A Far Piece to Canaan
Read A Far Piece to Canaan Online
Authors: Sam Halpern
To Joni,
the love of my life
Prologue
F
ifteen miles south of Lexington, Kentucky, on a road that dwindles from superhighway to brush-hidden, black-patched, gravel-strewn pike, stands a fractured, unhinged gate. The mud-washed lane behind the gate leads to a tumbledown farmhouse, which, devoid of human life, has knee-deep weeds for a lawn. On a sunny windowsill, head on forepaws, rests a cat with the mange, while a cowsucker snake, the only other inhabitant, glides slowly under the remains of a screened-in porch. There is silence and everything seems small.
I
was exhausted, and the monotonous sound of the commuter plane's engines irritated my already frayed nerves. My subconscious had been tracking the time and I knew I was nearing my destination. I shut my eyes and drifted into sleep. This afforded me relief from boredom until my brain conjured up giant horses, leaping flames, and wailing voices.
I gasped awake. With sleep, I had traded boredom for terror. I turned in my window seat and looked outside the aircraft. Clouds and window-blurring rain obscured everything beyond the engines. Thoughts of my childhood friend Fred wandered through my mind. A feeling of foreboding crept through me. The captain's voice was a welcome intrusion.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we're about fifteen minutes from touchdown. This weather's pretty deep, so please fasten your seat belts. Flights are stacked up because of the storm so we'll be in a holding pattern. If you're in a window seat, get ready for an aerial tour of the heart of the bluegrass.”
My anxiety returned as we dropped bumpily lower. I saw wisps of ground through thin gray cloud, then, suddenly, the earth became a brilliant kaleidoscope of color. The plane banked and the view was spectacularâKentucky in early summer. The Lexington of my memories had grown larger but still spread like a patchwork quilt into horse farms, deep green fields of corn, tobacco, and alfalfa set among bluegrass pastures that caressed slowly flowing creeks.
We began losing altitude rapidly, mushing through the air. Suddenly, the engines surged and we flew in a circle. The Kentucky River appeared, twisting and turning like a shiny blue-gray ribbon as it meandered through intense green vegetation. My breathing picked up instantly and my mouth became dry. Then there they were, the river's two great curves, first the Little Bend, then, as the plane continued its turn, the Big Bend. I fought for control of my emotions as I searched for landmarks. To my amazement, much of the land between the two serpentine flexures remained undeveloped; indeed, it looked nearly as wild as it had sixty years past. It was mystical to me now . . . something foreboding . . . known, yet unknown. I wiped my wet palms on my pants. My heartbeats became more powerful, slamming against my chest wall. “This is ridiculous,” I whispered, and angrily yanked my seat belt tighter.
The plane slowed, we moved onto glide path, and a short while later the screech of tires formally announced to my quivering psyche that I had arrived in the land of my birth.
I picked up my bags and the rental car, drove to my hotel in downtown Lexington, checked in, and nearly collapsed on the bed.
I'm back, Nora,
I thought.
I kept my promise
.
A
good night's sleep vanquished much of my fear, and the next morning I drove into a glorious new day. The road from Lexington to my destination reminded me in some ways of my life. Both had changed so much that I hardly recognized them. The interstate highway I was driving was a number now, wide, smooth, and impersonal. Gone was the intimacy of the old Dixie Highway that had allowed a close-up view of white-railed fields of the bluegrass country and sleek, grazing racehorses. The rental car was silent, no complaining engine, rattle, or squeak of brakes. I felt nostalgia for our green '36 Ford sedan with its broken rear window and the oil leak that killed the grass whenever Dad parked the car near the front yard.
“Dad, why do you want to make this trip?” my daughter Candy had asked as she saw me off at Boston's Logan Airport. “I could understand if it was Indiana; Grandpa's farm was there. But Kentucky? Penny and I are worried about you. It's hot in the South and you could get sick. What's there for you in Kentucky anyway, after all these years? Every time either of us asks what you did as a kid in Kentucky, you give a stock answer: âThe same thing the other sharecropper kids did; I worked in the fields.'”
I laughed at Candy's baritone imitation of my voice. How do you tell your daughter you are on a quest for something unknown at the behest of her dead mother? “Not to worry,” I said, “I'll be fine.”
An exit sign on the interstate said Harper's Village. That sounded suspiciously like the tiny village of Harper's Corner I had known as a child, so I took the off ramp. Nothing looked familiar. I drove past a mall and motored slowly down a picturesque country road. The tobacco fields I knew as a boy had been separated from the blacktop and its easement by barbwire. The barbwire had given way to white rail fences that guarded elegant pastures and homes. The horses in the fields were fine saddle horses, not workhorses. I checked the names on the mailboxes. None was familiar.
A few minutes later, I rounded a curve and saw a wooden arrow pointing toward a dirt road that cut through the easement. I stopped to read the words on the arrow: “Old Cuyper Creek Pike.” My road! I carefully maneuvered the car over the weedy, rut-filled turnoff, which was actually a tractor path that allowed farmers access onto the ancient blacktop.
The old road was in relatively good repair and drove easily. A few miles later, I passed an unmarked lane I thought I recognized, then decided I didn't and continued down a long curvy hill. Then I saw the sweet apple tree. Some of the branches and a part of the trunk were torn away, but what remained was dutifully producing fruit. The apple tree meant the entrance to the farm was only a short distance ahead. I felt an urge to eat one of the apples so I pulled close to the tree and parked.
Climbing the sweet apple tree hadn't been easy for me as a kid, and it was going to be harder at seventy-two. In my mind I could hear the banter between Fred and me.
“Y' know, Samuel, if'n you can take a little longer, I'll be done pickin'.”
“I'm climbing quick as I can, Fred Cody! I just ain't fast at climbin's all!”
It now took me twenty minutes to build a ramp of rocks to get into the branches. I picked three apples, then lay back on a big limb, exhausted but exhilarated. Sixty years had passed since I had last been up in this tree. What would they say, my colleagues, if they could see me up in the sweet apple tree? My peers in the world of comparative English literature? What would they think if they knew the history I had shared with this tree? A joyful, chaotic, wonder-filled, terrifying time that had been a secret prelude to my becoming their grudging choice for the Johnson-Goldsmith Prize, comparative English literature's highest award.
For exceptional scholarship that sheds new light on the nonlinear structures of late Cornish literature
So said the award plaque. Sounds awful, but that's academia, and it hasn't changed since Plato invented the concept under his own tree in Athens. I was amazed that I had received the award, having spent the majority of my career out of sync with so many people in the field.
Nora was sure my problems with academic polemics were because I had lived my formative years in what she referred to as “wacko-world.” By that she meant among the hill people of Kentucky. Nora was always sure. My little Brooklyn belle, wife of fifty years who had sometimes referred to me as the Jewish Rhett Butler she saved from that bitch Scarlett O'Hara. Rhett Butler, I am not. Samuel Zelinsky, I amâan emeritus academic doted on in recent times by his students, his peers, and his elite New England liberal arts college that periodically detested his presence.
I bit into one of the apples and a gush of saliva and juice filled my mouth. The apple was still green but so good. Just the way I remembered. Sometimes I felt there were only memories in my life now, the clear and solid drifting from substance into a mysterious fog that rolled and shifted and entwined the past, the living and the dead, into a swirling labyrinth in which everything seemed equally distant and ethereal. My parents and siblings were gone, my Nora to cancer, my daughters married to husbands and careers, my students off to the real world, my college in search of a greater trust fund, and me to my dotage as Professor Emeritus of Comparative English Literature, which somehow rang more hollow with each passing day. I looked around at the rugged countryside. What did I want from these over-farmed hills after sixty years? I had no idea, but only days before her death, Nora had made the request that I return. I felt honor-bound to make the journey.
I arranged the remaining two apples on my belly, then threw away the core of the one I had just eaten. I listened as it fell through leaves, ricocheted off limbs, and hit the ground. Swish, bop, bop, thump! Music! The day was hot and I was tired. I closed my eyes and let my muscles sag into the old tree's limb. I missed Fred. This was my first time up in the sweet apple tree without Fred on a limb near me. My memory of the day we moved onto Berman's was so clear . . .
It was cold, boy. You could blow your breath and see wisps of smoke come rolling out of your mouth just before the icy wind blew it away. I was doing okay, though, in my mackinaw, except for the spot near my left armpit where the seams was giving way and a little trickle of cold snuck in if I raised my elbow, which I didn't. Mr. Berman, the landlord we were renting from, took us to see the new house. We had come a long way from Moneybags' place where we had been renting, going down one road after another before coming to a big white gate. From there, it was a quarter mile back to the house. Mr. Berman kept telling Dad and Mom what a great road it was. I liked it too, especially the chuck holes in the gravel that caused the tailpipe of the big Buick to scrape. I was sitting in the backseat right behind Mr. Berman's head. He really had a fat head and neck. He didn't look anything like me or Dad. I kept thinking how odd that was because I heard Dad say that this was the first Jew we ever rented from and he didn't look like us at all and we were Jews too. Dad's head looked lean and hard and tanned. Mr. Berman's looked squishy. Matter of fact, I wanted to push my finger into it to see if it would dent, but I didn't. Off in the distance, patches of melting snow surrounded bare, black ground. Things looked dead, but there was a smell in the air. Spring! It was coming up spring in Kentucky.