The Lowering Days by Gregory Brown

Author:Gregory Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2021-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

We spent all afternoon and most of the night rowing and hauling the concrete and cedar up to the cabin. In the morning we would start the construction work. The initial edginess of coming upon one another faded into the pleasant and distracted camaraderie of communal work. Sitting together at day’s end with my muscles howling and my mind beat, I fully fixed my attention on Roman Fitch for the first time.

“Get a good eyeful now,” he said.

“Sorry.” It struck me that his complexion was as dark as the flat black spines of the Penguin Classics books that lined my mother’s office shelves. I felt my face flame with embarrassment at the observation.

“Don’t apologize for shit,” said Roman. “You’re just looking at me like everyone else does in the whitest place in the world.”

“Can I be honest?”

“That remains to be seen.”

“I was kind of imagining you as a book cover. Like those old Penguin Classics.”

“A book cover? Yeah, you gotta look elsewhere now. That’s messed up. I take it all back. Never look at me again.”

It turned out Roman Fitch had been born outside of Cincinnati and had grown up in Jackson County, Kentucky. It was a pretty place, lush and green and thick with mountain heat and music, and it wasn’t an overall bad place, but it was a vindictive place. He was drafted at nineteen and deserted at twenty-three. After that he lived in New York City, teaching healthy forms of dissent and conscientious objection, until his marriage fell apart and Gerald Ford’s clemency program gave draft dodgers a path to redemption but made war deserters even bigger pariahs. He told us he’d left something awful and doubted that his punishment, as unjust as it was, would ever end. He said he’d ruined his marriage with booze and other women, blamed it on living too close to death during the war, when it was really driven by guilt, fear, and shame. He’d been on the move ever since. Guile, displacement, and fear had become his guiding principles. Sudden and intense bouts of camaraderie, much like what we were experiencing at the lake, and his nine-year-old daughter, Khali, who lived with his mother in Hell’s Kitchen, were the only things that reaffirmed for him that the world was ultimately still good.

“Why here?” Reggie asked. The question had been gnawing away beneath our work the entire day. “What brought you to this place?”

“North is an old fantasy,” said Roman. “North means safety, freedom. Maybe it is. Or maybe it’s all bullshit. During the Civil War a bunch of draft dodgers fled up here. They started a community on a ridge. Locals called them skeddadlers and their spot Skeddadle Ridge. They called their home Musquash, and they stayed there for about a decade, living in a kind of communal utopia. Others came. Conscientious objectors. Deserters. Shit, they had fifteen families in Musquash at one point. Even had a little post office and a school. Then they all vanished. I thought I’d head up there and see what got left behind.

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