The Good Neighbors

It takes children a while to doubt their parents’ views. Some never do. In my case, it was a long time before I questioned my father’s crotchety opinion of our contentious older neighbor, Tom Gullette. I questioned my parents’ perspectives on God and our Lord Jesus Christ before I doubted their thoughts on Tom.

The first I recall being made aware of Tom’s existence was the year my father decided to make a pond. I was eight going on nine and we were new to the neighborhood at the time, having moved in and built a house on five wooded acres just the summer before. 

It had been a dream of my parents to buy a property with land. My mother had been raised on a tiny farm. My father had a vague yen for the status of landed gentry. At least since I was five or six we had been making occasional pilgrimages out to the countryside from our suburban north ‘Jersey home, looking at properties as far afield as Pennsylvania. These adventures left a lasting impression on me. Into my teens and twenties I sometimes dreamed of living on bosky acreages, and I can still call up a sunny summer afternoon around my sixth birthday when we visited a For-Sale farm and I wandered across a meadow to sit under a tree while the grownups in the house discussed. That was an hour of happiness for me.

In the end, what my folks decided on were these five acres of secondary woods, grown over what had been, a century earlier, the northeast corner of a dairy and cattle farm. The people who sold them the acreage lived in a fifty-year old home on a remaining ten-acre strip just behind us, a property itself carved from the same farm decades before. And behind them, in twenty-seven more acres, stood the original nineteenth-century farmhouse, which is where Tom Gullette lived. Most of the original farm, however, had been sold before he’d arrived and long since converted into a municipal, recreational airport. The buzzing of those single-engine prop planes would become the background sound of my youth. Between the airport and those three scraps of subdivided farm ran a natural creek edged by a strip of wetland that we called the swamp. 

The creek crossed the patch my parents bought, and my father had the bright idea that, if he dammed it, he could make us a swimming hole. Without consulting anyone, he did exactly that. A forklift lowered several tree trunks chained together, and my father’s workmen cemented the ends. Initially, it did the job nicely, and that summer we had a pond. I have fond memories of the water striders gliding over its surface and of the hot days when, one leg in a cracked plaster cast that was in imminent danger of dissolving, I stationed friends on either side of the water to quickly towel me off after each swim across.

One evening at dinner my father was cranky serving the meatloaf. It seemed there was some mean man up the road behind our house who was threatening to go to the town council if my father didn’t rip out the dam and drain the pond. I was shocked. I was nine. What could possibly be wrong with a pond?

In the end, the dam stayed in place until that winter when storms and a late-February thaw combined to flood and ruin our shady front lawn, so recently and effortfully hacked free from the forest and the poison ivy. Then, just as the flood approached our door, the pressure ripped apart the dam’s logs. The lawn drained and my father let it go. In the spring he quietly removed the tumbled logs. He wanted to save that lawn. The next year, he built a swimming pool in the back of the house, and from then on, whenever he put up a shed or added a part to the housing, he sought and posted his construction license from the town.

But the myth of the mysterious, mean old man up the road lived on. My father tangled with Tom again when Dad moved his noisy cabinet-making business into our garage. In retrospect, I’m amazed how many of these battles my father won, despite the zoning laws. I suspect he played the card of the local saint, the churchy man in a wheelchair with half a dozen adopted, disabled, multiethnic kids. Later, I discovered that the Gullettes were avid birdwatchers, and I know I would have hated the song of those saws buzzing all day in my bird-haunted backyard. If I had been Tom, I might have been angrier than Tom. But as yet, I didn’t question my parents' logic. They had to feed us, after all, and I loved my father’s workshop in the garage.

In my teens, away at boarding school most of the year, I took to walking up that back road between the scraps of old farm and the airport swamp whenever I was home, especially in the colorful fall. I always took care not to step onto the property of Tom Gullette. I scarcely dared looked at the windows of his house. Who knew if he kept a shotgun or not?

Then one day I got caught. I was strolling down the lane on a fine autumn afternoon, lost in the fantasies about myself that passed, for me, as thought. I was startled by a booming voice just over my shoulder just after I had turned and headed home. “You’re Jim Jeffreys’ boy, aren’t you?”

In a moment of sheer panic, I lied. I said that, no, I wasn’t a member of the family. I was only Mark Jeffreys’ friend. The real Mark Jeffreys was away at boarding school, I said.

Come to think of it now, there was maybe more than a grain of truth in what I bluffed then. The boy that I could be at school felt far more real to me than the boy I had to be at home. But that’s a topic for another rant.

“Oh, I see,” said the man with the booming voice, who was now abreast of me. His white hair tousled, he looked startlingly like the elderly Robert Frost but with thick, horn-rimmed glasses. “When will you see him, then? Because I wanted to speak with him. My name’s Tom, by the way.”

He didn’t ask me my name and I knew right away that he saw clear through me, but I tried to keep on fibbing anyway, hoping to make my escape. “Should I give him a reason you wanted to speak with him?” I asked cheekily. 

Tom chuckled. “My wife Mildred heard from his mother at the grocery store the other day that he plays chess. Do you know if he’s any good? If he is, next time he’s home, I’d like to have a game with him.”

This was disorienting information. Since when did my mother talk to the wife of old Tom Gullette, sworn enemy of our family’s chaotic ways, herself a woman we’d never met? Since when did my mother talk to any random neighbors at the grocery store, about me? Since when did my mother talk to anyone?

In a moment of pure craziness, I doubled down. “Oh yeh, Mark’s very good at chess. He’s an excellent player. He’s much, much better than me!”

“I see,” Tom said. “Tell him, next time he’s home, he should stop by my place. I’d like to see if he can beat me. Good evening.” He turned and headed back his way. 

The next couple of holidays, it became a game. I would wander down the lane, half hoping, half afraid to run into Tom. He’d turn up, wanting to know when Mark was going to come play chess with him. We were at about the third or fourth level of theory of mind by then, which was its own sort of chess. I knew he knew and he knew I knew he knew. But still we chatted about the prowess of that elusive Mark. 

Finally, the next summer, the summer before before I went to college, Tom and I agreed that, in the absence of the real Mark Jeffreys, he should just play a game against me.

So one evening in August, a fortnight before I turned eighteen, I turned up at Tom’s and Mildred’s farmhouse door after dinner, right as the crickets were getting going for the night. They welcomed me in, Mildred tiny and birdlike, with a sweet voice like a bell, and Tom shuffling but still tall and booming, and still pretending he didn’t know that I indeed was Mark but also that he didn’t care to know my “real” name, either. He and Mildred took a moment to show me around the home, which was lovely in a classic farmhouse way but surprising in that the walls were hung with framed black-and-white photos of their travels with their children all around the world. There they were at the pyramids, the Eiffel Tower, Machu Pichu, all the classic 20th-century destinations for western tourists, the works.

We wandered into the kitchen, Muriel and Tom now talking excitedly about the birds on their property they’d recently seen or heard. Without asking how old I was, Tom mixed me a large Bloody Mary and plunked it down in front of me. Then he carried out a handsome, well-worn wooden chess set.

Over the next hour or two, he proceeded to beat me soundly, two or three times. He played like a pirate, seemingly careless and swift to sacrifice, ruthless in his endgame. I later realized that the Bloody Mary had been a back-up. The man really liked to win, and I suspect that if I had turned out to be more challenging, more like the “real” Mark Jeffreys whom I’d boasted about, he would have assiduously refilled my drink, the better to tip the advantage back to him.

While we played and Mildred popped in and out with commentary, I found out that they were originally from darkest West Texas. They had come to Manhattan as newlyweds a half-century earlier, during the Great Depression, both graduates of Texas A&M. Despite the grim times, Tom had somehow made it in New York as an advertising man.

They had raised a couple of kids, one with a fairly severe cognitive disability. They had traveled, become ardent conservationists, joined the Republican Party to spite the Dixiecrats, and mostly lost their Texas accents. They’d bought this farmhouse to be closer to nature but still close enough to the city for his commute. In fact, Tom told me, a moment before I spotted another checkmate coming at me, I should climb to the top of the hill behind his house on a clear day, welcome any time, because from there I could see the skyline of Manhattan.

When I left that night, a little tipsy, laughing, I told them it was too bad I didn’t have Mark Jeffreys with me. He would won at least a game or two from Tom. Tom nodded mock ruefully and said he’d sure like to meet that fellow sometime.

Before I left for university, I did climb up their hill one afternoon. I peered at the hazy tip tops of Manhattan. I got some poison ivy on my ankles for my troubles. And I told my father who my new friends were. My father just shook his head like I’d given him one more sign of being an unhinged teen.

For the next decade and change, in and out of school and grad school, in and out of my family home, I would stop in from time to time to have a peppery Bloody Mary, discuss the birds and local conservation issues, play chess and get beaten. One time, I brought a couple of visiting friends from Montana, one of whom worked as a properties manager in the movies. Not long ago she had spent a year hunting down furniture for Horton Foote's 1918, a film about a small town in Texas during the great influenza epidemic. She, Tom, and Mildred discussed the rarity of period antimacassars from Texas for half an hour. Another time I brought along a girlfriend from Alabama who spent the entire visit being perfectly charming while wearing her trousers tucked into her socks for fear of ticks and Lyme disease in their overgrown yard.

Nearing the end of the millennium, when I was a young professor in the New South of Civil Rights museums, evangelical mega-churches, and wall-to-wall white Republicans, I got word from my mother that Mildred had died. I sent my condolences to Tom, but I never heard back from him. He followed her soon after. My father died a couple of years after him, and then my mother moved to Pennsylvania at last. I have no idea who lives in the old farmhouse now, but I still think of Mildred piping about bird sightings and of Tom and his Bloody Marys, although I haven’t played a game of chess against anyone since.

And daughter, if you’re still reading, the moral of this story is this: always question the wisdom of your parents, especially concerning neighbors.