PROLOGUE

My mother never tried to either stab or shoot my father, but her father -- my Grandpa Cole -- once threatened to ventilate the sheriff's deputies, who brought the eviction notice, with the two guns he wore on his hips.

Grandpa Cole's farm grew the best asparagus on the East Coast. Some of it was shipped all the way to New York City to the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where it was served a la Neville Island. The farm also grew strawberries and tomatoes, and my grandfather grew and processed his own horseradish.

The loss of the farm grew other things as well. It grew hatred, bitterness, greed, ambition and lust. It fed on zealous religion proclaimed with fire and brimstone, but that said little of love or Christian charity. In later generations, those who left, thrived. Those who stayed, struggled with the lives they endured. Some of them found solace in the very religion that was the source of their suffering.

All our lives are affected by things that happened to shape our parents. Family traits are handed down; attitudes are either perpetuated or discarded. Sometimes the younger generation rebels against a rigid attitude on the part of the parents. This rebellion can either be a complete about-face, such as when my cousin Tucker, turned his back on religion after his father over-reacted to his questioning of God, or it can be a silent, gradual change, as it was with me and my sister.

My mother grew up under the influence of the family's loss of the Neville Island farm in Pittsburgh and I grew up under the influence of her dreams, her regrets and her obsessions -- all of which fed her determination to leave the new farm in Sandy Lake. She would spend much of her life trying to reclaim her lost status as a Cole of Neville Island.

I benefitted from the benign neglect I sometimes enjoyed while my mother was busy with her various pursuits, as it counterbalanced the times she focused her attention on me. This attention was caught by what she perceived as negatives in my character that bore correction, and her remedy involved references to how I was shaming her and the whole Cole line, by not living up to her image of what they were, and what I had the ability to be. Her grandmother, Mary Ann Cole, was the image before my mother's eyes, and my mother had seldom found favor herself with that lady. When I heard the litany, "What will people think?" that meant, "What would my Grandmother Cole think?" As much as my mother loved living in Sandy Lake, and expressed happiness at the move from Neville Island, the influence of her early days there, and Mary Ann's fiery pride in the family's status, had an even strong influence on her outlook.

Perhaps if I had been mentally deficient, she would have let me live quietly in a corner, or borne me proudly as her cross. But I had a good mind and was expected to follow the path she had conceived for me. I did not. Her big mistake was allowing me to go to the movies weekly during most of my formative years.

Some things carried over. I shared her interest in elegant houses, and the underlying drive to have one remained with me. She liked the theatre, but I carried that interest beyond what my mother considered acceptable. When it counted, I did well in school, but my performance usually matched my level of interest in the subject matter. I somehow developed a stronger sense of injustice and sympathy for the underdog that surpassed her surface recognition that the world was not perfect.

From my grandfather, I inherited my love of animals that sometimes clashed with my mother's more practical attitude toward them, acquired from her life on the farm. She never hesitated to do away with one if she found it expedient. She would then burden me with her remorse, like the time she flushed the mother mouse and her babies, although the tiny, brave creature refused to leave her young to save herself. My mother told me about it after the fact, and left me the legacy of haunting mental images of those defenseless animals, looking to her for mercy, drowning in the septic system. I would have released them outdoors.

My life did not follow a straight path, but twisted and turned to naviagate the maze of influences on it. More than my own life, this is the story of what happened long ago, of the event that changed the direction of the family, of how my generation survived the effects of that event, and the influence of the strong personalities that made up the family psyche. Greed grew in a higher place than the farm, wrapped its tentables around my mother's generation, and affected those of us who came after.

This is what happened to our family -- my aunts and uncles, me, my sister and my cousins. Their voices were the cadences of my youth, their western Pennsylvania accents as familiar as that of my New Jersey neighbors.

The family's loss of the Neville Island farm certainly affected my mother's generation, leaving feelings of bitterness in three out of the four siblings. The effect on the lives of my generation was more subtle, but became part of the fabric of which we were made. Some of us have accomplished what we did because of that loss. Others, responding to the reactions of our parents, and perhaps the actions of our grandparents, achieved success in spite of it. But it did affect us. It was always there, lurking in the background of family stories. There is not one of us in this family today who is ignorant of the events of 1918 to 1921, who does not know that we collectively fell from a certain height and were left to pick ourselves up as best we could.

Neville Island is who we were -- who we are. Those events shaped our parents. As water ripples out from a pebble thrown into it, so is my generation shaped in the next ring. Whatever our present names, we are the Coles of Neville Island.