A Season of Whispers Read online

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  Sutton, with a curse, pounded the log with his fist, and the two men fell to arguing.

  This went on for a few minutes until Lyman, realizing there was nothing to do but mediate, brokered a truce in which the benefits of public nakedness were considered and its detriments denied, or at least not disputed for the time being; but that trousers would stay fastened while they worked, regardless of the day’s pleasantness.

  The incident, at least, had the benefit of finally spurring the men to action.

  “You see who and what Bonaventure attracts,” Sutton said low to Lyman as they worked on the roof, gesturing with his hammer to Presley’s hindside down below. “ Every reform was once a private opinion, says our august Emerson, and yet these are our reformers: misfits and eccentrics.”

  “I suppose upon examination every man holds some queer belief or two,” said Lyman. “And by its very nature these will bubble to the top of the saucepan at a place like Bonaventure.”

  Sutton considered. “There’s some sense in that. I myself came here out of a wish to separate from a society that condones and abets the evils of slavery and to live among abolitionists only. I refuse to think of that idea as queer, however, or on the same grounds as Presley’s dogma. It is the civilization outside the farm that is queer, insofar as it would truck in misery and pain.”

  “But to them, you and I are the queer ones.”

  “We are the correct ones.” He scraped and hammered, preparing for the beam. “And you, Tom? What road led to Bonaventure for you?”

  Lyman smiled and shrugged. “Despair at milling table legs and hanging shutters for the gentry. I wanted to help the poor and give my labor meaning so I left Norwalk and came here.”

  This summation was scene and act from Lyman’s epistolary script with Grosvenor, with the ad libitum bit about poverty tailored to Sutton’s sensibility.

  But the quip, intended to encourage fraternity, had the opposite effect. Sutton stopped work and squinted at him. “Your hands are too uncalloused and your carpentry too poor for that story to hold much water.”

  Lyman’s blood froze and he scrambled to assemble a counter-argument. But before he could, Sutton said, “You know, in my former career I was a broker at the Exchange Board on Manhattan. I dealt in cotton and tobacco—in fact, it was exposure to the slave labor behind it that brought me hither. There was a warehouse I had dealings with, quite a large one on South Street, and you bear a strong resemblance to one of the clerks there.”

  As he had with Minerva during their picnic, Lyman again practiced facial impassivity. “I’m sorry to admit Bonaventure is as far as I’ve ever roamed from Norwalk.”

  “You’re the very image of that clerk, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “Should there be a Remus to my Romulus, I’ve never met him.” Lyman tried to laugh but instead sputtered like a crow.

  Sutton said nothing but kept at his examination of Lyman until finally, mumbling an excuse, Lyman descended the ladder to earth, where he found the company of the half-naked Presley oddly preferable.

  •••

  As the days stretched farther into September, Lyman convinced himself the voice he had heard that afternoon in the bedroom—the whispered warning spoken just over his shoulder—had sprung from the well of his imagination alone.

  The distance of time and the habit of rationalism rearranged events in his memory; he told himself he had realized the trespasser’s presence a split-second before hearing the words, words which only echoed the thoughts flashing that moment through his mind. He only believed he’d heard a voice. Those syllables, like the violin of the first night, were nothing but the strange breezes moving under the house and up the dry cistern in the basement, creating whispers and whistles just as breath does across the lip of a flute. The dome shape of the cistern chamber doubtless magnified the sounds. Loud enough, they would’ve created the illusion of an explosion, like the Moodus Noises did. It was only the blacksmith of the mind that forged the red sounds into recognizable shapes. Nor was Lyman’s fancy alone: Minerva had said people had heard fiddling in the stone house for years.

  All of it was a distraction from the real question of who had been in the house and searched his belongings, and whether his (or even her) goal had been the money or some other inscrutable purpose. After their work together on the roof, Sutton stood tall on the list of possible suspects. Clearly the man doubted Lyman’s biography. But Lyman could not disabuse himself of the feeling Sutton had never been to the stone house before that day on the roof; by mannerisms and small indications, he had struck Lyman as a genuine stranger to the scene. Perhaps then the intruder had been another member of the farm. But whom among the more than two dozen?

  This line of inquiry soon awoke a cynic within Lyman who suggested that the timing of his absence away from the house may not have been coincidence. Lyman could not imagine Minerva colluding with anyone to deceive him; but the Diogenes on Lyman’s shoulder stated his emotions were but rag dolls in her grip. No, Lyman insisted. Rather someone had been watching them and used the picnic as the opportunity to enter and rifle the house. Lyman reasoned that if the circumstances of the picnic were duplicated, the culprit might attempt his burglary again, providing a chance for Lyman to catch him in flagrante—or at least uncover some clue to his identity.

  In sequel to their picnic, Lyman had invited Minerva to walk with him, to which she happily consented. It soon became a standing date where, every other afternoon weather permitting, they would meet at the stone house and explore the woods around it. Lyman often chose the route, planning long circuitous paths that would suddenly cut back into view of the house, where he could observe any disturbance or visitor. Yet always was he disappointed—the burglary, as far as he could tell, was never repeated—and Minerva, tired of staying so close to the farm, began prodding for their course to stray farther and farther distant.

  This did not go unnoticed by the demon inside Lyman. As much as he tried to keep it gagged, there came a day it finally seized Lyman’s voice during their stroll. “I am very fond of the memory I have when you came to the stone house with a basket, and we picnicked some way in the woods.”

  “I am too,” Minerva said.

  “I’m glad. Yet something about it troubles me. Were your motives fully transparent, that afternoon? You can tell me if someone put you up to it. I won’t be upset.”

  “What an odd question.” She looked at him sidelong. “If you want me to confess that my desire for your company was greater than the want of a comfortable lunch at the Consulate, then I confess it freely. But to suggest I am a puppet to someone else’s whims strikes me as a bit uncouth, Tom.” Her pace increased so that she walked several steps ahead of him.

  Deep inside himself, Lyman throttled the demon with white knuckles.

  He caught up to her. “I’m sorry,” he said very fast. “I’ve never told you this, but that day while I was out someone rummaged through the house. I suppose they were looking for money or silver.”

  “So you believe I was in league with a thief?” Her face, usually so disposed toward him, now contorted with some opposite feeling. “That I was to distract you?”

  “Absolutely not.” He stuttered and stammered. “What I’m trying to say—poorly, I realize—is that perhaps someone suggested the idea of a picnic lunch to you, and innocently—completely unknowingly—you took it as your own plan, and unwittingly abetted him.”

  Minerva said nothing for a long moment. “The plan was my own, and I told no one about it.”

  They walked in icicle silence.

  “It may interest you to know,” she said, “that Joan Alby told me she has seen some men lurking about the edges of the property. Further, at dusk a few nights ago, my mother said she saw a stranger near the Consulate. When he spotted her, he ducked into the trees across the road as if he didn’t want to be seen. She told my father about it.”

  “I hadn’t heard about this.”

  “Of cou
rse you hadn’t. What women on the farm do you speak with besides me?”

  Lyman made no parry to that blow. “What did your father say?”

  “He said he would keep lookout for danger, but that jumping into ditches or behind trees is not a punishable offense in the state of Connecticut.”

  “I see.” They continued, Lyman’s mind spinning like clock gears. “Well, that explains much. I apologize, Minerva—a thousand times I apologize. You understand what I meant? I would never imply you would intentionally aid some villain.”

  She slowed to a stop and covered her face.

  In that moment if Lyman could have stepped outside himself and laid his fist across his own jaw, he would have done it. “Minerva.” He gently laid his fingers upon hers to pry them away.

  She let them be pried. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes damp. “Had anyone else said those words—they wouldn’t have stung so sharply. They hurt because of what you mean to me.”

  Everything in Lyman’s head, the suspicions and anxiety and the fresh terror that he had been found, suddenly collapsed like butter in a warm pan.

  “Minerva.” And suddenly his lips were on hers.

  •••

  The full unabbreviated name of the place was the Bonaventure Farming Cooperative for Agricultural and Scientific Inquiry, although no one who hadn’t visited would know that fact as the sign nailed beside the front door of the Consulate was the only medium wherein the whole title could be expressed. In conversation it was simply Bonaventure Farm or, curter still, Bonaventure.

  The first word of the name, Lyman came to understand, resulted from a vote decided early in the farm’s first days, a simple blessing of good luck upon the experiment. Farming Cooperative referred to its economic structure. It was the latter part of the farm’s title that held the most importance for its founder, a fact that Lyman learned as he spent time with Grosvenor in the overgrown field behind the cabins.

  “You have never asked me, Mr. Lyman, why we have christened the main house the Consulate,” said Grosvenor to him as they dug, “but you must have guessed. It is because that was our first building when we began, and it is still where we first greet guests when they arrive at the farm. It is nothing less than our embassy to the rest of the world.”

  Lyman, with some reluctance, found himself conscripted into his apprenticeship of earth moving, which usually occurred after supper. There he would be, sitting at the table, chatting with Minerva, when suddenly her father would tear the napkin from his shirt collar and implore Lyman to join him in the field. There was no avoiding it, though at least Lyman avoided the clearing up after the meal, a chore the men were expected to conduct in balance to the women’s preparation of it. Lyman would have very much liked to have avoided the digging as well, remaining tableside to laugh and talk with Minerva, or at least retire to his bed in the stone house unmolested.

  “The Consulate is where we, the plenipotentiaries of the new regime, greet those citizens of the old. To them we must demonstrate that a lifespan can be expended at something better than mindless toil in a factory or a shop or on a wharf. Everyone must work to feed himself, it’s true; yet they must also spare a few hours of the day to minimize the evils of this world through experimental progress.”

  As Lyman worked, Grosvenor would soliloquize on soil types and ratios of compost to sand or the corn varietal best suited to the Connecticut climate. It was not enough to grow food or for the farm to support itself financially, he informed Lyman: it had to contribute something original as well.

  Lyman listened and nodded, often pausing to lean upon his instrument or wipe a handkerchief across his face.

  “Nature wears many robes, Mr. Lyman, but we must tease the secrets out of her pockets. God has seen fit to give us the intellects to do so. In time, all that is mysterious to mankind will be unriddled.”

  “Including, I hope, the bones you’re looking for.” Lyman tried very hard to make it a joke, to keep the exasperation from his voice, yet in all of their hours of digging, they had failed to disinter so much as a mouse’s toe.

  “Patience, Tom!” said Grosvenor. “I keep Bonaventure’s greatest discovery hidden in my office—that thing which we found here in this very field when we laid this foundation. When I finally show it to you, I need you to understand what it represents. Or, shall I say, what is at stake.”

  “And what is that?”

  For a moment, Grosvenor said nothing, his face as impassive as granite. “Some things at Bonaventure,” he said finally, “are not what they may appear to be. The knowledge of this, of this true state of things, is a heavy burden. I want someone who understands what needs to be done if Bonaventure is to prosper. As I said before, an apprentice of sorts.”

  Lyman nodded. “If you mean to say that Bonaventure is not on the steadiest financial footing, I regret to inform you it’s no secret. As much has already been hinted at, by you and several of the others.”

  Drapery fell across Grosvenor’s face, a shadow of frustration and disappointment, and somehow, instinctually, Lyman knew he had said an inopportune thing. Yet why it was wrong or what he should have said in its place escaped him.

  “Yes.” Grosvenor set down the shovel in his hands. “In regard to that.”

  Every hair on Lyman’s arms stood on end.

  “I’ve been speaking to some of the other members of the community,” said Grosvenor. “Some believe that a better qualified craftsman would have improved the stone house to a greater extent by now. They even suggest you may not be a carpenter at all.”

  Lyman could guess the fountainhead of this distrust. “Some, or just Mr. Sutton?”

  But Grosvenor, to his credit, did not attempt to pretend the barn door was shut when the horses were so clearly in the pasture. “Please don’t blame Mr. Sutton. He was a broker in his previous career, and like me, his training has made him particular about numbers and details. He only wants what’s best for the farm.”

  “Which is why I find Mr. Sutton’s preoccupation with past careers so curious. What does a broker know about sowing and reaping?”

  “I believe Mr. Sutton’s point is that, unlike him, you were explicitly recruited to Bonaventure for your skills.”

  “And I believe he has no right to complain. If I had not come to Bonaventure, the stone house would have remained a ruinous heap in the woods. Currently it is much more so.”

  “Perhaps. Or would it have been further along had someone else arrived in your place?” Grosvenor asked. “Bonaventure’s dilemma is one of expansion. We need more hands to grow, but before that can happen, we need more beds for them to sleep in. That is why Mr. Sutton counsels selectiveness with whom we recruit at this stage.”

  “Yet isn’t that against the very tenets of Bonaventure? Isn’t the goal to cast the old customs into the waters and instead raise new fish at the ends of our poles? Your own daughter dreams of a day when there are no carpenters or farmers, when anyone regardless of sex or birth can perform any task or chore with equanimity.”

  Grosvenor chuckled. “I am Aristotle undermined by a sophist.” He peered at Lyman through the lenses at the end of his nose. “Let me ask you pointedly: are you a carpenter, as you described in your letters to me?”

  “What I am,” said Lyman, drawing his spine straight, “is a subscriber to the Bonaventure project. I own a full share. I believe in Bonaventure—and if there are doubts about that, then as testament to my sincerity please refund my hundred dollars and I’ll be on my way.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “If such a demonstration quiets those suspicions of yours or anyone else’s, then yes.”

  Grosvenor fixed Lyman with frozen stillness. “Suspicion is a terrible emotion, I grant you. But often, it is not unwarranted. For example, I suspect a great many things about you, Mr. Lyman.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as your reticence to unhand your luggage that first day we met, as well as your payment of the su
bscription in full. You see, many of the others haven’t paid the balances they owe—and yet you paid the whole fee on your very first day.”

  “Do you mean to tell me,” said Lyman, “that the others aren’t even fully paid shareholders?”

  “I mean to tell you that I think you hold a great deal of money in your possession, which you have secreted somewhere at the stone house.”

  Suddenly two things became crystallized in Lyman’s imagination. The first was that the digging exercise was, from the outset, a mere pretense for Grosvenor to arrange this moment. The second was that now Lyman knew who had rifled through his belongings during the picnic.

  “Please don’t worry yourself unreasonably,” said Grosvenor. “I have no cares where the money originated. What I’m suggesting is that perhaps you and I are better,” he searched for the words, “better furnished than the rest. And as such you are uniquely positioned to invest in Bonaventure to a greater degree.”

  “That’s an interesting assessment,” said Lyman. “Yet tell me something. I also recall when I subscribed that a regular dividend is due to all fully paid members. I remember it mentioned in our letters as well.”

  “Ah, well,” said Grosvenor, “that’s just a trifle—”

  “How many of these dividends have you actually paid over Bonaventure’s existence? I mean, I’d be willing to pay more if a large dividend could be guaranteed. But I’d expect more than a trifle.”

  The two men faced each other, and in the adamant set of Lyman’s jaw, Grosvenor understood him; and in the anxious glance and quivering lip of Grosvenor, Lyman knew him. Neither was a carpenter nor the manager of a successful utopian venture. Both men were the perpetrators of very different fibs; each recognized his counterpart as a member of his own species, a brother of the same fraternal order.

  Lyman pulled on the hem of his coat to straighten it. “David,” he said, “I think we must come to an understanding.”