The Swan Gondola by Timothy Schaffert

Author:Timothy Schaffert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-02-05T16:00:00+00:00

21.

WHEN WAKEFIELD sent along yet another invitation, I accepted on the spot. Morearty stopped by the boardinghouse, having driven himself down in a one-horse buggy. Ferret & Cecily was written across the front of the envelope he handed me, our names made nearly illegible by all the swirl and flourish of the pen. I barely glanced at the card before starting to fan my sweaty neck with it. I told the old butler, as I leaned back on the picket fence, “Tell Wakefield I said ‘Why the hell not?’”

It makes me sick to cast back with my mind’s eye to my arrogance. My vanity. I could’ve simply declined. Why hadn’t my instincts led me to hide Cecily away, to keep her to myself, out of sight of everyone?

The truth was, I was proud. As proud as Wakefield, in my way. I wanted him to see how Cecily loved only me. I wanted the richest man in Omaha to want everything that was mine.

• • •

The cyclone machine is now divinely unstoppable, the invitation read. I’ve thrown together an afternoon of devastation. When we arrive in Pink Heron, Nebraska, it will still be a place on the map, but when we leave, all the maps will be wrong. Don’t eat lunch, for we’ll have a lavish early afternoon dinner in the Peacock Room of the condemned Pink Heron Hotel, so that we may watch the town destroyed by my tornado while there’s still good sun to be had.

And beneath the engraving, Wakefield had scribbled, F&C, Dress in your finest, as you’ll be hobnobbing with snobs. W.W.

We met the other guests at the train station early Sunday morning, to be ferried by private car to the depot of a town called Blue Creek, the stop that got us the closest to Pink Heron. But, of course, had Pink Heron been easily reachable by rail, it might not have perished. The countryside was riddled with new houses and new schools abandoned, whole towns pristine and empty. People had flocked to Nebraska for the land, only to discover they’d bought acres of desert. A few summers of insects, heat, drought, and flood, and the people fled their new houses without even taking down the curtains.

Wakefield hadn’t told us we would leave the luxury of the private car to sit in the back of a long hay wagon pulled by a team of local steeds. There were three such wagons for all the party’s guests, and most everyone was amused by the novelty of it. Wakefield had had chairs and tables set up in the carts for parlor games and rounds of cards. A few pretty maids in linen and aprons had been tasked with standing next to the tables with enormous parasols, dropping some shade on us all. But most of the women had their own shade, sitting beneath their elaborate hats decorated for their trip into the countryside, with wildflowers and thistle and milkweed woven into the hatbands.

Each cart was equipped with a fiddler in an evening coat who played what sounded to me like lullabies.

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