Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

During the summer of 1991—when the daffy elder Bush was still ruffling his own duck feathers in the aftermath of Desert Storm — a home sale, on tiny Quarry Street, opposite St. Leo the Great Catholic Church, culminated in a SWAT-team extraction when the owner-occupant refused to vacate the house he’d signed papers and already closed on. The man ran right out of the lawyer’s office, back across neighbors’ front lawns to his erstwhile family home, where he took a position in an attic dormer window and, using a varmint rifle, held off Haddam police, two hostage-negotiators and a priest from St. Leo’s for thirty-six hours before giving in, being led defiantly out the door in front of the same neighbors and the new owners, then riding off in chains to the state hospital in Trenton.

No one was hurt. But the reason for the behavior was the seller’s discovery that his house had appreciated 18 percent between offer-acceptance and the lawyers’ closing, which made the thought of all that lost money and the smirking ridicule from the neighbors, who were holding on for another season, just too much to bear. For weeks afterward, tension and threat hung over the town. Two new police officers were added. Threat sensitivity courses were made mandatory in our office, and a “conflict resolution half point” was added to closing costs when a bank approved super balloon notes to first-time buyers purchasing from sellers with greater than ten years’ longevity.

Nothing, however, prepared anyone for the outlandish worst. A trucking magnate of Lebanese extraction made a full-price offer on a rambling, walled monstrosity far out on Quaker Road, owned by the reclusive grandson of a south Jersey frozen-potpie magnate, who’d turned up his nose at the family business to become a competitive stamp collector. The house was a great weed-clogged Second Empire mishmash with a rotted roof, sagging floor joists, scaling paint, disintegrating masonry and cellar dampness due to being in the floodplain. It wasn’t even a candidate to be torn down, since regulations prohibited replacement. When I took the realtors’ cavalcade tour, I couldn’t find one timber or sill that wasn’t corrupted by something. Everybody who showed it presented it as uninhabitable. The land, we felt, was a write-off to some rich tree-hugger conservationist who’d turn it into “wetlands” and make himself feel virtuous.

The trucking magnate, however, wanted to come in with a big improvement budget, rebuild everything up to code, restore the house to mint condition, plus add a lot of exotic fantasy landscaping and even let tame animals roam the grounds for the grandkids.

But when he submitted his full-price bid, saw it accepted, put three-quarters down as earnest money, the hermetic owner, Mr. Windbourne, decided to take the house off the market for a rethink, then a week later listed it again with a 20 percent increase in asking and had five new full-price offers by noon of the first day — two of which he accepted. The trucking guy, Mr. Habbibi, who was known in the Paterson area as a patient man who didn’t mind using muscle when it was needed, naturally protested all this double-dealing, though none of it was illegal. He drove out to the Windbourne house in an agitated state but still in hopes of bettering the new offers and resuscitating his deal. Windbourne — wan, gaunt and blinking from long hours in the dark staring at stamps — came to the front door and said that the fantasy landscaping and tame animals sounded to him more suited to towns like Dallas or Birmingham, not Haddam. He laughed at Habbibi and closed the door in his face. Habbibi then drove to a marine supply in Sayreville (this is the strangest part, because Habbibi didn’t own a boat), bought two marine flare pistols and two flares, drove back to Quaker Road, confronted Windbourne at his door and offered him the deal they’d already agreed to, plus 20 percent. When Windbourne again laughed at him, informed him this was America and that Habbibi had “loser’s remorse,” Habbibi went back out to his car, got his flare pistols, stood out in the yard of what he’d hoped would be his dream oasis, shouted Windbourne’s name and shot him when he answered the door a third time. After which, Habbibi got back in his car, turned on the radio and waited for the police to show up.

Haddam house prices dropped 8 percent in one day (though that lasted less than a week). Habbibi was also trucked off to the loony bin. Windbourne’s relatives drove up from Vineland and completed the sale to one of the other buyers. Realtors started carrying concealed weapons and hiring bodyguards, and the realty board passed an advisory to raise commissions from 6 to 7 percent.

At about this time, I was experiencing the first airy intimations of the Permanent Period filtering through my nostrils like a sweet bouquet of new life promised. Things had also gotten to a put-up-or-leave stage with Sally Caldwell. Selling houses in Haddam had evolved to a point at which I couldn’t recognize my personal motives for even doing it. And on the waft of that bouquet and by the simple force of puzzlement, I decided it was time to get out of town.

But before I left (it took me to the sultry days of that election summer to get my affairs untangled), I noticed something about Haddam. It was similar to how the stolid but studious Schmeling saw something about the mute, indefatigable, but reachable Louis — in my case, something maybe only a realtor could see. The town felt different to me — as a place. A place where, after all, I’d dwelled, whose sundry homes and mansions I’d visited, wandered through, admired, marveled at and sold, whose inhabitants I’d stood long beside, listened to and observed with interest and sympathy, whose streets I’d driven, taxes paid, elections heeded, rules followed, whose story I’d told and burnished for nearly half my life. All these engraved acts of residence I’d dutifully committed, with staying-on as my theme. Only I didn’t like it anymore.

T he devil is in the details, of course, even the details of our affections. We’d, by then, earned a new area code — cold, unmemorable 908 supplanting likable time-softened old 609. New blue laws had been set up to keep pleasure in check. Traffic was deranging — spending thirty minutes to go less than a mile made everyone reappraise the entire concept of mobility and of how important it could ever be to get anywhere. Seminary Street had become the preferred home-office address for every species of organization whose mission was to help groups who didn’t know they comprised a group become one: the black twins consortium; support entities for people who’d lost all their body hair; the families of victims of school-yard bullying; the Life After Kappa Kappa Gamma Association. Boro government had turned all-female and become mean as vipers. Regulations and ordinances spewed out of the council chamber, and litigation was on everyone’s lips. A new sign ordinance forbade FOR SALE signs on lawns, since they sowed seeds of anxiety and a fear of impermanence in citizens not yet moving out — this was rescinded. Empty storefronts were outlawed per se so that owners forced to sell had to seem to stay in business. An ordinance even required that Halloween be “positive”—no more ghosts or Satans, no more flaming bags of feces left on porches. Instead, kids went out dressed as EMS drivers, priests and librarians.

Meanwhile, new human waves were coming, commuting into Haddam instead of out to Gotham and Philly. A small homeless population sprouted up. Dental appointments averaged thirteen months’ advance booking. And residents I’d meet on the street, citizens I’d known for a generation and sold homes to, now refused to meet my eyes, just set their gaze at my hairline and kept trudging, as if we’d all become the quirky, invisible “older” town fixtures we’d encountered when we ouselves had arrived decades ago.