The poor old creature seemed now indeed like someone being drawn, lured, into events of which he has no real comprehension, by people with whom he wishes to be friendly, even to play, who entice him by encouraging that wish and by whom, because they really despise and desire to humiliate him, he is finally entangled.  – Malcom Lowry, Under the Volcano

Four years ago, as the Great Pandemic struck and brought the world to a standstill, I found myself living in a small house in the quaint town of Longish, Maine, incorporated and settled by Europeans in 1784.

I lived with an elderly woman in her late 70s, Betty C. Whittaker, “a native” of Longish, “born and raised here.”

She described herself as a descendant of French Canadians on her mother’s side, and Scottish working-class immigrants on her father’s side, hardworking folks who all lived out their days on this northern stretch of the United States. She introduced herself in a Quebecois accent to emphasize her Canadian ancestry, and she mimicked a “Scottish highland” dialect to show her Scottish origin, all the time maintaining a conspiratorial grin that stretched even further the prominent age-lines on her fleshy face.

I still remember the day my Uber pulled up in front of Betty’s house on Kennan Circle, just outside downtown Longish. The streets were lined on either side by the remains of snow, which stood unmelted since the sun was rarely present that month, and the sidewalks were invisible, turned into the white banks of what seemed on that day like heavy waves frozen in mid-crash. I was drawn to the first driveway on Kennan Circle, where a car lay dismembered and left to stand in part-repair and part-decay, and all around were abandoned household appliances, all heaped in the yard a few houses away from Betty’s place.

As my Uber driver and I unloaded my stuff, I looked at Betty’s house and saw her standing behind the screened door, expressionless, in a thick white robe, the deep wrinkles on her face in sharp contrast to the smooth and youthful picture on her Airbnb profile, where her smile shone like glass, and her jawlines as defined as the edges of a spade. What I saw that first day were sunken cheeks that I would later learn from the minute that I walked in through the door was evidence of the complete absence of teeth. Her dentures would become a daily fixture by the shared bathroom sink in the days I lived with her, a constant reminder of the impermanence of everything under the sun.

But on that first day, I was both amused and moved by the discrepancy between her public profile and her private world.

The interior of her house was not the minimalist haven that I saw online. What confronted me was a space packed with items she had collected over the years, from charcoal irons fished off a trailer in Ohio, to jars containing beach sand from countries in Europe and South America—the jar of sand from Scotland was her favourite. Not to forget the horse harnesses on the wall, the “collection” of handmade cane chairs from the fifties and sixties, and manuals for appliances that had long disappeared.

And as she stood beside me, next to the oak table salvaged from a run-down house in Phippsburg, introducing me to her ‘collection’ without the usual polite apology people gave to excuse their cluttered homes, I knew at once that I was in a territory where reality had long disappeared, replaced by a cultivated narrative that cohered to the extent that you wanted it to.

It all made me feel at ease, on that first day, the air of deception and decrepitude. I was in a terrain that wasn’t far off from mine, and I doubted that she would hasten to judge me for my own baggage, some of which had nearly spilled in my earlier correspondence with her, when I said I would be “driving up with my books and some items and planning stay for three days,” but followed up a day later that I had been in “a little” accident and “my car was totalled,” and I would be “Ubering up and may stay for two weeks” if her place was still available.

She had replied and said a guest had cancelled, that I was free to stay for those two weeks. And then the pandemic struck, and the world came to a standstill, and my intended two weeks stretched into the whole year, spilling into the next.

I’m thinking of Betty today because a package from her granddaughter, Tracy, came in the mail this morning, and I’ve spent the whole day replaying my time in Longish, where I lived as a semi-recluse, without a car, accumulating credit card debts, mourning the doctoral work that I had abandoned.

Tracy’s package came with a note informing me that my “girlfriend” had passed and had left me some photographs and other items. The photographs were held together by two rubber bands, wrapped in a Matisse-inspired gift paper from the 1920s, one of Betty’s numerous “handpicked” wrapping papers collected over a lifetime. She had included me in her will: as the sole heir to said photographs, and also the inheritor of her extensive ‘collection’ of miniature dollhouses now waiting for me at a storage facility; and she also left me the handmade smoking pipe she said she once shared with Gary Snyder and friends in India.

She had one condition, that I pay her a visit every now and then at the historic Ross Cemetery in Longish, where her parents and grandparents and great grandparents were buried, and leave her flowers in the spring, her favourite season, “when the ospreys return” to the same spot not far from her backyard.

Reading those words, I saw again the family of osprey’s dividing their time between their nest atop an electric poll a hundred yards or so from Betty’s back porch and the stretch of trees to the left of their nest.

“They comeback in the spring,” Betty had said the first time she introduced me to the birds, “and they leave in winter,” she added, after which she disappeared into her room, emerging a few minutes later with some old binoculars that once “belonged to an Anglo-American rancher in the Kenyan Rift Valley.”

When she handed me the binoculars, heavier than I expected, we moved two or more steps forward and took turns watching that one osprey, a young one, as it perched on a branch, alert, its eyes sharp as a clean knife, its greyish black and dust white colours blurring into the light-bush-green of the line of trees.

We passed the Snyder pipe back and forth, smoking the Cosmos Candy she had bought the previous day, “on sale” at the cannabis dispensary just off the highway, “great stuff and it keeps you awake and alive.”

Later that day, she showed me her copy of Birds of Maine, a book two times my age, published by the now defunct Old Orchard Press, “right here in Maine.”

And we smoked more Candy and went for a walk afterwards, down Washington Street, which narrowed on its southern stretch into the Holden Nature Preserve, named after an English trader who immigrated to Longish in the early nineteenth century, made his fortune in the lumber business, and left some of his wealth to the Longish Nature Club, established in 1896.

On the way back, we took a different street, through the section of town with old brick houses built for the workers who “moved here for jobs at the Metal Works,” the historic shipbuilding company on the far edge of town, a company that had defined the socio-political and economic character of the town since the early twentieth century, shaping its collective consciousness and identity, attracting and retaining families of labourers and technicians and contractors through the World Wars and the Cold War.

Although she had mentioned it before, Betty pointed out the house where she was born, right across from the one where her grandparents lived, just a block away from where her daughter’s best friend died of a drug overdose “last summer.”

For some reason she slowed down at a housing complex, a building that looked out of place from all the single-family homes around. And midway through, she stopped and cast a decisive glance at the line of cars parked out front, and I wanted to ask if anything was the issue, but that question would answer itself when we picked up again and she said, “that building is a rental property for low income seniors,” and she had a friend who moved there “a year ago,” even though said friend could afford to live “at the Ritz” for the rest of her life.

And when we got back, she made her peanut butter cookies, and we nibbled and watched live performances of the band Queen on YouTube. 

It all feels like yesterday, that walk, and the time I spent down there with her.

As she once said, “time is all in your head,” sometimes “the years are like days, and weeks become decades. It’s all in your head.”

She said this while we were drinking what she called her “white Russian,” a mix of coffee flavoured brandy and “a shot of vodka.” She sipped hers slowly, reverentially, like a sacred brew sourced from a distant land. She recalled that it was on a fishing trip with a boyfriend years ago, somewhere close to Canada, that she tried “this drink” for the first time.

Nick was a big drinker and a seasonal lobster man, she said, and her first true love; though, looking back, she had concluded that it was something “more spiritual and transcendent,” because Nick was also a true artist who painted old New England lighthouses and would not hesitate to “give you the shirt off his back.”

I couldn’t work out the connections, but it all sounded good to me, and we pursued the night with another round that she made.

And since that first try of her best drink, and since I left her place, I’ve concocted mine a few times, throwing in flavours that had no business parleying with the base drink. There was the experiment with cinnamon, and another time with a pinch of clove, and with each attempt—my tongue in agony—I would think of Betty and would sometimes call her to share what I’d done, and she would note how much it “offended” her that I was dishonouring her favourite beverage.

The last time I called to share my experiment, she had coughed through her usual response, and she said something about needing to drink more water and maybe quit smoking weed, and just “lie here and see what happens.”

It was unlike her to sound so fatal, to yield to anything without putting up a fight or finding an angle of escape, and it got me feeling there was something more going on, but I didn’t quite know what it was and I didn’t want to ask in that moment, not even when she uncharacteristically described herself as “a frail old lady” and called herself out for using “a tired cliché.”

When the call ended, I imagined her struggling to rise from her couch, failing and groaning as I had seen her do in the past, but this time I pictured her yielding and lying down instead, waiting for her strength to return, waiting alone for the world around her to move.

After that call, we didn’t speak for a while. She reached out a month or so later to announce that she had sold her house to “some asshole from Massachusetts,” and she was moving into a tiny house up north in Kingsville, where she had bought a couple cheap acres by a pond.

She had a plan for the years ahead, an idea that she had shared with me while I was living with her in Longish. “When I sell this house,” she said, “I’d buy a small place up north,” and from there she planned to begin the last leg of her adventures up and down the state of Maine: revisiting the places that had shaped her early memories of the land, but always returning to that “small place up north,” which she said would be fitted with only the basics, but must have a deck so she could sit and smoke and catch the sun outside.

I was glad she was able to achieve that dream, buying that small place up north, but I couldn’t help imaging how long it took her to make that decision, giving up her house and its precious collection of objects.

What did she do with the marble head of David from Sicily? It was a replica, yes, but it was made by a sculptor from an “old Sicilian family,” which meant something beyond the work itself, hence the prominent display of said piece to the right of the TV stand, where the poor head seemed unsure where to look.

What happened to the lampshade that was originally owned by a member of the Vanderbilt family, bought at an auction of “heritage antiques” in Damariscotta?

I have a feeling that her death was somehow connected to that detachment from a house that oozed her every eccentricity, that was indistinguishable from the world she bore on the inside; it was her protection from the world outside, from whatever sense of order and expectation that life imposed. Each item had a story, some farfetched and some—from my point of view—were just ridiculous, like the thing about not wanting a new bedframe because the one she had, broken and held tight with strong ropes, was an “antique” from “maybe the 1920s.”

What I noticed the first few weeks at her place was how she panicked when a surface was empty. The couch. Windowsills. The kitchen countertop. The space in front of the fireplace. The hallway that linked my room on one end and hers on the other.

I once cleared the top of a rickety oak table that appeared from nowhere a month after I moved in, placed my laptop there and began checking my emails, and she spent the whole time hovering and puttering, and at some point she slid under the table just to “check and make sure,” and when she emerged she swept her palm on the surface of the table and said something about the yard sale in Woolwich where she found the table, and soon we were talking about a cabinetmaker who used to live down the road from her friend Archie’s house in Saint George in the late 80s, and how “this particular” table looked like something straight out of that cabinetmaker’s workshop.

Rapping the table with her bony knuckles, she launched a small lecture on the difference between oak and pine furniture, and this digressed into the history of Amish and Shaker furniture-making in Maine, how she would give anything to “go back in time” and inherit the set of Shaker chairs her grandparents owned, which somehow had disappeared from the family.

At this point I got the hint and moved my stuff, and in no time the tabletop became the site of a battle between stacks of crocheted potholders and jars of “vintage” buttons.

And the next time I came out from my room she pinned me down and shared the story and provenance of a particular potholder that she had inherited from “an aunt who moved out west to New Mexico in the 70s,” and gave me the backstories of a set of black buttons harvested from a nineteenth century sailor’s jacket she bought off “a family friend in Thomaston.”

It is her voice that is now coming back to me, that one-tone drone that is slow and mellow, revealing no emotional inflection, her face drawn down on both sides by sagging cheeks, her eyelids heavy-looking as though a nap was coming.

And now she’s finally asleep. Not on the “high-end” single mattress a “gay couple” she used to clean houses for down in Wiscasset gave her, which she had leaning on the hallway all the time I was living with her. Not in the pink floral couch where we invested hours, often in our matching white robes, watching Turner Classic Movies, analyzing the nature of American politics and diplomacy, and speculating—often through a prism of marijuana—what life after the pandemic might look like.

She’s asleep now, in the sacred grounds of the cemetery she had known all her life, the site of the annual warfare between her and her twin sister, Patti, the ex-hippie and ex-Woodstock attendee who in later life married a shrewd businessman who believed that a secret group of paedophiles and cannibals were running the United States.

While still living with Betty, I learned how, every year, she and her sister would compete to plant flowers at the family graves on Memorial Day.

The first year I lived there, Betty spent a month strategizing. And when the day came, she left early but Patti had gone a day early and planted her flowers on their parent’s graves.

Betty removed her sister’s and planted hers. She came back and related the long history of Patti’s pettiness going back to the year in high school when she, Betty, started dating a “full Indian” and Patti, herself interested in said Indian, announced Betty’s relationship at dinner, knowing well that their parents would not approve.

But it was not the pettiness that was disturbing. It was just how easy Patti swayed from one end of the political spectrum to another, depending on who she was dating or married to.

Now that Patti was married to the “raging Trumpite,” all immigrants were “parasites who sucked America dry.”

Patti trolled and attacked Betty’s daughter-in-law, the Portuguese ceramicist who “God knows why she married a man who would rather die than stop drinking.”

It all unfolded on Facebook, when the Portuguese posted something about migrant children at the border and Patti called her “a fucking immigrant” with no right to comment on American politics. She said things about Portugal and its history of imperialism, and called Betty’s daughter-in-law a hypocrite, “like all you Europeans who come here” and pretend “you are better than everyone else.”

What began online played out in real life, a family war that mirrored the politics of the day, led on one side by Patti and her followers within the family, and on the other by Betty and her solo follower: the embattled Portuguese daughter-in-law.

Canons of text messages where carefully aimed and shot in different directions. WhatsApp threads were launched from all angles. Dead and buried secrets were exhumed and weaponized. Greeting cards were released with passive aggressive lines that all parties understood.

As a “noble immigrant and international man of letters,” I was recruited to play a role in the Betty-Patti war, in the proxy fields of awkward social activities with the grandkids.

I accompanied Betty to furniture moving activities, random grocery delivery errands for her relatives, and on each occasion my mission was to seize a cue from her and say a thing or two about the documented contribution of immigrants to American life, and how the US would be nothing without the skills and sweat of migrants from all corners of the world.

The high point of this covert operation was my visit to the actual victim of Patti’s attack, the Portuguese daughter-in-law.

The son who drank was at it when we arrived that afternoon, his cans of beer arranged in a straight line to the right of his rocking chair. And on one side of the house, his abandoned 80s Chevy truck with its massive tires lay dead, surrounded by tall grass, its cargo bed filled with hundreds of empty cans and bottles of beer.

The sight of him hauling himself up and animating his whole body and slurring his words and welcoming us made me cringe, and it brought back my own experience which I was keeping from Betty even though I suspected she had figured that my not driving and the whole thing about the car crash pointed to something about a suspended driving licence, which may have led to suspicions of drunk driving.

She had alluded many times to her own son’s multiple cases of Operating Under the Influence, and how his wife drove him everywhere because his licence had been suspended, and this was often randomly raised while driving me to pick up our pre-ordered groceries from the Walmart store two towns away. 

So when I saw the forty-nine-year-old and three times married Clive, whose twice married Portuguese wife neither drank nor smoked, I shuddered at what a life of proximity to the bottle could do to the human form, the bloated face and bloodshot eyes and flaky skin, like my father back in Nigeria, whose true personality I never knew because I hardly ever saw him sober.

On the other extreme, Maria, the Portuguese immigrant, was a thoroughgoing vegetarian, a ceramicist, and a practicing yogi who gave private lessons via Zoom to “all sorts of creatures,” as Betty described them.

While Betty and Clive sat out front chatting, Maria showed me her new venture, a series of realistic miniature men, and laced her comments with lines about memory and time, and since I was “a renaissance man” as Betty had sold me, she reminisced about her younger days as an art student in Lisbon and how much she missed it there, and how I too must feel homesick being away from Nigeria.

Looking at her collection of poetry in translation—and she did some translation work on the side—I wondered what brought her over from Lisbon to that small town in Maine, into the life of a man who, according to his mother, had not held down a job “in the last five years.”

I kept that thought to myself and carried on with the generic conversation about America, in fulfilment of my role as the support soldier in the Betty-Patti war.

A year after I left Betty’s place in Longish, I got word that Clive had died in the woods just outside the town where he lived.

It was the late winter of 2022. He had gone drinking with his buddies and at some point, he excused himself and went outside, and that was the last time they saw him alive. Days later, his body was found in a partially frozen pond a few miles away from town.

Betty and I talked almost every evening for a week after I got the news of Clive’s death. One night I felt it might help to share how my own father nearly shot himself no thanks to the bottle, and how the days after that he lived as though he was dead, which rubbed off on me in more ways than one. I held back instead and listened to Betty’s monotone that barely revealed her grief, and while listening I could hear the click of her lighter, and I knew the pauses in-between speech meant she was sucking in smoke.

After each call, which left me drained by the memories of my own childhood that it dredged up, I would go down to the only General Store here in Merrypoint, which had a bar attached to the side, and have drinks alone with Steve, who owned and ran the place, just like his parents and paternal grandparents before him.

The first time I met and drank with Steve, he described himself as “a man of the world” and said that I was the only one in town who would understand him the way he wished to be understood.

He had never lived anywhere else but the ocean, which on a clear day was visible from the front door of the General Store, and had always been his “connection” to the rest of the world.

His maternal grandfather was “a man of the sea,” who worked in ships that carried cargo from one Atlantic port to another, and Steve himself owned a schooner, The Love Meridian, and each time he went out fishing he felt himself connected to the world.

“After all,” he added, “Canada is just on that side,” visible from the Merrypoint harbour. Europe itself wasn’t that far off, and if you strained your mind enough you could feel a vibration coming straight from the towns and cities of Western European.

Steve did occasionally wonder why I ended up “here” in the far north.

He liked that I was present in his town, bringing my experience of the world to that corner of the United States, but still he wondered if I was getting anything in return, if I was truly finding in Merrypoint what I came to seek, some sort of reward. There was a type of honesty in his voice, and a tone that I’d not encountered anywhere else. His questions and concerns were raw and stripped to the bone, especially after a few drinks, late at night, when the customers who trickled in had gone.

One evening last winter, while trying out a cocktail Steve had recently concocted for a “snooty” couple who’d come up to ski in a town nearby, he asked about Nigeria.

Since he met me, he had started looking up Nigeria and now “the internet” was hauling everything Nigerian his way. The internet “listens to everything,” he said. “They know everything about us, don’t they, the government and all the big companies.”

I agreed and said, “the most lucrative businesses today are not selling any products. They harvest and sell our data to the highest bidder.”

He nodded almost nonstop and reminded me that “the companies aren’t even American,” to which I agreed and added my own bit: “this country isn’t even America anymore, and just when you think you’re supporting a Made-in-America company, you find out the parent company is headquartered elsewhere, and all your data is sent abroad and used against you.”

It was all going well until he mentioned how his friend was scammed by someone in Nigeria. He too had received several emails alerting him to some funds offshore and he thought the emails became more frequent when he started googling Nigeria to know more about my country.

This would have drawn out a different reaction if it had come from someone else, like my ex’s uncle who joked about “those winning emails” from Nigeria, and how he thought “those guys are the best salesmen” out there.

Steve was different. He didn’t play the amateur anthropologist and didn’t see me as an object to be deconstructed, even when he wondered why I washed up there in Merrypoint. He didn’t use me to gauge his moral leaning, and I wasn’t threatened by the occasional slip of racist remarks. He could say whatever he wanted, and I would file it away as the talk of a simple man for whom time was the same cycle of winters and summers, springtime and fall, all tied to his General Store. And it was also the way he said the things he said, and how—perhaps to impress me—he would swerve to draw comparison with events or stories he considered similar to the one he was sharing.

After the thing about Nigerian scammers, for instance, he mentioned “the great gold scam of Lubec” in the late nineteenth century, when two friends from Massachusetts hatched a scheme to extract gold from seawater, swindling gullible investors through a company they had registered for that purpose, the Electrolytic Marine Salts Company, which had its legitimate offices in Boston, London, and New York.

Steve had one of the original brochures of the Electrolytic Marine Salts Company. A maternal ancestor was an early backer of the gold-from-seawater scam. He said he would find it for me, but I had already googled “the Electrolytic Marine Salts Company” and found a pdf of the brochure and read out a section that sounded like one of the “Nigerian” emails Steve had read out to me:

“One is at a loss to comprehend the enormous wealth thus floating in solution in the ocean. At the lowest estimate, a cubic mile of sea-water contains gold to the value of $65,000,000. It is probably nearer the mark to place it at $100,000,000. There is enough gold in the waters of Long Island Sound to pay off the National Debt and leave a larger gold reserve in the Treasury than the Government has yet possessed. The waters that sweep in and out of New York Bay daily contain enough gold to buy all the ships and merchandise borne on their surface. Massachusetts Bay holds enough of the precious metal to buy all the real and personal property in the entire state. Acre for acre the waters of the bay are worth more than the land of the state.”  1

We both laughed at how the criminal mind worked across time and space, from this corner of the world in the nineteenth century to streets of Nigeria. And on the walk back to my place, it struck me how much Steve, like Betty, was fascinated by crimes and the lives of criminals. He would binge on true crime documentaries, even the ones he’d seen multiple times.

I endured Steve’s documentaries because I needed to root myself in his world, here in Merrypoint, in the same way that I embraced his interest in UFOs, a hobby that he’d grown into a full-blown operation in the service of America.

He once shared his experience from one clear summer night in 1984, when he was relaxing with his then wife on his boat a mile out in the ocean, beers and weed and all, and saw a line of bright lights travelling fast but low enough “you could see the shape of each orb.”

A week later, standing outside the General Store, he saw the same formation in the distance, travelling in the opposite direction. And since that second sighting, he had kept a log of every time he saw something “unusual” in the sky.

One day, he showed me his logbook and said he always made sure to call the National Security Agency to “fill them in” because you just never know “what’s out there” and what might be a breach of national security.

 If watching his crime shows taught me tolerance, his UFO obsession weaned me from the habit of finding a rational answer to everything in life. I think I’m happier going with the flow, and at the same pace as Steve. And since I intend to live out my life here in Merrypoint, blending in with the locals is my top priority. And it helps to remind myself that Merrypoint has been very kind to me since I moved here and started my current job at the local community college. I’ve managed to pay down my huge credit card debt, buy a ‘95 Ford F-150 off Steve’s cousin down in Pemaquid Bay, and purchased the hundred-acre property with the old house that I now occupy. And behind the house, my land stretches down and slopes, with a small stream running east towards the Merrypoint River, which connects to the northern end of the Guston River. The land out back was empty when I bought it, and remained so until three summers ago, when a tall, tanned fellow drove east from California, looking for “the perfect” place for his “project.”

I was at Steve’s bar late one night when the Californian walked in and asked for something non-alcoholic at that ungodly hour and proceeded to dump his vision of “moving out here” from “out west” in what struck me as a reverse Gold Rush.

It was midway through the Covid-19 crisis and the pandemic had created a new urban flight that saw our northern towns flooded with pandemic refugees.

Our local stores were overwhelmed and often sold out of essential supplies, bought up by the invaders from away. 

Thanks to our local knowledge, we knew where to get fresh produce away from the hordes, and for months during the pandemic, Steve and I took turns driving out to get our groceries from the hidden places that we saw as our “safe spaces.” And for me the drive was a rebellion against the invading mob, against their deep pockets, especially those who had second homes here and had hauled their friends up to join them in draining our local resources, not to mention how awful they were as drivers on our quiet rural roads, speeding down like maniacs, or breaking to take pictures of our plentiful wildlife.

The Californian wanted to start a massive organic farm slash back-to-the-land leadership summer camp slash detoxification retreat for “burnt-out” tech executives and others.

He wanted an oasis that would “replenish” those whose souls had been “bled dry” by the corporate world. He had looked at a few places, but none called out to him. And as he spoke and reeled out his manifesto, I saw how his eyes gave off a kind of light, and how his teeth beamed a kind of sincerity that I couldn’t place. I could only decipher one thing: he had money, plenty of it, or had access to funds somewhere in the world, and as much as I had grown attached to my open land and the settler pride it bestowed, a few extra coins in my pocket wouldn’t be a bad thing. What could be more American than seizing an opportunity when it rears its head? I made my proposition right there at the counter, and the next day we were out walking the grounds of my property, down the slope and straight to its eastern flanks, where the stream ran clear and shallow you could see the rocks and the fish swimming about.

He stepped into the stream, looked down at his feet, said he could feel something spiritual and “transcendent” about “this place,” and I made some noise and said something about the “universe” and “rooted vibes.”

He reached down and gathered fresh water and washed his face. And when he stood back up, he drew a lung-full of air, exhaled like a contented yogi, and surveyed the pine trees on the other side of the river, and I saw how the water dripped off his Thoreauvian beard, forming strands of minor streams on his chest before falling back into the river.

As we walked back to my house up the hill, he carried on about his vision, and each sentence made me picture the emergence of a version of Alcott’s Fruitland in the woods behind my house. And that was what it turned out to be, only better organised and more profitable.

Just weeks after I leased him the land, he contracted a company to sort out the landscaping and trails and campsites, and his marketing machine began to spin across social media networks. It was a wonder to see him go from the free-range creature to a savvy entrepreneur, a combination that I watched closely as it unfolded right before me, and a part of me admired what I sensed in him, that ability to hold two natures and conceptions of the world in one.

And the summer after he signed the lease, I saw all sorts of open-minded creatures from around the world streaming to myland to camp and engaged all kinds of “innovative” and “earth-centric” activities. On one side of the river an organic farm sprouted, and there were evenings when a long dining table would appear in the field for their communal dinner, after which they would spread out and dance to the beat of their own music, some version of a revived ancient chant accompanied by hypnotising handpans and tambourines.

And at sunrise a group or two or just an individual would appear to worship the sun in stretches and eastern languages, rendering the body in Olympic-worthy shapes.

And from my privileged position on a hill, as the owner of what I now called “my plantation,” I would watch them with the binoculars that I brought up here from Betty’s, and sometimes I wondered what the biggest threat to Western civilization was: the ubiquity of yoga practices or the number of immigrants surging up the border. 

And some night I would go down to the General Store and pass on my sightings to Steve, and we would compare notes with his own logs of the faces that had descended on Merrypoint for the nature orgies on my land.

And through this exchange we began to form our own pictures of what the campers were, hacking through their smiles and ever-positive attitude to see what we considered a more authentic self, an identity that reflected back what we imagined them to be: zealous champions of a new order that must be handled with care and caution, engaged from a distance, and ultimately waved goodbye after the summer.

One evening, I went down to Steve’s store to relay what I had seen during the day, and sitting at the counter was a young woman with long braids, chatting away with Steve who, as I walked in, introduced me with a smile on his face, as if to say, “here is a guest that you may find more interesting than the rest.”

Her face was a ball of fire when she turned to look at me, and there was something else that was simultaneously familiar and strange, a sense of expected camaraderie that invited a response from me, some sort of silent acknowledgement that I knew that she knew that I was aware of what this place was in our shared imagination, hers and mine, this far north.

And it was this knowledge, that she could see and sense something in me, that she knew that I was posing, even without me saying or betraying anything, that forced me to ask, “So why are you here?”

It was a question that contained an accusation, and I asked it when Steve was away in the back room, which further cemented the fact of a shared knowledge that I didn’t want Steve to see or perceive. I followed my question with a direct eye contact that she reciprocated with a slight pull back of her entire frame and a sneer-coated smile, as if to ask in response: “What is a Black man doing up here?”

She lifted her glass and drank slowly, and I caught her looking at me with a knowing intensity, and there was something else there that I couldn’t read. I turned away to the TV, where a private investigator was sharing his experience working high profile cases across America.

She left before Steve returned, and the next time I saw her was at the group dinner with the other campers, and then she was gone, but her brief presence lingered in my imagination, especially that last look she gave me that I couldn’t decipher.

In the weeks that followed, my mind continued to cast her in different scenarios, from the idea that she was a lone traveller exploring this corner of the world, to the notion that she was one of those who tracked the activities of fellow blacks in unlikely places, perhaps to see if the land was ready for a progressive takeover, or a slight shift in demographics that might advantage a political party or business. Maybe she was out to see if the random black fellow was involved in some evil activity up there.

Curiously enough, some of the other summer visitors, like the Californian himself, would begin to settle down in Merrypoint and the neighbouring towns, a development that Steve and his lifetime buddies hated because the newcomers always had a way of disrupting the way things worked “around here.”

I took the side of the locals, and at Steve’s country store we decried what lay ahead if the new settlers involved themselves in local politics and town affairs.

You could already tell them apart in the ways they dressed and spoke and looked, often skinnier and trying too hard to sound like the locals, and I was beginning to spot them at the various farm stands that still ran on the honour system.

We paid close attention to their ongoings, and soon we were keeping a log of where they lived and how they spent their time in the various communities where they’d settled.

In one such place, a Black Lives Matter sign had gone up in a front-facing window, and another house had flown a rainbow flag.

We showed our disapproval.Steve’s friend, Bill, took to driving his monster truck around town, with two humongous American flags sticking out the windows, and he knew to step hard on the gas when approaching the homes of the newcomers, or saw them anywhere in town; and at different spots in town some locals began to leave junk out on their front steps. We hauled out a couple beat-up cars with smashed windscreens from a scrap yard and placed them at strategic places in town. I ordered a bright red All Lives Matter sweater and wore it to places where the invaders frequented, and I derived great pleasure seeing how they looked at me, the mix of confusion and curiosity. I was a walking contradiction, and I knew that they understood well what I was driving at, or simply saw me as a brainwashed figure to ignore. It was a refreshing experience, being able to stand outside what they expected of me, the only black resident in the area, and a part of me longed for the good old days before their arrival, when everything and everyone followed a certain code of silence and boredom and a general lack of fervour.

I was still living with Betty when I got the job up here in Merrypoint. It was a hot weekday in May, and we grilled hamburgers outside to celebrate and washed the burgers down with Betty’s homemade lemonade.

We had the picnic table out, the one we both found lying on a side of Wheelock Street, but we left it to stand and instead rolled out a mat on the back lawn that I’d mown that afternoon, and the smell of fresh cut grass was in the air, and the lawnmower itself, a tired thing from the 90s, lay nearby, visible in front of the north-leaning shed where it lived with Betty’s studded winter tires and a range of items too numerous and diverse to name.

This scene is especially important since it was the first time Betty took a selfie by herself on the cheap smartphone that I’d picked out for her at Walmart just hours before.

She shared that first selfie with her children and grandchildren, and it was all glorious watching her fiddle with a smartphone for the first time that summer, as the world was gradually re-opening after the lockdown.

I recall how she waited to see if anyone would respond and laughed out loud when her granddaughter Tracy replied with a photo of herself holding her bulldog while her son, about five years old, looked on.

While Betty was saying something about the dog, I was seeing my own son in Tracy’s boy, and all the feelings I had fought to supress came flooding back.

Betty knew that I had a son who was turning two, and she knew I had not seen him since I moved to Longish. She never brought it up, though sometimes she would say things about Tracy’s son, whose father was a “legitimate asshole,” and would take me up to hang out with Tracy and her kids, which made me suspect she either felt sorry for me or wanted to recreate for me an environment that could have been mine.

In any case, the picture of the dog and the boy threw me emotionally, and I retreated to my room and dug out the fat bottle of cheap red that I brought up with me the first day I arrived, that I had avoided for months because I did not want Betty to see or smell and find any grounds to validate what she must have suspected.

I stretched out in bed and began to drink from the bottle. I thought of texting my ex but couldn’t bring myself to do so; she had made it clear, after bailing me out the morning after the car crash, that she did not want to hear from me for a while, until she was sure I was making “good” progress in therapy. I was not sure if my weekly virtual therapy was making any difference to my crushing anxiety, but I continued and hoped.

I checked her Instagram page and saw new photos of my son, his hair fuller, his eyes steadier, looking straight at the camera as if to see through the lens, so much intensity in his gaze, just like my mother’s.

I embraced my phone and imagined it was my son, the way I embraced him when I saw his pink body for the first time, heard his first cry, offered him my index finger and watched him clutch it so tight I felt his entire pulse. I saw him again lying down on the scale, shrieking as the nurses observed him, prodded him, weighed him, wheeled him around.

I drank more and fell asleep, or so I thought, until I began to feel my whole body shaking, and I found myself in a pool of my own vomit, which had splashed all over the “high-end” mattress Betty had put in my room a couple of days earlier.

I can still see the jagged circle of red vomit with crumbs of undigested cheese. I can feel again the combined impact of my digestive system in disarray, and the pain and shame and guilt and confusion, and the overwhelming awareness that if anything happened to me that night in Longish, I would be alone and away from everything familiar.

I recall stumbling down the dark hallway towards the laundry room, crashing into the old mattress leaning on the wall, tumbling into the stack of empty potato baskets from the early 20th century, bouncing back only to trip over an extension cord that snaked across the hallway.

The sheet and blanket that I was holding, folded together, unfolded, and I was too disoriented and uncoordinated to fold them again.

I dragged them into the laundry room, where it took me several minutes to work the same machine that I’d used many times in the past.

When I returned to my room, Betty was standing by the bed, in her nightie from a different era, furious, her eyes ablaze.

I was about to say something when my stomach raved again and I fled to the shared bathroom, located just outside my door.

I emerged in time to hear her saying she had been through three drunken husbands and a son and would not put up with this “kind of crap.”

I apologized and said I would clean up, but she was already retreating to her room.

I moved the mattress to one side and saw that my books and shoes and printer and suitcase, all on one side, had splashes of red-crumbed vomit. And the rug, too. Her “antique” rug.

Overwhelmed and exhausted, I fell asleep on the floor.

When I woke up, I saw that Betty had covered me up with a clean blanket and moved some of my things out into the hallway. She also left me her cleaning items, the same she’d used for her part-time cleaning business before the pandemic.

I went to the kitchen, still feeling like I’d spent the night wrestling the devil, and saw Betty eating breakfast at the table, which was unusual since the table was never free of stuff. There was enough breakfast for two, she said.

I sat and tried to pretend, as she was doing, that the night had not happened.

She started saying something about her son’s drinking, perhaps hoping that I would open up about mine. She was the one who had suggested the first Alcoholic Anonymous programme her son attended many years ago. She was allusive and indirect.

I could have shared more at this point, the same way I’d considered opening up to Steve about my life before Merrypoint, and long before coming to the United States, but I held my tongue.

About the Author:

Timothy Ogene is a writer and lecturer at Harvard. His second novel, Seesaw, was published in 2021.

1 Quote excerpted from A Sketch: of the Discovery of a Commercially Profitable Process for the Extraction of Gold and Silver from Sea Water, published here.

*Feature image by Falling Further on Unsplash