Reviewers have been mostly positive about Russell Banks' last book, American Spirits, which was published posthumously a few months ago, and I recently got around to reading it and found the insights regarding rural folks, including their attachment to place and to the land, quite compelling. The book is comprised of three stories, each set in Sam Dent, a fictional small town in New York's Adirondacks.
This excerpt is from the first of the book's three stories, "Nowhere Man," which involves a man, Doug Lafleur, who, with his sisters, sold their interest in the land they inherited from their father (Guy Lafleur) in the rural Adirondacks to a man from New Jersey, Yuri Zingerman, a mysterious figure.
Zingerman’s shooting range was a half mile farther up the narrow gravel lane that passed in front of [Doug’s] and Debbie’s ranch house. When he and Debbie got married, Doug’s father, Guy Lafleur, sold him the eight-acre lot for one dollar as a wedding present, and on weekends over the next three years Doug and his brothers-in-law, Roy and Dave, built their house where the lane ended and their land began. After Doug’s dad died, Doug and his two sisters, Nina and Tracy, and their husbands, Roy and Dave, his brothers-in-law and hunting companions, sold off the rest of the old man’s land, all 320 acres. It was the last large tract of undeveloped forested land inside the town limits. They sold it to Yuri Zingerman from New Jersey. He said he wanted it for a private hunting preserve, but promised Doug that he and Roy and Dave could continue to hunt on the property. Zingerman said he was a veteran of the IDF, the Israel Defense Forces, but he talked with a regular American accent. He ran a company in New Jersey that provided security for celebrities and professional athletes and business executives. It was impressive when he named who they were.
Doug, who worked as a full-time caretaker for summer residents and a part-time handyman in the winter months, spent his share of the cash sale of his dad’s land on a new Dodge Ram pickup and paid off the mortgage on the house. Without the mortgage hanging over them, he figured he could support the family with his caretaking and seasonal work as a handyman, and maybe in a year or two he could build a third bedroom onto the house and the two-car garage Debbie wanted. They could get off food stamps and buy health insurance. When the twins were old enough for Debbie to go back to waitressing full time instead of part time, which should be soon, they’d be sitting pretty. That’s how he put it to anyone who’d listen, with his lips pursed in an air kiss. Sitting pretty. (pp. 10-11)
This is after Zingerman orders Doug not to hunt on the family property, Lafleur Woods, any longer. Doug is speaking initially to his wife, Debbie, who pushes back against his plan to continue hunting:
“He can go straight to hell if he thinks I’m not hunting on Pop’s land.”
“Who? It’s not Pop’s anymore, remember?”
“No. It’ll always be Pop’s. Just like it’ll always be Grandpop’s. That’s why people call it Lafleur’s Woods. Those two old boys, Pop and Grandpop, they’d roll over in their graves if they thought me and Roy and Dave couldn’t hunt that land. Max, too. Max’s gonna get his chance to hunt those woods, just like I did when I was his age. And my dad before me. And Grandpop. That sonofabitch Zingerman, he can have his hunting camp out there if he wants, he paid for that right, but he can’t keep me from tramping across those ridges and creeks that I know like the lines of my own hand and killing a deer once a year and busting up a few coveys of partridges and quails. It’s my goddamn birthright.”
She was silent for a moment. She knew that he’d had three gin and tonics and had been publicly humiliated by Zingerman, but even if he were stone-cold sober and Zingerman had managed to be polite and had apologized for posting the land and barring him from hunting it, Doug would be threatening to kill his deer over there anyway. He was a man. That’s what men do. She knew that by tomorrow he’d be trying to talk Zingerman out of his decision, and by Monday he’d be grumbling about Zingerman’s decision, and when hunting season opened, he’d meet up early with Dave and Roy, and they would hunt on somebody else’s land, not Zingerman’s. Not Pop’s and Grandpop’s. (p. 22)
* * *
“We’ll just go in there early the first day of the season and take out our deer, and the hell with him,” he told Debbie. “He’ll never even know we done it.”
“Doug, that’s about as dumb a thing as you’ve ever thought of doing.”
“Sometimes you got to do a foolish thing in order to do the right thing,” he said.
“I’m not letting Max go with you.”
“Whoa. When it comes to educating the boy to hunting, I’ll say when he’s ready. It’s a lifelong process, and it starts now for him. He’s ready to drive the deer, or at least watch how it’s done. He won’t carry a gun for four more years, but he’s got a lot he can learn before then. I started carrying a gun a lot younger than that, y’know. Of course, that was before the government started chipping away at the Second Amendment,” he added.
“Please, don’t start,” she said.
“What if Zingerman…?” “What if Zingerman what? Worst he can do is call the state police, and by the time they arrive, we’re back here at the house butchering a deer we can say we shot in the yard from the deck in our stocking feet.”
“What’s that going to teach Max? That it’s okay to lie to the police?”
“The staties all know me and Roy and Dave. They don’t care where we shot our deer. They don’t like Zingerman any more than we do. Actually, the one I want to be teaching is Zingerman. He’s the one needs a lesson. Coming into our town like this and snatching out of circulation three hundred twenty acres of prime hunting grounds. And I want Max to know we aren’t gonna let him get away with it. I want the whole damn town to know it. And the state police, too.”
“You’re the one who sold him the land. You and your sisters.”
“Yeah, but we had a deal. It’s him who changed the rules. And I’m just saying no, that’s all. No, dammit. No.”
* * *
[Debbie] didn’t buy Doug’s sudden sentimental attachment to his father’s and grandfather’s land. Where’d that come from? He’d been all too happy to join his sisters, Nina and Tracy, when they had the chance to sell the land to Zingerman, and they would have done it even if Zingerman hadn’t promised not to subdivide or develop it and hadn’t given them permission to hunt there. Doug wanted the money. He needed the money, not the land. They all did. (p. 24)
Then there is this powerful passage about Doug's attachment to the property:
For seventy-some years this forest was the Lafleur family’s private hunting preserve. Before that, for a hundred years it was a Boston-based timber company’s wilderness cache of uncut trees, part of the land across the region that got auctioned off in the 1930s and ’40s for pennies an acre when the company shifted operations south, and in 1947 Doug’s grandfather had bought a chunk of it. Before that, before the American settlers and the British and the French Canadians and the Dutch, for ten thousand years it was the Mohawks’ and Mi’kmaqs’ home ground. Doug liked thinking about that. He liked calling up that long line of woodsmen and hunters. He liked to believe that he was descended from them, that his relation to this piece of the earth matched theirs, that he knew in all seasons its streams and brooks and swamps, its glacial forests changing from hardwoods to dark conifers to ferny sunlit patches, that he knew it fully as well as those old-time hunters did, and he knew the man-made trails and paths laid down over centuries on top of the trails and paths followed for millennia by the animals before the humans made their way here, and he knew the behavior and habits and needs and desires of all the animals and birds that lived in the forest.
Without that ancient connection to the land, who was Doug Lafleur, anyhow? No one. Nothing. Just a not very talented amateur musician hanging around this small town for a lifetime, finding easy ways to house and feed his wife and kids and spending too much time at the local tavern amusing his neighbors with tall tales and dumb songs, a man with no good reason to be living and working here instead of somewhere else. Christ, anywhere. And no matter where he lived and worked, wouldn’t it be the same?
A nowhere man, that’s what he’d become. Like the guy in the Beatles’ song.
It was a mistake to sell the land to Zingerman, he said to himself. A mistake to sell it to anyone. He and his sisters should have clung to it for another generation for Max and his cousins to grow up on. It wasn’t fair to blame the old man, but Doug’s father had started the process by selling Doug the eight-acre pie-shaped corner adjacent to Route 50. The old man at first didn’t want to sell off the flat, birch-covered stretch of ground, but Doug, newly married, wanted to build his own house, even if he had to borrow fifty thousand from the bank to do it. He talked the old man into signing over the eight acres for a dollar an acre so he could use the appraised value of the land, a thousand times what he’d paid for it, to guarantee the bank loan. Doug and his father thought they were outsmarting the bankers.
They never should have done it, though. No one outsmarts the bankers. With help from his brothers-in-law over the next three years he built the one-story, two-bedroom bungalow with a full basement, and though he knew he could have done it cheaper with a double-wide set on cinderblocks, he wouldn’t have been able to expand on a double-wide, someday adding a third bedroom and a two-car garage with a tool room, the same as he could on a regular house. With his meager income from caretaking the homes of summer residents and handyman work over the winter, the mortgage payments turned out to be more than he could afford—several years into it and he was still paying mostly interest, and the principal was down barely seven hundred dollars from the fifty thousand he’d borrowed, and recently he’d been falling behind and was being charged penalties for late payments.
After the old man died he never should have agreed with Nina and Tracy to sell the rest of the land in order to pay off the bank loan with his third of the inheritance. He could have somehow figured out a way to make the mortgage payments by taking a night shift at one of the resort hotels or a factory job in one of the larger towns downstate. Or he and Debbie could have sold the house instead and rented an apartment or a house in town. They might have saved enough that way to afford health insurance. And after they sold their father’s land, he shouldn’t have bought the new pickup.
He could have squeezed a couple more years’ use from his old rust bucket of a truck. He and his sisters would still own the Lafleur Woods, the headwaters of Blackstone Kill, the sedimented shale slabs cut crosswise by the kill and the ridges and gullies, the moraines and eskers and erratics and the rock-strewn till left behind by the retreating glaciers ten thousand years ago. He’d still be able to hunt on his ancestors’ land. This love of the land, this irrational claim on it, was Doug’s strength, and it was his weakness. (pp. 28-31)
Then (spoiler alert!) there is a show down between Doug and Zingerman, each wielding a gun:
Zingerman said, “Lafleur, you’re a fucking dead man.”
Doug said, “I’m a nowhere man.” (p. 60)
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