America America by Ethan Canin Read Free Book Online Page A

being alone in the fields, especially as the sun came over the oaks; it was strenuous, too, but I liked that, as well. All spring and summer as I moved about the Metarey land, I felt I was being shown a secret, some riddle of possibility. And somehow, as well, I had become friends with Christian. Her friendship was as bewildering as any of it and had come upon me the most mysteriously of all. Part of the puzzlement I felt was the knowledge, really, that I didn’t deserve it. I didn’t deserve any of it. I didn’t belong here, not on this land or with these people. There were grown men in Saline who would have been very glad to have my job—quite a few of them, in fact—and there were plenty of seniors at Roosevelt who would have walked all the way across town to exchange one sentence with either of the Metarey daughters. Yet somehow, it had all come to me.
    One Saturday morning, not long after I’d started, a biplane appeared over the east end of the property and flew low over the house. I’d been moving pipe in the high fields at the top of the land, and below me I watched it break course and head in my direction. It looked like a crop duster, dark red with an open cockpit between the wings and a windshield that flashed in the sun as it started up the long hill. Halfway across the meadow it nosed up, dipped suddenly, and flew straight over my head, not a hundred feet above.
    I turned the tractor around. Over the far western border of the land, it began to ascend again. A moment later the rising whine of the engine reached me as it climbed nearly to a vertical; then, at the top, it paused like a roller coaster, crested the arc, and passed backwards into a banking, upside-down descent. Just above the treeline it pulled out, its engine roaring.
    I moved the tractor under the boughs of the Lodge Chief Marker, the great Norway pine at the top of the Metareys’ property, and shut off the engine. The Lodge Chief had been planted three hundred years ago by the Seneca as a beacon for lake travelers, and in its deep shade I sat looking over forty miles of tree and meadow. In the distance the biplane made loops, then figure eights. Then it performed a frightening maneuver in which it climbed swiftly, then slowed and nearly stopped in the air, canting backwards at the peak before spiraling down, the engine suddenly roaring again as it pulled out of its fall. Then it headed straight out over the woods again and returned. It would head out and return, head out and return, sometimes moving so low over the fields that I was sure it had set down in them. There was a landing strip, I knew, at the east end of the estate, a long stripe of concrete with a wind sock and two aluminum pole hangars. I’d watered near it once.
    Behind me, a voice said, “See you’re watching the show.”
    I turned. It was Gil McKinstrey, the house carpenter, straddling a bicycle. He was the one who gave me my orders.
    I started the tractor again. “Just for a second.”
    “Don’t have to do nothing on my account,” he said. “Far as I’m concerned anyway.” He hopped off the bike and let it fall. “I’d do it too if I was in your shoes.”
    “I wasn’t watching any show. I was working.” The plane was already small in the distance. I reached behind me into the cart and searched for a fitting. A compression ring came up in my hands. “I was looking for the wellhead.”
    He wedged open the top of his boot and pulled out a half-smoked cigarette, then smiled and pointed it at a row of raspberries. “It’s in the same place every week, though, ain’t it?”
    “Sometimes it takes me a while to find.”
    He pointed again. “Like I say.”
    The plane came in low over the trees now and passed over the far end of the field.
    “Aberdeen Red,” he said.
    I nodded. “That’s Mr. Metarey in that thing, isn’t it?”
    He looked at me. “You’re close,” he said. The plane turned a loop in the distance and he traced it with his cigarette. “You