“So you said.”
“It was a mistaken idea, the memoir. Dragging my own entrails out for the public. And not my idea to start with, you’ll recall. I told you I’d given it up when the little leather-bound diary turned up missing. Really I should get rid of all of them, just so you’ll quit nagging me about it. But I’m starting with this one.”
She had come a half hour early, today of all days, and caught me red-handed. The broad, canvas-bound notebook in my hand. I’d been wondering how to set that cotton duck to flame; the army tends to manufacture indestructible things. Stamped plainly across the front: “Potomac Academy.” She could probably see right through to the naked figures inside, as if catching me with an eight-pager. I may have blushed.
“If you won’t let me burn it now, I’ll just do it after you leave this evening.”
“Do as you please then. This evening.” Without another word she went to the dining room, slapped out the work on her table, and said little the whole day. But at five o’clock, crept upstairs to my study door. “Mr. Shepherd, be ye free for a word?”
“All right.”
“It’s something to grieve you, is it? In that notebook you now want burned.”
She has borne so much from her inconstant leader. The panics of the last month, for example. A better August than some, but still she takes the brunt.
“It’s nothing special, Mrs. Brown. I’m just ready to be done with school days.”
“Anybody would be queasy, with federal men nosing in your business.”
She acknowledged the deed would already be done, if she had not by chance caught the earlier bus this morning. “Mr. Shepherd, I’ve got no business depriving you of your own intents and purposes. Give it over and we’ll be done.”
She took it out to the backyard. I watched from the upstairs window, wondering if she would have a glance inside; it’s possible I was testing her. But she did not look. It was her choice to burn it in the barrel with the day’s used envelopes and botched letters, rather than in the living room. “Here now, it’s still the dog days,” she said. “What might the neighbors think, seeing smoke from your hearth on such a warm day of September?”
She is out there now. The week’s rubbish went into the tar barrel, the canvas-bound book flaring vividly in the center, its blackened leaves impossibly thin and intact, curling open before disintegrating. She stepped back from the heat of the barrel, but will remain at her post until everything is vapor. Viewed from above, she is framed by fences on both sides of the strange tableau: Mrs. Brown destroys the evidence. Her hat, a small blue plate, dampening in dark speckles as a light summer rain begins to fall.
Now the job is done.
September 8
Today the appeasement program begins. After a weekend spent drawing together a mess of notes into genuine prose, I have produced evidence of a new book. Not just some vague excuse for avoiding the memoir, but two draft chapters of the novel set in Yucatán, handed over to Mrs. Brown. The setting is giving me trouble, though, as I’ve never visited the Yucatán. I need to see Chichén Itzá, the stones of those temples.
Mrs. Brown’s eyebrows sailed, just to hear the names spoken aloud. You could see the childhood longing still in her. The girl, hiding in some chicken coop from sister Parthenia, dreamily turning pages of the Geographic.
I asked her to call the Asheville-Hendersonville air-port and find out how Pennsylvania Central Airlines might connect with Mérida. Mexico City will probably be the best bet. No, not passage for one. For two.
September 22
Harrison W. Shepherd
30 Montford Ave., Asheville, North Carolina
Dear Mr. Shepherd,
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AWARE, INC.
September 23
“No soap,” says Artie Gold. “You tell them that, your attorney says no soap, jump in a lake, bye-bye birdie. This letter you do not even have to answer.”
Artie had agreed to an emergency meeting on the condition we invite his twelve-year-old friend Grant. Ha-ha, as he would say. Grant is a blended scotch whisky. We met downtown on Patton Avenue, but en route to the bar he had to tramp through some errands. Coleman’s Man Store to pick up a shirt. (“Margaret says if I show up one more time looking like a hobo she will put me in a home. It’s the husband’s parents, they’re snobs.”) Next, Reiser’s Shoe Hospital, to fetch some resuscitated wing tips that should have gone to Reiser’s Crematorium, if there is one. Then Finkelstein’s Pawn.
“Is this how you generally impress new clients?”
Artie had handed his ticket through the iron grille, and we were waiting for the retrieval. “Ha! Don’t worry, I am not living on Skid Row just yet,” he said. “Although I wish the same could be said of all my clients. That ticket was given to me in lieu of payment, a very nice camel overcoat I’m told, to be had for only ten dollars.” Artie lowered his voice. “I’m going to give it back to the poor guy when cold weather hits.”