Old Newgate Road

by Keith Scribner

  After that night—the night—Liz’s parents forbade her from seeing him, and since he’d moved to Bloomfield and neither of them had a license, they’d hitchhike to each other, or get a ride from a friend. Her parents caught her twice when she couldn’t get home until long after midnight. The third time, they sent her off—gone in what seemed like a matter of days—to a boarding school in Florida. For the first months they wrote each other long letters full of promises, but then hers stopped. He never knew why, but he was crushed.

  He parks beside her Mercedes and shuts off the engine. She told him to enter on the left side, which makes him wonder about this particular arrangement. An exterior flight of stairs—slabs of chestnut—lead up to her second-floor entrance and a west-facing deck. Bossa nova’s pouring through the screen door, and she’s standing at the kitchen counter chopping at a butcher block.

  “Knock knock,” he says, and she turns, a chef’s knife raised.

  “Olá, Cole! Bem-vindo.” She wears a starched apron covering her skirt that swishes around her hips like silk. They kiss on both cheeks and he hands her a bottle of Oregon pinot noir that he finally found at a shop in Avon.

  “Magnificent,” he says. The chestnut timbers are exposed and finished with oil, in an expanse that’s sparse and clean with evening air passing through the big windows. He bends down to smell the huge bouquet on the dining table as Liz explains that she owns the whole place but rents out the main house and keeps this apartment for her Connecticut trips. She’d like to move here permanently someday, though her husband isn’t as interested.

  “The place you come from will always have that pull,” she says. “I feel that homing instinct most powerfully when I’m blue. Or even when I get a bad cold—I just want to come to Connecticut and curl up for a nap. With Manuel it’s Brazil. Somehow we’ve decided that Miami, right in the middle, is the sweet spot.”

  She makes a production of the cocktail, rattling the shaker over her shoulder to the music, then pouring their drinks in martini glasses—citrus and cucumber and gin.

  They clink glasses. “To coming home,” he says.

  He offers to help but she waves him away, so he sits on a stool at a soapstone counter and takes it all in. A dozen pendants, two chandeliers—twenty-five K, give or take, for the lighting alone, and worth every penny. It’s a comfortable, elegant, and very functional kitchen that Liz moves around in like a pro. She forms ground pork meatballs in her palms and rolls them into a pan of hot oil. He can see the scarring on her fingers where they meet her nails, painted the color of midnight, and before long their talk turns to Kirk.

  “For years I refused to see him at all,” she says, “and even now I don’t see him very often. I’m in and out of town in the summer, then sometimes we come at Christmas for a little snow, but that’s about it.”

  “What’s it like, though? I mean, what do you say to him? How can you stand to look at him after what he did to you?”

  She laughs. “I guess I don’t look at him much. His teeth are a mess, he doesn’t shave. He’s let himself go, don’t you think?”

  “But why…why would you even want a relationship with him?”

  “Brother is a relationship. It doesn’t matter if I want it or not.” She wipes her hands on her apron and sips her drink, wincing approvingly at the sting of the gin. “My parents died within a year of each other, my mother just this past Easter after endless doctor consults, bedside sitting, crying one minute and arguing with nurses the next, funeral, burial, lawyer meeting, and house cleaning. Kirk was good with that stuff. Respectful. It brought out his best. It’s really only since my mother died—just a few months now—that I decided to let it all go and reconcile with him.”

  “But after what he did—”

  “You don’t have a clue about what he did to me.”

  He feels like he does, like he witnessed it through her bedroom window or through her own eyes.

  “I know you don’t because I never told a soul.”

  “So what, exactly, did he do?”

  She tips back a long swallow. “Cole, dear, here you find yourself all these years later trying to figure out how to cope with your own murdering father. This whole conversation’s about you, not me. I’m over it. I barely remember what he did.”

  “Before your mother died you remembered it, but now you don’t? I’ll bet you think of it every day.”

  “But that’s you again.” She sips calmly, reasonably. “You’re a middle-aged man. How can you let yourself be consumed by something that happened when you were just a kid? A horrible thing, okay, but you’ve got your own kid to deal with now. Focus on him. The past only has the meaning we give it in the present. I’ve simply chosen to not allow what Kirk did a lifetime ago to matter to me. Since it never affected you back then, it certainly shouldn’t now.”

  “It did, though. I wanted to protect you.”

  “That was your deal. Some male thing.”

  He takes a swig, but most of it sloshes onto his shirt. “If it’s so trivial, why not tell me?”

  She eyes him, squinting coolly—not an expression she made back then. “Okay,” she says, “if it means so much to you. He’d get a little drunk and a little high and he’d grab my wrist and twist it up behind my back, yank down my jeans, and then…is it called dry humping? I don’t even know the name of it, so it couldn’t have been too traumatic.”

  He knows she registers the blood in his face, his shaking hands.

  “He’d flail at me like that for a while, twisting my arm the whole time, and when he pushed me away I’d gouge at his face with my nails but usually ended up hurting myself more, and he’d tell me he knew what a slut I was with you so I had no right to judge him. I’d spit that he’d burn in hell, and a couple times he said, like some creepy Eddie Haskell, that it’s not a sin if he doesn’t penetrate or ejaculate. And voilà, fifteen years later he’s part of a trial against that priest—”

  “Father Mally?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “The lawsuit gets momentum and pretty soon Kirk joins as a plaintiff and gives a deposition. Mally did the same thing to him, even used the same penetration-ejaculation line. But the men who brought the suit were altar boys a few years after Kirk, so by that time I guess Jesus had changed the policy and anything was game. The full monty. The lawyers dropped Kirk from the suit because they thought his case weakened the others.”

  “I’m surprised he didn’t change his story.”

  “He did. Or tried to. But then they thought he really undermined the credibility of the, you know, penetration plaintiffs.”

  “Well, it’s to his credit that he at least tried to do the right thing.”

  “Actually, he did it for the money.”

  “Why didn’t you ever tell your parents what he was doing to you? Or tell me?”

  “He said he’d beat you to a pulp every single day, and if that didn’t work he’d burn down your house. And I knew he would.”

  “So you knew he was burning the sheds all along?”

  She nods. “He learned that tactic from Mally too. He’d get altar boys into confession and then threaten to reveal their secrets. ‘Things could become much worse for you,’ he’d say.”

  “You know, I can’t feel sorry for Kirk, even hearing all that. It doesn’t change what he did to you. It’s no excuse.”

  “No, he really is a bastard.” She smiles. “But he’s my bastard. And he seems to be doing okay as a father. I’m only now getting to know Little Kirk—” she stops herself, pursing her lips. “I guess the truth of it is I want a relationship with my nephew. Manuel and I tried a little late, and with my parents gone, my brother and LK are the only family I’ve got left. And to me he seems like a decent kid.”

  “I hope so. He’s Daniel’s only friend here.” Turning his thoughts to Daniel begin
s to calm him down.

  “What does he say about him?”

  “I guess…” He pauses. “Not much. I mean, they’re pretty different, but I think they get along fine. I’m glad Daniel’s got a job. Thanks again for that, by the way.”

  “Little Kirk told me that Daniel feels like a cousin to him,” she says. “He doesn’t have any real cousins or siblings. He can be sweet about that sort of thing. I’m sure for years all he heard from his father about me was venom, but when I started making trips back, he warmed to me immediately. Long before I reconciled with Kirk, for my birthday and Valentine’s Day, he’d send me Hallmark cards. ‘For My Special Aunt.’ He’s very loyal. To his father, too. Lots of people in town think my brother’s an asshole, but his son has only the most glowing words for him.” She studies a cookbook, measuring cream and quarter teaspoons of spices from Ziploc bags. “What about your brother and sister?”

  He explains what they do for a living and implies he’s in closer touch than he is. He describes his two nephews as if he has a sense of who they are, though he probably knows more about Little Kirk. He hasn’t gotten the image of LK snapping the raccoons’ necks out of his head, but he’s convinced himself that it’s just the unsentimental, practical side of country living. No different from wringing a chicken’s neck. And if those raccoons had lived, they’d be stalking Phil’s new chicks night after night. He tells himself that Little Kirk was just doing what needed to be done.

  * * *

  —

  At the end of Liz’s driveway he turns left instead of right and drives north with the windows of his father’s car open wide. It’s a clear night, the black sky splattered with stars, moonlight glowing in the tobacco nets. The car rumbles louder when he speeds up on the country roads, shuddering in the curves as he tightens his grip on the wheel, fighting the skewed alignment. He thought he’d loop back on Alex and Antoine’s road, but instead keeps going and before long crosses the Massachusetts border. There was a roller rink around here where he and Liz would sometimes skate. Even then the place was a time warp, the relic of a family resort built in the 1930s on a lake with an Indian name. Canoeing, archery, ballroom dancing. The roller rink, in a massive wood-sided building, was probably all that survived of the resort itself when he and Liz used to skate in circles, holding hands, and in the dark corners tongue M&Ms back and forth into each other’s mouths. As the night went on blisters formed on their feet—an exquisite sting streaming up their legs.

  He turns around in the muddy lot of a dairy farm, his headlights sweeping over a field of chest-high cornstalks engulfing a long-abandoned gas station. He and Liz would whip each other in the tight curves; she was light as a bird and fearless. They’d extend their arms and she’d lean out hard away from him, and he felt powerful sending her soaring. He tries another dark road, and another, weaving all over for miles without ever finding the roller rink, so he veers back south toward East Granby.

  At an intersection, he recognizes a small brick house and follows the route up the Metacomet Ridge toward the Connecticut border and the northern tip of Old Newgate Road, which he can take all the way home. The car bucks a couple times going uphill, the road getting even darker in the trees, and he tunes in the same scratchy rock ’n’ roll station from Hartford he listened to as a kid. God, they’re playing the same music, and when Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon comes on, he thinks of Liz blowing those spit bubbles off the tip of her tongue. By now she’s finished cleaning up her first-class kitchen, maybe listening to a contemporary Brazilian band and changing into an elegant nightgown, while he’s rattling in his father’s old Pontiac beater down a pitch-black road blasting music from ninth grade.

  Just ahead he sees a yellowish glow hovering in the darkness. He backs his foot off the accelerator and rounds a bend where the road drops so suddenly that his stomach rises. It’s Old Newgate Prison.

  In the gravel lot he lets the engine idle until the song ends, then cuts it off and gets out to have a look. The night air’s cooler up here on the ridge, and the heat from Liz’s cocktails is fading. He was in middle school when the state took this place over—a historic landmark. They’ve built it up a little since then—a new ticket kiosk he doesn’t remember, handicap ramps, heavy iron chain strung between low columns of granite. Other than the high stone wall with the old brick guard tower perched on top there’s not much more to see from the outside, and it really hasn’t changed much since he came here on rowdy school buses with his classmates, winding the eight or ten miles past their house at the other end of Old Newgate Road.

  He gets back in the car and twists the key. The engine turns over, fires for a second, then quits. He keeps on cranking. Shit. After a minute he tries a few more times and pretty quickly can hear that the battery’s charge is dropping. “Fuck,” he says aloud, and senses that he’s starting to blame Phil for this new annoyance. He finds the AAA card in his wallet and calls it in, and then texts Daniel to tell him he’ll be late.

  He gets back out, and swinging the door shut sounds even creakier and tinnier than it did before. The car sits at a careless angle in the middle of the lot, like it was dropped there from a crane. He punches the hood.

  A text from Daniel dings in: “How do I get to work tomorrow?”

  He replies: “Little Kirk??”

  Then his phone rings: AAA, telling him it’ll be an hour.

  So he takes a deep breath and slips the phone in his pocket, his eyes traveling up the 250-year-old prison wall. This place was chartered as a copper mine around 1700, but by 1760 the copper ore—poor quality anyway—was running thin, so the Connecticut Colony sealed the shaft openings with iron grates and turned the mine into a prison. The inmates were of every stripe—murderers, thieves, counterfeiters and, during the Revolution, Tories; in fact, in a glass case of yellowed documents a letter ordering the incarceration of a band of Loyalists was signed “I am, &c, George Washington.”

  When he was very young, Cole would climb forty feet down an old wooden ladder into cold, damp caverns where water dripped from the rock, rotting the wooden bunks. The rusty remains of iron manacles hung from bolts driven into the stone. At times there were a hundred prisoners here, and Cole was riveted by the stories of their deathly hardships and harrowing escapes. One man sliced open his wrist and pressed filthy sludge off the floor into the wound, hoping that he could slip a gangrenous hand through the metal cuff.

  “You were just sent down into those old dungeons to crawl around?” Nikki used to ask. “I’m incredulous.”

  “There was a guide, but I think he was too old to get down the ladder. He mostly just did a head count to make sure everybody got out.”

  A few years later the state backhoed a new entrance to the shafts and put in stairs, a handrail, and better lighting. Some of the terror was lost, but in the darkest, deepest shafts, he’d told Nikki, he could still hear moans and cries.

  She was particularly fascinated by the human-sized gerbil wheel. In the morning the prisoners were brought up from the caverns to work, and one task involved a gristmill; with no river there to power it, they traded their manacles for neck irons and climbed paddles to turn the wheel.

  “It’s all I can think about on the StairMaster,” Nikki said. But he wonders now if his prison stories rattled some lockbox hidden inside her ribcage. When they met, she guarded herself with swagger and irony and forceful opinions. And one night he was telling her how for punishment the convicts were double- or triple-shackled, and in the severest cases left manacled in the mines for weeks, and that the guards dumped their daily pickled pork on the floor of the blacksmith shop, and they had to scoop it up and boil it in the same vats of water they used to cool the iron they’d forged. And then, in turn, she began a story about her own hometown, but her voice suddenly cracked, her eyes filled with tears, and she unloaded: her mother was a drunk, long divorced, a serial restaurant owner, failure after failure, and that ever
since Nikki was a little girl her mother would come home plastered after midnight and shake her awake, demanding a back rub until she passed out. Year after year. Sometimes it seemed like the only childhood memory she had: working her small hands into her mother’s broad back until, stinking of booze, she started snoring. As her older brothers got into high school they became big partiers too, and their small house was rowdy until two or three in the morning most nights of the week. She never had a sanctuary. Later, she even moved in with her boyfriend’s family for a while, embracing his parents as her own. The first time Cole told her he’d fallen in love with her, she said, “I love you so much. I’ve never felt safe like I do with you.” Whether he knew it or not, Cole had been looking for someone to save, and Nikki, despite her swagger, was looking for someone to save her.

  He leans back against the cool granite at the base of the prison wall, spinning the chestnut ring around his finger. Then he decides to chance it, and calls Nikki.

  After four rings she picks up. “Hey.”

  “You’ll never guess where I am.”

  “In a hayloft with your old girlfriend?”

  “Not quite. I’m—”

  “Singing all the old songs from Hee Haw?”

  “Old Newgate Prison.”

  “Oh, shit. Daniel?”

  “Jesus, Nikki, no. The colonial prison. The old copper mine.”

  “Thank God. How is Daniel?”

  “He’s good. Really good, I think. He likes the job and he’s finally got a normal friend. Just a regular high-school kid who cares about girls and cars and money in his pocket.”

  “That’s a relief,” she says.

  “I’m urging him to go to this Fourth of July barbecue at Little Kirk’s house—”

  “That’s his actual name?”

  “Well, his father’s Kirk.”