The Last American Man (31 page)

Here is Eustace Conway, looking down the
burl
of the shotgun that is age forty. If the actuary charts of the insurance industry are to be believed, he is halfway finished
with his life. He has achieved much. He has seen more of this world than most of us will ever read about. He has, about seventy-five
times a year, done things that people told him were impossible to do. He has acquired and protected the land he always wanted.
He has paid attention to the laws of the universe, and that attention has rewarded him with proficiency in a dazzling range
of subjects. He has instituted an organization of teaching and preaching founded in his exact image. He has become a public
figure of considerable renown. He is venerated and he is feared. He’s at the top of his game. He even calls himself a Type-A
Mountain Man, and, indeed, he has become a Man of Destiny in action, the World’s Most Public Recluse, the CEO of the Woods.

But there are cracks. And he can feel the wind blowing through them. Just as when he was thirty, he can’t seem to make his
relationships with other people work as well as he would like. The folks he labors with at Turtle Island are always angry
with him or misunderstanding him. Virtually every apprentice I met at Turtle Island ended up leaving Eustace long before his
or her time was officially up, and usually in tears. Even Candice, who was fiercely determined not to become just another
Disgruntled Ex-Turtle Islander, left the mountain abruptly as a DETI, frustrated by Eustace’s refusal to give her more control
over the garden.

And Eustace fares no better with his family. Foremost in his consciousness, of course, is that disparaging father—looming
over his every breathing moment, critical and disgusted and angry. Forever it has been the case in Eustace Conway’s life that
when he looks for love and acceptance from his father, he goes nearly snowblind from the blankness he sees there.

Although something strange did happen this year.

Eustace called me on his thirty-ninth birthday. We had a normal conversation, talking for an hour about Turtle Island business
and gossip. He told me about his new apprentices and about work on the barn and the birth of a beautiful new colt named Luna.

And then he said, in a strange tone, “Oh, there’s something else. I got a birthday card this week.”

“Oh, yeah?” I asked. “From who?”

“From my father.”

There was a long silence. I put down the tea I was drinking and found myself a chair.

“Tell me,” I said. “Tell me everything.”

“I’m holding the card right here in my hand.”

“Read it to me, Eustace.”

“It’s kind of interesting, you know? My dad . . . um . . . he drew the card himself. It’s a drawing of three little balloons
floating up to the sky. He drew the balloons with a red pen and drew a bow around the strings of the balloons with a green
pen. He used a blue pen for the message.”

“What message?”

Eustace Conway cleared his throat and read:
“It’s hard to believe that
thirty-nine years have passed since you were born and started our family.
Thank you for the many blessings you have brought us over the decades.
We look forward to many more. Love, Daddy.”

There was another long silence.

“Run that by me again,” I said, and Eustace did.

Neither one of us spoke for a while. Then Eustace told me that he’d received the card two days earlier. “I read it once and
folded it up and put it back in its envelope. I was so upset by it, my hands were shaking. It’s the first kind thing my father
has ever said to me. I don’t think anyone can know how that makes me feel. I didn’t look at it again until right now. It took
me two days to get the courage to open it up again and read it over. I was afraid to even touch it, you know. I wasn’t sure
it was true. I thought maybe I dreamed it.”

“Are you OK?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Oh, my God, I don’t know how to open my fearful heart and even think about it. I mean, what the hell is this
about? What does this mean, Dad? What the fuck are you up to, Dad?”

“He may not be up to anything, Eustace.”

“I think I’m going to hide this card away for a while.”

“Go ahead,” I said.“Maybe you can read it again tomorrow.”

“Maybe I’ll do that,” said Eustace, and he hung up.

This tiny but startling thaw between the two Eustaces reminded me of an obscure word I’d learned recently. I’d discovered
it one day when I was paging through a dictionary on a whim, trying to find Eustace’s name, to see if I could learn its derivation.
There was no
Eustace
in my dictionary, but I did discover
Eustasy
, which is a noun. And here’s what
Eustasy
means: “a worldwide change in sea-level, occurring over many millennia, triggered by the advance or retreat of glaciers.”

A slow and epic melting, in other words. Which is what it would take, I suppose, to effect even a marginal alteration on the
level of an ocean.

And then there are the other members of the Conway family to consider. Eustace’s relationships with them are unsettled, too.
He adores his mother, but he mourns her sad and arduous married life with an intensity that corrodes his own ability to seek
happiness. He cares for his little brother Judson more than he cares for anyone, but it’s cruelly obvious to the most casual
observer that the brothers are not as close as they had once been. Not since the Long Riders journey. Judson lives near Eustace
now, residing just over the holler from Turtle Island in a small log cabin that he built himself and now shares with his totally
kick-ass fiancée (a tough and independent soul who hunts for deer with a bow and arrow, and who works as a lumberjack, and
whose name is— get this!—Eunice). Judson could easily ride his horse over to visit Eustace every day if he felt like it, but
he doesn’t feel like it. The brothers rarely see each other. Eustace wants much more access to Judson than he is offered,
but Judson carefully and affably keeps an arm’s length between them.

“I saw it when we rode across America,” Judson told me. “Eustace is like my dad. He’s too fucking intense and hard to be around.
He and my dad both pride themselves on being great communicators. They think they operate at this higher level of intelligence
and communication than anyone else. At least Eustace does try to listen to people, and he comes across all gentle and equal,
but the bottom line’s the same—he has to get his way all the time, and there’s no talking through it. Hey, I love my brother,
but I don’t know how to deal with that. That’s why I keep my distance. I don’t have any choice. And it makes me really sad.”

Walton Conway, the middle brother, also lives nearby, less than an hour from Turtle Island. Brilliant and multilingual and
reserved, he lives in a comfortable modern home, his bookshelves filled with Nabokov and Dickens. Walton teaches English and
writes quiet fiction. He runs a business out of his home, importing and selling handmade crafts from Russia. His wife is a
generous and lively woman with two daughters from a previous marriage, and they’ve since had another daughter. Walton’s life
is tranquil now, but he did a good bit of rough traveling in his youth. Back then, he was always writing letters home to his
big brother Eustace, whom he admired deeply and whose respect he so clearly wanted.

“I hate to say it,”Walton wrote to Eustace back in 1987, after a long stay on a farm in Germany where he’d found work, “but
you might be proud of me. When I was working, my hands would get good and grimy, and I’ve got calluses now in places I’d never
discovered before.”

Or this letter from Russia in 1992: “Had a great change of pace digging a cucumber bed way out of the city last weekend. Good
shovel work all day long. Thought of you and Tolstoy and of that summer you did construction work—sweeping?—down in hotter-than-hell
Alabama. (You see, I’ve lived all your adventures vicariously, through little peepholes.) In general, though, you would hate
it here in Moscow. I am surrounded by filth. It is pitiful to see the city, what man has done to himself, what lives are doled
out at the front of the lines. I can’t imagine you here. I dream of Turtle Island.”

But now that Walton lives so close to Turtle Island, he hardly ever visits his brother. This kills Eustace, who dearly wants
to spend time with Walton, and who feels wounded because his brother won’t take a larger role in his life.

“It’s the ego that keeps me away,”Walton said, by way of explanation. “I can’t stand it. Some mornings I wake up and I think,
God,
wouldn’t it be great to have a brother with all the skills and interests of Eustace,
but who was humble, too?
I’d love to spend time with somebody like that, to learn from him. I’d like to go hiking with Eustace someday and have a quiet
interaction, but this ego thing is really difficult to get around. I always want to say to him, ‘Imagine if one day you went
for a horse ride and didn’t have to tell everyone about it? Does every moment of your life always have to be such a public
show?”

As for Eustace’s only sister, Martha? Well, I consider her the most inscrutable of all Conways. She lives so far outside the
bold and adventuresome world of her brothers that it is sometimes easy to forget her existence. The big joke in the Conway
family is that Martha was a changeling and that nobody can understand how she “got that way.” Martha lives with her husband
and two daughters in a tidy suburban development, in a house so clean and sterilized you could use her kitchen as an operating
theater.

“You know how most parents have to hide all the breakable stuff in their house when they have little kids around so that nothing
gets wrecked?” Judson asked me, when trying to describe his sister. “Well, in Martha’s house, it’s not like that. She leaves
the breakable stuff sitting right out there on the coffee table and tells her daughters not to touch. And you’d better believe
they don’t touch.”

Martha is a devout Christian, considerably more religious than either of her parents. She is also a keenly intelligent woman
with an MBA from Duke. I’m certain she could be running General Motors right now if she wanted to, but she focuses all her
acumen and organizational ability on being a faultless housewife, an exacting mother, and a vital member of her church. I
don’t know Martha well; I spent only one afternoon with her. But I liked her. I found her to be more gentle than I had expected,
after hearing reports from her brothers about her famous rigidity. I was moved that she welcomed me into her home, considering
how sacred that place is to her. I could see in her eyes how hard it was for her to let me in. I could see the painful edge
in her, where her profound sense of Christian hospitality sparred against her cherished sense of privacy.

When I asked Martha to define herself, she said, “The most important thing in my life is my walk with Jesus Christ. It reflects
on everything I do—how I raise my children, how I honor the commitment to my marriage, how I struggle not to put myself first,
how I struggle to deal with my emotions and control my voice. Every choice I make is based on my faith. I teach my children
at home because of my faith. I don’t want my children in public schools. I feel there are a lot of evils there, ever since
they took prayer out of school. I want my children to grow up with serious faith, and they can get that only here with me.
Out there in the world, everything is based on relativism, and I don’t want my children to learn that. Out there, nothing
is an absolute anymore. But I still believe in absolutes. I believe there is an absolute right and wrong way to live, and
I can teach my children that, right here in this house.”

The other big joke in the Conway family is to point out how different Eustace and Martha are. “Wait until you see how she
lives,” I was warned. “You won’t believe that she and Eustace are related!” But I respectfully disagree. As soon as I walked
into Martha’s living room, I thought,
Sorry, folks. These two are the exactly the same
. Eustace and Martha both found the world “out there” to be corrupted and repulsive, so both designed their own worlds, worlds
so stubbornly isolated from the greater society that they may as well be living under glass domes. They preside over their
personal worlds with an unconditional power, never having to suffer the sting of compromise. Eustace’s world just happens
to be a thousand acres, and Martha’s world is closer to a thousand square feet, but they rule with the same impulse. It’s
all about absolutism.

And absolutism is great for getting a lot of work done, but when absolutisms collide, it can be a loud and fatal train wreck.
Which is why Eustace and his sister have never managed to be close. This is made sadder because both want to work out some
kind of relationship. But they only vex each other. Eustace believes he makes every effort to respect Martha’s values and
tightly scheduled life by giving her plenty of warning before he visits and by reading Bible stories to her children and by
trying not to mess up her cherished house. Still, she accuses him of being rude and self-centered, which hurts him all the
more, considering his perception that Martha—who has brought her family up to Turtle Island only twice, despite repeated invitations—seems
to take no interest in his life. Martha, on the other hand, is routinely hurt by what she perceives: a domineering brother
who demands that the entire world stop and drop at his feet to worship him whenever he breezes through town. Out of pride,
out of habit,Martha refuses to bow.

So, no, Eustace’s interactions with his family aren’t satisfying. Not on any front. He can’t get past that. What bothers him
even more, though, is that he hasn’t begun a family of his own. Now, as when he was thirty, he scans his empire and is shocked
to notice that, while he has accomplished much through sheer force of will, he still doesn’t have a wife and children. At
this point in his life, he should be well into a family, deep into the process of childrearing and heartily comforted by the
solidity of marriage. Where does Eustace go wrong on this? He can’t figure it out.