Russell Banks - The Darling

But for every incapacity and limitation of age there is a compensatory gift and attribute. So while the girls flirt and gossip, I lay out their day’s work. I leave the rototilling to Nan and Frieda, but when we plow the riverfront fields in spring and in August cut hay in the high meadows, I drive the tractor; and when we go to market, I drive the truck, and Cat loads and unloads it, and the stock boys all come running to help her. I do the bookkeeping and select and purchase our seed and fertilizer and livestock and, inasmuch as it can be done selectively, control the breeding of the animals and fowl. Though I haven’t a quarter of Anthea’s experience and have no more natural intelligence than the girls, who are all very smart people, mine is the mental faculty of the farm. In this little troop, I am the rational one, the one who anticipates and prepares for catastrophe and crisis and the breakdown of machinery, the one who watches for capricious weather, sudden price fluctuations, illness in the livestock, and blight on the crops. The others merely go about their appointed daily rounds. I am the one who holds her tongue. The others are forever talking. I am the one with secrets untold, the one whose life’s meaning is shaped by her memories and not by her ambitions or desires. I am the serious one.

And I am the one with the money. Let us not forget that. The farm is not a democracy or a socialist experiment, so the girls and I are as different as two separate species for that, too. Money and the power that comes with it distinguish between us as sharply as our differences in age. I own the farm and finance its operation and pay the girls’ salaries with the money from the crops, but mostly run it with the money I inherited from my father by way of my mother. The sheep and goats are mine; the chickens and geese, the orchards and the fields and everything that grows on this land are mine; the house and outbuildings and vehicles and farm machinery and all the tools are mine, and the land and the forests on it and the river that runs through it. Even the dogs, Baylor and Winnie, who like all Border collies seem to belong to no one but themselves, they, too, are mine.

Thanks to my father and mother, I own a great deal now. In 1990, when I fled Monrovia, I owned nothing but a change of clothes — a pair of jeans, a sweatshirt, socks, and underwear — and a packet of old letters and a few photographs of my sons and Woodrow, grabbed almost as an afterthought when Sam and I ran from the house like terrorists who’d planted a bomb inside it. When I showed up at my mother’s house in Emerson, I had nothing — no money, no property, no future. Only a past, and that shattered.

Who’s the poet who said home is the place that when you have to go there they have to take you in? My mother took me in. She housed and fed and clothed me as if I were a child again, an errant teenager come reluctantly back to the nest, unwilling and unable to say where she had been, what she had seen and done, unable to tell anyone, even herself, what had gone terribly wrong out there in the wide world.

But my mother was by then very old, nearly eighty, and had grown feeble with Parkinson’s disease, and soon, a few months later, I was taking care of her. For the first time since I left my dreamers on their island and the night I gave my sons up for lost, I felt useful again and necessary to another person’s welfare. I fed her and clothed her and kept house for her as if she were a small child and I were her mother. The months passed, and she retreated from childhood to babyhood all the way to infancy, until she could no longer feed herself and then could no longer speak and was like a newborn animal and became incontinent. And then one night, without a sound, while I lay sleeping in the cot beside her bed, she simply stopped breathing, and when I awoke, I was all alone in the house that I had been raised in and had fled at the first opportunity and, when I had no place else to go, had returned to and was taken in.

My mother lies buried beside my father. There is no room there for me, even if I wanted it. In life as in death, for me and everyone else, there was no room beside or between my parents. In our family drama they were the only players. Standing off to the side all by myself, I was the chorus and sometimes played a messenger with news from the front, but more often was merely an extra, an onlooker. My small fate in the larger family fate was to be for my father an example, his Exhibit A, and for my mother a looking glass that told her she was the fairest of them all.

I sold my parents’ house and everything in it. I packed into my Daddy’s old Buick my few personal belongings, barely enough to fill the trunk, and drove to where for a few weeks each summer I had been a happy, contented child among other happy, contented children. I wanted to see the place again and try to remember what it was I felt back then during those five summers when my parents sent me away to live with other children and a few supervising adults on a lake in the forest. It was before I turned myself into the girl named Scout and the only time I felt as autonomous and free and authentic as an animal must feel all its life. I thought that if I could bring back the memory, I could bring back the feeling, and I would know for the first time what I truly wanted for myself, and then I would go and find it. That was my plan. But memories are always of things lost and gone and never returning. On a rainy, cold April morning, I sat in my car at the side of the road and wept bitterly. Saranac Lake Work and Arts Camp no longer existed. It had been sold to a private developer, who had torn down the bunkhouses and arts and crafts shops and cut the land into ten-acre lakeside lots for summer homes for suburbanite dot-com millionaires from Westchester County and Connecticut. The Adirondacks had become fashionable.

I thought of Alaska, of the far Northwest, of the Canadian Maritimes, but before leaving the Adirondacks for any one of those places, I stopped first at the Noonmark Diner here in Keene Valley. While waiting for my omelet to arrive I leafed idly through a brochure listing local real estate for sale and saw an ad for a property called Shadowbrook Farm, one hundred twenty acres with Ausable River frontage, meadows, open fields, a seven-room, hundred-year-old farmhouse with fireplace, outbuildings, farm equipment, and all furnishings included. It was listed for $130,000 with Adirondack Realty, whose office was conveniently located next to the diner, and by noon I had signed a contract to buy it. A month later I closed on the farm, hired Anthea and moved in, and commenced the life I have now.

It’s a life eleven years on, and the first ten passed very quickly, like a dreamless sleep, until the end of August morning when Anthea and I finished butchering the chickens, and I saw that I could not live out the remainder of my days here on the farm unless I returned to Liberia and learned what had happened to my dreamers and my three sons and over his grave made a private peace with my husband. But I no more knew what I would find there than I did on the day I first arrived from Ghana a quarter-century ago. Liberia is a permanently haunted land filled with vengeful ghosts, and I had committed many sins there.

I made my way first to Boniface Island, where I had abandoned my dreamers. When the fisherman who carried me across the bay in his pirogue left me alone among the buried bones of my dreamers, I thought that I, too, had been abandoned on an island. Terrified and sick from hunger and thirst and the brain-boiling heat of the equatorial sun, I fell down before the ghosts of my dreamers and accepted their bewildered rage. I was ready, almost eager, for them to devour me. Their curses rained down on me, and my long remorse and secret shame were replaced that day by the permanent mournfulness that has given rise to the telling of this story.