Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

Walter felt, himself, in his anger and disappointment with the world, like the gray northern woods. And Lalitha, who’d been born in the warmth of southern Asia, was the sunny person who brought a momentary kind of summer to his soul. The only thing he felt like celebrating tonight was that, having “succeeded” in West Virginia, they could now plunge forward with their overpopulation initiative. But he was mindful of his assistant’s youth and hated to dampen her spirits.

“All right,” he said. “I will try a beer, once. In your honor.”

“No, Walter, in your honor. This was all your doing.”

He shook his head, knowing she was specifically wrong about this. Without her warmth and charm and courage, the entire deal with Nardone and Blasco would probably have fallen through. It was true that he’d supplied the big ideas; but big ideas were all he seemed to have. Lalitha was in every other way the driver now. She was wearing a nylon shell, its thrown-back hood a basket filled with her lustrous black hair, over the pin-striped suit she’d put on for that morning’s formalities. Her hands were at ten and two o’clock on the steering wheel, her wrists bare, her silver bracelets fallen down beneath the cuffs of her shell. Myriad were the things that Walter hated about modernity in general and car culture in particular, but the confidence of young women drivers, the autonomy they’d achieved in the last hundred years, was not among them. Gender equality, as expressed in the pressure of Lalitha’s neat foot on the gas pedal, made him glad to be alive in the twenty-first century.

The most difficult problem he’d had to solve for the Trust had been what to do with the two hundred or so families, most of them very poor, who owned houses or trailers on small or smallish parcels of land within the Warbler Park’s proposed boundaries. Some of the men still worked in the coal industry, either underground or as drivers, but most were out of a job and passed their time with guns and internal-combustion engines, supplementing their families’ diets with game shot deeper in the hills and carried out on ATVs. Walter had moved quickly to buy out as many families as possible before the Trust attracted publicity; he’d paid as little as $250 an acre for certain hillside tracts. But when his attempts to woo the local environmentalist community backfired, and a scarily motivated activist named Jocelyn Zorn began to campaign against the Trust, there were still more than a hundred families holding out, most of them in the valley of Nine Mile Creek, which led up to Forster Hollow.

Excepting the problem of Forster Hollow, Vin Haven had found the perfect sixty-five thousand acres for the core reserve. The surface rights of ninety-eight percent of it were in the hands of just three corporations, two of them faceless and economically rational holding companies, the third wholly owned by a family named Forster which had fled the state more than a century ago and was now comfortably dissipating itself in coastal affluence. All three companies were managing the land for certified forestry and had no reason not to sell it to the Trust at a fair market rate. There was also, near the center of Haven’s Hundred, an enormous, vaguely hourglass-shaped collection of very rich coal seams. Until now, nobody had mined these fourteen thousand acres, because Wyoming County was so remote and so hilly, even for West Virginia. One bad, narrow road, useless for coal trucks, wound up into the hills along Nine Mile Creek; at the top of the valley, situated near the hourglass’s pinch point, was Forster Hollow and the clan and friends of Coyle Mathis.

Over the years, Nardone and Blasco had each tried and failed to deal with Mathis, earning his abiding animosity for their trouble. Indeed, a major piece of bait that Vin Haven had offered the coal companies, during the initial negotiations, was a promise to rid them of the problem of Coyle. “It’s part of the magic synergy we got going here,” Haven had told Walter. “We’re a fresh player that Mathis’s got no reason to hold a grudge against. Nardone in particular I bargained way down on the reclamation front by promising to take Mathis off its hands. A little bit of goodwill I found lying by the side of the road, simply by virtue of me not being Nardone, turns out to be worth a couple million.”

If only!

Coyle Mathis embodied the pure negative spirit of backcountry West Virginia. He was consistent in disliking absolutely everybody. Being the enemy of Mathis’s enemy only made you another of his enemies. Big Coal, the United Mine Workers, environmentalists, all forms of government, black people, meddling white Yankees: he hated all equally. His philosophy of life was Back the fuck off or live to regret it . Six generations of surly Mathises had been buried on the steep creek-side hill that would be among the first sites blasted when the coal companies came in. (Nobody had warned Walter about the cemetery problem in West Virginia when he took the job with the Trust, but he’d sure found out about it in a hurry.)

Knowing a thing or two about omnidirectional anger himself, Walter might still have managed to bring Mathis around if the man hadn’t reminded him so much of his own father. His stubborn, self-destructive spite. Walter had prepared a fine package of attractive offers by the time he and Lalitha, after receiving no response to their numerous friendly letters, had driven the dusty road up the Nine Mile valley, uninvited, on a hot bright morning in July. He was willing to give the Mathises and their neighbors as much as $1,200 an acre, plus free land in a reasonably nice hollow on the southern margin of the preserve, plus relocation costs, plus state-of-the-art exhumation and reburial of all Mathis bones. But Coyle Mathis didn’t even wait to hear the details. He said, “No, N-O,” and added that he intended to be buried in the family cemetery and no man was going to stop him. And suddenly Walter was sixteen again and dizzy with anger. Anger not only with Mathis, for his lack of manners and good sense, but also, paradoxically, with Vin Haven, for pitting him against a man whose economic irrationality he at some level recognized and admired. “I’m sorry,” he said as he stood profusely sweating on a rutted track, in hot sunshine, by the side of a junk-strewn yard that Mathis had pointedly not invited him to enter, “but that is just stupid .”

Lalitha, beside him, holding a briefcase full of documents that they’d imagined Mathis might actually sign, cleared her throat in explosive regret for this deplorable word.

Mathis, who was a lean and surprisingly handsome man in his late fifties, directed a delighted smile up at the green, insect-buzzing heights that surrounded them. One of his dogs, a whiskery mutt with a demented physiognomy, began to growl. “Stupid!” Mathis said. “That’s a funny word to be using, mister. You almost done made my day there. Not every day I get called stupid. You might say people around here know better’n that.”

“Look, I’m sure you’re a very smart man,” Walter said. “I was referring to—”

“I reckon I’m smart enough to count to ten,” Mathis said. “How about you, sir? You look like you got some education. You know how to count to ten?”

“I, in fact, know how to count to twelve hundred,” Walter said, “and I know how to multiply that by four hundred and eighty, and how to add two hundred thousand to the product. And if you would just take one minute to listen—”

“My question,” Mathis said, “is can you do it backwards? Here, I’ll get you started. Ten, nine . . .”

“Look, I’m very sorry I used the word stupid. The sun’s a little bright out here. I didn’t mean—”

“Eight, seven . . .”

“Maybe we’ll come back another time,” Lalitha said. “We can leave you some materials that you can read at your leisure.”