Mink River: A Novel Read online

  Table of Contents

  Beginning

  Map

  Part 1

  Part 2

  Part 3

  Part 4

  Part 5

  Thanks

  Praise for Mink River

  • Editor’s Choice Prize for Fiction, Foreword Reviews’ Book of the Year Awards

  • An Oregonian Top Ten Northwest Book

  “Award-winning essayist Doyle writes with an inventive and seductive style that echoes that of ancient storytellers. This lyrical mix of natural history, poetry, and Salish and Celtic lore offers crime, heartaches, celebrations, healing, and death. Readers who appreciate modern classics like Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio or William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying will find much to savor here. Enthusiastically recommended.”

  —Library Journal (starred review)

  “[An] original, postmodern, shimmering tapestry of smalltown life ...”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “The strength of the novel lies in Doyle’s ability to convey the delicious vibrancy of people and the quirky whorls that make life a complex tapestry. He is absolutely enchanted by stories, with the zeal and talent to enchant others ... The greatest gift of Mink River is that it provides every reason in the world to see your own village, neighborhood and life in a deeper, more nuanced and connected way.”

  —The Oregonian

  “Doyle’s language is rich, lush, equal to the verdant landscape he describes, and his narrative ricochets with a wondrous blending of the real and magical from character to character as he tracks the intersecting lives of Neawanaka oe summer.”

  —Greg Sarris, San Francisco Chronicle

  “Doyle explores the inner workings of a community and delivers a timeless story of survival, transcendence, and good cheer.”

  —Tim McNulty, The Seattle Times

  “This is a story to get lost in, as stories upon stories unfold in this tiny town on the Oregon coast. Mink River is flat-out fabulous.”

  —Sheryl Cotleur, Book Passage, Corte Madera, California

  Also by Brian Doyle

  Essays

  Grace Notes

  Leaping

  Spirited Men

  Saints Passionate & Peculiar

  Credo

  Two Voices (with Jim Doyle)

  Nonfiction

  The Grail: A year ambling & shambling through an Oregon

  vineyard in pursuit of the best pinot noir wine in the whole wild world

  The Wet Engine: Exploring the mad wild miracle of the heart

  Poetry

  Thirsty for the Joy: Australian & American Voices

  Epiphanies & Elegies

  Fiction

  Bin Laden’s Bald Spot & Other Stories

  Mink River

  a novel

  Brian Doyle

  Oregon State University Press

  Corvallis

  Map and spot drawings by Mary Miller Doyle

  The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources and the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Doyle, Brian, 1956 Nov. 6-

  Mink river : a novel / by Brian Doyle.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-87071-585-3 (alk. paper)

  1. City and town life--Oregon--Fiction. 2. Oregon--Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3604.O9547M56 2010

  813’.6--dc22

  2010007210

  © 2010 Brian Doyle

  All rights reserved.

  First published in 2010 by Oregon State University Press

  Fourth printing 2011

  Printed in the United States of America

  Oregon State University Press

  121 The Valley Library

  Corvallis OR 97331-4501

  541-737-3166 • fax 541-737-3170

  http://osupress.oregonstate.edu

  For Mary

  The only music I can compose is that of little things.

  —Giacomo Puccini

  The past has not passed away but is eternally preserved somewhere or other and continues to be real and really influential … everybody and everything is so closely interwoven that separation is only approximate …

  —Pavel Florensky

  Animals, as they pass through the landscape, leave their tracks behind. Stories are the tracks we leave.

  —Salman Rushdie

  I

  1.

  A town not big not small.

  In the hills in Oregon on the coast.

  Bounded by four waters: one muscular river, two shy little creeks, one ocean.

  End of May—the first salmonberries are just ripe.

  Not an especially stunning town, stunningtownwise—there are no ancient stone houses perched at impossible angles over eye-popping vistas with little old ladies in black shawls selling goat cheese in the piazza while you hear Puccini faintly in the background sung by a stunning raven-haired teenage girl who doesn’t yet know the power and poetry of her voice not to mention her everything else.

  No houses crying out to be the cover of a magazine that no one actually reads anyway and the magazine ends up in the bathroom and then is cut to ribbons for a fourth-grade collage project that uses a jar of rubber cement that was in the drawer by the back stairs by the old shoebox and the jar of rubber cement is so old that you wonder secretly if it fermented or a mouse died in it or what.

  No buildings on the National Resister of Hysterical Places, though there are some old houses, the oldest of which finally collapses on page 141; no cheating ahead to watch it slump like ice cream at noon, please.

  But there are some odd sweet corners here, and friendly houses and sheds and barns and a school and churches and shops, and certain rhythmic angles in the town where a road and a building and a line of trees intersect to make a sort of symmetrical geometric architectural textual physical music in the right light—the kind of juxtaposition of things that painters like to paint for inchoate inarticulate unconscious reasons they can’t explain.

  And the light itself—well, there’s a certain certainness of light here, the way it shafts itself through and around things confidently, exuberantly, densely, substantively; it has something to do with the nearby ocean, maybe. Or the rain, which falls eight months a year. Or the sheer jungle energy of trees and plants here, where the flora release so many feminine ions that the light fractures into geometric patterns that are organized along magnetic lines coherent with the tides and sometimes visible to the naked eye.

  Really and truly.

  And some buildings here have a moist salty dignity even as they grow beards of stringy pale moss green as seasick old men; and long relaxed streets that arrive eventually where they are headed but don’t get all fascist and linear and anal like highways do; and unusual fauna right in the town sometimes, like the young elk who ate a whole box of frozen hot dogs at a school picnic once, or the black bear who wandered through the recycling shed at the Department of Public Works and tore apart a pile of newspapers and was discovered reading the New York Times travel section, turning the pages daintily with her claws as big and sharp as steak knives.

  Right now, for example, look up, right over there, see the eagle flying low and fast down Curlew Street? Watch: as he sails over the grocery store he whirls and snatches a whirling piece of cardboard, and he flapflopflaps down the street triumphantly, big as a tent, you can almost hear him thinking I am one bad-ass flying machine, this weird flat brown bird didn’t get away from me, no sir, nothing can elude my lightning deftness in the air
…

  Not something you see every day, an eagle chortling over a beer box, eh?

  And down the street goes the eagle, heading west, his capacious shadow sliding like a blanket over the elementary school, where a slim older woman with brown and silver hair and brown and green eyes is holding court over the unruly sixth grade, her eyes flashing;

  and over her grandson Daniel age twelve with hair braided into three thick braids of different colors (red, black, brown) who is zooming on his bicycle just in front of a logging truck, giving the driver wiggy nightmares for a week;

  and over a sturdy young woman named Grace in an open meadow high on a hill where she is slicing apart a small car with a blowtorch her muscular right arm pumping and flexing with the torque of the torch and the leap of her muscle making her tattoo flash like a neon sign KISS flash MY flash ASS;

  and over a lithe woman called No Horses in her studio crammed with carving tools as she is staring thoughtfully at a slab of oak twice as big as she is which isn’t very big at all;

  and over a man named Owen Cooney who is humming in his shop crammed with automobile parts and assorted related ephemera as his pet crow sits quietly on an old Oregon State University football helmet watching;

  and over a grocer grocering a priest priesting a doctor doctoring teachers teaching two cooks cooking a man beating his son an insurer insuring a woman vomiting in a creek a banker banking an old nun’s heart faltering in her room on the top floor of the hotel a man telling a lie in court a teenage couple coupling on top of the blankets in the downstairs bedroom of her parents’ house so as to be sure that no rumpled sheets will tell tales of their vigorous unclothedness;

  and so many more stories, all changing by the minute, all swirling and braiding and weaving and spinning and stitching themselves one to another and to the stories of creatures in that place, both the quick sharp-eyed ones and the rooted green ones and the ones underground and the ones too small to see, and to stories that used to be here, and still are here in ways that you can sense sometimes if you listen with your belly, and the first green shoots of stories that will be told in years to come—so many stories braided and woven and interstitched and leading one to another like spider strands or synapses or creeks that you could listen patiently for a hundred years and never hardly catch more than shards and shreds of the incalculable ocean of stories just in this one town, not big, not small, bounded by four waters, in the hills, by the coast, end of May, first salmonberries just ripe. But you sure can try to catch a few, yes?

  At the west end of the main street, where it begins to slide off precipitously toward the ocean, there’s a long low building faced all around with cedar shakes. Right over this sprawling structure the eagle turns south toward his nest, and as he wheels against the noon light his capacious shadow slides over two elderly men at a rickety alder table in front of the long low building, and they look up right quick.

  That thing big as a tent, says the taller of the two.

  Adult male, says the shorter man.

  How can you tell from here?

  Can see his ego. The angle of his dangle.

  They grin.

  Actually I can tell it’s a male, continues the shorter man, because you notice that he’s carrying a piece of cardboard, which is foolish, so there you go.

  Gratuitous slur on our gender, says the taller man.

  Men: the final frontier, answers his companion. As your lovely bride says.

  The two men are drinking beer and eating salmonberries. Between them is one empty beer bottle; they split a beer every day at lunch. They work together in the long low building behind them. They are, collectively, the Department of Public Works. They have publicworked together for more than forty years, in various jobs. They are the best of friends. They are in their late sixties, they think. They are not totally sure about their ages because neither of them is in possession of a real actual birth certificate for reasons they were too young to learn at the time.

  The salmonberries are the first of the season and the two men are eating them very slowly, tasting every bittersweetorangeyellowacidic drop and then slowly sipping the beer a tongueful a thimbleful at a time.

  Yum, says the taller of the two men.

  Yup, says the other.

  Not everyone likes salmonberries.

  Vulgarians.

  I am told they are an acquired taste.

  Vulgarians?

  Salmonberries.

  Yeh. Listen, this afternoon we have to get back to work on the Oral History Project. We promised that we would get back to work on it the day after the rains stopped and the rains stopped last night and we have got to get to work.We are behind something awful on the Oral History Project.

  One of our best ideas absolutely. Whose idea was that?

  Yours.

  Was it?

  You were going on interminably one day about how one way to defeat Time is by recording every story possible. Not only from people but from everything living.

  For Every Thing that lives is Holy, says Blake.

  Yeh, you said that. Also you said that with the Project we could build an impregnable bulwark against entropy. I remember you saying that because you hardly ever hear the word entropy. Excellent word.

  Or impregnable, says the taller man thoughtfully. Unable to be made pregnant? I have to confess, says the taller man, that I was under the impression you invented the Project as part of your vast and overweening ambition.

  Nope. Your idea. It fits the expanded public works idea beautifully though. What a resource, eh? Here is what I want to do this afternoon. I want to record osprey calls along the river—those high screams, you know? Piercing sound. On a May day as they are finishing their nests. I wonder if they are speaking in a different tone now than midsummer or early fall. These are the things to know. Let’s add that to the list of Things to Know. Thank God for computers. Remember when the Things to Know was on paper? My god, we had to buy that barn just to keep the reams of Things to Know. That was crazy.

  Listen, says the taller man. I’ve been thinking …

  Did it hurt?

  Listen, my friend, says the taller man, holding on to his line of talk like a rope, did you ever consider that maybe the scope of public works as we have conceived it is too big altogether? I mean other towns and cities use their departments just to fix roads and sewer lines and streambeds and such.

  We do those things.

  But we also are prey to what I might call a vast and overweening ambition. I mean, really, to preserve history, collect stories, repair marriages, prevent crime, augment economic status, promote chess, manage insect populations, run sports leagues, isn’t that a bit much? We even give haircuts.

  Are we doing insects? Did I know that?

  I’m teasing. But we try to do everything.

  Not everything.

  I think maybe too much.

  I think not enough, says the shorter man.

  Don’t you ever think we could be wrong? asks the tall man.

  Billy, says the shorter man, this is why people call you Worried Man.

  Cedar, my friend, says the taller man, not smiling, I worry we are arrogant.

  Cedar leans over the table and stares his friend in the eye.

  Billy, he says quietly. Billy. We heal things. That’s what we do. That’s why we’re here. We’ve always agreed on that. Right from the start. We do as well as we can. We fail a lot but we keep after it. What else can we do? We have brains that still work so we have to apply them to pain. Brains against pain. That’s the motto. That’s the work. That’s what we do. Soon enough we will not have brains that work, so therefore.

  We could stop interfering, says the tall man. Who are we to talk to that young woman, for example? Grace?

  Who else would say anything to her?

  Her family.

  What family? Her mother’s gone, her brothers are donkeys, and the father … isn’t much in the way of a moral compass, let’s put it that way. Look, Billy, what
good are we to anyone if we are not ambitious to make a difference? If we don’t use our brains we are just two old men fixing potholes. Are potholes enough, my friend? I think not.

  I watched that girl’s face as we talked to her, says Worried Man. She was humiliated. You know it and I know it. Her face stays with me. Was that right? Did we have the right to sting her like that? Is that the purview of the public works department, to embarrass the public?

  To speak to her honestly about her behavior is to care about her, Billy. In a way it is to love her.

  Is it?

  Isn’t it?

  Is it?

  They drain the last thick dense bitter drops of their beer.

  Owen says today is Joan of Arc’s feast day, says Cedar, standing up to go.

  Her name wasn’t Joan, says Worried Man, also rising. It was Jeanne. Jeanne La Pucelle of Domrémy.

  Brave child by any name, says Cedar.

  She was a meddler too and look what happened to her, poor thing, says Worried Man.

  She changed the face of history, says Cedar.

  She was roasted to death one morning and her ashes were thrown in the river and the men who murdered her also managed to murder her real name throughout history, says Worried Man.

  They bow and part: Cedar to visit a client, as he says, and then to the river to record osprey calls, and Worried Man to his office in the Department to record an answer to this question from his grandson Daniel: How did my mother get her name?

  2.

  This is me, Worried Man, making a tape for my grandson Daniel, about how his mother, who is my daughter, got her name.

  Well, No Horses got her name because our people were the best horse stealers ever. By our people I mean the People, capital P—we who have lived here in the coast hills longer than even our stories remember.