Old Newgate Road

by Keith Scribner

  She flexes her biceps in the mirror.

  “You’re an Amazon,” Cole says.

  “Getting there.”

  * * *

  —

  Liz is pregnant, straddling him in a shed loaded with drying leaves, the heaters hushing with soft blue flame…then a shout and he shoots up in bed…a muffled cry, and now he’s tearing across his room, still half in the dream, and bursting out the door, and this has always been his biggest fear: he doesn’t wake up in time, doesn’t hear the scream through the pillow smothering her. He slams open their door—he’s on top of her and turning now toward Cole, his face red. “No!” his mother calls out from deep in the pillows. “Dad, stop!” Cole shouts as he leaps onto the bed and grabs his ankle, twisting and yanking him off of her. Ian comes running into the room, then Kelly rushes up the stairs wrapped only in a towel, her hair hanging wet. His parents, naked in the hot night, quickly cover up with the sheet but not before they see his father’s erection, his mother blushing in the lamplight, smiling and stifling a laugh. “Okay, kids,” she says. “Back to bed.”

  6

  With his phone pressed to his ear, Cole pulls ripe berries from a bush and tips them into his mouth.

  “I was sitting in American history,” Daniel’s saying, “learning how American democracy and capitalism have made the world just so amazing and free and full of opportunity, and out the window there’s a homeless couple pushing a shopping cart with a little girl in it, collecting cans from garbage bins. And I don’t mean ‘out the window’ like some synecdoche for ‘in the city’ or ‘in the nation,’ I mean I’m looking out the literal window of my high school at these Americans with their American child picking through garbage for the Rock Star empties my classmates tossed out before first period. I couldn’t stay in that room another second.”

  “But Daniel, you’re smart enough to know you can’t change the world without an education.”

  “Last time I looked up ‘education’ in the dictionary I didn’t see ‘lies,’ ‘hypocrisy,’ and ‘propaganda.’ ”

  Cole swirls sour berry juice around in his mouth, then swallows. “What do you propose?” he finally asks. “You have to go to school. You’re fifteen. It’s a law.”

  Daniel sighs. “Yeah, laws. Right.”

  They get nowhere and agree to talk later. The joke among their Portland friends is that—liberal parents all—they’d end up with kids rebelling into rabid conservatives, but Daniel has out-lefted the lefties. And to call it rebellion doesn’t do him justice either. He’s smart as hell, and his politics are more complicated than some knee-jerk reaction to his parents driving a Prius and favoring good wine, bike lanes, and Obama.

  Cole calls the school’s principal to see what can be done to allow him to finish ninth grade.

  “He can’t come back this spring,” she tells him, “but he’ll pass. He had A’s in all his classes, so even with F’s on his final papers and exams, he’ll be fine.”

  “What about next year?”

  “He can apply in August to have his expulsion lifted. You could also think about alternatives. He’s very gifted, Mr. Callahan. Some of his teachers feel he’s not sufficiently challenged here.”

  The next call is to Cole’s foreman, Ben Salverson. They have two jobs going—a wraparound porch with new entryways in Laurelhurst and a complete gutting and renovation on a Craftsman in Sellwood. Ben’s working through a punch list on the job they finished last week when he answers the phone. “I pulled two guys off the demolition to bang it out here. We’ll be done by lunch.”

  Cole, who’d pushed the crew hard before this trip, is relieved by the news.

  “Got a problem in Sellwood, though. Asbestos behind the drop ceiling in the kitchen.”

  “No, no,” Cole says. “We checked that.”

  “It was hiding behind the abandoned ductwork.”

  “Damn. So now you’ve got them working upstairs?”

  “Back to front.”

  “All right. I’ll set up the abatement, but we’ll lose at least a few days. If the guys are spinning their wheels, send them to the shop to make room for the chestnut. Looking at all those gorgeous timbers this morning, I realize we’re going to need racks on the whole south wall.”

  “So it’s good?”

  “It’s such beautiful wood, Ben. And there’ll be lots left over after the addition on my house.” The family room.

  “There was a message about the Richmond bid,” Ben says. “Sounds like they’re getting antsy.”

  “Yeah, I’ve gotta get to that. It’s been a hell of a trip so far. Hard to believe it’s only been two days.”

  “Ghosts popping up everywhere?”

  Just then, inside, his father hits one of the wrong notes. “Every time I turn around.”

  “Well, figure that bid pronto or else we’ll lose the job.”

  “Will do, Ben. You keep the guys busy.”

  Cole slips the phone in his back pocket and picks berries until his palms are full, then he goes inside and spills them into a cereal bowl. He carries it into the keeping room, and his father stops playing and peers into the bowl as if looking down a well. “Oh,” he says. He drops a few berries in his mouth and sucks on them while returning to the keyboard.

  Cole steps back and listens for a few minutes, then goes in the kitchen and fills a glass with water. The music’s mournful, in part because of a hollowness; it’s like the notes are calling out into darkness, but no reply comes back. Listening, drinking the cool well water, he walks into the parlor. The moldings are ornate, and he runs a finger over the wood overlay on the mantel that his mother cut from half-inch stock with a coping saw. His father had stripped a dozen layers of paint off the mantel, and when he got down to bare wood they could see the ghostly imprint of a frieze torn off who knows how long ago; so they traced the outline and remade it perfectly. Inspecting the interlocking circles now, he sees how skillfully it’s done. Through the years it’s been easy for Cole to fault his parents, critical of their bad judgment and incompetence. He doesn’t need a shrink to tell him that his entire career is—at least partly—an attempt to correct his parents’ restoration mistakes. But it’s more than that. They taught him to appreciate craftsmanship and artistry, and a beautiful piece of wood. Being here reminds him how much he still loves the New England colonial aesthetic, closer than people might think to the Craftsman houses he works on in Portland. Despite everything they did wrong, he respects what his parents were trying to create here, and he understands the hard work of living in a jobsite. The constant battle with frozen pipes and their own learning curve, with their Sisyphean progress and dwindling bank account. The long cold trudge to the bathroom in the middle of a winter night. Once a roof leak’s repaired, the medieval furnace conks out. Never a weekend or an evening when the list of what must get done could be ignored.

  Although in truth there was the occasional Saturday or Sunday at Sturbridge Village, buying a paper sack of penny candy from the store on the common, touring the Fitch House, then walking past the tinsmith and the waterwheel beside the gristmill to give sheep shearing a try. He remembers feasting on pounded cheese with gourd soup and Tunbridge cakes at the tavern while his parents drank hard cider from pewter mugs. Then they all got on a stagecoach so big it was pulled by a team of dray horses over the covered bridge and past the clanking and smoky blacksmith. As soon as his mother heard a Quebecois family on the coach behind them, she turned and spoke to them in French, her face flushed from the alcohol and the thrill of loosening her tongue in the language she loved. When they stopped in front of the meeting house, his father jumped down to the ground first and reached out his hand for his wife, caught her in his arms when she stumbled, and they started across the common after Cole’s mother bid her new friends adieu, walking hand-in-hand for several steps until they broke apart. Other than the night when he pulled his father off
of her because he thought he was stopping a beating, it was the only time he ever witnessed any intimacy between them.

  What does it mean that his own failure at intimacy is what drove Nikki away? It wasn’t like that at the start. They began as friends, part of a little clique in college, and when the two of them started meeting separately for dinner or a movie they’d laugh into the night. The first time they slept together it really was just to sleep: two in the morning and pouring down rain, and they’d been bingeing Louis Malle movies at his place. After he suggested that she spend the night on his couch instead of going home, she floated her contacts in teacups while he brushed his teeth, then rinsed the brush under a long blast of hot water and held it out for her. Nikki was poised to put his toothbrush in her mouth but stopped, and they stared at each other, and he parted his lips, mirroring her, and they fell into an explosion of passion that had been building for a year. They kept their romance a secret from their pals for a while, and when they finally went public some of them felt betrayed; their group wasn’t as tight anymore, and before long it dispersed.

  Even now Cole remembers that time with Nikki as a love that all others could be measured by, the kind celebrated in poetry and movies and dreams, so ecstatic that since things started falling apart he’s wondered whether he was romanticizing their early years, romanticizing his own past.

  Their love for Daniel, though, never wavered. Despite the difficult delivery and the hard toll it took on Nikki, their baby was born wise, a step ahead. He aced his Apgar tests. Nikki spent a few days in the ICU because of the hemorrhaging, so Cole held their baby beside her and combed the thick red hair he’d grown in utero. His eyes appeared focused and penetrating, watchful. He envied his baby, his past only a few hours old, a clean slate.

  He realizes the music has stopped, and when he peeks into the keeping room his father isn’t there. He goes to the piano and sits on the warm bench, looking out the window across the backyard, where Phil’s pulling up nettles half his height from around the chicken coop. The sheet music’s flopped open in the scroll-top rack, and Cole flips the pages to see the cover: Brahms’s Symphony no. 2 arranged for four hands. Which explains the emptiness he’s been hearing in the music. It’s a composition for two players. And when he turns to the first page he again recalls the image that he’s flashed on thousands of times: his parents holding hands on the Old Sturbridge commons, her good hand in his, her lame one hanging at her side—because on that sheet, in his mother’s handwriting, is her name for one player and her husband’s for the other.

  * * *

  —

  Late in the afternoon, after making some distracted but still decent progress on the Richmond project and a few phone calls in search of educational options for Daniel, he finds the kitchen tap running and, on the table, the old turkey roaster overflowing with currants. When he turns off the water, he can hear his father rummaging around in the laundry room, where he’s down on his knees and trying to stand with his arms around two flats of Ball jars, still in their tattered and dusty cardboard cases. The blue-speckled water-bath canner’s teetering on top, and Cole swoops down to catch it. “Let me help you with that.”

  Phil loses his balance and stumbles into the washing machine, the canner slips and clanks to the floor. “Don’t treat me like a pissant!” he snaps. “Now pick up that kettle and put it back on top!”

  * * *

  —

  Out in the yard, Cole stares at his brother’s face in a photo, then sets it aside and rummages through the box. It’s full of stuff from his mother’s desk. A pack rat, she crammed drawers, bookcases, shoeboxes, whatever, full of virtually anything: a receipt for stockings, a blouse, and a girdle from G. Fox & Co., for lipstick and a purse from Marks & Tilly; Cole’s fifth-grade report card and his permission slip for a field trip to Hartford; birthday and Christmas cards, canceled checks. Who is the woman who emerges from these archives? What could it mean that she saved a slip from Valley Dry Cleaners (“1 dress, 1 slacks”) in 1974?

  Like whoever years ago packed this stuff into boxes—Uncle Raymond or her brother Andrew, most likely—he feels the need to save it, too. Maybe he can’t expect meaning in each scrap of paper, but the mere accumulation—the records of a short life’s transactions—must add up to something.

  He needs new boxes, then he’ll move it all to the attic where it’ll stay dry. Before long, a time will come when he and his brother and sister will converge here, do the culling, and sell the house.

  His father has been banging pots on the stove for the last half hour, and now a waft of stewing currants settles around Cole, conjuring images of his mother in a steamy kitchen, a cotton sleeveless dress, her face red, a bead of sweat dripping from the tip of her nose.

  He spreads everything out in the sun, then carries the tea caddy into the kitchen and sets it on the table. “How’s the jelly coming?”

  His father doesn’t respond.

  “Hey,” Cole says. “I’m driving over to the liquor store to get some boxes. You need anything?” He’ll take some of the photos and maybe even the tea caddy home with him to Portland.

  “I need boxes too. Eight or ten.” Phil’s staring into the rising steam. “I’m ordering some day-olds. They can live in boxes till I get the coop cleaned out. Fifty rings a bell. Fifty’s what we got when you were kids.”

  “You’re talking about buying chickens? Is now the time to buy chickens?”

  “It’s a great time. Warm and getting warmer. With chicks, the cold can be a battle. Do you remember how much Kelly wanted chickens?”

  “I didn’t really mean the time of year. I meant…this time in your life.”

  His father stares at him for a long moment and then at his wrist, where a watch would be if he had one. Finally he looks back at Cole, rheumy-eyed, and says, “At eight weeks you can kill the roosters.”

  * * *

  —

  With a dull paring knife Cole hacks at a roasted chicken. He’s done some shopping at the new supermarket on the edge of town. Cracking a leg from the carcass, he remembers how Daniel has repeatedly told him to quit saying supermarket (grocery store, his bemused son instructs, or just store). He also shouldn’t say knapsack or high-test gas or Wash’n Dri (“Jesus, Dad, they’re wipes”) or refer to his iPod as a Walkman. But all these old words feel revived in this house.

  From the foot of the stairs he calls his father down for dinner, then puts the food and dishes out on the table. He’s stocked the fridge. The cellar and the cabinet under the counter have pretty well dried out. He plans to repack his mother’s old papers, give his father a good meal, and then leave him to his jelly making, his fifty day-olds, and the rooster slaughter in eight weeks. He’s got Daniel’s troubles to tend to, not to mention his eight employees who depend on him to keep the jobs running. In a few more hours he could finish the Richmond bid and get that off to the client. He doesn’t even want to think about his father’s finances or long-range plans or the house or his broken-down car…Suddenly he laughs out loud, shaking his head: those are the same damn things he listened to his parents fight about year after year. He’ll get his father settled this evening, go back to his airport hotel, and stop in just once more at the end of the week before returning home.

  Phil drags out the chair at the head of the table.

  “You want a drink?” Cole asks. “I got you seltzer, grape juice, OJ.” When he finally looks up he sees that his father has put on long flannel pajamas over his clothes.

  “What?” he responds, noticing the look. “I go to bed early. It’s what I got used to inside.”

  Cole sits down and fills their plates with steamed green beans, brown rice, and chicken.

  His father hunches over his plate. “Pass the ketchup,” he says, and Cole gets back up and swings open the fridge—still dark in there, he meant to buy a bulb—and grabs it from the door. His father squeezes ketchup over
everything, scrapes a few forkfuls into his mouth, and while he chews his back straightens as if he’s rising out of the chair, his face softening, his eyes going limp. “This is a meal,” he says, “tasty as any I ever had,” coming out of the gloomy confusion that dogged him all afternoon and recovering the easy charm he displayed with Alex, like a man in a seersucker suit with a highball in each hand. But then Cole smells something sharp and weirdly intimate: his father is pissing. Cole jumps from his chair. Piss soaks through his father’s khakis, through his flannel pajamas, and drips off the edge of his seat.

  “Who the hell are you?” Eyes burning, Phil shoves his plate away, knocking over the seltzer, chugging fizz across the table before Cole snatches up the bottle. “What are you doing in my house?” He pushes away from the table and Cole takes a step back, flashing on the bowl of salmon wiggle his father tossed from this same spot, the explosion of hot food and glass against the wall, his mother’s screams, Ian’s cries and burning arms, food splattered on his Little League uniform.

  Phil trudges into the keeping room, leaving a puddle in the seat and a trail of urine dripping down one leg of his soaked clothes.

  Cole’s heart is racing, then his phone rings: Nikki. Catching his breath, he says, “Hi.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.” The opening chords rise from the keeping room.

  “Airport piano bar?”

  “Something like that.”

  “So glad you’re enjoying your holiday while our son’s getting arrested.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “You said it. Shit, shit, friggin’ shit.”

  “Is he in jail?”

  “He’s out now.”

  “What, on bail?”

  “Tony called in a favor and got the charges dropped.”

  “Thank God. What did he do?”