Excerpt from Chapter 1

In the late winter of 2006, I returned to my hometown and bought 612 acres of land on the far western edge of the county. The land was forested, undeveloped, and surrounded by hills and farms; no one had lived on it for years. According to my information, it had been bought by the state from a variety of owners during the 1970s, with the intention of turning it into a recreational wilderness. Bu the state ran out of money and the project never got off the ground. The land, and the farmhouse that stood on it, were forgotten.

My interest in the land was greeted with suspicion by the real estate agent who had been contracted to sell it. A stocky, moon-faced, startlingly short woman in her thirties, she pursed her lips and gazed at me through tired pretty eyes across a cheap aluminum desk. Her name was Jennifer.

“Will you take me to see it?” I asked her.

“I can take you around it, anyway,” she told me. “No roads go through. At least not any I know about. I can show you the house, though.”

“That would be fine.”

“It’s a fixer-upper,” she warned.

“I’m very handy.”

She regarded me with a wary look, as though she doubted my seriousness. We couldn’t go out until after lunch, she said, when “the other girl” came in. It was ten in the morning.

“I’ll take a stroll around town and see the sights,” I said.

“That’ll kill maybe five minutes,” was her snorted reply. I responded with a smile and stepped out the door.

Gerrysburg, New York, population 2,310 and falling. That’s what the internet had told me. When I lived here, as a child, the town had been growing—4,000 people at least, many of whom worked at one of the two busy factories that stood between here and the nearby city of Milan. One of the plants was owned by General Electric, which moved production to Asia in the eighties. The other was run by a manufacturer of silverware and other cooking implements that went out of business before I even left. There was, at that time, a great deal of talk about keeping families and businesses in Gerrysburg and attracting tourists. But now it was clear that all efforts had failed. The town was in a state of decay.

From Castle. © 2009 by J. Robert Lennon. All rights reserved.