2
I KEPT watching the door. Yesterday she had come through that door. I had the feeling that she would come through that door again today in spite of the heat.
It was still morning, too early for trade.
Everywhere, except at the round table where I sat, the caned chairs were legs-up on the other tables in the barroom. The sawdust, which was an important part of the decor, had been swept up and the floors of the front room and the back room and the office were being mopped. They are water-mopped every day, for that’s the way it used to be down on the flats where the original of this room had its being.
The Prescott mansion, now known as River House, sits only a hundred feet back from the highway. There is a blue gravel drive and a blue gravel parking space near where Jason Prescott had an iron hitching post. The hitching post is now in the cellar of the carriage house and I must remember to have it set up some time. There is a whole new generation coming up that never saw a hitching post.
Finally I walked down the drive and wouldn’t admit to myself that I was walking toward the road to see if her car was coming. It was a green Mercury, I remembered from last night, and there was no reason it should be coming out the River Road at this hour of the morning. But it was.
I leaned against a brick gatepost higher than my head and when the car stopped I was on the driver’s side. I leaned on the window, looked in and said, “It’s an early thirst you have, ma’m.”
She said, “Come now, didn’t you invite me for breakfast?”
A part of my mind was thinking, She’s not the innocent child she seems . . . The other part was thinking, Sacred Cow—this is the daughter of General Gunther Cramer—and my old man was a brickyard straw boss . . . And just as suddenly I knew that whatever I was thinking was wholly unimportant. What mattered was what she was thinking.
She slid across the seat and said, “Do you want to go for a drive or do you want to park it for me?”
I got under the wheel and hesitated. “You spoke about breakfast—” I said tentatively.
“Conversation piece. I breakfasted hours ago. I’ve been out in the gardens. I might settle for lunch.”
“Then it’s a drive you want,” I said.
“Not much of a drive. Just down on the flats. With someone who knows his way around—who remembers.”
I said, “There’s nothing down under the hill now. The brickyards are gone. The clay is gone from the pits. The stores are boarded up and the houses mostly fallen in on themselves.”
“A ghost town,” she said. She reached over and put her hand on my arm and said, “Broome—I’d ilke to see the place that spawned you. One day I’ll tell you why.”
I said, “Then it’s not just my charm or my masculine appeal?”
“You’ve got it, after a fashion,” she said. “It’s not very overwhelming yet. But this hasn’t anything to do with that. Once when I was in Naples I went to see Pompeii—and if the comparison isn’t too ridiculous, I’m prepared to approach your brickyard ghost town in the same mood.”
I backed the smooth, green Mercury out of my blue-graveled drive, swung the wheel over and started down the hill toward the flat country along the river’s edge. I said, “I don’t see anything ridiculous about the comparison. People lived and loved and died in both places—and in both places a fault in nature brought the end of an era. They died a little quicker in Pompeii—none of them starved to death. That’s the chief difference.”
I had the feeling that she was looking at me closely, studying me, but when I took time for a glance, her hands were in her lap and she was looking straight ahead, down the hill.
I turned back to the business of driving. Halfway down the hill was the old brick school which I had entered with dread each fall and fled from in joy each June. The windows were gone now and some genius had managed to get a rock the size of my head up on the slate roof. It had cracked the slates, but hadn’t gone through.
“You went to school there,” she said. It was not a question.
I slowed. “Why not? Would you care to see the bronze plaque that marks the site of my old desk?”
She touched my arm again. “Bitter?” she said. “Why?”
“Not bitter, no. Just making like Berle. Why don’t you laugh it up?”
“Why don’t you get funny?” she said.
I drove on past the standing chimney and the weed-filled depression that marked the beginning of the old yards. Narrow-gauge track, rusted to the color of weak cocoa, still lay on rotted ties across the flats. Nature had been busy here with its chlorophyl cure-all, neatly growing the green stuff over the desolation. You could hardly mark the presence of a dead community.
She said, “Is that a barge, down in there by the stream?”
I said, “It’s a half-sunken brick scow on the mud bottom of the canal.”
“There’s a dirt road that seems to go down that way.”
“You’re sure you want to go that way? There’s nothing down in there but the old clay pits.”
“I’ve never seen those,” she said.
“Just holes in the ground. Some with enough pitch and drainage to keep them caked dry in midsummer—others are ponds now, with nothing to tell you that, fifty feet down, men and mules worked hard under the summer sun.”
We bumped down a dim trail that was no longer a road. Cicadas droned and once we saw a blacksnake slither off through the weeds. The hill was always above us, behind us now; but at one place a dip in the trail made it seem that the river, the bank of the river, was above us, too, in the other direction. An oil tanker, southbound, rode high against the tide, a slather of white wake creaming to yellow froth at its propeller thrash.
“Look,” she said, excited at the discovery, “why doesn’t the river flow in here and flood this place?”
“It’s the sun’s heat on the flats that makes us seem lower than the river—actually this strip never floods. The houses used to be here, and the sheds over there.”
There was broken brick and brick dust everywhere—the rubble of an industry that had sprung up and thrived and created a fortune and collapsed again because of the lack of the clay upon which it had been built.
She said, “And you lived here? Along this row, somewhere?”
“The biggest ruins—over there a little apart from the other ruins. My old man was Prescott’s straw boss. There were two foremen, but my old man used to boss the actual making of the brick.”
“Brick,” she said. “Somehow you never think of lives being dedicated to it. How is it made?”
I said, “There is a difference of opinion there, even in the yards. I can tell you the mixture in the old Prescott yards, but not the exact proportions—not even today.”
“What
