Every Fourth of July the town hosts a parade that begins at the Courthouse lawn, winds through the business district, and finishes on the banks of the Pinkwater Reservoir. The Pinkwater Reservoir is named not for the tint of the water, which is in fact a healthy greenish-blue, but for Nelson Pinkwater, whose house once stood on the land submerged by the water and who got drunk one night, forgot where he lived, and drove his Dodge Aspen down the shore into the water. Police divers found his car parked on the crumbling strip of his own driveway the next morning. His body was still buckled into the front seat. The parade takes place in the early hours of the evening and is followed by a weenie roast and the launching of the fireworks. Though he no longer attends the fireworks display, he can hear the muffled boom of the charges detonating from his front lawn. When the wind is blowing just right, softly and steadily, he can see the smoke clouds drifting by in the light of the street lamps. Some of the clouds are shaped like palm trees, and some are shaped like tousled hair. He has always found these shapes more interesting than the blossoming red and green sparks of the actual fireworks. The annual Fourth of July parade was instituted in 1974, when Tuck Miller, then mayor of Springfield, marched through town in an Uncle Sam costume, throwing strips of kindled firecrackers onto the curb. A crowd of children gathered behind him, following him to the RESERVOIR COM– ING SOON sign, where he lit a string of Roman candles and fired them over the swelling water. The next year, when he marched the same route, the children brought their parents and wore costumes and threw firecrackers of their own. Celia was always frightened of loud noises, but she was not afraid of sparklers or whirring dragonflies, and she did like holding the match to the punk. When Tuck Miller turned one hundred years old this year, the Springfield Citizen-Gazette ran a photograph of him snapped at last year’s parade. He was riding in the sidecar of his grandson Rudy’s motorcycle, his Uncle Sam hat yoked atop his head with an elastic chin-strap. His face was twisted together in the wind, and the effect was such that he looked like a tiny child in an enormous hat, indignant and vaguely alarmed. One of the late-night national talk shows broadcast the photograph in a News of the Week segment, tagging it with the punch line, And in this week’s Where Are They Now? segment: Captain America and Buffalo Bill Cody. The audience let fall only the barest smattering of laughter, and afterward the host said, Come on, folks. Easy Rider? This is top-of-the-line comedy here.
He has moved the television set into his bedroom, and at night he lies awake in the toneless white light of the talk shows and quiz shows with his pillow folded to a hump beneath his head. He never used to watch TV, and he doesn’t particularly enjoy it now, but he uses it like a drug to prolong the last few minutes of the day. After midnight, when he has shut the TV off and the long hours of sleeplessness have set in, he lies in bed listening to the pushing and easing of the wind. The radio tower blinks through the opening in his curtains. He has learned not to stare at the clock, and not to fantasize, and never to reminisce. Instead, he thinks the most mundane thoughts he can and waits for the buzzing feeling of sleep to travel up his body and carry him away. One sheep. Two sheep. Three sheep.
At the west end of town, heaving up between two branches of the state highway, is a rolling field that puts out a blanket of small purple flowers each spring. The flowers are shaped like tiny bells, and they have the sweet, liquory odor of cough syrup. The last time Celia ran a fever, he served her cough medicine from the cap of the elixir bottle. The silver of the teaspoon, she said, hurt her teeth. The field, with its small purple flowers, is displayed on the cover of the local phone book, and on all the Springfield tourism brochures. Eli Butters, the second most prominent town historian, who serves as a criminal court judge, claims that the town derived its name from this field, where the earliest settlers were received by a carpet of purple blossoms in the spring of 1812. Tim Lanzetta, the most prominent town historian, claims that this is a myth—that the town was in fact named for the mineral spring that leapt from the soil behind the old general store, a spring which continued to dribble until the late 1940s, when it was diverted into the lawns of the Valley View subdivision. Janet used to drive through Valley View on her way to Community Orchestra rehearsals. No valley, no view, she complained. Just street after street of dead trees and peeling houses. She played the clarinet with a beautiful, bleak, pouring-water sound. She twisted like a hooked fish when he kissed the hollows of her knees.
There is a story about the field of purple flowers, which Tommy Taulbee, who teaches English at the local high school, told him once at a school board meeting. Years ago, it seems, when the town was just eight families living in rickety oak cabins, the flowers in the field were as yellow as dandelions. There was a little girl, a blind girl, who liked to go wandering through them, where a wonderful humming noise always filled the air— but where, she wondered, did the humming noise come from? Now and then she would lie on the ground and feel through the grass with her hands, hoping to find it, to touch something that shuddered or twitched or vibrated like a pair of lips. Her father was a careless man, and one day, hunting rabbits in the field, he saw a flash of motion in the grass and fired off a shot. Whereupon he saw his daughter, and his knees foundered beneath him. The next spring the flowers that blossomed in the field were the darkest possible shade of brown, the color of ground coffee, and the year after that they were the color of burnt mahogany. Every year since, they have blossomed a little bit paler than the year before, and one day, fifty or a hundred years from now, they might turn yellow again. It takes a long time for such places to heal. When Tommy Taulbee finished telling his story, he smoothed his beard with his fingers and said, “You know, the day my dad caught that fish in your pond”—and he gave a little breath of laughter—“I just want to tell you, he talks about that all the time. It must be one of the happiest days of his life.” Then he turned to him and clasped his arm and said, “You tell your family I said thanks, okay?”
It is the first week of June, and the ladybugs have hatched in multitudes. They boil and hop from the grass, hundreds and thousands of them, so many that he is reminded of the spray from a glass of soda. The spring has been particularly cold this year: the last snow did not fall until April, and there were great dirty hills of it in the parking lots until May. Each season, the ladybugs appear after the snow has melted from the shadiest corners of the woods and the sun has softened the ground. They emerge all at once and migrate slowly to the south, passing from yard to yard as the summer burns on. The television news tracks their progress during the weather report. Shortly after the ladybugs hatch, the neighborhood cats go into estrus, and he can hear Sara Cadwallader shouting at Mudpie and Thisbe from her front porch: Mudpie! You get down from Thisbe, right now! Todd Paul Taulbee knocks on his door to ask if it would be all right if he uses the pond for a while. A curtain of fishing lures is hooked to the brim of his baseball cap, and his two Irish setters whirl round and round in the grass. Nathan Caru dons short pants for his mail route, exposing the hair on his legs, which is as thick and snaggy as Brillo. These things happen every year. For two or three weeks, whenever he opens his front door, ladybugs flit into the house, circle around, and bump softly but repeatedly against the windows. He coaxes them into his palm so that he can set them free outside, but he is never able to find them all, and for the rest of the summer their beady red bodies turn up behind the furniture or in the bowls of plants, their legs zigzagging into the air. They are the size and shape of a small split pea, so tiny that they can slip under the door of Celia’s bedroom, which remains shut even during the Saturday afternoon tours of his home. The word formication means the sensation of insects crawling over or under the skin. At the end of the summer, at the south end of town, the ladybugs vanish, just as they appeared, all at once, burrowing into the ground or folding themselves into the air. No one knows where they go. It is something of a mystery.
For a few weeks every summer, Enid Embry’s two grandchildren visit from California. They knock each other down in her f
ront yard, fighting with knee-length socks that have other socks balled in the toes. He can see them from the window of Celia’s bedroom: two red-haired boys in cut-off blue jeans whipping their arms about wildly. Celia’s bedroom has a dollhouse and a toy shelf and a bed painted to look like a turtle. It has not been changed since the day she left. Once, when Enid Embry came down with a fever, he took her grandchildren swimming in the neighborhood pool, and they quarreled incessantly, about everything, for almost two hours—from who got the red towel and who got the blue towel to which of them was Frick and which of them was Frack. They both wanted the red towel, and, for some reason, they both wanted to be Frick. A jump rope hangs over the doorknob of Celia’s bedroom, looped around twice so that it won’t slip to the floor. Her bed is painted with the face of a turtle on its headboard, the shell of a turtle on its base, and the four feet of a turtle on its corner posts, so that it looks not only like a turtle, but like a turtle that has tumbled over onto its back and cannot move. For a time, he could smell the dry, floury scent of her skin whenever he stepped into the bedroom, but within a year it faded and was replaced by the smell of rainwater in a metal pail. There is a picture book on her bedside table titled . . . Is . . . , illustrated by a Dutch artist named Sisquo. He leafs through it sometimes as he lies on her bed. Each page contains a drawing of a squat little man and woman meant to illustrate some simple catch-phrase, like Happiness is a sunflower, or Love is a rainbow, or Sadness is an empty pool. The catchphrases are all clichés, written according to the same mawkish formula, and in his head he likes to substitute them with adages of his own making—for instance: Grief is a weight that rolls and rolls, a horrible turning deep inside your body. Or: Worry is a mean-faced dwarf who beats on your heart like a kettledrum. Or: Regret is the way that ash billows from a fire that has already burnt to embers when you pour water over it in the gray light of the morning. Celia borrowed the book from her school library, carrying it home on the Friday before she vanished. He did not have the heart to return it. People reading books blink approximately eighteen times a minute, and they almost always synchronize their blinks with periods, commas, and the ends of lines. Late in the afternoon, sunlight streams through the arched window of Celia’s bedroom, falling across the bed and the carpet. It is the same light that speckles the downstairs ceiling with stars. From this arched window he can see Enid Embry’s grandchildren chasing and whipping each other with socks. They play outside all day, but as soon as the sun drops, Enid hurries them inside. “I love having them around, of course, but you and I both know a person can’t be too careful these days,” she says. Enid traces the sign of the cross on her chest, glancing apprehensively at the sky. A gust of wind hisses through the trees, and every leaf in the neighborhood is moved.
Ragland Fowler, the Gift Warehouse magnate, is running for an open seat on the City Council. He wants to build a strip mall that bisects the entire town, which he says will attract tourism dollars. Opponents are trying to subvert his candidacy by planting FOR SALE BY OWNER signs next to all the RAGLAND FOWLER signs in town. Campaign signs on wooden stakes decorate half the yards in Springfield: DEAN SNYDER FOR ASST. CITY DIRECTOR; RE–ELECT JUDGE ELI BUTTERS; VOTE NO ON PROPOSITION 204. Teenagers throw bottles of beer at the signs from the windows of their cars, and at night, on every block, you can hear the blooming sound of breaking glass. One night, while he was reading through the Trivial Pursuit deck, he received a threatening phone call from a person who may or may not have been Ragland Fowler. “I know you’re a part of this,” the voice said, and it was interrupted by a tick of silence. A long, deep sigh broke through the line. “Hold on,” the voice said, “I have another call,” and then the connection went dead. Though he continues to reject Ragland Fowler’s offer to buy his house, he has neither the will nor the expertise to have participated in the campaign of signs against him. He suspects they are the brainwork of Rudy Miller, former mayor Tuck Miller’s grandson, since Tuck Miller, though more than a century old, is also running for the open seat on the city council, and Rudy Miller is working as his campaign manager. Tuck Miller retired from public office in 1978, shortly after the Nelson Pinkwater incident, and devoted himself to the gardening of roses, a hobby he was forced to abandon during the Depression of the 1930s. For the past three years his roses have been ruined by sawflies, and for the three years before that they were ruined by aphids. He has decided to reenter politics. He is the very model of the age of medication: a life so long that every piece of it has returned.
From the time she was a toddler, Celia’s favorite dinner foods were macaroni casserole and a dish called cracker salad that Janet used to make using lettuce, tuna, mayonnaise, and saltines. On those days when he does not find a parcel of beef stew or pot roast waiting by his front door, he spends the afternoon preparing dinner for himself in the kitchen. He cooks better than he eats, and he always has. The refrigerator is filled with neat towers of Tupperware as high as milk bottles. Every few days he scrapes another stack of them into the garbage can. President Warren G. Harding died in the bathtub, of a busted gut. The word planteration means torture by overfeeding. Though he can never eat all the food he prepares, he likes the way the smell of cooking spreads from the kitchen while he is at the stove, leaving a thick fog of scent that makes the house feel crowded with family. He and Janet used to make love on the bed and the couch and the bathroom floor, fucking out of eagerness, lust, and affection, and much later out of desperation. Once, when Celia asked them about the thumping noise, they told her there was a badger on the roof.
A few days ago he saw his neighbor Matt Shuptrine at the supermarket atop the hill. Matt clapped his shoulder and asked him, “So what do you think of this weather?” and he did not know how to answer. Instead, he opened and closed his mouth a few times, like a fish, until Matt said, “Well, I’ve got light-bulbs to buy,” and shuffled away, looking back at him queerly. He is less and less able to respond to perfunctory questions, and less and less able to ask them. It is as if the instrument inside him which used to understand how people spoke to one another has cracked and fallen to pieces. He finds it hard to remember which questions are supposed to be casual and which are supposed to be impertinent. He apologizes for all the wrong ones—questions like How are you doing? or What have you been up to lately?—and he poses the others— So, are you worried about another miscarriage? Which of your dreams have you given up on for good? What do you two really think of each other?—with a tone of drowsy half-interest that should infuriate the people he asks them of, but somehow doesn’t.
The last time he had sex with Janet, she kissed him and said, “I really don’t blame you,” and he said, “Which means you really do,” and she said, “Which means I really do.” The second-to-last time he had sex with Janet, it was purely reflexive, a matter of grief and habit and desperation. They were two people touching and stroking each other because they remembered how and where to touch and stroke each other—that was all. It was as if, together, they were posing one of those perfunctory questions that don’t really require an answer, the kind he no longer knows what to say to. The night was warm, and there was a deadness in the air between them, and Janet pushed herself away and began to cry.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, though he already knew the answer.
“Why are we doing this?” she said.
Seven years ago, when his daughter Celia vanished, Janet was across town at the Catholic Assembly Hall, rehearsing a Menotti ballet with the Community Orchestra. Sara Cadwallader was outside calling to Mudpie and Thisbe, and the neighborhood children were clattering around on their scooters. Donald and Joan Pytlik were in his living room, where he was showing them the stone fireplace, its alcove darkened from years of soot. The ashes have left a starlike pattern here on the hearth, he said, tapping the stone with his knuckles. Sometimes the wind blows down the chimney, and that pattern you see there is the result. He looked out the window for a moment onto the side yard of the house. Celia was there, tightrope-walking alon
g the fragment of stone wall between the elm tree and the maples. It was a gleaming spring day, the third Saturday of the month, and there was still a stitch of cold in the air. The sky behind her was a startled blue, so bright that he had to screw his face together to look at her. He cut his eyes away. Okay, come with me, he said, and the Pytliks followed him out of the living room. He led them to the kitchen and the anteroom, where he told them the story of Stephen Wilkes and Thomas Booth, and then the story of Abraham Lincoln, and then the story of Edwin Reasoner, the woodwright, who engraved his initials beneath the top stair of the winding staircase. Donald and Joan Pytlik were traveling across the state on a tour of historic yellow stone houses. They wanted to write a book.
It was then that he heard—or thinks that he heard—a shout. It was very brief, almost curt, like the sound that a needle makes when it’s lifted too clumsily from a record. The shout did not seem to hold any fear or panic: just a sudden note of surprise. He thinks that he remembers hearing this.
When he passed back through the living room and looked out the window, Celia was no longer there.
The temperature of a raked-out bed of coals is nearly 800° F, but coal conducts heat very slowly, like a sponge, which is why you can walk across it without burning your feet. It was not until later that afternoon that he began to worry. Janet came home from Community Orchestra rehearsal just as the Pytliks were driving away. She stowed her clarinet in the closet and began to read through the entertainment listings in the Spring field Citizen-Gazette. They had booked Melanie Sparks to baby-sit that night and were planning to go to dinner and a movie. “Where’s Celia?” she asked as she smoothed the creases out of the newspaper. They were sitting by the glass table in the front room— he in the high-backed chair, she kneeling on the floor. It was mid-afternoon, almost four o’clock, and if the sun had been just a little lower in the sky it would have struck the table with its light, throwing the orrery of hidden stars onto the ceiling. But it was not that time of year.