Chapter One #3
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide;
They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.
—
Both the husband and the wife were from California.
The husband was from Redwood City, a name that he had always taken for granted but which, upon reflection, sounded like a generic name in a children’s book about the West; the wife was from Orange County, ditto.
Both loved their home state very much, loved the dry hills of summer and the packed dry earth, the dry summer grasses, the golden light; loved the scale of their state, the fury of her waters, the clear blue April-till-November skies.
Green, for them, was a dark live oak, the furred skyline of the redwood coastal forests, the sword ferns rising from rust-colored duff.
Rarely was it wet when it was warm; spring drew upon its winter savings.
The electric hour of the grasses was the month of March, and brief.
The state they’d left that summer was in its usual state of suspended animation: sere, and brown, and ready to burn.
The foothills of the Sierras were just as dry, as was the floor of the Sierran forests.
Nevada: also brown. Utah: brown, white, lots of white, brown again; red in places, ochre, vermillion.
Colorado: definitely red, brick red, until aspen country, and though it was August and the aspens had yet to change their colors, there was something about the shivering leaves that seemed a premonition, pale, washed-out.
Nebraska we have discussed already: yellow, save some multicolored gardens near the Cather Center.
Iowa, in the daughter’s journal of the expedition, was depicted with a single line of green above a line of brown, beneath a blue that filled the very edges of the paper.
Illinois was mostly experienced at night; for all they knew, it might have been a rain forest. Indiana, or at least what they saw of Indiana, had successfully replaced most living things with billboards.
Ohio was a surprise: rich, crowded islands of forest at the edges of the fields.
The point of all of this is that by the time the family reached Niagara Falls and decided against the turnoff, the daughter was down to a nubbin of brown in her box of Crayola 64 and had exhausted all blues, and tan, and tumbleweed, burnt sienna, timberwolf, mahogany, orchid, and thistle.
She had sacrificed her yellows and oranges (apricot, dandelion, “macaroni and cheese”) on the altar of seven suns.
And yet she had barely dulled the crisp Crayola rim of forest green and “asparagus.” At which point they turned from Lake Erie and dove into New York.
—
On their many visits to the Empire State, neither the husband nor the wife had ever been outside New York City.
Did they know that the state had the tenth-most forested land in the country, more than Idaho, or Oregon, or for that matter California?
(No, they did not know this.) Had they heard of Letchworth State Park, on the Genesee River, the Grand Canyon of the East?
(No, but, on the husband’s advice, they stopped there.) What did they do when they saw Amish women, dressed as they might have been a century before, whipping their axes through the air as they cut firewood along the country roads?
(They pretended they were lost, drove back, and had their daughter secretly take photos.)
“Mennonites, Dad, actually,” said the son, who had watched a documentary online during Zoom school.
Was it always so green? Or was it just that summer, with its lush storms that peeled water off the lakes and sent it spilling across the valleys?
Even Giuseppe roused himself, stuck his face out the window, his hair blown back, his lips flapping, sucking the smells of it all, the freshly cut grass, the piles of manure, the wild apples fallen from the trees and ground to pulp by passing cars.
And the daughter squealing, So much green!
So much green! As she tried to capture it all, grinding through “asparagus” and “Granny Smith,” discovering, like Cole and Bierstadt before her, that true green had hits of yellow, dandelion, her hand working so furiously that in the front seat of the Subaru her father—despite the sound of the wind through the gap, and the dog’s ears flapping against the pane, and the summer purr of crickets and animals not known to them yet—could hear her crayon.
—
It took them two days to cross New York, zigzagging, fortified by roadside stands with corn so fresh they peeled and ate it raw, tomatoes the size of cantaloupes, cantaloupes the size of watermelons, and state-park ice cream of lurid pinks and blues, which, to the children’s delight, passed through their bodies undimmed in its fluorescence.
They had planned on four days to take in sites from literary history.
To pump the children up, they played audiobooks of The Last of the Mohicans and Rip Van Winkle.
But neither book did much for anyone—not for the parents, who had once bonded over their unapologetic fondness for the Great American Canon, and certainly not for the children.
They went back to listening to Watership Down, which they had started listening to in Ohio, and which had eventually brought resolution to their disagreements.
And so, for the first weeks of their arrival in New England, they all vaguely carried with them the sense of seeing the world through the eyes of rabbits, emerging from their warren to roam the dew-damp paths, the world rich with the scent of roots and cut grass, and strange and perhaps dangerous creatures lurking at every corner.
There was so much to see, but as they drew closer, they found themselves growing restless. So they skipped Lake George, skipped the highway to the Catskills. The Rip Van Winkle statue would have to wait.
On the last day, as the sun set, the daughter finished the drawing she’d been perfecting on the encouragement of her parents, an image of her new home, when it was still unknown to her: pale blue, square, and symmetrical, with thin lines that showed the horizontal siding, flower beds, a flagpole, shutters on the windows, arranged symmetrically around the door.
To the side, she had drawn the five members of her family and, above them, written their names, in red: Giuseppe; her father, Miles; her brother, Wesley; her mother, Kate.
A true artist, she’d been careful to depict her gap-toothed smile, the protruding ears that she’d inherited from her dad.
Her name was Olive, Olive Krzelewski-Petrosian, birds grasping her many, many letters and carrying them up.
—
To get to Greensbury, one left New York and entered Vermont along a winding highway, past farms and homesteads, fields scattered with hay bales, gray homes with sunken porches, fallen barns, piles of firewood, lovingly stacked.
And trailers with flags of uncertain political alliance, vine-wreathed silos with their circling swallows, machines of forgotten purpose, their tines and bars and levers draped in grass.
The air was so humid, it seemed as if they had entered a cloud.
Only an hour remained of their journey. Then the trees drew closer to the road, and the road wound sinuously into the mountains.
The home of Norbert Rumphius, economist, sat on the aptly named Farm Road, between River Road and Mountain Road.
The features of the home and property did not come as a surprise, since the husband, the father, Miles, in hours of impatient daydreaming, had stalked each legible pixel of the premises on Google Earth.
It was a rhombus-shaped property of 12.7 acres, which sat on the seam of two different aerial photos, taken clearly in different seasons.
The front of the house had been photographed in winter, in the morning, the shadow of four small trees falling toward the west across the road; the rear was taken in full swing of summer, bright and green, with a green field ending in a forest. A line of conifers lay at the property line, identical in winter and summer. A little pond, half blue, half white.
The house itself looked like the house as Olive had rendered it; more googling had turned up the old description on the Realtor’s website, of its “private” setting, “spirit” of “classic New England” combined with “vintage charm” and “contemporary allure.” In addition to a “heated office space,” it offered its very own sledding hill, an orchard of “8 flowering crabapples,” and “intimacy with wildlife.” It had been built in 1983.
It had sold in 2014, for $225,000, presumably to Professor Rumphius.
When Miles zoomed in even closer, he saw what he thought were pixelated flowers just outside the door.
As for Rumphius himself: Kate, less credulous than her husband, had done a little sleuthing on her own.
House sitting? For free? You didn’t have to be a professor of economics to suspect that the two parties entering this particular contract did not possess equal information.
And she’d learned the good professor held an advisory position at the Fed (reassuring) and had recently gone through a divorce (more context, thus reassuring) after a certain scandal with a visiting Portuguese minister of finance (there you go).
Miranda, her friend from grad school, had done reconnaissance, and reported that the house was indeed the one posted in the photos on the website. There was no obvious external structural damage, and when she peeked inside, she saw nothing suspicious, no ominous sex contraption, no weird art.
Nevertheless, as the phone ceremoniously pronounced their arrival, and they turned up the driveway, and heard the crunching of the gravel beneath the tires, both Miles and Kate could not help but notice the butterflies in their stomachs.