Mink River: A Novel (45 page)

Sitting on an old football helmet and chattering like a jay, says Owen.

Ah, the jay people, our cousins, a garrulous people, the jay people.

Look who’s talking.

Exactly. Hey, is the game on the radio? Can I turn it on?

35.

The traditional annual All Saints Day Dinner at Maple Head and Worried Man’s house. November 1, the ceremonial beginning of wet season, football season, remembering season, inside-the-house season, basketball season, soup-and-stew season. May and Billy and Nora and Owen and Daniel and Kristi and Cedar and Nicholas and Moses around the table. Grilled salmon, last tomatoes of the season, basil minced with garlic and oil, fresh steaming loaves of bread with Oregon State University logos punched into the crusts in honor of Nicholas being a College Boy. Gooseberry pies. Cheese from the other end of the county where Cedar knows a guy who trades milk and cheese for professional consultation as regards water-distribution systems. Ale from Grace’s pub. Wines from a vineyard in the valleys to the east that Stella says is the kind of wine that will more and more be made here in the future including God help us all in Neawanaka at what will someday be famous as Stella Maris Vineyards you mark my words. Trails and tendrils and threads and webs and weaves of talk. The Department of Public Works. Early planning for the town picnic. College football. How to ascertain the gender of a new heron without having your eyes pecked out by that terrifying blade of a beak. Legendary train stations around these United States and the possibilities of Nora visiting, for example, the train station in Mississippi where
W. C. Handy invented the blues probably late in the afternoon. The nun who died gently in the hotel: three stories that she liked to tell Moses, having to do with sunder, thunder, and plunder. A disquisition on the gooseberry and its application to the physics of time travel. Disquisition: evacuation systems and robosuits. Q: if a man sailed directly west into the ocean from Neawanaka, on, say, a small fishing boat, which country would he strike first? Q: if a woman wished to publish a book crammed to the gills with stories of Neawanaka, would the better title be
Further Annals of Neawanaka,
or
Sisaxai Stories
? Sea lions: their anatomy, life cycle, and primary role in story sagas among aboriginal peoples of the central Oregon coast. The Great Hunger in Ireland, 1845-1852, and its rippling effects on the descendants of the survivors. Argument: the order in which berries ripen on the central Oregon coast, from salmonberries in May through gooseberries in October. Subargument: salalberries—watery weak-ass excuses for fruit or subtle glorious treasures? Kristi not only smiles for the first time that No Horses has ever noticed but she also actually no kidding bursts out laughing when Owen and Billy and Daniel have a contest to see who can sound the most like a chuffing huffing enormous arrogant male sea lion hauled up on the beach crowing about his harem and challenging any and all local dogs to battle. Cedar does the dishes with Nicholas after Cedar begs Maple Head to
please
find something
decent
on the radio for the oppressed kitchen
slaves
who cannot
bear
to listen one more
second
to this classical
crap
droning out of the radio and she tells him to stuff it but then finds a station playing nothing but the Beach Boys,
yes
! Coffee and pie. Owen spreads a map on the table for Nora. Nicholas wheels Billy out to the deck for a cigar. Kiss the joy as it flies, says Billy quietly. Blake, you know. Yes sir, says Nicholas. Kristi holding Moses in her lap in the corner as Daniel halfheartedly does his math homework. Maple Head builds a fire.

36.

At four in the morning, on All Souls Day, the Day of the Dead, the second of November, the priest winning the betting pool, seven drops of water fell from the sky, headlong, pell-mell, sliding from the brooding mist, and then seventy, and then the gentle deluge, a whisper of wet, a thorough and persistent pittering on leaf mold and newt knuckle, web and wood, tent and vent, house and mouse, the rain splittering the sea, soaking boats, rinsing streets, fluffing owls and wetting towels, sliding along power lines and dripping from eaves, rivuleting and braiding and weaving tiny lines in the thirsty earth, darkening the trunks of trees, jewelling the strands of spiders, sliding along clotheslines, moistening the infinitesimal dust in rain gauges. The rain gags a thrush chick who opened her mouth because the rain sounds like her mama. A rushing rivulet saves a shrew who is about to be snagged by a snake. New trout, having never seen rain on the river, rise eagerly to ripples on the Mink. Some windows close against the moist and some open for the music. Rain slips and slides along hawsers and chains and ropes and cables and gladdens the cells of mosses and weighs down the wings of moths. It maketh the willow shiver its fingers and thrums on doors of dens in the fens. It falls on hats and cats and trucks and ducks and cars and bars and clover and plover. It grayeth the sand on the beach and fills thousands of flowers to the brim. It thrills worms and depresses damselflies. Slides down every window rilling and murmuring. Wakes the ancient mud and mutter of the swamp, which has been cracked and hard for months. Falls gently on leeks and creeks and bills and rills and the last shriveled blackberries like tiny dried purple brains on the bristle of bushes. On the young bear trundling through a copse of oaks in the woods snorffling up acorns. On ferns and fawns, cubs and kits, sheds and redds. On salmon as long as your arm thrashing and roiling in the river. On roof and hoof, doe and hoe, fox and fence, duck and muck. On a slight man in a yellow slicker crouched by the river with his recording equipment all covered against the rain with plastic wrap from the grocery store and after he figures out how to get the plastic from making crinkling sounds when he turns the machine on he settles himself in a little bed of ferns and says to the crow huddled patiently in rain, okay, now, here we go, Oral History Project, what the rain says to the river as the wet season opens, project number … something or other … where’s the fecking start button? … I can’t see anything … can you see a green light? yes? is it on? damn my eyes … okay! there it is! it’s working! rain and the river! here we go!

Thanks

Lodestars, compass points, emotional touchstones during the wrestling of this peculiar tale to paper:

The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake

The Horse’s Mouth
, by Joyce Cary

Sweet Thursday
, by John Steinbeck

Cloudstreet
, by Tim Winton

For the Time Being
, by Annie Dillard

Nehalem Tillamook Tales
(told by Clara Pearson)

The King James Bible

Hymns to the Silence,
by Van Morrison

The Rising
, by Bruce Springsteen

Third Symphony,
by Henryk Gorecki

Tosca,
by Giacomo Puccini

Thanks too to the fine writer and former logger Jim LeMonds of Castle Rock, Washington, for help with logging details; to Sara Ogle and Melissa Madenski of Neskowin for true stories of the coast that I have borrowed and jerryrigged; to the erudite editor and scholar Dave Hanson of Sheridan for natural history help in the Cheamhill River watershed; to the poet and scholar Isabel Stirling of the University of California at Berkeley for prompt and creative natural history assistance; to the fine poet Ger Killeen of Marylhurst University, for help with my Gaelic; to my friends Bob Antonelli and John Wironen and Ed Obermiller, all Catholic priests of the Congregation of Holy Cross at the University of Portland, for their help with Latin and Catholic ritual; to the fine writer and wonderful scholar Stephen Dow Beckham of Lewis and Clark College for Salish language details; to Jo Alexander, Micki Reaman, and Tom Booth at Oregon State University Press for wonderfully sharp eyes and for help with Tillamook stories; to Detective Jon Harrington of the Oregon State Police for help with police matters; to the salty cheerful Mark Jacobson for his help with automobile repair matters; to the wonderful writers David James Duncan of Montana and Robin Cody and Barry Lopez of Oregon for continuous laughter and tart honesty; and to the fine painter and electric soul Mary Miller Doyle, whose total belief in the people in these pages allowed these pages to be written over the course of some years. No Mary, no novel. The moral, then: it’s all her fault, heh heh heh.

—
Brian Doyle