Richard Pollak

Garrett Snyder was waiting at his office in the morning. We climbed into the cab of his town truck and pulled out onto Broadway. I anticipated a ride to a farm out in the countryside and was preparing to ask him what he remembered of the accident when he pulled into a dirt driveway. I had driven past this farm myself four times already, but had rejected it as the site, had assumed Garrett would have pointed it out the day before and said, That's it at the end of the street, where Broadway curves out of town. Six cars and trucks in various states of disrepair littered the yard behind the ramshackle farmhouse; two dogs barked against their chains as we stepped onto their turf, and a colony of cats eyed us with lazy indifference. Garrett knocked on the door of the rear porch and the tenant farmer came out, blinking in the morning light. Garrett explained that this man here from New York City had come to see where his brother died many years ago. The farmer, whose name was Gurney, looked weary with the press of more important matters. He sized me up, shrugged and said okay, then warned me–apologetically, it seemed–that I should watch my step because the milking room of the barn was filled with manure. He retreated into the house. There were three barns, grouped together about thirty yards behind the farmhouse. They had a collapsing air about them, their weathered gray slats consistent with the rest of the farm and so much else in Cassopolis. That's where it happened, Garrett said, pointing to the barn on our right. It was the largest, higher than any I had ever seen, though, of course, I had seen this one. I thanked him for smoothing the way with Mr. Gurney and said I'd like to spend some time alone. He seemed relieved to get back to work.

The morning was cool for August, the sun bright as it gained in the cloudless sky. It was a day for a picnic, for a hike along the back roads, for a swim and an afternoon of reading and lemonade at the lake, for anything but this search. Cattle lowed in the pastures and barn swallows swooped and chirped as I unhooked the gate and crossed the dusty ground to the barn door. As I peered inside, more swallows racketed against the intrusion. The floorboards creaked as I took my first tentative steps, toward a trap door about four feet square. This is it. But the manure on the concrete floor of the basement was only about ten feet below, not thirty-five. There was no hay, only wisps of straw scattered about the floor. In its emptiness the barn seemed like a blighted cathedral; streams of sunlight angled down from the single windows high at either end, prosaic panes installed by a congregation that could not afford stained glass. More light pierced tears in the roof and cracks in the sideboards; in the shadows, there were the chutes, two on each side wall–square, wooden shafts rising almost to the topmost beams and pushing down below the floor where I was standing to the milking room. I smelled the hay again, felt its hot prickliness, heard my angry demand that Stephen be punished for his disobedience. I stood in the center of the barn and waited for more memories to rush in, but nothing about the barn, or the farm, or even the town was at all familiar; no sight ignited even the faintest flicker of recall; not a single recollection of that distant Saturday afternoon materialized. I had been dictating my impressions into a tape recorder and laughed out loud when I noticed that the pause button had been depressed for the last several minutes. I clicked off the recorder and waited in the churchly stillness, then skirted the edge of the dung below in the hope that viewing the area where Stephen actually landed would at last trip the switch. The screen remained blank.

As I left the barnyard, swallows perched along a telephone wire chirped like confident therapists discussing an obvious case. Didn’t this man with his ridiculous tape recorder know that the inability to recall the details of his brother’s death might be a godsend, a shield that had protected him from obsessing about it even more than he had over four decades? I knew that it was naïve to think that entering the barn would magically produce the missing memories, and that even if a few did surface in some vague form they would hardly be trustworthy, or necessarily generate some profound emotional liberation. Still, for years Cassopolis had been my Lourdes, the barn its healing grotto.

I persisted in my investigation long enough to go back and talk to Garrett Snyder. He tried to be helpful, but it turned out that he had not been at the farm when the accident happened. He and his family had been readying a fruit stand that the Lowitz family operated across town when they heard about Stephen. By the time they got to the scene his body had been removed. I believe it was the second chute from the north that he came down, if I remember right, he told me. Over the years I had heard that the opening in the chute was supposed to have been closed that day, but Garrett said such chutes usually have no covers. You would never really know unless you were a farm child that you should stay out of lofts, he said.

I left Cassopolis around noon, heading back on U.S. 12; at New Buffalo, I detoured through the dunes along Lake Michigan for several miles. The roads, sandy ruts during the forties, were now paved; the woods no longer hid isolated wooden cabins but were choked with an overgrowth of exurban ranch houses and bungalows. Michiana Stables, where a horse ran away with me and my friend Julie laughed, was still there; so was the road beside the railroad tracks where the pavement changed from gravel to macadam at the state line and I jumped from Indiana to Michigan and back, always a step ahead of the sheriff. The zoo and park in Michigan City looked much the same, and the bus stops along the narrow lake drive were still numbered. At No. 32, I parked the car and walked down the steep wooden steps to the beach, a descent Stephen and I must have made many times, our parents trailing with towels and umbrella. The sun had begun to descend, the water was a deep green, as I remembered it. A teenage boy walked barefoot through the lapping waves, heaving a stick for his grinning mutt; families dotted the beach, the children playing with pails and shovels and splashing in the shallow water. Did Stephen and I build sand castles too? I sat on the bottom step gazing out over the sparkling lake and listening for our brotherly laughter. On the drive back to Chicago, the diapered infant crawled into my path once again.

An excerpt from a work in progress.