Out Of The Deep I Cry (26 page)

Another volunteer let her in, let her know that Roxanne wasn’t working today, and then sank back into a chair by the door with an open book. As she climbed the stairs, Clare could hear the voice of a docent leading a tour through the public rooms and the soft thud of a researcher taking down one of the massive tax-enrollment books in the second-floor library. She reached the third floor and went into the former nursery, closing the door behind her to discourage any of the other volunteers from drifting in and chatting. She switched on the lights, dumped her coat and scarf in the extra chair, and turned on the computer, all with a weird sense of disconnection from her surroundings-a few hours ago she had been listening to Russ grinding his teeth against the pain as she hobbled him up the trail, freezing, sweating, and here she was now, in a clean, well-lit room, surrounded by white boxes and history.

She logged on to the catalog and scrolled down to her entries from last Saturday. She had been going through the records of the long-defunct Fonda-Johnston-Gloversville Railroad, whose primary claim to fame seemed to be hauling passengers to the Sacandaga Amusement Park, which had apparently closed down about 1930. She reached into the acid-free storage box and pulled out another set of folders stuffed with ads, timetables, newspaper clippings, and photographs.

She grouped a small stack of ads together-one of them, which promised “a gay holiday,” made her smile-and entered them as one item. The clippings, brown and brittle as dead leaves, had to be layered between sheets of archival tissue paper. Most of them were so dull-notices of stockholder meetings, appointments to the board-Clare found it hard to believe anyone, before or after her, would read them, but then she saw a lengthy story that made her stop. DAM PROJECT APPROVED: MAN-MADE RESERVOIR TO BE STATE’S LARGEST. She skimmed over it to see what it had to do with the railroad. The Conklingville Dam to be built… flooding the Sacandaga River valley… preventing flooding of Hudson downstream… over forty square miles to be submerged… ha, here it was, “including large sections of the F,J &G line.” So that was why they folded. There was a map, too, taking up two columns’ worth of space between the story and a Sears Roebuck ad, and after comparing it to the landmarks in her head, she realized that the reservoir in the story was the Great Sacandaga Lake. Huh. She hadn’t known it was a man-made lake. She examined the tiny dot-towns on the map and had another realization. Stewart’s Pond had also been created by the flooding of the Sacandaga.

She wasn’t aware she had been hunched over the table until she tipped back into her chair. She had known it was a reservoir. Someone had described it that way to her. But she had assumed, somehow, that the Ketchem graves were there because of a connection to the man-made lake. Maybe a summer camp there, or a sentimental attachment to the spot. But those children had been buried five years before there was a reservoir. What had it been then? A shady spot beneath the trees growing at the edge of a farm? Jonathon and Jane Ketchem’s farm?

She folded the clipping in a sheet of tissue paper and left the nursery. Down one flight of stairs, she found the library, two rooms that had once been bedrooms, fitted out with oddments of shelving: everything from utilitarian gunship gray steel to glass-encased mahogany. A gaunt man whose brown sweater looked as if it had fit him thirty pounds ago was bending over one of the reading tables.

“Excuse me.” Clare glanced at the stack of leather-bound books at his side. “Are you the librarian?”

“Yes,” he said. He stood up, like a heron righting itself. He inspected her over his reading glasses. “You’re not one of our regulars.”

“I’m Clare Fergusson,” she said. “I’m a new volunteer. Logging in the collections upstairs.” He continued to stare at her, as if he couldn’t imagine what she might want with him. She got the impression that the historical society’s library was underutilized. “I ran across this newspaper article”-she unfolded the tissue paper and laid it on the table-“and I was wondering if you knew anything about it.”

He bent over again to study the clipping. “Yes, of course,” he said. He sat up. She waited for something else, an explanation, but he continued to look at her.

Okay, then. He evidently didn’t feel compelled to share information like most reference librarians. She was good at asking questions. “From the look of that map”-she pointed to the clipping-“several towns were flooded. What happened to them? To the farms?”

“The Hudson River Regulating Board bought out the landholders in the late twenties and either tore or burned everything down. Houses, towns… chopped down all the trees, too.” He glanced around the room. “We’ve got a nice collection of original photographs… Where is that archive?”

“Where did the owners go?”

“Most of the residents who were displaced relocated nearby.”

“Like to Millers Kill.”

“That’s correct.”

“Wow.” She tried to imagine what it must have been like for the Ketchems, leaving their home, knowing it was going to be razed to the ground and drowned. Did Mrs. Marshall remember it? She would have to ask. If she wasn’t hunting with the wrong dog over the Ketchem burying ground. “What about cemeteries?” she said. “There must have been a lot of them inside that forty-square-mile line.”

“Bodies were dug up and reburied. There are quite a few transburial cemeteries around these parts.”

She didn’t want to imagine what that job must have been like. “I’ve been to a tiny family plot right on the banks of Stewart’s Pond. Could that be a relocated cemetery?”

“Stewart’s Pond Reservoir,” the man said, frowning. He stood up abruptly and circled the table, one hand held out as if to grasp the spine of a book. He circled again, closer to the bookshelves along the perimeter of the room, and with a grunt he darted forward and drew a three-ring binder from a high shelf.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“Copies of the land-grant information. Deeds, parcels, all that. We don’t have the originals. Have to go to Saratoga for those.” He sounded distinctly put out about that. He flipped rapidly through the pages. “Where is it?”

“Uh… you drive up Old Route 100 and get on a county road… um, and then you go a few miles…”

He looked up from the binder with an expression that said
Spare me.
“See that cord hanging down from that bookcase there?” He pointed.

“Sure do.”

“It’s a map of the area. Pull it down.”

Moving next to the shelves, Clare could see the long black tube fastened to the bookcase’s uppermost molding. She pulled the cord, and a large map unrolled, smoothly as a window shade. “We had these in my classroom when I was in grade school,” she said.

“Show me the place you were talking about.”

Maps were much easier than remembering the names of roads. She found the location of the Ketchem children’s burial ground and stabbed it with her finger.

“Ah,” the man said. He flipped some more. “Yes, yes, yes yes. Here it is.” Clare looked over his shoulder. He was turning back and forth between a page showing a line drawing of what appeared to be property boundary lines and a reduced-sized, badly photocopied legal document. “Your cemetery is on its original ground. See here?” He pointed to the drawing. “It would have been at the back end of the property. That county road didn’t exist back in the twenties. The road ran down here”-he pointed to another spot-“along the Sacandaga River.”

“Was this the Ketchems’ land? Jonathon and Jane Ketchem?”

He flipped to the legal document. “Jonathon Ketchem is the last landholder.” He looked up at her. “It wasn’t customary to include the wife on land grants in those days.” He dropped his attention back down to the binder. “Bought it in 1916. They probably sold it to a land speculator in the twenties. If they didn’t, it would have been condemned in 1929.”

“Condemned?”

“Some of the small landowners turned down the river regulating board’s offer and tried to stay put. Didn’t do them any good, of course. The HRRB wasn’t a governmental agency, but it had plenty of political muscle behind it. Anyone who didn’t sell voluntarily at the board’s asking price found their land condemned by the state. Evicted.”

“Did they get any money for it?”

“Of course they did. The government can’t take land without compensation, that’s unconstitutional.” He looked up at her. “Of course, once it was condemned, it was the state that decided what would be a fair price. And how much do you think land that’s going to be at the bottom of a lake is worth?”

“So the Ketchems wouldn’t have made much money from the deal?”

“Probably not.”

“Then where did-” She stopped herself. The historical society’s librarian wasn’t going to know where Jane Ketchem got the money to send her daughter to college and pay for Allan Rouse’s medical education. Besides, that was years after she had been forced off her farm. And Mrs. Marshall had said her mother was good at investing. Maybe she bought into IBM when it was fifty cents a share. “Why did the Hudson River Regulating Board decide to dam the Sacandaga, anyway?”

“To control flooding. The Sacandaga is part of the Hudson’s watershed. It’s a natural floodplain, that’s one of the reasons it was such fertile soil.” He pulled the clipping toward him with two fingers, keeping it flat. “See the course of the river before the dams went in? All along here was the Sacandaga Vlaie.”

“The Sacandaga Fly?” Clare said.

“Vlaie. It’s an old Dutch word meaning a swamp or lowland meadow. Ours was a huge marshland, teeming with wildlife. If they tried to build this dam nowadays, the DEC would be all over them. But in those days, wetlands were something to get rid of, not something to protect.” He traced the course of the river as it meandered east toward the Hudson. “The floodwaters would overflow the Sacandaga, fill up the Hudson, and next thing you knew, you’d have people rowboating through the streets of Albany. Caused some bad breakouts of disease in towns along the way, too, with the floodwaters washing sewage out into the open. Typhoid, cholera.”

“Diphtheria?”

“I suppose so. Businesses were the moving force behind…” He was on a roll now, recounting the movement to dam the river and the formation of the regulating board, but his words flowed past Clare like the river itself. She felt the awful weight of it, the rushing of her own blood the sound of the water. The river had run through Jane and Jonathon Ketchem’s life, bringing them good rich soil and cool summer days and the disease that destroyed their family. And then it had washed them away and cast them up in the village of Millers Kill, where Jane had lived out her days, pouring her grief into her remaining child until the mother Mrs. Marshall might have been sank beneath the depth of it, ensuring no more children to be carried away, ever. And Jonathon? Clare had a sudden, piercing conviction she knew where he had gone. Not to start over again, as his daughter had grown to believe. Clare could see him, as clearly as if she had been there, driving his car far away from the town, back toward his burned, wrecked farm, back toward the road that ran by the river that had sluiced through his life. When was it Mrs. Marshall had said her father disappeared? March 29, 1930.

“When was the dam completed?” she said, cutting off the librarian’s discourse on the railroad’s suit for compensation. “When did the valley start flooding?”

“Nineteen thirty.”

“But when? What date?”

“Ah,” he said, his eyebrows knitting together. He got up again, reaching his hand out, as if the book he needed could fly off the shelves into his grasp. He pulled a narrow paperback off a shelf, flopped it open, and flicked through a few pages. “March 27, 1930.”

Two days before Mrs. Marshall’s father disappeared. He probably couldn’t have made it to that road by then. He would have known which way to head, though. He must have made the trip dozens of times in the past, between the town and the farm, so that his hands on the wheel would have known the way, even at night. Even with every landmark cut down, torn away, burned. He would have kept on driving, the water rising around his wheels, until his engine submerged and he could no longer drive. Then he would have gotten out, wading through the pitch-black, icy water, rising as he pressed on into the valley, rising as the snowmelt-swollen mass of it piled up behind the new dam, rising until he couldn’t feel his legs or his arms or his chest for the cold of it. And still she could see him walking, walking farther and farther, until he disappeared from sight forever. Heading home.

Clare rested the box of one dozen of Kreemy Kakes’ finest on the counter of the nurses’ station and smiled at the woman typing away at a computer behind it. “I’m looking for Russ Van Alstyne’s room?”

“Mr. Van Alstyne.” The nurse glanced at a clipboard stretched to its limit with a sheaf of papers. “Oh, yes. The broken leg. He’s in 403.”

“Thank you.” Clare settled the box beneath her arm and made her way down the hall. The door to room 403 was closed. She knocked.

“Come in,” Russ yelled.

She sidled through the door. He was alone in the two-bed room, propped up at an angle, his injured leg slung between a pair of struts assembled at the end of the bed. His cast ran from the ball of his foot to below his knee, and was highway-department orange. It reminded Clare of one of the Tonka cranes her brothers had played with back when they were kids. He was talking on the bedside phone.

“I’m sorry, go on.” He beckoned Clare into the room. “No. No, it’s not my mom.” He glanced at Clare, and his eyes fell on the box she was holding. “It’s just someone dropping off some food,” he said.

She raised her eyebrows.

“How much extra?” he asked. He held out his hand for the doughnuts. “Six hundred bucks? For a one-way flight? That’s ridiculous! I thought it was like a fifty-dollar fee to change your departure date.”

Clare handed him the box, which he dropped in his lap. He flashed her a distracted smile, then frowned.