And in just this way, slowly but quite surely, my father buys Specter. Every square inch of it.
I imagine him quite pleased with the transaction.
For, true to his word, nothing changes, nothing but the sudden and suddenly routine appearance in town of my father, Edward Bloom. He does not call in advance, for I don’t believe even he knows when he’s going to make it back, but one day he will be seen by somebody. He is the lone figure standing out in the fields, or the one walking down Ninth Street with his hands deep in his pockets. He walks through the stores he now owns and breaks a dollar or two, but he leaves the management of these stores to the men and women of Specter, of whom he will ask, in his soft, grandfatherly voice, Well, now, how are things? And how is your wife, the kids?
He clearly loves the town so much, and all of the people in it, and they love him back, because it is impossible not to love my father. Impossible. This, anyway, is what I imagine: it is impossible not to love my father.
Fine, Mr. Bloom. Everything’s just fine. We had a good month last month. Would you like to see the books? But he shakes his head, no. I’m sure you have everything well under control here. Just stopped in to say hello. Well, I’ve got to go now. Good-bye. Say hello to your wife for me, would you?
And when the high school boys of Specter play baseball against other teams from other schools, he might be seen—his tall dark gauntness—alone in the stands in his three-piece suit, watching the proceedings with the proud, detached quality with which he watched me grow.
Each time he comes to Specter he stays with a different family. No one knows who it will be, or when, but there is always a room ready for him when he asks, and he always asks, as though it will be as a favor to a stranger. Please, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble. And he will eat with the family and sleep in the room and in the morning be on his way. And he always makes his bed.
“I RECKON MR. BLOOM will have himself a soda on a day as hot as this one,” Al says to him one day. “Let me get one for you, Mr. Bloom.”
“Thank you, Al,” my father says. “That will be fine, actually. A soda will be fine.”
He sits on a bench in front of Al’s Country Store, doing nothing. Al’s Country Store—he smiles at the name, and tries to cool down in the shade beneath the overhang. Just the tips of his black shoes jut out into the bright sunlight of this summer’s day. Al brings him the soda. Another man named Wiley is there, and this old man chews on the end of a pencil, and stares at my father as he drinks. Wiley had been the sheriff in Specter for a while, then the pastor. After being the pastor he became the grocer, but by this time, talking to my father in front of Al’s Country Store, he does nothing at all. He is retired from everything but talking.
Wiley says, “Mr. Bloom, I know I’ve said it before. I know I have. But I will say it again. It is great what you’ve done with this town.”
My father smiles.
“I haven’t done anything with this town, Wiley.”
“That’s just it!” Wiley says, and laughs, and Al laughs, and my father laughs, too. “We think that’s great.”
“How is that soda, Mr. Bloom?”
“Refreshing,” my father says. “It’s quite refreshing, Al. Thank you.”
Wiley has a farm a mile out of town. It is one of the first worthless things my father ever bought.
“I have to say what Wiley says,” Al says. “Not every man could come and buy a whole town for the love of it.”
My father’s eyes are almost closed; it won’t be long now before he can’t go outside without powerful sunglasses on, his eyes become so sensitive to the light. But he can accept these good words with grace.
“Thank you, Al,” he says. “When I saw Specter, I knew I had to have it. I don’t know why except to say it’s so. I had to have it all. I suppose in part it has to do with circles, with entireties. It is very difficult for a man such as myself to settle for a piece of something. If part of something is good, the whole of it can only be better. And as far as Specter is concerned, this is certainly the case. To have it all—”
“But you don’t,” Wiley says, still chewing on his pencil. His eyes move from Al to my father.
“Wiley,” Al says.
“Well, it’s the truth!” he says. “Can’t be wrong to say it if it’s so.”
My father turns to Wiley slowly, because my father has this special talent: just by looking at a man he can tell what the man’s motivation is in saying a thing, whether or not he is honest or true or trying for more than is right. It’s a kind of power, and it’s one of the reasons he became so rich.
And he can tell that Wiley thinks he is telling the truth.
“Well, that can’t be, Wiley,” he says. “That is, not as far as I know. I’ve been over every inch of this town either on foot or in my car, or seen it from the air, and I feel sure I’ve purchased it all. In its entirety. The whole kit and caboodle. It’s a perfect circle.”
“Fine then,” Wiley says. “I won’t bring up that patch of ground with the shack on it between where the road stops and the lake starts that just might be hard to find by foot or car or to see from the air, and just might not be on any map, or how whoever owns it has a piece of paper you’ve never seen to sign, Mr. Bloom. Because you and Al have all the truth with you over there. Don’t know what I’m talking about, I guess. My apologies to you who knows better.”
WILEY IS KIND ENOUGH to tell my father how to get there, how the road seems to end where it doesn’t, and how the lake seems to be where it isn’t, and how hard it would be for anybody to think to find this strange place: a swamp. A shack in a swamp. And so my father drives until the road seems to end, but when he gets out of his car it’s clear that beyond the trees and vines and dirt and grass, the road is there, the road goes on. It has been reclaimed by nature, by the lake now too high for its own banks. In three inches of swamp water is more stagnant life than an ocean could hold; at its edge, where the muck hardens and warms, life itself begins. He walks into it. The swamp swallows up my father’s shoes. He keeps walking. The water rises, the ooze clings to his trousers as he sinks. It feels good.
He keeps walking, no trouble seeing in the dim light. And all of a sudden there is a house ahead—a house. He can’t believe that such a thing remains upright, that any weight will not be taken down in this soft earth, but there it is, not a shack at all but a real home, small but clearly well built, with four good sides and smoke coming out of a chimney. As he approaches the waters draw back, the ground hardens, a path is there for him to follow. And he thinks, smiling, how clever, and how lifelike: a path is provided at the very last moment, when one needs it least.
On one side of the house is a garden, and on the other there are wood piles as tall as he is himself. In a window box, a row of yellow flowers.
He makes his way to the door and knocks.
“Hello!” he calls out. “Is anybody home?”
“Sure,” a young woman’s voice calls back.
“May I come in?”
There’s a pause, and then, “Wipe your feet on the mat.”
My father does just that. He pushes the door gently open and stands there, looking around at what is an impossible cleanliness and order: in the middle of the blackest backwater he has ever seen, he is staring at a warm, clean, comfortable room. He sees the fire first, but quickly looks away. From there he glances at the mantle, on which there are a number of blue glass jars arranged in pairs, and from there he looks to the walls, which are nearly bare.
There is a small couch, two chairs, and a brown hearth rug.
In the doorway leading to another room stands the girl. She has long black hair braided in the back, and still blue eyes. She can’t be more than twenty. Living in this swamp he would have expected her to be as covered in grime as he is now, but other than a streak of black ash across one side of her neck, her white skin and her cotton calico dress could scarcely be cleaner.
“Edward Bloom,” she says. “You are Ed Bloom, aren
’t you?”
“Yes,” he says. “How did you know?”
“Figured,” she says. “I mean, who else?”
He nods and says that he is sorry to bother her and her family, but that he has come on business. He tells her he would like to speak to the owner of the house here—her father, mother?—and of the land the house is on.
She tells him he is doing just that.
“I’m sorry?”
“This is mine,” she says.
“You?” he says. “But you’re just a—”
“Woman,” she says. “Near about.”
“I’m sorry,” my father says. “I don’t mean—”
“Business, Mr. Bloom,” she says, faintly smiling. “You said something about some business.”
“Oh, yes,” he says.
And he tells her everything he knows, how he came to Specter, how he fell in love with it, and how he merely wants to have it all. Call it a flaw in his nature if you will but he wants it, all of it, and this apparently is a piece of land he had overlooked, that he would like to buy it from her if she wouldn’t mind, that nothing will change, she can stay here forever if she likes, he only wishes to call this town his own.
And she says, “Now let me get this straight. You’ll buy this swamp from me, but I’ll stay in it. You’ll own the house, but it’ll still be mine. I’ll be here, and you’ll come and go as you please to one place or another because there’s a flaw in your nature. Do I have that right?” And when he tells her that she does, that in so many words she has it right, she says, “Then I don’t think so, Mr. Bloom. If nothing is going to change, I’d just as soon they not change the way things haven’t been changing all this time.”
“But you don’t understand,” he says. “In essence you will lose nothing. Everybody actually gains by this. Don’t you see? You can ask anybody in Specter. I have been nothing if not beneficent. In every way, the people of Specter have profited by my presence here.”
“Let them profit,” she says.
“It’s a small thing, really. I wish you’d reconsider.” He’s about to lose his temper, or break down in sadness. “I only want the best for everybody.”
“Especially you,” she says.
“For everybody,” he says. “Including me.”
She stares at my father for a long time, and shakes her head, her blue eyes still and steady.
“I don’t have any folks, Mr. Bloom,” she says. “They’ve been gone a long time.” She gives him a cold, mean stare. “I’ve been fine here. I know things—well, you might be surprised at all I know. It’s not like some big check is going to change anything for me. Money—I just don’t need it. I don’t need anything, Mr. Bloom. I’m happy the way things are.”
“Young woman,” my father asks, incredulous, “what is your name?”
“Jenny,” she says, in a softer voice than the one she has been using till now. “My name is Jenny Hill.”
The story goes like this: he falls in love with Specter first, then he falls in love with Jenny Hill.
LOVE IS STRANGE. What makes a woman like Jenny Hill suddenly decide my father is the man for her? What does he do to her? Is it that fabled charm? Or are Jenny Hill and Edward Bloom somehow made for each other? Did my father wait forty years and Jenny Hill twenty to finally find the loves of their lives?
I don’t know.
On his shoulders he brings Jenny out of the swamp, and they drive to town together in his car. He drives so slowly at times that it is quite possible to walk beside his car at a good pace and talk to him, or, as it happens today, for all of Specter to line the sidewalks to see what he has with him now, to see the lovely Jenny Hill.
From the beginning of his stay in Specter, my father has maintained a small, white, black-shuttered home not far from the town park, on a street as pretty as spring, with a soft green lawn in front and a rose garden to one side, and an old barn converted to a garage on the other. There is a red wooden bird perched high on a white picket fence, whose wings whirl when the wind blows, and a straw mat on the front porch with the word Home woven into it.
And yet he has never stayed there. Not in the five years since he fell in love with Specter has he ever spent the night at the only house in town where no one else lives. Until he brings Jenny in from the swamp, he always stays with others. But now, with Jenny installed in the little white house with the soft green lawn not far from the park, he stays with her. He no longer surprises the people of Specter with his shy knock at dusk (“It’s Mr. Bloom!” the kids scream, and jump all over him like a long lost uncle). He has a place of his own to stay now, and though at first some feelings are hurt, and the seemliness of the situation questioned by a few, pretty soon everybody sees the wisdom of living with the woman you love in the town you loved to live in. Wise: that’s how they thought of my father from day one. He is wise and good and kind. If he does something that seems strange—such as going to a swamp to buy some land, and finding instead this woman—then that’s because the rest of everybody just isn’t as wise and kind and as good as he. And so pretty soon no one thinks twice about Jenny Hill, not in any small-minded way, that is, but rather merely to wonder how she holds up when Edward is gone, which, even the most forgiving of those in Specter will have to admit, is generally most of the time.
They wonder, Isn’t she lonely? What does she do with herself? Things like that.
Jenny takes part in the life of the town, though. She helps organize events at school and is in charge of the cakewalk each fall at the local fair the town puts on. After so long in the swamp, keeping her lawn nice and green is no problem for her, and the garden just seems to thrive under her hand. But there are nights her neighbors hear her wail from a place deep inside herself, and, as if he can hear her, too, the next day or maybe the day after that he will be seen driving slowly through town, waving at everybody, and pulling up finally into the drive of the little house, where he will wave to the woman he loves, who might be standing on the porch, wiping her hands on her apron, a smile as big as the sun on her lovely face, her head just slightly shaking, and a soft Hello, almost as though he had never left at all.
Which, in fact, is how everybody comes to see him after a while. So many years have come and gone since he bought those first tracts of land on the outskirts of town, and so many more since he became a common presence, that people actually begin to take him for granted. His appearance in Specter is fantastic one day, quotidian the next. He owns every inch of land in town, and has been over every inch of it on his own as well. He has slept in every home and has visited every business; he remembers everybody’s name, and everybody’s dog’s name, and how old the kids are, and when a big birthday is coming. It is the kids, of course, those who grow up seeing Edward around, who first accept him as they do any other natural phenomenon, as any other regular thing, and it carries over to the adults. A month will pass without him here, and then a day will come, bringing Edward with it. That old slow car of his—what a sight! Hello, Edward! See you again soon. My best to Jenny. Come by the store. And so many years began to pass in just this fashion, and his presence there becomes so ordinary and predictable that eventually it isn’t as though he has never left, but as though he had never come in the first place. To everybody in that wonderful little town, from the youngest boy and girl to the oldest man, it is just like Edward Bloom has lived there all his life.
IN SPECTER, HISTORY BECOMES what never happened. People mess things up, forget and remember all the wrong things. What’s left is fiction. Though they never marry, Jenny becomes his young wife, Edward a kind of traveling salesman. People like to imagine how they must have met. The day he came through town so many years ago and saw her—where?—with her mother in the market? Edward couldn’t take his eyes off her. Followed her around all day. Or is she rather the woman—the little girl?—who asked to wash his car for a nickel that day and who from that day on has set her sights on this man and told everybody who will listen, He’s mine. The day I turn twenty y
ears old I’m going to make him marry me. And sure enough, the day she turned twenty, she found Edward Bloom on the porch in front of the country store, rocking with Willard and Wiley and the rest, and though they had yet even to share a sentence together all she had to do was hold out her hand to be taken, and he took it, and they walked off together, and the next time anyone saw them they were man and wife, man and wife, and just about ready to move into that perfect little house near the park with the garden. Or maybe . . .
It doesn’t matter; the story keeps changing. All of the stories do. Since none of them are true to begin with, the townspeople’s memories take on a peculiar tint, their voices loud in the morning when, during the night, they might have remembered something else that never happened, a story good enough to share with the others, a new twist, a lie compounded daily. In the heat of a summer morning Willard might tell of the day—who could ever forget it?—when Edward was just a ten-year-old boy and the river (gone now, dried up, not there if you looked) rose so high that everyone feared that another drop from the black sky would wash away the town, another drop of rain falling into that mad river, and Specter would be no more. No one could forget how Edward started singing—he had that high, cool voice—and walking away, singing and walking away from town—and how the rain followed. How not another drop fell into the river, because the clouds followed him. He charmed the falling water, and the sun came out, and Edward didn’t come back until the rain was somewhere near Tennessee, and Specter was safe. Who could forget that?