Nobody's Fool

dry) were now empty, just as everyone had originally predicted they would be. And so people began to congratulate themselves on their original wisdom, and the residents of the once lucky, now tragically unlucky, community of Bath sat back and waited for their luck to change again. It did not.
    By 1900 Schuyler Springs had swept the field of its competitors. The Sans Souci fire of 1903 was the symbolic finish, but of course the battle had long been lost, and most everyone agreed that you couldn’t really count the Sans Souci fire as bad luck, since the blaze had almost certainly been started by the hotel’s owner in order to collect the insurance. The man had died in the blaze, apparently trying to get it started again after it became clear that the wind had shifted and that only the old original wooden structure, not the newer, grander addition, was going to burn unless he did something creative. There is always the problem of
defining
luck as it applies to humans and human endeavors. The wind changing when you don’t want it to could be construed as bad luck, but what of a man frantically rolling a drum of fuel too close to the flames he himself has set? Is he unlucky when a spark sends him to eternity?
    In any case, the town of North Bath, now, in the late autumn of 1984, was still waiting for its luck to change. There were encouraging signs. A restored Sans Souci, what was left of it, was scheduled to reopen in the summer, and a new spring had been successfully drilled on the hotel’s extensive grounds. And luck, so the conventional wisdom went, ran in cycles.
    The morning of the day before Thanksgiving, five winters after that first elm turned on the residents of Upper Main, cleaving old Mrs. Merriweather’s roof and reducing Mrs. Gruber’s birdbath to rubble, Miss Beryl, always an early riser, awoke even earlier than usual, with a vague sense of unease. As she sat at the edge of her bed trying to trace its source, she had a nosebleed, a real gusher. It came upon her quickly and was just as quickly finished. She caught most of the blood with a swatch of tissue from the box she kept on her bedstand, and as soon as her nose stopped bleeding she flushed the tissue emphatically down the toilet. Was it the quick disappearance of the evidence or the nosebleed itself that left her feeling refreshed? She wasn’t sure, but she felt even better after she’d bathed and dressed, and when she went into her front room to drink her tea, she was surprised and delighted to discover that it had snowed during the night. Nobody had predicted snow, but there it was anyway, the kind of heavy wet snow that sits up tall on railings and tree branches, the whole street white. In the gray predawn, everything outside looked otherworldly, and she watched the dark street and sipped her tea until a car slalomed silently by, leaving its track in the fresh snow, and the vague sense of unease she’d felt upon waking returned, though not as urgently. Who will it be this winter? she wondered, parting the blinds so she could see up into the trees.
    Though Miss Beryl was far too close an observer of reality to credit the idea of divine justice in this world, there were times when she could almost see God’s design hovering just out of sight. So far, she’d been lucky. God had permitted tree limbs to fall on her neighbors, not herself. But she doubted He would continue to ignore her in this business of falling limbs. This winter He’d probably lower the boom.
    â€œThis’ll be my year,” she said out loud, addressing her husband, Clive Sr., who sat on the television, smiling at her wisely. Dead now for twenty years, Clive Sr. could boast an even temperament. From his vantage point behind glass, nothing much got to him, and if he worried that this might be his wife’s winter, he didn’t show it. “You hear me, star of my firmament?”Miss Beryl prodded. When Clive Sr. had nothing to offer on this score, Miss Beryl frowned at him. “I might as well talk to Ed,” she told her husband. “Go ahead, then,” Clive Sr. seemed to say, safe behind his glass.
    â€œWhat do you think, Ed?” Miss Beryl asked. “Is this my year?”
    Driver Ed, Miss Beryl’s Zamble mask, stared down at her from his perch on the wall. Ed had a dour human face modified by antelope horns and a toothed beak, all of which added up, to Miss Beryl’s way of thinking, to a mortified