finding a hole in his boot, he plugged it with a scrap of rabbit fur. That night, after a long day of trapping, Benedict took off his boot to discover that the pressure and sweat from his foot had transformed the scrap into a stiff but malleable substance, one ideally suited – he would in time discover – for making men’s hats. Benedict spent the next few years experimenting with various techniques.
Zadoc Benedict, too, was an inventor.
Having perfected his hat-making procedure, Benedict opened his first hat factory. Within a generation a dozen more hat factories flourished in Bethel. At their peak just after the Civil War they pounded out over a million hats per year – including, it’s been said, the famous stovepipe worn by President Lincoln himself.
By the time you and your parents moved there, all but two or three of the hat factories had been abandoned or burned down or otherwise come to ruin. Over time the rest of them burned down, too. Your papa would take you and your brother to watch them burn. It was cheaper than going to the movies.
IN 1760, A year after the town was established, Captain Benjamin Hickok built his home at the southwest corner of Chestnut Street and Greenwood Avenue. The Hickok house doubled as a tavern and served as a command post for General Israel Putnam during the Revolutionary War. To its rear stood a carriage house that, two hundred and ten years later, its owners converted into a rental property. They painted the front door blue and laid a path of fieldstones leading up to it.
From the sidewalk across the street you watched the teacher walk down the fieldstone path. He entered the cottage and shut the blue door behind him. For a while you stood there, on the sidewalk, staring at the blue door, not sure what to do next. It was just like you: all initiative, no follow-through.
You heard a rumble of thunder. You had no umbrella. It started raining. You stood there with water dripping down your face. You were about to give up and go home when suddenly the blue door opened and the teacher stuck his head out.
Care to come in? he said.
A CAST IRON stove. A bed in the corner covered by a rainbow-shaded serape. Improvised shelves packed with all kinds of books. An unvarnished slab of wood mounted on some bricks in the center of the room served as a table, with various-sized cushions scattered around it for sitting. Everything neat, tidy, clean.
The teacher hung your wet jacket. He had you take off your wet sneakers and put them on the tiled apron in front of the stove. He offered you a cup of Chinese tea. The tea tasted and smelled like smoke from a burning hat factory. You asked for sugar. The teacher gave you honey. Seated on a cushion at the Japanese-style table, you took tentative sips from a pottery cup with a fish design and no handle.
The teacher wore sweatpants and a gray sweatshirt with the word OXFORD in blue across the chest. He sat across from you, speaking in a soft voice, asking you questions about your family, your mother and father. He was especially interested to learn about your father, having heard that he was an inventor.
What sort of things does your father invent? he asked.
You told him about the Color Coder, the Mercury Switch, the Shoe Sole Machine, the Optical Differential Thickness Measuring Instrument, the Induced Quadrature Field Motor, the Null Type Comparison Reflectometer, the Neutralized Cathode-Ray Deflection Tube. The teacher smiled.
He has his laboratory at the bottom of our driveway, you explained, in a converted barn. We call it the Building. The floors are all rotten. It’s full of mice and spiders and snakes. He doesn’t mind. In fact, my father sort of likes it. (You were careful not to say “my papa.”)
Sounds like a most interesting man.
He’s an anglophile. He was born in Italy, but he talks with an English accent.
Speaks, said the teacher. He speaks with an English accent.
You did your best to describe your mother, explaining that she was Italian, too, but that unlike your father, who spoke English better than Walter Cronkite, she had a heavy accent and coined her own distorted versions of common idiomatic expressions, turning “when worse comes to worst” into “bad that it goes,” and “don’t stand on ceremony” into “no make compliment,” and “I don’t give a damn” into “I no give a goop.” Some people find it charming, you said.
The teacher laughed and so did you.
You told the teacher about your grandmother, Nonnie, who had her own little room in a corner of the house (decorated with Japanese fans, smelling of lilac and mothballs), and the family dog, Pa’al (the apostrophe had been your idea), and how poorly behaved she was, how – to the amusement and horror of dinner guests – she’d climb on the dining room table after, and sometimes even during, the dessert course.
The teacher asked you about your brother. He wondered how you and George got along. You confessed that you fought a lot, you weren’t sure why, maybe because people were always comparing you or lumping you together – the Selgin Twins; the Selgin Boys – as if you were one and the same.
Which we aren’t, you said.
Of course you’re not, said the teacher.
You went on talking, with the teacher mostly asking questions and you answering them. Meanwhile the rain kept falling, pattering against the carriage house roof, dripping down from its eaves. There was a fancy wooden chessboard at the center of the table, its checkerboard pattern formed by alternating veneers of different woods. Seeing you admire it the teacher asked if you cared to play. You’d never played chess before.
It’s not hard, the teacher said. I’ll show you.
He showed you how to move the pieces. At first it seemed impossibly complicated, all those different pieces and so many ways to move them.
Take your time, the teacher instructed. This is one game that gets played between the moves.
By the third or fourth game it got easier, though it still took the teacher less than a dozen moves to checkmate your king. You played until it started to get dark outside and the rain fell less hard. It was time to go. The teacher let you borrow his umbrella.
As you stood ready to leave by the door, he said, I enjoyed our visit.
Me too, you said.
I’ll see what I can do about getting you into my class.
You hadn’t even asked.
THAT’S ALL YOU’D remember, that and the smell of the stove and candle smoke and smoky tea, and of all the books filling the teacher’s shelves – a musty, vanilla-and-mushroom smell. And the sound of rain falling as you played chess.
You’d remember too how, as you walked home that day, things were different. The houses, the church steeple, the gasoline pumps at the Sunoco station, the cars splashing through puddles, the streams of smoke rising from people’s chimneys – they all looked the same. The town was the same town you’d spent most of your life in, where you rode your bike and waited for the school bus and watched the hat factories burn down one by one. Nothing had changed, really. Yet nothing would ever be quite the same.
I’VE LIVED HERE FOR THREE YEARS NOW, SINCE I TOOK a tenure-track position at the state university where I teach writing. When I told them I was moving here, my friends predicted that I’d go crazy, that after thirty-five years in New York City life in a small southern town would be the end of me – and not just any small southern
