Persistent small raindrops speckled his windshield. He drove between twin housing developments that had once been the Gengrich dairy farm and old Amos Schrack’s orchard, and from the crest saw what had been his family’s farm. The meadow, low land once drained by stone-lined ditches that had been dug by his grandfather and great-grandfather, was no longer mowed; instead, it was planted, by the new owner, in rows of evergreens and birches for sale to landscapers. Along its edge, quite buried in sumac and wild-raspberry canes, lay the road his mother used to walk, all by herself until joined by the Gengrich children down the road, on her way to the one-room schoolhouse. There had been a towering tulip poplar beside the meadow which had survived into Kern’s middle age, as had his mother. She would tell him how, in warm weather, she would pause, in her solitary walk, beneath the tree’s big, smooth, four-lobed leaves, grateful for the shade and for the birdsong—strong in the morning, subdued by late afternoon—in the branches.
His vivid image of her as a little girl, her hair braided and pinned so tight by her mother that her scalp hurt as she walked, in her checked dress and matching ribbons, down this sandy road between the fields, had been her creation, as she conjured up for him those days of country paradise, of trusting animals and hazy silence. She had wanted to infect him, her only child, with her primal happiness, so that when she died and he inherited the farm he would live on it. In the event, he had inherited it only to get rid of it quickly. The thirty acres on one side of the road, with the barn and house and chicken house, he sold to a second cousin, and the remaining fifty, fields and woods, he rented to the neighboring farmers, the Reichardts, thus keeping the green space free of development, as his mother would have wanted. He had inherited as well her childhood bird guide, a tattered oblong small book with a crumbling oilcloth cover and notes, pencilled in a careful adolescent hand, on the species—bluebirds, grackles, chimney swifts—that she had spotted on this farm. When he held her limp little guide in his hand, he felt her absorption in birds as pathos. One of her tales of herself recalled, with a trace of lingering grievance, how fiercely her mother had scolded her for climbing into a basket of freshly dry wash in imitation of a nesting bird.
The absentee owner of fifty acres, Kern felt guilty at the rarity of his visits. His career had taken him west. He had retired from teaching English at Macalester College, in St. Paul, and he and his wife, who hated the Midwestern cold, had moved to southern California. He had come East this time to attend an expenses-paid, three-day conference of educators in New York, where he had read a paper on the not inconsiderable contemporary relevance of Edmund Spenser. He drove past his old house with hardly a glance. The cousin had sold it, and then it had been sold again, to a Philadelphian, and renovated almost beyond recognition. The first time Kern had seen this house, he was thirteen, and a tenant farmer’s children scurried off the half-collapsed porch and hid. Where sandstone steppingstones had once led the way across a lawn mostly crabgrass, a smooth circular driveway now enclosed a clump of shrubs in shades of green like a nursery display, crowded around a terra-cotta gargoyle. Kern’s mother’s many birdhouses, and her wind chimes on the back porch, were gone. She had maintained, with the earnestness with which she advanced her most fanciful theories, that this had always been a woman’s house. She cited as proof the fact that its first owner was recorded, in 1816, as being a woman, named Mercy Landis. Nothing was known of her but her name on the old deed; she existed where history shaded into myth. And, in his mother’s version of things, her own mother had made the farm profitable by driving the wagon to market in Alton, every Saturday, and by growing cigar-wrapper tobacco, in short supply during the First World War. Her husband invested the profits and sold the farm and moved to Olinger, an Alton suburb. Twenty years later his daughter used the family savings accumulated in the Second World War to buy the farm back, from an Alton hosiery-mill owner who had installed tenants and cows on the acres. It was hilltop land, not the rich valley soil where the Amish had their picture-book farms, and the magnate parted with it for four thousand dollars.
Kern felt the tracks of his ancestors all around him—generation after generation laboring, eating, walking, driving within this Pennsylvania county’s bounds, laying down an invisible network of worn paths. Only he had escaped. Only he, of his boyhood household, now lived to witness how the region was changing, gradually consuming its older self, its landmarks disappearing one by one in the slow-motion tumult of decay and substitution as the newer generations made their own demands on the land.
He drove on, a quarter-mile, and pulled into the parking lot for the Reichardts’ produce stand. Their farm, one of the few surviving in the neighborhood, prospered as the south of the county filled in with new customers. The Reichardts were pious people but not superstitious about keeping up with the times. Kern’s annual rent check was printed by a computer; the simple shed that he remembered, with an awning and a few boards on sawhorses holding bushel baskets of peaches and apples, sweet corn and string beans, had sprouted freezers and cash registers and supermarket carts and a sizable section of imported gourmet delicacies. Young Tad Reichardt, who usually dealt with Kern on his rare visits, was off with his family for a week at Disney World. “He goes every year, down to Orlando,” a girl at the cash register volunteered. “He says it’s never the same trip—as the children get older, they see different things. His little girls have outgrown the princesses. Now, you live near Disneyland, I understand.”
“Miles from it. Miles and miles. I’ve never been.”
“Oh. Well, Mr. Reichardt got your postcard saying you were coming and said I was to fetch his father when you did.” Though her hair was worn in a traditional white-net Mennonite cap, she pulled a cell phone from her apron pocket and deftly punched in numbers with her thumb, a trick all young people seem to have.
Kern protested, “There’s no need to bother Enoch. I can see for myself. Things are going fine here.”
“He’s here,” she announced into the tiny phone. Within a few minutes, a member of Kern’s own generation, Enoch Reichardt, appeared, damp with the rain and grinning widely. They had been boys together, on adjoining farms, but their attempts to play together had not been successful. Enoch, a year younger, had brought a softball and bat over to the Kerns’ yard—the Reichardts had no yard, all the space between their buildings was used for equipment and animals—and David, newly a teen-ager and not yet used to his own strength, had hit the ball far over the barn, into the thorns and poison ivy past the dirt road, next to the tumble-down foundation of the old tobacco-drying shed. The road in those days, before it was macadamized and straightened, swung closer to the barn, to the broad dirt entrance ramp, and then dipped downhill to run along the meadow, past the tulip poplar. Though the boys searched for a scratchy, buggy twenty minutes, they never found the ball, and Enoch never came back to play.
Today, more than fifty years later, he seemed to bear no grudge, and Kern was happy to see someone nearly as old as he looking so well—stocky and tan, repelling the rain as if waxed. His grin showed straight white teeth. Enoch’s teeth had been crooked and brown and must have pained him for years. He asked his visitor if he would like to see his fields, how they were being farmed.
“It’s pretty wet out,” Kern said. “I think I get the idea.”
He had arranged to meet two old Olinger High classmates, with their spouses, at the Alton Country Club that evening, and was wearing a Burberry, a gray suit, and thin-soled black loafers bought at a Simi Valley mall.
Enoch’s uncannily white smile broadened as he explained, “We’ll go in my car. It’ll take hardly a minute. There’s some new ideas around since you were here last. My car’s right outside. David, should I get you an umbrella?”
“Don’t be silly,” Kern said. “It’s just a drizzle.”
“Yes, well. That’s the way I look at it,” Enoch allowed. “But I know in California you don’t see much rain.”
His car was a reassuring relic—a black Ford sedan
, with its chrome painted black. The former playmates slithered in. Not far along, on the edge of the enlarged parking lot, which even in this weather held a dozen customers’ cars and vans, stood the first of the new ideas—a kind of Quonset hut of white plastic, upheld by arching ribs. “Remember how we used to grow strawberries?” Enoch asked.
“How could I forget?” Strawberries had been David’s 4-H project, a means of making a few hundred dollars a summer toward his eventual college expenses. He and his mother standing along Route 14 selling them had humiliated him—she pretended not to understand why.
Enoch braked. “Would you like to take a look inside?”
David felt he had no choice, though the rain seemed to be intensifying and his Burberry was rain-resistant rather than rainproof. Enoch roughly, in his proud excitement, widened a gap in the plastic, and David peeked in. He saw strawberry plants up on several narrow troughs, four feet off the ground, so that the berries, ripe in November, hung down into sheer air like cherries, like Christmas ornaments. “Hydroponic,” Enoch told him. “The plastic keeps the warmth in and allows for the solar effect; all the nutrients are trickled in from a hose. There’s no dirt.”
“No dirt,” David numbly repeated.
“Remember how the berries would rest on the ground and pick up sand? And the turtles and snails would nibble at them before they could be picked?”
“And how your back would ache from straddling the row and bending over. The daddy longlegs would climb up your arms.”
“No more,” Enoch said, pleased that David remembered. “You pick these standing up. They bear all through the winter if we put in space heaters and growing lights.”
“Amazing,” Kern conceded, climbing back into the car after checking his new loafers for mud. Enoch wore thick yellow boots and a green slicker over denim bib overalls; he was one with the weather.
Enoch asked, “Would you like me to drive you over the big field?”
“Sure,” David said. “If you won’t get stuck.”
“Oh, now, I don’t think we’ll get stuck,” Enoch said slowly, as if to a child.
In farming the acreage, and in selling to people who drove here and picked the fruits and sweet corn themselves, the Reichardts had laid out little roads, firmed up with spalls to check erosion, between the crops. Development, David thought. His mother had dreaded it. Enoch drove, slightly skidding, among reserve lengths of PCP irrigation pipe, and dormant rows of strawberries grown through perforated black plastic, and several prefabricated shacks slapped up for the convenience of the summer trade. When the big field was under his mother’s management and lay fallow in clover and wildflowers, David used to mow it through a long August day on their old John Deere tractor, which he could drive before he could drive a car. Bought second-hand and painted mule-gray, the machine had crawled over the terrain gently rocking, dragging behind it the roaring rotary blade in its rusted housing.
“Would you like to get out?” Enoch asked. The car had gone as far as it could. David looked down at his shoes, and solicitously considered of the crease in his suit pants. He had never been a guest at the Alton Country Club before.
“Sure,” he said. He still owed Enoch that softball. They got out and stood together in the rain. A breeze made itself felt, at this high point of the hill. From here on a clear day you could see the tips of the tallest buildings in Alton, ten miles away. Today the city hid from sight. Kern’s mother in her decline would talk pathetically of his building a house out here, for him and his family, when he came back some day to the county to live. She would be safely tucked in the Mercy Landis house, just out of sight. “You won’t even know I’m there,” she had promised.
As he feared, the red earth was as gummy as clay. Transferring his feet from one patch of old-fashioned hay mulch to the next, he watched his steps so carefully that he missed much of Enoch’s friendly lecture on crop rotation, and on the ingenious new machines that planted peach saplings at scientifically determined intervals, and on new varieties of corn that didn’t take so much nitrogen out of the soil. Soil, Kern thought, looking down. Ancestral soil, and to him it was just mud. He turned his attention upward, to the corner patch of woods that no farmer of these acres, for some good country reason, no doubt, had ever bothered to cut, de-stump, and plow.
Feeling his listener’s attention wander, Enoch said, with what seemed a twinkle but might have been raindrops in his eyelashes, “Your mother used to talk about how some day you’d build a house up here.”
David said, old as they both were, “Well, I may yet.” He couldn’t resist adding, with a wave over the irrigated and plasticized acres, “And make all this my big front yard.”
On the way back, sure enough, the Ford began to slough and wallow in a stretch of puddles a short distance from the paved road. But Enoch downshifted and the black Ford slithered free, and Kern was spared having to get out, in his delicate clothes, and push.
He took away a gift, a paper bag of Enoch’s fresh apples. Driving north on Route 14 toward Alton, he moved from his mother’s territory into his father’s. He and his father, a schoolteacher, had daily driven together in this same direction, away from the farm to the region of schools, of close-packed row houses, of urban pleasures.
Kern was staying the night at the Alton Motor Inn, in West Alton, but was in no hurry to get there, by way of the newly developed section of malls and highways sprung up in recent years. He turned off 14, past the Jewish cemetery and under the railroad bridge, into Alton, over a bridge that his father, out of work at the start of the Depression, had helped to build, setting paving stones and tamping them snug between the trolley tracks. He had remembered that summer as pure back-sore misery, and his son never crossed this bridge without imagining drops of his father’s sweat as part of it, dried into the concrete. Kern’s bloodlines had left not just rural traces in this county.
Alton was a dying city, but its occupants persisted in living. Its prime’s ebb, which David located in his own boyhood but which his elders put earlier yet, before the Depression, had stranded a population that occupied the tightly built grid like sleepy end-of-summer wasps clustering in an old paper nest. Even in his boyhood the venerable industrial town had been prolific of what the child had thought of as throwaway men—working-class males whose craft or occupation had withered away and left them with nothing to do all day but smoke cigarettes and wait for a visit to the local bar to ripen into a permissable activity. Driving through south Alton, Kern spotted them through the flapping windshield wipers, standing on tiny porches, watching the rain drip from the aluminum awnings and darken the composition sidings.
He drove on, into the wide central blocks of Weiser Street, where the trolley cars would clang and pass, where the shoppers and moviegoers would throng, and where David, during the war, when his parents still lived a trolley-car ride away, would methodically wander through all the five-and-tens, from Grant’s and McCrory’s up to Woolworth’s and Kresge’s, looking to enlarge his collection of Big Little Books. At a dime apiece, it was possible, even on a thirty-five-cent-a-week allowance, to accumulate a sizable hoard. The five-and-tens all wore a warm cloud of perfume and candy scent just inside the entrance doors, and some had pet shops, with canaries and parakeets and goldfish, at the back. Alton, it seemed to him then, offered for sale everything a person could ever want in life.
He had been told by Ned Miller, one of the few high-school classmates with whom he kept in touch, that Blanken-biller’s Department Store was being torn down, to make way for a new bank. A dying city, Kern thought, and they keep putting up banks. In the old days you couldn’t find a parking space on Weiser Street; now he slid into one without trouble on the Blankenbiller’s side of the square. Not just the grand old department store, with its wrought-iron cage elevators and overhead pneumatic tubes for the whizzing brass canisters carrying change and receipts from a hidden treasury above, was being torn down; a row of buildings beside it, where Kern remembered shoes and office supplies and har
dware being offered for sale, had vanished, baring walls whose sloppy mortar had never been meant to show and basement chambers, now filled with rubble, that had not seen daylight since their construction. Even in the rain, as daylight drained from the afternoon, dolefully creaking backhoes were pecking away at the rubble.
His mother had once explained to him how she had become fat: she blamed Blankenbiller’s basement restaurant, where the apple or rhubarb or pecan pie à la mode had been irresistibly good, to top off a lunch when she was working in the Christmas season as an extra saleswoman. You got so tired, she explained, standing on your feet for ten hours; the ordeal had made her a food addict. Kern gazed down into the sodden, brick-strewn grave of his mother’s slender figure, a figure he had glimpsed only as a toddler. It had been at Blankenbiller’s that, one day when shopping, he had let go of his mother’s hand and gotten lost, burbling to the floor-walker and wetting his pants.
One of the city’s surplus men, curious as to what Kern was seeing, crept out from one of the few sheltering doorways left on this block of Weiser Street. Kern winced in fear of being asked for a handout; but the man mutely stared with him through the chain-link fence. Kern’s father used to embarrass him, in the city, by talking to strangers; the more disreputable they appeared, the more enthusiastically his father seemed to regard them as potential sources of enlightenment. Kern had been a fastidious, touchy adolescent, but had slowly shed many of his inhibitions. Now he turned to the poorly clad, indifferently shaven stranger, and attempted conversation: “Some hole, huh?”
The man turned away, offended by such levity. He might have said “Yeah” or said nothing at all, Kern wasn’t sure.