The Astor Orphan Read Free Page A

large-scale dairy farm, which she ran until her death more than sixty years later.
    Dad parked the tractor on the farm road at the edge of the barnyard and approached the yellow backhoe that he’d use to dig the trench by the lower barn. It stood next to a lonely fuel pump in the cluttered yard, its long hoe curled up behind it like a tail.
    The barnyard—although a sad version of what it had once been—was still the heart of Rokeby, and Dad its pulse.
    In the southeast corner of the barnyard stood a redbrick coach house designed by Stanford White. In the center was a U-shaped complex of white barns whose arms were still named according to their former purpose—the horse barn, the ox barn, the iceboat shed. Now the barns’ siding was missing, roof tiles regularly blew to the ground, and doors hung off their hinges.
    Just past the main barn complex stood a yellow farmhouse that, while badly in need of paint, was surrounded by a well-trimmed lawn littered with prickly Chinese chestnuts. This was where Sonny Day, Rokeby’s seventy-year-old groundskeeper, lived. Sonny, who had worked at Rokeby since 1915, was one of the last human vestiges of the old farm days. These days, his duties were limited to mowing the lawns on an ancient riding mower and picking up the mail at a one-room post office down by the railroad tracks.
    Dad called today’s Rokeby “the funny farm.” Nowadays, he used the barnyard to fix or store various broken tractor engines and appliances. Junk of all descriptions littered the yard: tires, old vacuum cleaners, broken fans, furnaces, lawn furniture, discarded washing machines, car transmissions. These were either donations from Dad’s friends or leftovers from Rokeby’s rental houses—converted outbuildings like the old greenhouse, the old “gardener’s cottage,” the creamery, and the “milk house”—whose tenants helped pay the property taxes.
    â€œThe hoe’s gonna need some diesel. Hey, Roy!” Dad’s voice searched among furnaces and mowers. “You here?”
    â€œYeah, Teddy! Over here!” A one-armed man with a scruffy black beard and a woolen cap now appeared from below the iceboat shed. “Just workin’ on the bulldozer.” Roy lived out in our woods, in an old school bus, with his family.
    â€œCan you give the hoe some diesel?”
    Roy was one of the many people Dad took under his wing and whom he taught to fix things on no budget, or entertained with stories about his adventures behind the Iron Curtain in the sixties. Like so many of Dad’s “mentees,” Roy had become an expert iceboater under Dad’s tutelage.
    One-armed Roy put fuel into the backhoe as I followed Dad into the horse barn. The stalls that had once been home to equine life now overflowed with detritus. As Dad poked around for some tools, I began picking up the garbage that cluttered the entrance and setting it aside in a pile.
    â€œWait just a minute! What are you doing with that?” Dad stopped me.
    â€œJust throwing away garbage.”
    â€œThat stuff is useful. I’ll go through it myself later.” Dad was a wall that stopped anyone from creating order in his barns.
    Among these objects Dad hoped to find the essence of a Rokeby now lost. It was his dream to revive this essence, to return to the way things were when his pop was still alive.
    My dream was to clean everything, so that it might one day look presentable to outsiders.
    â€œHey, Alexandra! Why don’t you go out there and try to start up the backhoe?”
    â€œMe? But, Dad, I’m only ten!”
    â€œ ’S about time you learned to drive a backhoe. I did at your age.”
    I couldn’t say no. I had to prove to Dad that I was tough—a true farm girl. So I climbed into the seat. Its yellow stuffing poked out of the tears in its black plastic upholstery.
    â€œCheck that she’s in neutral, now,” Dad