He laughed again, right in my face, crowing at a woman who gives a damn about trees.
“I didn’t make no promise. Did I sign anything saying I wouldn’t cut them down?”
“You gave me your word, Mr. Krovik. You swore up and down in front of me and my daughter and my lawyer that you would not fell a single tree.”
“Mrs. Washington, that’s a conversation I can honestly say I don’t recall. Now you better get on your way or else you might just find yourself under a tree.”
“Don’t you threaten me, Mr. Krovik.”
“It’s not a threat. I’m just sayin’, we have to get back to work. And the work we’re doing is cutting down trees. Now if you want to stay, then go ahead, but this is my land, and technically you’re trespassing on it. So if something happens to you while you’re on my land, even after I’ve told you to go, well then, I can’t be held responsible so far as I see it.”
At night, when the chainsaws were put away, I went out with a flashlight, counted the stumps, bore witness to the demise of the witnesses, heard their fall and observed their deaths. A hundred and sixty trees in all were brought down, one for each acre. I leaned over every stump, laid a cheek against the wound, felt the rings with my fingers, saw the events of centuries inscribed in undulating crescents, blood etching the grain.
Over the course of the next couple of years, more houses went up. His wife had another child, and Krovik’s roads cut into the land, preparing for two hundred houses where only twenty-one have come: blackjack, dealer’s hand. Not that the construction of those he completed was anything but a nightmare. I learned to stay away during working hours. At first I did nothing but drive around town, shocked at the way the city’s infection was spreading, consuming the land that created it in the first place. Later, I started going to a bookstore, until it closed, just like the public libraries. Where do people find books in this town? I thought of teaching myself a new language, but I couldn’t see the point since I have no intention of traveling. I thought for a while of researching a subject that interests me, like the life cycle of spiders, or winemaking, or mythology, but again I was unsure what the knowledge would do apart from fill the hours. A month later I started spending weekend afternoons watching two or three movies in a row at the multiplex, whether I wanted to see them or not. After the movies I would drive downtown and eat a plate of spaghetti at a restaurant in the Old Town, surrounded by families and groups of teenagers, the only woman eating alone. Sometimes I would run into former students who would greet me as “Mother Washington,” throw their arms around me and ask how I was doing, expressing what always seemed like genuine sadness when they heard of Donald’s death, although most had never met him.
Without Donald everything seemed pointless. It was not about having a man. I never felt myself determined by Donald. Living alone, I became convinced, was not good for my sanity. A grandchild would make things better, if not easier. A grandchild might rekindle my rapport with Rebekah. There is no reason my daughter, only child of an only child, should have wished to become a farmer herself and I never begrudged her the choice. Nursing is just as good a job as farming, caring for the world instead of feeding it, and not dissimilar in spirit. If we’d had another child (we certainly tried), someone who could have sat on Donald’s lap learning the land and its idiosyncrasies, the way the climate cannot be trusted to provide from year to year, how you might make a small killing in one harvest and have almost nothing by the end of the next, the way most people round these parts did not want to take orders from a man like Donald, well then it would have made being alone much easier. Seeing that child grown up, taking over the house, expanding, buying up land to turn one hundred and sixty acres into three hundred and twenty or a thousand, what a dream it would have been. But that kind of hope is over. Instead I hope for a grandchild who might become a good person and have children of her own. Hope is not a bird. Feathers are too fragile for hope. Hope is an aging tree that might still drop its seed in a barren world.
It was then, in the weekends at the multiplex, in the dinners at the spaghetti place, that I started to think about going back to work. Teaching takes all one’s time, eats up the free hours with grading and lesson plans and reading. I always tried to stay current, expanding my knowledge widely and hungrily. Teaching—the care and nurture of children—would give me purpose again, if only I could find my way back to it, if my former colleagues do not think I am too long out of practice, too far behind, too old to manage the demands of an ever-changing classroom. But the weight of the days drags at my arms; my feet are tired old dogs, and I am past the age of retirement. It might be too much after all. Perhaps I no longer have that kind of energy, the patience and stamina required to lead and illuminate a whole class of children.
Standing here at the kitchen sink, looking up at Krovik’s house, I straighten my back, think I see movement upstairs, a presence, a ghost, but the house is vacant. It must have been the reflection of a passing aircraft. There is no stillness on this earth. Everywhere is the movement of machines: if not on land, then underground, overhead, or slicing through seas. I want to scream for it all to stop, for the human world to silence itself and sit still, turn off the lights and put down its collective head on the table of our self-concocted ruin and let the earth recover.
Not that I am without purpose, for I know, however else I may have failed the land, I am still the keeper of its tale. I have never told it to Rebekah in the way I should have. A grandchild might still come, be receptive, listen to the story of Great-uncle George and Mr. Wright, benefactor of the Freeman family, patron in so many ways, giver who also took, beneficiary of free bodies and cheap labor. Fair terms, the family story always went, Mr. Wright offered fair terms from the beginning, never tried to take more than his due, took less than others might. He was a peculiar man, Morgan Priest Wright, an unlikely politician who knew he was strange and hid only what could get him killed, then failed in that hiding and got himself killed. A reformist from a family of reformers, he was descended from generations of abolitionists and freethinkers. I have kept his story, written it more than once, as other versions flower from memory: the way my mother told it, hard facts my father left out, details gathered from aunts and uncles and grandparents, the hearsay of family friends and social historians. I’ve recorded all I can remember and discover. I keep recording and collating, hoping someday to nail down what I know in a version I can leave behind. Speech passes like wind, its effects ephemeral, unless the speech is a tornado stripping bare the land, revealing new surfaces for new growth. What seeds will I sow?
In the years after Krovik’s coming, sleep became nightmare: trees burning blood, Donald burning, Krovik with a match and a chainsaw, a monster from a horror movie like ones I saw years ago, like new ones, too, the worse ones I watched on those long weekend afternoons at the multiplex, people spliced with animals, bodies cut apart and reassembled, folks more mechanical than human. I knew about such men, warping weapons out of tools, slinking through my mind and then suddenly, without warning, flourishing weedstrong in an inhospitable environment. I tried to kill him off in my dreams, or make him something better, but my idea of Krovik grew rank and ugly, spreading on runners that colonized every quarter of my thoughts. Once established, he could only be eliminated by poisoning every acre he occupied, killing off the innocent as well, burning it all to the ground. He was too strong for me, too relentless, spawning his colony of horror houses across land I can no longer call Poplar Farm. That place is dead, a name meaningless to anyone else but Rebekah, who never liked her home in the first place, never caught the farming spirit.
Some days, to escape the horror of Krovik’s construction, I drove to the cemetery, sat in a camp chair next to Donald’s grave, writing and rewriting what I know about Mr. Wright, and not just about him, but all the stories of my family. I worked through a stack of spiral-bound class record books left over from my teaching years. In those shaded grids where
I once would have recorded attendance and progress, I found a form for my purpose. Appropriate, it seemed, to record the attendance of my family on this land, their own progress, the successes and failures, the leave-takings and murders, years bumper and lean, in books designed to measure the submission and resistance of pupils to an educational regime. Like students, the Freeman and Washington families were subjects of the nation, submitting at times and resisting at others, too often paying an arbitrary price, as if they’d had the bad luck of being assigned to the classroom of a petty tyrant. I knew teachers like that, shriekers and ruler-snappers, bulging-eyed gorgons beaten by their husbands as women and by their fathers as girls, or male autocrats who thrashed their wives and daughters, all of them people who had no place in a classroom. I prided myself on being firm but kind, a mother to children too often motherless.
I cannot conquer my hate for that man. His vehicles moved the earth until it was no longer land, but something harder and smoother. Even the grass he planted looks artificial, synthetic turf that could be vacuumed and scrubbed with detergent to get rid of the dirt, flowers that never seem to die, an unnatural theme park of a neighborhood full of pointy-headed, bulging-stomached houses that growl and bluster and buzz.
Until this year, every night in summer I walked the street from my home to the last of Krovik’s finished houses, swinging a flashlight at my side so the people indoors could tell I wasn’t trying to pass unnoticed. I did not want the police called with reports of a prowler, knowing what my neighbors would see, a shadow grown huge by the light of the moon, a spook—and I knew when they spoke it they would mean more than just a ghost, would hiss that ugly word with the dark bellows of history in their lungs. People like that, they see darkness everywhere and try to create a world without night, believing that light is the only source of good. They do not know the beauty of blackness, the glory of the dark earth. Their lights are everywhere, flooding gardens and houses, blocking out stars. For the first time, I knew summer evenings with no fireflies, as though the creatures saw the light of those blazing houses and realized they were outmatched.
Now, I light my candle in this house I am no longer meant to occupy, condemned for committing the crime of surviving the development of the city around it. I clutch curtains tight where they meet and hope I will be allowed to sleep undisturbed for another eight-hour stretch. I am not leaving my house. I will not leave it until the city comes to tear it down, and even then only in a body bag, suffering under its collapse, repenting for the sale that brought all this to pass, for my lack of faith in the land and what it might still bring forth. I walk the planks, slip off my shoes and peel out of my socks to let my feet feel the boards worn smooth by the passage of lives, boards warm in this late summer night, as if the wood has its own life force, interrupted by the felling and planing but still pulsing a latent rhythm, waiting to be reawakened by purpose: wood put to use with function and utility, practicality and reason, instead of the willful clearing of trees to improve the view or increase the property value, to make room for swimming pools and decking made from lumber shipped across thousands of miles. No chopping down and using the odd trunk to make gingerbread boards for dishonest houses. That was never the spirit of this land. The photos from Grandma Lottie and Grandpa John’s days record the trees I have known all my life. They are more intact, with fewer limbs missing from the high winds and tornado days that have intervened, but they are recognizably the same. Most of them are now gone to the Krovik chainsaw, the cottonwoods of history brought down. Only the great body of woods remains, and for that I must be grateful: that Krovik did not penetrate the heart, satisfying himself with dismemberment and decapitation. The woods can no longer think or move, and yet they will go on beating in their hard-diminished way, dull-witted but living.
In the middle of their three-day drive from the East Coast, buffeted by semi-trucks and four-wheel-drive sport utility vehicles through rain so dense and blinding they eventually cannot see the cars in front of them, they are forced to break for the second night sooner than planned in a tiny town ten miles off the interstate where the only motel is all but full of truckers. Although he has allowed himself to be persuaded by Julia this is the right decision, that their futures lie somewhere beyond—far beyond—the city where they have built their lives together so far, Nathaniel can’t escape the feeling that the move is not just idiotic but potentially catastrophic. The feeling, he thinks, handing over his credit card to one of the two fat girls behind the desk at reception (the other one watches the local weather report, which forecasts more of the same, “Biblical rain,” the meteorologist shouts into the camera, eyes goggling), is rooted not only in a negative reaction to moving away from his hometown, or the panic he feels at transferring to a more senior position in his company, but in the new house itself and in the prospect of living out a span of his life on the margins of a provincial city. He is unprepared for suburban life. He does not speak the language of lawns and yard maintenance, of barbecues and block parties and Independence Day picnics, soccer and Little League and all the social pressures he imagines will accompany their days in Dolores Woods. His parents never taught him that language. They did their best, he knows, to be sure he had no chance to learn it.
With the keys in their possession, and the time until their arrival at the new house measurable in hours rather than days or weeks, the three of them sharing a motel room last redecorated twenty years ago, the curtains and bedspreads reeking of cigarette smoke even though it is supposed to be a non-smoking room, the crunch of the ice dispenser outside their door pulling him out of sleep every half hour as the party of truckers down the hall stumbles along to fill up their buckets for another round of beers, Nathaniel feels feverish with doubt and regret, holding his breath as three men laugh outside in the hall, cigarette smoke filtering under the door, ice cubes rattling into cheap plastic, stories of sexual conquests stage-whispered among the men and audible in the room. He wants to tell them to shut up and go back to bed, to warn them they are disturbing the sleep of his wife and child, but he fears what they might do to a man as small and obviously weak as he is. He picks up the phone to complain to the front desk but it rings and rings and no one answers.
THE HOUSE HAS BEEN EMPTY for some time, and their realtor, Elizabeth, warned them it would need to be cleaned before their arrival. Remembering the many rooms, they decided to hire professionals. Julia, who, after her mother’s suicide, grew up under the distracted care of her father in a subsiding eighteenth-century house outside of Portsmouth, has always been fanatical about cleanliness in a way that Nathaniel is not. This morning she showers twice—once before breakfast at the diner across the street from the motel, once after. “It was filthy,” she says as they pull back onto the interstate, “it made my skin crawl. Didn’t you want to shower again?” There are times when Nathaniel wonders, noticing his wife’s occasional tendency toward compulsive behavior, whether Julia might have inherited some aspect of her mother’s mental illness.
Approaching the city from the east, they cross a bridge over a river that makes its way through several states in its course from the Rocky Mountains all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. The river is high, out of its banks around the airport, flooding the parking lot of a waterfront restaurant and swamping the marina. Despite this, the city does not look as bleak as Nathaniel remembers: the new baseball stadium gleams and a handful of skyscrapers suggest larger ambitions. In the last fifteen years the city limits have expanded five miles to the west, from 144th to 204th Street, with countless residential subdivisions enveloping outlying small towns. The city is now wider than Manhattan is long by more than three miles, occupying almost four times the total land area, but has only half a million residents—twice that if the even larger “metropolitan area” of farming communities is included, homesteads laid out in this stretch of country between two rivers, a territory so resolutely unmetropolitan the designation as such would be laughable, Nathaniel thinks, if it were not at once
both so desperate and so patronizing.
As the highway turns into Poplar Road, shooting east to west in a straight line, the polish of the riverfront fades. Most of the downtown area is a patchwork of the new and the recently abandoned: buildings only twenty or thirty years old, which must have glistened in their day, are now vacant, the windows boarded up or smashed, OFFICE SPACE and FOR RENT signs covered in graffiti of floating genitalia and cartoons of sexual couplings, captioned with language that makes Nathaniel want to cover his son’s eyes. For a mile or more Poplar cuts through urban wastelands at the fringe of the downtown before crossing the major six-lane highway running north and south, then climbs a hill past the glass and steel conglomeration of buildings that makes up the national headquarters of Nathaniel’s company.
“There it is,” he says, trying to sound proud, hoping Copley will look at the place where his father is going to work and feel some sense of significance. But the neighborhood quickly diminishes once again, sidewalks cracked and overgrown, pavement buckling, houses with flaking paint, broken windows, and rotting woodwork, a stretch of stores and mid-twentieth-century developments largely vacant, and then a sudden flourishing of wealth: mansions from the 1920s and ’30s built on small lots along curving streets thick with trees that surround the university and the largest of the city’s parks. Nathaniel and Julia looked at houses in this neighborhood but could find nothing in their price range. After that brief stretch of residential prosperity, Poplar rolls into a corridor of commercial development, of strip malls and fast food restaurants, big box stores and medical centers, corporate offices, a shopping mall, banks, another labyrinth of highways racing beneath it in all directions, and then the beginnings of the most recent suburban developments, one after another, until the road narrows from six lanes to four to two, and seems about to peter out into gravel and dirt, to bisect farmland, easing them down to the abrupt right turn into Dolores Woods, which feels in the hot misty late summer like nothing so much as a mosquito-ridden swamp, waiting for the next torrent of rain in the system that is sweeping across the continent. They will not stay here tonight; the movers come tomorrow, but they wanted to be sure everything is in order, the floors polished, shelves dusted, the basement and garage mopped.
Fallen Land Page 9