The room was going wild.
“Mr. Deane! Mr. Deane! I must ask you to resume your seat!”
“No, I will not. I have something to say. We’ve listened to her. Now you’ll have to listen to me.” Charley MacIsaac moved from the back of the room and stood to one side of the selectmen. Penny gulped down an entire glass of water and glanced from side to side at her fellow board members. Morris Phyfe broke the silence. “Let the man speak. Everyone else has had a say, and I expect we’ll be throwing out
“Some of you are my friends. Some of you don’t know me at all. And some of you are my enemies. Not that I give a damn.” This last word was bleeped to those watching breathlessly at home but he might as well have said “read my lips,” so clear was the word.
“I want to clear the air; then we can get back to business—namely, approving a perfectly reasonable construction plan that will bring new taxpayers to town, to say nothing of jobs.
“Number one.” Gus held up his hand. Like Joey’s, they were huge—calloused, with fingers like knock-wurst. The room waited. He raised his index finger.
“Number one. Don’t think we haven’t been hearing all day that we set the fire ourselves for the insurance money and that Mrs. Batcheldor got herself killed when she wandered in on us. Now this is bullshit”—
another bleep—“and you all know it. There’s no way the insurance is going to cover our loss. And as for the poor woman, why not ask what in God’s name she was doing there? And who put her up to it? So, number one, I don’t want to hear any more about the Deanes setting fires or knocking people off. If the police were doing their job, they’d have figured out the facts by now. I have.”
Charley’s expression didn’t change a bit as the camera panned slowly over his face.
“Number two.” Gus raised his index and middle fingers. Somehow it seemed as if only one was up.
“Whatever scum is bothering my granddaughter—and you know who you are—is going to answer to me, and I
“Now.” He seemed to be winding up for a big finish. His broad forehead was so furrowed that the white bristles of his eyebrows jutted out toward the group in one defiant straight line. “None of these things happened until the formation of this cockamamy POW! group. It seems to me”—he turned to address Charley—“this is no coincidence. They’ve got it in for us and we’re not going to turn tail. We have as much right to be here as they do, even if we didn’t step onto Plymouth Rock or whatever.” Brad Hallowell jumped up from the front row. Millicent, to her credit, futilely grabbed at the back of his sweatshirt. “But you don’t have the right to rape the land! You don’t have the right to destroy the earth for a few bucks! You don’t—”
It wasn’t clear what Gus roared out. Some said it was “You little swine”; others opted for a more color-ful expression. What was clear was that Gus lunged at Brad, who met him, fists raised. Charley moved rapidly toward the pair, surprising those who thought Chief MacIsaac was less nimble than he used to be.
Nimble or not, it was all over before he reached them.
Millicent placed her skinny but resilient frame between the two men and Penny pounded the gavel so hard, the handle broke and went flying across the room, missing Cheryl Hardy by a few inches. Cheryl looked stunned, got up, and left, vowing to watch the meetings on TV in the future—at home, where she would be safe and might even finish the elaborate argyle sweater she had started for her husband when they were courting ten years earlier.
“This meeting is adjourned. Please clear the room,” Penny shouted above the din. “Clear the room immediately!”
Several people had come to Charley and Millicent’s aid. Gus was being pushed out one door, still yelling at Brad. Brad was being detained in his seat.
“I guess he’s blown any chance he might have had with Lora,” Pix commented to Faith. They were staying put.
“I think those chances went out the window long ago, but if I were he, I’d make that visit to Nepal or somewhere farther away about now.”
“He can’t. Millicent’s got him so busy doing things for Patriots’ Day that it would take more than Gus Deane to convince her to let Brad leave town. And he’s the only one the Minutemen have at the moment who can drum the call to arms.”
“But Gus Deane plays Captain Sewall! And isn’t he the current company commander?”
“Yes, but don’t worry. They really do become the figures they play. And Captain Sewall has no quarrel with young Tom Havers. It’s 1775 for a brief moment.
You’ll see. Nothing will happen.”
Looking at the glowering youth sitting with his arms stiff at his sides, clenching the chair, eyes straight ahead, apparently oblivious to Millicent’s soothing words, Faith sincerely hoped Pix was right.
Patriots’ Day was less than a week away. Not much time to cool off.
Margaret’s funeral was held Friday morning. Nelson had spent time with Tom the day before going over the service. It was surprising, he told Faith, how many references to birds there were in the Bible. They had settled on Psalm 104, some appropriate hymns, and Margaret’s favorite poem, Shelley’s “To a Skylark,” to be read at the graveside. This had been the only request her husband remembered that she’d ever made about her funeral.
Faith took out her funeral dress, a black Ralph Lau-ren wool knit she’d bought when she’d first arrived in Aleford and assumed the duties of a ministerial spouse. Before they were married, Tom had been insistent that she would be able to go her own way. “It’s my job, not yours,” he’d told her. So sweet, so naive.
She’d kissed him and gone out to buy the dress. It had since witnessed so many obsequies that she could never wear it anyplace else without instinctively looking about for a casket.
She slipped the dress over her head and stood by the window. It was pouring—not a drizzle, not a sun shower, but a steady curtain of solid precipitation that obliterated the landscape, turning the early spring into a monochrome. There had been so much rain this year after a curiously snowless winter. So much rain, but not on Monday night. Not on the fire.
Ben was at school and Amy was at a friend’s house.
There would be the funeral, the interment, then back to the house for thimbles of sherry and lots and lots of those triangle sandwiches.
Was this what Margaret would have liked? It was going to be pretty sedate, although not without tears.
What would Faith herself want? Faith pictured her own funeral and wished for some serious wailing and gnashing of teeth. Tom had promised to go at the same time, so presumably the kids, elderly people themselves by then, would be pretty broken up. Faith wanted a funeral where people would feel free to throw themselves on the thin red carpet that went up the center aisle of the church. Maybe roll around a little. She wanted hymns that could be belted out. She wanted “Amazing Grace” the way it ought to be sung.
It wasn’t very likely, particularly if her sister, Hope, outlived her, as she no doubt planned. Hope would not be scandalized by such a display of raw emotion; she would simply say it wouldn’t do, and that would be that. At least Faith could leave instructions about the food. Maybe champagne and caviar. We die as we live. Or was it the other way around?
As she searched for some dark hose, she realized she hadn’t known Margaret very well. Such different interests. Such different schedules. Margaret, a murder victim. So unlikely. This friend of feathered friends. Tom had mentioned that neither Nelson nor Margaret had any family to speak of. She wondered why they hadn’t had children. Margaret had spoken of her mother with obvious affection, a mother who set those feet, so sensibly clad in sturdy brown Oxfords, on the path through hill and dale in search of birdsongs. A pretty picture. Wouldn’t Margaret have liked to perform the same role? She remembered seeing Nelson installing some shelves at the preschool one morning. Miss Lora and the children were at his side.
Faith had never seen the man so animated, so obviously happy.
There was always something a bit wistful about the Batcheldors. Margaret had not had a career, but she’d been born in that sliver of time between the assump-tion that a woman’s place was in the home and the exodus into the workforce. She would have had a foot in each era, and that must have been confusing, as indeed such a picture presented. Faith tried to think about what Margaret actually had done. Nelson was more active in the church than she’d been, although she was a member of the Alliance. She’d done some volunteer work and was prominent in the Aleford Conservation Commission. She’d definitely had organizational skills, but seemed content with her life
