Everville Read Free Page B

her father said.
    ,,Did Mr. Buddenbaum not tell you?"
    Her father reached over her shoulder and gently pried the medallion from her fingers.
    "Oh he told me, sure enough," Hannon said, returning to the box and placing the medallion inside, "only I didn't altogether understand him." With the contents now gathered up, he closed the lid and started to lug the box back to the wagon. "And I think maybe we should not speak that man's name aloud again."
    "Why not?" Maeve said, determined to vex some answers out of her father. "is he a bad man?"
    Harmon set the box down on the tail of the wagon. "I don't know what kind of man he is," he replied, his voice low. "Truth is, I don't rightly know that he's a man at all. Maybe... " he sighed.
    "What, Papa?"
    "Maybe I dreamt him."
    "But I saw him too."
    "Then maybe we both dreamt him. Maybe that's all Everville is or will be. Just a dream we had, the two of us."
    Her father had told Maeve he wouldn't lie to her, and she believed him, even now. But what kind of dream produced objects and real as the medallion she'd just held in her fingers?
    "I don't understand," she said.
    "We'll talk about this another time," Harmon said, passing his hand over his furrowed brow. "Let's have no more of it for now."
    "Just tell me when," Maeve said.
    "We'll know when the time's right," Hannon said, pushing the box back through the canvas and out of sight. "That's the way of these things."
    TWO
    "These things, these things: what exactly were these things? For the next several weeks, as the wagon train wound its way through Idaho, following a trail forged by half a decade's westering, Maeve had puzzled over the mystery of all she'd seen and heard that day. In truth the puzzlement was a distraction-like the sewing together of dream-scraps-a distraction from the monotony of the trail. The weather through late June and July was mostly sweltering, and nobody had much energy for games. Adults had it easy, Maeve thought. they had maps to consult and feuds to fume over. And they had that business between men and women that her twelve-year-old mind did not entirely grasp, but that she yearned to comprehend. It was plain, from her observations, that young men would do much for a girl who knew how to charm them. they would follow her around like dogs, eager to supply any comfort; make fools of themselves if necessary. She understood these rituals imperfectly, but she was a good student, and this-unlike the enigmatic Mr. Buddenbaum-was a mystery she knew she would eventually solve.
    As for her father, he was much subdued after the clash with Whitney, mixing with the rest of the travelers less than he had, and when he did so exchanging only the blandest of pleasantries. In the safety and secrecy of the wagon, how ever, he continued to pore over the plans for the building of Everville, scrutinizing them with greater intensity than ever. Only once did she attempt to coax him from his study. He told her sternly to let him be. It was his intention, he said, to have Everville by heart, so that if Pottruck or Goodhue or their like attempted and succeeded in destroying the plans, he could raise the shining city from memory.
    "Be patient, sweet," he told her, then, his sternness mellowing. "Just a few more weeks and we'll be over the mountains. Then we'll find a valley and begin."
    In this, as in all else, she trusted him, and left him to pore over the plans. What was a few weeks? She would content herself in the meanwhile with the triple mystery of dreams, things unsaid, and the business between men and women.
    In a tiny time they would be in Oregon. Nothing was more certain.
    But the heat went out of the world even before August was over, and by the end of the third week, with the Blue Mountains not yet visible even to the keenest eye, and food so severely rationed that some were too weak to walk, the word had spread around the campfires that according to friendly natives, storms of unseasonal severity were already descending