Stillwater Trade paper - 2003

Details

• Title Stillwater
• Author Weld, William F.
• Binding Trade Paper
• Edition First Edition Fi
• Pages 240
• Language EN
• Publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Date 2003-08-01
• ISBN 9780156027236

The Swift River Valley

WHEN I was fifteen years old, I fell in love for the first and hardest time, I had my first tastes of inhumanity, and I watched every person I knew lose everything.

In a brief time I had the good fortune to see it all: the life that was lived in the five towns when we thought it would go on forever, the rumor of the plan to flood the Valley, the foreboding that grew like a fog around us, the destruction and flooding, and the aftermath. I could have lived ten lives and I would not have learned so much about endings and beginnings. The only other soul in the Valley who seemed to see it all was Hannah Corkery; she had had her share of endings and beginnings well before that summer.

They say in country towns, a man who dies today is buried in the earth where he's lain many times before; the man who marries today takes the same wife he's taken for generations. Perhaps that made the powerful folks in Boston feel it didn't matter if they buried our homes.

One thing I've learned: you don't get to live a life that's all your own. There are hands pulling you back, hands pushing you forward. If you don't pick up your feet and walk, you'll be carried along, with no say as to where you're going.

YOU would think nothing could prepare a child for what happened to us in 1938: the razing of our houses and farms, then the hurricane, then the flood. But I had had a sense for some time that events could go wrong. That was the way things were.

My mother ran off with a man to Pennsylvania when I was three, and I remembered not believing the explanations. I remembered watching from the window not long after as they brought my father in from the fields in a wheelbarrow. He had been killed in a threshing accident. They had folded him, so all I could see was his overalls. I recognized them well enough. I suppose it's as well I couldn't see more. I had woken up early from my afternoon nap and gone to the window in hopes of catching sight of some activity. Any sign of life would have been a diversion. Grandma saw me at the window and ran in the house and up to my room, engulfed me into her sobbing. She had on a gray calico housedress with pink flowers that I admired. I took in her scent. I thought it went with the dress. I accepted the fact I would not be allowed to go downstairs or outside. That was how things were. You lived life a moment at a time, at least in the Valley. Then one day there was a death and it ended, at least as far as you were concerned.

As the time for the flooding grew nearer, sometimes I dreamed my father was coming to take me away, to help me escape the water. I hadn't seen him in a dozen years. The fact that he was dead made it neither more nor less likely, to my mind, that he would return for me.

I never dreamed of my mother. It may be that I blamed her. It's odd how the father seldom gets blamed, though in my case his sin-being careless with the threshing machinery-was great.

Grandma's reminiscing at the dinner table gave me a sense of endings. She had enjoyed her days at the hat factory in Dana. The girls who worked there were given a free palm leaf hat for summer every year. That was as important to them as the rest of their annual wage. In her new hat she had not minded the trek along the main street to North Dana, to stop by the soda fountain and say hello to the boys who could occasionally afford to buy her a "white cow," vanilla iced cream and ginger ale.

The hat shops were all gone by the late 1920s. People wouldn't settle in the Valley once the Boston boys started talking about putting us underwater. Grandma found work at the Gee and Grover wooden box factory but said it wasn't the same. I supposed it was the same, but you like best the thing you do when you're young.

I could never work in a box factory. I don't understand why people put so much effort into creating objects and artifacts from scratch, in imitation of the world we've been given free. The finest cloth ever spun is burlap compared to a beaver's pelt. The most skillful machine work imaginable cannot rival nature's turn of the lathe. You can reorganize nature's raw materials, as I did with my birch bark canoe, but you cannot create them.

Grandma said every man and woman she knew would consider themselves first and foremost a citizen of the Swift River Valley, second a resident of Hampshire County, or Franklin, or Hampden, or Worcester. The rest of the state, and for that matter the rest of the country and the world, could take care of themselves. Presumably would. The people of the Valley knew one another, knew the seasons and crops and animals, knew nature's rhythms, and so knew what was right. I did not need to have it spelled out for me that the "Boston boys" understood none of these things, particularly not the last.

Grandma had been married to Bill Hardiman, by all accounts a voluble and generous man, who had died of tuberculosis at the age of forty. His brother, Ed, was nothing like him: begrudging, if anything. But Grandma often invited Ed over to the farm for meals, as he lived alone.

Grandma was quiet during Uncle Ed's speeches on the lost virtues of country living. If it was after dinner she might pick up the pace on her knitting a notch or two. She was a polite soul, not wanting to point out that Uncle Ed had spent his working life as a municipal official, sitting at a desk all day. He had been the town clerk of Enfield for thirty years.

One evening we were talking at table about the news that the Valley might be flooded. "The history of the Swift River Valley," Uncle Ed said, "is the history of man in God's world."

"The history of man in the natural world," said Grandma.

"The history of the Swift River Valley is the history of America," said Uncle Ed.

I hate to say it, but what Uncle Ed eventually did to the five Valley towns more or less proved that was true. America is grand and full, but people can be hard.



I grew up in the town of Enfield. Most of my friends lived across the line in Prescott or Ripton. We played Daniel Shays and General Benjamin Lincoln the way other boys played cowboys and Indians. Captain Shays, a decorated officer of the American Revolution, led the farmers' insurgency against the new government of the United States in 1787. He was a native of neighboring Pelham and our hero. General Lincoln, who had received Cornwallis's sword at Yorktown and handed it to General George Washington, may have been a hero in Boston. But he had hunted Shays down and so was evil incarnate in our play world. From the age of six or seven, Caleb Durand and I would dibs to play the part of Lincoln. That would give us license to practice a sneer.

Our towns had need of Captain Shays a century and a half later. That was when the government of Massachusetts announced a plan to send more men west from Boston, this time to flood the Valley to create a reservoir sixteen miles long, better to assuage the thirst of the patriotic citizens of Boston.

Caleb and Hannah and I understood what was being done to our families better than most of the grown-ups in the Valley. We had the history in our bones, having acted it out many times in the woods. We knew that having your hometown flooded is worse than having your family die, because there's nothing to visit, not even a gravestone.

I said to Hannah that attachment to the land is the same as attachment to one's ancestors, if you have family roots in a place. She held that they were different, because you have no choice but to be connected to your ancestors and your descendants, whereas you can always pick up and move. Not if you're attached to the land because of your ancestors, I said. And so the argument moved in a circle.

I learned a lot in 1938 about the surface of the earth: its folds and tissues, its dips and catchments. Of course, the water covered all that, covered Dana, Enfield, Greenwich, Ripton, and most of Prescott. Before they closed the locks at Winsor Dam, though, I could have led you to every cave, tunnel, quarry, and mine shaft in the Valley. Partly that was my own enterprise, mine and Caleb's; partly it was our good fortune in joining forces with Hammy, who was as comfortable below ground as above it.

When I was playing in the leaves or the mud as a child, sometimes I would pretend the earth was about to open and swallow me up. That would make me tingle. Hannah said that was the spirits' way of telling me what was going to happen. It turned out she was right, as usual.

When Captain Shays walked the earth, all the land in the Valley had been put to the plow. Everything was farms, seldom separated by more than a tumbledown stone wall or a hedgerow. In the time since Shays, the woods had flooded back onto the land, carrying along their cargo of wolves, coyotes, and catamount. You could chart nature's counterattack by the number of cellar holes in the woods: every one of them had marked the heart of a working farm.

As surely as ancient soldiers sowed salt in vanquished fields, nature leaves nothing to chance as it recaptures its territory. In cellars and foundations below the ground, vines and creepers were constantly at work to separate and dislodge the man-ordered stones. You can subjugate a piece of property easily enough, but if you don't tend it, nature's gods will wrest it from you in a twinkling.



I suppose I must have learned a bit at the Enfield school, since I went into teaching. You couldn't prove it by me at the time, though. I thought the lessons at school emphasized what was unimportant or dull. Or plainly untrue, like what they taught us in civics class.

Grandma encouraged me to read every day from the end of school until the beginning of evening chores. She had read me Kenneth Grahame's Wind in the Willows years earlier, and bribed me to learn by heart long passages from its seventh chapter, "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn." I took different lessons from this book every time I opened it. I was encouraged also to return to Conan Doyle's King Arthur, Ernest Thompson Seton's Wild Animals I Have Known, and to wander about in Frazer's Golden Bough. These reinforced my excitement with the natural world.

My other source of books was Annie Richards, the sheriff's wife, who lent me Gone with the Wind, The Virginian by Owen Wister, and the best-selling book of 1938, The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. These three books, all read when I was fifteen years old, produced my lifelong sense of what it is to be an American. It is not merely that they are set here; they are driven by Americans' love affair with the land. It's different than in the older countries of the world, where the land is taken as a given, a constant. In old countries the land is part of the backdrop of people's lives. It was always there. In America the land is found by each generation, fresh as a bride. We grow up with the land as you grow up with your own family, experiencing its turns of mood and circumstance as you would those of a brother or sister or parent. On this point Hannah and I agreed, even though neither of us had a brother or a sister or a parent.



YOU never knew what you were going to get for kids in the Enfield school, there was so much coming and going in the Valley. Mainly going. Hannah Corkery wasn't going anywhere, though. She was a state kid, lived at the poor farm in Prescott. She showed up at the school in the fall of 1936.

The farm at Prescott wasn't much, two plain houses with a number of small rooms upstairs, a bunch of outbuildings, and penned-in areas for crops. A dozen folks lived there, including a warden named Honus Hasby, a plump man with owlish eyes and muttonchop whiskers. Honus was supposed to represent the town fathers and the forces of law and discipline. In fact he was the least disciplined of any of the people at the farm. He would sneak up behind any woman, particularly if she was at a chore, and squeeze this or that part of her. Hannah hit him across the forehead with the flat side of a plank when she was eleven. He didn't bother her after that but remained a torment to the older women. They had no one to complain to. They were pretty much soiled doves, soft upstairs or problems with whiskey or men or usually both. Honus would say they were lying. Nobody in town believed them, and nothing was done with Honus.

The three men who lived at the farm were too teched in the head to be much use at the chores, so the women made up the rent to the town fathers by delivering the crops and eggs. Not so different than in the other parts of town.

Hannah was the only child at the poor farm, no kin to anybody there. She never knew who her parents were, so she had had to grow up fast. She had black hair in pigtails, a wide face with freckles, eyes set well apart, a sign of intelligence and more. Except for the color of her hair, she looked somewhat like Little Orphan Annie, the favorite cartoon character of both Uncle Ed and Lawyer Kincaid. Her mouth was too large and her lips too full for the rest of her face. When she smiled, which was often, mouth and lips would be drawn to a proper proportion. You could see both rows of teeth when she smiled.

I liked to look at Hannah and not say anything, just study her, but I wasn't sure what I wanted to find out. There was a gap between the two upper front teeth, and a sizable chip off the right one. She would never tell how her tooth got chipped. That was all right by me. I liked not knowing. I liked not quite knowing, and not quite understanding, things that Hannah knew and understood. I had all the time in the world, I thought.

Hannah threw a ball overhand and could climb a tree faster than most of the boys at the Enfield school. She could throw her head and shoulders off to one side, yet still walk at an ordinary gait, as though she was in a cave or a room with a low ceiling. This amused me, though others found it freakish.

None of the families in town that took boarders would have Hannah. People thought her slow because when she was asked a question, she paused before she spoke. They figured she was gone bad in the head and sent her to the poor farm. Nobody knew where she came from, so nobody objected. Least of all Hannah. "It was a blessing," she told me on her first day at the Enfield school.

"Why was it a blessing?" I asked.

"Because I like to be alone," she said. "Or as alone as I can be."

"How is that?"

"I'm always thinking about people, either the ones I've just been doing things with or ones in the past. Some of the ones in the past, I'm the same person as them."

"But you're you."

She laughed. "At least you think I'm me. The others think I'm nobody."

I shrugged.

Hannah took my forearm in her hand. It was an affectionate gesture, but it alarmed me. It was the gesture of an old woman. I looked at her eyes to see if they had changed, but they were still merry. If there's one thing that sends me moving sideways, it's a look of compassion in another person's eyes. That I don't need. It sets me to thinking and makes me end up feeling worse.

"I have dreams and think about them later," Hannah said. "I have a dream every few weeks where I'm inside a house and it's dark because the windows are slits. The floor is earth. There is noise everywhere, whooping and reports and screaming and moaning, and there's smells of gunpowder and sights of blood and people with arrows and a vacant space off to the side where there's a blur, you can't see anything. I think that's where my little daughter was who carried this memory down into my dreams."

"Your little daughter?"

"I'm the woman handing muskets to the man at the slit window, then cramping the charge back down the barrel of another rifle and handing it back to him. I see everything she sees, I smell everything she smells. There's a blur in the corner, where the girls used to sit."

"The girls?"

"I know I had two daughters, but I never saw them again. My Samuel screamed; he had an arrow just above the clavicle, not mortal but it kept him from firing, so he turned from the window to draw it out. In that moment he had another arrow in the back of the neck, clear through to his Adam's apple. He said nothing, not a sound, mercifully, only fell forward. The first part of him that hit the earth was the arrow point, coming out the front of his neck."

"This is in your dream?"

"I was there. The door slammed open and the space was filled with boys, muscular and naked to the waist. They were covered with paint and shouting, barking without meaning, no more than boys. One of them fell on Samuel and carved out part of his hair with a knife. I've blamed myself that I stood there looking on, didn't fling myself on him. Of course, by that time he was gone and there were two braves holding me."

"Who were you?"

"I never had a name in my dream. Sometimes I heard men talking about 'Oriel,' both before I was captured and after I came back. I think I was Oriel. Not among the Indians, though. There I did have a name. I was Oh-To-Lan, Little Thrush."

"Captured?"

"I lived eleven years among the Nipmucs. The first two were the worst of my life, the middle four or five were the best of my life. The Indians understand the Spirit, the Great Spirit, and they worship by what they do, not what they say. Then I grew apart from my Indian family. After I returned to Dana, I was no closer to the folks there. I was apart from everybody, except the spirits."

"You lived with the Indians and came back to civilization?"

"The Nipmucs were more civilized than the people in Dana, certainly more civilized than the rich people. I was a popular guest for dinner in Dana. People didn't know how to treat me. I was already an old woman, thirty-nine, when I returned. Some people didn't want to let me into their parlors, because they assumed I had been ravished by the braves and were afraid I might communicate something to their furniture. Eventually I was married off, against my wishes and judgment, to Alfred Woolsey. I finished up as Mrs. Alfred Woolsey."

"Who were you married off by, if it was against your wishes? Who could force you?"

"It wasn't physical force. It was an assumption on the part of everybody in the town, an assumption that was as good as force. No one would deal with you in any way except based on the assumption. I refused to admit Alfred to my bed, confirming his worst suspicions. Even though the suspicions were false.

"People in Dana overlooked a lot for me, though. The Valley had no entertainments or news of the outside world. People lived on work and love alone, and many had no love."

"You were their entertainment?"

"All I had to do was sit there. I was like a two-headed cow, didn't have to say anything to get people's full attention, and have them be grateful, in a way."

"Was it worth it?"

"Not a bit. Being pushed around by other people's assumptions means you don't get to live your own life."

"It can be your life even if other people expect it. I'm expected to till my family's fields, to stay in the Valley. I expect I shall. That will be my choice, so it will be my life."

"Will it? I'd rather lead other lives, lives no one can see and complain about. So I have."

"Has that been your choice?"

"I've just been lucky."

I laughed. "You make things boring when you're not around," I said.

MY classmate Caleb Durand was a rawboned boy, with fine blond hair, a high hairline, green eyes, and a thin mouth. He looked to have just stepped off a Viking ship. From his appearance you would guess he would be austere in deportment. He was the opposite: sloppy, jolly, disorganized. If he claimed he could not come along on an adventure because of chores or schoolwork, all you had to say was, "Come on!" and he would be out the door before you.

Caleb's father was a big man, Mr. Durand to me, a foreman at the grain mill. He seemed to care only for his work, at which he was concededly efficient. His great-uncle Robert had for a time led the Hatfields against the McCoys in their border feud in West Virginia and Kentucky. I was certain that Mr. Durand must have a cache of rifles somewhere on his property.

Caleb's mother was a sparrowlike creature with brown eyes, dark freckles, and masses of lovely curls that dwarfed her frame. Her name was Missy. She spoke little but loved Caleb openly.

Caleb and I lived to get beneath the surface, whether it was land or water. We used to dive in the quarry pool. Two teenagers had found a body in an underwater cave there a few years earlier. The cold water and limestone had perfectly preserved the features. It was old Ed Sawyer, wedged into a sitting position and grinning at you like he was about to stick out his hand and say howdy. Sawyer had had a huge row with his brother-in-law over some woman, and word was there had been a knife fight in the big barn at Atherton's place in Smith's Village, but he had not been found, even though the trail of his blood led right into the woods.

The brother-in-law was never tried for anything. Right after the detectives announced they couldn't find the body, the brother-in-law married the woman. So she couldn't testify, by law, and the only other witness was dead.

Once we were floating down Egypt Brook, past a curve in the shoreline piled high with sticks, and found an opening in the mud bank, four feet underwater. Caleb ran out of breath the first two times he tried to get through to explore the passage, so I said I would take a turn, as I can hold my breath well over a minute underwater. That's what saved me years later in the North Atlantic.

I wriggled through the opening and found the passage. It led not into the bank but upward. I was about to back out, to allow time to return to the surface, when my head broke out of water into an unlit space. Instantly there were explosions on the surface around me. I felt something bulky and something sharp push past my feet. I thought I was done for, and gasped for air, even though there was no shortage.

"Caleb, help!" I screamed. This was the first and only time in my life I have ever screamed for help, including when I was hurled into the freezing ocean at night. I blush to recall it. It seems so predictable.

I heard Caleb from close by but far away: "You're inside a beaver hutch, you fool!"

This experience was more terrifying than anything I saw in wartime.

Nobody was as at home in the tunnels as Caleb and I were. Some of these had been dug for the railroads, the Rabbit north-south and the abandoned east-west line. Some were spurs off the big Wachusett tunnel, or diversions from the spillway area at Winsor Locks. Some were connected to the open mine areas: quartz, gravel, soapstone, and lime. At the end, I bet Lawyer Kincaid wished he had spent less time reading up on how to bankrupt poor farmers and more time studying up on those tunnels.

At the Hastings mine in Greenwich, Caleb and I found a side shaft, deep underground, sealed off by a pile of boulders. We came back the next day with a lantern and moved the rocks one at a time, careful so as not to provoke a slide, until we had created a space we could get through. I was first into the opening, wriggling on my stomach and reaching my fingers out to probe the floor and ceiling of the crawl space. Caleb had the lantern behind me, so it didn't show me any light. The first thing I touched, I knew it was all wrong. It wasn't pebbles, it wasn't a dirt floor, didn't seem to be part of the place. It proved to be a denim shirt, with an arm bone in it. The man had been stretching out his fingers, just like mine, scratching at the pile caused by the cave-in. Turned out to be five skeletons, with their clothes still on, stacked on top of one another like rocks, right up against the rubble. Must have been gasping for air.

Uncle Ed didn't hesitate. He was excited, said it was the Hastings mining disaster, sixty years ago, and they were the five Polish workers, good, hard workers, all Protestants, who were never found.

From my first memories as a boy in the Valley, well before I ever met Hannah Corkery, I was certain of one thing: the dead were all around us.

Copyright © 2002 by William F. Weld

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PRAISE FOR STILLWATER

"Elegiac . . . Eloquent about the stark mysteries of the New England landscape."--The New Yorker

"A haunting kind of ghost story about a place stewing in its own slow history until it vanishes forever."--The New York Times Book Review

"An evocative, sweet coming of age story, entwined with local folk lore, political shenanigans and a story of young love worthy of Colette . . . Fine spicy satire."--The Washington Times