Chapter One Sometimes rain can be heard before it is felt. A sound like wind would rise from the valley dividing Thrush Hollow's property from the main road and sweep across the unused pasture towards the house, visible as water falling from the sky only when it reached the straggling barbed wire that marked the near boundary of the field. If you stood in the open doorway, breathing in the rich air that precedes rain's arrival, you could listen to the curtain of sound growing louder and louder as it approached the house--climbed the valley, crossed the pasture, struck the Hollow's road, and then advanced through the sugarbush and up the lawn. To Greta it felt as if the house and she were the rain's destination and she wanted to prolong the anticipation forever, to remain suspended in that interval before the inevitable happened; yet even before she could articulate the wish the water would be upon her, for an infinitesimal instant pecking at the gutterless edge of the steep silver roof but then, as if having found only what could be expected, splattering loudly on the tin, proclaiming its indifference to the building's obstruction of its path. The old house had once been a hotel, a summer resort; when the breeze swelled from the south in the previous century, young men in white flannels and boaters and young women in soft gowns and vast hats, tapping croquet balls across the lawn, had waited until the last possible moment before racing to the safety of the veranda, gleeful at having an excuse to huddle together, laughing, their clothes splotched by the first, foretelling drops; fire had destroyed one wing of the hotel early in the 1960s, an agent of nature invited in by the bankrupt owner, who put the torch not only to his own insured property but also, if belatedly and unwittingly, to a century and a way of life that would never come again. "Water cures," Thrush Hollow's 1890 brochure advertised, but what water did it mean? The small accordion booklet belonged to Nora Sleeper, a woman who had already been living for fifty years, her entire life, in the village of West Stilling, a mile and a half from the old hotel, at the time Greta and Ned Dene first happened upon it; the brochure was Mrs. Sleeper's sole souvenir of the two summers in the late 1930s when as a girl she worked in the hotel kitchen, but she didn't know the answer to this question. "They had baths," she commented. "Queerest-looking contraptions. They were all sold at auction, of course." Of course . As if it should be evident to everyone that the present had no use for such gimcrackery. Even then it had been hard for Greta to believe that the water of the "cures" meant the local brook no wider than the backstairs Nora had been deputized to climb with meals for the guests who took breakfast in their rooms--though there were few guests then, those final years of the hotel's operation, and those "scarce knowing how to enjoy themselves," Nora recalled with irritation, as if the Depression and the war that followed were inadequate reasons for people to mope. Seeming to fear that her present guests might think her annoyance directed at them, she announced, "There's a photograph," and brought out her ultimate reference, the History of Stilling ; in the photograph Thrush Hollow still wore not only its east wing but its two-story wraparound porches; a gazebo stood sentinel on the lawn; down over the bank in the direction of the abandoned copper mines on Trout Hill the swaybacked roof of the since caved-in carriage house was visible. (Ned and Henry had taken down the decrepit structure and made a bonfire of the unsalvageable lumber one summer after the horses had already been shipped back home.) Next Nora had turned the page to a photograph of a striking young woman in nineteenth-century coiffure, and this was the first time that either Greta or Ned had heard Lucinda Dearborn's name: the daughter of a Captain Rufus Dearborn (captained at Appomattox), who had nurtured Thrush Hollow to the height of its prosperity. When he died suddenly in 1870 his daughter, in her early twenties then, had kept the hotel open; she ran it until her death in the second decade of the next century, after which it was handed off like a baton in a relay race among a series of owners until the Second World War forced them and their guests to acknowledge what the First had failed to: that time of long, leisurely holidays and the kind of guiltless ease they represented, when entire families might spend the summer at a resort hotel looking for no greater excitement than a summer rainstorm, was really over. Though Greta had then known nothing about Lucinda, something about the young woman's expression had focused her attention and she hadn't raised her head from the photograph to look at the corner of the graveyard across the road in which Nora Sleeper was pointing out the Dearborn family monument. "She died by drowning," Nora was saying, sounding complacent. "When she was in her sixties she took a train to the seashore and she drowned." "Why does she look so sad?" Greta had asked, and Nora exclaimed "Who?" in such astonishment that Greta laughed. Ned remarked that Nora must have thought Greta commented not upon Lucinda but upon a figure who'd "cast off cerements" and was to be seen strolling about among the headstones. "This young woman, I meant," Greta said, annoyed with Ned for talking in his professorial manner in front of Nora, "this Lucinda Dearborn." "She never married," Nora replied. "But, surely," Greta said, "even if that could account for it, she must have been too young when this was taken to know for a fact that she wouldn't. Did she drown herself?" Nora shrugged, as if the question were impertinent. "I'm afraid I couldn't say." Whoever had originally built on the knoll on the north side of the valley after which the old hotel was named--Captain Dearborn had expanded an existing structure--must have known how riveting was its prospect; something seemed to inhere in the site's dual nature as surveyor of the valley and shelterer against its slope that gave the building a feeling of inevitability, as if it completed an inclination that already existed in the terrain. Hudson Sleeper, Nora's husband and a water-witch, maintained that lines of force lay hidden in the earth--he said he could tell by looking at a place where they came together--and when Ned and Greta were considering buying the old hotel, he mentioned that the Hollow contained some "powerful intersections." However one chose to explain it, something invisible combined with the topography to give the place a greater density than others, to make of it something more than itself--though Greta knew that to conceive of place in this way might make it impossible to recognize what was there to begin with. Maybe the salubrious effects boasted by the nineteenth-century brochure referred to subterranean waters--although Lucinda Dearborn's diary, preserved in the metal box located in the cellar by Hudson's dowsing rod earlier this summer, with Lucinda's complaints of interminable baths "too warm, lukewarm, gelid, and hot," suggested something more mundane, something to occupy the great-aunts while the grandnieces and -nephews disported themselves upon the croquet lawn. Lucinda Dearborn could have been one of those gleeful fugitives from rain; she, like the others, might have gone on to enjoy whatever further interludes life held in store--enjoy them for themselves--had it not been for the fateful visit of a young man who was to become one of the country's renowned writers; the encounter, in the summer of 1865, would pluck Lucinda right out of her life, and, in a way Greta knew only too well, never really drop her back into it. All summer now there had been a relentless drought. The previous winter's snowfall had been low, too, and by mid-June gardens were half dead and springs were already running dry--the reason Ned, swallowing his lowlander misgivings, had agreed to ask Hudson Sleeper to dowse for a new well. Water to water runs, Hudson claimed of the sap in his dowsing rod, to explain why the forked apple branch dragged him towards the ground when it sensed water beneath, and to him this explanation also served for what drew the rod to metal, to any lost or hidden thing; it was the water in everything, he said. You could find anything, if you let yourself be drawn. When the forked wand had first curved towards the ground, Greta couldn't believe that some trickery was not involved, but then Hudson had invited her to take the stick and she couldn't stop remembering the sensation of its trembling in her hands and then the sharp tug as it buckled towards the ground. The sensation had reminded her of nothing so much as Henry's birth, by cesarean section: the pulling out of something within her that was a part of her and yet not a part. At the time she had been pressing her lips tightly between her teeth and Ned, stationed by her head, had thought that she was in pain and shouted at the doctor that the anesthesia hadn't taken, but that wasn't it; she'd been trying to prevent herself from crying out for Crain, who should have been with her: it was his child; it was he the doctor was separating her from, after all those months of carrying him securely inside her; but Crain refused to claim his child and the child needed a father. As the divining rod strained at her hands the force was such that Greta could scarcely hold on to the branch, whose narrower ends she gripped, but she hadn't wanted to relinquish it when Hudson, chuckling, had taken it back and continued pacing slowly across the field, following the vein, which led directly to the house. "You say the spring's dry? Because you've got no shortage of water," he said as he went down cellar, Ned and Greta following, Ned laughing in a way not scoffing now but incredulous, as he ducked so that he wouldn't, as he always claimed he was in danger of doing, "crack his skull open on the floor joists." Then Hudson told them that Thrush Hollow's main foundation had been laid in a rectangle at whose center point two water veins intersected, the first eight feet below the surface, flowing from the northwest at six miles an hour; the other three feet below the first, travelling nearly due east, at two miles an hour. While Greta and Ned were still trying to guess whether or not Hudson was serious (water there might be, but how could he gauge its speed and depth?), he asked for a shovel, and Ned, thinking that he meant to set out to dig a well in the cellar, protested, but Hudson said it was something else--not water, exactly--close to the surface. After only a few minutes' digging he unearthed a metal box whose padlock was so rusted that he was able to release it with one thud of the spade, and then Greta and Ned had stared at each other (what sort of disbelief had they been exchanging? Greta wondered now). Hudson, having lifted the lid and glanced at the contents, had handed the box to Ned. "More your line than mine, looks like," he said, meaning (they assumed) that the packets of yellowed letters and the swollen-looking copybooks the box contained were a biographer and history professor's domain, not a logger and sometime water-witch's. (Legally, as Ned found it necessary to point out later, the box would have belonged to them in any case.) As Hudson headed back up the stairs to trace the first vein across the lawn to the spot beside the carriage-house foundation where they ultimately dug the new spring, he remarked, "Curious." Why, Greta berated herself now, had she registered this as an all-purpose country comment and not asked Hudson what he meant? He was so taciturn, but he had that glint in his eye that was part native amusement at the folly of "low country" folk, yet also seemed to promise that he could find whatever you were looking for if only you could tell him what it was. If you could ask the right question. But what would be the right question? Was there magic in the earth? And what was magic? Who could use it? It was late July now, and the suggestion of breeze had brought Greta to stand, as she so often did, in the doorway of the ramshackle summer house--the warped screen door, which had long since lost its spring, drooping wide open against the clapboards. She stood waiting, it seemed to her, like a parishioner in line for communion for water to advance across the pasture, to bring her relief, however momentary, from the desolation that living had become since Crain's death, already three and a half months ago now; why did the prospect of water falling from the sky call forth this unfounded hope? Her pulse quickened in the same way that the butternuts at the corners of the lawn and the sugarbush along the road to the village had begun to quiver, as if her blood, however inadequately perceived by her, responded with the same consternation and excitement in its invisible branchings. The rain always came from the south when it approached in this annunciatory way; south, beyond the valley, lay civilization, if by that one implied a population greater than the forty or fifty in the village of West Stilling, the eight to nine hundred in Stilling township (numbers yearly augmented by the northern migration of the "summah people"--a phrase enunciated with a never explicit disdain by those who lived in Stilling year round); though one could exercise one's identity as a consumer, as Ned put it, in Dalby, Silkburg, or Rye, fifteen miles east, west, and south of Stilling, the towns grew larger the farther one travelled, as if up here the law of diminishing perspective had been reversed. While the population had grown elsewhere, here it had dwindled; the 1850 map hanging in the dining room recorded habitation not only all along the now grassy road between Thrush Hollow and West Stilling but in back of the Hollow all the way up to the Trout Hill copper mines and beyond, but now the Hollow's nearest neighbor was over a mile away. Greta and Ned had cheerily advertised Thrush Hollow to visitors as the last outpost of the civilized world, but they had meant this as a warning that people had better know how to entertain themselves if they came. Greta had never felt it to be her world at whose edge Thrush Hollow stood. Sometimes since Hudson Sleeper's discovery, surreptitiously, even though she was alone when she did this, Greta had broken off a forked branch and, closing her palms around the two narrow ends, paced slowly back and forth as Hudson had; she had tried to think only of water flowing beneath the ground--you had to keep in mind a picture of what you were looking for, Hudson said, and then let yourself be drawn--but the stick never moved. Greta knew she hadn't imagined the pull when Hudson handed her his divining wand, but it must have been Hudson the water wanted to summon; it didn't want her. "Why won't you answer me!" she had exclaimed recently up in the field where she and Henry picked blackberries, then, shocked, looked around. Though who had she imagined might possibly be there? Berry-picking had always been one of her and Henry's favorite shared pastimes, and in a few weeks the blackberries would be ripe and Henry would be home from camp, but how could they enjoy anything anymore, with Crain dead, Henry's father dead, and who was Henry, without his father? Then she had been sobbing, the stick jettisoned into a thicket of the wild cherry and poplar that threatened to engulf the field if they weren't cut back soon; sobbing because the stick wouldn't move for her, because she hadn't even known she had it in her to weep anymore until she heard herself, alone in a field, arguing with the ground ; sobbing to realize that she could think with such coldness of her own child. Ned maintained that Thrush Hollow's last owner could not have been aware of the material he held, encrypted, in his possession, since he (the arsonist) would not have balked at converting the discolored, brittle pages into crisp, green rectangles with pictures of presidents on them--and "rather more presidents than letters, more Grants than Washingtons," Ned said sententiously, "given a find of this magnitude," the letter writer's identity apparent to him after he'd read a mere three lines. "Good God, only one person ever wrote the English language like this," he said grimly, turning to the signature and staring at it as though he were going to be sick. Simply the one letter in which the writer addressed Lucinda Dearborn as his "one untarnished darling" could have earned Thrush Hollow's previous owner enough to make it unnecessary for him to set his property on fire! This Greta doubted. No one's private correspondence was that valuable, not even evidence that O. (to whom Ned, absurdly, insisted on referring by his initial) had felt the great passion of which no one had believed him capable. What difference could it make to anyone to know? The evidence was hardly conclusive; if anything, passionate outpourings on paper only showed that the writer had spent his passion through his pen. Of course, as Ned pointed out, Greta was hardly in sympathy with the man or his work, finding it too long-winded and analytical for her taste, which ran to mysteries (she having for her own mother "Priscilla Thwaite," a doyenne of the genre), naturalists' accounts, and stories of exploration; but she did know O.'s reputation. Her mother had been a die-hard fan and had pressed her favorite titles on Greta, though Greta had merely browsed through them until recently. In other circumstances, maybe, she wouldn't have doubted Ned's assessment, but his awestruck attitude combined with his insistence on total secrecy (whom did he think she would tell?) had made her dubious. Ever since the "find," Ned had closeted himself a good part of each day in his study, rereading O.'s biography and skimming his oeuvre, trying to ascertain how much and where his fifty-year almost entirely epistolary relationship with Lucinda, about whom no biographer had known, might have influenced his novels and stories--though at the moment Ned was in Dalby, buying a newspaper and getting the chain saw sharpened. Originally, Greta had looked with distaste upon the prospect of publishing something so private; she felt protective of Lucinda; Lucinda had hidden the letters for a reason, but lately she'd found herself fearing just the opposite: that Ned now meant to suppress the papers. At first he'd claimed that he simply wished--opportunistically, he acknowledged, but how often in life was one granted such an opportunity?--to take advantage of the serendipity before opening the cache to other scholars, but then recently he'd remarked, in a flip way that filled Greta with mistrust, "You know, Greta, I sometimes think that you were right. What difference does it make if our friend was in love with a girl in the last century? Who are we to disturb the peace?" Maybe she was allowing her imagination to run away with her in a manner befitting some of the writer's own more neurasthenic heroines, and yet she was convinced that Ned's change of mind--his change of mind and his whole strangely possessive attitude about the letters and diaries--was a response to the change in her since Crain's death, even though Ned hadn't challenged her explanation that her near-breakdown tension and insomnia resulted from "too much stress" at work, too many people wanting the impossible from her--to transform either them or their horses into world-class material without any effort on their parts. Which was true enough, but nothing out of the ordinary. Ned couldn't know, having never suspected Crain's existence, that Crain was dead (she had been alone at Thrush Hollow the first, numb month), but he sensed something, how could he not?, some crack in the carapace--and Greta could not now comprehend how she'd been able to keep her life with Crain secret all these years. Whether or not he knew it, Ned meant to hold Lucinda Dearborn hostage, to trap her in silence until Greta broke hers. Finally, at last, the rain began, swelling towards the house with the purifying eloquence of a choir, and Greta, still standing in the doorway, began to breathe, lightly at first, cautiously, but then more deeply, until finally she permitted the exhalation she'd been withholding to wash through her, as if the water Hudson had reminded her she was largely composed of sought the water all around. She waited until she was sure that the rain was no wayward summer shower but was settling in for a long sermon before she hoisted the crooked screen back into the tilted door frame and climbed the narrow backstairs to shut the south-facing windows on the second floor. At night, however, no matter how wild and insistent the storm, she never wanted to close the window beside the bed; she liked to lie on her side facing the weather, the blankets tucked around her ears, the rain wetting her face, while from the far side of the bed Ned complained that if she'd wanted to be splashed while she slept she should have slept in a boat. Back downstairs, Greta sat beside the cold wood stove in the kitchen in the rickety overstuffed rocking chair that, though since reupholstered, had stood in the identical spot since the first time she and Ned had entered the room, trespassers sixteen years ago; she picked up a book, one by Lucinda's correspondent--they practically infested the house, borrowed by Ned from a college library an hour's drive away--though she knew she had no intention of looking at the novel because she was still listening, not only with her ears but with her blood, to the rain pounding on the flower beds, drumming on the faraway roof, trying as if with every pore to inhale the rich air and the exalted smell of the wet earth. She held the book self-protectively against her chest, like the schoolgirl she had been when she first met both Crain and Ned, as she absorbed the sound of the rain in a state of receptivity she knew was less like listening than prayer, even though no prayer could bring Crain back to life or alter the fact that her more than twenty-year marriage was founded on a lie. Greta could not remember even once, in all that time, when she'd woken in the night and been unable to get back to sleep that Ned hadn't said, "What is it, Greta? Can't you sleep, darling?" in his gentle, really fatherly way--and where had he acquired this, when they'd known each other since they were teenagers? By what trick or secret marriage agreement? She had often been amused by Ned's insistence that she hadn't woken him, he'd already been awake, but in her present mood the habit seemed to stand for too much else. Why couldn't Ned admit that it was her wakefulness that aroused him even before she herself knew that she was awake; aroused him so instantaneously and completely that he seemed, even to himself, to have been awake all along? The habit went back, she was sure; as with so much else from which the habits of their marriage had grown, this never fully articulated argument found its source in the time they'd met, under then Bishop McAndrew's auspices when she had been Margaret , that poor afflicted girl Ned had been led by McAndrew to believe in need of his succor. It was Margaret Ned had fallen in love with, even though nine years later he'd agreed to marry Greta; yet always, Greta suspected, Ned had been hoping that she would become again that lost girl for him, so that he could finally save her. In the midst of her grief and shock it astonished Greta, even as it left her uncertainly, fearfully grateful, that Ned hadn't confronted her, insisted on more information--why was she so on edge? Why had she suddenly decided to come to Stilling six weeks early? How could it simply be work? She had been a riding professional for many years without showing this kind of strain why--now? And she had brought only the one horse with her instead of the three or four she usually did; how could she suddenly afford to have no horses in training? How was she planning to pay Henry's tuition in the fall? And why, after refusing to consider it in the past, had she, this year, not only allowed Henry to go to camp but in fact urged him to? Though Ned was no master of directness, intentional subterfuge had never been his style either, and it frightened Greta that he seemed to be making a point of not questioning her at the same time that she was afraid he was going to, for if he asked her in a certain way, kindly, without accusation, what was wrong, in the voice he used when she was having trouble sleeping, she knew she would tell him. Henry isn't your son! All these years I've lied to you! I remained his father's lover. But now his father is dead, and I can't keep the secret anymore. I haven't the strength. I don't know who Henry is . I don't even know if I love him! Greta could never sit still once her fear drove her into this corner; she sprang up now and hurried to the sink to wash the dishes waiting from lunch but then, instead of filling the dishpan, stood staring out the window at the rain: beating down hard now, bending the half-closed daylilies in the back yard, sending rivulets down the slope into the vegetable garden. The great elm, one of the few of its size left anywhere in the region, whose long branches reached down and swept the grass, back and forth, back and forth, with increasing urgency when rain approached, now stood mutely, bowed to receive the water. She saw, then, why Ned might say nothing: not out of strategy, not even strategy unknown to himself, but because he thought he was undergoing the upheaval, his tendency the opposite of most people's. He took on others' feelings, instead of supposing his feelings to be theirs. Thus he would try to make sense of everything privately, not liking, as he put it, to hear the exegesis before he'd read the text. That was his way, and they were alike in this--keeping their own counsel, as if they were weak natures afraid of being influenced. The stupidity of this struck Greta, the arrested development of it: parentless, grown-up, from what or whose contradiction were they protecting themselves? But there was no one to talk to . No one she, anyway, could talk to besides Ned. Rachel was not down the road as she usually was but in England and anyway angry to discover that Greta had never confided fully in her; only Rachel, besides Crain, had known that Henry was Crain's son. Flippantly, Greta tried to imagine speaking of her circumstance to anyone in the village: to Reuben Bliss, the farmer from whom they bought milk, or to Nora Sleeper, sitting in her spanking clean kitchen gazing across the road at the plots reserved for herself and Hudson. How would she respond if Greta asked her advice about whether or not to tell her husband that their fourteen-year-old son, whom he loved more than anyone or anything on earth, was not his own? Greta imagined Nora gasping and staring across at the graveyard for advice. Greta had sometimes comforted herself by picturing how, with Ned (assuming she could not be with Crain), she might someday lie among the Chubbs, the Osgoods, the Burroughses, the Dearborns (they ought to reserve a space, Nora urged her and Ned; the sites were nearly all spoken for)--the cozy Anglo-Saxon names conjuring images of lives lived in sweet self-contained hamlets, even though Greta knew that this could only be a vision from outside, spun from wishes and half-knowledge, a romance she carried on with her nominally native land. (She'd grown up overseas, she'd insisted; inheriting a passport didn't make her a citizen.) To envision her name and Ned's on matching slate tombstones among these country dead had permitted her, however artificially, to imagine their marriage as other than it had been, as someone, reading their names and dates years hence, might imagine it. In Thrush Hollow's kitchen, Greta blinked to contain tears--no chance anymore of that. No lifelong confidence and trust. She had no one to blame but herself; no right to self-pity, or to anyone else's either, and she forced herself back, with a reflexive sensation of culpability as if she'd been inattentive to someone in conversation, to the sound of rain on the tin roof, as if it --this repetitive reminder of a world not infected by human deceit and uncertainty--were what she'd been detained to, where she had to start over, to learn the instinct for wholeness somehow gone wrong in her nature. She listened to it--the same sound, new each time yet the same as before--as if to a patient teacher trying to instill a foreign language solely by repetition, hoping that understanding would arise not through translation but out of familiarity, the way children learn to speak. Copyright © 1998 Kathryn Kramer. All rights reserved.
