Old Newgate Road

by Keith Scribner

“Breaking and entering, destruction of property, vandalism. He’ll have to pay Safeway some money, or else.”

  “He broke into a Safeway?”

  “No, just into their dumpster.”

  “Oh,” Cole says. “He’s told me about those. He’s right, too. They’re shameful.”

  “Turns out you can do a thousand dollars of damage to one of them with a hacksaw and a small gang of homeless people and freegans.”

  “The freegans again.”

  “You know, we’ve been blaming them for a year, but Daniel’s the only one who got arrested. The one with the hacksaw. The rest of them were just standing around. You can watch it all on YouTube. It’s pretty obvious he’s the ringleader.”

  He listens to the somber chords preceding the run of trills that by now he’s memorized. When Nikki was first pregnant, they both sensed the baby was a girl, which was a relief to Cole since he wasn’t sure he’d know how to raise a boy. A few days after the ultrasound he was driving the pickup home from the shop and passed a park where a Little League game was being played. He looped around and sat up in the small bleacher with the fathers and studied them for how to act, but could think only about his own father, which was maybe what he’d feared.

  Daniel’s ideas of fairness were strong. In pre-K he pointed out to the teacher that she was favoring boys when they lined up to go outside. He returned kindnesses religiously. After one boy’s birthday party, Daniel told him to take off his shirt, then—a four-year-old son of a seamstress—peeled off his own, got down on his knees in the driveway, and taught him how to fold.

  When he was five, walking down a sidewalk in Portland, they passed a panhandler they’d seen for years, and Daniel asked, “What’s his sign say?”

  “He wants us to give him money,” Cole explained.

  “What for?”

  “Food.”

  They walked a few more steps before Daniel stopped, yanking on his father’s hand, confused and angry, and said, “Why wouldn’t we?”

  Cole had felt it at his birth, but looking at his incensed boy on the sidewalk that day, he knew Daniel’s spirit and intelligence and heart were limitless. That he could do what any father dreams his child would: reach further than his parents, live a richer, more meaningful life.

  “Hello? Cole?” Nikki says, exasperated.

  His father has arrived at the dreamy middle of the piece. Cole half-listens, knowing where the mistakes will come, anticipating them like a skip in a favorite record. “I’ll call him,” Cole says. “And I’ll try for a flight back tonight. Maybe there’s a red-eye.”

  Phil’s piss has run the length of the kitchen floor and pooled in a depression in front of the sink. Cole straddles the puddle and finds a rancid sponge in the cabinet, and putting all squeamishness aside he sops up the urine, rinsing the sponge repeatedly in the sink before bending over to wipe up some more. This takes long enough that by now his father has finished the piece and started in again from the top. Cole wipes down the chair, thinking of Daniel’s pee-soaked diapers, of having to chase him down in the summer to get them off—he never wanted to stop running—and when he released the Velcro tabs, the diaper would drop to the floor heavy as a melon, and he’d dash away, naked and ecstatic to be free of the hindrance.

  He sponges up dribbles on the wide floorboards that lead like a trail of breadcrumbs to the piano. He’ll have to make arrangements for his father—he needs real care—but he can do that by phone. He’ll have to pay for it, and he’ll also have to get in touch with Kelly and Ian.

  He stands beside him for a minute, waiting for a transition between movements before interrupting. “You should hop in the shower and get a change of clothes.”

  Phil turns to him, smiling serenely, then nodding in time to the music. “It’s fine. It’s fine.” He chuckles. “Change in the shower and hop into clothes.” He plays on.

  “Really, Dad,” Cole says, and reaches out to touch his forearm.

  He reels back as if stuck with a knife. “What in the goddamn hell!” His lips trembling, teeth bared.

  “You need to clean up.”

  He looks around the room as if trying to place where he is—fireplace, windows, piano, his own wet pants, and finally the sponge in Cole’s hand. “It was an accident,” he says flatly.

  The words hang between them, piano strings still quivering. Their eyes meet in the piercing stares of animals. “What was an accident?”

  His father’s head drops. He looks at his lap. “Just…just…” He slides off the far end of the bench and stands as if ready to fight, but quickly his fists fall to his sides. “Just let me wash up, will you?” Stiff-legged, he walks into the bathroom and cranks the shower on. “It’s fine,” Cole hears over the water.

  * * *

  —

  From the back porch he calls the airline. There’s nothing tonight, but he books a flight for six a.m. Alex and Antoine can sign off on the shipment for him.

  He calls Daniel, who instead of “Hello” says, “A thousand bucks is such bullshit, Dad. I cut through an eighty-nine-cent bolt.”

  “We’ll deal with the money part,” Cole says. “The main thing for you is not getting arrested again.”

  “Trumped-up BS, and they knew it. They couldn’t hold me for two hours.”

  “The only reason they let you go is because Tony boxes with some cop.”

  Daniel bristles—he can feel it right through the phone. “This is much bigger than some old boys’ network. It’s about feeding people in a state with the disgraceful standing of number one in childhood hunger. And these goddamn ‘fully-enclosed waste removal systems’ are criminal! Safeway sends enough food to the dump to feed every hungry person in Oregon. The solution’s pretty fucking simple.” And Cole lets him vent, listening to the rant he’s heard before. Crates of wilted lettuce, bushels of bruised tomatoes and peaches, heaps of pasta, damaged boxes of Bisquick and brownie mix sent down the dark conveyer belt through the hanging rubber flaps and into a compactor as big as a truck, fully enclosed, impenetrable from the outside. “They don’t even look like dumpsters. They look like space pods.”

  How could he and Nikki have raised a boy so principled? Cole thinks of himself at that age—the summer of his mother’s death. Sex with Liz, and getting high with her—those were his passions. He supposes he believed in the careful and accurate restoration of old colonials. He disapproved of vandalism and littering and would call people out when he witnessed it. He understood the value of hard work. But he felt he’d missed the moment—his whole generation had arrived late. The sixties were already over, the seventies had turned sour, and the groundwork for Reagan’s eighties was solidly in place. It was far too late to save the world.

  But Daniel feels the urgency of his time. America’s been at war for half his life. Climate change has become undeniable yet is all the more fiercely denied. World economies implode weekly. “Our neighbors are starving,” he says, “while we’re enjoying French cheese from Whole Foods.”

  As Daniel continues on the phone about the other people in among his freegans, Cole walks out to the chicken coop at the back of the yard, some of the wire fence pulled down by weeds but for the most part intact. He has to yank on the door of the coop until it finally flies open. Inside, a motorcycle. No front tire, no seat, surrounded by cardboard boxes of greasy parts, all of it coated with years of dust. A tenant’s project, long ago abandoned. And then from the back corner, dark except for bright stripes of sunlight shining between the siding, he hears squeaking, like chicks, but when he squats down to look, he sees a nest of baby raccoons, three of them piled up like kittens, their long snouts pointy as a rat’s, black masks, their eyes chips of light.

  He leaves the coop’s door ajar and back in the kitchen pours a dish of milk and fills another with stale saltines and the remnants from a bag of peanuts in the shell.

  “I’m
sorry, Dad, but if anything we’ve got to step up the action.”

  Cole slides the dishes under the motorcycle.

  “Anyway, I should go. I’ve got a meeting.”

  “With the freegans?” He wanders over and kneels beside the contents of his mother’s desk, sifting the papers and photos, now crinkled but dry, in his fingers.

  “For work.”

  “You got a job?”

  “The People’s Farm.”

  “Can you save enough on that job to pay Safeway?”

  “Dad, it’s a co-op. And I donate my share back for the food boxes. As you know. I’m not giving Safeway a penny.”

  “You don’t have a choice, Daniel. That was a condition of them not pressing charges.” He begins stacking his mother’s things in the fresh cartons.

  “I’d sooner give money to the Klan.”

  “I don’t think the Klan and Safeway are in the same category.”

  “Ah, that’s where you’re mistaken, my friend.”

  So now they’re on to this. “Okay,” Cole says. They’re getting nowhere. “I’ll see you tomorrow and we’ll make a plan.” He lowers the phone and watches Daniel’s picture on the screen until it fades. After loading the boxes, he carries them inside to the kitchen table. The shower’s still running. He pulls the drawers open but can’t find any tape. He just wants to get back to the hotel. He has to be up before dawn. He has to get his father a phone. He has to make sure his car’s running. From Portland he can make arrangements to have an aide come in and assess his needs. He’ll email Kelly and Ian. He’ll get everything rolling.

  Wondering why the shower’s still on, he goes to the bathroom and sees a trail of water and footprints across the floor. The shower curtain’s pushed open. Christ. He twists off the tap and starts through the door into the parlor but stops short. The wing chair’s still here, pushed up against the wall. He hadn’t noticed it earlier. The upholstery looks like a dog bed. It’s a repro, made by his father’s friend Tom Mace, who charged them, according to his mother, an astronomical price. Something was always off about the chair. It looked right, with elegant colonial lines, but was never comfortable, and if you shifted to find the fit, it was hard not to slide off the seat. But his father made a point of sitting in it to read. And then there was the night that Cole got out of the shower and half dried off and came through the parlor to go upstairs but stopped in his tracks: his parents seemed to be kissing, something he’d never seen them do. His father was sitting in the chair, a book open in his lap, his mother leaning down to him, her palms flat on his chest, his hand reaching up to her. But he wasn’t holding her face, as it first appeared. He was gripping her throat.

  “Hey!” Cole shouted, and his father’s hand sprung open.

  She stumbled backward, choking. “You could’ve killed me,” she croaked, in a voice not even recognizable as hers. Hoarse and rasping. Possessed. And over the following days the voice he knew began to re-emerge, slowly, cautiously. She made their dinner and sat at the table, but she didn’t eat. She drank tea, asking Ian about Little League, Cole and his sister about their classes, a blood spot in one eye, purple dots dusting her cheekbones and brow.

  The water trail leads up the stairs, where he can hear a TV playing. “Dad,” he calls, but there’s no reply. The steps squeak as he ascends, the crack down the length of each board widening under his weight, opening enough to let through the smell of the dirt cellar, earthy and dank as a grave.

  Evening light washes through the Palladian windows on the second floor, the shadows of balusters like bars on the white plaster wall. The blanket chest and Canton jar are gone, replaced by a low black-and-blond IKEA-looking cabinet with a glass door, weirdly out of place on the rough wide floorboards beneath the decorative colonial window moldings. The trail of water continues into his parents’ old room, and he pushes open the door. The bed’s positioned where it always was, on the far wall, and there’s a TV on a nightstand, an old set with rabbit ears, and behind it lies his father, still dressed in his pajamas over his clothes, soaking wet, fast asleep. His white whiskers look sharp as quills. Dirty dishes, a sandwich crust, and a mossy brown apple core litter the other side of the bed. The TV screen is mostly fuzz—a Red Sox game, the desultory observations of commentators. Cole touches the antenna and the screen goes white, the voices staticky, and he switches the set off.

  He opens Ian’s door. The small room has been turned over to storage, packed so full with furniture and boxes, rolled carpets flopped over a cot, a stack of games—Yahtzee, Operation, Chutes and Ladders—that he can’t see the fireplace, or the closet with its secret compartment under the attic stairs, where Ian sometimes slept. He wouldn’t recognize the room at all.

  The carpet his mother braided is still in the center of Kelly’s room. Her canopy bed, too—stripped of its canopy. It has been rearranged, the desk and all her decorations are gone, but it still feels like a dusty gray preservation. He runs his finger around the rings pressed into the closet doorjambs where her pull-up bar was.

  At his own room he pauses with his thumb on the latch, and after taking a deep breath and blowing it out he bursts through the door to find his room even more impossibly the same. The twin beds are right where they were. The curtains are yellowed and dusty, but he instantly recognizes the Williamsburg fabric—a bare-chested Indian leading a colonist through a lush forest populated with peacocks, dogs, and lions; the years have made the print look more cartoonish. What’s most different is that the walls, which they’d gutted to the studs for insulation, have been sheetrocked and painted, making it feel like his room’s been transported to a museum and reassembled.

  He sits on his bed, rests his head on the pillow, and closes his eyes. Beneath the dust is the familiar damp-wood smell of his childhood. Promptly, he falls into a fitful sleep and then wakes abruptly, running into the hallway before he stops in the moonlight shining through the windows, his heart pounding. His father is shouting out gibberish in his sleep.

  Downstairs, he finds his phone. It’s almost midnight. He tries to remember…Yes, when he closed his eyes it was still light. The thud in his chest begins to let up. He takes the grape juice from the fridge, can’t find a clean glass, and sits at the kitchen table, swigging from the bottle. In front of him, the rosewood tea caddy. He lifts the lid and pulls out a square of card stock, ink-stamped with a newborn’s foot—Kelly Marie Callahan, November 4, 1962—and then their marriage certificate, yellowed and ancient-looking. And darker still, as if it’s been stained with tea, a newspaper clipping he carefully unfolds: an ad for the grand opening of Marks & Tilly Ltd.’s second store in Avon, the store his father would manage. They always called it his store, Phil’s store, but everyone knew it was Tilly’s.

  Tilly’s father, Mark O’Brien, had owned Mark’s Five-and-Dime, and when he got sick, Tilly took it over just as rural Simsbury was becoming a Hartford suburb. Within a few years of his death, Tilly had transformed the store—which had never made even enough money for him to move his family out of the dark apartment at the rear of the shop—into Marks & Tilly Ltd., a small but fancy department store catering to Simsbury’s new residents flocking to big new homes and restored old colonials, founding members of the country club, insurance-company executives, and bigwigs from Pratt and Whitney, Taybro, and Boulger Tobacco. She carried expensive women’s clothes, luxurious sheets and towels, and there was a nook of English teas and biscuits in tins. As a boy, Cole was only allowed in the store with clean clothes and hair neatly combed.

  When Phil got out of the army, Tilly opened the second store, in Avon, and hired him to run it. Year after year, as the Simsbury store flourished, his store struggled to break even. Everyone knew this because Tilly talked about it incessantly. Or did she? Suddenly he wasn’t sure. But it was known, a fact that hovered around them always, suffusing the very air they breathed.

  In a small blue envelope Cole finds a pla
stic hospital anklet typed with his name, his mother’s, and his birth weight. A lock of hair is tied up in a flattened blue ribbon. He thumbs through his mother’s high-school diploma, report cards, snapshots of her as a girl, her grandfather Mark in front of his five-and-dime. He pulls out a postcard—a photograph of the Queen Mother with adolescent Margaret and Elizabeth, taken in 1941 in a Windsor Castle garden. They’re posed, straining to seem at ease: Margaret fiddles her fingers, Elizabeth pets a small dog, broodingly, and the Queen Mother has perched her hands on the handle of a parasol, its tip planted in the grass. Lording it over the girls. She looks exactly like Tilly, and the card is from Tilly to his mother, dated June 1964: Fashions changing for the worse. I’ll stick with tried and true for my customers, thank you. England bleak. Get that baby weight off. Your self-respect never amounted to a hill of beans (as you know) and a layer of fat doesn’t help. A cigarette takes the appetite away. Men get their shots in—Lord knows your father was difficult—but they’re only stronger in the arms, not in the backbone. Stiff upper lip. With affection, Tilly.

  Cole was two months old then; Kelly less than two years. His father, still in the army, was making the trip home from Fort Devens every few weeks. What makes Cole feel sick now isn’t so much what Tilly wrote—he’d heard many versions of this straight from her own mouth—but that his mother had kept the card, and kept it in her box of sentiments and memories. Why hadn’t she torn it up and burned the shreds?

  He pulls out a photo of him and Liz sitting side by side on the back porch steps. She’s wearing her blue rain slicker, a little small on her, gripping the cuffs to tug down the sleeves, her arms wrapped around her knees. Cole’s looking at the camera and smiling while Liz stares off, far away. He remembers that his mother came outside to get a shot of the copper weathervane his parents had bought that morning at an auction. The weathervane never made it to the roof, and the picture of it isn’t here with the others. It was that last summer, in August. Squinting, he thinks he can see that his fingers are stained from tobacco picking. His head’s cocked toward Liz, but she’s leaning away from him. He wonders why this is the photo of them that his mother chose to keep in the tea caddy, both of them wet from the rain, scraggly, coming down from a joint they’d smoked earlier. Liz looks tough. He imagines she’s still the same girl she was then, except she’s sitting in a high-rise making deals for coffee beans or Brazilian hardwood or whatever it is she imports. But of course she isn’t the same. People grow up. People move on. It’s Nikki’s voice he’s hearing now. He thought he’d moved on, but he’s beginning to feel like he only moved away.