Another Kind of Eden (Holland Family Saga 3)

Prologue

THE EVENTS I’M about to describe may challenge credulity. I do not blame the reader. Young Goodman Brown wanders these pages. The macabre images, the Gothic characters, the perfume from a poisonous garden could have been created with the ink from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s pen.

But the operative word is “could.” Edwin Arlington Robinson once wrote that God slays Himself with every leaf that flies. I think the same is true of us. I think we cannot understand ourselves until we understand that living is a form of dying. My generation was born during the Great Depression and, for good or bad, will probably be the last generation to remember traditional America. Our deaths may be inconsequential; the fling we had was not.

Cursed or blessed with the two faces of Janus, we saw the past and the future simultaneously but were sojourners in both, and most of us had gone into the night even before we knew the sun had set. In our ephemerality, we were both vain and innocent, as children can be vain and innocent. In our confidence that the evil of German fascism and Japanese imperialism lay smoldering in the ashes of Berlin and Hiroshima, we believed the republic of Jefferson and Adams had become the model for the rest of humankind, without acknowledging the internecine nature of triumphalism.

Music was everywhere. Dixieland, Brubeck, R&B, swing, C&W, rock and roll, Bird. The amusement piers along the Gulf Coast rang with it. In the hurricane season, when the nights were as black as silk, the waves seemed to swallow the stars and turn the waves to burgundy. They were five feet high, hissing with foam, swollen with seaweed and shellfish, with the thudding density of lead, smelling of birth and organic turmoil and destruction; then, suddenly, they would lift you into the air, pinioning your arms behind you like Jesus on his cross, and release you on the sand as a mother would a child.

It was a grand time to be around. War was an aberration. Bergen-Belsen and Changi Prison were devised by foreign lunatics who wore the uniforms of clowns. A GI with a cigarette lighter that had a sketch on the side of Mount Fuji was a celebrity. But the fondest memories were the drive-in theaters, the formal dances under a silver ball, the summer tuxes and hooped crinoline dresses, the dollar-fifty corsages and small boxes of chocolate-covered cherries we gave to our dates at their front door, the flush in a girl’s face when you kissed her cheek, the shared conviction that spring was forever and none of us would ever die.

But illusion is illusion, and the millions of bison and passenger pigeons slaughtered on the plains and the whalebones that still wash ashore on the New England coast are testimony to our anthropogenic relationship with the earth. And for that reason I have written this account of the events to which I was witness in the year 1962, in the days just before the Cuban Missile Crisis.

These events fill me with sorrow and give me no peace. They also make me question my sanity. But they occurred, and others can reckon with them or not. I said Goodman Brown found his way into this story. That’s not quite accurate. I believe the human story is collective, that we write it together, but only a few are willing to recognize their participation in it. T. E. Lawrence described the aftermath of the Turks at work in an Arabian village. I have never forgotten the images, and I have never forgiven him for implanting them in my memory. At the conclusion of this story, I hope I have not done that to you.

Chapter One

MANY YEARS AGO, knocking around the American West was quite a gig. Think of running alongside a boxcar, your heart bursting in your chest, slinging your duffel and your guitar inside and jumping in after them, and then two hours later descending the Grand Divide, your head dizzy from the thin air, grizzly bears loping alongside the grain cars. The side-door Pullman didn’t cost a cent, and what a show it was: an orange moon above a Kansas wheat field; the iridescent spray of wheel lines; the roar of a stream at the bottom of a canyon; the squeak of an irrigation valve at sunset; the cold smell of water seeping through a walnut orchard at evening tide.

Colorado had strange laws back then. Hitchhiking or hopping a freight could cost you six months in the can or on the hard road. The consequence was that bums and migrants riding a hotshot into Denver could get into the state but not out, so Larimer Street was overflowing with panhandlers and derelicts pissing and sleeping in alleyways and under the bridges on the Platte. In the spring of ’62, I swung off a flat-wheeler at the Denver city limits and slept two nights in the Sally, then took a Greyhound bus down to Trinidad and hired on with a big dairy and produce farm that provided cabins and community showers and a dining hall for the workers. The owner was Mr. Jude Lowry.

Know why migrants are migrants? There’s no yesterday and no tomorrow. Anonymity is a given; migrants come with the dust and go with the wind. Mortality disappears with a cold bottle of beer in a juke joint. I had nonalcoholic blackouts back then, and because of the life I had chosen, I didn’t mind. In fact, the migrant way of life seemed created especially for people like me.

Late in August, Mr. Lowry put me in charge of the flatbed and the trailer it towed, and told me to round up Spud Caudill and Cotton Williams and start hauling our last crop of tomatoes down to the packing house in Trinidad, which would take us three trips. The air was heavy with the odor of insecticide and the harrows busting up the soil and the scattered chunks of ruined melons that looked like red emeralds in the sunlight. But there was another phenomenon at work also, a purple haze in the lee of the mountains, one that smelled of the desert and the end of the season, as though the land wanted to reclaim itself and drive us from its midst.

* * *

I FIRED UP THE flatbed and, with Spud in the passenger seat and Cotton behind the cab, headed down the dirt road for the highway, the knob on the floor shift jiggling in my palm.

Spud’s face was as coarse as a lampshade and pocked with ringworm scars, his head shaped like an Idaho potato. He always wore a wilted fedora low on his brow, and cut his own hair to save money for brothels. He had been on his own since he was eleven years old. One mile down the road, he unscrewed the cap on a canteen and filled a jelly jar half-full with dago red. “Want a slug?”

I gave him a look.

“Mind if I do?” he said.

“Mr. Lowry entrusted us with his truck.”

“A passenger drinking in the truck don’t hurt the truck, Aaron.”

“Do whatever you want, Spud.”

He poured the wine carefully back into the canteen, shaking out the last drop. “Why are you so weird, Aaron? I mean deeply, brain-impaired weird?”

I drove with one hand, the breeze warm on my face, the sky piled with plum-colored clouds above the mountains, backdropped by a molten sun.

“You not gonna say anything?” he asked.

“Nope.”