Drop by Drop

24

Although it was very late, Bea was waiting for Jack when he came home that night. “How did the meeting go?” she asked as she always did.

“I keep saying you should join us.”

She pursed her lips. “You young people don’t want me.”

“Hooper Watson and Morris Saddlethwaite aren’t young, Aunt Bea. And Edgar Tilbury certainly isn’t.”

“Edgar Tilbury? What does he have to do with it?”

“He’s the newest member of the Wednesday Club; didn’t I mention that?”

“I would have remembered,” said Bea. “I’ve known him all my life; we went out together before he met Veronica. Nothing serious, at least on my part; he was too intense for me. Then he met her and that was a perfect match. It doesn’t always happen.”

“You liked him.”

For a moment she had a faraway look in her eyes. “Edgar was smart and clever and we had a lot of fun. But I knew other men who were smart and clever and fun.”

“You were looking for more than that?”

“It was a long time ago, Jack. I don’t remember what I was looking for.”

“Aunt Bea, I don’t often lay down the law to you, but you’re going to come to the next meeting of the Wednesday Club if I have to sling you over my shoulder and throw you into my car.”

Tyler Whittaker resented the Change as a personal affront to him. It made his job as sheriff of Sycamore River infinitely more difficult than he had anticipated. Since he took over the office once occupied by Hooper Watson a kind of craziness had set in. In what had been a pleasant, easygoing town, the citizens had become edgy and suspicious. People who had been honest were now devious. And the devious had begun deliberately breaking the law.

Violent crime was up fifty percent by Whittaker’s calculations.

The Change was making everyone meaner, that was for sure. Every little thing that went wrong, some irate taxpayer came running to him wanting him to fix it. They didn’t seem to have any idea what “keeping the peace” meant.

The sheriff’s office consisted of two rooms plus a lockup in a squat brick building at the end of Miller’s Lane. Because the town had never been a major crime area, the facilities were modest. On the rare occasions when secure incarceration was required the police came down from the state capital to take custody of the guilty party.

Today Whittaker wished he had a reason to send the man confronting him to prison. He was a colossal pain in the ass. “Do you know who I am?” he demanded.

The sheriff sighed. By now he knew who almost everyone in town was. “Of course I do, sir, you’re the manager of Friendly Foods. I assume you have another complaint. Sir.” Whittaker added the second “sir” as a precaution.

“That’s right, and I insist you take out a warrant against those Gypsies who’re running the horse-and-buggy service. Their animals keep dropping manure on the street in front of my store. It’s against all the sanitation codes and it’s filthy. Just look here…” He lifted one foot and waggled it in the air. “I even got shit on my shoe!”

Whittaker regarded the soiled shoe impassively. “They’re not Gypsies, they’re local businessmen providing a legal and badly needed service to this community. All I can do is ask them to be more conscientious about cleaning up behind their horses.”

“That’s not good enough!”

“It’s the best I can do. Sir.”

After the supermarket manager stormed out of his office, Whittaker took his cap from the peg and went to see Shay Mulligan.

“I’m sorry to bother you about this, Doc, but we’ve had another complaint about horse manure.”

“From the same source as before?”

“’Fraid so.”

“Sheriff, I can’t hire people to run behind every carriage with a burlap sack.”

“What about attaching sacks to the backsides of your horses?”

“Diapers on horses? Are you serious?”

Shay enlivened the next meeting of the Wednesday Club by recounting his conversation with the sheriff. The society also welcomed a new member; Bea Fontaine arrived with Jack and Nell.

Edgar Tilbury was seated in the booth when they entered. He smiled and raised his glass in a salute. “I’m mighty glad to see you here, Bea. Can I buy you a drink?”

“Jamesons?”

“Bill can’t get any more, I’m afraid; but I’ve got a half bottle of my own stashed behind the bar and it’s all yours.” He patted the seat beside him.

Bea slid into the booth next to Tilbury. “This has become a different world in such a short time,” she remarked. “None of us can keep up with it.”

“Nell Bennett thinks the Change may be slowing down.”

“Does she really?”

He scratched his neck. “Yep.”

“What do you think, Edgar?”

“I’ll admit there’ve been some signs, but it’s too soon to tell. If we start getting the news from abroad maybe we’ll have a better idea.”

“The news from abroad,” Shay echoed. “I never thought that would sound exotic.”

When Morris Saddlethwaite offered a pithy suggestion about what the supermarket manager might do with horse manure, Evan Mulligan laughed so hard he sprayed cola across the table.

Without quite knowing how it happened, the meeting morphed into a party. Bill’s other patrons joined in. When someone suggested a singalong Gerry Delmonico revealed an exceptional baritone voice.

Closing time came and went.

When his sister-in-law came out of the kitchen and announced she was going home—“If you lot want any more food you can fix it yourselves”—Bill Burdick guiltily consulted the railroad clock on the wall behind the bar. He called out, “Closing time!” No one heard him.

With difficulty—Bill had consumed his share of the liquor—he clambered onto the bar and stood up, swaying and waving his arms. “Closing time now!” he shouted.

Jack Reece caught him before he hit the floor.

There was no question of Tilbury trying to drive his “hybrid” the long distance home after drinking so much. Shay and Evan took him to their place in the trap, behind Jupiter. Edgar would awake in the morning to the smell of someone else cooking breakfast for a change.

Jack and Bea accompanied Nell to her house. He drove very carefully because there was horsepower under the hood and not in the shafts.

On the following day the British Ministry of Defense announced that its entire fleet of warships had been called into port.

Looking back on the evening at Burdick’s, it was hard to reconcile it with the onrushing apocalypse.

“We were whistling past the graveyard,” Bea said as she and Jack sat on the front porch, drinking tomato juice liberally laced with Tabasco.

“Aunt Bea, do you think there’s a chance Nell could be right?”

“About what?”

“The Change slowing down. The light at the end of the tunnel. If so, maybe there won’t be a war either.”

“What does your intuition tell you?”

“Nothing, it’s stopped cold. I want to believe Nell’s right, but I don’t know.”

Bea gazed at her small front lawn. A teenager could mow that in ten minutes. “Nell’s a lovely woman, Jack, but she comes with a ready-made family.”

“I know. Hostages to fortune.”

“I fell in love with a man once,” she said slowly. It was the most intimate statement he had ever heard her make. “It wasn’t right; I knew it and I think he knew it, but we went ahead anyway.”

“And?”

“There wasn’t any and. I told you, it wasn’t right. Just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse, they did. Shay Mulligan has a cat named Karma. Do you know what that word means?”

“You’re changing the subject, but yes, I know what karma means. A person’s destiny; their fate.”

Bea nodded. “I’ve seen it at work too many times not to believe in it.”

Jack waited for her to continue.

She set her half-empty glass on the floor of the porch and went into the house.

Following the recall of the British fleet other military forces were gathering themselves. The Sycamore Seed dutifully reported every available scrap of information.

Auerbach was allowing Lila to write articles herself. He did not give her a byline, but one morning she came to work to find a neat black-and-white sign propped on her desk: “L. E. Ragland Staff Reporter.”

Dwayne Nyeberger knew where she was now. He made it his business to always know where she was, at any given time.

Spurred by an imminent global war, the manufacturing of armaments went into overdrive. Assembly plants and full-on production facilities sprang up almost overnight, operating not in bold new ways, but in the reliable old ones.

Before the town of Sycamore River knew what was happening trucks full of building material and construction workers began arriving at the site of the former RobBenn complex. The chain-link perimeter fence was reinforced with corrugated panels surmounted by razor wire, making it impossible for anyone to see what was happening inside.

Rumors sprouted like the weeds along the bank of the river.

Finbar O’Mahony, recently returned from his lakeside idyll, told Nell Bennett she was a lucky woman. “I came out of retirement to get you the best possible deal for the property,” the lawyer boasted. “It’s all here.” He gestured at the stack of documents on the large marble coffee table in the great hall of her house. “Survey reports, condemnation orders, site clearances, engineers’ findings; it’s a big project. Mayor Dilworth personally went to Washington to campaign for this; it was his idea in the beginning and he was the man to promote it; the chairman of the Ways and Means committee’s an old friend of his. It’s quite a coup; it’ll put Sycamore River on the map. Think of the jobs this will mean, Nell.”

“I don’t understand, Finbar. I thought the Nyebergers’ lawsuit had everything tied up.”

“Not where the federal government’s concerned. What the fed wants they can get, and they want that land to put a new munitions plant on. It’s centrally located, you see; there’s even proximity to the railway.”

“What about the financial records in the Cloud? They’re still somewhere, aren’t they? Proving ownership?”

He smiled knowingly. “Uncle Sam doesn’t care about that, Nell. This is wartime, or going to be wartime, and the rules are changed.”

“You said it would mean a lot of jobs for the town, but there aren’t many construction workers in Sycamore River and probably no factory workers at all since RobBenn closed down. Who’s going to benefit?”

“The necessary people will be brought in from outside,” O’Mahony assured her.

“So our local unemployed will remain unemployed?”

“Think about the service industries,” he said. “There’s going to be a whole influx of new people with money in their pockets. They’ll need food, accommodation, everything; there’ll be plenty of money made from them. Take your real estate business, for example; you can sell houses to the upper echelon and arrange rentals for the rest.”

The skin tightened around her eyes. “Isn’t that what they used to call profiteering?”

The lawyer was offended. “My dear woman! It’s called turning a profit—or have you forgotten what that means? Your late husband certainly understood it. Consider the house we’re sitting in right now. The profits made by Robert Bennett bought every square inch of this place. Which reminds me… I think the papers are here somewhere…” He leafed through the stack of documents. “Yes, here we are. I’ve requested that you receive the deed for this house and grounds ‘free and clear of all encumbrances’ as part of your financial package.” He looked at her proudly, anticipating gratitude.

“But the Nyeberger boys—”

“Nell, you’re not listening to me. You’re making an issue out of a couple of tiny scratches on a bar of solid gold bullion. This is the federal government we’re dealing with; such an arrangement is an everyday matter for them.” The lawyer’s good cheer was evaporating. “If you want to give the Nyebergers a charitable donation out of your share of the proceeds that’s up to you, of course, but I wouldn’t recommend it. You’d be creating a bad precedent, opening the door to endless demands.”

“Let me get this straight.” Nell’s voice was cold. “First we take advantage of the Change to deny those children compensation, then we use the federal government to do it?”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“I would, Finbar, and it’s an outrage to my moral compass. If there’s anything the last couple of years have taught me it’s the true value of money. Which is zero.”

“Are you telling me you don’t want to do this? I’m afraid you don’t understand. For the last time, the government is going to do it whether you agree or not. The only question is what it will mean for you.”

Not many restaurants were still open in Sycamore River, but several enterprising men and women had turned their dining rooms into informal eateries and were doing a brisk trade in home cooking.

When Jack came to take Nell out to dinner she told him about the situation.

“You don’t sound very happy about it, Nell. Most people would be thrilled to have the government take a white elephant off their hands for a fair price.”

“The price is fair enough, but it wasn’t really on my hands. The Nyebergers have a legitimate claim on it, at least on part of the money from the sale. Now Finbar says their entitlement will be obliterated as if it doesn’t matter.”

“Did you actually make that remark about your moral compass?”

“I did.”

Jack was amused. “It must have come as a bit of a jolt to him. I doubt if moral compasses are discussed in law schools these days.”

“Then they should be. And another thing, Jack. The trees.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“Surely the munitions plant, no matter how large it is, won’t take up all of Daggett’s Woods. What about the nature conservancy? Shouldn’t some of that be protected? It was given to the people of this town and they have a right to it.”

He drove on for a little way before pulling over to the curb and stopping the car. He switched off the engine, took a handkerchief out of his jacket pocket and wiped his face. Twice. Then he turned toward her.

“Eleanor Richmond, will you marry me?”

She sat up very straight. “What?”

“I asked you to marry me.”

She stared at him. “Were you serious?”

“I’ve never asked a woman to marry me before, so I must be serious. Do you want me to get down on my knees? I’d have to be a contortionist to kneel in this car, but if you insist I’ll try.”

Nell put her hand against his chest. “Please don’t. Why did you call me Eleanor Richmond?”

“Because if you say yes you won’t be Eleanor Bennett anymore.”

At the next meeting of the Wednesday Club they were the last to arrive. When they entered Bill’s Bar and Grill Jack took hold of Nell’s right hand and did not let go.

Nell was glowing.

Engaged, Jack was thinking. Me, Jack Reece. Engaged to be married. To be married.

He had not planned it; had not even thought, consciously, about proposing to her. The words had poured out as if his brain and mouth were not connected.

“We’re going to get married,” he said aloud.

After a startled silence Gerry began to applaud. The others joined in.

“Way to go, buddy!” Bill called from behind the bar. “When did it happen?”

“Just now. I mean, an hour ago.”

“Have you set a date yet?” Gloria asked as she hurried over to them.

Nell said, “It’s far too soon, I haven’t even thought about dates.”

“Well, what about the ring? Did you give her a ring, Jack?” Gloria reached for Nell’s left hand, then frowned in disappointment. “No ring yet. Jack, you’ve got to get your act together. First the ring, then the proposal.”

“I’ve never done this before.”

“Then tomorrow morning you take this girl down to Art Hannisch and make the engagement official.”

Nell was embarrassed. “All this fuss…”

“It’s important.”

From his place at one end of the booth Evan Mulligan declared, “Nobody gets married anymore. And nobody buys engagement rings either.”

Shay told his son, “That’s not true.”

The boy saw his opportunity. “So are you going to marry Lila?”

“Wait a minute!” Lila protested.

Conversation swirled around Nell as if she were in the eye of a storm. Which was how she felt. Questions, suggestions, recollections of other weddings… the Wednesday Club was delighted with the unexpected turn of events: a happy topic to replace all the gloom and doom.

The threat of war was so close now. The air almost smelled of death and destruction.

But two people were in love.

Champagne was ordered. She and Jack were given seats in the middle of the booth. “So you can put your arm around her,” he was told.

She was almost painfully aware of his physical presence. He seemed to radiate heat.

I’ve been married before and it was nothing like I expected. Will this be any different?

I love him. And I’m in love with him, at least I think I am. They’re not the same thing, but I know the difference.

“About the date…” Nell said tentatively.

Jack looked down at her. “Don’t worry about that; like you said, it’s too early.”

Is she trying to back out? Suddenly he realized how very much he wanted this.

“About the date,” she reiterated. “And making all the arrangements… it won’t be easy, the way things are. But… it’s going to get better.”

They were all looking at her now.

I have to believe in something, and here it is.

“The Change is slowing down,” she said, “I’m convinced of it. As soon as it’s over we’ll get married.”

“That’s what I’d call a giant leap of faith,” said Edgar Tilbury.

Little things. Knobs on kitchen cabinets. Buttons on clothes. Covers on checkbooks thrust into the backs of desk drawers.

Did not melt.

Cessation was not instantaneous. The Change had taken months to build to its full fury; it would not abate for months more.

But the end was coming.

The members of the Wednesday Club devoted themselves to sniffing out every instance of returning normalcy.

Lila wrote an article about it for the Seed. She did not mention Jack and Nell, but she reported that people were making plans for the end of the Change. She encouraged her readers to watch for examples and report them to the paper.

Within a week the letters began to come in.

Bit by bit, a sense of excitement pervaded Sycamore River. It was like a giant treasure hunt. At the end everyone would win.

Beyond the Sycamore River Valley, across America and around the globe, others also were aware of the improving situation. The puzzle that could not be solved was starting to go away. Soon it would be possible to concentrate on other matters.

In the meantime the race to provide acceptable substitutes for plastic continued. The Change had disrupted too much for the modern lifestyle to be restored completely, but some of the discoveries and innovations forced on the human race had proved themselves better than the originals.

Bamboo surgical stents, being organic, were more readily accepted by the human body and did not need to be replaced as often.

Some though not all of the people who had substituted real horses for automotive horse power found the slower pace of their lives too pleasant to relinquish. For them, returning to the combustion engine was viewed as a retrograde step.

But.

The international armaments industry continued to move ahead. The old-style weapons they had begun producing could be manufactured more cheaply and required less training to use than their modern counterparts. Battle would become the preserve of the infantry again, rather than a technological game played out by opponents who never saw each other. The nuclear option was shelved. For the time being.

However, the genii had been let out of the bottle and might find a way to escape again in the future.

After an absence from toy store shelves, startlingly realistic guns and other weapons—with no plastic parts—became available again, and were heavily promoted.

War had never gone out of fashion.