There is a river, yes. It curls like a lazy digesting snake around the southward curve of the valley, and like a snake busy digesting, it rarely has time to do anything else. Occasionally it will sigh out a current that squiggles past the banks and is gone. Only at its widest point, which is where the child nearly drowned, do the waters turn choppy, irritable, as if whatever has been swallowed requires quite a bit of acid and effort to break down. It is just beyond this point that the opposite shore spreads out in invitation, lush, lovely, limned with a curious shade of sunlight that seems to fall away the deeper you look, into the horizon of the forest, where eventually no light pierces through. You might think this is not so inviting after all, this dense tunneling darkness, and indeed only once in these last twenty years has a villager paddled roughly across the agitated waters and docked at the opposite shore and hiked resolutely into the forest, never to return, forgotten except in the silence that follows an ellipsis: “I haven’t seen a boat out there in the current since…” The drowning child, who thanks to Rascal did not drown and still cheerfully occupies her second-row seat in Miss Hilary’s third-grade classroom, claims to have seen something moving on the opposite shore, and maybe holding up its hand in greeting, or surrender, which is why she’d tried to swim across—but this is unlikely. Besides, Jeannie has always been an imaginative child.
To leave the valley, one would have to ford the unpleasantly choppy river and then hike who knows how far through the unmapped forest, or else cross the mountains. How the villagers’ forebears managed this—summiting the concentric rings of mountains that shelter the valley, climbing all the way up to where snow grips the peaks and avalanches sometimes shake and send surprising rocks crashing down to the village’s perimeter, and somehow then surviving the steep sliding downward trek that ends in the thick grass of the valley’s fields—the villagers do not know nor especially care to wonder. Beyond the mountains and the forests, there must eventually be paths leading back to the wider world, which anyone anxious to leave could discover.
But why leave? Here in the valley, the rains fall just often enough. In autumn, the trees blush gold and drop their leaves as if startled. Here is a slow, mindless, dreamy, selfish, pretty place to live; and to leave, to allow oneself to even entertain the question, would create a jagged friction between oneself and the village, the villagers, the goats, the as yet unmentioned chipmunks scurrying below the shrubbery—the kind of friction that wears each side down until something must erode, whether it’s a smoothing-out of circumstance or of self.
And at the northernmost point of the valley is a slight easing of altitude where the mountains are least fearsome, and this is where the postmaster lives. They call him the postmaster, though the post comes so rarely that his job has melted beyond its borders into a pool of other jobs: telegram receiver; wedding officiant; curator of the village lost and found; sole newspaper reporter; kitten rescuer; militiaman and policeman, on a moonlighting basis; herder of errant goats; late-night barfly; early-afternoon barfly, sometimes. No one is close to the postmaster, nor could the village do without him. He can be found at one or the other bar most nights (there being only two bars), drinking steadily, not making a nuisance, and quite willing to talk if anyone should strike up a conversation, which no one ever does. How the letters and telegrams (and once, seminally, a package) reach him is not known. Speculation has it that a fierce bearded man in a leather coat descends from the mountains every so often, withdrawing from his satchel a stained and sodden bundle of papers, which he gives to the postmaster in exchange for whatever outgoing letters the villagers may have cobbled together. The bearded man doesn’t know cold, they say, and never stays in the valley longer than the few minutes his task requires. Never once has he wandered down to the Toadstool, just a few blocks past the postmaster’s door, or to Skully’s, at the valley’s opposite end, or even along to Mary Mary’s near the village center, where Mary herself serves things hot off griddles, battered and fried, coarsely chopped, tossed, swimming in sauce, stacked high with a choice of side.
On these mornings when the bearded man arrives—or however it is that the bundle of letters crosses the mountains and lands at the postmaster’s door—the postmaster, who has been sitting nursing his hangover cure in the breakfast nook of his wood and linoleum kitchen, sighs, sets his drink aside, and fits on his sagging hat, and steps outside to make the rounds. He begins with the outer reaches of the village and circles inward, a corkscrewing route that ensures he passes every single house, though he’ll end up having mail for only two or three of them. The mail comes most often from distant relatives who left the valley many decades ago but still send Christmas cards, accompanied by the occasional catalogue, coupon booklet, religious flyer, budget newspaper from some strange-named town like Pebble Creek Ridge, tabloid magazine, subscription renewal request, handwritten letter, care package full mostly of crimped paper shreds with one or two bags of chocolate-covered almonds buried underneath, glossy leaflet offering cheaper insurance, pre-approved credit card, faster and free-for-the-first-six-months Wi-Fi, urgent jury duty summons for someone whose name none of them have ever heard, notice of late fees on library books, envelope stamped return-to-sender, envelope with nothing inside it, postcard.
You might expect these relics of a remote and unreachable outside world to generate some excitement, some anticipation at least of the postmaster’s painstakingly circuitous route past their houses, but in truth the villagers much prefer their own local thrice-weekly newspaper, which contains all the important news. And besides, when outer-world mail does reach their mailboxes, it has been so alternately rained upon, snowed upon, crushed into the pockets of a dirty leather jacket, crumplingly extricated, and bleached by the sun that it arrives nearly unintelligible. The villagers smooth out the water-bitten edges and gather round to read the remaining words like tea leaves. “Begging you,” one of them reads out, to general amusement. “This may be the last. Windmills and. Over all of us now. Entreat—entreat, excellent word. Entreat you to immediately and without. Could spare even the slightest. Please, for the. With all my—and I’m thinking that’s the word love; that would make sense there, wouldn’t it?” Or a newspaper whose front three pages have eased off their hinges somewhere along the way, but whose crosswords survive mostly intact, one dark inky blotch at the center where no words can go. Or a catalogue whose gummed-together pages advertise absolutely inexplicable things: a triple volumizing mascara, a lemon-yellow lipstick, a woman wearing nothing at all except a purse splayed across an advertisement seemingly for airline miles. Airline miles, imagine. The groups digest, banter, and disperse, with the reupped feeling that the world beyond the valley is chaotic and puzzling and perhaps a bit silly, and they’d all much rather be here. And then the next of the thrice-weekly neighborhood newspapers arrives and the postmaster’s prior delivery is forgotten, except for the chocolate-covered almonds, which the goats swiftly consume.
The goats eat everything. There is no need for lawn care, for trimming back the shrubs around the prison yard, which doubles most days as a rehearsal space for the community chorus because hardly anyone is ever in prison except for Omnibus Jones, who joins in the rehearsals sometimes with a very respectable baritone. The goats are not afraid of the villagers, and the villagers are not afraid of the goats, except some twilight evenings when, rolling the trash out to the curb, they startle at the sudden lurch of a previously innocuous shadow, which on closer inspection turns out to be a goat, blinking its sideways blink. It is not clear who collects the trash; it is always gone in the morning, even on holidays.
In the morning, after the flaring orange-purple sunrise has gathered its things and departed, leaving in its wake a hazy glorious blue, Mary carries out her sandwich board sign and props it open on the sidewalk. The sign reads Open. The regulars stand back respectfully, and someone holds the door as she heads back in. For a few minutes no one follows, though they have been queued outside for the last quarter hour awaiting this moment. And then finally a shy trickle begins, as first one ambles inside, then another, and when the less regular customers come in an hour later for their Mary Mary’s Classic Brunch Special Plate, they find the tables nearly full of sweet old men who all look the same but who drink their coffee different ways: three sugars, no cream, half-caff. The old men will smile with absent recognition if you call them by name, and then return to their newspapers. They will still be there when dusk falls and Mary plugs her string lights into the outlet by the door, when Garett the local musician sets up his folding stool and strums strange wordless tunes out of his acoustic guitar, a nightly gig he always frets about losing, though he is the only competent guitarist in the valley. If Garett is especially good, the old men will fold up their newspapers, which they’ve already read end to end several times, and they will nod their heads, not really in time with the music, and encouragingly smile.
The thrice-weekly newspaper is authored solely by the postmaster, who reports on the latest antics of the goats, as well as of Omnibus Jones, whose thefts are exhaustively documented, though he is never identified by name in the column until proven guilty in court. Besides these constants, the paper might contain a review of the monthly special at Mary Mary’s, or a features column exploring some developing romantic scandal, or a strange half-coherent sort of personal essay on the sanctity and refuge to be found at the Toadstool, or at Skully’s, often concluding with detailed recommendations of what drinks to get and in which order. When they hear the thwap of a cinched roll of paper against their doorsteps, the villagers hurry out to retrieve it, shake out its folds over breakfast, and eagerly scan to see whether they’ve been mentioned, first in the romantic rumors column, and if not there then perhaps in the reviews column, or the front-page thefts column, or even the obituaries column at the back, which is more of a squat block than a column, given the valley’s meager population, to see whether they might particularly survive any of the departed. To be featured anywhere in any way is a thrill that can last all week, even through the next two deliveries.
The postmaster, of course, would be glad to feature anyone who asked—would craft a full-page, no, a two-page spread on Alma Parson’s doilies if she requested it—but this would never occur to the villagers. To them, news is not a thing made by man, by in this case the postmaster, but gathered from on high like clouds and given unto them like rain. If there is a correlation between what they loudly discuss at Skully’s one night and what appears in the paper the next day, the villagers don’t notice it, or choose not to. And the postmaster accepts this, and some time ago ceased to check the “Letters to the Editor” box outside his house, standing empty day after day.
The letters and telegrams that do survive the postal method mostly intact—“I don’t know whether you’re getting these letters, but I’m going to try one last time” and “We can’t hold out much longer STOP nowhere else is safe STOP you might be our last hope STOP” and “I miss you and think of you often” and “Before long it will come for you too”—are then somehow extricated by the goats from the recipients’ mailboxes and chewed into an unreadable pulp and then deposited back onto the recipients’ porches, mashed and wet. Nothing to do at this point but throw them away, although every now and then Jeannie will carefully, surgically detach a surviving scrap from the bundle in the kitchen trash and dry it out on her windowsill and then hide it deep in a shoebox underneath her bed. Why she saves these pages, she’s not sure. When she thinks about them, she gets a funny feeling, the same feeling that she had that afternoon when she nearly touched her hand to the wild uneaten grasses of the opposite shore. The water really wasn’t that deep, and the current wasn’t that strong. The whole town dove in to rescue her, felt like, even the mayor was there, and the postmaster, watching from the back of the crowd with an expression on his weathered face that she had never seen on anyone’s before, and hasn’t since.
It used to be the mayor’s job to keep track of what day of the week, and what month, and what year it was. He had a sandwich board like Mary Mary’s on which every morning he’d write the day and date in bright chalk, and also the time, which had to be erased and rewritten every hour. But the mayor is forgetful, and his handwriting was never very good. A few days collapsed into Monday the thirtieth, and then no one could remember whether thirty or thirty-one days were had by June, and the day’s gentle breezy humidity felt more like August anyway, and so August second was settled on as the date. But in the course of the debate, the mayor had already broken all of his sticks of chalk, and so the sandwich board was retired, leaning dusty against the inner courthouse wall next to the lobby bench, where sometimes Omnibus Jones will stretch out his handcuffed hands to trace his initials in chalky constellations that will never fully erase.
Now it is Thursday, and has been for a long time. The children don’t mind because when the river floods, the playground gets soggy and the classrooms close and the teachers lead them home along Main Street, whose puddles are the best. At home, their mothers wipe mud off their boots and wash the gritty rain out of their hair. The evening sun is always golden and warms the puddles back into sparkling drops that rise and disperse in a cool bright mist, and the villagers emerge from their homes in their dirt-stiff gloves with their spades and seeds. Almost everyone has a vegetable patch, and some of the villagers wage a cheerful war against the rampaging goats and the cutely pernicious chipmunks, fencing and bed-raising and hot pepper-sprinkling, and some don’t bother, and the vegetables grow anyway, little green paperweights swelling through their skin and bursting into color. And Mary Mary keeps chickens, and her fried egg sandwich is the best in town.
Maybe—I’m just suggesting this as a thought experiment—maybe there is no bearded man who comes across the mountains with an armful of weather-beaten papers and letters and typed-out telegrams. Maybe there is a road through the mountains that only the postmaster knows, and once a week, a rattling truck drives up and drops off this week’s mail, all perfectly preserved and legible and true. And then maybe as he drinks, the postmaster reads through all of it, every last harrowing line, and as he reads, he spills his drink, accidentally the first time, and watches the words bleed out of the paragraphs in a smear of wasted meaning, until they are just words, and he spills and spills until the whole thing is a harmless soggy mass, and then he binds it up in red string and waits till he’s next in the mood for delivery.
But then maybe it doesn’t matter how the letters and packages and coupons and catalogues end up bundled quietly on the front step outside the postmaster’s door, just as it doesn’t matter what the letters say or who it was that Jeannie saw, or thought she saw, across the river that long-ago Thursday. It doesn’t matter. At night, the moon hangs nearly full above the mountains, and the stars drift down across the snug dome of sky like the settling flakes of a snow globe. The streets are very quiet at night; even Omnibus Jones prefers to do his thieving by dusk. The Toadstool closes first, but Skully’s is still open, the postmaster holding up his finger for one last round. How he’ll fill the pages of tomorrow’s paper is anyone’s guess. Maybe a feature on where the community chorus will be performing next, or who saw Rascal the goat peering through the windows of their living room this morning, or which of several eligible single-parent suitors the pretty librarian is rumored most likely to fall for, or whether you can substitute butter for lard in Daphne’s famous applesauce cake, or why Omnibus Jones, after yet another stint in group therapy, led by the pretty librarian, can’t seem to help but continue picking pockets, or whether perhaps in a shocking twist it’s Omnibus Jones the librarian is falling for. The postmaster tips well and walks up the hill toward home. In the dark lawns of the nearby houses, he sees the goats busily chewing, furry shadows nudging through the slats of the garden fences, this month’s mail already ground between their molars into damp white clumps that only Jeannie will ever pick up and smooth out and try to decipher, and isn’t that maybe for the best, not the deciphering but the grinding down, and the goats? Does it matter what sound the world makes as it ends? From down here in the valley, you could almost mistake it for thunder, someone else’s storm rolling in, and rolling back out again, stopping just long enough to water the plants.
