Archie woke up the next morning and tried to think of nothing but the weather as he walked out to the shed for his work gloves. It was a nice day, by his standards: cold and overcast, the maple leaves fully oranged and falling off the trees, and the dull new light giving everything a gunmetal sheen, making the world seem to have slowed by half. Late October was Archie’s favorite time of year, and the hours before seven his favorite hours, and absorption in a simple physical task his favorite state of being. He liked Equinox best when it slept. The irony of this was not lost on him.
The garden shed was all that was left of the house the town founder, Thomas Crim, had built. It appeared to Archie that it had originally been the kitchen—the remains of an ancient lake-stone hearth stood against one wall, and the dirt in front of it was still packed to the consistency of cement. To Crim’s credit, the building was solid. It was about fifteen feet by ten, composed of tough old-growth logs, blackened with pitch and insulated in between by horsehair and clay. Archie used it to store tools and wood, and his potter’s bench was here, teeming with jars of carefully labeled seeds, and it was from here that Kevin Russell, dressed up as a ghostly Crim every Halloween, emerged to frighten trick-or-treating children. Every once in a while some local historian would come and ask to see the shed, which was thought to be among the oldest structures in the county. Everybody who visited touched the hearth. Just a pile of rocks, piled by famous hands. Or infamous, he supposed. It was Ruth Spinks, long before they became lovers, who told him the truth about his land—at the time, Mary had barely been in the ground a year, and Ruth seemed to him gaunt, guarded, nasty. But they had gotten to be friends, and one night, six or seven years back, she had showed up at his door with a bottle of wine in her hand and half another bottle in her belly.
It was harvest time for Mary’s Pearl. Archie pulled on his gloves, carried his ladder into the orchard. He felt a connection to the trees, and to the land they grew upon, that was harder to come by in other seasons, at other times of day. He hummed as he worked, twisting the apples off the branches. It was good work: he was happy. He stripped off his overshirt and the steam rose off his shoulders. The clouds cleared a little in the east and the sun shone through. When people pulled over at the stand, he went to meet them. Simple life. Simple town.
Or not. He knew he was kidding himself, that this idyllic life was an illusion. But it was one he thought he deserved. He’d managed to hold on to his trust in other people all the way through the war, and wasn’t that good for something? He chose to believe that his government’s cause was just. He fought in a spirit of respect and obligation. And his reward had been Mary, and this town, and this orchard, and the law.
But when she died, his trust in other people died, and now he was like Ruth: he believed in duplicity and manipulation. He understood that money was made by exploiting the weak, and that wars were acts of political convenience. He knew that the law was fallible, because it had been designed that way, by people who had wished to exploit it. Laws, he could see, were made to be gotten around. But he was different from Ruth, as well, because he no longer believed there was a point in resisting. He believed in hiding, and taking his pleasures where and when he could get them, and minding his own business.
Maybe he was weak, for giving up so easily. There were plenty of other people who had shared his experiences and still held on to their convictions. But knowing that was no cure. For Archie, the orchard was the only cure; it was the thing he could trust. The trees wouldn’t notice when he was dead; the apples would keep coming. If he drowned himself in the lake tomorrow, apple trees would continue to grow, for hundreds of years, for thousands. There was nothing complicated about it. The trees had it figured out; he just kept them on a course that let him make an honest living.
And then here came Happy Masters to foul everything up. Everything reminded him of her these days. That was her modus operandi: control the agenda. Always a new plan, a new ground-breaking, or leave-taking, or sudden return. A rumor, a theory, a plan. She was sighted almost daily now striding up and down the salted sidewalks, waving hugely to every citizen, shaking hands, popping into the building sites like, of all things, a mayor.
Which he didn’t doubt she would someday be. And which, though it would appall Ruth to know it, he wouldn’t really mind. He would still have his house, his orchard, his little stretch of lake. He would still have his books and his memories.
But would he still have Ruth? Or would Happy Masters drive them apart? The fact was, he and Ruth Spinks were the same inside—cold and calculating and strong enough to ruin one another. And this idyll that Archie valued above all—the false innocence of Equinox—this was the thing that insulated them, that kept them from freezing one another to death. If it disappeared, so then would whatever they had together: not love, he supposed, but something.
Or not. Maybe he had overthought everything. Maybe he loved Ruth. Maybe people could be trusted. Maybe Happy Masters didn’t have that kind of power.
“Oh, Mayor!” came a voice, in his head—her voice, materializing as if to answer, at great length, his rhetorical question. And then came crunching footsteps, and, carried on the breeze, a whiff of some subtle scent—some spritz or mist or after-bath splash of undoubtedly extra-Equinoxian origin—and he realized that it wasn’t his head she was in, but his orchard. “Archie!” she said, hearty as a pirate.
“Hello, Happy,” he muttered, turning. There she was, wrapped in a pair of gray wool pants and a fluorescent yellow fleece. She looked up at him and, apropos of nothing, winked.
“I knocked on your door, then saw you wandering out here.” She glanced around, nodding in apparent approval. “Lovely, isn’t it. Hard to believe, these apples just come out of nowhere every year. Out of the dirt and the water and the sun.”
Archie climbed down from the ladder, his joints cracking audibly. “Hard to believe.”
They faced each other, hands in their pockets. She grinned.
“What?” he said.
“Nothing, it’s just—” She gestured around the orchard with her open palms. “All this. It’s wonderful. It’s everything a small town means. It’s everything I love about Equinox. And America,” she added, as if reporters might be lurking nearby. “You’re a lucky man.”
“I agree,” he admitted. “What can I do for you then, Miz Masters?”
Her eyebrows went up. “I know, you’re busy. Well, I’ll get to the point. There’s something I want to do, something for the town, and I thought I should come to you and ask about it.”
“Something for the town,” he repeated.
“Well, Equinox has been very generous to me. The people have given me room to explore my vision, and I want to give them a little gift.”
He scowled, crossed his arms, waited.
“Ah, you’re skeptical. As well you should be. Let me explain. You have noticed, I’m sure, the signs posted on the way in to town? The green ones with the white letters that say ‘Equinox’? And the one down by my place is actually a bit bent in half?”
“Truck hit it,” Archie said.
“Of course. Well! I propose to replace those signs with ones that are a bit more…appropriate to the feel of our village. At my own expense, of course. This is a lovely place and I think lovely signs should announce it.”
“What,” he asked, “do you mean by lovely.”
“I mean,” she said, feigning exasperation, “wood, for one thing, and painted, for another, and no, nothing fru-fru, no gold trim or any such thing, just a nice big wooden sign on wooden posts, with the name of the town painted on it—I have one of my people working right now—and perhaps underneath, the population, which of course has gone up by a citizen or two recently, wink wink.”
“What makes you think the population will stay where it is now?”
She laughed, reached out, squeezed his bare arm. Her fingers were warm on his skin, and soft. She left the hand there.
“Very good, Archie, you can read me like a book. Let me put it to you this way.” She released her grip now, gave his arm a pat. Inaction had allowed the cold to find him, and he shivered. “The sign on the south end of town is actually on my property? Remember, I own everything from the north property line all the way on down to the game preserve? So, essentially, I don’t need anyone’s permission to put up a sign.”
“Ah.”
“And after having checked the appropriate papers in the county office, I discovered that the other sign is on a little patch of land—”
“That belongs to me.”
“That belongs to you, yes!” She leveled a finger at him. She went on, her voice maple-syrup sweet and just as smooth. “So all I want is permission to replace the lousy old sign on your little plot over there—”
“Where my customers park their cars. In the busy season.”
“—yes, of course they do. So I’ll replace that sign, if it’s all right with you.”
“No population,” he said.
“Pardon me?” She brushed a strand of hair out of her full, pink face, healthy as a baby’s.
He said, “The sign on my land can’t have the population painted on it, Miz Masters.”
For once, she seemed taken by surprise. “Whyever not?”
Archie smiled. “Because,” he said, “I said so.”
Her face—quickly, almost subliminally—contorted with rage, and then just as swiftly righted itself. He almost laughed out loud.
“Well,” she said. “Fine. Perfect. I’ll have my men come take care of it later this week.”
“Your men?” he couldn’t help asking.
She leaned a bit closer, and the scent of her pushed toward him on the air. “Men,” she said, “tend to do what I tell them to.” Then she spun on the wet ground and stalked out of the orchard. He watched her all the way to the road—indeed, she turned to make sure that’s exactly what he was doing.