All That I Have by Castle Freeman Page A

owners, had been to the house that day.
    “I’m afraid there’s an issue,” Mr. O’Connor said.
    “I guess there is,” I said. “I saw it. Whoever got in there about took down that whole wall.”
    “That isn’t the issue. Can you meet us up there tomorrow?”
    Us?
    So Friday morning at nine, I was back in Grenada, on that mountain, on my way to get a look at some of those famous Russians.
    Going up their million-dollar driveway, I thought, not for the first time, how differently rich and poor set on a piece of land. If there’s harm done, nine times out of ten it’s the rich who do it, not the poor. All my life, this mountainside up here had been the back of the backcountry. Out of the way, steep, heavily wooded, it had been perfectly good boondocks: good for logging, good for hunting, good for bears and porcupines. As the ass end of creation, it had done very well.
    A poor man, if he had settled in here, would have bought a quarter-acre lot right on the road and moved in a trailer or put up a plain little house. He wouldn’t have been able to afford to do anything more. Then by and by, suppose his house burned or he moved his trailer, in two years, less, it would be as if he’d never been here at all.
    A rich man is different. He can afford to do whatever he wants, so he does a lot. He does everything. He buys the whole mountain, he clears ten, twenty acres at the top, he gets in heavy equipment, builds a road a quarter-mile long to his house site, puts in ponds, walls, banks, berms. If there’s a hill where he don’t want a hill, he grades it; if there’s a dip where he don’t want a dip, he fills it. He changes the whole place, the whole land, so it’s to his liking — and he changes it forever. He turns the ass end of creation into real estate. Maybe the bears and the porcupines are still there, but now they’re his bears and his porcupines, in a way they never were the poor man’s.
    It’s when the money moves in that the neighborhood goes to hell, it looks like to me. Have a rich man for your friend, if you can, but a poor man for your neighbor.
    When I got to the house, I found two vehicles parked in front: a wagon that I took for O’Connor’s, with Vermont plates, and a Mercedes limousine, New York plates, with a man the size of your woodshed standing beside the driver’s door, waiting. I parked the truck and got down. The driver of the Mercedes — I guessed he was the driver — beckoned to me, and I went over to him. Without saying a word, he proceeded to pat me down. Patting people down is something I have done a fair amount of myself, and I know good work when I see it. This fellow knew his business. He went over me as though I’d just flown in from Damascus or Teheran, carrying a heavy suitcase that went tick-tock. When he got done, he nodded and pointed toward the house, so I passed him and went on in.
    Inside were Emory O’Connor and two others, standing in a hallway with a high ceiling. O’Connor I knew, a bit. We shook hands, and he introduced me to one of the others.
    “This is Mr. Tracy, Sheriff,” O’Connor said. “He’s up from New York, from the insurer. Sheriff Wing.”
    “Logan Tracy,” the insurance company’s man said. He was a heavy, kind of soft fellow who looked like a college football player gone to seed. He had on one of those leather jackets that cost a few hundred dollars and that New Yorkers and others seem to think make them look like country people. But what country?
    I shook hands with Mr. Tracy and looked to the third man, but nobody offered to introduce me to him, then or ever, and he never spoke a word that day. He was another kind of thing altogether, it looked like. He wore a gray suit and a dark tie. His shoes were polished. His hair was long, coal black, and slicked down and combed back around his head. He wasn’t trying to look like a country man. He wasn’t trying to look like anything. Was he a Russian? He might have been. He might have been