Serendipity Green (12 page)

Driving toward Tuttwyler he calls home on his cell-phone. “I just dropped Vicki off,” he tells his wife. “I thought I'd stop at the farm for a while.”

“Don't be too long,” Karen Aitchbone says. “I want us to have a nice lunch with the kids. Tacos, OK?”

“Better than OK. All I had for breakfast was airplane peanuts and a Sprite.”

Then Karen Aitchbone remembers. “You haven't heard, have you? Howie Dornick painted his house yesterday.”

D. William Aitchbone says “Love you, babe” and clicks off. What a couple of days! He's finagled the VP for Squaw Days! He's resisted Victoria Bonobo's wonderful shoulders! He's forced Howie Dornick to paint his house! “Am I on a roll or what?” he says to himself. As much as he wants to drive straight into town and see for himself that white paint on Howie Dornick's clapboards, he knows he needs to stop by the farm. Uncle Andy's will is moving quickly through probate. The court-appointed appraiser is coming to look it over on Friday. A developer is coming to look it over on Saturday. Other developers will be coming after that. So everything out there's got to be ship-shape. He turns onto Three Fish Creek Road.

Three Fish Road is about sixty percent developed now: three-acre estates crowed with big new houses; pole barns for pet ponies and cute little pigmy goats; front yard ponds as round as pancakes; newly planted trees that won't provide a lick of shade for another thirty years. The forty percent that isn't developed lays fallow: cowless cow pastures; pigless pig yards; fields that once grew corn and soybeans now thick with wild carrot and thistle. Some of the old farm houses are still standing, some still lived in. Some of the old barns are still standing, too, though there is no hay or straw in their mows; no fodder in their silos; no corn in their cribs; no tractors with attached plows, waiting greased and gassed for the rain to stop; no cows to be milked; no pigs to be slopped, no eggs to gather, no sheep to shear; just mice and bats and mold and rot.

D. William Aitchbone turns into his Uncle Andy's driveway. In a few months it will be his driveway. It will be his house. It will be his barn. It will be his four hundred acres. But not for long. Nosireebob. With a little luck his name will be on the deed for only a few days, maybe only for a few hours. As soon as humanly possible this driveway, this house, this barn, these four hundred acres, will belong to a developer. He has been in contact with several already. By Thanksgiving the old Aitchbone homestead will be cash in the bank. Even after the state and the federal governments take their unfair shares, he still will be a millionaire, two maybe three times over.

D. William Aitchbone trots to the house. He checks the doors to make sure they're locked. He checks the windows to make sure none are broken. He does not go inside. The last time he was inside is the day he took Uncle Andy to the Sparrow Hill Nursing Home.

The house, built in the 1830s, is one of the older houses in Wyssock County. It was built by the original Aitchbone from Connecticut, Jobiah Aitchbone, but not before the barn was built or the fields and pastures cleared. For nearly twenty years those original Aitchbones—six sons, three daughters and wife Almira—lived in a log house, which, according to the family's oral history, had been located somewhere along the creek; not far, D. William Aitchbone surmises, from where the Tuttwyler brothers clubbed to death Princess Pogawedka and her poor little Kapusta.

Although the old house always smelled like someone hadn't flushed the toilet, it was a grand place for a boy to visit. So many little rooms, with their lopsided walls and slanting ceilings and creaking floors; so many old drawers to snoop in; attics full of old trunks and boxes; attics and drawers and cupboards filled with antiques that he sold to one of the state's top dealers the same week he moved Andy to Sparrow Hill. He made enough money from those antiques to cover six months of Andy's care. The only thing he kept was the little dresser that had first belonged to Andy's grandmother. It had glass handles and a cracked oval mirror. It would have brought three hundred bucks but Karen wanted it for Amy's bedroom.

So, D. William Aitchbone does not go inside. He walks to the barn. The padlock is still on the big sliding doors. The side door that Andy's cows once used is padlocked, too. No need to go into the barn, either. Unfortunately, the door on the granary has been jimmied open. He goes inside. He finds a few pages ripped out of a
Hustler
, and an empty beer can. He looks at the dirty pictures and goes back outside.

He walks to the fence behind the barn and slides between the loose strands of barbed wire. He heads across the pasture. Andy sold off the last of his herd three years ago, so the pasture is waist-high with weeds and the cowflops are as gray and hard as granite. He walks to the end of the pasture and again slides through the barbed wire, this time snagging the knee of his Dockers. He is not particularly concerned. Dockers are always on sale at the new mall at the I-491 interchange. He walks across the rolling fields where Andy—and God knows how many Aitchbones before him—once grew corn. He keeps is eyes peeled for arrowheads, even though most of the ground is covered with weeds and rotting stalks. After he moved Andy to Sparrow Hill, he sold a whole shoe box full of Indian artifacts to that same top dealer. He was amazed at how much those worthless things went for.

He walks all the way to Three Fish Creek. Most of the creek here is on Aitchbone land, though some of it wiggles onto the old Tuttwyler homestead. He stands on the shale bank and looks into the shallow water, hoping to spot a crayfish or a school of minnows. All he sees is a crushed Dr Pepper can. On the ridge above him are the backyards of new houses. A year from now the spot where he is standing will be in someone's backyard, too. He heads upstream through the burdock, well aware that he is the luckiest sonofabitch alive.

He is a lucky sonofabitch because he was born with good Connecticut Yankee genes. He is a lucky sonofabitch because his parents made sure he got the best education the Wyssock County public schools could offer, so he was ready for the best education a private college could offer. Never once at John Carroll or at the Cleveland Marshall College of Law did he get drunk on beer or high on marijuana. He kept his hair short, his mind sharp, his nose in his books, and his name on the dean's list.

He is a lucky sonofabitch because he married a good, level-headed woman. A woman who, despite the weakness of her father, the war-hero Artie Brown, had the good sense to keep her knees together until she had an engagement ring on her finger. A good, level-headed woman who gave him two good level-headed children, cute-as-a-button Amy, handsome-as-his-dad Cannon.

He is a lucky sonofabitch because he turned down those offers from those big Cleveland law firms and returned to practice in Tuttwyler. He is lucky because while other students followed George McGovern over a cliff, he stayed connected with the local Republican Party. That got him Donald Grinspoon as a client. And having Donald Grinspoon as a client got him all the clients he'd ever need. He built his political career slowly, patiently carrying Donald Grinspoon's waterbucket. That patience paid off in spades. Today he is president of the village council, vice-chairman of the Wyssock County Republican Party, president of the county library board, and—
Yeeeessss!
—chairman of the Squaw Days Committee, just back from the White House where he charmed the Vice President of the United States into attending that summer's festival. The luckiest sonofabitch alive, that's what he is. Sure, he isn't mayor yet. But that's Donald Grinspoon's fault, for not knowing when to hang it up, for falling off the stage during the Meet the Candidates Night at G.A. Hemphill Elementary School. But there is always another election. And when that next election is over, Woodrow Wilson Sadlebyrne will be back connecting TV cable. And a patient and disciplined lucky sonofabitch named D. William Aitchbone will be running the village. He'll be the best mayor Tuttwyler, Ohio ever had. Better than Donald Grinspoon ever was. He'll be a mayor who personally knows the VP. The same VP who in just three short years will be elected President of the United States of America, having carried Ohio's fast-growing 26th congressional district in a landslide, a landslide orchestrated by a lucky sonofabitch who by then will be a congressman-elect. And thanks to Andy Aitchbone's decision never to marry, he'll be a millionaire two or three times over. The luckiest sonofabitch alive, that's what he is.

He wades out of the tall grass and burdock and climbs the highest hill on the farm. There is a fantastic elm up there. Next spring some two-income couple will eagerly pay a premium to have that fantastic elm in their front yard. Come Saturday, he will have to point out this hill and that elm to the developer.

As he reaches the top of the hill, and the shade of that fantastic elm falls over him, he lifts his clenched jaws and with angry disappointment growls “Shit!” Just beyond the elm is something he'd forgotten all about: the old Aitchbone family cemetery.

Breathing hard with worry, he trots toward the cemetery. The gravestones and the wrought-iron fence surrounding them are barely visible above the weeds. He orbits the fence until be finds the gate. Weed-bound, it won't swing open. So he hops it, snagging the ass of his Dockers on one of the iron points. He kneels by the nearest gravestone. It is the grave of Henry Aitchbone, one of Jobiah's six sons. Born July 1802. Died February 1878. His wife, Blanche, August 1805 to March 1881, is buried next to him. He kneels by other gravestones. Some are broken, some flat on their backs, some leaning, some as straight as the day they were planted. There are maybe fifteen gravestones in all. He looks until he finds the stone where the original Ohio Aitchbones are buried. Isn't that something, Jobiah and Almira were both been born in May 1782; both died in May 1861.

D. William Aitchbone cannot help but think about Jobiah and Almira walking their brood all the way from Connecticut, through forests and across rivers, worried about wolves and bears and how much flour was left in the wagon; maybe even worrying about Indians, though if Katherine Hardihood is right, the Indians were long gone from the Ohio frontier by the time Wyssock County was settled. Indians or no Indians, the genetically blessed Aitchbones made it. They chose this land above all the rest, paying $1.50 an acre. They felled trees and burned stumps and maybe it was right around here somewhere, where that Indian squaw appeared in the smoke, forgiving the Tuttwyler brothers for clubbing her and her baby to death, wishing the white settlers nothing but the best—not that such a silly thing really happened, of course.

Surrounded by the graves of his ancestors, how can D. William Aitchbone not think about these things? How can he not think about them plowing their fields with teams of oxen? Or shooting squirrels and raccoons to save their precious corn crops? Or crowding into their first little long house? Or building with their bare hands that big house and big barn down there? How can he not think about them sitting around the table eating pork roasts and potatoes? Pies stuffed with the apples they grew themselves? Washing it down with the milk they squeezed from their own cows? How can he not think about them chopping wood and spinning flax and dipping candles and having no such thing as toilet paper when they headed for the outhouse? How can he not think about those nine Aitchbone children growing into adults and marrying somebody from an adjoining farm and copulating and copulating and copulating, creating new generations of Aitchbones and Browns and Warners and Grinspoons and Randalls and Goodes and Sprungs, spreading across Wyssock County like windblown milkweed seeds? How can he not think of them dying of the ailments people now take over-the-counter pills for, of them being buried on this hill on terrible February mornings, horizontal snow pelting their disciplined Connecticut Yankee faces?

And how can he—being who and what he is—not think about the problem this collection of ancestral bones is going to create for him? Will developers want a farm with a cemetery on it? Will it affect the price? Will voters vote for someone who sells his ancestors' remains? What will it cost to dig these bones up, and bury them somewhere else? How much will fifteen cemetery plots cost? Will he have to buy fifteen new caskets? What would that cost? And what kind of a stink will Katherine Hardihood raise about all this? “That woman has more brass than a marching band,” he tells his long-dead relatives buried there, afraid that maybe he isn't the luckiest sonofabitch alive after all.

This new predicament requires an immediate strategy session. Those tacos with the kids will have to wait. He walks straight and fast for his car, as straight and fast as those early Aitchbone men walked when an Aitchbone woman rang that dinner bell he sold for one hundred bucks to that top antique dealer.

D. William Aitchbone drives into Tuttwyler. He waits impatiently for the light at Tocqueville and South Mill.

Red.

Yellow.

Green.

As he drives up South Mill the impressive Victorians and Greek revivals click by like perfect teeth. Then he pounds the brakes. The car squeals and twists, narrowly missing the fender of a Jeep Cherokee. “That crazy bastard,” he screams, the bastard being, of course, Howie Dornick, owner of the freshly painted clapboards in front of him.

And so D. William Aitchbone finds himself out of his car, screaming “Crazy bastard!” over and over, charging the freshly painted two-story frame, invading its rotting porch, banging on its door with two fists, grabbing the man who opens it by the sleeves of his undershirt, shaking and jerking him about, screaming “Crazy bastard!” square into the man's stunned, crazy-bastard face. Then he finds himself retreating back across the grass. He finds himself swiveling and pointing a single sharp finger at the man, the way the Japanese on Guadalcanal pointed their bayonets at the man's war hero father. “That isn't white, Howie! That is a far cry from white!”