The Narrows(19)

Like a good son, he remained until he felt that his father had moved beyond the grief of losing his wife, Ben’s mother. Ben moved beyond that, too, feeling that the grief had been replaced by some unspoken allegiance between the two remaining members of the Journell family, father and son. They had their roots already firmly planted in Stillwater; where else did he need to go? Back then, there were jobs to be had in Stillwater. With a college degree in hand, Ben already had a leg up on ninety percent of the workforce in town. Hell, he could do whatever he wanted. So what did he want to do? As it turned out, what he wanted to do was put his criminal justice degree to work and join the police department.

He had only been on the force for five years when his father, William Journell, a retired sustenance farmer who still lived in Ben’s childhood home off Sideling Road in Stillwater, began seeing and speaking with Ben’s dead mother. Bill would speak of seeing his dead wife out in the field behind the house, which had once been lush with crops but had slowly become overgrown as the soil hardened and the town dried up all around it. It was usually around dusk, just as the sun melted behind the mountains and Bill was out on the back porch smoking a pipe and drinking a glass of tea. Often, he would wander out into the field where they would engage in long conversations. Other times, she would continue walking clear across the property until she vanished into the curtain of trees at the far end of the farm. On these occasions, Bill Journell would call to his dead wife and attempt to follow her, but he moved too slowly and she seemed determined to remain elusive.

That was how the dementia started for Ben’s father—in momentary bursts of unreality that were quickly forgotten the moment they were over. Ben had witnessed his father standing in the middle of the field one afternoon, talking to someone who was not there. When he went over to his father and took him gently by the forearm, Bill Journell smiled wearily at his son and told him to say hello to his mother. “Doesn’t she look beautiful?” the old man had asked, simultaneously frightening Ben and breaking his heart. He took the old man to Cumberland to see a cadre of doctors who all diagnosed him with dementia.

That was when Ben moved back into his childhood home to take care of his father. He would remain there for the next year, through the worsening dementia and the onset of Alzheimer’s, until Bill Journell inevitably passed the previous year. Ben had never moved out of his childhood home and, in the days following his father’s funeral, he thought he could still hear the old man treading the tired old floorboards of the farmhouse. Some evenings, he was afraid to look out the windows and into the rear fields for fear that he would see both his parents out there, reunited in death but just as lively as they had been in life. He began to wonder, not without some sense of irony, if the Alzheimer’s had needed someplace to go now that his father was dead, and since Ben was the only creature still living in the farmhouse, it had invaded him. Was that possible? Could the disease be working him over, worming its virulent fingers through the gray knots of his brain while he slept in the night? This notion made him uneasy. Instead of losing his mind, he took a brief vacation. When he returned, he no longer heard his father’s footsteps creaking up and down the halls, and he no longer feared the sight of his dead parents standing out in the rear fields.

After his father died, and for the first time in Ben Journell’s life, he had begun to second-guess his own life choices. The plants and factories had all dried up as work was farmed out more cheaply overseas. Similarly, the mom-and-pop stores along Hamilton were being systematically replaced over in Cumberland by massive department stores, bookstores that doubled as cafés and toy stores, and corporate chain restaurants with gimmicky menus and salvaged bric-a-brac on the walls. Here he was, Benjamin Journell, only son of the great William and Helen Journell, presiding like Charon over a town that, like a shallow swimming hole in the middle of summer, was slowly drying up beneath his feet. He could go out to Baltimore or Washington, D.C.—or any of the myriad metropolises throughout the East Coast—and live among the living. Hell, why did it have to stop there? He could pick up and go anywhere in the whole country…anywhere in the world, if he wanted to. For the first time in his life, he felt truly free…and also guilty that it had taken his father’s death for him to feel this way.

However, the dying town of Stillwater and the Stillwater Police Department had different plans for him. Just when he was about to make the leap, he was promoted to sergeant. The last mortgage payment on the farm was handed over to the bank and now Ben owned his childhood home free and clear. And because complacency is the demise of momentum, he had stayed. Meanwhile, the shallow swimming hole had become nothing but a pit of dust.

Now, standing in Porter Conroy’s east field in the middle of the night, Ben once more questioned the choices that had caused him to remain in Stillwater, presiding over some farmer’s dead livestock. Sighing, he unhooked the flashlight from his Sam Browne belt and clicked it on. A few steps behind him, he could hear the labored respiration of Porter Conroy and Officer Eddie La Pointe. At the crest of the hill, Ben paused and ran the beam of the flashlight along the expansive field. He could see nothing but black piles of cow shit and swampy pools of rainwater, each one reflecting the stars. Against the horizon, brought into stark relief only when lightning struck, Porter Conroy’s barn loomed like Noah’s ark, the white-shingled cupola like the dome of a space shuttle. Ben cursed silently.

Porter sidled up beside him, reeking of booze and days-old sweat. He was an anemic fellow with a nose like the periscope of a submarine and skin as roughly textured as burlap. At least Porter had been forward thinking enough to slip into a fleece-lined dungaree jacket.