spending the summer. It looked serviceable enough, yet there was something about it, he'd felt it from the start: something that disturbed him.
Perhaps it was the all-enveloping ivy, or the squat shape of the roof, or the way the shingled eaves hung low over the doorways. Or.. . yes, that was it – the windows. The windows in the back. They were too big, and too near the trees, and the trees seemed to press toward them in a way he didn't like. While the front windows looked out upon a comfortable expanse of lawn bathed by the pale rays of a late afternoon sun, those in back seemed to open on another world, a twilight of tangled branches and shadowy black forms. They offer no protection, he decided.
Later he would wonder what had prompted such a thought, and what there was to be protected from. But at this moment, with the photo before him and the bus bearing him toward that very scene, all such questions fell before a single overriding conviction: It isn't right to build a house so close against the woods.
Its outskirts had become the haunt of bargain hunters, a busy region of shopping centers and showrooms, but the town of Flemington was quiet on this Sunday afternoon, though cars still lined the parking lots of the churches at the edge of the business district. Farther up the street the bus stopped before a red-brick card and candy shop. New Jersey Lottery stickers on the window and commercial notices fluttering from a bulletin board by the door. Several passengers filed off, the youth with the radio among them; the lone attractive girl had long since disappeared into one of the small towns back down the road. With a hiss of air brakes, the bus continued on past the venerable white pillars of the Union Hotel; then a bakery, odd star-shaped loaves in the window; a real-estate office with its shades drawn; and the old county courthouse, beyond whose worn stone steps the killer of the Lindbergh baby had been tried. At the end of the street stood the offices of the local daily, the Hunterdon County Home News. Next to them a funeral parlor's awning reached toward the sidewalk.
The bus followed the main road as it curved westward, the stores and municipal buildings giving way to handsome suburban houses with gables, ornate shutters, and broad well-tended lawns, which in turn gave way to freshly plowed fields, pastures where cattle grazed, and occasional patches of woods. Abruptly the bus veered north, leaving the main road for a narrower one that twisted between tall hedges like the footpath it may once have been. It wound past small, shaded bungalows half hidden by trees and secretive little lanes where foliage blocked the view ahead. Down one of these the bus turned, branches scraping at its sides. The lane cut through a stand of cottonwoods and over a gentle, sparsely forested rise choked with ground ivy and brambles. Beyond it, winding away from each side of the road until they were lost amid the trees, ran what appeared to be the ruins of an ancient stone wall. As the bus passed through them, Freirs felt as if he were trespassing onto private ground.
The way continued through a lane of cottonwoods and maples that looked as if they'd been there for centuries. Behind them stood a succession of dark-shingled houses, three on one side, four on the other – dwellings without ornament, obviously old, with lawns trimmed neatly and glimpses of gardens in back. Just past them the road suddenly widened and came to an end at another running perpendicular to it, forming a T. Facing the intersection stood a rambling white clapboard building with a wide front porch and a Post Office sign by the doorway. Behind it, and apparently attached, rose the tall rust-red pillar of a grain silo and the black gambrel roof of a barn, its weathered shingles curling in the sunlight.
The bus slowed as it came into the intersection and pulled noisily up to the building. In front of it Freirs could see three old-fashioned gas pumps and, along one side, what appeared to be a loading area, with broad ramps leading up to a garage adjoining the barn. By one of the doorways stood a dusty little tractor and a wagon piled high with bags of grain. An empty pickup truck was parked ahead, near the pumps, with another parked farther back, in the shadow of the barn. Both trucks looked decades old, like the car he'd noticed in a driveway down the street; their paintwork was dark, lacking all decoration and chrome.
No one was about. The porch was empty save for a straight-backed wooden bench; the front door was closed, the windows shuttered, the place as quiet and deserted an empty film set. There were no street signs to be seen, not even a sign above the building, and there'd been no words of welcome down the road. But Freirs knew, even before the bus driver turned and announced the name, that at last he'd reached Gilead.
The bus left him standing alone before the store, holding his jacket and his envelope of clippings. As Deborah Poroth's letter had warned, there was no one to meet him, and as he turned to look around, he felt marooned. Across the street, set well back from the road behind a line of massive oaks, stood a building that he guessed to be a school – a square red-brick structure with a patchy brown playing field beside it and two lonely seesaws in front. At the opposite corner, on a piece of ground slightly higher than the rest, stood a little cemetery, old but obviously well tended, though here and there a tombstone was askew, like trees after a storm.
The sound of the bus's engine faded beyond the curve of the road, leaving a silence broken only by the buzzing of insects and the occasional cry of a bird.
Freirs hadn't really expected the town to be this small. He'd expected at least a town center, someplace for the populace to meet. Yet except for the schoolhouse back behind the trees, there appeared to be no civic buildings of any kind, not even a Grange hall or an American Legion post.
What surprised him most of all was the absence of a church. From where he stood he could see. nothing but well-scrubbed houses bordering both sides of the road, and maples and oaks whose new foliage looked cool against the burning blue sky, the treetops receding into the distance toward a line of low green hills. The skyline was unbroken by either a golden cross or a slim white steeple. Perhaps services were held in some simple one-room tabernacle concealed behind a bend in the road.
Turning, with a sigh, toward the clapboard building – obviously the Co-operative mentioned in the letter, though for a store it was curiously bare of window placards and advertising – he climbed the steps to the front porch, wishing there were somewhere around to take a pee. The bench did not look comfortable, and wasn't. Above him, as he sat, he noticed a row of ominous-looking iron hooks protruding from a beam in the porch ceiling. Probably where they hung the sinners. He wondered, briefly, what sins lay on his own head.
He sat for a few minutes, savoring the silence. He was going to like this place, if the farm was as quiet as the town. Who knows, even boredom might be welcome. Tedium as Therapy: The Uses of Ennui. Time as a Function of… He was already beginning to feel drowsy. All those hours on the bus, and now this heat and solitude: it took a lot out of a body.
His bladder was full, though, and there seemed little likelihood there'd be a bathroom handy. Typical, that he hadn't thought to go back there on the goddamned bus. Opposite him, by the schoolyard, a line of oaks made patterns of shade along the roadside; inviting, but he'd be too conspicuous there. Past the farther corner the stone slabs of the cemetery stood bathed in sunlight; behind them rose secluded clumps of trees. That was the likeliest place. Besides, there might be some interesting old tombstones; do some rubbings there someday. At least it would help pass the time.
He strolled down the porch steps and across the street. Climbing the slope to the cemetery, he felt self- conscious. What if they didn't like strangers walking over great-granddaddy's head? That probably wasn't the case, though. People around here would be proud of these things, of how far back their families went.
Here was one, for example; he stood looking down at a small white headstone that the years had worn almost smooth. Ephraim Lindt; who Died 1887 in the 63rd year of his Life. That wasn't as far back as he'd expected. Obviously you couldn't go by the condition of the stone; the white ones tended to weather more.
Nearby he saw an older one that had held up better. Johann Sturtevant, Call'd to His Maker 1833, Aged Fifty-One. His Dutiful Wife, Korah, Join'd with Him in Heaven 1870, Aged Seventy-Eight. Jesus, a widow for almost forty years, and in a place like this.
Farther back stood a small stand of willows and, behind them, a scraggly hedgerow. He approached them, unzipping his fly, and let loose a splattering yellow arc on the base of one tree. Insects circled round in protest. Off to the right he could see the assemblage of headstones regarding him like an audience – Buckhalter, Stoudemire, van Meer – but there was no one to see him but the ghosts of the dead, and surely they were tolerant. Envious, even. How long had it been since his citified cock had been touched by actual sunlight? Damn, but this place felt healthy! Zipping up and with nothing to flush, he wandered back to the graves.
Slowly he made his way through the aisles, stopping at intervals to read the inscriptions on the older stones. Their quietude, the sense of souls and bodies in repose, had begun to make him drowsy again. Many of the stones had faces on them, or angels' heads, or skulls; some of the more modern ones had willows, like the one he'd just watered. There were also smaller headstones, for children. Picturing the tiny wooden coffins, Freirs tried to imagine how parents must have felt in an era when half the population died in childhood. Maybe, in those days, they didn't mind so much.
