something he’d told himself he’d never do.
It was a fourteen-hour drive. He could have flown, but somehow driving the whole way seemed appropriate. He would find somewhere in Ohio to spend the night.
The thought struck him in the silence between the hypnotic sounds of the Honda’s tires hitting the evenly spaced grooves separating sections of asphalt: his big brother might soon be a senator. Six years ago, when Graham won the state version of that office, CJ couldn’t help feeling the requisite pride a brother was supposed to feel, even if he’d tried his hardest to keep those brotherly feelings in check. And many of the reasons for his reluctance to celebrate Graham’s success were spelled out in varying degrees of detail in CJ’s books. He’d always found it funny that the critics who had suspected that much of his writing was autobiographical would never have presumed that the most authentic parts were the ones that made for good fiction.
Sort of like stealing a dog and a miter saw from your own house.
As if in sympathy to the absurdity of it all, Thoreau turned away from the window long enough to meet CJ’s eyes, and then he let go of the king of all dog belches. CJ agreed with him wholeheartedly.
Chapter 5
Adelia, New York
The dog was asleep as CJ followed the fir- and maple-lined SR 44, approaching the last curve that separated him from Adelia. The SR 44 became Buckley Road after the curve, where the speed limit slowed to forty-five as drivers passed the small industrial park just within the city limits, its brick factory buildings from before the war suffering a self-inflicted industrial melanism, the walls dark with soot and time, and the more modern-looking structures wearing their age almost as poorly. Farther on, the speed limit dropped to thirty-five for a quarter mile before the colonial-style houses he’d seen sporadically since Winifred started to cluster into neighborhoods and subdivisions. A half mile after that, Buckley became Main Street, and stayed that way until one was through Adelia and heading into the thick pine and maple forests that hugged the road all the way to Canada.
It was something CJ had considered—shooting straight through town, perhaps picking up an image here or there to feed the small pangs of nostalgia that had surprised him somewhere around Pittsburgh. It was the last thing he’d expected to feel— any sort of affection for this place. Adelia was just something he’d thought he would have to bear in order to see the old man off. But who can factor the pull of a heritage on a man who had been absent from it for the better part of two decades, especially when that heritage had its roots sunk deep into a land, into a familial constancy, that had remained unchanged for more than two hundred years? There was a saying that the house on the hill, the historic family home, had infiltrated the blood of every living Baxter, and when a Baxter died, it was sawdust he turned into in the coffin.
As CJ guided the Honda around the last curve, spotting the street sign that gave Buckley Road its asphalt birth, his thoughts went back to a poorly worded phrase from one of his books. “This part of the country was like a magnet ever pulling at the heart of every person who shared blood with Hal and his forefathers.” It was the sort of unwieldy line that made him wonder why anyone would have given him an award for his writing. And as far as his family was concerned, he suspected the name Hal wasn’t far enough away from Sal for there to have been any doubt what land he was referring to.
Poor prose and family reference aside, it seemed appropriate as he approached Adelia. The farther north he’d driven, the more he’d started thinking about the people and places he hadn’t seen in a long time, and how he looked forward to seeing some of those people and places again. He’d tried to push those thoughts aside rather than indulge them, remembering there were reasons he had not visited since college—reasons that no amount of nostalgia, however pleasant it all might feel, could diminish. Despite his best efforts, however, the scale seemed to tip in favor of the nostalgia.
Even so, there was still the matter of his family. The critics could argue all they wanted about the possible autobiographical nature of his work; most members of his family weren’t stupid.