“I’m sorry,” she said.
“I’ll get Ian from camp tomorrow,” he told her, knowing she’d have to call in sick for the rest of the week, staying indoors until makeup could hide the bruises.
“This is the last time.” She spoke the words precisely, angrily, defiantly, as if doing so would make them come true. “Lord help us.”
He sat beside her on the edge of the mattress, resting his hand on her back, until finally she dropped to the pillow. He draped the sheet over her and kissed her again, the ice bag sitting on her cheek. He pulled the door closed until the latch clicked.
At the top of the stairs he heard machine-gun fire, explosions, a scream. From Ian’s door, listening to him cry, he stared across the landing at the blanket chest with the Canton ginger jar set on top like an urn, focusing on the hairline cracks in the porcelain’s depiction of a coastal village. The elements of Canton, his father had taught them, were rain clouds, water, birds, and trees, a scholar in the teahouse, a bridge that no one is crossing. There’d been a lid, shattered now into a dozen pieces, swept into an envelope and stowed inside the jar. That fight had been a year ago, or was it two? By the time Cole ran from bed, his father had hit her here (was she stumbling toward his room?) and she’d fallen into the chest, knocking over the Canton jar.
Not until Cole was laid out flat in his bed, his sheets clammy from the feverish humidity and sweat—it was over for now, but he left his fan off so he could hear anything even in his sleep—not until he’d turned out his light and punched up his pillow did he erupt into sobs.
By one o’clock and then one thirty, he had nothing left. Released and spent, he blew his nose and thought how good sleep would feel. At eight a.m. he’d be picking leaves under the tobacco nets. His father would be gone when he woke up. At dawn Cole would hear the car start, then the rest of the family would straggle downstairs, cringing at their mother’s bruises but saying nothing as they entered the week-long period of afterward: silent, wounded, sometimes tender with one another, sometimes trading deadly stares of blame for a fit over staying out late on Friday or asking for new cleats. For setting them off.
Cole would get his sister to drive Ian to camp, then he’d tell the straw boss he had to quit an hour early, and he’d bike out to the brook and ride Ian home on the handlebars.
His father would be home as usual for dinner. His mother would bang pots, muttering, weeping, but she’d serve them a meal just the same; she’d keep the family running despite it all. They’d go through the motions of eating, of making believe that everything was normal. Which it was…all of this…normal.
Then his breath caught: his father’s footsteps dragging up the stairs. But he didn’t stop at their room. He turned down the hall—a scholar in the teahouse, a bridge that no one is crossing—and passed Ian’s door and Kelly’s. Cole pulled the sheet up over himself. His latch clicked, the door opened, and he pretended to be asleep. His father came toward him. He stepped between the twin beds, the spare now heaped with sleeping bags and a backpack, a mess kit and hatchet, and just stood there looking at the pile, picking up a packet of freeze-dried food, unsure about whether to clear off the bed, shoulders slumped and head dropped, defeated. Cole couldn’t let him go back to their room, and almost offered to move the gear, but the beatings were a secret even among themselves, and to acknowledge that his father was sleeping in his room would’ve been too close to admitting that this had happened, that it happened over and over.
He tossed the foil package back onto the bed and turned for the door. As he moved down the hall Cole clenched his teeth, his stomach churned. Don’t go in the bedroom! Then he heard his father descending the stairs, and he could breathe.
After five minutes, or ten, Cole silently padded to his brother’s room. He touched the sleeping boy between the shoulder blades and went back into the hall, pausing at his sister’s door. In the past, she’d come running with him—since they were little children, as far back as he could remember, when Ian was an infant and could sleep through it all; and then, in later years, the three of them racing in pajamas to their parents’ bedroom in the dead of night, like children escaping a fire, just moments ago asleep and suddenly watching their house burn. Daddy, stop! Kelly would shout, but then one night she stayed in her room, and afterward her light, as it was now, would be shining from under her door.
When he got back in bed it was just after two. His alarm was set for six o’clock.
After running through a checklist in his mind—his mother with plenty of ice and quiet in their room, Ian asleep, his father on the couch—he finally let himself relax, a visceral release. The fight had played out. Unless she went downstairs. Cole suspected one reason his father sometimes came into his room afterward to sleep—it wasn’t just for the bed, the couch was large and comfortable—was so she wouldn’t follow him. So he could sleep. So it would be over.
But he should’ve thought to move the camping gear. How could he be so stupid? Next weekend, with Liz, would be their first time spending a whole night together, the two bags zipped to each other, drifting off entangled, still inside her, waking, stirring, and making love again, which was what he called it even though she got a charge out of saying balling, screwing, doing it—as tough and unsentimental as she’d been from their first encounter. He’d seen her—a small town, you saw everyone—and he’d always been drawn to her taut body and blasé expression, giving nothing away. And she was known for being the girl who got shot.
In the winter, kids skated behind the elementary school on the duck pond—a dredged swamp, actually, so full of mosquitoes the rest of the year that even the ducks stayed away. Cole was sitting on a bench lacing his skates with two boys when Liz glided off the ice and stomped up through the packed snow to the bench where she’d left her coat. She was alone, and that confident loner quality—she seemed self-contained—was something else he’d found alluring. Like her, the other boys were a grade ahead of him, but they sometimes treated him as an equal, so when they started taunting her—“Did you see The Dick Van DYKE! Show last night?” one of them said—Cole knew how to play his hand and muttered, “Lesbo.” She stopped in front of him and waited until he looked up at her, face-to-face for the first time. When their eyes locked, she kicked him in the shin, the teeth at the front of her skate blade stabbing through his jeans and driving right to the bone.
A year and a half later he could still hear the thud, still feel the pain barreling up his leg, the numbness in his groin slowly spreading to nausea. God, it hurt. But he smiled, remembering it, and remembering tonight, making love twice in the shed, the drooping corners of her stoned blue eyes, her bony naked shoulders. He could see her sharp pretty nose scrunching up when she comes, and his cock stirred, and her scent rose off his body—the intoxicating smell of red currants beginning to ferment.
* * *
—
He woke with a start, the house quiet, crickets chirring. He was desperate for sleep to carry him off, but his mind raced. If he hauled himself out of bed, he could put on the record to help him drift away: I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon…If only he could let go of the hyped-up watchfulness. From a week of his mother’s shrill complaints and his father’s threatening stares and futile violence—slamming a door, hurling a coffee mug at the side of the concrete cistern—Cole was always on guard for the moment he had to run to them and hold back his father’s fists. From a week of that to one of tense, funereal placidity. He’d considered calling the cops and had even floated the idea with his mother—never more than a hint because that would violate the code, the secret—and she responded with equal indirection: Private matters staying within a family, that’s the real bond…My clients get involved in this sort of messiness…I could tell you stories, social services whisking the baby right out of the high chair…
He could’ve killed his father. Who’d blame him with her bloody face as his defense? Knifed him i
n the kidneys in the middle of a fight, hiked up Metacomet Ridge to the cliffs that overlook Old Newgate Prison and shoved him off, kicked out the jack when he was changing the oil.
His heart was pounding so he finally got up and put on the record, side B. His turntable was old—Liz’s cast-off—and sometimes the needle picked up at the end of the album, sometimes not, but it was 2:45, too late to care if it spun around in the dead zone for a couple hours.
He fell heavily back into bed—God, he could hardly breathe in this swampy air—and the music transported him to that loft in the shed with Liz, their nest now collapsed, still smoldering, incinerating all traces of them before the exhausted gaze of firemen and cops. And along with Liz’s scent there was the smell of smoke and tobacco juice from skulking under the nets for a view of the fire, a combination that reminded him of smoke pouring from the censer as the priest walked up the aisle swinging it over his head, clanking the chain against the brass, and Father Mally acting holy and solemn, when he actually must be feeling how cool it was to walk through a crowded church whipping around a huge incense burner pouring off sweet clove smoke like a Rastafarian. And when Liz came to church with them she got a kick out of tossing her coat over their laps then easing her hand across his thigh and getting him hard so when he went to the altar for communion he had to bunch up his hands in his pockets. And if they made love before church—up against the washer while she was helping him iron a shirt, maple syrup sweetening the corners of her mouth—they melted into each other in the varnished pew, calling out with the chorus of parishioners how culpable they were for their sins, their thoughts, and their words, what they’d done and failed to do. Lord, I am not worthy!
In the shed, her body striped with long bands of light, he’d inspected—surreptitious, clinical, instinctual—for bruises across her back and thighs. And now he was drifting up to their nest on the platform, embers hot enough to melt nails, the staring faces of firemen and cops in the hot yellow light, mesmerized by the flames. Dreaming that he and Liz were embraced on the platform in a cloud of curing leaves, and then there were noises—shrieks and a boom like one of the huge shed doors blowing closed—and she said, It’s just one of the barn cats and her kittens. But he heard a rhythmic crackle and smelled smoke and within seconds the tobacco and the timbers and the roof were in flames; clutching each other, she gasped for air. Help me, Cole!
He kicked off the sheet. He had to sleep. Or he could call in sick and go back to bed after Ian went to camp, then bring his mother cold drinks and more ice, sit on the edge of her bed with his hand over hers while she wept. He could clean the house. Make dinner. He touched his face. Below his left eye, his cheek was throbbing.
The rhythmic crackle was the needle spinning around and around at the end of the record. He got up and as soon as he lifted the arm, there was a tense quiet. No crickets. His ears rang, and the pressure pulled at his eardrums and temples and the skin up the back of his skull. More than silence: absence. The dead hollow of the night pulling him with a distant resolute force out into the hall.
Why was his parents’ door ajar? He peered into their room—too dark to see if his mother’s body, or his father’s, lay beneath the twisted sheets.
He was so thirsty now he could hardly breathe, but it was something else, ghostly and certain, drawing him downstairs past the wing chair and pie cupboard through the keeping room to the kitchen for a drink of water, and then he heard a familiar animal noise, like the scratching and hissing that rose up from under the porch when a family of possums had burrowed down there last winter. Lots of holes and cracks in this house where wild things could sneak in, so he moved back through the keeping room and grabbed the fireplace poker as he stepped across the hearth, peering behind the dining table, gripping the poker in front of him like a sword, defensively, knowing he could never club a possum, and slowly his eyes focused in the eerie darkness, and he saw him: deep in the dark corner, sitting on the floor, his arms locked around his knees, his head on his chest.
And the sound was coming from him—not crying or weeping, but sniveling. Cole stared at him in the feeble light that seemed to have traveled to this spot from another galaxy, another time. He stared because he knew—though he shouldn’t, no one should—what he was going to find next.
Under the window, moonlight glared off a bare leg. He bent low to see beneath the table: her bunched-up nightgown, the underside of her wrist. A grunt slipped out of him as he rushed to kneel close to her; she was slumped against the upright piano, bruises around her throat and mouth, deep scratches down her neck. He shook her—she was warm but her head dropped forward. “Mom!” he shouted. He put his face to her mouth—no breath—and his ear to her chest. He jumped back, jumped to his feet. His father still curled in a ball.
“Jesus Christ!” Cole yelled, and he raised the poker over his head.
2
“Nobody answered when I knocked,” Alex says over the hood of the rental car, “but I heard somebody playing the piano.”
The seats and steering wheel have gotten hot in the sun. “It looks just the same,” Cole says. “A little too much the same. Ha!” He forces a laugh. He glances at the house as he swings a U-turn. He’s not deluded about the lasting trauma of this place or the emotional and even metaphorical significance of making this trip thirty years later. He knew that coming back might rattle the healthy distance he’s cultivated. But seeing the house so much the same, then his bike standing by the back door…he wasn’t prepared to dive in so deep so fast.
But this trip’s about looking forward: a shed, seventy-five feet long with thirty thousand board feet of old-growth chestnut that he’ll mill into neat fat stacks of lumber at his shop in Portland. And Alex, who he’s known from afar for years yet met only today—many shared divulgences, even a few flops, failures in engineering or aesthetics, disagreements over money, all infused with an expectant new friendship. Hell, even this car smells new—he looks down at the odometer—only 623 miles old. He stops at the corner, then hits the gas hard. “I love that ring,” he says to Alex. “Is it chestnut?”
“Yeah, I turned it on the lathe and then Antoine did that minuscule carving.” She raises her thumb so he can get a better look. “It’s a traditional Slovak pattern.”
“Cool,” he says. “Really beautiful.”
“Antoine looked like he was doing scrimshaw or something, all hunched over a bright light and a magnifying glass in a clamp. It looked like the Renaissance.” She spins the ring and admires it in the sunshine pouring through the windshield.
They drive five more miles east of town. Just beyond a defunct little schoolhouse—shuttered since before he was born—Alex directs him left, and as he turns under the canopy of two enormous black walnut trees he expects to see the fields he worked, tobacco nets filling the low stretch of land that bottoms out at the river, but there’s only a new sign, meant to look historic: Connecticut Shade Estates. They pass houses in varying stages of completion. Some are finished, already lived in. A woman in flip-flops pushes a power mower across her lawn, though the houses on either side are foreclosures, back on the market. And the next three are roofed but lacking windows and doors, flaps of Tyvek dangling from the sheathing in the stagnant air.
He hits a speed bump a little too hard and the car bucks. There are no trucks or materials on site, no evidence of ongoing work, not even a dumpster. Just rutted and mounded-up dirt—the best and richest alluvial soil on earth for growing cigar wrappers, which now looked dried out and crusted over, like the site of a bomb blast next to hyper-green sod yards.
Alex points left again and he turns. Ahead, in a cul-de-sac shaded by a weeping willow, he sees the shed he’s been studying in photos all spring. He’d convinced himself that he remembered it from childhood, but now he’s less sure. And he can see the developer’s vision of this shed—evoking, at a distance from his ten or fifteen new homes, the history of this land, which Cole guesses is mo
stly too close to the flood plain to build on.
The crew has already stripped the shingles off the roof and peeled back half the skip board, exposing the rafters. Cole parks behind a flatbed, older than he is, with “KLK Crane” painted on the door of the cab. And the crane, a grimy yellow Cat, sits close by in the shade, its operator beating the long arm of an oversized crescent wrench with a hammer trying to loosen a bolt. A man up in the rafters raises a gloved hand in a wave, and Alex waves back.
“Antoine?” Cole asks her.
She nods.
He tightens a cable around the first rafter and shouts “Ready!” down to the crane operator, who keeps pounding on the wrench—arrhythmic, frustrated—sucking on the stub of a smoldering cigar. When Antoine shouts “Ready!” again, he sounds pissed off. “Now!”
After three or four more clanks on the wrench, the guy flings the hammer into the weeds, climbs into his seat, and fires up the diesel engine. Black soot coughs from the exhaust, the pulleys engage, the cable snaps taut and jerks the rafter from the shed. Jarred off-balance, Antoine grabs hold of a timber and shakes his fist, but his angry shouts are drowned out by the motor as the huge timber swings high and light as a bird before dropping smoothly to the ground. The crane operator, who Cole can already see is an asshole, hops down from his seat and unhooks the cable.
Cole leaves Alex at the car and walks through the tall grass and weeds and kneels down beside the timber—six-by-eight, twenty feet long. He flicks open his buck knife and carves a slice off the edge—tight-grain chestnut, hard as oak, with the patina and sweet smell of curing tobacco. He holds the shaving to his nose, flooded now with memories of these sheds, of carrying in leaf bins to the women chatting with each other in Spanish, who’d then sew the leaves to the sticks of lath and hand them up to the men who moved as nimbly as acrobats through the beams to hang them.
Old Newgate Road Page 3