Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 51, No. 6, June 2006

Breathing a Fine Stone Mist by Robert Gray

When she arrives at work, the letter is still on her desk. Emma has never received personal mail from the main office in Boston before. That the envelope bears no postage is worrisome. Somebody came all the way to Vermont and stopped by her little office but didn’t have the courage to stay and face her.

She taps the envelope against the desktop, then tears off one end. She pulls out a single sheet of paper and unfolds it — a form letter, with her name Emma Parker scrawled in after “Dear.”

The letter is brief. “Due to unforeseen economic challenges,” it begins, then cites “a marked downturn in both the national economy and Vermont tourist traffic during these uncertain times,” along with “other key factors” as the basis for the recent “extremely difficult and painful” decision by the board of directors to “cease all operations, both ongoing and proposed,” for the MillWorks Project as of a date that is less than a month away. The board “deeply regrets any inconvenience this decision will cause among its valued associates, and sincerely wishes all of you the very best of luck in the future. The board will always be deeply grateful for your loyalty, your fine work, and for your understanding of the current, extremely unfortunate situation.”

Cordially...

The room spins. Emma sits, tries to think clearly, tries to breathe, fails at both for a moment, then catches some air and places the letter down on the desk. She has a tour beginning within minutes, but suddenly she’s forgotten what to tell them, the words erased from her memory and replaced by all these new, awful words — uncertain, difficult, cease, inconvenience, unfortunate. She can’t even summon the strength to hope, to pretend that there has been a mistake. The letter looks and reads like truth. Everything ends today.

It’s her husband’s fault. She knows he’s behind this somehow, though it seems impossible. He’s punishing her for what she’s done, for what she’s become; punishing her again. He never wanted her here in the first place, and finally he’s gotten his way. The son of a bitch, she thinks, even though she would never say this aloud. No one in Millbridge would believe her capable of saying such a thing. The son of a bitch.

She can’t bear the thought of changing again. Emma loves being a docent. She even likes saying the word to herself — docent, docent, docent. The out-of-state developers who’ve been renovating the old marble mill brought that word with them from Boston, just as the Irish and the Polish and the Italians had carried their words here in earlier times.

Emma first saw the classified ad in the local paper three years ago: “Wanted: one full-time docent.” She had to look it up in the dictionary: “A knowledgeable guide, particularly one who conducts visitors through a museum and delivers a commentary on exhibitions.” Above all, she loves the notion of being a docent every time somebody in town asks, “What are you up to these days, Emma?”

“I’m a docent at the MillWorks Marble Museum,” she replies. Since she began working here, she has noticed how much more interesting and even enjoyable life is; the work has put a spring in her step and a lilt in her voice that just weren’t there before, ever. After all those years of saying “housewife” or “wife and mother,” it has felt awfully good to have a new answer to that annoying and demeaning question. But now she will lose her answer. Now she will be “Bill’s wife” again, and that is no pleasure at all.

How had she ever summoned the nerve to apply for this job in the first place? She’s still not sure. She considered a hundred sensible reasons not to apply, but in the end she couldn’t stop herself. Just getting out of the house, away from Bill, seemed like the best reason. Ever since his retirement twenty years ago, he’d haunted their house more than a real ghost ever would have. And for the past eight years he’d been confined to a wheelchair, so he was mad every time she went out the door for any reason, as if her two good legs were an insult or a rebellion or something.

Emma’s friends teased her at first about this docent business, and Bill, who thought she was crazy to want to do this, said it was just “a high-falutin’ way of saying tour guide, like calling a garbage collector a sanitation engineer.”

When she told him later what the salary would be — she should have kept that to herself — he said she should turn them down; said if they were going to give her a fancy French title they should at least pay her more than a supermarket cashier.

“We got enough money, ain’t we?” he asked her the day they actually offered her the job.

“It’s not about money,” she replied.

“Why do you want to work anyway?” he growled. “You’re seventy-five years old, goddamn it.”

“Seventy-three. I can do this job. I can still walk and talk.”

“What am I supposed to do?” He was practically spinning circles in his wheelchair, that old anger welling up just like it used to, but with no place to spend itself, least of all on her. Not anymore.

“What are you supposed to do about what?” she asked calmly.

This stumped him, but only for a second. “About lunch.” It was pathetic, but the best he could do under pressure. In fact, he relied on her for a lot more than lunch — she was his full-time nurse, and those wages were worse than what she’d be getting from the museum.

“Eat,” she snapped, surprising herself. His face betrayed a flutter of shock. He stormed away without another word, and that was how her career began, like busting a bottle of champagne against a ship. Jealous was what he was, just plain old jealous.

There was a time when she would have listened to him, let him bully her. Instead, she didn’t even fight with him about it, not really, or at least not in the old way, with shouting and tears and threats. She simply waited him out, did what she wanted to do, and let him stew about it. She took care of all his needs, came home on her lunch hour, and showed him she could handle both worlds, his and hers. She didn’t even talk to him about it after a while. She just let it happen. She’d learned how to be stubborn too.

What would he say now if she told him about the museum closing? He’d be happy about it, she’s sure.

Teach you a lesson, he’d say.

What lesson?

Not to hope.

“The original settlers in the Millbridge area were mostly English and came from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hamp-shire,” Emma says. The words, when she needs them, come without effort, like a prayer. “The Irish arrived by the mid nineteenth century, built the railroads, and stayed on to work in the quarries and shops of the new marble industry.”

Even by the marble museum’s modest standards, this is a small group. A young family of four trails behind her, followed by an attentive couple about Emma’s age, mid seventies, dressed for sport in pale yellow sweatsuits and dazzling white sneakers. Emma realizes that her smart blue skirt and jacket and crisply starched white blouse probably seem old fashioned and schoolmarmish to all of them, but she doesn’t mind. It feels good to dress up. For too many years she mended her housedresses again and again because every nickel Bill earned at the mill went to keep their daughter out of rags and put food on the table.

“By the end of the nineteenth century, more than a hundred commercial varieties of marble were being quarried in Vermont,” she continues as she leads her party along a corridor. Red letters stenciled on the whitewashed walls of the corridor announce the next exhibit: The Story of Marble: From the Precambrian Period to Contemporary Times.

Emma has already shown them, from the vantage point of a custom-built, second-story balcony, the immense, abandoned interior of the mill building attached to the museum. It’s one of a dozen such ghost buildings that were once loud, crowded, and dusty. What her group saw, however, was a clean, spacious cement floor, a couple of long-silenced gang saws, several polishing machines, and a few A-frame pallets holding marble slabs.

After seeing the shop floor, the group watched a grainy, fifteen minute condensed history of the Millbridge Marble Company. Now, as they enter the history room, Emma continues her talk: “By 1908, the company had five thousand employees. Interpreters were sent to Ellis Island to recruit immigrants. In 1923, nearly fifty gang saws in one Millbridge mill operated twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. During a strike in the mid 1860s, the company brought in French-Canadian workers to replace the evicted Irish. In 1871, the company imported several dozen Swedes, but few of them remained. In 1886, a large number of Italians were brought over by the company, and in the early 1890s Polanders began arriving. In this room you will see how and why Vermont became their destination and their future.”

“What’s Polanders?” asks one of the children, a thin girl with straight blond hair. She looks up at Emma with bright, curious, blue eyes.

“Immigrants from Poland, sweetie,” her father says. “People came from all over the world to work in America. It was their dream.” He is gravely overweight. His wife is tiny and quiet.

Emma steps aside with practiced grace and gently waves her right arm through the air as an invitation. “I’ll give you some time to look around here before we continue on to the Marbles of the World Hall.”

The kids burst into the spacious room. Their parents follow, and all four scatter among the exhibits as if chronological order were just an old-fashioned notion. The older couple, by contrast, moves directly to the first numbered exhibit to study a cutaway of the earth’s surface during the Precambrian era. The man points and his wife nods. On the other side of the room, the little boy whispers to his mother, then tugs at her sleeve when she ignores him. Finally, she leans down to listen.

“Ask the docent,” she says.

He looks at Emma but doesn’t speak.

“Could you show him where the bathroom is, ma’am?” the mother asks.

“Of course,” Emma replies, smiling. The boy responds to her smile, as children often do.

She will miss the children. She will miss everything. She has spent three years talking about change as it relates to the earth and to marble and to the business of bringing stone to market. Now that she faces change herself, she realizes that knowing about it is not the same as feeling its effects.

Emma loves telling tourists about the marble industry in Millbridge. She feels like an actress in a play. If there’s one thing she knows, it’s this damn marble mill, where all of the men in her family and all of the men in Bill’s family spent their working lives. Her father worked a gang saw, with its long steel blades swinging back and forth, slicing, with the help of an abrasive slurry of sand and water, through the immense marble blocks. It took hours to work through a single block. A fine stone mist suffused the air around the workers. That was what they breathed all day. At night, when her father came home, gray mud covered him from head to toe, and he looked like a statue.

She wasn’t the least bit surprised when she discovered, during her first training session, that one of the blown-up, black-and-white photographs on the wall at the museum pictured her father, his hands on his hips, looking disgusted, that impatient scowl Emma remembers so well, as he watched his saw blades slice through stone in a pendulum swing as relentless as nature.

She’s not vain about her accumulated knowledge. She realizes that a lot of people her age in Millbridge could probably do this job. Marble flows through their veins too. Well, the men wouldn’t be good at it. They couldn’t control their foul mouths, and she can’t imagine them sticking to the script; the poor tourists would have to listen to one boring story about the good old days after another. She’s constantly amazed by the way the men, including her Bill, could hate the marble company for all those years and then, after it was taken away from them, talk about it like the place had been paradise itself. No, it was definitely best to keep the men away from the tourists.

The little boy drops a candy wrapper on the floor. Emma doesn’t want to scold. It’s not her style, and the museum discourages it, believing that scolding tourists is bad for business. Instead, she waits until the child moves along, and then scoops up his litter, crumpling it into a tight ball. She doesn’t like to see her museum, her second home, abused. She loves the place, loves the sheer glorious wasted space of it all. She loves the whitewashed walls and the tall banks of factory windows, through which sunlight pours because the panes are no longer coated with marble dust. Everything here is so bright and clean now.

Except when she is leading a tour group, Emma is often left on her own. The girls they hire to work in the gift shop never stay for long and seldom have much to say to her, so she wanders the halls even when she doesn’t have a group. Sometimes she finds a quiet place to sit and read.

Emma glances at her watch: eleven fifteen. They’re behind schedule. She needs to be home for lunch by noon. She’ll have to cut a few corners to get this group through before then. She scans the room, sees the father examining a scale-model reproduction of an early steam drill. This is the second time he’s been there, which is a good sign. He’s ready to move on.

“If you’ll follow me, we’ll continue our tour in the Marbles of the World Hall. There you will see for yourself the vast array of colors and textures this extraordinary stone comes in, depending upon where it has been quarried. If you would... Excuse me. Please come this way now.”

The children race toward her, stopping at the last possible second, their shoes squeaking on the polished wood. They laugh. She smiles. The older couple, who only managed to get halfway through the numbered displays, obediently moves toward her as well; the kids’ mother trails just behind. Only the husband hesitates. Clearly, Emma thinks, he is used to giving orders, not taking them.

“Wow!” cries the little boy as they approach the brilliant, sunlit expanse of the exhibition hall. He starts to run ahead.

“Careful, champ,” yells his father. “Wait for us.”

Emma picks up the thread of her talk again. “The marble slabs you are about to see range from Parian marble, a semitranslucent stone quarried in Greece and popular among sculptors for its whiteness, to Belgian Black, which smells like rotten eggs when it is cut.” As usual, the children snicker when she says this.

On her way home for lunch, Emma drives down Pine Street past the Catholic church. As the spire looms, she feels an urge to stop, go inside, and pray... for what? Can she pray for a museum? Can she pray for her own selfish needs? Her happiness? Maybe she should at least make a sign of the cross as she drives by. She doesn’t, though, and soon the church shrinks in her rearview mirror. Just before it disappears altogether, she whispers, “Please, God.” Too early to say, “Rest in peace.”

She stands on the porch of her house, their house, Bill’s house. Although it’s only a little after noon, dark autumn clouds have given to afternoon a darkness like twilight. She notices that there are lights on in every room. Bill hates the dark, but he hates high electric bills more.

Through the living room window Emma can see marble everywhere — coffee and end tables, lamps and ashtrays, all set against the pale blue tint of the furniture fabric, wall paint, carpeting, and curtains. On the fireplace mantel, family photos mix with bowling trophies and knickknacks. From this distance, they could be pictures of anybody; she can only recognize them because she already knows who they are.

She could lead one of her tour groups through this house, point out marble artifacts in almost every corner, take them out to the TV room where Bill, an authentic retired marble worker, slumps in his favorite chair, the television screen shifting from one program to the next with the reliability of a clock.

She thinks about the way young people talk about needing their space these days. When Bill first retired, the walls of their little house suddenly boxed her in. He was never a homebody when he worked. On his days off he fished and hunted, and many nights he’d go to the Legion or to the Bowlerama. In retirement, he went out less and less over the years, stopped visiting his old buddies, and eventually they died or stopped visiting too. He hasn’t done anything for a long time. He sits and waits for her. That’s his job.

Emma slips quietly inside. In the TV room she stands beside the chair where Bill’s heavy body sprawls, surrounded by objects that tell the simple story of his days — dirty coffee mugs lined up on his tray, along with an open, half empty bag of potato chips, an overflowing ashtray, a crumpled pack of Marlboros, and a breakfast plate that once held scrambled eggs and toast.

The television is on, but soundless. Three pretty young women sit on plush furniture in a coffee shop, laughing at a pair of young men who punch each other in the shoulder, then wince with pain and fall to the floor.

“The museum is going to close, Bill,” she whispers. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m so...” She touches his shoulder, gently at first, then with a sharp poke.

They don’t have conversations, only confrontations. Last month, for example, she cooked at the Senior Center and he got on her case about that. She’d just come home from a long day at the museum, and the minute she walked in the house, he yelled, “Supper ready?” as he came back to consciousness at the sound of the front door slamming shut. His voice was frail but still had that threatening edge she had always feared. It twisted something inside her every time.

Emma did not answer him; she headed for the stairs. She had a headache. Her legs were sore and tired. Her everything was sore and tired.

“Supper ready?” his gravelly voice echoed again through the house. “What’re we havin’?”

She hated shouting, but from the bottom of the stairs, she called back to him. “I told you this morning. It’s Thursday. I have to help cook at the Center tonight. If you’re interested, we’re having chicken and biscuits.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“You’re welcome to join us. You know that. You love chicken and biscuits.” Slowly she climbed the stairs.

“It ain’t the food.” Bill hated the senior center, which he called a “dump full of geezers learnin’ to knit.” Actually, she knew he didn’t like people seeing him in the wheelchair, especially the part where she had to help him get in and out of their car.

Emma knew there was little point in arguing. She didn’t want to fight. She didn’t even want him to come with her, truth be told. She took a deep breath at the top of the stairs, trying to calm herself. She shut him out by concentrating on something she’d read that afternoon in a book she borrowed from the library. She’d already memorized it:

“Champlain Black marble comes from one of the oldest quarries in the United States. The rich black of this stone is contrasted by flecks of fossilized organisms. The quarry is an ancient sea bed, more than four hundred fifty million years old. This stone has been used in the construction of many well-known buildings, including Radio City Music Hall and the Brooklyn Bridge.” She felt confident enough to add it to her script.

Emma entered her bedroom and chose an outfit, something nice but practical, since she would be in the kitchen and not at a fancy ball. Bill yelled again, but she couldn’t make out a word he said, so she didn’t respond. She dressed quickly and touched up her face, wishing she had time to shower. She delayed leaving the bedroom, hoping that he’d lose interest and go back to his damned TV.

Even at eighty-one, frail and withdrawn and crippled, hardly more than a shadow of the man she’d known all her life, Bill could intimidate her. She knew this had more to do with the person he once was, not the one he’d become, but her reaction was instinctive, honed from years spent trying to predict his moods and deflect his anger.

When she’d married him, he was thirty and she twenty-two, still living with her parents. He was a man of the world. He’d been to France and Germany during the war, and had come back to work in the quarries, a good job in those days. Bill was tough, like most of the quarrymen, and always had a short fuse. When they were young, he scared her sometimes. Although he hardly ever laid a hand on her — she was lucky compared to some of her friends — the things he’d say sometimes froze her heart.

Ready at last, Emma left the bedroom. At the top of the stairs, she saw Bill waiting for her below, his wheelchair positioned to block her way, its bulky frame making up for his frailty.

“I said, what am I supposed to do about supper?” His eyes were cold, his tone seething with rage.

“There’s still some pork in the fridge,” Emma said, descending slowly. She stood on the last stair, waiting for him to move aside. He scowled. He hadn’t shaved for a few days, and his beard made him look even older and meaner. She wondered what she had ever seen in him, and almost laughed at the thought, so absurd under the circumstances.

For the first time that she could remember in a confrontation like this, he surrendered. Waving her off with disgust, he turned sharply and headed back toward the TV room, muttering some terribly unpleasant things about her, though none she hadn’t heard before. A moment later, the volume was so high that the sound of canned laughter filled the house.

The afternoon is slow at the museum, as if the tourists all received a letter this morning, too: “Your visits will no longer be required. Thank you for...”

Whether it’s the bad news or the lack of a sizable audience, Emma just can’t keep her mind on her work. “The process of sawing marble by means of a toothless strip of metal and the liberal use of sand was the invention of a Vermonter — Isaac Parker, of Middlebury,” she says, and knows the name is wrong the second it leaves her tongue.

“Was he an ancestor of yours?” asks a professorial type wearing a corduroy sport coat and blue jeans.

“Who?”

“Isaac Parker.” He jots the name down in a small notebook.

“Oh, no, did I say Parker? I meant Markham.”

Emma is suddenly disoriented in the one place where she had come to feel oriented.

When the tour is over, she goes outside and strolls through the marble chip — covered parking lot, just to breathe some fresh air and to clear her mind. It almost works. A few minutes later, she walks beneath the museum’s entrance arch — one immense marble block atop a pair of vertical blocks — and enters the building again. The place is nearly empty. She wanders through the quiet halls, fondly touching displays with her fingertips.

She enters her favorite room, the Marbles of the World Hall. As big as a gymnasium, it was originally the company’s showroom. Marble, limestone, and a few granite panels are showcased vertically and bathed in abundant natural light streaming through the banks of small-paned windows high on the walls.

Emma walks down one of the narrow aisles, moving from slab to slab as if each were a separate canvas in an art museum. She loves the names: Verde Antique, Regal White Danby, Westland Green Veined Cream, Pico Green, Westland Cippolino, Neshobe Gray Clouded, Champlain Black, Mariposa Danby, Striped Brocadillo, Verdoso, Olivo. She will miss them all.

In a soft voice, Emma recites: “Extraneous substances introduced in minute quantities during formation created the colors, veining, clouds, mottling, and shadings in marble. The activity and movement of the earth’s crust caused the wavelike or folded configuration of the veining. The limestone beds tilted up and folded, resulting in the characteristics of the marble. Veins appeared when cracks or sedimentary layers filled with minerals to become permanent characteristics as a result of metamorphism.”

Standing before a slab of Best Light Cloud, she moves in close, observes crystals fleck in the changing afternoon light. Then she steps back, as she imagines people do in front of paintings at an art gallery, and the crystals become veins of soft color. She can sense her own blood rushing along its delicate arteries, and feels a connection with the stone.

Two hours later, shortly before closing time, she stands in the same spot and recites her script again; this time a dozen people form a semicircle around her. They listen, some intently, some just politely, but all look surprised when she suddenly falls silent and stares at the slab with intense concentration. No one seems willing to move or to speak.

Emma is not meditating; she is stunned. All of those facts and figures she has dutifully memorized and recited for three years about unimaginable lengths of time and immense forces beneath the earth’s surface suddenly make sense in a new way, a way that almost renders her words meaningless. She doesn’t dare move; afraid the thought will desert her if she even blinks.

Verde Antique, Regal White Danby, Westland Green Veined Cream, Pico Green — the names mean nothing. She’s learned so much about marble, but knew nothing until now. This is so much deeper, a quarry, deeper still. She turns toward her group and smiles. Suddenly she has a new script, handed to her like Moses and his tablets, only this is not about “Thou Shalt...” or “Thou Shalt Not...”

“Flaws are an element of marble’s makeup,” she begins, “and part of what gives all these different marbles their unique beauty; there’s a kind of purity in their impurity. I’ve read that this purity comes from metamorphism, but that’s just a word, like docent.” She pauses. No one moves. No one blinks. “The beauty comes from death, from the end of things. Champlain Black is loaded with fossils of creatures that once wandered as freely as we do. It is stone made from organic material. Living things created marble. Marble is a kind of living thing too. Everything is organic material that will die and return to the ground. Not just this town, but me, and my husband, and all of you nice people waiting patiently for me to say something sensible, something that will make you feel better.”

The thought takes Emma’s breath away. She has to sit for just a minute on a marble bench. She watches the sunlight alter the stone’s surface again and again. She pictures her grandfather and her father and her husband underground, standing with other workers, dwarfed by the quarry walls. She sees them not as they look in the blown-up museum photos, but like those ancient drawings of the slaves who built the pyramids. Nothing changes. Everything changes. This frightens her even as it grants her a strange peace of mind.

Someone clears his throat, which brings Emma back.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I was thinking.” She studies their faces, these innocent tourists who only want to learn a little bit about marble before moving on. They don’t know anything. Tomorrow they will pick apples or buy maple syrup at a farm stand or maybe take a hike on the Long Trail. Eventually they will be fossils too, and maybe even marble. They need to know more than can be contained by these walls. This is not the whole story.

“Please follow me,” she says curtly, like a stern first-grade teacher as she heads toward the far end of the building. Accustomed to obedience, they follow, though some appear concerned when she reaches the fire exit and presses firmly on the bar just below a sign warning that the alarm will sound if anyone does such a thing. The harsh buzz immediately echoes throughout the Marbles of the World Hall as Emma moves into the sun-drenched holding yard. Warily, the tour group joins her.

“This area was used to store marble that was ready for the finishing mill,” she says in her best docent voice. The yard has only a scattering of weathered A-frame pallets and the odd slag pile. Thick weeds and vines cover everything.

Metamorphosis.

As they follow her brisk steps across the yard, the noise of the alarm gradually diminishes. “Although what you see here now is just a handful of rusted iron pallets and weeds, thirty years ago the sun’s reflection off the marble could have blinded you, like the glare off fresh snow.”

Emma reaches the far end of the property, where a rusted steel mesh fence encloses and protects nothing. Kids have forced a narrow opening at one corner. She hunches down and wedges herself through the gap, then stands on the other side, waiting. Again there is hesitation, but when two boys scoot through, the others follow.

She sets off down the sidewalk, indicating points of interest as they go.

“The entire business block here was once owned by the marble company. The only food store for miles was the company store. Employees commonly worked for no paycheck whatsoever, since the company often deducted rent, food, insurance, and other supplies from their wages.”

A boy rides by on a bicycle, nearly ramming a parked car as he spins around to join the strange parade. Emma stops before a marble statue of a G.I. “This World War II memorial was commissioned by the town and erected here in 1951, even though the company had at first threatened to fire any man who enlisted.”

She leads them across the street and they march toward Kapitan’s Dash Mart, in front of which three men sit at a picnic table. One of them points toward Emma; another waves. “See those old men? All of them are retired marble workers. All of them were in the quarries with my husband when they were young. All of them cough too much. All of them drink too much. They thought the mills and quarries would kill them young, so they drowned themselves in booze and cigarettes. They’ve lived too long. Their kids left long ago — God knows where — just like mine did. The man in the middle? Stubby Cole? He once beat his wife so bad she had to go to the hospital for a week.”

Two cars head across the marble bridge at a high rate of speed, as if racing, and everyone stops to watch them streak past. Both vehicles are full of sullen-looking boys, who sit low and wear baseball caps turned backward. The boys coolly ignore the odd assembly on the sidewalk, and in a moment the cars screech around a corner and disappear.

“See that marble bridge over there?” Emma asks, as if nothing happened. “Seven people have jumped to their deaths from it. All marble workers or their wives. Many, many people were not happy here.” She shakes her head, looks down at the cracked pavement, then sets off at a brisk pace toward the bridge.

“That large house way up on the hill?” she says, pointing beyond the bridge to a weathered brick mansion that perches on a ledge. “That used to be the company hospital, where they treated workers for reduced rates, mostly so they could keep them out of the big hospital in Rutland and control the statistics regarding the number of patients and their diseases and injuries, which might have attracted unwanted negative attention to the company. Here’s a statistic for you: At one time there were more bars per capita in Millbridge than any other town or city in the state.”

Emma looks behind her. Half of her group has deserted and are now heading back toward the museum at a trot. The rest stand their ground, waiting for more.

“Now I will take you to my house, where another retired marble worker, Bill Parker, is at this moment sitting in front of his TV, on which God-knows-what is playing as he prepares to become a fossil in a limestone formation himself.

She pauses, then adds, “I’ve been adding ground marble to his food for a long time because everybody needs more calcium in their diet and it’s probably not that dangerous, but it has destroyed his appetite over time. Ground marble, or calcium carbonate, can be used as an extender and sometimes the main ingredient in products like latex paint, antacids, and toothpaste. Marble didn’t kill Bill Parker. I did. I fed him less and less. By the time he figured out what was happening, he was too weak to do anything about it. The prevailing colors of Vermont marble are white and blue; this is now also true of my husband.”

That does it for her remaining audience. They back sheepishly away, as if pretending to follow her even as they leave. Someone mumbles, “Thank you.” The boy on the bike also abandons her.

Emma walks on alone, heading for the marble bridge. She leans against the thick stone railing and looks down at the foaming water as it tumbles frenziedly around smooth boulders and then plummets over the falls.

We’ll be fossils all right, she thinks. We’ll be limestone. We’ll be marble. I’m not the only one who’s changing. Thousands of years from now, Bill will be an ashtray.

People. History. A bad joke.

She remembers reading that on April 14, 1730, Captain William Gates and a party of Iroquois guides beached their canoes about three hundred yards north of where she stands. Gates was the first white man to set foot in what would become Millbridge fifty years later. The Indians were here long before all that, of course, but even they were latecomers compared to the fossils embedded in the rocks all around her.

The rush of water makes Emma dizzy, but she stares deeply into it anyway. Gradually, her eyes adjust to the glare, and then, through the sparkling green and blue camouflage of the water, she sees the mottled surface of a white limestone streambed. She feels a light, cool spray on her face. She inhales the drops and thinks of her father sawing those huge blocks and breathing the stone mist.

Marble is a kind of living thing.

She understands this completely now.

She doesn’t move, not a muscle, still as stone.