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.She saw the eternal, universal truth for some of the pilgrims who traverse the twisted highways and byways of small towns.“It takes a strong person to outgrow their environment,” Aunt Pearl Ivy said to Amy Joy.“You’d make ten Dorrie Fennelsons any day.She can’t hold a candle to you.”Amy Joy smiled and for the second time in less than a decade, the women, those old agriculturists, those first gardeners, saw their men folded like seeds into the indifferent earth, and they grew stronger for it.ALBERT AND BRUCE: A MAN, HIS DOG, HIS SWIMMING POOLSince most of us are now citified or at least suburban, we’ve probably never set foot in a barn.—Richard Rawson, Old Barn PlansAlbert Pinkham swept the last autumn leaves of 1968 away, once again, from his cement walkway.They had blown from his lawn and from the nearby fields.A new autumn would bring others, but 1968 could finally be scooped up and burned.Spring had no tricks up her sleeve this day.The temperature had risen over the days since Albert’s last hangover, and now birds had arrived from those distant places most folks in Mattagash could not even find on the globe.Six herring gulls, their bills like yellow pencils, interrupted their steady flapping to soar over the river.Albert watched them closely.Six was more than he’d ever seen at one time all the way up in Mattagash.“Probably stormy weather along the coast,” Albert explained to Bruce.“Either that or they’ve found out that our garbage up here in Mattagash is just as good as the garbage down around Portland.”The doors to numbers 3 and 4 in back were gaping open as Albert aired them out.A group of nature enthusiasts would be arriving later in the afternoon, a party of six, with requests to reserve three rooms.Albert had already swept and dusted in number 1, but number 2, his bridal suite, was left untouched.Inside, a thin layer of spring dust, like thin grains of rice, had spread soundlessly over the dresser, the pillowcases, the throw rug, the lamp.Amy Joy’s bridal suite in utter disrepair.Albert had already received three advance reservations for the room in June alone.The first, second, and fourth Saturdays of that month, the good old-fashioned wedding month if your head was screwed on straight, had been filled.More of the newest members of the old stock were settling down with the age-old notions of keeping the whole shebang going forward to the future, keeping the family alive, the hearth rosy, the old-settler ghosts appeased.If hunters needed the bridal suite, they could have it, except for those wedding nights when its services would be required.Albert even decided that once this latest batch of nuisance enthusiasts was gone, he would move the bridal suite to number 3, the pink room, that lair of mysterious women.All that really dictated that number 2 be the wedding chamber, instead of just an ordinary room, were the small plastic and metal chandelier that Albert had poetically hung over the bed, and the plaster of Paris statue of one of those naked Greek gods he had found at a yard sale in Caribou.A small candy dish by the bedside was always filled with salted peanuts for the occasion, compliments of the establishment.And Albert tried to remember to toss a few extra bath towels into the deal.We aim to please had been, after all, his motto since opening in 1958.Albert sat on the bed in number 3 to catch his breath.Bruce flopped on the rug near his feet and watched him curiously.A soft breath of perfume still clung to the room, an aroma of hyacinth hovering mothlike in the air.Could it be Miss Tessier’s perfume, fresh to the room? Or was it perfume from an old memory, an autumn ghost who had arrived in a swirl of colored leaves.It had been almost a month since Monique Tessier had come and gone from Mattagash.Was Violet La Forge still lingering in his memory, in the pink room she had painted and then left behind her? That secretary from Portland had stayed just long enough to tear open the wound that Albert had lovingly nursed over the past decade, until he thought it had closed and healed.Now he saw the light, pink as it was, filtering in through the windows of number 3.He was a man alone, and like the old barn builder, he found his very life was disappearing.He needed a change, goddamn it, a big one.He looked at Bruce, who yawned a sleepy spring yawn, displaying his crippled fang
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