• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1972 0

August Fred McKearny invited Stephen to stay for supper, and soon Stephen found himself befriended by the entire McKearny family, including the golden labrador Rufus, who, while Stephen sat at the dining room table with the McKearnys, rested his head on Stephen’s knees. There was Mrs. McKearny, who seemed as fond of Stephen as if she’d known him all of his life, and there was eighteen-year-old Rich, and there was sixteen-year-old Marlena, and there were several younger children; Stephen was giddy with happiness, for he’d forgotten what it was like to sit at a table, relaxed, and eat delicious food, and talk, and laugh as if it was the most natural thing in the world. This is real life, Stephen thought.

And how different, too, the semirural neighborhood in which the McKearnys lived, in a large white clapboard house surrounded by similar woodframe houses where homeowners kept gardens, orchards, livestock. Everywhere, friendly dogs like Rufus ran loose. There were roosters and chickens pecking in the dirt by the roadside. And not a mall for miles—many miles. Stephen tried to recall his old home in the city, where no one knew neighbors and where everyone drove cars, rushing from place to place and back again, traffic in snarls on the expressway. How mad that life seemed now. How aberrant, as if seen through a distorting lens.

I never want to return, Stephen thought. I won’t!

He could attend Contracoeur High School with Marlena. And Rosalind, too, could enroll. Their parents had not said a word about school; perhaps Father expected to be returning to his own life by the time school resumed; how utterly unrealistic, how blind and selfish, for of course that wasn’t going to happen; that wasn’t going to happen, Stephen realized, for a very long time.

Often, alone, thinking dreamily of Marlena McKearny, who was so different from the girls he’d known in the city, his classmates at his private school; Marlena who was short, freckled, pretty but hardly glamorous—hardly “cool.” Her way of hugging Rufus, her sweetly teasing manner of laughing at Stephen as she laughed at her older brother Rick, making both boys blush. Had he fallen in love with Marlena? Stephen wondered. Or with all of the McKearnys. Or with Contracoeur itself.

Stephen wiped angrily at his eyes. Tears embarrassed him!

But he’d been missing it so—life.

Stephen, too, had surreptitiously visited the small Contracoeur library to browse through the local history shelves. He, too, had been shocked and disgusted to read about his great-grandfather Moses Adams Matheson. The “most wealthy mill-owner of the Contracoeur Valley"—the “distinguished philantropist-conservationist who had donated thousands of acres of land in the Chautauqua Mountains for free public use.” But there was the matter of the South Winterthurn “tragic blaze” of February 1911, killing more than thirty persons and injuring many more. There were striking workers locked out of their mills when they attempted to return, and numerous instances of union organizers “dispersed” by Pinkerton’s security police. Stephen read with particular disgust about the construction of “the most ambitious and costly architectural design of the Contrecoeur Valley, Cross Hill.” The massive, pretentious limestone house, in emulation of English country houses of a bygone era, had required eight years to build and had cost millions of dollars. Before it was completed, Moses Matheson’s wife, Sarah (about whom little information was provided in these texts) had died. Moses Matheson was said to be “estranged” from his single heir, a son, as from most of his family; he lived at Cross Hill in “guarded seclusion” for eighteen years, a recluse who died in 1933, at the age of sixty-five, “under suspicious circumstances, the country coroner not having absolutely ruled out the possibility of a ‘self-inflicted fatal injury.’ “ Suicide! Quickly Stephen turned a page in the crumbling History of Contracoeur Valley only to discover that the next several pages had been crudely torn out. Just as well; he didn’t want to read further.

Another