Near Canaan Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Liese O’Halloran Schwarz

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One: The Journey

  Chapter Two: The Stranger

  Chapter Three: The Belle of Naples

  Chapter Four: Buddy Downtown

  Chapter Five: The Indians

  Chapter Six: The Ladies’ Page

  Chapter Seven: The Confessor

  Chapter Eight: Controversies

  Chapter Nine: The Gun Collector

  Chapter Ten: Ladies’ Man

  Chapter Eleven: The World of Men

  Chapter Twelve: At the Hospital

  Chapter Thirteen: Solomon’s Baby

  Chapter Fourteen: The Midnight Round

  Chapter Fifteen: Twins

  Chapter Sixteen: The Nanny

  Chapter Seventeen: Strangerland

  Chapter Eighteen: Men and Women

  Chapter Nineteen: Flirtations

  Chapter Twenty: Regular Guy

  Chapter Twenty-One: Conflicts and Allies

  Chapter Twenty-Two: House Call

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Good and Evil

  Chapter Twenty-Four: Fireman’s Daughter

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Treaties

  Chapter Twenty-Six: Farewell

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Filmmaking student Buddy Whyte never visited his mother’s hometown while she was alive.

  But in the wake of her tragic death, he can no longer resist the lure of Naples, Virginia. He packs up his car and drives south from New York City with his camera. He means to make a short film about the town – and perhaps learn why Beth Whyte left it, and why she never went back.

  Many people in the close-knit community are devastated to learn of the death of Buddy’s mother – not least two brothers, Jack and Gil, who knew her best. Although they live and work side by side, a dark secret divides them, and they have not spoken to one another in years.

  Through his camera lens, Buddy captures an unexpected story, including glimpses of his mother that challenge everything he thought he knew. Butin a small town where even disparate voices agree that the past is best kept hidden from outsiders, will he actually learn the truth?

  Near Canaan is an intricate and multi-layered novel of secrets and memory which explores the far-reaching, inescapable effects of the past.

  About the Author

  Liese O’Halloran Schwarz published her first novel, Near Canaan, while she was studying at medical school. Her second novel, The Possible World, was published nearly thirty years later. She currently lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

  Also by Liese O’Halloran Schwarz

  The Possible World

  for Wright

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Journey

  THERE MIGHT HAVE been a faster way to get there, but he didn’t know it. He had asked no one’s advice before starting off; only three people in the world knew he was going at all, and had one of them proposed a shorter route to him, he probably would not have taken it. He was a person made uncomfortable by complexity; and shortcuts, side roads, bypasses, all of those inventions of an impatient civilization, held no attraction for him. Not that he was not impatient—he was—but his impatience was far outweighed by his fear. He did not himself know this; and he could not call many of the things that he feared by name; but they were diverse and numerous, and the immense capillary network of the country’s road system was among them. With its twists and turns and long lightless stretches of tarmac, it stayed at the back of his mind in some preconscious category of evils. He stuck to the main roads; and it took him nearly all day.

  He was nervous even at the beginning; to the last minute, he hadn’t been sure if he was really going to go at all. He had first had the idea while drunk, after all, and nearly asleep. Throughout the week following, he had enjoyed dwelling upon the thought of it, his own private adventure; it had seemed exciting then, and probable. Two days ago, he had gone about borrowing a car from a fellow in the dormitory who was notoriously openhanded with his possessions. Yesterday, he had procured a colored road atlas. Yet none of this had truly convinced him; none of it had warned him for this moment, this sudden and stark intrusion of reality into his fond daydreams. The early morning light, the bag in his hand, the car he had finally located, standing forlorn-looking in a No Parking zone on a side street, waste paper blown up against its front tires. He considered it, mustard colored and rusty, peering at it as though it might tell him something.

  “Hey, man, your car?” A voice at his elbow; when he turned, it was a stranger, one of the millions of people in this city who were strangers to him. He had learned to classify them by dress, by mannerisms, by speech. Whom to ignore, whom to answer, whom it was safest to placate. He turned away from this one.

  “Somebody did some shit to it, that’s for sure,” said the stranger. “But if it’s been here more than a day, you’re lucky. This your car?” he asked, edging closer. Getting no answer, the stranger reached out and actually touched the paint of the car, watching him the while. “I need to know is this your car, man,” he said, losing patience. “I mean, it’s still got some good stuff on it.”

  The car did look like junk: rusty, dusty, one sidelight smashed in and repaired clumsily with orange tape. He hoped it ran better than it looked.

  “See that tailpipe,” said the stranger.

  He nodded.

  “Muffler could be shot,” said the stranger, bending down to peer under the car, and straightening again. “Looks okay,” he reported.

  Without knowing what he was doing, still nodding, he brought out the unfamiliar ring of keys from his pocket.

  “Shit,” said the stranger, hearing the jingle, looking up. “Fuck you, man,” he said, moving away.

  He poked the key into the lock; a twist, a pull, and all the gathered breath of the car was upon him, stinking vinyl and mentholated cigarettes. He tossed his light duffel onto the backseat, and lifted the two heavier cases after it, setting them down more carefully. Then he slid into the driver’s seat. That was that, then; he was ready to go.

  He studied the road atlas carefully, following with his index finger the route he must take, memorizing lefts and rights. He creased the atlas fiercely at the proper page, and left it open on the passenger seat, glancing frequently at it as he drove. Seeing nothing but a tangle of blue and red lines against a cream yellow background; but still, it reassured him. He peered through the windshield, listening nervously to a rattling from the engine, shifting gears tentatively, chanting to himself. Bleecker to Broadway, Broadway to Canal. This first part was to be a simple effort, in distance less than a dozen city blocks, and all of it tolerably well marked with dirty but legible road signs. Nevertheless, he didn’t trust the city not to rearrange itself while his attention was diverted; and when Broadway indeed led him to Canal Street, he idled at the stop light, pleased and self-congratulatory.

  There it was, Canal Street, broad and decrepit, lined on either side with tall crumbling buildings. He peered upward at the stone against the sky, and then, his eyes insulted by the early sun, he brought them down again and studied the sidewalks below, their confusion of vendors and pedestrians, the sun glinting off rows and rows of sunglasses, batteries, cassette tapes. He fumbled in his shirt pocket for his own sunglasses, watching a worried-looking man fuss behind his stall of flimsy carnival toys. Suspended from a crenelated steel overhang above the man’s left shoulder, a cellophane fish turned in the wind.

  The light changed, and the rush began again. The line of cars all surged desperately forward together, only to decelerate suddenly, less than one hundred yards ahead, for a line of st
opped traffic which had been well within view from the previous intersection. He was dismayed by the weaving, the horn blowing, the intrusion into his lane from either side by cars at high speed, cars whose drivers seemed to understand intuitively that he was unused to this, a novice, an easy mark. A taxicab swelled suddenly into his lane to avoid a delivery truck, missing his right front fender by millimeters. He pushed hard on the horn, but no sound came forth. He punched it again, and was rewarded with a short, nasal bark. The taxicab was long gone; the protest was useless; and the effort of making it had taken his attention from the road, so that he nearly rear-ended a Toyota, which had stopped at the next intersection and was idling, primly.

  A few jolting blocks later, he was at the mouth of a tunnel, obscurely frightened by the pulsing darkness within, the thought of the rushing water overhead. He inched and stalled his way into and through, his sunglasses now off, his eyes pale and weak looking without them. Progress was slow, but at least here the cars obeyed the Stay in Lane signs: they fell into two orderly lines, and sudden peace reigned. It was much as though these drivers had never driven any other way and had never subscribed to any method of transportation other than this one, this uniform stream of polite traffic; there was no horn honking, no weaving, no hurry-and-stop. Just the twin lanes, the cars flowing along slowly under the arch of the tunnel, their headlights making long light streaks on the tiled sides, their taillights winking back red through the collecting fumes. There was a putrid twenty minutes or so at a complete standstill, dozens of cars wheezing and vibrating in place; and the young man’s eyes began to water from the exuberant gases of the road: he had come to his senses only belatedly, rolling up the car windows full minutes after entering the tunnel. At long last, traffic began to move again, in jerks, and then the road began to rise ahead of him, and they were all being lifted toward the far opening.

  Then the tunnel was past, and there was just the open sky above and a chaotic jumble of cars below. Previously constrained, so well-behaved just moments past, they were now set free to resume their dangerous business of rearranging. They went about it with a happy vengeance, straddling lanes, interweaving recklessly, swerving inches from one another’s fenders, the drivers leaning hard upon their horns and making angry faces from their windows.

  He found signs to the road which would take him much of the way, and when he had achieved entrance to it, he noticed an immediate difference: cars were not so ill-behaved here. There was more space, for one thing, and the possibility of travelling at ninety miles per hour; but also, it seemed that travelling was a more serious venture for the turnpike driver, who was not so concerned as before with the transgressions or progress of his neighbor, and was not so apt to blow his horn. The turnpike was not a Manhattan thoroughfare, littered with heedless pedestrians and intrepid taxicabs; it was no Broadway, and it was no simple unchallenging tunnel: it was a wide straight ugly slash through the countryside, meant only for drivers of the long haul. The spirit of grim purpose penetrated even to him, where he slouched in his borrowed car, and he sat up a little straighter behind the wheel.

  He stopped once while still in New Jersey, pursuing the blue signs off to the right, stalking past the groups of windblown travellers clotted in the lobby of the rest stop. He lumped them all together in his mind—all the mothers, daughters, uncles, and brothers, all the sweethearts and secretaries, all the toddlers and truants, all the grandfathers—all of the people standing here on their way from one place to another. Taking in their garish cheap jerseys and tight blue jeans with one contemptuous glance, he summed them up, collected them all into one oppressive whole: the Talkers, the Gigglers, the Unthinking. Passing through them, though hating them, he felt less real than they were, less solid; and in the men’s room, combless at the mirror, he winced at the nearly transparent pallor of his skin. He ran wet fingers through his hair; the face hanging before him was resolute, with a fluorescent-light bonelessness to its features. He frowned at himself; and his image looked hungrily back at him.

  Back in the car, there seemed no end to the sameness and flatness of the road. The weak spring sun moved across the sky, and he followed, his mind strangely emptied. Imagining nothing; driving. Coming out of the chemical plains of New Jersey, plunging into another tunnel and emerging again, into the steaming downtown heart of Baltimore. The sky here was nearly white, pencilled with smokestacks, patterned with drifting factory smoke. He took the tight cement curve around Washington, eyeing the cars strung out across the lanes. They had an air of fellowship about them now, all part of a loose army, marching toward the capital.

  The Beltway was nestled in a flashing gem bed of glassed-in high rises. He passed between these, examining them at high speed, appreciatively. Some were modest, only twenty shining stories of amber glass; while some were more grand, fifty or more levels of smoky mirror, the clouds of the Maryland sky seeming honored to pass across their faces, while on the top of each building rode one or another intensely modern portmanteau symbol, COMSYSDYNE writ in enormous letters, identifying for all passing pilgrims the patron of this remarkable structure: Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair. He, thinking none of this, admired the reflection of one in the surface of another, and drove on by.

  He could tell when he entered Virginia. The roadside shrubbery was suddenly gigantic, greener and more lush than the scrubby, halfhearted foliage which had lined the Northern roads. Gone were the images of the morning; gone, the shabby crowds in the city, the painful stop and go of the traffic channeling along between the high buildings, each one separately and peculiarly demolished-looking, eaten away by the difficulties of the city. Gone, the company of other vehicles; his path had peeled off from theirs long ago, their brake lights and glittering edges of metal flashing past the turnoff, away and out of sight. Now he was marching alone, down the thin asphalt carpet unrolling between clumps of trees and occasional filling stations.

  He stopped at one of these and bought a candy bar from a vending machine near the men’s room. A hand-lettered sign taped next to the coin slot read, “Please Drop Quarters Real Slow.” Outside again, he waited while the attendant hooked the hose back onto the pump.

  “Seven forty,” he said. The first human voice of the day, apart from the caught drifts of conversation at the New Jersey rest stop. Those voices had been high, stretched thin; this one was low and substantial. Fo’ty, the young man repeated mentally, with deep pleasure. So this was the South, not forty minutes outside of Washington.

  The attendant accepted his money without hurry, straightening the bills carefully, digging out a warm assortment of change.

  “Looks like storm weather maybe,” he commented, dropping the dime into the young man’s palm. Sto’m.

  The young man squinted up at the sky, as if seeking a password.

  “Could be,” he said at last, his breath coming short at his own daring.

  “Come a long way?” the attendant asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “You look it, son,” the attendant returned, startling the other, who was no younger than he was. “Car looks worse than you do,” he added.

  “It’s not my car,” he said, automatically.

  “Well, someone needs to take care of her,” said the attendant. “She’s seen a lot of road time. She could use a wash. How’d you like to travel all day without a bath at the end of it?”

  The young man, listening, began to feel a glimmering of cynical understanding. He looked around for a car wash sign, but didn’t see one.

  “In New York, it’s good to have your car look like this,” he told the man, who narrowed his eyes suspiciously. “No, really. The worse it looks, the less likely it is to get smashed up or stolen.” But not junked, he told himself, recalling the stranger of the morning.

  “That right,” said the attendant, neutrally.

  “It’s kind of like a car alarm,” explained the young man, and instantly realized he was going too far. He gave a short, false laugh.

  “Well,�
�� said the attendant, easily. “You just turn that alarm off now, if you want.” He slapped the car as he passed it. “You get where you’re going, you take a hose to her.”

  “Maybe I’ll let the rain do it,” said the young man, in a last attempt at camaraderie.

  “That you could,” said the attendant, with a smile. “Well, you sure could,” he repeated, nodding, smiling larger now, and moving away. “Take care now,” he said over his shoulder, leaving the young man to his car, that private interior world of cracked vinyl and AM radio. He slid stiffly into the front seat, pulling the atlas across to him. He consulted it briefly, then slammed the door and started the engine. He was nearly there.

  He had to confess his surprise, reviewing the interaction he’d had with the gas station attendant. He hadn’t been hillbilly, exactly, or even Hee-Haw; but he hadn’t been what the young man had expected, not an hour from the Capitol building. Of course, he knew that Washington, D.C., was Southern by location, but he considered it a neutral place, a normal place was how he thought it to himself. He’d been to Washington once on a school field trip, and it hadn’t seemed odd to him then, not foreign or Southern or slow. And later, looking at maps, he’d always seen the capital as a kind of buffer state or even a sort of oasis, like divided Berlin nestled deep within East German territory, the Western democrats going about their business in the tiny half city allotted to them, as though on all sides they were not breathed upon by the enemy. At least the West Berliners had a wall to protect them.

  When he thought of the South, he thought of Mississippi, and no matter what his mother had said, he couldn’t take Virginia all that seriously as a Southern state. Tennessee, yes; and Alabama, and Kentucky. But Virginia? Virginia was too close to the capital, right up against Northern culture; some of it must have rubbed off, over the years.

  But that fellow had been Southern, in a way that even he recognized; more than that, the whole place had been Southern, as though somehow, without knowing it, he had driven across an invisible dividing line. But maybe the gas station attendant had been from somewhere else, somewhere in the deep South; that would explain his voice, and his manner, his Southernness. But who would come so far to work in a gas station?