The Fisherman (11 page)

IV

Right around the time Cornelius starts counting his age in three digits is when plans are being drawn up for the Reservoir. New York City is living beyond its means, and someone has to make up the difference. Spoken like a true upstater, right? I assume you know the story. After some discussion, the powers-that-be in the City and State decide to dam the Esopus and turn the valley behind it into a lake. This doesn’t go down so well with the people whose houses, land, and businesses are going to be at the bottom of said lake, and they do what they can to fight the plan. Cornelius is at the forefront of that struggle, spending no small part of his fortune hiring lawyers and buying politicians in an effort to convince the City that the water from the Adirondacks would taste much better. Initially, there are a few, hopeful signs, but that soon changes. In the thirst of all those people, Cornelius has finally encountered a force he can’t overcome. The Reservoir is approved for the Esopus valley.

It’s a massive undertaking. Eleven and a half towns have to be relocated to higher ground. In some cases, this means entire buildings, houses, churches, will be moved. Whatever isn’t being moved has to be destroyed, burned if it can be, torn down and carted away if it can’t. Every last piece of greenery, every tree, bush, and shrub, must be uprooted. Even the cemeteries have to be emptied. You’ve read Alf’s book, so you know what I’m talking about. You can appreciate why the old-timers, the ones whose families were living here before the Reservoir, have less than kind feelings for the City, even now.

As you might imagine, the Reservoir’s construction draws a host of workers to the area, which is how Lottie and her family enter the story. She, her mother Clara, and two younger sisters, Gretchen and Christina, come up from the Bronx with her father. Rainer Schmidt’s an interesting fellow. In the old country, he was an educated man, a professor of philology—that’s the study of languages, in case you didn’t know. Apparently, the man could speak something like half a dozen languages, and read another three or four besides. He taught at the University of Heidelberg, and was quite the rising young star. In the university system over in Germany, it takes you a long time to become a full professor. Before that, you’re a kind of glorified gofer. Rainer had made professor at the age of twenty-nine, which I gather was a real accomplishment. The essays he wrote were read and debated all over Europe; the book he was working on was eagerly anticipated.

He was a striking-looking fellow. Not especially tall, but he carried himself as if he were, the residue of a boyhood spent in military schools. His face was long, the majority of it taken up by a nose that joined a pair of deep-set eyes to a full mustache. Together, he and Clara made quite the couple. She was nearly as tall as he was, and she wore her head of brown hair up. Her face was broader than his, her features more evenly proportioned. The three girls favored their mother; though Lottie’s eyes had inherited something of her father’s sharpness. A fine, upstanding young family, you would have said.

Then something happened. Lottie wasn’t too clear on exactly what it was, but it concerned a book Rainer was studying. Whatever he did got him drummed out of his school and made it impossible for him to find work at any others. It must’ve been pretty spectacular, because Lottie told Reverend Mapple that she could remember people crossing to the other side of the street when she and her papa were out walking. Once the family had gone through what savings they had, and no sign of another job for Rainer anywhere on the horizon, they decided a move was in order, to some place with new horizons, where no one had heard of whatever it was Rainer had done. Lottie’s mother, Clara, had a sister who’d immigrated to the Bronx years ago, and now ran her own bakery and restaurant. She wrote to her, and the sister sent them the money for their passage.

Once they arrive in New York, they all go to work in the sister’s establishment. Since she paid their way, I guess that’s only fair. Rainer, who numbers English among the languages he speaks, tutors the rest of the family in it each night. Things trundle along like this for a good two years, and then Rainer, who’s moved up to working the counter in the bakery, hears from one of his customers that there’s going to be a massive new construction project upstate and that they’re looking for workers. A skilled laborer, the customer says, a stonemason or a machinist, can do quite well for himself and his family. Rainer finds out whom he needs to talk to, and goes to see the man the following morning. Somehow, he convinces the fellow who interviews him that he’s a stonemason, highly skilled, one of the finest in Germany, who’s done work on some of the most important buildings in Heidelberg. I guess being a professor helps you fake your way through all kinds of situations. After all, when was the last time you heard one of them say he didn’t know something? The man asks Rainer if he and his family can be at the work camp within the next couple of weeks. Sure, sure, Rainer says, no problem. He leaves that office with a new job he has no idea how to perform and two weeks to learn, in a place whose location he isn’t exactly sure of and which he’s going to have to convince his family they need to leave for in that same two weeks.

Through some combination of skill and luck, Rainer succeeds in both tasks. How he does, I can’t imagine. All I can say is, with powers of persuasion like that, I can’t see how he ever lost his job in the first place. Three weeks to the day after the interview finds the Schmidt family living in one of the four room houses the company provides for its married workers. What they thought they could take with them, they have. Only, they overestimated the size of their lodgings, which means that things are a bit cramped. You have to step carefully to avoid knocking over a pile of books or breaking this or that box of dishes. Lottie’s aunt wasn’t happy to have them all up and moving so quickly, but she agreed to store whatever they couldn’t bring until they send for it. Clara isn’t too happy, nor are Lottie, Gretchen, and Christina, with their new accommodations. When he described the place they’d be moving into, Rainer promised little less than a mansion. What they found was little more than a roughly built shack with no running water and no toilet. Compared to her husband and daughters, Clara’s English isn’t especially good—she spent most of her time in her sister’s bakery in the kitchen, helping with the baking—and here she’s living next to other women whose English isn’t especially good. A few are German, a few Austrian, but most are from places like Italy, Russia, and Sweden. One of their next door neighbors is from Hungary. For the better part of the first month they’re at the camp, Lottie lies awake at night, listening to her parents arguing.

V

It’s about this time—I’m talking the fall of 1907, when the first construction on the Reservoir is starting—that Cornelius Dort finally gives up the ghost. He’s not yet surrendered the idea of halting the Reservoir’s construction, and to that end has summoned a team of lawyers to his house to discuss possible strategies for doing so. As he walks down the front walk to meet them, Cornelius stops where he was, shudders, and looks down at the ground beneath his feet. His face twists into a look—one of the lawyers who sees it describes it as “the look of a man striding across a frozen river who realizes with sudden horror that the ice he has been traversing has become too thin to support his weight.” Cornelius shudders again, drops to the ground, and in the time it takes the lawyers to rush up to him, is gone. Story is that final expression, eyes starting from their sockets, lips curled back, remains on his face all the way to the grave.

Cornelius’s passing puts the axe to any lingering hopes folks in the valley might have been nursing that the Reservoir, not them, will be moved. To tell the truth, from everything I’ve read, once those fellows down in the City set their sights on having their water from the Catskills, it was only a matter of time before the valley was underwater. At the end of his life, though, for pretty much the first and only time in it, Cornelius Dort became something like a hero to folks. His meanness, his cunning, his ruthlessness, all those qualities that earned people’s abiding hate, when they were turned against a common foe, were transformed into virtues, into almost heroic assets. There’s a considerable turnout for his funeral, which, interestingly enough, takes place over in Woodstock. This is a good couple of years before the valley’s cemeteries start being dug up and their inhabitants moved to dryer beds. It seems that, despite the efforts he was making, Cornelius had seen the handwriting on the wall. Turns out he’d already had little Bea’s body exhumed and transferred to the Woodstock cemetery almost a year earlier. No one could recall it having happened, but with all the fuss over the Reservoir, who can keep track of such things? A few people remark that, in death, Cornelius is admitting defeat in a way he never did in life, but what more is there to say?

With Cornelius gone, everyone assumes that the Dort estate will go to the nearest relative, a cousin living up in Phonecia. You can appreciate that young man’s surprise, not to mention everyone else’s, when who should reappear but Cornelius’s long-ago Guest, claiming the estate for his own. He must be well into his eighties, if not older, but the years have been kind to the man. Kind, they’ve been positively generous. Some say it’s as if the man hasn’t aged at all. Obviously, this can’t be the case. But he must dye his hair and beard, because they’re as black as the day he first came riding out of the west, and his face shows none of the lines you’d expect the decades to have carved onto it. The Guest declares that he has a copy of Cornelius’s will to support his claim, which, when the inevitable pack of lawyers descends on the situation, turns out to be the case. There is a will, and it’s legitimate. The cousin is outraged. While there’d certainly been no love lost between him and Cornelius, neither has he had any reason to suspect the old man was plotting a slap in the face like this. There’s a story that, once the lawyers have departed and the Guest retreated to his new property, the cousin sneaks into the house and takes everything he can lay his hands on, but, if that’s true, no charges are ever filed.

It’s going on twenty years since Cornelius’s Guest was last glimpsed by anyone. For younger folks, it’s as if a character from a storybook stepped off the page. For older folks, it’s as if someone you haven’t seen in years stepped from the last time you saw them to now, skipping all the years in between. With his return comes a change in the stranger’s behavior. No longer furtive, the man begins appearing all over the place, as if inheriting Cornelius’s fortune has given him substance he formerly lacked. He spends most of his time at the spring, conducting experiments that consist, so far as anyone can tell, of lowering different lengths of rope and chain into the water. Those who observe this activity assume the Guest is measuring the spring’s depth. But why he should be so concerned with such matters, when the spring is going to be at the bottom of the Reservoir, no one can guess. People assume he’s a scientist, or maybe a crack-pot inventor. He does the same thing at spots up and down the Esopus, casting the end of a length of rope or chain out into the water, waiting a couple of minutes, then hauling it back in. There are markings on the ropes and chains, which no one is close enough to read but which seem like units of measurement. A few folks say the man mumbles to himself all the while he’s doing whatever it is he’s doing. Keeping time, could be. If he notices anyone watching him, he tips his hat to them, then returns to his work. That gesture, that tip of the hat, bothers whoever’s on the receiving end of it. There’s mockery in the touch of hand to hat, not enough to be insulting, but more than enough to make a person self-conscious. There’s a kind of warning to it, too, as if the man is saying, “Okay, you’ve seen me: now run along.” There are few who see it who don’t leave off their viewing and go straight home.

Pretty soon, the Guest is once again the center of rumor. What with everything, people in the valley are under a lot of stress, so any behavior like the stranger’s is bound to set their imaginations, not to mention their tongues, running. More than one person claims they’ve seen the Guest walking around the spring late on a moonlit night with a tall, white-haired man they swear was Cornelius Dort. Old Otto Schalken’s brother, Paul, out for a walk one afternoon, sees the Guest strolling the Dort orchards, accompanied by a woman wearing a black dress and a long, black veil. The sight of her inspires such a rush of fear in Paul that he bolts for home, running all the way to his front door as if the very devil himself were after him. As far as anyone knows, the stranger is the sole inhabitant of the Dort house, the last of the servants having been dismissed once the lawyers upheld the man’s claim to the estate. There are nights, however, when every window in the house, from top to bottom and all around the sides, is ablaze with light that frames the silhouettes of men and women behind them. Voices drift across the open air. Though no one can make out what they’re saying, a few folks claim to hear Cornelius’s tones mixed in with them. Most likely, the fellow was just hosting a party or two, but no one sees the guests coming or going.

VI

Meanwhile, at long last, Lottie Schmidt’s family has started to settle into life at the camp. Rainer gets on well as a stonemason. Most of the other masons are Italian, some brought over from Italy expressly for this job, and Rainer speaks Italian with sufficient fluency to make a good impression on his co-workers—management, too, who appreciate his ability to translate. Clara decides what can’t be cured must be endured, and finds herself a job in the camp’s bakery. Lottie goes with her. Her sisters, Gretchen and Christina, attend the camp school. Rainer is making good money. A stonemason could bring home about three dollars a day; I don’t know what the modern equivalent of that is, but, apparently, for a man with a wife and three daughters to take care of, it’s all right. Between both parents’ jobs, the Schmidts are able to repay Clara’s sister, and then begin putting something away for the house they want to buy. Clara has dreams of returning to the City, to be close to her sister, while Rainer’s thinking that Wiltwyck might be nice to settle in. I doubt it’s the life either of them expected when they married, but they’re doing well at it.