Old Newgate Road

by Keith Scribner

  Secrets. He spoke of that night to almost no one for ten years, as if he’d just jumped town and what happened here, his entire childhood, didn’t stow away with him. The beatings were always a secret, until his father killed her, and then the truth spread like fire. But when Cole left for the West Coast, he snapped the latches closed and left all the secrets behind, like the footlocker full of clothes and trophies and souvenirs he’d stored in Tilly’s attic. A decade later, that night had almost become a secret to himself. By now, honestly, he mixes up his memories of that night with Nikki’s retelling. She’s the one who sensed when the time felt right to tell their friends, good friends who she thought should know. She’d decided it was important for Cole to have it out in the open.

  But even if she’s right—that it’s good for him to “let in some light”—the story she told makes him uncomfortable. She made him out to be a hero, beating his father off, trying to protect his mother, trying to stop it, when he knows it wasn’t like that at all. He listens, accepts the sympathy and hand wringing and pats on the back, endures the long silence, then slaps the table and jumps up: “Okay. Who wants marionberry pie?”

  He never resented Nikki for talking about that night, but when she left and he started meeting new people—women, to be precise—he didn’t know how to tell the story himself, and it could be one of the reasons why nothing clicked with any of them.

  The truth is he has plenty of options. Within weeks of Nikki moving out (two weeks seems to be the official mourning period for a marriage pronounced dead) he was getting calls from friends, mostly female friends, who knew a “wonderful” or “brilliant” or “drop-dead-gorgeous” woman. A landscape architect, a potter, an ER doctor, a lawyer, a yoga-slash-Pilates instructor. There were Stumptown Coffee dates and drinkable chocolate at Cacao. Dinners in the Pearl, shows at the Schnitz. Afternoon rendezvous at Powell’s Books and bike rides through Forest Park. Winery loops down the valley. After the strained and angry final months with Nikki it was all light and fun, even thrilling. But the time would come in their shared divulgences when the lovely woman sitting across the table from him, open and generous, wineglass at her lips, would ask about his childhood, and they would’ve already become too intimate for his usual sidesteps, but he wouldn’t know how to tell the story, he didn’t know the story, and she’d lower her glass and sit back in her chair, sensing his dishonesty.

  It’s early morning in Portland. He conjures Nikki in her sunny kitchen, singing “The Last Chance Texaco.” She’s sprinkling cinnamon over oatmeal, slicing on strawberries, and tossing in a handful of caramelized walnuts. Daniel’s standing at the toaster reading texts, wearing the robe.

  * * *

  —

  His foot lays off the accelerator as he approaches the house, surprised again that it looks so much the same, so perfectly preserved in his memory. He hadn’t intended to drive down Old Newgate Road, or at least not to stop, but then he glimpses Phil sitting on the front steps, his arms crossed over his knees, his head resting on his arms, and his pulse flutters. Only once has he seen his father sitting like this—when he found him that night. He hits the brakes and swings into the driveway.

  Phil lifts his head.

  “I was just passing by,” Cole offers.

  “Great day for a drive,” he says hopefully, his eyes yellow and distant.

  “I came over Holcomb Road.”

  His father looks at him vacantly.

  “Not the new cutoff but the old Holcomb Road.” Far back in the tobacco fields a few workers are rolling up a net to open a bent. They might be suckering already. “Anyway”—Cole’s beginning to sweat, standing there in the sun—“aren’t you hot sitting out here?”

  “I was cold. I left my groceries on the bike, but they’re gone.”

  “Alex took them in.”

  His gaze is totally blank.

  “Yesterday. The woman I came by with.”

  “Lovely lady,” he says. “I think I met her once a long time ago.” He drops his head back down on his arms.

  “Did you have breakfast? Let’s go inside.” He steps by him and thumbs the latch, but the door’s locked.

  “That’s the snag right there,” his father says.

  “Is the kitchen door open?”

  He doesn’t respond, so Cole goes around the house checking all the doors—all locked.

  “Do you have the keys?” he asks once he loops back around.

  “Stuck out here since suppertime yesterday,” his father says.

  “All night?”

  “The car’s locked too.”

  From behind the shed he grabs a mossy cinder block and sets it below the keeping-room window. He steps up, pries out the screen, and climbs inside, as his father could’ve easily done. Replacing the screen, he hears water running, and follows the sound to the kitchen: the sink is overflowing. He sloshes across the floor through water up to his ankles and twists the knobs shut. First he thinks: a lot of water. But next: there should be more. He stands still and listens—a loud and steady trickle from below. Although plenty of water has run out into the keeping room, the kitchen floor slopes down toward the sink and most of it flowed under the cabinets. He rushes to the cellar, where it’s showering down between the joists and cascading from around the holes cut for plumbing. The dirt floor’s puddled and muddy but absorbing it all pretty fast. He’ll get some air moving down here and it’ll dry out in no time.

  But then he sees some soaked cardboard boxes beyond the oil tank. Through the soft mud, water raining down on him, he carries the boxes straight outside through the bulkhead. His father glances at him as he sets them down in the sun and rips them open. Miraculously, the cardboard has shed a lot of the water. Inside the first box there’s a loose stack of damp photos—Ian’s third-grade class picture right on top, the kids lined up in three rows, his brother in the front on his knees with crooked teeth and a zippered shirt, bangs in his eyes. Miss Patterson, who was Cole’s third-grade teacher too, looks a bit bonier than he remembers her. He shuffles through the pictures. There’s his father stirring flaming logs in the keeping-room fireplace with the brass-handled poker, his face turned to the camera—someone has called to him just before snapping the shutter. And there’s his mother lighting a new tapered candle, probably at Christmas or Easter, with dangly earrings and a beaming white smile. Young. Which is always his first thought when he sees a picture of her. She should grow older with him, old enough to be his mother.

  He spreads out the photos in the sun, then digs down through a few paperback books, a stapler, a coffee mug stuffed with pencils and pens, and at the bottom of the carton finds the rosewood tea caddy she kept on her desk, the lid inlaid with ivory, the handles brass. He sets the box on the brick walk, where it looks like a foot-long casket. His grandmother insisted he be a pallbearer. Tilly had a vision for the funeral involving a particular card stock for the programs, a harpist in a black satin dress, and Kelly and Ian arranged like Caroline Kennedy and John Jr. She orchestrated the funeral from a hospital bed; the same eye that had distinguished Marks & Tilly Ltd. would bring dignity to her daughter’s funeral, despite the shame.

  He goes down through the bulkhead and up to the top of the cellar stairs, where he slips out of his muddy shoes before stepping through the house and opening the door for his father, who pushes by him, straight for the piano, and begins playing the familiar piece. In the kitchen Cole removes the stopper and stares at the hunk of iron sitting there in the sink. These are the nails, the thousands of nails pounded from the lath by Ian and left in the cellar in a cardboard box, where for thirty years they’ve rusted into a block the size of a small, impenetrable safe.

  “What were you trying to accomplish here?” he calls, but gets no reply. Did Phil think that water dissolves rust? Or is he just not thinking straight at all?

  He opens the window and cabinet doors and drops the towel
on the floor. Most of the water has already drained through to the cellar, but his socks are wet and he takes them off and carries them along with his muddy shoes out to the steps and sets them in the sun. As he listens he realizes his father keeps hitting the wrong notes at the same places.

  “Do you want some eggs?” Cole asks from behind him.

  Still playing, he nods. Cole rummages kitchen cupboards and drawers until he finds what he needs. The milk and eggs are where Alex left them in the fridge, otherwise empty except for the sketchy-looking stuff he saw yesterday.

  Cole scrambles the eggs with milk and shakes in some salt. There’s no toaster, but after sniffing the tub of margarine he spreads some on the bread. While the eggs are cooking, the music stops and his father appears in his armchair at the head of the kitchen table. Cole serves them each a plate and takes his old spot, but then Phil gets up and disappears into the back room for a minute and returns with a small canning jar. He unscrews the metal ring, pops off the seal, and heats a paring knife under hot water at the sink before slicing the disc of paraffin on top. He slides the jar to Cole, who picks it up and looks at the oval label decorated with berries and his mother’s handwriting: The Callahans, Red Currant, 1978—a year before she died. Before he killed her. They spoon jelly onto their bread and eat.

  “Why didn’t you come in through a window?” He can see that his father is getting back to himself with the food. “Didn’t you know the sink was running?”

  He doesn’t answer.

  “What if I hadn’t come along?”

  “I would’ve snapped out of it. I always do.”

  He’s gaining strength by the minute. He was famished, is all. Who knows how long it’s been since he ate? The delicate taste of the currant jelly brings him back to this table, this kitchen. His father reaches out and clasps his hand over Cole’s beside his plate. “Good to see you, son.”

  Cole nods.

  Phil takes a bite of bread and chews slowly. “That’s the last jar of the currant.” He stares off through the window. “We should let her know.”

  5

  Her final summer she doesn’t make jelly. That June, early on a Saturday morning, it’s barely light outside, too early for anyone in the house to be awake, yet Cole is sitting on the stairs listening to his parents in the living room. His arms are wrapped around his legs, his bare feet cold. There’s the roasted-chestnut smell of instant coffee.

  “Can you at least say you’d like to spend a week with me in France?” she asks. He’s been listening for a while; she’s the calmest he’s ever heard her in a dispute, and his father the most forthcoming, as if the day’s too young to work anything up.

  He clears his throat. “Not really.”

  She soldiers on, even-toned. “But this is deeply important to me.”

  He’s silent.

  “So that’s it!” Her voice sharpens. “It’s not about the money at all.” She emits a clipped cry. “Good God! How long have you so loathed spending time with your wife?”

  Cole wishes she hadn’t asked him that. In the long pause he tries to picture them: his father staring at the floor, lips pursed as if he’s cycling through memories, arms crossed high across his chest and resting on the rise of his paunch like a pregnant woman might rest a coffee mug there; his mother hanging on the edge, impatient with his silence, with waiting to hear how completely he’ll shatter her delusion.

  When Cole was very young—four, five, six—and he woke in the night and went to his mother’s bedside, he’d never have to wake her. “What is it, mon petit?” she’d whisper. Her radar for activity in the house, or disturbance in her child, is the same instinct that woke Cole up this morning, and now he’s wondering if his father slept on the couch last night.

  Finally he says, “Since Bermuda.”

  “Lord help us!” she cries. That’s where they spent their honeymoon. For a time he hears her weeping, and waits for the scrape and gasp of sudden movement, but in the end she just blows her nose. “And it’s because you’ve always cared so little for me that it was so easy to smack me while I was pregnant with Cole?”

  “You said we’d have a reasonable discussion.”

  “Are you denying it?”

  “Pregnant and smoking. And so pleased with yourself in front of your girlfriends, telling that same idiotic story.” This was fifteen years ago, but his disgust surges as if it were yesterday.

  “So you twisted my arm until my wrist snapped.”

  “And you still wouldn’t shut up.”

  “Talk about dumbfounded. They knew at the ER that I was telling lies.”

  Cole backs slowly up the stairs to avoid a squeak, and sits on the edge of his bed. Just after five thirty. If this was a weekday, he could escape to school in a couple hours, but it’s a Saturday in June. Two weeks until summer break and his tobacco job.

  Through the window screen birds chirp, squawk, warble—a frenzy of feeding, fighting, sex. Jays swoop down on the currants and tear off clusters of bright red berries, already overripe. They’re early this year. Everything is. When he filled out the employment papers at Taybro they told him the tobacco starts were two weeks ahead. “That warm stretch before Easter,” the farm boss said. “The whole season’s jumped the gun.”

  The numbness that often seizes him takes hold and he drops back in bed, curls his knees to his chest and, as if he’s been drugged, falls immediately, deeply asleep.

  Until.

  A scream.

  She’s screaming his name and he’s running out to the hall, then flinging open his parents’ door. Their tangled bed is unmade and empty, the curtains and windows open to the sun. He’s flying down the stairs when she shouts “We’re waiting, Cole!” and he stops, standing on the step where he was just sitting and listening. “You can’t sleep all day!”

  He leans into the handrail. His head drops. He can see his own heart thumping beneath the tight skin of his bare chest.

  He starts across the keeping room, his hands still shaking, and spots her through the open door outside on the driveway, her back turned, the soles of his bare feet cool on the hearthstone and then blistering on the hot granite steps, the bright sun blinding him, voices twittering. He squints through yellow and black sunspots floating in his vision like a scene in a psychedelic movie: standing around their battered, wine-colored Malibu, all four doors flung open, are five round and full-bodied high-school girls, two of them holding newborn babies on their chests, standing ragtag by the car—tall and short, black, brown, and white, hair feathered, permed, or ironed straight. He knows who they are, though he has no idea why they’re here.

  His mother turns. “And ladies,” she says, “I present my son.” Then finally looking at Cole, she dials up her shock at the sight of him shirtless and in gym shorts, and she says, “Good gravy, make yourself decent!” at which the girls laugh.

  “Your momma told us you’re only fifteen,” one of them says, stepping forward. Her face is as round as a paper plate, all dark lips and eyes, heat rouging her cheeks and forehead. Her small hands grip the bottom of her equally round belly like she might otherwise teeter backward.

  “He looks older than that,” another girl says, “with those shoulders.” They all giggle again.

  “How old are you?” Cole asks the girl in front of him.

  “Seventeen.”

  They break out laughing. “She lies,” one says.

  The girl cracks a smile—her puffy lips parting to reveal an adorable overbite—and he knows she can’t be much older than he is.

  “She’s perfect for you,” another says.

  “That’s enough,” his mother cuts in, shooing him into the house. “Cole, you go make yourself presentable. Ladies,” she says, curling her index finger, “follow me.”

  At the upstairs window, pulling on cutoffs, he watches the girls totter around the long row of g
rapevines to the six currant bushes planted in a lopsided circle. The two with the babies sit in the shade of a pear tree, unbutton their tops, and slip them underneath to nurse. Another picks a few currants and pops them in her mouth, and when her face puckers, the others laugh. His mother comes across the grass with mixing bowls and the blue-speckled turkey-roasting pan. She’s been working with the unwed mothers at St. Mary’s in Hartford for a few years, and regularly brings home their stories but never before the actual unwed mothers.

  With their bundles and babies the girls look out of place in the yard—like pictures on the news of boat people arriving in foreign lands and plopping down on any patch of ground to feed their children. He puts on a T-shirt that smells of smoke; last night was the bonfire at the high school. A year from now—next year’s bonfire—he will no longer live in this house, and he’ll drive Uncle Andrew’s car over from Bloomfield after dark. He’ll park and trudge down the hill as a bottle rocket stashed in the burning tower of scrap lumber and logs ignites and shoots across the grass. He’ll keep his head low, hoping to spot Rochelle or Paul. Liz will already be away at boarding school in Florida. In a letter she’ll have told him she’s staying in Boca for the summer, serving cocktails and club sandwiches at a golf course. He’ll sit down at the back of the crowd, huddled in shadows. When the fire lights one side of his face, a girl from freshman English will recognize him, her eyes shooting wide with the red and yellow flames. She’ll poke her friends’ shoulders, urgently whispering. An M-80 will blow—sparks bursting and a leg of the fire collapsing—and the boom will hit him in the chest, indistinguishable from the wallop of shame that will keep him away from his hometown for thirty years.