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virtue of the Metarey quarries exhibited the elegant, stone-fronted façade of a good-sized city. From the peak of St. Anne’s Hill, which started at the rear of the last commercial building, a visitor’s eyes were drawn west toward Lake Erie, the same beckoning glimpse of water that could be seen from the top floor of the bank. At Port Carrol, Eoghan Metarey kept the largest yacht in the United States—or so it was said by Saline’s old-timers. My grandfather was born in the Scottish Lowlands, but my father was born on Eoghan Metarey’s property, in the house I grew up in myself, a tin-roofed clinker-brick saltbox that was split in two vertically: 410A Dumfries Street. 410B Dumfries was lived in by a man named Eugene McGowar, who also worked for the Metareys and who, like my father, always seemed grateful to have found himself ashore in a new world—even if it no longer thrived as it once had—in a neighborhood in which every block had been built by Eoghan Metarey and in which every house was the same.
    Except for Eoghan Metarey’s own, of course. By the time I was born, in 1955, most of the Metarey quarries and mills were silent and a good many of the Metarey workers had moved east, but the downtown still looked the same as it always had, and anyone who visited was still taken past Aberdeen West, the Metarey estate. Aberdeen West was a twenty-four-room brick and stone Edwardian manor that was by then occupied by Eoghan Metarey’s youngest son, Liam, who had taken over the family enterprises. It sat at the apex of a hundred-thousand-acre triangle of land—almost a quarter of the county. Eoghan Metarey had been born to a village farrier, but by the age of thirty-six he’d already laid the railroad linking Albany with Washington and had mined the richest coal seam in Nova Scotia. This was at a time when coal powered most of New England’s industry and would soon power all the new electric plants for New York’s growing train-stop suburbs. Shortly before the first settlement boom in our part of the state, he’d built his three lumber mills between Saline and Lake Erie and bought the forests to supply them. And that wasn’t even all of it: in an era when all the grand public buildings were going up in Albany and Buffalo and Manhattan, he’d dug limestone and granite quarries that cut great slabs of rock twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, lit by Edison’s amazing new invention, and laid them on flatbed Metarey railcars that rolled right up to his chutes. And a year before the onset of World War I, he’d made a partnership with John D. Rockefeller in oil wells two thousand miles west in Alberta, Canada. Like many such men, he always seemed to know what was coming.
    During my childhood it was Liam Metarey who took care of the town. The fact that he so closely resembled his father didn’t hurt his cause with the old-timers, either, who seemed to believe that God had offered special safeguard for them in the form of two nearly identical-looking old-world Scottish saviors. Both Metareys were tall, restless men with a narrow nose bent severely at the apex and Gaelic cheekbones pushing in on darkly staring eyes—eyes that still announce themselves in every photograph ever taken of either of them. It wasn’t their color so much as their mood and the fact that their soulful look contrasted so strikingly with the martial cast of the cheeks and nose. Both men, in fact, looked more like artists than industrialists—at least they always have to me. More like those old photographs of Kafka in Prague or Picasso in Paris than like any Rockefeller or Vanderbilt.
    And the Metareys always drove ordinary cars, too, and generally wore the same clothes that are still worn today by the regular citizenry around here. For Sunday dinners Liam Metarey’s wife, June, shopped at Burdick’s Market herself, just as my mother and all the other housewives did. All three of the Metarey children—the two girls, Christian and Clara,