The Risk Pool

been drunkards and fornicators and welfare recipients. They had been strong, earnest, God-fearing men and women who knew adversity, self-sacrifice and hard times. And when they’d won their battle with the wilderness and the wild heathens who had roamed the forest, these men begat scholars—men of intellectual courage and wisdom like her father, who had bequeathed to subsequent generations the gift of memory, the knowledge of great times and deeds.
    If Mohawk could just be introduced to her father, Mrs. Ward felt certain, then the whole community would rediscover the pride that had lain dormant for so long. In the beginning she had doubted she would be able to go through with it—sharing her father with the world, that is. But then she realized that he was large, that he contained multitudes. And again he whispered in her ear, confirmed the wisdom of the course she had chosen. Use me, he had bravely insisted, and so she would. Because it wasn’t just Mohawk, after all. There were towns all over the nation that would benefit. Didn’t most Americans, even those now living—if you could call it living—in the hateful big cities, didn’t they have their roots in places like the young Mohawk? Wouldn’t all Americans answer the call to remember if sufficiently motivated?
    She was thinking best seller. And who could blame her? After all, she was broke. As stony as stony could be. It was Tria who confirmed this later, when my work on the history was done, after Wussy, whose travels were wide and contacts myriad, came into Mike’s one afternoon and wanted to know what the hell Jack Ward’s daughter wanted with working as a cocktail waitress in Amsterdam. I said I was sure I didn’t know. He’d probably heard wrong. But I knew he hadn’t. Unlike just about everybody in Mohawk, Wussy’s information was usually correct. Besides, as Tria herself had observed, some things were too terrible to be anything but true.
    The night I drove to Amsterdam I passed the fairgrounds and saw the first tent going up. Summer had flown. Fourth of July, Mohawk Fair, Eat the Bird, and Winter. I thought of my own grandfather and felt a degree of sympathy for Mrs. Ward’s warped nostalgic view of things. Indeed, a great deal of territory had been surrendered since our ancestors had stolen the land and erected white churches with felled trees. Up and down the Mohawk valley the green world had gone brown and gray, and the people who lived beneath the smokestacks and in the shadows of the tanneries were scared that even the brown and gray might not last. They didn’t know what came after brown and gray, and neither did I. One thing was for sure. Each Mohawk Fair was sadder and grayer than the last. And winter followed. With a capital W.
    Tria’s boss at the T-Pee Lounge let her take five minutes. She looked like she’d been expecting me, sure I’d tumble to the truth eventually. The house, she explained, was paid for, but the moneymy father had once told me was impossible to spend was gone. And as more and more of the county was added to the welfare rolls, property taxes had increased proportionally. Jack Ward’s army pension covered taxes, but not much else.
    There in the dim light of the T-Pee Lounge I fell in love with Tria Ward all over again, and she let me hold her hand as we spoke. “It’s a monster,” I said. “Why doesn’t she just sell it? Get an apartment, live off the sale?”
    “Sell Grandfather’s house?”
    “Yes. Sell it. It’s not a national shrine.”
    “She has this idea that it will be.”
    After a minute, I said, “You can
make
her do the right thing.”
    But she looked at me as if she couldn’t think what I might mean. Maybe I didn’t know myself.
    “I’m going to leave in a week or so,” I said finally. Our five minutes had stretched to fifteen, and Tria was getting looks. “Come with me. We’ll go someplace where the sun shines. And play house.” When the attempt at humor fell flat, I added, “We never gave it much of a chance, you know.”
    “It never
had
much of a chance, Ned.”
    Maybe she was right, but on the drive back to Mohawk I thought of all the arguments I should have used. Tria’s mother, who rambled on about pioneer spirit, certainly didn’t possess much. She didn’t drive, you know. She didn’t type, you know. She freely admitted that when skills were parceled out, you know, she had somehow been passed over. Her talent, you see, was simply as a witness. She had been