Setting Free the Kites - Couverture souple

***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected copy proof***

Copyright © 2017 Alex George

PROLOGUE

 

Haverford, Maine, 2015 

Nathan Tilly gave me the story I’m going to tell, but it was the old paper mill that set my memories free.

I read the report in the Haverford Gazette the previous week.  The mill has not been operational for more than fifty years, but now the land has been sold to a supermarket chain, and the old building is to be razed to make way for a customer parking lot.  The news has prompted vigorous local debate.  Some are angry that the city council has allowed part of our municipal heritage to be sold off.  Others are excited at the prospect of fresh bagels.  Such is progress. 

For myself, I’m sorry to see the old place go.  I want to pay my last respects, watch the thing go down. 

 

The lower end of Bridge Street is lined with mud-encrusted pick-ups and vans.  I have to double back and park on the other side of the river.  It is a beautiful, fresh spring morning.  The faintest of breezes is coming in off the ocean.  As I walk across the bridge I can hear someone shouting instructions through a bullhorn.

Warning signs have been posted along the road, keeping the curious at bay.  Authorized Personnel Only.  Hard Hat Required.  I keep my distance.  A huge crane is parked in front of the old building, its arm stretched high into the sky.  A wrecking ball hangs at the end of the crane’s thick steel rope, fat and heavy with the threat of violence.  The mill’s giant wooden doors have been padlocked shut my entire life, but now they are opened wide, and early morning sunlight falls into the cathedral-like space where vast pulping machines once rumbled from dawn to dusk, the town’s beating heart.  Workmen in reflector vests walk in and out, murmuring into walkie-talkies.  I guess they are checking all three floors for uninvited visitors before the walls start crashing down.

The mill’s red brick chimney rises tall and straight into the sky.  By lunchtime it will be gone.

At precisely nine o’clock there is a long, shrill blast from a whistle.  A man climbs into the cabin of the crane and turns on the ignition.  As the engine rumbles to life, the arm of the crane begins to move from side to side, and the wrecking ball starts to swing. 

The old mill has been on the brink of demolition for years.  Up and down this part of the southern Maine coast, from Biddeford to Brunswick, abandoned industrial buildings have been rescued and revivified, artfully repurposed for twenty-first century living.  Those ancient spaces have been reborn as art galleries, office suites with double-height ceilings, and organic delicatessens selling squid ink pasta from Umbria and artisanal cheeses from Vermont.  Everyone has been waiting for a similar metamorphosis to happen in Haverford.  It hasn’t been for want of trying: in 2004 a consortium of property speculators from away went crazy for the mill’s exposed brickwork.  An architect was commissioned to design a warren of luxury condominiums with reclaimed timber floors and glinting chrome appliances.  But the town lacked the necessary real estate mojo to pull it off.  No matter how pretty the artist’s impressions in the brochure looked, nobody was buying.  Not a single unit was sold, and the promised renovation never happened.  The place has remained abandoned and deserted ever since.

The wrecking ball is swinging fiercely now, slicing through the air in ever more violent arcs.  The crane operator begins to rotate the cabin, gradually turning it toward the old walls.  I feel my body stiffen in anticipation of the first impact.  When it comes, there is an infernal roar of collapsing brick, crushed wood, and splintering glass.  That’s when I feel a release within me, a quiet letting go.  The crane operator edges the caterpillar tracks forward a few feet, and moments later another slab of wall disappears.  A fog of atomized red brick hangs over the rubble.  I watch for a few minutes, and then turn away.  There is nothing more to see. 

As I walk back over the bridge, I think about those two gravity-defying summers, almost forty years ago, when the old mill gave us shelter, and Nathan Tilly’s gift for boundless hope gave us wings.  Nathan loved the mill so much.  Inside those old brick walls, the light of uncomplicated happiness shone down on us, as warm and as comforting as the sun. 

But such a bright light casts long, dark shadows.

I open the door of my car and climb in.  I rest my hands on the steering wheel and gaze back across the bridge.  The wrecking ball is still swinging hard, making its way toward the mill’s chimney.

I do not want to see the chimney fall.  I drive away.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1976

ONE

 

 

 

Sometimes life-changing moments slip by unnoticed, their significance only becoming apparent in the light of subsequent events.  But Nathan Tilly was never one for the subtle approach.

The summer of 1976 had been long and humid.  The horseflies had been larger and more vicious than in past years, which was saying something.  They had swarmed around me, taking painful chunks out of my sweet, thirteen year-old flesh.  My legs and upper body bore the scars of months of relentless attack.  For me the smell of summer was not the salty tang of the ocean, nor the ambrosial scent of young blueberries, but the sour chemical whiff of antiseptic cream that my mother would slather on my bumpy mosaic of bites, a constellation of unending irritation.  On the first day of my eighth grade year at Longfellow Middle School, my shoulders were still itching from the horseflies’ diabolical attention. 

My discomfort was also, I am sure, a physical manifestation of the anxiety that I was feeling that day.  I had been dreading the start of the new school year all summer.  Every blissfully unscheduled day of vacation was, to me, just one step closer to seeing Hollis Calhoun again.

For most of the previous year, Hollis Calhoun had bullied me without mercy.  He undertook a campaign of terrors, small and large.  Some of it was innocuous enough – an unanticipated cuff around the back of the head in the corridor, a sharp elbow jab to the ribs in the cafeteria line – but he also liked to corner me out of sight of others, and inflict more elaborate, sustained cruelties.  He crowded in on me, heavy and huge, obliterating the world beyond his fists.  His violence was claustrophobic as well as cruel. There was a warped intimacy in all those carefully administered punches and kicks.  He would scrutinize my face intently as he hurt me, delighted by the fear in my eyes.

For all his thuggery, Hollis possessed a nuanced understanding of the psychological mechanics of terror.  He took care to ensure that his attacks were never predictable.  Not knowing when they might come, I was in a constant state of high alert.  Sometimes he would leave me alone for days, which had the paradoxical effect of ratcheting up my sense of impending dread.  When I finally saw him lumbering toward me, I felt something oddly close to relief that the wait was over.  The threat of Hollis Calhoun’s fists that marauded across my fevered imagination was worse than any blow they could land in actuality.

There had been nothing I could do to make Hollis stop, since he didn’t appear to want anything from me.  My terror seemed to be an end unto itself.  He never told me what I had done to deserve his attention, and always the same unanswered question would fog my panicked brain as he approached me with that malevolent look in his eye: why me?

Hollis was a year older than me, and I had consoled myself with the thought that at least he would be graduating to high school in the fall.  Then, a week before the school year ended, Hollis had cornered me in the boys’ locker room.  He pressed one side of my face into the cold floor, his knee in the small of my back, and told me that he was being held back a grade.  He would be at Longfellow again next year.  He banged my head against the tiles a couple of times, as if this was somehow my fault. 

As I pushed open the door to my classroom, the prospect of seeing Hollis Calhoun again, combined with the ferocious itching beneath my shirt, had plunged me into my own universe of self-pity.  I sat down at the nearest desk and opened my bag.  As usual, my mother had left me a folded note.  Her choice of quotation that day seemed especially apt.

 

The Lord is my helper; I will not fear.  What can man do to me?

  

Hebrews, 13:6

 

That was indeed the question.  I had spent much of the last three months anxiously imagining what abominations Hollis had in mind for me.  I looked up gloomily, and noticed an unfamiliar presence in the row ahead.  Most of my classmates were already slumped in bored disaffection over their desks, but a new boy I did not recognize sat bolt upright in his chair.  His hair was as black as the leather on my mother’s Bible.  He wore a green cable-knit turtleneck sweater, which looked insufferably hot on that warm morning.  While I was surreptitiously examining him, he turned and looked right at me.  Our eyes met for the briefest of moments, and then I looked away.  New arrivals were to be treated with extreme caution until their position in the classroom pecking order could be calibrated.  I bent down and pretended to look for something in my bag.  The new boy didn’t turn back around, though.  He kept looking at me. 

 

The day dragged on impossibly slowly, but not slowly enough for me.  As the hands on the clock above the blackboard crept toward the final bell, I could feel the fear rising in my throat. 

As soon as classes were over I ran to fetch my things, hoping for a quick escape, but Hollis Calhoun was already waiting for me, leaning against the door of my locker.  To my dismay, he seemed to have grown even bigger over the summer.  We looked at each other without speaking.  There was nothing to be said. Hollis twisted my arm roughly behind my back and began to march me against the tide of students who were streaming toward the exit. The corridors became more deserted as we walked toward the back of the school.  Like a nostalgic lover, Hollis was taking me back to one of our old haunts.  He stopped in front of the boys’ locker room, and pushed me inside. 

He grabbed my shirt and shoved me up against the wall, snapping my head backwards.  The summer evaporated in an instant.  Pinned there by his fists, it felt as if we had never been apart.  Hollis was peering beadily at me.  I averted my gaze and said nothing.  After a moment he relaxed his grip, took a half step away from me, and put a ferocious knee into my thigh.  I yelped and dropped to the ground.  He pushed me over on to my back with his foot.  Pain began to radiate across my lower body.  Killer dead legs were a specialty of his.  He held me down and went to work on my upper arms, pressing and pulling my skin into fat knots of pain.  He found the worst of my horsefly bites and pinched them with brutal relish. 

“Oh, this is just like old times, isn’t it?” he whispered.  “Are you ready for another year of fun?”

Before I could answer Hollis hauled me to my feet and dragged me to the nearest cubicle.  He flung open the door and pushed me inside. Still holding the collar of my shirt, he flipped up the lid of the toilet.  He kicked the backs of my legs and I collapsed to my knees. 

“I thought we might try something new,” said Hollis.  He grabbed my hair and pushed my head into the toilet bowl.  I just had time to take a deep breath before he pulled the chain.  He held my head firmly in place as water sluiced through my mouth and up my nose. When he finally yanked me out of the bowl I sucked air into my lungs, and then started coughing.  Hollis did not relinquish his grip on my collar.  “We’re just getting started,” he told me.  To my disappointment, I felt the prickle of tears at the corners of my eyes. 

Just then there was a loud bang, and Hollis lurched into me.  The door of the cubicle had been flung open.  Standing there was the new boy from class that morning. 

“Let him go!” he yelled.

Hollis and I were both too surprised to speak.  Neither of us really wanted to be interrupted.  Hollis was too busy enjoying himself, and I didn’t want my humiliation made worse by a witness.  As we stared at our intruder, he began kicking Hollis on the shins.  In that tiny cubicle there was nowhere for Hollis to go.  Laughing, he let go of me for a moment and tried to push the boy away.  His attacker responded by stepping in closer and hammering his fists against Hollis’s chest.  He was no match for Hollis physically, but what he lacked in strength he made up for with sheer ferocity.  The cubicle was crowded with the three of us squeezed in there.  The new boy was by the door and I was still kneeling in front of the toilet bowl.  Sandwiched between us, Hollis had no room to defend himself properly or mete out retribution.  The boy stepped in to deliver another flurry of punches, which Hollis swatted away. He had stopped laughing by then.  Now the fight was conducted almost entirely in silence.  All I could hear was the boy’s heavy breathing, and a few grunts from Hollis whenever a punch landed on target.  I cowered on the floor, hoping not to be kicked.  My head and shirt were soaking wet.  The world beyond the cubicle vanished.  The three of us were so focused on the strange, unequal struggle within its walls that we failed to hear the door of the locker room open.

The shout of anger that followed we heard well enough.

TWO

 

 

 

Ten minutes later, the three of us were sitting on a bench in a deserted school corridor.  The janitor who had interrupted the fight had hauled us out of the cubicle, one by one, grabbing us by the scruffs of our necks like newborn kittens.  Identifying Hollis Calhoun and the new boy as the principal antagonists, he had propelled them angrily in front of him toward the principal’s office.  I – ob...

“A warm, relatable—at times heartbreakingly so—story of two boys becoming men in 1970s Maine... George authentically relays the dynamic, difficult nature of families.”
—Columbia Daily Tribune
 
“George’s effortless and beautiful prose flows off of the page to construct a timeless narrative of love, loss, kinship and how the connections we make will almost always find a way to affect us for the rest of our lives.”
—Oxford Citizen
 
“George combines wit, sorrow and nostalgia into a story readers young and old will not forget... heartbreaking and real.”
—Vox Magazine

“Setting Free the Kites is a serious but breezy work, a sad but delightful story, and just right for thumbing through at the beach this summer.”
—Down East Magazine

“A mesmerizing and eloquent read... This is a book that takes hold of your life, so much that you forget the individuals are fictional and assume them as characters in your everyday life... Highly, highly recommended.”
—Jenn's Bookshelves

“Heart-rending... A beautifully told, nostalgic tale about friendship, George brings to life true, strongly independent characters... An effecting, emotional read. So many excellently crafted details are packed into its pages, poignantly capturing the rapid change of emotions during adolescence”
—Portland Press Herald
 
“A dandy book.”
—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
 
“A moving novel of friendship, family, loss and reconcilation... an emotionally resonant novel”
—Shelf Awareness

“This generous, poignant novel addresses family, friendship, and dealing with catastrophic loss... a beautifully wrought work for fans of literary fiction and coming-of-age novels.”
—Library Journal

“[A] touching story . . . George is masterly in his rendition of Maine landscapes and the emotional swings of adolescence.”
— Publishers Weekly

“A lovely meditation on young friendship and the harsh realities of growing up.”
—Book Riot

“It's sort of early to be carving titles into the marble ‘Best of 2017’ lists already, but it would be a surprise if I didn't end the year as impressed and moved by this novel as I am right now... With echoes of Stephen King's ‘Joyland’ and ‘The Body’ as well as John Knowles' A Separate Peace, Setting Free the Kites features unforgettable characters and a nice little twist.”
— New London Day
 
“George’s writing has tremendous voice, one that brings these adolescent boys to life as few others do.”
— Seattle Book Mama

“Replete with soaring emotion. Setting Free the Kites is a coming-of-age novel driven by the forces of hope. Alex George skillfully proves that the tethers of a painful past can be cut, freeing us to rise above our circumstances if only we have fearless hearts.”
— SARAH McCOY, New York Times and international bestselling author of The Mapmaker's Children

“I think I fell a little in love with Alex George's Setting Free the Kites when I heard the beautiful title. Luckily, the book itself—colorful, poignant, winning and touching—does not disappoint and seduces like a spring breeze. Mr. George, please consider me one of your new and ardent admirers.”
— GEORGE HODGMAN, author of Bettyville

“In Setting Free the Kites, Alex George has written a captivating, lyrical novel with scenes so crisp and moving you will find yourself holding your breath as page by page he renders the profundity of childhood, the primality of longing, and breaks your heart. It’s an absorbing novel, with place and people crafted so fully they become real and important to the reader. A full and beautiful book.”
— MEGAN MAYHEW BERGMAN, author of Almost Famous Women

“Alex George’s brilliant new novel explores a life-changing boyhood friendship in the ‘70s, the way first love can whack you out of balance, the terror of an ill child and the way memories can haunt or free you. So exquisitely written, I was underlining sentences, and so engrossing, I read through the night.  Funny, devastating and so human and humane, the novel is filled with characters so alive and complex, that I ached to continue on in their lives.  But most important of all is this: Loss, George says, can destroy us, but it can also create us, giving possibility rapturous flight.”
— CAROLINE LEAVITT, New York Times bestselling author of Is This Tomorrow and Pictures of You

“A profoundly moving, charming, heart-breaking, heart-lifting portrait of childhood, parenthood, and friendship. I couldn’t love it more. With a down-on-its-heels amusement park as the perfect backdrop, Setting Free the Kites is both elegiac and comical, a celebration of adolescent stumbling-around. This book is a treasure.”
— TIMOTHY SCHAFFERT, author of The Swan Gondola

“Can it be that John Irving’s heir is a British import, writing in the Midwest? Setting Free the Kites is as American as Garp, as heartbreaking as Owen Meany, and as hilarious as Hotel New Hampshire. Alex George proves himself a master storyteller, and with a magic all his own he has tied these elements together behind an unforgettable tale. All the pain, the joy, the absurdity of an American childhood is here, the sting of marriage, the bonds of brotherhood, brilliantly rendered in a book you will want to recommend to everyone. Family is a language we can barely understand ourselves, and this story is a brave and beautiful translation.”
— LYDIA NETZER, author of Shine Shine Shine