Chapter Five
Five
That night, Olive asked for a story, and Miles asked if she would like to hear another tale of Whiskey.
“Whiskers, you mean,” Olive corrected him, for though it had been some months since he had trotted out the little collie, eternal is a child’s memory for scandal.
“Whiskers,” he said. This time he made nothing up, and as he spoke he found himself telling her the story as he had come to understand it, part legend, part history, the story of a man who many years ago had fled the city of his childhood and church, and settled in the woods, where, one day, wandering, his little dog had disappeared into a cave, and he had followed.
Down, down, down he went, into the solutional network.
It was cold and wet and very tight in places, but footprints in the earth told him that people had been there before him.
At times he came across what seemed to be some kind of writing, hidden in the patterns of mineral deposits, a script that, once he learned to read it, told of an ancient civilization. Or so he said.
But that was later, much later. This was just the man’s first trip; he had no idea what secrets awaited him. Deeper he went. The passage narrowed, sometimes he had to scramble over boulders, Whiskey following at his side.
“Whiskers.”
“Whiskers.”
Deep unto deep. Hours passed, and he was getting hungry, but he pushed on, the tunnels leading him through marble chambers, covered with swirling colors of the rainbow, greens and blues and reds…
Olive smiled. What other colors were there? And he told her, eyes on her Crayola 64. Sapphire, orange, apricot, and lemon. Pale green, blue like eggshells, jade and emerald. Silver stalagmites hanging from the ceiling.
“Stalactites,” shouted Wesley, from the other room.
“Stalactites, from the ceiling,” said Miles. “And stalagmites grew up from the earth.”
For days, the man wandered through the caves. Before he reached some kind of door, and opened it.
“Is this story true?” asked Olive.
Miles paused a moment, for she had stopped him as they stood upon a threshold, between the possible and magical.
“So far,” said Miles. The part he wasn’t sure of was the part that came next.
“What came next?”
And he told her.
—
He woke next to her, his face pressed against the whiskers of a large stuffed mouse. Olive slept quietly. Everything was dark and still. He rose and tiptoed out.
It was almost midnight. Quietly, still half asleep, he went downstairs and to his bedroom, expecting to find Kate curled up beneath the covers, but they were empty.
This woke him fully. Immediately rose up a vision: an empty country road, a bridge, black ice.
A passing truck, drunk students coming back to Greensbury from some party at a sister college.
Everything okay? he texted her, heart pounding unexpectedly.
And she, after an excruciating minute: Yes, sorry. Be there soon, please go to sleep.
—
So that night Miles didn’t tell Kate about Jeremiah Wylkes.
And it wasn’t until the following afternoon that Kate told him about her night, the reading, the visiting poet, who did not believe in any self/world differentiation, and didn’t use a name.
Who had famously claimed that if speech had begun as song, language expressed in anything but verse was, at its core, an act of violence.
A bold and interesting claim, said Kate, but one which made the Q something had happened, he needed to talk to Miles. And off each went, she to manage the cruelties of nine-year-old girls, he to his son.
—
What Wesley wanted to talk to Miles about was journalism. And he wanted to talk to Miles because he’d done something that seemed like the kind of thing that his dad might do, and his mom might disapprove of.
“Okay,” said Miles. For a moment, he studied his son, seemingly taller than yesterday, with a new haircut that Miles hadn’t fully registered, his mop now more a studied tousle, a hint at vanity that Miles didn’t think the boy possessed. Was this a good thing? he wondered. To care, all of a sudden?
But: journalism. “Yes?”
Despite his more conventional assignments, said Wesley, for the past two months, he had not given up on his dream of a Big Story, settling at last on his earlier interest in the Pineridge Farm.
Until now, he had kept this hidden from his parents.
He had sensed their disapproval, their desire to keep a low profile, their sense that they were visitors, strangers in a strange land, dependent on the hospitality of their hosts.
He’d understood this, he truly had, and each time the stories were assigned, he’d held his tongue, interviewed the captain of the Junior Varsity golf team, covered the dog parade, profiled Vice-Principal Strickland, who made decorative ceramic pumpkins.
He’d written for the fabled “Getting to Know” column (“Getting to Know: Nurse Erica, Healer;” “Getting to Know: Bjorn Nordqvist, Paratrooper, Coach”), run straw opinion polls on the best school lunches.
But then, every day, the bus would take him by the Pineridge Farm, and every day he’d wonder what was happening behind that looming fence, and no matter whom he asked, the good country neighbors just kept to their own business.
But the truth was out there, somewhere. In his free period at school, he looked around on Google Maps, and the town GIS, and the recently digitized collection of the college museum.
And he sent emails from his school account to the town manager and the director of environmental management and the Department of Animal Welfare.
His leading suspicion then was some kind of CAFO, a concentrated animal feeding operation, operated by an investment group that had been buying up the area’s farms and homes and medical practices.
But he was either ignored, or given some vague answer that suggested his correspondent didn’t want to be bothered, and certainly not by a seventh-grader, even if he was posing as a twelfth-grader then.
“Sorry, what?” said Miles.
But still he kept at it; he had his friends to help him out.
By then the sleuthing had become a game in its own right.
Who needed Cosmos? They took it seriously, but didn’t really take it seriously.
Or perhaps a better way of putting it: truth was the game, part of the pretending.
They made up names for each other, opened new email accounts with official-sounding titles: the Vermont Center for Agricultural Studies, the Rural Response Network, VRDEP (which didn’t stand for anything).
And because no one answered their official-sounding letters, it still felt just like make-believe.
Then, one day, they got an email back.
The note came from a Gmail account that none of the children recognized; the sender, John B.
, claimed to be a former employee of a contractor that had done work at the farm during the pandemic, and he himself had grown suspicious about what was going on there.
Lies were being told, rules were being flouted.
Now he was working for one of the state agencies they’d contacted—he didn’t dare use his work account.
He just needed to know he could trust “Steve” from “VRDEP” (which doesn’t seem to be a real organization, and so I suspect “Steve” is not your real name).
“And?” said Miles, who throughout the whole story had been thinking about what exactly made it the kind of thing that his dad might do, and his mom might disapprove of. Because certainly it was.
“And nothing, yet. Internet safety, right? That’s why I’m asking.”
—