Banks American Spirits

1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-915798-93-0
Verlag: No Exit Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 208 Seiten

From one of America's most celebrated storytellers come three dark, interlocking tales about the residents of a rural New York town, and the shocking headlines that become their local mythologies. A husband sells property to a mysterious, temperamental stranger, and is hounded on social media when he publicly questions the man's character. A couple grow concerned when an enigmatic family move next door, and the children start sneaking over to beg for help. Two dangerous criminals kidnap an elderly couple and begin blackmailing their grandson, demanding that he pay back what he owes them. Suspenseful, thrilling, and expertly crafted, American Spirits explores the hostile undercurrents of our communities and politics at large, as well as the ways local tragedies can be both devastating and, somehow, everyday. Ushering the reader through the town of Sam Dent, Russell Banks has etched yet another brilliant entry into the bedrock of American fiction.

Russell Banks published ten novels, six short story collections, and four poetry collections. His novels Cloudsplitter and Continental Drift were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Two of Banks's novels have been adapted for feature-length films, The Sweet Hereafter (winner of the Grand Prix and International Critics Prize at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival) and Affliction (which earned a 'Best Supporting Actor' Oscar for James Coburn). His work has won numerous awards, among them a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, O. Henry and Best American Short Story Award, and the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. One of America's most prestigious fiction writers, Russell Banks was president of the International Parliament of Writers and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He passed away in January 2023.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Banks, Russell

Leseproben

HOMESCHOOLING

The story about the Weber family starts with a pair of identical houses built side by side one hundred fifty years ago on an east-facing, sloped meadow on a narrow dirt lane that’s called High Street. It’s an unpaved road, but people call it High Street because it looms above the town of Sam Dent like a green furrowed brow. Sam Dent is little more than a down-at-the-heels north country village now, but in the late 1800s it was a thriving industrial mill town clustered around two small shoe factories powered by a dam on the Blackstone Kill. The word kill is a Dutch word for ‘stream’ and reminds us that the first non-native settlers here, and thus the first landowners, surveyors, realtors, bankers, farmers, mill owners and workers, were Dutch, displaced later by the English, displaced in turn by the victorious Americans, some of whose descendants reside here today, along with summer residents from downstate and newcomers of various nationalities and races and ethnicities who have trickled in over the years. For all that, the year-round population, a bit more than one thousand, is about the same today as it was in the 1880s, when the twin houses were built on High Street.

Local legend has it that the owners of the shoe factories were first cousins, Dutchmen, both men named Herr. Their long-abandoned factories have since been converted and recycled over the years into a car repair shop, hardware store, pizza parlor, hair salon and, nowadays, tenement apartments. But the Victorian manses built on High Street by the factory owners, first by one Herr and a year later by his cousin, look and function more or less as they did when they were built. Each still serves as the primary residence of a local family that has made few visible alterations to the structures and outbuildings.

They are the largest private dwellings in town, Victorian stick-style piles of wood and slate with towers and gables and narrow, shuttered windows and wraparound porches and balustrades and an excess of gingerbread trim. They stand in striking, self-important contrast to the modest New England–style farmhouses and modern ranch and split-level homes and double- and single-wide mobile homes on small lots where the rest of the town’s year-round residents live. The rooms are dark and high-ceilinged and expensive to heat. The plumbing, sewage, heating, and electrical systems are obsolete and in need of constant repair or replacement. In today’s real estate market, houses like these do not move easily from For Sale to Sold.

Four years ago, when Kenneth and Barbara Odell arrived in Sam Dent, they were in their early thirties, and Kenneth had taken a junior administrative position at the Essex County Correctional Facility in Lewis, his first desk job since receiving his Master of Social Work degree from Utica University. The couple had met and married as undergraduates at the college. Their names, Ken and Barbie, amused their friends, for they somewhat resembled the famous dolls, though she was a brunette and he a blond. Once married, they took to calling each other Kenneth and Barbara, and their friends and family complied. Kenneth was advised by the prison authorities, for safety’s sake, not to settle his young family close to the prison, so they shopped for their first house in several nearby towns, including Sam Dent, our town, seventeen miles southwest of the prison, where, as it happens, several of the guards also live.

Barbara loved the house on High Street at first sight. It had a country kitchen and a formal dining room and a living room with a fireplace. She envisioned dinner parties, her parents and college friends coming from downstate for weekends, separate bedrooms for each of their three children. It may have reminded her of the house in Utica where she grew up. She imagined the attached shed and carriage barn as safe places for the kids to play together on rainy days with their new friends from town, where they’d care for the animals housed there, rabbits and maybe a goat, a few chickens for fresh eggs. Or a donkey. ‘Yes, Kenneth, why not a donkey?’

Barbara had especially liked the way the house looked down onto the town from above. It was a pretty pastoral view and gave the viewer a slight feeling of separateness and superiority over the locals huddled in the valley below.

Kenneth saw only what was wrong with the house, but that was his nature. It was in fair repair, but he suspected that the soft-spoken elderly accountant and his wife, who were selling their longtime home to retire to Florida, had likely exhausted themselves and their bank account maintaining it. Kenneth noticed gutters that needed replacing, cracked chimney crowns, sills starting to rot, wobbly porch posts and columns, missing panes and broken cames in the leaded stained-glass windows of the three-story tower. He saw loose slate shingles and siding, difficult and expensive to replace, and peeling exterior paint, and water-stained wallpaper in the living room. He noticed fifty-year-old plumbing fixtures and a wheezing hot-air furnace and rusting ductwork. Beyond that, he thought the Victorian style of the manse was a little pretentious, almost ugly. He intended to resist buying it, no matter what Barbara wanted. Even at the low price of $123,000.

But, as the realtor pointed out, except for the residents of the matching house a mere hundred yards away, they would have High Street and the broad, sloping, twenty-acre meadow that sprawled down to the Blackstone Kill valley and the village of Sam Dent all to themselves. That was a positive for both Kenneth and Barbara. They could plant a line of fast-growing white pines between the two houses, the realtor said. She mentioned that a very nice couple with four young adopted children lived next door.

Kenneth and Barbara wanted a cosmopolitan adult social life for themselves and neighborhood friends for their children, and they also wanted rural privacy. After the house tour, they sat in the realtor’s car and compared notes, and Barbara said this house gave them all three. It was a place where they could host and entertain their friends and relations from Utica and Syracuse, it was a socially healthy environment for their children, and it gave them plenty of privacy. The $25,000 down payment was coming as a gift from Barbara’s parents. The balance came from a pre-approved loan from her parents’ bank in Utica. As a result, Barbara’s preference counted for slightly more than Kenneth’s. They agreed to make an offer of $105,000. They ended settling with the retired accountant and his wife for $110,000.

The closing took place in the realtor’s home office in downtown Sam Dent. When all the papers had been signed and the check had passed from buyers to sellers, the four stood and shook hands awkwardly, as if unsure what to say or do next in order to end the ceremony. The portly white-haired gentleman with his jolly, round wife had lived in Kenneth’s and Barbara’s new house for more than thirty years, and they had raised their children there.

The man said, ‘So I guess you don’t mind living next door to a pair of married lesbians and a bunch of colored kids.’

Kenneth said quickly, ‘No, no, of course not.’

Barbara said, ‘Oh? They sound really interesting. We look forward to getting to know them.’

Kenneth wondered why he and Barbara hadn’t asked the realtor to tell them more about their High Street neighbors, other than that they were a nice couple with four adopted children. He and Barbara didn’t want to seem prejudiced or racist in any way, because they weren’t. But it occurred to him that, before agreeing to buy the house, maybe they should have tried to learn a bit more about the people next door. Suddenly the distance between the two houses didn’t seem as great as it had earlier.

‘Yes, the Webers,’ the retired accountant continued. ‘Mis-sus and Mis-sus Weber. It’s legal for homosexuals to marry now, you know. Two white women and four colored kids,’ he said. ‘Adopted from a state agency in Texas, I heard.’ The man’s thin-lipped smile was like a lizard’s. One almost expected a forked red tongue to flick between his lips. It was the triumphant, self-satisfied smile of a man who had pulled a fast one and now was free to reveal it to the victim.

The Odells didn’t think of themselves as victims, however. They hoped to befriend the Weber mothers and their four Black children and were pleased that their own kids would have the opportunity to know children of another race, as Kenneth and Barbara hadn’t yet seen anyone in the town who was not White. With a few noticeable exceptions, the only Black people living in Essex County – all of whom appeared to be young, most of them male, unmarried and probably transient adults – were the inmates serving time at the prison in Lewis where Kenneth worked.

?

A week after moving in, the Odells were still unpacking. It was early July, and they hadn’t yet arranged for sending the kids to school and had met no one local, except the clerks at the IGA and hardware store and post office, and were feeling isolated and unknown in town. Barbara baked a batch of Toll House cookies and boxed a dozen of them nicely, tied the package with a blue ribbon, and placed it in the next-door neighbors’ mailbox at the street, along with a card on which she’d written, ‘From your new neighbors, Kenneth and Barbara Odell. Enjoy!’

The following afternoon she strolled from the carriage barn down the long curled driveway to High Street and discovered in their own mailbox the same package tied with the same...