of Indian raids and settler counterraids resulted, culminating in a famous battle where white men’s scalped heads dotted a field like pumpkins. Then a military man known as Mad Anthony Wayne brought up a punishing brigade from Louisville, stunning twelve Indian tribes into submission. The 1795 Greenville Treaty between the Indians and the United States of America effectively ended Native American life in the area. A generation before, few Indians had seen a white man.
The tribes scattered. Seventeen days after the Greenville Treaty, the parcel of land on which Dayton was built was sold to four investors. The seller was a man named John Symmes, who by some wishful connivance had declared himself the land’s owner. The buyers knew a village would drive up the value of their investment, and announced that their land was available for settlement. A hypothetical village was named Dayton after one of the four investors, General Jonathan Dayton, who never set foot in the area but who had been, nineteen years earlier, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Maybe his name carried some status. The other three investors gave their names to three blazed trees.
North to south, the Stillwater River empties into the Miami River. Then the Mad River comes in, the three rivers together forming the Great Miami, a river which takes a meandering course to the Ohio River fifty miles south. The Miami River was named for a tribe of Indians; the Stillwater and the Mad, for the qualities of their flow. The surveyors who worked for Dayton and his partners marked their trees at the confluence of the Miami and the Mad. It was a rare settlement that didn’t owe its existence to water.
Dayton’s first settlers used poles to push their low-sided boats upriver from the Ohio. Rivers then were uncontrolled, wide in places and narrow in others. They had whirlpools and shallows and enough shoreline trees to sometimes meet and make a tunnel. The nineteen men and assorted women and children who made the journey to Dayton were dismayed to find, instead of the rough buildings they expected, nothing but three marked trees.
“What do you think?” Chad would bellow, his big-man tie swinging. He always wore a tie for this course, sensing that it added to the drama. He rehearsed his speeches, filling them with unexpected or irreverent facts that woke students up; his colleague Ramsey had acidly suggested Chad re-name the course “Dayton: A Celebration.” But Chad couldn’t help himself. “Would you have obeyed those three spots of paint? Would you have left your boat? What do you think of the people who did—were they determined? Docile?” Slight pause. “Where they desperate?”
You shouldn’t stay here, said the local Indians. Maybe the settlers didn’t want to believe this; maybe they thought that the Indians were up to their usual tricks. In fact, the Indians told the truth. This place won’t be good for you. It floods.
GENTIA, ONE OF the Gribbles’ neighbors, was telling Sharis about a day years before when she had met her husband’s boss. George was his own boss now: he owned a business that installed and serviced home alarm systems containing small generators. In case Consort crapped out—in case, say, the Dayton nuclear plant was bombed—not only would George’s alarm still function, but people’s electricity would function, too. A perfect product for uncertain times, Gentia said.
Gentia and Sharis were in the kitchen of Sharis’s house; Gentia sat, like Derk had, in the guest seat at the end of the blue table. Their kitchen was like an airport, Sharis often thought, visitors passing through.
“And I was so nervous,” Gentia said breathlessly, “because I’d never met anyone important, and I was hurrying along in my high-heeled shoes, and you know what George said to me? ‘You’re walking like a fat cow.’”
“You’re kidding,” Sharis said. George was not small himself.
“That’s what he said. And that was years ago, when I had a figure.”
Fat cow. Sharis would never repeat that line. But Gentia, Sharis noticed, repeated it gleefully, a fresh salvo of shots aimed at her husband. Gentia and George had been married for thirty years (Chad and Sharis had been at the anniversary party); they had two grown children, both unmarried.
“And you wonder why I want to put cyanide in his coffee. I bet Chad’s never like that, is he? Oh no.” Gentia’s voice was suddenly mocking, “Chad’s a gentleman. But you work. You bring in some cash. And back then I was nothing but a frau. I said to him once: ‘George, you’ve got to treat me with respect.’ You know what he said? ‘Gentia, respect is something you earn.’” Gentia smirked. “So now I’m earning it.”
Sharis sighed. Thirty years. She looked at George in the backyard helping Leon tie his shoelaces, and tried to imagine him saying such horrible things. Squatting as he was, George was the shape of an egg. Of course, you didn’t know what Gentia had said back, or said before. You never really knew what went on in a family. Belatedly, Gentia’s last comment sunk in. “You’re earning it?” Sharis asked.
“I’m bringing in the big bucks, baby. I’m selling alarms! You know me, aren’t I a natural salesperson? Everybody wants a system. You know who thought up that antibomb guarantee?” Gentia pointed elaborately to herself. “I know what people want. I do.”
Sharis nodded. There was something spookily compelling about Gentia, with her sureness and big jewelry and her happy wallowing in the muddy puddle of her marriage. She threw lots of parties, inviting Sharis and Chad as the young people.
“Listen, it’s an ill wind that blows nobody good. This conflict is a gold mine for us. I tell George every night: I love the threat of war.”
CHAD WAS SCHEDULED for his Dayton course again this fall. He was adding some information on geography: explaining the three glaciations that, pushing down from Ohio’s northwest corner, had moved like snowplows across the state, flattening the ground and pushing ahead ridges of gravel and stone. The final glaciation, the Wisconsin, occurred some fourteen thousand years ago. The ridges of stone that had been the glaciers’ leading edge were now western Ohio’s modest version of hills. The northwest corner of Ohio had been pressed flat. The glacial melt on its surface formed an ur–Great Lake that stretched a hundred miles west of Lake Erie’s current border, and remains of this lake lived on for thousands of years as the Great Black Swamp. The Great Black Swamp was drained in the late 1800s to provide land for farming. The glacial melt that sank into the earth became the aquifer. Thanks to the glaciers’ heavy scraping, no caves of significance opened to the surface of western Ohio; there were, however, huge caverns filled with water far underground.
Chad toyed with the idea, that year, of having Dayton speak in the first person. If Dayton could talk—if any loke could talk—what would it say? A novel point of view to pique his students’ interest. Hi, I’m Dayton. I’m glad you’re studying me this year!
Maybe not. Ramsey would have a field day.
But words came to Chad unbidden, late one night when he was standing in the kitchen eating ice cream straight from the container. Later he couldn’t fall asleep for hours, because he’d thought he was a Grid supporter. I’ll test it on Sharis, he thought. Because she was from one of the reclaimed towns. Because she’d been there at the Gridding. But for years she hadn’t spoken about that time, and Chad wavered, worried that his words would stir up some silt or sludge inside her.
Still, he needed her opinion. Sharis didn’t have Chad’s education (Chad had earned his doctorate), but he never doubted that Sharis was as smart as he was. Maybe smarter. Everything she saw or heard, she remembered. The next day he presented his class in the basement, Sharis sitting in the big red leather chair Chad had moved from his parents’ house, Chad pacing in front of her. They’d done tests of Chad’s lectures before. Almost always, Sharis said “Very good!” or “I get it, but …” and produced some minor suggestion.
Chad
