Mama always told me that we couldn’t afford Christmas presents. Every year I made something in school for her—a paper ornament, paper angel, a sachet made of a scrap of cloth and filled with the pine needles and rosemary that were commonplace on the island, or a newspaper mâché pot painted with primary colors that began to flake off as soon as the paint dried.
It was always Miz Verlow who gave me something that I wanted, and other gifts that I needed. Sometimes I thought that I loved Miz Verlow more than I did Mama, or even wished that she was my mama, instead of Roberta Ann Carroll Dakin. Of course, I always felt guilty for loving her more than Mama, and wishing such a thing. I feared her more than Mama too, for as I grew, I began to perceive Mama more and more as a paper tiger.
That Christmas, that first Christmas, I unhooked the paper cranes from the fake tree and smuggled them to the linen closet, where in a very high, hard to reach corner, one that I nearly brained myself climbing to, I stashed them in the box that had held the sweater and cap from Mrs. Llewelyn. If I kept those cranes that once had been playing cards, if I had the right candle, I might be able to ask more questions of my great-grandmama Cosima. If I ever felt brave enough. I wished that if she had to speak to me, she would do it without hocus-pocus, like all the other whispering or chittering voices that I heard. Of course I worked mightily to ignore them but now that I knew her voice by name, I would recognize it. Of course. How could I be so stupid? She had spoken to me first by way of introduction. The proof would be when I heard her voice again, and knew it for hers.
And then, oddly, or perhaps not oddly, given what I have learned, the visitation of my great-grandmama, my vigil and my visitor and what she told me that Christmas, went out of my head. I remembered it only in dreams. When I dreamt it, I promised myself to remember when I woke but then, did not. It took a great many dreamings before I did. Before I remembered that I was supposed to listen to the book.
Forty-six
MERRYMEETING’S operation and upkeep took an enormous amount of work that Miz Verlow made every effort to keep unseen. Nothing upset guests like unreliable plumbing, while at the same time the finest pipes and fixtures in the world would be tried to their utmost by a succession of paying guests. After she lost a reliable plumber to a freak lightning strike at a church picnic, Miz Verlow cast about, trying several other local plumbers. She was dissatisfied with all until she found Grady Driver.
First, though, she fired his daddy. On his very first call to Merrymeeting, Heck Driver managed to bust a pipe and ruin a wall, not from incompetence but because the Co’Colas he drank one after another, complaining of the heat, were about half cheap rum. The ruination of guest-room wallpaper by the leaking pipe in the bathroom next door was a predictable consequence. Miz Verlow took Heck Driver to task; he cussed her out, and she not only fired him and declined to pay him, she told him she was going to bill him for the repairs.
An hour after Heck Driver stumbled out, leaving his tools where they lay, and drove uncertainly away, his rusted-out van returned with a mere boy at the wheel. I knew him from schooclass="underline" Grady Driver, Heck’s son, excruciatingly shy and chronically dirty. He had been sent home repeatedly with nits and been held back a couple times, so even though he was a couple years older than me, he was in the same grade.
Grady knocked at the kitchen door and asked to speak to Miz Verlow.
When she came to the door, he apologized for his father’s error, using a formula he had by heart.
“My daddy sent me to beg pardon, Miz Verlow, and not hold it agin him on account of he come out sick to start, from havin’ ate bad fried fish last night, but not wantin’ to let you down, and maybe I could clean up the mess for you and pick up his tools.”
Miz Verlow was in the doorway with her arms crossed under her bosom.
“I will excuse your lie on grounds of your understandable desire to defend your daddy. However, Mr. Driver was drunk. You are too late to clean up, as my maid has already done so, and it requires a competent plumber to repair the broken pipe. But you may retrieve his tools.”
“Hit were an accidence, Miz Verlow,” insisted Grady.
Miz Verlow had rolled her eyes. “Enunciate, young man. Accident! It-was-an-accident.”
Grady swallowed hard and repeated after her. “It-was-an-accident.”
“It was not an accident,” Miz Verlow said.
Grady looked confused. He was built like Roger, long-limbed and gangly, but poorly nourished for his frame, with a stolid expression on his face that people often took for vacuousness or backwardness of intellect.
“True accidents are surprisingly rare. Most of the events that people call ‘accidents’ are entirely predictable. Time and again, close examination of the so-called ‘accident’ reveals incompetence, fraud or drunkenness, or any combination of those faults, as the real cause. The only ‘accidental’ aspect of the mess your daddy made was the fact he did it here, because I had the random bad luck to have hired him today.”
Grady had passed from confused to stunned and back to confused again.
Miz Verlow threw up her hands. “Get your daddy’s tools!”
I’d been lurking about the kitchen to see what I could see and hear what I could hear. When Miz Verlow vacated the doorway, and Grady stood hesitant on the threshold, I hauled him inside.
“I’ll show you,” I told him.
He followed me up the backstairs and down the hall. Cleonie and I had mopped up and wiped up and even tidied the tools into Mr. Driver’s toolbox but we could not fix the pipe. Miz Verlow had turned off the water to the bathroom and so it was unusable.
To my surprise, Grady made a thorough examination of the scene. Then he took some of his daddy’s tools and went to work. Needless to say, I was fascinated, not only by Grady’s bold advance upon the problem, but also by what he did. In a quarter of an hour, he had the miscreant pipe repaired and asked me to show him where the water was turned off and on. Once the water was back on, the bathroom was operational.
Then I required Miz Verlow to cover her eyes and let me guide her to the scene, whereupon she opened her eyes on a clean, functional bathroom, and a grinning, though still regrettably unwashed, Grady Driver.
“I kin fixt that wall, Miz Verlow,” Grady said, “you got you sum plastern paste.”
Miz Verlow shook her head in disbelief.
“Young man, you amaze me. You’ll have to come back to fix the wall. I’ll have the materials on hand tomorrow.”
Grady packed up his daddy’s tools again.
Miz Verlow watched him for a moment, sighed, and went away.
I tagged after her all the way to her office. She looked at me inquiringly and I held out my hand.
“He done a good job,” I advised her.
She pursed her lips. “You know better grammar than that, Calley Dakin.”
I corrected myself, “Yes, ma’am, he did a good job.”
She opened a desk drawer, the one where she kept petty cash. I watched her fingers hesitating and then lunging and plucking out a bill. She thrust it at me.