Stone Lake: part 65

A Star Tribune serialized novel by Richard Horberg

Chapter 23 continues

The story so far: Dave Meyers is a bachelor again.

One Saturday afternoon, as he lay on his bed listening to the Metropolitan Opera from New York on the radio in an attempt to broaden his knowledge, he heard footsteps coming up the stairs. Then there was a knock on his door. He got up and, running his hand through his hair, opened it.

A stranger stood in the hall, a middle-aged man wearing a suit and tie, smiling, a brief case in his hand. He introduced himself as Herbert Owens, a realtor from Crookston, specializing in cemetery lots. He gave Allen his card. "My company has bought the cemetery on the edge of Stone Lake," he said. "A very fine property which needs quite a bit of fixing up. We intend to do just that. We intend to make it a showplace."

Allen admitted that he barely knew where the cemetery was.

"We'll put it 0n the map for you. As a matter of fact, I just sold two lots to your good neighbors next door," he said. "Very nice people."

"You've never met them?"

He managed half a smile. "I've only seen them coming out of the bathroom."

A hearty laugh. "Well, I can tell you that they're both in the prime of life. Mid-forties, I'd guess."

"Isn't that a little young to be buying cemetery lots?"

"Not at all. Not at all. As a matter of fact, I dropped by just to see if you might be interested yourself. I understand that you're a teacher in the high school. Your superintendent, Arnold Magnuson, has a family plot there. So do several other people in the school. I can tell you that they're all very interested — and very pleased — in the kind of changes we intend to make."

"Indeed, I do."

"I'm leaving at the end of the year."

"You can always come back."

Allen laughed and showed him to the door. He told him that he'd rather be buried in the coal mines of West Virginia than in Stone Lake, Minnesota. He'd rather be cremated in Timbuktu. He'd rather have his bones hung out to dry in India and picked clean by buzzards.

The salesman asked him for the names of other teachers in the school.

***

He received another letter from Mary Zane — an astonishing letter. Right in the middle of a newsy paragraph, without the least bit of preparation, she told him something that shocked him: She was getting married.

Married? He couldn't believe it. He had to read the sentence several times.

"Joe is terribly nice, Allen," she wrote. "He comes from Albuquerque and is in mining engineering. Summers he's been working for the forest service — smoke jumping — but this will be his last summer doing that…

"Do you have scruples against being friends with a married woman? I hope not, as I value your friendship. I've told Joe about you and he doesn't mind if we write to each other…

He did not wish her luck. He was hurt. He was angry. How long had she known this guy? Where had she met him? He thought of all the times they'd been together in Minneapolis, all the places they'd visited and the things they'd done, all the letters they'd exchanged, the thousands and thousands of words he had spilled out on paper for her. Who was this Joe? Was he the reason she'd told him, one night in his car, that she didn't "want him to like her too much?" Was he the "other story?"

Probably not. Probably he'd come to Idaho as a university student, maybe a graduate student, and met her at some gathering similar to the Lutheran Student Association, where he'd fallen in love with her. But wasn't it awfully fast? Hadn't it been little more than a month since she'd asked him to take her to Europe with him? As he saw it, she must have met him one day and agreed to marry him the next.

And she claimed that there was nothing more to say, that she was going to become one of the masses. That hit him hard. He had never considered her one of the masses. He had considered her special. He had considered her precious.

That night, he wrote her a long, incoherent letter. After reading it over, he tore it up and threw it in the wastebasket. She was right — there was nothing more to say. On a three by five card he wrote simply, "Don't write to me again." Then he put it in an envelope, walked down to the post office and mailed it at once.

So be it.

Regrets.