America America Read Free

enough at their graduations and their weddings—to see them through all of that is to know that everything you have ever done, every act you’ve ever had a part in, has another meaning as well, and that it is both greater and more terrible than the one you knew. Not just the meaning it had for you but the one it had for someone’s child, as well. That’s what came back to me now, more than anything else. The unavoidable truth of that. That all one’s deeds—those of honor and those of duplicity and those of veniality and those of ruin—that all one’s deeds live doubly. I can only marvel at the forbearance of my own parents and of others that are part of this story.
    We’re twenty minutes from Lake Erie here and not that much farther from Lake Ontario, and when you get up into the breeze, you’re aware of the maritime lucidity in the sky and the feel of it in the air: a coastal hint to the winds even though we’re four hundred miles from the Atlantic. My climb had taken a good quarter hour. To the east, I could see only a few cars left in the lot. Ahead of me, toward Masaguint, where Trieste Millbury lives with her parents, the first whiffs of a stratus layer were forming. Those clouds have always made the daylight heavens look even grander to me, lit from below at this hour like silver yard-marks but not yet dominating the eye as the more typical cumulus do here in the fall, with their mountainous white reach and pounding storms. I looked out on a full circle around. In a couple of hours the sky above Masaguint would be a dark gap in the horizon that’s otherwise lit at night now all the way from Islington to Steppan. That’s another thing this story is about, I suppose: how there’s no going back.
    I rose from the bench. Masaguint was behind me now, the cemetery ahead. I suppose the developers will get to the last of it soon enough. What remains, the part where Trieste lives, is embedded with car-sized boulders from the glacier; but these days that doesn’t stop anyone. No doubt they’ll call the subdivisions Granite Ridge or Boulder Brook Estates and turn the great, buried stones into pillars at the entranceways or fix them upright and carve them with the numbers of the houses. Some think that’s not coming for another decade; but I believe it’s sooner.
    On my return, the cemetery was nearly empty. A couple of mortuary employees in worn suits were stacking chairs, and from beyond the hill in the distance a tractor had appeared: the grave diggers. I had a good look, crossing the decks over the marsh. My last view of Senator Henry Bonwiller.
    The mound of earth lay between us. The tractor slowed and a man jumped out of the scoop, and then the driver began pushing the pile toward the grave. I moved under one of the oaks. Even when they’re burying a senator, grave diggers swear and spit and ash their cigarettes onto the grass, and that’s what they did now as soon as they had filled the hole. Then they picked up their tools and proceeded to do a rather tender job of smoothing the contours of the dirt back into the lawn. Henry Bonwiller had always been a friend to the working man.
    When they were done, they got into the tractor again and drove back over the hill, and it was then that another man appeared. With a hitching gait he stepped from behind a tree and limped across the grass toward the grave, one leg lagging behind the other so that he had to swing it around his cane. That’s how I recognized him, in fact: the limp, and then the carved handle of the cane.
    At the grave, he stopped and looked around, then bowed his head. He was as old as the Senator but even from a distance I could see that he still had that certain kind of roughly determined American face that you see less and less often around here. Not to be mercenary about it, but if he’d taken off his hat it would have made a front-page picture.
    He was worn out, but the last one standing.
    You could hear starlings now in the trees. But then