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“See who?” Christie asks, baffled.
“The bird?” Mary asks, confused.
“It must have been huge,” my mom said.
I open my eyes. All are watching me. But it’s Nina I look at. “No,” I say. “I
didn’t see him.”
She nods as if she’s received the answer she expected. She watches me for a
moment longer before handing the feather back to me. There’s a burst of heat as it
touches my fingers, and I know she can feel it too when her eyes widen, when a coy
smile dawns on her face. “It’s blue,” she says after a moment. “Isn’t that right,
Benji?”
“Yes, dear,” Mary says, smiling at her sister. “The feather is blue. That’s very
good!”
I shove it in my backpack and turn to walk out the door, unable to take her
knowing eyes on me anymore. My mother calls after me, reminding me that I’m
taking the day off tomorrow, that she’ll open the store. I wave without looking and
then am out the door into the cool morning air.
“This whole area used to be gold!” Abraham Dufree tells me a few hours later,
standing above me while I lean under the hood of his ’89 Honda Civic. “That’s why Roseland was founded, you know!” I know only because Abe tells me the same thing almost every single week when he brings in his car for a rattling he’s sure he hears under the hood, or how his tires seem to be low, or he’s sure there’s a brake problem because they feel squishy to him. More often than not, there’s nothing wrong with the car. “He just needs someone to talk to,” my father had told me once. “After Estelle died, he got lonely. It’s what happens when you’re with someone for over sixty years, Benji. When that is suddenly gone, you’re lost. He just needs help finding his way back.” After Big Eddie, Abe still brought his car in and transferred all his stories over to me. I don’t know when it happened, but I suddenly found myself with a best friend who was an old man.
“In 1851, right?” I say, tightening the spark plugs that I loosened only moments before to make it look like I was doing something.
“That’s right! This place was just empty fields and hills, and then they found gold! Over the next year, over two thousand people made their way up here, thoughts of riches flashing through their eyes, wouldn’t you know. O’course, once the railroad moved south, the town pretty much dried up along with the veins buried under the rock.”
“But somehow it’s still here, right?”
“Oh, sure. There’s something special about this place. There’s something about Roseland that kept it alive, even when everyone else thought it would die.”
“What makes it special?”
He laughs, as he always does at this point. “The people, o’course! I’ve lived here all my life, Benji. It’s always the people. They’re the ones that kept it alive. You and I have kept it alive.”
“And what was it Estelle always used to say?” I ask him, even though I can tell him verbatim. “What did she used to tell you about the gold?”
He grins and nods, his dentures sturdy and slightly yellowed. “She used to say, ‘Abe, there’s still gold up in those hills, I can just feel it! I’ve almost a mind to head on down to the hardware store and pick up a shovel and a pickax and just start hitting rocks to see what I could find!’ That’s what the missus used to say. Sure as I’m standing before you, that’s what she said.”
I don’t know why, but I choose to deviate from our usual conversation. I’m supposed to tell him that I wouldn’t be surprised if his late wife was right on the money, that there were nuggets of gold the size of footballs just waiting to be discovered. Then we’d move on to the weather and how it seems to get hotter and hotter every summer and the season approaching should be a doozy. It was March and already in the seventies? Gosh!
But I don’t. Somehow I know things are changing, and I can’t stop myself. I’m thinking of the feather when I say, “And did she ever?”
The grin slides from Abe’s face. He looks confused. “Did she ever what, Benji?”
“Did she ever get a shovel? Did she ever get a pickax? Did she ever head into the hills and split rocks until she found gold?” My hands feel cold, even though it’s warm; wet, even though they’re dry.
