I was ready to volunteer to leave the apartment so Angela could have the space to work, but she knew that was coming and had prepared accordingly.
“I bought some groceries,” she said. “I thought we’d stay in and that maybe you’d make us dinner?”
There may have been no romance to it, but there was also no hostility or tension either. It had been weeks since we’d had an evening where we were both home together for the entire night. Angela watched me closely throughout dinner, as if we had just met and she was waiting to catch a telltale sign that revealed a personal deficiency—a tendency to blink too often or to chew with my mouth open. She had assumed until that morning that she knew these things already. Briefly there was a shared pleasure in thinking that we still had significant parts of each other left to uncover, and by the time dinner was over I had begun to think that was enough to count the evening a success. We’d fall asleep and peel back another layer. As we were beginning to prepare for bed, she stopped me in the bathroom. Her eyes were slightly glazed; when she caught her reflection in the mirror behind me, she turned away so I could no longer see them.
“Can you sleep on the couch tonight?” she asked me.
“Of course,” I said. “I was going to stay up late reading anyway.”
Which was precisely what I did. I read and graded papers until the sun came up, always hoping that I would hear Angela mumble a few words in her sleep that would call me back to her, or at least hint at that desire. When the morning came we stumbled around each other, our grace completely gone.
PART II
IX
It was somewhere near here, along this relatively empty stretch of Interstate 155, roughly forty miles southwest of the Greater Peoria Regional Airport, between the towns of Fayette and Tupelo, Illinois, that my parents made the first unplanned stop of their trip. There isn’t much here now and I doubt that there was more than thirty years ago when they first drove down this road. Little, if anything, changes on the surface around here, and even less does underneath. I wouldn’t be surprised if the billboards advertising lunch and dinnertime buffet specials were the same ones that were here back then.
I’ve been on this road before, on several occasions as a child with my father, and then again later with my mother just before she gave this land up for good and headed out east for the modern city and apartment of her dreams. I didn’t know it at the time but two completely different versions of history were being offered to me in preparation for my inevitable role as both advocate and judge over what happened between my parents during this trip, the events of which would determine nearly every aspect of their relationship from that point on, from the varying times that each went to bed to the odd glances I often caught them casting toward each other in the presence of strangers.
There are hardly any cars along the road at this time of day, which would be roughly, give or take an hour or two, around the same time my parents would have passed through, the only great difference being that of the seasons, fall for them and the early weeks of spring for me. Still, I imagine the days would have looked much the same—mild, pleasant days and a sun that rose and fell at roughly the same time. More important, however, is the shared sense that you can get at the start and close of each season—the tumult and confusion that comes when the air holds the distinct memories of two different times at once. On several occasions over the past week I’ve stood outside my rental car on a warm, slightly humid evening and found myself drifting back into memories that belonged to late September, the rush and fear of the start of a new cycle of classes and students blurring into my own childhood memories of taking back roads to school so as to avoid being caught alone on the sidewalk by any one of a dozen students and adults I feared. On those occasions, when the wind is warm and smells vaguely of a rain that has recently fallen or is about to do so, I’ve found it better to simply pull my car off the side of the road, or if I’m walking, to cease and temporarily forget wherever it is I’m going in order to submit to the confusion of time and memory carried in by the breeze. Within a single breath I can jump across decades. I can recall sprinting at full speed toward the relative safety of my elementary school doors, and what it felt like to hide in an empty classroom for an hour after the school day had ended, because only then could I trust that the path to my house was safe, that the streets were once again clogged with rush-hour traffic and people waiting in line to get on buses. And yet it’s only after I’ve fully recalled the sights and sounds of my own students twenty years later spilling into the arched-stone gates at the start of each morning, and the ensuing panic that their voices—loud and breaking with emotion—always aroused in me, that I’ll remember this is not September at all but May, that I’ve lost the one career I’ve had, and that I’ll never experience that same rush of panic and affection that came with hearing my students laugh and curse at one another again.
The brown historical signpost on the side of the road says there are four miles between here and Fort Jean-Patrice Laconte. It’s the first and only sign like it, and I’m sure that if I hadn’t pinpointed the fort’s location on my atlas beforehand, I would have missed it entirely. There are signs for gas stations, fast-food restaurants, picnic spots, and scenic views that are neither scenic nor interesting that are more obvious than this. I have the feeling that the sign is not supposed to be noticed at all, that it was placed there strictly out of obligation, or as a concession to some group of historically minded citizens who believe all of American history is worthy of preservation. I name them fondly in my head: the Guardians of America’s Forgotten History, picturing gray-haired old men in responsible dark suits with forest-green sweater vests underneath. Surely they would deserve a name as grand as that, a title that could stand up there with the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Mayflower Society. Their task no less noble than the committees assigned to preserve trees, houses, and former Civil War battle sites. I’ve looked in the history books. There is almost nothing out there about Fort Laconte. In the large green and white textbooks assigned to my students there wasn’t even a single mention of Jean-Patrice, much less his fort and the role it played in the founding of America. I would have never known about it had it not been for a conversation my mother and I had years ago.
“Your father took me once to see some leftover fort on our way to Nashville.”
She was living at that time in a coastal village an hour outside of Providence, Rhode Island.
“It’d be nice if I could see the ocean from here,” was her only complaint, if it could even be called that. She had enough memories of the ocean by that time to get her through, and a view of the ocean would have simply served as a nice but unnecessary prop for her memories. While my father had chosen to plant himself firmly in the middle of the country, she had opted for a series of small eastern towns, moving up and down the coast, from Boston to Virginia. I visited her rarely. The two of us went to dinners and movies together, more like an old tired couple who had nothing left to say than a mother and son who saw each other no more than once a year. I never visited her unannounced, and would have been unable to had I tried.
She wouldn’t have remembered the name of the fort, and at the time I hadn’t thought to ask her. There were hundreds if not thousands of things that she had never forgiven my father for, and taking her to that fort could have easily been one of the minor ones, on par with his tendency to fall asleep with the lights on and to leave his fingernail clippings on the bathroom floor. But perhaps it’s because that conversation was one of the last I had with my mother before we lost touch for several years, or perhaps it’s because when I was younger I had a special love for forts that the image of my parents standing outside the ruined remains of one somewhere along the road to Nashville stayed with me. As a child I built dozens of forts in my bedroom, in corners around the house, and on a few occasions in the garage when either my mother or father had left with the car with promises never to return. None of the forts were especially sturdy. I was never a crafts-man; even at my most diligent the rules of geometry failed me. My forts were often too tall or short on one side. They were always crooked and looked as if they would break at the slightest touch. Nonetheless, there was a gradual development in size from one to the next. The first ones had been made of small rocks and twigs, no longer or taller than a book lying flat on its back. I built them from pieces scavenged from the driveway and held them together with tape and glue when I could find them. Those forts housed nothing, or nothing that was tangible. They were built under my bed, out of sight and therefore protected. I suppose I imagined that even if they were too small to hold little more than a paper clip and a few scraps of paper, they still represented at least one sanctuary that could not be broached. On more than one occasion I prayed for the ability to shrink down into a thumb-sized version of myself so I could enter the fort’s stone and wood walls and discover that there was nothing there that could find me. In later years I studied how-to books written for children. How to build an igloo, a tepee, a birdhouse, a tree house. The books carried full-page diagrams with numbered instructions at the bottom. They told you how to build the walls and the roof separately, and how to create a proper foundation to hold them together. All you needed to know according to those books was how to put each piece together, and this was, inevitably, where I always failed. My walls were always too weak and my roofs had a tendency to slope at odd, irregular angles, too fragile to carry anything but the smallest weight.
For seven years I tried to construct as many versions of home as I could find. By the time I was twelve I had probably tried them all, but always with one distinct variation that was of my own making. I built each, regardless of how poorly it may have been constructed, as far as possible out of anyone’s general line of vision. I put the birdhouse in the closet and kept a small circle of rocks near the head of my bed. There were no back- or front-yard forts for me. I didn’t build protective cocoons to fight from or to defend. I built mine to hide in because I always knew an attack would come, and that even at their best, the most my forts could do was soften the blows when they came.
It’s nearly one p.m. by the time I arrive at the single wooden barrier and guard’s post that mark the entrance to Laconte’s failed fort. From the highway exit, after a few quick turns, the route becomes a narrow dirt and gravel road, wide enough for only one car at a time. The sun is high and shining bright, casting its full force down on the large open green meadow, in the middle of which sits what looks from a distance to be a small pile of building blocks, the kind a child would use to arrange towers and squares in the middle of a playpen. Most of the trees surrounding the edge of the meadow have bloomed but not yet fully matured, so there is still a mix of white petals and green palm-sized leaves along the branches. I’ve arrived a few hours later than my parents would have, but on a clear day such as today, I don’t imagine it makes much of a difference. The leaves would have begun to turn for them, and the grass I imagine would not have the same shimmering green effect it has now, but otherwise nearly everything else is surely the same. The lone guard gate, the absence of any other cars or people, the arrangement of stones lying scattered on the ground—I can say with confidence that we all shared this.
I park immediately in front of the entrance, in a space designated for the handicapped. It’s a touch I admire, this desire to make every part of America seemingly accessible to anyone who wants it. The fact that few want or care for this particular part is beside the point entirely. Here is proof of our largesse and our generosity, freely given, with nothing expected in return.
The noise from the highway and the main road leading into a town of only a few hundred residents is hardly audible. It’s the first time in almost a week that I’ve been beyond the sound of traffic, and getting out of the car, I can’t help feeling that there is something missing to the air, that it’s the silence and not the sounds of horns and shifting gears that is the real intrusion. The guard steps out of his little wooden compound, a man-sized shoe box if ever there were one, and takes note of my out-of-town license plates and clothes, suspecting, I suppose, a madman of some sort. He has a bored but wary look to him as he carries his clipboard and pen, his face hidden under a dark green park ranger’s hat that seems to have been lifted from an advertisement for Boy Scout paraphernalia. He is clean-cut and wholesome, no doubt born and raised not too far from here. I don’t hold his suspicions against him, even as he stands in front of my car pretending to note the year and make of the model I’m driving while secretly eyeing me for any odd behavior from underneath the brim of his hat. I suppose like most of us he’s seen too many horror films about what happens when a stranger comes into town. His sort never fares too well, always the first to die and with the least to say.
I play my role perfectly, standing nonchalantly to the side while he takes his notes. I know that we’re all supposed to be wary these days, of strangers and strange bags and especially of strangers carrying strange bags, and I want to do my part in easing some of the collective tension as best I can. In the past I’ve held back a few seconds before revealing my last name, and have been quick to offer my support or condemnation of violence and war, whichever one was needed to ensure that everyone around me felt well, and that all was well indeed. Today, however, I’m guilty on both counts, with my clothes wrinkled from a week of travel, my face unshaven, and my black leather attaché case strapped around my neck. I want to make reassuring small talk with the guard. I want to discuss the weather, the rising cost of gas, a baseball team that I know nothing and could care less about. I wonder if this would be enough to put his mind and pen at ease. I know it would be too much to say, “Don’t worry, I come in peace,” or to offer him, without asking, a peek inside my bag, or into the trunk and backseat of my car, where he would find the remains of three days’ worth of fast food eaten while driving. I could tell him that yes, I understand, it’s a dangerous world, but he need not worry, at least not about me, and if he wanted I would even go so far as to put a reassuring arm around his shoulder, a sign of camaraderie that I’m sure he could use. I say and do nothing, however, hoping as I always do for the best—that perhaps he will find a measure of comfort in my prep-school uniform of khaki pants and dark blue shirt, of which I have a suitcase full, one for each and every day of the week, and that he has a large house and dog to turn to at the end of the day.