Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work (21 page)

My father was born with exceptionally long flat feet and cannot walk more than a mile without having to sit down. He has to have special shoes made by a cobbler in Augusta. He is allergic to wool. Even if he had been drafted, they would have sent him home. At six-five, he is an enormous man, but when he sits, he hunches and his narrow limbs collapse inward like wings. It's difficult to see him in his office at first, but he's in there. He was exhausted by the fighting long before the war started, before I was born, and before he married a woman from a good family, my mother, and moved her back to the river town where he was born.

A woman named Janet Robinson thinks she looked in the window of his office last year (when helicopters were lifting people off the roof of the Saigon embassy on the front page of the
Valley Journal
) and saw him sitting behind his desk with tears washing down the slope of his face. She knocked on the door, she said, but he did not move. She mistook sadness for the reflection of the river in the glass, and mistook the man she saw inside for my father (he had the same reaching nose and anvil face), just as my mother has begun to mistake the man in her memory for the men in the portraits on the walls of our house. In her memory, he speaks, he sips his coffee, but she is not sure now if she can remember a word he has ever said.

Mrs. Small saw him on Water Street early one morning when she got up to walk the dog. At four in the morning, he drives his rusty Chevrolet to Augusta to buy milk and cheese at an all-night convenience store.

I am told that before I was born he would spend hours walking through the acreage, lying down when he felt like it and letting his arms sink into the wood sorrel and bluets. My grandfather has called him a dreamer. A man who has lost his way. His hair, Mrs. Small said, was down to his shoulders when she saw him. Janet Robinson thinks she heard music coming from the back room of his office. She could barely hear it, she said. She had to press her ear to the glass; for some reason she also thinks my father is carving pieces of wood back there, and he may be. Wood shavings pile up behind the building.

After I help my mother with the clocks, I go to the upper field where my father talks to me as if he were there. He travels in his thoughts to Montana or California or Idaho as he talks to me, revealing the most banal details of the things he saw the summer before he met my mother. I tell him I would like to see Nebraska as he has seen it, and roll my eyes over the great central plain, but he doesn't respond. At the end of our conversation, during which he has not listened to a word I have said (even though I shout over his voice), he reminds me that he has not been here to
visit, and that we have not had a conversation. The house, the land, and all its history belong to you, he says. He calls me the child king, and then says goodbye.

My mother pretends he is on his way home, and I pretend he visits me in the upper field.

My last name is the name of the town where we live. The king granted us this land at a time when our schooners crowded the docks along the banks of the Kennebec to haul hundred-foot pines, granite, and ice to England, Hong Kong, and Calcutta. The docks have rotted into the mud, the windows of our shoe factory are boarded up, the roads are cracked, and the clapboards of the old federals are soft to the touch. The last of our wealth is in the land, six hundred acres, part of which we let to a local farmer for the cost of groceries and part of which we open to the public as a park for a break on taxes so that it can remain ours, if in name only, and so that it might, when I have reached the proprietary age, become mine until the next generation when it will be someone else's job to wind the clocks. But none of this may come to pass. It's possible that no one will grow older here.

My mother goes into the old study where the photographs are strewn over the floor. Though as a boy my father looked much the way I do now, I have held his photo while looking at myself in the beveled mirror and there is no way I can reproduce the smile he wears
sitting on top of the five-foot wheel of the tractor. It makes me think I was never his age.

She spreads the photos out, the ones of my father when he was young mixed with the ones she took of him when they first met. She picks them up, holds them close to her face, and puts them down. There were pictures of her, too, when she was twenty, but she has picked those out over time and burned them in the fireplace, presumably for the same reason she never looks in the mirror. Even when I stand in front of her and ask a question, she doesn't look me in the eye.

She's pulled other photo albums out of the trunk, of my grandfather's days after the war when he first met my grandmother, and they drove around town in their Packard and took the Woolwich down the Kennebec to Bath. My father was not supposed to be an only child, but my grandfather had an affair with a woman in Augusta when he was serving in the state legislature, and my grandmother found out about it. She didn't talk to him for a whole year, even though they lived in the same house, and they never slept in the same bed again. I was an accident (at the beginning of the war), but I suppose that I wasn't meant to be an only child, either.

There are photos of my grandmother (the surfaces peel off like fly wings), and a tin photo of my great-grandfather sitting in a chair on the lawn (which has since overgrown with thistle and bayberry) just after he returned from the war. He sits in the chair as if in the
saddle of a horse, his beard covering all but his stolid eyes. I often carry the tin type around in my pocket. If I turn it in the direct light, the image disappears. I carry several photos with me—I don't know why—and occasionally I exchange the ones I have for others in the pile, depending on how I feel. Maybe I carry them because there are no photos of me anywhere in the house. I do worry that I might not be here at all.

My favorite picture is of my father when he was younger than I am now, sitting in a wicker chair with his eyes peacefully closed and his legs crossed and hands folded in his lap like an old man.

My mother turns and says I should stop sneaking up behind her, to act my age, and busy myself with the toys she has bought for me. She covers up what she has been doing, as if embarrassed, goes downstairs to put a record on the phonograph, and sits in a wicker chair leaned up against the edge of the house near the open window. She falls asleep by the time the record finishes and doesn't hear the needle scratching over the middle of the disc. The sound reminds me of certain moments in old movies when an actor enters a room where someone they love has died.

I stand over her while she sleeps and ask her to stop waiting for my father, but she often stays up all night reading a novel and can't be woken until the afternoon. Someone has to be awake in case he does come home, so I run outside to drag a branch along the jagged surface of the old stone wall, clicking off the seconds and
holding my breath when I see barbed wire passing right through the middle of a tree trunk. It's bad luck otherwise.

I hear a car braking down the road, and the voices of kids from town passing through the leaves, but I see no one except the man now climbing to the upper field, a very fat man who used to be mayor before I was born. He ambles up the slope each day at this time, stopping every five or six steps to breathe. After a few minutes standing in the middle of the field, looking down the hill to the sluice and below that to the stream, he lies down and rests the back of his hand over his eyes. The starlings seem drunk in the grass. The yarrow and aster are past their bloom and the thrush's flute, so welcome a month ago, has started to strain. I think I can hear the webbed feet of the ducks pushing through the current of the river below the lower field.

My mother comes outside and rubs her eyes, looking into the old pool, which has been dry and cracked since long before I was born. Speaking softly, as if to herself, she says my name and that she wants to go for a drive. I have been no farther north than the Schoodic Peninsula and no farther south than Kittery Point, both times with my mother in our light-blue sedan. The air has cleared and cooled by the time she pulls out of the barn. She has not wanted to drive much this summer; I had almost forgotten the feeling of the trees whipping by and the sudden hard glances of the people in town whom we rarely see.

As she puts the car in gear and coasts toward Water Street, I hold my hand out the window and pretend we are flying on the wing of my fingers. At moments like these, I am conscious of being happy, and I turn to her to ask if she is happy. This is a game we used to play, and she flinches and looks out the window, trying to make me think she doesn't want me to go on, though I know she does. “You are happy, Mother,” I say, and she pretends not to hear as we cross the Augusta Bridge, suspended seventy feet up, in midair. “You are so, so happy, Mother,” I say again, and she breaks out in tears, though she smiles as she wipes her face.

On the way back, she pulls off the road across the river from our town and looks out over the water.

“It's as if I've always lived here,” she says.

“We can leave,” I say.

But she is afraid that if we drive down the road any farther (in the direction of the city and the state where she was born), we will travel forever forward in a straight line until even this moment is forgotten. She turns right across the river and climbs the hill back to the house.

I wish we had kept driving. I don't say anything. She is sad enough without the burden of my disappointment.

We go over to sit with my grandfather while he drinks his afternoon tea, and he talks to us about Patton's rush to Berlin and the German girl he met in Freiburg and almost married, as if we have never heard
these stories before. He tells my mother that she is as beautiful as the day she first came to town. Then he puts his hand on my shoulder and leaves it there while he turns to me with hazy eyes. His skin smells of pipe smoke as he pulls me over. His hands are bent and spotted and dirty. Even though he is almost blind, he is the only one who sees me, so I have to believe what he says. We live in two worlds, he says. The one we fight for, and the one we fight against. And he starts in on all the people he thinks are ruining this town. After so many years, he has quite a list, and I know all the names: the Dawsons, who own the store and overcharge and no longer make their own bread; Willoughby, the tax assessor just down the road; the Nasons; Mrs. Molloy; the MacDonalds, both of them; and so on. Someone wants to build a new school, someone lets their kids chase his cows through the field, someone's father said to my grandfather in a town meeting thirty-five years ago that he was a fool.

As my mother and I walk back across the road, I think that someday, if I am fortunate, I will have a few friends and sometimes, coming home with them after school, will think of myself as one of them. But even then as I walk along, led down the slope of the valley by the dark chimneys against the metal sky, it will be impossible not to remember this time, standing above the house with my fingertips resting on the high grass as I look up and see a single-engine plane bank over the river, disappear in the late afternoon glare, and reappear
downriver, heading east toward Richmond. There is something in this moment, beyond the sight of the plane's white wings turning in the currents, that recalls a time I can't quite reach, leaving me with the sense that I have been here before.

I walk through the side door and pass the portraits in the dark stairwell leading up to the third floor, where discarded furniture is stored in the spare rooms, the spindles and legs cluttered together like piles of weapons from a defeated army. No one ever painted portraits of mothers, grandmothers, daughters or the boys who died young (no one will ever paint me), but we live here, too, in the contours of the buckling plaster.

My mother goes back to bed downstairs, and I sit in an armless rocking chair to wait for her to get up. I listen for the door in case I have to speak for her if someone knocks—I've learned to speak as adults do. Today I hear only the strange calls of the cicadas in the grass; my mother also hears them as she closes her eyes and pulls the frayed white sheet up around her neck. We wait so long for summer this far north that it seems to last forever when it arrives, bloating the air with the smell of wet mud at low tide. My mother is tired; I am tired, too, but I need to slow every moment of daylight against the coming dusk, when it will feel as though the river is everywhere all around me while what little I remember—the last year, the last two years—will expand to fill more than the history of my name in this
town. Even now, there is still time left (after the heat has silenced the birds and if the train is not coming and if the river is at the turn of the tide and if the breeze is still) for it to be quiet before dark. I can hear my grandfather mowing the small lawn in front of his house with his rusty push mower, but then he stops, and the cicadas are silent.

When he forgets that I am listening and talks as if to himself, this is what my father tells me in the upper field: There's an old man who lives a mile down from the entrance to our property. He was in the war in Europe, but he was not a hero. He drove supplies to the front. Now he sits on a narrow patch of trimmed grass in a metal lawn chair and listens to his transistor radio. In the morning the sun beats down on his face and on the white face of his house. By midday, the angle of the light has passed over the peak of his roof and he goes inside. For forty years he was a stonecutter—a granite cutter. I think of him at least once a day. When the sun doesn't come out, he doesn't come out. He is no more aware of us than the clouds are aware of him. His body holds what he is thinking in the way the town holds all of us: with a kind of indifferent affection. I am like that man, my father says.