A Far Piece to Canaan Read online

  Dedication

  To Joni,

  the love of my life

  Contents

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  Fifteen 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.

  1

  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 spectacular—Kentucky 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.

  2

  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: ‘The 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 pic
kin’.”

  “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 am—an 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.

  “What are the people around here like, Nate?” Dad asked, looking past Mom, who was sitting between him and Mr. Berman.

  “Like the goyim you knew in Bourbon County, maybe a little more meshuga,” Mr. Berman answered, meaning they were Christian and a little crazy.

  “Meshuga?” said Mom, straightening up, and I knew her eyes were wide in her round, chubby face. “What do you mean, meshuga?”

  “Nothing bad,” said Mr. Berman, laughing. “It’s just that they’re full of superstitions. Like when I was buying this place in January; the first time I came to look at it, there were maybe twenty people in the yard. A tall goy with a wild look in his eyes was shouting at the others about evil and floating Bibles in the river.”

  “Floating Bibles? Why?” Mom asked, a little scared.

  Mr. Berman laughed again. “I don’t know. The meeting broke up with some shouting. Since I was a stranger I didn’t ask questions. It’s a bobbeh meisseh.” Grandmother’s tale.

  That scared me. I could see that my sister Naomi, who was sitting beside me, was worried too. Mom turned toward Dad, who was laughing.

  “Morris, what do you think it means?”

  “Nothing,” said Dad, turning toward her. “There were nutty people around Moneybags’ place too.” Then he looked at Mr. Berman. “Nate, what shape’s that tobacco barn in?”

  “Good shape,” said Mr. Berman. “Throw on a few shingles, it’s good as new.”

  As the barns got closer you could see the roof of the tobacco barn was about gone.

  “Few shingles, huh?” Dad muttered, and Mr. Berman just kept driving quiet.

  Mom didn’t say anything either, but I could see her face in the rearview mirror.

  Her lips were pursed and she had pulled her arms together under her big chest. She was acting like she hadn’t gotten over that stuff about evil and floating Bibles. Even though Dad didn’t think much of it, it bothered me that Mom seemed worried.

  We come around a curve in the lane and there stood a white frame house with a big yard that had a thick kind of wire fence around it that folks in our parts called road wire. The gravel lane kept curving until it ended in a muddy stock barn lot. Mr. Berman veered off before he got to the barnyard gate and parked just outside the road wire fence.

  The yard was full of trees that didn’t have leaves yet but you could tell they were going to shade everything soon as they come out. There was a rock path that led to a big screened-in porch which had about half its screen rusted out. Next to the yard was an orchard and I knew one of the trees was a cherry. I loved cherries.

  There were lots of buildings you could see from the front yard. From where Mr. Berman parked, the field sloped down to a deep hollow with a creek at the bottom. On top of the other slope of the hollow, three, four hundred foot from us, was a tobacco barn. A corncrib and sheep barn were strung out after it like the navy ships I saw in picture shows, the buildings all creosoted black with shingle roofs. On down the hollow from the sheep barn, maybe another quarter mile, was a hired hand’s house. I knew it was empty because no smoke was coming out of the chimney. It was pretty though, nestled below a big hill that was shaped like a volcano with the creek in the hollow running maybe fifty foot from the front porch.

  The house we were renting had electric lights and a telephone. We’d never had those before. The kitchen was just like what we had at Moneybags’, with a peeling linoleum floor, a place for a cooking stove, and a big pantry. Behind the kitchen stove was a wood bin we could use for coal. We always burned coal even though most folks around us burned wood. I figured Jews had to burn coal to set them apart from the goyim. Out back was a yard with a chicken house. It had a flat rock path to it that went on past the chicken house and ended at an outhouse.

  I was with Mom and Naomi in the kit
chen when I noticed Dad and Mr. Berman talking in the kitchen yard. I went out through the kitchen’s screened-in porch to get close so I could hear, figuring they were talking about renting and that I’d be doing it someday and had better learn how. Dad was leaning against the fence that separated the kitchen yard from the barnyard. Next to Mr. Berman, Dad looked big, all muscled up in his Levi’s with his red flannel coat unbuttoned and light blue work shirt open at the neck. Mr. Berman was wearing a brown suit and looked like a pear with legs.

  “Nobody rents money rent these days, Morris,” Mr. Berman was saying. “It’s share or nothing,” and he looked away from Dad toward the stock barn.

  Dad nodded. “What kind of deal you offering?”

  “Same as you had on Coachman’s.”

  “Fifty-fifty on the tobacco?”

  “Yes.”

  Dad’s lips squenched together. “What about the fertilizer and labor and all?”

  Mr. Berman’s face went hard. “You paid it at Coachman’s, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah. Moneybags wasn’t fair either. You got fourteen acres of burley, Nate. I can’t do all that myself. Payin’ help will take a lot of my share. Why don’t we split fifty-fifty on that?”

  Mr. Berman’s face stayed hard. “Because that’s not what people do here, Morris.”

  Dad’s mouth squenched harder. “What about the livestock?”

  “You can have every third lamb.”

  “Every other.”

  “No.”

  “What about the cattle?”

  “You can pasture your livestock, raise hogs, and chickens, but everything else is shares.”

  Dad looked toward Mom and Naomi, who were walking across the yard toward another part of the fence. The last tenant had made a garden there. I could see beehives too.

  “What about the garden and honey?” Dad asked.

  “Shares. Everything but what we’ve agreed on is shares.”

  Dad turned back to face Mr. Berman. “You got a hired hand can help me?”

  “Yeah, there’s some white trash named Mulligan on the other side of the place. You can hire him when he isn’t working for me. The other tenant house is empty.”