“Nathan,” Jacob says. He sits down across from me. Alan is in the bathroom.

“Jacob, hi.”

“How are you enjoying your holiday?” he asks. His accent is thick, much thicker than his wife’s.

“I’m enjoying it. I love it here.”

“It’s quiet. Very quiet.”

“I like quiet.”

“My wife says you’re writing a novel.”

I freeze for a half second, studying his tone for any malice or suspicion

“What is it about? Your book.”

“It’s about Mexico. About the drug cartels there. About violence.”

He nods. “So, you come to Greece to write about Mexico.”

I laugh. “Yes, basically.”

He smiles. It’s a warm, generous smile.

“Do you want a shot with me?” he asks.

“Sure.”

He goes to the bar and comes back with two shots of souma.

“From my private collection,” he says, smiling. He raises the glass. “Yammas, Nathan. To your book.”

“Thank you, Jacob.”

　

~

　

This is not my first village. But the others, those of my childhood, no longer exist. They are on the maps still, of course, names unchanged. Medaryville. Shawano. Arcadia. But they exist now only as memories and in stories and in photographs. They have been eradicated, homogenized, assimilated. And those of us who remember them as they once were continue our slow, inevitable march.

It’s a brisk Sunday morning. A fierce wind drives small clouds rapidly over the sea. It rained last night, and the air is still lush and moist. I am on the roof again, having my morning coffee with a cigarette. Behind me, at the village‘s apex, church bells resound. The loudspeakers that are situated around the village crackle to life. A stern tenor blares forth, incanting in Greek. There’s a familiar rhythm to his voice, even if I can’t understand the words: they contain the reverent intonation of faith. There is a hint of fear in the orderly cadences, too. We structure things at the smallest level because, as systems get bigger, they begin to escape us.

I sit down, watch the clouds, listen to the hymns.

~

What I remember most of the first village in my life are the drives. I was seven at the time, and my father had taken a position as interim pastor at a church in the village of Medaryville, about an hour and a half south of our home; my sister had just been born, my mother was out of work, and we needed every dollar we could get.

Most Sundays my father and I would leave before dawn and drive out of the linear, rigid sprawl of our Chicago suburb into the haunting, fallow fields of Indiana’s countryside. It was winter. I remember drifting in and out of sleep while the febrile sky slowly grew over expanses of withered corn husks. We drove through other, nameless villages, their brick downtowns passing in less than a minute. Sometimes we stopped in one of them, at a little café near a railroad crossing, and my father drank black coffee while I ate eggs and thick pieces of bacon.

Medaryville was, for a century, as the name suggests, a dairy community. But in the 1980’s a dairy conglomerate finally arrived and forced most of the old farmers to sell their operations; if they didn’t, they were simply run out of business. The minute the conglomerate came to town, every cow became a depreciating asset. Only most of the farmers didn’t realize it.

By the time my father became pastor, most of Medaryville’s younger families had fled in search of better fortunes. Those that remained were old, or infirm. Most Sundays there were no more than a few dozen congregants. It was rare if any of them were under fifty. They would sit stoically and listen to my father’s sermons - in those days, perhaps out of necessity, they were very often sermons of resurrection and hope. New testament sermons. It makes sense. They needed something hopeful; even their hymns sounded like dirges.

I was young, of course. And as such, most of my impressions are at once broad and fractured: the fire of dawn over the barren fields; the smell of burning wax whenever we first walked into the church; the throb and thrum of the heaters as they slowly warmed the nave. But what I remember most vividly is the small closet where my father put on his robes every Sunday morning. They were stained a sickly off-white from years of wear. The room, which had only one murky window, was all dark stained wood, and smelled, viscerally, of stale coffee. There are still moments when, emptying a cup of old coffee, I find myself, for a half second, back in that small room, watching my father slip into his robes, sipping his coffee, reading over his sermon while in the other room a piano in dire need of tuning played melancholy old world hymns.

Dad stayed with the congregation for only a year. The job exhausted him. He made the three hour commute not just Sundays, but Wednesdays, too - and he almost always made that one alone. After the cost of gas and the beating our already-run-down Volvo took, he was barely making a profit. But despite the logic of leaving, it was an extraordinarily difficult decision for him: whether to take on this anonymous, dying congregation, or whether to move on.

“Can you ask them for more money?” I remember my mother asking.

“It’s not their fault,” he said. “There’s so few of them. Who would want to take on this congregation? I can’t ask for more. They don’t have it. They can barely pay me what they do. If I leave, I don‘t know who they‘ll find.”

He spent two months mulling it over. It was summer by then, and my younger brother starting making the Sunday trips with us. On the drive home we often stopped at a derelict wildlife preserve, an overgrown swath of forest long abandoned by the state. We spent those afternoons fishing, catching a half dozen perch, if we were lucky, to bring home and fry for dinner.

In September the church had a potluck. Dad had already decided that, after Christmas, he was going to leave, but he hadn‘t yet told the congregation. The potluck was in the church basement, which smelled like a century worth of accumulated grease and coffee grounds. The old ladies brought casseroles and home-pickled vegetables and jello desserts. Someone made a big bowl of punch. The gathering was stodgy, redolent of decay and near-death. The ladies wore their end-of-summer sun dresses, ancient musty things that looked like bad kitchen wall papering: faded canaries and sunflowers and frilled hems. Most of the men wore overalls. Dad talked to everyone, laughed a lot. He was great with them; he grew up with people like this: dairy farmers, men who worked six days a week, men who built tractors as a hobby, women who could whip up the best dessert you’ve ever tasted on the fly. It was these people that made his decision so difficult. The job was impractical, it paid too little, it required too much. But these were his people. They were his grandparents, his cousins, his aunts and uncles. He’d grown up with them. Abandoning them, even if it was the only logical decision, would deeply wound his sense of community - which, as any Midwesterner knows, is perhaps a Midwestern boy’s basest instinct.

At the end of the meal, a few of the women came to the front of the room and they called my father up. Looking back he wasn’t that much older than I am now, still a young man. There must have been moments when he looked at me, my brother, our baby sister, and thought: where did you come from? in surprise and awe and a bit of horror.

“We just wanted to thank you, so much, for all that you’ve done,” one of the women said, a frail Germanic crone with an oblong, deeply pruned face. “It means so much to have someone work so hard for such a little place like this.” My father smiled perhaps a little too widely, trying to stave off the guilt, the inveterate pain of abandonment. The women presented him with a check - “Not much,” they’d said, “but we scraped together what we could, as a show of gratitude.” My father thanked them, hugged both of them. On the drive home we stopped at the wildlife preserve. I baited my line and my father sat on the trunk of our car staring out over the water. When I looked back I realized he was crying. He’d hung his head, and tears, a lot of them, were falling around his feet, sticking like spit in the hard, dry earth. I’d only seen him cry once before, when his grandmother had died - his grandmother who’d been married in a church like Medaryville‘s, who’d kept a cellar of pickled onions and beats and cucumbers, who made strawberry rhubarb pie every time we visited because it was my father’s favorite. This wasn’t quiet crying either. It was violent, a primal sobbing that shook his whole body. I had no idea what to do. For a time I stood at the edge of the lake, listening to the cicadas and the crickets, kicking at the earth. But he didn’t let up. So finally I went over and sat on the tailgate beside him, and doing the only thing I could think to do, put my arm around him. This seemed to calm him, and he laughed a snotty laugh and wiped his eyes.

“Ah, Christ, Nate, I’m sorry.”

“It’s ok, Dad.”

“They’re good people,” he said. “They’re good people. I wish I could do better for them.”

“You’re doing your best.”

He laughed again. “You think so?”

“I do.”

The next week, at the beginning of the service, my father informed the congregation that he would be leaving after Christmas. Our whole family made the trip that Sunday. The announcement was brief; he cited my baby sister, a need to be closer to family. He didn’t mention money; he didn’t need to. Most of the congregants took the news as stoically as they took everything else - I remember turning to look from our pew at the front of the room, my mother turning me back around - but a few of them nodded in a sort of understanding reproach: yes, everyone leaves, is what they seemed to be saying.

My last memory of Medaryville comes from that October. The church had organized their annual fall festival, replete with square dance. They’d rented out the old armory gym, which had mostly fallen into disuse because the local high school had contracted. The gym was musty and dusty; it’s floorboards were warped, and at times broken. But the residents did what they could. They brought in a small bluegrass band and they decorated the gym with bales of hay, pumpkins, oversized gourds. There was no animosity towards us, and my brother and I danced with the old ladies, and we danced with their granddaughters that had come down for the night. I remember feeling strangely punchdrunk, dancing around the derelict old armory with nameless blonde girls in white skirts and stockings. I didn’t understand, couldn’t possibly have understood, that this was already anachronistic.

I asked my father about Medaryville some years ago. It was summer. We were in the backyard of our suburban Philadelphia home, in the long shadow of a plum tree my brother had lovingly planted before he lost his way in pills, theft, bad women. We threw a baseball back and forth in the evening warmth. The grass was long and fecund and damp. We were both barefoot.

We’d been in Philadelphia a decade then. Both of us had smoothed out our Midwestern accents during that decade, shortening our vowels, eradicating the laconic lilt of the farmlands - though it still rears its head every once in a while, a cultural palimpsest, just legible beneath all the layers accumulated above it. My accent comes out most obviously, I am told, when I say the word milk; it emerges melk.

“Hey Dad, do you remember Medaryville?” I asked.

He laughed and then threw a wobbling knuckleball. “Oh God, I hadn’t thought about that place in ages.” He shook his head, maybe not quite believing that it had been a part of the same life he was still living. “I do remember it. What a strange, sad place. You probably don’t remember, but the people there, God. There were a lot of abnormalities, a lot of inbreeding. It was like something out of a Flannery O’Conner story.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. You were probably too young to realize it. A very strange place. I wonder if it’s even there anymore. It was almost dead already.”

And that was the end of it. We went on throwing the baseball until dusk overtook us. We haven’t talked about Medaryville since.


~

My first sexual encounter was in the basement of a village church. I was nine or ten at the time, and my family had come up to the Wisconsin Northwoods for a wedding. Who was getting married, I don’t remember - a distant relation, probably; a second cousin of my father’s, if I had to guess - but my father had been asked to preside over the wedding. It was held at my great-grandparent’s church, outside the village of Shawano. The church is still there, at a crossroads, nestled in a hollow carved some millennia ago by the Wisconsin glacier. It’s small and white washed. It’s surrounded, on all sides, by rumpled farm land, by faded barns, by once grand wooden homes augmented by vinyl siding, by grain silos reaching like severed fingers towards the vast sky.

The service was in the early afternoon. Afterwards, while the bridal party and their families posed for pictures, my cousin, Kate, and I snuck away from an impromptu game of football that had formed on the field behind the church. It was a hot, dusty day, mid-July. The air was thick and sticky with pollen. I wore a miniature suit, replete with clip-on-tie. She wore a purple dress, and an iris behind her ear; she’d been a flower girl. We sought refuge from the heat and the discomfort of our formalwear in the church’s basement. It was cool down there, and dark. It stank of mold and linoleum. The lights were off, and daylight filtered through small, rectangular windows, refracted by a layer of dust and dead insects. We found our way into the coat closet, where most of the men had left their suit jackets, and where the women had deposited their purses. She found a lighter in someone’s purse. We could hear footsteps above us, muffled by the church’s carpeting, the scampering of children less adventurous than we. She found a candle and lit it and turned off the lights. We sat beneath the coats, smelling the cologne and odors of our fathers and uncles, our mixed blood.

“Has anyone ever touched your penis?” she asked.

“No,” I blurted out in a desultory tone that seemed to asseverate: what a preposterous question!

“No one?”

“No one.” Then, catching on (I was an awkward child with big glasses, and was always very slow at noticing girl‘s cues; this awkwardness, this social illiteracy, would haunt me long into adolescence, and sabotage many an evening with a pretty girl at a high school party), I asked the only natural follow up question. “Has anyone touched your vagina?”

“No.”

We sat in this silence of negation, breathing heavily with curiosity, with the first intimation of serious desire, its mysterious chancels, its resistances and thrusts and games.

“Well, I’d touch your penis if you touched my vagina,” she finally said, confidently, matter-of-factly, like a businessman making a very fair barter. I did the only thing I could: accepted. Then, in equally blunt fashion, she took down my pants, and for a few minutes, she fondled my penis. It tickled, mostly. “Ok,” she said. “Now you.” So, taking strength from her confidence, I lifted up her skirt and pulled down her flowered, cotton panties. I thought it looked like a coin slot.

“What do I do?” I asked.

She took my finger and ran it along the small opening, back and forth. She removed her hand and I kept going like that for a few minutes. The candle flickered and cast about its inconsistent light, its vestigial shadows. The footsteps started and stopped above us. The moisture surprised me.

“What does it feel like?” I asked.

“It feels good. It tickles. Like a good tickle.”

We both laughed. Eventually I stopped and we sat there in the frail light, the subterranean cool.

“Do you think we should kiss?” she asked.

“I’ve never kissed anyone.”

“Me either.”

So we kissed, or what we thought was kissing. I remember feeling very mature, like I was being indoctrinated into some secret ritual of adulthood, one of those shibboleths that would someday help answer the questions that were already fully formed in my young mind: why are we here, what happens when we die, what is love, does God exist? I assumed, in some abstract sense, that there was a word out there, waiting to be discovered, a word that would answer these questions - and that being an adult was finding this word. No word came to me in that closet, of course. But it seemed, at the time, like I’d taken my first real step towards finding it.

Eventually we returned to the outside world. No one had noticed our absence. The reception was held in a barn on the old family farm. It had been filled with tables and chairs. A bandstand had been erected, and a polka band played through the night. Our parents got very drunk and danced wildly. I watched them with a furtive satisfaction. I danced a polka with my grandmother. We all did the chicken dance. The band rolled out the barrel. Kate and I danced, too, in our facsimile of adult clothes, and people watched us and took photos and remarked about how adorable we looked. At some point, a deep and ineffable tiredness took hold of me. Kids were asleep all over the great space, flopped under tables, or in corners. I fell asleep curled up beside my grandmother.

We still visit Shawano every summer, although last year I didn’t go, choosing, instead, to drive south with Susanna, through the tobacco fields and deadwood swamps of South Carolina. But I’ve been able to witness Shawano’s incremental transformation - the preponderance of new homes being carved from the woods around the lake, the slow dissolution of downtown. A few years ago, a new Wal-Mart opened on the fringes of town. That fringe, however, grows further afield with each construction season. The hallmarks of the bloated American empire are slowly seeping in: TGIFriday’s, Perkins, the fast food joints and the monolithic hardware stores and the multiplex cinema. The roads leading into Shawano now resemble the roads leading into almost any other American town: a dissembled stretch of homogenous, drab structures, their brands easily recognizable, built to last two, maybe three decades. That sepulchral sea of concrete and blanched placards, delineated by stoplights and traversed by taillights.

A new casino opened three summers ago; the state government promised it would provide employment for those being exsanguinated by the farming industry’s continued hemorrhaging. One of my uncles got a job there. He’d been a dairy farmer all his life. They started him at minimum wage, but he gets a twenty-three cent raise every year. On his days off, it’s not uncommon to find him at the slots, plunging away an hour of wages in minutes.

That was the same summer Shawano’s drive-in movie theater closed. It’s still there, though most of the screen has been torn to shreds by the August thunderheads, and the speaker spindles stand like rusted headstones amidst grasses grown wild. When I was a kid, you could catch a double feature for six dollars a car. We’d go with our cousins, all crammed into the back of their mini-van. Our parents would bring coolers of beer. We’d fall asleep in lawn chairs, or wrapped in sleeping bags in the back of the van, three of us entwined in one cocoon, the voices on screen talking wordlessly, fireflies blinking in the trees like ephemeral stars.

There are still shadows of that childhood Shawano, though. It’s as if Monet’s water lilies had been stenciled over by the McDonald‘s arch logo - but if, in places, the stenciling had been done hastily, poorly, and, in glimpses, there were still lush strokes of beauty. The ice cream stand is still there, on the road leading north, across from the ruins of the drive-in theater. If you search hard enough, there are still pick up trucks parked at roadside, selling bed loads of sweet corn, paper bags of tomatoes and wax beans. The town bakery still opens, although now only on Saturdays and Sundays. And the VFW hall still does its Friday night fish fry during summer, although that season seems to shorten every year.

Perhaps most poignantly, for me, is our family jewelry store. It’s been open on Shawano’s main street since 1947, when my father’s uncle came home from the war and opened it. And it’s still there, a block from the railroad tracks that are no longer in service. But many of its neighbors - the department store, the butcher, the tailor - have closed. Their store fronts either stand vacant, or have been occupied by national chains. There’s a Starbucks where the bank used to be, and it does brisk business. One of my distant, older cousins - the kind of cousin I always just called ‘uncle’ growing up, because it was easier - runs the business now. But he’s fallen into some trouble related to a few drunk driving charges. He’s trying to get his jail time reduced to weekends only, so that he can keep the store open. If he can’t, he’s not sure what he’ll do.

Those charges stem from the one local business that still seems to be doing all right in Northern Wisconsin: the roadside bars that emerge from the dense forests like oasis of neon light and bad 1980’s hair band music. I sometimes find myself driving aimlessly through these forests late into the night, my windows down. I stop at some of the bars, park amongst the pick ups and dusters. The interiors are usually small, draped in Packers’ memorabilia, stained by decades of smoke. People are often singing karaoke. I usually sit at the end of the bar, alone, eliciting suspicious stares from the barrel bellied men, the slag faced women. I want to say to them: I have your blood in me; your great grandfather probably worked in the paper mill with mine. But it wouldn’t be much use. Because I am only visiting; because I can leave. So I watch while they sing rock anthems and country ballads. Most sing sincerely, deeply, as if their performance were more than it were, and I’m moved by the honesty, the vivacity, the dedication to such a silly task. I wish I could sing like they do, even when I’m alone.

Sometimes I’ll think of my cousin, the one I unwittingly fingered all those years ago. She has had a difficult life. She dropped out of high school when she was seventeen, and lived in a trailer with a much older man. He was a Menominee Indian, from the reservation half an hour north of Shawano. At some point she got pregnant, and the Indian left shortly thereafter. She went through with the pregnancy, but put the child up for adoption. A series of bad relationships with older men followed, a drunk driving charge of her own. She and her mother had a falling out after she ended a second pregnancy. A third one soon followed, and she saw this one through and kept the baby, a boy. The last I heard she was living in a motor home thirty minutes from Shawano with a friend and her son, and working at Costco. I haven’t seen her in a decade, and truthfully, if I ran into her at one of these bars, I don’t think I would recognize her. Then again, maybe if I saw her, something inveterate would be triggered, some faint recognition: the same pair of eyes I looked into by candlelight in the coat closet of my great-grandfather’s church. And maybe I’d buy her a beer, and we’d talk, haltingly, about our lives, and both wonder at how thoroughly we’ve diverged from that one transgression all those years ago. Or maybe she wouldn’t even remember at all.