The Cordon faced outward. Their folk did sometimes bring nerve-racking tales of organized assaults from precincts to the south and west, from New Hampshire. The Cordon’s people were stoical, flinty types; Eke was typical. Hardly storytellers. Shouldn’t that make them trustworthy? Maybe, maybe not. The Cordon’s accounts all underscored the need for their defensive measures, the hardening of a perimeter, the justifiability of their paranoiac vigilance. Motive made all their tales suspect. Journeyman had wondered: how many hungry beggars equated to a berserker horde? Maybe just a half dozen.
The peninsula’s second town, Granite Head, was where the old quarries were centered—those mysterious engines of the region’s prospering for more than a century, before the appetite for granite bank and skyscraper lobbies and bridge foundations in Boston and New York had been exhausted. The overgrown deep-bottomed quarry pits now not only functioned as natural freshwater fish hatcheries and swimming holes. Those of them with the right proportion and smoother walls made ice hockey rinks when the freeze was hard enough. Quarry hockey was a free entertainment relying on sturdy paraphernalia: metal skates, sticks, hard rubber pucks, and winter clothes.
Maddy lived in East Tinderwick, where the locavore and natural-growing community had centered itself, mid–twentieth century. The community blossomed in the 1940s, before hippies or foodies, though it paved the way for both. That was when the back-to-the-land gurus Seldon and Margot Stevedore bought several hundred acres of woods and overgrown farmland, to the wonder and consternation of the locals, and began parceling it out to young acolytes, so long as they were willing to bend their backs to the labor of growing food in a hostile terrain.
East Tinderwick was, therefore, the secret battery of the present survival of the community. The preservation and reinvention of the oldest methods, the mushrooming and berrying, the jarring and canning, the smoking of mackerel, the cellaring of root vegetables, had placed the community in a position to barter for their survival with the Cordon.
The Cordon had guns, when guns still worked. Once guns quit they had the authority of their willingness to do violence. They also had can openers, and Bush’s maple-and-cured-bacon baked beans, only they were running out of the Bush’s. The peninsula had farms that ran by horsepower even before the Arrest, simply because the trust-fund idealists and peak oil preppers and golden hippie grandchildren of the Stevedore sharecroppers thought it was a better and a nicer idea than lubing up and repairing a grimy old tractor. The peninsula had farmers who knew how to raise and murder a duck—as Journeyman had learned, ducks were hard—and a sausage maker who never wasted a drop of blood from a single murdered duck, if Journeyman could catch it and bring it to her. The peninsula had rose-hip-and-yellow-dock chutney, and smoked mackerel, and the best marijuana.
The Cordon liked these things, as well they should.
East Tinderwick was where Journeyman’s sister had landed, after she fled Los Angeles, after the Starlet. East Tinderwick was where Maddy bought her own acreage, with a couple of partners from her senior-year off-campus house at Baginstock College, and, with them, founded the intentional community called Spodosol Ridge Farm. It was Spodosol where Journeyman had begun, after some time, visiting his sister during the summers, and it was where, over three decades later, he’d unintentionally found himself in residence at the Farm at the moment the Arrest occurred.
10.
Madeleine
LONG BEFORE THE STARLET, JOURNEYMAN’S sister had struck him as dark. Not depressed, or gothy, more what’s called saturnine. She seemed to occupy, helplessly, a square of Earth plagued by an excess of gravity, or shaded by a tiny storm cloud. Or both, gravity and cloud. It wasn’t a thing she had the power to decorate or disguise, but a current that flew tangibly through her despite the adoption of any number of stances, attitudes, or enthusiasms—all the usual self-making of an adolescent person. Journeyman got to be the one who encouraged her by making fun of her. Or perhaps it was the reverse: that he made fun of her by his encouragement. Madeleine only stuck with things—field hockey, vegetarianism, certain tattooed and heavily pierced friends—that Journeyman had declared ridiculous, and unlikely to persist. She disappointed their parents freely, without giving them the satisfaction of seeing her fail. She only quit the violin on the day she’d finally achieved near sublimity, a celebrated recital after which she never lifted the bow again.
He’d never heard her volunteer an interest in music of any kind, let alone play it in her room.
On summer vacations at Rehoboth she steeled herself to swim in the cold ocean, out a terrifying distance from the beach. She refused to be recruited for basketball but destroyed Journeyman in their backyard.
She possessed an uncanniness for problem-solving procedures, of a sort that caused her always to ace her math and science classes. Yet she eschewed abstractions and figuration both. She once explained to her brother how she visualized math problems: as a series of broken objects needing rearrangement into a more pleasing whole. Her hands moved while she solved them. She liked stuff.
One year she read all of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey and Maturin novels, and shifted them from their father’s shelves into her room. Yet she disliked the sailing cultures, the boaty folk, of coastal Delaware, of Fishers Island, and, later, of the peninsula to which she’d removed herself.
Journeyman never saw her take one drink at a high school party, but she’d accept a glass of wine from their father at dinner, the year before college. Journeyman didn’t know if she’d been a drinker at college.
When Madeleine got her mathy hands into the soil, in college, and began to come home Christmases and Thanksgivings talking of loam and silt and hydrostasis, of cryptopores and mollisols, alfisols and spodosols, how could Journeyman have known she was describing her whole future concern, right down to the source of the name of the farm she and her fellow righteous oddballs would make their permanent home? Let alone that it would flourish and survive and become instrumental, a pin stuck through a tattered portion of reality when all the rest of it flew away?
11.
Permanent Vacation
THE FIRST TIME JOURNEYMAN VISITED Spodosol Ridge Farm he dropped in on his way back from a wedding on Mount Desert Island, a nuptial festivity that actually began with a chartered flight out of LAX into the Bar Harbor airfield. He’d at that point seen Maddy just once since the Starlet Apartments, on Fishers Island, at their father’s seventieth birthday. Journeyman and his date to the wedding—a girlfriend who hadn’t lasted long—had rented a car and meandered down the peninsula, the same road he walked today. On that day it had been smooth-paved, and made no particular impression on Journeyman apart from the length of it, and the depths of the woods that rose up intermittently like walls, the remoteness of the life his sister had chosen.
They stayed at the Farm less than two hours, Journeyman and his date. There was little he recalled of the visit, though he could place it in time: it was the year he’d written two episodes of a television show about a family living with a talking toaster, the first and, it would turn out, the last time Journeyman would earn a single-card credit on-screen for his writing. He did recall that Maddy and her six or seven homesteading companions at that time still bunked and cooked in one central lodge while laying foundations for the first of the individual homes on the Farm. He recalled being served a pasty, chunky yellow curried-vegetable rice in wooden bowls, and that his date didn’t eat very much of hers.