The Brass Stand

Tess had lived in Ludlow for exactly ten days, and she was still counting the days like a prisoner marks a wall. Was that fair? She honestly didn't know. She was sixty-two years old, she had retired from a city hospital where she'd spent nearly forty years telling people to breathe, and now her biggest daily decision was whether to have her coffee on the porch or in the kitchen.

The porch won. It always won. From her porch she could see the old cycle polo court at the end of her street, a converted tennis court with a wooden bleacher on one side, and she found herself watching it every morning like it owed her money.

Who played cycle polo, anyway? She had asked her neighbor that exact question on day two, and the woman, Dorothy, had looked at her like she'd asked who breathed air. Everyone in Ludlow, apparently. Well, not everyone. But enough of them. Grown men and women on bicycles swinging long mallets at a little ball, every Saturday morning, rain or shine.

"You'll come see it," Dorothy had said. "Inga runs the farmers market on the court Saturdays. You'll love Inga. Everyone loves Inga."

Tess wasn't sure she loved anyone yet. She missed her old city in a way that surprised her. She had spent decades caring for other people, patients, her late parents, a long line of cats with unfortunate names, and she had never once been married, which people in Ludlow seemed to find fascinating. She'd been asked three times in one week whether there had "ever been anyone special." There had. Several someones, actually, over the years, and she'd learned to say "a few" and change the subject.

Still. A fresh start was a fresh start. Even if the fresh start mostly involved watching a tennis court and wondering if she'd made a terrible mistake.

On Saturday morning she walked down to the market. It was a proper little market, too, six or seven stalls set up along the edge of the court, tomatoes and honey and a man selling what he insisted was homemade root beer. And there, holding court near the gate, was a tall woman with white hair and the posture of someone who had disciplined children for a living.

"You must be Tess!" the woman called out before Tess had said a word. "Dorothy told me you'd be coming. I'm Inga. I run this whole circus."

"Inga. Nice to meet you. Dorothy speaks very highly of you."

"Dorothy would say that to your face and then complain about your casserole behind your back, but thank you." Inga laughed at her own joke, which Tess found instantly endearing. "You're the new nurse, yes? Sixty-two, just retired from the city?"

"Word travels fast in this town, doesn't it?"

"Word travels at the speed of gossip here, which is faster than light. Scientists should study it. Can you help me set up? Doris didn't show and my back is sixty-eight years old and full of opinions."

Anyway, Tess helped. She carried crates of squash and arranged a table of jams and answered approximately forty questions about her life, and by nine o'clock she felt like she'd been interviewed for a job she hadn't applied for.

That was when she saw the stand.

It sat at the edge of the bleacher, brass, tall, with two adjustable arms that could hold a book open at any angle. A reading stand, obviously, the kind a choir might use. Except nobody was reading from it, and it stood slightly apart from everything else, like a guest at a party who knew no one.

"What's that?" she asked Inga, nodding toward it.

"Oh! The brass stand. Isn't it lovely? The polo players used to use it to hold the rulebook during matches. See the arms? You can set the pages at any height, any angle. Very clever piece of work. The club bought it back in, oh, the nineties? Don't quote me."

"It's beautiful work. Why is it standing all the way over here?"

Inga's face did something odd. Not much. Just a little tightening around the eyes, the kind of expression Tess had spent forty years learning to read on the faces of families waiting for news.

"Well," Inga said, "it spent one night holding a lantern, and after that night nobody much wanted it at center court. Superstition, probably! Small towns run on superstition the way cars run on gasoline."

"Holding a lantern? What night was this?"

"A night match, years ago. They lit the court with lamps and the stand held one so the referee could see the rulebook. It was a special occasion, I don't remember why. And, well. Things happened that night." She waved a hand, the universal gesture of a woman refusing to elaborate. "Would you like some honey? Burt's honey is the best in three counties."

That was it. That was all Inga would say, and Tess had met enough patients' relatives to know when a door was being politely but firmly closed. She took the honey. It was very good honey.

It was later, near noon, when the stands were coming down, that she got the rest of the story, or at least a version of it. The young man hosing off the court was Jeremy, the groundskeeper, thirty-five years old, born and raised in Ludlow, and he had the particular sadness of a person who loved a thing everyone else had stopped loving.

"You're the new nurse," he said. "Everyone says you fixed Doris's shoulder already."

"I suggested she ice it. Somehow that counts as medicine here."

"Pretty much, yes." He shut off the hose and looked at the brass stand, then at her. "Inga tell you about the night match?"

"She told me things happened and then sold me honey."

Jeremy laughed. "That's Inga for you. Okay, so. The night match. Five years ago, maybe six? They set up lamps around the court, and the stand there held the referee's lantern. Big crowd, hot night, bleachers full. And in the middle of the third period, a bat flew in."

"A bat?"

"A bat. Out of nowhere, right over the bleachers. You know how bats fly, all jerky and fast, and it kept swooping down at people. Somebody screamed. Then more people screamed. Then the whole bleacher kind of... lost its mind."

"Did anyone get hurt?"

"Not really. A woman fell over a cooler. Somebody's folding chair went sideways. And here's the part people argue about." He leaned on the hose reel as a man settling in. "Everyone who was there says the crowd started applauding. Big, rhythmic clapping, hundreds of hands, right in the middle of the panic. And when you ask them why, they all say the same thing. They weren't clapping at the match. They were clapping at the bat. Trying to drive it off with the noise. All at the same time, same rhythm, like one person decided it and every hand followed."

Tess looked at the stand. It caught the afternoon sun and threw it back, bright as a coin. "People clap at things all the time. Maybe they were clapping to calm down."

"Maybe. That's what the sensible people say. But the folks who were there, they don't say it that way. They say the clapping started before anybody decided to clap. And my uncle was there, and he doesn't talk about that night, and my uncle talks about everything." Jeremy shrugged. "Anyway. After that they stopped doing night matches. And the stand got moved over there, and nobody uses it, but nobody throws it out either, because Inga won't allow it."

"Why won't she allow it?"

"Because it's a beautiful stand and because Inga doesn't believe in bats, apparently." He grinned, but the grin didn't quite hold. "You'll hear ten versions of that story by the end of the month. Pick your favorite."

Tess walked home with her honey and her squash and a strange itch at the back of her mind. She had seen things in forty years of nursing that she couldn't explain, and she had made peace with not explaining them. Bodies did strange things. Rooms felt wrong sometimes. Nurses didn't talk about it much, but they all knew.

Still. She stopped at her gate and looked back at the court. The brass stand stood there in the empty afternoon, arms folded up against its pole like a mantis at rest.

Why did it look like it was waiting for evening?

She went inside and made tea and told herself she was being ridiculous. She was sixty-two years old, she had a fresh start, she had good honey, and a bat story from five years ago was not going to ruin her retirement.

But she left the porch light on that night. Just in case.

Tess found out about Howard the way she found out about everything in Ludlow, which was by being told about him by someone who had already decided they were going to meet. In this case it was Dorothy, over the fence, on Wednesday.

"There's a man teaches lifting classes at the court on Thursdays. Manual handling technique, he calls it. Howard. Fifty-eight years old, widower, well, no, never married either, actually. You two should compare notes."

"Is comparing notes on being unmarried a thing people do?" Tess asked.

"It's a thing people do here. Ludlow has very few entertainment options."

So on Thursday morning Tess walked down to the court, and there he was. Howard was a big man, broad through the shoulders, with a back that had clearly been through something, because he moved the way careful people move when they've decided never to be careless again. He had six traffic cones set out on the court and a hand truck and a woman of about fifty who was practicing lifting a box of what looked like canned peaches.

"Knees, not back. Let the legs do the arguing." Howard was saying. "There. Was that so hard?"

"It was hard," the woman said.

"Well. Yes. It's supposed to be. The whole point of technique is that it's hard now so your spine isn't hard later. Go on, once more."

Tess waited by the bleacher, and when the woman was done and gone, Howard came over wiping his hands on his jeans. Up close he had gray hair cut short and eyebrows like two surprised hedgehogs.

"You're the new nurse," he said. "Dorothy's been advertising you. Tess, right? Sixty-two, never married, line of cats with terrible names?"

"Dorothy told you all of that?"

"Dorothy tells everyone everything. It's her retirement project. I'm Howard. Manual handling technique instructor, which is a fancy way of saying I teach people not to ruin their backs moving coolers at the farmers market."

"Inga mentioned you. She said her back would be in heaven if you ran the market setup."

"Inga's back and I have an arrangement. I shout at her, she ignores me, we're both happy. So. What brings you down here? Dorothy said you had questions about the market, or was it the stand?"

Tess looked at him. "The stand?"

Howard's eyebrows went up further. "The brass one. On the end of the bleacher there. Dorothy may have also mentioned that you've been asking about it."

"How much did Dorothy tell you?"

"That you asked Inga about it, that Inga fed you honey instead of answers, and that you left your porch light on."

"I did not tell Dorothy about the porch light."

"Well, she knows. Small town, Tess. Everything travels. Now, what about the stand?"

Tess walked over to it. Up close it was handsome, brass gone dull brown, a weighted base, a jointed arm that folded up like a folded wing. The mark she'd noticed on Saturday was still there, a small stamped circle near the hinge, worn almost smooth.

"Jeremy told me about the night match," she said. "The bat, the clapping."

"Ah. Jeremy's bat story." Howard said it the way you'd say a relative's conspiracy theory.

"You don't believe it?"

"I believe there was a bat and a panic and a lot of clapping. I don't believe that's the whole story, and neither does anyone who's stood next to this thing long enough." He put his hand flat on the base. "You want to hear something odd? Come here. Put your hand on it."

She did. The brass was cool and slightly rough.

"Now we wait a minute," Howard said.

"Wait for what?"

"You'll hear it. The joints. When the temperature shifts, or the wind gets under it, the arm moves a hair and the joints grind. Everybody thinks it's just old brass, stiff hinges, whatever. But listen."

Tess waited. A minute went by. Then a cloud went over the sun, the air cooled a touch, and there it was. A slow grinding sound from inside the joint, not a squeak, not metal on metal the way a stiff hinge sounds. Something rougher. Something that stopped and started.

"That's not a hinge," Tess said.

"That's what I said. First time I heard it, five years ago, I took the whole arm apart looking for the problem. Cleaned it, oiled it, put it back together. Grinding came back within a week. A hinge grinds at the hinge. This grinds down inside the base too. I put my ear against it once and the sound came from inside the column, down where there shouldn't be anything at all."

"Because it's hollow?"

"How did you know it's hollow?"

"Inga said the club bought it in the nineties and it's some kind of adjustable reading stand. The good ones have hollow bases, weighted and filled. Weighted, not filled."

Howard looked at her with something like respect. "Forty years lifting people onto gurneys and you know your furniture. Yes. Hollow base, ballast in the bottom. Except I've never been able to figure out what the ballast is, because it doesn't rattle like sand and it doesn't sit quiet like lead."

"And you never opened it?"

"I never opened it. Because it's not mine. It's the polo club's, and the polo club is basically Inga, and Inga says leave it alone." He looked at the stand, then at Tess, and something in his face shifted, the gruffness settling into something more honest. "But you're asking, and you're a nurse, and nurses don't spook easy. So. Do you want to open it with me? Right now, in daylight, which