Everyone decorates for Christmas on Cannonfield Road. As early as the second week of November, dark workmen appear on ladders, affixing red ribbons to window sashes, installing real pineapples and holly berries into triangular cornices. Cheryl and Roger decorate, too, with the most understated of candle glow, if only to avoid derision. What they’d prefer to do is hang a banner informing the neighbors that all their ornamentations are historically incorrect. The original owners of these homes were strict Puritans, forbidden to acknowledge the popish holiday. The colonists, in their plain way, would have worked through Christmas as through any day of the year, not a pineapple in sight.
It would be a stretch of incredible na?veté, of course, to think that the new owners of the Slater house are adhering to historical authenticity. It’s true that she knows nothing of these newcomers other than that they are young, childless, and in possession of a preposterous Aston Martin that appears in the driveway from time to time like a mute foreigner. Its owners have shown themselves in full form only once. Cheryl and Roger had watched from the kitchen window one summer morning as the young couple slowly circled the august white saltbox across the street, freshly theirs, with the assessment of predator birds. Finally they disappeared inside, and as evening fell, Cheryl and Roger had seen a cool unfamiliar light appear in the window of the second-floor bedroom. Harriet’s bedroom. Harriet’s window: one of the beautiful, spit-perfect windows that Lars had installed with his own hands when he and Harriet were newlyweds. Those windows, like all things with flawless beginnings, had slackened with age and begun to gap over the years. There were drafts, Cheryl knew, that kept Harriet beneath a stack of quilts on winter nights.
They haven’t seen a light in that bedroom since. There has been no moving van, no contractor’s truck, no roofing ladder, no silver car.
“It’s the Spaulding house all over again,” Cheryl says to Roger. “I was afraid this might happen.”
She still has nightmares about the Spaulding house, the wrecking ball slamming into its cedar shingles again and again, the front elevation crumpling inward as from a punch in the gut. Just like that, in one spinning flash of stupidity, two hundred years of history obliterated.
“I’m going to say something,” Cheryl states, “at the next meeting.”
Roger nods. Now that winter has descended, he has brought his file and spokeshave into the kitchen and works continuously at shaping spindles. His decision to specialize in the art of steam bending has paid off splendidly. There may be more multitalented carpenters around, but now that the legendary Thomas Whitman has hung up his adz, there exists no better maker of eighteenth-century Windsor chairs on the planet. The jump in demand after the Colonial Faire suggests that Roger has been crowned the living history community’s chair-maker of choice. And once these people have chosen, they are loyal for the duration.
Roger shakes his head. “It’s a bloody shame, it is.”
It irks Cheryl when he slips like this, tainting the colonial manner of speaking with cockney syntax. She presses her lips together. At least he is trying. At home, she grooms her own speech but does not force it. Even with years of practice, she is drained by the effort of sustaining proper diction for any length of time, and reserves her thees and thous for sanctioned gatherings.
“You know Harriet would be turning in her grave,” she tells Roger. “And Lars, too. And Ezekiel Slater, for that matter, and Jeremiah and all the grandchildren. You can be sure that Benjamin and Comfort would have done something. It’s the duty of friends, then as now.”
Roger does not reply at once, but holds a spindle aloft and examines it. Watching him, Cheryl feels a crawling vexation. He has slipped so comfortably into success. He has absorbed the admiration so easily, as if it were long due. He has cut his billable hours at work without a jag of self-doubt. His transformation from lawyer to chair-maker has been as fluid as tadpole to toad.
Her own enterprise is a slower slog. She has to remind herself that only the most refined slice of the community will ever appreciate her work. Most are content to settle for buttons made of horn, pewter, or even tin. Among those who understand the superiority of thread, there are even fewer who recognize the beauty and accuracy of the death’s-head tradition. In her workshop at the faire, she’d been visited by a small handful of exultant admirers in flawless midcentury dress and had sold three sets of astral-style buttons. She has to remind herself that it is her own choice to reject dressmaking, that wide and easy highway—and in no way is it Roger’s fault.
“You’re a good friend,” he tells her at last, fitting the spindle into a chair seat.
Cheryl feels a sudden threat of tears. Harriet is there, all at once, in her vegetable garden, dwarfed by sunflowers and tomato plants, bending with a watering can of dented metal. To Cheryl’s surprise, this old woman had twined her way into her heart. She had risen above the general populace of scuttling, self-involved citizens and demonstrated what a full human being should be. Faithful and industrious, there could be no better heir to Reverend Slater’s homestead, no better steward of the virtues of loyalty, sacrifice, and humility.