Freeman's: Home

John Freeman, John Freeman

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780802189493
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Asiatische Literarische Sammlungen

"A superb anthology" on the theme of sanctuary with original work by Viet Thanh Nguyen, Edwidge Danticat, Aleksandar Hemon and more ( Kirkus Reviews ). The third literary anthology in the series that has been called "ambitious" ( O Magazine ) and "strikingly international" ( Boston Globe ), Freeman's: Home, continues to push boundaries in diversity and scope, with stunning new pieces from emerging writers and literary luminaries alike, including in this edition Leila Aboulela, Barry Lopez, Amira Hass, Emily Raboteau, Kjell Askildsen, and many others. "This edition of Freeman's manages to do what the world off the page cannot: provide a place where diversity can safely reside. A sanctuary for stories…Home is often the stories of others. Let these poems, shorts and stories guide you to what is your home."— Literary Hub

Vacationland

KERRI ARSENAULT

Mexico, Maine sits in a valley or “River Valley” as we call the area, because I suppose you can’t have one without the other. The hills are low and worn and carved by the waters surrounding them, and trees line the rivers, which confine the town. It’s a paper mill town where smokestacks poke holes in the smog they create. That’s money coming out of those smokestacks, my father used to say about the rotten-smelling upriver drafts that surfaced when the weather shifted. That smell loitered amid the high school softball games I played beneath those stacks and lingered on my father’s shirtsleeves when he came home from work, allowing me to forgive the rank odor for what it provided.

From the porch steps of the house where I grew up, to the right, you’ll see a street of clapboarded homes, the quiet interrupted every now and then by a braking logging truck. A mile or two out of town, the road narrows and small creeks knit through pastures shadowed by hills, a working farm or two, a long straight road, and smells of cut hay, muddy cow paths, rotting leaves, or black ice, depending on the time of year. The seasons, they calendared our lives.

To the left of the porch, you’ll see the end of the road. There, the pavement dips down to reveal the town’s only traffic light, a gas station, and the roof of the Family Dollar Store. Behind the store lies the wide, slow-moving Androscoggin River. Just beyond the Androscoggin, on an island in the neighboring town of Rumford, the paper mill’s largest smokestack emerges like a giant concrete finger. From anywhere in town you can orient yourself to this stack or the ever-present ca-chink ca-chink ca-chink of the mill’s conveyor belts and find your way home, even from a pitch-black walk in the woods. When mill shutdowns occur for holidays or layoffs, the smokeless stacks resemble the diseased birch trees dying throughout New England.

Where stack meets sky, the river pivots and heads southeast, under bridges and over rapids, pushing through falls and dams, around islands and along inlets, through Jay, Lewiston, Topsham, Brunswick, and other small towns, until it meets and mingles with five other rivers at Merrymeeting Bay, whereupon it finally and quietly slips into the Atlantic Ocean.

April 2009 and I am home for my grandfather’s funeral.

My parents’ house sighs with winter’s leftover lethargy. Spring has arrived in Maine with driveways full of mud and sculled up snowplow debris; salt stains, shredded earth, and derelict mittens lie in the wake of its embracing path. A few dirty buttresses of snow linger like pocked monoliths, meting out the new season’s arrival. The swollen Androscoggin pushes flotsam downriver in the commotion of spring’s thaw, and insect hatches will soon begin bursting along its surface until summer opens like an oven. My mother comes out on the porch where I’m standing. Want to go for a walk? she asks, her face pinched with the sharpness of her father’s death.

We head up Highland Terrace and stop to peek in the windows of an abandoned house, one I always liked, with its wraparound porch, turreted roof, and buttercup-yellow paint. The owner is sick but refuses to sell the house, my mother says as we walk across the battered porch. So it sits there, this once elegant home, shedding its brightness, yellow flecking the half-frozen ground. Spray-painted in the road near the driveway: “Fuck you, bitch.” The fug of the mill swallows us.

Ahead, we reach the top of the hill, and there, my old high school. To the east, snowmobile trails and abutting them, the mill’s decommissioned landfill. To the west, the football field slices the horizon and beyond that, lazy fingers of smoke lick the sky.

We walk inside the school, and my mother stops in the office to chat with the principal. The lobby smells of Band-Aids, warm mashed potatoes, and damp socks. Being there reminds me of Greg, my high school on-again, off-again lumberjackish boyfriend who lived near the town incinerator. I loved him like I would a sorry stuffed animal, one who had lost an eye or whose fur was rubbed raw. Kelly, a girl who wore her black, perfectly feathered hair like a weapon, was in love with him too. When he and I fought—usually because of her—I’d listen to sad songs on my cassette player over and over until he’d call and I’d forgive him in a pattern of everlasting redemption. I only saw Greg once since I graduated. He came to my parents’ one Christmas break when I was home from college. He and my mother caught up while I leaned against the kitchen countertop across the room. Peckerhead, my father said when he entered the room. He called all boys I dated “Peckerhead” but only if he liked them. If he didn’t, my father would sit at our kitchen table like a boulder while the boy fidgeted by the kitchen door in blank-faced silence. Greg eventually married Kelly and got a job at the mill, alongside his sister Janet, who pitched for my high school state championship softball team.

After my mother and I leave, we follow the dirt path behind the football field, past Meroby Elementary where I got into a fistfight with Lisa Blodgett. Lisa and I took turns swinging horizontally at each other’s head until a teacher intruded on the brawl. Lisa’s strength was tremendous for a sixth grader, her grit shaped by being one of the youngest girls in a family of fourteen kids, most of them boys. When I looked in the mirror that night at home, I was sure I looked different, the way you think you do when you lose your virginity. It was my first and last bare-knuckled fight, except for a few unconvincing swipes at good old Kelly one night at a dance. My best friend, Maureen, who towered over both of us, protected me from Kelly’s sharp, red fingernails.

Down Granite Street, an untied dog begins following us, growling. Just ignore him, my mother says. But I hear his snarls over the thrum of the mill. As I turn to look at him the dog sniffs my heels, his tail down. I walk faster. My mother continues talking. The dog gives a final bark and sits down in the middle of the road. I look over my shoulder until we are out of his sight and he is out of ours. Down the hill, past the Green Church, the town hall, the library, the fire station, the post office, we walk through the oversized parking lot at the Family Dollar Store. Someone sits inside the only vehicle parked there eating a sandwich with the windows rolled up and the engine running. Nearby, the vacant lot where the Bowl-O-Drome used to be and behind it, St. Theresa’s, our shuttered Catholic church where Father Cyr gave me my first communion, confirmed me, and listened to my first confession. I’m sorry I lied to my parents, I said to him, though that itself was a lie.

On the corner at the traffic light, a gardening store, a newish shop, to me anyway. Lawn decorations, perennials, stuffed animals, and miniature tchotchkes for terrariums strain the overstocked metal shelves of the store. Most mom-and-pop shops have closed in town, but for a few. In their place, discount stores like Marden’s Surplus & Salvage, Wardwell’s Used Furniture, the What Not Shop Thrift Store, and other such second-hand outlets and pawn shops appeared over the years, as if the people who live here only deserve leftovers. Walmart with its blinking fluorescent lights and the faint smell of formaldehyde, hijacked the rest of the commerce.

I am inspecting a snow globe when I hear my mother shout, Kerri, guess who’s here? Do you know who this is? Inevitably, she plays this remembering game, usually in the grocery store, where she will stand next to someone, grab his or her arm as if she were a koala, and ask me, do you remember so-and-so? I will stand there frozen, in the frozen foods, staring at my mother and the person she has grabbed, their eyes like dinner plates, waiting for my answer. Sure, yes, I remember you! I had said earlier that same day to Mr. Martineau, the man who lives across the street from my grandfather. After Mr. Martineau left the store my mother told me he has Alzheimer’s. He doesn’t remember you, she said.

Kerri, come see who’s here! she shouts again. I walk around the aisle like Gulliver, jiggling the doll-sized plastic floral arrangements, pitching the teeny flowers to and fro. My mother raises her arms upward like a magician. DO YOU KNOW WHO THIS IS?

Hi. Long time no see, the woman says. Yeah, what is it, about twenty years? I say. Her dry yellow bangs slump over oversized round glasses that hide pink powdered cheeks. On her bulky sweatshirt, something plaid. Where do you live now? she asks, leaning on the counter, arms crossed like a fortress. California, I say, feeling bad, not knowing why. San Francisco! I clarify. Oh, I went there once. Didn’t like it. The people are not very nice. And I never found anything good to eat, she says.

I look around the store for my mother, for the exit. It seems quiet around here nowadays. Much less going on than when we were kids, I say. No, not really, she says. Really? I say, wondering if she means there is something going on or there isn’t. I went by the Recreation Park yesterday. It’s just so . . . so different, I say, hopeful. I glance at her around the periphery of her glasses, our conversation. She stares at me over the top of her rims, as patient as a road, looks at me without blinking: my leather jacket, my Prada eyeglasses, my fitted jeans. Nope, you’re the one that’s different, she says.

We leave the store and my mother tells me the mill plans to shut down Number 10 paper machine, and others are on a transitional schedule, meaning they too may lumber to a slow hissing halt. In the past few decades, with technology displacing people and digital media overtaking print, the production of coated magazine paper—our mill’s primary product—has become as precarious as the livelihoods of the men and women who make it. We want to sell the house, but nobody wants to live here anymore, my mother says, panning her hand from one side of the street to the other. Homes sag with ruined lawns—and the families who live in them haven’t fared much better.

Around the block, we pass Kimball School where I attended K–4. Weeds root in the tar playground and a plastic bag twirls in the damp breeze. A rusty chain-link fence girdles the property. Dr. Edward Martin gutted the school years ago and transformed it into a medical office, but after he died, the building closed up permanently. Broken glass breaches the milkweed that surrounds the maple tree we had sought shade under during recess. Down the street, my grandfather’s house, buttoned up, the furnace long expired. Remnants of crabgrass and soggy leaves flatten his once thriving garden. Mr. Martineau, who my mother and I saw at the grocery store earlier, emerges from the house across the street. He waves. We wave back.

My mother and I walk home in silence. Halfway there, I run my hand along the cool green iron railing that parallels the sidewalk and snag my sweater on it. The rusted, dismembered rail is scattered in bits at the bottom of the banking. On my way from school, I’d roll on my side down that banking, again and again. With gra...