The Good Neighbor

by William Kowalski

  “How come we only ever do it after you spend a lot of money?” she asked instead, running her finger through the swirls of hair on his back. Last time, it had been the purchase of his very expensive cell phone that sparked things. The time before that... she didn’t remember.

  “Mmf,” he said.

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  “Coltrane.” “Hm.”

  “Do I still excite you? On a day-to-day basis?” “Hum,” he said. “I’m sleepy.”

  “But do I?”

  “Of course you do,” he said. “Why do you always feel the need to quiz me on our relationship after we have sex?”

  “I do not.”

  “Always.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, looking up at the ceiling again. “Are we go ing to stay here for a while?”

  “I wanna take a nap.”

  He lay with his back to her. Francie grabbed the remote and flicked on the TV. A man and a woman lay in bed and nuzzled each other. The woman was wearing a silk nightgown and the man was wearing silk boxer shorts. The sheets of their bed were silky-looking, too. They lived in a silk world. Francie muted the television and watched with envy as these people talked gently to each other, imagining what they were saying, trying to read their lips, trying to figure out how it was really done.

  5‌

  A Historical Digression

  Adencourt was built, in its slapdash fashion, on the orders (and with the considerable family fortune, got by the slave trade)

  of Captain Victor T. Musgrove, gentleman-hero of the Mexican- American War of 1848, and of several unnamed Indian campaigns before then. Captain Musgrove knew a fair bit about one or two things, including Indian warfare and a couple of native languages, but was completely ignorant of everything else, including the principles of architecture. This didn’t matter in the slightest, as far as building the house was concerned; for the Captain consid ered himself to be a man of impeccable taste, and no one was rich enough to contradict him.

  Adencourt was one of those spectacularly solid and impenetrable homes of which it was said, even one hundred fifty years ago, that it would last at least one hundred fifty years. One could tell this just by looking at it. It was a breathing, alert thing, looking something like a submarine monster: the vast, oaken panel of the front door like a mouth agape; the windows, its many blank eyes; the roof, by turns gabled, peaked, flattened, and widow’s-walked, a ridiculous

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  hairline; and the two large wings, northern and southern, a pair of clawless appendages. Its skeleton of hand-smoothed beams was connected by a kind of joint known as mortis-and-tenon, carved with mallet and chisel by carpenters skilled in arts hardly anyone remembers today, except Luddites and Amishmen. The carapace was motley clapboard of a half-dozen tones, all variations on the theme of dirty white. Were you to go over the whole thing with a metal detector, you’d find scarcely a nail in it. It was put together with hand-whittled pegs, like some sort of giant Chinese puzzle. The frame, that is. The drywall had to be hung with nails; there just wasn’t any other way. But that, of course, was a recent addi tion.

  The house’s bones were cherry, ash, and oak, grown from the very earth on which it stood now. Some of its beams, the ones you rarely saw unless you descended deep into its bowels, were thicker than a man—these were the spine and ribs of the house. It was a strong house, a house built like a ship, or even better than a ship; it was a house that would float if set on the sea, a house that could never be broken. It was, in fact, a fortress. In certain rooms, the walls were still the original mixture of horsehair and plaster of paris, so springy that if you tried to drive a nail in, it came flying right back out at you, like a bullet.

  Until 1945, an old-fashioned carriage house with a turnabout had stood next to the barn. The carriage house had been knocked down with the intention of replacing it with a modern garage, but at the dawn of the twenty-first century, this improvement had yet to be accomplished. The barn was still there, however. It was older than the house by three years, and would likely continue to exist a while longer in its present form as a pile of ancient lumber, unless someone took a match to it—or it was hit by merciful lightning.

  Captain Victor T. Musgrove was commonly referred to by his neighbors as a “hero,” but his last war was one that, strictly speak ing, had not offered the standard opportunities for heroism that a

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  good war ought: namely, an honorable reason for fighting. The war against Mexico had really only been a thinly disguised land grab, an embarrassing mark on the report card of a country al ready founded on land grabs—a nation whose entire philosophy of growth, in fact, was based in thievery and genocide, just like all nations. Captain Musgrove knew this, and so did everyone else in the United States of America, though it can be said, with almost complete certainty, that none of them knew that they knew it.

  It had, of course, been Captain Musgrove’s opinion that Amer ica had an excellent reason to fight the Mexicans, who in his eyes were not even a true race, but only the bastard descendants of the Spanish conquistadores and the native women they had raped centuries earlier. It was because they had plenty of land, and America wanted some of it. Nothing could be simpler. Captain Musgrove was a professional Indian-killer—a title that once car ried great distinction—and he had firm ideas about the destiny of white men in North America. There was clear evidence that the continent belonged to them, the primary pillar of which was that they were there. Do not try to argue with Captain Musgrove about Manifest Destiny, people used to say of him, four and five genera tions ago. First he’ll argue you to death, and then he’ll shoot you, and then he’ll scalp you—a trick he had learned from the very same In dians he once used to hunt, as though they were rabbits. And then he’ll argue with you some more.

  Not that anyone was interested in arguing with the Captain. The doctrine of Manifest Destiny was so manifest it didn’t even need to be discussed. It was a self-evident truth, as dear to the heart of the Great White Father in Washington as the one that stated all beings were created equal, as long as those beings were white property-owning males. Every white American man be lieved, back then, that the whole world belonged to him, or at least as much of it as he could farm and hunt. It must be remem bered that most of these Americans were really only transplanted Europeans or their immediate descendants, and that they’d been

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  tricked into this belief by the stupendous size and wealth of the continent of which they found themselves the de facto heirs. To stare over the oceanic vastness of the Great Plains—with the wind roaring in the long grass like surf, and the humped spines of buf falo just visible over the tips of the wild sedge and amaranth grasses, like sleeping whales—was a vision miraculous enough to convince the most timid serf or humble peasant that he’d become wealthy almost by accident, particularly because no one had farmed here yet. In Europe, there was no such thing as unfarmed land. That continent had been overpopulated and overcultivated since the Middle Ages. America was too good to be true, a broad- hipped, buxom temptress wearing absolutely nothing, who did not even try to hide her fruits but urged men on to blind abandon in the plundering of her. It was enough to make even the most vir tuous of men greedy; those who were already weak in character didn’t stand a chance.

  Captain Musgrove, who certainly saw himself as among the most virtuous of men, retired from the U.S. Cavalry in 1851 at the age of forty-three, already moving and thinking like an old man, thrice gravely wounded, twice healed. The name “Adencourt” had been circulating in his mind for some years now, though he didn’t yet know what it meant. It came to him from time to time, usu ally when he was a-horse, like a one-word lyric poem that fit the beat of thudding hooves. It pleased him to form it with his tongue, as though he were going to say it, but he never did, not out loud.

  The Captain’s left arm, chest, and both legs were scarred and weakened by arrow, musket ball, and sabre. His last wound,
the one from which he’d never fully recuperated, had been received in hand-to-hand combat with a Mexican officer. They’d come at each other on foot, screaming like charging bulls. He’d shot at the Mexican and missed. He threw his empty pistol at his head, and missed again. Then, like an amateur, he fumbled with his sword. The Mexican had taken this opportunity to stick his own blade between the Captain’s ribs. The Captain promptly passed out—

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  not from pain, which was something he had never acknowledged, but from the certainty that he was finally, blissfully dead.

  The Captain did not believe in heaven, since he had never re ceived any reliable reports of its existence. He expected, when he awoke, to find that he was in hell, but he was not. He was in Texas. The Mexican officer was nowhere to be seen. The field, in fact, was mostly empty. The Captain was never able to offer him self a reasonable explanation of that day. In fact, he was to puzzle over it for the rest of his life. What had happened to his enemy? Had someone else killed him? Had he himself been left for dead? Had Jesus come while he was unconscious and taken away all the righteous, leaving only the damned?

  It was one of those incidents that might have caused ordinary men to take stock of themselves and perhaps mend their ways, out of sheer gratitude. Not so the Captain. He’d been trying to kill himself ever since puberty, when he’d first taken up soldiering. In truth, he wasn’t much given to introspection. He was aware now only of a dim but familiar disappointment at finding himself still breathing. He’d come close to death so many times that he felt he could salute it by its first name, that he could recognize it from a distance at which, to most men, it would only resemble a faint disturbance in the atmosphere. Like a desired whore, like America itself, death was, to the Captain, almost an unattainable ideal, something he could strive for all his life and never achieve. The irony of that was not lost on him, philosophical ineptitude notwithstanding. He wasn’t a stupid man. It was that he believed the only life that had been well lived was one that ended bloodily, in the service of something greater than oneself.

  Now retired, having reached his mid-forties, it was hard for the Captain to breathe. A military sawbones told him his left lung was partly ruined. Someday it would kill him. He couldn’t raise his left arm above his head. It took him half an hour to get dressed in the mornings. He didn’t care. It was only a body. The rest of him learned to compensate.

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  ❚ ❚ ❚

  The Captain was born in easternmost Pennsylvania, and he’d al ways intended to return home, buy some land, and grow some sort of crop on it when he became too old to fight, if that was to be his miserable fate. (Suicide was out of the question, unless he’d been defeated in battle.) He was, he often thanked God, of purely English extraction. In those days, the ethnic makeup of that part of the country was different. All the Indians from around there were already dead, of course, or nearly all. And you didn’t have so many of your Eastern Europeans then, not yet—the Poles and the Bohemians and the other miscegenated rabble that would soon in vade the East came over to work the coal mines only later, when the invention of steamships made the trip affordable for anyone who could scrape together a few dollars. In that part of Pennsyl vania you mostly just had your Germans, your Scots, your shanty Irish (as if there were any other kind of Irish, the Captain fre quently opined), and many English. There were a few lingering French, left over from the days when those people had ruled the fur-trapping trade. Some of the Scottish families had already been in the New World long enough to have migrated all over again, from the Ozarks in the South to the Catskills and the Adiron dacks and the Poconos in New York and Pennsylvania. These people had mountains in their blood, and they still sang the Gaelic songs of the Highland clans from the days of Bonnie Prince Charlie, as well as the songs of their cousins from the northern Irish counties. They sang them at their whiskey-soaked gatherings year after year, generation after generation, until grad ually the sound of their voices and the rhythm of their tunes evolved into a different kind of music altogether, one that would have been only slightly recognizable to their ancestors, yet would have set their feet to tapping all the same.

  And then there were the families descended from the oppres sors of these people, which was the kind of people the Musgroves

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  were: English lairds, nobles who’d been granted land in Scotland and Ireland that they would never even see. Early Musgroves had assisted in the systematic eradication of every trace of indigenous culture from the Scottish Highlands with sword and English Bible as their weapons, just as they would cleanse the North American continent of red-skinned heathens centuries later. The Captain knew his family history intimately, and was proud of every bit of it. His was a family of winners. They would never sink. Some of what they’d done wasn’t pretty, he knew, but this was the price of progress, and it was better to be on top than on the bottom. That was a motto he repeated to himself every night, in the only Latin he knew, to pacify the pangs of conscience that were plucked in his head like a harp. Melior in summo quam in fundo: Bet ter to be on top than on the bottom.

  ❚ ❚ ❚

  Musgrove would name the house Adencourt because it sounded like something he’d heard about that had happened once in France. He had not been to France—but it had happened there, a battle or something, he wasn’t sure what. He just liked the name. It had resounded in his skull now for years, ricocheting like a mus ket ball in a bell, ringing with all the force of destiny.

  The word he sought was “Agincourt,” of course, which was the name of a battle between France and England in 1415; it had been a complete rout for the French, who were demoralized and embar rassed by not having made good on their threat to cut off the mid dle and index fingers of every English longbowman on the field, so that they would never pluck anything again, be it bow-, harp, or heartstring. It was a shame the Captain wasn’t familiar with this story, because he would have enjoyed it thoroughly, especially the part about the French losing.

  But he also would have liked the idea of cutting off fingers. In his youth, like many others, the Captain was a practitioner of bat

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  tlefield mutilation. For many years, from the rafters of the long porch of his new house near Plainsburg, there hung oddlooking things, something like horsetails with a bit of horse still attached. These were human scalps. The Captain had taken them himself, from three warriors of some Apache tribe, at the battle of San Fer nando. In those early days of America, to hang body parts of your enemies in public places was, though perhaps excessive, still so cially acceptable. Visiting ladies politely averted their eyes from the grisly trophies, and the more squeamish business gentlemen up for a few days from Philadelphia or New York (who often stopped in to meet the old war hero on their way to points west) would take a great deal of time working up the courage to ask what, exactly, it felt like to rip off a man’s scalp. The Captain was only too proud to describe it, in his diffident, frontier manner:

  “Feels just like skinnin’ a possum. Makes the same kind of noise, too. Yeh make a gash with your hatchet at the front of the head, not too hard, for yeh don’t want to dash his brains out. Yeh want him to feel it, yeh see. Then yeh get your knife blade under there, just ’twixt the skin and the skull bone. Yeh run it up under and around, holdin’ onto the feller ’s hair all the while. Like as not he’s kickin’ and screamin’ about it, so, why, yeh just got to kneel on his chest and hold ’im down. Then, yeh just give a mighty tug, and off she comes, hair and all, and if you done it right, it’s just as neat as can be. They usually fall pretty quiet about then, and you just run your blade acrost his throat, and that’s the end of ’im, an’ a fittin’ end it is, too, the filthy bastards.”

  Said one truly horrified gentleman, a dandy lawyer from New York City:

  “Why, then, sir, do you not simply remove the entire head, and carry that around with you?”

  The Captain was as unfami
liar with the principles of sarcasm as he was with architecture. He explained:

  “Yeh cain’t put a human head in a saddlebag, nor tie it to a sad dle horn. It spooks the horse.”

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  ❚ ❚ ❚

  Upon his retirement, Captain Musgrove decided to move back East and marry. With all the deliberation and forethought that men now give to purchasing automobiles, he chose a wife from a family whose background was as similar to his as possible. This meant that he married his first cousin, because who else but other Musgroves could possibly be suitable for a Musgrove? Most every one else in the world suffered from weak blood and water-on-the brain, anyway. That was not for the Captain; he wanted strong children. Musgroves wanted their line to prosper. It was the only right way.

  Her name was Marly. She was sixteen to his forty-three, which was considered by everyone, including Marly, to be a perfect match. Marly was short and thick-waisted, with a wide, sturdy pelvis and strong forearms; her features were a little too heavy to be considered attractive, but to the Captain, who had spent most of his life in the company of men, she was the epitome of woman hood, and he gladly took possession of her from her father. This girl would eventually bear the Captain ten children—including two sets of twins—and would assist in running the farm, as well as overseeing the few hired hands. Marly succeeded admirably in all these tasks, until she died under the hooves of a runaway horse when she was fifty-three, carrying an infant grandchild in her arms. That grandchild, Lincoln Flavia-Hermann, survived the acci dent without a scratch, and lived long enough to see the assassina tion of President John F. Kennedy replayed on television some eighty years later. Lincoln would watch it on his little black-and white set in his nursing home, and he would remember the story of the tragedy that had attended his infancy, marveling at how eas ily death came to some, while others, such as himself, had to pray for it.