The Turn of Marlow Court

There was once a street called Marlow Court, which had eleven houses upon it and no way out but the way in.

Every Sunday, as the church bell down the hill struck six, a blue stone was found upon one porch or another. It was the size of a loaf of bread and painted the blue of a robin's egg, though no robin ever laid such an egg. Whoever found it upon their step was said to have the Turn and by seven o'clock the other ten houses had each sent over a casserole, as one does for a death.

What the Turn was, nobody could say.

Now in the spring of the year this story concerns, the stone was found upon the step of number seven, where Walter Marsh had lived for forty-one years and where, three weeks before, he had stopped living. His daughter Dell had come home from the city for the burying and had not yet gone back. She stood in the front room in her father's cardigan, which had hung on the hook by the door and which she had put on because the house was cold. His slippers sat beneath the hook, side by side, toes to the wall. She had not moved them. She heard the knock.

It was Mrs. Okafor from number three, holding a dish with a cloth over it.

"It's on your step," said Mrs. Okafor.

"I know what it is," said Dell.

She looked down. The stone sat on the welcome mat, very blue and damp from the dew. She bent to take it up and Mrs. Okafor caught her by the wrist, very gently.

"You know you mustn't move it until it's done."

"I know."

Mrs. Okafor put the casserole into her hands. It was still warm. It was macaroni.

"Eat something," she said and went down the path.

By noon the others had come, one after another, each with a dish and none of them came in. They stood on the walk in their Sunday clothes and spoke to her over the gate and Dell, who knew what each would say, found she could not stop them from saying it.

Mr. Henderson of number nine said that in his opinion the thing was to bury something in the yard. He said it with his hat in his hands. He had buried a casserole himself, in the autumn of '98 and the street had gone on exactly as before and he would not call that a failure. "Your father held the lantern for me," he said. "Never laughed. Not once."

The Pruitt sisters of number two said it was the poem. They said it in one voice, as they said most things. "He did it for us, the year Edith had her operation," said the elder. "Stood on our lawn at dusk." "Which poem?" said Dell, though she knew. The elder said it was about a field and the younger said it was about a ship and they looked at one another with old astonishment, like two women who find they have been wearing each other's hats.

The Okafors said it was the mailbox. Red paint, two coats, the year of the flood, when the water had come up to the foot of Marlow Court and stopped. Mr. Okafor said Walter had painted it with him both springs after and had never once let him pay for the paint.

The Lindqvist boy, who was nine, said that his grandfather said you left the door open all night and that twice it had been done and both times a cat had come home. "Mr. Marsh let me hold the stone once," he said. "It's heavier than it looks."

Only one man said nothing. He was Mr. Quill of number eleven, at the very end of the street, who looked at the stone on the step as a man looks at a dog that has bitten him once. When the others had gone he stayed at the gate.

"I put a teaspoon of sugar on the windowsill," he said, low. "Every time it's mine. Just the one." He turned his cap around once in his hands. "The night my wife went, your father sat in my kitchen till morning. Didn't say a word about it. About the stone, I mean. Drank my tea."

He went home and his back was very straight.

Now it must be told that on Marlow Court there was a ledger. It was kept in the hall of number four by a retired surveyor named Mr. Abernathy, in a binding of green cloth and it had two columns. One was headed Nothing Happened and the other Something.

The first ran on for pages, in ink that went from black to brown. The second held two entries. The first said: Streetlight at the corner failed in March. Household had skipped the Turn the Sunday previous (Gatewood). Mr. Gatewood's dog was not seen again. The second said: Rain, 4 days, in August. Household had recited a poem (Pruitt). Rain thought coincidental by some.

"It is a very good street," said Mr. Abernathy and closed the book with his pencil.

Dell went home. The casseroles stood along the kitchen counter in a row of eleven and she lifted each cloth and looked beneath and sat down at her father's table and ate a little of each, because it seemed rude not to. His mug was in the drying rack. Her telephone lay beside her plate with a message on it she had listened to eleven times since March. She did not play it now. She knew it by heart. Dell. It's me. Nothing, nothing, I only, the street's standing. Ring when you like.

She had rung on the Thursday. He had not been well enough to come to the telephone. On the Saturday she had been going to come.

She got up and went into the study.

In the second drawer of his desk, under a box of rubber bands, was a black notebook and on its first page, in his square hand: The Turn. Walter Marsh. Began 1983.

She read it by the lamp.

Year one. Swept the whole street at dawn. Nothing happened.

Year four. Sang to the drains. Nothing happened. Mrs. Pruitt saw me and has not mentioned it.

Year nine. Painted the stone green. Street uneasy by Wednesday. Painted it blue again. Street easier. Do not do this again.

Year twelve. Stood in the road with an umbrella, though it was fine. Got wet at midnight, but that was the weather.

Year nineteen. Said it aloud to the street, plainly: I do not know what you want. Nothing happened.

Year twenty-one. Sat on the curb all night and told the street about Margaret.

Dell put her hand flat on the page.

Margaret was her mother. Her mother had been gone since Dell was eleven and that autumn Dell had been in her bedroom upstairs with the window open a hand's width, because she could not sleep. She remembered a figure on the curb under the streetlamp, quite still, with its back to the house. She remembered the sound, which was not crying but was a low steady talking, as a man talks who is telling a long story to someone who cannot answer. She had stood at the window until her feet were cold. She had thought: I should go down. She had thought it until the sky went gray and she had not gone down and in the morning her father had made her toast.

She turned the page.

The next entry said: Did it again. Told it more.

After that the entries grew shorter and farther apart. Left my shoes on the Henderson step. Took them back in the morning. Cannot say why. And near the end, in a hand that had begun to shake: Walked the street backwards. Mr. Quill saw. Said nothing, God bless him.

The last page was dated the first of March, which was the day he had telephoned.

Think I finally have it. Will try Sunday.

He had not tried Sunday. On the Sunday he had been three days gone.

Dell turned the notebook over and shook it. She held each page to the lamp. She looked in the drawer and under it and behind it. She went through the pockets of every coat in the front room and found a button, a bus ticket, a peppermint gone soft in its paper and a receipt for a spade. She went through them again. She stood in the hall with his scarf against her face until it stopped smelling of him, or until she could no longer tell.

She did not find what he had.

On Monday the Lindqvist boy came to the gate with word from the street, that the Turn must be done between the church bell on Sunday and the church bell on Monday and that it was now half past eleven and that they would all be glad if she would begin.

She went out to the step. The stone sat where it had sat and every curtain on Marlow Court that faced her was moving.

"All right," said Dell.

She fetched the spade from the shed and dug in the front yard and buried nothing and filled the hole. She stood at the mailbox with a can of red paint that had been in the shed since before she could read and stood a long while and put the lid back on. She recited the first line of every poem she knew, which came to four. She left the front door open and sat watching it until she was cold and no cat came. She told the street her mother's name, aloud and then her father's and then she could not go on and sat with her hands between her knees.

At four o'clock the light went yellow and strange and the birds rose off every roof on Marlow Court at once and went over the hill. Every porch lamp flickered, once, together and held. The Pruitt sisters came out onto their step with their hands to their mouths. Mr. Henderson took off his hat. Mr. Okafor put his arm about his wife.

Then the light came back to its ordinary color and a dog barked and a child was called in to supper and that was all.

"Was that it?" called the Lindqvist boy across the road. "Was that you?"

"I don't know," said Dell.

She saw the faces turn. She saw that it was the one thing she should not have said and she saw also that each of them had said it to themselves a hundred times.

She went inside. She stood in the kitchen with her hand on the back of her father's chair, which was the chair nearest the window, with the cushion worn to the shape of him. She thought of the last line of the notebook and how a man who writes Will try Sunday is a man who knows what Sunday is for.

At a quarter to five she carried out her father's kitchen table, the one with the burn from the iron and set it on the crown of the road. She brought the chairs and the stool from the bathroom and a crate, until there were eleven places and then one more. She set the casseroles down the middle with their cloths off. At the head, where the sun would last longest, she put his mug, filled with tea and the notebook, open and on the notebook the stone.

Every window on Marlow Court had a face in it. Dell sat down beside the stone. She said, "Dad," and found nothing to follow it and so she ate.

The bell down the hill began to strike six. At the fifth stroke she heard a chair drawn out across the road behind her, wood on stone, the way a chair is drawn by one who means to sit.

At the sixth stroke a hand came past her shoulder, with paint upon the fingers still wet and set down beside the first stone a second one, blue as a robin's egg, which she had not put there.