IT IS ALSO SNOWING IN MASSACHUSETTS, WHERE HENRY SITS IN a cabin even smaller than Stephen’s. One room, four windows, a simple porch, and a steeply pitched roof. Marcus, who helped Henry build this place, has told Henry it sits a hundred yards from the site of his parents’ old cabin. The windows frame segments of water and sky similar to those Henry saw as a child.
Across the cluttered table from Henry, Marcus peers at some yellow papers. He has pushed aside the cards and the cribbage board, as he often does when he visits; he comes for a drink and a friendly game, but he ends up telling stories. A pair of bricks may set him off, or an iron hinge, an ancient scythe blade, one of Henry’s family mementos. He has a tale to go with the picture of Henry’s parents at the Farewell Ball, which is tacked to the south wall. He has anecdotes related to Da’s newspaper clippings, which hang from a corkboard on the north wall, and more to go with Da’s “Letters to the Editor,” which frame the window facing east. Lately he’s been telling stories about the papers he now holds in his hands.
The papers come from the briefcase Henry received from Da when he first left Coreopsis; the same briefcase he took from Kitty’s closet at the start of his journey with Brendan. As soon as the cabin was finished, he hung the pictures and the clippings on the walls. Then he leaned the briefcase against the table, where it sat until the night Marcus idly picked it up and ran his fingers over the leather.
“Used to be everything was made like this,” Marcus said. “You don’t see tanning like this anymore.” Marcus slid his fingers inside and commented on the firmness of the stitching. Then he asked Henry what he’d left in the small interior pocket.
“Nothing,” Henry said. The briefcase had never been more to him than the shell surrounding the relics Da had left him, and he’d emptied it carelessly. But Marcus said, “There’s something here,” and then fished four sheets of paper out. A pain shot through Henry’s chest, as if he’d swallowed a seed.
“Your grandfather’s handwriting,” Marcus said. “I think. Do you know what these are?”
Henry bent over the brittle sheets. The writing was cramped and jagged, the pen strokes so shaky that each letter appeared to be fringed. He could not be sure Da had written the pages, nor could he tell where the pages were from. He told Marcus he’d ask his sister what she knew, and then they waited for her answer for two weeks. Still, he counts himself lucky that she writes to him at all.
In July, after Waldo sold the house out from under him, and after Delia announced she didn’t want him at her wedding, Henry had packed his few belongings and then gone to visit his sister. He had nothing, he’d told her then. His job had vanished, his kids didn’t need him, he had no place to live. “I’m going to take off. Make a new start somewhere.” He’d heard the self-pity in his voice, but he hadn’t been able to correct it.
The children had been at Waldo’s and her house had been empty and quiet. She had a spare room, he knew: the place where she’d intended to bring Brendan. For a minute he wondered if she might offer to take him in.
“Again?” she’d said. “You’re leaving again?”
Her voice had been so bitter that he’d been completely surprised. “What again? It’s not like I’ve ever gone anywhere.” At that moment he’d believed his words absolutely. He was fifty years old and he’d never been anyplace interesting; all his travels had been in his dreams.
But Wiloma sat down at the table and wept, and when she could catch her breath, she said, “It’s not like you’ve ever stayed. How could you leave me alone when Da was dying? Where were you when Brendan drowned? You’ve never been here, you’ve always been off with your stupid projects.” Then she told him a story about Da’s last days, which he’d never heard before. “There was a book,” she said; she went up to the attic and returned a few minutes later with a faded, red-bound volume. “This was all I had to get us through it.” She handed it to him. “Where were you?”
He couldn’t remember. Driving, he supposed; that was what he’d always done when he was troubled. He drove Kitty to Niagara Falls, he drove back and forth along the lake, he drove to his new apartment and around the site of his first development. He held Wiloma’s book in his hands and remembered driving very fast and going nowhere. But she couldn’t have thought he meant to abandon her.
“I don’t know where I was,” he said. A wave of guilt swept up from his stomach and then was pushed aside by anger. “Maybe I was around and you didn’t want to see me. Like that night before Brendan and I took off—how come you wouldn’t even say hello?”
“I always talk to you when you’re around,” she said. “When was this?”
He reminded her how he’d stood in front of the community center window and waved at her, how she’d looked right at him and then turned away. “I hate it when you do that,” he said, and all the pain of that moment hit him again. “I hate it when you ignore me.”
“I didn’t see you. Really. I don’t remember seeing you at all.”
And that might have been true—at the reservoir she hadn’t seemed to be aware that she never looked at him. “That’s worse. That you can’t even see me.”
She couldn’t seem to answer him. She looked over his shoulder, out the window, into the trees. Then, finally, she looked at him. “Where are you headed?”
Of course she wasn’t going to offer to take him in. “Massachusetts,” he said. Of course he would have turned down her offer, had she made it. “I want to spend some time on the land Uncle Brendan left us. That’s all.”
Wiloma had let him hold her precious book, but at that she snatched it back from him. “Don’t you touch that land. It’s half mine, it’s mine as much as it’s yours. If you think you’re going to pull some business like you did with Coreopsis—”
“No business. I just need a place to stay for a while, until I figure out what to do.”
She had folded her hands in her lap. “I can’t stop you. When has anyone ever stopped you from doing anything?’
Her neck had rings around it, he saw, and her hands were as creased and worn as his. He gestured toward the book. “Could I borrow that—just for a while? I’d like to have something of Da’s with me.”
She’d let him take the book, which he now keeps on the floor by his cot, but he hadn’t been sure when they’d parted if she’d forgiven him and he’s still sorting out in his mind the acts for which he needs to be forgiven. For a few months he’d heard nothing from her, but then she started writing him letters after she learned that he’d finished the cabin. Cautiously friendly, guardedly open; letters in which he can feel her pushing herself to be kind to him. Guilt may be driving her, or pity or love; or maybe the letters are only a duty her church says she has to perform. Whatever they mean, he is grateful for them. She sends news of Wendy and Win and tries to answer the questions he asks.
Four sheets of paper, he wrote in his last letter to her. Lined, like they came from a notebook. The handwriting’s hard to read, but it looks like Da’s. What do you think they are?
Her answer arrived this morning, and now he reads her letter out loud to Marcus. He skips over the parts about the kids and about the job she plans to take, and also the lines where she asks him, for the tenth or twelfth time, why he’s wasting so much time on these old things. The past is the past, she writes. You can’t change it. And yet each time she writes him she seems to heal a part of their old estrangement.
“Listen to this,” he says to Marcus. “‘Those must be from Da’s notebook. After Gran died, but before Da was so sick he couldn’t hold a pen, he used to scribble things in this notebook with a speckled cover. He never let me see what he was writing. Then one day, after you took off with Kitty, I found the notebook under his bed with some pages torn out. All the pages left in it were blank. Maybe he stuck the ones he’d written in that briefcase before he gave it to you. But why would he give those to you and not to me?’”
Marcus reaches for the letter and reads the passage for himself. Then he asks, “Why would he?”
“I don’t know.”
Marcus shakes his head and pours them both a drink. “Might as well add it to your list.” His tone is mocking but affectionate.
The list Marcus is talking about occupies the back pages of the notebook Henry has been filling: unanswered questions, things to follow up. There are forty or fifty of these. They have to do with his father and the tale Marcus told in the van, which he hardly heard at the time; with Brendan’s request that they visit the dam before the land, which might have changed everything had he granted it; and with a score of other things related to Brendan’s last journey. Who were those people camped out in the house in Coreopsis? Why did Jackson stay in his garage? What happened to the broker in Buffalo who was caught robbing all those banks? And where did that army of uprooted men come from, the men who knocked on his door when he still lived with Kitty and wanted to shovel snow or clean gutters, the carpenter’s helpers and plumber’s assistants who hung around Coreopsis Heights begging for work and who now seem to be everywhere, their lives as twisted as his?
The rest of his notebook is filled with the stories Marcus has told, the information he’s gleaned from books and maps, and the fragments he’s been able to reconstruct of the tales Da and his father and Brendan told. Henry writes in this notebook every night, the act of writing so new, after years of dictating to willing secretaries, that his pen still stutters on the pages. Sometimes he feels like a monk himself, shut inside a medieval cloister and patiently copying manuscripts no one will ever read. Even Marcus, who delights in uncovering obscure facts and useless details, sometimes looks at what Henry’s doing and shakes his head.
“If you’re going to spend your time like this,” he says., “why don’t you put in some more stuff about everyday life before the reservoir? Why don’t you write a real history of what happened to the valley?”
What he means, Henry knows, is Why don’t you put in some more stuff about me? He can’t answer that; he knows that’s the question everyone else at the Visitors’ Center wants to ask as well. The bookshelves at the Center are lined with pamphlets full of facts. What day the men in their fancy suits first came into the valley; their names and ages and occupations; who said what at the endless meetings; what houses were razed and in what order. But the heap of paper he’s accumulating has a logic of its own, and he thinks that if he can understand it, he will understand what he’s doing here.
Marcus moves to the window facing the water. “It’s really coming down out there. We’ll have six inches by morning.”
“You’ll stay over?”
Marcus nods. He often spends the night on Henry’s extra cot; the path to the cabin is rugged and he has nothing to rush home for. Henry reminds himself to set the alarm clock, so he’ll have time to drop Marcus off. A load of sheet-metal stampings is waiting for him at the place in the valley where he sometimes works, and he’s so grateful to have his license back that he almost enjoys loading the pallets, unloading boxes, driving rickety trucks full of metal parts over bad roads. When he returns from his run to Springfield, he may stop at a bar and have three beers. No more—if he has four, he knows he’ll start to feel misunderstood. When he has four, he ends up telling other lonely drunks how he has come to be living like a hermit.
I messed up my marriage, he will say in a small voice. I took something that belonged to my sister and I ruined it. Then I took my uncle on a trip and couldn ‘t save him when he had an accident. Then I came here.
He will tell this over and over again, to anyone who will listen, and no one will understand how he has given up almost everything and gotten so little in return. No one will praise him for his sacrifices; no good luck will fall in his lap and no letters will arrive from his wife and daughters, begging him to come home. Wiloma told him that Delia threw out the framed copy of the Farewell Ball photograph that he sent as a wedding present. Lise won’t answer his letters. No one seems to understand what a struggle it is for him to walk these acres every day and resist the urge to change them.
He rises and stands by Marcus, near the nail from which dangle the knotted ties that didn’t save Brendan. It’s too dark for him to see the reservoir, but despite that he sees his uncle floating below the water and then all he might build on this land. Buildings would block out his visions of Brendan, as they have blocked out everything for years. The temptation to build is terrific; if he had money, he might not be able to resist. But he has no money, and no prospects for getting any.
What he has, instead, are the stories that fill his notebook—the ones Wiloma and Marcus have told him, the ones he remembers from Da and Brendan and his father. When he looks out the window, he sees families jumping off the cliffs at Marpi Point, plums arcing over a wall, Da dying while Wiloma reads to him about snow and water and clouds. He sees Roxanne moving her hands along Brendan’s legs and Marcus shooting into the night, just to be shooting at something. On Makin, Marcus has said, Henry’s father had been brave but he had not, and he had been one of the men who shot at nothing.
Henry wonders if he may be shooting at nothing himself. He might be writing Latin verse in his notebook, for all the good it will ever do; no one will read it, no one will care, his lost family is only one among a million. The words with which he tries to preserve them are only words, no more likely to survive than the words Da scribbled so long ago. And yet Da’s words lie on the table, on the pieces of paper that Marcus has set down, and Henry walks over and makes himself read them again.
The pages, worn and brittle and stained, contain no astounding insights, no solutions, no revelations. They contain no generalizations, no overview of life in the valley before the reservoir, no statistics, no assessments, no blame. Nine short paragraphs, written in a wavering hand and widely spaced. The words are Da’s, but as Henry sits down and begins to copy them, the voice he hears is Brendan’s.
The Paradise Valley was 13 miles long and 4 miles wide at the base. The eastern branch, where we lived, was less than a mile across. Our nearest neighbor, Timothy Dana, made excellent cheese.
We had pigs, cows, and chickens at our place. We raised berries, potatoes, apples, corn, and four kinds of winter squash. I had a pig each year, a pet crow, three black Labs, and Flossie. Flossie had to be put down in 1911.
I met Eileen for the first time outside the feed store in Pomeroy. Her hair was as dark and shiny as Flossie’s coat and parted in the center. She wore it in two long braids, wrapped twice around her head like a crown. Her eyes were blue and her feet were small. She was standing with her father that day.
Her father had a red face and enormous shoulders, but I was taller than him. He never stopped hating me. He brought Eileen and her sister and his wife over from Ireland when Eileen was four, and he worked at the sawmill. He was jealous of our land—we had a large place even without the woodlot, which I bought in 1926.
Brendan’s birth went very easily, but there was a blizzard when Frank junior was born and the doctor couldn’t get to us. Neither could my mother or hers or any of our neighbors. Frank junior was breeched and Eileen was in labor for two days. She told me to do what I did with the calves, but when I reached to turn the baby, I couldn’t get my hand inside. I tried to turn him with my fingers. When he came out he was folded up like a lamb, bent at the waist with his legs against his chest, his face on his knees, his feet and arms over his head. I thought he was dead at first. Later he was a good-looking boy. Eileen was sick for a long time, and we had marital relations very seldom after that.
The apple trees in the orchard were planted before I was born and were 51 years old when we left the valley. We had Wine-saps, Jonathans, Granny Smiths, and a yellow kind Eileen made good pies from. I can’t remember the name of those. The petals fell off the trees in the spring and floated on the pond and scared the cows. That was the pond where Brendan almost drowned.
My father let William Benson keep his beehives under our apple trees. In return, William gave us some of his honey each year. The honeycomb was brittle and delicate, and I kept the wax in my mouth after I sucked the honey out. The wax had no real flavor, but it smelled of apple blossoms and something else, maybe pollen.
Frank junior used to follow Brendan everywhere, but he didn’t follow Brendan into the abbey and I was grateful that I’d been left with one son—the right one, even; Frank was the hardy one. Now I wish he’d followed Brendan in. Brendan looks awful but at least he’s alive. I should have made Frank come to Coreopsis with us.
Our neighbors were Timothy Dana, whose family had lived in the valley forever; the Bourdins and the Gendreaus, French Canadians who came down around the time my grandfather did; and the Gregorys, who came from Ireland when I was a boy. And the monks, of course. On quiet spring evenings after a rain, we could hear them chanting when we went to milk the cows. The whole valley lay under a mist. Some of the shrubs were hinting at green, and the fields had thawed and turned black. The willows were yellow near the pond. The colors seemed very bright against the mist, and through the air, so softly we could not be sure we heard it, came the sound of the men chanting to welcome in the night.