The Dark Side of Innocence by Terri Cheney

Author:Terri Cheney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2011-11-06T16:00:00+00:00

4

Of tangled things and wild things

The mind must choose to dwell upon

Of circles without central points

That never end, round on and on . . .

What hopeless clutter clouds the brain!

What rushing, racing spurs of thought

Obscure the tracks of order’s way,

Obscure the circle’s centrodot.

—Age sixteen

The nuns had done their best to instill in me an unwavering belief in miracles: the loaves and the fishes, smooth-skinned lepers, Lazarus, and the like. It’s strange that I was always so ready to believe in fairy tales but not in Bible stories. Perhaps because I fancied myself a writer, miracles seemed too neat a trick, like a literary device whipped out for the occasion to make a story pretty.

That all changed by the time I was sixteen.

By then, I had actually seen firsthand that miracles do happen, even to ordinary folk like me. Nineteen seventy-six witnessed the resurrection of my father’s dream, the Volkshouse. Although Daddy and I had been forced to stop working on the project, and the blueprints were stashed away in my mother’s closet, that hadn’t kept him from pitching the idea whenever he could (out of my mother’s hearing, naturally) to anyone who would listen. And damn if he didn’t find the money. He and a few risk-seeking partners convinced the Federal Housing Administration that it would be a grand idea to build several tracts of government-subsidized low-income housing way the hell out past nowhere, in a godforsaken swath of desert poetically named Hesperia.

At that time, there was little more to the township of Hesperia than a truck stop, a general store, and some monstrous tumbleweeds. The first time we took the long drive out there, I actually entertained a treacherous thought. “Who’d ever want to live out here?” I said, regretting the words before they were out of my mouth. But my father didn’t take offense. Perhaps because he’d grown up in a similar one-drag town, he knew how to dream through the dust. “You just wait,” he said. “In a couple of years, we’ll be turning people away.”

It took a bit more than a couple of years, but in the end he was right. Volkswagen objected to the term Volkshouse, so the name was changed to Custom Homes, which I always thought was hilarious because there was nothing custom about them: four slabs of stucco, a garage port, and a gravel-strewn driveway. Finito. Next house.

Sundays were now spent driving around the desert—my mother still in the back seat, of course—looking for new lots. Since they contained nothing but dirt and the odd yucca tree, they were, appropriately enough, dirt cheap. By the time other builders caught on to the idea that there might be a gold mine out here, my father had already bought up the best of the lots, and construction was well under way.

Money is no panacea, of course, but it’s a powerful sedative. With the influx of money, a relative calm descended over our house. Daddy was finally able to quit his indentured servitude at Brew 102.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.