Fallen Land (40 page)

8:30 AM:
His mother has given him her hairdryer, a bucket of warm soapy water, and a sponge as big as his head. “Turn the hairdryer on a small section and heat it up. When the crayon is warm and soft, wash it with the sponge,” she says, looking as though she is about to cry. She watches while he turns on the hairdryer and heats up a postcard-sized section of floor where the word
AWAY
has been written. His own handwriting looks nothing like the writing in the hall. When he can see the wax beginning to melt he turns off the hairdryer and draws the sponge up out of the water, squeezing it before he wipes it over the floor. He scrubs the melting word, moving feathery arcs of foam back and forth, watching the red wax begin to smear and disperse. He can see that it’s going to take a long time to clean the entire hallway. It looks impossible to do in a day.

10:15 AM:
He is on his fifth bucket of warm soapy water and has managed to clean a section of floor the size of a bath towel, although there is still a haze of pinkish wax covering parts of it where he could not get all the crayon to come off. As he heats and scrubs, his arms and back and knees and neck all aching, the sweat running along his body, he wonders who the man is that has done these terrible things, who took him up in his arms when he walked outside, who has tried in so many ways to drive them from the house. He has read about ghosts and poltergeists but thinks that neither of these are a way of describing the man. Instead, the man reminds him of a troll or an ogre, a creature who is real and fleshy and wicked, who lives in a dark hidden place, and wants no one to pass over his bridge or disturb his rest.

12:05 PM:
His mother comes to check on his progress. He is scrubbing so slowly, barely a quarter of the way along the hall, not even touching the walls or the doors, that she says, “Okay, time for a break. Come have some lunch.” They eat in silence. He pays no attention to the food on his plate. He puts it in his mouth and tastes nothing but soap and wax. When his mother’s back is turned, Louise winks at him and reaches out to touch his hand, which is red and raw, either from abrasion or heat or melted crayon. He does not know where his father is.

1:00 PM:
He is still sitting at the island in the kitchen, between Louise and his mother, when his father comes through the back door. “I think Copley and I should go for a walk,” his father says. “I think we should talk about things.” Although they are not touching, he feels his mother’s body grow tense. “Where are you going to walk?” she asks. “Just back in the woods, maybe into the reserve.” His father’s voice sounds calm and flat. “Cop and I need to discuss what all of this means.” “Nathaniel—” his mother begins, but his father interrupts her. “It’s okay, Julia. We won’t be long. We’ll be back soon. He has a job to finish this afternoon.”

1:10
PM:
There is low cloud over the woods and the fog from overnight still has not cleared; if anything, it is growing thicker and more opaque. His father says nothing as the two of them walk to the back gate, which is already unlocked. “The gate,” he says. “It’s okay,” says his father, “I was just out here a while ago. I was looking for those stairs and that chimney. And you know what? I
still
couldn’t find them.” After his father closes and locks the gate they are alone in the woods, standing in the fog beneath corn-yellow leaves.

1:15 PM:
His father leads him toward the stand of fir trees not far from the back gate. When he looks at the house he notices how the trees and fence block the view: he can’t see the house and the house can’t see him. He looks up through the twisting branches of one of the cottonwood trees. “You still haven’t climbed a tree, have you, Cop?” He shakes his head; the first branches are far above the ground. “It’s really an experience every child should have,” his father says, pulling a coil of rope from the pocket of his coat. “I want to help you climb this tree.” He watches as his father throws the rope up over the lowest branch, which is five or six times higher than his father is tall, and catches the other end when it comes down. “Come here.” He steps toward his father, who threads the rope through the small loops at the waist of his jeans, twisting it around his leather belt. His father ties a knot and then another knot and yanks several times on the rope to see if it’s secure. “Okay, so here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to pull you up to that branch so you can climb on it.” “No,” he says, feeling his legs dance, “no, please, no!” And then, before he can run away, his feet are off the ground and the rope tightens around his waist. He grips the rope above his head but the noose around his waist pushes the wind out of him; he struggles to breathe as his father pulls him up through the air, the world falling away in spinning lurches as his head approaches the branch. “Now reach up,” his father says from below, “and when you can, you grab that branch and pull yourself up on top of it. Don’t be afraid, I’m holding the rope.”

—:— PM:
Sliding out of time, he forgets where he is, loses sensation in his body, slips away from his arms and legs, connected only by the head to his body, the two of them suspended in air, rising, rising, trying to separate from his body, and then a knock pushes his arms and legs back into their flesh, his two heads joining up first, aching from the blow of the limb against his crown. He reaches for the branch, fumbles onto the wet ridged surface, pulls himself up, trembling, the breath coming back to him, one leg over the branch, straddling it, his chest collapsing, arms clutching, struggling to hold on to the wet bark, seeking purchase on the rough edges. He looks for his father down below but the fog whites out the ground and fills his lungs. “Copley?” his father calls, “you all right? Stand up so I can see you. Come on, stand up! I want to see you stand up. You’re climbing a tree!” He pushes his chest off the branch and sits upright, looks back at the trunk, three or four feet away, and begins to scoot his body in reverse, tightening his legs around the branch as he moves, teetering from side to side, his balance precarious, until he reaches the trunk. He exhales. He inhales. His father hates him. His father is trying to kill him. “
Now
, Copley! I want to see you stand up. I’m not letting you down from there until you stand up on that branch and admit what you did. I want to hear a confession. I want you to stand up and tell me what you did. Copley? Say something!”

—:— PM:
It may have been seconds or minutes although it feels like many days of sleeping and waking, of dreaming in and out of consciousness as the fog closes around him, thickening and rising up until it is lying beneath the branch, the surface of a silvery white lake. He will walk the length of the branch, believing that if he falls, he will fall only into water, that he will be able to swim back to the branch, pull himself out of the water, and continue his walk. He knows how to swim, he was always good at the balance beam, his dance teacher in Boston said he walked the most natural straight line she had ever seen. There was a floating log in the lake near his grandfather’s house in New Hampshire, which they last visited two years ago during the summer vacation. He swam with his mother out to the log and she held it still at one end while he climbed on top of it, pulled his body upright by gradual degrees, and walked back and forth along its length until his mother let go and he walked for a full minute, she said, timing him, as the log rolled gently beneath his feet on the surface of the silvery white New England lake. Here the tree is holding the branch instead of his mother, so it will not turn beneath his feet. It is wet like that other branch was wet, it has ridges along its bark as that other log had ridges. He can walk its length, back and forth, without having to worry that it will begin to spin too fast, and that he will eventually plunge forward or backward into the void. Not a void, not the air, but water, the silvery white lake of fog on which the branch of the cottonwood floats, a body of water that will buoy him up if he falls.

—:— PM:
His father’s voice is distant and small and he cannot see the man, nor does he believe that his father can see him. All he wants is to be back on the ground. All he wants is for this terror to stop and for the three of them to go back to Boston. He reaches behind him, gripping the rough trunk as firmly as he can, and draws his legs up so his feet are resting in front of him on the branch. He turns, swinging his legs to one side, so that if he wished, he could lean back in space and hang from the limb by his legs. Instead, he begins to stand, clinging to the trunk, his knees wobbling and watery, and just as he is nearly upright, the rope still knotted around his waist, he cries out, “Help me,” before slipping and flying into the lake of fog.

W
hen he comes up from the cellar, rifle over his arm, pushing aside the gates of camouflaging boughs and trees, Paul can see the man on the ground holding the rope, leaning backward toward the stream, pulling and losing his footing. At the other end of the rope, the child is in midair, struggling, reaching up, trying to pull himself along the line, whimpering in a strangled voice, “Help!
Help
me!” It looks like the man is hanging his son, a noose tightening around the child’s neck as his father tugs at the rope from the ground, grunting. A low gasping comes from the child, then the sound of his sleeves rubbing against rope, slippery and synthetic. From this angle through the fog, the boy looks more than ever like Carson.

Paul shifts the rifle from his shoulder and points it skyward, braces his legs and squeezes the trigger, watching as the man startles at the sound of the blast. He turns to face Paul and as he does, the man’s fists open, letting go of the rope. The child floats through the fog, feather-light, and as Paul races to the tree, believing he can catch the boy before he hits the ground, he sees those waxy, glassy eyes staring down at him, horrified, the child’s face puzzled, his body contorting and scrambling through vapor, trying to find purchase in the mist, to grasp something, looking always down, staring at Paul, and at last crying out as his feet, his knees, his hips and chest and arms hit the ground, his head falling last, cracking against a stone rising up from the sea of fallen leaves, the rope tied tightly round his waist, his neck unmarked.

The man looks at Paul and does not even stop to attend to his son, but begins running in the direction of the stream. The rifle is still in Paul’s hands and he raises it into position, finding the man in his sights, and pulls the trigger. The whole movement, the raising of the gun, the aiming, his finger pressing against the trigger, it all happens in a single instant. He does not think. Or rather, Paul looked at the man who was trying to kill the child who resembled Carson and saw a man endangering his own child, Paul’s child. He has shot the man who was trying to kill his son.

In the fog he cannot see if the man is dead, but hears the body splash into the water. He runs down the hill and finds the man swimming away from him, thrashing in water up to his neck. Throwing the rifle down on the bank, Paul wades into the water, swims to the man, and catches him up in his arms. They stare at each other for a moment, treading water, the current pulling against their feet, drawing them westward. Paul blows out a stream of air, empties his lungs and then fills them again, closing his eyes and leaning forward, pushing both of their bodies down under the water, thick with silt and leaves and blood. He can feel the man struggling in his embrace, thrashing and crying out, the man’s voice echoing through the clogged artery of stream, twisting and bouncing across its muddy bottom.

When the man’s body is still Paul throws his head above the surface, breathes in dense wet air, and sinks below again, reaching for the man’s body, pulling it up, swimming it to the bank, and feeding the dead arms through an exposed root.

W
HEN HE TURNS
THE BODY
over the child’s eyes are open, staring at the sky. Paul leans close and holds his cheek just above the boy’s mouth. He listens against the child’s chest for a heartbeat, searches for a pulse in the thin neck, in the wrists. The rock is dark with blood, the boy’s eyes crossed, glazed ceramic balls, blood marking his brow. As Paul looks into those dead eyes a convulsion shakes his gut. He has never seen human eyes so fixed, unresponsive, without light. Sprawling on the leaves, he is aware of how wet and cold he is. If he does not get back indoors he will slip into hypothermia.

With his dripping bandaged hands he touches the eyelashes, closes the lids, fingers the hair, looks closely at the scalp, the fingernails, the line of the jaw, taking apart the child in his arms. The boy is not Carson. There is no resemblance. His own sons are alive on the other side of the country. He wants to be anywhere but here, on this land, skulking through these woods. There is no reason to stay.

W
e were standing in the kitchen, both of us feeling, I think, as though we ought to go after them, both of us knowing that Nathaniel was not himself, or that, over the course of days, weeks, perhaps even months, he had become someone his wife no longer knew.

The sound was muffled but we both heard it. I looked at Julia and then, a moment or two later, moments dropping down between us, another sound arrived, and we knew. We flew out the back door, across the porch, down the steps, running over the mound in the middle of the lawn. Depress the gate’s latch, pull it forward, but it would not budge.

“Keys?”

Julia shook her head and ran back to the house while I tried to pull myself up, throw my body over the fence, but it was too high and there was nothing to climb. Moments dropped all around me, accumulating in the fog, tying up my feet and knotting my tongue. I pulled my words to make a shout that exploded into stupid white noise.

Pushing me aside, Julia slipped the spare key into the lock, depressed the latch, and as the gate opened I could see the green-brown form of the man crouched in front of us, fifty paces away, at the foot of the tree. I knew Krovik without seeing his face, the body that strutted over this land, raping and routing. At his feet, in his hands, I could see the body of the boy, dishrag limp, hands whiter than fog. The rifle was on the ground, just behind the man. I could sense Julia about to scream but I turned to her, clapped a hand over her mouth, and picked my way through the fog. Leaning over within hitting distance, I pinched the gun between my fingers, whisked it from the ground to my shoulder, aiming at Krovik as he pivoted on all fours to look up at me, his face and whole body wet, running with blood and filth, nose draining over his upper lip, his chest heaving up the most horrible sobs I have ever heard. The rifle was weightless in my arms. I held it so he had no doubt of my abilities. My arms and back were steady. I directed him with the barrel: move now, to the side, get away from the child.

And then the mother must have seen her son, because she was screaming on the ground beside the man, pushing him over against the earth, raising up the small wet body, the head dripping as it lolled against the rock.

When the police arrived they told me to drop the gun. I curled my fingers free, placed it on the ground, and Julia explained who I was, that I was not the person they needed to arrest. As they put handcuffs on Krovik he turned to Julia and snarled: “Your husband’s in the water.”

T
HE BODIES WERE LAID
OUT
together on the ground by the tree where we discovered Krovik and Copley. We followed the police to the stream, and Julia shook in silence, pushing away the hands that reached out to hold her steady. She sat on the ground a few feet distant from her dead son and husband, watching as I answered questions. Krovik was gone and the police were searching the area, picking through leaves and undergrowth as the fog condensed and daylight faded until one of them yelled, knowing his part so well, “I’ve got something.” The others clustered round him and disappeared into the old storm cellar.

“As soon as I saw Krovik I knew,” I said to the officer taking my statement.

“Knew what?”

“That he’d been living somewhere on this land, hidden down below.”

“How’s that?”

“The boy told me, he told everyone, but none of us could see it. Krovik was out of his mind. He loved this land as much as me. I just didn’t want to believe it.”

W
HEN THE POLICE FINISHED
AND
the bodies were carried out of the woods, loaded into ambulances and taken away to the morgue, I led Julia back inside that house which always glowers, not least at twilight, its unblinking windows black and reflective as the streetlights shuddered in their hazy glow.

Neither of us wanted to speak or eat. We slow-danced around each other, drinking shots of bourbon, and then for a long time we just stood in the kitchen and I held her as she cried and shook, that fine-boned little body tight with energy and anger and the implausibility of grief.

Before we went to bed, three EKK vans pulled up outside. At first I thought they might be here to offer support but then I watched as the men in their riot gear broke down the door of the neighbors’ house and dragged out the brown man who lived there, while the white man and child stood crying on the porch, held at bay by the men in their mirror-faced masks. Watching those two men, the brown and the white, I could not help thinking of the benefactor, Mr. Wright, and of Great-uncle George, still buried in their unburied way, unconsecrated, unmourned except by me, who sits meditating on the land and the times, the undulation and flow, the joining together and casting apart.

T
HAT NIGHT
I
HEARD
JULIA
up and moving through the house. In the morning we looked into each other’s faces, speaking only with eyes and expression: a muscle twitch, a narrowing of lids, lips cushioned over a trembling knob of chin. Language was dumb. Police came and went, examining the house, the basement, the pantry, the entrance they discovered, the burrow beneath the backyard, the hidden and the hiding.

The police were inept. Only the next morning did a man without a uniform suggest we go elsewhere for a day or two, while they dusted the house for prints, followed trails of invisible marks, pieced together a narrative of past action.

I drove us to a new hotel west of the old downtown.

“Would you mind staying with me, in the same room?” Julia asked. It was the first time she had spoken to me in thirty-six hours. If she had slept the previous night she did not look like it, eyes nestling deep in their sockets, cheeks sinking, hair clinging in oily ropes.

In the room on a high floor we sat on our respective beds with views of flooded land spilling around us to the west and south.

“It’s time you had a bath.”

“A shower,” Julia says, “I don’t want to stew in my own filth.”

“A shower then.”

She looked at me, a sudden, furtive look.

“Would you sit in there?”

“Where?”

“Would you sit in the bathroom while I take a shower?”

I waited while Julia undressed and got into the tub, drew the curtain and called for me to enter. I sat on the closed lid of the toilet.

“Are you there?” she asked.

“I’m here.”

“Will you do something else?”

“What?”

“Will you talk to me?”

“What would you like me to talk about?”

“Tell me a story.”

There was only one story that came to mind. It was neither happy nor even a story I know first-hand. It was the story I have cobbled together from rumor and historical document, from whisperings I heard as a child, from the little I could pry from my mother when the old woman let the bolts on her tongue slip to speak the memories she contained. It is a story of land, of men on the land, of the way that men came to blows over land. It is a story, I know, without women. It is not my own story. I am merely its keeper, its guardian, its partial creator, since more than half of it is my own invention, my necessary speculation. I am the one who keeps it breathing, who brought it back to life in the first place, a resurrectionist. At first as I spoke I could hear Julia washing, moving under the water, shampooing her hair, sponging her limbs, but after the first minutes I knew she was just standing still, letting the water run down her back, scalding the white skin red, listening as I spoke above the murmur of hot rain.

“We know that others owned the land before the benefactor, Morgan Priest Wright. Before him there was his father, Ambrose Balthazar Wright, who came west from Philadelphia, and before him a German immigrant called Carl Hauschildt from Hesse. Before Hauschildt there is no record of an individual owning the land, unless you count the president of the railroad company, or the president of the United States, or the distant kings of Spain and France. The railroad acquired the land from the United States Government and the government acquired it from France in 1803 as part of the Louisiana Purchase, and before that it had been controlled by Spain or France, depending on which one you asked, and explored and mapped in the early eighteenth century by a Frenchman who took a common-law Sioux wife while the land was under the shifting control of various indigenous nations that had been settled there for more years than I can say and did not recognize the claims of the European powers who sought to control it.

“Before the nations this land belonged to the animal world, was underwater for tens of millions of years, and before the animal world it belonged to nature herself, to the cosmos or whatever you wish to call what existed before life on this planet acquired complexity. Morgan Priest Wright inherited the hundred-and-sixty-acre parcel from his father Ambrose Balthazar Wright, who bought it from Hauschildt, who bought it from the railroad company for eight hundred dollars. Wright’s father owned over twelve hundred acres at the time of his death, and left one hundred and sixty acres to each of his eight sons. Morgan, the eldest, who had learned the art of gardening at the knee of his mother, inherited the family home and was the only one to retain his plot, while his brothers sold off theirs with little regard for who was buying or what the future of that land and the people upon it might be. They had goodwill on their lips but self-interest in their hearts. Wright regarded himself as a benefactor from an early age—or if not a benefactor then a protector. His father had employed sharecroppers to farm most of the acres he owned, and when his brothers sold off the land, ignoring the fate of the families who farmed it, Morgan Wright tried to help those he could, turning the sharecroppers into tenants who paid him rent but could sell all they produced. And that’s where the Freemans come into the picture.

“George Freeman’s father and mother had worked the land for Ambrose, and George was born and grew up upon it with his brother John, my grandfather. When their parents died the brothers went on working the land for Morgan after his inheritance. John married Lottie Marshall from the neighboring county and she worked alongside the brothers. George did not marry, and as he reached full maturity there was a kind of recognition of interest between him and his landlord. My grandparents lived in the house where I once lived, but George lived closer to Wright’s own house in a small cottage whose ruined chimney is all that remains standing today in those woods. You will scoff at the possibility and euphemism of any “recognition of interest” and ask if there was not an element of exploitation, wonder at how the two men might have met, even when the land was still remote and rural from the burgeoning town, without being noticed by John and Lottie and the neighboring landowners and sharecroppers. The first encounter between George and Mr. Wright was during a tornado in 1915, when George was twenty-one, in that storm cellar that still sits below the surface of the ground. As during a later fateful event, John and Lottie were away, visiting her relatives, and George and Mr. Wright were ostensibly alone on the farm, sheltering from the green light of the tornado, from its freight-train thunder and the rainless pause before the cataclysm that did not come. Let us say that in those minutes, perhaps hours, spent alone underground on camp cots first employed by soldiers of the Union Army with a kerosene lamp to light them and nothing but the awkward silence of unequal power between them, they found their way across the social barricades toward the possibility of speech, and in speaking, not as landlord and tenant, but as two men removed for a moment from the world, two men exceptional in their difference, they discovered a common interest and a mutual understanding.

“Or perhaps, you will wish to say, Wright simply forced himself on the younger man, took as he and his kind had taken in so many other ways. And in fact there is no way to be sure either way, so the story continues in a double vein, both possibilities evolving toward one perhaps inevitable conclusion. The men had congress, relations, in the half-lit dark, underground, in a storm cellar buried in the woods, between the big white house where Mr. Wright lived and had grown up and the gray-timbered cottage where George Freeman spent his solitary nights, reading his Bible by lamplight and darning his own socks. Having discovered this possibility, an understanding was established: either an understanding of mutual desire, or one in which George relinquished yet another hard-won liberty in the interest of keeping his home and his livelihood on the land of his employer, doing what was necessary to secure the little security he had in the world.

“The house of Morgan Priest Wright was white, rectangular, and on the first two stories had twenty-four windows: eight on the front, eight on the back, and four on each side (there were an additional six dormer windows in the roof but these are of no consequence). Following his first encounter with George, Mr. Wright used the twenty-four windows as a kind of signal clock, designating a specific hour to each window and informing George of the code. In order to arrange a meeting with his tenant, at eight o’clock in the evening Mr. Wright would place a burning kerosene lamp in the window corresponding to the hour when he wished to see George on the following day. George, either desiring himself to see Mr. Wright, or feeling he had no free choice in the matter, would contrive every night thenceforward to circumnavigate all the buildings of the farm, thereby checking for the signal. The meeting times were almost always in the evening, after dark, when the likelihood of the two men being seen disappearing into the storm cellar by John and Lottie or any passing stranger, poacher, or neighboring farmer was more remote.