Spooner (3 page)

But whatever the reason she decided that her husband should be returned to the sea instead of the prairie, the point here
is the way things happen—in this case, the end of the congressman and the beginning of Spooner—the long way around telling
you that after a sparsely attended funeral, Toebox’s casket was driven to the naval station in South Philadelphia, and the
next morning loaded on board the U.S.S.
Buck Whittemore
, a 2,800-ton Forrest Sherman–class destroyer under the command of Commander Calmer Ottosson, a polite, soft-spoken farm boy
from South Dakota turned wunderkind at the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, turned youngest commander in the United States
Navy, and now, still polite and soft-spoken, plainly an officer on the fast track to the top.

Except things morbid and unexpected happened one after another that day on the
Buck Whittemore
, and after that day, the only place Calmer Ottosson was going as far as the navy was concerned was back to wherever he came
from, the sooner the better.

And which accounts, indirectly, for how he became Spooner’s father.

C
almer Ottosson had not received the coffin containing Rudolph Toebox gladly. The congressman came with reporters and photographers,
for one thing, and a widow and a congressional aide and other congressmen and their congressional aides, and Calmer, who didn’t
like on-board ceremonies in the first place, or, now that he thought it over, on-board politicians, resented the waste of
money and time just to drop one over the side. In this way he was unlike most of his classmates back at Annapolis, who were
drawn into the service by ceremony and/or the uniform itself.

But then, Calmer was bare-bones itself. Except for physical-education classes, he’d had no social life at all at the academy,
no girls, no card games, no sports, no fistfights, very little self-abuse. He was reclusive and self-reliant, never comfortable
asking for anything, even the salt and pepper. His only authorized activity beyond the ordinary academic life of a midshipman
was caring for the school’s mascot, Bill, a sweet, low-key angora goat whom he fed and groomed throughout his junior and senior
years, and for whom he kept a secret, oddly romantic diary entitled
The Quiet Yearnings of Bill, a Castrated Goat
.

He held himself to a short regimen of nightly calisthenics and taught himself to write with his feet. This foot writing was
accomplished by holding a pencil between his second and third toes (counting from the inside out), and before he gave it up
he could write in script or block letters and even turn the pencil around and erase his mistakes.

He was a natural student with a tireless curiosity and could stay awake forty-eight hours and still think clearly over an
exam. He played the piano and did square roots in his head, and could read sheet music and in some way hear it almost as if
he were remembering it.

He kept these things to himself and kept himself apart, yet never seemed to stir the kind of resentment and misunderstandings
that you might expect, this sort of person in this sort of place. And nothing about this ever changed. Sixth in his class
at Annapolis, first at flight school in Memphis, and right to the end had no enemies below or above.

If the question occurs to you as to how or why a human being teaches himself to write with his feet, it began, at least in
this case, with a letter from home. Calmer’s mother wrote all the letters and cards that came out of the house, and he received
one every week, Wednesday or Thursday, usually six pages long, as it was her habit to compose a page a day, usually after
the supper dishes were done, and rest on the Sabbath. The letters were full of weather forecasts, crop reports, news of broken
drive belts, what the coyotes had killed while she and Dad were at church (
My, but the varmint has got Father’s dander up this time! He’s still setting up there in the upstairs bathroom window with
his 30-30 and a flashlight, wouldn’t even come down for supper…
), stories of broken fences and heartburn, car wrecks, tractor accidents. And newspaper clippings. Sometimes it seemed like
she’d clipped the whole
Conde Record
. Winners and losers of the turkey shoot down at the Rod and Gun Club, football scores, honor rolls, high school graduations,
marriages, births, obituaries. The letters were always signed
Love, Father and Mom.

It was toward the end of one of her letters, after a detailed, strangely nonpartisan account of a monthlong battle of wits
between Father and a weasel that was raising cain in the henhouse that she dropped in the news about Arlo:

I suppose you heard by now that Cousin Arlo finally run out of Luck with that polar bear in Minneapolis and had Three Fingers
de-gloved on his left hand, which I am given to understand means the bear got it all but the Bones, which the docs proceeded
to Lop off at the hospital anyways. He made all the papers and the UPI news wire, and said he didn’t blame nobody at the Zoo,
lest of all the bear, who was just doing the job she was hired to do. Just his luck to be left handed! I am certain he’ll
be looking at those missing fingers for the rest of his Life, and think about what a darn Fool he was to be getting drunk
with that crowd in the first place. But that’s Arlo for you, the one that’s always got to find out everything for himself.

And off this news, Calmer taught himself to write with his feet. More out of curiosity than sympathy, wondering what he would
do if he lost his own fingers. As the fitness reports always said—right up until the day he was ruined—Calmer Ottosson was
an officer prepared for contingencies.

But more to the point, teaching himself to write with his feet was the sort of thing he had been up to all his life. Making
his own fun, as the great writer called it.

But then, like the great writer, he’d grown up alone.

An adopted only child on a break-even two-hundred-acre farm fourteen miles southeast of Conde, South Dakota, a tiny spot up
in the northeast corner of the map near Aberdeen, who at seven years old enjoyed sitting barefoot in a plowed field, balancing
his father’s helmet from the war on his head and firing his single-shot Remington .22 into the air, correcting for the breeze
as the little puffs of dust appeared in the spots where the bullets landed, trying to bring one right in on top of his head.
He was a child who listened to what he was told and never bragged about his good marks at school or his shooting, just as
years later, at the academy, he never mentioned that he could write with his feet. Not to anyone there, not in any of his
letters home. Not even the ones to Cousin Arlo, although Arlo would have been tickled to hear of it—Arlo was everybody’s favorite,
and not just because he led a colorful life and visited the twin cities and Chicago and came home with stories on himself,
but also because, unlike the rest of them, he knew how to accept a compliment without feeling indebted, which led to family
resentments. Most of them wouldn’t smile if you gave them the Nobel Prize. On the other hand, Arlo was a damn-the-torpedoes
drinker, especially at family celebrations, and Calmer didn’t want the relatives hearing about his foot writing at a baptism
or a funeral and coming away thinking that he’d got so fancy in college that he was having fun these days off the misfortunes
of his own cousin, which would just kill his mother.

Once in a while, though, alone on a Saturday night, he might take off his shoes and socks and stand on his desk, ducking his
head to accommodate the ceiling, and write a letter:

Dear Arlo,

Greetings and salutations! Mother wrote with the happy news that you have finally quit biting your nails.

Or something of that nature, which was the nature of Calmer and Arlo around each other, and had always been. Calmer was no
mischief maker himself, but he had an appreciation for those who were, and even when his luck ran out and he lost all the
things he’d worked for and was drained empty, he never quit trying to see himself in the world as Arlo did, as part of the
story.

I
f it is fair to say that Calmer Ottosson got where he was in spite of an inclination to avoid human entanglements, it is also
fair to say that he got where he was because of it, loners and leaders so often turning out to be the same people. This solitary
bent was his nature, but it was also a practical thing. Humans, he’d noticed early on, even before the academy, followed best
when they couldn’t see who was leading.

There was another reason for keeping apart, demonstrated in his awkwardness at finding himself off duty and in the proximity
of the same men who took his orders. He accepted this awkwardness, knowing better than to try to change it, knowing his shyness
was as set in him as the shape of his head. On duty, though, there was no shyness; he was fair with people and respectful,
played no favorites, kept no enemies. Kept to himself. Privately, he did not trust even the best of them to do their jobs,
particularly at sea, and constantly took the ship’s signs himself, often knowing instinctively where trouble was coming—the
engine room, communications, the kitchen, the mood of the crew—even before it arrived.

He did these things quietly and in order of importance, leaving time enough during the day to do his own work too.

How he kept this schedule was anybody’s guess, except that for a human being Calmer could do with very little sleep. Beyond
that, what was most in his favor was an innate sense of how things were put together and the way one part affected another—an
engine, a horse, a septic tank, an outbreak of flu on ship—if a thing had moving parts, he could find a logic behind the movement,
and when it broke, he would see how to fix it.

He was slower to see himself in the same way, though, and it was only later on that he came to understand that he’d done too
much of the work himself, kept to himself too long. It had affected his judgment, this being alone, and led to what happened,
and made him see things that were not there.

T
he sky was still dark when the congressman was delivered to the pier, not a glimpse of light in the east. The congressman
arrived in a gray Cadillac hearse, the driver an old man in a black suit and a jet-black toupee who owned a funeral home on
South Broad Street and did quite a bit of business with the navy. Calmer came off the ship to personally supervise the unloading
and introduced himself to the undertaker.

“Calmer?” the undertaker said. “I never heard that one before.” Then he squeezed Calmer’s bicep and said, “You ever done any
piano moving, sonny?”

It was a few minutes before six in the morning, and there were already eight or nine reporters on board, along with half again
as many photographers. It was cold, and the newspapermen were all down in the galley, some of them eating, some of them drinking
laced coffee against the chill of the morning, talking about the stories they’d covered that were better stories than this
one.

The casket was made of mahogany and weighed, fully loaded, something over five hundred pounds. It emerged from the Cadillac
dark and gleaming (rollers had been installed at the business end of the vehicle, and they rang faintly as they spun) and
was gathered up into the hands of as many sailors as could squeeze in to grab hold. Wherever Calmer went in the navy, it was
always the enlisted men—not the officers—who went out of their way not to disappoint him.

He signed for the congressman and shook the funeral man’s hand—it felt as small and fragile as a child’s—and the casket was
placed carefully in the center of a platform attached by four lines to a windlass operated from the deck of the
Buck Whittemore
.

Calmer checked the lines himself, then motioned to the operator, and the platform lifted slowly into the air, Calmer leaning
farther and farther back to follow its progress. There was a whining noise from the electric motor and the platform climbed
slowly into the fog and then stopped. The noise changed pitch and the platform jerked sideways, commencing a swinging motion
that continued even as the casket dropped slowly toward the deck.