Fallen Land

by Patrick Flanery

  Walking the winding streets of Dolores Woods, Nathaniel understood the neighborhood’s particular aesthetic philosophy, one in which the past was preferable and this country was at its greatest before it tried to tear itself apart in the middle of the nineteenth century, before the rift and emancipation and urbanization. While each house had its own unique design, they were stylistically congruous, pastiches of Victorian architecture just out of scale, the verticals too long, the pitch of the roofs too acute or too shallow, as though the houses had been stretched or subjected to a deforming growth hormone that left one aspect of their shape enlarged—houses with elephantiasis or localized gigantism, houses that belonged in a sideshow of architectural grotesques.

  The streetlights were reproductions of black Victorian gas lamps and the street signs were made from hand-lettered wooden shingles. Most of the garages were separate two-story structures designed to look like carriage houses, with dormer windows and fake dovecotes jutting out of steep gabled roofs. It struck him as New England architecture transposed to an inhospitably open landscape. The finished portion of the neighborhood came to an end in an oval at the center of which was a miniature park with a cluster of trees, a white wooden gazebo, three wrought-iron benches, and a few neglected flowerbeds. Immature trees dotted the large expanses of lawn, and past the gazebo the streets cut a gray and illogical labyrinth through weed-filled wasteland, bordered to the east and north by the woodland that merged into the nature reserve.

  On the day they viewed the house, a red-tailed hawk sat on one of the streetlights in the territory of vacant lots, scanning the rolling grassland. Apart from the roads, the fields were punctuated only by a regular rhythm of utilities points awaiting houses that might never be built. Someone had made a patriotic attempt to sow chicory and daisies and pale red columbines in the area closest to the last of the finished houses, but it was impossible to deny that what remained was a sign of failure and waste, fertile land lying fallow. Fine silt blew from the places where the ground remained bare. All the finished houses were occupied, but a majority of the residents owned properties worth less than half what they had paid for them. No one was buying. Everyone wanted to sell. The population of the city, after rising for decades, was in sharp decline. Birth rates were dwindling and the whole region was contracting. Nathaniel had read an article that suggested a bill might soon make its way through the state legislature that would propose leasing more than a third of the state to the federal government, either to be run as a nature reserve, or to build a vast prison farm complex of detention centers for illegal immigrants, failed asylum seekers, enemy combatants, and domestic terrorists. We must be crazy, Nathaniel thought, the hot summer wind hurling grit into his face, to imagine we’d want to live here. The truth was that they could not begin to afford the kind of solid historic home they thought they wanted. A simulacrum was the closest they were going to get, and Dolores Woods, however unfinished it might have been, had pretensions to historical awareness that most suburbs lacked.

  That evening, when they were eating dinner downtown in what Elizabeth had recommended as the city’s best restaurant, located in the storage vaults of a recently redeveloped warehouse, Nathaniel tried to explain to Julia the nature of his larger reservations. It was not just about this house that she loved, a house even he had to admit was impressive, tempting in its way, but appealing as a kind of trophy rather than somewhere he would ever want to live. It would be an irrational purchase. They had agreed they were not going to have more children, and three people did not need so much space.

  “But it’s also got me thinking—I wonder if we’re making the right decision about this whole thing. We love Boston. Copley loves Boston. He loves the Lab School,” Nathaniel said, lowering his voice and watching as his son struggled with a bowl of noodles.

  “I don’t want to leave the Lab,” Copley said. “I’m not ever leaving there.”

  “Come on, guys, we’re going to have a much better life here,” Julia said. “We’ll have space like we’ve never had before. We’ll have a yard and a vegetable garden. You can have a playroom, Copley. This is what we’ve always said we wanted. And if the new school isn’t up to scratch, Nathaniel, well, we’re intelligent people. We can pick up the slack, or hire a tutor.”

  Since making the decision to leave Boston, Nathaniel had begun to think of himself as deferring to Julia. She, in turn, pleaded with him to trust her, asking him to abandon his otherwise sensible tendency to play devil’s advocate and stop second-guessing what was, by all objective measures, professional progress for both of them, as well as the kind of increase in their standard of living that would have been unattainable in Boston.

  “You’re leaving the best lab in the country. Do you understand what that means? People will think you’re crazy.”

  “I never would have made director there. This is about power and autonomy, Nathaniel. I can do things here that I never could have done in Boston. I can do other, better, more ethical kinds of work. I’m not interested in defense applications or space exploration or mapping oil wells. I want to create useful tools that can improve the lives of people who need help. That’s why I got into this field in the first place.”

  “And you need that house, don’t you?”

  “And I really need that house.”

  Nathaniel understood that having a house like the one in Dolores Woods—a house, he had to admit, that was unlike any they could ever have afforded in Massachusetts—was important to Julia in a way it would never be to him.

  After seeing the house with Elizabeth they left instructions for her and returned to their high-rise apartment in Boston to await the results of the foreclosure auction. Nathaniel knew that Julia had decided the house would be theirs by some miracle of fate, although he privately hoped that in the end they would be outbid, and the difficult logistics of finding somewhere to live in a city fifteen hundred miles distant would put a stop to the plans that were already, in every other respect, so far advanced.

  When Elizabeth phoned to tell them “the good news” that not only had they “won” the auction, but that the final price was well below their “target,” Nathaniel understood, despite his many misgivings, that they were going to be significantly better off financially than they had ever been at any previous point in their lives together. Even with the downturn in the market they sold the apartment in Boston at a substantial profit and the mortgage payments on the new house are less than half what they were paying on the Back Bay apartment. Although still paying off student loans, their taxes would be lower, the cost of living lower, everything about their new life was going to be cheap, while both their salaries were increasing by more than a third. Judged by any objective measures, they were far luckier than most of their friends and contemporaries.

  The sun is going down earlier each evening, summer quitting itself, but still I can see the white man at the bus stop from a block away. It’s only when he boards that I realize he’s in uniform. For a moment I think the vest he wears says KKK and my heart rumbles, but then my eyes come together and I see the first K is an E and all the man is doing is checking tickets. Under those three capital letters is an unfamiliar phrase: Revenue Protection. Maybe it’s because I haven’t been riding buses much lately, but it used to be enough to pay the driver and get off at your stop. I fish the ticket from my purse and the Revenue Protection man looks at it and then at me as if the little white slip should somehow correspond to the shape and features of my face. He puts it back in my hand without saying anything and goes on to the next person. Everyone has a ticket. I wonder what would happen if someone didn’t, if he’d whip out a smart black fine book or slap a pair of silver cuffs around offending wrists. He gets off at the next stop, crosses the street, waiting for a bus headed back into town.

  How many times I’ve driven this road, watched it change over the last decades, but if I were my young self again I would see nothing familiar about any of it, not the ph
rases or faces or the houses where there used to be fields surrounding our own. Just before the last stop I press the yellow strip of tape running along the window and as I get off I thank the driver. The man doesn’t even look at me, as if I were an apparition, as though I might never have existed at all. I trudge along the hot sidewalk where buffalo grass used to grow, past a brick wall where I remember split-rail fences. I come to our land, to that place where the forest reaches all the way to Poplar Road, and the cottonwoods in their thick-trunked waltz bow down and say here you are, Louise, here you come. I remember when this stretch of road was still dirt and Donald and I stood at the edge of the property watching the men and cement trucks, knowing it was the end of the way we and our people had lived upon this land my grandparents inherited, land my Freeman forebears tenanted before a stroke of most unlikely luck delivered it into their name; great-grandparents sharecropped before that, arrived on it newly free and looking for a way of living in the quiet of the seasons, hope humming in their ears.

  Through the trees I see the white hem of our house, a silver ghost like my dead Donald, belted with an apron of porch, teacup sky overhead, clouds rimmed in gold. I take the woodpath to avoid the eyes of neighbors where there didn’t used to be any, follow my feet along tracks I could walk blind from first walking, fifty paces to the north, feel the tug of the pole, then my old sharp turn left and twenty more paces through treecover until I step into the corrugations of the garden, the sky darkening to a purple bronze. Now I stand alone.

  Not that I blame anyone. I don’t blame my husband for taking out loans to install an irrigation system, to keep the farm alive, building up a debt that forced my hand in the end, debt to the FHA, and debts to banks to pay off the Feds. I don’t blame him for dying before his time. I don’t blame my daughter for telling me what was obvious. I don’t even blame Paul Krovik with his big plans and big money.

  But I do blame myself. I blame myself for giving in to Krovik when he asked me to sell the farm, and for giving in to Rebekah when she said I had no choice but to sell: either sell and remain solvent, my daughter told me, or hang on and let the bank take everything when I could no longer make the payments. All those badgering, shouting people, hollering even when they didn’t raise their voices. I don’t blame them, but in the end I didn’t have the strength to resist. I blame myself for that weakness, for not standing with the land, letting my feet sink in, holding the soil with their fleshy roots, finding a way to make farming pay as we always had in the past.

  One foot just fits in a furrow between two rows in my garden, the earth warm and soft, lines clear, all of it my labor: the hoeing and weeding and mulching, the mounding and raking and watering. Between stands of asters in September bloom I can see tomatoes and peppers in twilight, leaves yellow and ragged for neglect. I feel bad about that, but my time has been divided. I’ve been fighting to save you all, my little that remains. Rent of a sigh rips my chest, and a claw comes snagging from nowhere. I cannot name the hand that scrapes me now, but I feel its hook bring up a coughing cry. Stuff it back inside, fist my tongue behind my teeth, a salt-knuckle silencing. God forbid the neighbors should come investigate or call the cops.

  I love this life and I love my freedom. I want them both to last, free on this plot that was supposed to be my people’s promised land, the new home at the end of their long exodus from the south. My great-grandparents, born in bonds, came here under their new name, following their own star. My grandparents, the first generation born in freedom, the first to own the land themselves, started off as tenant farmers. If they managed to do it, then I might have found someone again willing to assume the burden and possibility of farming land not their own, farm it in the way it’s been farmed ever since people came to cultivate this part of the country. I should let go of the blame, but I still find myself accountable for caving in to all those people in the weeks after Donald died, his life going out all at once, moving upright from bed, putting his feet on the rag rug. A congenital defect, said the doctor, weakened by a lifetime of labor, time catching up after the decades of handpicking and lifting and early rising.

  I can’t help thinking that if he’d retired and leased the land to tenants when it was clear the work was taking him down by degrees each day and the returns, ever slim, fast diminishing, were no longer worth the effort of his labor, when there were still farmers around looking for land, then he might still be alive. But no, I’m no overlord, he said, and I’ll be no overseer. We worked harder than ever to stay in the same place, struggled to fall behind slower than we might have otherwise, as crop prices dropped and the cost of everything else went up. We’d never have survived without my job, my commute across town every day of the school year, my long hours. Without that, we would have been finished decades ago.

  I kick off the shoes and put my feet in the damp ground, run soil through toes, break leaves and stalks of tomatoes to smell the perfume of fine green hairs, scent of my homeplace and heritage. There are two parts to me: earth and sky. Let me think through the land for now, for a while, for the last hours of my life in this house, however many days they may last. Let me find my way to a reckoning of how it came to pass.

  After selling the land to Krovik, paying off the ocean of debt to the banks, I still found myself robed in an almighty blanket of money. But it was stamped and stitched together with blame: self-blame, worst kind of blame. Rebekah said it was the only rational choice given the circumstances: “You have to be reasonable, and look at the thing logically. You sell this land and you don’t ever have to think about working again, not ever. You get out of debt for the first time in your life. You say screw the government for not recognizing our claim. You say fuck the bigots and the neighbors who never helped. You leave it all behind, mom, and you get a more secure retirement. You get yourself free from worry about bills and food. No more crusts, like you’re always saying. Instead, you can buy what you really want.”

  Rebekah has always thought she knows what I really want, but she could never imagine that what I most want now, and even in those weeks after her father’s death, was for Donald Washington to climb out of his coffin, scratch through six feet of dirt, come home, sit next to me on the porch, and for the two of us just to rest there, swinging in silence and laughter, for a good year or two. I might be able to stand it if I could have those two years of Donald and me just sitting together, not worrying about land or crops, two years to get used to the idea of him not being here. I told Rebekah there was no way she was putting me out of my house.

  “No one is saying you have to move,” she said. “You can keep this old house, stay here long as you can.”

  I looked at my daughter, shifty-eyed Rebekah, and knew she couldn’t wait to get me in a retirement home. I told her she should put to rest any ideas about powers of attorney and health proxies, because I will go out looking after my own affairs, making my own arrangements, ushering myself to the grave, through grace and in the company of the dead who have preceded me. The mistakes I make are my own.

  “Oh Lord, mom. I’m not making you go anywhere,” she said, finger-wagging, swivel-armed. “Tell Krovik you want to keep the house and half an acre around it, but you can’t keep all this land. Krovik’s made you a good offer. It’s honest money. There’s nothing wrong with selling something you don’t need anymore once it’s served its purpose. Let the land turn into something else. He wants to build houses, so let the fool man build houses. If you don’t, you’re going to lose it all anyway, and have nothing to show for it.”

  But this land was made for farming. It’s not suitable for houses. It has secret, sliding ways.

  “Come on, mom, get real. This land is just plain old tired. It’s been tired for a long time. There’s nothing mystical about it. Let the land rest. Let it do something else for a century. Be pragmatic, like you always said you were. Sell up, sit tight, find something to occupy your time.”

  I should have told Rebekah how much I need this
land, the way the rock, soil, and trees are not merely the only home I’ve ever known, but are my bones and blood and limbs. All my dawns I’ve woken with this land in my nostrils, lived with it every day each day, gone to bed at night thinking about worms and organisms, all that life-seething, life-smelling brownness. My feet have always been here, in this quiet earth. When it freezes I freeze. When it thaws my limbs begin to move again. When it grows hot and dry in summer I feel the heat kindling in my stomach, a flame taking hold, drafts down my throat drawn to feed the blaze. Without land my feet would be fancy from being earthless: I could not think properly away from the soil.

  Donald died on a dull morning in late May and in the following weeks and months we endured a drought more severe than any in recorded history. The corn he’d planted dried up, turned brown, and on the Fourth of July some kids set off Roman Candles and Catherine Wheels in one of the fields. Those fireworks were a match to flash paper or gun-cotton. Talk about flame. All but ten of the hundred and sixty acres burned. Walking the fields in the aftermath of that fire was the same as being broken in torture, and the blackened earth went on staring back, pummeling my limbs and breaking my body. There would be no crop to sell, no hope of servicing the debt that was mine alone to bear. It was the coup de grâce that made the sale to Krovik my only choice. He lowered his offer from $1.2 million to an even million, more than three quarters of which would go directly to the banks, to pay off the farm debts. Rebekah said I was lucky to get what Krovik was offering, given the state of the place. My daughter failed to see that the fire not only forced me to sell but also cleared the land for him, making Krovik’s job easier.