“We orbit like an ancient couple of moons,” she said to me one day.
“If there were people in Pluto, they could set their clocks by us,” I answered, “or worship us.”
We laughed to think of ourselves as moon goddesses.
Most of the yards and lots were empty. There hasn’t been money in the town coffers for street repairs and the majority have been unimproved or left to gravel. Only the main street is paved with asphalt now, but the rough surfaces are fine with us. They give more purchase. We don’t want to slip. Breaking a hip is our gravest dread. Once you are immobile at our age, that is the end.
“I’ve been meaning to tell you why Murdo’s brother, Octave, you know, tried to run away to Brazil,” she told me one day, as though the scandal had just occurred. “I want you to write the whole thing up for the town historical newsletter. I would like the truth to become part of our official record now!”
I asked Neve to wait until we finished our walk and sat down at the caf, so that I could take notes, but she was too excited by the story beating its wings inside of her, alive and insistent that morning for some reason, and she had to talk as we made our way along.
“As you remember,” said Neve, “Octave drowned himself when the river was at its lowest, in only two feet of water. He basically had to throw himself upon a puddle and breathe it in. It was thought that only a woman could have caused a man to inflict such a gruesome death upon himself, but it was not love. He did not die for love.” Neve paused and walked meditatively for about a hundred yards. Then she began again. “Do you remember stamp collections? How important those were? The rage?”
I said that I did remember. People still collect stamps, I told her.
“Yes, yes, they dabble like my brother Edward,” she said. “But for Octave the stamps were everything. He kept his stamp collection in the bank’s main vault. One of this town’s best kept secrets is exactly how much money that collection was worth. Even I was not aware of it until very recently. When, as you know, our bank was robbed in ’thirty-two, the robbers forced their way into the vault. They grabbed what cash there was and completely ignored the fifty-nine albums and twenty-two specially constructed felt boxes framed in ebony. That stamp collection was worth many times what the robbers got. It was worth almost as much money as was in the entire bank, in fact.”
“What happened to it?” I was very much intrigued, as I’d heard only confusing rumors.
Neve gave me a sly, sideways look.
“My brother took bits and pieces of that collection, but he had no idea what was really there. I kept most of the stamps when the bank changed hands. I like looking at them, you see. They’re better than television. The collection is in my front room. Stacked on a table. You’ve seen the albums but you’ve never commented. You’ve never looked inside of them. If you had, you would have been enchanted, like me, with the delicacy, the detail, and the endless variety, at first. Later you would have wanted to know more about the stamps themselves and the need to know and understand their histories would have taken hold of you, as it did my uncle, my brother, and as it recently has me, though thankfully to a much lesser degree. Of course, you have your own interests.”
“Yes,” I said, “thank God for those.”
As we passed by the church, we saw the priest was there on his visit. The poor man waved at us when we called out a greeting to him. No one had remembered, so he was cutting the grass. He looked sad and overworked.
“They treat the good ones like simple beasts,” said Neve. Then she shrugged and we pressed on. “In reading my uncle’s old letters, going through his files, I’ve made a discovery. His specialty, for all stamp collectors begin at some point to lean in a certain direction, was what you might call the dark side of stamp collecting.”
I looked at Neve, thinking that I’d seen dark tendencies in her myself, but still surprised about the stamps.
“After he had acquired the Holy Grails of Philately — British Guiana’s one-cent magenta, Sweden’s 1855 three-cent issue which is orange instead of blue-green, as well as many stamps of the Thurn and Taxis postal system and superb specimens of the highly prized Mul-ready cover — my uncle’s melancholia drew him specifically to what are called errors. I think Sweden’s three-cent began it all.”
“Of course,” I said, “even I know of the upside-down airplane stamp.”
“The twenty-four-cent carmine rose and blue Invert. Yes!” She seemed delighted. “I’ve been reading through his notes and combing through the collection for that one. He says that he began to collect errors in color, like the Swedish stamp, very tricky, then overprints, imperforate errors, value missings, omitted vignettes, and freaks. He speaks of one entire album page devoted to a seventeen-year-old boy, Frank Baptist, who ran stamps off an old handpress for the Confederate government. I’ve yet to determine which it was, but am sure I’ll find it.”
Neve charged across a gravelly patch of road, much elated to share the story, and I hastened to stay within earshot. Stopping to catch her breath, she leaned on a tree and told me that about six years before he absconded with the bank’s money, Octave Harp had gone into disasters — that is, stamps and covers (envelopes or similar materials) that had survived the dreadful occurrences that test and destroy us. These pieces of mail, marked by experience, took their value from the gravity of their condition. They were water stained, tattered, even bloodied, said Neve. Such damage was part of their allure.
By then, we had come to the former bank/caf, and I was glad to sit down where I could take a few notes on Neve’s revelations. I borrowed some sheets of paper and a pen from the owner, and we ordered our coffee and sandwiches. I always have a Denver sandwich and Neve orders a BLT without the bacon. She is a strict vegetarian, the only one in Pluto. We sipped our coffee.
“I have just read a book I ordered,” said Neve, “on philately, in which it says that stamp collecting offers refuge to the confused and gives new vigor to fallen spirits. I think Octave was hoping he would obtain something of the sort. But the more he dwelt on the disasters, the worse he felt, according to my father. He would brighten whenever he obtained something valuable for his collection, though. He corresponded with people all over the globe; it was quite remarkable. I’ve got files and files of his correspondence with stamp dealers. He would take years tracking down a surviving stamp or cover that had been through a particular disaster. Wars, of course, from the American Revolution, the Crimean War, the First World War. Soldiers would frequently carry letters on their persons, of course. One doesn’t like to think how those letters ended up in the hands of collectors. But he preferred natural disasters and, to a lesser extent, man-made accidents.” Neve tapped the side of her cup. “He would have been fascinated by the Hindenburg and certainly there would have been a stamp or two involved, somewhere. And our modern disasters, too, of course.”
I knew what she was thinking of, suddenly — those letters mailed on the day we lost our thirty-fifth president, or the mail, I pictured White House thank-you notes, that had been waiting, perhaps, in Jackie’s purse. I went a little cold with dismay to think that many of these bits of paper were perhaps now in the hands of dealers and for sale all over the world to people like Octave. Neve and I think very much alike, and I saw that she was going to sugar her coffee — a sign of distress, since she has a bit of a blood sugar problem.
“Don’t,” I said. “You’ll be awake all night.”
“I know.” She sugared her coffee anyway and put the glass canister back. “Isn’t it strange, though, how time mutes the horror of events, how they cease to affect us in the same way? But I began to tell you all of this in order to explain why Octave left for Brazil.”