48.

THE FOSSIL.

Gwen and her family arrived the Sat.u.r.day after Labor Day, exhausted and cranky after three days of driving. The house she and Phil had bought overlooking the Deerfield River in Charlemont had been cleaned and was ready, but the moving van with all their furniture had broken down in Illinois and would be two days late. R.J. insisted that they move into her guest room for two nights, and she went to a rental store on Route 2 for a pair of folding cots for the children, Annie, eight, and Julian, six, whom they called Julie.

David labored mightily to make their meals a pleasure, and he got on very well with Phil, with whom he shared a love for team sports in all the seasons. Annie and Julie were attractive and lovable but they were children, full of pent-up, noisy energy, and they made the house seem small. The first morning they were at R.J.'s, the kids got into a loud and physical fight, Julie wailing because his sister insisted he had a girl's name.

Phil and David finally took them down to the river to fish, leaving the two women alone for the first time.

"Annie's right, you know," R.J. said. "He does have a girl's name."

"Hey," Gwen said sharply. "It's what we've always called him."

"So? You can change. Call him Julian. It's a perfectly good name, and it will make him feel like a grown-up."

R.J. was certain Gwen was going to tell her to mind her own business, but after a moment her friend grinned at her. "Good old R.J. You still have all the answers. I like David, by the way. What's going to happen between you two?"

R.J. shook her head. "I don't have any of the answers, Gwen."

David started writing early each morning, before she left for her office, sometimes even before she was out of bed. He told her that by remembering the Amish he was able to flesh out his descriptions of people who had lived in the Ma.s.sachusetts hills a hundred years ago, and describe their evenings by lamplight and their days filled with work.

The writing filled him with tension that could only be released through physical labor of his own. Late each afternoon he worked about the place, picking fruit in the small orchard, harvesting the late garden vegetables and pulling up exhausted plants and adding them to the compost pile.

He was grateful that R.J. had saved his beehives, and he set out to rehabilitate them. They offered him all the busywork he could ask for.

"They're a mess," he told R.J. cheerfully.

Only two of the hives still contained healthy swarms of bees. David started to be watchful, and whenever he saw bees going into the woods he followed, hoping to recapture one of the swarms that had gotten away. In some of the hives that remained, the bees were weakened by disease and parasites. He built himself a worktable of unpainted lumber in the barn and set up a honey house. He dug right in, cleaning and sterilizing hives, dosing bees with antibiotics, and turning nests of mice out of two of the hives.

He wondered aloud what had happened to his honey separator and to all the empty honey jars and printed labels.

"Those things are in a corner of the barn on your old place. I put them there myself," R.J. told him.

That weekend, he telephoned Kenneth Dettinger. Dettinger looked in the barn and reported all the things still were there, and David drove over and collected them.

When he returned, he told R.J. that he had offered to buy back the separator and the jars, but Dettinger had insisted that he take them, along with his old honey sign and his entire inventory of filled jars, almost four dozen of them. "Dettinger said he didn't want to be in the bee business. He said he'd settle for an occasional jar of honey. He's a nice guy."

"He is," R.J. said.

"Would you mind if I sold honey again, from here?"

She smiled. "No, that would be good."

"I'll have to put out the sign."

"I like the sign."

He drilled two holes on the underside of her sign that hung out front, then he screwed in eyebolts and hung his sign under hers.

Now somebody pa.s.sing the house received a barrage of messages.

THE HOUSE.

ON THE VERGE.

ROBERTA J. COLE, M.D.

I'M-IN-LOVE-WITH-YOU

HONEY.

She began to be hopeful about the future. David started going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings again. She went with him one evening, sitting in the low-ceilinged meeting room of a graceful stone Episcopal church with perhaps forty other people. When David's turn came, he rose and faced the group.

"I'm David Markus, and I'm an alcoholic. I live in Woodfield, and I'm a writer," he said.

They never quarreled. They got along sunnily, and she wouldn't have been troubled save for one fact she could not sweep away into a cranny where it didn't have to be examined.

He never talked to her about Sarah.

One afternoon when David had been digging up, splitting, and transplanting the tough, woody rhubarb roots that had been old when R.J. had bought the place, he came inside the house and washed something at the kitchen sink.

"Look here," he said as he wiped it dry.

"Oh, David. It's amazing!"

It was a heartrock. The piece of reddish shale was an irregular heart, but what made it wonderful was the clear imprint of an ancient, armored fossil that was imbedded in its surface, slightly off center.

"What is it?"

"I don't know. It looks like some sort of a crab, doesn't it?"

"It's like no crab I've ever seen," R.J. said. The fossil imprint was less than three inches long. It recorded a wide head, with prominent eye sockets, empty as Orphan Annie's. Its body sh.e.l.l was made up of many linear segments in a row, in three distinct longitudinal lobes.

They looked under "Fossils" in the encyclopedia.

"I think it's this one," she said, pointing to what the book said was a trilobite, a sh.e.l.led animal that lived more than 225 million years ago, when a warm, shallow sea had covered much of the United States. The little sh.e.l.led animal had died in the mud. Long before the mud hardened into rock, the flesh had rotted and carbonized, leaving a hard chemical film over the imprint that was left to be discovered under a rhubarb plant.

"What a find, David! How could there be a better heartrock? Where shall we put it?"

"I don't want to display it in the house. I want to show it to a couple of people."

"Good idea," she said. The subject of heartrocks reminded her of something. That morning when she had brought in the mail, there had been an envelope for him from the Beth Moses Cemetery in West Babylon, Long Island. She had read in the newspaper that before the Jewish high holidays was a traditional time for visiting cemeteries.

"Why don't the two of us go to visit Sarah's grave?"

"No," he said shortly. "I can't face that just now. I'm sure you understand," he said, and he put the shale stone in his pocket and went out to the barn.

49.

INVITATIONS.

"h.e.l.lo?"

"R.J.? This is Samantha."

"Sam! How are you?"

"I'm especially fine, that's why I'm calling. I want to get together with you and Gwen and share a little surprise, a little good news."

"Sam. You're getting married."

"Now, R.J., don't you start making all sorts of outrageous guesses, or you're going to make my little surprise seem shabby by comparison. I want you two to come to Worcester. I've already talked to Gwen, welcoming her back to Ma.s.sachusetts. She said she knows you have a free day next Sat.u.r.day, and she'll come if you will. Say you'll do it too."

R.J. checked her book and saw that Sat.u.r.day still was clear, except that she had dozens of ch.o.r.es. "Okay."

"Wonderful. The three of us together again. I can't wait."

"It's a promotion then, isn't it? Full professor? a.s.sociate chair of pathology?"

"R.J., you're still an eminent pain in the a.s.s. Good-bye. I love you."

"I love you too," R.J. said, and hung up, laughing.

Two afternoons later, as she drove home from her office, she came upon David, walking in the road. He had come out to intercept her, down Laurel Hill Road and up Franklin Road, knowing it was the route she took.

He was two miles from home when she spotted him, and she grinned when she saw him sticking out his thumb like a hitchhiker, and opened the car door.

He climbed in, beaming. "I couldn't wait to tell you. I've been on the phone with Joe Fallon all afternoon. The Peaceful G.o.dhead has been given a grant by the Thomas Blankenship Foundation. Big money, enough to establish and support the center in Colorado."

"David, how wonderful for Joe. Blankenship. That English publisher?"

"New Zealander. All those newspapers and magazines. How wonderful for all of us who want peace. Joe asked us to come out there with him in a couple of months."

"What do you mean?"

"What I said. A small group of people will live and work at the center, and partic.i.p.ate in its interfaith peace conferences as a permanent staff. Joe's inviting you and me to be among them."

"Why would he invite me? I'm not a theologian."

"Joe feels you'd be valuable. You could contribute a medical viewpoint, scientific and legal a.n.a.lysis. He's interested in having a doctor there to take care of the rest of the members. You would have your work."

As she turned the car onto Laurel Hill Road, she shook her head. She didn't have to put it into words for him.

"I know. You already have your work, and this is where you want to be." He reached over and touched her face. "It's an interesting offer. I'd think about accepting it if it weren't for you. If this is where you want to be, this is where I want to be."

But in the morning when she awoke, he was gone. There was a scrawled sheet of paper on the kitchen table.

Dear R.J., I have to go away. There are some things I must do.

I should be back in a couple of days.

Love, David At least this time he left a note, she told herself.

50.