Old Newgate Road

by Keith Scribner

  “Hey, I wanted to ask you something,” Cole says.

  He pulls off the helmet and sticks it over the throttle.

  “My son’s coming out for a while. I was hoping to get him working tobacco.”

  After a pause Little Kirk says, “And?”

  “I thought you might tell me who I could speak with to find him a job.”

  He gazes off at the crane, chewing his lip with a petulance so similar to his father’s that Cole feels it might as well be 1979, not 2009. “How old is he?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “He ever work tobacco before?” He’s milking the opportunity: an adult asking him for a favor.

  “We don’t grow tobacco in Oregon.”

  “Right.” He nods, as if considering. “Does he know how to bust his ass and not complain?”

  “He does.”

  “And what it’s like being the new guy?”

  “He will.”

  Little Kirk takes a step toward his dad, then turns back. “I work for Boulger, out in Suffield. Ask for Jim Stanton.”

  * * *

  —

  He’s driven less than a mile down the road and just tuned in NPR when his phone rings. It’s Nikki, up before six. Unheard of. He stops on the shoulder.

  “Have you lost your mind?” she says.

  “We’ve got to get him out of Portland. At least for a while. What if Tony can’t get him off the next time? God, Nikki. What if he ends up in juvie?”

  “So your solution is to have him run away. That sounds familiar. How did that work out for you?”

  He ignores the swipe. “It’s not running away. It’s temporarily getting him out of an environment that invariably leads him to doing stupid shit.”

  “Why’s it going to be any different there?”

  “Because there’s no fucking freegans or foragers or squatters for miles.”

  “So you think you’ll rent an apartment? Do they even have apartments in that backwater? Where the two of you can spend your days discussing responsible adult choices?”

  “I’m arranging a job for him…” He pauses. “Working tobacco.”

  “This is weird, Cole. You want him to do all the same crappy stuff you did?”

  He might as well just spring it: “And we can live in my old house. My father’s back here. His health isn’t great and he could use a hand.”

  The line is silent for so long he wonders if she’s hung up. But finally she says, “You want to move our son to Bumfuck, Connecticut, force him into a job that you’ve said is the most miserable thing you’ve done in your life, and live in a house that destroyed any chance you had at a normal childhood, and be nursemaid to the man who strangled your mother?”

  “I think it could be good for him.”

  “The answer’s no.”

  “Daniel’s with me for the next two weeks, as per agreement. And we’re taking a trip to Connecticut. Your lawyer will tell you there’s nothing you can do about it.” Tony is her lawyer.

  * * *

  —

  A tobacco shed towers over one end of the gravel lot with a huge Montecristo medallion on its side. He parks in front of the office—a tidy wood house with a big front porch and gable dormers, part colonial farmhouse, part southern plantation. Back toward the fields a few Hispanic men are unloading flats from a tobacco bus; they’re still using retired school buses painted light brown. A white man wearing khaki pants and a dress shirt speaks briefly to one of them, pointing at the greenhouse with the hand holding his cigar, then sticks the stogie in his mouth and walks briskly off.

  Inside, Cole asks to see Jim Stanton and is told he’s in the field, but at that moment the door in back opens and the receptionist looks up. “One minute,” she says and follows the man he just saw into a rear office. He comes right out to the small front room and shakes Cole’s hand suspiciously.

  “Kirk Schaler told me I could speak with you about getting my son on tobacco.”

  “Junior or senior?”

  “Little Kirk.”

  The man warms at this. “He’s a good kid. Good worker.” He folds his arms across his chest. Although he’s left his cigar behind, he smells sweetly of the smoke—the whole office does. “Your son a friend of LK’s?”

  “No. But I know the family from way back.”

  “Why isn’t your son here in person?”

  “Well, he’s in Portland.” Then he adds, “Oregon. But he’ll get here tomorrow.”

  “He’s away at school or something? How old is he?”

  “Fifteen. He lives in Portland. We both do. But we’re here taking care of my father. And I worked tobacco as a kid, for Taybro. Loved every minute of it.”

  Jim smiles. “Now I know you’re lying.”

  “Well, it’s true. Maybe I felt miserable now and then, but it was all part of the experience.”

  “Times have changed. It’s really not a local kids’ summer job anymore. It’s all migrants now. Little Kirk’s the exception. Special dispensation, you could say.”

  “Can’t you just give him a shot? Meet Daniel and try him out for a week? Look, I’m a contractor myself. I know the value of a good man with a little training.”

  “I got eighty-four Mexicans who know tobacco backwards and forwards. I don’t need to train some fifteen-year-old from who the hell knows where.” He sticks out his hand to shake goodbye.

  8

  “She wanted to go to grad school in Paris and got accepted. French literature and film at the Sorbonne.”

  “So why didn’t she?” Alex says.

  He’s told them everything, and the unloading has left him spent. They’d heard much of the story already—town folklore—but they hadn’t known it was Cole’s family, hadn’t known which house. They stopped short of saying “the Old Newgate Strangler,” but he could tell they knew more than they let on.

  “My father had his ROTC commitment, and I think—I don’t know, I might’ve heard this in a fight or from my grandmother—he was all panicked to get married before the army, so they had a wedding while they were still in college and nine months later my sister Kelly was born.”

  Antoine leans into a mound of dough with a rolling pin. “So she never went to the Sorbonne?”

  “She used to say she’d planned to stay in France, to live in Paris and direct movies, and when I was a kid that always seemed like a perfectly reasonable alternate life for her. But as I got older I realized, who the hell moves to Paris and turns into Truffaut? She’d talk about these films she loved—Hiroshima Mon Amour, Elevator to the Gallows, The 400 Blows—and I’d imagine growing up in Paris, my mother a famous director”—he shakes his head, sips his wine—“like with a megaphone and riding boots and a beret. It was a compelling but absurdly romantic story about who we might’ve been. I never questioned it until I was”—he forces a laugh—“way too old.”

  Alex smiles. “She had a notion of escaping, don’t you think?”

  “Just like you and your brother and sister,” Antoine says.

  “Escape her marriage before it began.” Cole shakes his head. “Like she knew how that romance would end.”

  Why does he feel so comfortable talking to these two? Across their kitchen’s chestnut island, Alex skewers chunks of marinating chicken alternated with yellow and orange peppers, zucchini, red onion. Antoine cuts neat squares of rolled-out dough and folds the peaches and berry and sugar filling into elegant puffs, shaping them like acorn finials. Flour dusts his dark forearms. He’s deeply tan from working outside, and Alex, who works in the shop, is milky white. Side by side, it’s striking. They’re the same height, but in his thick arms and shoulders and weathered face he carries his Hungarian stock, generations of craftsmen, in every muscular move. She’s wonderfully plump, the figure of a pastry chef rather than a woodworker, skin as soft and white as do
ugh, and today she’s in a vintage dress, a paisley scarf in her hair, dark red lipstick, and an apron printed with ladybugs that his mother might have worn.

  “Sometimes she’d stand in front of two long bookshelves in the parlor lined with the Livres de Poche she’d studied.” The books are gone, he realizes, and he hopes they found a good home. “She never even plucked one off the shelf. Just stood and stared like she was at a museum looking at relics from another era. You’d think she might’ve resented her kids, but…” He shakes his head. “Not a word of regret. I guess it’s doubtful she was destined to be a star of the French New Wave, though even my father admitted that not going to the Sorbonne had been a sacrifice. But she’d interrupt him and insist, ‘No, no, not at all. There’s nothing I wanted more than a family.’ ”

  When Cole has been lucky enough to meet someone he can open up to so freely, it’s usually been while traveling. And he is traveling now. Traveling back.

  It was like this with Nikki at first. Easy to talk to, eager to divulge, to allow himself to be vulnerable. When did they start sniping? If falling in love involves a series of ever more intimate divulgences, do you plumb the depths at some point and bottom out, leaving you no place else to go?

  “She sounds like an amazing woman,” Alex says, spearing a wedge of onion.

  “It’s tragic,” Antoine says. He reaches around his wife’s back for a carton of eggs, then cracks one open in a blue ceramic dish. She sprinkles crushed herbs over the skewers. The whisk rings in the bowl. The colorful platter of meat and vegetables is more than they could ever eat. Antoine brushes egg on the pastries. It’s a domestic scene as beautiful and tranquil and timeless as a Vermeer. He hasn’t cooked much since Nikki moved out. He’s become a solo binge watcher, with dirty dishes and takeout boxes piling up in the kitchen; he forgets to open windows and the house gets stuffy. He misses their domestic life. He misses her.

  From his breast pocket Cole slips out a photo he found in the tea caddy, probably taken at a wedding. She’s in front of a church wearing a dark A-line dress with white polka dots and a sun hat in the same fabric.

  Alex’s eyes go wide. “She’s beautiful!”

  Antoine studies the picture. “She looks like you, Alex,” he says.

  She glances at the photo again. “Thanks for the compliment, and I’d kill for the outfit, but…” She shakes her head. “Your mother would’ve made amazing French films.” She pops the cork on another bottle of wine. “She would’ve rocked a beret.”

  He puts the picture back in his pocket as Alex reaches over the counter to refill his glass. He’s been in Connecticut three days, but it feels like weeks. He’s exhausted. Maybe it’s the shifting time zones. He drank the first glasses of wine too fast, and telling anyone new about it always drains him, which is partly why Nikki told it for him. He stares into the wine, as red as blood.

  “When I was a kid I had very involved fantasies of getting myself set up in Paris—a job and a great apartment—and then I’d bring her over. I’d introduce her around at my favorite cafés and boulangeries, and show her out-of-the-way museums I’d discovered. Take her to mass at Notre-Dame. Bring special cheeses and pastries back to the apartment, and we’d drink heavenly red wine at a tiny table overlooking the Seine. I knew she’d never get divorced, but while she was with me at least she’d be safe. I imagined that with me she’d be as happy as when she spoke French with strangers.” He smiles, shakes his head. “Sort of embarrassing, really.”

  Once they’ve moved outside Alex spins the skewers on the hot grill. They sizzle and the charcoal flares.

  “She wanted all of us to take a trip like yours,” Cole says. “ ‘We’ll do Ireland right,’ she’d say. ‘We can find our ancestors’ graves, eat shepherd’s pie in their villages—hardly changed in generations—and meet cousins we never heard of, who’ll embrace us like family. Because that’s their way. Our way. The kind of people we come from.’ ”

  Antoine’s sitting on the railing of the deck, sipping his wine. “I try not to romanticize it,” he says, “but I’m sure I’ll feel a connection. The stories passed down from the time I was a baby, they’re so real inside me. Like I’ve lived there already—another time, another life.”

  “Be careful,” Cole says. “You might meet some ghosts.”

  Antoine rubs his chin, his rough hands chafing against stiff whiskers. “I guess that’s what I’m hoping for.” Then he slips inside and Cole can hear the oven door opening and closing.

  “She wanted each of us to change the world,” Cole says, “but none of us has.”

  “It’s the small acts,” Alex says.

  “Small wasn’t what she had in mind. I fear we’d be a disappointment.”

  “I don’t believe it. And you can’t speak for your siblings.”

  “You’re right. I barely know them. It’s pretty disgraceful.”

  One by one she picks the skewers from the grill and sets them on the platter propped against her hip. “And by the way,” she says, “this isn’t just to make you feel good, but you’re an incredibly gifted architect and builder, certainly the most talented I’ve ever worked with. I show off your stuff on the website all the time. And if you believe that the spaces we inhabit change us, as I do, then you’re creating an environment where people are more inclined toward beauty and insight.”

  “Thanks,” he says. “That’s nice of you to say.” They’re quiet as she fills the platter with skewers, and then Cole says, lowering his voice, “Antoine has pretty high expectations for this trip. Do you worry he’s setting himself up for disappointment?”

  “We should have high expectations. For everything. What’s the alternative?”

  Cole admires them both and wishes they weren’t leaving so soon. Since his mother died, it’s felt like people are always leaving.

  “And you’ve got super expectations for the work you buy from me,” she adds. “Remember that corner cupboard you got all pissy about because the angle of your walls was so fucked up?”

  “You sent some nice trim to cover the gaps. My gaps.” He lifts his glass to her.

  She steps toward the kitchen door, then stops. “I can’t save him from feeling let down,” she says, “but I can be by his side to share in the disappointment.”

  He wonders about Nikki’s disappointments, and whether he’s shared in them.

  “You haven’t mentioned your wife.” It’s like Alex is reading his mind.

  “Things aren’t going so well.”

  “I gathered.” She’s holding the platter on her forearms, like a load of firewood, making no moves for the house.

  “I think I’ve tried to shield her from my letdowns and worries. You know, from my dark underside.” He laughs, but Alex doesn’t. He notices that since all the skewering she’s put the chestnut ring back on her thumb. “I didn’t think I should drag her down into those dank places with me. I’m not sure that’s the reason, but now after twenty years it seems like there’s just too much festering for us to ever air it out.”

  * * *

  —

  Back at the house, his father asleep, Cole full from his meal with Alex and Antoine, he lies naked on top of the sheets in his old bed in the dark.

  His mother wanted grandchildren to sleep over in the homestead, to be surrounded by laughter and singing on Christmas morning in a meticulously restored old colonial. She wanted them all to be happy and successful and Catholic and nearby.

  9

  As they cross the town line the sun drops below the nets, a fiery sky above the acres of cloth. This afternoon, before returning the rental car, he jumped his father’s Bonneville, filled the tank, and added two quarts of oil; except for a clackety-clack in the engine, it runs okay. The alignment’s out of whack, though, the car leaning toward the yellow line, so he steers against it to keep them from veering into the oncoming lane.

 
“A, it’s smoking, which if you haven’t heard…” Daniel shakes his head. “B, they’re cigars, which maybe at one time were partaken of by GIs and cabbies and plumbers, but now are nothing but a phallic symbol of wealth and class and I don’t know—like guys at a bachelor party getting lap dances and pretending they’re Wall Street tycoons. Oh, and that old president sticking his Cuban in the intern. So yeah, I have a slight problem jumping on board with the whole tobacco-industrial complex.”

  He hasn’t seen Daniel in nearly two weeks, and to suddenly see him here, so strangely out of context, is disorienting. It had occurred to Cole that his arrival might be grounding, might bring along familiar and welcome elements of his life, but instead it’s like those dreams where he goes to a new client’s house to discuss a new sunroom or whatever, and the door is answered by his mother, the age she was then, an ice bag over one eye. He has a nagging feeling that Nikki’s right, that Daniel doesn’t belong here.

  “Dude,” Daniel says, “are you messing with me? This is where you grew up?” The car creeps up the gravel drive. “This is the sticks! Somehow, I thought…I don’t know what I thought, but not this. And pre-internet. What did you do all day?”

  In the driveway, Cole turns off the ignition but the car diesels and he floors the gas pedal to flood it silent. “There’s still no internet.”

  Daniel stares at his phone, then out at the tobacco nets, and at the house with its peeling paint. “So this is my Peace Corps experience.”

  * * *