your question?”
She said, “No. I think I’d like to know more about the making of brick. I’d like to picture these yards active again, and the people here as they were in the old days.”
I knew what she meant. Her enthusiasm didn’t make much sense, but I could understand it. The ghost towns of the West have their fans. There are clubs concerned with the preservation of old automobiles. Somewhere in New England there is a museum devoted to the bygone steamboat days. So why shouldn’t she be interested in the artifacts of a vanished brickyard?
It was impossible to go farther along the rutted trail by car. I cut the switch and she said, “Can’t we get out and go on foot? I’d like to see that old scow close up.”
We could see the tilted cabin of the old brick barge—the rotting hulk was canted over like a drunken dowager, her broad bottom flat to the mud.
“Why not?” I said and got out. When I rounded the car, she was already waiting for me. The underbrush grew close on either side of the car and when I came abreast of her, our shoulders touched. I had seen her shoulders bare the night before, but this actual touch showed me for the first time how firmly fleshed she was.
I had been aware from the first that in many ways Anne Cramer was unlike any of the other women I had known. It was too soon to say what special quality she possessed, but I had the feeling, even then, that it was not a quality of goodness. There was a half shadow on the earth, although the Valley in June is famous for the brightness of its summer sun. It would take a thin-veined poet to hint that the warm stillness of the flats was burdened with more than humidity, that it was a foreboding that weighted down the morning air. And since I am pleased to be neither thin-veined nor a poet, I could be amused at the idea. But not quite at peace with the world—the beginning, then, of never again being quite at peace with the world, forever after. Spare the Amen.
I stood on the bank of the inlet, which was part inlet and part man-made canal, and said, “There is your brick barge, your romantic scow. On such as this, with canopy yet, Cleopatra floated down the Nile. On such as this a million, a billion, perhaps even a trillion brick floated down the Hudson—to build Brooklyn.”
She stood there on the grassy bank and was silent for a moment or two. I wondered for the first time if she were just a degree or two removed, one way or the other, from normal.
Finally she said, “A man and a woman probably lived together in that shack on that scow, once upon a time. The lazy, cat-heat of the sun would be in their bones all day, and the whisper of the night breeze would lave over them like tropic waters, soothing, cooling, reviving—”
I wanted to jolt her out of it. I lied. I said, “I remember that very scow, as a kid. The captain was a scurvy old rumpot with pellagra, and the slattern in dirty calico who cooked for him weighed over two hundred pounds and had a harelip.”
She hit me with the back of her palm, not viciously, not enough to hurt. But in the nature of a warning.
“I can dream, can’t I?” she said lightly. But I had caught the wrist of the hand that had struck me and now I shifted my grip to the upper arm and then to the shoulder. She turned to me, her face coming closer and closer as though from a great distance, far beyond my reach. And then suddenly there was no distance left between us at all and she was not beyond my reach, and the experience of vital contact that had come from the mere brushing of our shoulders was a hundredfold increased . . .
I kissed her.
She was shaking a little when she moved away, and I do not think that her eyes quite focused, for she stood for a moment with her hands on my shoulders and her face turned earthward. Her voice seemed incredibly far away when she spoke, and not her natural voice at all.
She said, “Never do that again, Jason. Never.”
And I was so surprised at my own reaction to those unbelievable thirty seconds that I said, “No, Anne. Not if that’s the way you want it—” but I lied, in words and tone, and she guessed at the lie and looked up at me. Suddenly she laughed, and for the moment everything was all right again—almost.
“You were telling me about the clay pit,” she said. “Before we leave I should like to see it.” She turned her back on the old barge which had so interested her only a few minutes before.
I said, “We’ll have to go around to the other side of the yards to see the clay pit. There are a half dozen small depressions where they probed for clay, but the big pit, the pit that kept the yards going for so many years, is off here to the south.”
We reached the car and I had to back it out to the road. When we reached the ruins of the old settlement near the sheds I swung the wheel over and found the rutted trail to the clay pit. I stopped at the shore of a barren, water-filled depression. The top branches of a crabapple tree were just above water level at the end of the lake nearest us, and we could see where the morning sun slanted down through ash-gray spidery branches, waterlogged now and barren of blossoms these many years past.
“This is it?” she asked. “This lake is a clay pit?”
“Yes,” I said.
I glanced at the sun and was sure that it was about right for us to see what I wanted her to see. I led her to the edge of the pond and said, “Look down at an angle, just about in a line with that sumac tree over there.” I waited, and she made a sound of surprise.
“What is it?” she said. “A wagon of some kind—and just where the sun strikes I can see a sloping shelf and the roof of a building.” She shivered. “Is there a world down there still, going on about its business under water?”
I laughed, not yet understanding the unusual trend that her thoughts could take. I said, “That’s an old shed where they kept tools. The sloping shelf is the road out. And the strange-looking cart with the two high wheels is an old clay cart. There are a couple of others at the far end of the pond.”
“Down there, under water, all these years,” she said musingly. “There’s something eerie about it—as though a flood had caught them, just as the lava caught Pompeii.”
I said, “No. The mules that drew the carts had long since gone to the soap factory, and the wheelwrights who shrunk the wide iron rims on the shoulder-high wheels were names on a churchyard stone before the water seeped in.”
She said, “Just the same, there is something eerie about this place. I shall always remember it—think of it at night if ever I drive down this way.”
I tried to laugh at her mood. There must be half a hundred such clay pits up and down the river. I could not see why this one should so impress her. Nor did I ask why she thought that she might be driving down this way some night.
But then I could not guess that this particular clay pit was the one upon which the attention of the whole valley would very soon be focused.
3
WE STARTED back toward River House. It was almost noon. I hadn’t wasted a morning like this since the place had opened. But I didn’t have the feeling that the morning had been wasted—rather I had the sense of standing on the verge of some momentous event.
On the way up the hill I said, “You were joking about breakfast, but I’m not joking about lunch. Can you?”
“Can I what?”
