The Body in the Barn

A white van has been parked all day outside the huge apple barn that supports our apartment off of its south side. Michael is in the city, so I am alone here with my cat.  I spotted the van in the morning and it is still here several hours later. A couple of antique dealers rent much of the space in the barn, pleasant guys who have shops in Hudson.  They show up every week or so, bringing in or taking out stuff, but the van doesn't belong to either of them.  And no one is in the barn.  Or at least no one alive.

I take a picture of the license plate and text it to my friend and landlord to see if he recognizes the car.  He doesn't.  He says he'll call Ben, one of the antique dealers and see if he recognizes it.  Ben doesn't, but says he'll come out to the barn and check it out.  I'm not sure what to do until he comes.

Here's what I learned about growing upstate in New York:  it is far crazier and deadlier than the city is. My kids attended Manhattan public schools and no one they knew died.  In the late fifties and early sixties, before I was 18, three of my friends from our idyllic American small town were killed in car accidents and one in a fire. Soon after I left high school, a girl I had babysat for hanged herself after taking LSD and a two-year old, whom I had also babysat for, was run over by a truck.  One of my mother's friends tried to commit suicide and was given electroconvulsive therapy during the era when it made your toes curl and your teeth fall out.   Our neighbor ran off to Mexico with the mailman and came back after several months to her husband, who subsequently was run over by a car after he pushed his prodigal wife out of its path.  The father of a boy I knew in school shot his wife and a few of his children.  We had our very own Nazi bund until the mid fifties, and, no surprise, the girls' female high school coach and the Boy Scout leader were pedophiles.  There were eight very old Democrats; everyone else was a Republican.

Upstate New York itself is the birthplace of several fanatics, notably Joseph Smith and John Brown, and has housed a slew of serial killers -- Joel Rifkin, Gary Evans, Arthur Shawcross, and Robert Garrow.  It provided the original homes for the Shakers and Millerites, who both pinned down apocalypse dates that came and went without incident. Upstate has also been the residence of several famous authors whose books were too depressing for me to get through (Joyce Carol Oates, John Gardner, Hermann Melville, William Kennedy). Richard Russo and Kurt Vonnegut and the cartoonist Gary Trudeau also come from upstate and are much more fun to read but, naturally, deeply pessimistic.

My hometown lies close to the Vermont border, and unlike its New England neighbor, the countryside still retains an emptiness beneath its rough landscape of spare sunlight and stubby grass.  My Peckham ancestors had farmed its impossible soil since the 1700s, where rocks emerge every spring and need to be harvested before the short-season vegetables can be planted.  Winters are eternal.  I often thought of my home country as having no ghosts, only a constant rebirth of unhappy self-inventing autodidacts who learn nothing from their history or genetic code.  

If you take route 43 out of my old town and head toward Vermont, the minute you go over the border, you're in an Eden of cultured lawns and farmlands, fat cows, covered bridges, maple syrup, and universal health care.  I went to Bennington College, which was 30 miles east of my hometown and that might have been 30 light years.  From there, I left behind my upstate neighbors chewing on their bones and snarling in their caves and headed south to Manhattan, my Sane Haven for the next fifty years.

To be clear, until today I haven't considered the Hudson Valley where I live now to be the dystopian Upstate New York of my youth. The river connects Hudson, the town, directly with The City from which it curls up like a languid odalisque, made famously beautiful by the Hudson River School painters, and especially by their leader Frederick Church, who built his wonderful folly Olana right next door to our property. My new town is a mecca for hipsters and hippies and the residence of a diverse underclass, who all help balance the political conservatism of its natives. A friendly spawn of its Great Mother to the South, Hudson is a place where I can live and possibly die.

But now, waiting for Ben to come, I have some doubts that this place is all that different from the rest of the Upstate Death Trip.  The van, which has a bumper sticker in German, has now been outside the barn for seven hours.

 Our apartment is protected from its neighboring cavernous spaces by a single door in our living room locked only with a flimsy hook and eye. I am sure that somewhere very close to me and my cat is a corpse hidden among the antiques, dangling from a wizened puppet or hanging over a steam calliope that will begin playing the minute I open my door. "Don't go in, Carol!" echoes every horror movie ever made.  So, unlike their moronic heroines, I go outside and sit on the wooden swing in the back yard to wait for Ben.  I plan on watching his back when he goes in to look for the body.

Apple blossoms and lilacs scent the air and my garden is becoming lively with tulips, hyacinths, and pansies. The late afternoon golden sun sheds silky green shadows across the grass. It is the best day so far this year.  I swing back and forth like a kid and sort of forget about the van until Ben pulls up and gets out.  He checks the car.  "Oh, I know who this is," he says.  "I recognize the bumper sticker.  Nice guy," He pulls out his cell and makes a call.  The owner, it turns out, is helping out the other dealer who rents barn space and who is at Brimfield today, a major antique show held twice a year in Massachusetts.  The guy will pick up the van when he gets back.  I thank Ben, who loads a couple of old things into his own space and takes off. 

I get back on the swing and squeak it back and forth into the coming bird-filled flower-filled May evening. I should have offered him a glass of Chardonnay.  I have a nice one that I bought earlier from the terrific wine store in town. It would be good to know more people here.