The Heart Mightier Than The Pen

Walking up the high drive towards the gabled barn entrance, Jeremy saw a docent silhouetted against the outpouring luminescence of LEDs hanging from the rafters, their ancient adze scars a rustic landscape of ridges and valleys transmuted into urbanity by the metal-clad wiring running lengthwise on the underside of every beam, its courses interrupted only by constellations of warm light.

Even the bank grading up to the doorway had been updated, with flanking concrete buttresses poured to corset its centenarian slough. The piers tapered to the perimeter of the high drive but solidly cinched the bank. Their hypotenuses were evident even from above, for while they terminated nine feet below the walkway’s grade, they also rested, at the base, a full six feet out from the embankment. The eaves above, Jeremy noted, had even been outfitted with copper gutters, tucked neatly under the drip edge, not unlike - he mused - a silk handkerchief in the pocket of a suit coat; carried for debonairness as much as for utility.

They need not be copper to protect the rebuilt foundation, he noted. Everything about the barn’s improvements suggested attentive care, steeped in fathoms of capital.

The docent came into discernable view as Jeremy stepped under the threshold, and he instantly recognized Becca Markowitz, a former journalism classmate. Her eyes widened as she extended her arms to lean forward and embrace him, exclaiming, “Jer! I thought I might see you here.”

And then, leaning back and playfully cocking her head, one eyebrow raised, she asked, “Are you in…official capacity? Are we being judged?”

Jeremy laughed, shrugging his shoulders, and said, “I suppose both. I’m here for the story and the experience. You know how writers are; always writing, even when we’re not.”

Reaching out to touch Jeremy’s elbow, Rebecca offered him a playbill with her other hand. He accepted it and then rolled it into his palm. “I’ve enjoyed your work since college,” she said, “and I always look forward to seeing what new devilry you’ve managed to uncover. I look for your article every week, you know. I read that paper for the horoscopes and for your exposés; that’s about it, and that’s the truth.”

Thanking her graciously, Jeremy made small talk for a minute, asking routine questions and offering his own routine answers when the former were reciprocated. As more patrons began to file in a line behind him, however, Becca ushered him inside, encouraged free choice in seating, and parted with a portent, little more than whispering, “He’s here, you know.”

Jeremy knew exactly what this meant. They had both been - as journalism majors - under Kearney’s tutelage, and Becca was a friend close enough to also serve as confidant when the affair began. In fact, Jeremy had violated the secret to which Kearney had sworn him only to his mother, and only after many months had passed, and to Becca. In her case, however, he had broken his oath very quickly, after she detected something amiss in the classroom rapport between teacher and student. A witty and vaguely flirtatious banter became, almost overnight, agitated silence. Jeremy would move in his seat when Kearney met his eyes, and while it was imperceptible to the other students, Becca had known right away that something had changed.

After the affair began, Jeremy would suddenly go silent, like a songbird sensing an occulted fox in its midst, when their professor walked into the room and strode to his lectern.

“It’s okay only because you’re on track to graduate this spring,” she had told Jeremy when they sat down for coffee on Church Street one azure autumn day. “Otherwise, he’d have sway over more than just your senior year. And the age difference would be even more glaring than it already is.”

Making it clear that while no one would find out about the unfolding tryst from her, she pointed out that it was nonetheless ill-advised and unethical. “Particularly,” he remembered her saying, “because Kearney’s ex-wife still sits on the board of trustees.”

The fear had mingled with desire, however, and Becca’s warnings had only served to heighten the attraction Jeremy had for his lover. For eight months, Jeremy navigated the gauntlet and did so by lowering his profile not only in Kearney’s class but also with the faculty in general. Vouchsafing his collegiate extracurriculars, he poured unmoored time into the internship at Burlington’s free weekly, and, heeding Kearney’s private counsel, sharpened the edge of his writing so much so that it became a sword, and, ultimately, the Excalibur that won him his seat at the round table of paid journalists.

Jeremy lost touch with Becca after graduation, a divergence natural for students leaving the confines of university and following the incipient call of career; but for him, the gauntlet had been traversed, and no calamities had manifested. In fact, Kearney’s mentoring had produced a first-rate journalist with a job right out of college, and while Becca’s advice might have served a purpose, it had also framed their friendship in a portentousness so exclusive that building any addition on to it became impossible.

From their congenial discourse at the barn door, Jeremy could see that no hard feelings were being harbored and Becca perhaps even pitied his situation. The affair may have been a secret while they attended university, but it was an obvious fait accompli after Jeremy moved into Kearney’s condo the following October; and then, falling from whatever brief grace it had been afforded and into tumultuous schism, it ended as little more than a salacious story snickered at by the undergraduates in Kearney’s subsequent classes.

Jeremy suspected that his old flame might be in attendance tonight, as Kearney had, in the decades before scuttling his marriage and rapaciously courting the promising young man with kind eyes and an endearing lisp, raised two children of his own, seeing both through the Community Chorus program.

Eva, the older, had completed her undergraduate work and become a museum curator, Renaissance enthusiast, and hobbyist madrigal singer; while Derek, who garnered a juris doctorate and went on to be accoladed as the youngest lawyer ever to argue a case before the state supreme court and win, never abandoned his passion for music, singing with his old college friends in a Burlington-area blues band nearly every Saturday night. Kearney had patronized the program and donated to it graciously for decades.

After Jeremy found a seat on the side of the room opposite his former beau, he unrolled the playbill and turned to the list of sponsors. “Robert Kearney” was the third name down from the top. Shaking his head and chuckling sardonically, Jeremy flipped back to the first page. Vintage Vocalizations From America’s Golden Era was the program’s title, and the second page listed a roster of songs that were only sporadically recognizable to him.

The Browns’ “The Old Lamplighter” was first, followed by a matrix of even more obscure titles: “Get Out Those Old Records,” “The Things We Did Last Summer,” and “Way Back Home,” amongst others; finally culminating in the Country Gentlemen’s “A Land Where No Cabins Fall.” Reading this last title, Jeremy put the playbill down, looked up, and took in his surroundings.

Knowing that the barn had originally been English in design, Jeremy looked at the exposed support timbers for the square-headed nails that would betray a vintage; none could be found. The old barn had been reconfigured in the late 19th century for the purpose of dairying Jersey cows. Its roof was laboriously raised and, to construct the high drive, field slate was pillaged from the stone fences about the property, abandoned by long-prodigal sheep farmers who could have never conceived of such a resurrection.

Only two generations of Benoits managed to squeeze a profit from the herd before their market was cuckolded by the Midwestern milk carried in on refrigerated railcars. The third generation, in the person of Simon Benoit, drunkenly clambered the rows of rough cedar shingles to the ridge of the barn and hurled himself headfirst off the northern gable end. With neither wife nor children left behind, his body wasn’t found until four days later, when a creditor’s representative stopped by to inquire about one of many unpaid debts.

Falling into seemingly irreparable disrepair, the farm was sold at auction to a holding company and folded into their deck of investments, kept in the hope that it might one day be subdivided and re-sold for an effortless margin. That day never came and, realizing the futility of waiting any longer, they finally allowed a cadre of wide-eyed beatniks from Greenwich Village to trade their meager savings for the deed.

The commune lasted, remarkably, more than a few winters. By the mid-1970s, however, it had dwindled down to Bart and Laurie Graves, the only locals willing to give the bohemian lifestyle a try. They brought generations of Yankee wisdom to what had been an otherwise untethered culture, and in so doing, drove the dreamers and recalcitrants back to Manhattan. Stolid and devoted to one another, and to the farm, they cribbed the barn and repoured its foundation, no less a miracle for two than parting the Red Sea had been for one; and proceeded to rehabilitate the entire property into a profitable beef and pork operation.

The partnership worked because of their combined work ethic and frugality, but also because they were unencumbered by parturition. After Bart was gored by a Devon bull and bedridden for four months, the lack of heirs revealed itself to be the curse that it always was, undeniable once tragedy had stripped it of fortune’s vestments.

And so, with tears and regrets, they signed what had been most recently called Graves Farm over to the Green Mountain Agrarian Trust. Held in perpetuity, the farm sat empty once more, and it didn’t take even one full decade of uncleared winter snow for the barn’s hemlock-raftered roof to regain its periodic slouches, scalloping the sheathing that Bart and Laurie had painstakingly nailed down to replace old laths.

Perpetuity being a legal term of art, and art being malleable, the Trust announced that a consortium of non-profits and commercial backers had formed to turn Graves Farm into the Greensboro Performance Hall. When Black Rock Properties was named as a development partner on the project, Jeremy’s inner bloodhound began howling.

Having barely recovered from their scandalous manipulation of a federal program that awarded visas to foreign investors, Black Rock settled with the FTC by paying a fine and compensating complainants. Less than two years had passed, and they were suddenly backing a project that was pitched as “a beacon to draw patrons of the arts to these green hills.” Jeremy knew who these patrons were, and he knew that Black Rock specialized in siphoning money from wealthy people just like them.

Signs of the development company’s gentrifying hand were everywhere: the recesses between each support had been framed, insulated, and plastered with artisanal fractals. A ceiling had been installed in similar fashion, its stucco swirls peeking from the shadows above the suspended LEDs like thousands of half-illumined galaxies. The original cedar clapboards had been pried from the outside and re-installed as flooring, planed into smooth surfaces that received a cheap polyurethane finish. Now reflecting the lights, they twinkled dully like fool’s gold.

In his mind’s eye Jeremy could see Simon Benoit, alone in the barnyard, splitting shakes from a cedar bolt, hophornbeam mallet indented on one side from a winter of pounding the froe, sweat forming on his brow, freezing as it fell through the air. Jeremy closed his eyes to give the ghosts of the past their due.

Opening them again, he drew his journal and pen. He was preparing. The flooring creaked under the weight of approaching footsteps, breaking his concentration. Jeremy looked up to see Kearney striding confidently towards him.

“Mind if I sit with you?” Kearney asked.

Jeremy shrugged, closed his journal, and motioned to the empty seat at his side.