The Crooked Way Home, Volume II

About the Book

Sometimes telling stories is good therapy for the anxieties of life. Everything can be explored and explained. Yet some doubt and delusion always remains, as obsessional as ever, and equally capable of helping to destroy or fulfill one’s dreams.

Reaching back three broken generations to create a family and regional history uncovers half-breed ancestors and the orphan Marthe, who is adopted by the itinerants K.J. and El. At teenage, Marthe is abused by K.J. and runs away to meet, at age 21, Harold J. Lafayette, training to be a ship’s navigation officer. He was dubbed the Captain by his abusive stepfather, C.J. Lafayette, a crippled WWI veteran, once he learned that neither he nor Lewis, his natural son (raised by cousins), wanted to take over the derelict family farm in Central New York. Harold takes pregnant Marthe to meet his elderly parents anyway, and she loves the hilltop place. But revulsion grips the Captain, and he abruptly leaves her for Seattle, soon to be followed by Lewis. She’s taken in by the prominent James family of Syracuse, of which Cap'’ mother, Lillian "Sissie" Lafayette, nee James, is a rebellious daughter who prefers farm life to James luxury. A son, Junior, is born to Marthe. The Captain is reported missing at sea, and later the whole conceited James clan also sinks into oblivion, when their ocean liner founders off Tierra del Fuego. By a sentimental quirk of the James patriarch, Marthe become the sole heir.

After all this, she and Junior move out to the farm, joining C.J. and Sissie (“Gramma’n’Grampa” to Junior) and the older, eccentric hired man, Arthur, who is immediately befriended by Marthe. Police finally confirm the Captain’s death was a suicide. Junior grows up on the farm, with Arthur as foster father and Gramma’n’Grampa his senile mentors. Marthe grieves over the mythic Captain, but falls in love with caring, reliable Arthur, a foundling at birth who arrived unbidden on the farm as a youth, and has been there ever since. The hilltop farm is magical, and Junior shares Arthur’s obsession to explore its heritage. Junior’s relationship with his possessive mother, however, is difficult and haunting. Each year maverick Uncle Lewis visits by train from his salvage and boatyard business in Seattle.

At last Lewis takes Junior, now 18, out to Seattle; up the Great Lakes by sailboat, then an extraordinary bicycle tour west. Junior spends the next three years plumbing his father’s lonely Seattle life, his mansion and collections, to uncover and reach intimacy with him. Then word comes from home of his mother’s death, and he returns east. In his absence, not only his mother but Arthur and his Gramma’n’Grampa are dead and buried in a plot out in the woods. In homage to these exhausted parental lives, he resolves to restore the old place as a model historic farm of the 1870s. He courts and marries a local woman, Aurel, who shares his family ideals, and Uncle Lewis decides to come home, too.

The author/narrator concludes, “To love and marry once and forever, and raise a family on the ancestral land. That’s an old dream.”

About the Author

Gordon H. Hills was born, and raised in Central New York. He received a degree in Agriculture from Cornell University, but did not pursue this as a career. He served in the peacetime army, then went to Europe for almost three years on the GI Bill. For many years he held a variety of jobs before receiving a librarian’s degree. Then he worked in many types of libraries, becoming a specialist in Indian/Native library development, publishing a book on the subject. He and his wife moved to Hawaii in 1998, and there he continued enjoying favorite pastimes of his such as playing the cello, painting in oils, and working on his writing. He died of cancer in August, 2002. Cover photo: © 2002 Paul McCormick