Prologue


Rabbits: two, on my lawn, dancing.
No fooling, that morning I watched from my second floor bedroom window, a hare and a doe on their hind legs, circling each other. They leapt formally, joyously, then back on all fours, genetically imprinted leporine choreography, their steps traced in the dew drenched lawn. Then side by side the hare and the doe, tails up, haunches and long back feet in synchronous motion, ambled down the embankment toward the lake, swallowed from my sight by a low-hanging fog over the water. Streaks of sun began washing the yard with light filtering through the giant weeping willow on the east side of our yard. I waited for a curtain call but the rabbits had exited, performance ended, the sun climbing, the fog lifting.
I was thinking about the rabbits dancing that evening when Boats started salivating, then moaning. Boats is my giant dog, a shaggy black Newfoundland, the dog I inherited from my granddad, a man who should have outlived this dog, the runt he’d picked from a litter, Boat’s now fifteen years old, a 200 pound easy-going bear of a dog who’s only imperfections were drooling and constant shedding of his jet black coat.
That evening I’d taken him with me, I rarely took him anywhere, he scares people who don’t know him, he wouldn’t hurt a fly but he’s so large he’s intimidating; he really looks like a bear. But because my mom and dad and grandmother were visiting relatives over in Chicago and because Boats really doesn’t like to be left alone, I’d taken him along to this…gathering, not a celebration of anything, just a bunch of people, some I knew, some I did not, the summer coming to a close. There was wine, beer, chips, cheese and crackers, somebody with weed passing a joint, all of us chasing ennui, our next semester of college looming just after Labor Day, just a couple of weeks. With the exception of Sian Llewellyn, the evening’s hostess and my best friend, the other guests unaware the previous day had been my twentieth birthday.
For some reason the dog and I had been fidgeting, I noticing a lack of Boat’s usual calm demeanor, dismissing it, then discovering feeling ill at ease myself. Thinking I needed fresh air, cannabis heavy in the muggy August evening. I moved toward the Llewellyn’s front porch and opening the door the dog nearly knocked me over, so anxious he was to be outside.
It did feel good stepping from the house, the heat of the day still uncomfortably trapped inside. As I stepped down the porch stairs the deepening August twilight was splintered by approaching stroboscopic spasms of blue and red light, the spinning extremes of the spectrum universally indicative of calamity.
In the split seconds before the village siren began its whine, cars and pickups with magnetized flashers carrying volunteer firemen streaked south on Blackstone Avenue, a good address of lovely homes in our very small town, Boat’s and I watched from Sian’s parents front lawn. As the fire alarm sounded I swiveled like an automaton to face its source off South Street two blocks from where I stood.
“Lexi, what’s wrong?” I heard Sian calling from the front door. My gaze shifted slightly left, to the east, toward an eerie orange glow against the darkening sky.
“Fire,” I called to her.
From the Llewellyn’s front yard I could see the village center, the huge fire engine beginning its trek from the Fire Station, the siren continuing to draw red and blue flashing lights from all directions. The engine turned onto State Street, houses and buildings silhouetted by its flashing red lights as it passed, diesel engine roaring as it rumbled over the small dam separating Palmer Lake from Swan Creek below, the great fire engine’s transmission up-shifting as it turned on the street I knew had to be Goodell, headed toward Palmer Lake, toward the glow, all the converging headlights, flashers and beacons illuminating a plume of dense smoke. Thundering toward the flames, the giant fire engine advanced in the direction of the house with no address.
Night had fallen, it was fully dark, the scene eerily dark and light, simultaneously, the throbbing, roaring diesel, a retinue of circus-like cars and pickups following, headlights, searchlights, volunteer firefighters with comparatively tiny sirens, the flashers converging, surreal. Obeying a sixth sense compulsion I began to walk, remaining on foot, leaving my father’s pick-up I’d driven to Sian’s house behind, Boats trotting beside me. I discovered I was running. Flames had become visible above tops of trees.
Reaching State Street I turned and sprinted across the dam, the dog matching my pace, my stomach knotted with apprehension and dread. I turned left down Goodell, all traffic crossing the dam had been halted, my lungs burning, tears flowing down my face, knowing, understanding, now seeing it was my house on fire. Only the intense heat and Boat’s herding me with his massive weight prevented me from running directly into the conflagration, the dog’s instinctual fear of fire stopped me, his love for me reflected in his aging, rheumy eyes. As I tried to get to the flaming house he corralled me, placing himself between me and the fire, his broad muzzle dripping, shaking his massive head flinging ropy saliva everywhere. I stopped when I realized I smelled his singed fur.
“Get back, Lexi,” a voice commanded. “Nobody’s in there, right? Tell me, now!”
It was one of the volunteer firemen and I understood. I helplessly shook my head, then finding the presence of mind to use my voice yelled back “No.”
On cue my big dog backed me farther away from the searing heat, smoke swirling, columns of steam rising from water from the hoses of the firefighters aimed at the blaze, Boats nuzzled me, backing me into the safety of neighbors who now surrounded us. The cottage next door where Mrs. Hillerman lived was being doused with water to prevent it from catching fire, Tillie Hillerman an aging seamstress who walked with a cane, working her ancient treadle Singer sewing machine with her good leg and foot, her other limb a wooden leg complete with shoe replacing the one amputated at the knee. The first time I saw her prosthesis as a child in her State Street dress shop with my mother I had nightmares for awhile. She came up to me, tears in her own eyes, she was clearly afraid.
“Lexi, thank goodness you’re OK,” she said, shaking, “you’re all right, aren’t you, dear?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I answered, “are you OK?” She hobbled close, hugged me and I hugged her back, Tillie Hillerman loved everyone but loved me more, I was like her granddaughter, she’d lost her own daughter Ellie who died young.
“Why, have you seen the lakefront?” she asked, “It looks like the Forth of July…”
I excused myself from Mrs. Hillerman circling around the far side of the house next door finding countless boats full of gawkers, people watching, drinking, even cheering as flaming timbers fell into the conflagration causing showers of sparks to rise into the dark sky. Furious I ran down the grassy embankment to the seawall.
“Assholes! Get away from here,” I yelled, “this is my family’s house. Go home, get outa’ here, what’s the matter with you?”
“Kiss my ass, honey!” a man’s voice came out of the crowd of boats and an object, a half full can of beer whizzed by my head. I walked back up the embankment, disgusted.
Shortly after that the fireman whose voice called out to me earlier returned to look after me. Boats growled, then lay down next to me, wary. The firefighter ignored him. I looked on, outraged and helpless, “My house…our home…”
“It’s gone, Lexi,” the firefighter said, “I’m so sorry, you just have to let it go. Nobody’s hurt, the cottage on one side and the house on the other are OK. Can you talk?”
“Yes, sure,” I offered, dry-eyed, not so much from being over crying, more from heat, ash and growing exhaustion, but now recognizing for the first time the volunteer fireman as someone I knew. Abraham Cramer.
“Abbie?” I croaked out of my parched throat.
“You remember, Lexi, I mean you remember me?” he said, patting my giant snarling dog. Abbie smiled at me, his face partially blackened, the rest red as a baby’s bottom, his eyes now searching, burning holes of much more than recognition before turning back to work.


























Chapter One

Lexi

Tiny Colon, Michigan is my hometown. It’s officially a village, the name isn’t a misprint, Colon is its name. Not the Spanish Colon’, not an internal digestive organ, just Colon, like punctuation, not a period, not an apostrophe.
I grew up and lived in Colon in a one time cottage remodeled several times until our family turned it into our home. It sits on the shore of Palmer Lake, the house a local anomaly because a long ago township clerk failed to designate an address, the real estate part of a larger tract, ownership by my grandmother Birdy, my mother and a trust. The house has always been numberless and streetless, a house on the lake and on a driveway, the bane of a secession of several local postmasters. I lived there from just a few days after my birth until the day after my twentieth birthday when I burned it down.
Abbie and the other volunteer firemen tried to put the fire out that evening and well into the next morning. The house burned to the ground along with everything in it.
Abraham Cramer, Abbie, also started a fire that evening: he started a fire in me that he has never been able to put out, either, although he has tried. Abbie and I have been together ever since, twenty years, married fourteen of them. We have two children Isaac and Sarah, two of the most remarkable outcomes of that night. Like many things that happen, at least in the way I have come to view them, it was all an accident.

~

In August, 1969, my expectant parents Tom and Ariana Miller hitchhiked from Michigan to upstate New York. Ariana carried high meaning she didn’t look pregnant, even to herself, nor did she feel pregnant and thought she would have her baby whenever she wanted, if there actually was a baby.
Ariana understood there was a baby, especially after I began kicking in utero. She shared her unremarkable insight into the obvious with me in a discussion we had about this once, I recall listening and shaking my head back and forth both in wonder and disbelief, but in her mind she felt the timing, a due date, was ‘sometime…out there’. She didn’t know when the due date was. Ariana was stoned a lot, not hard stuff, but pot was plentiful. She fantasized she might just be bloated, maybe not with child, nearly freaking out once thinking I might be a tumor. She finally reasoned that tumors don’t kick.
My parent’s accounts of my birth indicate they were probably ripped at the time: Ariana stoned; my father, Tom, blown away by chemicals he had no idea about, on a collection binge amongst the crowd, the music, the availability, a space cadet in orbit, fellow travelers offering LSD, hash, speed, whatever, Tom and Ariana participants in a most unusual gathering, a social uprising unparalleled in US history.
On the third day of what was billed as The Upstate New York Music and Art Fair, my mother Ariana went into labor during an unknown Joe Cocker’s now iconic cover of the Beatle’s “With a Little Help From My Friends”, her legs suddenly wet not from the subsided torrential rains; no, this downpour was from inside her, Ariana with no idea what was happening to her, she and Tom had failed to consult a doctor, ever, they thought that it all would just come natural, whatever significance that non-sequitur had for them.
Lore has it that there were two deaths during the festival, a drug OD and someone accidentally run over by a tractor. There were also two reported births, one in an ambulance, another in a helicopter, both en route to hospitals. I am an addendum to this birth/death statistic, delivered a la’ mudslide by an MD with an OB practice on Park Avenue in New York who just happened to have a pony tail and was nearby rolling a joint when Ariana went into labor. I came into the world in Bethel, New York shortly after downpours of rain and a few hundred thousand drunk or trashed revelers turned the theater of Max Yasgur’s farm into a muddy mire, my birth on a borrowed sleeping bag miraculously warm and dry, less than an hour after my mother’s water broke. The attending physician’s name is Benjamin Rothman. I cannot recall many summers when he and his family have not rented a cottage in Colon from our family during the month of August to see us and to attend the annual International Magic Festival held by the Abbott Magic Company, Dr. Ben a pretty good amateur magician.
So I was born August 17, 1969 at a little gathering remembered as Woodstock. I had always been able to prove it, prove that as unlikely as it sounded I really was born at Woodstock.
So much was lost in that fire: family pictures, books, vinyl records, reel-to-reel tapes, cassette tapes, beautiful handmade quilts from my Amish great-grandmother, all our clothes, tie-dyed baby clothes my mother had made for me, my high school cap and gown with its National Honor Society braid and its Valedictorian vest, my parents financial records, my father’s wooden cabinet planes and carpenter tools, all my grandmother Birdy’s family records, priceless pictures, letters and vaudeville memorabilia, Amish and antique furniture, our clothes, our underwear, my parents collection of original 60’s posters, concert programs, newspaper articles, sheet music and recordings of almost all the performers at Woodstock, the original Woodstock tickets[1], as well as the Miller family bible containing our family tree and our first Apple Macintosh computer. Everything, much of it priceless, gone.
We all knew who we were, I knew who I was and had always been able to prove it, BTF. Before the fire. Now ATF the proof was gone. I was now mortal: the hippie princess-child-goddess of Woodstock had burned down the house, the proof. Truth is hardly anyone believes the story of my birth, anyway, I’ve seen my share of lifted eyebrows and whispered “…uh, yeah. Right…” We live in an age of extreme skepticism wherein people eschew reality, choosing instead to believe the unbelievable but call it, regard it as reality. But I digress.
I love the word digress, such a pompous, elegant pause.

~

My hometown is unique in many ways. For instance in 1989 and for a half century before and in the twenty plus years since the Amish of St. Joseph County surrounding and including Colon remain plain dressing, no buttons on their clothes, women in bonnets and men in hats with beards without mustaches who still use the horse and buggy to get around, they do not own cars. The local supermarket, such as it is, hardly super in the age of Wal-Mart and Super Target, has hitching posts in the parking lot shared with cars, parking lots where the uninitiated need to watch their step. The surrounding Amish farms and households are prosperous but remain off the grid, using no electricity, except batteries, allowing no telephones inside their houses, although there are Amish farmhouses dotted across the countryside with pay phones, actual telephone booths, in front yards.
The Amish, with little direct participation, have nonetheless been a force in my life, inextricably intertwined with my family, my father Tom’s father, my grandad Thomas Miller, Sr., was born to and raised in an Amish household. His mother, my great-grossmutter Sarah Miller has been a direct participant in my life all along, as well as my grandad’s and my father’ lives.
It should have not been a surprise the day following the fire, before my grandmother Birdy and my parents had even returned from Chicago, although they had been contacted and knew of the catastrophe, that I was awakened by my very elderly great-grandmother Sarah Miller at the Llewellyn’s.
“Lexi get dressed and come with me, liebschen.” My great-grandmother was very direct, she rarely wasted words, standing as erect as someone half her age inside the doorway of the room.
“Grossmutter, I have no clothes except these…” I said, throwing back the sheet and blanket revealing my stained, sooty and smelly shorts and top. “Everything is lost, I have nothing…”
Sleep had been fitful, I woke when Sarah summoned me unrested, dirty and confused. I stood up, dazed, Sian, myself and my very proper great-grandmother Sarah Miller in her skirts and in her bonnet, each of us anxious to be somewhere other than where we were. Sian piped up.
“I have clothes for you, we’re almost the same size, Lexi,” then she blushed, “well, except for…the top part, but I’ve got some, er, smaller tops that used to fit. Me.” She looked at me sheepishly, Sian quite lovely, also quite buxom although we were about the same height and somewhat similar in body type below the chest.
“Underwear, I have no clean underwear. So I go commando? I can’t wear anyone else’s underwear, dear god. Used underwear?”
“We’re closer in size there and I have some new that’s never been worn, okay?”
“Okay,” I sighed
My great-grandmother cleared her throat, Sian and I had momentarily forgotten her. “Vie must leaf, Lexi. Do what you must, quickly. I’ll wait in the buggy. Danke, for coffee, Sian.”
“You’re welcome, Mrs. Miller.”
I thought as I showered, then dressed in Sian’s donated clothes I could drive dad’s pickup but as I walked outside Boats was already in the buggy with Sarah, she was saying something to him in Dutch, he was attentively drooling on her long skirt, his huge pink tongue lolling. I climbed in and we were off down the street, clip-clopping over the dam then turning on Goodell headed directly toward the ruins, the horse never breaking stride, Sarah with the reins, a skilled driver even at her advanced age. I never tired of the sound of horses’ hooves, their shod hoofs on local streets and highways one of the sounds of my life. As the buggy neared the lake I could not believe what I saw.
The last of the wet, cold ashes, unburned debris and trash from the fire had already been hauled away in horse-drawn wagons, the small army of Amish men working on a vacant lot I had never seen before, all of them toiling against the backdrop of the lake seemed other-worldly, bearded men in hats hard at work in a space that until last night contained our house. Only the stone fireplace and two-story chimney remained, along with the cut stone foundation. They had even cleaned and pumped out free of water the poured half basement and root cellar. I was astounded, turning to my great-grandmother just as she turned away to gaze west over the dam inlet, across Maple and Swan Streets to South Street.
The big draft horses, black and grey Percherons and light brown Belgian draft horses double hitched two-in-hand, drawing gigantic wagons with the heavy squared timbers came into sight first. I thought them reminiscent of a circus parade, local people were beginning to line the streets. There were ten such wagons containing what would turn out to be all the posts and beams required to reframe our house.
“Grossmutter, what is all this?”
“Lexi, you are family. Vie are all family,” Sarah said in her Dutch-German tinged accent, “you need your house. vie build it bach, just like before.”
I watched wagons arrive and depart, there were Amish everywhere, horses everywhere, an Amish invasion, these people in their button-less shirts, trousers, dresses, bonnets and straw hats, these odd and wonderful people were coming to rebuild our house. The day after it burned down.
At the sight of this I sat down and cried, down on the ground, tears of grief, tears of gratefulness, of unexpected joy, of sorrow, of loss tears of delight. My great-grandmother didn’t know what to make of me, finally smiling at me, a favor I rarely saw. Sarah Miller made-do, survived, made her way and showered her love with a lowered gaze as she indulged me, I not one of them, understanding as she always had.
As I recovered I began to watch what was going on remembering a movie I’d seen maybe three, four years ago, Witness, for the most part a violent thriller, Harrison Ford, Danny Glover, cops chasing a murderer in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, Ford’s character undercover on an Amish farm. It was a good movie, fine cast, good story and screenplay but the thing that most sticks in my memory about the movie were scenes dealing with a barn-raising, an Amish community coming together to build a barn. In a day. I was mesmerized by the community, the solidarity, the cooperation, a setting aside of petty differences and the pure humanity of that barn-raising. I was sure after I saw those scenes of that movie I had been a witness to human beings at their finest.
It was now happening before my eyes, these crazy Amish were rebuilding our house. My remaining tears were shed for their amazing unselfishness even though Sarah’s son Thomas, my grandad, had walked away, not returning to them to be baptized so many years ago.
By sundown we again had a house, rough, but a house. My father Tom arrived from Chicago mid-day by himself, Birdy was verklempt, so upset she was flat on her back in bed at her nieces’ house in Evanston and my mother had stayed with her, they at least had their luggage and would shop for essentials before returning to Michigan.
“Where did they get the plans?” were the first words my father said to me, even before he asked how I was.
“I guess it must have been grandad.”
“Yeah, I think you’re right, honey,” my father agreed, “he had some stuff made by his cousins, posts and beams, siding, yeah, of course, I mean we remodeled the old cottage a few times, aye?”
“Yeah, it was an ongoing deal for awhile as I recall.”
“Lexi, you look sunburned.”
“Dad, the friggin’ house burned down, I’m not tanned, I’m fried.”
“Oh.”
“Roasted.”
“Yeah. Did my truck get roasted, too? Hauled off?”
“No, it’s over to the Llewellyn’s’.”
We both looked at each other for a while before I asked, “Smokin’ dope on the way back from Chicago, Dad?”
“Yeah. Got me.”
“I’m stayin’ with Sian. Sarah said you could stay out at her farm, they can use you and your truck tomorrow for something, I don’t know what.”
“OK.”
I gave him the keys. “Dad, we owe them.”
“Lexi, I’ve always owed them. Aside from you and your mom they’re the best people on the planet.”
As my father walked away I asked after him, “ How can you say things like that and just walk away?”
“I dunno, it’s just the truth.”

~

Sian’s bras were way too big but she managed to dig up all kinds of nice clothes for me. She said they were all hers and it’s true all the stuff was laundered, I mean you can tell when something is brand new, the sizing and all, but I think she and her mother may have went shopping for me. I had nothing else except what I could buy for myself. I had classes to pay for at Kalamazoo College or I would have to drop them, soon.
My mother and Birdy called to let me know that they intended to stay in Chicago until the new cottage, as they referred to it, was finished. They did not seem concerned about where my father and I were staying, they were in a residence hotel near Evanston. Frankly it was better they remained in Chicago, they are both JAPs of the first order, my grandmother Birdy a major pain in the ass. I love her, unconditionally, but she makes me meshuga. My father misses my mother, I see him at the house doing electrical, doing plumbing, hanging windows. Smoking dope, drinking beer, talking to the neighbors, being just who he is.
There was insurance, of course the Amish would not accept a cent, they rebuilt the house free of charge. The insurance settlement is hung up by Birdy, technically while she remains alive the house is hers; it becomes my mothers’ once Birdy dies. My father has resources of his own, he grows marijuana all over St. Joseph county on a variety of Amish farms in places that only he knows. Lately he’s been hauling Amish manufactured merchandise in his pickup all over the place.
They did rebuild our house.
Abbie came calling at the Llewellyn’s because I’m living there. Temporarily, so far just a week. Sian doesn’t know him, nor do her parents, Abbie a couple of years older than Sian and I. It’s been awkward. And wonderful.

NEXT, THE HISTORY OF COLON, THE AMISH AND HARRY BLACKSTONE
[1] Before Woodstock was declared a “free concert” there were tickets. Tom and Ariana did not buy any, of course, but found a number of the tickets discarded.