All history, granted a wide enough perspective, is merely irony. In the paleozoic era, New Burlington, Ohio, was very largely limestone, at the bottom of the sea. Later, it was forest: the durable oak, the sweet maple, the sassafras, hornbeam and buckeye. Still later, in the last days of New Burlington itself, when the waters of Caesar’s Creek flooded into the village’s only cross streets one final time, farmer Phil Hartman drove his powerboat across the bottomlands towing his young son on water skis. The boy slalomed over Bill Conklin’s submerged fence posts and up into New Burlington, where he landed in 90-year-old Merle McIntire’s peony bed. Three generations down, five-year-old Gregg McIntire watched both the water and the Hartmans and suggested to Grandmother Merle that she not move from New Burlington as the Army Corps of Engineers demanded, rather remain and open a bait shop on her back porch which overlooked the Caesar’s Creek bottomlands. Gregg’s mother, thinking this like him, laughed. Merle McIntire did not. Unsuccessful at willing herself to die, she soon met the corps’ deadline, and moved into a trailer park. The mollusca (whose shells provided the benevolent organic sediment basic to limestone) had given way to the McIntires, who in unyielding turn, were giving way to the return of the water. And the Hartmans, in an unwitting betrayal of their stricken village, became the first pleasure-seekers of the Caesar’s Creek Reservoir.

Frank Robinson’s house is on one hill, the graveyard is on another, although half a mile away. To get to his work he walks, but everyone knows him and most of the time he is soon picked up. When a familiar automobile passes him by, as it occasionally does, he forgives, although the driver is likely to feel he has behaved irrationally, on some vague and quarrelsome instinct, and he is left with a tenuous cusp of a guilt as the gravedigger shrinks in the rear glass. One of the villagers, far into some solemn moment, will tell of this as if ashamed and say: "I’ve done that." The gravedigger, living alone, returns silence for silence. The moment is too complicated, somehow past reckoning.

January comes to New Burlington as stealthy as old grief, known only by the idle spin of pages under Don Collett’s calendar portrait of Lovely Lillian, gazing insouciantly through the mad march of another year. Collett’s Hardware has moved now. Ronnie Grooms’ grocery store is gone. Wren Muterspaugh’s barber shop has been gone, and so has McClure’s Garage. Mrs. Louie Wills, at 94 the village’s oldest resident, has moved to the country, but it exists only in her mind’s eye. The preacher comes on Sundays still, to teach the natives shame, but there is less comfort now in such strained ritual. In January, the snows come to reclaim the village.

The blacksmith shop is in the farmland north of the village. It was not the oldest blacksmith shop in the New Burlington farming community, but it survived to become the oldest. Hugh Lickliter built it behind his house in the first year of the great depression. One eye consulted the failure in the nation, the other regarded the rich New Burlington fields. If the shop faltered, he would make it into a double corncrib: nations rose and fell, and the fortunes of men, but the fields went on forever. In the spring, the plowshares piled halfway to the roof. Howard Pickering, fifth generation blacksmith, came to work and stayed forever.

It is an ordinary chair, of good mahogany and quiet cloth. In front of the rockers, the figured carpet is worn, an acquiescence to Mrs. Louie Wills’ passage through the seasons. The chair is the center of her existence, as if the rockers themselves absorb grief, loneliness, and age. From the chair, everything is equidistant: kitchen, bedroom, television, front porch and neighbors, even the minister of the Nazarene Church around the corner, whose bleak wrath in the warm months when windows are flung up bludgeons the center of the village like failure itself.

In the summer, the cornfields surround New Burlington with a startling density. In early August of a wet year, the stalks climb until the roads into the village disappear. Farm houses mire in a seasonal forest: green shingles, green stalks, green thoughts. In late August the silken plume on the ear darkens. The earth tilts under harvest weight. Frank Lundy’s heart leaps on green August mornings. Form and function meet in such dark bottomlands. The road that rises to the graveyard hill is east and west, but Frank Lundy’s corn rows run north and south. "You can drive by and look down the rows," he explains. "I thought I could plow as straight a row as anybody in the country, you see. It showed well running north and south, gave a different look to the field, and made a very pretty picture. They would say at the bank: ‘I saw your cornfield…."

In the difficult fields, the farmer looked at the ill-conceived shapes of the new technology and turned reassuringly to his horses. The sweaty flanks moving under leather harnass compelled him. He would not yet turn away from the muscle and blood pulling him through the furrows. He felt wedded to it. Perhaps such feelings came from stubbornness. The fields taught that well. He was uncertain, and since he was uncertain, it meant he would change. But not for the moment. At night, under a raw sky, his wife heard him come to bed. She subconsciously prepared herself for his weight in the bed, which made her shift in half-sleep. He breathed deeply out, a sound which carried a subtle tone. She thought sometimes it was resignation, a breath at the end of all breathing, to either stop, or to begin anew. And so it frightened her, even in this twilight of sleep, and she moved until she felt his rough hand upon her hip. His breathing began again, the quiet orderly rise and fall before sleep. She relaxed then (such easy wisdom) and was content for a long moment, and such contentment provoked a minor resentment. She resented his hand. She resented it all. She slept, and sleeping, she dreamed of herself in harness, like the old etchings reproduced in history books, bent women dragging a plowstock through uneven fields.

I have come to live in New Burlington’s last farm house, surrounded by white brick and clean silence. I have come here to understand its death, my life. Nothing is revealed. I consider Ross McDonald and Agatha Christie, all mystery in the telling, and resolution before a fortnight. For a time, before the death of Lawrence Mitchner, I shared the responsibility of lastness, which is not to be taken lightly. Across my orchard, behind the drawn shutters in Lawrence Mitchner’s house, I could see a blue glow in the heavy tangible weight of a winter’s night. Some say he watched television. Others said not.

John Harlan Pickin’s great-grandfather walked from New Jersey to Ohio when farming country was still new. Caprice being the true nature of human delivery, John Pickin grows older in New Jersey now, and the distance is ever more awesome. He will never return to New Burlington, Ohio, because it is a dying village. Yet New Burlington, condemned in death to even more obscurity than it bore in life, remains the home of John Pickin in that particular way places of the mind and heart transcend all geography.