Greenville (31 page)

Almost as soon as they leave Hull Farm the father begins pulling cinnamon candies from a big bag on the center console of the Lincoln and sucking them down one after another. He puts the red cellophane wrappers in his empty coffee cup in the cup holder that sticks out from the dash. The cup holder can slide flush with the dash when not in use, but the son has never seen it empty of cups and candy and cigarettes in all his times in the car.

The son pilots the Lincoln along 81 through Oak Hill until he reaches the intersection of 81 and 32 in Greenville. The Thruway is dead ahead, the farm to their left.

Want to take one more look at the place?

Yeah sure, the father says, and the son can’t tell if his voice is wistful or just quiet. He sucks on his candy. Why not.

Thirty-two to 38. Past what used to be the high school—it’s the middle school now—past what used to be Shepherd’s Bush—now it’s called Pine View—then right toward what used to be Uncle Wallace’s farm.

Used to run this every day, Dale. Yes, son, your old man was a cross-country star in his day.

How is your foot?

Last night, when he’d carried their luggage up to their motel room, the son had been surprised to find a pair of crutches in the trunk, even more surprised to find out they were his father’s.

My foot’s all right, thank you Dale. Last week I couldn’t hardly walk it hurt so bad. But that’s the thing about gout, it comes and goes of its own accord.

As the Lincoln ascends the last hill toward the farm the son feels a little thrill in his chest. It’s not just his father’s presence in the passenger’s seat. He first discovered the farm two years earlier, and he’s driven by it several times since then, and every time he crests the hill he feels that same sense of what if? in his gut. It’s hard to frame the feeling more specifically than that because so much seems to hang off his father’s decision to leave the farm when he was fourteen. If he had stayed, the son thinks, he would have been a different person. Not the same man with different qualities, but someone else entirely. He would have had a different wife, different children. He—the son—would be different too.

First there’s the abandoned house north of the farm. The Flacks own it now, Flip plans to renovate it for his daughter and her fiancé. Then there’s the Flacks’ own house, a stately white Greek Revival backed by a cluster of pristine green-roofed barns, divided by a gleaming asphalt parking lot the size of a minimall’s. Then the farmhouse.

It seems naked without any trees in its front yard, just the row of six stumps cut flush to the ground like a row of checkers. This time the first thing the son notices is that the house doesn’t have a porch. He remembers standing on the Hulls’ front porch in the shade of the two well-grown sugar maples that flank the front
walk, but the Pecks’ farmhouse—formerly the Millers’, as the historical marker next to the driveway still proclaims, and now someone else’s—has neither a formal front porch nor a side porch for outside meals and sunsets. It does have a few extra feet of eave over the front door, but it is hardly a porch. It is barely as wide as a grown man’s shoulders, just enough to shelter strangers—friends would come around to the kitchen—as they wait for someone to answer their knock. It is a compact Federal-style house. A contemporary viewer might call its simplicity elegant, but no one would ever mistake it for what weekenders call a country house. The Hulls and Flacks live in country houses; the Pecks lived in a farmhouse. A house that has only what it needs. Whose plainness isn’t aesthetic, but economic. The fieldstone foundation was extracted from the yard; the rectangular dentals aren’t decoration, but rather the tips of the roof joists extending beyond the asphalt-shingled eaves to provide a secure base for the gutters. The bay window on the east wall of the kitchen wing was added by the most recent tenants, and if you look closely at the mullions in their other new windows you’ll see that they’re just strips of tape applied in a cosmetic grid. By contrast the tongue-and-groove ceiling of the side porch on the Flacks’ house is painted light blue—Tiffany blue, Prussian blue, sky blue. When the man’s son tells him that it is a country custom to paint a porch’s ceiling the color of the sky the man says, I didn’t know that. That’s very interesting. It certainly is the color of the sky, he adds, though he is still sucking ruminatively on a candy and staring at what used to be his uncle’s house.

Those stumps used to be trees, he says.

They were elms, his son says, a little fact the son pushes
forward like a novice chess player advancing all his pawns to get them out of the way. Flip said they had to cut them down in the early seventies.

Elms? the father says absently. Yes, Dale, I think they were elms. But his voice is so vacant he could as easily have said oak, ash, redwood, banyan.

It’s a beautiful house, the son says now, though by then the slow-moving car has passed it. They’re in front of the field now, what used to be the north pasture. It’s freshly mowed, and a long black serpentine drive leads to a stately white neocolonial at the top of the hill. It’s only a few months old, its corners so crisp against the empty sky it could be a billboard rather than a building.

Ah, now that’s a house Dale. Look at that, right up there on that hill where I always wanted to build a house. If you’d only come up here a year sooner, that’d be my house up there on that hill.

The son hears his father say
house
three times, but none of the words seem to refer to the building on the hill.

You wouldn’t want to live in Uncle Wallace’s house?

Aw hell Dale, that place is a step above a shack. There wasn’t a plumb line in the whole house forty-five years ago, who can say what kind of shape it’s in now. Lead pipes, oil burner in the basement, some rusted-out cast iron tub with hot and cold water coming out of two different faucets.

There are some people who like that sort of thing.

I know it, the father says. They keep me in business.

He and the son laugh.

No, Dale, if I wanted to live there I’d have to gut the thing, rebuild it from the inside out just to make it livable. Be better off
tearing it down and starting over. And the view’s better up there on that hill.

Yeah, no, I guess you’re right. He taps the steering wheel. Well, I guess we should head back then.

The son says he thinks he knows a shortcut back to the Thruway but as it turns out he doesn’t know the area as well as he thinks he does, or would like to. He spends an hour piloting them through the twists and turns and hills of Greene and Albany County back roads, and the whole time the father admonishes him to slow down, you’re gonna get us killed Dale, Jesus Christ, be careful, I want to get to the reunion but not on a stretcher.

Look, Dad, the speed limit’s forty-five. He taps the digital speedometer. I’m driving forty-three.

Well there’s no law that says you have to drive
at
the speed limit, Dale. Keep both hands on the wheel. You have to pay attention to road conditions.

It’s a sunny day, Dad, road conditions are perfect. They wouldn’t make the speed limit forty-five if it wasn’t safe to drive forty-five.

The father reaches nervously for another candy.

Well just take it easy for your dad’s sake then.

The boy slows down to forty, thirty-nine, sets the cruise control.

Happy?

The father laughs. Father and son is a game the two have only recently begun playing, and both enjoy it.

This was a very nice trip, Dale, thank you very much for suggesting it.

It was my pleasure.

It was good to see the farm again. And Flip and Donnie. And of course Gloria Hull.

She was sweet.

Prettiest girl in Greenville, New York.

Actually, she lived in Oak Hill.

Prettiest, nicest girl in Oak Hill, the father says, untroubled. Oak Hill, Greenville, they’re all the same. Hell, there’s a Greenville in every state of the country, but you’d be lucky to find a girl half as pretty or as nice as Gloria Hull in any one of them.

That’s true.

By the time they’ve reached Rochester she’s become the prettiest, nicest girl in Upstate New York, and by the time the bulk of the family shows up Friday afternoon she’s become the prettiest, nicest girl the father has ever met—except my daughter, of course, he says if his youngest child is in earshot. By the time Dale Peck Gorman shows up Saturday morning, thirty-six hours after the two men have returned from Hull Farm, the father has told everyone who passes through his Uncle Herb’s house about the prettiest, nicest girl you could ever hope to meet—told many of them more than once, in between telling them about his rebuilt ’31 Chevy street rod and the advantages of trenchless sewer pipe replacement over traditional methods, which in the father’s eyes seem as backbreakingly labor intensive as Roman aqueducts. When he talks about his car he talks about how Donnie Badget messed this up or did that wrong (he calls him Donnie Sutton sometimes, and every time he does he curses his son for confusing him), and when he talks about trenchless sewer pipe replacement he talks about the four hundred thousand dollars
he has invested in it and the downturn in Kansas’s aerospace-driven economy, but when he talks about Gloria Hull his voice lightens, slows down. If his digital camera is handy he calls up her picture on the square-inch screen and points with his blunt index finger at the orange blob on the right, smaller than his nail. There she is. The prettiest, nicest girl in Greenville, New York.

The night before Dale Peck Gorman arrives the son dreams that he has awakened in his great-uncle’s dairy barn, and as he runs down the milking alley the cows follow him with their dark eyes and wet mouths. When he wakes up he is standing in front of the washer and dryer outside the basement room where he had been sleeping on a row of twin beds with his father, stepmother, sister, sister’s boyfriend, and his cousin Misty, daughter of his father’s youngest sister, Priscilla. It is the first time in his life he has ever walked in his sleep, and he stands next to the washer and dryer for a long time, heart pounding half from fear, half from exhilaration. He has slept-walked! He has walked in his sleep! The cows’ faces come back to him, their blank stares less menacing now. He wonders if the images come from Hull Farm, or his Great-Uncle Wallace’s, which he visited when he was four or five. There is something vaguely pleading in the cows’ direct gazes, but he will not think of it again until he sees his father’s half brother the following day.

A few hours later the morning dawns humid but cool. The son can see fog through a window in Uncle Herb’s basement, where the rest of his family still sleeps on their barrackslike row of single beds—except for his father, he sees, who wakes with the dawn. The son gets out of bed quietly, slips into a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and to kill time walks a mile or so down the road
his Great-Uncle Herb lives on, a mile back. As he approaches the house he sees an extra car in the driveway. Florida plates. To distinguish the three Dales from each other, they are referred to jokingly by the family as Florida Dale, Kansas Dale, and New York Dale, and now the son—New York Dale—examines the short man in a short-sleeved plaid shirt and low-slung jeans who is only just now getting out of his car. He has a bit of a belly but he’s still a lot thinner than Kansas Dale. Nearly bald on top, with a slightly blobby nose that fits right in with all the big Dundas noses surrounding him. The woman next to Florida Dale has a helmet of black curls sprinkled with gray. She is shorter than her husband, a slim woman in thick glasses. Her husband wears glasses too, and his eyes are wide and blank behind them, a little needy, a little scared.

The son thinks of the nicknames as signs like the one in front of Uncle Wallace’s farm, alluding to history and yet excluding it as well, names like locked boxes that tell you what’s inside without letting you touch the contents. All the Dales started out in New York, but it would take more than one book to tell you how they ended up in Kansas, Florida, down in the city, how they all came to be standing on a freshly mowed lawn in front of a tan brick ranch-style house outside of Rochester. Though there are six people on the lawn as the son cuts toward them—his father and his stepmother, Uncle Herb and his girlfriend, Dale Peck Gorman and his wife, Dot—the son still feels someone is absent, and he is surprised when he realizes the person he is missing is Gloria Hull.

It’s like looking in a mirror, he hears Dot say as he comes up. Nobody seems to notice his approach.

The son’s father and his father’s half brother stand face to
face. The father is a heavier man, more fat but a lot more muscle too, but their features
are
the same. Not identical, but filial. The son watches as the two men look at each other through nearly identical square-framed silver glasses.

Been waiting a long time for this, Dale Peck finally says.

Been waiting my whole life, Dale Peck Gorman says, and on the last word his voice cracks and he throws his arms around Dale Peck’s shoulders.

The son watches as Dale Peck lets himself be held by Dale Peck Gorman. It’s good to finally meet you brother, he says, his voice light, his words meaning no more than what they mean. He holds his brother for a moment, and then he lets go.