by Ruth Doan MacDougall
About the Book
To order a copy, see the information on the panel, at left. The publisher, Plaidswede, also accepts mail orders.
CHAPTER ONE
“Hot lemonade,” Mercy Blodgett said, spotting the sign as she and Bob walked along the fair’s crowded midway, “hot.”
Under her black wool jacket she was wearing her grandmother’s white satin wedding gown, high-necked with a lace yoke, long sleeves, and a bustle. She took a firmer grip on its bunched-up train and veered toward a small stand whose yellow sign shone more warmly than the bright October afternoon sun above the red and golden leaves. Because of the cold weather on this Saturday of Columbus Day weekend of 1986, the enterprising owner had taped a scribbled “HOT” before the “LEMONADE.”
“Horse piss,” said Bob, her husband, but he followed her. Big and burly, comic-strip freckles on his fifty-one-year-old face, he was wearing sensible clothes, a Thinsulate jacket over jeans and a sweater that almost matched the mountains’ blend of distant autumn colors, honey, rust, dark-green. Although he looked entirely normal, she knew he was an unexploded bomb. Danger UXB, that had been the name of a Masterpiece Theatre series a few years ago, UXB a term she hadn’t ever run across for “unexploded bomb.” Bob was a UXB.
“Two, please,” he said to the woman behind the counter.
Mercy glanced at her watch. One-thirty. “What about lunch? Did you get anything to eat while I was in the parade?”
“I’m okay.”
And probably full of his fair favorites, an Italian-sausage sub and onion rings. Since yesterday, she’d had no appetite at all.
He asked, “Do you want something besides lemonade?”
“No. Let’s go home.” To flee from people’s questions. Before the parade, everybody—including her parents and brother—had been asking about the rumors about the mill.
Sipping from paper cups, she and Bob left behind the swirling music of the merry-go-round and Ferris wheel and the many many rides new since her childhood. Outside the fairground gates, however, there were also crowds, and under the tall old maples that lined Main Street, the sidewalks seemed like city sidewalks. Dragooned as usual by her mother, the town clerk, to participate in the Chiswick Historical Society’s contribution to the fair parade, which included a noisy float celebrating the restoration of the Chiswick Falls one-room schoolhouse, she had ridden along Main Street in her Great-Grandfather Wheeler’s buggy driven by her brother, Perley, two years younger, whose only concession to costume was a rakish top hat from the historical society’s clothing collection. (His beard didn’t count; he’d worn a beard for years.) Usually the buggy resided in the historical society’s transportation-museum barn, with a card propped on the seat explaining, In this buggy Dr. Tilden Wheeler (1846-1879), the first doctor in Chiswick, New Hampshire, made his rounds, caring for the needs of his patients far and wide. If you did the math, you saw that he hadn’t jounced over hill and dale in this rickety little buggy for all that many years, having died at the age of thirty-three. She was older than her great-grandfather, forty-nine; she was alive, but one part of her life and Bob’s had died. Yesterday, with the closing of the hosiery mill in the nearby city of Palmerton, they had lost their jobs. She had been an executive secretary, and Bob had been in charge of production at the old brick mill that used to boast: First in the Country to Produce Fine Gauge Seamless Stockings!
The terror that had sickened her since yesterday had briefly subsided as she rode in the buggy, waving to the enthusiastic people crammed along the street and remembering the excitement of the long-ago Columbus Day fairs when she and Perley and their parents would drive down to the village from the farm on Paine Road and park at her grandparents’ house on Main Street and, in the front yard, view the parade, little Mercy on tiptoe behind the white fence to see the bands, clowns, oxen, sheep—and relatives, because she seemed to be related to almost everybody in town, relatives marching, riding, herding, relatives impressive or foolish on crepe-paper floats. A banner always announced DISCOVERER OF THE NEW WORLD, and Grandma Paine would say, “There’s your Great-Aunt Barbara, she’s Queen Isabella this year”; another banner would proclaim FOUNDING OF CHISWICK IN 1762, and Grandma Paine would explain, “There’s King George the Third, your Uncle Jim is playing him this year, King George with the charter decreeing that Chiswick can hold an annual fair, but the town was too busy getting itself settled to hold one until—”; OCTOBER 1868, FIRST CHISWICK FAIR, a crop of more relatives amid vegetables, fruit—“There’s your Great-Aunt Lottie playing your Great-Great-Great-Aunt Abigail who was famous for her cheeses and for outliving your Great-Great-Grandfather Ezekiel Paine, whose third wife she was, he married three sisters, you know, the Sanborn sisters, your Great-Great-Grandmother Emily the eldest, poor valiant soul—”
Now she and Bob battled upstream through the throngs past the brick fire station, the white post office, the old brick general store, Mom’s Bakery ’n’ Coffee Shop, Olmstead’s Superette, Chuck’s Auto Service and Used Car Sales, the hardware store, and, along the common, the dark yellow Chiswick Inn and the usual white clapboard buildings, the town hall, the Methodist Church, the grange hall, the Congregational Church, and the historical society in the white colonial house that had belonged to the Baldwin branch of the Paine family, where Mercy Baldwin, the first Mercy, had been born in 1842. On the lawn was displayed another transportation-museum treasure, Grandpa Paine’s mail carriage. Such an elegant carriage for such everyday work, slim and shiny black, with sliding windows out of which Grandpa Paine had leaned to put letters in mailboxes. Beside it sat the sleigh he’d used come winter. Grandpa hadn’t really adjusted to using the internal-combustion engine for business or pleasure until Mercy’s parents got married and took over the Paine farm and Grandma and Grandpa moved into the village. Her father used to recall, “I remember how the people who first bought autos would drive them through garages hollering whoa, whoa, as though they were still driving a horse, and they only stopped when they struck something solid. Foot on the gas hard and hollering like hell. That was your mother’s father at the beginning.” But by the time the War arrived with its gas-rationing-hobbled tourists, Grandpa enjoyed driving so much that he earned extra money by picking up vacationers at lakeside hotels and chauffeuring them on scenic tours of the White Mountains. Grandma had never learned to drive, period.
Next came another square white clapboard house, but one with a brick bowfront. It had belonged to Dr. and Mrs. Tilden Wheeler. Eventually the place had been sold out of the Wheeler family to summer people, and now a retired couple from Massachusetts owned it. On the three front steps were three pumpkins in carefully graduated sizes ascending small to large.
Mercy said, “Those pumpkins. Too cute!”
Bob didn’t comment.
He normally had opinions about everything. Including the fair. Back when the Chiswick Fair officials had gone along with the national switch of Columbus Day from the traditional October 12 to a Monday to make a long weekend, Bob could only rant; two years ago, however, he had been the director of the fair when the majority of the officers had voted to expand it to Sunday, and he had resigned at the top of his lungs, predicting darkly the thin end of the wedge, which it had been. Now, this year, Saturday had been added and what next, a whole week’s disruption of Chiswick, with strip shows and pari-mutuel harness racing? Normally, he would be complaining today about the shift of the parade from Sunday to Saturday.
More houses, then Grandma and Grandpa Paine’s white Cape. (Grandma had been the third Mercy, granddaughter of the first Mercy, daughter of the second.) Grandma and Grandpa were dead, also Uncle Jim who’d inherited the place, but spry little Aunt Helena, his widow, continued to give fair parking privileges to friends and relatives, so Mercy and Bob had left their red Blazer in the slot she’d directed them to on the side lawn, which today was a packed parking lot of empty cars, everybody still at the fair. Including, thank God, Aunt Helena.
Bob unlocked the Blazer, never locked in Chiswick except at fair time. Mercy hoisted Grandma’s wedding-gown train and climbed in. They crumpled their paper cups into the litterbag. He drove down the driveway into the clear lane against the bumper-to-bumper line of cars just arriving, passengers craning their necks to see the fair.
