Chill Hours

Chill.

Two months ago, there was no such thing as chill, not even the memory of chill. Everything was sweat and fire. Maybe you could say there were “bone-chilling” things you witnessed as society broke down—your neighbor dragging her husband’s corpse from their apartment, children begging for water in the sizzling streets.

And that was just Worcester, of all places. They say the bigger the city, the worse it was. The long, hot summer had been brutal. Every prediction of rain turned out to be wishful thinking. Every prediction of record-high temperatures turned out to be conservative. Boston, for example, reached triple digits for thirty-three straight days and hardly dipped below ninety at night in that time. It drove people out of their minds. On September 1^st, the dash display in Calvin’s car told him it was 109 when he finally gave up on the chaos of Worcester and made his way back to Pippin, the little hilltown just east of the Berkshires.

109.

So, a cool night on the farm in late-October was like a fucking godsend. By the time the sun went down, there was actually a chill in the house.

Calvin let the screen door slam behind him. When he was real little, the creak of the spring and the whack of the wood of the door on the frame was his go-to sound-effect when he wanted to make a car-crash video, which was often. His tablet had some built-in sound effects, but a well-timed close-up of two matchboxes and the scree-crack seemed more satisfying back then. His mom had saved some of those videos, but they weren’t worth watching.

The back porch had always been a nice place to sit and “rest a spell,” as he and his cousins used to say growing up, trying to mock the older generations who they thought of as hicks. But Lizzie grew up and had her own hick husband and kid now living in this same house she grew up in. Darryl was younger, but he was getting there, too. Calvin was the only one who had the guts to escape. The choice to return when the city got too dangerous was not easy or happy.

Just off the porch was a wood pile under a tarp. It was probably the same goddamn tarp his family had been using his whole life. And the rows of crisscrossed split birch and hemlock had always been in the exact same goddamn spot for probably seven generations.

Instead of heading down the steps and around to the right side, he used the same old trick he’d thought up when he was ten: leaning way over the railing to slip a few pieces out from under the tarp without having to trudge through the snow when there was some. It saved some time, too, but now he realized he had plenty of that, so he took a moment to stop and listen to the crickets. The stars were out, a nicely-curved sliver of a moon. It had been a long time since he appreciated these things.

The screen door screeched.

“Need a hand?”

“I got it.”

Calvin’s father was only forty-eight, but he hobbled on bones that were as warped as the house’s wooden frame. Anyone who grew up farming knows there’s still plenty of work to take a toll on the body despite modern technologies.

Dad stepped to Calvin’s side and they both leaned against the railing.

“Your ma and me, we want you to stay.”

Calvin laughed. They had made that clear constantly since he’d arrived. He could see that his father was trying to make this a moment, to give some weight to the invitation.

“At least stay until the spring. We got plenty of food. The co-op’s in real good shape. We could use another hand.”

“Na-ahh, no sir. You’re not gonna get me up those trees,” Calvin laughed. He had liked picking apples as a middle-schooler because it made him feel like a grown-up, but once he was old enough to be allowed on the tall ladders, it turned into a job, and a terrifying one. He was picturing the old Granny Smith trees in the south orchard. Massive, snarled, bark rough and gray. They seemed like they were a thousand years old.

Dad was right about the co-op, though. It had always been there when he was growing up, but he never really thought about what it meant that all the farmers in the town joined together to share the work of bringing their harvests to market, whether that meant the farmer’s markets in Northampton and Pittsfield or whatever wholesalers or institutions they were selling to at any given time. But now, the wholesalers seemed to have vanished and the farmer’s markets were more like ration lines. Calvin could see that the co-op was really a means for sharing. So, while they’d grown wheat, corn, and beans this year, they were eating greens, cukes, squash, tomatoes, and potatoes, not to mention peaches and melons, and this was despite the drought’s havoc on the farms.

“No, I’m thinking of moving on.”

“Where?”, Dad asked, a little hostility in his voice.

Calvin hadn’t known he was going to say this. It just jumped right out of his mouth, so he didn’t have an answer for the obvious question. The first thing to come to mind was Albany, so that’s what he said.

“What’s in Albany?”

“I guess I’ll find out.” Calvin had gone to college in Albany, so he knew the city pretty well, but he really didn’t know if there was anything there for him now.

“What are you gonna do there?”

The whole family sat around the fire that night talking it out.

The story was that his great-great-great-great grandfather had bought this land across the street from his brother’s farm in 1952. In those days, nobody gave a shit about what it would take to heat a giant house, so he built this 4,000 square-foot monstrosity and filled it with kids, twelve of them. Over the generations, families began shrinking, so the old house had been split into three three-bedroom units. The family was his parents, a grand-aunt and grand-uncle, two aunt-and-uncle pairs, and their one kid each, plus now Lizzie’s baby and husband. Everyone except the baby had questions about Albany.

The fire crackled. They kept it small, but it was every bit as hypnotizing as it had been when he was little. He watched as the white paper bark singed to black and curled, giving way to the smooth, tan shell that seemed to resist the flames until the heat became too much for it.

“I just want to see how things have settled down in the cities,” Calvin explained. He tried to convince them that he had thought this through and had a good reason for choosing Albany: it was a medium sized city; it held the state government, so it would have a strong infrastructure in place to ensure public health and safety. Nobody seemed very satisfied with his explanations, but nobody put up much of a fight.

They were all in bed by 9:00. They were country people who organized their days around the sunrise and sunset and the weather, so 9:00 was normal this time of year.

Calvin yawned hard, but he decided to go for a walk.

Even without a bright moon, he could walk this road. He could do it blindfolded. He could do it in a blizzard with a foot of snow under his feet and zero visibility. He’d walked it countless times, going right down the middle, and nothing had ever changed in this road since the day he was born. No new houses built. Not even any new pavement as far as he could tell. Nothing.

There almost certainly would be no cars, and if one did come, he’d be able to see it coming for a long time and just step off to the sand on the side unless it happened to be timed for the spot where he had to cross the one-lane bridge over the brook that attracted his ancestors to this site. The brook where he’d played as a child. And his father had played. And his grandfather.

Just down the road, he passed by his cousins’ farm, another giant house divided for three separate sub-families. The old golden retriever barked at him from the porch.

“Shut up, Jake,” he called out, and he pushed on toward the town.

He passed Gracie’s house, the girl he’d dated all throughout high school, aware that she now lived there with her husband, a guy named Roy who had graduated a year ahead of them.

There was only one house left on this end of the road, the oldest house in the town, built in 1810 or 1820 or something like that when the main road through town was a stagecoach route and literally nothing else existed here. The house was a saltbox with a black slate roof and stained cedar siding. It still had a stable out in the back where Mr. and Mrs. Jenkins kept a couple horses that they’d still hitch to a wagon and take down the road to visit their grandkids. Calvin saw them once in Dalton 20 miles away with that wagon.

The main street wasn’t much. Pippin’s population had only once ever topped a thousand, in the 2010 census, and it stood at 857 now. It was the kind of town that people driving through from the cities wouldn’t even notice, wouldn’t even realize it was a town.

There was the general store, the church, and the town hall which doubled as the basketball gym. They talked about building a library when Calvin was a kid, but it never happened and never would.

It was unbelievable. Ever since he’d been back, he couldn’t get over how the town hadn’t changed in twenty years.

The steps and floorboards on the general store’s porch creaked just like they always had, and as he climbed up to sit on the rocking chair next to the front door, he wondered if these were the original broad boards from when this ridiculous place was built. He thought now, the town hadn’t changed in two hundred years.

He had to get out.

“Albany?”, he whispered as if he had to say it out loud but had to do it quietly because the town was listening.

His gut ached. This goddamned center of town didn’t even have a single streetlight or even a single bulb left on in the general store at night. How was he the only one who couldn’t stand this backwards place?

He said goodbye to his parents and his cousins in the morning and got in his car, assuring his mother that he’d be careful and check in later.

“Listen. You can always come back and stay here tonight,” his father said. “Check out Albany, but if you want to ease your way into it, we’re here for you.”

Calvin rolled his eyes and assured his father this wasn’t necessary. But he knew it was absolutely reasonable and there was a good chance he’d find no work in Albany and be right back here in a few weeks. And he loved his father for saying it, too.

Albany was sixty miles away. It would probably take two hours to get there on the country roads, which tended to be in bad shape around here.

As he drove down the main street, he had an urge to say goodbye to the town, to literally whisper “goodbye” out of respect under his breath as he passed the general store.

***

Albany was hell. There was a checkpoint at the bridge over the Hudson on the way into the city where surly police in combat gear questioned him about his plans and background, searched his car, patted him down, and scanned his driver’s license.

The city was calm enough, but it looked like a warzone. More than half the storefronts were boarded up and a few here and there just stood empty with doors and windows smashed out.

He checked into a cash-only motel near the university, but guards turned him away when he tried to stroll onto the campus.

And it didn’t take him long to realize that there was no work for him anywhere.

But a part of him wanted to stay until he ran out of money, to walk the streets and ride the city buses, to join the ranks of the desperate who stayed because they knew what a city could be.

One day, after he’d been there for a week, he happened to come upon a protest rally in the park across the street from the grandiose State Capitol building. He’d never been to a protest and hardly paid attention to what it was about when he showed up, but he was attracted to the spirit of the crowd. They undulated in waves and shouted and chanted and passed around a bullhorn.

Calvin made his way into the crowd, browsing the signs and listening to the speeches. He gathered that the governor was neglecting poor people as the state recovered from the summer’s chaos. Some accused her of racism for systematically neglecting policies and programs that would help black and Latino populations.

One woman held a sign saying simply, “NYS unemployment: 10%. Black unemployment: 30%.”

Another sign highlighted inequal emergency funding for hospitals and school districts in poorer neighborhoods.

Someone handed him a flyer about another rally scheduled for the next day, and he got into a conversation with her about what the city had been like in the summer, explaining that he had been living in Worcester at the time and that he had gotten out to spend some time in the country.

“Damn, you came to Albany on purpose?”, the woman said.

“Yeah. I couldn’t stay in that small town.”

“Pfft. Gotta be a lot safer than this.”

“Who wants safety?”, he said with a laugh.

“Damn, boy. That’s why we’re out here.”

He was a little embarrassed at this and just put his hands in his pockets. This was exactly why he came to the city, this conversation.

***

He sat outside the general store all morning, chatting with the townies as they came and went one after another. The chair squeaked as he rocked and also drew a groan from the floorboards beneath it like a ridiculous symphony of untuned violin and cello.

He’d come back in time to pull his fair share of weight in the late apple harvest, which unfortunately included some time on the high ladders. Now that the harvest was done, he was committed to working a few hours a day in the cider press and claiming the rest of the time for relaxing.

He didn’t really feel like he was helping. That work was gonna get done if he wasn’t here. It just meant his father and cousins would have a little more time to relax, if anything.

He couldn’t afford to stay in Albany with no jobs available. He’d even called his old employer in Worcester, but things weren’t going well there, either, so Pippin was his only option. But that one part of him that always loved the town was glad, and he was allowing that to surface more.

At the same time, he was learning to be critical of what it meant to be safe.

It was 50 degrees on December 15^th.

Roy was leaning against the doorframe, twirling a keychain on his index finger as he spoke. “Pretty soon, you farmers are gonna have year-round production.” He said it like it was great news. He worked for the highway department and thought mild winters were nothing but good news.

“Yeah. Some crops can probably start getting planted earlier. It’ll be interesting to see how the winter wheat does,” Calvin said. He was far from an authority on agricultural trivia, but growing up on the farm did make him intuitively aware of the balance of things. “Actually, if the fall is too warm, you’re probably gonna see the apple trees blossom late in the spring. We’re probably looking at the makings of another down year already.”

“A warm winter makes the blossoms come late?”

“Yeah. Believe it or not.”

Gracie came out of the store now carrying a little white paper bag of apples and some other groceries.

“You coming by tonight, Cal?”, she asked, cheerily.

“Sure. Wanna play some cards?”

“Alright. Roy’s gonna make us one of his pies, too,” she said, holding up the apples.

They said their goodbyes just as somebody else came up the steps. They’d no doubt stop for a brief chat on the weather, ask Calvin about his family. He didn’t let it bother him that he was becoming a small-town stereotype.

It was one way to be safe.

It was something new in a town with nothing new.