The End of Country (3 page)

I
HAD BEEN WONDERING LATELY
what my father would have thought about a lot of things. It had been a tough couple of years for me, too, and though I knew it was only my imagination—and my propensity for looking at things in the worst possible light—I often found myself wondering just how disappointed my father would have been at the way I was turning out. I was nearing fifty, and it was not lost on me that by the time my father was my age, he had owned the farm for a decade, managed to amass a sizable nest egg, and married off his two children, whereas for me every day was a constant struggle.

My father had always thought that I was both pigheaded and reckless, and to a great extent he had been right. By the time I was twenty-five I was already reaching the end of one failed marriage and had managed to turn myself into a full-blown blackout drunk, a condition that on at least two occasions landed me in jail. The last time was in 1983, when I rammed my 1973 Cadillac Coupe de Ville into the rear
end of a rent-a-wreck in Wilkes-Barre and ended up not only in the Luzerne County Prison overnight, but also on the inside pages of the Wilkes-Barre
Times Leader
. Reluctantly, my old man bailed me out.

At thirty, I was bankrupt and well on my way toward an equally disastrous second marriage. But by the time I turned forty—the year my father died—I was at last beginning to grow up. I had met and married my third—current and, I swear, last—wife, Karen, a woman who had faced down some of the same demons I had, but who had emerged from the encounters a lot stronger and a lot wiser. My parents loved her. They didn’t even seem to mind that the ceremony was held in the Methodist church in Montrose rather than in a Catholic church. We held our reception at the farm, and the day before the wedding, my father and I sweated together as we hefted about a hundred large flagstones into place, building a path that would run from the caterer’s tent to the canopied tables arrayed in the front yard. I didn’t know it then, and neither did he, but he already had the tumors that would, in six months, kill him.

For a long time after he died, I had the feeling that I might be doing the kind of things that would have made him proud of me. In fact, for the better part of the next ten years, I had managed to make a decent living writing freelance articles for national magazines and websites. It was hard to imagine my father reading
Playboy
, but I was pretty sure that if he had been alive, there would have been at least one copy—one with my name in it—stuffed in his underwear and sock drawer.

But a few months before my mother’s phone call, things had started to fall apart. Those of us in the newspaper and magazine business know that when it comes to the economy, we’re the canaries in the coal mine. When the nation’s businesses start to flag, the first thing businesspeople cut back on is advertising, and it’s the last thing they bring back when the economy recovers. By the spring of 2007, I was already choking on the toxic fumes of the coming recession. The work hadn’t dried up entirely, but the assignments were fewer and farther between and the checks smaller.

It didn’t help that my wife was a newspaper editor. Not only was she facing the same economic perils that I was, she was doing it at a newspaper office sixty miles from our home at a time when gas prices
were spiraling, and in order to keep that job she had to work nights, driving treacherous mountain roads in the dark. I could see that it was taking an awful toll on her. She was tired all the time, and every minute she spent on the road was time she felt she was stealing from our kids. It was taking a toll on them, too. Seneca, who was then six, and Liam, three, were reaching an age when they needed the firm hand of their parents—and Karen has a firmer hand than I—and they also had increasingly expensive needs. I could see the look of pain in Karen’s eyes every time we had to say no to them. And then, just a few weeks before my mother’s call, while I was waiting for an overdue payment to arrive from a troubled and now defunct magazine, Seneca came to me and told me that she needed thirty dollars for a class trip. I didn’t have it. But I couldn’t stand the thought of disappointing her, not on something like that, and I couldn’t imagine the humiliation she would have felt, even at that age, if she had to be excluded from the trip because her father was a failure. I drove into town and hocked one of my few nonessential possessions, a .50 caliber flintlock rifle.

I was trying not to let any of that influence me as I spoke to my mother that evening. I promised her that I would research the whole matter and get back to her in a few days. But just before she hung up, she made it clear that she wasn’t buying my desperate attempt to act like a cool, detached reporter taking on a new assignment. “I know you have to understand that this affects you, too,” she said. I tried to protest, but she cut me off. “I don’t have that many more years left,” she told me, making sure to squeeze as much good old-fashioned Irish pathos out of the statement as she could. “If anything comes of this, it’s going to be yours and your sister’s, and the kids’—and the two of you, you and your sister, you need to decide what you’re going to do about it, and you’re going to need to decide it together.”

I hadn’t asked her for a thing. I didn’t have to. For all her flaws, my mother has always been a generous woman, and even then she proved it, offering to give my sister, Janet, and me half of whatever she got. But beneath her offer, I could hear her fear. She was going to relinquish control of her affairs, at least in this matter, to her children, and she would abide by whatever decision we made. But there was, she reminded us both, far more than just money at stake. My father was watching.

•  •  •

I
T WAS STRANGE
, I
THOUGHT
as I hung up the phone. In all the years that my family had owned that farm, I had never thought much about it in the future tense. It was always past and present, something that just was.

I can still remember the moment we first saw the place that would become our home. It was forty years ago. We had traveled up from New Jersey to this spot, about 150 miles west of Manhattan, beyond the Delaware River where the Catskills give way to the Poconos, past the coal-scarred valleys of the Susquehanna and Lackawanna rivers, a worn-down stretch of Appalachian Mountains in northeastern Pennsylvania. Up here, they call that patch of hills “the Endless Mountains.”

We were sitting in a coffee shop on Route 6, a scenic old highway that stretches across the northern tier of Pennsylvania, waiting to meet with a real estate agent, when my mother caught sight of an ambling road that rose from the highway and disappeared in a series of switchbacks into the hills. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could find a place on a road like that?” my mother had sighed. Sure enough, we did. I spent the best part of my childhood—both in the number of years and in the quality of them—along that stretch of road, on a none-too-productive patch of scrub forest and farmland that rises up from a creek bottom at the eastern edge of Appalachia. And for all these years, this place has remained my family’s home. My sister was married here. So was I—the last time, at least. My father died here. My mother, of course, still lives here.

I was eleven years old when my family bought these hundred acres a stone’s throw from the little village of Lymanville. They paid $23,500, the rough equivalent of $130,000 today.

My parents had reached a prosperous middle age, having spent the first twenty years of their working lives in central New Jersey. Like tens of thousands of others, they had escaped a decaying coal-patch town—in their case, Scranton—in the mid-1950s and headed east for a fresh start.

It had been a good move. But by the end of the 1960s, Mom had had enough of living in the vast postwar Pennsylvania diaspora; she was sick of being one of thousands upon thousands of onetime coal crackers who had left for better opportunities in New Jersey. My parents
had earned a pretty good living—she as a public school teacher, he as a systems analyst for a pharmaceutical firm—and once they amassed enough money, my mother decided that she wanted to go home. But not to Scranton. She wanted to move beyond that, another twenty-five miles to the north and west, to a spot the coal industry had never reached, up to the farm country nestled in the Endless Mountains. She had always treasured her memories of the trips to the nearby town of Tunkhannock as a child in the early 1940s to visit her grown-up sister and her brother-in-law, a state trooper who had been assigned to what was then a remote outpost in these hills.

To a little girl from coal country, the mountains were a romantic place, foreign and in a way forbidden, a region that seemed to be one of the last places in America where you could find the sentiment—if not the actual sign—“No Irish Need Apply.” In her mind, it was a place where rigid, old-fashioned Bible-thumping Protestants gathered every Sunday in their stark white wooden churches, where, my mother had been raised to believe, they talked of nothing but the perfidy of the Irish Catholics from down in the valley. Far from being deterred, my mother had always dreamed that someday she would gather both enough money and the social clout that it brought to stake her claim in these mountains, and when at last she had attained them, she wasn’t about to let anything, or anyone, stand in her way.

This became a problem when, having found a home that the whole family loved, my father, who always suspected that everyone was trying to cheat him, dug in his heels when the sellers demanded more money for the place. My mother can become ostentatiously Irish Catholic when circumstances require it, and in this case she quite audibly began making daily novenas to Saint Martin de Porres—the child of a slave woman who became the church’s first black saint, in whose rise she saw a parallel to her own ambitions—asking him to intervene with both God and my father. God certainly seemed amenable. My father finally came around.

He knew she loved the place. It had been built piecemeal beginning in the 1830s and was expanded room by room by a well-to-do farmer, merchant, and timberman named Avery who was spurred on, it’s said, by his love for his younger wife. He built onto it over the next few decades until it reached its rambling twelve-room apex. The house sat back a hundred yards from the road in a ring of seventy-foot
hemlocks, a covered porch along one side of the place, three tall gables rising in front and tying together its disparate elements. By the time we arrived in 1970, old man Avery was long dead, his descendants scattered, and a succession of far less inspired owners and tenants had buried his oak and plaster love song for his wife under 110 years of ugly wallpaper and paint. My mother immediately set down her statue of Saint Martin on the ledge of a gabled second-story window overlooking what would become her garden and set about uncovering its past. Literally. For the first few months we owned the place, my father, my mother, my sister, Saint Martin de Porres, and I lived in a constant toxic cloud of cleaning products and wallpaper remover.

The house and the yard that surrounded it would be my mother’s domain, and she worked like a dervish, believing that she was turning it into a showplace. She spent her days studying swatches of the most garish Victorian wallpaper she could find and perusing catalogues for extravagant glass hanging lamps—a disturbing number of them turned out to be bordello red—and on Sundays she would scour the newspaper for antiques to furnish her dream home. She drew her inspiration, both for her decorating ideas and for her developing farm-woman persona, from the old movies she had seen and from the cheap and lurid novels about frontier women to which she had become addicted.

Before long the rambling old house was so crammed with all manner of antiques—lamps and spinning wheels, handcrafted solid oak tables, carnival glass candy dishes, not to mention the aforementioned clocks, a ticking, whirring swarm of grandmother clocks and old schoolhouse clocks and all the genera and species of cuckoo clocks—that you couldn’t walk from one side of any room to the other without barking your shins on some cloyingly ornate artifact from somebody else’s past, or tripping over one of my mother’s discarded personalities.

And so my father, my sister, and I increasingly took refuge outside the house and beyond the yard. It might have been in part an act of self-defense, but it was then that my old man decided to become a gentleman farmer. It was something he had always wanted to try, a desire instilled in him by his own father, whose dream of escaping the mines and rebuilding the life that
his
father had left behind in County
Mayo never came to pass. But as it turned out, farming didn’t come naturally to my old man.

That became evident the first year we owned the place, when my grandfather turned up with a boxload of potato plants. The three of us enthusiastically carved out a small patch of dirt—about a quarter acre—and stuck the plants into the ground, convinced that we had, by virtue of our roots in Ireland, a genetic talent for raising spuds. In fact, my grandfather had been adept enough with potatoes that he managed to grow a few in the coal ash beds he had built in the dank, dismal basement of his house. Tragically, that gene was not transmitted to my father or me. I will never forget the look of disappointment on my grandfather’s face, or the look of abject shame on my father’s, when, a week after we planted them, all that remained of the potato plants were a few lifeless stalks.

To his credit, though, my father didn’t quit. The way he figured it, his pride now depended on finding a way to make that land produce something, and he also thought that turning his hand to farming would help him earn respect, not just from his father but from the neighbors.

At first, those neighbors, all of them dairy farmers, were baffled by my father. They had spent their lives fighting a never-ending battle to coax enough hay and corn out of this ungenerous soil to keep their herds going for one more year and couldn’t for the life of them understand why anybody would choose to farm if he didn’t have to.

But he was so earnest and insistent as he badgered them for tips on how make a go of the farm that eventually they embraced him. Old Leon Williams, the patriarch of the clan that farmed much of the land around my family’s place, was the first to take him under his wing. It was Leon who nudged him toward beef farming, figuring that it was far less demanding than dairy farming—you could pretty much just fatten them up on grass and hay and let nature do the bulk of the work—and it was Leon who helped him pick out his first tractor, a 1941 Farmall Model A that he bought for $395 and immediately slathered with a coat of lead-infused barn-red paint.