Chapter One
Revival Road
Faye Travers
Leaving the child cemetery with its plain hand-lettered sign and stones
carved into the weathered shapes of lambs and angels, I am lost in my
thoughts and pause too long where the cemetery road meets the two-lane
highway. This distraction seems partly age, but there is more too, I
think. These days I consider and reconsider the slightest of choices, as
if one might bring me happiness and the other despair. There is no right
way. No true path. The more familiar the road, the easier I’m lost. Left
and the highway snakes north, to our famous college town; but I turn right
and am bound toward the poor and historical New England village of Stiles
and Stokes with its great tender maples, its old radiating roads, a stern
white belfry and utilitarian gas pump/grocery. Soon after the highway
divides off. Uphill and left, a broad and well-kept piece of paving leads,
as the trunk of a tree splits and diminishes, to ever narrower outgrowths
of Revival Road. This is where we live, my mother and I, just where the
road begins to tangle.
From the air, our road must look like a ball of rope flung down
haphazardly, a thing of inscrutable loops and half-finished question
marks. But there is order in it to reward the patient watcher. In the
beginning, the road is paved, although the material is of a grade inferior
to the main highway’s asphalt. When the town votes swing toward committing
more money to road upkeep, it is coated with light gravel. Over the course
of a summer’s heat, the bits of stone are pressed into the softened tar,
making a smooth surface for the cars to pick up speed. By midwinter, the
frost creeps beneath the road and flexes, creating heaves that force the
cars to slow again. I’m glad when that happens, for children walk this
road to the bus stop below. They walk past with their dogs, wearing puffy
jackets of saturated brilliance – hot pink, hot yellow, hot blue. They
change shape and grow before my eyes, becoming the young drivers of fast
cars who barely miss the smaller children, who, in their turn, grow up and
drive away from here.
As I say, there is order, but the pattern is continually complicated by
the wilds of occurrence. The story surfaces here, snarls there, as people
live their disorder to its completion. My mother, Elsie, and I try to tack
life down with observation. But if it takes a lifetime to see things
clearly, and a lifetime beyond, even, perhaps only the religious dead have
a true picture of our road. It is, after all, named for the flat field at
its southern end that once hosted a yearly revival meeting. Those sweeping
conversions resulted in the establishment of at least one or two churches
that now seem before their time in charismatic zeal. Over the years they
merged with newer denominations, but left their dead sharing earth with
Universalists and Quakers and even utter nonbelievers. As for the living,
we’re trapped in scene after scene. We haven’t the overview that the dead
have attained. Still, I try to at least record connections. I try to find
my way through our daily quarrels, surprises, and small events here on
this road.
We were home doing pleasant domestic chores on a frozen Sunday in the dead
of winter when there was a frantic beating at our door. In alarm, Elsie
called me. I came rushing from the basement laundry to see a young man
standing behind the glass of the back storm door, jacketless and
shivering. I saw that he’d lost a finger from the hand he raised, and knew
him as the Eyke boy, now grown, years past fooling with his father’s chain
saw. But not his father’s new credit-bought car. Davan Eyke had sneaked
his father’s new automobile out for an illicit spin and lost control
coming down off the hill beside our house. The car slid toward a steep
gully lined with birch. By lucky chance, it came to rest pinned precisely
between two trunks. The white birch trees now held the expensive and
unpaid-for white car in a perfect vise. Not one dent. Not one silvery
scratch. Not yet. It was Davan’s hope that if I hooked a chain to my
Subaru and backed up the hill I would be able to pull his car gently free.
My chain snapped, and the efforts of others only made things worse over
the course of the afternoon. At the bottom of the road a collection of
cars, trucks, equipment, and people gathered. As the car was unwedged, as
it was rocked, yanked, pushed, and let go, as different ideas were tried
and discarded, as the newness of the machine wore off, Davan saw his plan
was lost and he began to despair. With empty eyes, he watched a dump truck
winch his father’s vehicle half free, then slam it flat on its side and
drag it shrieking up a lick of gravel that the town road agent had laid
down for traction. Over the years our town, famous for the softness and
drama of its natural light, has drawn to itself artists from the large
cities of the eastern seaboard. They have usually had some success in the
marketplace, and can now afford the luxury of becoming reclusive. Since
New Hampshire does not tax income, preferring a thousand other less
effective ways to raise revenue, wealthy artists find themselves
wealthier, albeit slightly bored. Depending on their surroundings for at
least some company, they are forced to rely on those such as myself – a
former user of street drugs cured by hepatitis, a clothing store manager
fired for lack of interest in clothes, a semi-educated art lover, writer
of endless journals and tentative poetry, and, lastly, a partner in the
estates business my mother started more than fifty years ago.
(Continues…)
HarperCollins
ISBN: 0-06-051510-4
Excerpted from The Painted Drum
by Louise Erdrich Excerpted by permission.
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