Russell Banks - Trailerpark

Behind the black sedan, in the warm darkness of the barn, there were animals and hay and grain, and the noises of the cows and the pair of draft horses as they ate, the cluck of the hens and the nervous snorts from the pigs mingled with the earthy smells of their confinement — a warm, crowded, utterly domestic place, like the inside of one’s own body.

“All right,” the father said, and the boy put the car in gear and drove out. When the sedan was clear of the barn, he stopped, and the father got out, walked back and closed the barn door.

Returning to the car, he said again, “All right,” and they left the farm, turned right at the road and headed for town, tire-chains slapping loosely against the freshly plowed dirt road, the motor chirping warmly along, and the boy, for the first time, driving to town, driving skillfully, too, for he had driven for almost two years now, as his father had said, but only out at the farm, driving the tractor in the fields and the truck along old lumber trails in the woods, hauling wood back and trash out, bringing corn or hay or a load of potatoes in from the fields — never this, however, never along a public road and then along the streets of Catamount, where there would be other cars and where there would be people who would see him and wonder if that was Dewey Knox, Fred Knox’s oldest boy, driving Fred’s new Model A. That boy’s growing up fast, they’d say. Before long he’ll be as big as his father, they’d say.

An hour later, they had finished their errands — the purchase of a trap to keep a fox from the chicken coop, and at the hardware counter of the same store, nails, an ax handle, stove black, and a half-dozen carriage bolts; they had stopped at the post office, and they had stopped at the farmers’ exchange outlet to order seed; at Varney’s Dry Goods Store the boy’s father had purchased new boots for him, military style boots the color of oak that laced almost to the knee. When the boy wore them out of the store he tried to walk as if he had always worn boots like these, but he stumbled at the threshold and almost fell through the doorway to the sidewalk, while behind him his father and George Varney laughed. But he drove well — skillfully and with increasing confidence, pulling into parking places and backing out to traffic, though of course in a town as small as Catamount, even on a Saturday when most people in the area were doing their weekly shopping, housewives at the A & P, husbands and fathers at the farmers’ exchange or the hardware store, there was not much traffic.

Leaving town, they had turned left and had gone a few hundred yards past the Catamount River Bridge near Skitter Lake, when the man said to the boy, “You probably want a bite to eat.”

“I do.”

“Stop off at Daddy Emerson’s, then.”

The boy looked around at his father, who was staring straight out the windshield at the road.

“You can say you ate in town,” the father said.

The boy didn’t answer. They passed a small, run-down farmhouse, then took a left onto a narrow dirt road that looped through a pine woods and over a ridge. Here and there hundred-year-old farms with attached barns and outbuildings sat off the road, woodsmoke swirling from the big square chimneys while boys and sometimes men shoveled snow away.

“Okay?” the father said.

“What?”

“You’ll say you ate in town.”

“Yeah, fine. Sure.”

Running alongside a rocky stream humped over with snow and ice and, except for the scrubby leafless brush that grew along the banks, almost indistinguishable from the fields that spread like bedsheets away from it, the road narrowed gradually, crossed the stream on a rickety wooden bridge and headed for a cleft in the ridge at the end of the valley.

At the bottom of the cleft there was a large old house, a colonial that had not been painted or repaired for a generation. Behind the house was a barn with a collapsed roof, the timbers showing through like bones, and beyond the barn the land rose swiftly up to the ridge. The house faced the road, which ran past it and through the cleft to a crossroads in another town. Beyond the road was a steep slope dotted with gnarled old apple trees and rocks shoving gray heads through the snow. Because of the ridge in back and the steep slope in front, the house at midday in winter was in shadow and looked cold, and despite the gray string of smoke curling from the chimney, the place looked uninhabited.

The boy drew the Ford off the road and followed tire tracks through the unplowed snow around to the back of the house, where there were two more vehicles, a Model T coupe and an open, wood-sided, pickup truck. He parked the Ford next to the truck, shut down the motor, and got out. His father was already out and was at the door, knocking on an old board panel that had been nailed over a pane of glass in the door. The boy came and stood behind his father and looked down at the color and precise definition of his new boots against the gray, trampled snow.

A man’s gravelly voice called from behind the closed door. “Yeah?”

“Fred Knox.”

“Who else you got there?”

“My boy.”

“Okay,” and the door opened to a dark hallway. Then the owner of the voice appeared, a burly man in his sixties wearing long underwear and floppy dark green trousers and on his feet loose, untied hunting boots. The man’s red face was large and good-natured, sloppy and half-covered with a week’s growth of white whiskers. “What say, Fred?” he said as he led the way along the dark hallway. He shuffled in his loose boots as he walked and bumped once or twice against one wall, as if his balance were off.

He opened a door at the end of the hallway and led the father and son into a warm, brightly lit kitchen. There was a long rectangular table in the center of the room with a few chairs scattered about and a Glenwood kitchen range near the stone sink crackling with a woodfire in its belly. There were two other men in the room, a tall, skinny man in a plaid wool shirt and wearing a hunting cap like the boy’s and a shorter, more compact-looking man with a black beard and a thick shock of black hair that fell across his forehead. Both men were in their late twenties, and the boy knew them slightly — the tall, skinny one was Al Foy, a woodcutter, and the short, bearded one was Jimmy Sherman, a hide-stacker from the tannery. He was supposed to have been a prizefighter for a few years down in Boston, but apparently not a successful one, for he had returned to Catamount and now lived with his mother and father in their apartment above the paint store. The burly, older man who had let them in was called Daddy Emerson. He had lived alone in this house since the death of his wife, twenty or more years ago.

“H’lo, boys,” Fred Knox said to the two men at the table. They had glasses in front of them, tumblers half-filled with a pale yellow liquid, and they were smoking cigarettes.

“Sit down, Fred,” Al, the skinny one, said. “That your boy?”

“Yep. Dewey.”

The boy took off his cap and crossed the room to a chair near the stove.

“Take off your coat, son. We’ll sit and get warm.” The father had taken a seat next to Al and across from Jimmy and had shed his mackinaw and hat. Emerson set a bottle and a glass on the table in front of the man, who quickly uncorked the bottle and filled the glass to the top, then drank off about an inch of the liquid. “Ahh! Now that warms a man up real quick!”

The other men laughed.

They drank and talked in low, relaxed voices. Emerson stood near the sink, resting his bulk against it, now and then lumbering across to the table to refill the glasses. At one point he turned to the boy and said, “Them’re awful good-looking boots. Brand-new?”

Dewey looked down at his boots. “Yes, sir. This morning.”