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.