Anne Tyler - Searching for Caleb

Then Justine warmed to him all over again, to his absurd fringe of a beard as precise as the brush on a typewriter eraser and his preposterously long, multiple-jointed fingers fumbling at his hat; and her grandfather relaxed enough to grow politely bored. "Come inside, Eli," Justine would say. "I'll make you some iced tea." But at that very moment his face would narrow, his fingers would grow still. "What all were the records your family owned?" he might ask.

626

"What?"

"Recordings. For that old-timey phonograph."

She had to turn to her grandfather, who scuffed the porch floorboards petulantly. "Caruso, I remember," he said finally. "Other things. Red Label discs."

"Oh yes. Red Seal."

"In the beginning they were called Red Label."

"Ah," said Eli.

"Don't you know anything?"

"But what besides Caruso? Any more?"

"I don't recall."

"It's something I got to find out," said Eli, but he wouldn't say why.

"Well, I reckon I'll just have to go to Baltimore again. You've kept them, now."

"We've kept everything," said Grandfather Peck. And when he went inside he would slam the screen door. Yet it was plain that Eli's questions intrigued him. For the remainder of the day he would be thinking hard, frowning until his eyebrows met. "Can you tell me why he would ask such a thing? What has he got up his sleeve? That fellow must know something we just have no idea of, Justine."

But for the grandfather, after all, finding Caleb was the only goal. For Justine the point of the search had been the trips themselves, and now she felt bereft and useless. She wandered from room to room, absently carrying her straw bag around with her as if she were a visitor, long after her grandfather had settled himself in the armchair to plan what he would say first when he and Caleb met.

Meanwhile Duncan was selling antique tools by the dozen, by the gross, faster than he could stock them. Why did things always work out this way?

Newton Norton, the man who had bought the garden engine, was reconstructing his ancient farm down to the last pitchfork in the barn.

He haunted the Blue Bottle, seizing on old rusty pliers and milking lanterns, blacksmith's implements, kitchen utensils. "If you could see Silas's face!" Duncan told Justine. "Sometimes Newton Norton has to call for a truck just to take his purchases home."

"He must be crazy," said Justine. "What if he has to move someday?"

They were on the front porch, Duncan sitting on a stool while Justine gave him a haircut with the kitchen shears. His hair was thick and straight, audible when it fell. She cut it in layers down the back like a shingled roof, and then when she combed it the layers sifted magically together and evened out. She combed again, floating off into a trance among the shimmering yellow ribbons. She cut another inch off. "Maybe I should have been a barber," she said.

"Let's not get carried away here," Duncan told her.

By now it was August and their corn was so tall it blocked their view of the street. Cars swished by unseen, almost unheard. (Duncan was interested in the effect of greenery upon the decibel count.) People walking past were no more than disembodied voices.

"Hello!" they called, apparently taking it on faith that someone was there to answer. "Well/ hi!" said Justine. She waved her flashing shears in the air. Duncan didn't look up. He had his mind on other things.

"I told Silas, 'See there?' He wouldn't let me buy that old sewing machine of Mrs. Farnsworth's, now he's sorry. Newton Norton tracked it down himself and gave her twice what it was worth. But you know Silas.

'Yes/ he said, 'but once he's got this farm of his set up, what then?

Hmm?' Well, yesterday Newton Norton opened his place to the public, a fully working nineteenth-century farm. Admission two dollars. Fifty cents for children. Plus. Cooking lessons. A six-week course in old-time American cooking. You learn in this kitchen that has a wood stove and a fireplace big enough to roast an ox. You make cabbage custard and codfish cakes-well, to tell the truth, none of it sounded edible. But somebody must like it. All this morning women were coming in asking for sausage guns. Bird's-eye maple sauerkraut mashers. They snatched up these hand-cranked machines that I hadn't even quite figured out yet, things to pare cucumbers and strip corncobs and peel potatoes. By noon I'd sold every utensil in the place."

"Think of that! You're a success," said Justine, trimming around his ears.

"That's what they call it."

But he spoke through a yawn, and then sneezed when a snippet of hair landed on his nose. His face glinted all over with stray blond sparks. He didn't look like a success.

On the fourth Sunday in August, the three of them drove to Semple to visit Meg. They were supposed to go earlier but always at the last minute Duncan claimed that something had come up. He had to attend an auction, or a special flea market, now that Silas was urging him to buy more tools. Yet he returned without any tools whatsoever-only, once, a carton of rusty Prince Albert tobacco tins. "These are antiques?" Justine asked.

"Imagine, they used to be garbage. I used to see them in the weeds along Roland Avenue. But where are the tools? What about the kitchen utensils?"

"None of them appealed to me," said Duncan. "Only Prince Albert."

"In the end, the silliest things get valuable. We shouldn't throw anything out."

"It doesn't seem to me that we do," said Duncan.

Now he wanted to cancel the trip yet another time (he said there was a Tailgate Treasures near Washington) but Justine had caught on to him.

"It's not possible," she said. "You know how long we waited for Meg to invite us. Now we've put her off twice. What will she think?"

"Maybe just you and Grandfather could go. I could go to Washington alone."

"What on, bicycle?"

"I could borrow Silas's station wagon," he said.

"Besides, I don't want to go just with Grandfather. I'd really like you with me this time."

"Maybe in the fall, when things are quieter."

"I don't understand you, Duncan," Justine told him. "What is it you have against this visit?"

But then he grew touchy. He always did object to the way she dragged his secret feelings into the open.

Still, on the fourth Sunday in August there he was, maybe a little grimmer than usual but resigned to the trip, heading the Ford along a gritty two-lane highway toward Semple with Justine sitting beside him and Grandfather Peck next to the window. On the rear seat was a stack of Meg's summer dresses and a paper bag containing a dozen ears of corn.

("But the corn will be wasted," Duncan said. "Reverend Mildew will try to eat it with a knife and fork.") Meg's other belongings-her set of Nancy Drew mysteries and her pennants and bottles of cologne-remained in her room. Duncan had thought they should bring everything in one fell swoop but Justine preferred not to. "All she asked for were her summer dresses," she said. "Maybe she doesn't have space yet for the rest."

Duncan, who never dragged anyone's secret feelings into the open if he could possibly help it, merely nodded and let her have her way.

They reached the outskirts of Semple at two in the afternoon. Welcome to Semple, Va., "Prettiest Little Town in the South," the sign said, looming above a stack of pine boards weathering in a lumberyard. They bounced over railroad tracks, past rusty, gaping boxcars. "Now there was a town," said Grandfather Peck. "Had its own train."

"Only freight trains, Grandfather," Justine said.

"Pardon? Freight? Didn't we go to Nashville once from here?"

"That was from Fredericksburg. Three years back."

"Oh yes."

"Here we had to take a bus to Richmond and then catch a train."

"Nashville was where that boy played the banjo," said her grandfather.