Mink River: A Novel (9 page)

36.

Worried Man stares up at the porch, which looks vaguely familiar, but it’s awfully dark.

Must be the utter and complete lack of moon that makes this hillside so strange, he thinks. The darkness dread & drear. Blake.

He gets a bead on the pain again, which is right above his head through the decking, and he thinks about calling up to her gently through the patio, but then considers that the young woman will have eleven heart attacks if suddenly a voice from beneath her feet asks about her stabbing pain.

I’ll go around the house and knock, that’s what I’ll do.

He steps out quietly from under the deck, trusting that the blanketing night will hide him, and when he reaches the corner of the house he leans in to use his hands against the wall, so as to be sure of his steps. He feels a smooth tube attached to the wall, and then he feels the rough wood of the wall itself, but not until he edges along to the next corner does he realize that the tube is Cedar’s rain gauge, that the wall is faced all around with cedar shakes, that his hands are upon the Department of Public Works, and that the young woman in throbbing pain on the deck is his daughter.

37.

Grace and Declan are back in port just after dawn. A good night’s work. They’ve cleaned and iced the catch on the boat and they box it now in wooden crates and heave the boxes into Declan’s truck.

Coming?

I need a drink.

Fecking seven in the morning, Grace.

I’m not tired.

She hops back on the boat to get her gear. Declan’s itchy eyed and he stinks and his back hurts and all he wants is shower and sleep and he’s worried about Grace and embarrassed by her and his temper rises.

You’ll get drunk and screw some loser, he says.

So?

What for?

Feels good.

Come home and sleep.

I’m not tired.

Screwing drunks in their rathole rooms. Lovely.

She says nothing.

You’ll get pregnant with some loser spawn and then what?

Then I’ll be pregnant for a few hours and then I won’t be.

Meanwhile half the town gets a crack at you.

So?

You’re a cheap bus everybody gets to ride, Grace.

So?

You’re my fecking
sister
.

So?

He guns the truck and rattles off. A spurt of yellow ice-melt slides off the truck. She walks down the street to the bar. The bar opens before dawn for the boats coming in. It’s half-full of men. The only other woman is the bar maid, Stella. Grace gets a whiskey and gulps it, gets a second whiskey, sips it fast, and then gets coffee and a third whiskey. Takes her sweater off, tucks in her shirt, turns to survey the room. All but two of the men are looking at her. The faces of the men looking at her are greedy and masked. Several are smiling. She knows them all except the two not looking at her. Her throat is burning from the whiskey.

They must be from away, those two, she says to Stella.

I guess, says Stella.

Someone calls Grace from the other side of the room. She ignores the man calling her. She carries her coffee and whiskey to the table where the two men from away are eating eggs.

May I? she says, and the two men look up. She sits down next to the one who pulls out a chair for her.

38.

Of course there are many other people in Neawanaka. So very many. Old and young and tall and short and hale and broken and weary and exuberant. So very many it would take a million years to tell a millionth of their lives and we don’t have the time, worse luck, for their stories are riveting and glorious and searing. But, ah, let us choose two, we’ll go sidelong for a moment and peer in on, say, the young couple who were coupling on top of the bedclothes earlier in the day.

Their names are Timmy and Rachel. For Timmy’s twentieth birthday Rachel has decided to give him herself. A friend from high school has a tiny family fishing cabin up in the hills near the source of the Mink and Rachel is going to borrow the cabin. She and the friend went up there this afternoon to arrange the cabin as a love nest as the friend says teasing but envious. They make up the bed with freshly ironed cotton sheets and set candles around the bathtub and Rachel sets a bowl of salmonberries by the bed.

What
are
you planning to do with those berries? says the friend.

Use your imagination, says Rachel and they laugh.

When they are done preparing the cabin they sit on the front step watching two tiny mud-brown wrens skittering and stuttering in the tangled brush around the door. The wrens have a burbling whirring wheedle like a sung question:
rrrrrrrrr?

What kind of bird is that? says the friend.

Winter wren, says Rachel. Hear the rising note at the end of the call? And they flit around low to the ground like mice, that’s a sign of winter wrens. My mom loves them though she says the males mate with several females in a season.

Men! snorts the friend and they laugh.

The wrens find something in the brush and get all excited
rrrrrrr!

House wrens are different, says Rachel raising her voice a little over the excited wrens, once they get together they stay together.

Rrrrrr!
say the wrens.

You want to marry him? says the friend.

No, says Rachel. I haven’t thought that far. I don’t want to think ahead. I don’t want to think at all. I just want to be with him now.

He seems a little … raw, says the friend.

Rrrrrr!
say the wrens, hopping about.

He’s cute, says Rachel, and he’s gentle with me.

What does
he
want? says the friend.

He wants to
rrrrrrrrr
me all day long, says Rachel, and both young women laugh, and they stand up to go, and the frightened wrens leap away into the brush chattering
kipkip kipkip
.

Rachel’s friend locks the cabin door and gives Rachel the key and they drive home imitating the wrens
rrrrrrrrrr
and laughing but each thinks the other is laughing a little too hard.

39.

Owen Cooney taping at home here. I am telling stories for my son Daniel. They are sad stories some of them but we are made of joy and woe both. So. My greatgrandfather was Timmy Cooney who worked on a road that goes nowhere and there is a story in that. This was during Bliain na Sciedan, the years of small potatoes. The road is built of stones. The stones were carried by hungry men. The men were paid with one piece of bread a day. The bread wasn’t enough and most of the men died. Some men fell right on the road and other men fell to the side into the grass and nettles and bushes. Timmy Cooney fell to the side of the road into the bushes and he crawled on his belly through the ditch looking for
caisearbhan
, which is dandelions, and
samhadh
, which is sorrel, and other herbs and weeds. His mouth was green from the weeds he ate. He was there in that ditch for two days and one night. On the second day he saw a man fall on the road above him where they were working and the man was too weak to stand up anymore and the other men working were too weak to carry him off the road, so they put their stones over him where he lay and they went on down the road.

My greatgrandfather remembered that place because there was a holly tree there.

After two days my greatgrandfather could stand up and he walked across a field to a little house. There was an oak tree there by that house. There was a man and woman and a dead girl there. The girl was about twelve years old. She was naked and my greatgrandfather covered her with half of his shirt because she was just beginning to grow breasts and no man’s eyes should see that. Her father and mother were too weak to bury her so my greatgrandfather carried her out behind the little house to the edge of a little creek and folded her arms across her chest and covered her as best he could with mud and grass. He cried he said like he never cried before and never did again in all his long life.

Then he came back into the little house and made a fire and boiled oak leaves and grass and made a soup. The father and the mother seemed stronger after the soup but in the morning when my greatgrandfather awoke he found them both dead with the man holding the woman’s feet to his chest inside his raggedy shirt.

That man died trying to warm his wife’s feet.

There are many other stories about my greatgrandfather Timmy Cooney, but I will tell just one more now.

Many years after that morning he came back to that place to mark the graves of that family. He found the little creek where he had buried the girl but there was no trace of the little house and no graves marked for anyone. My greatgrandfather was very old then but he took a spade and marked out three graves by the creek and then took his hat and brought water from the creek and gave them to drink of their own water, as he said, the pure water washing away their pain and sorrow.

My grandfather who was there that day told me that story.

40.

The front door of the Department of Public Works is never locked, Cedar and Worried Man being of the shared opinion that a public service project should never close, and over the years they have found many things when they opened the door in the morning, including once two babies the size of two fists.

Worried Man wrenches the door open and runs straight through the building, sure of his way in the dark, through the reading room and cavernous central shop and warren of little offices in the back, his fear rising
what is the matter with Nora?
and he reaches her studio door and wrenches at it and just as he does he feels a stab of her pain like a train running right through his head and he wavers there by the door, his grip loosened for a second as he feels blindly for the source of the pain—
my child! Nora!
—and he wrenches ferociously at the door again but it’s locked!
shit! shit!
and he hammers on the door with all his might which is considerable even in his later years he having been all his life a sinewy and passionate man and he yells
Nora! Nora!
and then suddenly the door gapes open and she stands there sobbing and he half steps half stumbles into the studio the half a wooden man looming on her table in the dark and she leans into her father and he bends down and folds his daughter into his arms hunching over her longleggedly like a heron and she tucks her head under his chin and weeps and weeps and he doesn’t say a word but keeps his mouth buried in the black river of her hair and they stand like this for so long that her tears soak twin circles into his shirt and those circles never actually do wash out of his shirt and eventually the shirt fades away to rags and ribbons but the circles remain inviolate and one morning he joins them together reverently and folds them into his prayer bundle where there are many things like that.

As she cries into him he makes deep wet sounds in his throat.

Finally he says into her hair
talk to me talk to me
but she can’t speak and he leads her to the porch and she puts her face on his long knees and cries again his long hands stroking her black hair he says
what? what?
with the front of his mind frantic for Nora and the back of his mind feeling for the pain he felt at the door, and that’s how they are when Moses floats up to land
plop
on the railing and yells

Daniel is hurt! come! come!

She leaps up and takes two quick steps and sails right over the railing like a deer.

Worried Man shouts
run! run!

Moses with two terrific strokes of his wings like twin black tents is away over the tops of the trees below him No Horses flies down the path her hair a river of black in the black night between the twin lines of black trees her heart black black.

41.

Owen Cooney here at home telling stories for my son Daniel.

I will continue with stories of Timmy Cooney.

Timmy Cooney was fifteen years old when the Hunger came. It came one night in late summer. When the family went to bed the potato plants were healthy and in the morning the plants were black and withered. The people went from field to field amazed. They dug up the potatoes but the potatoes were black and withered too.

That was how
an Gorta
began, the Hunger.

Soon there was no food at all and people stole from each other and knocked each other down when a cauldron for gruel and broth was set up in the town.
Bhi an t-ocras comh mor sin agus nach rabh trocaire in aon duine leis a-duine eile
, my grandfather would say, no one had mercy for anyone else.

With the Hunger came the fever and very many people died. Old people and babies died first, then children, then men, and finally women. They always died that way when the Hunger came to a town.