Chapter 12
Hank had spent his whole life learning he couldn’t fix a thing by telling it to stop.
He couldn’t order a fever to quit, or a green colt to settle, or a cracked beam to carry a load by the force of asking.
He found what drove the thing and went at that instead.
He’d asked Ruth Sanger to cool it three weeks back, in the gentlest words he had, and the gossip had caught a draft and blown up.
And he was pretty sure she was behind most of it.
He’d been turning it over the way he did when a patient kept coming back with the same complaint.
The whole town was running a fever. The fire investigators had pried the lid off a five-year-old grave, and the valley had gone hot with it.
Speculation was flying every which way. Who’d known what, who’d covered for whom, whether or not a dying man had struck the match.
Thing was, a fever would break unless some infection continued to fuel it. Ruth Sanger’s daily booth in the middle of Rose’s diner was the source of this infection and main fuel for the town’s fever.
He’d tried prescribing the truth.
Pass along the truth, then, he’d told her.
He’d watched her set down the truth, untouched, because the truth he’d handed her, that Sunny Carter was an honest woman doing honest work, wasn’t a good story.
It had no villain in it. Ruth couldn’t make sure her voice carried two booths in each direction and watch people’s faces go bright and interested.
It took him until the morning after the forum in the Grange to realize what he’d done wrong. He saw it the way he saw most things, with his hands full of something else.
A story didn’t die because someone called it a lie. It died when a better one came along to take its place.
Ruth didn’t deal in stories because she was cruel. She passed them out because she was past eighty in a house gone quiet as a held breath, and telling stories connected her to every other soul in the valley in a deeply satisfying way.
She’d outlived nearly everyone who’d loved her or been a close friend. Her penchant for gossip wasn’t the actual sickness. It was just a symptom. Her sickness was that the town had stopped needing her. And she’d found a way to make it need her again.
He couldn’t ask a lonely old woman to cool it on the gossip any more than he could ask the lake to run uphill. But he could hand it a better story to tell.
So on Thursday, after his last house call not far from the Sanger place, he drove over to see Ruth.
She lived on the north edge of town in a white frame house with a porch swept clean enough to do surgery on.
Inside it was warm and close, immaculate and quiet.
Every flat surface held photographs of people the town had long since stopped asking her about.
A husband twenty-some years gone, children scattered to other states, grandchildren she knew mostly by cards sent at Christmas.
His pretext for the visit was dropping off a refill of her arthritis medicine that she didn’t strictly need yet. She clearly saw clean through it and let him in anyway, pleased to her bones to have a body in the house to feed.
She put coffee and a slab of pound cake he hadn’t asked for in front of him, and settled across the kitchen table bright-eyed, ready for the conversation she’d plainly been saving up for someone to listen to.
Hank let her run a while, telling him about the Bray boy’s new truck, the price of the church re-roof, a thing the pastor’s wife had said at the potluck. He drank her coffee and ate her cake and let chatter on because he didn’t want Ruth braced for an attack from him.
When she momentarily wound down, he set his fork on the plate. “Ruth, I’m going to be straight with you because you’ll see through me otherwise and like me less.”
Her eyebrows went up, her gaze intent on him. She sensed a good story forthcoming.
He turned the coffee cup a quarter-turn on its saucer. “This town’s coming apart at the seams, and I think you’re the only one who can baste it back together long enough for the rest of us to heal it proper.”
Her eyes sharpened with pleasure and suspicion in equal measure. “You’re managing me, Doc.”
“I am.” He didn’t bother to look sorry about it. “And I’d rather do it to your face than behind your back, which is more courtesy than most folks in this town have been showing lately.”
He leaned in, forearms on her spotless table.
“You know everybody in the Stillwater Valley. Not the way the rest of us do. You know folks all the way down to our roots. Whose grandfather homesteaded which draw, who sat up with whom the winter the flu came through, which of those firemen used to keep peppermints in his turnout coat for the kids along the parade route. You’re the only soul left who remembers everyone who made this town what it is today. You know where we all come from.”
Ruth went still in a way he’d been hoping for and dreading at the same time.
“Right now this town is so busy fighting over who lit the fire that it’s clean forgotten the part worth remembering: who burned in it.
Folks have forgotten who those men were, and how the people they left behind have kept going every morning for going on five years.
That’s a better story than the one going around right now.
It’s got more truth in it.” He held her eyes.
“I’m not asking you to stop talking, Ruth.
I know better than that. I’m asking you to start talking about the right thing.
You’re the best story teller in this entire valley. Nobody can match you at it.”
She was quiet long enough that he could hear the clock ticking in the next room. When she spoke, her voice had set down some of its gleeful suspicion.
“You think I don’t know the firefighters are getting lost in all of it?
” She looked toward the window where the light was going gold over a yard she kept up alone.
“I knew every one of them. Watched them each grow up. Get in trouble. Leave and come back to Cobbler Cove. Fall in love. Did you know I taught every last one of them junior high math?” A breath.
“Nobody’s asked me a single thing about any of them in years.
Folks only ever want to hear about the day they died.
About how bad the fire was. Whether or not anyone heard them screaming. ”
Hank jolted.
Ruth’s mouth turned down in a humorless facsimile of a smile. “Never fear. Nobody heard them. Couldn’t anyone hear anything over the roar of the fire and the screams of those horses panicking and dying.”
He let out the horrified breath he was holding and, a little shaken, said, “I’m asking you to remind the people of this town who they were. All of it. The good, the bad, the ugly. Everything that made them who they were and made them part of this town.”
She gathered herself, and the bright edge came back, but warmer now, and aimed somewhere better. “All right, Doc. I’ll do it. Lord knows somebody ought to.” Then she leveled a knotted finger at him before he could go feeling pleased with himself. “But I’m keeping the other story.”
“What story?”
“You and that accountant.” She said it with frank relish.
“That’s the best story in this valley, and you’ll pry it out of my cold hands.
A man like you, going on forty years old and settled as a fence post, and along comes a redheaded widow with four children and a tongue like a tax audit.
” She shook her head, delighted. “No, Sir. That one’s mine.
I’ve been right about you two longer than you’ve owned up to it yourself. ”
Hank thought about arguing and found he didn’t want to.
“Tell that one however you’d like,” he said with a shrug.
He stood to take his cup to her sink because his Mother had taught him and his brothers that it was polite not to leave a dish on the table for his hostess.
“It’s the only thing you’ve been right about and kind about in the same breath all month. ”
She cackled at his remark and was still laughing as he let himself out into the long, late afternoon light.
He’d driven over to turn the tide flooding this town around and found, the way he generally did, that the work was mostly a matter of looking straight at the one person nobody else had bothered to look at in years.
The house was nearly finished, and Hank kept catching himself standing in the middle of rooms with no work left to be done in them.
He’d never once stood in the front parlor without seeing a project in need of doing in here.
The dropped ceilings throughout the entire house were gone, even on the third floor where he’d barely set foot since he moved in.
The true ceilings soared fourteen feet overhead on the ground floor and twelve feet overhead on the second and third floors.
Each room’s hand-carved ceiling medallions and original wood trim were stripped, sanded, and freshly re-stained.
The wallpaper Sunny had steamed off in long, ugly sheets had given way to the original paint colors and rolls of wallpaper dating back to the building of the house that she’d found in the attic and sent to a wallpaper restoration company that duplicated the lovely floral pastels upstairs and rich jewel tones downstairs.
The tall windows had all been taken out, restored to working order, repaired, re-finished, and re-installed, as well. Light streamed through the thick, faintly wavy original glass and crossed the oak floors the way it had when the floor was brand new.
Every single room he’d kept locked shut before stood open now, cleaned, restored, and redecorated with the treasure trove of original furnishings Sunny’d found in the attic and lovingly cleaned, repaired, and reupholstered with Madison’s eager help.
The house didn’t look new. Sunny didn’t do new. It looked like itself, the way it was meant to before forty years of people didn’t listen to it. It looked old, but sound and honest, the scars kept where they told a true story and mended where they didn’t.