Beneath This Noise, Another

DAVE BARRETT

Saturdays, April through September, Priscilla Mep sold honey out of a booth at Pike Place Market in Seattle. MEP APIARIES HONEY: from the Bees of Thomas and Priscilla Mep, P.O. Box 533, Cedar River, WA, 98017. Blackberry. Huckleberry. Fireweed and Wildflower Honey. The 1, 3 and 5 lb. jars were stacked in a neat pyramid atop an old card table: with fresh cut ferns and daisies on either side: and several dozen backup jars in an old wooden LOGGER’S DYNAMITE crate at Priscilla’s feet.

The Meps were retired: Priscilla after 25 years as an elementary school teacher for the Cedar River School District, Thomas after 35 years with the U.S. Forest Service. They had one child: a 42- year old son, a Professor of Entomology at the University of Iowa, recently divorced. No grandchildren.The Meps had raised bees on their five acres of land since the early days of their marriage, but it wasn’t until retirement that Thomas’s hobby morphed into a fullfledged cottage industry.

It was noon, the first week of May, and business was brisk. Priscilla’s booth was at the north end of the market, midway between the two fish markets, with big warehouse windows opening on Elliott Bay a quarter mile below and plenty of foot traffic. Thomas was due to relieve Priscilla at the booth at 12:30, but already Priscilla knew he would be late. Today was the opening of Chinook salmon season. Thomas and a few of his V.F.W. buddies were meeting at a nearby Elliott Bay pier to “throw out a plug or two.” But Priscilla didn’t mind, really. The truth was Thomas was a shy man: painfully so at times. And in their business, as in life, the people side of things had fallen largely upon her.

Priscilla was glad she’d worn her Pendleton wool jacket today. In spite of the clear Seattle sky, and 70-degree heat, a steady stream of frigid air had been blowing down the rows of market stalls all morning. It chilled her long elegant hands, and caused her to bury them deep into her pockets when she wasn’t shuffling jars or exacting change from an old tackle-box she’d converted into a makeshift cash register. And she’d just hoisted the tray of the tackle box to make change for a twenty-dollar bill when she caught a glimpse of them. Her new Cedar River neighbors. The young couple from Montana with the adorable three-year-old daughter. They lived across the highway from the Meps—at the end of a long old gravel road—in a tiny two-bedroom rental house fifty

yards from the river. They’d moved to Cedar River in September of last year. Priscilla had welcomed them then with a gift of MEP APIARIES HONEY and a bouquet of mixed wildflowers.

Priscilla finished her transaction, then pushed her steel-rimmed spectacles off the bridge of her nose. How strange seeing her new neighbors here of all places—35 miles from Cedar River! They’d just made a purchase from the Italian fish market. The father was making his little girl laugh pretending the butcher-wrapped package he was carrying was a live fish biting at her knees. Mom was in the lead, the little girl atop her Daddy’s shoulders, getting back at him by mussing with his hair. Priscilla had watched them from her kitchen window walking the river road just so: the little girl commanding her father forward like a child atop an elephant. Priscilla had visited just that once. She’d meant to visit again, but had been sidetracked by so many things that winter, including her son’s devastating divorce. Her neighbors were past the Korean fruit and vegetable stands now. She thought of calling out to them by name, but then realized she could not recall their names! Smiling in spite of this, Priscilla waved one of her thin arms over her head to gain their attention. Then, with a start, Priscilla saw—or knew, ssomehow—that they had already spotted her. Yes. It was plain as day. Not by how they were looking at her, but how they were not looking at her: repositioning themselves in the crowd so their backs were turned towards Priscilla. The little girl’s beautiful brown eyes had met Priscilla’s own beautiful brown eyes for a brief moment—only to look away as Mom and Dad veered further and further away from Priscilla’s booth.

Priscilla was stunned. Unconsciously, she lowered her arm and rested it upon her chest. She watched her neighbors feign interest in a Tie-Dye clothing boutique across from her own stall. When an appropriate amount of time had elapsed, the young parents shuffled their way back into the mainstream of the Pike Market throng, heads lowered, a flush of embarrassment on their faces.

All the while, the bright-eyed child had smiled and jabbered away—oblivious to it all.

Sunday. A day later. Priscilla had been up late the night before, thinking over the incident at the Market, trying again and again to come up with a rhyme or a reason why her neighbors had snubbed her so. It made no sense. They seemed like such a pleasant couple.

Priscilla remembered the day she had welcomed them to the Cedar River community. The young father had been out in the tall grass of the side yard rinsing out a 5-gallon glass carboy bottle he’d used to make beer with a garden hose. The young mother and child were in the front yard, their black shiny hair held back in matching blue bandanas. They were building an “apartment house” for the child’s imaginary friend “Chiswick” out of old cardboard moving boxes. Mom had invited her inside for a cup of Iced Tea; told her how excited they were to be in Cedar River; how her social work job in the nearby Tahoma School District had already started and her husband was hoping to land a job any day now as well. Though the couple’s furnishings were simple, there was richness to their household that transcended their lack of material possessions. There was homemade bread on the kitchen table; an old-fashioned hand-crank ice cream maker in one corner of the living room; no television or hi-fi stereo, but a whole wall of books, and a small table littered with the child’s finger paintings and drawings. They had both seemed so pleased by her visit: the young mother sending her home with a half-loaf of bread (after Priscilla’s staunch refusal to accept a whole); the handsome young man, over and above his wife’s embarrassment, good-naturedly promising to save some bottles of beer for her and her husband when fermentation was complete.

The couple had, point-of-fact, reminded Priscilla of Thomas and herself when they were first starting out.

Priscilla was filing bills of sale at the kitchen table, staring at the back of Thomas’s gray crew cut head as he sat watching the Seattle Mariners baseball game on TV. She’d taken up the matter with Thomas over breakfast. But he’d hastily shrugged it off as another example of city folk rushing out to the country to escape their city problems, only to bring their city problems with them. When Priscilla countered that these new neighbors may even have come from the country to find jobs they had not been able to find in Montana, Thomas had countered:

“Then why don’t they just go to the city directly!” It was while Bruce Battlefield, the Mariners announcer, was pitching an ad for THUNDER CLAP POTATO CHIPS that the answer came to Priscilla. Money. Of course. How silly of her to not have recognized this earlier. Her new neighbors were such frugal people—making their own bread and beer, hanging their clothes out to dry on a line. They must have misconstrued her gift of the 1 lb. jar of honey as a financial ploy to establish new clientele. With a flush of shame, Priscilla remembered handing the couple her business card as she left their home and, worse, reminding them that MEP APIARIES HONEY was now on the shelves of the local IGA supermarket.

Priscilla pushed her paperwork away in disgust. Even before she had talked it over with Thomas, she knew what she would do. It had been years since her and Thomas had invited anyone other than a relative or an old friend to Sunday dinner. What better way to break the ice and make her neighborly intentions plain! Thomas would object, of course. But she’d soften him up to it. It would do everyone a world of good. Surely her new neighbors hadn’t made many new friends—coming all the way from Montana. And Thomas would benefit most of all. He was pulling ten-hour shifts in front of the tube nowadays. If it wasn’t for their blessed bees, Priscilla didn’t know what she’d do with her dear old dear old man.

Priscilla crossed the Cedar River Highway without much difficulty, just a little sand and gravel kicked up from a passing dump truck. Fortunately, today was a Sunday and Priscilla did not have to deal with the unending chain of commuter traffic going back and forth from Greater Seattle to Cedar River. New homes and subdivisions were going up so fast Priscilla could scarcely recognize the landscape anymore. The local population had doubled in the last year alone—

and was slated to triple within the next five. Priscilla and Thomas, and several of their neighbors, had put up a stink; had petitioned for better land use law and zoning considerations; but, in the end, they’d backed off when they discovered just how difficult it was to fight the County and the Developers—let along rally local support from locals reaping quick profits from sale of their lands.

Priscilla gathered branches from the ferns that grew up from the drainage ditch on both sides of the arterial road. The ferns were for the daisies she’d picked for her new neighbors from her own front yard. She was in no hurry now. It was too beautiful a day for that. The sky was a stellar blue. A light breeze from the river fluttered the new yellow leaves of the big Alders that flanked Priscilla’s path. By all means, Priscilla intended to appear casual when she arrived at her neighbor’s doorstop. No free samples. No business card. Just out for a Sunday stroll . . . and, oh, by the way . . . next Sunday.

Priscilla’s pace slackened as she approached the end of the arterial road. It was not unusual for her pace to slow here. The river landscape was its most striking now: the denseness of the trees and ground cover creating a home for bald eagles and river otters, foxes and, occasionally, a stray bobcat or mountain lion. Snoqualmie Indians had played cedar drums in a longhouse along this bend of the river. The longhouses and Indians were gone, of course, but a sizable grove of old growth Red Cedars still remained. In the fall, sockeye salmon still spawned in the shade of these giants.

But it was something else that slackened Priscilla’s pace this morning. Something seemed distinctly out of place. For a moment, Priscilla thought she’d walked in too far.

Then, rounding a row of blackberry bramble tall as her head, she spotted her new neighbor’s mailbox: the one painted up with sunflowers and farm animals. No. This was it all right. Third set of mailboxes after you crossed the highway. And there was Preacher Reynolds’ goat—staring at Priscilla from behind the barbed-wire fence in the adjacent wood lot. And it was then, as Priscilla walked past Preacher Reynolds’ long line of locust trees, that she saw it. Smelled it, first. Smoke. Thin curling gray columns of it rising behind the eight-foot wall of blackberry bramble that blocked her new neighbor’s house and the adjacent stand of old-growth Red Cedars. “No! Not the cedars!” Priscilla was furious. She threw a rock at Preacher Reynolds’s goat to stop the animal from following her. She’d smelled the smoke from the moment she’d stepped outside her own door, but hadn’t even suspected it might be coming from this stand of Cedars. These brush pile fires had become such a common occurrence in the Cedar River community over the last year: bulldozers shoving trees and brush and roots together in one big pile—then setting fire to the whole works without even bothering to sort out the low-grade Hemlock and Alder wood. More profit in getting the houses up fast.

Her new neighbor’s rental came into view as she rounded the last hedgerow of blackberry. And there was the WEYERHAEUSER CONSOLIDATED HOMES construction trailer on the smoldering ruins of the cleared out lot next door. Beside the trailer a large sign that read: FUTURE SITE OF CEDAR GROVE ESTATES. “Greedy animals!” Weyerhaeuser—the timber giant—was branching into the booming home building business now that the big forest cuts were on the wane. And the gall of naming the new development after the very thing they’d destroyed. “Cedar grove estates!” Priscilla was so overwhelmed by the devastation that she had not even noticed the new red sports car parked up on the grass of the young couple’s side yard. She hadn’t noticed that the tire swing hanging from the big alder in the front yard was gone; hadn’t noticed that where a small garden plot had once been a satellite television disc now stood in its place. Not until after she’d finished wiping her smoke-irritated eyes and had already knocked on the front door of the house. . .

The door opened. A smiling young woman Priscilla had never seen before appeared in the doorway, holding a Cellular phone against one ear, motioning Priscilla to wait. She was wearing a short white dress that accentuated her tanning booth tan, and had her hair teased up in the latest fashion. Rap music was blasting inside the house. And beneath this noise, was another noise. A strange wild whirring sound. A moment later, Priscilla located the source of this sound when a thick-set, bare-chested young man Priscilla had also never seen before poked his smiling head out the bathroom door, holding a blow-dryer to his curly head, yelling, “Who is it, baby?” But neither of them ever found out. Priscilla backed away without a word, leaving the mixed ferns and daisies on the sill of the door where she had dropped them.

When Priscilla returned home, she found Thomas snoring lightly on the couch, the Mariners losing (again). She turned down the sound on the TV, and then covered Thomas lightly with the Pendleton throw blanket he’d bought her when they’d first moved into their beautiful Cedar River home. The blanket’s thinning wool made Priscilla smile remembering how their neighbor’s little girl had carried around a frayed and much worn infant’s blanket she called her “Scrubby”. When Priscilla had asked the young mother why her daughter called it a “Scrubby”, the mother had told her it was because it was an old blanket—her old blanket—and that “old blankets are best, of course!”

Priscilla kissed the top of Thomas’s head lightly (so as not to wake him), and then wandered off to the kitchen to see if there was enough baking powder left to make biscuits for dinner.

Dave Barrett lives and writes out of Missoula, MT. His fiction has appeared most recently in Doubleback Review, Hobart, and Quarter After Eight. His novel—GONE ALASKA— was published by Adelaide Books in August of 2019. He teaches writing at Missoula College and is working on a new novel.