Setting Free the Kites: A Novel - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

The author of A Good American, Alex George is an Englishman who lives, works, and writes in the middle of America. He studied law at Oxford University and worked for eight years as a corporate lawyer in London and Paris before moving to the United States. He lives in Missouri with his family.

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***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected copy proof***

Copyright © 2017 Alex George

PROLOGUE

Haverford, Maine, 2015 

Nathan Tilly gave me the story I’m going to tell, but it was the old paper mill that set my memories free.

I read the report in the Haverford Gazette the previous week.  The mill has not been operational for more than fifty years, but now the land has been sold to a supermarket chain, and the old building is to be razed to make way for a customer parking lot.  The news has prompted vigorous local debate.  Some are angry that the city council has allowed part of our municipal heritage to be sold off.  Others are excited at the prospect of fresh bagels.  Such is progress. 

For myself, I’m sorry to see the old place go.  I want to pay my last respects, watch the thing go down. 

The lower end of Bridge Street is lined with mud-encrusted pick-ups and vans.  I have to double back and park on the other side of the river.  It is a beautiful, fresh spring morning.  The faintest of breezes is coming in off the ocean.  As I walk across the bridge I can hear someone shouting instructions through a bullhorn.

Warning signs have been posted along the road, keeping the curious at bay.  Authorized Personnel Only.  Hard Hat Required.  I keep my distance.  A huge crane is parked in front of the old building, its arm stretched high into the sky.  A wrecking ball hangs at the end of the crane’s thick steel rope, fat and heavy with the threat of violence.  The mill’s giant wooden doors have been padlocked shut my entire life, but now they are opened wide, and early morning sunlight falls into the cathedral-like space where vast pulping machines once rumbled from dawn to dusk, the town’s beating heart.  Workmen in reflector vests walk in and out, murmuring into walkie-talkies.  I guess they are checking all three floors for uninvited visitors before the walls start crashing down.

The mill’s red brick chimney rises tall and straight into the sky.  By lunchtime it will be gone.

At precisely nine o’clock there is a long, shrill blast from a whistle.  A man climbs into the cabin of the crane and turns on the ignition.  As the engine rumbles to life, the arm of the crane begins to move from side to side, and the wrecking ball starts to swing. 

The old mill has been on the brink of demolition for years.  Up and down this part of the southern Maine coast, from Biddeford to Brunswick, abandoned industrial buildings have been rescued and revivified, artfully repurposed for twenty-first century living.  Those ancient spaces have been reborn as art galleries, office suites with double-height ceilings, and organic delicatessens selling squid ink pasta from Umbria and artisanal cheeses from Vermont.  Everyone has been waiting for a similar metamorphosis to happen in Haverford.  It hasn’t been for want of trying: in 2004 a consortium of property speculators from away went crazy for the mill’s exposed brickwork.  An architect was commissioned to design a warren of luxury condominiums with reclaimed timber floors and glinting chrome appliances.  But the town lacked the necessary real estate mojo to pull it off.  No matter how pretty the artist’s impressions in the brochure looked, nobody was buying.  Not a single unit was sold, and the promised renovation never happened.  The place has remained abandoned and deserted ever since.

The wrecking ball is swinging fiercely now, slicing through the air in ever more violent arcs.  The crane operator begins to rotate the cabin, gradually turning it toward the old walls.  I feel my body stiffen in anticipation of the first impact.  When it comes, there is an infernal roar of collapsing brick, crushed wood, and splintering glass.  That’s when I feel a release within me, a quiet letting go.  The crane operator edges the caterpillar tracks forward a few feet, and moments later another slab of wall disappears.  A fog of atomized red brick hangs over the rubble.  I watch for a few minutes, and then turn away.  There is nothing more to see. 

As I walk back over the bridge, I think about those two gravity-defying summers, almost forty years ago, when the old mill gave us shelter, and Nathan Tilly’s gift for boundless hope gave us wings.  Nathan loved the mill so much.  Inside those old brick walls, the light of uncomplicated happiness shone down on us, as warm and as comforting as the sun. 

But such a bright light casts long, dark shadows.

I open the door of my car and climb in.  I rest my hands on the steering wheel and gaze back across the bridge.  The wrecking ball is still swinging hard, making its way toward the mill’s chimney.

I do not want to see the chimney fall.  I drive away.

1976

ONE

Sometimes life-changing moments slip by unnoticed, their significance only becoming apparent in the light of subsequent events.  But Nathan Tilly was never one for the subtle approach.

The summer of 1976 had been long and humid.  The horseflies had been larger and more vicious than in past years, which was saying something.  They had swarmed around me, taking painful chunks out of my sweet, thirteen year-old flesh.  My legs and upper body bore the scars of months of relentless attack.  For me the smell of summer was not the salty tang of the ocean, nor the ambrosial scent of young blueberries, but the sour chemical whiff of antiseptic cream that my mother would slather on my bumpy mosaic of bites, a constellation of unending irritation.  On the first day of my eighth grade year at Longfellow Middle School, my shoulders were still itching from the horseflies’ diabolical attention. 

My discomfort was also, I am sure, a physical manifestation of the anxiety that I was feeling that day.  I had been dreading the start of the new school year all summer.  Every blissfully unscheduled day of vacation was, to me, just one step closer to seeing Hollis Calhoun again.

For most of the previous year, Hollis Calhoun had bullied me without mercy.  He undertook a campaign of terrors, small and large.  Some of it was innocuous enough – an unanticipated cuff around the back of the head in the corridor, a sharp elbow jab to the ribs in the cafeteria line – but he also liked to corner me out of sight of others, and inflict more elaborate, sustained cruelties.  He crowded in on me, heavy and huge, obliterating the world beyond his fists.  His violence was claustrophobic as well as cruel. There was a warped intimacy in all those carefully administered punches and kicks.  He would scrutinize my face intently as he hurt me, delighted by the fear in my eyes.

For all his thuggery, Hollis possessed a nuanced understanding of the psychological mechanics of terror.  He took care to ensure that his attacks were never predictable.  Not knowing when they might come, I was in a constant state of high alert.  Sometimes he would leave me alone for days, which had the paradoxical effect of ratcheting up my sense of impending...