A childhood is a bit like a forest. You enter the world, and the trees and the stones and the creeks and the bright spots and dark corners are already there, waiting for you. I knew this business between my father and Lyman—the move toward the edge of constant violence, the fear of what would happen next, the volatility of two men who in their paranoia saw threat to their families, the desperation of it all—had something to do with the war. Though decades had passed, both men still carried it with them.
Beyond that, I was only starting to conceive of the harshness of my father’s life before us. I had never known my grandparents on his side. I had never been to the scrub-grass farm downeast where the dawn light first brushed the land, and where he grew up staring out at the waters of the Quoddy Narrows, honing his urge to keep things alive on goats and draft horses and mixed-breed hounds, and wrestling to keep the tractors and crop dusters running. He’d grown up there with his uncle Harlan. When Harlan died, my father sold the farm and headed down the coast to Penobscot Bay and the little town of Seal Point. His life growing up must have been tremendously lonely. The only child, miles away from the nearest town, pressed against the easternmost point in the entire United States. Water and wind so heavy and present, you screamed to escape it. Both his parents had more or less been children still when he was born. In his free time, his father was supposedly a canoe builder, and good at it, but he spent most of his life chasing road-crew gigs dumping fresh tar onto rural highways. It’s an old and awful story: Two kids deeply in love. Two different worlds. A child with no place in either. The girl’s family are not accepting or forgiving people, so the boy vanishes because he has to. One night the girl takes her father’s car out on the roads, atop the cliffs holding back the sea, and skips a turn. In the child left behind, people see his mother’s long eyelashes and brown eyes streaked with wires of gold. They ignore the dark, chiseled features that are his father’s. The boy is not handsome but beautiful, like a doll, the type of child normally heaped with adoration, trailed by constant touch. They feel such guilt at what happened to his mother that were they to pick the boy up and comfort him or make a shadow puppet on the wall or slip a small toy into his hand, they would surely shatter. So they do none of these things. And the child is left behind, raised by an uncle who may be rough, but is at least composed of more love than hate.
My father chose to believe that his history began with us: with the river, the bay, our mother, our world. And I knew he would do anything to protect us. What I knew of my father’s past, I had mostly learned over the years from Reggie, and it was again to Reggie I turned in the middle of our strife, for answers perhaps, but above all else for solace.
After Cal Hayes pulled us out of school and our father turned the bateau into ash, I headed to the hotel, knowing Reggie would be there. It was a Thursday afternoon before a four-day weekend, and I was relieved to have the space to do nothing and avoid everyone. The ceiling fans spun through heavy air. The doors and windows were open against the humidity. Having arrived at October, the true end of the tourist season, the whole place was empty, and I was grateful for this too.
The hotel was three stories tall and connected to a single-story bar built from the same weathered bricks. A faded wooden sign hung above each business, one announcing the s. l. robbins tavern and the other the e. h. coombs hotel. Around the turn of the century, when Seal Point was a shipbuilding center and thriving lumber port, a man named Sutton Robbins had run the bar, which also enjoyed a curious secondary life as a women’s clothing store, while a man named Emmitt Coombs ran the neighboring hotel. Recognizing that drunks and boarders were of a common community, the two men knocked a hole through the adjoining wall and framed a door to connect the businesses. After flourishing for a few years, the partnership reached its point of division in 1907, when Robbins was caught attending a little too intimately to Coombs’s wife in the fitting room and Coombs later walked into the bar and shot Robbins in the throat with a Colt single-action revolver. Reggie had never bothered taking the signs down. Convinced the whole place was haunted, my uncle and I had a routine that dated back years. I’d show up, pick a table, have him draw a salt-line circle around the table, and then sit down. When he stepped over the salt line and joined me, proving he was indeed my uncle, not some malevolent spirit, I’d settle in, order a grape soda, and stay until he drove me home or my parents picked me up. Maybe it was over-the-top, the whole production, maybe it was a bit foolish and childish, but it was ours.
When my uncle came over with a container of salt this day, I waved him off. “Not this time, Reggie.”
He shrugged and sat down beside me. “Do you remember when I wanted to be a lawyer for a while? When I worked in Louisiana doing civil rights shit one summer and lived in that terrible hotel without air-conditioning, the one where everything smelled like ashtrays and cats.”
“I wasn’t born then, Reggie.”
“That doesn’t mean you can’t remember it still.” I didn’t know back then what he meant. “Anyways, when I was in Louisiana, I started having these dreams. I was down in the south. It was the only time I’d really been away from home, from my history. The dreams were too vivid. And I guess I drank them right under, because they went away for a long time. Came back when I got sober and bought this money pit.” He gestured out over the bar and hotel lobby. “These dreams, well, they weren’t in English. They came from an entirely different life than the one I’d lived. That’s what frightened me so much.”
Sorting back through my own dreams, I was unable to identify any language in them at all. I could see people and animals and places. I could feel these things communicating, sometimes even see their mouths moving, but I could recall no sound, no spoken words. Reggie said he couldn’t retain enough detail when he woke to identify the language, but he believed it was one of the languages under the Eastern Algonquin tree.
“You have to be real careful, though,” he said. “I’m just some white guy. And it’s real easy to open your mouth and become some white guy who’s a real jerk.”
Reggie told me one of his ancestors had fathered two children with a Maliseet woman in the Allagash up near the Telos Cut. He was pretty sure they’d survived the French and Indian Wars and been cared for by some later generation of cousins. “So I thought maybe those children accounted for the language dreams. I stopped fighting the dreams. Things got better.”
“Accounted for them how?” I wanted to know.
“I think our ancestors give us gifts we’re supposed to keep safe. Sometimes it’s a trait or a tradition passed down by a parent. Sometimes it’s really clear. Arnoux builds boats like no one can believe. You have Arnoux’s hands. It doesn’t matter what you do with them. Maybe you’ll bake bread, lay bricks, be a doctor and save lives. The point of the gift is to hang on to it for future generations. I started thinking maybe those kids needed someone to leave something with.”
I flexed my small, creased hands, which were indeed quick and capable for my age. They could tie an intricate bird snare, snap on three fingers, play my mother’s piano, and throw a baseball with delicious speed and accuracy. But I had never thought about my hands saving a life. I liked the idea very much and was terrified by it as well.
I grabbed the container of salt from behind the bar and poured a thick line around the table. Then I stepped over it and sat back down to my soda. Reggie lifted an eyebrow. “Honestly,” he said. “I liked the idea of not having to sweep for once.”
“It’s tradition,” I said. “Didn’t feel right without it.”
“Funny how that works, isn’t it? Go home, Almy, get some rest. Hug your brothers. Kiss your mom. Tell your dad he’s an asshole for burning your boat. We need to get going early tomorrow.”
“Going?”
“I need your help this weekend, and since you’re here hiding inside a salt line and nursing the shit out of a grape soda, I’d say you might need mine too.”
That night I fell asleep thinking of Reggie’s words about family, about gifts, about what we’re given and charged to hold for others. It was early when I woke. The rest of the house was silent. I found Reggie in the yard, sitting on the hood of his truck and watching the sun come up through the woods.
“You could have come inside,” I said.
Reggie shook his head, slid off the hood. “Go pack a bag. Pack it light.”
My head felt too full, and behind my eyes a sharp ache was developing. I could see the light getting full and green around the woods and hear the birds coming into the world and smell the mixing of gravel and sawdust in the wind.
A blue tarp was tied down over the truck bed. I was picturing the woods, camping for a few days, fishing, being free of the mess Link and I had made. When Reggie pulled the tarp back, I saw another truth: a pickup filled with sixty-pound concrete blocks and several squares of cedar shingles.
“That’s a lot of weight.” I did the quick math like my father had taught me. “Gonna ruin your truck.”
Reggie shrugged, pushed the tarp back down, adjusted some shingles. “Probably. So go get ready before it gives out.”
Reggie and my mother owned a rough cabin on East Grand Lake, out along the New Brunswick side of the Canadian border. The camp was surrounded by twenty acres of remote forest and sat high on a wooded ledge overlooking the lake. Seventy-seven stone steps led from the edge of the lake up the ridge to the cabin. On the other side, a mile-long gravel two-track connected the land back to a rural Canadian road. The cabin was sitting on posts that were starting to rot. Reggie’s plan was to jack up the cabin and level the footprint, then lay a foundation of concrete blocks. When the new foundation was completed, we’d maneuver the structure onto the blocks using a come-along. Our final task would be re-siding the north face of the cabin with the cedar, a comparatively easy goal. I avoided the obvious observation: that a bit more help, from my brothers or even my mother and father, would have made this entire plan infinitely more plausible, if somehow less romantic.
We drove four hours north and east through the Maine woods. East Grand was twenty-two miles long and four miles thick at its widest point. While many were drawn there because of the abundance of landlocked salmon and various species of trout, I was fascinated by its natural beauty and strange mythical quality. The international boundary between Maine and New Brunswick sliced through the middle of the lake, and one could set out from the shore of America in a rowboat and within an hour be straddling the demarking line between two countries while listening to the ghostly call of a loon circle through the pines. My brothers and I would spend entire afternoons holding the rowboat on the exact line through the water where the two countries met. One hundred and forty feet beneath us, the teeming bottom of the lake peered up and watched. We had studied maps. Done our own surveying. Consulted area experts at length about the basin’s geography. The great northern lake became for me a place that managed to slip through a crack in the known world. It was a little like being nowhere and everywhere all at once.
Finally we pulled down a fire road that ended in a clearing at the edge of the American side of the lake. Goldenrod and aster colored the land purple and yellow. A wide rowing boat was pulled up on shore. The boat had a tight lapped hull and was painted a striking white. I recognized the design as one of my father’s immediately. The centerline was breathtaking, rising high at the bow and stern before swooping and flattening along the boat’s middle. It reminded me of a smaller but no less regal version of the old Viking longships I’d seen in history books.
Across the water was a dense granite ledge. Atop the ledge, nestled among the trees, was the cabin. “We’re on the wrong side,” I said.
As I looked around, it became clear what was going on, and obvious that the point was grueling work, with no mind paid to the sensibleness of the method.
“Let me get this straight,” I said. “You want to row hundreds of pounds of concrete and wood across a lake and then haul it up to a ledge.”
“More or less.”
“There’s a road into the camp.”
“Washed out two years ago. Never bothered fixing it. Plus I hate driving into another country. You make that type of crossing through water. It’s tradition.”
“This is insane,” I said.
“I’m not asking you to become a French voyageur, paddle fifty-five strokes a minute, carry two hundred seventy pounds of fur pelts over your shoulders. Don’t be dramatic about it.”
“I’d rather not drown doing something preposterously stupid with my uncle before I even get a driver’s license.”
“Look,” Reggie said. “You’re a dreamer.” It was no secret that I was an ill-formed and amorphous kid, lost in my own head, guilty of letting stories feel more real than reality, chronically watching others and imagining outlandish triumphs and defeats. “Lying around worrying about what’s happening fixes nothing. You need to do something physical, exhaust the body to tame the mind. Plus think about how many people have undertaken something like this in a rowboat. You’ll be a legend.”
“If I live,” I grumbled. I rarely questioned Reggie. But I wanted to be back home. I wanted to know what was happening with the mill fire. I wanted to know what was happening with my mother and Link and my father and Lyman. Mostly I wanted to see Wren, who I had hardly seen or spoken with since she’d rescued us that night on the water.
“I feel like we’re running away,” I said.
Reggie gripped my shoulder. “Being away for a bit isn’t running away, Almy. Sometimes it’s okay to get a little space to breathe.”
From there, I could find no energy to argue. Instead I climbed out of the truck and got to work. The rowboat was fourteen feet long and could carry eight hundred pounds. We calculated we’d need to make three trips across the lake, and decided to begin with the concrete, saving the cedar for a respite at the end of this game of madness in which we were about to engage. By noon we had the first load ready and set out across the water. It was clear, calm, and hot, and after the initial fear subsided, the pleasant rhythm of rowing absorbed my body. I began to believe we would not only survive the trip but also perhaps enjoy it. Halfway across the lake something shifted in Reggie’s body language. He stopped rowing, grabbed a pair of binoculars, eyed the trees around the camp for a long time without speaking.
“What?”
He tucked the binoculars back in their case, retrieved the oars, and plunged the blades beneath the surface. “Nothing. Keep rowing.”
Farther on I saw it too, the glint of something in the trees, moving across the camp windows from inside. “Someone’s up there.”
“That happens,” he said. “People come through hiking.”
“Then how come you look so nervous?”
“I always look nervous. Less talking, more rowing. They’ve seen us too, so we might as well keep at it.”
There was a man standing in the tiny camp kitchen when we got to the cabin. Reggie walked directly past him, opened the icebox, and pulled out a water jug nestled among several bottles of beer. No one spoke. The silence heightened the menace, and I felt every inch of my heart hammering in my chest. Though the man had kept his footprint tidy, it was apparent still—clothes hanging to dry around the woodstove, a sleeping bag rolled out in the corner, a few dishes washed and dried and stacked beside the sink basin—and I couldn’t help but feel like we were the sudden, silent intruders barreling into his world.
Reggie moved his body two steps to the left, coming around so he stood between the stranger and me. “At least you packed in some ice,” he said. A green canvas duffel bag was slumped in a pile by the door. Reggie pointed at it while drinking. “Special forces?”
“That was a long time ago,” the man said. He was solidly built with deep blue eyes and dark skin. His eyes took their time moving around the room, taking us in, taking everything in. “I’m not armed,” he said.
“Except for the beer,” said Reggie. “I hear they make good bags, the army.”
No smile from the man, no motion in him at all. In fact, he was eerily still. “You like a show, don’t you?” he said after a while.
“It’s a bad habit.” Reggie blushed a little at being found out. “I’m afraid I was born to be the fool. Here’s the deal. We’ve got at least five hundred pounds of concrete that needs to be unloaded from a rowboat. Good squatters make good workers. How about it, then?” My uncle extended his hand. “I’m Reggie,” he said. The other man didn’t move. “And this is my nephew, David. We call him Almy. He’s the greatest human being you’ll ever meet. He just doesn’t know it yet. My brother-in-law left the war too.”
“Who said anything about leaving any war?” The sudden edge to the man’s soft voice was impossible to miss.
“I just did.”
“Boy, you’ve got a nose for assumptions then.”
The word fell across the air like a slap, bold and chiding. For a moment I thought Reggie might let his hand drop back to his side, but he didn’t. Slowly the man reached out and gripped it.
“Let’s start with names,” said my uncle. “What can we call you?”
“When I’m being straight,” the man said, “Roman Fitch. When I’m feeling grandiose, a patriot.”
“Grandiose.” Reggie smirked. “I might like you, Roman.”
“This brother-in-law,” Roman said to me. “Is that your father, great man?”
I blushed, nodded, and felt like I could have awkwardly stood there searching for something to say for days.
We spent all afternoon and most of the night rowing and hauling the concrete and cedar up to the cabin. In the morning we would start the construction work. The initial edginess of coming upon one another faded into the pleasant and distracted camaraderie of communal work. Sitting together at day’s end with my muscles howling and my mind beat, I fully fixed my attention on Roman Fitch for the first time.
“Get a good eyeful now,” he said.
“Sorry.” It struck me that his complexion was as dark as the flat black spines of the Penguin Classics books that lined my mother’s office shelves. I felt my face flame with embarrassment at the observation.
“Don’t apologize for shit,” said Roman. “You’re just looking at me like everyone else does in the whitest place in the world.”
“Can I be honest?”
“That remains to be seen.”
“I was kind of imagining you as a book cover. Like those old Penguin Classics.”
“A book cover? Yeah, you gotta look elsewhere now. That’s messed up. I take it all back. Never look at me again.”
It turned out Roman Fitch had been born outside of Cincinnati and had grown up in Jackson County, Kentucky. It was a pretty place, lush and green and thick with mountain heat and music, and it wasn’t an overall bad place, but it was a vindictive place. He was drafted at nineteen and deserted at twenty-three. After that he lived in New York City, teaching healthy forms of dissent and conscientious objection, until his marriage fell apart and Gerald Ford’s clemency program gave draft dodgers a path to redemption but made war deserters even bigger pariahs. He told us he’d left something awful and doubted that his punishment, as unjust as it was, would ever end. He said he’d ruined his marriage with booze and other women, blamed it on living too close to death during the war, when it was really driven by guilt, fear, and shame. He’d been on the move ever since. Guile, displacement, and fear had become his guiding principles. Sudden and intense bouts of camaraderie, much like what we were experiencing at the lake, and his nine-year-old daughter, Khali, who lived with his mother in Hell’s Kitchen, were the only things that reaffirmed for him that the world was ultimately still good.
“Why here?” Reggie asked. The question had been gnawing away beneath our work the entire day. “What brought you to this place?”
“North is an old fantasy,” said Roman. “North means safety, freedom. Maybe it is. Or maybe it’s all bullshit. During the Civil War a bunch of draft dodgers fled up here. They started a community on a ridge. Locals called them skeddadlers and their spot Skeddadle Ridge. They called their home Musquash, and they stayed there for about a decade, living in a kind of communal utopia. Others came. Conscientious objectors. Deserters. Shit, they had fifteen families in Musquash at one point. Even had a little post office and a school. Then they all vanished. I thought I’d head up there and see what got left behind. This was as far as I got.”
Reggie took the story in for a moment. “Desertion,” he finally said. “It seems like the worst reason to kick a man off the ark.”
“I’m sorry I broke in,” said Roman.
Reggie shrugged. “I leave the door open and the solar battery hooked up. It’s practically an invitation. Stay as long as you like.”
“I don’t stay well.”
That night I struggled to shake the incongruity of my father and Roman Fitch’s paths. I stayed up late thinking about how second chances were one of the great American lies. The war had ended twenty-five years ago, yet it hunted Roman still. My father had fled the same war but skated through to another life, what most would call a good life. I wondered why some people came through damage and arrived at wholeness, while others came through damage into more damage and heartache. It was impossible not to think of my father’s exodus to Seal Point and his hermitage there, the result of which was our tiny family. The moment Roman Fitch deserted, an act that many saw as a declaration of war against one’s own country, his blackness had made it impossible for him to ever have what my father had. With enough charm at his back, with enough value to the people around him, Arnoux might be tolerated. He might even be fully forgiven someday. But Roman Fitch had been born into a cruel America satisfied with its decision to give him the one and only act of forgiveness it thought he deserved: it had let his black body survive, let it scrape together an existence as a child and a son and then a young adult. It had allowed him to make it that far, and it had asked one thing in return: service. Roman Fitch had thanked it by becoming a betrayer. After his act of defiance, my father was given another chance, but Roman Fitch would never be anything other than a traitor in the eyes of his country.
The heat inside the cabin was stifling. Reggie had gone outside to sleep. Saddened by the world, I stood and breathed in the scent of the camp and its feeling of held time—the leather-bound books walling the loft on bowed shelves and the hand grinder for coffee and the black iron cookstove and the scuffed-up heart-pine floors. I had been here often over the years, and still it held all the rustic promise, comfort, and safety I’d loved when I first visited it as a small child. I knew nowhere else in the world like East Grand. Here everything had a place, and nothing seemed to move or diminish. The pairs of old slippers and mud boots lined up beside the woodstove. The massive brass jar sitting on a shelf and filled with pennies. Tattered purple and blue and plaid work shirts and barn coats arranged on nails, waiting to be removed for wear at specific times for specific tasks. Maps and stretched animal skins neatly tacked to the walls. There was a particular order to these objects that seemed to stop time.
The loft was designed in a horseshoe around the small upstairs. The north side was furnished with a Japanese platform bed my mother had built from harvested white pine one summer when she was a teenager. There was a dresser and a vanity that had belonged to my grandmother, and two expandable mahogany steamer trunks filled with winter gear and wool blankets. The south side opened into a windowed alcove that looked through the conifers down across the lake. It was furnished simply with a small roll-top writing desk. A few candles were set about in jars. Two twin mattresses were built into the walls on board platforms that could be pulled down and folded back up. A narrow catwalk connected the two ends of the loft.
I was in the loft looking at the books when Roman found me. “That’s a good one,” he said.
I hadn’t been paying much attention. My finger was resting on A Fable by William Faulkner.
“Only time in history people decided to put down their guns and stop fighting a war. Too bad it’s fiction.”
“I don’t get it. What’s so bad about saying you won’t do something awful?”
“You’re as simple as a child, but the thing is you aren’t a child anymore.”
I was hurt but had no way of proving otherwise.
“Everyone wanted to leave. Only some of us had the guts to do it and shame our all-American mothers and fathers. I’ve been called scum, nigger, coward, cockroach, turncoat, traitor, and combinations of profanity I won’t get into. But you gotta break a cycle somehow, even if doing it kills you.”
Roman was studying the selection of books as well. “Try this one sometime.” He pointed to The Destruction of Black Civilization by Chancellor Williams. “And this.” And then to The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James.
“What are they about?”
“Being a fucked-up human being.”
Silence filled the hot air between us. The old dusty walls seemed to draw nearer, as if we were standing inside some ancient wooden lung. I pulled both books off the shelf and cradled them in my hands, turning them over, studying their weight, their look, taking in their smell and feel.
“Your uncle’s a weird dude,” Roman finally said.
“Yeah, I guess he is.”
“It was stupid calling him out earlier. I got it in my head that Canada was safer. But getting somewhere safer doesn’t mean getting dumb once you’re there.”
“Are there safe places?”
Roman shrugged. “Some people always live underneath a bootheel. But sometimes the heel lifts up just enough that you can’t see it for a bit.”
I found my thoughts drifting back down the bay, to Lyman Creel, to the girl he had assaulted on the river, and to the assault Link and I had carried out on him, proving ourselves no better or worse.
“I’m tired,” Roman said, “and it’s foolish hot up here. Think I’ll sleep in that rowboat down on the water.”
“I’ll read them,” I said as Roman walked away. “The books.”
He nodded slightly without turning. “That’d be a start.”
We lived alongside Roman Fitch for four days, until the foundation had been dug and set, the camp moved, and the walls entirely reshingled. When we shook hands down at the shore before climbing back into the rowboat to leave, Roman said he didn’t plan to stay too long. Probably just through the fall. He’d do what he could around the property to leave it better than he’d found it.
Our last night together, our muscles screaming from an entire day hammering shingles in place, we set out into town, a collection of rutted logging roads, bait shacks, a scandalous-looking roadhouse, and a small diner where the cooks and waitress switched between speaking French and English, depending on which choice would yield either the largest tip or the least trouble, as the area was as notorious for bumbling and entitled tourists as it was for loggers who liked to drink, fight, and grab.
Roman wanted to go to the roadhouse, a low-slung, concrete building. Old cigarette smoke bled from the walls. The floor was perpetually damp and sticky with beer and haphazard mopping jobs. We’d gotten inside and up to the bar itself, several long sheets of plywood butted together and propped on sawhorses, before the bartender spotted me, shook his head, and pointed at the door.
“Not happening, Reggie.” The man’s soft, reedy voice carried the slightest southern accent. He was wearing a leather apron and had a long silver ponytail, tied back with a piece of leather cord.
“Really, Tripp?” said Reggie. “You’re picking now of all times to finally turn adolescent business away?”
“Gotta make a stand sometime.” The proprietor, Tripp, disappeared into a room behind the bar. When he came back, he was holding a plate of fried haddock sandwiches. He tossed the plate down on a folding card table set up in the corner of the room. He poured two glasses of beer and then, of all things, a glass of milk. He looked from me to Reggie, and then to Roman. “This doesn’t mean I like any of you. Anyone else comes in here and decides they want to stab or shoot you, which has been known to happen, it’s not my problem.”
A long and pleasant silence filled the bar. The fish was grilled to perfection and slathered with lemon-dill mayo. I realized that Tripp, like most people my uncle knew, was far less the outlaw than he tried to seem, and a certain heaviness sank on me at the sheer spectacle of having to watch all the men I’d ever known challenge, groom, uphold, and coddle each other’s masculinity. We finished our sandwiches and, not knowing what else to do, rose to leave. As we were heading out the door, Tripp said, “Hey, you. Reggie’s friend.”
Roman’s shift was slight but unmistakable. His body began to lengthen and bristle, while his head sank and his eyes swept sideways, as if trying to go small and slide from the scene. An instant later Roman’s shoulders were back and his head up again.
“Fuck Vietnam,” Tripp said. “It was a useless war.” Then he went back to poorly mopping the roadhouse floor.