Brendan was silent in the back of the van and Bongo was asleep, but Marcus, sitting next to Henry, kept up a nonstop flow of chatter and directions.
“Take a left here. Then a right, at that light. This used to be farmland here, where those brown buildings are — they make computers in there. All these businessmen have moved here from the city the past couple of years, and you wouldn’t believe the prices they’re paying for houses.”
Henry’s heart leapt at that. An influx of wealthy executives, a rising real estate market — if his uncle’s land had any view at all and even reasonable access, anything he did there would mint money. The land would come to him clean and unencumbered, the way the farm had in Coreopsis. But this time he’d know what to do with it.
“Turn left here,” Marcus said, and then he started talking about the years before the dam was built and how, even before the acts authorizing construction had passed through the legislature, men from Boston had invaded the area.
“They were the slick ones, they were, and you can’t tell me they didn’t plan every step of it. We didn’t have phones or electric then, and most of the roads weren’t paved, and most of the farmers weren’t doing so well and neither were the mills. Those men were like vultures — they smelled the weakness. They came sniffing around, sniffing out the greedy men and the failures and the widows, and they spread rumors that the dam was coming and that land values were going to crash.”
Marcus’s voice rose a little and he plucked at the loose skin on his neck. “‘Sell now,’ they said, and they offered a premium to the first ones who did. Pots of money, more than some could resist. Then they went to the neighbors and said, ‘See, so-and-so sold already for a good price. We can’t offer quite as much now, but it’s still a lot, more than you’ll get if you wait.’ They offered each round of sellers less, and pretty soon people panicked — and the diehards, the ones who’d held out until the rumors became a sure thing, they threatened them with eminent domain.”
He pursed his lips and made a disgusted noise. “What can you do with men like that? ‘We can take it anyway,’ they said. ‘And we will.’ And they did. People like my parents, and your grandparents — they held out so long they got almost nothing.”
Henry listened with half an ear, but Marcus’s story seemed impossibly distant, like a fairy tale set in a time Henry couldn’t imagine. The fact was — his daughters and Kitty had often accused him of this, and he’d had to admit they were right — the fact was that, despite his ability to imagine alternate lives for himself in places he’d never been, he couldn’t imagine a scene without himself in it.
He tried to picture the valley during the 1920s, but he could see only flappers and gangsters, images from movies, nothing that squared with Marcus’s tales or with what his parents and grandparents had told him. And he couldn’t help thinking that those men from Boston had only been doing their jobs. He’d used the same tactics himself, on a smaller scale — in his glory days, when his developments had sold out immediately and the people who moved in were young and had small children and were thrilled with their homes, he had sometimes acted secretly to piece together his parcels of land.
He had never looked at land that was already advertised for sale. Instead, his talent had been to cruise the countryside in a mood as relaxed as a trance, waiting for the flash that would tell him here, here, here. A certain combination of topography and location would flash in the sun like a mirror, and he’d look at the land and see himself reflected in it. Then he’d start the slow, secret process of tracking down the various owners, and after that the even more secret process of finding out what those owners might want or need. And of course he’d approached those people one by one, cutting them out of the herd, and of course he’d offered large sums to the early sellers and then smaller sums to the later ones. How else could he have assembled his tracts at a reasonable price? Those men from Boston had only been canny, and he blamed his grandparents’ bitterness on their inability to see what was coming and get out early.
He interrupted Marcus midsentence to say, “But you all knew it was coming — why didn’t you just get the best price you could and go somewhere else?”
“Because this was our home,” Brendan said acidly from behind Henry’s head. “Our families had been here for generations. Our lives weren’t for sale.”
“That’s right,” Marcus said, and he gave Henry an odd look. “What do you do for a living, anyway?”
Henry stiffened, waiting for his uncle to say something scathing about his real estate career. Marcus seemed old-fashioned, one of those stiff types who disapproved of development on principle, and Henry was anxious not to alienate him. When Brendan said nothing, Henry said, “I’m working in a corrugated-box factory these days, running a die-cutter.”
To his surprise, Marcus broke into a huge smile. “Isn’t that something, now. Used to be, there was a big box factory in Pomeroy that your father worked at in the winter. When they moved it to Athol, after the building started, he commuted out there. It’s nice to think you’re following after him.”
“I didn’t know I was.” Henry looked in the rearview mirror and caught Brendan’s gaze; Brendan dropped his eyes, leaving Henry to wonder why he’d never mentioned this. Then he wondered what else Marcus knew that Brendan didn’t, or hadn’t seen fit to mention.
They drove along the base of a long, low hill and crossed a river that was, Marcus said, one of the three that fed the reservoir. On the other side of the river was a quiet town that seemed very old. Henry turned where Marcus told him to, and the road, already small, narrowed further and became frost-heaved and rocky.
“You want to take a right at this fork,” Marcus said. “Then you’ll have to be careful — the last stretch is dirt.”
Marcus knew about the place where his father had worked, Henry thought. Perhaps he knew more than that. “What happened to my father during the war?” he asked. “Did he ever say?”
“You must have heard that story before.”
“Not from you. You knew him.” Henry saw Brendan lean forward in his chair, as if to catch Marcus’s words, and he remembered how Brendan had lain in the parlor in Coreopsis, telling him stories about the war in China. Those tales had come from the same time and the same war but a different place; although Henry had clung to them, they had never done more than circle around his father’s war.
“I was with him,” Marcus said. “But it’s a long story.”
“Tell me,” Henry said.
Marcus drew his arms together in his lap. “War stories,” he said sourly. “I hate war stories.” But then he stretched his arms out on his knees and gazed into his open palms, as if the words Henry wanted were written there.
“Nothing went right for us,” he began. His voice was distant and cold, and Henry saw that the skin inside Marcus’s elbows was as crinkled and fragile as Brendan’s. He checked his own arms quickly; the skin was creased but firm.
“We’d both joined the National Guard before Pearl Harbor, and our unit got called up in March of ’42. They shipped us over to Oahu for training, and to serve as part of the base defense force. We didn’t see combat until November of ’43, when they shipped us over to the Gilbert Islands. A place called Makin.”