Fallen Land (28 page)

M
aybe the boy was trying to warn me, raising his hand, that little ghostface at the window. I don’t know what these men expect me to do. They could yell
come out with your hands up
, but since the city put the big black lock on the front door I can’t come out in the most logical way, and if I go out the back they’ll think I’m trying to escape.

From my place on the boards I listen: wind, heavy boots on the porch, the idling of their engine outside, sirens in the distance, and now, the men fumbling the lock, the screen doors at the front and back whining open and closed. They must have the wrong code. One of them, his face a black visor reflecting the window and me, a genie, trapped tiny within, looks inside from the porch, shining a flashlight, and shouts to the others, “She’s on the floor. She might be armed.”

“Land sakes, you fools, I’m not armed!” I scream, holding up my hands, palms to the front: read these open tracks with your blind flashing faces.

The men give up on the front entrance, circle round to the back, kick in the kitchen door. I try to hold my body stiff as they spill down the hall, a storm of jet-black vermin surrounding me, shouting, “Face down, hands where we can see them,” until I extend my body, roll onto my stomach, hands at my sides. One of them pins my head, another clamps my feet, one holds my right hand, the other my left, and then they bring the two hands together behind my back, truss me up with plastic ties, haul me to my toes, pulling my arms almost out of joint. I bite my tongue, refuse to scream. I don’t know if I’m being arrested or evicted: no reading of rights, no actual police. I know who they are. Welcome to town: this city is privatized.

So with two of the men leading the way, the other four drag me out the rear of the house. I struggle, scream, and as they pull me through my back door, across the porch, out to the garden and around to the front yard, I see the machine moving on its tracks, cutting into turf, bringing up clods of soil through long-tailed ryegrass.

That skinny little child is screaming in the street and his parents are next to him now, putting hands on his shoulders and arms, small woodland animals emerged from their hollowed-out trunks and warrens, looking like dawn might scare them back inside.

There are hands on my own arms, hot hands, bloody stumps chewed down to nothing on one set, the others perfectly pared, French manicured, and those are the hands that pinch hardest. No misgivings in that man’s mind about the work he does. Mr. Chewer doesn’t grip as hard. I can tell from the way he shifts and shuffles that he knows something’s wrong with this assignment, a private action on behalf of an imaginary public.

Sun begins to shoot over the treetops, bouncing gold off the barn’s shingle roof, and then comes a sudden passing shower, burst of waters through slanting light and an apparition of color haunting the air: rain and early sun mixing, come together for a moment before the wind blows them apart.

The new neighbor man approaches, whipping out his wallet, flashing identification, talking to visor-faces with their strong hands and their strong-arm car, saying they should let go, there’s nothing more to be done, I pose no threat and can do nothing to stop them. What does he know about the kind of threat I pose? I bite my tongue again. This, surely, is the neighborliness I always missed.

These latter-day storm troopers give me ten minutes to go back inside and take whatever I want to save: jewelry, letters, my notebooks, the albums and frames full of photographs, files of a life, ledgers of the farm, the only history I have left. Mr. Chewer volunteers to escort me into my own house, and the little neighbor comes with us. The guard cuts me loose and the two men stand now in the kitchen, securing the exit, as I make a pile of my life in the hallway, all cold concentration. Forget nothing, Louise. Check each room, open every drawer, pack all your clothes, your documents.

“I need more than ten minutes. Give me half an hour. That’s all I need,” I say to the men, aware of my voice veering off its track of composure even as I try to hold it steady.

Little neighbor man looks at the guard, his visor up, and the guard nods, speaks through his walkie-talkie to the others outside. I move from room to room, filling four suitcases and an old steamer trunk, taking more than I would choose to keep under rational thought, fearing I might later regret some minor loss. I raise loose boards and prize out the cache of Kennedy half-dollars I once collected in belief they would one day bear value greater than their mark. Pens, blank paper, cards and gifts from forty-three years of classrooms go into cloth sacks. Kitchen utensils from mama and Grandma Lottie go in the cast iron pot. A rope braided by my great-grandmother coils up in a bread bin Donald made when I was pregnant. As I pack, I look down, wondering why my hands are wet; realizing the source, I keep working. There is no way to dry them now. The water rises in silence but flows, unstoppable, a spring opening up to cover the land. Watch me fill the world with my deluge. I am the sea-dark spirit, shaken to torrent.

There is so much to carry I cannot do it alone. With my purse on one shoulder I grip the photo albums against my stomach and watch as the guards all return looking humbled, every one of them, as they cart my life to the curb. They lead us off the property, holding my arms again, the child whimpering against his mother, while the rain slaps faces in passing showers. Standing on the lawn of the Krovik house, we watch as the machine approaches, raising an arm to tear off a corner of my porch with its bucket, reaching again, ripping a gash, opening wide all that should remain private: couches, tables, wallpaper and drapes, sheets and blankets, the oddments of a life. Fragile as balsa my house splinters, collapsing under the moaning hydraulic arm. The house is my Corsican twin: each blow she suffers pulls a sob from my throat. I cover my eyes and feel the child reaching out to take my hand. “Can I help you?” he asks. “Can’t we make them stop?”

“No, we cannot make them stop,” I say.

In the lull between movements of machinery I hear a rushing in my ears, panting breath, my voice claggy and clotting, words so distorted I don’t know what I’m saying, or if the source is even my body. A voice that might be mine, or a multitude, suddenly hollers:
house
,
home
,
theft!
Forget the connections, truncate the syntax. Broken apart and wet to the skin, water pools at my feet. Bare feet. I have no shoes. I stand in the waters I summon to wash away this collapse and demise. I scream against the wantonness. If they hoped for an adversary they have created one, kindled me out of soft dry wood, leaf mold, the desiccated moss of forest floors. Lord knows my house could have been moved, lifted off its foundations, put somewhere else on that great patch of empty land Krovik cleared, quartered, and failed to fill.

In less than ten minutes there is nothing but a heap of wood, glass, metal: splinters of things once whole. I can no longer name them. To name what no longer exists is a form of conjuring I cannot muster. I watch the workers—two thin young men, a middle-aged fat woman with a ponytail—collect the damage, put it in trucks, cart it away.

“This is carnage!”
I scream, glimpsing the pile of plants and vegetables uprooted from the kitchen garden.

Mr. Chewer says someone reported an intruder: me, an intruder on my own land. But it is no longer mine. The father of the child nods, trying to be reasonable, says he’ll take responsibility, as if I ever needed a man to take responsibility for me. I start to protest but decide it might be better to let myself fall under the protection of this little mole-man than to go to wherever my brigade of mirror-faced fools might deliver me: some private prison, unseen and unlooked for, unable to reach anyone from there. They would have me disappear. Grips loosen on both arms and I feel the blood run back into my hands, a flashing physical cosmos as the circulation returns to my fingertips. And then they give me a push in the direction of chubby nocturnal father who squints in the dim light, rain coming harder now, turning the last stand of Poplar Farm into a mud wallow putsch. The mourning of it, the weeping and keening, the foot-stamping grief, all of that will have to come later, in private, not before these men. I shall beat the ground, shriek to the trees who remain, call the submerged world to rise up and fight on my side.

Through the holding and restraint the child has not let go. His parents help carry my salvaged belongings and, silent, the boy leads me up the lawn into the Krovik house that now belongs to these small creatures. The boy tells me to come in, invites me across the threshold. My gut rumbles with visions of rocking-chair mothers and shower-curtain victims, of high contrast shadows and screaming violins.

Once inside I catch my breath. All is whiteness, nowhere for the eye to set down and relax, everything the whitest of whiteness. “It’s okay,” the child says, “I’ll explain later.” I look into his eyes and see he has already decided how things will be.

“We thought we should get your stuff out of the rain,” the father says; he and the mother make trips back and forth from the street to the house. I watch my life piled up at my feet.

We do not let go of each other, the boy and me, not yet. I can’t even say what I feel for him but it’s there, right away, sparkling in the harmonics of his voice, and not just in those: an energy comes out of him, signals surging through his grip, messages and motives and words: data transfer, they would say today, this child communicates through touch alone. Messages are fuzzy, unreadable, too much interfering noise over the signal, but I can see, hold his hand tight, trying to get all I can, letting him know I’m trying to read, hungry for his message and the keys he holds.

T
HEY SIT ME DOWN
IN
the den with a cup of coffee and stand dripping with rain, clutching mugs themselves, the three woodland people in their wet pajamas.

“This all used to be my land,” I say, my voice settling back into itself, “until I sold it some years back. And now the city has taken my house to build a turning lane and widen your street into a boulevard, replace all the cracking asphalt that the fool who built this neighborhood didn’t lay right in the first place.”

“Do you have anywhere to go?” the man asks.

“You have to understand, my people lived on this land for going on a hundred and fifty years.”

“I’m sorry,” the man says. He shakes his head, as does the mother, but they do not want a history lesson. They have busy lives, want to be rid of me quick. “Do you have any family you can stay with?”

“My daughter lives in California. Poor girl never loved this land and got away fast as she could.”

“Could you go live with her?” the man asks.

“We don’t have an easy relationship, and in any case, I can’t bring myself to leave it, not yet. I’ll camp in the woods if I have to, or pitch a tent in those fields.”

They must already think I’m a crazy old woman, ranting as I did. Mine are not the ways of the world today, and gentle as they act, these are not the kind of people who understand a connection to land. On the faces of the adults there is only confusion, looking at me as though I have come out with some fragment of ancient lament:

She was the daughter of a free farm man,

Oh the land and fire.

The only daughter of a free farm man,

Sold her lonesome heart’s desire.

I find song bubbling up on my tongue, look fast for sand to stop the melody.

His land no longer kept her safe at dawn,

Oh the earth’s on fire.

That land it couldn’t save her heart no more,

Called for flood of purging fire.

“I’m sorry,” I say, “I’m not—you must think I’m cracked.”

“Not at all,” the man says. “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to feel guilty. It’s not about you folks. I’m an old woman who made her decisions freely.” Even if I had no real choice, even if the choice was dictated to me: by time, by laws, by debt and circumstance, by the unhappy curve of history’s low arc.

Even as I drink my coffee with one hand the child has gone on holding the other.

“Copley,” says the father, “let the woman go.”

“It’s okay,” I say, “we’re acquainted.”

“So you two really have met before,” the mother says.

“We introduced ourselves through the fence, isn’t that right?” I say to the boy.

“This is Louise,” the child says. “She should live with us. We have room. She can’t go camping with all her things.”

He reminds me of boys I taught, bright ones easy and eager to please, the kind I always knew I could trust more than others.

“Can I just ask,” I say, turning my face to the father’s dark eyes, “how you got those men to let me go?”

Little woodland father looks uncomfortable, caught in a sudden foot-shuffling shame, staring at the white floor, the white walls, out the window. “They work for my company,” he says. “I mean—it’s not
my
company.”

“But you pulled rank.”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“I bet you’re in a corner office.” More foot shuffling, and now he won’t meet my gaze, as ashamed as that guard with chewed-up fingernails, embarrassed by the kind of company he works for, a business that strong-arms old women out of their homes when they resist. He doesn’t realize I was teasing.