If Mr. Sutton had fallen into a sinkhole, why would he have left a note?
It was always a joke at the farm, the supposed vanishings, made comical by time and the lack of connective tissue between the Bonaventurists and the original family. Before today no one, certainly not Minerva, ever stopped to assume the stories were true. Of course, for decades the farm sat empty, and the legend of it carried some weight with the locals. But not with the modern tenants.
And yet, lying in the dark, it suddenly did not seem so inconceivable to Minerva. Perhaps the Garricks did drop through soil one by one until none were left, save for the last poor fellow who fled west.
Sutton vanished as his hog John Tyler had vanished. As did John Bradway. And Clemmie Russell.
Minerva’s thoughts between sleeps eddied and spiraled. In the center of her mind’s ocean, a single berg of ice loomed larger than the rest, the others winding about it in slow orbits. They came together, jostled, rebounded, and flung themselves away in new patterns, and yet always gravitated toward the larger mass.
It was common in the evenings, after dinner but before everyone retreated to their slumbers, to hold some entertainment in the Consulate parlor or out of doors on the lawn. There would be readings of essays, either homegrown or from The Dial, or speeches or plays; the previous year Minerva had portrayed Hermia in Bonaventure’s episodic production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, spread across four sequential nights.
Upon a recent night there had been a poetry reading, with the Shelleys and Byrons among the community rising to stand before the audience and, with sometimes quivering hands and trembling voices, share their own efforts. Mr. Presley versed his way through doggerel celebrating the life-giving benefits of the sun, while Mrs. Alby offered a few lines calling for the equality of women before the law. Yet no one had been more delighted than Minerva when little Judith Alby stepped before the room and announced, “On Obligation.”
“We drive and beat across the frontier, taming the untamed land,” she read, “yet traveling not so far as to leave behind obligation to our fellow man.”
In a steady tone, her sheets of paper clutched before her, Judith praised the improvement of the American countryside and the innovation of its people, of its farmers and settlers, all the while reminding her listeners that such progress was worthless without responsibility to others. For these reasons and more, she intoned, the names Meriwether Lewis and William Clark should be held in higher esteem than Washington or Jefferson; and Minerva thought Judith made several clever couplings with seemingly unrhymable phrases like Corps of Discovery and Sacagawea. And while one metaphor regarding the digging of shallow holes seemed overused and, odder still, was accompanied by sharp glances at Minerva’s father, who simply nodded and smiled in encouragement, throughout her poem Judith praised the loyalty among those early explorers of the wilderness, equating the tenacity of their mission to their fidelity toward each other.
“Friendship, like duty, is hard won but easy to lose—and equally it was shared by the men and woman in their hide-bound canoes.”
The seats in the parlor were loosely arranged in two groups. That evening Minerva had chosen not to sit beside Lyman, or perhaps Lyman had chosen not to sit beside her; tongues bounced enough regarding them and their walks together, and Minerva did not always care to indulge the gossip of the butter churn or the hay bale. Yet rarely was he far from her mind. Greedy for a quick smile or a wink of affection, she turned to sneak a glimpse at him seated across the aisle.
How to describe what she saw, or her astonishment at the sight? Supportiveness, amusement, boredom; any would have been expected emotions. Instead she saw a man perched rather than sitting; a man whose hands gripped, not held, the spindles of the chair in front of him; a man whose spine leaned forward like a willow bent toward the water. Rivulets coursed down his cheeks and his nose sniffled. His eyes—his eyes adored. Minerva, far from taking a cursory peek at him instead stared openly, safe in her place far outside his attention. She doubted whether Lyman was aware of her or the others at all, or even the room or the house or the planet. For him in that moment, all that existed was Judith and her message of devotion.
How little we know each other, Minerva thought. One meets a person and paints a portrait of him using colors to our preference, and then upon confrontation with evidence outside their shared experience, the paint smears and bleeds. We assume people only exist within our eyesight; that they were born seconds before we met and die moments after we leave them. What an illusion it is to imagine that by spending a few idle moments in common company we comprehend another person. Not more than an arm span from Minerva was a stranger, a being moved by an emotion unknown to her. Something between love and uneasiness gripped her deep within. What tenderness lay beneath the bark of a man, Minerva wondered, that a child’s poem could bring him to tears? Or should she rather ask what sin had he committed, what trespass against a brother had he effected, that could kindle inside his soul a remorse so intense that it flowed like warm mineral waters down his face?
Suspicion is
