We were standing in the kitchen, both of us feeling, I think, as though we ought to go after them, both of us knowing that Nathaniel was not himself, or that, over the course of days, weeks, perhaps even months, he had become someone his wife no longer knew.
The sound was muffled but we both heard it. I looked at Julia and then, a moment or two later, moments dropping down between us, another sound arrived, and we knew. We flew out the back door, across the porch, down the steps, running over the mound in the middle of the lawn. Depress the gate’s latch, pull it forward, but it would not budge.
“Keys?”
Julia shook her head and ran back to the house while I tried to pull myself up, throw my body over the fence, but it was too high and there was nothing to climb. Moments dropped all around me, accumulating in the fog, tying up my feet and knotting my tongue. I pulled my words to make a shout that exploded into stupid white noise.
Pushing me aside, Julia slipped the spare key into the lock, depressed the latch, and as the gate opened I could see the green-brown form of the man crouched in front of us, fifty paces away, at the foot of the tree. I knew Krovik without seeing his face, the body that strutted over this land, raping and routing. At his feet, in his hands, I could see the body of the boy, dishrag limp, hands whiter than fog. The rifle was on the ground, just behind the man. I could sense Julia about to scream but I turned to her, clapped a hand over her mouth, and picked my way through the fog. Leaning over within hitting distance, I pinched the gun between my fingers, whisked it from the ground to my shoulder, aiming at Krovik as he pivoted on all fours to look up at me, his face and whole body wet, running with blood and filth, nose draining over his upper lip, his chest heaving up the most horrible sobs I have ever heard. The rifle was weightless in my arms. I held it so he had no doubt of my abilities. My arms and back were steady. I directed him with the barrel: move now, to the side, get away from the child.
And then the mother must have seen her son, because she was screaming on the ground beside the man, pushing him over against the earth, raising up the small wet body, the head dripping as it lolled against the rock.
When the police arrived they told me to drop the gun. I curled my fingers free, placed it on the ground, and Julia explained who I was, that I was not the person they needed to arrest. As they put handcuffs on Krovik he turned to Julia and snarled: “Your husband’s in the water.”
THE BODIES WERE LAID OUT together on the ground by the tree where we discovered Krovik and Copley. We followed the police to the stream, and Julia shook in silence, pushing away the hands that reached out to hold her steady. She sat on the ground a few feet distant from her dead son and husband, watching as I answered questions. Krovik was gone and the police were searching the area, picking through leaves and undergrowth as the fog condensed and daylight faded until one of them yelled, knowing his part so well, “I’ve got something.” The others clustered round him and disappeared into the old storm cellar.
“As soon as I saw Krovik I knew,” I said to the officer taking my statement.
“Knew what?”
“That he’d been living somewhere on this land, hidden down below.”
“How’s that?”
“The boy told me, he told everyone, but none of us could see it. Krovik was out of his mind. He loved this land as much as me. I just didn’t want to believe it.”
WHEN THE POLICE FINISHED AND the bodies were carried out of the woods, loaded into ambulances and taken away to the morgue, I led Julia back inside that house which always glowers, not least at twilight, its unblinking windows black and reflective as the streetlights shuddered in their hazy glow.
Neither of us wanted to speak or eat. We slow-danced around each other, drinking shots of bourbon, and then for a long time we just stood in the kitchen and I held her as she cried and shook, that fine-boned little body tight with energy and anger and the implausibility of grief.
Before we went to bed, three EKK vans pulled up outside. At first I thought they might be here to offer support but then I watched as the men in their riot gear broke down the door of the neighbors’ house and dragged out the brown man who lived there, while the white man and child stood crying on the porch, held at bay by the men in their mirror-faced masks. Watching those two men, the brown and the white, I could not help thinking of the benefactor, Mr. Wright, and of Great-uncle George, still buried in their unburied way, unconsecrated, unmourned except by me, who sits meditating on the land and the times, the undulation and flow, the joining together and casting apart.
THAT NIGHT I HEARD JULIA up and moving through the house. In the morning we looked into each other’s faces, speaking only with eyes and expression: a muscle twitch, a narrowing of lids, lips cushioned over a trembling knob of chin. Language was dumb. Police came and went, examining the house, the basement, the pantry, the entrance they discovered, the burrow beneath the backyard, the hidden and the hiding.
The police were inept. Only the next morning did a man without a uniform suggest we go elsewhere for a day or two, while they dusted the house for prints, followed trails of invisible marks, pieced together a narrative of past action.
I drove us to a new hotel west of the old downtown.
“Would you mind staying with me, in the same room?” Julia asked. It was the first time she had spoken to me in thirty-six hours. If she had slept the previous night she did not look like it, eyes nestling deep in their sockets, cheeks sinking, hair clinging in oily ropes.
In the room on a high floor we sat on our respective beds with views of flooded land spilling around us to the west and south.
“It’s time you had a bath.”
“A shower,” Julia says, “I don’t want to stew in my own filth.”
“A shower then.”
She looked at me, a sudden, furtive look.
“Would you sit in there?”
“Where?”
“Would you sit in the bathroom while I take a shower?”
I waited while Julia undressed and got into the tub, drew the curtain and called for me to enter. I sat on the closed lid of the toilet.
“Are you there?” she asked.
“I’m here.”
“Will you do something else?”
“What?”
“Will you talk to me?”
“What would you like me to talk about?”
“Tell me a story.”
There was only one story that came to mind. It was neither happy nor even a story I know first-hand. It was the story I have cobbled together from rumor and historical document, from whisperings I heard as a child, from the little I could pry from my mother when the old woman let the bolts on her tongue slip to speak the memories she contained. It is a story of land, of men on the land, of the way that men came to blows over land. It is a story, I know, without women. It is not my own story. I am merely its keeper, its guardian, its partial creator, since more than half of it is my own invention, my necessary speculation. I am the one who keeps it breathing, who brought it back to life in the first place, a resurrectionist. At first as I spoke I could hear Julia washing, moving under the water, shampooing her hair, sponging her limbs, but after the first minutes I knew she was just standing still, letting the water run down her back, scalding the white skin red, listening as I spoke above the murmur of hot rain.
“We know that others owned the land before the benefactor, Morgan Priest Wright. Before him there was his father, Ambrose Balthazar Wright, who came west from Philadelphia, and before him a German immigrant called Carl Hauschildt from Hesse. Before Hauschildt there is no record of an individual owning the land, unless you count the president of the railroad company, or the president of the United States, or the distant kings of Spain and France. The railroad acquired the land from the United States Government and the government acquired it from France in 1803 as part of the Louisiana Purchase, and before that it had been control
led by Spain or France, depending on which one you asked, and explored and mapped in the early eighteenth century by a Frenchman who took a common-law Sioux wife while the land was under the shifting control of various indigenous nations that had been settled there for more years than I can say and did not recognize the claims of the European powers who sought to control it.
“Before the nations this land belonged to the animal world, was underwater for tens of millions of years, and before the animal world it belonged to nature herself, to the cosmos or whatever you wish to call what existed before life on this planet acquired complexity. Morgan Priest Wright inherited the hundred-and-sixty-acre parcel from his father Ambrose Balthazar Wright, who bought it from Hauschildt, who bought it from the railroad company for eight hundred dollars. Wright’s father owned over twelve hundred acres at the time of his death, and left one hundred and sixty acres to each of his eight sons. Morgan, the eldest, who had learned the art of gardening at the knee of his mother, inherited the family home and was the only one to retain his plot, while his brothers sold off theirs with little regard for who was buying or what the future of that land and the people upon it might be. They had goodwill on their lips but self-interest in their hearts. Wright regarded himself as a benefactor from an early age—or if not a benefactor then a protector. His father had employed sharecroppers to farm most of the acres he owned, and when his brothers sold off the land, ignoring the fate of the families who farmed it, Morgan Wright tried to help those he could, turning the sharecroppers into tenants who paid him rent but could sell all they produced. And that’s where the Freemans come into the picture.
“George Freeman’s father and mother had worked the land for Ambrose, and George was born and grew up upon it with his brother John, my grandfather. When their parents died the brothers went on working the land for Morgan after his inheritance. John married Lottie Marshall from the neighboring county and she worked alongside the brothers. George did not marry, and as he reached full maturity there was a kind of recognition of interest between him and his landlord. My grandparents lived in the house where I once lived, but George lived closer to Wright’s own house in a small cottage whose ruined chimney is all that remains standing today in those woods. You will scoff at the possibility and euphemism of any “recognition of interest” and ask if there was not an element of exploitation, wonder at how the two men might have met, even when the land was still remote and rural from the burgeoning town, without being noticed by John and Lottie and the neighboring landowners and sharecroppers. The first encounter between George and Mr. Wright was during a tornado in 1915, when George was twenty-one, in that storm cellar that still sits below the surface of the ground. As during a later fateful event, John and Lottie were away, visiting her relatives, and George and Mr. Wright were ostensibly alone on the farm, sheltering from the green light of the tornado, from its freight-train thunder and the rainless pause before the cataclysm that did not come. Let us say that in those minutes, perhaps hours, spent alone underground on camp cots first employed by soldiers of the Union Army with a kerosene lamp to light them and nothing but the awkward silence of unequal power between them, they found their way across the social barricades toward the possibility of speech, and in speaking, not as landlord and tenant, but as two men removed for a moment from the world, two men exceptional in their difference, they discovered a common interest and a mutual understanding.
“Or perhaps, you will wish to say, Wright simply forced himself on the younger man, took as he and his kind had taken in so many other ways. And in fact there is no way to be sure either way, so the story continues in a double vein, both possibilities evolving toward one perhaps inevitable conclusion. The men had congress, relations, in the half-lit dark, underground, in a storm cellar buried in the woods, between the big white house where Mr. Wright lived and had grown up and the gray-timbered cottage where George Freeman spent his solitary nights, reading his Bible by lamplight and darning his own socks. Having discovered this possibility, an understanding was established: either an understanding of mutual desire, or one in which George relinquished yet another hard-won liberty in the interest of keeping his home and his livelihood on the land of his employer, doing what was necessary to secure the little security he had in the world.
“The house of Morgan Priest Wright was white, rectangular, and on the first two stories had twenty-four windows: eight on the front, eight on the back, and four on each side (there were an additional six dormer windows in the roof but these are of no consequence). Following his first encounter with George, Mr. Wright used the twenty-four windows as a kind of signal clock, designating a specific hour to each window and informing George of the code. In order to arrange a meeting with his tenant, at eight o’clock in the evening Mr. Wright would place a burning kerosene lamp in the window corresponding to the hour when he wished to see George on the following day. George, either desiring himself to see Mr. Wright, or feeling he had no free choice in the matter, would contrive every night thenceforward to circumnavigate all the buildings of the farm, thereby checking for the signal. The meeting times were almost always in the evening, after dark, when the likelihood of the two men being seen disappearing into the storm cellar by John and Lottie or any passing stranger, poacher, or neighboring farmer was more remote.
“And so they began to meet regularly as time and the seasons permitted. Either these were meetings of genuine love, a free exchange of flesh and sentiment, or they were meetings of exploitation and submission. George left no text to tell us, and whatever text Wright might have written (outside of his last will and testament, which left everything he owned to George, and in the event of George’s death to my Grandfather John) was burned beyond recovery. Even if one had survived, we could hardly countenance it as objective or impartial or remotely true, given the age of its origins and the nature of the relationship that might, however impossibly, have been described. In other words, just because Morgan Priest Wright might have depicted the intimacy he enjoyed with my great-uncle as love or a reciprocity of equals removed from the forces of society does not mean it was, does not mean that he was even able to recognize the persuasive influence of his own position and power over a man who owned nothing but his clothes, his shoes, and the text of his God.
“Relations continued in this manner, undiscovered but perhaps half-understood by John and Lottie, understood in a way that remained unspeakable, until the fateful Indian summer of 1919, when a mob moving west from the city in search of Mr. Wright, who by then had been elected mayor, discovered the two men not in the storm cellar but in Mr. Wright’s house, sheltering together in Mr. Wright’s own bedroom. John and Lottie were away, and we can surmise that, believing themselves safe from discovery, and the mayor wounded from the chaos that had wracked the city in previous days, he and George did what they had never dared to do in the past: met and measured their relationship, whatever its nature, in a house instead of a hollowed-out cavern of stone and earth. The mob took them outside, dressed George in Lottie’s clothes, tied the men together facing each other, and strung them up from a cottonwood tree, hanging them until they were dead. The mob torched Mr. Wright’s house but left untouched the house where my grandparents lived. When John and Lottie returned the next day, the tree and the men upon it sank into the ground and remain there to this day, hanging in the soft spot that throbs in your backyard.
“This is the history of the land you own. I used to say it was perfect land, redemptive land, but I no longer think this is true. There is no such thing as good land or bad land. There are merely cycles of goodness and badness upon it. For millions of years, monsters of the sea patrolled the space above the seafloor that would rise to be my family’s farm, predatory monsters that battled and killed and fed on each other, filling the waters with blood, which filtered down, soaked through the deep, settled and held forth, growing rich and fertile, waiting for the seeds that would come and the monsters of men to walk the earth. Perhaps we are merely a fut
ure civilization’s prehistory, terrible apes who soak the land with our own blood.”
TONIGHT I DO NOT SLEEP: I lie in my hotel bed, thinking of Great-uncle George and the benefactor, of the white man and brown man next door, of Nathaniel and Copley, all the death and loss upon the land that used to be my farm. The only deaths on the land in my tenure were those of my parents and Donald, and those were natural, time taking what was owed, sometimes too early, but not with terror or anger. Lying between starched sheets, I stare out the window at the blinking lights of aircraft, the faster flash of satellites, the glowing blue letters of the corporate headquarters next door, letters that float in space at the top of a building that seems not to be there at all. In this hotel I can hear the same buzz I now hear everywhere: the engine of the building, the machinery of its hidden circuits, a buzz and a drone that can only be escaped by walking alone in the woods, where I can still settle down at the base of George Freeman’s cold hearth, overgrown with ivy, filling up with dead leaves, and think again of lighting a spark.
Present
. . . in our watching we have watched for a nation that could not save us.
LAMENTATIONS 4:17
At the house closest to the traffic circle, the one most exposed to the browning waste of undeveloped property and the hazards that go with such a position, a technician is installing a security system. His van is parked in the driveway with the radio blaring a country station while he affixes the hexagonal white plastic box above the front door. As she drives around the circle and back in the direction of Julia’s house, Louise notices the van is from EKK. She pulls over and rolls down the window.
“You install many of these systems in Dolores Woods?” she shouts.
Fallen Land Page 38