The Fool of New York City

by Michael O'Brien

  “Help you?” she asks in a toneless way, devoid of all welcome. It is not so much unmannerly as it is guarded. Across her round healthy face there is written a history, generations upon generations of careful sifting: insiders and outsiders, locals and aliens, year-round people and summer people, newcomers and the ancestrally rooted. Without doubt, she is a permanent fixture.

  I step forward. “Yes, ma’am. We’re trying to find the Benjamin Uffington Brewery.”

  “Uffington’s,” she replies, looking out the window. “It closed down years ago. Nothing to see there now. Are you looking to buy beer? I have some malt ale and lager in the fridge, but none of the microbreweries.”

  “Thank you, no,” says Billy in his deep rumble. Her eyes dart to him, and stay on him.

  “As you wish,” she says with a tone of philosophical musing. “Though I always say a slice of homemade pie and a beer, even on a spring day, is mighty nice.”

  She points to a pie rack under a glass dome on the counter:

  “Lemon custard. Raisin. Apple. Pumpkin. Got to admit the pumpkin is last autumn’s, but I canned it fresh and I use plenty of sweet spices.”

  “I would appreciate pie,” says Billy. “May I purchase the whole pie?”

  “You surely may,” she says with a twitch of her thin blue lips that I take to be a smile.

  “The pumpkin, then, for me, and another for my friend.”

  “A small slice of apple, please,” I say.

  “Do you have espresso?” Billy inquires with bright-eyed optimism.

  “Nope, no espresso. I could make you some regular coffee extra strong, just add a spoonful of instant.”

  “That would be perfect, ma’am.”

  As the woman busies herself cutting pie, I glance at the book she has been reading. Its title is Blue Mountains Quilt Patterns.

  “I’ll have one of them lemon custards, Myrtle,” the old man at the table calls out.

  “Coming right up, Cory.”

  As she unhurriedly goes about her business, I say to her, “So Uffington’s Brewery shut down.”

  “That’s right. In 2002, if I recall.”

  “Do you remember the people who lived there?”

  “Oh, I remember them well enough. A bank owns the land now, last I heard. Thinking of buying the place?”

  “No, no, not at all,” I say too hastily. Her eyes dart at me and linger, assessing.

  “A lot of city people come up here trying to buy land cheap,” she says, bringing out her words at a ponderous rate. “They want the old farmhouses for summer places. It’s not right. For hundreds of years, men and women and children sweated to clear those fields, pulling out stumps, picking up rocks, building stone walls, putting up their barns and homes. Now it’s all sliding back into forest. You walk through the woods just anywheres around here and you come across a field wall. Used to be these hills were pastures. Big families lived up and down the back roads, kids running in and out like flies in the slits of a raisin pie. We had a two-room school built in 1840, before the war, and two more rooms added over the years until after the Hitler war. In the fifties, the young men started moving away to Montpelier and Burlington and such places, for the work mostly. It got so you couldn’t raise a family by farming anymore. Then in the early seventies, some hippies broke into the school and had a drug party, burned the place down. They were building communes in the hills in those days, not far from here, though they’re mostly gone now. At the time of the fire the population was shrinking pretty grim, and the few kids we still had were being bussed up to Saint Johnsbury for school.”

  “That is a great pity,” Billy sympathizes. “I was raised on a farm, and I know what a loss it is when it’s gone.”

  “Lots of good things gone these days,” Myrtle says, placing a slice of pie in front of me and a whole one in front of Billy, with forks for us both. “Sure I can’t get you some beer?”

  “Just the espresso, please.”

  “Water for me,” I add.

  She serves the old gentleman his pie and returns to us. Billy is served his coffee in a soup mug, with a pitcher of cream beside it. I am given a glass of water and a paper napkin, with the image of an antlered stag on it.

  She places a cloth marker in her book, closes it, and says:

  “You sound like nice boys. Where you from?”

  “Iowa.”

  “New York City, I think.”

  “Uh-huh. So, why’re you interested in Uffington’s?”

  Billy answers. “In my home I have a painted sign for the brewery, very old. It has a brown horse on it.”

  “Yup, just like the labels. That’d be Benny’s Vermont Dark Ale. It was sad to see it go.”

  “So we thought we would drive up here and learn a little more about where it came from, what its past was. I hope you don’t think we’re intruding.”

  “Oh no,” she says, warming to him. “It’s just we get antique dealers from the city scavenging everything within thirty miles. They’ll buy a milk churn for a dollar and sell it in the city for a hundred. Take an old picture off the wall of an abandoned house and sell it for a thousand. It isn’t right. It’s like selling your love letters.”

  Billy nods sadly. “All the love and labor people put into things they made. Then to go treating them like numbers on paper.”

  “Ain’t it so. More pie, boys?”

  “Yes, please. Lemon, if you don’t mind.”

  “Mind? Heck, you can have it on the house.”

  “Myrtle, if it would mean anything to you, I’d be happy to return the sign to you as a gift. It might be a good memory for your store. Don’t you agree, Francisco?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  Now the lady is smiling wide, her crooked brown teeth displayed in a moment of guileless pleasure.

  “That is very nice of you,” she says. “Very nice indeed. I can’t say how many years it’s been since I was more touched. But you just go on keeping it down there wherever you live. And you’ll remember us, won’t you? A piece of Tadd’s Ford right there in. . .”

  “In New York City.”

  “Well, that’s fine,” she says, wiping off the counter with a rag, her eyes wet. “That’s just fine.”

  “Myrtle, can you tell us a bit more about Uffington’s?”

  “Well, I think I can, some. A Colonel Uffington was in the Revolutionary army and afterward got a land grant in Vermont after we kicked the British out. He wasn’t a good farmer, so he built a grist mill on the race higher up the river.”

  “That river?” I ask, pointing out the window to the wide but not very impressive creek running through the valley.

  “The very one,” she says. “So he put up the mill, and before long he’d built the brewery off to one side. He loved his ale, you see. Plenty fine water upstream, fed mostly by springs from the mountain. The buildings are still there, but the roofs are gone. Vandals made off with everything they could carry, and busted up the wooden barrels—hand-carved staves with straps made in the Franklins’ own forge. They kept them for years after the breweries were supposed to change over to metal barrels. Things were tough in Prohibition years. The Franklins had troubles with the law in the twenties, but the company recovered under FDR.”

  “Who are the Franklins?” I ask.

  “The Franklin family. They bought the company in 1899, just before the last Uffington died, about a hundred years after the mill and brewery were founded. But they kept the name because the beer was known far and wide as a right good drink. The last of the Franklin line ended a few years ago now. The wife, Dorothy, she passed away shortly after the turn of the century. The husband, Benjamin, he died a year later. I never got to know them real well, because they leaned more to the western side of the range and the people who live that direction. They got their mail at Graniteville, did their shopping there too, I suppose.”

  “Did you say Benjamin Franklin?” I exclaim.

  “Oh, lawd,” she laughs, “he wasn’t the famous Ben Franklin. But
you can see why those people kept giving the name to their boys. For generations it ran in the family, and sometimes there was four generations alive at once and living under the same roof. Can you imagine what it was like for the women to call them to supper? And of course the original Uffington was a Benjamin too.”

  “So this Benjamin Franklin you mentioned was the last owner?”

  “He was. They had a daughter but she left home early on, and I’ve never seen her since her parents died. She married a man from the city—I ‘m not sure where—and I guess she never wanted to claim the old place after her parents were gone.” Myrtle sighs. “Same as all our young people. They all go away. My sons and daughters too. Most of mine live over in Manchester, New Hampshire, and one in Montpelier, but they come home for Christmas some years and a few weeks every summer.”

  Billy decides to widen the discussion:

  “My friend Francisco may have lived here at one time. Did you ever know any people named Goya?”

  “Goya? No, I can’t say I did.” She shakes her head. “No, no one by that name this side of the mountain.”

  We scrape our plates and finish our drinks. Standing, we make our good-byes, shaking hands. Billy is careful with old people’s hands, little bird bones you could crush with a wink.

  “Come back, now,” says Myrtle, seeing us to the door. “Come back anytime.”

  The old fellow stands, throws some coins onto his table, and comes outside with us. He straightens his cap and peers judiciously up the road.

  “Three miles that way you come to a fork,” he says, “just before the highroad dips down over the range. Take the right fork, and it’ll bring you to the old Franklin place. Watch out for potholes.”

  We thank him, and hop into the van. Roberta is still talking into her cell phone. Without ending her conversation, she turns the ignition key and lets out the brake. With one hand she steers us into the enveloping, enduring trees.

  It doesn’t take long to reach the Franklin place. For the people of this region, perhaps, a few miles means another country, another community. For us, the distance is next to nothing. As we bump and rattle along the fork, with a rampant creek roaring beside us all the way, Roberta slows the vehicle to a crawl. Five minutes farther in, she brakes and turns off the engine. Ahead of us, beyond a few saplings blocking the road, are the faces of three dilapidated buildings, gray and white and rust red. Billy and I get out, leaving Roberta to resume her communications with the world.

  As we walk into a clearing through knee-high grass, we see that it was once a wider, more open space. The remnants of a waterwheel lie rotting in the creek, which gushes down cold and fast from the hillside above. Wisps of mist play about the banks. The trees crowd the buildings, the two largest of which are roofless. The mill is a square fort of hand-cut stone blocks greened by moss and spray. The brewery is the larger brick building, which stands farther back, with copper pipes jutting from its side, leading to a catchment basin above the water race. Painted on its front wall is the brewery’s name and an image of a life-size sorrel horse, faded and peeling. The front doorway is open, its massive wooden doors hanging at an angle on hinges that are pulling away from their frames. Swallows dart in and out of the open windows, building nests. To the right of the brewery stands a two-story clapboard house with glassless windows, its porch half-collapsed, bricks from its chimney scattered about the roof shakes. There is a clothesline off the end of the porch, a loop of wire sagging between a post and a tree, like loose rigging on a sailing ship. The high-standing grass is speared with last year’s dead burdock and mullein. Overgrown lilac trees are blossoming purple and white. The sun shines down on us, but it doesn’t dispel the chill in the atmosphere.

  Billy and I have not yet entered any of the buildings. We are simply soaking it all in. Rather, he is waiting quietly while I look. I have the oddest feeling that I know this place—yet it is a knowing without memories attached to it. My mood, which had been expectant only moments before, and elevated by the pie and the lady at the cafe, now plunges.

  Billy clears his throat and asks, “Does anything look familiar, Francisco?”

  “It feels familiar, Billy, but there’s nothing attached to the feeling. No pictures in my mind, no scenes, no memories.”

  We spend an hour going through the mill and the brewery, imagining what they once were. They are empty shells now, echoing with the lost eras of their abundance. The house has been stripped of furniture, save for a white enamel cookstove in the kitchen, missing its top plates. The smoke pipes have also been removed. There’s an occupied bird nest in the open chimney, quite busy with comings and goings. In every room, we find evidence of the many lives, the many Benjamins and their families who lived here. The birds-eye maple floors are scored and dented in a hundred different patterns. The embossed wallpaper, once white, now dark ivory, is badly stained by water leaks. There are paler squares and rectangles where pictures once hung. In upstairs closets, we find messages scrawled in crayon or quill and ink: “I love Taddie Archer,” and “Benny owes me thirteen pence,” and “Papa is mean,” the small protests and ardor of simple people. We know that numerous babies have been conceived and born in these rooms, have grown up and grown old and died in these rooms. These empty spaces are not so much hollow as hallowed by vanished stories. But they are not mine.

  “Do you feel you know this house?” Billy asks as we pick our way carefully down the ominously creaking staircase.

  “I feel something. But there’s no name for it.”

  Outside in the yard, we come upon a trail of broken weeds leading into the maple trees behind the house.

  “This looks recent,” says Billy. “No farther back than last fall, but it could’ve been made this spring.” He kneels and fingers a few crushed stalks. “There’s winter film on it. So it wasn’t this spring. I wonder where it leads.”

  “Just a deer trail,” I say.

  “I don’t see any pellets. We used to have deer on our farm, but they never made this kind of trail. No, Francisco, people made it. And it’s going somewhere. Let’s take a look.”

  He leads the way into the trees. We have not gone more than a hundred yards when the trail comes to its end in a clearing. On the far side sits a log cabin rising from high grass. To its right and farther back is the glitter of sunlight on water.

  The cabin door is unlocked. Going inside, we see little at first, for there is only a small window. As our eyes adjust, the details emerge: it is a single room furnished with plain wooden chairs, a plank table, and a cot. The smell of mildew and musk is strong, as well as the stench of decaying matter. On the table sits half a loaf of bread furred with blue mold. On a sideboard, unopened cans of beef stew, smoked salmon, liver paste. On the floor there’s a littering of empty cans. The most telling of the debris is a heap of empty liquor bottles scattered haphazardly about the floor. More such bottles sit on the windowsill. One is open, half-consumed. It is vodka. For the most part the alcohol was whiskey. I inspect a frying pan sitting on the woodstove in the corner. My gorge rises when I bend over it and the stench of decay hits my nostrils. It looks like hamburger patties, fried to the point of near carbonation, leaving just enough meat to rot.

  “Look at this, Francisco,” Billy says in a whisper, pointing to the bed. On its rumpled vomit-stained sheets sits a handgun. He picks it up gingerly and turns it over and over in his hands. It’s a revolver, full of bullets. He places it carefully back on the bed.

  “What happened here?” I gasp.

  “I don’t know, but it looks like someone fell apart pretty badly.”

  “Maybe teenagers had a drunken party.”

  “It could be, but it seems more like one person stayed here awhile. He left and hasn’t come back.”

  Billy bends and inspects a colored photograph, a page torn roughly from a magazine and tacked to the wall above the bed. He straightens abruptly, exhaling.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “The Twin Towers,” he murmurs.


  “The what?”

  “Nine-eleven. Remember I told you about it? Thousands of people died?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t remember you telling me that.”

  “But I did. . .” Then he closes his mouth on what he was about to say.

  “Let’s get out of here, Billy. This place is terrible. I think something bad happened here.”

  Billy and I step out into the clearing and walk around behind the cabin. Now we can see a small pond shining through a narrow belt of birch saplings. There’s an old tumbledown woodpile there too, a chopping block and an axe leaning against it.

  I stare at the scene, wondering. There are thousands of ponds in this part of the country, I tell myself.

  Billy walks ahead to the edge of the water. He stares down into its depths. Without warning, he drops onto his haunches and removes his shoes and socks. Rolling up his pant legs, he wades into the pond.

  “Don’t go in there, Billy!” I yell, my voice high-pitched.

  He pays me no mind and walks out farther. Suddenly he bends over and reaches in, soaking his sweater to the shoulder. Rising, he lifts up a square of green.

  “Computer part,” he says, and bends again to look for more.

  “Bottles, lots of bottles.”

  Again he straightens, hands on hips. He is shaking his head, puzzled, as if to say, Why am I doing this?

  Returning his attention to whatever he is seeing beneath the surface, he takes another step forward and stops. He reaches into the depths and pulls up something small. Slowly he wades back to shore, pondering intently whatever he holds in his hands. After sloshing it clean with water, he looks at me somberly and holds out the object toward me. It is a child’s toy, a tiny yellow racing car.

  I choke and double over, coughing. Fear is a lump in my throat, my scalp is stinging, my skin convulses with chills. I cross my arms over my chest and hold my body tightly to keep it from shaking to pieces.