Lydia

By Brian Willson

Type designer Ed Austin is on a losing streak. Divorced, and with his daughter studying abroad, he has only an old dog for a companion. His world has contracted into something simple, solitary—and safe. But after acquiring a dozen handwritten letters forgotten in the barn of an old Maine farmhouse, Ed finds himself haunted by thoughts of a nineteenth-century woman named Lydia Starbird. At first he’s enchanted by her penmanship, and then the life she describes in her letters—each addressed to a cruel husband who cannot read. When finally he encounters Lydia herself, he starts to question everything.

Is she a ghost? A time traveler? Or the invention of a yearning soul?

With precise attention to the subtleties of human emotion and vivid description of the natural world, Lydia tells a haunting tale of carrying on in the face of loss.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brian Willson
• Release date: Mar 27, 2013
• ISBN: 9780962299421

Brian Willson

Brian Willson is a babaláwo (specialist in the Yorùbá system of Ifá) and a senior member of temple Ilé Òkànràn Onílè based in Ibadan and New York. He has been a practitioner of African diasporic religious practices for over forty years. He received his DMA from City University of New York Graduate Center, has lectured or performed in over twenty-five countries, and is a trustee on the board of Education Africa.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Three crows stalked the edge of Old County Road as Ed Austin slowed his pickup to turn into Feener’s place. Ed admired crows and privately ascribed them mystical powers and a complex language. As for these particular three, he admired their unruffled nonchalance despite the baleful rush of car tires only a yard or two away.

The last of the traffic passed, and Ed steered off the blacktop and onto Feener’s gravel drive. When his old truck jounced as it came off the pavement, he looked to see if Zelda was all right. He was worried about Zelda. Just now she sat on the passenger seat beside him, leaning against the door as she tended to do, her tall, pointed German shepherd ears held high, her bright eyes focused on the crows. She’d always been ready for a hike or a ride but had lately seemed slow to rise and sometimes limped a little. He’d even had to hoist her up into the truck a time or two. He made another mental note to call the vet.

Gravel popped under the pickup’s tires as Ed pulled alongside Feener’s ancient gray Mercedes, parked as usual under an enormous stand of lilacs. His old dog sat at alert, ears up, eyes expectant.

Guard the truck. I’ll be right back.

He got out, shut the door, and started up the fieldstone walk. The day was overcast. The air held a chill. A small bird flitted through lilac leaves going brown around the edges—a wood-warbler that had lost its brilliant color. Ed climbed the weathered wooden steps and pulled open the squeaky door.

From his tiny writing desk, where he always sat reading or working on a crossword, Alexander Feener raised his wispy balding head beyond the clocks and lamps and stacks of books and considered Ed for a moment above his wire-rimmed glasses, eyebrows raised.

Well, Feener said. Mr. Austin.

Call me Ed, Alex. Their routine greeting.

Have I got a treat for you, Feener said. With a soft grunt, he rose from his chair and began to wind his way along the crooked corridor lined with dusty heirlooms.

Feener was a wizard who gave clutter the appearance of order. On sunny afternoons the light angling through his shop’s back windows warmed the rich colors of the wood grain of the tables and cabinets and longface clocks—the old man had several, with sailing ships rocking or moon faces smiling above their dials, each ticking and tocking independently, all chiming together on the hour—but today odd electric lamps lit the room from its teeming walls and corners. Feener had to wind all the clocks, light all the lamps, and navigate a maze to do it.

And Ed loved the smell of the place, some combination of must and wax, sawdust and cloves. On each visit he’d glance around at familiar pieces, like that absurdly narrow-backed corner chair and the metal Drink Moxie sign, and would feel a pang if one was missing. But he’d also cast about for something new. This day one new thing stood out: a three-legged spinning wheel, displayed conspicuously in what used to be the room’s only open area, now obstructing Feener’s habitual path from his desk.

That’s new, Ed said.

Yup. Feener sidestepped the great wooden wheel and looked up at Ed from his perpetual stoop. Ol’ Will Starbird died, and I bought out his barn up to Faith Village. Which is where I happened on somethin’ you might like.

Feener tipped his head toward the front door. Ed squeaked it open, held it for the old man, then followed him down the steps and across the yard to the big plank door of his low-slung barn, nearly hidden behind the lilacs. A miniature whirlwind kicked up some fallen maple leaves and sent them bouncing around the closed-in corner like pint-sized contra dancers. From a clump of keys tethered to his belt Feener picked out the one he needed. He twisted off the padlock and heaved his weight into the door, which slid easily open, then reached around and flicked a light switch. A single overhead bulb illuminated towers of crates and boxes, an old piano, a couple of cast-iron woodstoves.

This ol’ fella come from there. Feener patted the surface of a giant kitchen cookstove. The boys wasn’t too happy movin’ that.

He continued past the stove and shuffled sideways between it and a dilapidated wardrobe. Ed sized up the cookstove. It appeared in good shape, with its handsome curved back plate and great circular burners.

Glenwood, Ed read. I might want that for my new kitchen.

He often referred to his new kitchen or new living room or new bedroom when admiring Feener’s inventory. They both knew what he meant: the old house he intended to buy one day and spend some time restoring.

Ed heard a scrape and a clank, and Feener reappeared from around the dark corner carrying a flat metal box. He set the box on the Glenwood, covering one cold burner.

Take a look at what’s in there, tell me what you think.

As Ed bent forward, a small shape swept between the two men, fluttering, then back again, casting a fleet shadow beneath the bare bulb.

Whoa, Ed said.

Bats in here, Feener said. I don’t much mind ’em.

Leaning away, Ed watched the bat rocket back and forth once, twice, the third time finding the door to the outside.

Nice ol’ tin box, Feener was saying. It’s a good one. And I’m confident what’s inside won’t disappoint ya.

Ed reached for the metal box and pulled off the ornate lid. In the glare of the bulb he saw a faded sheet of paper, the top page of a shallow stack, its surface lined with fine, delicate handwriting from a bygone era. Here, a curled uppercase E; there, an old-style A; there, a long, graceful dash. The script was uncommonly legible for such old penmanship, distinct and compact, almost artistic. Ed’s eyes flicked quickly across the page, from a looping terminal d to a pointed, paired pp to an old-style long s to the elongated descender of a g. He sensed a warmth to the strokes, a sort of organic perfection that nearly pulsed with intelligence, like some goodness of mind flowing straight through a quill pen. Only then did he read the date neatly applied at the top of the page, October 3d 1828, and the first line below it, My Dear Husband. The cross-stroke on the H had a tiny line through it. Ed let out an audible breath of air.

Yup, Feener said.

May I? Ed asked without looking up.

Go right ahead.

Ed wiped his hands on his jeans, reached into the box, and gently collected the tidy stack of letters, their corners soft or slightly torn, their edges faintly crinkled. A couple had been folded, he could tell from the feel of the stack. Gingerly, with one finger, he paged through them. They’d been kept in the order of their dates: October 1828, December 1828, June 1829, ending in October 1829. He noticed a few stray drops of ink, blot marks in the margins, two or three crossed-out words. A dozen letters addressed to My Dear Husband.

Ed let the pages settle together and nestled them back into their tarnished container. Again he read the date of the first.

Today’s October third, he said.

Why, so it is, said Feener. Ain’t that odd. So anyways, what you think?

He smiled up at Ed, his hair casting spidery shadows across his reddened cheeks, knowing full well that he hadn’t had to ask.

How much? Ed said.

What say twenty dollars for the contents—there must be ’bout ten letters there, so that’d be two dollars apiece for those. Now, that box is worth a little somethin’…

How’s about I give you a hundred, box and contents?

Feener raised his eyebrows, which had miniature wisps of their own. I’ll take eighty, he said.

I expect you’ll take a hundred.

Well, I suppose. If you’re gonna twist my arm.

Ed brought the box through the wide barn doorway that framed the restless, overcast day. This season always filled him with a sense of delicious urgency, as if he could see into the future: lengthening nights, strings of geese in the sky, snow in the wood, ice on the pond. The little bird still flitted silently in the lilacs—a yellow-rumped warbler, was his guess. Up the drive beyond Feener’s car, Zelda was watching though his driver’s-side window.

Feener swung his weight into the sliding door, replaced the lock, and slapped it closed.

These are wonderful, Alex, Ed said. Stunning, really.

I thought as much. Feener gave out a high chuckle. When I find myself thinkin’, ‘Now, that’s some handsome writin’,’ I know it’s time to give Mr. Austin a call.

Ed followed Feener back to his shop, holding the tin box with care.

It all still seemed far-fetched. After grappling with deadlines for nearly two decades in the art department of a small trade publisher, Ed had stumbled onto a new occupation—an occupation that had turned out surprisingly lucrative. He was a craftsman now. A type designer. Ed created fonts for graphic artists like the one he used to be. It had begun with a crazy notion: to digitize his own handwriting, to make a typeface of it, so his fingers would never have to leave the keyboard, so he could substitute fast typing for the hand-cramp that came of his painstaking scrawl. He’d tinkered with that first font late into evening for weeks. It had to look authentic, had to fool people into believing they were reading something Ed himself had written and not some soulless series of computerized curves. But his idle dabbling had soon become an obsession that opened a rift in his home life, widened the chasm between him and Michelle, and even sent tremors through his relationship with Clare.

One evening he’d found among his mother’s keepsakes a few nineteenth-century certificates and bills of sale—a historical librarian, she’d put aside stuff like that—written with a purposeful flourish, in longhand. Digging further, he’d uncovered a small collection of Civil War–era letters home and orders from headquarters, each penned with its own peculiar tilt or quaver. The imperfections had fascinated him, revealing a sort of miraculous insight into each author’s character. And since he’d never seen a font that faithfully simulated antique penmanship, he’d made one. Then another. They’d proven popular with his coworkers, so he’d tracked down a distributor, who had greeted his work with enthusiasm. Eventually, he’d quit his day job, moved to Maine, got divorced, and here he was.

Alex Feener knew of Ed’s craft from a chance meeting at a yard sale that first Maine summer. Ayuh, Feener had allowed, he did run across old handwritten documents from time to time. Love letters, accounting journals, and the like. Soon after, Ed paid a first visit to Feener’s Antiques in Limetown, and their unlikely kinship had resulted in four strong-selling fonts so far. Seeing them on ads and in movie titles continued to astound their creator, and Clare had even spotted one the other day in Tokyo.

The work could be tedious. It took at least an hour to shape each character, and counting numerals, accents, and punctuation a font had at least two hundred glyphs. But Ed enjoyed the intricacies of manipulating vector graphics, the zen-like focus on curves and junctures, the just-so of a kerning pair. He also found the source material compelling. Across these scraps of aging brown paper flowed the living thoughts of long-dead souls—thoughts urgent or important enough to write down.

But none had yet so moved him as just the glimpse he’d had of the letters in Feener’s tin box. He could hardly wait to read them, to linger alone over their author’s words. The prospect made him feel anxious, even, like a teenager before a first date.

Ed squeaked the door closed behind them and placed the metal box on an antique gathering table. Feener had already begun scribbling in the yellow receipt book he kept next to his old register by the door. He used a fountain pen.

That’ll be eighty dollars, he said.

Ed reached into his jeans pocket and pulled out a fold of bills. He counted out five twenties and handed them to Feener.

Thank you, sir, Feener said as he held out the sales receipt. The way his eyes twinkled in the light of multiple lamps made Ed wonder if the bent old gentleman didn’t moonlight as one of Santa’s elves.

"Thank you, Alex. You were right. This is a real treat."

My pleasure.

As Feener shuffled back toward his hidden desk, Ed took another look around the shop. He wasn’t ready to leave just yet.

You say you picked these old letters up at the Will Starbird place?

Yup. Feener slipped with a grunt into his chair. Also that spinnin’ wheel there, the ol’ Glenwood you saw, a few decent chairs, and a wardrobe. Ol’ Will didn’t leave heirs. There’s still some rusty ol’ farm tools in the barn out there, and the original kitchen cabinets look to be in pretty good shape. Also, too, the barn, for its age. Built about eighteen hundred, so they tell me. Been in the family all those years. But I don’t have the patience. I tend to pick and choose these days, what’s left of me.

Now, now. Ed looked at the tin box on the antique table. What happens to the house? And where is the place exactly?

I suppose the town’ll take it for taxes, Feener said. Although I hear Lakeshore Realty’s interested. Quite a few acres there, along with a piece of Pitchfork Pond. Just out beyond Right Hill.

As Feener spoke, Ed reached again for the box, lifted its lid, and skimmed the neat, feminine script. He read the phrases Heaven only knows and greatest Pleasure in the World.

Take Route 30 to Faith Village, Feener was saying. You know Eternity Road? Little road by the church, ends up at the nature preserve out there? Take that a mile or two. Where it turns to dirt, it’s the first place on the left, just across a little bridge. There’s a family cemetery there—all Starbirds, I believe. Can’t miss it.

Ed only half-heard, as his eyes had reached the signature at the bottom of the page.

Your truly attached Wife

Lydia

You still house-huntin’? Feener said.

Ed gently replaced the box lid.

Going on five years.

Well, outside the barn and kitchen cabinets, the place don’t amount to much. I expect some developer’ll snatch it up for a subdivision.

Doubt I can afford it then.

Pretty lonely ol’ road anyways. I hear the place has even got its own ghost.

Feener was peering down at his crossword, and all Ed could see over the lamps and cabinets were a few white wisps of hair. He picked up the tin box and propped it carefully under one arm so he could squeak open the door.

They say the place I’m renting’s got a ghost, he said. I haven’t met him yet.

Don’t believe in ’em, Feener said.

Alex. Thank you again.

You’re most welcome, Mr. Austin.

Ed swung the door closed behind him.

Chapter 2

A wind gust ruffled the collar of Ed’s flannel shirt as he walked across Feener’s dooryard. The air held a pungent smell, like a leafy gutter or an old cider press, mixed with a hint of woodsmoke. He saw Zelda, ears high, watching him approach and was aware of the warbler still poking about in the lilacs, but his attention clung to the contents of the tin box. He carried the box around to the front of Feener’s Mercedes and set it softly on the hood. When he opened the door of his truck, Zelda let out a happy whine, and he reached in and grabbed her by the thick fur of her neck and bent down so she could lap at his nose a couple of times with her wide, warm tongue.

Good girl, he said. Move over.

Zelda hopped into the passenger seat, emitting another little whine in the process. But this was not a happy one.

You OK, sweetie?

Zelda had begun showing signs of hip trouble a few years ago, but just now she seemed to be favoring a front leg. She put no weight on it, and it was trembling slightly.

Wait just a sec.

He pulled his seat-back forward and dug out from behind it a stained green work blanket. He smoothed the blanket flat on Feener’s hood, positioned the box in its center, snugged the soft material around it, then slid the bundled box behind his seat. Zelda watched with interest.

Not for you, pup. You’ll get a biscuit when we get home.

Ed climbed into the truck and slammed the door. In the rear-view mirror he saw that the crows were now foraging at the edge of a yard across the road. He thought a lot about crows, studied their behavior in the little wooded lot behind his rental place. Either you’d see a solo crow or, at this time of year, great congregations of a hundred or more. Or you’d see a smaller group of late-summer fledglings, begging noisily for food. Or you’d see exactly three.

He started the pickup and backed down Feener’s drive. Never mind its looks, his truck still ran great after twenty-something years of hauling firewood home and great loads to the dump. It had made plenty of dump runs just this past summer: in exchange for reduced rent, Ed had agreed to refurbish the downstairs rooms of his house in town, whose plaster walls were badly cracked and bulging. Just this morning he’d finished mudding the new sheetrock, which was now ready to sand and paint. He got to craving sweaty work like that after marathons at his desk and took pride in being fairly fit for a man who’d be turning fifty on New Year’s Day. Sure, he had a bit of a gut on him—from his love of microbrews, no doubt—but beneath the middle-aged padding lurked some pretty firm muscle. Still, he’d sooner use that muscle to fix up his own place, not some moldy old rental in town.

Ed stepped on the gas, and his pickup accelerated up Old County Road. The house should be small, just big enough for him and Zelda and

Clare, who would always have her room. There should be privacy, a field to mow, some woodland, a long view. Also water. A swimmer in high school, Ed felt drawn to fresh water, and jumping into a pond was Zelda’s favorite thing to do. Sometimes they’d hike the Coastal Rivers Land Trust trail to Loon Lake, where he had a secret skinny-dipping hole.

As the vehicles ahead of them slowed for the signal at Route 30, Ed braked smoothly so as not to jostle his dog. Traffic seemed heavy even for a late Friday afternoon. Now they were moving at a creep, and in his head he began to count out seconds, as he had in his mother’s hospital room while watching her keep on breathing. And then she’d come up with those mysterious, whispered last words.

Like Clare, Ed was an only child. His father, an orthodontist, had dropped dead of a heart attack back in East Texas while Ed sat in a junior high school English class wearing the gaudy braces his dad had fashioned to correct an overbite. He didn’t smile much back then, back when they’d lived in a new subdivision at the end of a wooded road. After the funeral, in an attempt to make sense of things, he’d taken long walks through the piny woods, inspecting the leaves of plants, quietly stalking birds. One day he came upon a tall pine with twin trunks. He named this The God Tree and figured out a way it could let him talk with his father.

His mother had taken a job teaching history at San Antonio College. He’d gone to high school in the Alamo City, had his braces off, swam a lot, played a little basketball. After wrangling a degree out of Southwest Texas State, he landed a job in an ad agency in Dallas, where he’d met a lot of crazy deadlines—and Michelle. He’d lost his mother to an auto accident soon after their move to Maine. Drunk driver. She’d lingered for a week before she died.

Change direction, had been her last words. He seemed to hear them now.

As traffic began to move again, a wave of nervousness rippled through Ed’s gut. It was late, nearly time for Zelda’s dinner, but he couldn’t shake the urge to hang a left on Route 30 and swing by the old Starbird place. They’d just check out the house and barn, wander around the property a bit, maybe even head down to Pitchfork Pond if they could find a way to the shore. A line of cars was approaching from the oncoming lane, but just as they entered the intersection—as if in approval—an opening appeared in the traffic, and soon he and Zelda were flying west down the smooth state two-lane toward the distant lumps of inland hills rising dark against the lowering sky.

Take a hike? Ed asked his dog, knowing she’d agree. He reached over and threaded his fingers through the thick fur of her mane.

They veered around the first long curve. The maples had begun to turn. Somewhere amid the vibration of the tires and engine he felt a rising thrill at the thought of the old handwriting on the letters in the blanket-wrapped box behind him. Your truly Attached Wife is how she’d closed. Lydia must’ve loved her husband very much.

When his little family had moved to Maine six years ago, Ed felt sure Michelle had loved him very much. Right away they’d found That Special Place, a converted cottage in the heights at the edge of Limetown. It had cold, sweet water from a drilled well, an airtight woodburner, a view of the islands from a spacious deck, and a half-acre pond between the house and road. He’d worked a lot on that place, too—winterizing it, adding a nice-sized sun porch, tilling a vegetable garden. Bordering the property were a line of old sugar maples, a day-lily patch, and a long tangle of wild raspberries. The pond was a natural one, fed by a little brook, with a deep end for swimming, a high ledge for Zelda’s ludicrous belly-flops, cattails, small fish, turtles. Several species of duck and grebe stopped by after ice-out, along with green and great blue herons. Clare, only thirteen then, had named the place Raspberry Downs.

Then Michelle had met a man in town—the one she was now married to up in Bangor—and out of hurt and righteous contrariness, he’d moved out, drunk too much, and launched into a string of affairs. Shameless, ridiculous affairs. He flushed with embarrassment even now, flying down the highway, not least for the pain it all caused his daughter. They’d sold The Downs and pooled the proceeds to pay for Clare’s boarding school. And here she was in college already, beginning at year of study in Japan. Clare was the main reason he checked email.

Where Route 30 ran between a pair of low hills, Ed caught sight of an arc of distant clearing in the northwest sky. The emptiness beyond glowed like cool fire, its color blending smoothly upward from faint yellow at the treeline to greenish-blue at the clouds’ bright, ragged fringe. Then the roadside fields and hardwoods became dark walls of conifers until, at the end of another curve, the trees swept open to reveal the broad mirror of Loon Lake, which reflected the scrap of clear sky, and he saw silhouetted against the clearing three crows flapping above the water in single file parallel to his pickup’s path, as if man and dog and crows had a common destination.

Chapter 3

Just beyond the Right Hill turnoff the speed limit dropped to thirty-five, and Ed knew they were nearing the village of Faith, Maine. When he downshifted, the pickup backfired, and he couldn’t help but grimace at having disturbed the peace. Faith was a quiet, rural, spread-out town whose center amounted to a little cluster of shingle-sided buildings. He’d stopped here only once that he could recall—at the general store one day on his way to Augusta—but he knew the road Feener talked about, the one by the church on the corner. He knew it primarily because of local humor.

Where does he live? Oh, just the other side of Eternity. How do you get to Eternity from here?

Ed waited for an oncoming car to pass, then steered his pickup onto the narrow stripe of raggedy blacktop between the church and Faith General Store: salvation on one side, beer and smokes and lottery tickets on the other. Eternity Road resembled a private lane more than a bona fide right-of-way, but it was paved more or less, and a rust-streaked speed limit sign gave permission to accelerate to forty.

Here we go, Zel, Ed said.

The road cut through a second-growth forest—once hayfield and pasture now reclaimed by native hardwoods and conifers. Even in the gray light of this cloud-covered afternoon a few maple crowns were burning vivid red. No more than a hundred yards in, Ed had to brake for a large pothole, and soon they were bounced along at a steady crawl