Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [67]
“They’re out, too, I’d imagine.”
He handed me a sinker from the package and took up the one that had been languishing in his lap all this time. The blast of weed must have awakened his appetite. We took big bites and chewed on them awhile in companionable silence. Then he turned to me, his upper lip dusted with a sugary mustachio.
“Doesn’t sound like much of a holiday,” he said.
THREE MILES OFF THE interstate, at the point where the old state highway met the Youngstown Road, there was a diner called the Seneca, with a chrome-and-neon warbonnet for a sign. That was how I always found the shattered strip of country blacktop that led to the Warshaws’ farm: just past the Seneca Diner, you took the first left, rolled over a steel bridge that crossed an insignificant fork of the Wolf River, and flashed past the general store, filling pump, and post office that were all that remained of the town of Kinship, PA. The town’s schoolhouse was little more than a picturesque woodpile, and in 1977 its volunteer fire station, abandoned for a decade, had burned to the floor joists. For the last few years there’d been a sort of antique store on the ground floor of the old Odd Fellows’ Hall, but now that was gone, too. Things had pretty much been deteriorating around Kinship for over a hundred years, since the original Kinship Community was abandoned and its somber-hatted population of Utopians were scattered into the great expanse of general American dreaminess. Irving Warshaw’s beloved springhouse was one of the few Community structures still standing, and Irene Warshaw had been trying for years to have it declared a national landmark, although not, we believed, because she cared particularly about the history of the Kinship Community. No, Irene had an idea that it would have to be a federal offense, at the very least, for an elderly man to hole up days on end—smoking El Productos, listening to Webern and Karlheinz Stockhausen, inventing magnetic paint and liquid saws and Teflon hockey rinks for desert climes—inside a building that was on the National Register of Historic Places.
Along with the old springhouse, only the barn and the boathouse on the pond were standing in the late fifties when Irving Warshaw bought the land. He’d had to build the main house from scratch, on weekends and holidays and summer vacations during the Kennedy and Johnson years. On the foundation of an earlier structure, with materials salvaged from abandoned farmsteads all over Mercer County, he’d raised up a modest two-story saltbox of weathered gray shingles, with a fieldstone chimney, an eclectic assortment of old leaded windows in the living and dining rooms, and a pair of dormers in the attic story that were set too close together and lent the house a cross-eyed expression. The floors were crooked, none of the doors hung true, and on windy days the draft of the fireplace had been known abruptly to reverse itself, filling the entire house with roiling clouds of black smoke; but Irv had done the job almost entirely himself, with some help from his late brother, Harry, and from a local named Everett Tripp, an alcoholic wires-and-pipes man who’d tried to feel Emily up when she was eight years old, and who may well have been a distant cousin of the narrator. When his sons were old enough to give him a hand, Irv set about restoring the wreck of the barn, a great gray ark staved in and keeled over in the tall grass a hundred yards from the house, which an expert from Penn State had dated to before the Civil War.
“I’ve never visited a real farm,” said James, as we turned right, just beyond the Odd Fellows’ Hall, into an alley of elm trees, huge and still leafless, that ran from Kinship Road up to the house, planted at reasonable intervals in the last century by careful Utopian hands. These trees, according to some freak of the breezes, had for many years escaped the Dutch elm disease, but now there were many gaps in the double colonnade. Last summer I’d helped Irv bring down two blighted trees, and it looked as though a few more had failed to