America America (2 page)

A preserve runs behind the cemetery, part of the tract that Henry Bonwiller helped legislate back into wetland once the biologists understood what the Dutch pioneers had done by draining it, and now, to get away from the crowd, I moved off in that direction. I’m not a loner—a loner wouldn’t last a month in my job—but my wife had driven her own car and my father would be more than happy riding home with her. They didn’t know the Senator the way I had.

When I reached the preserve, I saw that there were birds there now in good numbers, the land looking as though it had never been anything but what it had once again become: a low swamp of cattail and willow pocked by flats of water lilies and spent rose mallow. As the Senator’s doubters say, it’s taken us three centuries to get back to where we started. A sandhill crane was gliding low over the scrub. The entrance to the preserve itself is down a short, spined hill from the high ground of the cemetery, and behind me as I entered I could just see the tops of the buses as they turned from the lot onto the highway. In the hollow where I stood I could hear a lone bullfrog but couldn’t see it anywhere in the spread of murk stirred by aquatic bugs and mysteriously swaying stems. Boardwalks skirt the edges of the marsh, rough-hewn planks of silvered cedar spiked together only a few inches above the water: I set out on one of them. The occasional catfish swifted itself into the depths. A quarter mile behind me a crowd of mourners was still about, but from the trough where I walked I could see none of it; I crossed the central bog, hidden to shoulder height by cattails, then climbed to the ridge that runs above the creek. At the top, I rested on a bench beneath a giant bur oak, wider than it was tall, its roots skeletonizing the long shoulder of earth that looks out over half of Carrol County.

What you aren’t prepared for is the way children change your past, too. That’s the thing. Everyone knows that they change your future, but to see them in their innocence—in their cribs and then on their bicycles and then in their cars, at their soccer games and then their recitals and soon enough at their graduations and their weddings—to see them through all of that is to know that everything you have ever done, every act you’ve ever had a part in, has another meaning as well, and that it is both greater and more terrible than the one you knew. Not just the meaning it had for you but the one it had for someone’s child, as well. That’s what came back to me now, more than anything else. The unavoidable truth of that. That all one’s deeds—those of honor and those of duplicity and those of veniality and those of ruin—that all one’s deeds live doubly. I can only marvel at the forbearance of my own parents and of others that are part of this story.

We’re twenty minutes from Lake Erie here and not that much farther from Lake Ontario, and when you get up into the breeze, you’re aware of the maritime lucidity in the sky and the feel of it in the air: a coastal hint to the winds even though we’re four hundred miles from the Atlantic. My climb had taken a good quarter hour. To the east, I could see only a few cars left in the lot. Ahead of me, toward Masaguint, where Trieste Millbury lives with her parents, the first whiffs of a stratus layer were forming. Those clouds have always made the daylight heavens look even grander to me, lit from below at this hour like silver yard-marks but not yet dominating the eye as the more typical cumulus do here in the fall, with their mountainous white reach and pounding storms. I looked out on a full circle around. In a couple of hours the sky above Masaguint would be a dark gap in the horizon that’s otherwise lit at night now all the way from Islington to Steppan. That’s another thing this story is about, I suppose: how there’s no going back.

I rose from the bench. Masaguint was behind me now, the cemetery ahead. I suppose the developers will get to the last of it soon enough. What remains, the part where Trieste lives, is embedded with car-sized boulders from the glacier; but these days that doesn’t stop anyone. No doubt they’ll call the subdivisions Granite Ridge or Boulder Brook Estates and turn the great, buried stones into pillars at the entranceways or fix them upright and carve them with the numbers of the houses. Some think that’s not coming for another decade; but I believe it’s sooner.

On my return, the cemetery was nearly empty. A couple of mortuary employees in worn suits were stacking chairs, and from beyond the hill in the distance a tractor had appeared: the grave diggers. I had a good look, crossing the decks over the marsh. My last view of Senator Henry Bonwiller.

The mound of earth lay between us. The tractor slowed and a man jumped out of the scoop, and then the driver began pushing the pile toward the grave. I moved under one of the oaks. Even when they’re burying a senator, grave diggers swear and spit and ash their cigarettes onto the grass, and that’s what they did now as soon as they had filled the hole. Then they picked up their tools and proceeded to do a rather tender job of smoothing the contours of the dirt back into the lawn. Henry Bonwiller had always been a friend to the working man.

When they were done, they got into the tractor again and drove back over the hill, and it was then that another man appeared. With a hitching gait he stepped from behind a tree and limped across the grass toward the grave, one leg lagging behind the other so that he had to swing it around his cane. That’s how I recognized him, in fact: the limp, and then the carved handle of the cane.

At the grave, he stopped and looked around, then bowed his head. He was as old as the Senator but even from a distance I could see that he still had that certain kind of roughly determined American face that you see less and less often around here. Not to be mercenary about it, but if he’d taken off his hat it would have made a front-page picture.

He was worn out, but the last one standing.

You could hear starlings now in the trees. But then in a few minutes the rumble of the engine returned, and after another moment the tractor appeared again over the berm, this time carrying the sod. It crossed the grounds and stopped within a few yards of the man’s back. But he didn’t even look up. I could tell that the grave diggers didn’t know what to do. The driver turned off the engine. You could hear a boom box then, playing some kind of angry talk radio—it’s going to be the death of newspapers like mine—until he reached down and shut that off, too. Then he sat there in the seat while his helper climbed out of the scoop and stood looking the other way. I suppose they were happy to have another minute to smoke.

Presently, the driver climbed down and the two of them went to work restoring the grass. They filled in down the length of the plot with squares of sod, carefully again, using buck knives to cut the last pieces to size. But it was only after they’d finished and set off across the lawn again in the tractor that the man finally looked up; and when I stepped out from behind the tree he finally looked over at me, too, but just for a moment. We must have been fifty feet from each other, but I’m sure he didn’t know who I was. I had a decent look at his face, though, and then at the duck’s head handle of his cane. I took a couple of steps closer and saw then that his wife was there, too, standing behind a tree. She looked wrecked, I have to say, and when she noticed me watching she gestured me away with her arm.

That’s when I turned back and found that her husband had lowered himself onto one knee, and even from where I stood, I knew he was weeping.

That was it. The quiet end of all of it.

There was no one else alive now who knew.

II

1971

I
WAS RAISED
ten miles from that cemetery, in a town that was almost entirely built and owned by a single family, the Metareys. The town is called Saline, which if you’re an old-timer rhymes with
malign
, and if you’re a newcomer, with
machine
. We’re an hour south of Buffalo in western New York State, in what used to be the territory of the Erie and Seneca Indians. In 1881, a young boy named Eoghan Metarey arrived penniless with his father in Fort Clinton, New York, having endured half a year’s voyage from their farming hamlet in the east of Scotland, and the two of them made their way west together to our low hills and hardwood forests. They shoed horses and shoveled barns for their meals and passage, but by 1890 they’d saved enough money to open a hardware store, and from there Eoghan Metarey launched his empire. Within five years he’d bought his first large tract of land, and within another five he needed a post to house all the woodsmen and mill hands and quarriers he employed on it. He became the first great capitalist in this part of the world and one of the first to found a settlement for his workers; but unlike the other tycoons of his day, he actually lived in the town he founded. When he first set to building Saline, a group of renegade Seneca was still roaming the woods; he wasted no time in dispatching them. A few were hired as guides and the rest paid to move south, so that by the turn of the century a visitor could take an Otis elevator to the top of Eoghan Metarey’s six-story, granite-faced New World Bank of Saline, sit for a cup of Chinese tea, and enjoy a small, slate-colored view through glass at Lake Erie, twenty miles to the west, where those Seneca once fished.

Until the end of the Second World War, both Saline and the Metarey family prospered. The town’s stately central square started at the wide marble steps of a Greek-columned library bearing Eoghan Metarey’s name, and its walks were lit by cast-bronze gaslights bearing the name of his foundry. Across the street the public park was divided in two by the brook he had dug, its pumped water tumbling all spring and summer over a set of falls that had been carved from his granite. The downtown was six blocks long and by virtue of the Metarey quarries exhibited the elegant, stone-fronted façade of a good-sized city. From the peak of St. Anne’s Hill, which started at the rear of the last commercial building, a visitor’s eyes were drawn west toward Lake Erie, the same beckoning glimpse of water that could be seen from the top floor of the bank. At Port Carrol, Eoghan Metarey kept the largest yacht in the United States—or so it was said by Saline’s old-timers. My grandfather was born in the Scottish Lowlands, but my father was born on Eoghan Metarey’s property, in the house I grew up in myself, a tin-roofed clinker-brick saltbox that was split in two vertically: 410A Dumfries Street. 410B Dumfries was lived in by a man named Eugene McGowar, who also worked for the Metareys and who, like my father, always seemed grateful to have found himself ashore in a new world—even if it no longer thrived as it once had—in a neighborhood in which every block had been built by Eoghan Metarey and in which every house was the same.

Except for Eoghan Metarey’s own, of course. By the time I was born, in 1955, most of the Metarey quarries and mills were silent and a good many of the Metarey workers had moved east, but the downtown still looked the same as it always had, and anyone who visited was still taken past Aberdeen West, the Metarey estate. Aberdeen West was a twenty-four-room brick and stone Edwardian manor that was by then occupied by Eoghan Metarey’s youngest son, Liam, who had taken over the family enterprises. It sat at the apex of a hundred-thousand-acre triangle of land—almost a quarter of the county. Eoghan Metarey had been born to a village farrier, but by the age of thirty-six he’d already laid the railroad linking Albany with Washington and had mined the richest coal seam in Nova Scotia. This was at a time when coal powered most of New England’s industry and would soon power all the new electric plants for New York’s growing train-stop suburbs. Shortly before the first settlement boom in our part of the state, he’d built his three lumber mills between Saline and Lake Erie and bought the forests to supply them. And that wasn’t even all of it: in an era when all the grand public buildings were going up in Albany and Buffalo and Manhattan, he’d dug limestone and granite quarries that cut great slabs of rock twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, lit by Edison’s amazing new invention, and laid them on flatbed Metarey railcars that rolled right up to his chutes. And a year before the onset of World War I, he’d made a partnership with John D. Rockefeller in oil wells two thousand miles west in Alberta, Canada. Like many such men, he always seemed to know what was coming.

During my childhood it was Liam Metarey who took care of the town. The fact that he so closely resembled his father didn’t hurt his cause with the old-timers, either, who seemed to believe that God had offered special safeguard for them in the form of two nearly identical-looking old-world Scottish saviors. Both Metareys were tall, restless men with a narrow nose bent severely at the apex and Gaelic cheekbones pushing in on darkly staring eyes—eyes that still announce themselves in every photograph ever taken of either of them. It wasn’t their color so much as their mood and the fact that their soulful look contrasted so strikingly with the martial cast of the cheeks and nose. Both men, in fact, looked more like artists than industrialists—at least they always have to me. More like those old photographs of Kafka in Prague or Picasso in Paris than like any Rockefeller or Vanderbilt.

And the Metareys always drove ordinary cars, too, and generally wore the same clothes that are still worn today by the regular citizenry around here. For Sunday dinners Liam Metarey’s wife, June, shopped at Burdick’s Market herself, just as my mother and all the other housewives did. All three of the Metarey children—the two girls, Christian and Clara, and their brother, Andrew—attended Martin Van Buren Elementary, then Governor Minuit Junior High, then Franklin Roosevelt Senior High, like all the rest of us, and they all walked home on the same path we did. At one point, just before John Kennedy was inaugurated, Liam Metarey had worked for President Eisenhower as the secretary of the treasury—I still have a fifty-dollar bill printed with his angular, left-handed signature—but those few months, as far as I know, were the only time the family had absented itself from Saline. Otherwise, they lived all year on their estate and we all lived on land that had once been their horse pastures.

By the time I was born, the Metarey holdings had already been in decline for more than a decade; but even in that state they were magnificent. They still included brick furnaces, a paper plant, the New World Bank of Saline, the iron foundry, a fiberglass boat works in Buffalo, the two remaining lumber mills, and coal seams and oil wells in several Canadian provinces. The yacht was gone, but they kept a sailboat on Lake Erie and owned nearly three hundred houses in Saline and Islington, which Liam Metarey continued to rent out at rates that even the renters found reasonable. Two of their spent lime and granite quarries had been converted into lakes, which they stocked with trout. Port Carrol was half an hour away, but if you grew up in Saline you learned to fish and row and maybe drive an outboard on the old Metarey Lime Quarry #3, and you learned to dive off the high rocks at Granite Mine #1. My father and the other men from the neighborhood took home quite a few nice browns from Metarey waters, just as they took home quite a few nice deer and pheasant from Metarey game lands in winter. For these and other reasons, Liam Metarey was well liked even by the men who worked for him.