America America (15 page)

Although dusters have clearly become a status item around here lately—you see them in the backseats of plenty of Toyota Highlanders parked at the upscale malls—they’re also as utilitarian a piece of clothing as has ever been stitched by man. The cut covers you from neck to heel, and the oilcloth material sheds water as though it’s allergic. In a wet March snowstorm you can walk ten miles in one and not feel a drop of damp—and because they were designed for horsemen, you can even ride a bike in one. But they’re not cheap. That night at home I took it out of the box and thought about roughing it up to make it look used. I even thought of just leaving it anonymously on Trieste’s desk at the paper. But she’s the kind who would ask about a lost and found.

Instead, I called her into my office for the conference we have with every intern midway through the term.

“Nice job on the dioxin piece,” I said.

“A waste of time,” she answered. “But thanks.”

“The assignment, you mean? Or what you did with it?”

“The former.”

“And therefore the latter.”

“Well, it turned out all right. But I could have told you all of it without having to hitch to Albany.”

Without saying more I reached behind my chair and brought out the copy of the front page that I’d had framed. I’d had the whole staff sign it, too. “Well, we’re glad you did it, anyway,” I said, presenting it to her over the desk. “Your article made a difference to a lot of people.”

“Whoops, Mr. Sifter.”

“That’s okay. I appreciate your honesty.” Then I took out the box from under the desk and handed it across to her, too. This she accepted without a word. She opened it, removed the duster, and tried it on. It fit.

“Oh, I see,” she said, smoothing the long panels. “I guess you figured I could use one.” She smiled her enigmatic smile.

“Next time you hitch to Albany.”

“Very funny, sir,” she said. But then she pulled the button loops tight and looked over at herself in the window, and I could see that it had touched her. “Thanks, Mr. Sifter,” she said softly. And then she added, “I’m grateful.”

“M
AKES YOU WISH
it wasn’t a Saturday night,” Liam Metarey said to me. “Not a farm supply open in the state.”

We were out by the work barn standing alongside the old Massey-Ferguson, which had broken down in the snow. It was the beginning of Christmas vacation. The snow had been falling heavily since morning, and now, past dark, it was just beginning to taper. Earlier in the evening, I’d driven the tractor down from the garage to plow, but when I’d tried to push it into low, it had made a snapping sound and stopped dead. A gearbox cable. That’s what Mr. Metarey told me as he pulled a small mirror from under the crankshaft and screwed closed the engine housing. Already there were two inches of white on the seat. “Broken clean through,” he said. “Time for the shovels.”

“Our neighbor’s got a New Holland,” I said. “Eugene McGowar. I can call.”

“Oh, no,” he said. “The trick’s to see the opportunity. That’s what my old man would have said. Come on—let’s pull the damn thing back into the barn and then we can get to shoveling by hand.”

It seemed odd, of course, to start such a task in the dark; it seemed odd, in fact, that he wanted to do it at all. But as I’ve said before, I’ve always enjoyed the feeling of physical labor. We looked out together over the turnaround and the drive sloping uphill to the sycamores. There must have been two feet of snow in the yard already, and the drifts on the north-facing slopes of the drive were as high as my shoulders. Mr. Metarey went into the barn for a moment and came back with a pair of chains.

“Isn’t it funny,” he said, gathering one over his shoulder. “How everything will eventually reverse itself on you?”

“How do you mean that, sir?”

“Reverse what it needs and what it offers. You and me pulling the old Ferguson, for example.” He handed me the other chain. “But it’s true for all kinds of other things, too. One of God’s lesser-known laws. The law of comeuppance. Come on, Corey,” he said. “It’ll be good for us. Here’s your end.”

He clipped both chains to the plow stay, and then I gathered mine over my own shoulder and we leaned down into the load, pulling steadily until the tractor’s inertia suddenly broke and it began to creep up the hill behind us. We kept our steps short in the slick footing, guiding the wheels back up their deep tracks until at last we had succeeded in pulling the huge machine up the slope and levering the rear axle over the threshold into the barn.

“Nice work, young man,” he said.

“Thank you, sir.”

“Now,” he said. “The shovels.”

I mention this incident not to illustrate what a ferocious worker Liam Metarey was—although he certainly was
that
—but to show what I think must have been the precarious state of his mind around that time, which I believe was when he ended up making his fateful decision for the Bonwiller campaign. He was, as I later came to understand, bedeviled by a generational curse—the very curse that had made his family what it was. And now I wonder if on that evening it had hold of him.

I have to say, the task seemed impossible. Before us, the snow stretched two feet deep for almost a quarter of a mile before it finally thinned under the dense branches of the sycamores. But he merely said, “Two hundred yards to the trees, knee-deep most places. How many shovels is that, Corey?”

“A lot.”

“By my figuring, thirty-two hundred. Sixteen hundred each. That is, if we keep up with each other.” He smiled and pulled down the two widest snow shovels from the wall, then hung his coat from the peg. “If we clear one lane, I mean. We can clear the other way in the morning.”

“Are you sure, sir? I can call our neighbor.”

“Seneca Indians used to do this sort of thing when they wanted a vision. The Great Chief Sagoyewatha.”

We began with the turnaround. Before long I’d taken off my coat and then my sweater. Next to me, Mr. Metarey had rolled up his sleeves. The shovels had wide blades and short handles that were meant for pushing and not throwing, and the snow was wet; but still he worked like a piston. He was thirty years older than I, but before long he’d built a lead on his side of the drive. When he saw it, he crossed over and began shoveling on mine.

After a few minutes he looked up. “Been thinking about the presidents,” he said.

“Yes, sir.” I was glad for the break.

“You ever hear of a man named Isaiah Berlin?”

I stood from the snow and leaned against my shovel. “Not a president,” I said. “He’s a singer, I think.”

“I suppose you mean Irving Berlin. The composer.” He bent to his shovel again. “I’m talking about Sir Isaiah Berlin, the philosopher. He was the one who noticed that there are two kinds of thinkers, the monists and the pluralists—that’s what he called them.” He was working now again, lifting and burying his shovel as he talked, tossing the load into a gathering ridge at the side of the drive. “Let’s see—otherwise known as hedgehogs and foxes. You heard of any of this?”

“No, sir.”

“The fox knows lots of things. The hedgehog knows only one thing but he knows it in his bones. I’ve been thinking. Been thinking about which one Senator Bonwiller is.” He stopped working for a moment. “Fifty,” he said as he resumed. “You know your presidents, Corey?”

“Yes, sir, I think so.”

“Who was the first?”

“The first president?” I looked at him. “Washington, sir.”

“That’s right. Washington was a monist. A hedgehog. A charismatic one, too. Those are the great leaders.”

We were fifteen yards up the drive now. Both of us sweating.

“A republicanist in the true sense of the word, I should add. Voluntarily gave up command of the army. One of the great acts of any world leader. 1783, that was—and the statement still holds. Back to a life in Mount Vernon. Stunned old Europe. A true hedgehog. Beat Adams, Jay, Harrison, Rutledge, and Hancock. And soundly, too,” he said. “Next?”

“Sir?”

“Next president.”

“John Adams.”

“Pluralist. A fox. Beat Pinckney, Burr, and his own cousin Samuel. Not to mention Jefferson—barely. Nothing of Washington’s charisma but a student of the world. Saw both sides of everything—a hindrance if there ever was one. Defended British soldiers at the trial for the Boston Massacre—how’s that for an unpopular stand? Just because he saw it that way. 1770. And
still
won. Lived by the mind. Took notes on everything he saw, all his life. A fox through and through. No doubt on that one. Hindered him in the end, of course. One hundred. Always does. Next.”

“Jefferson.”

“Pluralist. Greatest fox of them all. Philosopher. Paleontologist. Violinist. Architect. Mathematician. Cryptographer. And wrote some of the most brilliant words ever written. Still took him
three
tries to win.” He stood and looked downhill at the blunted house and the land running into blackness behind it. “‘We hold these truths to be self-evident’—listen to this, Corey—‘that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.’
Certain inalienable rights
,” he said, bending back to the shovel. “What words!” He was breathing steadily from the effort. “‘Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’” I heard the rhythmic scrape of the blade and the soft landing of the snow. “‘That to secure these rights Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.’ From the consent of the governed, Corey! All Jefferson. One-fifty. We live in what he invented. A pluralist at the exact moment when the country needed one. The greatest in history. Wouldn’t survive now six months in politics. Not with Nixon on his tail. Next.”

“John Quincy Adams.”

“What’re they teaching you at that school of ours?”

“Madison?”

“Right. And then Monroe. Then Quincy Adams.”

All the while he was shoveling, and the black of the road was appearing again beneath us. We had gone perhaps forty yards now. I won’t record everything he said, but two hours later when we reached the trees, he’d covered every president through Lyndon Johnson and had shoveled his own half of the trail and probably a third of my own. I’d never seen him like that. He knew the losing candidates in every election since Washington’s, and he knew the tally of the electoral votes. I’d never realized the extent of his knowledge nor the concentration with which he obviously executed his job—indeed I’d never even realized that he was a man of books, on top of everything else he was. He didn’t show that side to me ever again.

I can only tell you that as we made our way up the driveway, him counting off every fiftieth shovel stroke in a rough cadence and me dropping behind by four or five at every interval, I too began to feel the euphoria of that kind of hard work in that kind of cold weather. Of that kind of discipline against what the inner voice says is insurmountable. When we reached the cover of the sycamores where the snow thinned to a depth that was passable for cars, he set aside his shovel and we sat down together on the asphalt, both of us exhausted, and he said, “Henry Bonwiller’s going to win this goddamn election, Corey. I’ve figured it out on the graphs of history. I’ve had my vision.” The snow had stopped now but the veil of flakes drifting down from the canopy caught the light of the lamps like a gossamer stage curtain behind him. “That’s what I’m trying to show you. The monist tends to win against the pluralist. And most so amidst uncertainty. That’s the mathematical lesson of history. And those forces are coming together for our man right now—the intersecting graphs of discontent and optimism. By November Nixon’s going to wish he’d never heard of Henry W. Bonwiller, I guarantee you that! And Muskie, too. God damn him to hell! We’re standing at the crossing point of the great unchallengeable historical vectors. And they’re on our side, Corey! You mark my words. They’re on our goddamn side! Goddamn right we’re going to win the thing! You mark my words!”

H
ERE’S WHERE IT GETS COMPLICATED.

It was a week into Christmas break now, a little more than a month before the Iowa caucuses. Mrs. Metarey had taken Clara and Christian skiing in Idaho, and Aberdeen West was quiet, especially in the mornings. Very early one of those mornings, just after light, while I was sweeping snow off the front walks, Henry Bonwiller arrived alone at the estate. He didn’t even have Carlton Sample with him, and instead of giving me the Cadillac he parked it himself in the garage and went quickly up the stairs to the house. He looked ashen. Weather had come in the night before—a warm snow that was pleasant and hushed when you were out in it, as I was, but that was getting thicker. Liam Metarey was in the horse pasture helping Breighton walk off a sprained foot. I ran to tell him the Senator had arrived.