Fallen Land (7 page)

Some mornings I walked up the new street and offered him a cup of coffee. Not a friendly fellow. Nodded and took the coffee, drank it in front of me, handed back the mug like I was a boss he begrudged. He did not want me there, made that clear from the beginning. When I told him I’d be interested in seeing the plans he said they were still getting worked out, but two hundred houses in all, a nice generous development, large lots, big places, not too many families, the
right kind of people
. Two hundred families on Poplar Farm! My heart fluttered in the chest-cage. I never would have sold if I’d known what he planned.

Krovik sometimes worked alone, often with others: meaty, shirtless men whose skin scorched red, then darkened to cordovan: shoe-leather backs, hides instead of skins, ass cracks rising up pinky-white out of a sheath of dirty blue jeans. The gangly wife came round as the weather turned hot, stood leaning against her car calling out questions, shouting commands, a silent baby in her arms.

Over that summer the house grew up mammoth, a changeling child or goblin birth, haunted mansion from an old horror movie:
Gables of Fear,
Balcony of Blood
. It was an invasion of the Gothic, colonizing the land. My own house is Greek Revival and I’ve always been proud of its classical lines. The benefactor Mr. Wright’s house was of a piece with this one, columns and porticos, perfect proportions, white siding with black shutters. Krovik was building almost on the very site of Wright’s burned-down house. I wondered then if I should tell him about the sinkholes, the way the land can open up without warning to swallow whatever rests upon it. Over the years Donald and I witnessed the sudden dropping of a circle of corn, the disappearance of a tree, and once, a tractor left out in the field overnight was half-submerged in soil the next morning. We learned to ring suspect places with stones, fill them with brush and dead cornstalks, use the soft spots as natural compost heaps that could be filled without ever expanding beyond a gentle sloping mound. There was the big one, too, on property that no longer belongs to me, a soft spot swollen with secrets, marked by two granite stones.

When Krovik’s house was finished it emitted a humming sound persistent as an idling car. I woke up in hours that should have been quiet to find a buzz of machinery burrowing into my brain. After the fence went up, almost a foot taller than me, I could only see the top two floors and nothing of his backyard. I have never believed in the edict of good fences making good neighbors and Krovik’s stockade fence made me feel I was living in a reproduction fort on a living history farm, wondering when the costumed bandits might come to sack the homestead. At night, even after the house seemed to be finished, I could hear sounds of digging and machinery in motion, see shadows of indistinct shapes monstering the forest.

A moving van came one Thursday late that year, unloaded, left at 2:38 in the afternoon according to my anniversary clock. Except for the distant whirr of the new house, silence settled again, heavy and dense as wool before spinning. I walked my old rooms through a white silence that slowed my steps, swimming upright through a thicket of invisible fibers, sharp with static.

But that was five years ago, and the man is long gone, lost everything: his house, his land, his family. Standing here now, there’s a different breed of silence, thinner and less elastic, taut but worn-sounding, liable to snap from the hum of not one but twenty-one houses, all of them machines rather than buildings, idling and running, gearing up and shifting, opening and closing, rotating and hammering, sapping the strength from the world: the life-giving, life-taking spark. I can feel the sound even if there’s nothing to hear, the foundation-shaking tremor and purr. In the morning I will go to the woods, find silence again if it still exists there, scan the backyards of those other houses, imagine shouldering my turkey-feather cloak, moving without noise, head ducking, hair pulled back, ears tuned to snapped branches and the squelch of shoes in mud, to the furtive steps of the sneaky coyote or the swift fox stirring in his lair.

T
he bunker’s ceiling is covered with a mosaic of fixtures that flicker and hum, throbbing into a pattern of cold white light so that this space underground is brighter than the most brilliant day, the power draining down from the solar shingles on the roof of the house. Following a new rule, Paul checks the two containment doors, one opening onto the pantry in the basement of the house, the other onto the old stone storm cellar in the woods, both secured with combination locks and treble-bolted. Although he thinks of them as “containment doors,” they are only antiques, salvaged when an old bank downtown was being demolished. Made of concrete encased in stainless steel, one had served as the door to the vault, the other to the bank’s safe deposit boxes. At either end of the bunker he pushes and pulls at each door, spins the combination knobs, reassures himself that he is safe and that no one can possibly enter. The noise of the helicopter buzzing overhead has stopped, he will be all right for now, unhunted, undiscovered.

Underground there is only the time he creates by turning on and off lights, producing the illusion of daytime or night, twilight or dawn. By his watch he knows it is time for dinner in the outside world, but he has already eaten and tries to ignore the hunger carousing in his stomach. As soon as he has checked the containment doors he feels the impulse to return to his house once more: he knows he should resist the desire, but once the thought has surfaced it won’t go away until the longing is satisfied.

He enters the combination on the door to the pantry and spins the dial, the movements second nature already, numbers as integral to him as the date of his birth, and as the bolts slide back he feels a euphoric emptying. The door swings open, he crouches on all fours, drops to his stomach, pushes open the wooden panel that opens onto the back of the pantry, and slithers out of the bunker, leaving both hatch and containment door open behind him.

Fumbling along the cool wall, he finds his way out of the pantry and into the single large basement room. The concrete floor that he poured and polished is clammy under his bare feet as he steps across to the carpeted recreation area, working his soles into the pile. He pauses again to listen for the helicopter but everything remains silent. Where there is now only an assortment of half-empty paint cans there was once a small trampoline, a pool table, a fully stocked bar, a large television, collections of toys and leftovers from life above ground. Amanda took the trampoline for the boys, the pool table Paul sold at the estate sale, the booze and glassware he removed to the bunker, though he does not imagine he will ever begin to drink. Amanda was the one with the taste for alcohol. It was the kind of thing her family did, her father pouring glasses of sherry before dinner. Paul has never wanted anything stronger than beer, he has no taste for bourbon or scotch, but the alcohol may have some medicinal purpose in the future, or be useful for barter in the coming war. The greatest worry now is that the new owners, whoever they are, will be on the wrong side. He will not only have to expel them from his house, but do battle against them just to survive. If anything, the whole disaster has taught him that neighbors no longer exist. There is only the individual, alone in the world, with no one to rely on except himself, stamping out the snakes that swarm at his feet. He hears the way his father used to speak to him when he was a boy, Ralph’s voice measured, calm, offering lessons to Paul on the long drives back and forth from hunting expeditions:
Today’s nation is tomorrow’s dead, leaving nothing behind. Society is no more than a wave. You think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it.

A car’s speakers thud as it drives past on the street above, stops, and disappears into one of the garages Paul designed and that his crew, now working for other men on other jobs, built with their own hands. When he wrote the bylaws for the development he failed to think of car speakers. A rule should have been written stipulating that car stereos must never be audible anywhere in the Dolores Woods development outside of the cars themselves. There are similar requirements about noise from houses. Outdoor music—except music organized by the residents for neighborhood social gatherings at the gazebo—is strictly prohibited. He always meant for it to be a quiet neighborhood, the kind of sanctuary where a man might forget he lives in the twenty-first century and pretend instead it is the nineteenth, where the sound of thudding car speakers and the unwanted noise of neighbors never intrude, where it is possible to live a life of absolute silence and privacy.

W
HILE STILL ONLY
IN
HIS
late twenties, Paul bought the hundred-and-sixty-acre parcel of farmland near the western edge of the existing suburbs, a purchase funded almost entirely by his father-in-law, Robert, a successful divorce lawyer in Miami. After buying the land, Amanda helped facilitate a change in zoning, pushing through the application, greasing the gears and even pressuring a city official who feared that another subdivision of homes could not possibly be sustained by demand. “I’m risking my reputation for you, Paul,” she warned him at the time.

Paul and Amanda spent the beginning of their life in a condo she bought just after moving here to work in the city planning office, so this was the first property they owned together. Designed to be not only their family home, the house was also the model for the rest of the Dolores Woods development, the keystone in Paul’s plan. After building two hundred houses and selling them each for a minimum of $500,000, with the larger ones going for three quarters of a million or more, he would have become a multimillionaire. It had all made sense on paper. People would want the extraordinary houses he knew he could build. At least, it had all made sense before the crash. History had other plans, but history alone was not to blame. Society, the widow Washington, and his own failings of design and construction, he believes, are the real causes of his decline.

In the beginning, deed in hand, there was nothing around but cornfields, woodland, and the widow in her house at the edge of the property that became his, which he subdivided and plotted, pouring concrete into loam. Despite his determination to do it right, he now recognizes the shortcomings of his plans. Where there should have been two hundred houses there are only twenty-one, but even these, complete as they are, terrify where they were meant to comfort. He wanted to build a neighborhood that evoked the country’s pastoral history, but he has, he knows, created something closer to a landscape of nightmare. The lumber warped, the land subsided, houses split: the surveyor was a friend just out of college who, though qualified, did the job fast and on the cheap.

The inspiration for Paul’s designs came from an old copy of Andrew Jackson Downing’s 1850 pattern book,
The Architecture of Country Houses
. For his own house Paul followed the basic plans laid out by Downing’s colleague, architect Alexander Jackson Davis, for a Gothic Revival cottage with, as Davis described it, “a high, pointed gable” at the center of the front of the house, rising to three stories and containing the front door, an oriel window on the second floor, and a peaked window with a small balcony high on the third. As he revised Davis’s plans, Paul’s version became larger, the modest lines of the original exaggerated, the ground floor stretching out, and the second and third floors rising to a much greater height so that the balcony outside the third-floor window is not merely ornamental, as it appears to be in Downing’s illustration, but accessible through French doors.

Every Sunday at noon Paul turned on the neon
OPEN
sign hanging in the front window, put out the mat for shoes, and rehearsed his pitch. Some Sundays they had two-dozen prospective buyers, while other weeks no one came. A woman once asked Amanda if she had been hired to pose in the kitchen with Carson. Living in the model was a stupid idea because it meant having to keep everything clean, always looking as though anyone might live there, but he believed that a lived-in house would sell better than the same old model home buyers see everywhere else, houses that look as though no one has ever taken a breath in them. The people who walked into the house and loved it knew exactly what Paul was thinking.

In planning the houses for the whole development, Paul adapted Davis’s nineteenth-century designs to modern needs and materials, adding embellishments such as wine cellars and hot tubs, substituting board-and-batten with vinyl siding, putting a brick or stone façade on a frame house, using solar shingles on the rear roofs so they would be invisible from the street. He resisted the open-plan designs favored by most developers, preferring the more traditional arrangement of domestic space into discrete rooms each with a specific purpose. All the houses in Dolores Woods have carved gingerbread verge boards, gabled roofs, garrets and towers and finials and white picket fences or stone walls. For each one he built, Paul used a portion of timber from the cottonwood trees cleared at the edge of the site, thinking it was a respectful way of integrating the properties into the landscape, but none of that salvaged wood was cured properly and all of it warped and cracked in unusual ways. It is not just Paul’s house that now looks sinister. The lawyers, bankers, and junior executives who bought those houses understood his ideas, shared in his belief that the past was a better place, that by living in spaces that reminded them of their country’s early history they could become different and better people, but when the boards began to twist and the walls split they demanded repairs without charge since the houses were still under warranty, and when Paul resisted, claiming “natural weathering and settling,” all of the owners banded together and sued. That was a major part of his undoing, the whole romantic idea of the poplar wood, but also the land itself, and neighbors who thought themselves nothing more than customers.

The world has now overtaken him. Paul still believes that one day he will finish what he started, plant more trees to replace the ones he cut down, build the rest of the houses, see his vision realized: a whole community, an ideal new town on the fringes of the old, a rational utopia where neighbors look after one another without recourse to the state. In the meantime the woods are unharmed; only a small number of trees have been taken out, just a few compared to all that remain standing. The widow accused him of something terrible, of hating trees, of butchery, but that wasn’t true at all.

The trees, not only cottonwoods but ash and maples and linden, are so thick that during the summer the canopy blocks most of the sunlight from the woodland floor while the preserve of mixed forest beyond, blackened with conifers, has the texture of the great old-world forests, rich with folklore and threat, a place both to hide and to lurk, to retreat and lie in wait. The trees are so dense in the preserve that on cloudy days, if you stand in a clearing looking into the depths of the forest, you can see nothing but the first few ranks of trunks, and then total, light-devouring darkness: not just a black hole but a vast undulating mass radiating night even at noon. It is the kind of forest that made early settlers to the area believe they had found a home whose obstacles could be transformed into sanctuary, spaces of utmost threat and uncertainty become their greatest stronghold and protection.

Paul saw the woods for the first time when the land came up for sale. Looking at that surging green darkness it reminded him of forests seen from cars and trains in Germany and Scotland that seemed to beckon with their unknowability, offering an inheritance from his northern European ancestors: forests of wolves and lost children, forests whose folk were good but crafty, compelled by the dangers of the world to be as cunning as the evil forces that always threatened to swallow them. Often he had asked his father to stop the car and let him explore, but they were always in a hurry, “and besides,” his father would say, “that’s not our land, so it would be trespassing. Plus the only right way to go into a forest is holding a gun.” Paul had wanted to imagine himself out of the present and into the past, running fast through trees, burrowing into a bracken-sheltered bank. Later, after they stopped moving, he went on a school fieldtrip to the nature reserve that Dolores Woods now abuts, a forest in a region of open plains, where woodland always seems anomalous. Straying to the back of the line as they walked muddy trails, he fell back, out of sight of the teachers who would not quit talking about plants and animals, identifying spoor and scat and warning against wandering from the path. He wanted silence but those women kept chattering in their nasal-keyed voices about poison ivy and oak, ticks and rattlesnakes, and the sheer drop from Demon Point to the river. Where Paul sensed possibility they perceived a world of absolute danger. He stepped behind a bush and held his breath, watching the class disappear over a rise and listening as the voices of the teachers faded. Alone in a way he had never known before, with no adult next to him, he began to run in the opposite direction, past trees and over the leaf-rotting floor, sliding down muddy furrows until he heard his name being called. He ran faster, away from the voices, striking out until he barreled headlong into the arms of his teacher. At the time his father was away on a mission and his mother scolded him, washed his clothes and made him eat tamale pie, kept him from school the next day when he woke with a fever and earache. His hearing must have been affected. If he had heard clearly, he could have been free, alone in the woods for the rest of his life.