Louis Creed, who had lost his father at three and who had never known
a grandfather, never expected to find a father as he entered his middle age, but
that was exactly what happened… although he called this man a friend, as a
grown man must do when he finds the man who should have been his father
relatively late in life. He met this man on the evening he and his wife and his two
children moved into the big white frame house in Ludlow. Winston Churchill
moved in with them. Church was his daughter Eileen's cat.
The search committee at the University had moved slowly, the search for a
house within commuting distance of the University had been hair-raising, and by
the time they neared the place where he believed the house to be (all the
landmarks are right… like the astrological signs the night before Caesar was
assassinated, Louis thought morbidly,) they were all tired and tense and on edge.
Gage was cutting teeth and fussed almost ceaselessly. He would not sleep no
matter how much Rachel sang to him. She offered him the breast even though it
was off his schedule. Gage knew his dining schedule as well as she—better,
maybe—and he promptly bit her with his new teeth. Rachel, still not entirely sure
about this move to Maine from Chicago, where she had lived her whole life, burst
into tears. Eileen joined her, apparently in some sort of mystic feminine sympathy.
In the back of the station wagon, Church continued to pace restlessly as he had
done for the last three days it had taken them to drive here from Chicago. His
yowling from the cat-kennel had been bad, but his restless pacing after they finally
gave up and set him free in the car had been almost as unnerving.
Louis himself felt a little like crying. A wild but not unattractive idea suddenly
came to him: he would suggest that they go back to Bangor for something to eat
while they waited for the moving van, and when his three hostages to fortune got
out, he would floor the accelerator and drive away without so much as a look
back, foot to the mat, the wagon's huge four-barrel carburetor gobbling expensive
gasoline. He would drive south, all the way to Orlando, Florida, where he would
get a job at Disney World as a medic, under a new name. But before he hit the
turnpike—big old 95 southbound—he would stop by the side of the road and put
the fucking cat out, too.
Then they rounded a final curve and there was the house that only he had seen
up until now. He had flown out and looked at each of the seven possibles they had
picked from photos once the position at the University was solidly his, and this
was the one he had chosen: a big old New England colonial (but newly sided and
insulated; the heating costs, while horrible enough, were not out of line in terms of
consumption), three big rooms downstairs, four more up, a long shed that might
be converted to more rooms later on, all of it surrounded by a luxuriant sprawl of
lawn, lushly green even in this August heat.
Beyond the house was a large field for the children to play in, and beyond the
field were woods that went on damn near for ever. The property abutted state
lands, the realtor had explained, and there would be no development in the
foreseeable future. The remains of the Micmac Indian tribe had laid claim to nearly
8,000 acres in Ludlow, and in the towns east of Ludlow, and the complicated
litigation, involving the Federal government as well as that of the state, might
stretch into the next century.
Rachel stopped crying abruptly. She sat up. 'Is that—'
'That's it,' Louis said. He felt apprehensive—no, he felt scared. In fact he felt
terrified. He had mortgaged twelve years of their lives for this; it wouldn't be paid
off until Eileen was seventeen, an unbelievable age.
He swallowed.
'What do you think?'
'I think it's beautiful,' Rachel said, and that was a huge weight off his chest –
and off his mind. She wasn't kidding, he saw; it was in the way she was looking at
it as they turned in the asphalted driveway that swept around to the shed in back,
her eyes sweeping the blank windows, her mind already ticking away at such
matters as curtains and oilcloth for the cupboards and God knew what else.
'Daddy?' Eileen said from the back seat. She had stopped crying as well. Even
Gage had stopped fussing. Louis savored the silence.
'What, love?'
Her eyes, brown under darkish blonde hair in the rear-view mirror, also
surveying the house: the lawn, the roof of a house seen off to the left in the
distance, the big field stretching up to the woods.
'Is this home?'
'It's going to be, honey,' he said.
'Hooray!' she shouted, almost taking his ear off. And Louis, who could
sometimes become very irritated with Eileen, decided he didn't care if he never
clapped an eye on Disney World in Orlando.
He parked in front of the shed and turned off the wagon's motor.
The engine ticked. In the silence, which seemed very big after Chicago and the
bustle of State Street and the Loop, a bird sang sweetly in the late afternoon.
'Home,' Rachel said softly, still looking at the house.
'Home,' Gage said complacently on her lap.
Louis and Rachel stared at each other. In the rear-view mirror, Eileen's eyes
widened.
'Did you—'
'Did he—'
'Was that—'
They all spoke together, then all laughed together. Gage took no notice; only
sucked his thumb. He had been saying 'Ma' for almost a month now, and had
taken a stab or two at something that might have been 'Daaa' or only wishful
thinking on Louis's part.
But this, either by accident or imitation, had been a real word. Home.
Louis plucked Gage from his wife's lap and hugged him.
That was how they came to Ludlow.