Mink River: A Novel (7 page)

22.

Grace on the boat with her older brother Declan. Smoking cigarettes. Declan runs the boat and decides what to fish for: scallops sometimes, salmon sometimes, halibut sometimes. Depends.

Why’d you crop your top? asks Declan.

Felt like it.

Why?

Change.

You look like a broom.

Piss off.

And why’d you cut up mom’s car?

Felt like it.

With my torch.

It’s dad’s torch.

Which means it’s mine.
He’s
not going to use it.

Leave him alone.

Why? You love him all the sudden?

Piss off.

The boat slides on through the twilight and as they pass the mouth of the Mink full dark drops over the ocean like a scene change in a theater. The boat rocks and slaps. Tide coming in. Their cigarette ends glow. The silence is rich. A small fast dark bird whips by the stern and Grace identifies it instantly: nighthawk.

They’re not usually at sea, are they? she says.

Who?

Nighthawks.

Feck if I know, Grace.

Odd.

Tonight Declan has rigged the boat for halibut and when they are far enough off the beach they set the long lines and eat sandwiches and drink coffee and wait. After a while Declan squeezes into the little cabin to read by lamplight but Grace stays in the stern, staring into the dark. Declan knows her well enough, after two decades, to leave her alone. But he watches her face for a while, with its fringe of hacked black hair.

A
woman
, he thinks. Who knew. Was just a kid. Now look. Those shoulders. That fecking tattoo. Breasts. Mouth on her like a mean dog. Smart though. College smart. She’ll never go. Should have gone. She’ll marry some loser with refrigerator parts in his yard and ten mangy dogs and a huge tab at the pub. Waste. Should make her go to college. Dad should send her to college.

There’s
a joke. The old man doing something for someone else. Hell fecking freeze over.

23.

In the hotel the old nun thinks of Moses. She was young and strong when she found him.
Lithe, pliable, supple
, she thinks. She has been a teacher of reading and writing all her life and words swing and sing through her mind all the time in parades and poems.
Concatenation.
He had fallen from his nest in a maple tree and was huddled brokenboned groaning in the mud and leaf litter.
Moaning sobbing weeping
.

She’d crouched and stared.

A new crow is an awkward cake from the bakery of the Lord; all angles and bones, half naked still from the shell, hardly feathered at all.

She and Moses gaped at each other, each frightened; the nun of this angry little sudden bony goblin in her path and Moses of this giant billowing creature clearly leaning in to tear him to shreds.

It had been an unnerving day for Moses: strenuous escape from the shell, rush of smells and winds and Mother, and then lurching out of the nest and the hell-ride down through the whipping branches and slapping leaves and smashing to the ground pain pain pain and now this leering awful nightmare;

who cradles him in the lap of her white habit and brings him first to Owen, who builds a complex latticework of splints and slings (and paints them black for symmetry, detail being everything and the core of beauty as he says), and then to her room in the old hotel, where she reads aloud to the bird for weeks, Edmund Burke mostly, and painstakingly teaches him to speak. She starts with words she thinks will fit the shape of his mouth:
car, roar, raw
. Then when he has a hundred words in his vocabulary she teaches him to put them together in groups.

He realizes quickly that groups of words are more powerful than the individual words are and one bright summer afternoon when she is bent over her desk in the window he floats over from the top of the refrigerator to her desk and says to her
pain mud mother.
A sentence neither of them ever forgot.

24.

Worried Man reaches the spar tree near the lip of the hill and holds on for dear life. He’s really dizzy now and he’s worried.

He sits down.

He’s lost the trail of the pain for a moment; his own pain shoved it out of his head.

Room for only one pain at a time, he thinks. Well. There’s a lesson. Take a note, Billy. Get that down on tape. His head spins. He stretches out on the ground. Fern. Bracken? The base of large trees, he has noticed over the years, are often draped in fern. Wonder why. Like skirts. Fern skirts girdle female trees? Huge wooden women. Like Anna Christie. Huge wooden woman.
Not
wooden, turns out. Fascinating woman. Not pretty but
what
grace and dignity. Not pretty but beautiful. And what a singer. And what a drunk. A
howling
drunk. Felt her pain all the way across town. What a voice. Her pain had something to do with her voice, he remembers; he remembers that her pain quivered in a curious way. Quavered. Some women have a pulsing energy almost too sharp and salty to endure and when they are in pain their pain is ferocious and shatters all over the place. Her pain had wobbled his knees and by the time they got to the Christies’ house Cedar had to help him hobble up the stairs. Where they found Anna screaming drunk that night and her family escaped to a motel. Broken glass everywhere. Broken dishes. Puke and blood. Music blasting. Opera. When I turned off the music I thought she would kick me to death. Her boots in my ribs. Cracking my bones. Cedar talked to her all that night, his voice like a cello. He and Anna sang in the dark. Songs with no words. The river sang too. Anna big as a bear. I couldn’t sing. Her voice like a river. They sang by the river.

He sits up and draws a bead on the pain above him and gets it clear in his head again. It’s a
young
woman, he realizes. The pain is raw, uncut by experience. Whoever she is hasn’t felt pain of this sort ever before and it is flowing out of her like blood from a severed vein.

25.

I’ll tell you a story about working in the woods, says George Christie to his daughter Cyra. They are sitting comfortably in their kitchen. We wore what we called tin pants, which were wool pants coated with paraffin to keep the rain off. Cyra and her twin Serena are the last of George and Anna’s children. At the end of the day the guys would hang their wet socks and unmentionables and shirts around the stove in the middle of the bunkhouse and the smell had
hair
on it. This fall the girls go off to college. Sometimes there were sixteen of us fellas bunking in one shack all together and we had us
some
fun, I can tell you that. Cyra once found her mother passed out in the creek and for a long moment hesitated to pull her out. We played us a lotta cribbage, and fellas who could play harmonicas and fiddles, they were popular fellas. Cyra is frightened of college but thrilled that it’s far away. We ate like bears, we did, pancakes and potatoes and bacon and steaks, as much as we could cram home, Cy, but we were none of us fat, as you burned it off so fast, and if ever you saw a fat man in the woods you knew there would be three accidents that day. Cyra thinks she might want to be an actress or maybe a filmmaker. It was more deadly than war, was your daddy’s life then, and I saw fellas cut up in all sorts of ways, but when my friend Minor got killed that was the end of it. Cyra wonders how her dad can still love her mom after all the screaming. We had our own language there in the woods, words I don’t hear anymore, and I miss ’em, Cy:
barberchair
and
bullbuck
, and
chaser
and
choker
, and
crummy
and
gyppo
, and
highballing
and
hooking
, and
kerf
and
peavey
. Cyra loves her dad best when he is just telling stories relaxed and grinning like this and not wearing his cold
I will endure
face as her twin sister calls it. Here’s a word to describe your daddy, Cy:
jillpoked
, which is what you call an old log what’s rooted in the ground at one end and all airy at the other. I’m all airy these days, waving in the wind. My feet are set good but my canopy’s moving around something fierce.

26.

No Horses closes up shop. She sweeps the chips from the day’s work into a pile under the work-table; it is her habit to leave the chips under the table as she is working on a piece, so that she will be able to tell at a glance how much work she’s done.

A decent pile today. A good start. The hips are coming clear. Lean male hips. Men have hips like tea mugs, she thinks. Women have hips like spoons. A man’s hipbones are handles for his woman’s hands.

She leans the broom against the table and feels the hipbones of the oak man on the table. Good. That’s right. So, she thinks, pubic bone here, and belly here, and navel here; she marks the lines with a pencil for tomorrow’s work.

Who is this man coming out of the tree, she thinks. Being born. Seed from tree. She grins, remembering her father’s remark when she told him she was working in oak:

Ah, the rough bark opens, he said. Blake.

She oils her chisels and puts them away, and checks her hammers for flaws and puts them away, and turns out the lights of the studio, and puts on her jacket, for while May days at the coast hint at summer the evenings are absolutely convinced still of winter. By the door she pauses—and then locks the door and goes back through the shadowy studio to the porch, through the door shaped like her, and there she sits down in the dark, under the dark bent knives of herring gulls floating inland to wherever it is they sleep,

and she begins to weep.

All day long she fended off this moment with the tools in her hands but now she cups her face in her hands and sobs and sobs and sobs.

27.

Daniel on his bike thinks of his family. He rushes downhill through the onrushing night. We’re so weird. My dad is Irish and my mom is one of the People, which makes me an Irish-People-American. My dad works with a talking crow. My mom says that she finds out what wood and stone want to be when they grow up. My grandfather in Ireland died working on a road that doesn’t go anywhere. My grandmother in Ireland lives on a hill that’s she never left not once in her whole life and she says if she leaves the hill she will die for sure. My grandfather from here thinks about time all the time and walks around town every night feeling other people’s pain in his head. My grandmother from here is the strictest teacher in the history of the world. Their best friend is a tough little old man named for a tree.

Is this a nutty family or what?

At the bottom of the hill there’s a wide grassy meadow on either side of the river. Sometimes at dusk you can see elk. Tonight he sees a rack of antlers against the sunset and he stops quietly under a big spruce tree. Waits patiently. He has learned to wait patiently from his mother, who is patient. After a while he picks out the outline of the rest of the buck. Enormous. Then he sees one doe, feeding; then a second doe.

Then he sees the buck rear up and flail his front feet at the second doe and for a minute he thinks the buck is attacking the doe, but then the buck straddles his front feet around the doe’s rump and mounts her. She quivers under his weight. Daniel is the most still silent person in the history of the galaxy. So silent and motionless and dazed under the deep-green skirt of the spruce as Moses floats overhead on his way home that not even Moses, who sees very well in the dark, sees the boy with the long braids in three colors: red, black, brown.

28.

In the cop car behind the liquor store there is a cop named Michael. He and his wife Sara have two small daughters. Michael does pushups with the girls sitting on his back giggling. He likes to make love to Sara in the first pearly light of morning, before the girls are awake. She prefers making love at night with candles and wine after the girls are asleep. He liked being a policeman when he first started but now he is burdened by the brokenness he sees every day. She wishes he would quit the force but feels she cannot comment on his profession as he is bringing in the money. He loves opera and his favorite opera of all is Puccini’s
Tosca
, which he knows by heart and plays constantly in the car. She thinks secretly that he will leave her because she is not exciting. He has been on the force for sixteen years and has four more years to go before he earns his pension. She feels fat. He asks her questions sometimes just to hear the vibrato in her voice. She has been fish counter at a dam and a waitress. He is afraid he will not last four more years on the force but doesn’t tell Sara because he doesn’t want her to worry about financial stability. She discovered three months ago that she is pregnant but hasn’t told him yet. His favorite parts of
Tosca
are the subtle ones: the shuffling old sacristan who prays at the sound of the Angelus, the cannon signaling the police, the sheep bells and church bells heard at the opening of the final act. She plans to tell him that she is pregnant every night after dinner but something always gets in the way. Their older daughter is hers and their younger daughter is theirs. He is a serious scholar of Puccini’s life: how Puccini walked thirteen miles to Pisa to see Verdi’s
Aida
, how Puccini once remarked that “the only music I can compose is that of little things,” how Puccini left his opera
Turandot
unfinished at his death, only two scenes from completion, and how Arturo Toscanini, when
Turandot
had its premiere in Milan in 1926, lay down his baton out of respect for the composer when the production came to its truncated end, and would not finish with the scenes added by another man, the scenes that finish the opera to this day.