The Mulberry Tree

  Bailey walked through the doorway to the kitchen. Yesterday the men had been wonderful. They’d done as much as they could to make the kitchen livable, but it hadn’t been enough. One of the electricians and a plumber had pulled the overhead cabinets off the wall, saying that to leave them up there was dangerous. When the movers had wheeled the giant cooking range, a forty-eight-inch-wide Thermador, into the room, there had been nowhere to put it. One of the gardeners had solved the problem by taking a chain saw to the lower cabinets and cutting out a section. The electrician had hooked up the gas line. It had taken more sawing to put in the big Sub-Zero double-door refrigerator three feet from the range. The men had put the porcelain sink with its tall, integrated backsplash on the other side of the room. “We threw out one of those when we redid my grandmother’s kitchen,” one of the men said as they dropped the sink into place. Beside it, the plumber set the Miele dishwasher she’d purchased.

  So now, looking at the kitchen, Bailey sighed. It was a mess. What was left of the base cabinets ended in raw, splintered edges, and the walls above showed half a dozen colors of paint where the overhead cabinets had been. The cookware she’d bought with Phillip, and later what she and Carol had ordered, had been put in the adjoining pantry, but there wasn’t room to store so much as a spoon in the kitchen.

  Opening the refrigerator, Bailey saw that all that was left of the food the residents of Calburn had left for her yesterday was a wing stuck to the naked carcass of a chicken. One by one, the workmen had helped themselves to the food.

  Bailey found a big ceramic mug in the pantry, filled it with water from the faucet, took the chicken wing, and went outside.

  After Patsy Longacre had called her brother-in-law, the women had left, and Bailey had shaken her head in wonder when she saw them get into the same car, an older-model Mercedes, and drive away. “Wonder if they talk to each other when they’re alone?” she asked aloud as she went into the house and tried to answer questions about where she wanted what. During the rest of the day, she’d been kept so busy that she hadn’t so much as looked out a window to see what the people outside were doing.

  So now, when she opened the back door and looked into the garden, what she saw was a revelation. The day before yesterday, all she’d seen was weeds. She’d been able to follow a path to the huge mulberry tree, but beyond that, she could see nothing.

  Now, before her was a garden. A real garden. It wasn’t just the American idea of a backyard, with a lawn encircled by a few shrubs and “foundation plantings.” No, this was something that Jasper, Jimmie’s old head gardener, the man who oversaw all of Jimmie’s houses, would have been proud of.

  And, more importantly, it was the garden that Bailey had always dreamed about. There were no “long vistas,” no lawn that had to be big enough to land a helicopter. No, there was nothing grand about the place, just trees and flowers and—secrecy, Bailey thought; the way the trees were sited, she couldn’t see what was ahead.

  Putting down her empty cup and the chicken bone, she stepped onto the flagstone terrace, then followed the stone path into the trees. There was the mulberry tree, huge, magnificent, regal, now that all the weeds and debris had been cleared away from under it and it could be seen in its entirety. Smiling, saying, “Good morning,” to the wonderful old tree, she kept following the path to see where it led.

  To the right there was a fenced-off area, not very big, that the gardeners had used a Rototiller on, and she could see the rich black soil waiting to receive seeds. Years of lying fallow had renewed the earth in what had obviously been the vegetable garden.

  Past the vegetable garden was an orchard of fruit trees that, years ago, had been pruned in the vase, open-center method. This meant that, although they were full-size trees and bore a great deal of fruit, they would never grow very tall; the lowest branches were just a couple of feet above the ground. A child could pick most of the fruit.

  Since the trees had been neglected for many years and only just properly pruned yesterday, Bailey doubted if they would produce much fruit this year. She could see several blank spaces in the even rows of trees, and see the new sawdust where the gardeners had cut down trees that had died.

  Beyond the orchard, the path took a sharp left turn, and as she walked around a stand of evergreens, she drew in her breath. Before her was a small pond, and from the hill above it a stream tumbled down into a little waterfall over rocks that had been carefully placed to look as though nature had put them there. Slowly, Bailey ambled along the path, looking in wonder at the little pond, its sides lined with reeds; then she followed the path upward, walking beside the stream.

  At the top of the little hill, stepping-stones led across the shallow stream, and on the other side, under a huge, shady walnut tree, a wide iron bench waited, weathered by the years. It was set on flagstones that had been interplanted with wooly thyme.

  Bailey didn’t walk across to the bench but kept slowly walking, wanting to see more. At the very top of the little hill was another pool, this one surrounded by stones. Yesterday the gardeners had cleaned out the inside of the pool, and as she peered into it, she could see that they had put a new recirculating pump under the surface of the water to create the waterfall below.

  Beyond the pool, the path again turned left, and to her left, down the hill, she could see the side of the house between the trees; to her right was the barn. But here, hidden and private, was a lawn that looked to be the perfect size for a game of croquet. Or kids playing soccer, she thought, then put that thought from her mind. On the far edge of the lawn were bushes and a vine-covered wooden fence that would have fallen down except that steel posts had been embedded in concrete, from which the wooden slats hung. When she stepped across the lawn to examine the bushes and vines, she smiled. The bushes were gooseberry and currant, and the vines were blackberries.

  Past the lawn was a large patch just in front of the barn that the gardeners had obviously worked hard on. Weeds had been removed to show the bare soil; poking up through it were sticks with the distinctive serrated leaves of raspberry plants: rows and rows of raspberries.

  At the end of the raspberry bed, the stone path branched, and she could see that one side meandered through the trees, then back to the house, but she couldn’t tell where the other branch led because it disappeared into a densely wooded area. She chose the path toward the woodland. As she stepped under the canopy of trees, she marveled at the silence and the dark coolness of the forest. It was as though she were in a place no one else had ever entered, not in all the time of Earth. But she smiled at her fantasy; a man-made path lay under her feet, and she could see a little stone bench almost hidden by the trunks of two big trees.

  The path took a sharp right, and Bailey stopped at the sight of a clearing that contained a big fire pit. A hole, three feet in diameter, had been dug, and rocks cemented all around it. Inside were the remains of logs burned years ago. There were no seats around the pit, but English ivy had been planted to make a soft, low groundcover. Above her head trees encircled the area, but straight overhead, she could see sunlight, so if a fire was lit here at night, the smoke would escape. Turning about, she looked at the place, feeling the intimacy of it. It was as though she could hear people talking quietly, could smell the smoke, even feel the warmth of the fire.

  Smiling, she walked back down the path, out of the woods, and into the sunlight, then turned in front of the barn and went back to the house. As soon as she saw the house, this time from the front, her good mood left her. How could something as beautiful as that garden surround a house as ugly as this one? she wondered. It occurred to her that one person had been in charge of the house, while another took over the garden. “I hope they weren’t married,” she said aloud as she opened the front door. Two such opposites would never get along, she thought.

  Once she was inside the house, all she wanted to do was go back out. But she had to figure out what to do with her life. With that thought, she laughed out loud. “I’m thinking like
a soap opera,” she said, then went to the bedroom to get her handbag. First things first. She needed to buy food; then she’d have to figure out what to do next. As Jimmie had said many times, “I always know when Lil is upset about something, because she heads for the nearest kitchen.”

  She got behind the wheel of the car that Phillip had purchased for her and took a deep breath. She’d not done much driving in her life, and the fact that she even knew how to drive a car was a testament to her tenacity. Jimmie didn’t usually fight her about anything she wanted, but he’d fought her about taking driving lessons. At first she’d been understanding, thinking that maybe he was afraid she’d leave him if she knew how to drive. But as the weeks went by and he wouldn’t relent, she got angry. She knew that no amount of anger in his work life affected him, but she also knew that he truly hated for there to be any turmoil between the two of them. She’d looked him straight in the eye and said, “I’m not going to speak to you until you allow someone to teach me how to drive a car. I am a grown woman, James Manville. You can’t keep me a child forever.” It was one of the few times she’d ever seen Jimmie get angry at her, and she’d almost backed down. But she didn’t.

  He’d lasted a mere three days of her cold shoulder before he hired some ugly little toad of a man to teach her how to drive. And on the day she’d received her driver’s license, Jimmie had given her the keys to a cute little yellow BMW. That she drove it only about half a dozen times didn’t seem to matter to either of them. She’d attained the knowledge that she wanted, and that was what had been important.

  That had been years ago. Now, Bailey wondered if she’d remember how to drive. Slowly, cautiously, she backed the car out of the driveway and onto the dirt road in front of her house. There were trees on both sides of the road, no houses, and about a quarter of a mile down, she came to asphalt. She knew that to the left was the way that she’d entered with Phillip, so to the right was downtown Calburn.

  After a moment’s hesitation, she turned left. She wasn’t yet ready to enter the town. If the people of Calburn were anything like Janice and Patsy, then Bailey would be in for hundreds of personal questions, and she wasn’t prepared for them. First she needed to get some food inside her and think about what her next step was going to be.

  Three hours later, Bailey drove back into the driveway of the old house. The car was filled with groceries. The back had full plastic bags all the way to the roof, the floor below the backseat had crates full of just-picked strawberries she’d bought at a roadside stand, the seat held boxes full of big bags of sugar and huge bottles of vinegar, while the front seat and floor had more plastic bags full of groceries.

  Bailey was smiling, for she had an idea about what she could, maybe, possibly, do with her life.

  Six

  Matthew Longacre parked his pickup under a tree and looked at the clock on his dashboard. Six-thirty. He’d put it off as long as he could. Last night Patsy had been on him nonstop that he had to go meet “the widow.” “She’s pretty, she’s nice, she’s young. What more could you want?” Patsy had said, standing over him as she dropped a thick slice of her “surprise” meat loaf onto Matt’s plate. The surprise was that anyone could eat it.

  “Did you and Janice go over there?” Rick asked his wife as he dug into the meat loaf, the made-from-a-package mashed potatoes, and the green beans that had been boiled so long they no longer had much color.

  “I went by myself,” Patsy said, her chin up, her mouth set in that line of defiance that her family knew too well.

  “Oh, ho,” said one of her big, strapping, six-foot-tall, eighteen-year-old twin sons. “A fight is about to happen.”

  “I got fifty on Mom,” John said.

  “Twenty-five on Dad,” Joe said.

  “You two want any dessert, you’ll can it,” Patsy said in warning, then looked back at her brother-in-law, pretending to ignore her sons as they made silent betting gestures.

  “Patsy,” Rick said, “what’s that woman going to think of the people in Calburn if you and Janice go over there together, then don’t speak to each other?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Patsy said, her eyes still on Matt as he mushed the meat loaf with his fork. “We aren’t talking about me. Mrs. James needs a contractor, and you, Matt, are it. I told her that you’d take on the job.”

  Matt didn’t look up. He knew that his life was in his sister-in-law’s hands. He was living in her house, so he was at her mercy. And he knew that she hadn’t set him up with “the widow” for any reason except to match-make—with the intention of getting him out of her house.

  “Matthew, I am talking to you,” Patsy said in the same tone she used on the other three men in her life. “Are you going to do this one tiny thing for me or not?”

  “What did you tell her about me?” he mumbled, pretending to have his mouth full.

  “Not to give you any sex,” she snapped, and that made all four males stop eating and look up at her. When she had their attention, she said, “Are you going or not?”

  “With that condition already in the works—” Joe began, but the look his mother gave him cut him off.

  “I’ll go, but not tonight. Tonight I have to . . . ” He couldn’t think of anything.

  “Watch Buffy?” John suggested, both boys obviously loving their uncle’s discomfort. This summer they were working construction with him and, based on the way he was at home, they’d thought they were going to have an easy time of it. But Uncle Matt at home and Matt the boss were two different people. They’d learned that the first day, when they’d sauntered back from a two-hour lunch.

  “What’s she going to do with the old Hanley place anyway?” Rick asked, attracting his wife’s attention and thereby letting his big brother off the hook.

  “As she said, what else can she do but live there?” Patsy said as she went back to the stove. “I don’t think her husband left her very much money, certainly not enough to live on. But her husband’s lawyer seems to have bought her a lot. Anybody want any more meat loaf?”

  All but Matt asked for seconds.

  “Why did her lawyer buy her any thing?” Joe asked. “Was she having an adulterous affair with him?”

  “Richard Longacre!” Patsy said to her husband. “You have got to do something with these boys. The way they talk is a disgrace.”

  “Now, Pats,” Rick said, reaching out and putting his arm around his wife’s trim waist. “They aren’t children anymore.” He gave a sideward glance to his brother, silently telling him that he could leave the table and get away from Patsy’s questions.

  That had been last night, and all day today, Matt had dreaded tonight’s meeting. He and his nephews had been working thirty miles away, converting a garage into a guest room, so he’d been spared from hearing about the woman who had set all of Calburn talking. After work today, he’d hurriedly kissed Patsy’s cheek, mumbled something about having to meet a client, and then had gone to the diner in Calburn for a grease burger.

  “I hear she’s loaded,” Ruth Ann, the waitress, had said as she poured him a cup of coffee. She was talking not to Matt but to a couple of the locals who had gathered to discuss the goings-on out at the old Hanley place.

  “She’d have to be rich to pay for all those men. But why waste it in Calburn? Why not go somewhere else, some place closer to civilization?” asked Mark Underwood. Mark was leaving in the fall for college, and he couldn’t wait to get out of Calburn and never come back.

  The others in the diner ignored him.

  “You know what I think?” said Opal of Opal’s Beauty Salon down the street. “I think she’s up to something. I think she’s planning to open one of them, what do you call them? Where you stay overnight and eat breakfast?”

  Matt was looking into his cup to see what the coffee was like tonight: colored water or motor oil. Once, in an attempt to make a joke, he’d suggested that if Ruth Ann mixed the two together, it might make decent coffee. She’d told him that if he
didn’t like the coffee in Calburn, he could go back to his hoity-toity ex-wife and ask her to make him some coffee. Matt had sighed. There were no secrets in a small town.

  As he pondered the contents of his cup, he suddenly became aware of the silence around him. When he looked up, he saw that everyone in the diner was looking at him, obviously waiting for him to give an opinion. Thanks to Patsy, he was considered to be the “big-city expert.” “Bed-and-breakfast,” he said. “It’s called a bed-and-breakfast.”

  “Sort of a diner with a motel attached, isn’t it?” Ruth Ann said. “Does that mean she thinks there’s room enough in this town for two diners?”

  Matt got up, put a five-dollar bill on the table, and walked toward the door. “Ruth Ann,” he said, “I don’t think you should worry. Your business is unique. No one could replace you and this diner.”

  At that he gave a big smile to all of the customers, who were looking at him as though wondering if what he’d just said was good or bad, and went outside. Chuckling, feeling that he’d got some of his own back for that coffee, Matt went to his pickup, a dark blue, three-quarter-ton, wide-bed Chevy, and got inside. “Now to the widow’s,” he said, then started the engine, backed out of the parking place, and headed toward Owl Creek Road and the old Hanley place.

  Now he was here, and he could put it off no longer. Slowly he got out of the truck and began walking toward the house. He knew it and the grounds well. As kids, he and Rick had ridden their bikes along the creek, then forced their way through the weeds to find the trees that still bore fruit. For three summers, they’d had a roadside fruit stand with produce they’d purloined from the abandoned farm. But they’d had no luck selling much; every other farm in Calburn also had a roadside stand.

  As Matt walked up the path, he looked around. He had to admit that a lot of work had been done in a very short time. He couldn’t stop himself from turning around full circle to see the changes, then gave a low whistle. Someone had paid a lot for this. In fact, someone had paid double and triple to persuade company owners to pull all their men off other jobs and send them here for one day.