Searching for Caleb

"I'm going to buy a camera and walk around filming to one side of things, wherever the action isn't. Say there's a touchdown at a football game, I'll narrow in on one straggling player at the other end of the field. If I see a purse-snatcher I'll find someone reading a newspaper just to the right of the victim."

"What's the point?" Justine asked.

"Point? It'll be the first realistic movie ever made. In true life you're never focused on where the action is. Or not so often. Not so finely." He stopped and looked at her. "Point?" he said. "You don't usually ask me that."

"Duncan, I wish I knew what we should be doing about Meg."

"Oh. School called. She cut all her afternoon classes, they said. Is she sick?"

"Why, I don't know. I haven't been home."

"Every day this week she's had a headache."

"See there? No wonder I worry," Justine said. "I ought to go look in on her." But instead she sat down on a knobby piano stool he had been trying to get rid of for months. "I am forty and one-third years old," she said.

Duncan blew on the pastry cutter and started polishing it again.

"Doesn't it seem to you that things are going by very fast?"

"I have always thought everything moved too slowly," he said. "But I know I'm in the minority."

"How did we get here?"

But when Duncan looked up, she had her eyes fixed on the opposite wall as if she didn't want an answer.

He set down his work and rose to walk around the shop, passing his rows of polished tools and utensils. They did his heart good. He ignored what Silas had brought in from his tours of the auction sales- the china and scrolled furniture, which he allowed to pile up in dim corners. He paused beside a nineteenth-century pressure scale and laid his hand upon it gradually, delighting in its intricate, precise design. Behind him he heard the familiar plop, plop of Justine's cards. What would she be asking, all alone? But when he turned he saw that she was laying the cards absent-mindedly, the way another person might doodle or chew a pencil. Her eyes were on something far away; she smoothed each card blindly as she set it on the sewing chest beside her.

While he watched, she frowned and collected her thoughts. She looked down at what she had laid out. "Why, Duncan," she said.

"What is it?"

"Why-"

"What is it, Justine?"

"Never mind, don't worry. Don't worry."

"Who says I'm worried?"

But she was already out the door, running down the street with her hat streamers fluttering. It was the first time Duncan had ever known her to leave her cards behind.

Daniel Peck was on the front porch, rearranging a sheaf of correspondence, when Justine came dashing up the walk between the rows of sprouting vegetables. She looked wild-eyed and flustered, but then she often did. "Grandfather," she called, "have you seen Meg?"

He tried to think.

"Meg."

"Well, now I wonder where she could be," he said.

"What time is it?"

He fumbled in his pocket and hauled out lengths of gold chain hand over hand, raising his eyebrows when his fingers met up with a watch. "Ah!

Five twelve," he said.

She spun past him, into the house, clattering the screen door behind her.

He felt the noise rather than heard it. He felt his bones jar. Then there was peace, and he returned to a letter dated April 10, 1973. He squinted in the twilight at a ragged blue script.

Dear Mr. Peck:

In response to your query of March 17, I am sorry to say that I do not recall my grandmother's ever mentioning a Caleb Peck or, for that matter, any other young man she used to dance with. I was not aware that she danced. However my cousin Annabel Perce (Mrs. John M.) of Duluth, Minnesota may know more. I myself was never at all close to my grandmother and am certainly not the one to ...

He sighed. Long white fingers entered his vision, fluttering another letter on top of the first.

Dear Mama, I have gone to be married in Arthur's church. We will be living with Arthur's mother. Don't worry about me, III finish school in Semple. I will keep in touch.

Love, Meg

"Eh? What's this?" he asked Justine.

She merely lifted an arm and dropped it, as if she couldn't speak.

"Why," he said, "I didn't know it was proper for ministers to elope."

Justine went down the porch steps, back through the vegetables toward the street, drifting along slower than he had seen her in years.

"Justine? Wasn't that fellow a minister?"

She didn't answer. In the end he simply filed the letter away among his other correspondence and went on with what he had been doing before.

10

B y May the whole front yard was a tangle of cucumber vines and little green stalks of corn. Neighbors began knocking on the door. "Justine, of course it's your lawn to plant as you please although frankly it seems .

. . but never mind, what is that smell? What we want to know is, that smell!"

"Oh, just things from the blender."

"The-? When you turn down this street it's the first thing you notice. It smells like a zoo. A city dump. A slaughterhouse."