Fallen Land (9 page)

The main stairs lead him back down to the foyer. He built the two sets of stairs believing that one day he and Amanda might have a live-in maid who would be restricted to the steep narrow “service stairs” while the family used the broad front staircase. It was a selling point for the development and a full half of the houses completed have this added feature, though as far as Paul knows not one of the families in Dolores Woods has any live-in help.

As he opens the door, sniffing the warm air for signs of other people, he catches grass cuttings, pesticides, and the ozone exhaust of air conditioning units, the smell of a late evening barbecue, but no bodies. Leaving the door ajar, he walks down the path to the driveway and mailbox, itself a handcrafted miniature of the house, mounted on a brick pillar. Inside he finds several pieces of mail, all for the new owners, Nathaniel and Julia Noailles. How is the name pronounced? No-ales? No-els? No-ills? It sounds foreign. Taking the envelopes back up the driveway, Paul opens the lid of the shed that holds the garbage cans and throws the mail inside. People have to learn to be more responsible. They must be taught.

Back behind the locked door he slumps to the floor. Beside him he sees a spot where he tracked in dirt, but when he tries to wipe it away with the cuff of his shirt the stain spreads—tar rather than dirt—and in the light coming in from the street he sees it expand, sharp lines of black breaking against the grain of the wood. He spits and rubs but the stain only gets larger and as he works at the mark tears erupt from deep in his viscera. By the time the stain has spread across the width of the hall he gives up. It is no longer his responsibility; the new owners can deal with the mess.

In the basement Paul turns on all the lights over the recreation area to read the engraved brass plaque mounted in the wall:
PAUL KROVIK BUILT THIS HOUSE
. He feels the sharp indentations of the letters. Except for a low buzz the house is silent, and then, somewhere more distant, on the other side of the foundation walls, there is an irregular vibration, a scuffling sound he has not noticed in the past.

Turning off the lights and dropping to his knees, crawling back across the floor and into the pantry, under the shelf at the back, through the open hatch, following the pinkish glow that comes from inside the bunker, fluorescent light reflecting off its deep red walls, pulling the hatch shut behind him, Paul throws its flimsy lock, then stands, heaves closed the containment door in a single movement, and engages its own lock. Listening to the bolts slide into place as he spins the combination dial, he rests his head against the cold metal surface. Breath comes in a pant; his hands are shaky, legs calf-wobbly.

When the new family arrives he will have to come and go through the storm cellar at the back of his bunker, entering and exiting his home through the woods. It will take time and determination to turn things around, to rebuild his business and fight for his family. Apart from his truck, everything he now owns is in the bunker’s two bedrooms, bathroom, kitchen and living space, all of the rooms opening off the long hallway. The distance from one containment door to the other is nearly two hundred feet, long enough that he can run back and forth to keep in shape. He has mounted a bar in the door of the second bedroom and does chin-ups every morning before going out through the back entrance to look for work. He has a cell phone that costs him little each month and the tools he needs to perform small contracting jobs. He will build shelves and renovate kitchens and undertake structural repairs. He parks his truck on a different street every night. He will plan, prepare, and be ready to win back his sons, to rescue them before the final reckoning, returning them to this place of absolute safety.

In the meantime, he will wait for the inevitable, for the arrival of people with a name he cannot say.

I
no longer remember when the first trees came down, but it was around the time Krovik laid out the roads, must have been five years ago, in the late autumn of the year he finished his own house, before the ground froze again and I put up the storm windows for another winter. I watched him cut his twisting snake deeper into the land, zing down stray cottonwoods at the edge of the arable fields. I grew acquainted with the clattering
whoosh
and
thump
of trees falling, the growling thunder of wood chippers and two-stroke screaming of saws, the cutting chains slicing into tree flesh. I might as well have been camped on a log run. When I inquired with the city if there was any way to stop Krovik felling more trees—conservation laws, public nuisance laws, zoning laws—a tart young woman in the planning office said, “The land belongs to Mr. Krovik now, he can do what he likes, Ms. Washington. It doesn’t sound to me like he’s breaking any laws.”

“But these are good trees. There’s nothing wrong with them except they’re a little old.”

“The health of the trees is irrelevant, ma’am. The property is his. You sold it to him, he can do what he likes, within the zoning laws, and he’s had the property zoned for residential development. Just be glad he’s improving the value of the land by putting up houses. It’s good for the tax base.”

“I don’t see how that improves the value of land that had no need for improvement in the first place,” I said, hanging up before the woman could answer.

I searched the city ordinances but could find no laws to curb Krovik’s felling. Laws against nature did not count. Laws against vandalizing a canvas of land as balanced in its composition as a fine painting are not on the city’s schedule of ordinances. Those trees saw the land through wars and droughts and fires, through crime and benefaction. They were trees of memory and witness.

At last I mustered strength to speak to him, drew my body as tall as it has ever stood, marched up the road to face him and his chainsaw crew, my arms aquiver with rage.

“Are you going to take them
all
down?” I shouted, pointing at the untouched shelterbelt and the body of woods that rides into the reserve. No longer knowing the slope of the land where his machines had flattened it, I stumbled and one of the men caught my arm before I fell to the ground. I could smell his meat breath and the sweat on his arms carving channels through sawdust.

Krovik removed his headphones and baseball cap and raised a hand to tell his men to stop.

“What’d you say?”

“Is it your intention to fla—to take, I mean, to
cut
all of them down?” Words turned to prickly burrs and caught on my gums.

“Take down what, Mrs. Washington?”

“The trees! Are you going to take down every one of them? When I sold I said I didn’t want you chopping down the trees. You remember that?”

He looked around, confused, a brute pillager. Opening his mouth, lips thin, hard-pink steel blades, he laughed—not a malicious laugh, but one of power and disregard.

“Don’t you worry,” he said, cackling. “I’m just taking down a few to make room for the roads and houses. I’ll plant others if it looks bare. Don’t you worry. I’m a good guy, Mrs. Washington. I like trees too.”

“But I
insisted
when I sold you this land that I wanted the trees left. I understood you were going to build houses but there’s no reason to be cutting down the trees. Lord, you
promised
you wouldn’t cut them down, not a one of them. You said you wouldn’t so much as
touch
them, that you’d build around them!”

He laughed again, right in my face, crowing at a woman who gives a damn about trees.

“I didn’t make no promise. Did I sign anything saying I wouldn’t cut them down?”

“You gave me your word, Mr. Krovik. You swore up and down in front of me and my daughter and my lawyer that you would not
fell a single tree.”

“Mrs. Washington, that’s a conversation I can honestly say I don’t recall. Now you better get on your way or else you might just find yourself under a tree.”

“Don’t you threaten me, Mr. Krovik.”

“It’s not a threat. I’m just sayin’, we have to get back to work. And the work we’re doing is cutting down trees. Now if you want to stay, then go ahead, but this is my land, and technically you’re trespassing on it. So if something happens to you while you’re on my land, even after I’ve told you to go, well then, I can’t be held responsible so far as I see it.”

At night, when the chainsaws were put away, I went out with a flashlight, counted the stumps, bore witness to the demise of the witnesses, heard their fall and observed their deaths. A hundred and sixty trees in all were brought down, one for each acre. I leaned over every stump, laid a cheek against the wound, felt the rings with my fingers, saw the events of centuries inscribed in undulating crescents, blood etching the grain.

Over the course of the next couple of years, more houses went up. His wife had another child, and Krovik’s roads cut into the land, preparing for two hundred houses where only twenty-one have come: blackjack, dealer’s hand. Not that the construction of those he completed was anything but a nightmare. I learned to stay away during working hours. At first I did nothing but drive around town, shocked at the way the city’s infection was spreading, consuming the land that created it in the first place. Later, I started going to a bookstore, until it closed, just like the public libraries. Where do people find books in this town? I thought of teaching myself a new language, but I couldn’t see the point since I have no intention of traveling. I thought for a while of researching a subject that interests me, like the life cycle of spiders, or winemaking, or mythology, but again I was unsure what the knowledge would do apart from fill the hours. A month later I started spending weekend afternoons watching two or three movies in a row at the multiplex, whether I wanted to see them or not. After the movies I would drive downtown and eat a plate of spaghetti at a restaurant in the Old Town, surrounded by families and groups of teenagers, the only woman eating alone. Sometimes I would run into former students who would greet me as “Mother Washington,” throw their arms around me and ask how I was doing, expressing what always seemed like genuine sadness when they heard of Donald’s death, although most had never met him.

Without Donald everything seemed pointless. It was not about having a man. I never felt myself determined by Donald. Living alone, I became convinced, was not good for my sanity. A grandchild would make things better, if not easier. A grandchild might rekindle my rapport with Rebekah. There is no reason my daughter, only child of an only child, should have wished to become a farmer herself and I never begrudged her the choice. Nursing is just as good a job as farming, caring for the world instead of feeding it, and not dissimilar in spirit. If we’d had another child (we certainly tried), someone who could have sat on Donald’s lap learning the land and its idiosyncrasies, the way the climate cannot be trusted to provide from year to year, how you might make a small killing in one harvest and have almost nothing by the end of the next, the way most people round these parts did not want to take orders from a man like Donald, well then it would have made being alone much easier. Seeing that child grown up, taking over the house, expanding, buying up land to turn one hundred and sixty acres into three hundred and twenty or a thousand, what a dream it would have been. But that kind of hope is over. Instead I hope for a grandchild who might become a good person and have children of her own. Hope is not a bird. Feathers are too fragile for hope. Hope is an aging tree that might still drop its seed in a barren world.

It was then, in the weekends at the multiplex, in the dinners at the spaghetti place, that I started to think about going back to work. Teaching takes all one’s time, eats up the free hours with grading and lesson plans and reading. I always tried to stay current, expanding my knowledge widely and hungrily. Teaching—the care and nurture of children—would give me purpose again, if only I could find my way back to it, if my former colleagues do not think I am too long out of practice, too far behind, too old to manage the demands of an ever-changing classroom. But the weight of the days drags at my arms; my feet are tired old dogs, and I am past the age of retirement. It might be too much after all. Perhaps I no longer have that kind of energy, the patience and stamina required to lead and illuminate a whole class of children.

Standing here at the kitchen sink, looking up at Krovik’s house, I straighten my back, think I see movement upstairs, a presence, a ghost, but the house is vacant. It must have been the reflection of a passing aircraft. There is no stillness on this earth. Everywhere is the movement of machines: if not on land, then underground, overhead, or slicing through seas. I want to scream for it all to stop, for the human world to silence itself and sit still, turn off the lights and put down its collective head on the table of our self-concocted ruin and let the earth recover.

Not that I am without purpose, for I know, however else I may have failed the land, I am still the keeper of its tale. I have never told it to Rebekah in the way I should have. A grandchild might still come, be receptive, listen to the story of Great-uncle George and Mr. Wright, benefactor of the Freeman family, patron in so many ways, giver who also took, beneficiary of free bodies and cheap labor. Fair terms, the family story always went, Mr. Wright offered fair terms from the beginning, never tried to take more than his due, took less than others might. He was a peculiar man, Morgan Priest Wright, an unlikely politician who knew he was strange and hid only what could get him killed, then failed in that hiding and got himself killed. A reformist from a family of reformers, he was descended from generations of abolitionists and freethinkers. I have kept his story, written it more than once, as other versions flower from memory: the way my mother told it, hard facts my father left out, details gathered from aunts and uncles and grandparents, the hearsay of family friends and social historians. I’ve recorded all I can remember and discover. I keep recording and collating, hoping someday to nail down what I know in a version I can leave behind. Speech passes like wind, its effects ephemeral, unless the speech is a tornado stripping bare the land, revealing new surfaces for new growth. What seeds will I sow?

In the years after Krovik’s coming, sleep became nightmare: trees burning blood, Donald burning, Krovik with a match and a chainsaw, a monster from a horror movie like ones I saw years ago, like new ones, too, the worse ones I watched on those long weekend afternoons at the multiplex, people spliced with animals, bodies cut apart and reassembled, folks more mechanical than human. I knew about such men, warping weapons out of tools, slinking through my mind and then suddenly, without warning, flourishing weedstrong in an inhospitable environment. I tried to kill him off in my dreams, or make him something better, but my idea of Krovik grew rank and ugly, spreading on runners that colonized every quarter of my thoughts. Once established, he could only be eliminated by poisoning every acre he occupied, killing off the innocent as well, burning it all to the ground. He was too strong for me, too relentless, spawning his colony of horror houses across land I can no longer call Poplar Farm. That place is dead, a name meaningless to anyone else but Rebekah, who never liked her home in the first place, never caught the farming spirit.

Some days, to escape the horror of Krovik’s construction, I drove to the cemetery, sat in a camp chair next to Donald’s grave, writing and rewriting what I know about Mr. Wright, and not just about him, but all the stories of my family. I worked through a stack of spiral-bound class record books left over from my teaching years. In those shaded grids where I once would have recorded attendance and progress, I found a form for my purpose. Appropriate, it seemed, to record the attendance of my family on this land, their own progress, the successes and failures, the leave-takings and murders, years bumper and lean, in books designed to measure the submission and resistance of pupils to an educational regime. Like students, the Freeman and Washington families were subjects of the nation, submitting at times and resisting at others, too often paying an arbitrary price, as if they’d had the bad luck of being assigned to the classroom of a petty tyrant. I knew teachers like that, shriekers and ruler-snappers, bulging-eyed gorgons beaten by their husbands as women and by their fathers as girls, or male autocrats who thrashed their wives and daughters, all of them people who had no place in a classroom. I prided myself on being firm but kind, a mother to children too often motherless.

I cannot conquer my hate for that man. His vehicles moved the earth until it was no longer land, but something harder and smoother. Even the grass he planted looks artificial, synthetic turf that could be vacuumed and scrubbed with detergent to get rid of the dirt, flowers that never seem to die, an unnatural theme park of a neighborhood full of pointy-headed, bulging-stomached houses that growl and bluster and buzz.