Sometimes, just once in a great while, the seasons run in a perfect cycle in northern New England so that when you have grown old the memory of perfection is so sharp and clear edged that you look back and say to yourself, Yes, that’s the way it was. You remember that you were young and that at the end of summer, just before school opened, everyone you knew had a cellar full of vegetables put up in glass jars because summer had put forth just the right amounts of sun and rain. In autumn the apple trees were so red and so swollen with fruit that the branches dragged on the ground and your mouth watered when you thought of biting into a McIntosh because you knew what the sharp tang would be like against your teeth and how the juice would feel running down your chin. The foliage was brighter than it had been since anyone could remember and under your feet the leaves crunched louder and the bonfires sent up a sweeter, smokier smell than they had ever done before. There was snow on the ground at Thanksgiving and you remember best the smell of cranberries and mincemeat and butter and how it felt to come in out of the unfriendliness of November and into a bright warm kitchen where something was always going on. By Christmas Eve there was enough hard-packed snow on the roads that you could go carol singing in a horse-drawn sleigh and your mittens were bright red and your nose ran a little and over everything there was the smell of freshly cut spruce. In January there was a blizzard that knocked down the power lines and closed the schools for three days. Then you stayed home, warm and safe in front of the fire, and read Snowbound to your little brother and it wasn’t at all like reading it in school because this time you felt all the words instead of just saying them out loud, and that night you ate canned food for supper because no one could get out to the stores. The thaw set in at the end of the month and everyone who was older than you said that it was unhealthy but you didn’t believe it and you looked forward to the next day because maybe tomorrow you wouldn’t have to wear overshoes to school. But then it was February, bleak and snowy and not much fun at all because now you were looking forward to spring and sleds and skates had become tiresome. You were not surprised when March came in like a lion and went out like a lamb because you had heard that it was so in school and you forgot all the years when it had not been true. In April the rains that would bring the blossoming of May ripped at the rivers and streams until winter melted clear out of sight and then it was the time of gentleness. Purple violets poked their little heads suspiciously out of the ground and the more daring crocus rose defiantly out of patches of now harmless snow. Bare ground was covered overnight with a soft green fuzz and on the trees the new leaves were the color of lettuce, so tiny and tender looking that you wanted to pick a handful to put into your mouth. The forsythia bushes were like young girls at a party with their yellow skirts all spread out, fresh and crisp and new looking. Even the pines discarded their black winter faces and turned now, washed and green, toward the sun. You walked in the woods where the pine needle floor was still soggy from the recently gone frost and if you were very lucky you found a lady’s-slipper with its color going all the way from shell pink to deep rose and you felt singled out and special all day long because this was a practically extinct flower and you had found one. You put your blossom in a glass of water and set it on your bureau and you could not believe that the flower would be dead by morning.
One year spring came with gentleness to a town called Cooper Station. It was the spring that Anthony Cooper came home after ten years away, and after he had come to the top of the last hill before the long slope down into town he parked his car at the side of the road and looked down at Cooper Station. The town looked like something, or the reflection of something, in the bottom of an enormous green cup.
Like something I dreamed, thought Anthony, or like a picture on a calendar or on a Christmas card.
The sun shone warmly on pink brick and white wood and it filtered down through the leafed trees to make patterns on the shadowed sidewalks. It reflected itself in the front of the shops on Benjamin Street, the main thoroughfare, where even the First National was painted white and had small paned windows. Anthony noticed that the marker at the town line was still a plain black post with the name of the town painted in white block letters on a crosspiece. There was no huge billboard such as is found at the entrance of many towns and which, in this case, might have read, WELCOME TO COOPER STATION. WORK, PLAY AND LIVE IN OUR TOWN, for the simple reason that Cooper Station did not welcome just anybody. If a man wanted an obvious Chamber of Commerce welcome he had to go north for another ten miles, beyond the camouflaging hills, to where there was a gigantic curve in the river and there he would find the city of Cooper’s Mills. There he would find the factories, the tenements, the sixty-watt light bulbs in the soiled beer joints, the Canucks and the Catholics. But Cooper Station was different. It was made up of the people who profited from the existence of Cooper’s Mills and who could, therefore, afford not to live there.
For a moment Anthony felt some of the old bitterness which had caused him to leave Cooper Station in the first place, but then he merely shrugged and put his car in gear. He had not come home to champion lost causes. He had come home to die.
“And I intend to do it with dignity and in peace and quiet,” he said aloud as he turned his car off Benjamin Street and into Smith Road.
Much later, Anthony would say that he had given up the idea of dying because he never found the time for it. He had been home less than six weeks when, as he put it, all hell broke loose.