Bag of Bones 10 страница

I turned, expecting to see the curtains over the room’s window in motion. . . but they hung perfectly straight.

“Jo? ” I said, and hearing her name made me shiver so violently that I almost dropped the Memo-Scriber. “Jo, was that you? ”

Nothing. No phantom hands patting my skin, no motion from the curtains. . . which there certainly would have been if there had been an actual draft. All was quiet. There was only a tall man with a sweaty face and a tape-recorder under his arm standing in the doorway of a bare room. . . but that was when I first began to really believe that I wasn’t alone in Sara Laughs.

So what? I asked myself. Even if it should be true, so what? Ghosts can’t hurt anyone.

That’s what I thought then.

When I visited Jo’s studio (her air-conditioned studio) after lunch, I felt quite a lot better about Brenda Meserve—she hadn’t taken too much on herself after all. The few items I especially remembered from Jo’s little office—the framed square of her first afghan, the green rag rug, her framed poster depicting the wildflowers of Maine—had been put out here, along with almost everything else I remembered. It was as if Mrs. M. had sent a message—/can’t ease your pain or shorten your sadness, and I can’t prevent the wounds that oming back here may re-open, but I can put all the stuff that may hurt you in one place, so you won’t be stumbling over it unexpected or unprepared. I can do that much.

Out here were no bare walls; out here the walls jostled with my wife’s spirit and creativity. There were knitted things (some serious, many whimsical), batik squares, rag dolls popping out of what she called “my baby collages, ” an abstract desert painting made from strips of yellow, black, and orange silk, her flower photographs, even, on top of her bookshelf, what appeared to be a construction-in-progress, a head of Sara Laughs herself. It was made out of toothpicks and lollipop sticks.

In one corner was her little loom and a wooden cabinet with a sign reading jo’s KNITTING STUFF! NO TRESPASSING! hung over the pull-knob.

In another was the banjo she had tried to learn and then given up on, saying it hurt her fingers too much. In a third was a kayak paddle and a pair of Rollerblades with scuffed toes and little purple pompoms on the tips of the laces.

The thing which caught and held my eye was sitting on the old roll-top desk in the center of the room. During the many good summers, falls, and winter weekends we had spent here, that desktop would have been littered with spools of thread, skeins of yarn, pincushions, sketches, maybe a book about the Spanish Civil War or famous American dogs. Johanna could be aggravating, at least to me, because she imposed no real system or order on what she did. She could also be daunting, even overwhelming at times. She was a brilliant scatterbrain, and her desk had always reflected that.

But not now. It was possible to think that Mrs. M. had cleared the litter from the top of it and plunked down what was now there, but impossible to believe. Why would she? It made no sense.

The object was covered with a gray plastic hood. I reached out to touch it, and my hand faltered an inch or two short as a memory of an old dream (give me that it’s my dust-catcher) slipped across my mind much as that queer draft ad slipped across my face. Then it was gone, and I pulled the plastic, over off. Underneath it was my old green IBM Selectric, which I hadn’o ees. sgpr thought of in years. I leaned closer, knowing that the typewriter ball would be Courier—my old favorite—even before I saw it.

What in God’s name was my old typewriter doing out here? Johanna painted (although not very well), she took photographs (very good ones indeed)

and sometimes sold them, she knitted, she crocheted, she wove and dyed cloth, she could play eight or ten basic chords on the guitar. She could write, of course; most English majors can, which is why they become English majors. Did she demonstrate any blazing degree of literary creativity? No. After a few experiments with poetry as an undergrad, she gave up that particular branch of the arts as a bad job. You writejr both of us, Mike, she had said once. That’s allyours, ’ I’ll just take a little taste of everything else. Given the quality of her poems as opposed to the quality of her silks, photographs, and knitted art, I thought that was probably wise.

But here was my old IBM. Why?

“Letters, ” I said. “She found it down cellar or something, and rescued it to write letters on. ”

Except that wasn’t Jo. She showed me most of her letters, often urging me to write little postscripts of my own, guilt-tripping me with that old saying about how the shoemaker’s kids always go barefoot (“and the writer’s friends would never hear from him if it weren’t for Alexander Graham Bell, ” she was apt to add). I hadn’t seen a typed personal letter from my wife in all the time we’d been married—if nothing else, she would have considered it shitty etiquette. She could type, producing mistake-free business letters slowly yet methodically, but she always used my desktop computer or her own Powerbook for those chores.

“What were you up to, hon? ” I asked, then began to investigate her desk drawers.

Brenda Meserve had made an effort with these, but Jo’s fundamental nature had defeated her. Surface order (spools of thread segregated by color, for instance) quickly gave way to Jo’s old dear jumble. I found enough of her in those drawers to hurt my heart with a hundred unexpected memories, but I found no paperwork which had been typed on my old IBM, with or without the Courier ball. Not so much as a single page.

When I was finished with my hunt, I leaned back in my chair (her chair)

and looked at the little framed photo on her desk, one I couldn’t remember ever having seen before. Jo had most likely printed it herself (the original might have come out of some local’s attic) and then hand-tinted the result. The final product looked like a wanted poster col-orized by Ted Turner.

I picked it up and ran the ball of my thumb over the glass facing, bemused. Sara Tidwell, the turn-of-the-century blues shouter whose last known port of call had been right here in TR-90. When she and her folks—some of them friends, most of them relatives—had left the TR, they had gone on to Castle Rock for a little while. . . then had simply disappeared, like a cloud over the horizon or mist on a summer morning.

She was smiling just a little in the picture, but the smile was hard to read. Her eyes were half-closed. The string of her guitar—not a strap but a string—was visible over one shoulder. In the background I could see a black man wearing a derby at a killer angle (one thing about musicians: they really know how to wear hats) and standing beside what appeared to be a washtub bass.

Jo had tinted Sara’s skin to a card-all-lair shade, maybe based on other pictures she’d seen (there are quite a few knocking around, most showing Sara with her head thrown back and her hair hanging almost to her waist as she bellows out her famous carefree yell of a laugh), although none would have been in color. Not at the turn of the century. Sara Tid-well hadn’t just left her mark in old photographs, either. I recalled Dickie Brooks, owner of the All-Purpose Garage, once telling me that his father claimed to have won a teddybear at the Castle County Fair’s shooting-pitch, and to have given it to Sara Tidwell. She had rewarded him, Dickie said, with a kiss. According to Dickie the old man never forgot it, said it was the best kiss of his life. . . although I doubt if he said it in his wife’s hearing.

In this photo she was only smiling. Sara Tidwell, known as Sara Laughs.

Never recorded, but her songs had lived just the same. One of them, “Walk Me Baby, ” bears a remarkable resemblance to “Walk This Way, ” by Aerosmith. Today the lady would be known as an African-American. In 1984, when Johanna and I bought the lodge and consequently got interested in her, she would have been known as a Black. In her own time she would have been called a Negress or a darkie or possibly an octoroon. And a nigger, of course. There would have been plenty of folks free with that one. And did I believe that she had kissed Dickie Brooks’s father—a white man—in front of half of Castle County? No, I did not. Still, who could say for sure? No one. That was the entrancing thing about the past.

“It ain’t nuthin but a barn-dance sugar, ” I sang, putting the picture back on the desk. “It ain’t nuthin but a round-and-round. ”

I picked up the typewriter cover, then decided to leave it off. As I stood, my eyes went back to Sara, standing there with her eyes closed and the string which served her as a guitar strap visible over one shoulder. Something in her face and smile had always struck me as familiar, and suddenly it came to me. She looked oddly like Robert Johnson, whose primitive licks hid behind the chords of almost every Led Zeppelin and Yardbirds song ever recorded. Who, according to the legend, had gone down to the crossroads and sold his soul to Satan for seven years of fast living, high-tension liquor, and streetlife babies. And for a jukejoint brand of immortality, of course. Which he had gotten.

Robert Johnson, supposedly poisoned over a woman.

In the late afternoon I went down to the store and saw a good-looking piece of flounder in the cold-case. It looked like supper to me. I bought a bottle of white wine to go with it, and while I was waiting my turn at the cash register, a trembling old man’s voice spoke up behind me. “See you made a new friend yes’ty. ” The Yankee accent was so thick that it sounded almost like a joke. . . except the accent itself is only part of it; mostly, I’ve come to believe, it’s that singsong tone—real Mainers all sound like auctioneers.

I turned and saw the geezer who had been standing out on the garage tarmac the day before, watching along with Dickie Brooks as I got to know Kyra, Mattie, and Scoutie. He still had the gold-headed cane, and I now recognized it. Sometime in the 1950s, the Boston Post had donated one of those canes to every county in the New England states. They were given to the oldest residents and passed along from old fart to old fart. And the joke of it was that the Post had gone toes-up years ago.

“Actually two new friends, ” I replied, trying to dredge up his name. I couldn’t, but I remembered him from when Jo had been alive, holding down one of the overstuffed chairs in Dickie’s waiting room, discussing weather and politics, politics and weather, as the hammers whanged and the air-compressor chugged. A regular. And if something happened out there on Highway 68, eye-God, he was there to see it.

“I hear Mattie Devore can be quite a dear, ” he said heah, Devoah, deah—and one of his crusty eyelids drooped. I have seen a fair number of salacious winks in my time, but none that was a patch on the one tipped me by that old man with the gold-headed cane. I felt a strong urge to knock his waxy beak of a nose off. The sound of it parting company from his face would be like the crack of a dead branch broken over a bent knee.

“Do you hear a lot, old-timer? ” I asked.

“Oh, ayuh! ” he said. His lips—dark as strips of liver—parted in a grin. His gums swarmed with white patches. He had a couple of yellow teeth still planted in the top one, and a couple more on the bottom.

“And she gut that little one—cunnin, she is! Ayuh! ”

“Cunnin as a cat a-runnin, ” I agreed.

He blinked at me, a little surprised to hear such an old one out of my presumably newfangled mouth, and then that reprehensible grin widened.

“Her don’t mind her, though, ” he said. “Baby gut the run of the place, don’tcha know. ”

I became aware—better belated than never—that half a dozen people were watching and listening to us. “That wasn’t my impression, ” I said, raising my voice a bit. “No, that wasn’t my impression at all. ”

He only grinned. . . that old man’s grin that says Oh, ayuh, deah; I know one worth two of that.

I left the store feeling worried for Mattie Devore. Too many people were minding her business, it seemed to me.

When I got home, I took my bottle of wine into the kitchen—it could chill while I got the barbecue going out on the deck. I reached for the fridge door, then paused. Perhaps as many as four dozen little magnets had been scattered randomly across the front—vegetables, fruits, plastic letters and numbers, even a good selection of the California Raisins—but they weren’t random anymore. Now they formed a circle on the front of the refrigerator. Someone had been in here. Someone had come in and. . .

Rearranged the magnets on the fridge? If so, that was a burglar who needed to do some heavy remedial work. I touched one of them—gingerly, with just the tip of my finger. Then, suddenly angry with myself, I reached out and spread them again, doing it with enough force to knock a couple to the floor. I didn’t pick them up.

That night, before going to bed, I placed the Memo-Scriber on the table beneath Bunter the Great Stuffed Moose, turning it on and putting it in the DCTATE mode. Then I slipped in one of my old home-dubbed cassettes, zeroed the counter, and went to bed, where I slept without dreams or other interruption for eight hours.

The next morning, Monday, was the sort of day the tourists come to Maine for—the air so sunny-clean that the hills across the lake seemed to be under subtle magnification. Mount Washington, New England’s highest, floated in the farthest distance.

I put on the coffee, then went into the living room, whistling. All my imaginings of the last few days seemed silly this morning. Then the whistle died away. The Memo-Scriber’s counter, set to 000 when I went to bed, was now at 012.

I rewound it, hesitated with my finger over the PLAY button, told myself(in Jo’s voice) not to be a fool, and pushed it.

“Oh Mike, ” a voice whispered—mourned, almost-on the tape, and I found myself having to press the heel of one hand to my mouth to hold back a scream. It was what I had heard in Jo’s office when the draft rushed past the sides of my face. . . only now the words were slowed down just enough for me to understand them. “Oh Mike, ” it said again. There was a faint click. The machine had shut down for some length of time. And then, once more, spoken in the living room as I had slept in the north wing: “Oh Mike. ”

Then it was gone.

Around nine o’clock, a pickup came down the driveway and parked behind my Chevrolet. The truck was new—a Dodge Ram so clean and chrome-shiny it looked as if the ten-day plates had just come off that morning—but it was the same shade of off-white as the last one and the sign on the driver’s door was the one I remembered: WILLIAM “BILI’ DEAN CAMP CHECKING CARETAKING LIGHT CARPENTRYPLUS his telephone number. I went out on the back stoop to meet him, coffee cup in my hand.

“Mike! ” Bill cried, climbing down from behind the wheel. Yankee men don’t hug—that’s a truism you can put right up there with tough guys don’t dance and real men don’t eat quiche—but Bill pumped my hand almost hard enough to slop coffee from a cup that was three-quarters empty, and gave me a hearty clap on the back. His grin revealed a splendidly blatant set of false teeth—the kind which used to be called Roebuckers, because you got them from the catalogue. It occurred to me in passing that my ancient interlocutor from the Lakeview General Store could have used a pair. It certainly would have improved mealtimes for the nosy old fuck. “Mike, you’re a sight for sore eyes! ”

“Good to see you, too, ” I said, grinning. Nor was it a false grin; I felt all right. Things with the power to scare the living shit out of you on a thundery midnight in most cases seem only interesting in the bright light of a summer morning. “You’re looking well, my friend. ” It was true. Bill was four years older and a little grayer around the edges, but otherwise the same. Sixty-five? Seventy? It didn’t matter.

There was no waxy look of ill health about him, and none of the falling-away in the face, principally around the eyes and in the cheeks, that I associate with encroaching infirmity. “So’re you, ” he said, letting go of my hand. “We was all so sorry about Jo, Mike. Folks in town thought the world of her. It was a shock, with her so young. My wife asked if I’d give you her condolences special. Jo made her an afghan the year she had the pneumonia, and Yvette ain’t never forgot it. ”

“Thanks, ” I said, and my voice wasn’t quite my own for a moment or two. It seemed that on the TR my wife was hardly dead at all. “And thank Yvette, too. ”

“Yuh. Everythin okay with the house? Other’n the air conditioner, I mean. Buggardly thing! Them at the Western Auto promised me that part last week, and now they’re saying maybe not until August first. ”

“It’s okay. I’ve got my Powerbook. If I want to use it, the kitchen table will do fine for a desk. ” And I would want to use it—so many crosswords, so little time. “Got your hot water okay? ”

“All that’s fine, but there is one problem. ” I stopped. How did you tell your caretaker you thought your house was haunted? Probably there was no good way; probably the best thing to do was to go at it head-on. I had questions, but I didn’t want just to nibble around the edges of the subject and be coy. For one thing, Bill would sense it. He might have bought his false teeth out of a catalogue, but he wasn’t stupid. “What’s on your mind, Mike? Shoot. ”

“I don’t know how you’re going to take this, but—” He smiled in the way of a man who suddenly understands and held up his hand. “Guess maybe I know already. ”

“You do? ” I felt an enormous sense of relief and I could hardly wait to find out what he had experienced in Sara, perhaps while checking for dead lightbulbs or making sure the roof was holding the snow all right.

“What did you hear? ”

“Mostly what Royce Merrill and Dickie Brooks have been telling, ” he said. “Beyond that, I don’t know much. Me and mother’s been in Virginia, remember. Only got back last night around eight o’clock. Still, it’s the big topic down to the store. ” For a moment I remained so fixed on Sara Laughs that I had no idea what he was talking about. All I could think was that folks were gossiping about the strange noises in my house. Then the name Royce Merrill clicked and everything else clicked with it. Merrill was the elderly possum with the gold-headed cane and the salacious wink. Old Four-Teeth. My caretaker wasn’t talking about ghostly noises; he was talking about Mattie Devore.

“Let’s get you a cup of coffee, ” I said. “I need you to tell me what I’m stepping in here. ”

When we were seated on the deck, me with fresh coffee and Bill with a cup of tea (“Coffee burns me at both ends these days, ” he said), I asked him first to tell me the Royce Merrill-Dickie Brooks version of my encounter with Mattie and Kyra. It turned out to be better than I had expected. Both old men had seen me standing at the side of the road with the little girl in my arms, and they had observed my Chevy parked halfway into the ditch with the driver’s-side door open, but apparently neither of them had seen Kyra using the white line of Route 68 as a tightrope. As if to compensate for this, however, Royce claimed that Mattie had given me a big my hero hug and a kiss on the mouth. “Did he get the part about how I grabbed her by the ass and slipped her some tongue? ” I asked. Bill grinned. “Royce’s imagination ain’t stretched that far since he was fifty or so, and that was forty or more year ago. ”

“I never touched her. ” Well. . . there had been that moment when the back of my hand went sliding along the curve of her breast, but that had been inadvertent, whatever the young lady herself might think about it. “Shite, you don’t need to tell me that, ” he said. “But. . . ” He said that but the way my mother always had, letting it trail off on its own, like the tail of some ill-omened kite. “But what? ”

“You’d do well to keep your distance from her, ” he said. “She’s nice enough—almost a town girl, don’t you know—but she’s trouble. ” He paused. “No, that ain’t quite fair to her. She’s in trouble. ”

“The old man wants custody of the baby, doesn’t he? ” Bill set his teacup down on the deck rail and looked at me with his eyebrows raised. Reflections from the lake ran up his cheek in ripples, giving him an exotic look. “How’d you know? ”

“Guesswork, but of the educated variety. Her father-in-law called me Saturday night during the fireworks. And while he never came right out and stated his purpose, I doubt if Max Devore came all the way back to TR-90 in western Maine to repo his daughter-in-law’s Jeep and trailer.

So what’s the story, Bill? ” For several moments he only looked at me. It was almost the look of a man who knows you have contracted a serious disease and isn’t sure how much he ought to tell you. Being looked at that way made me profoundly uneasy. It also made me feel that I might be putting Bill Dean on the spot. Devore had roots here, after all. And, as much as Bill might like me, I didn’t. Jo and I were from away. It could have been worse—it could have been Massachusetts or New York—but Derry, although in Maine, was still away. “Bill? I could use a little navigational help if you—”

“You want to stay out of his way, ” he said.

His easy smile was gone. “The man’s mad. ” For a moment I thought Bill only meant Devore was pissed off at me, and then I took another look at his face. No, I decided, he didn’t mean pissed off; he had used the word “mad” in the most literal way. “Mad how? ” I asked. “Mad like Charles Manson? Like Hannibal Lecter? How? ”

“Say like Howard Hughes, ” he said.

“Ever read any of the stories about him? The lengths he’d go to to get the things he wanted? It didn’t matter if it was a special kind of hot dog they only sold in L. A. or an airplane designer he wanted to steal from Lockheed or Mcdonnell-Douglas, he had to have what he wanted, and he wouldn’t rest until it was under his hand. Devore is the same way. He always was—even as a boy he was willful, according to the stories you hear in town. “My own dad had one he used to tell. He said little Max Devore broke into Scant Larribee’s tack-shed one winter because he wanted the Flexible Flyer Scant give his boy Scooter for Christmas. Back around 1923, this would have been.

Devore cut both his hands on broken glass, Dad said, but he got the sled. They found him near midnight, sliding down Sugar Maple Hill, holding his hands up to his chest when he went down. He’d bled all over his mittens and his snowsuit. There’s other stories you’ll hear about Maxie Devore as a kid—if you ask you’ll hear fifty different ones—and some may even be true. That one about the sled is true, though. I’d bet the farm on it. Because my father didn’t lie. It was against his religion. ”

“Baptist? ”

“Nosir, Yankee. ”

“1923 was many moons ago, Bill.

Sometimes people change. ”

“Ayuh, but mostly they don’t. I haven’t seen Devore since he come back and moved into Warrington’s, so I can’t say for sure, but I’ve heard things that make me think that if he has changed, it’s for the worse. He didn’t come all the way across the country ’cause he wanted a vacation. He wants the kid. To him she’s just another version of Scooter Larribee’s Flexible Flyer. And my strong advice to you is that you don’t want to be the window-glass between him and her. ” I sipped my coffee and looked out at the lake. Bill gave me time to think, scraping one of his workboots across a splatter of birdshit on the boards while I did it. Crowshit, I reckoned; only crows crap in such long and exuberant splatters. One thing seemed absolutely sure: Mattie Devore was roughly nine miles up Shit Creek with no paddle.

I’m not the cynic I was at twenty—is anyone? —but I wasn’t naive enough or idealistic enough to believe the law would protect Ms. Doublewide against Mr. Computer. . . not if Mr. Computer decided to play dirty. As a boy he’d taken the sled he wanted and gone sliding by himself at midnight, bleeding hands not a concern. And as a man? An old man who had been getting every sled he wanted for the last forty years or so? “What’s the story with Mattie, Bill? Tell me. ”

It didn’t take him long. Country stories are, by and large, simple stories. Which isn’t to say they’re not often interesting. Mattie Devore had started life as Mattie Stanchfield, not quite from the TR but from just over the line in Motton. Her father had been a logger, her mother a home beautician (which made it, in a ghastly way, the perfect country marriage). There were three kids. When Dave Stanch-field missed a curve over in Lovell and drove a fully loaded pulptruck into Kewadin Pond, his widow “kinda lost heart, ” as they say. She died soon after. There had been no insurance, other than what Stanchfield had been obliged to carry on his Jimmy and his skidder. Talk about your Brothers Grimm, huh?

Subtract the Fisher-Price toys behind the house, the two pole hairdryers in the basement beauty salon, the old rustbucket Toyota in the driveway, and you were right there: Once upon a time there lived a poor widow and her three children. Mattie is the princess of the piece—poor but beautiful (that she was beautiful I could personally testify). Now enter the prince. In this case he’s a gangly stuttering redhead named Lance Devore. The child of Max Devore’s sunset years. When Lance met Mattie, he was twenty-one. She had just turned seventeen. The meeting took place at Warrington’s, where Mattie had landed a summer job as a waitress.

Lance Devore was staying across the lake on the Upper Bay, but on Tuesday nights there were pickup softball games at Warrington’s, the townies against the summer folks, and he usually canoed across to play.

Softball is a great thing for the Lance Devores of the world; when you’re standing at the plate with a bat in your hands, it doesn’t matter if you’re gangly. And it sure doesn’t matter if you stutter. “He confused em quite considerable over to Warrington’s, ” Bill said. “They didn’t know which team he belonged on—the Locals or the Aways. Lance didn’t care; either side was fine with him. Some weeks he’d play for one, some weeks t’other. Either one was more than happy to have him, too, as he could hit a ton and field like an angel. They’d put him at first base a lot because he was tall, but he was really wasted there. At second or shortstop. . . my! He’d jump and twirl around like that guy Noriega. ”

“You might mean Nureyev, ” I said. He shrugged. “Point is, he was somethin to see. And folks liked him. He fit in. It’s mostly young folks that play, you know, and to them it’s how you do, not who you are. Besides, a lot of em don’t know Max Devore from a hole in the ground. ”

“Unless they read the Wall Street Journal and the computer magazines, ’’ I said. “In those, you run across the name Devore about as often as you run across the name of God in the Bible. ”

“No foolin? ”

“Well, I guess that in the computer magazines God is more often spelled Gates, but you know what I mean. ”

“I s’pose. But even so, it’s been sixty-five years since Max Devore spent any real time on the TR. You know what happened when he left, don’t you? ”

“No, why would I? ” He looked at me, surprised. Then a kind of veil seemed to fall over his eyes. He blinked and it cleared. “Tell you another time—it ain’t no secret—but I need to be over to the Harrimans’ by eleven to check their sump-pump. Don’t want to get sidetracked. Point I was tryin to make is just this: Lance Devore was accepted as a nice young fella who could hit a softball three hundred and fifty feet into the trees if he struck it just right. There was no one old enough to hold his old man against him—not at Warrington’s on Tuesday nights, there wasn’t—and no one held it against him that his family had dough, either. Hell, there are lots of wealthy people here in the summer. You know that. None worth as much as Max Devore, but being rich is only a matter of degree. ” That wasn’t true, and I had just enough money to know it. Wealth is like the Richter scale-once you pass a certain point, the jumps from one level to the next aren’t double or triple but some amazing and ruinous multiple you don’t even want to think about. Fitzgerald had it straight, although I guess he didn’t believe his own insight: the very rich are different from you and me. I thought of telling Bill that, and decided to keep my mouth shut. He had a sump-pump to fix.

Kyra’s parents met over a keg of beer stuck in a mudhole. Mattie was running the usual Tuesday-night keg out to the softball field from the main building on a handcart. She’d gotten it most of the way from the restaurant wing with no trouble, but there had been heavy rain earlier in the week, and the cart finally bogged down in a soft spot. Lance’s team was up, and Lance was sitting at the end of the bench, waiting his turn to hit. He saw the girl in the white shorts and blue Warrington’s polo shirt struggling with the bogged handcart, and got up to help her.

Three weeks later they were inseparable and Mattie was pregnant; ten weeks later they were married; thirty-seven months later, Lance Devote was in a coffin, done with softball and cold beer on a summer evening, done with what he called “woodsing, ” done with fatherhood, done with love for the beautiful princess. Just another early finish, hold the happily-ever-after.

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