Things Are Coming Up by Grace Kendall

It began with a smell – faint, creeping, and sickly sweet at first, but the sweet gave way to rancid within a few weeks, by May first.

         By then the townspeople of Harper’s Cove were beginning to see the changes too. In a broad circular area far out into a wooded field off Deer Path Road, the ground began to turn gray. The plants seemed to die, not by shriveling and drying up, but by collapsing down into themselves in gelatinous heaps, gray, black, and stinking. The ground began to dip, imperceptibly at first. Soon you could rest a tennis ball at the lip of the depression and watch it roll, tumbling and bouncing its way down the slope, bumping over leaves and sticks – all graying and sludgy at this point – until it came to rest at the center. By June, there were over a dozen balls huddled at the nadir of the sunken area.

         Mr. Mennin’s dog, Maisie, caused a momentary panic when she spotted the trove of tennis balls – her favorite – and hurtled in to claim one. No one dared step onto the depression in weeks, unsure of how solid (or not solid) it was. Maisie returned with her tennis ball, unscathed and unsunk. Although Mr. Mennin did hose off her paws of all the “stink mud” she came back with, holding his breath all the while. And the tennis ball was dumped, unceremoniously, in a village trash bin, so he wouldn’t have to dispose of it at home.

         Over the first three months, the dished ground grew to over sixty feet across, and it was around the sixty day mark – the July fourth holiday weekend – when townspeople began to demand answers in earnest.

         A selectmen meeting on July eighth became rowdy when board members couldn’t answer questions about the depression. Is it a sinkhole? Is it on town land or state land? Is it pollution? Is it safe?

         Mr. Mennin wanted to know why there wasn’t a fence put up to keep dogs out already, noting how he had thought Maisie was going to sink and require rescue.

         “It’s still growing, Mr. Mennin,” said Mr. Carpenter, the board chair. “Where would we put the fence? What will we do if it grows beyond the fence next week?”

         A jumble of shouts erupted at this.

         “It’s still growing?”

         “It’s growing weekly?”

         “It’s going to take over Caswell Road!”

         “The whole village!”

         “The library is on Caswell Road!”

         Mrs. Knowlton asked who owned the land and, more specifically, “whose responsibility is it?”

         “By responsibility, Mrs. Knowlton, do you mean who caused it?” asked Mr. Carpenter.

         “No, I mean who’s going to fix this? It’s going to hurt our property values! That spot used to be such a pretty wood-meadow. Someone’s got to… to bring it back up to snuff.”

         “The… spot,” said Mr. Carpenter, “is on town-owned land. But the state has asked us to take no action at this time.”

         More shouts.

         “Please, please!” cooed Mr. Carpenter, trying to calm the crowd. “The state is sending a biologist.”

         “They should have sent them weeks ago!” shouted Mr. Sealand. “They missed their chance to have input. We need to fix this now!”

         “No one knew weeks ago, Mr. Sealand–” said Mr. Carpenter.

         The rest of his statement was drowned out by shouts, the rising din making the hall’s window panes nearly shake in their ancient frames. This continued until all were overtaken by the board’s vice chair, Mr. Curran.

         “NO ONE KNEWWWWW, MR. SEALAND!” he bellowed. As the crowd quieted and ceded the air to him, he continued, alarmingly serene: “No one knew what this would become. And I think you know that, Mr. Sealand.”

         He spoke with a smile, with a booming but melodic tone that floated to each and every corner and crevice of the old town hall. Wrapping itself around the rooms and even as far as the mice in the walls, so they, too, paused for a moment, paws in air, to feel how things in the hall had shifted.

         “We none of us knew,” continued Mr. Curran. “And we still don’t know. I certainly don’t know. Do you?” He didn’t pause for an answer to his question. “This smell appeared. This depression appeared. We reacted as we could, with the information we had.”

         He spoke with such warmth and care, that even Mr. Sealand sat down, cowed. Mrs. Knowlton spoke up, quietly, and expressed a single, timorous doubt.

         “I think perhaps it’s difficult,” she said. “Difficult to know you’ve done anything, the town has done anything, if we don’t know what has been done. If nothing has been communicated to the townsfolk, I mean.”

         Mr. Carpenter was now seated, and he watched Mr. Curran with a straight-lipped concentration as the board vice president moved out from behind the selectmen’s table to stand before the crowd.

         “That’s a very astute observation, Mrs. Knowlton,” he said. “Very astute indeed. So let me share.”

         Mrs. Knowlton sat down once more, purse clutched on her lap and a satisfied smirk on her face at Mr. Curran’s complement of her very astute observation.

         “We have contacted the state,” said Mr. Curran.

If an observer had been watching closely as he said this, they would have seen a twinkling, reassuring, and disarming wink he gave to the first row of townspeople.

“We have asked if anyone knows what this might be. No one did. We asked if they had ever seen or heard about anything like this in another part of the state. They had not," he continued.

         “So it’s not a sinkhole?” asked Mr. Sealand. “Surely they’ve seen sinkholes.”

         “Another astute citizen!” Mr. Curran clapped his hands together. “A sinkhole, they tell me, as I am not the expert on these subjects, is generally not accompanied by the odor we have experienced, nor the… shall we call it a sludge?”

         He glanced back at his selectboard colleagues, who seemed to accede to the term.

         “The sludge. There is not usually sludge associated with a sinkhole. Nor the death of plantlife.”

         “So what does cause it?” asked Mr. Sealand.

         “What can cause it… why the reasons are many. Which is why the state would like one of their biologists, and I believe a geologist as well, to come look at our anomaly.”

         “Anomaly.”

         “Yes. Until we know what it is, it’s best to call it ‘anomaly’ so that we don’t inadvertently call it something it isn’t.”

         “Like a sinkhole.”

         “Precisely, Mr. Sealand.”

         Mr. Curran removed himself back to the selectmen side of the tables and took his seat, once more alongside Mr. Carpenter and three other selectmen. The room was restless, but quiet, which even Mr. Carpenter, if pressed, would have admitted was a dramatic improvement.

         “All of that said,” began Mr. Carpenter. “We have heard back that a biologist and geologist will be here in two weeks – it would normally be longer, but we shared with them how much this anomaly has grown in the last few weeks and they delayed some other projects to come sooner.”

         “Do we know which day they’ll be here?” asked Mrs. Knowlton.

         Mr. Carpenter began to flip through the day planner before him, his glasses perched on the edge of his nose as he flitted page to page, running a finger along the length of each. Mr. Curran cleared his throat.

         “I believe it is August the third,” Mr. Curran called out.

         “Yes,” Mr. Carpenter cleared his own throat. “So we will have news for you at the August selectman meeting.”

         “Must we wait that long?” asked Mrs. Knowlton. “That’s over two weeks after their visit.”

         Mr. Curran began to speak, but was stopped by Mr. Carpenter’s second loud clearing of his throat, this one more of a hoarse, forced cough, and the removal of his glasses.

         “I understand, Mrs. Knowlton. If we have news before that time, we will try to find a way to bring townspeople together for an earlier meeting. As it is, the biologist in particular will want to take samples, and it will take a number of days for them to complete any tests they want to run.”

         Mrs. Knowlton seemed satisfied with this, and as the selectmen moved on to standing business, the room became less electrified. The mice in the walls moved freely once more, giving no care to the goings on of the humans in the large hall, and instead turning their attentions to the kitchen in the rear of the building. It was here that, in a few short weeks, townspeople would gather to assemble finger rolls, plug in myriad slow-cooking devices, and prepare for the annual bean supper and blueberry shortcake sale to benefit the Harper’s Cove Public Library next door. For now, the kitchen was left to the mice, and the mice turned to a hole they had gnawed in a sleeve of saltines, forgotten deep in an upper cupboard.

***

         August third came and went. On the day of the state visit, onlookers gathered along Deer Path and Caswell Roads to watch the goings on. There was a biologist and geologist, as promised, as well as someone from the emergency management division and even, Mr. Mennin noted with alarm, a member of the state’s Center for Disease Control.

Much discussion was had among the onlookers about the state officials’ protective gear. They wore waders over their shoes and trousers – thick black rubber ones that fly fisherman Mr. Andrews looked at with envy, sighing “I bet those wouldn’t tear on the rocks at Mill Pond” – as well as large gloved sleeves, also made of black rubber, that ran up and cinched with elastic where their arms met their shoulders, and finally, surgical masks that they wore over their faces at all times.

It had not taken them long to establish that the ground was not safe to walk on.

They tested this with a long pole, maneuvered from the basket of a cherry picker and poked down into the soil. None of it, apart from the most outside edges, appeared very solid, and they decided, no matter Maisie’s experience, the state officials wouldn’t risk it. Instead, the four men worked on makeshift scaffolds they fashioned by laying a network of aluminum ladders down, with long boards atop them.

Some of these they pulled from racks atop their vans, some they borrowed from the town fire station, and some were brought and offered by townsfolk. Housepainter Mr. Carleton got several days’ of storytelling from his ability to donate the most linear feet of ladder, at one hundred and forty eight, and the fire department’s tanker truck came at the end of the day to hose everyone’s ladders down before they were taken home and stored once more in barns and garages.

After several hours at the site, which had grown another few feet in the two and a half weeks since the selectmen meeting, the state workers had collected bags of dead plants, vials of sludge and soil, groundwater samples taken from bored holes, and at least one dead bird found in the wood-meadow. From the approximate center of the site, the officials staked a circle around the edge as it stood that day.

Logging tags were attached to the stakes noting the day and time, and further concentric circles were placed at five foot intervals to track any further growth.

“They did the same thing to Mr. Sealand’s arm when he had sepsis,” said Mr. Carleton. “Doesn’t bode well.”

“My arm is fine, thank you,” said Mr. Sealand, from his lawn chair several feet away.

“But it almost wasn’t. They gave you IV antibiotics. What’re they gonna do here? I don’t see a vein they can tap into.”

“Hmph. How about you let them worry about that? You’re no expert. You paint houses, for Christ’s sake.”

“Painting houses came in pretty handy today, though, didn’t it?” he said, and rapped his knuckles against a ladder sitting nearby.

*

         “Yes, Mrs. Knowlton, the entire town,” said Mr. Carpenter.

         “Under a boil water order? Ridiculous.”

         “It is not ridiculous. It is an appropriate precaution.”

         “But a precaution against what? You don’t even have results yet!”

         Mr. Carpenter looked to all present like he was very, nearly impossibly, tired. He had deep circles under his eyes, which were already relatively sunken in nature, and when coupled with his naturally pale face, this combination gave him an overall sickly look. This fact didn’t seem to pry any sympathetic gentleness from the attendees at the town’s emergency meeting one week following the state visit.

         “We don’t have results, but we have hypotheses from the state biologist that it could be microbial in nature, and thus a boil water order cannot hurt and is an appropriate precaution while we wait for final results.”

         “And when will those be?”

         “You wanted updates before the board meeting, Mrs. Knowlton,” Mr. Carpenter sighed, lifting his glasses to his head and pinching the bridge of his nose. “This is what early updates look like. You can have information quickly or completely, but not both.”

         “It’s grown, you know.”

         “I know.”

         “Beyond the first circle. Six feet, it’s grown. Did you tell them that?”

         “I did, Mrs. Knowlton.”

         Mr. Curran sat, quietly, and busied himself with his day planner, scribbling here and there, never looking while Mr. Carpenter was whittled down.

         “It’s fifteen feet from Caswell Road.”

         Mr. Carpenter offered no response to this. Merely stood, glasses atop his head, with his fingers at the bridge of his nose. He had not opened his eyes in nearly half a minute.

         “FIFTEEN FEET, Mr. Carpenter. Which means a mere sixty feet to go before it’s at the library’s doorstep.”

         Still, there was no response from Mr. Carpenter.

Mr. Curran looked up, finally, and stood to place a hand on the board president’s shoulder.

“Doug?” he said, quietly. “Doug, you’re… you’re bleeding.”

“Hm? I’m wha–? Oh, Jesus.”

Mrs. Knowlton sat down abruptly as the room watched blood fall in urgent drippings down Mr. Carpenter’s button-up. Mr. Carpenter liked to dress the part for these meetings, despite the small town, the usually low meeting attendance, and his board colleagues’ presence in dungarees most nights. At his board meetings, he always said, he would dress as the town deserved. Slacks, pleated, in black, brown, or navy, and a white button-up. On a summer evening, he might roll his sleeves up, but that was the limit of his casual dress when acting as president of the selectboard.

And now, that crisp white shirt bloomed with blood, as Mr. Curran urged his colleague back down into his chair. Other board members – Misters Kent, Langlais, and Richmond – stood and scurried around him, bringing him a handkerchief for his nose, some water, a clean shirt – a tee shirt, of all things – that someone fetched from behind their truck seat.

“It’s just a nosebleed,” Mr. Carpenter said as he was advised to visit the hospital. “Who ever heard of going to the hospital for a nosebleed?”

“But with everything, Doug,” said Mr. Curran. “Don’t you think?”

“No I do not think. I think I have dry air in this hall, ragweed in my yard, and dust in my Buick, and I am fine. Thank you.”

He accepted the proffered items and clasped the handkerchief to his nose.

“I do think, however, that we will call it a night. Mrs. Knowlton, the boil water order stands. It is up to you what you do with it. I am aware of the concern around Caswell Road and I, too, hold that concern. My hope is that the state will have answers soon.”

With that, Mr. Carpenter stood, handkerchief to his nose and cardboard cup of water in his hand, his day planner and borrowed tee shirt tucked under his arm, and walked unsteadily out the back door to where is car was parked, leaving Misters Curran, Kent, Langlais, and Richmond to close out the meeting and lock up the hall.

He had never not been the last one out after a selectmen meeting.

***

         Three weeks later, Caswell Road was blocked by several red sawhorses at either end, complete with signs that said “ROAD CLOSED. LIBRARY CLOSED. BEAN SUPPER CANCELED.”

         The anomaly, for they were still calling it an anomaly, had grown with such speed and severity that it had not only reached Caswell Road, but overtaken it. It was now inching, daily, nearer to the front steps of the town library. The library would be the first building the anomaly would encounter, and townspeople waited with perverse curiosity to see what exactly it would do to a building.

         If the road was any indication, the outlook was grim. The dirt road, much as the wood-meadow, had relaxed into a sludgy, sagging mess, the sand turning a sickly gray as if the color-giving minerals had leached out. The ground was unstable and unpredictable, sometimes cake-stodgy in a place that looked firm. Across the town, no one dared walk their dogs off leash anymore. That they hadn’t found more wildlife caught up in the anomaly was a surprise and a blessing, and one the biologist, geologist, CDC, nor the EPA could explain.

         Every test had come back with notable results, but none that should cause such a phenomenon. The soil readings came back alkaline, but the plant samples showed damage that looked like acid burns. The sludge shared many characteristics with mucus, but appeared non-biological in nature. The smell suggested bacteria, while the blanched soil gave no indication that there were usable nutrients that would attract such bacteria. The lack of insects or grubs present at the site suggested much the same. Instruments installed by the geologist captured a constant, low-frequency vibration that became stronger as the weeks crept on and the depression spread, but he confirmed it was not enough vibration to cause any soil irregularities.

When Caswell Road closed, some villagers were already reporting a sensation not unlike what is felt when a distant freight train hurtles along. A humming not seen or heard so much as it was perceived. A subtle shaking that could be sensed only when standing still and near to the anomaly.

No one knew how long that first artifact sat enveloped in the earthy mush before Mrs. Knowlton noticed it. By then, the smell was so overpowering that most townspeople were avoiding the area, so observers were few. Mrs. Knowlton, in her role as a library trustee, was present with a handful of others that day, placing the barriers and signs on Caswell Road, formalizing the impotence they felt around the continued spread of the anomaly and its ruining of the annual BBs for Books event, as the bean supper and blueberry shortcake sale was known locally.

While she was stapling signs to the sawhorses, Mrs. Knowlton noticed a glint in the middle distance, near the edge of the wood-meadow. After further inspection – completed by nudging the object from the sludge with a stick so no one would have to touch it – the library trustees reported to Mr. Curran, a trustee of the local historical society in addition to his position as vice president of the selectboard, what they had found.

It was an axe head. Broad and long buried, and bearing a stamp reading “1755,” all agreed with Mr. Curran’s assessment that it should have been corroded and brown. It had no business being the bright, glinting thing that they plucked from the field’s edge. But it was as if the axe head had been steeped in some kind of chelating acid, which enabled it to sprout from the ground beside Caswell and Deer Path Roads shining like one freshly sharpened on the grinding wheel at Dexter’s Hardware.

Several days later, it was followed by a mapmaker’s caliper, similarly polished. Then a carpenter’s plane. A schoolhouse slate. A half a dozen musket balls. A teacup. All were aged by the local historical society, judged to be from the 18th and early 19th centuries, and added to the society’s permanent collection. The historical society matrons were incredibly pleased with the discoveries and seemed unable to relate to the agita with which the rest of the town reacted.

“It’s just such a gift,” said Mrs. Morrison to the local newspaper reporter. “How else could you describe it?”

In the news story that later ran – 350 words on the new artifacts titled “Local Historians Receive ‘Gifts from the Ground’” – Mr. Curran was quoted in his capacity both as a historical society trustee and a member of the board of selectmen.

“It’s true that we would otherwise not have an opportunity to see artifacts like this,” he said. “Especially ones so closely tied to our town’s history.”

The mapmaker’s caliper, in particular, had its provenance traced by a small ownership engraving on one of its broader edges.

The engraving read “M. Arrowsmith” and could be attributed to a Mr. Matthew Arrowsmith, a several-year resident of Harper’s Cove and industrious mapmaker who, it turned out, did much work with the colony governments throughout the east coast in the 18th century.

“With how much he traveled,” Mrs. Morrison was quoted as saying, “It’s a miracle this caliper – a vital tool of his trade – didn’t land in another state where he had worked.”

Tempering Mrs. Morrison’s excitement, the Harper’s Herald article closed with a quote from Mr. Curran in which he acknowledged the uneasiness some townspeople felt with the discoveries.

“With the development of this anomaly over the last several months, it’s very much fair that people are wondering what new change is indicated by artifacts being churned up. I think we all want and need answers. And the sooner the better.”

***

         In late September, an emergency town meeting was called. Unsurprisingly even to the mice in the building, who could sense a rising volume as townspeople queued up outside the hall, the meeting was tense from the beginning. The state had sent their report, which the selectboard had posted publicly, and everyone had found it inadequate. “Idiosyncratic natural phenomenon” was their official finding, if it could be called a finding. The state offered several opinions and options for what could be done with the anomaly, from attempting to dig out the affected soil with large scale machinery to treating the soil with gypsum for the smell, even though it would likely harm the soil and plant life even more.

The selectmen by that point were looking into the town insurance policies to see what could be done to replace the library as the worst was poised to happen. Already, the building was closed to the public and the ground around it was beginning to soften and turn. Cracks in the foundation were noted by Mrs. Knowlton, who had done an exacting walk, binoculars in hand, as close to the library as possible prior to the meeting. She shared this development with her neighbors in line for the meeting, and the news filtered down the many waiting ears waiting in the queue.

“I simply don’t think it’s going to stop,” said Mr. Carpenter as he opened the meeting. “We have some difficult discussions ahead of us.” He was still pale, tired-looking, and now carried a handkerchief in his front right pocket and a spare one, folded neatly inside his back pocket, for the nosebleeds that continued to come at inopportune times.

The room remained tense, but this opening statement, and perhaps the way it was delivered, seemed to temper the anger of the attendees. More than anyone, Mr. Carpenter had been consumed by the work of investigating the anomaly, visiting it each day to note growth and report back to the state, with whom he now had near-daily telephone calls.

“If it doesn’t stop, what does that mean for the library?” Mrs. Knowlton asked, after Mr. Carpenter had shared this update.

“It’s not just the library, Mrs. Knowlton,” said Mr. Carpenter.

“I don’t understand.”

“With help from the emergency management agency, we have been tracking the growth of the anomaly for six weeks. With the addition of estimated data we were able to provide them about the three to four months before they came, they have determined that it’s growing faster the longer it exists. It’s snowballing, so to speak.”

The room remained nearly silent, punctuated only by a few mumbles between spouses or neighbors trying as they tried to guess to what conclusion Mr. Carpenter was coming.

“By Thanksgiving, the library will be taken over entirely. Unsafe to use. Inhabitable. By Christmas, it will be past the town hall. The next closest building after the town hall is, I’m afraid–”

“The school!” shouted Mr. Carleton. “The school and the ball fields!”

“Yes, Mr. Carleton.”

Voices rose in a constant, intent din, drowning out the gentle whirring of window fans that had been placed, not to cool the room, but aimed outward to try to push the mephitic air away from the building.

Far from trying to quiet the room, Mr. Carpenter watched the townspeople with calm solicitude, letting the room eddy and churn as townsfolk processed this newest information. Mr. Curran shifted uneasily in his chair and, once, made a motion as if to rise, but was stilled by Mr. Carpenter’s hand placed gently on his forearm.

“Let them talk, Peter,” Mr. Carpenter said. “It’s a big thing.”

When the voices had mostly stopped, Mr. Carpenter continued.

“This is why I love Harper’s Cove,” he said. “You all care so much. We have some very hard times and, likely, hard choices ahead of us, and I think I speak for the board when I say we want to make these choices together. As a town.

I’ve shared with you everything I know. Unfortunately, it isn’t much. We have a problem that doesn’t appear to be going away.”

“Mr. Carpenter?” asked Mrs. Knowlton.

“Yes, Maggie.”

She smiled at this – her name being used. Mr. Carpenter was often so proper that the townspeople made fun after they left the meetings, wondered where he got it from. Some even said he talked down to the townspeople. On this day, Mrs. Knowlton found herself charmed by this small slip of his usual beadledom.

“What happens when the school is taken?”

“That’s something we – and I mean all of us,” he paused here to gesture to the room full of people. “Need to think about. I am not confident insurance will be a help. As you all know, we have filed a claim for the library based on our policy’s ‘act of God’ clause. And the insurance company is not cooperating with that. Not accepting that. The key phrase for them is a part of the definition of an ‘act of God’ that includes the words ‘for which no human is to blame.’ An act of God must be natural, it must be unpredicted, it must be impossible to prevent, and it must occur with no human cause. The insurance company, in the absence of any geological or biological evidence to explain it, maintains that the anomaly must be man-made.”

Shouts and curses went up at this, and once more, Mr. Carpenter did nothing to stop them. It was impossible to know if he his attitudes about decorum had shifted in recent weeks or if he was simply too unwell to rise to the occasion, but his hand again rested on Mr. Curran’s forearm suggested the former.

“I agree with all of you,” he finally said, as loudly as he could. “Truly, I do. But until we come up with proof, which the state seems unable to provide, they’ll not hear our claim on its own merits. They will be sending an adjuster to do their own investigation, but I don’t hold out much hope. And when it reaches the school…”

“We can’t live in a town with no school,” said Mr. Mennin. His children were many years grown, but he enjoyed a close relationship with both his daughters, and they themselves were Harper’s Cove residents and had five children in the local school. His granddaughter, Elsie, had won the town spelling bee last year, beating out even children several years older than her.

“I think you’re right, Mr. Mennin. A town with families and children and no school for them and no library for them and no town hall… well.” He shrugged, weakly. “It’s not much of a town.”

“So what does that mean?”

Mr. Carpenter finally stood. He cleared his throat – a quiet, tumbling noise – and dabbed the back of his hand against his nose to ensure there was no blood (there was none) before he continued.

“The state, along with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, has suggested eminent domain.”

Grace Kendall is a writer living and working in central Maine who focuses on literary and upmarket fiction as well as incisive memoir. She holds bachelors’ degrees in both history and education and is in her final semester of the Stonecoast MFA program at the University of Southern Maine.