Planeville: A History of the Lost Village

By Barry Pomeroy

The first settlers along the river had fled the Miramichi fire in the late fall of 1825. Traumatized by the loss of their homes, they retreated into the placid life of the river and hid from the outside world for long generations. They might have lived that way forever if Wilhelm hadn’t looked at the high ridges that surrounded them and wondered what lay on the other side.
The founder of Planeville, Wilhelm was an enigma to his peers. He went into the woods and built his village, and his descendants lived there for four generations until Planeville was abandoned.
This is the story of the river people and the village founded by their adventurous son. A capsule of our dreams and a symptom of our discontent, Planeville erupted from the wilderness. It enjoyed a brief prosperity and then disappeared when the forest loam closed over the rotting houses and abandoned machinery and graves, leaving behind only stories and misplaced stones. This story is an examination of what Planeville meant to the people who lived there, and how the village so completely disappeared from memory and the public record.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barry Pomeroy
• Release date: Sep 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781987922875

Barry Pomeroy

Barry Pomeroy is a Canadian novelist, short story writer, academic, essayist, travel writer, and editor. He is primarily interested in science fiction, speculative science fiction, dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction, although he has also written travelogues, poetry, book-length academic treatments, and more literary novels. His other interests range from astrophysics to materials science, from child-rearing to construction, from cognitive therapy to paleoanthropology.

Book preview

Introduction: Working on the Birth and Death of Planeville

I spent a few years—when I could spare a moment from teaching and marking—working on this novel about the now extinct village of Planeville. In some ways that project was more difficult than others, although much of that had to do with both the techniques I chose to use as well as how little was known about the village.

Although I sometimes write stories with magic realist elements, I hadn’t yet applied them to a sustained project. My novels are either strictly realist—like my science fiction thought experiments about the potential application of technology—or various forms of interpersonal explorations of relationships and travel narratives. With this latest novel I am tasked with trying to evoke both a village about which almost nothing is known and a feeling from my childhood upon hearing its story, and that is much more demanding.

I was young when I first heard vague stories about Planeville. Perhaps they were even more mysterious because of my age, but I listened with a confused fascination as I was told of the village that had been swallowed by forest. The fantastical stories were told in as matter-of-fact a fashion as a list of chores, but that didn’t dull the image of a white spruce growing from the blank pit that had been a basement and a plow stranded amongst the trees, its wooden parts rotted but the metal still waiting to be hitched to a team of horses.

Those glimpses into a life which no longer existed were endlessly evocative to me and my imagination supplied whatever elements the meagre stories did not allow. I could see the deep moss on the ground, picture the knobby beech of the highland slopes, and hear from far away the forlorn bell of a lost cow. I imagined farm equipment tangled in fragrant roots and ferns and earthenware cups which lay where they had been dropped. Planeville was my Pompeii and I was Schliemann who would attempt to find Troy. Planeville lay in our dim past. Planeville was gone. Planeville had never existed. Part of my fascination had to do with my lack of understanding of the circumstances which caused the settlers to abandon their village, for the convenient narrative device of Vesuvius was missing, and the archives were mute.

The stories about the village only obscured its mysterious abandonment, and I imagined the feelings of the last people as they loaded their wagons and trudged down the hill toward the river. I saw houses in the clearings gradually overrun by weeds and trees, and watched as the weathered buildings sagged and eventually fell into the cellars that had been laboriously dug when the hopeful villagers had first arrived.

Many people around the world, Chinese villagers in the dust belt, rural Indians along the coast leaving in droves for Mumbai, dustbowl farmers in Kansas during the depression, could have explained what had driven the people of Planeville from their homes, but in the pre-internet days of my youth, my curiosity was left to my untutored use of a poorly-stocked library.

When I began to tell the story of the founding and eventual abandonment of Planeville, I first went to the New Brunswick Archives, where I was definitively told that no village by that name had ever existed. My evidence was limited to a childhood glimpse of a map, which, like a treasure map from a pirate movie, was tattered and faded. I have a visual memory, however, so I could call up the vague image and examine it more closely, as well as the book it was in. Therefore, when I was stymied by the archivist’s confident assurance, I thought a moment and then asked for the shelf where the land atlases were kept. I guessed at the date on the cover of the book, for my memory didn’t supply that, but since I knew the back roads near where I had grown up, I was able to trace the village to its source.

Under the careful gaze of the hovering archivist, I photocopied the map. Later, my nephew Darius and I tried to find the village by running a compass line and pacing off the rods and chains of its location. Although we likely trod the slope where the village had been, we didn’t find the long sunken houses or any sign of machinery. We lamented that we were at least seventy years too late, for the stories I had heard when I was young were already two generations old by that point.

Several years later we tried again. This time we were armed with GPS coordinates we’d calculated by reference to old maps, online scans, and aerial photographs, and we kept a weather eye on the movement of the creeks. We were marginally more successful, and we ran parallel transects along compass directions. We first stumbled on two moss-covered rock piles and he used his metal detector to find a curved steel rod. It was caked in rust, but we rejoiced at this indication that Planeville had once existed in the forest around us. The rod was perhaps thirty-five centimetres in length and originally might have been nearly a centimetre in diameter. I guessed it to be a broken tine from a dump rake. Although such equipment was meant to be horse-drawn, I’d spent many hours being pulled around the fields by tractor while I tripped the dump mechanism when it gathered enough hay to make a row.

We eagerly searched the rest of the woods around the rock piles, but we found nothing else until I happened to see a flat piece of metal poking from the loam. I thought it was the remains of an axe, but when Darius dug them from the ground, it instead turned out to be multiple shards from an iron kettle. I set them on a fallen log until we had enough pieces that we could tell it was a three-legged cast iron kettle that looked as though it dated from the middle of the nineteenth century. We suddenly felt closer than ever to the people who had thrown it away, or had it shatter while they were cooking a dinner in the woods.

The finds made us think that we were about to stumble upon the houses, but later we decided—when examining an aerial photo from 1945—that we had walked too far north, and that we’d likely been examining the farthest extent of the Planeville residents’ property.

Undaunted by the paucity of evidence, and statements to the contrary, I decided to tell the story of the people who had been entirely effaced from folk history, local memory, and the more official certification of maps and deeds. The archivist’s stubborn declaration about Planeville’s lack of existence was a clue, I finally realized, and I assiduously set about re-examining what made a people build their houses deep in the forest, and more importantly—to me at least—why they would leave.

In an attempt to recover what time had forgotten, as well as evoke the magic of a child’s perception of story, I tried to harness the rich language of metaphor. In their dialogue, my characters speak in homely—in nineteenth century terms—rhythms and have an almost animist understanding of the landforms around them. Their world is one of magic, whether that lies in their simple evocation of an untutored understanding of the bible, or in folk notions that still surrounded the hills even while I was a child. The peculiar abilities of diviners, the forerunners and second sight some have laid claim to, as well as the mystery that lies in their misinterpretation of simple biological or astronomical functions—like those who are still entranced by fairy rings or the glowing and changeable heavens—all supplied me with the rich fodder that became Planeville, a History of the Lost Village.

In this return to Planeville, I tell the story of those villagers by examining what drove some of the river valley people to abandon the rich bankside mud in order to wrest a living from the acid soil of the ridgeland. Drawn by their hopes and accomplishments, I attempt to evoke their struggles and eventual despair before they tired of the enterprise and disappeared from a history which pays them scant regard.

Book I ~ The River Valley People

Chapter One ~ Running from Fire

Many years later people said that the founding of Planeville should have been foreseen, and that everything that transpired on the ridge could have been predicted by the way a cat birthed its kittens, or by a lightning strike on a riverbank oak. Most powerfully, Meme Tucker held forth in the Baptist church on the topic nearly every Sunday, and although she never lived to see Planeville dry up like an onion skin on a sideboard, she spoke against it at the beginning.

Somehow Wilhelm Hagerman knew that Planeville was going to be more than a hardwood ridge within a day’s ride of the river. He could see that when he first hacked a path for his horses through the overhanging beech and rock maple. He saw a potential village where many were overwhelmed by the leaning hemlock and swamp cedar. Dreaming of maple sugar from ancient trees, he saw level-leaved beech and rigid hornbeam. While others thrashed through alders and cursed the clatter of the poplar, only Wilhelm felt the rich breeze that shook the coin-like leaves.

Perhaps it was because they had clawed their way upriver from the town on the floodplain, or maybe the resounding falls at the river’s mouth had threatened them with its intemperate whirlpools, but the people who settled on the bank were a skittish and inflexible group. They’d dragged their wooden boats onto the gravel next to an island that they’d named after the black bears they’d found there and promptly dismantled the hulls. If someone were tempted to ask them why they were destroying their only chance to escape downriver, the settlers’ inward gaze and determined nature would have dissuaded them. The boats became stacks of lumber destined to be the floors of the first houses, and the nails were re-forged into knives and axes. They were settled in a year and before twenty years had passed, they had always lived there. Questions about their community’s founding were answered by blank looks and more than one settler placed a stone in the burying ground for a relative who had died elsewhere.

Perhaps because they’d escaped the Miramichi fire in the late fall of 1825, they’d put the cataclysm from their minds and crowded together on the narrow band of shore between the river and the towering ridges that protected them from the winter storms. With smoke still stinging their eyes, they avoided flame that first summer and ate their food raw. Only when the winter’s cold began to claw at their backbone did they relent, but they remained suspicious of any consuming force. As far as they were concerned, love that burned too hot, passionate scholarly pursuits, religious fanaticism, and feuds between families were as devouring as the great fire. They worshiped a cow’s placidity, its day like its mouth, filled with grasses along the shore.

Taking the river’s calm current as their byword, they trudged from rocky bank to shelved beach, followed the wandering trails of deer, eschewed the straight graded roads of town, and instead stretched each task on the rigid rack of their fears. Milking a cow could take an hour, and if the hens were slow in the morning, they merely stood until another egg made its appearance. Some people passing on the slow river said they’d spent a day watching a man trying to cut down a black spruce, the echoing axe heard across the river long minutes after his arm had descended.

The settlers pulled a living from the south facing slope by planting apples trees on the bank, floated spruce and fir down the river to Jewet’s mill so the lumber could be sold in town, and scraped gardens into the rocky fields. The placid life between the banks became a circle of seasons, as hay was cut to feed cattle who were milked and turned to grass before the hay was cut again. Far away the trials of other people were a distant banging of pots and pans. Protected from the world’s affairs by the ridges, their valley trapped sound like a cedar trunk. The surrounding forest kept the soft voices of the valley people confined, a low murmuring lapping against the river’s banks, affirming that what was accepted could become true.

As far as they were concerned, the river valley marked where life began and ended. As their babies were born they washed them in the still water, hoping to slow their blood so their feet wouldn’t stray from the trails their parents had made. Generally a passive group, their children played solemn games that were miniature versions of their parents’ lives. Small gardens were scratched into the hillsides where the children poked at weeds, and they threw branches into the water when people passed in boats, the descending stick only marginally faster than the slow current drawing the boats toward the distant town which was being built on St. Anne’s Plain.

The river people lived in a two dimensional world of up and downstream, caught as they were between the thundering falls above them and the ones below. All people should live along a river, and as far as those who ploughed their fields on its banks knew, that self-evident fact informed everything in the world. The river, with its placid ripples and mercurial waves, its obscure depths and pleasant shallows, its bountiful fish and flotsam from upstream, was the lifeblood of the community. No one went as far as to worship it, but the waters of Jordan were a popular theme in the sermons along its banks, and many swore the river water was more wholesome than that from the trickling creek. From Baptist to Methodist to Catholic, from English to French to Maliseet, the river’s animist spirit flavoured their life, and if anyone spoke against it they were shunned and, in at least one case, hanged.

The settlers milled their lumber by pit-sawing wide boards from the spruce and fir they’d cut in thickets, and slowly they built small houses facing the tranquil water. They fingered each seed they’d brought before dropping them into shallow holes in the forest soil, and although they cleared the land only gradually, by the fall harvest they had cut the overhanging trees. When the stretched plants of their gardens were finally able to take advantage of the rich soil and the last of the summer sun, they produced food and seeds for the following year. The barns represented a slow accumulation of poles cut along the edge of the fields. They gradually became structures and although the cows and horses were at first reluctant, the settlers knew they’d enter more willingly when the frost began to silver the grasses. Piling moose grass by the shore, and then stooking the first grain harvest, the settlers were fixed as though they were characters in a Dutch painting. Their contentment richly coloured by the backdrop of their carefully banked lives, they moved deliberately through their first winter, the slowly falling huge flakes of snow a sudden intrusion, and then a blanket of comforting acceptance.

The settlers’ lethargic nature could not help but play a role in their somnolent community. At the mills in town and in the churches where the bosses bought productivity with generous tithes, there was much talk of the protestant work ethic. But that had no place in the sleepy chapels and halls the settlers had built some time after the first houses had been carved from the deep forest. People who’d had a chance to observe the community, such as go-preachers, or as the locals called them, the Black-Stockings, were surprised the phlegmatic settlers had survived their first winter. The Black-Stockings were not normally given to hyperbole, with their drab clothing and righteous air, but when their boats scraped the gravel on the shore in town, they tumbled from the gunwales with sloth-heavy descriptions of the settlers. The townsfolk listened to them with scant tolerance, for they were concerned with their own affairs and ignored reports from upriver.

To the indigenous people, the settlers were an enigma. They toiled slowly on the hillsides they’d moved into as though the woods were a resoundingly empty hall. When the Maliseet passed in their wide river canoes the boil of ants that typically represented the stirred-up nest of the invaders never came. One man landed his bark canoe on the sandy shore as if to verify his own existence and if what he told his people was true, he walked amongst the sleepy houses as though a ghost. Becoming more bold, he stooped in the gardens to face the people weeding neat rows of potatoes and carrots, only to be ignored. He passed his fingers before their eyes and they brushed the air as though troubled by a fly. Finally, consumed by his need to startle and dismay, he entered the closed houses. He reported women peeling potatoes by the stove, their eyes on the tuber in their hand, children playing passive games on the stairs, and even couples languidly making love, the summer day of their lassitude more potent than his presence.

Shaken by the experience, he spoke of nothing else for three winters, until finally peering into the mirror was not sufficient and he caused a confrontation in town. The reports that worked their way upriver necessarily came against the current, and so arrived too late for his people to save him from the noose.

If they’d been able, they would have pled his case, and told their own stories about the settlers who were infuriatingly impossible to arouse. As it was they cautioned their people against stopping, and typically hugged the western side of the river with their canoes, becoming, to the oblivious settlers at least, the ghosts they were thought to be.

Chapter Two ~ Wilhelm’s Birth

Born on the riverbank like the other children, Wilhelm Hagerman had been washed as a baby in the icy spring torrent. Some said the sudden shock to his small body forced the warmth from his eyes, and for others the fresher air he’d taken in with his first cries had set him apart from babies born in the summer. At the Baptist church Meme claimed that he’d not fussed when he’d been pulled from his mother, and that slick with birthing matter he’d already set his foot on the trail that would drive him from her side. Some listened to Meme, for even though she was given to proclamations and warnings, she was the only midwife who’d been present, and it had been her who offered Wilhelm to the river’s icy grip.

Others remarked on portents that had accompanied his birth. The Howland farm lost a dozen chickens to a bloodthirsty weasel, the Brown boy had suddenly been stricken with deafness, and an old white pine that overhung the brook dropped onto the road even though there’d been no wind for a week. Heavy clouds circled over the great bog, and the William horse bucked and nearly threw John Hallet when he came to borrow a bridle. People crushed eggs that had been hatched on the day Wilhelm was born and the Ingrahams would have slaughtered their calf if they’d been able to find a knife.

In later years Wilhelm’s mother Ida claimed that the intemperate current went to his blood, spoke to him of other lands upstream, and with the flotsam of the time, set him on the path that would drive him from their warm home to wander the wilds beyond the ridges. Like many in the valley, she had noticed that the river changed when the ice broke up and tore trees from the bank. She had seen the weeks-long tumult of the rush for the sea, and although she turned her back on such flagrant vitality, she suspected the spring flood wore at the edges of her carefully prepared nest. Wilhelm was a symptom of that wearing, and for her that tempered her relationship with her firstborn.

For Samuel, the birth of his son was a cause for celebration, and he was two days recovering from his night of celebratory liquor that the Perleys made behind their pig barn. He already felt the strong arms of his son beside him on the farm, and almost immediately began planning an extension to the stable. My son will need a horse of his own, Samuel declared, and he thought he was rather subtle when he visited his neighbours in order to find a likely foal. Most understood a father’s myopic delight, and as they walked him to the barn they said nothing about how the Tuckers had imitated their matriarch and rumoured Meme’s warnings downriver.

Samuel rejected Meme’s claims, and when she returned to help with the baby’s care since Ida was a new mother and inexperienced, he cursed her off the doorstep. Her back as rigid as iron, she climbed into her wagon as though it were a mountain and only when she had her reins in hand did she turn to Samuel. Each of your words will follow that boy and close his mouth to others, she said, her eyes dark with prophesy and her hair wild as the river weed. His own voice stilled by your cursing, that’s all he’ll hear until the day he leaves, and you’ll not live to see him return.

Samuel apologized with a chicken less than a day later but the damage had been done. One rumour chased another like a dog going after its tail, and although strangers wouldn’t have noticed it, blind as they were to the murmur of the riverbank, an uneasy note had entered what the settlers thought of as the melody of their existence. Almost stirred to action by the talk of prophesy and Wilhelm’s strange birthing, some people contemplated leaving for town. Despite the frailty of his age, John Heustis said he would pack his trunk, and Ira Ingraham soaped his harness for the first time since he’d cleared his fields. The community settled down after a few months, but many thought the Hagermans had done so much damage that they’d be a generation recovering. Their statements survived long after what had inspired the sentiment had been forgotten, and even in town some people weighed Samuel’s grain twice. Others were ashamed by what they saw as superstition and they overcompensated. More than once Samuel left a shop confused, his hands overflowing with ten-penny nails or broad sticks of butter.

Wilhelm grew up hearing what was said about him, and although it was a torment to his mother, it meant little to him. His eyes were fixed on the horizon, which in their narrow valley seemed to hover over their house. Even as a baby he either looked at the wooded wasteland across the river on the border, or the boundless quiet of the deep forest that surrounded them. To their dismay, more than a few people noticed that Wilhelm was enraptured by the broad circles of eagles riding the thermals on summer days. Even from his crib he seemed to see another path when the huge raptors went beyond the ridges.

He’s the dreamer of the Hagerman boys, Meme Tucker said as he grew older. He’s got it hanging over his eyes like a hat on a winter day, like moss from a cat spruce. He’ll wander off some day and we’ll never see him again.

Meme’s tendency to prophesy notwithstanding, most people thought little about what she said when she’d jump to her feet to proclaim or warn during Preacher Ozwald Slattery’s droning Sunday. Her urge to be a preacher had been stifled by those who argued it wasn’t a fit profession for a woman, since it involved holding the hands of the dying and being responsible for their worldly goods as well as their souls, but like many before her, Meme was determined. She pushed Preacher Slattery aside when the call came to her and the one time he’d decided to take back the pulpit he’d regretted both the lost parishioners and his unsteady limp. Meme had the passion, and even without her gift of sight, most people felt she was a better leader than Slattery, who’d been found with his hands on a girl’s skirt more than once. Hers was a voice that everyone who lived along the river knew, and even if she turned it against them, they’d learned to season her statements with the streamside mint of good-natured assent.

Wilhelm’s mother took Meme’s declarations more to heart. She remembered the night he’d been conceived and even though she’d turned her face from the pillow as her husband laboured above her, she’d been terrified by the comet that hung in the sky like a warning written on a heavenly banner. She’d protested, pointed soundlessly to the flickering glow, but Samuel had spent the day of the eclipse sowing corn, and he was in no mood to be dissuaded by yet another ambiguous message from the luminous heavens.

Although she’d felt nothing when her second son David was quick within her, Ida knew the moment of Wilhelm’s conception. She’d felt the cells stir and her body, flushed with its first success since she’d stood at the altar, panted with the import of new life even as an owl flashed across the window and momentarily dimmed the lurid comet. Later Ida would tell the neighbour women, who rough-shouldered their way into her kitchen after Wilhelm was born, that her firstborn was part star, part bird. The jest faltered as Wilhelm grew older and, alert as a fox, spoke from his crib to visitors in the hall who were too astounded by what he said to remove their muddy boots.

Subject to vision even while his peers used the morning sun to pull splinters from their fingers, Wilhelm became an isolate. He learned to read from the thick family bible, and although Ida never told a soul, it hadn’t been her who taught him. Soon, even while he played with his food and his hands moved uncertainly to his mouth, Wilhelm would preach from his high chair. Goliath will rise again only to catch his huge shoulder on the boy, he’d say, his chin smeared with squash. The river will run with wine and the Perleys will lose their business and turn to thievery and raising goats.

Some said Meme heard Wilhelm’s voice in her sleep, and that her prophesy had always owed more to him than she’d let on, but those closer to the Hagermans knew the temper of Wilhelm’s statements was rock hard and brittle like a poorly forged axe. Even though his sentences chipped on the frozen fir of their doubts, Wilhelm spoke of possibilities and potential while Meme spread the butter of fear over a people shaking with what the future might bring. Soon Ida was turning the curious from her door, and when a Black-Stocking preacher in the full ecstasy of his faith showed up to rant and curse, she forbade Wilhelm from speaking to others.

Solitary, Wilhelm played in the mud of their yard, building from the trickles of snowmelt a river of his own. He pawed the gravel with a hoe, forcing the eager stream to twist this way and that, confined by the tiny banks he’d meticulously made from sod and sticks. If anyone had asked, Wilhelm might have said he was building a town, lording over his creation like any child, but with his mouth clamped shut by his mother’s decree, he said nothing. Instead, he would nod knowingly and return to his tiny village, scraping gullies and torrents, building pebble houses and barns, his eyes narrowed with concentration as if he saw people moving about on their miniature farms. In his version of the village, the river was a threat, and more than once he’d judiciously placed stones so a deluge from a puddle would swamp the houses closer to the shore.

Even if he’d been able to speak to other children, Wilhelm’s cryptic game would likely have horrified them. They made little houses and in their solemn way enacted the vicissitudes of streamside living, but they weren’t ready to take responsibility for their tiny charges. Apocalyptic floods were a terror, and even if they were dry in their cowhide boots, their minds would have been sodden with what they’d done until their crying was beat into sleep by their exhausted parents.

Chapter Three ~ Wilhelm’s Play

When Wilhelm was older the villages were more elaborate. His pebble houses were rows of rocks, each fixed to its neighbour by spruce gum from the trees along the edge of the field. His irrigation system would have startled an Egyptian on the Nile, if they had known a ten-year-old boy would be confronting some of the same age-old questions about mastery over the intemperate water. Smoothing the fractal banks of streams into guided canals, Wilhelm twisted complex watercourses through his pebble town, watering every garden with the shared beneficence of rain. He had replaced the sober characters of his imagination with tiny stick figures, and when John Hallet came to borrow a shovel he was amazed enough by the diorama to stay and help. He carefully fed water into troughs that Wilhelm had prepared until Ida’s call to dinner finally distracted him. Then, catching a glimpse of himself in the glitter of their rippled windows, he went home along the narrow road, casting a look back every few paces as though what he’d seen would disappear, or hadn’t been real enough to endure.

The Black-Stocking preacher who Ida had driven away came to read the palimpsest of Wilhelm’s creation, and he stood in the yard for long hours until Ida stirred him with a broom. Then, startled by her firmness or his own entrancement, he called witchcraft and ran howling into the woods beyond the ridge. Amongst the Black-Stockings Harley Brown became a martyr and they claimed if anyone ever tamed the great bog they’d find his bones heaving through the mud, still striving to conquer the unknowable by reference to the stories he’d been taught.

As a good Baptist, Meme rejected their claim. She said instead that he’d thrashed a short distance into the huge bog and been trapped in the black mud. Then, like a heavy moose, he’d cursed the god he’d lorded over others, quieted, and was eaten by the wary wolverine that some claimed haunted the edge of the bog. The resultant conflict between the Black-Stockings and Meme’s Baptist church was finally aired in front of the Catholic’s high steeple. Father Jeffries forced a reconciliation, and even though it meant he had to be driven from the community, many said afterward that he’d prevented the first bloodshed since they’d settled along the river.

When he turned twelve Wilhelm brought a rake from the garden and smoothed the yard one last time. With her hands buried in suds, Ida watched him from the window as he ploughed the loose gravel of the yard over his imagined village. He buried the carefully built canals and toppled the fragile steeples of the churches. Mixing the pebbles from his houses with the moist soil of his carefully constructed town, Wilhelm destroyed the evidence of his youth. Drying her hands on a towel and for a moment a visionary herself, Ida heard the cries for help and saw the bucking horses bowled under the deliberate tide of dirt. She stood in the doorway long minutes, her hands twisted in the towel, as Wilhelm buried a village in what had recently been the forest clay.

At first Ida thought Wilhelm was preparing the ground for his greatest attempt yet, and she imagined the towering babel that she’d read about in the bible. But when Wilhelm returned the rake and went to the garden to weed, she realized he’d grown beyond what the mud of their yard could supply. Just as adolescents will pack up their toys for the eager hands of younger siblings, Wilhelm had thrown the miniature villages from him like a snake, as if he were casting off the temptation to control the lives of his tiny charges. Inwardly, Ida celebrated, but when she thought to congratulate Wilhelm on his incipient adulthood, she saw his eyes had turned from the childhood carnage and were fixed on the ridge above the house. Following his look, her vision twisted by the heatwaves of the summer day, the ridge that confined the valley wavered and seemed unreal. Ida glanced back to the surety of the river and the fields her husband had wrested from the shallow forest soil, and although she would have laughed to hear it, many said that was the last time she looked away from the river.

She was still standing at the window when a streak of light burned across the sky and smashed into their yard. She first thought it was the comet of Wilhelm’s birth, and she trembled to think it had returned to claim its own. She shook herself from her reverie and ran to the yard where Wilhelm was lying in the dirt, his eyes open and fixed on the drifting smoke trail in the empty sky. She knelt beside him, her eyes drawn to his bloody shirt. Pulling it up, she discovered he’d been wounded by some of the falling object’s shrapnel, and she carried him to the porch while she called for Samuel. By the time his father had arrived the wound had stopped bleeding and, rough farm folk that they were, they bound it in his bloody shirt and Samuel carried his son to bed. Wilhelm had woken partway through the binding of his wound, but his eyes were far away and his answers to their questions were vague and cryptic.

Most of Wilhelm’s youth was spent, naturally enough, labouring in the fields. Working with his father as the years wound on the spool of seasons and then unwound for another spin, Wilhelm learned the slow pace of the hillside farmers, and if following the plough chafed, he was as silent on the matter as though he’d never been taught to speak. His mute acceptance of Samuel’s homespun wisdom seemed to water a ground few would have thought of as fertile, and soon his father grew voluble. When Samuel first told him of Frank McCarthy’s near death, Wilhelm thought there was a lesson in the simple story and he cocked his head like a dog, having