For months after the Eden’s Gate sign appears on the shoulder of Arcady Lane, nothing changes. The osprey leaves her nest atop the tallest tree in the woods and heads for Mexico, and the first snows blow down from the mountains, and the county plow plows it into berms, and Lake Street fills with weekenders driving to the ski hill, and Bunny cleans their rooms at the Aspen Leaf Lodge.
Every day after school, eleven-year-old Seymour walks past the sign
COMING SOON
CUSTOM TOWNHOMES AND COTTAGES
PREMIER HOMESITES AVAILABLE
and drops his backpack on the love seat in the living room and postholes up through the snow to the big dead ponderosa, and every few days Trustyfriend is there, listening to the squeaks of voles, and the scratchings of mice, and the beating inside Seymour’s chest.
But on the first warm morning in April, two dump trucks and a flatbed carrying a steamroller stop in front of the double-wide. Airbrakes moan and walkie-talkies squawk and trucks beep, and by Friday after school, Arcady Lane is paved.
Seymour crouches on the brand-new asphalt at the tail end of a spring rain. Everything smells of fresh tar. With two fingers he tweezers up a stranded earthworm, hardly more than a waterlogged pink string. This worm did not expect rain to wash it from its tunnels onto pavement, did it? To find itself on this strange new impenetrable surface?
Two clouds separate and sunlight spills onto the street, and Seymour glances to his left, and the bodies of what might be fifty thousand earthworms catch the light. Worms, he realizes, cover the whole blacktop. Thousands upon thousands. He deposits the first at the base of a huckleberry bush, rescues a second, then a third. The pines drip; the asphalt steams; the worms thresh.
He rescues twenty-four twenty-five twenty-six. Clouds seal off the sun. A truck turns off Cross Road and approaches, crushing the bodies of how many? Faster. Pick up the pace. Forty-three worms forty-four forty-five. He expects the truck to stop, an adult to climb out, wave the boy over, offer an explanation. The truck keeps going.
Surveyors park white pickups at the end of the road and climb through the trees behind the house. They set up tripods, tie ribbons around trunks. By late April, chain saws are droning in the woods.
As he walks home from school, fear buzzes in Seymour’s ears. He imagines looking down at the forest from above: there’s the double-wide, the dwindling forest, the clearing at the center. There’s Trustyfriend, sitting on his limb, an oval with two eyes surrounded by 27,027 dots in rings.
Bunny is at the kitchen table, lost behind a drift of bills. “Oh, Possum, it’s not our property. They can do whatever they want with it.”
“Why?”
“Because those are the rules.”
He presses his forehead to the sliding door. She tears out a check, licks an envelope. “Know what? Those saws could mean good news for us. Remember Geoff-with-a-G from work? He says that lots at the top of Eden’s Gate might go for two hundred thousand.”
Darkness is falling. Bunny says the number a second time.
Trucks grumble past the double-wide loaded with logs; bulldozers punch through the end of Arcady Lane and cut a Z-shaped extension up the hillside. Every day, as soon as the last truck leaves, Seymour walks the new roadway with his earmuffs on.
Sewage pipes loll like fallen pillars in front of mounds of debris; great coils of cables lie here and there. The air smells of shattered wood, sawdust, and gasoline.
NeedleMen lie crushed in the mud. Our legs are broken, they murmur in their xylophone voices. Our cities are ruined. Halfway up the hill, Trustyfriend’s clearing has become a tire-churned welter of roots and branches. For now the big dead ponderosa still stands. Seymour trawls his gaze along every limb, every branch, until his neck aches from looking.
Empty empty empty empty.
“Hello?”
Nothing.
“Can you hear me?”
He does not see Trustyfriend for four weeks. Five. Five and a half. Every day more light spills into what was, hours before, forest.
Realty signs sprout up and down the newly paved road, two with SOLD placards already attached. Seymour takes a flyer. Live the Lakeport lifestyle, it reads, that you’ve always wanted. There’s a map of homesites, a drone photograph with the lake in the distance.
At the library Marian tells him that the Eden’s Gate people jumped through all the planning and zoning hoops, hosted a public hearing, handed out some seriously delicious cupcakes with their logo in the frosting. She says they even purchased the crumbling old Victorian next to the library and plan to remodel it as a showroom.
“Development,” she says, “has always been part of the story of this town.” From a file cabinet in Local History she produces black-and-white prints from a century ago. Six lumbermen stand shoulder to shoulder on the stump of a felled cedar. Fishermen hold yard-long salmon up by their gills. Several hundred beaver pelts hang from a cabin wall.
Looking at the images starts the roar murmuring at the base of Seymour’s spine. In a vision he imagines a hundred thousand NeedleMen rising from the ruins of the forest and marching on the contractors’ trucks, a vast army, fearless despite the incredible odds, swinging tiny picks at tires, driving nails through men’s boots. Plumbing vans go up in flames.
“A lot of folks in Lakeport,” says Marian, “are excited about Eden’s Gate.”
“Why?”
She gives him a sad smile. “Well, you know what they say.”
He chews his shirt collar. He doesn’t know what they say.
“Money isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.”
She looks as though she expects him to laugh, but he doesn’t understand what’s funny, and a woman wearing sunglasses jerks a thumb toward the back of the library and says, “I think your toilet is overflowing,” and Marian hurries away.
Nonfiction 598.9:
Between 365 million and one billion birds die just from crashing into windows in the United States each year.
Digest of Avian Biology:
Multiple onlookers reported that after the crow died, a large number of fellow crows (well over one hundred individuals by some accounts) descended from the trees and walked circles around the deceased for fifteen minutes.
Nonfiction 598.27:
After its mate struck the utility wire, researchers witnessed the owl return to its roost, turn its face to the trunk, and stand motionless for several days until it died.
One day, halfway through June, Seymour comes home from the library, stares up into Eden’s Gate, and sees that Trustyfriend’s big dead tree has been cut down. Where this morning the snag stood on the hillside behind the double-wide, now there is only air.
A man unrolls an orange hose from a truck; a backhoe cuts galleries for culverts; someone yells, “Mike! Mike!” The view from the egg-shaped boulder now stretches up a bare drumlin of shredded forest all the way to the top.
He drops his books and runs. Down Arcady Lane, down Spring Street, south along the gravel shoulder of Route 55, traffic roaring past, running not so much in rage but in panic. All this must be undone.
It’s the dinner hour and the Pig N’ Pancake is packed. Seymour pants in front of the hostess stand and scans faces. The manager eyes him; people waiting for tables watch. Bunny comes through the kitchen door with platters stacked along both arms.
“Seymour? Are you hurt?”
Somehow still balancing five plates of patty melts and chicken-fried steaks on her arms, she crouches, and he lifts one cup of his ear defenders.
Smells: ground beef, maple syrup, French fries. Sounds: the grading of rocks, the driving of sledges, the back-up alarms of dump trucks. He’s a mile and a half from Eden’s Gate but somehow he can still hear it, as though it’s a prison being built around him, as though he’s a fly being wrapped and spun in a spiderweb.
Diners watch. The manager watches.
“Possum?”
Words stack up against the backs of his teeth. A busboy trundles past, pushing an empty high chair on wheels, the wheels going thumpthwock over the tiles. A woman laughs. Someone yells, “Order up!” The woods the tree the owl—through the soles of his feet he feels a chain saw bite into a trunk, feels Trustyfriend startle awake. No time to think: you drop like shadow into the daylight, as one more safe harbor is wrenched out of the world.
“Seymour, put your hand in my pocket. Do you feel the keys? The car is right outside. Go sit in there, where it’s quiet, do your breathing exercise, and I’ll be out as soon as I can.”
He sits in the Pontiac as shadows trickle down through the pines. Inhale for four, hold for four, exhale for four. Bunny comes out in her apron and gets in the car and rubs her forehead with the heels of her hands. In a to-go box she has three pancakes with strawberries and cream.
“Use your fingers, honey, it’s all right.”
The fading light plays tricks; the parking lot stretches; trees become dream trees. A first star shows, then hides itself again. Best friends best friends, we’re never apart.
Bunny tears off a piece of pancake and hands it to him.
“Okay if I take off your muffs?”
He nods.
“And touch your hair?”
He tries not to wince as her fingers catch in his snarls. A family leaves the restaurant, climbs into a truck, and drives away.
“Change is tough, kid, I know. Life is tough. But we still have the house. We still have our yard. We still have each other. Right?” He closes his eyes and sees Trustyfriend cruise over a wasteland of endless parking lots, nowhere to hunt, nowhere to land, nowhere to sleep.
“It won’t be the worst thing to have neighbors close by. Maybe there will be kids your age.”
An aproned teenager crashes out the back door and lobs a plump black bag into the dumpster. Seymour says, “They need big hunting ranges. They especially like high vantage points so they can hunt voles.”
“What’s a vole?”
“They’re like mice.”
She turns his earmuffs in her hands. “There are at least twenty places like that north of here your owl could fly to. Bigger forests, better forests. He could have his pick.”
“There are?”
“Sure.”
“With lots of voles?”
“Tons of voles. More voles than there are hairs on your head.”
Seymour chews some pancake and Bunny looks at herself in the rearview mirror and sighs.
“You promise, Mom?”
“I promise.”