Chapter 27 #2
He answers the sock question. Of course he does. He’s been alive for the good ones.
Harriet’s campaign goes on for four weeks. It’s resolved in the parking lot of the grange, when Harriet—who has plainly been waiting for a considerable time—walks straight up to Julian himself while I am carrying two chafing dishes and cannot physically intervene.
“Mr. Volkov.”
“Mrs. Coyne.”
“Do you sleep in the ground?”
“No,” says Julian.
“A bed?”
“A very good one.”
“There,” says Harriet, turning around in triumph. “There. Eunice Ballard owes me five dollars and she has owed me since February.”
And she leaves.
That’s the sum total of the great questioning of Julian Volkov by the town of Black Harbor—one question, in a parking lot, about furniture, for five dollars.
He stands there holding a folding table.
“I had prepared for that,” he says.
“Had you?”
“I have been preparing for that since 1740.”
“How’d it go?”
“There were nine variants,” says Julian, “and none of them was about a wager.”
I laugh so hard I have to put the chafing dishes down on the hood of a car.
That’s the miracle of it, really. Some people know.
Some people have known for years. Some people have probably suspected and politely decided not to finish the thought.
Some people plainly know almost nothing, because Harriet has Wikipedia and five dollars riding on whether my boyfriend sleeps in dirt.
And none of it matters as much as Julian thought it would.
Black Harbor keeps asking him about socks.
Arthur Finch behaves, throughout, as though absolutely nothing whatsoever has occurred.
He is not warmer. He does not refer to the pub, or the axe, or frightening a photographer from Ohio, or what he said on his way out of the Lantern about the beech.
He complains about the parking. He brings the Historical Society a box of hymnals nobody asked for.
He tells me on two separate occasions that he does not much care for Rowan Pierce, in the past tense, as though Rowan were a weather system that had gone through.
And then, at the beginning of April, he starts coming up the hill on Tuesdays.
He’s done the Blackthorn gardens since 1971 and for all those years he has done them alone and sent an invoice to a firm in Boston. In April he starts arriving at nine and knocking on the kitchen door.
“Volkov.”
“Mr. Finch,” Julian says politely.
“About that beech.”
“Yes?”
“Come out here.”
Then a ninety-year-old man and a four-hundred-year-old man stand on the south lawn in the rain and look up into a copper beech for forty-five minutes, twice, and then a third time with an arborist from Camden who is told nothing at all.
The verdict is that the tree has perhaps thirty years in it. Maybe forty. There is something wrong at the base that has been wrong for a long time and there is nothing to be done except keep it comfortable.
“My great-great-grandfather put it in,” says Arthur. “Eighteen sixteen.”
“Yes,” says Julian.
Arthur looks at him.
“You’d know.”
Not I know. Not you haven’t changed. Not a question about portraits or fathers or grandfathers or why one Volkov has the same hands as another. Just two words that leave the knowledge sitting exactly where Arthur has apparently preferred it to sit for however long he’s been thinking about it.
Julian looks at him.
“I do know.”
Arthur nods. Then the two of them go on looking up into the tree, and neither of them says one further word about it. Later, Julian tells me he doesn’t know when Arthur figured it out. “I suppose his father may have told him something.”
“Did his father know?” I ask.
“I don’t know.”
“His grandfather? His great-grandfather? His great-great-grandfather?”
“I don’t know that either.”
I look at him. “And that’s bothering you.”
“Not in the way you think.” He glances back towards the south lawn. “I spent a very long time believing the structure worked because no one knew. Retire one name, raise up the next, keep the resemblance plausible, stay useful, and stay private.”
“But some of them knew.”
“Some of them saw enough.”
“And left it alone anyway.”
“Yes.”
He’s quiet for a long minute.
“You weren’t wrong to be careful,” I tell him. “There were times when you absolutely needed to be careful.”
“I know.”
“You were just careful longer than you had to be.”
Julian turns that over.
“Armor,” he says finally.
“What?”
“Something Victoria told me once. That armor is useful until you forget you are wearing it.” His mouth shifts. “I believe I told her she was being tiresome.”
“Was she?”
“Almost certainly.”
“Still right, though.”
“Frequently. It is her worst quality.”
I laugh and we let it drop, but it still leaves the other thing.
We don’t talk about it for eleven weeks. That’s not avoidance, or it is not only avoidance. February is Mabel’s questions and a hundred and ten covers for the wedding that was rescheduled due to the storm, and March is mud and Theo’s pump, and I have a business to run.
It’s still there, but I know exactly where it sits.
It sits in the fact that I have stopped doing a piece of arithmetic I never knew I was doing.
I caught myself in February, watching Julian carry a barrel and not counting.
I’ve stopped calculating, but I haven’t decided anything.
Both of those things are true at once, and they have to go on being true for a while.
It comes up in the middle of April, on the south lawn, on a rainy Saturday, because Julian plants a tree.
Not a beech. Arthur is extremely clear that you do not put a beech in the shadow of a beech.
It’s an oak, about nine feet of it, delivered on a flatbed from a nursery in Union.
I come up the hill at four to find Arthur Finch supervising from the covered porch while a four-hundred-year-old vampire digs a hole in the wet ground with a spade.
“He’s doing it wrong,” says Arthur, contentedly.
“He’s doing it very fast.”
“Fast isn’t right.”
Julian, waist-deep in a hole, says, “Mr. Finch has explained this to me four times.”
“And I’ll explain it again.”
“I have every confidence.”
They put the tree in. It takes them two hours and involves a quantity of arguing that I would characterize as affectionate on one side and resigned on the other, and at half past six Arthur sniffs and says he’ll see us, and goes down the hill.
Julian and I stand on the south lawn as the rain finally eases and look at nine feet of oak tree in the wet ground.
“How long?” I ask.
“For what?”
“Till it’s a tree. A proper one. The kind you can’t get your arms around.”
Julian considers it.
“Two hundred years,” he says. “Two hundred and fifty. It will be respectable in eighty.”
And there it is. It arrives the way it always does, which is without warning, on a perfectly ordinary evening in April with mud on my boots.
Two hundred and fifty years.