The barrowfields, p.26
The Barrowfields, page 26
“How’re your folks?”
“Not too well, to be honest.”
“Where are you from again?”
“I grew up in the mountains of North Carolina,” I said. “Old Buckram.”
“Oh, hell yes. I’ve been through there a thousand times. Piper and I like to go up to Blowing Rock to buy furniture and knickknacks and shit for her store. We always take a trailer with us so we can bring stuff back if she finds anything. This table might even be from up there.” He bent over to examine the underside, as if he might find a bill of sale still affixed. “Piper has a booth at an antique shop. That’s how she makes money.” This remark was punctuated by his gurgling laugh. “Last year it made us, I don’t know, negative twenty-five thousand dollars. It probably saved my life, though—so anyway, we go up there and buy antiques and ride around on the parkway looking for wild turkey and deer, but I never have a gun with me when I need it. One time I saw a black bear and her cubs running right across the road—she was probably about three-fifty, four hundred pounds—and I would have given anything to have had my hunting rifle. I’d have shot her from the car. I’ve got a modified Ruger with a Mauser extractor that’ll absolutely blow the head and antlers off a deer. I’ve never had occasion to shoot a bear, though, although I hope one day I get lucky.”
I wanted to say “What the fuck is wrong with you,” but I kept my mouth shut. He downed another glass of red wine and unskillfully poured another. When he began to speak again, I noticed a gobbet of food—maybe a piece of shrimp—flat on the surface of his upper-right lateral incisor that really began to bother me.
“A few times,” he said, “we’ve taken the parkway from Blowing Rock and we get off at Chilblain’s Gap and go into Old Buckram to look around. Piper likes that one homestyle restaurant there. What’s that place called?”
It was offensive to me to hear him talk about the parkway and the area around my hometown in such familiar and grotesque terms. Come to think of it, it was just offensive for me to hear him talk.
“The Hopedale Inn,” I said.
“That’s it. I took my Harley up there one time and I had a hell of a fun time driving up 321 on all those roads, back and forth, but it rained for two solid days and I couldn’t get back because I didn’t have any rain gear.”
I nodded but could think of nothing relevant to say in response.
He said, “Do you want another beer? I’ll get you one.”
I said, “What the hell.”
“Piper! Bring this boy another beer.” The kitchen was empty; Mrs. Glauchnor must have sent the chefs home for the evening, or to their quarters, or wherever they stayed when they weren’t cooking for Mr. and Mrs. G. I began to feel terrible for Story.
“Jumping back to what y’all were doing down here before—is she trying to get you in the middle of all that?” He stirred an imaginary pot with his finger. “You wouldn’t be the first.”
I didn’t know what the hell that meant, so I ignored it and said, “She’s not getting me in the middle of it. She really hasn’t said too much to me about it, and she hasn’t asked for my help. I get the impression that she’s going to do what she’s going to do whether I’m involved or not. I don’t think I have any power of influence over her in that regard. Perhaps you don’t either.”
This pissed him off, and I thought he was going to come across the table at me. Getting himself under control, he said, “Well, I can tell you right now, y’all are wasting your damn time.”
I began to wonder why he was so openly hostile in regard to Story’s quest to find her biological father. After my few glasses of wine, and notwithstanding the paltry half-ounce of alcohol contributed by the Anheuser-Busch product, this played right into my unsettling and increasingly paranoid conspiracy theory in which Mr. Glauchnor was somehow Story’s real father. He doesn’t want her to find out precisely because he is her real father, I thought—and then just as quickly I pushed this out of my mind as pure lunacy. Why the hell wouldn’t he tell her if he was her real father? It doesn’t even make sense. I remembered my father saying it was better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak up and confirm it. This seemed like good advice. I thought about it critically and surmised that Mr. Glauchnor must have known something unsavory about the whole affair that he didn’t want Story to know. Maybe he was just trying to protect her. Maybe her real father was in federal prison on racketeering and bribery charges. Maybe he was in state prison for murder or some other more heinous crime. That the Glauchnors were simply protecting Story from something unseemly was the simplest explanation, I decided.
Story and Mrs. Glauchnor reentered the room, a negotiated peace having been won, and sat down at the table. Story was still mildly furious and Mrs. Glauchnor was fawningly obsequious, as I’d come to expect her to be. She offered up a stream of refined and therefore meaningless apologies until Mr. Glauchnor interrupted her with an impatient wave of his hand.
“Piper—did you get him a beer?”
“I sure didn’t. I’m so sorry.” She sprang silently into action and, from what I could tell by listening, retrieved another Bud Light from the crisper in the bottom of the refrigerator, this one sans the delightful little napkin.
“Thank you.”
“You are very welcome. I didn’t open it for you because my nails—”
“That’s fine,” I said. “I can get it.”
—
After dinner, Story and I escaped and walked down to the water, where we sat with our feet hanging off the end of the dock. Next to the dock was a two-story boathouse, where a crimson and beige Mastercraft and two glinting Jet Skis were fastidiously secured and suspended by steel cables above the water. A sunburst kayak lay face-down at the end of the pier, tethered with nautical rope. Across a broad expanse of the lake looking west, a row of lonely houses marked the horizon. The warm light from the many broad windows lay restless upon the water as it flowed and retreated and flowed again into the pungent marshes.
“I could live here,” I said. “It’s stunning.”
“Is it? I don’t think I can see it anymore. I may be spoiled beyond redemption.”
“No,” I said, “I understand. It’s the same way with me in Old Buckram. I know the mountains are beautiful. Sometimes when I walk outside in the morning, there’s an ocean of mist down in the valley. And I’m up there on the hill above it, looking down like some kind of deity. And then the sun comes over the Morning Mountain and it reflects off all that infinite white and suddenly the whole sky is too bright to look at. I know it’s glorious beyond compare, but because of…things I associate with my childhood…it’s hard for me to see the true beauty of it anymore. Does that make sense?”
Story looked around to see things with a fresh perspective and cogitated on what she saw. “I want to see it. Maybe in a couple of weeks I’ll drive up?”
“I’d really like that.”
She leaned over to look down into the black water and I rubbed the small of her back.
“What did she say to you when you walked out of the dining room?”
“She said ‘Elizabeth, honey, let’s not make a bad first impression.’ ”
“Nice.”
“She’s lovely.”
“I’m sorry about what happened in there,” I said. “I didn’t think about it. I should have realized not to say anything—”
“It’s not your fault. They’ve fought me tooth and nail on this for as long as I can remember. I think it just stems from them wanting me to accept them as my parents, which if I’m honest with myself I haven’t been willing to do, partly because I feel like we’re just so completely different in every material respect. But I know they feel a sense of rejection when I talk about my biological parents, like they’re somehow not enough for me. Like I’m going to find my real dad and leave here and never come back. They always say, ‘Are we not enough? Are we not enough?’ ”
We walked back to the carriage house through a sculpture garden that Mrs. Glauchnor had set up on the east side of the house. The “exhibits,” which she insisted they be called, consisted of mostly yard-sale junk set absurdly on short marble podiums. We first encountered a rusted ship anchor, and then a weathered bust of Triton with strands of facsimile seaweed draped dramatically around its shoulders. Then there was another anchor, this one smaller, looking curiously like at one time it belonged to a pontoon boat. The next piece was a concrete statue of a grazing deer (this one got two podiums—one for each set of legs) and so on. The exhibits were connected by a stone pathway that ran through a maze of ragged boxwoods, all obliquely lit by small lights placed at the foot of each showpiece. Story and I walked through holding hands and admired the art as seriously as we could.
“I’m surprised your dad hasn’t shot that deer already.”
“Please don’t say that to anyone.”
After letting Buller out to run around, we opened more beer and lit candles and sat on the floor like children in a hideout and talked about Story’s search for her father and all that had happened since she first learned of her adoption. She talked about going to see Lelia, and how Lelia had called her Maggie and likened her to a magpie, and how she’d found the picture of Benjamin, and how Mr. Glauchnor had gone with her to Lelia’s funeral, which seemed like the one decent thing he’d done. She said, “The days are bright, but the nights are empty,” and I thought of Threnody and wished she were there with us. I knew Story would make her feel at home.
With the candles still burning, Story took me into the bedroom with all her notebooks and newspapers and walked me through her earliest research to the present, starting with the original birth certificate that was issued by the health department preceding her adoption by the Glauchnors. This document she kept inside a laminate cover in a box of important things. It appeared to be the original. On the lines above the section titled “If family Bible is used as proof,” the certificate listed Lelia’s name as the mother—in Lelia’s own hand—but very clearly the father’s name had been obliterated. It had first been marked out with what appeared to be a ballpoint pen and then covered with a thick black marker. Story said it also used to have white correction fluid on it as a third layer, but she scratched that off only to find the more permanent attempt to remove the father’s name underneath. I asked how she got the original and she said she’d stolen it. I held it up to the light but could make out nothing. Story said she’d done everything but x-ray it, with similar results.
With me at her desk, she paced the room and interjected disconnected thoughts into the narrative as I went through page after page of the meticulously collected notes. After two hours of reading and squinting at photographs old and new, I just ached in my soul for Story, but I saw nothing even remotely compelling that seemed to warrant further investigation. Story was right; it was all a dead end. There were no answers to be had.
The last notebook I came to was the first one Story had started when she began looking for her father. It contained excerpts from dozens of interviews she had conducted with people on the peninsula who went to Versirecto Methodist Church and knew Lelia and had some reason to know about the circumstances surrounding Story’s conception. Story told me of its contents and suggested my time would be better spent elsewhere, but I read through it anyway looking for a clue she might have missed. Again, she was right. Everyone she had talked to, probably twenty-five different people, mostly women, could recount with remarkable clarity that Lelia lived in the little white house on the church property and that her mother was an alcoholic and didn’t treat her particularly well, and that when Lelia was just a girl of fourteen or fifteen she became pregnant—this was quite a scandal on the peninsula, I gathered—and that the Glauchnors, having been recently married, were kind enough to adopt Lelia’s little girl. Yet bewilderingly it seemed they were unable to provide any details at all about who the mysterious father was.
By the time I finished, Story had gotten dressed for bed and she and Buller had fallen asleep together on the couch. She was at one end and he was at the other with his enormous head resting on her feet. I sat down in a chair next to her and stared at the ceiling. Sitting there and going through it all in my mind, I decided that the people on the peninsula knew. They had to know. They just weren’t telling. Two ladies Story talked to remembered the names of Lelia’s mother’s cats, for god’s sake. One lady recalled that when Lelia went to the hospital to have the baby, she came outside wearing “a little blue dress covered in white flowers with the sweetest little rickrack around the arms.” Another lady, who took the family meals on behalf of the church, was able to recount the contents of Lelia’s bedroom with astonishing, heartbreaking clarity (“a white dresser with pink drawer pulls in the shape of a bow,” “one empty picture frame that looked like it’d been given as a gift but never filled,” “a wooden jewelry box with nothing in it,” “a Raggedy Ann on the bed”). It was impossible for me to believe that these ladies, all of them regular Miss Marples in their own right, had no true idea of the identity of the father. I then realized with a jolt what was even more impossible to believe: That they refused to even speculate about who the father might have been. This, I knew, was in complete defiance of the laws of human nature. People love to gossip. They can’t help it. People will offer conjecture all day long about things they don’t have the first idea about. But not one person Story had talked to cared to venture a guess about a putative father. This could only mean one thing: They knew who the father was.
So who was it? Why wouldn’t they tell? Was it a political figure? The president? The governor of South Carolina? Castro? I had two thoughts. The first was that if the people on the peninsula knew who Story’s father was, Story’s parents also knew, because they’d know before anyone else did. There was no way that they would have gone through the whole adoption process without making an inquiry and satisfying themselves as to the father of the child. If they’d done this and were not able to discover his identity, surely they would have told this to Story already. It would’ve been an easy defense. They could’ve been quite honest with her and told her they didn’t know and would likely never know given the time that had passed. But this is not what they said.
The second was that there must have been something extraordinary that had occurred to close all those mouths in such solemn and unyielding secrecy.
Story sensed me sitting next to her and reached out to take my hand.
“Aren’t my new pj’s soft?”
“They sure are.”
“I feel bad that you’ve spent your entire time here reading all that stuff. Am I just crazy? Would you tell me?”
With purposeful delicacy, I attempted to articulate what I’d deduced, but it came out all in a shambles. Story grew increasingly agitated as I talked. First she sat up. Then she stood, blew out the candles, and turned on the overhead light.
“You really think my parents know?”
“Yes, I think they must.”
“Then why wouldn’t they have told me?!”
“Have you asked them?”
“Of course I have!” She went into the bedroom and half a minute later came out dressed. She pulled her tennis shoes on without untying them.
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m just going to see if my dad’s still up.”
“It’s one o’clock in the morning.” I felt like I was in water over my head; like a critical mass had been achieved and could no longer be impeded. I suggested it would be better to wait until the next morning, but she was already out the door. The haste with which she departed prompted me to follow after her. Halfway to the main house she began to jog, and then in a few steps the jog became a run. I ran through the yard behind her. When I got there and ascended the steps of the porch, Story had already gone inside. I went in and waited in the darkened foyer, figuring I’d give it a minute just in case Mr. Glauchnor was asleep and Story came right back down.
For a long while I heard nothing and thought I should walk back to the carriage house and wait for Story there. The first sign of movement was poor Jim thumping down the stairs. After growling and then barking at me, he realized we’d met before and this caused him great, happy excitement. He jumped and trotted a little unevenly on his old hips over to where I was sitting to say hello, his tail thwacking all the furniture between the two of us and wagging his entire body. He and I sat there talking about how I was going to introduce him to Buller, which he seemed amenable to, while upstairs all was quiet and I began to feel like an ass for inciting such foolishness. I said good night to Jim and stood to leave and then heard a dull, unnerving, repeating sound coming through the floor. Cracking, splitting, god knows what, it grew louder and sounded every bit like a bloody murder when an explosion of noise came from overhead and broken glass rained down from above. I jumped entirely out of my skin and Jim tucked tail to run out of the room, presumably to flee the Armageddon underway above us, but he made right for the minefield of glass that now covered the floor and I had to collar him and carry him fighting like a caught marlin into Mr. Glauchnor’s office to keep him from ruining his old brown paws.
As I was closing the door behind me, Mr. Glauchnor stomped irritably, deliberately down the stairs (no doubt thinking These are my fucking stairs, by god, that was my fucking crystal vase), crushing fragments underfoot and grinding glass into the wood with every step. Close on his heels was Mrs. Glauchnor, who more or less tiptoed through the debris, proudly trembling like a reed. He moved by me like a locomotive in the dark and went straight to the bar in the corner of the living room to pour himself another drink. Mrs. Glauchnor caught my astonished eye and said, “It’s awful, isn’t it?” All pretense was gone.
A moment later Story walked calmly down the steps as if nothing unusual had happened. She paused once to inspect the ceiling and then ran her finger along the top of a portrait to test for dust. Here and there she knelt down to pick up and inspect the larger shards of glass as if they were seashells washed up on the beach. To me, she said, “Will you help me, please,” and not knowing what else to do, I began collecting the multiplying fragments as well as I could in the dimly lit room. When we had barely a handful between us, a fraction of what would be found in the hidden corners of that house for years to come, Story said, “I think that’s enough,” and took mine into her cupped hands. She then went to where Mr. Glauchnor was standing and deposited the contents delicately onto the bar.
