Red Hook Road Read Free Page A

daughter, Iris, spent the better part of every summer at her grandmother’s, where she was free to run and playwithout concern for the silence demanded by her father’s rigorous practice schedule.
    If they thought of it at all, Iris and her parents assumed that Iris’s grandmother had either bought out her siblings, the five sons of Nathaniel Hewins, or had inherited their shares in the house as in turn they died, but upon the old woman’s death it was revealed that no such formal transfers of ownership had ever taken place. Iris’s grandmother left her not the ramshackle old summer house but rather only the one-sixth share that was hers to bequeath. It took Iris nearly seven years to track down every last one of the twenty-nine heirs, some of whom had no idea that their origins lay in a harborside village of white clapboard, blueberry bogs, and lobster boats on the Down East coast of Maine. Most of the heirs were willing to sign away their claim to the rotting and sagging old house in return for their small fraction of its fair market value. But one cantankerous second cousin twice removed, a Texan, refused to sign a quit claim until Iris offered him significantly more than the $443 that was his share. Over the objections of her husband, Daniel, who, while he enjoyed Maine well enough, felt no ties to the land or the house that would justify such an expense, Iris wrote her distant cousin a check for $3,000. As soon as the deed was clear, she began the renovations, which were to consume her time and energy for years of summers to come. Her projects were so numerous and her plans so intricate that until the last moment there had been some concern that the latest work—adding a shower to the downstairs powder room—would not be finished in time for the wedding of Iris’s daughter Becca to John Tetherly, the son of the woman who had been coming to clean the house since before the death of Iris’s grandmother.
    Elias Hewins had nurtured pretensions of being a gentleman farmer, and not long after he built the house, he deeded a small strip of adjoining land to the local chapter of the National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry. The Grange had constructed on the land a simple structure, with long, narrow, shutterless windows, a front room large enough for a town meeting, a tiny branch of the large library in Red Hook in back, and a kitchen. For generations the Grange Hall was a center of village life, but by the time Iris took possession of her house it was little more than a hollow shell forgotten by the village that owned but neglected it. The hall’sfixtures, including its cast-iron woodstove, were long since lost to vandals and unscrupulous antique hunters, and the library was in use for only the three months of summer.
    To Iris the Grange Hall was as much a part of her family’s legacy as was her own house. More, perhaps, because while the house where she had spent her childhood making noise away from the hush that obtained at her parents’ cottage was her home, the Grange Hall was her connection to the village itself, a symbol of the integral part her ancestors had played in the communal life of this sliver of Maine coast. Although for the past few generations they had been coming only as summer visitors, the existence of the Grange Hall proved that before that they had been
Mainers
. Their mortal remains populated an entire neighborhood in the town cemetery. There was a Hewins Pond, and a Hewins Road, and one found the name written not only on headstones in the cemetery but under portraits of long-dead deacons in church halls, in birth and marriage rolls, over the doorway of one of the oldest commercial buildings in town, and on the pedestals of monuments to the dead of Bull Run, Ypres, and Iwo Jima.
    She knew there was probably something absurd about it, but this record in stone and paper of her belonging to Red Hook was critical to Iris’s sense of herself, of her place in the world. Half of her