America America (4 page)

At the beginning of high school, I began carrying around the hand furnace that my father used for packing lead joints. This was my Saturday job. By 1970, you probably couldn’t find a dozen lead-jointed pipes within fifty miles of Saline, but my father taught me how to pack them anyway. The furnace was a bulb of steel the size of a lantern, with a check valve and an air knob that mixed the gas into a hissing jet of flame. I scorched the lead in a melting pot until it changed from black to silver and finally to cherry red; then I poured it. He kept me well aware of the dangers: the fumes would addle me; the lead had to pour like soup or the joint would leak; a wet fitting could explode. I carried his caulking irons and packing, too, and the coils of oakum that left my fingernails reeking of tar. Before I left for school every Monday, I checked my hands for the smell.

There were new houses going up, too, in those days, but these were union jobs and the men didn’t work on Saturdays. These houses were for the families who were moving in then a couple of miles to the west of us on the upward slope of Shelter Bend Hill, at the rate of a dozen or so per year: the new managers from IBM’s expanding transistor plant in Islington. They were commissioning broad-chimneyed brick Colonials or turreted Queen Annes with brick for the first story and lapped cedar for the second. My father did the rough-in and the hookups. It was all still Metarey pipe, of course, and Metarey brick and Metarey lumber, too, and although the construction trucks said
O’Shaughnessy-Erie
in white script across their green doors, we all understood that this firm, too, was part of Liam Metarey’s empire.

One day my father asked me to help on a sewer that had broken on the Metareys’ own land. This was in the spring of my second year at Franklin Roosevelt High School. The sewer had been pierced by the roots of the estate’s great bur oak, a majestic, horizontally drafted tree whose lowest limbs reached from the ridge of the main lawn all the way across the entrance road to the top steps of the porch. “You know what that means?” my father said to me at breakfast one Saturday.

“What?”

“It means we have to dig with a toothbrush.” He took a sip of his coffee. “And we have to cut with nail clippers.”

“Not bad money for cutting nails,” answered my mother, who kept the family budget.

We had risen before dawn and she had cooked eggs and hash. On the stove ledge now she was fixing sardine sandwiches for my father and me and examining a sheet of stationery that had been engraved with the image of the same oak we were about to work under. I could tell she was reading the terms of payment.

“It’s a ten-foot trench, I’d guess,” said my father. “And in the heat of the day.”

“Then you should be getting started then, shouldn’t you?” said my mother.

“Right you are, love.”

And that was what we did then, before it was even light. The drip line of the tree reached well past the sewer, and when we arrived at Aberdeen West my father set to work with a lantern and an iron spike, testing the ground for roots. The big house was still dark. My father was whistling “Roddy McCorley,” but softly, and now and then he glanced up at the windows. When he was finished with the spike, we began digging, but before we were even down as far as our boots we had to switch from shovels to spades, wedging their narrow heads between the roots. They were everywhere. His whistling stopped. He gently pulled back the end of a tendril but as soon as he let go it dropped back into the hole. He stood looking at it in the rising light, which was still pale but already warm on my back. “What would you use here, Cor?” he finally said.

“Half-hitch?”

“Not gentle enough. Mr. Metarey’s paying us not to hurt the tree.”

“Two half-hitches and a round-turn, then.”

“That’s what I would use,” he said. “Or a double-loop bowline.”

It was almost noon before I could stand as deep as my waist in the short section that we’d dug. I hadn’t seen Christian, who was in my class at school, but soon after we’d started, her sister, Clara, had come out and sat on the front steps, not twenty feet away from us. She was reading a book. Occasionally she would set it down, close her eyes as if to think about something, then pick it up again. I’d always been a hard worker, but I couldn’t help being aware of her.

The pipe still lay another foot or two below us. Around me, a net of tendrils hung gently in the set of slings I’d been making from mason’s line. A web of thicker, arterial roots still stretched across the channel, though, as intricately crossed as the tree’s crown, and at this depth we had to bend over to dig in them. My gloves were already soaked.

As I took one off to free a root tip, I saw my father set down his shovel, and when I looked up Liam Metarey was standing next to the trench. “That’s you men’s secret,” he said, jumping down between us. “Isn’t it? It must be ten degrees cooler at the bottom here.”

“God’s air-conditioning,” answered my father without a moment’s hesitation—the kind of reply I was trying to learn to make. Then he began whistling “Roddy McCorley” again.

Mr. Metarey pushed his tie over his shoulder and knelt to examine what we’d done. “And I like the way you’ve secured those roots,” he said. He lifted one of my slings. “Be happy to be treated that well myself by a Park Avenue surgeon.”

My father smiled. “Ingenuity of the American working man,” he said.

“Take it easy there, son,” Mr. Metarey said as he climbed back out of the hole. I’d been wiping the sweat from my face with the dry end of my shirttail. He turned to my father. “Doesn’t he know he’s being paid by the hour?”

My father chuckled, more of a low shaking in his chest than a noise. “He’s a good worker, all right.” He was the steward of the plumbers’ union local, and everybody liked him. “Beats me where he got it, though,” he added.

“Perfectly clear to me where he got it,” Liam Metarey answered as he walked back into the house.

Sometime past noon, as we were finishing our sandwiches, Christian appeared. She stepped over her sister and walked across to the trench, where she set a pitcher of lemonade on the planking. My father declined a glass—he drank tea even on the hottest days—but after a moment I accepted. I drank one glass and without asking she poured me another.

Clara put down her book now and was watching us from the porch. “Thirsty?” she called.

“He’s just polite,” Christian answered.

“Good. I like polite.”

I drank my second glass, and Christian filled another. In school, we’d hardly spoken, but we had an English class together. “Drink as much as you want,” she said softly. “Don’t worry about my sister.”

I watched her walk back across the yard. On the porch she had to step over Clara again.

“Careful, Corey,” said my father.

At this depth, clay was veined into the topsoil, and I had to use a pick to pry it out. Around it the roots ran in many-stranded webs that had to be shaken free before they could be pulled. But even at that age, I liked work. I craved the discipline that settled over me and allowed me to escape my thoughts. By the time the sun dropped behind the high gable of the house, we’d freed a whole main trunk and all its branching; and soon after that, I pried a lump of clay from the far furrow of the ditch and came to the cracked sewer flange itself. As the trench moved into shade I dug away at the covering, chipping apart the clay hub with a chisel until I finally pulled out a long, fibrous lump in the exact shape of the joint.

That’s when I heard Clara’s voice again behind me. “You don’t want this?” she said.

I turned. She had come down from the porch with the book in her hand. “You don’t seem to be drinking it,” she said.

“I’m trying not to drink it all at once,” I answered, and I laughed. But she kept her eyes on me.

I picked up my shovel. “What are you reading?” I asked.

“You wouldn’t know it.” She made a face. “It smells like fish down here.”

“Sardine sandwiches,” I said. I smiled again, but she only looked down at me. I knocked the trowel on my boot. “Well,” I said. “Back to work.”

She held the glass of lemonade up to the sun. Droplets gleamed halfway up its side. “If you don’t want it,” she said, “then I think
I’ll
drink it. Would that be all right? It’s so hot out here.” She took a long swallow, then set the glass back down. I blinked in the light, then nodded up at her, smiling again—that’s the way I was. Finally, I looked away again and leaned back into the hole.

A few minutes later, I heard the sound of footsteps. This time, I didn’t turn around. I was working at the bottom of the trench now, carving out along the length of the exposed sewer, and when the steps stopped on the planking I kept my head down. At the other end of the channel, I could see my father’s legs. They rose, and his knees and boots turned. Finally, I heard Mr. Metarey’s voice. “Here, Corey,” he said, in what sounded like an amused tone. “I brought you another.”

W
HEN
I
WAS GROWING UP,
our entire neighborhood, which had once been grazed by Eoghan Metarey’s Clydesdales, was still dotted with his enormous oaks and sycamores and his grass-covered berms erected by human labor, all of it running inside a stone wall cut by hand. The wall was split in a meandering course by a brook that was narrow enough to jump and that we used to call the River Lethe—although I don’t think even our parents knew what the name meant. The houses we all lived in were identical two-story brick saltboxes divided in half, the two sides joined by a common wall that was unusual for its time: the builder had been saving brick. During a brief period when Eoghan Metarey was in Europe after the First World War, a Dutch builder from Buffalo had double-crossed the family and set down row houses six to an acre. They were arranged in widening arcs around Aberdeen West, like fieldmen’s cottages around a manor, ending near the Metareys’ iron gate with its pillared entryway. That gate was Metarey iron, of course, and those pillars were Metarey limestone.

One morning as I was crossing near them on my way to school, Christian walked through. “I don’t know why my sister’s like that,” she said.

“Like what?”

It was the first time she’d ever stopped to speak to me.

“You know—” she said. “Drinking the lemonade. She makes me furious. She makes
all
of us. I wanted to say I was sorry. To you and your father.”

“You don’t need to say you’re sorry for anything, Christian. Neither does Clara. I already had plenty. I was glad to have any of it.”

“You’re sweet to say that.”

“I
was
. It’s the truth.”

“It might be,” she said. She set her books down beside the path. “Or it might not be. But either way, you’re sweet to say it.”

I shrugged.

She looked at me. “You’re different from the rest,” she said. “Aren’t you.”

I looked away.

“You
are
. You’re different from the other boys. I can tell that already.” Then she took hold of one of the pillars and swung herself up onto the ledge. “Anyway,” she said, “Clara’s already in trouble.”

“For the lemonade?”

“No. Not for the lemonade. Hand me my books and I’ll tell you.”

I did, and she put them underneath her to sit. “
Bad
trouble, too,” she said. “Didn’t even take her a week.” She pointed behind us. “Look what she did to Father’s shed.”

I turned. On the far side of the row of spruces, two men were moving alongside one of the garages.

“Father’s beside himself,” she said, shaking her head. She threw her hair back over her shoulder. “She burnt it down.”

“What?”

“Clear to the ground.”

“On purpose?”

She examined me, the green of her Scottish irises flecked with the silvery glint I would later come to know. “Everything my sister does is on purpose,” she said. She jumped from her seat. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

We crossed through the trees and on the other side of the driveway we found Gib Burl and Sandy Blount, two men my father knew, pulling down the remains of the building. Four black posts were all that stood, braced upright by bits of charred siding.

“She’s going to reform school,” Christian said.

A row of tools still hung on one of the posts, and as we stood there Sandy Blount took a jack plane off its hanger, looked around, and pretended to slide it into his coveralls. I realized he didn’t know we were watching, and I stepped in front of Christian. The coal train blasted its horn. “We’re going to be late for school,” I said.

She only laughed and walked out into the clearing herself, where, when Sandy saw her, he set the plane in a pile with the rest.