America America (5 page)

E
ARLY ONE
S
ATURDAY MORNING
there was a knock on our door during breakfast, and when my father returned from answering it he said, “Well, that’s interesting—it’s Mr. Metarey.”

“What?” My mother rose and stepped onto the back porch, where there was a mirror over the laundry sink. “
Here?
The sun’s hardly up.”

“He wants to see Corey.”

She pulled her hair back into a bun, slipped a band around it, and pulled it tight.

“He wants
me
?” I said.

“On the porch.”

“Go invite him in now, love.” She leaned close to the mirror. “Granger—” she said.

“He doesn’t want to come in. He said he didn’t want to bother breakfast.”

“He’s not bothering us. You invited him in, I hope. How do I look?”

“You look beautiful, love,” he said. “As always. I did invite him in. He didn’t want to bother us.”

“What should I do, Dad?”

“Go talk to him. He’s waiting out there for you, Cor. Either go, or sneak out the window. Here,” he said, moving to the glass, “I’ll hold it for you.”

“Granger,” said my mother.

When I got to the porch, Mr. Metarey was standing on the lawn. “Sorry to disturb your breakfast,” he said. “I told your father I’d be happy to come back another time.”

“Of course not, sir.”

“Your dad said it was grits.”

“It is.”

“Well, I certainly wouldn’t want to keep you then.”

“Thank you, sir.”

He laughed. “You’ve had a good upbringing. Wish I could get my own children to treat me as well.”

“I imagine they already do, Mr. Metarey.”

He seemed to examine me then. I was wearing my Wranglers and a blue long-sleeved shirt, the clothes I wore every day.

“What are you doing this summer, Corey?”

“Working for my dad, I guess.”

“I’ve spoken to your mother.”

I looked at him.

“We need someone to work at the house.”

“Yes, sir.”

He crossed his arms and smiled, leaning back on his heels. “I’m offering it to you, son. I’m offering you the job. Working at Aberdeen.”

“You’re offering it to
me
?”

“Yes, young man. I already saw the way you work. Saves me the trouble of an interview. You could start tomorrow if you wanted. Would you like it?”

“Well, yes,” I said. I thought of Christian. “I would, very much, sir. Thank you.”

III

I
T’S NOT THAT ANY PART
of Carrol County is still farmed. The farmers are long gone. Masaguint is the only bit in the whole watershed not yet taken by the suburb-makers who’ve long since claimed everything else. It’s a wet, boulder-strewn downland: no good for a crop in the old days and no good for a development now. The Dutch Downs, as the old-timers call it. Bog from the time the glacier reached from Greenland to Pennsylvania. Our poor dike-building settlers at the turn of the eighteenth century thought they’d found a miracle soil. There was even a land rush. Muck farming, they called it—not having an appreciation yet for real estate terms. They drained the marshes and planted potatoes, sending to the Netherlands for their families to join them in the toil. But despite all their humble labor, despite all their Protestant prayers, they couldn’t stop those marshes from eventually going completely dry. Near the end, the land grew so withered the topsoil began blowing away. First, gradually; then, ruinously. Up into the lake wind, then on in dark swirls toward the Atlantic. In the parched layer that remained, fires actually burned—underground infernos that poured smoke from the carboniferous peat. Imagine: the land itself in flames. God’s displeasure. How could it have seemed anything else?

Soon the farmers gave up and left. Thousands of oxcarts moving west or north. That’s considered a lesson in these parts: that the cropland around here, for all its gentle green cover in spring and its pleasingly hilly watershed, for all its sunny, cloud-tumbled horizon, will only fool you into optimism. Everything is hiding something.

For a long time after that, the commerce in our part of the state depended on lumber and mines. On men like Eoghan Metarey and his counterparts in the counties alongside. By the end of the nineteenth century, the remaining farmers had sold at rock-bottom rates to the mineral prospectors and the railroads; pits were dug and track laid. When I was a boy the coal train still blasted its two-note whistle at eight, four, and ten, approaching the drop-gate on Bridge Street, and you could board a passenger train at Saline Station and not get off till Baltimore. But five years ago the last of the rail bed was converted to bicycle path, and all the mines are long sealed. For most of the seventies and eighties, the economy around here provided wood and coal and rock, but not much else. People scraped by.

Which is one reason, I think, that Henry Bonwiller was so loved, even though he was a social and economic liberal in a county of close-lipped lowlanders. But the politics of Carrol County aren’t easily apparent, and to those who don’t live up here they must be an absolute mystery that is further veiled by a habit of silence. We don’t like to talk much, or to argue at all—we just think there’s too much work to be done. And we certainly don’t like to talk politics, especially with a stranger—which, in these parts, means anyone you haven’t known since elementary school. And in fact this taciturn habit of ours might be the very thing that saved Henry Bonwiller when all his troubles began. For thirty years he protected the people of Carrol County. And the people protected him in return.

Even today, there’s still a lot of work to do around here, which is the way we all like it—too much to do to waste time with Washington gossip or tax code riders or a president’s private philanderings. At primaries time, when the candidates swing through on their fifteen stops of the day in the western half of the state, I think the people here are more interested in getting through the grocery line at Burdick’s without having to talk about whether it’s the government’s business to rule on what you can say in a biology textbook, let alone what goes on in a citizen’s bedroom. Those kinds of divisions embarrass us. I’ve known people for fifty years and I still can’t guess if they’re Democrats or Republicans. And the people who know me—friends of my parents and my own friends from the old days, as well as the newcomers who’ve found their way up here for the air and the water—certainly a few of them could identify my leanings if asked, but I’m certain they don’t care.

This puts a newspaperman at a disadvantage, actually—figuring out how to break through that wall of industrious lowlands silence. It’s also been the primary influence on the editorial policy of
The Speaker-Sentinel
, which I’ve had the privilege of helping form over the fifteen years I’ve been at the paper. Our readers—the blue-collar descendants of farmers and mill workers—might not agree with all our editorials, but at least we can count on a few items that can still rouse them, if only a bit: corruption, misuse of our land by downstate interests, and the morals of our kids.

There are three community colleges within fifty minutes of Saline, I’m proud to say, and Eoghan Metarey’s library in town gets its new bond approved overwhelmingly every four years by a group of voters who almost never go in there—except perhaps to vote—but who probably hope their children might. Or even their grandchildren. That’s a nice population to share a county with. On most days I’d take this place over the big city, hands down, even though in towns like this there’s always plenty to miss about the old times.

In any case, I’m at the age when a wistful melancholy is a rather pleasant way to spend an afternoon. That’s what I was doing over lunch the day after Senator Bonwiller’s funeral, in fact—thinking about the old times—when Trieste Millbury appeared in my office. “I just wanted you to know,” she said, “that I’m all over it.”

“Over what?” I asked.

She spooned some yogurt into her mouth and took a seat on my windowsill.

“The Bonwiller story. When he ran for president in ’72, I mean. His campaign was run by Liam Metarey, sir.”

“Everybody older than my daughters knows that.”

I opened my sandwich. Corned beef. That morning before dawn I’d trimmed the fat from it and put it on whole grain, no mayo. This contributes to my wistful melancholy.

“And Nixon’s men were in on it,” she said.

“Oh,” I said. “Better. Nixon won that election. If you remember from your reading.”

“I mean more than that. I mean Nixon was in on it from the other side. Silverton Orchards. Anodyne. All that stuff.”

“Where’d you read that, Trieste? Some blog?”

“I Googled it, sir.”

“Did you find any evidence?”

“No.”

“Then what kind of credence do you give it?”

She took another spoonful of yogurt. “Okay, then,” she said. “There wasn’t great evidence. But yes, I give it credence.”

“And how’s that?”

“Sir,” she said. “I’m like all good reporters.”

“Which means?”

She looked at me with her curious eyes. “Which means I go with my instincts.”

I
N THE SPRING
of 1971, near the end of my sophomore year in high school, I went to work for the Metarey family. It was a life that took me by such swift surprise, I now realize, that within a very short period of time I’d lost track of where I’d come from. And because of the Metareys’ generosity—I call it that, though I could as easily call it their
peculiarity
, or, as my wife used to say, their
nasty sport
—because of how the Metareys let me into their existence, I think I first took it inside myself, at the age of sixteen, that such an existence might someday be mine.

I worked as the groundskeeper at Aberdeen West: trimming the great bushes of gardenias and roses in the three oversized gardens, raking the pods that fell from the groves of sycamores and the husks from the walnuts, watering meadow after meadow of feed grass. The Metareys grew a thousand acres of hay that they sold to stables in the area, and my first job every morning was to water them. I drove their old Massey-Ferguson tractor, hauling the big pipes behind me on metal wheels big enough for a covered wagon. The main pipes were three-inch-diameter tubes of cast iron, forty feet long, that were coupled together with huge, greased compression nuts—a system most farmers had abandoned half a century before. But every morning before school, and one morning on the weekends, I pulled them behind the Ferguson, maneuvering them into place on their giant wheels and linking them together with a wrench as long as my arm. By the time the sun crested the oaks, I was sweating through my clothes.

Liam Metarey didn’t bury his watering system like the other gentleman farmers because even at the height of his fortune I don’t think he ever thought of himself as a gentleman; he must have still heard the voice of his own father—the Scottish blacksmith’s boy who had stepped penniless from steerage at Fort Clinton. To the main-line hubs, which probably weighed three hundred pounds each, I coupled vertical steel sprayers twice as tall as I was. When I opened the flow valves, their spray heads gurgled for a moment, then stirred. Finally they lifted their long, flat arms, rising to throw out stuttering half-moons of water forty yards in either direction—great rainbows of mist that shimmered on one side of the pipe, fell in a heap of gems, and in a moment reappeared on the other. I was back home just in time each morning to change for school.

I have to say, I felt lucky. It was solitary work, but I liked being alone in the fields, especially as the sun came over the oaks; it was strenuous, too, but I liked that, as well. All spring and summer as I moved about the Metarey land, I felt I was being shown a secret, some riddle of possibility. And somehow, as well, I had become friends with Christian. Her friendship was as bewildering as any of it and had come upon me the most mysteriously of all. Part of the puzzlement I felt was the knowledge, really, that I didn’t deserve it. I didn’t deserve any of it. I didn’t belong here, not on this land or with these people. There were grown men in Saline who would have been very glad to have my job—quite a few of them, in fact—and there were plenty of seniors at Roosevelt who would have walked all the way across town to exchange one sentence with either of the Metarey daughters. Yet somehow, it had all come to me.

One Saturday morning, not long after I’d started, a biplane appeared over the east end of the property and flew low over the house. I’d been moving pipe in the high fields at the top of the land, and below me I watched it break course and head in my direction. It looked like a crop duster, dark red with an open cockpit between the wings and a windshield that flashed in the sun as it started up the long hill. Halfway across the meadow it nosed up, dipped suddenly, and flew straight over my head, not a hundred feet above.

I turned the tractor around. Over the far western border of the land, it began to ascend again. A moment later the rising whine of the engine reached me as it climbed nearly to a vertical; then, at the top, it paused like a roller coaster, crested the arc, and passed backwards into a banking, upside-down descent. Just above the treeline it pulled out, its engine roaring.