Looking ahead, the curve wasn't difficult to plot.
And why should it be us, I wondered. Why a little town like ours? A town that was no different from ten thousand other towns.
Although, I told myself; that might not be entirely true. It was exactly what I would have said and perhaps everybody else. Everyone, that is, except for Nancy Sherwood — Nancy, who only the night before had told me her strange theory that this town of ours was something very special. And could she be right, I wondered? Was our little town of Millville somehow set apart from all other little towns?
Just ahead was my home street and my calculations told me that it was located just inside the encircling barricade.
There was, I told myself, no sense in going farther. It would be a waste of time. I did not need to complete the circle to convince myself that we were hemmed in.
I cut across the backyard of the Presbyterian parsonage and there, just across the street, was my house, set within its wilderness of flowers and shrubs, with the abandoned greenhouse standing in the back and the old garden around it, a field of purple flowers, those same purple flowers that Mrs Tyler had poked at with her cane and said were doing well this season.
I heard the steady squeaking as I reached the street and I knew that some kids had sneaked into the yard and were playing in the old lawn swing that stood beside the porch.
I hurried up the street, a little wrathful at the squeaking. I had told those kids, time and time again, to leave that swing alone. It was old and rickety and one of these days one of the uprights or something else would break, and one of the kids might be badly hurt. I could have taken it down, of course, but I was reluctant to, for it was Mother's swing. She had spent many hours out in the yard, swinging gently and sedately, looking at the flowers.
The yard was closed in by the old-time lilac hedge and I couldn't see the swing until I reached the gate.
I hurried for the gate and jerked it open savagely and took two quick steps through it, then stopped in my tracks.
There were no kids in the swing. There was a man, and except for a battered hat of straw set squarely atop his head, he was as naked as a jaybird.
He saw me and grinned a foolish grin. "Hi, there," he said, with jaunty happiness. And even as he said it, he began a counting of his fingers, drooling as he counted.
And at the sight of him, at the sound of that remembered but long forgotten voice, my mind went thudding back to the afternoon before.
2
Ed Adler had come that afternoon to take out the phone and he had been embarrassed. "I'm sorry, Brad," he said. "I don't want to do this, but I guess I have to. I have an order from Tom Preston." Ed was a friend of mine. We had been good pals in high school and good friends ever since. Tom Preston had been in school with us, of course, but he'd been no friend of mine or of anybody else" s. He'd been a snotty kid and he had grown up into a snotty man.
That was the way it went, I thought. The heels always were the ones who seemed to get ahead. Tom Preston was the manager of the telephone office and Ed Adler worked for him as a phone installer and a troubleshooter, and I was a realtor and insurance agent who was going out of business. Not because I wanted to, but because I had to, because I was delinquent in my office phone bill and way behind in rent.
Tom Preston was successful and I was a business failure and Ed Adler was earning a living for his family, but not getting anywhere. And the rest of them, I wondered. The rest of the high school gang — how were they getting on? And I couldn't answer, for I didn't know. They all had drifted off. There wasn't much in a little town like Millville to keep a man around.
I probably wouldn't have stayed myself if it hadn't been for Mother. I'd come home from school after Dad had died and had helped out with the greenhouse until Mother had joined Dad. And by that time I had been so long in Millville that it was hard to leave.
"Ed," I had asked, "do you ever hear from any of the fellows?
"No, I don't," said Ed. "I don't know where any of them are." I said: "There was Skinny Austin and Charley Thompson, and Marty Hall and Alf. I can't remember Alf's last name."
"Peterson," said Ed.
"Yes, that's it," I said. "It's a funny thing I should forget his name. Old Alf and me had a lot of fun together." Ed got the cord unfastened and stood up, with the phone dangling from his hand.
"What are you going to do now?" he asked me.
"Lock the door, I guess," I said. "It's not just the phone. It's everything. I'm behind in rent as well. Dan Willoughby, down at the bank, is very sad about it."
"You could run the business from the house."
"Ed," I told him shortly, "there isn't any business. I just never had a business. I couldn't make a start. I lost money from the first." I got up and put on my hat and walked out of the place. The street was almost empty. There were a few cars at the curb and a dog was smelling of a lamp post and old Stiffy Grant was propped up in front of the Happy Hollow tavern, hoping that someone might come along and offer him a drink.
I was feeling pretty low. Small thing as it had been, the phone had spelled the end. It was the thing that finally signified for me what a failure I had been. You can go along for months and kid yourself that everything's all right and will work out in the end, but always something comes up that you can't kid away. Ed Adler coming to disconnect and take away the phone had been that final thing I couldn't kid away.
I stood there on the sidewalk, looking down the street, and I felt hatred for the town — not for the people in it, but for the town itself, for the impersonal geographic concept of one particular place.
The town lay dusty and arrogant and smug beyond all telling and it sneered at me and I knew that I had been mistaken in not leaving it when I'd had the chance. I had tried to live with it for very love of it, but I'd been blind to try. I had known what all my friends had known, the ones who'd gone away, but I had closed my mind to that sure and certain knowledge: there was nothing left in Millville to make one stay around. It was an old town and it was dying, as old things always die. It was being strangled by the swift and easy roads that took customers to better shopping areas; it was dying with the decline of marginal agriculture, dying along with the little vacant hillside farms that no longer would support a family. It was a place of genteel poverty and it had its share of musty quaintness, but it was dying just the same, albeit in the polite scent of lavender and impeccable good manners.
I turned down the street, away from the dusty business section and made my way down to the little river that flowed dose against the east edge of the town. There I found the ancient footpath underneath the trees and walked along, listening in the summer silence to the gurgle of the water as it flowed between the grassy banks and along the gravel bars.
And as I walked the lost and half forgotten years came crowding in upon me. There, just ahead, was the village swimming hole, and below it the stretch of shallows where I'd netted suckers in the spring.
Around the river's bend was the place we had held our picnics. We had built a fire to roast the wieners and to toast the marshmallows and we had sat and watched the evening steal in among the trees and across the meadows.
After a time the moon would rise, making the place a magic place, painted by the lattice of shadow and of moonlight. Then we talked in whispers and we willed that time should move at a slower pace so we might hold the magic longer. But for all our willing, it had never come to pass, for time, even then, was something that could not be slowed or stopped.
There had been Nancy and myself and Ed Adler and Priscilla Gordon, and at times Alf Peterson had come with us as well, but as I remembered it he had seldom brought the same girl twice.