Old Newgate Road

by Keith Scribner

  Another woman, younger but with long silver hair, comes out from the breezeway, carrying a tray with a teapot. She pushes aside the rags on the table, sets down a teacup, pours it full, and makes space for the pot. She stands behind the painter—maybe her mother—resting one hand on her shoulder, pointing out details on the canvas with the other, and chatting, although at this distance Cole can’t hear a thing.

  * * *

  —

  His mother’s buried in Tariffville, the next town over. The fifteen-minute drive takes him past some beautiful old colonials, through fertile countryside, and across a silver steel bridge right into the restaurant’s parking lot. He gets out and leans a foot on the guardrail, white water surging through the gorge below, and decides to visit the grave another day.

  When Liz pulls up in her Mercedes, he says, “I’d have bet this whole town would’ve slid over the cliffs by now.”

  “It’s not Nantucket, but no, they’ve had a little renaissance.” Her Mercedes chirps and they kiss on the cheek. Again she’s in a killer outfit—a fuchsia blouse with a white silk scarf, a bright yellow skirt, open-toed pumps. Her purse looks like Park Avenue—stiff, shiny leather with gold clasps and a wooden hoop handle. It’s impossible to connect the dots to her frayed cutoffs and tube tops, the girl with stringy blond hair sitting cross-legged in the dirt rolling a perfect joint.

  “How long has this place been open?” Even when he was a boy these carpet and textile mills along the river had long been shuttered. All he remembers here was an army-surplus store, a single-bay garage that sold retreads, and a dreary market with a butcher in back where his mother bought their meat for the week on Sundays after church. Local kids wore secondhand clothes that didn’t fit, exposing their bony wrists and bare ankles, and they stared at you with a squint, like the next blow could come from any direction or like they were fixing to pull a rock from their pocket and hurl it at your skull the moment you turned away.

  “I don’t know,” she says cheerfully. “Things change.”

  The organic restaurant, a former mill, is beautiful inside, and the air-conditioning feels good. Massive posts and beams rise up from wide plank floors to a clerestory. On their table, white linen and three purple tulips. A live recording of Miles Davis playing an upbeat “Springsville.” He sees he’s underdressed. Clean jeans and a collared shirt will get you anywhere in Portland, but now he suddenly feels like some contractor out with a client.

  She orders a glass of Sancerre and then he does the same, and when the waiter brings them Cole raises his in a toast. “To meeting again,” and they clink.

  “I’ve had some good news,” she says, “so lunch is on me. Driving over here I got a call from my lawyer and found out I just bought a flower farm.” She grins with unrestrained delight and Cole catches a flash of the girl he knew.

  “Where?”

  “And ferns. Flowers and ferns. North of Miami.”

  He’s not sure what to say. “I like flowers.”

  “Everybody does, and that’s the idea. I’ll always keep a toe in shade tobacco. Ten or fifteen years from now, though…” She shakes her head. “It’s already a labor of love, but tobacco in Connecticut is history.”

  “So flowers are the future?”

  She takes a sip, widening her eyes. “And ferns.”

  He laughs, mostly because she’s so giddy.

  “The farm’s gorgeous, all the colors and fragrances, and it’s huge—fourteen employees. But what clinched it for me is they do lots of growing under nets. I bought it on an impulse, though I figure that boom times or bust, in sickness and celebration, people want flowers.”

  “So does this mean you’re leaving town now?”

  “We don’t take possession until October. My husband’ll spend time there this summer while I’m here, and by fall…” She shrugs. “You know, it’s an investment. If it doesn’t work out, we’ll sell it. But until then”—she rotates the small vase, scrutinizing the tulips—“we’ve got heaps of flowers in our lives.”

  Their meals come, along with more wine, and as they eat he tries to steer the conversation to when they were kids, but she keeps looping back to her Christmas plans with Manuel’s big family in Brazil and the Portuguese lessons she’s going to resume for the third or fourth time.

  Once they’ve finished Cole goes to the restroom, and when he returns, Liz is talking with two women and a man who are standing by their table. “Cole,” she says, “you must remember…” followed by their names, jarring loose washed-out images as misplaced as Daniel and Phil together in his old house, Kirk and his son manning the crane, or Liz’s face across the table—older but truly the same—pasted into a glossy ad for Chanel. Everything’s at once familiar and strange, as in a dream where you walk into your office and it turns out to be your childhood bedroom, and then a masquerade party where you’re the only one without a costume.

  And yes, he remembers the three of them. The man a year ahead of him in school, married now to the woman who’d been in Cole’s class, while the other one’s rolling “How’s the West Coast?” off her tongue like they’d all met for drinks a month or two ago. And Cole’s saying, “Beautiful coastline. Microbrews. Rains a lot,” and Liz mentions a recent trip to San Francisco. Okay, just three people who used to be classmates—they look just like them and act like them, and he remembers that one of these girls, whose name he couldn’t have summoned in a million years, had bad allergies and scrunched up her nose to keep from sneezing and always breathed through her mouth. And now she’s married to this boy, and they’re all grown up and wearing dressy business clothes, all grown up, whereas Cole’s dressed essentially as he was when they last saw one another, aged fifteen.

  * * *

  —

  He pours the boys two tall lemonades and drops a handful of ice in each glass. It’s good to see Daniel with dirt covering his arms, and his jeans and T-shirt, too. The rich smell of under the nets so familiar to Cole.

  “How was Phil this morning?” he asks Daniel.

  “He did fine,” his father says as he comes in the kitchen. “Bigger question is how was day one as a tobacco picker?”

  “We ain’t pickin’ yet, Mr. Callahan,” Little Kirk says.

  “It’s good,” Daniel answers. “Real work. I just wish we were growing carrots and broccoli.”

  “But you like it?” Cole asks.

  “I like working in the soil. The heat. The intensity of it. And I’m using my Spanish, which is cool. It’s a privilege to be working with such folks—”

  “Like that one babe,” Little Kirk blurts.

  “And it’s very labor intensive—”

  “Fuckin’ A it is.” LK drains his glass.

  “—so it provides a lot of jobs.”

  “Now, when I first worked tobacco,” Phil says, “there were some serious initiations for the new guy. I had my pants tore right off me.”

  “I’m keeping an eye out,” LK says. “Nobody’ll mess with my boy.”

  “I met Connie Stevens back then,” Phil notes. “She looked right at me and said, ‘Nice to see you.’ And I saw Karl Malden in the Windsor Family Restaurant. Karl Malden, eating a plate of eggs. Imagine.”

  Cole heard this story many times as a kid, but he wants to keep Phil reminiscing. “Was that when they were filming the movie?”

  “Parrish, starring Troy Donahue. I never saw him. Thought I did, several times, but it was always somebody else.”

  “I love that movie,” Little Kirk says. “I’ve seen it a hundred times. And you know the speech about tobacco leaves being like a baby—”

  “ ‘You gotta keep it warm, sheltered,’ ” Phil puts on the voice, “ ‘water, hoe, sucker. It never leaves you alone. Like a baby.’ ”

  LK lights up with a wide grin. “Exactly! Our farm boss gives the same speech. Right from the movie.”

&
nbsp; “Well, it’s accurate. There’s not a thing in that movie about tobacco farming they got wrong.”

  His father’s making perfect sense, his mind clear, and Cole wonders if the episodes of the last week might have been aberrations. There’s a bang on the door and Cole opens it to a UPS delivery woman. “Phil Callahan,” she says, setting two big boxes down on the step, “Live Chickens” stamped on the cardboard. They can hear the frantic chirps. She holds out her electronic clipboard for Cole to sign.

  He’s about to say this must be a mistake—as if just saying it would change his father’s mind and make her take them away—but instead he simply signs. Half the people on their street in Portland have a few exotic chickens, but he’s got a bad feeling about what’s in this box. “How many?” he asks his father, looking down at the boxes once the woman leaves.

  “Thirty-five.”

  “That’s awesome,” Little Kirk says. “Your coop looks like a classic.”

  When they built it, Cole remembers, his father was working from a few Polaroids of a board-and-batten henhouse in Sturbridge Village and drawings in a coffee-table book of colonial outbuildings. They’d paid extra to get rough pine instead of smooth.

  Phil tears open the top of a carton and the chirping goes wild like…well, like hungry chicks. “About half hatched,” he says.

  “Do you have any feed?” Cole asks.

  His father’s silent for a moment, like he’s thinking, but then his face slackens.

  “I had some,” he says, turning to Cole. “Did you throw it out with the garbage?”

  Cole shakes his head.

  “Everything’s been disappearing since you showed up.”

  Christ. How can any of this work out? Daniel has asked the only sensible question in days: What the hell are we doing here?

  “We got feed,” Little Kirk says. “Don’t take much for the day-olds. They’ll peck at some food scraps for now.”

  “Ha!” Phil points at Daniel, seeming right back on track. “No scraps with my grandson in the house. What’s it you call that?”

  “ ‘Scrappetizing,’ ” Daniel says.

  “His own coinage.” Phil nods proudly.

  “Huh?” LK looks blank.

  “Tell him.” Phil chuckles. “He’s committed. Got suspended from school for it.”

  “All I was doing was eating off the trays on the conveyor belt before they went into the dish room.”

  “He started a movement.”

  “I got some other kids doing it too. You don’t need to buy food in this country. Half a sandwich, a cup of pudding, a carton of milk barely touched, most of an apple.”

  “Got him kicked right out of school.”

  “Only for two days,” Cole adds.

  Little Kirk’s face twists up. “ ‘Scrappetizing’?”

  Phil pats his grandson’s arm. “Tell him about eating from dumpsters.”

  “That’s just wrong.” LK turns up his nose. “I won’t even eat leftovers.”

  * * *

  —

  Each of the boys carries a box, and the men follow them across the backyard to the old henhouse in the weeds, then Cole suddenly remembers. “Hold up, guys. We got squatters in there.”

  They open the door and see the eyes reflecting the sunlight. On the other side of the motorcycle, the three raccoons are curled around one another in their nest.

  “Their momma must be dead,” says Little Kirk. “They’ll make quick work of thirty-five chicks.” The dish Cole put out for them has been flipped over and swatted into the opposite corner. The three Callahans all stare blankly at one another, and after a moment LK asks, “You got another carton?”

  Cole jogs back to the house, and when he returns Little Kirk lifts the raccoons into the box along with much of their nesting while Cole drags the one-wheeled bike out of the coop.

  “Will they make it?” Daniel asks.

  “Say what?”

  “Don’t they need food?”

  LK stares at Daniel, seemingly fascinated. “They can fend for theirselves by this age.” He closes the cardboard flaps and bungees the box to the back of his motorbike. “I’ll let them go by that shed closer to town.” He claps Daniel on the shoulder. “They’ll live a nice life there. And now we still gotta patch those holes,” he adds, pointing at the sunlight shining through two spots. “Keep the chicks in and the critters out.” Then he starts giving them all orders, setting them to work. For twenty years Cole has supervised every detail of extensive, complex building projects, and here Little Kirk Schaler is telling him how to nail a piece of wood over a hole. And it’s a relief, really, to have the kid take charge.

  When the holes are sealed, the boys straighten up the chicken wire, pounding the highway stakes solidly into the ground. Cole and Phil work on the henhouse door, so warped by time that it won’t swing freely or latch.

  His father had gotten angry back when they were building the henhouse: his mother thought the chickens—and the Chinese geese, the mallards, the rabbits, the goat—were fool’s errands that took him away from restoring the house, and the night before, he and Kelly and Ian had listened to them arguing—or listened to their mother’s side—late into the night. But when it was finally quiet he fell asleep, and his father woke him up early the next morning. Cole endeavored to keep the project going smoothly, without complaining about hunger as they worked through lunch, measuring precisely and cutting fast even though he was tired from staying awake and vigilant so late. But things didn’t go well. They were short a sheet of plywood and had no idea how to cut a birdsmouth or set rafters. By dinnertime, with only the framing done, his father said, “If we fly through the siding we’ll be done except for the roof.” Cole set to cutting, exhausted by now and knowing they’d be working until dark, and he promptly cut through the cord of the circular saw—always an awful sound, like a snake choking on its own tail.

  “Damnit!” his father shouted, then chucked the saw as far as he could, the severed cord dangling, and marched into the house. Cole stayed out there sawing the bats and boards by hand until his mother called him in to eat. He picked up the circular saw, nosed into the dirt, and collected the rest of the tools. No one spoke over the meal except his mother: “Everything always takes longer than anybody thinks.”

  That night Cole was so exhausted it was almost a relief that it came so fast. When he stepped out of the shower his father was leaning into the sink with the Waterpik stuck in his mouth, and his mother stormed into the bathroom shouting at him—“Chicken coops! When there’s no money to install heat upstairs!”—and he turned the Waterpik on her, the pulsing spray needling her cheeks and eyes and inside her mouth, and she held up her hands—“Stop it! Phil! Listen to me!”—and then with one swift backhand he sent her slamming into the wall beside the toilet and pounded out the door. Wrapped in a towel, Cole kneeled at his mother’s side, blood running from her nose. She was howling. The toilet paper, ripped off the wall, unrolled across the floor, the Waterpik tip spasming where it dangled off the counter from its slim coiled hose.

  Once the henhouse is patched together, LK stays for dinner, and while the boys are doing the dishes, Cole takes a shower. Afterward, standing at the upstairs window, he watches Little Kirk take off on his motorbike, kicking up a tail of dust down the tractor road. At the back of the field along the tree line, he stops. One by one, he lifts the baby raccoons from the box, snaps their necks over his knee, and flings them into the woods.

  * * *

  —

  It’s not too late on the West Coast, so he makes a few business calls he should have made days ago. “We’re losing money on this one, boss,” Ben Salverson says.

  “Isn’t the abatement done?”

  “Yep. But behind the asbestos there’s dry rot. Every layer we peel away on this job leads to something else.”

  “Well, okay
. So get the jacks over there and let the customer know we’re adding a week. Can you pull Travis and Dylan off of shingling?”

  “Travis sprained his ankle yesterday, really bad.”

  “Damn. On the job?”

  “Yep. Just stepped wrong off a ladder. He’s out for a few days at least, and then I’ll get him making window trim in the shop. That job’s hit some snags too.”

  “Handle it best you can—”

  “Fact is we could use you here now. I couldn’t pull the permit for the bay window on Thirty-Third.”

  “Why not?”

  “Setback issue. The neighbor produced a survey from nineteen-ten or something. They still want it, but you’ve got to do a redesign.”

  “Well, I can do that from here. And I’ll finish that bid tonight.”

  He can sense disappointment in Ben’s silence. Or worry. “I thought they called you.”

  “Who?”

  “They gave the job to somebody else.”

  “No. The Richmond job? Damnit. That was supposed to carry us through September.”

  “I know, boss. I looked at the numbers this morning. At best, this summer’s a wash.”

  * * *

  —

  Liz didn’t tell him anything about her house, and he was surprised by the address—way out on Airport Road. He guessed it was in a new development, but at the mailbox he turns into a long, pristine gravel driveway that winds up through nursery fields with rows of holly and dogwoods; on a rise in the distance a tobacco shed is set against the Metacomet Ridge, and as he gets closer, the sunlight reflects off its hefty steel overhangs suspended from cables, its expansive windows and polished doors. Ha, meeting her in a shed!