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A Novel
by Ethan Canin
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The intern from The Speaker-Sentinel was named Trieste Millbury. Trieste and I have had our share of go-arounds since her arrival at the paper, and to tell you the truth I was wishing that afternoon that I worked at a bigger outfit—perhaps one where the publisher wouldn’t find himself at a funeral with the intern. But that’s the way The Speaker-Sentinel is: we like to send our own people on stories, even if the wire services have us bound and tied. We’re the last of the local dailies not to have sold to McClatchy or Gannett or Murdoch, and though we recently stopped publishing on Sundays we still put out a very good morning edition the other six days of the week, a paper that we write ourselves and have for a hundred and ten years. I’m proud of that.
Though I suspect that it, too, is coming to an end. That’s just the way it is up here in Carrol County. It’s been ten years now since the hardware store had the name Delaney & Sons on it and the bakery had the name Cleary Brothers, and fifteen since the Starbucks in Carrol Center convinced the descendants of Dutch root farmers to speak Italian at the cash register. Senator Bonwiller was the one who lured IBM up here in the first place, and once IBM arrived it wasn’t long before DuPont and Trane and then Siemens followed. And that was the beginning of the way things have turned out now, with our Crate & Barrel and our Lowe’s and the news of an Ikea opening by spring, all the way up here in what used to be lonely country. Plenty of people are grateful to Henry Bonwiller for that. And plenty are not.
Trieste Millbury’s parents, I think, are among the latter. She lives with them in the failed farmland ten miles to the north of us, in a trailer on the edge of a drained bog that was allowed to refill in the 1980s after the Wetlands Protection Bill went through—Senator Bonwiller’s doing, again. That part of the county isn’t as sophisticated as some of the areas to the south, which are dotted now with horse farms and gentlemen’s estates and carriage houses painted historic red. But even so, there aren’t many other trailers where the Millburys live. They’re educated people—Trieste’s father was once a chemist for DuPont—but Trieste, I believe, is the only one of them who goes to work in the morning.
Her job at the funeral was to help our reporter. The reporter was going to write the story, and Trieste was going to write the sidebar. Pick a subject, I told her when the committal was over, anything she wanted, and if she did it well I would run it Monday morning.
“I get a byline,” she said, “right, sir? Just checking.”
“If it’s good,” I said. “Yes, you do.”
The air must have been close to a hundred degrees, and we were making our way to the refreshments. My wife and my father had been at the service, too, but they’d already headed into the stone entrance-house to escape the heat. At the table, a caterer was tearing open the wrapped bottles of spring water, and Trieste took one for each of us.
“If what I write isn’t good, sir,” she said, handing me one, “I wouldn’t want the byline.”
“I suppose that’s true.”
She smiled. “I can tell some of these men are famous,” she went on. “But I don’t know who they are.”
“How can you tell they’re famous then?”
“By looking at them. They’re bigger than ordinary mortals.”
I took a drink. “Powerful men are just like everybody else,” I said. “They put on their pants one leg at a time.”
She smiled again, a habit of hers and a useful quality in a reporter. “Is that something your father used to say, sir? I think I saw him at the service, didn’t I?”
Excerpted from America America by Ethan Canin Copyright © 2008 by Ethan Canin. Excerpted by permission of Random House, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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