Page 37 of The Invisible Hour

NATHANIEL SAT AT A table in the rear of the tavern while his uncle went upstairs to nap. It was a sweltering day and there were flies buzzing around spilled pools of ale on the tabletops. Bees hit against the windows, drowsy in the last glints of sunlight. Nathaniel and Robert had been at the river since daybreak and had hiked ten miles or more through damp areas where the swamp cabbage grew and the ferns were as tall as a man. They’d stopped at a fisherman’s shanty where several local men were gathered, sharing the stories of that day’s catch. One fellow swore he’d caught a blue that was forty-five inches in length, not that anyone believed him. Another said he’d seen the ghost of a little girl at the nearby Eel River, and the men laughed out loud, in utter disbelief. Still another said he’d seen an eel step out of the slow-moving falls of the river and become a woman who’d gone to live in an old fisherman’s shanty, another story no one believed.

Berkshire County was filled with tall tales, and Nathaniel loved to hear them, true or not. This was a place where anything could happen, where bears roamed the hills, and children tended the sheep with collie dogs by their sides to protect them. Nathaniel had begun to fill a notebook with words and phrases. He wrote down the local tales, but he also remembered the words that Mia had told him about growing up in this wild place. Bewilderment, love, judgment, wild rosebushes, the deep heart of nature, the black flower, I wanted more for you than I wanted for myself.

Nathaniel and his uncle had shared a few drinks with the local men, rough whiskey in tin cups, and that was likely why Robert had been compelled to lie down when they returned to the inn, promptly falling into a deep sleep.

“You’ll forgive me,” Robert had said when he excused himself. “Fishing is hard work.”

“That it is,” Nathaniel agreed. It was also curative, as his uncle believed. It had centered Nathaniel’s thoughts and allowed words to come back to him, as if they were beads on a strand. The Berkshires reminded him how beautiful this world could be. He felt as if he had woken from a long sleep, as if he was a bear himself, one who’d thought his only purpose was to tell stories, when it now became clear that it was far more important for him to have the ability to love someone.

Nathaniel had mud on his boots and leaves in his hair, though he’d done his best to shake them out before coming into the inn. He’d left his pail by the back door, empty, even though they’d caught several blues, one of which was nearly fourteen inches, a monster that flushed a vivid plum color when plucked from the river. Any other fishermen would have dispatched the trout, smacking it against the rocks, bragging about the catch for months, but Nathaniel and his uncle Robert had set their trout free. That was the secret joy of their fishing trips. They never once kept anything they caught, they simply experienced the marvels all around them.

Nathaniel was himself exhausted; still, words continued to come to him on their own, as if called down by an angel. He took up his pen and pad again, and while sitting at a table in the barroom he made a list of the trees they had seen in the forest: sugar maple, red maple, black birch, yellow birch, hickory, red oak, beech, white ash, hemlock, pine. He was falling in love with words all over again, for each told a story in and of itself. He was starting from the very beginning, but he was starting all the same. He didn’t have a story, but he had the words to use should he ever have a story to tell. The word tree could be anything and everything. An apple tree in a shaft of sunlight. A conifer where crows were nesting. A sapling bent over the river, its roots turning a mossy green. A rosebush outside the inn, the crimson flowers tumbling down. This was how it began, with a world that was as real as a river, even though it was made of nothing more than words.

CHAPTER EIGHT WEST OF THE MOON

Mia arrived at the small train station in Blackwell, which would be torn down decades before she was born, for the train route had been stopped once the highway was built. It was a white-hot afternoon and before Mia began to walk toward the Jack Straw, she took a moment to sit on a wooden bench on the town green, across from the library. It looked as it had in her time, a brick and shingle building, with leaded glass windows and an oak door. Mia saw the town both as it was and as it would come to be. There was the grocery store, and the sheriff’s office, and the town founder’s house, which was said to have a garden in which only red plants grew, bittersweet, azalea, and a variety of red lilies that could be found nowhere else in the Commonwealth, along with climbing roses called Crimson Glory. Mia tried to imagine her daughter living in this world, and all she could see were the confines of the Community. You cannot walk barefoot down the street, or cut your hair short, or do as you please. You will do as others expect you to do. She crossed the green and stood in the doorway of the library. But you would always have this, the place where there were a thousand keys to a thousand doors.

One of the men working at the desk noticed Mia and approached her. “Can I help you, miss?” he asked, for he did not recognize her, and the library was private, a club for men to gather and to expand their minds with readings and discussions. The only public library in the Commonwealth was the Franklin Library, founded in 1790, begun with a donation of Benjamin Franklin’s books. The Boston Public Library would not be established until 1848. Most libraries were private, and it would be years until women’s reading societies were formed, to include women and girls.

“May I not borrow a book?” Mia asked.

“Is your husband a member?” the librarian asked.

“I have no husband,” Mia replied, and when the librarian shook his head, she was stunned. “Are you saying I therefore have no right to read these books?”

“I’m sorry, miss. If the library becomes public, then you will be more than welcome. Until that time, I must ask you to leave.”

WALKING BEYOND TOWN, ON the dirt road that would someday become Route 17, Mia easily found her way, even without the landmarks—the fence that ran the length of the Community’s property, the road signs to Lenox and the Mass Pike, the mailboxes of distant neighbors to whom they weren’t allowed to speak. Mia now understood that Joel was well aware that once a girl walked into a library she could never be controlled again.

When she entered the woods, she spied a red fox running through the shady glen, leaping for no reason other than to celebrate the joy of being alive. Such a sighting always meant good luck. See a fox and you’ll see your future, that was what Ivy had once told her. There were chokeberries and mulberries in the thickets, and the sky was a luminous blue. Mia hiked through the meadow filled with tall plumy grass and was soon flushed from walking hard and fast. Her skirts caught on thorns, and she’d had to tear the fabric away from the brittle limbs of the bramble bushes. Bees were everywhere, and they rumbled around her as if she were a flower moving through the fields.

Every now and then enormous flocks of sparrows could be seen flying south. In Berkshire County, summer was brief. Nights here were already chilly. The present was always overtaken by the future, spring by summer, and summer by fall. Already, the leaves on some twisted vines in the woods were turning yellow. Mia remembered searching to find the first red leaf of the season. Here, in the deep woods, there was jewelweed along the damp, muddy banks of streams, as well as patches of cardinal flowers, which bloomed scarlet.

When she came up the hill, Mia lifted her skirt, for the grass was wet with mist. She certainly remembered the Jack Straw Tavern, and how she’d sneaked into the bar, relishing her brief time spent there, when she could feel that she was an ordinary girl. As she drew closer, she spied a tin pail outside the door, and when she reached it, she crouched down to have a look. She saw that it was empty, and that no fish had been caught, and then she was sure Nathaniel was inside, for he’d boasted that he’d never once killed a living creature and never kept his catch when out fishing.

Mia went to the window and peered inside. There he was alone at a table, his dark, beautiful face knotted with absolute concentration as he wrote in a small leather notebook, a plate of food before him left untouched. Her heart lurched as she lightly rapped on the window. At first Nathaniel thought he heard the bumblebees hitting the glass. Then he looked up and his attention was riveted. He thought he was dreaming; perhaps he was asleep on his small metal bed in his room, napping just as his uncle was, and had only dreamed that he had walked downstairs and ordered supper and a whiskey. Mia waved to him, another dream surely, or so he thought until he pinched his hand and felt the smart under his skin.

When Nathaniel came outside, it was late in the day and the light was silvery and pale. They were beyond words and recriminations. He had been stung by her disappearance, but she had returned, and he was unable to resist her. Without a word, they went inside the Jack Straw and took the back staircase to Nathaniel’s room. He bolted the door, then stripped off his black coat. She unbuttoned her dress, until he told her to stop. He would do that for her.

The bed was small, too small for Nathaniel alone it had seemed, but that didn’t matter now. Life can be long or short, it is impossible to know, but every once in a while an entire life is spent in one night, the night when the windows are open and you can hear the last of the crickets’ call, when there is a chill in the air and the stars are bright, when nothing else matters, when a single kiss lasts longer than a lifetime, when you do not think about the future or the past, or whether or not you are walking through a dream rather than the real world, when everything you have always wanted and everything you are fated to mourn forever are tied together with black thread and then sewn with your own hand, when in the morning, as you wake and see the mountain in the distance, you will understand that whether or not you’ve made a mistake, whether or not you will lose all that you have, this is what it means to be human.

AS SHE WAS PLACING the book back beneath the mattress, he saw both the name and the title. She’d thought he was asleep, and now she clutched the book to her chest. You will change everything, Elizabeth had warned her. There is no logic in love or in writing, Mia had insisted, but now she wondered if she had gone too far in tempting fate.

“You must let me see,” Nathaniel urged. When Mia refused, there was a darkness in his voice. “It appears to be my book. Is it not?”

“Not yet. Not until you write it. If you saw it now you might be influenced to change it in some way, or to write it as you think it’s meant to be written.”

But now he knew the title, which he assumed he dare not change. Among the words he’d recently written in his notebook there had been a list of colors. Scarlet had not been among them, but now that he had spied it, he thought it the most beautiful word.

“Did my sister tell you not to show it to me? She’s not always correct, even though she believes she is.”

Mia had never seen him so shaken. She had read about his black moods and the gloom that often descended upon him, and yet she was unprepared when he stormed out of the room, muttering that he would find some coffee at the bar. As soon as he’d left, Mia thought it was best to conceal the book in a place where he wouldn’t think to look. She would stow it in her bag and store that in the fireplace, but as she lifted the book, it fell open on the floor, and then she saw the change had already begun.

The words she knew so well were disappearing. An entire passage she knew by heart, one that concerned what to do with an unwed mother who had broken the Puritans’ rules, was gone, replaced by blank white space. At the very least, they should have put the brand of a hot iron on Hester Prynne’s forehead. More was disappearing as she turned the pages, as if the words were black sparrows flying off the paper, too quickly to be caught. What do we talk of marks and brands, whether on the bodice of her gown, or the flesh of her forehead? This woman has brought shame upon us all, and ought to die. Is there not law for it? Truly, there is, both in the Scripture and the statute-book. Then let the magistrates, who have made it of no effect, thank themselves if their own wives and daughters go astray!

Even if Mia was at the fringes of Nathaniel’s life, those edges might burn so fiercely they could change everything, and like the butterfly across the world, she would have changed all that he did and thought and wrote as well. Even if she told him how to follow his history, where to meet his wife, at what addresses he should live, the date he was to join Brook Farm, the day he should begin to write his great novel several years from now, she could not make certain he would experience the small details of his life. A dragonfly he spied on a Friday. A bird he noticed in the sky. One meeting in the forest could affect all that he was and would ever be. What would their daughter mean to him, how would she change his vision of the world? A novel was made of personal experience and raw emotion. It was a chart of all that a person was. Even if Mia lived in the cottage, if she saw him once a month, or every six months, it might be enough to change what was meant to be. Elizabeth had been right; it was already happening. Mia went to look in the glass and saw that she was beginning to disappear. Her freckles were gone, her hair was a pale ashy color, her eyes were silver rather than black. That was when she knew, if she waited too long to leave, she would become invisible, both here and in her own world, as if she had walked into the water all those years ago, as if his book had not been on the shelf, there to change her fate.

IN THE MORNING, THE carriage arrived to take Robert and Nathaniel back to Salem. Their time here was over, and the real world awaited. It had moved on without them, and now it was time to step back inside their lives and pick up their responsibilities and renew their family ties. Robert Manning thought the trip had done his nephew a fair amount of good. Nathaniel seemed in better spirits, and he had stopped talking nonsense about life in the future. The future, after all, was what they made it and what they lived each day.