America America by Ethan Canin Read Free Book Online

is a rather pleasant way to spend an afternoon. That’s what I was doing over lunch the day after Senator Bonwiller’s funeral, in fact—thinking about the old times—when Trieste Millbury appeared in my office. “I just wanted you to know,” she said, “that I’m all over it.”
    “Over what?” I asked.
    She spooned some yogurt into her mouth and took a seat on my windowsill.
    “The Bonwiller story. When he ran for president in ’72, I mean. His campaign was run by Liam Metarey, sir.”
    “Everybody older than my daughters knows that.”
    I opened my sandwich. Corned beef. That morning before dawn I’d trimmed the fat from it and put it on whole grain, no mayo. This contributes to my wistful melancholy.
    “And Nixon’s men were in on it,” she said.
    “Oh,” I said. “Better. Nixon won that election. If you remember from your reading.”
    “I mean more than that. I mean Nixon was in on it from the other side. Silverton Orchards. Anodyne. All that stuff.”
    “Where’d you read that, Trieste? Some blog?”
    “I Googled it, sir.”
    “Did you find any evidence?”
    “No.”
    “Then what kind of credence do you give it?”
    She took another spoonful of yogurt. “Okay, then,” she said. “There wasn’t great evidence. But yes, I give it credence.”
    “And how’s that?”
    “Sir,” she said. “I’m like all good reporters.”
    “Which means?”
    She looked at me with her curious eyes. “Which means I go with my instincts.”

    I N THE SPRING of 1971, near the end of my sophomore year in high school, I went to work for the Metarey family. It was a life that took me by such swift surprise, I now realize, that within a very short period of time I’d lost track of where I’d come from. And because of the Metareys’ generosity—I call it that, though I could as easily call it their
peculiarity
, or, as my wife used to say, their
nasty sport
—because of how the Metareys let me into their existence, I think I first took it inside myself, at the age of sixteen, that such an existence might someday be mine.
    I worked as the groundskeeper at Aberdeen West: trimming the great bushes of gardenias and roses in the three oversized gardens, raking the pods that fell from the groves of sycamores and the husks from the walnuts, watering meadow after meadow of feed grass. The Metareys grew a thousand acres of hay that they sold to stables in the area, and my first job every morning was to water them. I drove their old Massey-Ferguson tractor, hauling the big pipes behind me on metal wheels big enough for a covered wagon. The main pipes were three-inch-diameter tubes of cast iron, forty feet long, that were coupled together with huge, greased compression nuts—a system most farmers had abandoned half a century before. But every morning before school, and one morning on the weekends, I pulled them behind the Ferguson, maneuvering them into place on their giant wheels and linking them together with a wrench as long as my arm. By the time the sun crested the oaks, I was sweating through my clothes.
    Liam Metarey didn’t bury his watering system like the other gentleman farmers because even at the height of his fortune I don’t think he ever thought of himself as a gentleman; he must have still heard the voice of his own father—the Scottish blacksmith’s boy who had stepped penniless from steerage at Fort Clinton. To the main-line hubs, which probably weighed three hundred pounds each, I coupled vertical steel sprayers twice as tall as I was. When I opened the flow valves, their spray heads gurgled for a moment, then stirred. Finally they lifted their long, flat arms, rising to throw out stuttering half-moons of water forty yards in either direction—great rainbows of mist that shimmered on one side of the pipe, fell in a heap of gems, and in a moment reappeared on the other. I was back home just in time each morning to change for school.
    I have to say, I felt lucky. It was solitary work, but I liked