The Probable Future

Whether or not he was living in accordance with his true nature, he had no idea. He had simply followed fate to this place: meals taken alone, nights at the library, mornings in a house where the only voice he heard was his own as he chatted with the birds outside his window. He was supposed to go to NYU, but that was years ago, when his mother first took ill, and his plans hadn’t worked out. Instead, he attended the state college in Hamilton, taking night classes, eventually earning his bachelor’s degree. Soon, he would have his master’s in history, if he ever finished his thesis, a study of Colonial life in Unity. Matt was well aware that the state college wasn’t Harvard, but he’d be willing to wager that he knew a hell of a lot more about their hometown than his brother ever would, despite Will’s high-priced education. He knew, for instance, that those peach trees which had naturalized all through the county had initially been shipped to Farmer Hathaway, along with two bolts of silk and a silver-plated mirror. All of it had been carried on an ill-fated ship called The Good Duck, which went down fast after hitting a stretch of rocks in the marshes in the days when there was still deep water and sturdy docks as far as a man could see. There were plum trees from China onboard as well, and rosebushes bound in twine; there were bales of green tea left drifting over the mallows and pickerelweed. One thing Matt knew for certain: his brother wouldn’t know a peach tree from a plum, black tea from green, truth from self-serving dishonesty.

Matt had gone up to Harvard once, to visit Will and Jenny after they’d married and moved into an apartment in Central Square. He was a junior in high school, and Will and Jenny had seemed so much older, so sophisticated, cut off from their families and living on their own. Most college students, even when married, lived in the dormitories, but not Will. Will, who’d been accepted despite his laziness, due to phenomenal SAT scores, was a spoiled brat in Matt’s opinion. He needed his space; his lifestyle demanded better. He had a grand piano he’d finagled from Lord knows where, and such a thing would never fit in student housing. Even back then, Will’s neighbors complained about him, whether he was practicing Brahms or letting go with some boogie-woogie at 2:00 A.M.

What Matt remembered most about his visit to Cambridge were the hours he spent in Bailey’s Ice Cream Parlor, where Jenny was working. He’d gone back, years later, but the place was gone, and he couldn’t quite recall exactly where on Brattle Street it had been. What Matt did remember was that even though Jenny had only been a year and a half older, she had seemed like a woman, while he was still a boy. She’d already been promoted and was the manager at Bailey’s, and was therefore free to fix Matt complimentary ice cream sundaes all day long. He had them for breakfast, for lunch, and for dinner. Butterscotch, hot fudge, strawberry, marshmallow swirl. He couldn’t get enough. After two days of this diet, he was shaking from the sugar, yet he couldn’t seem to stay away from Bailey’s. He’d set out for the Fogg Art Museum or Blodgett Pool, but he’d always wind up walking back to Brattle Street. He had usually followed Will and Jenny around back in Unity, but it wasn’t until the visit to Cambridge that he realized why this was so.

“I think you’re addicted,” Jenny had teased him, and of course she was right, although ice cream wasn’t his problem. These days, he never touched the stuff, not even a plain dish of vanilla bean. At the tea house, Liza Hull always swore he was her only customer who preferred bread and butter to cake and pie. Matt grinned whenever Liza kidded around, but he kept quiet, and he continued to order bread and butter for dessert, for the truth was, that trip to Cambridge had cured him of the urge for sweets.

Matt liked to lose himself in hard work, but lately he found himself thinking about history the whole time he was landscaping, wondering if Farmer Hathaway or one of the other founding fathers of the town, Morris Hapgood or Simon Elliot, perhaps, had walked exactly where he now stood, or if Rebecca Sparrow had sat in the woods he was clearing of brambles and poison ivy, there to watch the light as it filtered through the trees on the Elliots’ hillside, where the air was by turns green and gold. In the evenings, Matt always stopped at the library on Main Street on his way home. Beatrice Gibson and Marlena Elliot-White, the librarians, most likely would have put in a call to the police if he ever failed to show up, that’s how regular his visits were, that’s how dependable Matt Avery was.

By now, Matt had read through all of the journals in the historical research room under the stairs. He had grown so used to twists and turns of the founding fathers’ script he could read what to any other man might look like chicken scratch or loop-de-loops. Each time he walked along Main Street, or reseeded the grass on the village green, or thinned the ivy that was choking the linden trees near Town Hall, or relocated a hive the honeybees had set up in the roof of the courthouse, Matt had the distinct feeling that he was walking through time. He thought of those who had lived their lives in Unity and died there, too, every time he went out his own front door and saw the grove of wild peach trees which thrived in an empty lot across the way. Matt Avery believed that history was made of the smallest details, the letter written, the list dictated on a deathbed, the ingredients of the dinner cooked with care, the variety of trees that had been chopped down, and those which had multiplied.