Ford Road

Cover

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Title Page, Copyright

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Back

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pp. 1-6

On may 2, 2003, Marion Seger died in her hometown of middleville, Michigan, just a short drive down a gravel road from Parmalee Cemetery, where she was to be buried. She was eighty-six years old and the daughter of Fred and Ada Gaillard, whose graves were also in Parmalee...

Forward

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pp. 7-11

In the country, a person could be set upon by dirt. bad as town. This was Fred Gaillard’s discovery. But at the end of a dry spell, here on Shaw Road, a remote track in western Michigan, Fred found country dirt to be dusty. It chased him in gusts of warm wind, like swarming brown powder, infesting his eyes and hair. He brushed it off...

Comfort Inn

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pp. 12-17

Stretched across the double bed in the motel room during those first few days back in Michigan, flipping channels with the remote, Kay thought about her inheritance. It was uncomfortably large and probably to blame for her recent impulsive actions. And it was old Hollywood. If there had to be so much money behind this dramatic...

Maple Court

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pp. 18-25

Of course, they were going to fail. joe and kay longed to live in reverse, but every cell in their bodies, like every blade of grass in the yard outside Joe’s little brick house, was living forward. They had only to look out the window at the street and the town to see how far...

Tiger Stadium

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pp. 26-31

Although Kay had not heard of Hofer’s condition at the time, it was during that month of July that she began, very tentatively, to allow that something was wrong. And it was Joe who inadvertently triggered what might be described as a Hofer’s-like episode when he came in from work one evening, cracked open a beer, flopped down in...

Fred

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pp. 32-35

One night, Kay showed Joe a photograph and held a flashlight over it for added illumination. It was a somber picture, old and brown, printed on thick card, but with a crease running along one side. It showed a neat, sparsely furnished room, with a dark wood table placed against the wall. Ada Gaillard, Kay’s grandmother, had written...

Frenchman

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pp. 36-39

In January 1896, seven-year-old Fred Gaillard woke with a start when the downstairs door clicked shut. He listened for his father’s footsteps, light at first, then a loud crunching noise in the snow outside the house, as they crossed the yard to the street and moved away. It was still dark outside and too cold to be out of bed, but Fred...

Charlie Bennett

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pp. 40-42

Jacques Gaillard had played and watched baseball since childhood, and his closest friendships had been made in alleyway matches and in the bleachers. He could remember as far back as the Hollinger Nine, a local team formed in 1879 and disbanded after one season. Detroiters then switched their allegiance to the Wolverines...

A Disease of An Afflicted Imagination

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pp. 43-48

Late one night, unsure if Joe was asleep, Kay slipped quietly out of bed, tiptoed to the fridge, poured a glass of iced tea, and carried it into the spare room, now a makeshift study.
Stacked with books and papers, the desk was lit pale yellow by a streetlight. There were some loose diary pages written by Fred’s sister, Bell, along with a handful of letters exchanged between brother and...

Allie Green

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pp. 49-54

Dear Mrs. Parker,
I have become more than anxious to know how Baby Ada is. I hope she does not cry too much. My going away is postponed. When it came time to go I just could not, so it’s postponed for a time and maybe for all time. Now you must write me on receat [sic] of this as it seems a lifetime since

Sixteen

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pp. 55-60

“You do look beautiful!” Lon exclaimed, gazing up at his sister as she appeared at the top of the stairs.
Ada Parker smiled, brightening at the compliment. Just turned sixteen, she was celebrating two occasions in the same week: her birthday and her graduation from Middleville High School, class of 1910...

Concord Street

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pp. 61-66

Jacques Gaillard answered Fred’s questions about the Tigers before turning to his wife and handing her the envelope. He waited for her to reveal his earnings at Hudson’s that day. Clara slit the envelope carefully and placed the wages on the table.
Each day was different—the pay varied and seemed to follow no rule that Jacques could fathom: thirty or fifty cents, sometimes as...

The Corner of Michigan and Trumbull

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pp. 67-74

On the last Sunday of July, they drove downtown. Joe was at home in his used Ford, on the highway, within the magnetic field of the big city, a Detroit station playing on the car radio. But Kay felt uncomfortable, like the fraudulent Wizard in his hot air balloon, drifting away from Kansas and about to land in the wrong place. Also, she was...

Circle

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pp. 75-77

One afternoon, the children on Concord Street amused themselves by leaping from the back porch of one of the houses into deep, drifted snow. They tumbled on top of one another, spluttering and shrieking and making messy indentations in the white crest until it collapsed, flattened, and the frozen earth beneath it began to reappear...

Yellow Brick House

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pp. 78-83

“i need to get out of here for a few hours,” Joe said finally.
Kay climbed from the car and walked toward the front door. He waited until she was safely inside the house, then reversed out of the driveway and drove away...

Charlie Bennett’s Park

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pp. 84-87

In later years, Fred liked to think he had grown up with the Tigers. He and Jacques and their baseball team came before the first horseless carriage made its way along Detroit’s muddy streets, even before The Great Train Robbery played at the Wonderland Theater down on Woodward Avenue...

Spring

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pp. 88-95

Jacques began to think that better times lay ahead. warmer weather brought people out of doors, and he regularly ran into friends and former workmates downtown. They loitered on street corners, discussing job prospects, exchanging leads, speculating about the coming baseball season and the progress of the new ballpark. Most days, after...

The Ragged Mound of History

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pp. 96-99

Opening day came and went. Clara asked Paul to take his brother to the baseball game, but Fred refused to go. It would be several years before he returned to Bennett Park. He stopped looking forward to things promised in the future. Nor, in his bitterness, would...

Spider Huff

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pp. 100-104

Dear Dad,
I write you from the heart of our city, where the spluttering of the automobile engine has joined the familiar racket of trams, pushcarts, manure wagons, and market vendors. Fred is something of a street boy now. He crosses the downtown avenues wherever he wants, dodges...

George Minniver

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pp. 105-106

Bottom of the fifth, tie game, two out, Ramón Santiago on second, Craig Monroe at bat, full count. Kay glanced up from her book for the next pitch, a strike which ended the inning. Joe cursed the team, although he could never stay mad at the Tigers for long, even in that disastrous 2003 season. She was thumbing through a history of...

Witnesses

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pp. 107-112

Fred arrived a few minutes after the event, too late to be an eyewitness. He thought about this, thought it was something that happened to him regularly. He was always a little late and forced to rely on other people’s untrustworthy accounts...

Heat Wave

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pp. 113-120

Kay and Joe had planned a road trip to western Michigan, where they hoped to spend a few days exploring Ada’s hometown of Middleville, in Barry County. They were put off, in part, by the weather. There was a heat wave during the last two weeks of August, pushing daytime temperatures to the high nineties...

Yankees

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pp. 121-131

“So tell me about Barry County—is it all cornfields over there, or what?” Joe said after they came in from a walk one night. He opened a beer and flopped down on the sofa.
“Yeah, right,” Kay called from the bathroom, where she stood splashing her face and neck with cool water. “Complete with talking...

Morning

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pp. 132-140

Late morning sun covered the house. it warmed the grass and dandelions, dried the dew from each blade and stem, until a sweet, green smell hung over the yard and drifted indoors. Light pushed against Ada’s lowered window shade, turning her room into a slow oven, coating the walls and furniture in amber. Downstairs and...

Dr. Thisroy

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pp. 141-147

Dr. Elmer Thisroy, whose writings arrived at the end of August, proved to be an inventive and colorful character, a working psychiatrist with a scholarly interest in Johannes Hofer’s pioneering work on nostalgia. In just two published articles, Thisroy achieved what, as far as Kay could see, no one else had managed. He resurrected the lost history of nostalgia, claimed that it continued to make...

Obituaries

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pp. 148-158

“Can you decipher this?”
Kay showed Joe a photograph of James Parker’s grave, one of a black and white series taken at Parmalee Cemetery after Marion’s funeral...
“Let’s see. Well . . . the headstone looks so worn I can’t read the inscription. It’s not helping that the shadow of you—holding the camera...

Late

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pp. 159-160

On the Friday following her party, Ada perched on the front step, waiting for Lon. The Thornapple Valley finally dropped into dusk, the last of the long summer sun having reddened the western end of the fields before draining from sight. Lon was more than an...

Crystal Palace

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pp. 161-163

Increasingly standardized, interchangeable parts; good suspension; vanadium steel; a sturdy, but light car for the rutted roads beyond Detroit. All four cylinders contained in a single block that could be opened on top and bottom for easy service. The transmission...

Stranger

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pp. 164-168

The cartoon, printed in the New York Globe and Commercial Advertiser, waiting at a cashier’s booth. Another man, similarly attired and sitting at the back of a car, speaks to his chauffeur: “Hawkins, will you step over to the pay window and get my wages? I quite overlooked the...

Low

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pp. 169-174

In the bars around the Ford plant, workers paid a quarter for two shots. They stumbled out of the factory in small groups, cursed the cold, and headed for the nearest saloon to buy a burn of whiskey. It soothed the coughs, diminished the taut, binding sensation in the...

Ford Road

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pp. 175-183

Joe drove slowly through the residential blocks, past the hospital, schools, and playgrounds. He followed zigzag routes, crawling along the back streets where old schoolmates once ran, finally arriving at Ford Road, Garden City’s largest east-west thoroughfare...

Jefferson Avenue

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pp. 184-196

On a Saturday night in august, 1914, Fred saw his father in a crowded tavern on Jefferson Avenue. Jacques Gaillard was at the bar, holding a beer and making idle conversation with the man next to him. Both men stood with their backs to the room. Fred lifted onto his toes...

Middleville Night

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pp. 197-200

September 1914. the warm, dry weather persisted, a promise of Indian summer. Violet Parker lay very still in her cotton nightdress, silvery hair sprayed on the pillow, curved hands hugging a packet of letters to her chest. Sometime after Lon’s disappearance four years...

The Lighted Field

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pp. 201-207

September 2003. summer closed with a run of thunderstorms that finally broke the heat. There were tornado watches and warnings. The sky yellowed, and then darkened as gusts of fierce, hot wind rattled the screen door. No funnel cloud swept along Maple Court to tear...

Love

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pp. 208-211

“I can’t,” Joe said, finally.
They had been trying to make love.
“It’s all right. You’re tired—don’t worry about it. Let’s just get some sleep.”
“No, I mean it, Kay. This has gone on too long. I can’t touch you anymore without feeling I’m going to break you. I reach for your skin...

Forward

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pp. 212-214

Kay stood watching him for the longest time. He walked up and down Shaw Road outside the town of Middleville, kicking at the dirt, occasionally stopping to adjust his hat or feel his coat pocket, carefully checking for something inside it. Of course, he was familiar to her; she knew him, but even a complete stranger would guess that...

Acknowledgments

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pp. 215-218