Enon by Paul Harding
“It’s like mud,” I said. “Gravelly.”
“I know, I know; it’s your rocket fuel.” She took the mug and looked in it and crinkled her nose at the grounds floating on the surface and took a sip.
“Blech.” She handed it back.
“Told you.”
“Mah, mah,” she mimicked. “Are there any yard sales?”
“Check it out,” I said, and pulled out the classified section and tossed it to her. That was a ritual, too, her asking me about the yard sales and me having her check the paper for us. I deliberately never looked before she woke up. She opened the paper and laid it out across the table, leaned her face close to it, and followed the listings with her index finger. I wondered whether she might be farsighted.
“Junk, crap, junk, junk,” she said as she worked her way down the list. “Hey, an estate sale, over off Ash Street.”
“That might be good.”
“Books and records for you, maybe.”
“And maybe you’ll find Hector’s brother, or one of his cousins,” I said. Kate liked to search yard and estate sales for curiosities. The strangest thing she’d ever found was a translucent amber-colored bowling ball in which a dead rat had been preserved. The name “Hector” was etched in the ball, above the finger holes. Kate had wrangled the ball for two dollars.
“Alas, poor Hector!” Kate said. That had become our refrain whenever we mentioned the ball. It’s what I’d said when Kate had first shown the ball to me at the yard sale, after she’d bought it.
“So, Ash Street then?” I said.
“Ash Street,” Kate said.
“Okay. Let me get my sneakers on. Why don’t you fill up a water bottle.”
“Aye, aye, sir. What about Mom?”
“We’ll let her sleep in.”
BEFORE KATE DIED, I loved studying the history of Enon. I read things like mimeographs of the minutes from old town meetings, and the four books that had been published about the village’s history, the earliest of which had been written in 1823, on the occasion of the town’s bicentennial, and the latest of which had been written in 1973, for the village’s three hundred and fiftieth anniversary. Over the years, three of the village’s historians had drafted maps of Enon at different times in its history, with little drawings of individual houses and the perforated lines of extinct lanes and paths, and the disused names of every rise and cleft and meadow and tuft of land sticking out of the western swamp, like Birch Plains and the Thick Woods and Pigeon Meadow, and Hemlock, Grape, and Turkey Islands. The hills were named either after their original colonial owners or the fact that their summits were capped with bare granite. There was Cherry Hill and Cue’s Hill and Moulton Hill, and there was Bald Hill and Barepate Hill and Stone Crown Hill. I imagined the hills as the exposed heads of giants standing asleep in the earth, older than the colonies and the Indians and the kettle holes and drumlins carved by the glaciers, the earth having risen around them and buried them during their eons of slumber, and that they might someday stir and scratch the tops of their boulder skulls and upend the whole village. I had also bought survey maps of the village from the government geological service and fitted them together like a puzzle and tacked them up on one of the walls of the back room. Kate and I occasionally plotted our walks beforehand, standing in front of the maps, sometimes inspecting them with a magnifying glass or taking rough estimates of distance with one of my grandfather’s old metal shop rulers, or tracing some arbitrary radius around our house or the day’s destination with one of his compasses. I kept a dozen of his drafting tools hung from tacks I’d stuck in the wall next to the maps. Even though Kate and I only ever fiddled with the compass and the ruler, there was also a slide rule and a micrometer and a protractor, a divider and three or four other tools for which I did not know the use. (I had wanted to take apart the old clockworks I’d kept in a box after my grandfather’s death and somehow or other fit them together with his tools and make a kind of sculpture or machine, but nothing ever came of it.)
I loved summer, and my perfect weekend days were spent lying on the couch in the living room, with the windows wide open and the sunlight flooding everything, and the perfume from the flowers Susan planted in the beds outside the windows drifting into the house with the breeze. I’d read a few pages of a book I’d picked off one of the piles stacked around the house (which provoked Susan to fond exasperation: “Arrgh, more books! They’re everywhere!” she’d yell from the bathroom or the bedroom) or a reprint of a pamphlet about Enon’s centennial celebration of 1723, or I’d look over a quadrant of a survey map with a magnifying glass and float off, riding the updrafts of whatever interesting scrap of local history or theory of thermodynamics or description of Scottish moors I’d just read, my senses intermingling in half sleep, and read the topology of Enon with my fingertips like Braille, tracing brown hills, aqua swamps, curved blue lattices of streams and rivers, the bright moss green of its meadows, dozing, hearing Susan ask Kate upstairs for all the whites out of her hamper or Kate ask, “What’s for dinner?” and Susan answer, “Dad’s grilling. Want him to make corn?”
ANY GOOD-SIZED GRANITE STONE you come upon in Enon, and by good-sized I mean large enough to step or climb on without it rolling, has at one time or another in the past three hundred and fifty years had a sermon preached in front of, on top of, or from behind it. Such stones are scattered all over the area. Several have bronze plaques bolted to them commemorating local, formerly less obscure occasions when a minister, usually itinerant, usually involved in the Great Awakening, preached the Word to the local farmers and merchants, often to electrifying effect, if old accounts are to be believed. There’s Pulpit Rock in Rowley, and Whitfield’s Rock in Ipswich. Enon has Peters’s Pulpit, which is where Hugh Peters preached the village’s first sermon, in 1642, presumably on John 3:23 and the surrounding verses. Peters later returned to England, where Cromwell appointed him a chaplain and he was beheaded on Tower Hill after the restoration of Charles II. Peters did not preach his sermon by the rock that now commemorates the occasion. The site is located on the northeastern shore of Enon Lake, in a patch of meadow. There is no path to the rock or sign indicating its existence. Donny Leavitt and his two helpers in the DPW, a pair of hangdog older guys who usually stand around over a pile of dirt or wheelbarrow full of hot asphalt chain-smoking, mow the meadow every two weeks, although not a soul outside the village knows of the site, and no one from the village ever visits it. There was originally a hill on the site, with a broad, moderate slope and a granite brow. Peters preached to the villagers from the top of the hill. I imagine that little group of people, gathered in a small clearing in the middle of what was then wilderness, full of wolves and dismayed, abraded Indians, on a blustery Saturday morning in October, perhaps with clouds gathering and rolling across the horizon behind Peters on the summit, banking and releasing the light, intermittently spattering the trees and the grass and the rock and the congregation with fat drops of rain, and Peters on high, exhorting, perhaps even using the weather as an occasion to emphasize the verses he preached, about the darkness that men love because they are wicked, and the light of God coming into the world being its condemnation, and how this small brood of souls must lift up the serpent in the wilderness, must lift up Christ on His cross in this wilderness and flood its shadows with glory and light.
The hill was leveled in 1839 to build an icehouse for the Enon Ice Company. Eighty-four years later, in 1923, Rebecca Fisk, a descendant of John Fisk, who had assisted Hugh Peters in his ecclesiastical activities during that first year of Enon’s existence and subsequently established the first church of Enon after Peters had returned to England, donated the money to the town to buy, as her original instructions, on file in the town clerk’s office, read, A large, appropriately sightly rock, a bronze plate, and the inscription thereupon, for commemorating the introduction of God’s Word to Enon by Hugh Peters, martyr, to be placed as near as can be determined to the original location of Peters’s Pulpit.
“This kind of banana seat is the best; you can fit two people on it and the guy on the back can lean back against the sissy bar. And these ape hanger handlebars are the best; if you move them up, then you can stand up and lean way forward when you pedal and go wicked fast. Or you can move them down and lean way back and just cruise around, like a chopper. This is the best kind of bike except for my new one.”
The bike was a shiny brownish orange. I begged my mother for the money for a week, until she gave me the four dollars Doug wanted. I paid Doug and hopped on the bike and started toward my grandparents’ house, across the village. Less than halfway there, the air had leaked out of both tires and the handlebars had come loose because the bolt that held them in place was stripped.
My second bike was a red three-speed with a saddle seat and a metal emblem of Robin Hood on the handle post. I was too big for it and all my friends called it a girl’s bike, but it worked and I used it to get around the North Shore for four years.
I was not especially traumatized by those experiences. It exasperated me, though, that no one in my family could figure out how to patch a tire or tighten a pair of handlebars or raise a seat, especially my grandfather, who had a basement and a garage full of tools.
When Kate was four, I was determined that she would have a good, solid, well-maintained, and new bike for every stage of her girlhood. I took her to a bicycle store in the next town over, called Black’s. Black’s was located on the corner of a block of local shops, in between a cobbler and a locksmith. The three or four guys who worked there wore short-sleeved, button-up shirts with gray pinstripes and kept their glasses cases and pens and receipts in the breast pockets. They wore dark green work pants and Hush Puppies shoes, had army-induction haircuts, and looked like they should be teaching mechanical drawing at the vocational high school. But they knew all the bikes as if they’d designed them themselves, and the store carried only the most straightforward, unadorned, solidly built brands. There were no tassels or decals of cartoon characters or fake plastic motorcycle engines clipped onto the frames. The first time I took Kate there she was uninterested until we walked through the door and she saw the bikes arranged in two long rows down either side of the store, men’s and boys’ on the left, women’s and girls’ on the right, smallest to largest. Kate let go of my hand and dashed to the girls’ bikes. She stopped and stood in front of a bright blue bike fitted with training wheels.
“Look at this one, Dad!” she said. There was a salesman on duty at the back of the shop, working on a bike clamped to a repair stand.
“Hi there,” he called. “Can I give you guys a hand with anything today?”
“Well, this is Kate and we’re looking for a bike for her,” I said.
“Well, hi, Kate. That’s a good thing,” he said. “Looks like it’s about the right time.” He tossed the hex wrench he was using into a tool tray and wiped his hands with a handkerchief from his back pocket. “What kind of a bike do you think you’re looking for?”
Kate pointed to the blue bike. “This one.”
“That’s a great one,” the salesman said. “I’d say that one or one of these other two would be good for you, too.” He drew the blue bike out into the aisle and two others, one sunflower yellow, the other nail-polish red. Each was fitted with training wheels. Kate barely looked at the yellow and red bikes.
“This one,” she said. I was surprised by how adamant she was. My first reaction was to think she was almost being a little rude to the salesman, but I realized that it was more like conviction, a kind of intensity in her I’d never seen before that the blue bike seemed to activate.
“I like that,” the salesman said. “You know just what you want. Now, I can get you a helmet that goes with that blue color too, if you want,” he said.
“You want that, love?” I said. Kate came out of the little spell the bike had her under. She looked at me and beamed and said yes, she’d like that.
“Well, hop on it and we’ll get the seat adjusted for you,” the salesman said. Kate looked at me, suddenly shier, blushing.
“It’s okay, sweetie,” I said. “Get right on.” She grabbed the handles and put a leg over the bike.
“Here,” I said. “I’ll hold it still so you can sit.” I held the middle of the handlebars and Kate wiggled herself up onto the seat. She put her feet on the pedals and leaned forward and made a serious face, as if she were racing, and made a sound like rushing wind with her mouth.
“It’s going to be really cool,” I said to her.
“Yeah,” she whispered. “Really cool. I’m going to go fast.”
A sound, working bike, with properly filled tires and an oiled chain and tight handlebars, had always seemed impossible when I’d been young, and I tried to imagine the feeling of being a little kid in possession of such a treasure.
“We can go all over town,” I said to Kate. “Every night after I get home from work, if you want. All over.”
“And we can race!” she said.
The first bike trip Kate and I went on, I was too ambitious and we barely made it to Peters’s Pulpit. We ate the lunches I’d packed. Kate asked me what a sermon was and I stood behind the rock and pretended to bang it with my fist and threw my arms up and cried, “Ah, Sister Kate! Unless my name be not the right, ah, Reverend Borrowed Moment, then allow me, ah, to shout about how we are, ah, blessed to be, ah, together, ah, like this, under the, ah, sun, and, ah, down by the clean clear, ah, waters of Enon, ah, Lake—yes that water, child, where so many good things happen!” I felt impious about my imitation of a preacher, but not about being blessed to be together or about the water.
We tried to ride our bikes back home but Kate tired and was close to tears after a hundred yards. I called Susan to come get us and we leaned our bikes against an old fence and Kate sat on a stump and twirled a stalk of chicory between her fingers and hummed to herself. Susan wasn’t long, but I felt a genuine sense of rescue when I saw the familiar white station wagon round the corner a quarter mile away. I thought to myself, We have each other.
Susan pulled over and opened the car door and stepped out and rested one elbow on the car door and the other on the roof and smiled at us. “My two cyclists are bushed!”
I winked and nodded my head in Kate’s direction. “I think we both need an ice cream, Mom.”
“I think we all do,” Susan said. She came around and hugged Kate and kissed her head and Kate hugged her back, her hair matted and damp. “Okay, my Kat. Let’s pack up the gear and go to Dick and June’s for an ice cream.” She wheeled Kate’s bike to the car and I put it in the back with mine. I hopped into the passenger seat and kissed Susan on the cheek and said, “My undying appreciation and loyalty to you for rescuing us, milady.”
Susan rolled her eyes. “ ’Twas nothing, milord. Let’s go get a frappe.”
Susan pulled the car onto the road and made a U-turn and headed toward the ice cream place. I looked at Enon Lake and thought about what pottery and arrowheads and people must be under its silty floor.
“That stand of beech trees, right over there? That’s where the icehouses used to be,” I said to Susan.
“It seems so crazy that they shipped the ice to England,” she said.
“We’re being bad,” I called back to Kate. “We’re having ice cream for dinner. What flavor are you going to get, babe? Maple walnut? Strawberry?” Kate didn’t answer. Susan looked up into the rearvi
IF YOU LOOK AT the side of the hill between the sixth and seventh holes of the Enon Golf Club, west of the cemetery, you can still see traces of the foundation of the town’s only windmill. The windmill burned down in 1661. Farther down the hill, by the road, near the putting green for the tenth hole, stood the house of the father of Sarah Good, who was condemned as a witch and hanged down the road in Salem in 1692, and who famously told her accuser that God would give him blood to drink. I wondered if the girls I had seen in the cemetery knew this. I imagined it would please them, that they’d feel an immediate kinship with her, like Kate always had from the first time I told her about the witch trials, perhaps one that ran deeper than their usual teenage sense of persecution. I read about Sarah Good in an old history of the town, published in 1823, for the town’s bicentennial. It was striking that at that time the author of the book, a man named Barnet Wood, already considered Sarah Good a part of the town’s remote history. I liked to think about the fact that he wrote his book one hundred and seventy-five years before I read it, and that Sarah Good met her fate one hundred and thirty-one years before he wrote it. Sarah was hanged in Salem, but there were nights when I passed through the center of the village and imagined Sarah swinging in the wind from a gallows where the Civil War memorial is, which was originally a green used for common pasturage. The statue standing atop the pediment of the memorial is modeled after a man named Benjamin Conant, who fought in the Union Army and was famous for the grapevines he kept, and who repaired shoes before and after the war out of a small shack behind one of the larger houses along Main Street; the shack is still there and is now used as a tool shed by a dentist. Benjamin Conant’s statue was erected in 1870, while he was still alive, forty-seven years after Barnet Wood published his book A History of Enon, on the Occasion of Its Bicentennial, one hundred and seventy-eight years after Sarah Good was hanged in Salem, thirty years after the first Crosby settled in Enon, and one hundred and thirty-five years before my daughter was buried half a mile up the street. In fact, Barnet Wood and Benjamin Conant are both buried in the cemetery as well. I don’t know where Sarah Good was buried—maybe in Salem. I never looked it up. But the woods of Enon are full of very old unmarked graves and hers may well be among them, along with the bones of animals and citizens: sheep and dogs, fathers and brothers, oxen and horses, mothers and aunts, pigs and chickens, sons and daughters, anonymous cats and owls, Puritans and Indians, and unnamed infants, getting their bones mixed in the currents of soil and groundwater, migrating beneath the foundations of our houses and the fairways of the golf courses, trading ribs and teeth and shins and knuckles, commuting under baseball diamonds and the beds of streams, snagging up on roots and rocks, shelves of granite and seams of clay. There are certainly more citizens of Enon beneath its fifty-four hundred acres than there are above it. Just beneath our feet, on the other side of the surface of the earth, there is another, subterranean Enon, which conceals its secret business by conducting it too slowly for its purposes to be observed by the living.