by John Enright
“We were just leaving, thank you, officer,” Morgan said. And as she brushed past Nemo to get in the back seat she said just loud enough for the deputy not to hear, “You drive, don’t ask.”
Nemo just nodded and went to get in the driver-side door. The deputy stopped him. “Hey, Mac, you know what they do to rapists in the county jail here? The other inmates form a circle with him in the middle and they make him jack-off till he can’t do it anymore, then longer. Nobody likes perverts up here.”
“Sounds appropriately peer inspired,” was all Nemo said as he got in and drove away.
Nemo drove them to the bed and breakfast where he had stayed when his car was being fixed, but they were full for the weekend, a wedding party. Morgan went in and convinced the lady to call around to see what else might be available. The best she could come up with was a hotel room over in Hudson, but all they had left was a smoking room. “I told her he’d take it,” Morgan said when she got back to the car where Amanda was listening to an oldies station. Nemo had stayed behind to use the lavatory.
“Do you think we could get your brother to bring charges that Susan had stolen his car?” Morgan asked.
“I doubt it. Not unless he had to for some reason. Why?”
“I just feel like a counterattack is in order.”
“But they let him go.” Amanda turned down the radio.
“For the time being, thanks to Susan not giving them enough to hold him on.”
“Then why get her in trouble?”
“Denise moved Susan out as a pawn. I could toss her back at her.”
“Toss whom back at whom?” Nemo asked. Neither of them had seen him come back to the car.
“Susan at the witch,” Morgan said, “the truth against a lie. You didn’t rape her, but she did steal your car.”
“Nix to that,” Nemo said. “This will blow over, and the kid’s already in enough trouble if they decide to charge her with making a false accusation.”
“Never happen,” Morgan said, “not on a she-said-he-said sex case. Reeks of blaming the victim. But if you say no, then no it is. I’ll think of some other way to get back at Denise.”
“Am I still designated driver here?” Nemo asked. He was leaning forward at the driver’s side window.
“At least until we get across the bridge and out of the county,” Morgan said.
“I am not that drunk,” Amanda said. She felt like driving.
“I know where that hotel is,” Morgan said. “I’ll give you directions.”
Actually, Amanda enjoyed the ride. She rarely got to ride shotgun and just watch the scenery go by, look up side roads and into yards, look out at the river as she crossed over it. From the bridge up to Hudson was a ten minute drive through an antique countryside well worn by centuries of human use. The road followed a route established by horses and wagons not automobiles. The hotel was toward the back of the old brick downtown, across a railroad track. They left Nemo and his luggage there and headed right back across the river to Diligence. Morgan was antsy for combat. Amanda was happy to drive. She turned up her oldies station and let Morgan stew.
***
Dominick copied the entire passage out longhand into his notebook:
All those laws which are now in force admitting the right of slavery are therefore before God utterly null and void, being an audacious usurpation of Divine prerogative, a daring infringement on the law of nature, a base overthrow of the very foundations of the social compact … and a presumptuous transgression of all the holy commandments.
Nobody wrote like that anymore. The pages and papers that Dominick had taken from the trunk were spiced with such pieces of hyper-rhetoric. This one was a quote written into what Dominick took to be the draft of a sermon, quoting someone named Garrison in a so-called “Declaration of Sentiments.” There were newspaper clippings as well, from publications with names like the Liberator and Friend of Man, all dated from the late 1830s and ’40s, that also sounded mainly like scripts for sermons or speeches. Such respect and care those authors took with the language, as if being handed a finely crafted sword to wield. It was the language, mainly, that hooked Dominick’s attention—the precision of grammar, the care taken with turning a phrase. If you could filter out the religious hyperbole—that fallacious appeal to authority—these were speakers who loved their native tongue enough to find music in even the most necessary statements. Maybe it had to do with writing with a quill pen and having to think out and rethink out every sentence before committing it to the page. Surely they didn’t normally talk this way. Back then there had still been that separation between the spoken and the written word, a low and high language, speech and sacrament, in an age when oratory was still an art form and the best of it sounded like the written word, like scripture. Some of the pages ended with the initials VVH. At first he thought it was WH, then he came upon a letter addressed to the Rev. Vestal Van Houten and realized his mistake.
His room at the St. George Hotel was not a cell—he had the key to the door—but it wasn’t much bigger than one. It also reeked of stale cigarette smoke, a smell Dominick found offensive. He had immediately turned off the AC and opened the second-floor window, which looked out on a green dumpster in a brick alley, and lit up a Churchill. He did not like staying in hotels. It was like joining a statistical class with whom he wanted nothing else in common. A house of strangers, and let’s keep it that way. So he was glad for the documents from the trunk; they gave him somewhere else to go for the evening.
He did stroll out for dinner. Hudson’s main drag, Warren Street, was just a block away, and he found a barbeque joint. He had forgotten how awful he looked with the spreading bruise, now green and yellow around the edges, and the again bloodstained bandage. They gave him a table where no one could see him. The waiter was a swish, one of those gays on parade. “Ouch,” he said when he saw Dominick’s forehead, “now that’s a nasty owie.”
“An accident,” Dominick said. “I survived.” He survived the meal as well.
The green-covered ledger started with pages of cryptic accounting—dates and times of “arv” and “dep” and brief phrases: “Mother & Children,” “left for K,” “midnight pursuit.” It went on for pages and years. The back of the ledger was filled with prose passages in different hands. Dominick set it aside for another day. He slept well, awakened just once by the rumbling rhythm of a railroad train sneaking past as slowly and silently as possible, seemingly just outside his still open hotel window, right through the middle of town in the dead of night. It was a comforting sound.
The next day he lazed in his room reading and copying and he strolled around Hudson. There was some sort of Hudson River School Art Festival going on, and Hudson was crowded with visitors. The shops and eateries here were more upscale than those in Catskill on the other shore, and the tourists were more obnoxious, more of the type who treat a destination as an amusement park rather than as someone else’s home. On this side of the river, day visitors could take the train up from New York or down from Albany, a different crowd. Dominick noticed that the once ubiquitous badge of the tourist—the camera around the neck—was a thing of the past. Now folks just held up their cell phones—or something similar and equally small—to snap their photos (were they still called photographs?) of each other or themselves as proof that they were there, somewhere, once. An electronic memory image, nothing actual or substantial. Something virtual—in their term—something that existed not in fact or form but only in essence or effect. Unreal, in other words, as unreal as personal memories, and as fleeting. Substitutes for memory. Speak, digital cloud.
Further out toward the edge of town from his hotel, beyond the reach of tourists, was a local’s saloon, the Wunder Bar, a neighborhood joint from anywhere in America, half filled with its regulars. Dominick was the sole outsider. It was late, close to midnight. He had left his room and the hotel when he heard a train approaching and went out to watch it creep past through the park across the street, a string of mix
ed freight cars, one carrying cattle who looked out at him with, yes, cowed expressions.
In the bar he noticed that all the women wore dangling earrings larger than their ears. He ordered a draft and a shot of Jameson’s. At the entrance end of the bar was an anomalous couple sitting alone. They didn’t belong together. Not just that she was black and he was white and that she was at least ten years older than the young man, but that Dominick doubted from the way they acted that they even knew each other’s names. She was there to eat. The bartender didn’t know the guy, but he knew the woman well enough to lean across the bar and give her a kiss. She ordered a glass of white wine; he ordered a coke. They spent most of their time staring at the little bright-screened gizmos in their hands or holding them up against their ears, ignoring one another. She ordered a bowl of chili. There was something about the way the guy acted. Then it struck Dominick—the dude was her latest john and she had conned him into buying her an after-trick meal. The longer the guy sat there, sipping his Coke, the antsier he became to leave; but she was enjoying her chili and her second glass of wine, her time off from work. The young guy was being naively polite, waiting for her to finish the meal he was paying for. When they left they walked off in opposite directions.
By Sunday Dominick was feeling antsy himself. He wasn’t used to being carless and trapped. In New York, New York, it was one thing not to have a car, but in Hudson, New York, it was something else. It was a perfect summer day. He wanted to get out, but the town now bored him—another place he didn’t belong. He found the scribbled phone number of his Catskill cabbie, Vernon, and called him. Vernon didn’t work on Sundays, but for that reason he wasn’t busy. He accepted Dominick’s offer to pay him as a tour guide for the day.
Vernon showed up in his mature Cadillac after lunch, and they went for a ride into the country. When Vernon asked what Dominick wanted to see, he said, “History. Just show me some history.” Vernon nodded and headed south out of town, down the river road. Their first stop was Olana, the bizarre villa built by the painter Francis Church overlooking the valley he had immortalized through gross exaggeration. The parking lot and grounds were packed with art fest tourists. The same was true for the painter Thomas Cole’s house, Cedar Grove, across the river in Catskill. “No, no,” Dominick said at the sight of the crowds, and Vernon drove on. Back across the river Vernon headed north up toward Kinderhook and Martin Van Buren’s family home, Lindenwald. At least here there was next to no one, though the old yellow house of a politician whom historians found faint reason to praise was of little interest to Dominick either.
“He wasn’t any friend of black people,” Vernon said as they drove away from Van Buren’s historic house site. “My people only have negative stories about him and his. They were slave owners, the Van Burens.”
“How long have your people been here?” Dominick asked.
“Since before him. Free blacks, too, not runaways. My great-great-granddaddy was a teamster, ran a blacksmith shop over in Valatie. I’ll drive you past there. That’s where everybody’s buried.”
Dominick didn’t know enough about where he was. He was on terra historica incognita. Church and Cole, the Hudson River School, sure, sidebars to history. But free blacks and slaves existing side by side here on the northern colonial frontier? Clueless. “Vernon, tell me more about your people,” he said.
“I’ll take you over to Valatie. That’s where we’re from, not Africa.” Vernon said. “We got plenty of time.”
The country roads were as always hypnotic. Dominick imagined himself briefly into every passing farm house. On a back road outside the little town of Valatie, Vernon stopped at a pocket cemetery of old gravestones inside a grove of trees. “We’re all buried here,” Vernon said. “It may not be big-house history, but it’s older.”
Dominick got out and walked through the graveyard. The grass between the scattered graves was uncut and high, but the place showed signs of periodic care, and there were newer graves back at the edge of the trees—the younger generations encircling their elders, shielding them from the wilderness and the future. It was a serene setting. Rest in peace. If one’s image of history was primarily of graveyards, one would be mistaken. The past was no way as peaceful as death. Out of respect Dominick did not stoop to clear and read a single grave marker. At the far end of the cemetery he stopped and lit a cigar. After he had stood silently for a while, the birdsong returned.
Back at the car Vernon was standing in the road, talking on his cell phone. He closed it up and put it in his pocket as Dominick came back. “If you don’t mind going on a bit further, I have someone for you to talk to about history,” Vernon said.
“Lead on, MacDuff.” It was another fifteen or twenty minute drive down empty county roads, most of the way through a dense mixed forest. Dominick finished his cigar. Vernon didn’t mind. The windows were open. Life was good. “Vernon, we should stop and get something to eat and a drink. Do you know of some place to do so out here?”
“That’s where we’d be headed. You can eat and drink at Jefferson’s. That’s what they are there for.”
“Excellent. And who is it we are to meet there?”
“Someone who knows a lot about what went on and what goes on hereabouts and who wants to meet you.” The woods that the two-lane blacktop curved through had become pristine, unbroken, as if the old Cadillac had driven through a lens out of the present into a truer space.
“It’s all good, Vernon,” Dominick said. “It’s all good.”
***
By Sunday a truce of sorts was being observed at the house. The sides were not speaking with each other, but no fires had been set, no cutlery thrown. As was their custom, Amanda and Morgan made themselves scarce during Sunday, leaving the place to Denise and her congregation for their services. Wiccans came from around the county and across the river to meet and do their thing. This being one of their high holiday weekends, there could be quite a crowd. The house was, after all, legally their church, or house of worship, or whatever. Amanda didn’t know what they called it. That was all Morgan’s dealing. Somehow she had worked out that as long as the house was a church they didn’t have to pay taxes on it, which had meant a lot when they first got the place. In addition, they had been charging Denise and all of her resident coven members rent. So the place made a profit as they waited to fix it up and sell it. The no-men rule was Denise’s, not theirs, but it had worked out well, kept the peace. The trip to Albany had been about taking the place back from the church. It was all legal stuff, Morgan’s end of the business, where Amanda just acquiesced and signed the papers where she was told to.
This Sunday they drove over to Hudson. The arts festival was happening, and Morgan had gotten them invitations to a reception for sponsors at Olana, the Francis Church estate. Morgan wanted Amanda to work the group of deep-pockets who would be there, looking for possible prospects for their place. Amanda put on her best summer dress and her only pair of heels. Morgan made her promise that she wouldn’t drink.
Chapter 12
There were two moose heads above the bar and a militia’s worth of antique weapons hanging on the walls, giving a sort of swank Second Amendment feel to a place at a country crossroads. A big room, it was reasonably full with Sunday diners. Vernon and Dominick sat at the bar. Dominick ordered a cheeseburger and a draft IPA. He was famished. Vernon ordered chicken wings. One of the things Dominick liked about being with Vernon was that there was no unnecessary conversation. Vernon obviously didn’t think that part of his tour guide gig was entertaining Dominick with small talk. He never said anything about himself or asked a personal question. It was a comfortable silence.
Dominick was finishing his excellent burger when some sort of commotion started up at the restaurant’s entrance. Voices were raised. All the heads in the room turned in that direction. A man’s voice was saying, “No, no, I have every right to say so. I am the owner. I can refuse service to whomever I choose.”
“What grounds do you have
to discriminate against me?” a woman’s voice asked, calm but purposefully loud.
“You’ve been told, your paper’s been told, that you are no longer welcome here. Why are you causing a scene?” the man answered.
“You got more to hide, Mr. Lubitch? I’m not here as a reporter. I am here as a member of the public to get something to eat. This is a public place, isn’t it?”
“Not for you it isn’t. Please leave, quietly.”
Dominick turned to watch. The standoff was at the maître d’s podium just inside the front door. A small balding man in an ill-fitting suit was blocking the way of a large woman in a colorful flowing dashiki. She was smiling. “You’re the one causing the scene, Mr. Lubitch. I just came to meet some people.”
“You’ll excuse me,” Vernon said to Dominick as he slowly wiped his mouth and fingers with a napkin, got down from his bar stool, and strolled in the direction everyone was looking. The man in the suit was blocking the exit. Vernon placed a hand on his shoulder pad and said, “Excuse me, sir.” The man stepped aside.
“Hi, Daddy,” the woman said. “You done eating? I hope they didn’t poison you.”
Vernon put an arm around her shoulders and said something in her ear that made her laugh, and they headed for the door. Before she followed Vernon out she turned back to the room. “Ta-ta, Mr. Lubitch, and you all can go back to eating. Floor show’s over.”
There were still some chicken wings left on Vernon’s plate, so Dominick had the waitress box them up to take. He finished his ale and paid the bill. Outside in the parking lot, Vernon’s Caddy was still there, but no Vernon. Dominick put the plastic bag with the Styrofoam box of left-over wings in the back seat. Across the road from the restaurant was the only other business at the crossroads, a general store. Vernon and the woman in the dashiki came out of the general store with their own plastic bags. She was still smiling. That would seem to be her default expression. She was slightly taller than Vernon and there was nothing linear about her. She was all curves, full-bodied and not ashamed of it. Her brown hair was long and braided and pulled back from her face. Her complexion was café au lait with large darker freckles. Her facial features were also full and softly rounded. Hers was an uncommon comeliness.