Bright and Distant Shores Read Online Free Page A

it was here that he made his private discoveries. Every building harbored secrets, tiny embellishments that would never show up on a set of blueprints. Stone-carved figurines above a mantel or hand-painted tilework; gargoyles and stained-glass windows of despairing saints; architraves with messages encoded on them. Hidden chambers and forgotten strong rooms replete with pistols and tinned cherries. Owen began to assemble a salvage museum in the back of his father’s scrap-yard. He labeled and catalogued his finds, writing down building names and the dates of demolition onto pieces of cardstock, attaching them by string, a thousand toe-cards in a morgue of objects.
    At the end of each workday he came away with something new. It could be as small as a Spanish coin or as large as a Gothic window. Porter indulged his son’s appetite for collecting, saw it as an adolescent flurry of seriousness that might someday pay dividends. He knew that although a life of junking could be profitable there had to be a passion for the science of destruction. Times were changing. Penalty fees and late clauses, the mendemanding better wages. The beginnings of steel-frame, multistory construction would mean more labor, a hundred men snapping the heads off rivets and boring them out with drift pins. Derricks and steam shovels and power winches—all of it would increase his overhead. Let the boy find some speck of delight in all that razing.
    After work they rode home through the Loop and assessed the office buildings with a wrecker’s cold regard.
    â€œI could fell that one in thirty days if it came down to it,” Porter said, angling his chin up at a new ten-story offering.
    â€œTop to bottom. Sixty-man crew,” Owen affirmed. He re-knuckled the reins, making sure his father saw he had a tight grip.
    Porter smiled and lit a cigarette, looking off into the storefronts where clay mannequins modeled the latest tweeds. “You have the eye for it. Just like me. You walk past a building and can’t help gauging the brickwork and lintels, figuring the way it might topple.”
    Owen felt his father’s pride like a wool blanket around his shoulders. It was dusk and people were heading to restaurants and theaters in their frocks and tails. The pedestrians eyed the wagon with its ramshackle load and Porter tipped his hat. They ignored him, eyes down on a fastened glove or a pair of tickets. Even then Owen knew that he and his father lived apart from polite society. They ate soup and bread for supper and pork sausages on Sundays. They weren’t much for religion but believed in shaping one’s destiny through honest work. There was grease under their fingernails, cinders in their hair. Owen could read and add numbers but didn’t know how to ride a bicycle. What Owen thought now but did not tell his father was that he never noticed bricks or lintels when he walked by a grand building. He never thought about its demolition and the thousand man-hours it would require to level it. Instead he wondered about the artifacts it might contain, the remainders of other people’s lives. What did a man keep in the concealed compartment beneath thefloorboards? Whose initials had been engraved in the handle of a forgotten pistol?
    The summer of Owen’s thirteenth birthday, a collar beam dislodged during one of Porter’s post-dynamite inspections. The beam dropped without warning, bringing part of a stone wall and several rafters with it. Helpless, Owen watched from behind a barricade of rubble as a cloud of mortar dust mushroomed then fell away. In the chalky air he could make out his father’s prone form, pinned beneath rafters and limestone. Porter’s work boots, still attached, faced in opposite directions. The wreckers charged forward and began working the pile, prying beams and plumb-lifting massive sheets of stone, all the while calling to Porter as if he stood a chance. Owen knew his father was dead by