The Duration Read online

  “I think that’s why there is so much plastic surgery, so many nose jobs and fake boobs,” I said. “That’s why everyone gets divorced in their forties, why this house over here looks nothing like the one next to it, why there are so many nice cars on lease. A lot of these people, they’re totally focused on tomorrow. There’s no reckoning. Nothing to bear. Tomorrow’s gonna be great. Tomorrow’s their day.”

  Kelly’s uncle looked at me with disbelief.

  “Yeah,” he said, eventually. “That’s exactly the point.”

  So, right. California. Head out there, forget all this stuff. Call it amnesia and hope that it sticks.

  Until then, I’m bombing around the Berkshires on a road bike leased at favorable terms from Asgard. The truck is pretty beat up, still in the shop, and I don’t have money to waste getting it out, but the weather is good, though it rains for some stretch of nearly every day. People wave at me, even people who know about what happened. Sometimes they look a little wary, but it’s late spring and folks seem willing to forgive. They’re believers in redemption, or something. We’re all in it together. I’m probably not the first one to go around the bend. So I wave back, and keep on pedaling. I’m sorry for everything. Sorry to everyone. The other day I went to St. Barney’s and prayed.

  Beyond that, I’m getting a lot of hill work in. Sometimes in the evening I ride up the curving road toward Richmond and stop at the overlook, stare down at Normanton Bowl, like that night in March when Chick fell asleep on the way back from the Heirloom, except that then the Bowl was frozen and now it’s a blue plate in a green lawn. I count the boats. There’s a lot of them, more each day. Nearby, a huge rock sticks out over the road, and years ago someone painted it to look like a shark. It’s a rock shark. Nobody messes with it. The sun sinks low and sometimes I can see the moon come out over the eastern hills. Beneath me, the woods hum. I stand on the retaining wall and scan out as far as I can, past the Bowl and Fleur-de-Lys and Gable, but the hills always meet the sky no matter where I look. I went to the Midwest once, to a wedding on the edge of the plains outside of Chicago, a green summer day, the air humid and glowing. No hills on the horizon, just flatland that rolled out forever. It spooked the hell out of me.

  I talk to Chickie a fair amount these days, when I’m asleep but when I’m awake too. Sometimes I don’t even think he’s gone. I didn’t go to the funeral, being otherwise obliged, but I heard it was solid. His mom had him cremated and took his ashes back to Florida with her, which I’m sure he would have appreciated not at all. I’m sure he would have wanted to stay here. It’s okay, though. It’s like Jimmer was saying with graves and markers and cognitive ability or whatever. I know where to find Chick when I need him. Just last night, for example, he and I went Hill-to-Bowl, cruising down Main to Walker toward 183, he was ahead of me and the rough road was making our tires bounce and our cheeks vibrate. We turned off into the marshland by Stonover and the fireflies rose out of the night, blinking lazily in the heavy air, and the pavement got smooth and I caught up to him almost.

  “Guy,” I called out into the space ahead of me. “That time at the quarry. Remember? With Shaunda and them?”

  He cocked his head like he was waiting for the question.

  I pumped my pedals and came up behind him.

  “Were you really drowning?”

  It was something I’d always wondered about. There were a whole lot of things I’d always wondered about.

  I couldn’t see Chick’s face but I feel like he grinned. A turn or two later, he started laughing. Happily, quietly.

  And then I was laughing too.

  Laughing as if it mattered at all. What really happened. The actual truth!

  This tumbling, star-crossed parish, this lurid slab, all the great beasts that swam beneath her swells and under the feet of her citizens. Mist and shadows. The ghosts of the natives. Things you felt but didn’t know. Things you didn’t know you knew until after. They all rose up around me and pushed me forward, pushed me along through the dark county, the road uncoiling, the white moon high, until I was just even with my friend.

  Thanks

  Ben LeRoy, Ashley Myers, Tyrus Books, and F+W Media. Lauren Abramo at Dystel & Goderich Literary Management. Jim Ruland. John Leary, Pia Ehrhardt, Ron Currie Jr., and Tom O’Keefe. Roy Kesey, Pasha Malla, Pamela Erens, Marc Strange, Mark Keats, Peter FitzGerald, Matt Tannenbaum, Ben Marlowe and Eileen Donovan Kranz. Kate McKean, Mark Weinstein, Alexis Hurley, Rhonda Hayes and Clyde Taylor. Bob Schneider. Pete, Chris, Tom and Ted. Jayme, Brian, Steve, Art and Setti. Missy, Sonja, Sonia and Nichole. Matt Lenehan. Joe Malossini. Turney Duff. Dotch, Keyes, Mullen, Weave, Richard, Kev, Ian and Pete A. Sheesh and the Deacon. David, Mary, John, Frederick, Katie (always), Matthew, Bridget and Timmy. Schermerhorn Park. The Millionaires. The Zoetrope writing community. Maryjane and Jerry Fromm. Katie, Rick, Trey, and Kai Shinholster. Leo, Eliza and Jenny.

  The Duration was partly inspired by the legend of Columbus, a circus elephant who died while touring the Berkshires in 1851 and is supposedly buried in the woods on the south side of Lenox, Massachusetts. His remains have never been found.

  Reprinted with permission from “Where Do Elephants Go to Die?” by Derek Gentile, 2004. The Berkshire Eagle, B1 & B4. 2004 by the Berkshire Eagle.

  Where Do Elephants Go to Die?

  Legend says pachyderm’s grave in Lenox

  By Derek Gentile

  Berkshire Eagle Staff

  Lenox—The elephant was tired. He had walked almost 15 miles on a leg that was badly injured, possibly broken. His breathing was coming in long, heaving wheezes, like a bellows.

  Suddenly, despite entreaties from his handler, Columbus the elephant veered off the road, stumbled a few yards into a nearby shed, and collapsed. A week later, he was dead, and was buried a few dozen yards from where he died. Somewhere in Lenox.

  That’s the story. It is also the legend.

  The death of Columbus occurred in October 1851 and was written about in a number of publications. This year, Margaret Biron, a teacher at Lenox Memorial Middle School, assigned the story as an extra-credit research project for her social studies class.

  “It’s an interesting story,” said Biron. “I’m not sure how true it is, but I thought it would be a good project for the students.”

  The story of how Columbus died began in Adams. According to Adams historian Eugene Michalenko, the 33-year-old male Indian elephant had been displayed in North Adams the day before he was injured.

  The elephant came to America in 1818. At the time he was in the Berkshires, Columbus was apparently part of a traveling menagerie that also included a rhinoceros, a hippopotamus, lions, tigers and cougars.

  Columbus, however, was one of the stars of the show, so the story goes. His handler, a man named Raymond (no one is sure if this was his first or last name, or if he was the elephant’s owner, James Raymond), would attach a “salon car” to the elephant’s back and allow children to ride him a short distance.

  The kids loved it. It is unlikely that Raymond mentioned to anyone attending his shows that Columbus had a bit of a temper and, according to the Adams Historical Society Newsletter had, over the previous 15 years, killed four people.

  The North Adams show had apparently gone well. Columbus and the rest of the menagerie were to travel to Stockbridge the next day, to set up the exhibition in a field in that town. The trip was about 24 miles, a good day’s hike.

  That October day, (the date is not certain) the troupe traveled down Route 8 and walked through the center of Adams. Meandering down Park Street, the elephant came to a bridge at the intersection of Park and Center streets, which spanned the south branch of the Hoosic River. The bridge is now made up steel and cement but then, said Michalenko, it was made of wood, “and probably not that sturdy.”

  It wasn’t. Columbus, who weighed about 10,000 pounds according to the menagerie’s handbill, got about a third of the way across and the bridge collapsed, dropping the elephant about 20 feet
onto the rocks on the west side of the river. There was a “mighty crash,” according to the Berkshire Hills Monthly, an historical magazine published at the turn of the 20th century.

  Accounts differ as to the nature of the elephant’s injuries. Judy Peters, an historian from Lenox, recalled that she had heard the elephant had injured one of his legs. The Berkshire Hills Monthly speculated the animal had “internal injuries.” Perhaps it was a little of both.

  But Raymond had a schedule to keep. He “cajoled” Columbus out of the riverbed and got him walking south again. It’s unlikely that Raymond used sweet reason to get Columbus out of the riverbed. What is more probable is that he used a quirt or a whip or, more probably, a training hook -- a metal or wooden rod two or more feet long with a sharp hook at the end.

  Columbus rose awkwardly out of the riverbed. With his handler leading him, he headed south.

  Several hours later, Columbus made it through the center of Lenox, moving slower and slower, despite the physical entreaties of his handler. Columbus continued south, along what is now Old Stockbridge Road. Route 7 would not be built for decades, and Old Stockbridge Road was the main road to Stockbridge in 1851.

  But it was tough going. About two miles from the center of town, Columbus stumbled off to the side of the road. There was a shed a few yards off the road. The elephant headed for the tiny structure and once inside, he collapsed. No further entreaties by Raymond would get him up.

  The elephant was in obvious pain. According to The Pittsfield Sun, a weekly newspaper, “his groans and cries could be heard from an immense distance.”

  But Columbus did not die right away. The curious came from miles around to see the gigantic creature. Columbus lay in the shed for about a week before finally expiring. He was dragged a short ways away from the shed and buried.

  But exactly where all this happened is something of a mystery. An Eagle account of the event, written by columnist Dick Happel in 1951, suggests the shed was on the former Bishop estate. The shed was apparently located “across the road from the entrance to Elm Court.”

  The Bishop estate was cut up into lots for single-family homes many years ago. And any sheds or structures that might have housed a sick elephant are long gone. Understandably, none of the current residents of that portion of the road know much about it.

  “I’ve never heard that,” said Coreen Nejame, who lives at 238 Old Stockbridge Road, and whose land is not quite opposite the entrance to Elm Court. “That’s an interesting story.”

  “That’s interesting, but I don’t know anything about it,” said Lucille Friedson, who, with her husband, Belvin, owns property at 245 Old Stockbridge Road.

  Peters, however, recalled that years ago she spoke with the late May Butler, a longtime resident. Butler’s father was a superintendent at the Bishop estate and he apparently knew where Columbus was laid to rest. Peters said Butler described the elephant grave as being “near the entrance to Elm Court, across the street.”

  One of the people Butler’s father showed the grave to was, according to Peters, the late Dick Happel. But his column about Columbus did not specify exactly where the grave was.

  At one point, there was speculation that the stuffed body of Columbus was somewhere at Williams College. This was probably generated when it was discovered that the elephant’s owner, a man named James Raymond of Carmel, N.Y., sold the body to the Williams College Lyceum of Natural History.

  But, at five tons, Columbus was so large that there were no local taxidermists available to stuff and mount him. So the lyceum officials decided to wait a few years until the body decomposed.

  They waited six years, according to this story. It wasn’t enough. A group from the college dug up the body, but, to put this politely, it had not decomposed sufficiently. Columbus was reinterred, and the lyceum officials vowed to return in another few years. But the lyceum went out of existence in 1871. Columbus was never stuffed.

  “I’m almost sure he never went to Williams,” said Michalenko. “He’s still somewhere down in Lenox.”

  About a week ago, a reporter drove slowly along Old Stockbridge Road, a copy of Happel’s column in hand. There was the entrance to Elm Court. There was the Friedman parcel, and there, slightly to the north and across the street from Elm Court, is the Nejame parcel.

  Coreen Nejame graciously allowed access to the parcel she and her husband own.

  But, besides a very nice home, there’s really nothing there. No shed, no huge mound of dark grass that might conceal a mighty body, no rusty training hook hidden under a bush, nothing. The next parcel is heavily wooded, with old growth. Wherever Columbus is, he may be hidden forever now.

  And there is a postscript. Owner Raymond sued the town of Adams for a “defective” bridge. (Adams officials countered that the bridge was fine for people, wagons and most animals, except elephants.) Raymond sought $20,000. The case was settled out of court for about $1,500.

  About the Author

  Author photo by Jen Fromm

  Dave Fromm is an attorney and the author of the memoir Expatriate Games: My Season of Misadventures in Czech Semi-Pro Basketball (Skyhorse, 2008). He lives with his wife and children in western Massachusetts. This is his first novel.