Authors: Don Hoesel
Janet had called twice while he packed the few things he would take to Adelia. He’d let the machine pick up both times, feeling pleased with himself when he heard the anger in her voice. The only thing that had given him a moment’s pause was when she’d told him she was going to call the police. He’d wondered how a cop would assess the act of breaking into one’s own home. It was, after all, still his house, and he and Janet were not officially separated. It was a somewhat muddied issue, and so he decided the most logical course of action was to not worry about it. Anyway, he and Thor were leaving town, and would be beyond reach of local law enforcement. He did wonder what Pastor Stan would say, but suspected that even a minister would give due consideration to extenuating circumstances.
New York was a more imminent concern for CJ. For all that he had written about it, the prospect of returning to it in physical, rather than literary, form tied his stomach in knots. After seventeen years, even family can become like strangers.
Seventeen years. It was a long time no matter how one parsed it. Four years of college, thirteen years of marriage, seven novels of varying quality, one literary award, two short stories in
The
New Yorker
, and one dog. A lot of water under the bridge. He was tempted to ignore the summons to attend his grandfather’s funeral. Sal wouldn’t know if he showed up or not. As was so often mentioned, funerals were for those left behind. And CJ was not close to a single one of these orphans of truncated lineage. He’d missed other deaths, along with births, marriages, family reunions, and his brother’s swearing-in ceremony for his state senate seat. He wondered why this should be any different. Why couldn’t he stay in Tennessee and send a card and flowers across the miles?
It was a question he couldn’t answer, except to suspect that his father’s call had caught him in a vulnerable spot. The dissolution of his marriage, the destruction of his reputation with the literary community, the situation with his dog—all were good reasons to decide to do something he’d told himself he’d never do.
It was a fourteen-hour drive. He could have flown, but somehow driving the whole way seemed appropriate. He would find somewhere in Ohio to spend the night.
The thought struck him in the silence between the hypnotic sounds of the Honda’s tires hitting the evenly spaced grooves separating sections of asphalt: his big brother might soon be a senator. Six years ago, when Graham won the state version of that office, CJ couldn’t help feeling the requisite pride a brother was supposed to feel, even if he’d tried his hardest to keep those brotherly feelings in check. And many of the reasons for his reluctance to celebrate Graham’s success were spelled out in varying degrees of detail in CJ’s books. He’d always found it funny that the critics who had suspected that much of his writing was autobiographical would never have presumed that the most authentic parts were the ones that made for good fiction.
Sort of like stealing a dog and a miter saw from your own house.
As if in sympathy to the absurdity of it all, Thoreau turned away from the window long enough to meet CJ’s eyes, and then he let go of the king of all dog belches. CJ agreed with him wholeheartedly.
Adelia, New York
The dog was asleep as CJ followed the fir- and maple-lined SR 44, approaching the last curve that separated him from Adelia. The SR 44 became Buckley Road after the curve, where the speed limit slowed to forty-five as drivers passed the small industrial park just within the city limits, its brick factory buildings from before the war suffering a self-inflicted industrial melanism, the walls dark with soot and time, and the more modern-looking structures wearing their age almost as poorly. Farther on, the speed limit dropped to thirty-five for a quarter mile before the colonial-style houses he’d seen sporadically since Winifred started to cluster into neighborhoods and subdivisions. A half mile after that, Buckley became Main Street, and stayed that way until one was through Adelia and heading into the thick pine and maple forests that hugged the road all the way to Canada.
It was something CJ had considered—shooting straight through town, perhaps picking up an image here or there to feed the small pangs of nostalgia that had surprised him somewhere around Pittsburgh. It was the last thing he’d expected to feel— any sort of affection for this place. Adelia was just something he’d thought he would have to bear in order to see the old man off. But who can factor the pull of a heritage on a man who had been absent from it for the better part of two decades, especially when that heritage had its roots sunk deep into a land, into a familial constancy, that had remained unchanged for more than two hundred years? There was a saying that the house on the hill, the historic family home, had infiltrated the blood of every living Baxter, and when a Baxter died, it was sawdust he turned into in the coffin.
As CJ guided the Honda around the last curve, spotting the street sign that gave Buckley Road its asphalt birth, his thoughts went back to a poorly worded phrase from one of his books.
“This part of the country was like a magnet ever pulling at the heart of
every person who shared blood with Hal and his forefathers.”
It was the sort of unwieldy line that made him wonder why anyone would have given him an award for his writing. And as far as his family was concerned, he suspected the name
Hal
wasn’t far enough away from
Sal
for there to have been any doubt what land he was referring to.
Poor prose and family reference aside, it seemed appropriate as he approached Adelia. The farther north he’d driven, the more he’d started thinking about the people and places he hadn’t seen in a long time, and how he looked forward to seeing some of those people and places again. He’d tried to push those thoughts aside rather than indulge them, remembering there were reasons he had not visited since college—reasons that no amount of nostalgia, however pleasant it all might feel, could diminish. Despite his best efforts, however, the scale seemed to tip in favor of the nostalgia.
Even so, there was still the matter of his family. The critics could argue all they wanted about the possible autobiographical nature of his work; most members of his family weren’t stupid. If they read his stuff, they would call a spade a spade.
At the speed he was driving, ignoring the sign that told him to begin slowing down, it didn’t take long before the place of his birth opened up before him. There was nothing gradual about the reveal—nothing like an anticipatory ascent up a high hill, then getting to the top and seeing the place spread out in front of him. He simply reached the top of a rise he hadn’t known he’d been climbing, and it was there, as if a giant hand had dropped the place down to the earth at the instant before it appeared in his line of sight.
From where he was, gazing past the incorporated areas and the industrial park and taking in the city proper, he was amazed at how familiar it looked, how much it seemed as if he’d just taken his old Mustang to Winifred to see a movie and was on his way home. He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting when he saw it for the first time in seventeen years, but if someone had pressed him, he would have bet against it being pleasure. Strangely enough, though, that’s what it was.
Before he started down a hill noticeably steeper than the one he’d climbed to gain this vantage point, he could see enough to determine that while some things looked out of place—structures and cleared plots of land in places he didn’t remember seeing before—for the most part, Adelia looked the same, like the image of it that had burned its way into his memory. It was odd, really. He thought that he could even see the decorations for the Fall Festival around the square.
For generations, Adelia had survived as one small Upstate New York town among many—one that always seemed to be heading toward some ultimate demise that it never quite reached. While everything about the place appeared older with the passing years, there was just enough new construction, just enough new birth, to keep it on the map. At its heart it was a manufacturing town; most of its people had earned a living, at least since the forties, at either the sawmill, the Chevy plant in Winifred, or at Jordan Gum & Machine. CJ had spent a few summers at the latter, scooping large gumballs in and out of the coaters that looked like cement mixers, hosing the coaters out whenever they ran another color, filling the pulley that carried the gum from the forming floor to the finishing floor, losing maybe a gallon of sweat a day as it ran down his arms and into the gum with each scoop. To this day CJ couldn’t see a gumball machine without envisioning hairy, sweat-soaked arms scooping and pouring.
It had been hard work among hard men, most of them twice his age. He’d learned some words he’d never heard before, and witnessed how constant ten-hour days in heat and noise could fray tempers. There was an undercurrent of violence to the production floor that he’d learned to read. Only once had he seen the violence escalate to anything beyond fists. It had happened during a slow period on the production floor, when one of the younger guys had used a marker to color a couple of the white gumballs black and then offered these new licorice-flavored gumballs to one of his shift mates. Though CJ had found the man’s surprised expression amusing after he bit into the gum, he was unprepared for the speed with which the guy had pulled out a pocketknife. He got in two slashes before being held down by others. The practical joker had required several stitches to reattach his ear.
Job prospects like these were, he supposed, what made the arrival of the prisons such a boon to the area. The picturesque landscape did not hint at it, but murderers, thieves, gang members, and shade tree pharmaceutical dealers surrounded Adelia. There were thousands of them, in four prisons set in strategic locations around the county. All had been built within the last decade, and the fact that they were here in Franklin County was a coup of almost biblical proportions. What the mayor had done to convince the state of New York to make this area Prison Central was the subject of much speculation, and yet none of the locals could argue against the economic results.
Many communities might have protested the idea of their small part of the world signing on to receive an amount of criminals sufficient to make theirs the county with the highest percentage of felons in the United States. But the arrangement raised not a single voice of disagreement. The prisons created jobs, and that was that. Early on, anyone who might have offered an objection recognized the futility of doing so.
And a prison job, unlike work at the sawmill or the Chevy plant, or Jordan Gum & Machine, was virtually recession-proof. Even in a flagging economy there were prisoners. In fact, in a recession there were more prisoners, as people without jobs found other, not always legal, ways to make ends meet. And inmates required guards, and janitors, and cooks, and office workers, and various other personnel needed to make a prison run smoothly. And here it was all tucked neatly out of the way, which was a luxury that building prisons in Upstate New York afforded.
CJ was gone before the prisons came, but he’d followed their coming through Sal. Like most Adelia citizens, his grandfather had approved of them, and had bent CJ’s ear about what they meant for the town, even as he knew not to place too much emphasis on their importance. Now that CJ was older, he realized that the Franklin prisons were a good metaphor with which to describe his now-deceased grandfather. Sal had only wanted what was best for Adelia, and had done everything in his power to see that happen, but a clear line of sight on history—almost a genetic predisposition for a Baxter—had instilled in him a fatalism that had only grown worse with age. In more than one phone call, Sal, well into a fifth of whiskey, had bemoaned the fact that nation building (his metaphor for both the advancement of Adelia and the Baxter line) didn’t work—that things happened regardless of the best intentions of learned men, or even the educated mechanisms of powerful forces exercised by these same men. Sal said the Kennedys were aberrations, that some grand societal juxtaposition of need and opportunity had served to make them American royalty. A little planning and a lot of dumb luck, Sal would say, in a manner that told CJ his grandfather was considering the metaphysical ramifications of an entire lineage—his own—having wasted more than two hundred years. And to make matters worse, he thought the Kennedys had squandered their opportunity, done nothing with their chance.
It was a perspective that made Sal happy for the prisons, and monumentally sad for the town that needed them.
Oddly enough, this line of thought—picked up somewhere around Cleveland—had caused CJ to consider the proposed article on his brother in a new light. When he was sitting on the porch of the house he’d probably never set foot in again, he’d understood that he wouldn’t write the article that
The Atlantic
wanted, regardless of what he’d said to Matt. Supporting his brother’s campaign just wasn’t something he could do with a clear conscience. But as his thoughts had gravitated toward Sal, one of the main subjects of their last few conversations lingered near the surface. They’d talked of the prisons. Over the last several years—after incarceration had become firmly entrenched as Ade-lia’s industry of choice—their phone calls had seldom included the prisons in the list of topics discussed. But a few months into Graham’s senate campaign, Sal had begun to drop hints that Graham was delving into an area that would see a significant impact on Adelia, and Sal had delivered these fleeting missives with enough rancor to convince CJ that Sal’s concerns weren’t just the inane ramblings of a man losing his grip on reality. The elder statesman of the Baxter clan was worried, and that meant there might be a story CJ could write after all.
CJ guided the Honda down Buckley, and just as he crossed the line where it turned into Main Street, Thoreau woke up. The dog raised his head, took a groggy look around, and gave one derisory sniff before standing and stretching. The factory buildings had disappeared behind CJ, as had the new residential development that took over the land where he used to go four-wheeling with his friends, and the Onochooie River from which he would pull crappie. It all looked strange to him, unsettling. But wasn’t it the job of a writer to imagine things as they might be? The difference was that he would never have substituted cookie-cutter subdivisions for the pristine land they’d replaced. Fortunately, he was through the area quickly, crossing the spot where Buckley became Main, and into Adelia proper.