Chapter 30: The Cedar Line
By the second summer, the fence had silvered.
Cedar does it whether you want it to or not β takes the weather into itself and turns the color of driftwood, of old barns, of honest things that have stopped pretending. Ethan had let it, as Marge advised, and she had been right, which she mentioned occasionally and he conceded every time, it being the cheapest rent he paid on the whole friendship.
Along the base of the fence, on both sides, ran the flowers.
It had started on his side, with Laura's kids planting nasturtiums in a wobbling row during the spring break, and black-eyed Susans Ethan put in along the footings, because his mother had planted them along every fence of his childhood. It had continued on Marge's side without discussion, and without Marge ever quite deciding to decide it β first a line of the irises she divided from her own beds, then the hollyhocks from the back moved up front, making a point nobody had asked them to make. By July the two plantings had met at the corners and read, from the street, as one long bright sentence along the line where once there had been only a warning and a silence.
People walking dogs slowed down. People did that. It is a particular thing to live where everyone knows what the ground used to hold and what it holds now, which is: grass, and fence posts set true, and flowers, and underneath, nothing. Nothing at all, anywhere along the whole cedar line, that anybody was afraid of. The absence was not a secret anymore. It was just an absence, ordinary as a garden bed in August, and it had taken forty years and one terrible spring to make it ordinary.
Ethan sat on his porch in the dusk with a glass of tea going warm in his hand, doing the carpenter's arithmetic of aftermath. The township had a new records policy with Grace's name effectively on it. Carl Bennion had pleaded to a lesser count and was serving his time with his apologies published in the Record, which Marge read once and folded away. Mick's name was on a plaque in the county archive and on a stone at St. Brigid's and in the mouths of fourth-graders once a year, learning that a town can correct itself if it is willing to do the digging. Laura called more. The kids had a grave to visit now, with flowers and questions, standing before it the way children stand before anything important: completely.
And on the other side of the fence, a porch light came on, the way it did most evenings now, and Marge came out with her tea and lowered herself into her chair with the care of a woman whose porch steps were, these days, equal to the occasion.
"Your Susans are eating my irises," she said, across the line.
"Your irises started it," Ethan said.
"Everything in that yard started it, according to history," Marge said, and they sat with that a moment, because it was true and because it no longer weighed what it used to. "I sat out here forty years not talking over this fence. Seems a waste of a fence."
"It wasn't the fence's fault."
"No," she said. "It never was. A fence is just the place you stand when you're deciding whether to say the thing." She sipped her tea. "I say more things now. Grace says my statement is the most complete one in the county file. I told her forty years is a long time to draft."
He laughed, and she laughed, and the light went the rest of the way out of the sky over Alder Street, and the flowers along the fence closed or didn't β nasturtiums don't care about dusk β in their bright, unbroken row.
The line was never really about property. Ethan understood that now, down in his hands where a carpenter keeps his real knowledge. It was about what people bury β out of greed, out of shame, out of love tangled past untying β and what they finally choose, at cost, to bring into the light and name correctly. The ground on Alder Street had given up its one terrible secret, and what had grown back was not forgetting. Forgetting was just another kind of burial. What had grown back was the truth, set in posts and planted in rows, where anybody walking past could see it.
The fence, silvered. The flowers, running bright along its foot. Two porches lit, one on either side, and between them a line that held nothing now but the honest boundary of two yards β and under its whole length, in the clean dark ground, nothing left that anyone was afraid of.
"Good night, Marge," he called, eventually, because some things across a fence should be said every time.
"Good night, Ethan," she said. "Mind the steps."
He minded them, all the way up.