The Probable Future

“I guess Jimmy Elliot is working for you again,” Hap said to Matt Avery when Matt came by, uninvited, to speak on Stella’s behalf.

“He was supposed to. Never showed up. What did they nab him for this time?”

“They got him for throwing rocks at the tea house.”

“That’s an asinine thing to do.”

“I think he’s in love.”

“Ah.” Matt nodded, sympathetic. Even Jimmy Elliot wasn’t immune to such things. “I stopped by your grandfather’s house and took down some fencing and left the bulldozer inside the field,” he told Hap. “Tomorrow morning make your grandfather go out somewhere, take him to breakfast. I don’t think he should be there when I’m digging the hole for Sooner.”

“He’s pretty broken up.”

“Well, he spent twenty-five years pretending to hate that horse.”

After Matt went in to the meeting, it was quiet in the corridor, and Hap got back to reading the police report. People inside the meeting room were surprisingly silent as well, in something of a state of shock as they listened to Dr. Stewart explain that Eli Hathaway had asked Stella to determine what would be done with his estate. At this point many members of the council were wondering if Eli Hathaway wasn’t merely being spiteful in his choice of a teenaged executrix; this child now had the power to decide what to do with far more money than anyone had guessed Eli had possessed. They realized it was a huge bequest as Nathan Elliot read off the list of properties, securities, bank accounts, investments. Wasn’t choosing Stella to oversee it all a joke on the council members and on the town?

But, no, as it turned out, this was no prank; Stella had already come up with a plan. A clinic was to be built on a lot of Hathaway land, and a doctor and nursing staff employed, for such was Stella’s resolve; people wouldn’t have to go all the way to North Arthur or Hamilton if they were ill. Not only that, but the Hathaway Recreation Center would be built across from the library. There would be tutoring and an afterschool program; in the summer, swimming lessons would be offered to one and all. This was well and good, this was excellent, as a matter of fact. The members of the town council began to relax, but then Matt Avery got up and he started to talk. This was something of a surprise as well, for Matt wasn’t known for his oratory skills. All the same, after so many years of plowing snow and cutting down trees, after so much time spent being alone, he couldn’t seem to talk enough. When he finally got in front of a classroom in the fall, he’d go on lecturing for an hour or two at a time, without stopping for breath or a glass of water.

It took Matt more than an hour to tell Rebecca’s story; those members of the town council who hadn’t been silently taking an oath against Eli Hathaway’s memory were cursing him now. But when Stella stood up to thank Matt for his background for her most important decision, even the dissenters fell silent. Now the other shoe was about to drop, the bloody, stone-filled boot. Stella had on the silver star Eli had given her, the one Rebecca had been wearing when she’d been lost in the woods.

Stella informed the group that a dispensation from the mayor and the council would allow a memorial to Rebecca to be built in the center of town. A crew had already been approached and were carting a six-foot-tall slab of granite down from New Hampshire; an ironworks in Lowell had already been contacted. If anyone felt that such a memorial was a sacrilege, they didn’t speak up on that day— there was the health center to consider, after all, much needed in town. There was the rec center, where their children would learn to swim—and so work was quickly begun.

If anyone expected letters of protest, they were sorely disappointed. To most people in town, Rebecca Sparrow was nothing more than a portrait in the library, one of the first settlers in Unity, a young girl with long black hair. Folks got used to the idea of Rebecca’s memorial, just as they became accustomed to seeing Stella on the town green, sprawled on the grass on days that were fine and on those that were foul. Something that had taken so long now went up in no time, right in the very center of the green, surrounded by plane trees and lindens. Atop the simple granite slab there was a bronze bell which, when it was rung, would be heard for miles around. There would never be silence again, at least not in this town.

Elinor and Jenny came to the common on the evening when the bell was set in place. It was a windy night in May, and Elinor and Jenny had both dressed up. It was an occasion, after all. Stella hadn’t wanted a public display; no fireworks to announce the memorial’s completion, no town sing-alongs. It was a family matter, first and foremost. Jenny did the driving now, and she helped her mother along the path that cut across the common. Stella had picked a handful of violets, which she’d set on the step of the memorial in a little glass vase.