Part III
Sweetboro

Seven

What surprised him first was how close it was. On the roadmap it seemed a vast distance. But the final day of August he’d left at sunup with Andy Flood coming over at dawn to eat a breakfast with him and go over the care of the house and see him off. A little after two that same afternoon he’d parked on the main street of Randolph Vermont, watching the people walk by him. Thinking that even among them might be one with some fragment of his own blood. During the time since he’d found the letters he’d reconciled to the notion that his father had a past and had been silent about it. Foster could not say for sure that at some point in the future he’d not do the same. Everything that had happened to him in his life this far seemed impossible to describe to any other person. He suspected that any telling would diminish the actuality of it, that such a telling would replace memory and lock events and persons into some simple single line of reference, some reduction enacted both upon himself and the persons recalled.

He ate a sandwich and looked out upon the mild weekday throng. Trying to feature some younger version of his father among them. Studying the buildings, the streets. Watching the people. Parked at the curb, he felt comfortable. The people seemed to him more workaday, less worried over themselves than the people he was used to from the resorts. Even the merchants seemed plainclothed; suits readymade without overdue fuss or attention. Himself bareheaded, in engineer boots and corduroy trousers and a plain open-necked white shirt. He felt he might step out and walk among them and be at home someway.

The man at the post office studied him carefully before issuing curt precise directions to the farm. As if examining him for intent. Foster thought Well, two old ladies living alone, I’d be cautious too. That was what he knew: Abigail, the letter writer, and her sister Prudence. And Father, his grandfather. Now dead. No mention of any others in the handful of letters.

What he knew: The first letter had been written a dozen years ago, clearly in response to one from his father and had been effusive, a quickly written three-page expression of delight, with an invitation for the four of them to come visit. More than three years passed before the next and either in response to the long silence or in something his father had written the tone had changed and this change was maintained throughout the remainder of the widely spaced letters. It was clear each was in response to communication from his father. One mentioned a postcard received. All after that first letter had been little more than updates of agricultural notes and the health of Prudence and Father. Abigail did not write of herself. Only the last letter, writing of the death of their father, had been sent to the same General Delivery address as any of the others. Foster believed she’d written it without any assurance it would be claimed. He could only assume that his father had not written a reply.