the duke power company

The Carson family had attained its lofty social position due to sheer and utter misfortune. When the state had decided to dam the Catawba river basin and create a lake, hundreds of homes were flooded and their lots purchased by the state. One of these lots belonged to Quentin’s grandfather. He received a generous buyout for a ramshackle cabin in what was once a swamp, and was elevated overnight from the dirt-farmer stock that ran through his blood into a different social category. This money, more than anyone in his family had ever held at one time up until this point, was used to purchase a vacant lot where a house was soon built thereafter. Owing to a miscalculation by the state’s engineers, the new Carson lot, which was supposed to be a quarter mile inland, became lakefront property on a secluded peninsula. This made minor aristocracy out of the Carsons, who were made, overnight, the wealthiest family in Denver, North Carolina. 

As a child, Quentin’s grandmother, Catherine, told him about watching the river flood the lowlands of Mecklenberg county. She had made the Duke Power Company seem bigger than God in her retelling, as a wide eyed Quentin closed his eyes and listened to her tell of the power of the water coursing through the swamps, pulling trees from their roots and wiping the ground clean of vegetation, revealing the naked clay dirt beneath. She spoke breathlessly about the hydroelectric dam, how it turned water into power like Christ incorporated. She spoke of the squalor that persisted throughout the lowlands. The Duke Power Company had washed it away, made the Carson family clean, and drug the country into the 20th century. That night he dreamt that the same waters rushed over him, and, ripping off his skin, revealed that in his veins ran the same muddy red clay. 

To this day, there was little patience for nosy environmentalists or do-gooders among any member of the Carson family. A mortgage was taken out on the house in those early days in order to invest in the coal refinery being built by the Duke Power Company. Twenty years before Quentin’s birth, the smokestack at the Marshall Steam Station breathed its first breath, exhaling an incessant stream of milky white which wouldn’t stop again for 35 years. In his childhood, Quentin used to think that it was the smokestack that was responsible for all the clouds in the sky. He would lie on his stomach in the grass and watch as the white clouds fixed themselves against the light blue sky, trying to pinpoint the exact moment that the clouds became fixed upon the horizon. It never became apparent to him exactly where the clouds became a part of nature and not a product of the grey concrete structure that they were birthed from, but he spent the summers of his childhood looking for it. 

Quentin’s grandmother died on his 13th birthday. His party was cancelled, naturally, a slight for which he could not find it in himself to forgive her for until a half-decade later, when she was named a plaintiff in a class-action suit against the Marshall Steam Station. Her cancer was attributed to the outpouring of coal ash into the groundwater around Mecklenberg county. Catherine had drunk nothing but well water for most of her life, something which the Carson family still held as a point of pride. Her estate, made out to be entirely disbursed to her grandson on the day of his 18th birthday, consisted mainly of stock holdings in the Duke Power Company. As a result of the numerous lawsuits already in progress before her death, these holdings were diminished before they could be legally transferred to her grandson and sold, so in the end, Quentin received the settlement paid for her death and little else. This was all of little importance to Quentin, who merely understood that he had received a large sum of money. There was little question about what he was to do with this renewed affluence. He had been accepted to two schools in Boston, which he spoke of in hushed tones, the sincerity of which was never doubted. He said there were worlds attainable only by passage through certain channels, none of which ran south of the Mason-Dixon, and he was going to go north to make a man of himself.

Quentin, in his first year at college, tried to underplay his family’s wealth. He had the vainglorious affect of those children of the upper-upper middle class, who, having been born into comfort, place pride in some authenticity that exists outside of material wealth. For Quentin, this manifested in outsized claims about the rags-to-riches story of his family. He was something of a novelty in his northeastern school, where, surrounded by the children of industrialists who were very much like himself, he found himself exaggerating the vowels of his speech, drawling when he spoke of his hometown until he sounded like Foghorn Leghorn. To the girls he wanted to impress, he described himself as country as a turnip green. He cultivated an interest in Faulkner, whom he described as “a revisionist and, frankly, an asshole.”  

One night, in the November before his first finals week away, Quentin was invited by some older classmates to a bar not far from his dorms. He accepted in a hurry, so excited by his inclusion he forgot that he had just turned 19. Shaking with nerves the entire walk there, he attempted to appear calm, walking and talking in an exaggeratedly slow manner. There was a drunk on the street by the bar, retching into a gutter. For some reason, this unnerved Quentin further. The wooden doors pulled open for him, he prepared his excuses for not having an ID under his breath until a tall glass was dropped on the table in front of him, its weight shocking him out of his soliloquy. Whiskey burned his throat, but he drank fast and soon felt warm and calm. Two pretty girls joined his group, and his nervousness gave way to excitement. They began talking about the hometowns they would soon be returning to over winter break.

“Molly, aren’t you visiting your aunt in Aspen,” one of the pretty girls asked. 

“No, definitely not. She’s decided to winter down south” the other pretty girl said.

“Oh what, is she spending the winter out with Quentin?” an older boy said. The group laughed. Quentin didn’t understand why but smiled.

“Not that kind of south, but hey, you never know. Don’t you have a lake house down there somewhere, Quentin?”

“Yeah, we do. It’s right on a peninsula that’s kind of shut off from the rest of the town, so it’s real secluded,” Quentin said. The group was excited by this information.

“Oh wow,  so you don’t even have to hang around the townies and the hicks then,” one of the girls said. “I bet it’s like Deliverance out there,” another girl said. “Or Flannery O’Connor,” someone chimed in.  Quentin described the scenery and grew animated as the group began to patter amongst themselves and discuss the possibility of taking a trip to a secluded house on the lake. Quentin went on, his voice distorting into a drawl he had learned more from Forrest Gump than he had from his childhood.

“The catfish jump right out of the water at you, and at night you can hear the wind rustle through the hickory trees, carrying the sound of the whippoorwills whistling to each other. When the sun peaks over the treeline in the early morning you can see this factory puffing smoke and it takes on different colors as the sun gets higher, almost like the leaves changing in the early fall.” The girls began to laugh as he waxed sentimental about the smoke that came from the factory. He took notice and paused.

“You sound like you really have a thing for that factory,” one of them said, laughing. He began to try to explain, but the liquor had made his tongue heavy and his wits dull. He tried to remember his grandmother’s words, which seemed so eloquent in youth, about the way that the factory had changed life in the valley, baptized those living in the squalor of the lowland swamps. He couldn’t make the words sound the way he remembered, and one of the older boys cut him off mid-sentence.

“So your family owns it?”

“Well, not quite. My grandfather worked in it early on and they owned some shares, but not -”

“So your family works in this factory you love so much?” The boy said, cutting him off. The group laughed, and Quentin’s face became hot. He struggled to find an answer. The group began to talk about factories their families owned and the industries their fathers oversaw. The topic shifted and this exchange was forgotten for all but Quentin, who sat at the table thinking drunken  thoughts, unable to reach any real conclusions.

They left the bar. The cold November air felt good on Quentin’s face. He was drunk and he enjoyed the chatter as they walked through the streets. He looked for the drunk he had seen on his knees in the gutter, but didn’t find him. As they turned the corner, one of the girls touched his arm.

“So do you think we could really go to your lake house?” She asked.

“Oh absolutely,” Quentin said, “My folks’d love to have y’all.”

“What do you mean your folks?”

“Well, my parents.” The girl pulled back her arm.

“You mean, like, your parents live in your vacation house?”

“I mean, it's our house,” Quentin said, confused. The girl ran up to join the rest of the group. He didn’t understand what he had said wrong. The anxiety grew into a pit in his stomach as they walked the block back to campus, hardening into a tight ball above his bladder. Before he could realize it, he became sick. He retched onto his shoes. The group in front of him turned at the noise, responding with various degrees of disbelief and laughter. He convulsed again and covered the front of his jacket in pink spew. The girls began to laugh as he took off the jacket and shook it out onto the sidewalk, flakes of half-digested food coming off in strings. He began to shiver. One of the older boys jogged back, removed his own coat, and draped it across Quentin’s shoulders. He held his arm around him and walked him to the door of his suite. Quentin sat down on his bed. “You’re sure you’re okay?” the boy asked. Quentin said yes and the boy turned to leave. He laid down, and the room spun before he jolted up and out of the door. “Wait,” he shouted across the hall, “your jacket.” The older boy turned, and waved his hand dismissively. Quentin, even in his state, recognized the label on the tag. “No, come on. This has to be like what, five, six -”. He looked up and the older boy was gone. 

That winter, Quentin went back home to the house on the lake. The whole of the Carson family was there for his arrival. He got out of the car and took turns hugging his relatives. “Nice jacket,” his uncle said. Amidst the backslapping and congratulating, the shame he had felt when he had driven up the dirt road to the house, which now appeared to him pitiful, dissipated. Over the break, he eased into the familiar rhythms of life with his parents.  One afternoon, the clouds began to part and the sun warmed the little peninsula. He went down to the yard with a book and a water bottle. He sat reading and rereading the same page. He looked up across the water, and saw the smokestack billowing against the sky, the trail like milk from a carton defying gravity, pouring upwards into the sky, growing a deeper shade of pink as it slowly glued itself to the background. Shades of orange began to emerge at the apex, and Quentin had to turn back to his book before he became sick.