A Season of Whispers Read online

  Lyman choked on his tea.

  “That’s the legend, anyway,” said Minerva as Lyman hacked and coughed. “Passers-by swear they hear fiddling from the stone house late at night. It’s one of the reasons why no one has lived in the house for so long. The whole farm, in fact, is alleged to be haunted. That’s why my father was able to pick it up so cheaply.”

  Lyman wiped his beard and said with a hoarse voice, “He told me it was because the farm was trapped in probate. That the original family, the Garricks, slowly extinguished until there were no more heirs.”

  “So they did. But did he tell you how they extinguished?”

  “Well, no.”

  “Precisely. Because no one knows. They just vanished. Disappeared, one by one. No signs of evil intent among the survivors, just gone. As if they were swallowed into the earth.”

  “Your father said some of them moved away, that the final Garrick died on the frontier.”

  “Wouldn’t you depart a place if your siblings and parents and assorted relations kept mysteriously popping off into aether?”

  Lyman had come to think of Bonaventure as a place to escape to, but upon reflection he supposed to others it might be a place to escape from. “More to the point: has anyone disappeared at Bonaventure since you moved here?”

  “Not so much as an egg from the henhouse.”

  “Well, there’s that. What about the elder Garrick, the one from England? He was said to have lived a long time.”

  “And died of natural causes, apparently. If it was a family curse, I imagine it was on his wife’s side.”

  “Or he was the one in the larder grinding the rest into sausage.”

  “Tom! I do like a gentleman who isn’t all flowers and rainbows,” and she clinked her glass against his. “But I think there’s more than one mystery present here at Bonaventure. Namely: you.”

  With great effort, Lyman kept the muscles of his face relaxed, his expression neutral. With deliberation he set his glass on the blanket and dabbed his mouth with the napkin. “All men contain an infinitude, isn’t that what Mr. Emerson tells us? An infinitude of depths, of mysteries and secrets.”

  “Indeed. And yet in our conversations I’m given the impression that you have come lately to Emerson and philosophy, transcendental or otherwise, and that your passion for our project doesn’t burn as hotly as others’. I think you’ve come to Bonaventure for ulterior purposes. I think you’re running away from something and you’ve come here to hide.”

  Lyman looked at her steadily. “You’re right, Minerva.”

  “Aha!”

  “I am running away.”

  “Here it comes.”

  Lyman breathed deeply, steeling himself. He had yet to tell the story to another living soul. “There was a girl—”

  “I knew it.”

  “—a very pretty girl, whom I courted. However, her family criticized my lack of means —”

  “And when you proposed she said no and rejected you and full of despair you ran away and now here you are. I knew it!”

  “The thing of it is,” said Lyman, a bit annoyed at the apparent cliché of his life’s story, “was that just before my proposal I inherited a good deal of money from an uncle, which I presented in cash to show to her—”

  “To show off to her.”

  “Well, yes. But even that was not enough. She said my inheritance was merely a unique event and questioned how I should support her in a proper manner when that money was gone. I told her I could invest it, grow it. And yet.”

  “You’ll forgive me if I’m happy for her ingratitude, Tom. Had she accepted, you would not be here and the stone house would be as ruinous as ever. As it is, it is much improved.”

  “Improved? All I’ve done is sweep the floors and roof.”

  “More than that. I seem to recall as I knocked on the door seeing a very stout ladder against the wall.”

  A strange sensation flushed through Lyman, spreading through and to the ends of him, not unlike a glass of whiskey after retreating indoors from a snowstorm.

  “I dare say,” said Minerva, filling the space, “even Bitty Breadsticks would live at the house now, and she has always avoided it.” At Lyman’s blank expression, she added, “Bitty Breadsticks is an itinerant traveler, shall we say, who passes through from time to time. Anyway,” she said, “all of us at Bonaventure are better for your romantic difficulties.”

  “And you, Minerva? I should think you’d be in receipt of ten proposals a day. Or does your father chase them off?”

  “There was one gentleman but when I did not reciprocate his feelings, he quit the farm. He was very earnest, however.” For half a moment, Minerva glanced off into the trees in dreamy reminiscence. “As it is, I see no benefit to marriage for a woman beyond the utilitarian, the economy of sharing resources and income and so forth. The odds of finding a true partner—an equal of mind and soul—are so long that it is hardly worth the bother of courtship.”

  “All the same, people do find such companionship.”

  “Some people. Maybe so. But right now I’m too busy with Bonaventure, reading and writing and conversing and changing the world, to concern myself with a distant hope. I don’t forsake weddings and children but I do shepherd my efforts closely.”

  Neither wanted the picnic to end but clocks and planets turn irrespective of our wishes. They gathered the things into the basket and Lyman snapped the blanket a few times to shake off the leaves and grass before folding it. He started back toward the stone house, then stopped after glancing over his shoulder. Minerva stood frozen by their lunching spot, staring at him.

  “Did you feel that?”

  Lyman hadn’t noticed anything. “Feel what?”

  Minerva remained silent, then shook her head. “For an instant I had the oddest sensation the ground moved.”

  Lyman was in no rush to return to his rooftop tumbling and believed it to be the gentlemanly thing to do, new world or no, to escort Minerva on the walk back to the Consulate. For her part Minerva welcomed his company on the pretext of having set aside some foodstuffs in the kitchen—a sack of apples, some cornmeal and salt and other small things—for Lyman to take with him to the stone house so that he might, if hungry and fatigued, have some refreshment between mealtimes, and also at the very least have a few comestibles lying around in case a visitor again came calling. The pair said their adieus at the kitchen door, and Lyman reembarked for the stone house with the sack slung over his shoulder.

  As the kitchen of the stone house was the very room that lacked a roof, Lyman had yet to use it as such. Instead he marched the sack up the stairs to his bedroom, the only comfortable chamber in the house, where he sorted and suspended his rations from hooks while reminiscing about the afternoon.

  “Someone’s been in the house.”

  The effect of those five words, spoken from an indistinct point somewhere behind Lyman’s right shoulder, was dynamic. Lyman managed, cat-like, to both twist and thrust forward in the same motion, slamming himself into the brick of the fireplace while simultaneously upsetting the apples and spilling the water jug and scattering salt across the boards.

  There was nothing behind him. Nothing but air and the rest of the room. And yet he had distinctly heard the words, their sibilance fresh in his right ear as if the speaker had leaned in to whisper them. Lyman was not drowsy; he was neither falling asleep nor waking up. Someone had spoken. Some words had been said. Something had told him—what?

  It was at that moment as he stood, breathing hard, surveying the chamber with wild eyes, that he noted the bed was unmade; but Lyman, perhaps from his years as a diligent clerk tallying the contents of storerooms and scrutinizing bills of lading, was fastidious in his habits, never failing to pull the covers square upon rising.

  An impulse sent him to the chest of drawers; his clothes and sundries, he could tell, had been disturbed, then put back hastily to mask the disturbance. The bed, he realized, t
he bed—the bed frame, upon closer scrutiny, had been pulled aside, pushed back into place.

  Someone had been in the house while he was with Minerva.

  His hands fumbled with the lamp wick, his shoes pounded down the basement stairs and swept him through the tunnel. The bag still hung from the top of the ladder; he reeled it up, pulled back its lips. The money was untouched, all of it. It had not been found. Lyman suspected, without any real proof but based upon an odd intuition alone, that the second basement itself had also remained hidden.

  Lyman did not go to supper that night at the Consulate. He couldn’t bear the thought of leaving only to return, in twilight or full-blown evening, to the darkened house; the anticipation of passing through the front door, exposing himself to every shadow within, terrified him. Instead he sat on the bed, his back wedged into a corner of the room, and slowly gnawed apples picked off the floor. Somewhere, out there, was an enemy, and somewhere closer by was a friend; but their identities or even their natures Lyman could not fathom. The late August night was hot but he kept the fire high anyway, feeding it with logs and apple cores.

  •••

  Minerva’s father pursued his studies in natural philosophy in a fallow pasture far behind the cabins, screened from sight by a line of trees. There, hidden amid the waving stalks of wild grass, lay the partial foundation of a building Lyman had heard the other Bonaventurists reference as either a Phalanstery or a Fraternum or sometimes a Lyceum, a structure that once was a focus of their communal labor but which had been since forgotten and therefore lapsed, for unspecified reasons, into a crepuscular state of earthly return.

  The original purpose of the edifice was likewise ambiguous, varying by respondent; but in each interview Lyman detected notes of loss or warmhearted remorse, as if he or she recalled a childhood summer, a whimsical period in a lifetime never to be experienced again. In each reply also the farm itself was implicated in the structure’s abandonment, and Lyman was compelled to believe that the two could not coexist.

  When the Grosvenors and the initial subscribers settled Bonaventure, they understood beforehand the major tasks involved in farming, the plowing and seeding and weeding and reaping. Yet what they hadn’t foreseen were the myriad other chores necessary to farm living. The animals needed feeding, their pens or stables needed mucking. The cows demanded milking, butter required churning, the garden wanted hoeing and attention. As inside, so outside, for as the floors were swept and the beds made, so the grass in the yard must be mowed, rails hand split for the fences, and sundry minor repairs and fixes done to beat back the elemental encroachment of weather and decay. Nor was there any end to washing, to the laundering of clothes and linens, or to the scrubbing of cookware and dishes. Only once these and countless other tasks were affected was there a little time for reading and reflection and the further entertainments of Bonaventure, which were in fact its whole reason for being.

  Farming was a distraction that became Bonaventure’s profession.

  “On a farm,” Grosvenor said to the younger Lyman, “animals are frequently butchered. The parts that are unwanted or aren’t useful, which are few, end in a refuse pile, and the parts that are useful eventually end up there too, or at least the bones do. Keep in mind that successive generations at the farm also have successive heaps; and further, that waste does not always stay where it was last placed—vermin will often drag it hither and yon. I once knew of an elm inhabited by a family of raccoons and the base of it could have been mistaken for a burying ground turned upside down, if drumsticks and soup bones were interred by their widows. Of course, every farm has its dogs and barn cats as well as mice and other rodents, all of whom add their own remains to the soil in good time. And let us not forget horses! The noble steed, the faithful workman, who at last is usually buried where he falls, or at least dragged with effort a not very far distance. Same for oxen.”

  He thrust a shovel into the earth closest to the hand-laid stones.

  “The result, Mr. Lyman, is that to stand within a farm’s fence posts is to stand inside a cemetery. Bones, bones, everywhere underfoot, and it takes only a plow’s edge or a spade or even a hard rain to unveil to daylight that which was secret. While digging the trench for this foundation,” Grosvenor tossed aside a shovel load of dirt, “a few of the other community members and I uncovered some most unusual bones.”

  He thrust the shovel at Lyman.

  “What I would like for you to do is to join the search. In your free time, of course.”

  Lyman frowned. “You want me to dig a hole?”

  “Not dig a hole, no. That would be tedious. I wish for you to find more of the bones like those we’ve already discovered. Consider it an apprenticeship of sorts.”

  “I still don’t understand the point of the exercise.”

  “The point is to join me in my study of natural science. To improve Bonaventure, to demonstrate to the outside world that our community is both self-sustaining and a center for science and inquiry. The point, Mr. Lyman, is that the bones we found are just that—bones, and not fossils.”

  “You’re suggesting it’s a surprise they should be one and not the other.”

  Grosvenor said, “’There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’” And then he chortled at his own literacy.

  •••

  After long cogitation and for lack of any better strategy, Lyman finally decided to peel back an undamaged section of the stone house’s roof. This, he theorized, would provide him with a blueprint useful for repairing the hole over the kitchen; but upon doing so a new problem identified itself. He surmised that a supporting beam, having been broken in the original catastrophe and rotted away, was missing from the damaged area; and in his zeal to clear the space of old wood, Lyman had ripped out any remnant or trace of it, leaving the roof unsupported. It was in poorer shape than when he’d found it.

  Lyman lived every waking moment under the weight of a sword dangling overhead, waiting for the hour in which his charades were revealed. Asking Grosvenor or anyone else was to risk questions and ultimate discovery. Whatever the solution to the absent beam, it would have to be his alone. None of the planks supplied to him was thick enough for the replacement. Fine, he thought; he could sister three of them together to make a beam of suitable girth, but he had no worthy fasteners. He looked to his shaky ladder for inspiration. He cut and shaved some straight lengths of sapling into pins, drilled holes through the trio of planks, and doweled them together. But the resulting beam was too heavy for him to lift into place by himself. He would have to hold his breath and request help.

  The response at the supper table was contrary to his fear. All marveled at the thrift and ingenuity in constructing the makeshift beam, and Grosvenor repeated his claim that Bonaventure was better for Lyman’s arrival. Lyman, glancing across the table at an approving Minerva, saw something in her eyes that made his stomach jump. There was no shortage of volunteers for the task, though Lyman suggested only two men were necessary, and so the following morning after breakfast, a pair returned with him to the stone house.

  Their names were Presley and Sutton and they bunked together in one of the cabins close to the Consulate. Lyman found they were in no rush to work; after a cursory tour of the house—which excluded any exploration of the basement—Sutton suggested a pot of tea would strike the right mood for labor, and for a long time the three sat outside on a log with their backs to the stone wall of the house, drinking and gossiping while the first yellow leaves rained down in the cool bright morning. Sutton composed a poem about the turning season, speaking the couplets between five-minute intervals of silence in which he concocted his next lines; and Presley wondered if the sky was best described as sapphire, azure, or cobalt, before settling on a color he had once seen in a painting—a seascape—that he could not identify. Occasionally Lyman would say, “Now about that beam,” or slap his thigh and stand up with energy; but all of these gestures a
t duty were ignored by the other two and eventually Lyman would retake his seat and wait further.

  A peculiar thing then happened as the morning progressed and the air warmed. Presley, complaining of the heat, unbuttoned and removed his coat, which he threw over a low branch. His waistcoat soon followed. Then, after a few more tickings of the clock, he gradually undid his shirt, which soon joined the coat and vest, and he sat down on the log beside Lyman bare-chested, doughy as pancake batter and white as a summer flounder having sprouted hair. All the while Sutton, who had given up his poem and begun speaking about pigs both general and specific, observed this behavior narrowly. When Presley stood again and began fumbling with his remaining garments, Sutton leapt up in anger.

  “If you touch one button of those trousers, I will box your ears square.”

  “It is a beautiful day and I am over-warm,” said Presley with mildness.

  “A more temperate day could not be conceived. You will not disrobe.”

  “Why, what forbids it? There are no women about, even though it is without shame for either me or them.”

  Sutton turned to Lyman. “David has insisted Presley here not express his peculiar philosophy in front of the women of Bonaventure and only in the privacy of the cabin. Why such punishment should be inflicted upon me as his house mate, I cannot say. For the most part Presley has obliged though I am afraid poor Mrs. Alby and her daughter has not been entirely unscathed—Presley cavorts about the yard at all hours.”

  “It does no good to remain indoors. Eden was without log cabins.”

  “Damn you, Presley.”

  Lyman observed this revue with ascending alarm, wishing they could just install the beam and return him to his solitude. Presley, however, spoke to Lyman in an evangelical tone.

  “Brother Tom,” he said with a sincerity rarely seen outside a pulpit, “what if I told you there was a medicine that could cure you of all sickness and disease by preventing it from ever taking root in your blood? What if I told you this medicine gave health and long life and was free of cost and readily available around us? That this medicine was the sun and air itself and has been known to us since the days of Adam? I speak of course, Tom, of the power of nudism.”