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the foundations of churchill
by Nannette
Croce
Of course, everything that happened around that
time is now burned into my memory. It was a dry, hot summer, not
humid like we usually get around here. The sun burnt everything
brown, and inside the house the heat pounded you till you wanted to
cry or yell at somebody. So I offered him a beer, and we sat on the
porch while Amy played, kicking the gravel on what we call our
street.
He was from the paper (not the same guy who came later for
Amy). He came to take pictures and write a story about our
“community,” which is called Dew Drop Court and which is really just
three old cabins hidden behind a big block HomeMart store.
He was way older than me—well into his twenties—but still
kind of good looking, and I found him easy enough to listen to. He
sat a long time with me, since I was the only one home except for
Mr. Johnson, and I suggested he’d do best not to bother him because
he was a crotchety old man who didn’t care to have his TV shows
interrupted.
He said our place used to be a motor court named the Dew Drop
Inn. “Motor Court” apparently is what they called motels in the old
days, when people stayed in cabins instead of just rooms with
bathrooms and beds. He said the road we live on, Route 30, which is
also called Lincoln Highway, once linked up across the whole United
States, from here all the way out west. He said they had places like
this all along the highway for people to stop along the way.
I told him I never took the road farther east than
Philadelphia, and that was just once to take my mom to a doctor, and
west I’d never passed Lancaster. My Dad used to drive us out there
on summer Sundays to see the Amish driving their buggies to meeting,
and now I go there to shop the outlet malls.
This guy kept switching lenses on his camera and taking
pictures from different angles. He said ours had been a particularly
nice motor court, more of a resort, and I saw what he meant when he
told me where bits of the other ones stood. There are still quite a
few around here, but the one or two tiny cabins left look about to
topple over and ours seem to be the only ones that anybody lives in.
He said that was
because ours were not just sleeping cabins but “bungalows”—that’s
what he called them—with a kitchen, which he pointed out, might be
small for a house but is large for a vacation cabin, and a living
room and a bedroom and a loft. He said mostly rich people stayed
here since the countryside was so peaceful, which is funny because
now the countryside is filled with houses and stores, and the people
living on the court are anything but rich.
He pointed out things about the cabins we lived in that I
never took much notice of until then.
“These are great old Victorian style porches,” he said,
hanging off one of the posts to show how sturdy it was. “Look at
those gingerbread designs.”
Then he said what a shame it was that somebody covered the
original clapboard with aluminum siding, and I nodded, though it
made no sense. The only place without aluminum siding is Mr.
Johnson’s house, the one we call “the big house,” though it’s puny
compared to those new houses in Church Hill, and Mr. Johnson’s house
always looks like shit with the paint peeling and the wood rotting.
The newspaper guy stayed into late afternoon talking, until I
had to interrupt so I could take Amy to my Dad’s and get to work.
Back then I worked for a company cleaning offices at night, which
was one of the good things about all the building that had already
started around here. I hinted he should leave too, because except
for James and Teresa, the couple next door, people on the Court
tended not to trust strangers. Before he left, though, I leaned in
his car window and said how I was here alone most days if he ever
needed to stop again and didn’t mention what Sean might think about
that. I saw no reason to.
It took a few days, but he did come back and without his
camera this time. I offered him another beer and he asked more
questions but didn’t write anything down like before. He questioned
me about when the siding went on and when they knocked down the
other bungalows that used to sit here, none of which I remembered,
though I should have, given how I lived next door on the Church
School property practically all my life, but it’s funny how you
can’t remember what was in a place once it’s replaced with something
else.
This was how it looked two years ago when I started renting,
and all I could tell him was when they built the Homemart
store—around five years before—1985. I remembered because it was
the first bit of property the Church School sold off, and it
included the piece my Dad used to farm.
After a couple more beers he stopped asking questions. We
lolled on the porch, waiting for a breeze and talking of this and
that till he went in to use the bathroom and I followed, and then we
spent the rest of the afternoon, before work, fucking in the
burning-hot bedroom while Amy watched Sesame Street.
He never came by or called again, and I don’t read the paper,
so I don’t know if the story of our little court ever did run.
That same summer they started digging the
foundations for Church Hill, which is not just “executive mansions”
but office buildings, too. The only good part about it was I hoped
to get a job cleaning there so I could walk to work, which I do now,
but it no longer matters. I don’t clean there. I work in the kitchen
at Church Hill Assisted Living, and it’s day work, which I had
always wanted for when Amy started school.
Back when I worked nights, I took Amy to my Dad and his
girlfriend’s every day at five o’clock. She ate dinner there and
went to bed while I worked. I’d get home at two, long after the
headlights from the HomeMart lot stopped flooding our living room,
and grab something to eat and watch some TV and then sleep,
sometimes in bed and sometimes on the couch, until seven in the
morning, when I’d go to my Dad’s to pick Amy up. Back then, I felt
lucky if she napped during the day, so I could nap too. But now I
feel like it wasted what little time we had together.
Even then, though, I felt a little shitty after I left her
alone all that time while I fucked that newspaper guy, and I felt
worse when I got home at two o’clock and found Sean waiting on my
porch. I can’t figure how he knew what I’d done, but I sensed that
he did, not because he ever said anything, but because when he
fucked me that night, which I had to let him, he did it kind of
rough and mean.
Of course, Sean didn’t really have any claim on me. I mean I
never promised him anything. I was barely nineteen and spent most of
the week home alone with just Amy. The only one around was Mr.
Johnson and all he did was watch TV. Sean kept me company on the
weekends. He just lived across from me, so I didn’t have to leave
Amy with my Dad and he didn’t have to know what I was doing—even
though he was doing the same thing but with a girlfriend he lived
with all the time—and even though it wasn’t anything I hadn’t done
loads of times before, only now I used birth control.
I liked Sean okay, I guess. He had a strong chest and arms
because he worked construction, and an all right face. He was nice
to Amy and bought her candy and toys. He did nice things for me,
too. He’d buy take-out on a Saturday night or grill for us in the
summer. He had a way with mechanical things, so he took care of my
car and kept it running over a hundred thousand miles, and in winter
he shoveled me out plenty of times so I could get to work.
But Sean could get mean too—a quiet kind of mean. Like the
night after the newspaper guy, when he practically ripped my insides
out with his dick, but said he wasn’t mad. Most of the time, though,
he did small things—so small if I said anything, I was the one who
sounded crazy. He got that way mostly when another guy talked to me,
like James, the married guy next door, or Mr. Johnson’s son. Or
sometimes all he had to see was some guy eyeing me, even if I didn’t
look back or anything.
Like one time when I was sunbathing outside our bungalow, and
these two guys got out of this SUV at the HomeMart and kind of
looked me over. They came from one of those new neighborhoods, you
could tell, with the big houses and the green lawns and the wives
who garden and the kids who play on big wooden swing sets. Those
kinds of guys don’t whistle or say dirty things or even elbow each
other. They just snatch looks as they walk by. I don’t think I did
anything and Sean didn’t act like he even noticed, but then he burnt
my hamburger to a crisp. He apologized and said it got away from
him, but he’d been standing there watching it the whole time, and
his and Amy’s hot dogs were fine. Just my burger got burnt. I didn’t
dare accuse him though, because I knew he’d just deny it and make me
feel like I was crazy and then maybe do something even meaner. So I
just let it go.
Sometimes when I’m working at Church Hill
Assisted Living, or when I sit in my house alone in the winter and
think how pretty it was when there was nothing but field out there
and woods on the hill that rises beyond it, sometimes I wonder how
rich I would be if my Dad had bought even a little of that property
when he had the chance.
That field where my Dad grew corn now grows houses and
buildings, and our white house with the big porch and the red trim
is long gone. Well, it never really was our house. I mean we didn’t
own it, but we could have. I remember the day Father Ryan came and
told us the Church School couldn’t support itself raising pigs and
corn anymore, and people weren’t donating money the way they used
to. They planned to sell off pieces of land, bit by bit, and turn it
into just a school without the farm for the boys to work. But
because my Dad was such a good caretaker, they gave him a certain
time to buy the house for what it cost them and even raised his
salary to make up for the free housing we lost.
First Mom and Dad talked about it. Then they argued about it
till Mom cried, but she never could convince him to take a mortgage.
Dad didn’t like debt, and he remained certain Father Ryan would
never let the new owner sell our house from under us while he worked
to save the money. He also believed he could talk the new owner into
letting him raise some corn on his property, if they split the
profit. But my father couldn’t find out who exactly the new owner
was or where to write to him, and six months later they started
digging a foundation for the HomeMart, and six months after that,
when they replaced Father Ryan at the school, they kicked us out of
the house. The next year Mom died of stomach cancer and the Church
School bought an old seminary closer to Philadelphia, making the
school for poor kids into a prep school for rich kids and putting
the entire property on the Lincoln Highway up for sale.
They didn’t start Church Hill right away because the same
folks who had moved into fancy developments just before that and
complained about the smell of the pigs and manure, now complained
the place would be overrun with houses and traffic, so they fought
it in court, but eventually the developers won, and they have ever
since.
Me and the guy who moved into Sean’s bungalow are
the only ones left here now and that won’t last long. Sean just
disappeared one day after about the fifth time the police detective
came to ask questions about Amy and around the same time some stuff
disappeared from the construction site at Church Hill. I guess they
assumed it was all connected because they pretty much stopped coming
after that, but I doubt that it was. I really do.
Sean’s place stayed empty about a month and then this guy
rented it. He has no interest in me. In fact, he seems to have no
interest in women at all, if you know what I mean. Which is okay by
me. In fact, these days, it’s better than okay because I want to be
left alone.
James and Teresa moved out a little over a year ago, not long
after Sean. I never knew if it had to do with Amy, but it might
have. They probably planned to have kids and were scared to raise
them here after what happened. But then I never could figure why
they lived in a place like this anyway. Teresa’s parents drove a big
Cadillac when they came to visit, and James’s parents drove a
Mercedes. Maybe they needed to wait for their parents to die so they
could get the money.
Even though we hardly ever spoke, I hated to see them go,
only because they kept their place so nice, and it kind of made our
places look better too. Teresa always planted flowers and had
baskets with ivy and such hanging from the porch. After the last
court battle, when they started digging for Church Hill and our
windows got caked with dust and rivers of mud separated our
bungalows when it rained, James and Teresa went to a bunch of
township meetings to complain, saying that our places “represented
part of the county’s history.” They tried to get us all to go, but
we knew better than to think anybody would care about a few shacks,
even if it had been a motor court in the old days, especially since
just before that they’d knocked down a barn that went back to the
Revolution . . . or was it the Civil War?
James and Teresa put on a friendly act to everyone when they
lived here, but mostly it just consisted of waves and smiles. As I
recall, mine was the only house they ever stepped inside of. I had
to invite them to Amy’s birthday party because the cars and people
took up the whole court. The entire time, though, they only talked
to Amy, pushing her to play with the expensive computer toy they
bought her and eying the rest of us like we belonged on another
planet.
Nobody ever rented James and Teresa’s place. It just stayed
empty, which is a waste because it was the nicest place here, but
after sitting empty awhile, it now looks pretty bad.
The first of every month since I moved here I’ve
walked over to the real estate office down the street and paid my
rent, so it wasn’t until a few months back, when Mr. Johnson died,
that I learned he owned the whole court and some other properties
along the Lincoln Highway, too. Now you would have thought he’d have
used some of that rent money to get a new coat of paint on his
house, or at least just buy the paint and let his son, who sometimes
lived in the apartment over his garage, do the work. But then, his
son was always a little strange—gone for months at a time, then
constantly yelling at the old man when he got back.
They found Mr. Johnson dead in his house, in front of the TV,
of course. If that oil delivery man hadn’t backed into the mailbox
just that morning, his body might have sat there for weeks, but the
guy knocked on the door and then peeked in the window and noticed
Mr. Johnson looked funny, and so he called the cops.
I was at work. I only found out when the cop came to my house
asking if I knew where to find his son. It was the same cop who came
about Amy, but if he remembered me, he didn’t say. I told him I
hadn’t seen Mr. Johnson’s son in a couple of months and had no idea
where to find him, and the cop told me Mr. Johnson had died of a
heart attack, “no foul play,” which I didn’t really care much about
one way or the other. That’s when I found out that Mr. Johnson owned
our places. So I guess his son is rich now, if they ever find him.
It was last week we got the eviction notice, me
and the guy who lives in Sean’s place. Somebody’s building a
multiplex theater on the property, and the folks at Church Hill are
going nuts. They say it will attract rowdy kids and bring the
property values down, just like in the neighborhoods where their
kids go to the movies now. Of course it didn’t bother them living
all those years behind the HomeMart. That’s one ugly building, no
matter how many trees they plant around it.
It’s funny, though, with everything that happened you’d think
I’d be glad to leave here. You’d think I’d have wanted to leave
right away instead of hanging on a couple of years, but I didn’t and
I don’t, and it’s not just because I don’t know where I’m going to
live. I just can’t help but think, if Amy does come home now she
won’t know where to find me.
Ever since that day she disappeared two years back, I leave
the porch light on every night. I know it doesn’t make much sense.
How can a five-year-old just come wandering home on her own? But
still, I always believed that someday, maybe not this year or the
next, maybe not until she was all grown up, but someday, she’d knock
on the door, and I would know her right away, and we would hug and
cry, and she would tell me where she had been, though I wouldn’t
care, just so long as I had her back.
The weeks after she disappeared the cops went to every house
on the Court and asked questions, and they went back to Sean’s over
and over again, until he disappeared. Except for Sean and James and
my dad, only the cops helped us look—nobody else from around here.
The cops said they checked all the open holes at Church Hill. My Dad
said they should also check all the fresh-poured foundations, but I
suspect the developer put up a fuss—or maybe a bunch of
money—because they never did. The story ran in the paper about a
week, and then it stopped, just like that, and except for
questioning Sean so many times, I don’t know they did much else. In
time they stopped returning my messages or left me on hold so long,
I finally quit trying.
But I guess they had to stop somewhere. Any number of people
could have seen Amy that day, the ones going into the Homemart or
stopped at the light on the highway or wandering through the sample
houses at Church Hill. For all I know, Amy could be under one of
those houses right now, part of the foundation of some rich family’s
home.
A couple weeks ago there was a little girl missing for two
days from some farming community in the Midwest. I heard it on CNN.
I listen to those stories closely now, of course. All the neighbors
turned out to search, night and day, using flashlights and
headlights when it got too dark. Then a neighbor found her wandering
on the edge of a big cornfield. She said she got lost in it.
The women at work say the guy kidnapped her, then got scared
and brought her back. Maybe he threatened her to lie. They don’t see
how anybody can get lost in a cornfield for two days. But I told
them it can happen.
I got lost in my Dad’s cornfield at the Church School once.
Not for two days but maybe for two hours. You can get really turned
around in a cornfield. All the corn stalks look the same, row after
row after row. So you can’t tell one from the next.
Of course that
didn’t happen to Amy. The cornfields disappeared long before she
did. Now we have rows and rows of houses and holes that more houses
grow out of, and soon a multiplex will crop up on this spot where
Amy’s home used to be, but there aren’t any cornfields to get lost
in—not around here anyway—not anymore.
# # # # # # # #
VOTE! Should this story be included in our annual print
anthology?*
Nannette Croce is a writer, editor, and blogger at
zine writer
http://zinewriter.blogspot.com/. Her short stories have appeared
in various online and print publications, but most have been
re-printed in The Rose & Thorn Literary Ezine where she
volunteered for many years as Co-Managing Editor. She has also
written op-ed for the Philadelphia Inquirer, and her book
reviews and articles on topics in American History have appeared in
Montana, the Magazine of Western History and on Suite
101.com. She lives in a once rural ex-urb of Philadelphia where,
hidden behind a Wal-Mart or Home Depot, one often finds
long-forgotten but still inhabited relics of the past. It was
one of these relics that inspired
“The
Foundations of Churchill.”
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© Sotto Voce, 2008.
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