The Probable Future

“Did it turn out all right?”

Elinor was out of breath and chilled, but seeing the memorial was worth the trek she’d made from Cake House. She nodded her approval; it was, indeed, beautiful. She thought about everything that was invisible: courage, honor, pain, love. She narrowed her eyes and the memorial disappeared, just for an instant; then it was right there in front of them again.

“It’s perfect,” Jenny Sparrow said.

It was the hour when the light faded quickly, when it drifted down and turned everything blue, houses and steeples, fences and sidewalks. In the time when Rebecca Sparrow lived in this town, people believed blue could protect them from evil, and they often attached strips of indigo homespun to their undergarments and the hems of their skirts. They believed anything sewn with red thread could cure what ailed them, be it fevers or nightmares or fits of coughing, that bay laurel could protect a man from lightning, that helping a blind man would bring good fortune. They believed that remembering someone could bring them back to you long after they had departed, if you only concentrated hard enough, if you stood outside on a windy night and tried to count every star sprinkled across the universe like rice on a table or stones in a lake, like bones in a body or snowdrops in the grass.

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IF A TRAVELER was without a map in this section of Massachusetts, he could easily grow confused. The villages blended together to any out-of-towner passing through, particularly when the view was surveyed from the window of the train. Look, and look again; white steeples, town halls, houses with black shutters. Farther out—malls, triplexes, parking lots—and farther still—green woods, streams, fields of black-eyed Susans and barley. It was a quilt without distinction, lilac here, green there, bordered by blurred faces, by rocks and clouds, by bricks and train tracks. Imagine the stations that go by: Concord, Lincoln, Hamilton, Monroe, North Arthur, Unity. The last of these had been built in 1930, out of brown granite, constructed by men from out of town, from Boston or New Haven, men so desperate for jobs they were willing to sleep on cots set up in Town Hall. There they dreamed of home and of trains and of the brown granite dust that fell everywhere whenever the stone was cut, dusting their faces, drawn into their lungs.

When Elisabeth Sparrow came to feed these men she brought pots of nine-frogs stew and over a hundred loaves of bread. Elisabeth heard these men crying in their sleep, she heard them praying for a familiar face, a kind word, supper set before them with care. She was that face, those words, that bread for an entire year. The train station was built with Elisabeth in mind; her name could be found etched into the granite in dozens of places, although an individual had to know what he was looking for in order to identify the lettering. On the whole, people in town didn’t seem to notice; to them, the marks were all but invisible, dusty strikes, like a chicken’s scratch, a pattern that was indeed impossible to make out if someone was standing too near.

Eli Hathaway used to be a common sight here, out in the parking lot in his taxi or chatting with the ticket-seller, Enid Frost. Eli himself had made a hobby out of counting the times Elisabeth’s name appeared in stone, and at last count it was 1,353. But the days of Eli Hathaway’s counting her name were over. Now, it was the new driver, Sam Dewey, from over in Monroe, who was parked at the station. Sam was an overly eager fellow who’d confide to anyone who got into his cab that he was trying to start a new life in Unity after his divorce. Indeed, he had a lot to learn. Ever since that incident with Sissy Elliot, when he left her outside the Laundromat, where she stood on the street for several hours, hoping for a neighbor to pass by to give her a lift, Sam had been studying local maps. He no longer had to ask his passengers for directions: How do you get to Lockhart Avenue? What’s the shortcut to the mall in North Arthur?

On the seventeenth day of May only one passenger got off the early train. Sam Dewey had already begun to wonder if he’d be able to earn a living driving a taxi in this town, so he made a bet with himself on that day, not that he was a betting man, not since his wife had left him, claiming he spent more time at Foxwoods than he did with her. All the same, if the gentleman on the platform got into his cab, Sam would stay in town. If, on the other hand, the fellow who’d gotten off the train turned and walked away, or if a friend or relative came to pick him up, Sam would move to Florida. Just thinking about Boynton Beach, where he’d been once on holiday, and the sunny life that might be ahead, cheered Sam up mightily. But after he went to the phone and looked through the Yellow Pages, the man on the platform approached. He was a well-dressed individual in his thirties, dark hair, a good-looking man who wasn’t bogged down by luggage, except for a backpack slung over one shoulder.