The Solitudes

  The Blackbury for most of its length has always been a useless sort of river; bordered as it is on both sides by the stony Faraways (Mount Randa rises in a series of ever-steeper removes from its western banks), it has no real ingress; clots of tree-topped islands every mile or so inhibit navigation. A stretch of fertile fields does well in corn and vegetables between the river and the mountains, though often disastrously flooded, and as it seeks an egress from the valley, its banks grow steeper and its course narrower, the land is more sharply folded and less farmed, the woods older, the banks less populous.

  The river breaks from its valley through a gap called David’s Gate, between stony palisades that are the eroded clubfoot of Mount Randa, and there is a sudden confluence there with the much smaller Shadow River, which has been curling and cutting its way along the steeper western side of Mount Randa before adding itself to the larger body; and there, built up on the palisades and reached by two bridges, one over the Shadow, one over the Blackbury, is the town of Blackbury Jambs: named for the enjambment of two rivers, or because it occupies the jambs of David’s Gate—both opinions, and others, are held locally.

  Sometimes, in the right weather or the right light, it is possible to see, from Blackbury Jambs, the two rivers rushing together and turning southward, but not mixing; the Blackbury’s water, now silted again from its slow valley journey, less reflective, less brilliant, than the faster, colder Shadow; two kinds of water side by side for a moment, shouldering each other. Fish might swim, it seems, from one kind of river into another, as though passing through a curtain. Then the moment is gone; it is all one river. (There is local argument about this too, though; some claim that the sight of two rivers is an optical illusion, or even a legend, something never really seen at all. Those who have seen it—or know others well who have seen it—merely state the fact again. The argument goes on.)

  You can get to Blackbury Jambs from the north by taking the river road along the eastern bank of the Blackbury, and crossing the bridge at South Blackbury; or you can cross farther up, at Fair Prospect, and take a smaller road over a hump or two of mountain, and come into town at the top—Blackbury Jambs being one of those towns that has a top and a bottom. Locals invariably do that; and as she once had been a local, and was on her way to becoming one again, that’s how Rosie Mucho always did it when she came into the Jambs from her house in Stonykill, even though her old station wagon, huge as a boat, pitched and rolled like one too as she came over the mountain road.

  Rosie Mucho (née Rosalind Rasmussen, and soon to be so again) had a longish list of errands, some pleasant, one not, one not even exactly an errand at all though Rosie had decided to think of it as one, had put it on the mental list along with the daycare center, the stop at Bluto’s Automotive, and the library. In the car with her were her three-year-old daughter Sam, her two Australian sheepdogs, her natal chart in a brown manila envelope, a historical novel by Fellowes Kraft to be returned, and her husband’s lunch, wrapped in plastic wrap; and then too all the other oddments, baggage and tackle that invariably accumulate in a car of this one’s kind and age. Beside her on the seat was the rear-view mirror, which only that morning had come off, when Rosie tried to adjust it, from where it was attached to the front window. It reflected nothing useful there, only cast up into Rosie’s face and her daughter’s the brilliant August morning and the leafy way.

  The streets of Blackbury Jambs are a series of traverses leading down to the waterfront main street that connects the two bridges. Up above, the houses are often gaunt frame places with outside staircases to the second floor, and wash hung on lines from windows, and steep front stairs; for the Jambs could not until recently have been considered a pretty town, or a wealthy one; it was a workingman’s town. Now there are health-food stores and shops with clever names on the ground floors of some houses, galleries in the old warehouses; but still, especially in hard weather, an older, less hopeful place still persists, a black and white photograph: dirty-faced children, a sour church bell, coal smoke, smells of five-o’clock supper. Rosie, who remembered, was cheered by the new cleanliness and color of the town; amused, too, by its air of dressing up. She wheeled the big car downward and then turned onto a shady street, Maple Street, and pulled up—the steepness of the street required some pulling—before a large house, one of that kind whose hipped roof seems to bulge pregnantly and whose deep porch is supported by fat pillars made of rubble. Up its side went the usual stairway to an apartment on the second floor.

  “Going to see Beau for a while?” asked her daughter Sam. It was their usual euphemism for being left at daycare.

  “Yup.”

  “C’n I come up?”

  “You can come up,” Rosie answered, pushing open the door of the wagon, “or you can stay down in the yard.” The brief, brownish yard had its attractions: there was a changeable number of children who lived in the house, and their toys—trucks and wagons and a garish plastic motorcycle—lay here and there. Sam chose the yard, and solemnly, as though it were duty not pleasure, mounted the motorcycle. Crumb-crushing equipment, Rosie’s husband Mike called such things. Kids were crumb-crushers. Apartments with outside stairways, like Beau’s, were creeper apartments. Mike Mucho had supported himself through school selling encyclopedias door to door and had picked up the lingo. Creeper apartments with crumb-crushing equipment in the front yard indicated good marks: young marrieds with kids.

  Like so many other certainties, that one had passed. Nowadays daycare might be indicated, three or four or five single women, a couple of them with kids, a butch, a baker, and a candlemaker, and six or eight other kids taken in to help pay the rent—as here. And Beau upstairs could not be sold an encyclopedia, not one anyway of the kind Mike had once sold.

  He should have stuck with that, Rosie thought, climbing upward. I bet he was good at it. I just bet. Helpful. Advisory. We’re conducting a survey in your community, Mr. and Mrs. Mark. We want to place these books in your home, at no cost to you now or ever.

  “‘Lo, Beau!” she called through the screen door. “You up?” She cupped her hands against the screen to look within.

  “Hello, Rosie. Come on in.”

  He sat lotus-fashion on his white-clothed mattress, dressed in a white caftan. The little apartment was white too, walls ceiling and floors; a long strip of oriental carpeting connected an enameled metal kitchen table, the white bed, and a small balcony beyond, overlooking the town and the river. Beau’s path.

  “I can’t stay,” Rosie said, loitering just inside the door. “I didn’t want to disturb you. Hey, don’t unfold just for me.”

  Beau laughed, rising. “What is it?”

  “Can I leave Sam for a while? I’ve got a bunch of stuff to do.”

  “Sure.”

  “Just for a couple of hours.” She was aware she hadn’t paid this month’s bill, and didn’t have a check; this wasn’t supposed to be a day on which she left Sam here. Emergencies. Emergencies and money made her a little shy before Beau, who didn’t seem to acknowledge either in an ordinary way.

  “Sure,” Beau said. “You want a cup of tea? Who’s downstairs?”

  “I didn’t look in. I can’t stay.”

  Beau began making tea anyway. Rosie watched him set water to boil on a hotplate, find tea and cups, set them out. He was still smiling slightly. He always was. Rosie thought maybe it was only the shape of his mouth that made it seem so, a turn-up of the delicate corners like an archaic Greek statue: a beautiful mouth, she thought. A beautiful man. His sweep of curly black hair had a brilliant sheen, his velvet eyes were soft; his long narrow nose, that mouth, and the shapely beard, made him look like the best kind of Renaissance Jesus, strong young courtier become translucent with holiness.

  “So what’s up?” Beau said. “How’s Mike?”

  Rosie walked Beau’s path toward the balcony, enfolding herself in her arms. “All right,” she said. “He’s having fun. A lot of fun. He’s in his Down Passage Year.”

  “What?
??s that?”

  “Climacterics. His thing. Every seven years. Things go up and down. A sort of curve.”

  “Oh yes. I remember now. He explained it to me once. He referred to it.”

  Mike didn’t like Beau, and didn’t like Sam being given into his care. Beau had tried to draw him out once or twice when he’d dropped Sam off; Beau (Rosie had seen it) could draw almost anybody out, but not Mike. “Yeah,” Rosie said. “Down Passage Year. Heading for the bottom of a cycle. He’s feeling very tender. So he says. His needs, you know?” She laughed. “His needs are sticking out.”

  Beau opened a china cookie jar in the shape of a fat pig and took out a lumpy circle of something brown, Beau’s own recipe probably, Rosie thought, he did the cooking as well as much of the baby-sitting for the women downstairs. He saw to them; that was his only job; somewhere, Rosie guessed, between guru and servant and pet for them. What other relations he had with them she didn’t know; it wasn’t that he or anyone hid them, only that they were too amorphous, or too superstandard, to ask questions about in a nosy way. For all Rosie knew, he was chaste as well as holy. Chaste: watching him chew with slow self-possession, she felt impelled to stroke him like a cat.

  “I think,” Beau said, “he’s a young soul.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “I think,” Beau said, “that might be why it’s a hard trip for you.” She’d never told him that life with Mike was a hard trip. “You’re an old soul,” Beau said. “And he’s just not in the same place you are.”

  “An old soul, huh,” Rosie said, laughing. “An old soul. A jolly old soul.”

  There was a shriek outside, and Beau without haste put down his cup and went out. Sam and Donna, a fierce-faced child Rosie mistrusted, each held an arm of the plastic motorcycle, glaring at each other.

  “Hi, Sam,” Beau said, shielding his eyes like a scout.

  “Hi, Beau.” Still not releasing the vehicle. Donna shrieked threateningly again.

  “Hey,” Beau said. “Hey, what’s all this energy, where’s all that coming from? Hey, let’s talk.”

  “I’ve got to run, Beau,” Rosie said, fishing out her bunch of keys from her overalls. “Bye, Sam. You be nice. I’ll be back soon.” Sam had already begun negotiations with Beau, who knelt to hear both children, and barely noticed her mother pass. Rosie, starting her car, glanced back at them and had a sudden vision, an idea for a painting, which made her laugh. A big painting. It would be a version of that old religious picture that used to be everywhere, Jesus sitting on a rock and around him all these sweet-faced kids of all nations with shining eyes. Only, in her painting, around the same Jesus (Beau in his caftan) would be real kids, kids today: sticky-fingered kids armed with TV weapons, kids in plastic diapers, kids in filthy T-shirts lettered with smart remarks, belly buttons showing, orange-popsicle drool on their chins, bandaids on their knees; kids lugging superhero dolls and frayed blankies and five-and-dimery of every kind, riding red and yellow plastic motorcycles, making rum-rum noises. She laughed aloud, seeing it clearly. The Easy Jesus Daycare Center. Suffer the little crumb-crushers. At the end of Maple Street she had to stop, unable to make the turn, laughing hard, too hard, tears standing in her eyes.

  She returned the novel, a week overdue, to the library that stands on Bridges Street, one of those thick, gray Romanesque concoctions that Andrew Carnegie used to give away across America, pillared, arched, rusticated and domed, at once fantastic and dispiriting. The stone steps are worn like old salt licks, partly by Rosie’s young feet in years gone by; and in the entranceway there hangs a slab of prehistoric mud, turned to stone fifty million years ago with the track of a dinosaur clearly pressed into it. When Rosie was a child, she would stand before that paw, thinking: fifty million years ago; and in after years she had often described it to others, the old library where there hung an immense footprint of a prehistoric monster. Immense: the print, when Rosie returned to the Faraways fully grown, had shrunk to the size of a monkey’s paw, or a human hand signaling three: trivially, laughably small. Well, so had she been herself, back then, fifty million years ago. She passed into the dim inside.

  “And how was this one?” Phoebe asked her while she hunted up nickels for the fine. This was the same Phoebe to whom Rosie had once paid fines for The Secret Garden and The Borrowers Abroad, herself, too, grown a lot smaller.

  “Good,” said Rosie. “A good one.”

  “I’ve never read him,” Phoebe said. “I suppose I should. Our local famous author.”

  “Oh, it’s good,” Rosie said. “You’d like it.”

  “They were popular once.” She turned Darkling Plain in her hands, regarding through the bottoms of her bifocals the edgeworn cover, a dim painting of armored men struggling together. “There’s lots more.”

  “More where that came from, huh,” Rosie said. She paid her fine and wandered into the stacks. Maybe she would try another. She was intending to save them for winter, when, if things turned out as she thought they would, she would be in need of long and easeful distractions, a place to go. But Darkling Plain had not satisfied, somehow; involving and colorful as it had been, it had seemed not a complete story; she wanted more. She ran her hand across the backs of them, unable to think how she might make a choice among them; she knew only the rudiments, if that, of the true histories they were based on (in fact she was hoping to learn a lot from them in the history line), and they all seemed more or less the same thing, each with its old-fashioned watercolor painting for a cover, overlaid with black script title, and each bearing at the bottom of the spine a little leaping wolfhound imprint. She drew one out: Under Saturn, a Novel of Wallenstein. More battles. Who was Wallenstein again? Another: this one’s cover had a crowded Elizabethan scene, an inn-yard theater, orange-sellers, swells with swords, an apprentice or somebody who turned away from the scene and called out to the viewer, hand by his mouth, pointing to the players: Lots of fun here, let’s go. Well, all right, this looked cheerful. It was called Bitten Apples.

  She checked it out, and with its solid, deckle-edged weight under her arm felt oddly safe. Only one or two things left on the list before Mike’s lunch. Mike’s lunch was the last. She wrestled the great wagon out of its parking place, craning her neck to see whom she might run over; the power steering cried out, oil smoke farted from the tailpipe, the dogs barked. Rosie went west across the bridge and out of town, thinking: the last.

  From Blackbury Jambs to Cascadia, the river takes on briefly a broad, quick lordliness; there are paper mills and furniture mills and a few tall brick chimneys along this stretch, and the river is walled and channeled here and there. Most of this work from the Iron Age is derelict now, many of the mills stand windowless and the riparian works are crumbling; visitors to the Faraways in the last century complained bitterly about dark satanic mills and the intrusion of the Great God Dollar into sylvan loveliness, but the rosy brick and calm desuetude of the old factories seem harmless enough today, even romantic in certain weathers. One small ivy-clad block, once a chair factory, is a kind of monastery now; there are open services on weekends, and ecstatic dancing. The crowd there even makes and sells herbal remedies and cordials, but there are old cars in the yard, and crumb-crushing equipment, they aren’t celibate who live there. Others of the old places are still marginally alive, doing a little warehousing or renting space to small businesses.

  Rosie turned in at one of these, a corner of which housed Bluto’s Automotive. Its sign showed a grinning, black-bearded cartoon brute in full stride, crushing a muffler in one paw and holding a wrench in the other; the resident mechanic, though, was a chinless, weedy guy with a thin fair beard and a prominent Adam’s apple, scholarly-looking in rimless glasses. He looked at the rearview mirror Rosie handed him as though he’d never seen anything resembling it before, but if given time for study would figure out its purpose.

  “It glues on,” Rosie said.

  He put its chrome foot to the spot on the window where it had come from. It didn’t cling ther
e.

  “I can’t see behind me,” Rosie said. “Can’t see where I’ve been.”

  “Epoxy,” he said thoughtfully. “Give me a minute.”

  He went off with the mirror into his shop. Rosie let the patient dogs out of the car—they flowed smoothly out as soon as they understood it was permitted, and went racing after each other around the littered yard; they might, Rosie thought, melt like Sambo’s tigers in this heat, churn themselves into buttermilk. She wandered to the brick embankment, iced with broken concrete, which ended the yard at the river’s edge, and leaned her elbows there. Bending forward and stretching she could see, far downstream, the towers of Butterman’s lifting themselves out of the river and the midday haze like a fairy castle.

  Even along this deep and almost lakelike part of the Blackbury there are islands large and small that put out their heads; and on one of them someone named Butterman once built a castle. A real castle, with turrets and outworks and machicolations; across one red stone face he had his name carved in tall Gothic letters, BUTTERMAN’S, and inside there was a beer garden and a variety theater. The commonalty on excursion to the Faraways a hundred years ago needed to go no farther than here. A steamer then plied the river all summer long, starting from a special steel pier at Cascadia (Gateway to the Faraways) and calling at Butterman’s on its way to Blackbury Jambs, and then again on its return to Cascadia. Butterman’s is a ruin now, and the dock at Blackbury Jambs is gone, though the water-stairs remain; Rosie’s uncle Boney could remember the steamer, and she often used to imagine it, holiday-makers in white clothes, the tooting steam whistle and the striped awnings. And though she had never been inside the ruin of Butterman’s, she always meant to organize an expedition there, when she was grown up and needed no permission, because Butterman’s, at least partly, was hers.