Mink River: A Novel Read online

  We were terrific horse stealers. We were awesome. No one could steal horses like us. And stealing a horse is hard. I mean, the creature weighs half a ton, and they’re skittery, and they’re smart, some of them, and they know they’re not supposed to hustle off quietly into the bushes in the middle of the night; they’re supposed to stand drowsily in the milky dew until the morning when they get to eat again. Horses just want to eat. Anyway, you have to get to the scene silently, sometimes slipping past sentries and sentinels, and then you establish an immediate rapport with the horse, silently of course, and then detach all ropes and hobbles and such, and then you calm the horse, and lead him away, past the sentinels again, and the fact is that slipping past a sharp-eared sentinel with a confused fat half-ton animal is no easy matter, as you can imagine.

  Well, if you got caught they’d slice your throat.

  I’m always hearing about counting coup in battle in the old days, where a guy at great risk to life and limb touches his enemy with a coup stick, escaping with great acclaim and all, but what’s the point? I mean, you touched a guy with a stick. Big deal. I’d rather risk life and limb and come out of the fray with a horse. Now that’s an accomplishment. You got something to show for your labors.

  Well, one time we were berrying in the valleys east of here, boiling berries into cakes, cooling the cakes in the creeks, and packing down horses with enough berry cakes to choke a small whale—an orca maybe. Though they’d eat anything. Coyotes of the ocean.

  Of course to carry the cakes back here to Neawanaka we needed horses, because this was before everyone and their aunt had a truck. We had a lot of horses. These were fine animals absolutely, and they needed to be guarded carefully by stalwart sentinels with sharp ears and sharp eyes. I was chosen as sentinel, being then young and sinewy and in the fullness of my itchy first strength. But I was also in the fullness of my first cocky stupidity, and I had boasted that I could pick more berries than any other man or woman, and also be a sharp-eared and sharp-eyed sentinel, and it turns out I was wrong. On the third night I was so tired and sore that I fell asleep, and that’s when horse thieves from the valley made their move.

  They slipped up on me and under my horse blanket they affixed four long thin poles of red cedar, willowy whippy things, and then ever so gently ever so daintily they lifted me on the blanket and propped up the poles so that they could gently urge the fat fool horse out from under me, which they did, and left me propped up in the air sound asleep. Then they unhobbled our horses and silently made away with all of them—a dozen of the finest horses you ever saw.

  The next morning was difficult.

  We all walked home, of course, a very long walk, all my former friends jeering and cursing, and all of us carrying those damn berry cakes, and when we got to Neawanaka everyone was hooting and jeering and telling the story of how I fell asleep, and I have to say that there was a lot of embroidering going on. I know a little about embroidering stories myself, as you know, but this was wholesale embroidering, all sorts of exaggeration, really not suitable at all to the occasion.

  My young pregnant wife Maple Head was waiting for me in the little cedar cabin we’d been given by her parents, where we live still, as you know, and when I came in to see her she swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood up and asked about all the hooting and hollering and jeering and embroidering, and I felt that I had better tell her the story myself, so she would get a fairly accurate version of a very unusual event.

  So I did.

  She laughed, snorted, chortled, wept with laughter, rolled on the floor, guffawed, howled, and etcetera absolutely. She laughed so hard, in short, my little thimbleberry, that she went into labor on the spot, and a few minutes later your mother was born, and that is how your mother received her name, which is, as you know, No Horses. And that is the end of that story.

  3.

  Neawanaka has been a settlement of one size or another for perhaps five thousand years. Human beings lived here for all the normal reasons you can name: it is well watered, with small but persistent creeks to the north and south, a small but serious river running right smack through town, and an Ocean. There are trout in the creeks, salmon and steelhead run up the river and creeks seasonally, and perch and halibut and cod and such swim not too far offshore; there are so many fish of so many kinds in and around the town that for perhaps five thousand years the name of the town was So Many Fish in the native tongue spoken here. There are deer and elk in the spruce and cedar forests. It hardly ever snows in winter and hardly ever bakes in summer. It does get an unbelievable amount of rain (nearly two hundred inches one year, according to Cedar, who measures such things), and the rain starts in November and doesn’t really end, as a continuous moist narrative, until July, but then those next four months are crisp and sunny and extraordinary times, when every living creature, from the pale cloudberry close to the ground to the eagles the size of tents floating overhead, is grinning and exuberant.

  And there is of course an amazing amount of wood growing here—spruce and alder mostly, although there’s some big cedar and hemlock still in the more remote ravines where loggers couldn’t and still can’t easily log. And there are more bushes and plants than you can shake a shrub at, most of them providing some sort of food or use, and there are grouse in the spruce thickets also, and a little quail with a topknot that makes really good eating if only you can catch it, so all in all there is enough food to get by, and enough material to easily build shelter, and weather that doesn’t set out grimly to kill you, as Cedar says of some other weathers he has known, so people have lived here probably from the first couple of days after the glaciers slid away muttering, or from the first day that a little boat filled with exhausted people from Elsewhere landed on the beach or in the mouth of the Mink River.

  Howsoever the first people arrived in this little green cupped hand of a place, they stayed, and like all people everywhere, when eventually they encountered other groups of people, and the other people wanted to know what the people living in the cupped green hand called themselves, the cupped green hand people looked at each other’s faces, and cleared their throats uncertainly, and met briefly to confer, and then emerged from their confab, harrumphed, rattled their weapons, and said, why, we are, well, of course, what else would we be, The People.

  4.

  This is me, Worried Man, making another tape for Daniel, about how I met my friend Cedar.

  Well, about forty years ago Maple Head and I were courting on the Mink River. We were way up in the hills near its source to the east. East in rivers of bliss. Blake.

  We were pretending to be fishing but really we were learning how to make love. We were trying all sorts of ways of making love to see how we fit together as bodies and companions without family and friends around to shape us with their emotions and expectations, and seeing what ways of making love made us deeper with each other and what ways were just acrobatics or showing off. We were trying to make love absolutely with every muscle and every shred of our attention.

  Maybe, thinking about it now, we were trying to figure out how to make love in such a way as to make time not matter at all, or defeat it for a while. Which we did for a while.

  I’ll say no more.

  Hand in hand wandering terrified of each other’s beauty. Blake.

  Well, we were there by the Mink, and we were actually fishing that afternoon, and we were sore and tired and happy, and to be honest neither of us planned on fishing very long at all, and as I remember your grandmother and I were already casting eyes at each other more than we were casting for fish, but then I noticed a person’s body going past me in the river, and everything changed absolutely from that moment.

  I waded in fast and grabbed that body.

  For a not very big body it seemed awfully heavy and I couldn’t tell if it was an alive body or a dead body. But I was young and strong then and not afraid of dead things, which are only cousins to living things, so I hauled with all my might and got it up
on the riverbank through the ferns. Sword fern, I think. Maybe bracken.

  The body was naked and brown and face down in the grass and I flipped it over and it turned out to be a man, who turned out to be Cedar, who turned out to be alive, although awfully waterlogged. We didn’t know he was Cedar right at that moment of course, and of course neither did he know he was Cedar right then, because he had been in the river a long time and was nearly completely drowned. I’d say he was about ninety percent drowned. He was awfully full of river. Which is probably why Cedar has such a thing for rivers and rain. Heck, he lived inside the river for a while, which you can’t say about many people, especially living ones.

  Anyway when Maple Head saw me haul Cedar out of the river she came sprinting through the fern like a deer, a lovely sight absolutely, that woman could bound and float like a swallow and still does when she walks, if you pay close attention.

  She knelt down and looked into Cedar’s face, and he had just opened his eyes and seen me and realized that he wasn’t drowned, and when he saw her face he smiled, and she smiled, and he said I like your face better than his, and we all laughed, although then I decided to throw him back in the river.

  But I didn’t, which was a good thing, because he turned out to be Cedar. We brought him home and he recovered pretty quickly, but he never could remember how he got to be in the river or where his clothes were or anything at all from before we fished him out. All he could remember was that his name was Cedar. He knew that much.

  So that’s how Cedar didn’t drown.

  Lately I have been absorbed by bicycle repair and so I must conclude this tape. I have repaired seventeen bicycles in the past month during which time I have become fascinated by spokes, which are really wires, and now I am utterly into wires—weight-bearing capacity, elegance, metaphor. They are so thin and taut and lithe like your grandmother. I have some very interesting ideas about wiring and strength and the webbing of time, the structural basics of time, you understand, and they must be pursued apace, life being short but not brutish, so I must go. That is the end of this story.

  5.

  There are halibut as big as doors in the ocean down below the town, flapskimming on the murky ocean floor with vast skates and rays and purple crabs and black cod large as logs, and sea lions slashing through the whip-forests of bull kelp and eelgrass and sugar wrack, and seals in the rockweed and giant perennial kelp and iridescent kelp and iridescent fish and luminous shrimp too small to see with the naked eye but billions of which feed the gray whales which slide hugely slowly by like rubbery zeppelins twice a year, north in spring and south in fall.

  Salmonberries, thimbleberries, black raspberries, gooseberries, bearberries, snowberries, salal berries, elderberries, blackberries along the road and by the seasonal salt marshes north and south.

  The ground squirrels burrow along the dirt banks of the back roads, their warren of mysterious holes, the thick scatter of fine brown soil before their doorsteps, the flash of silver-gray on their back fur as they rocket into the bushes; the bucks and does and fawns in the road in the morning, their springy step as they slip away from the flower gardens they have been eating; the bobcat seen once, at dusk, its haunches jacked up like a teenager’s hot-rodding car; the rumor of cougar in the hills; the coyotes who use the old fire road in the hills; the tiny mice and bats one sometimes finds long dead and leathery like ancient brown paper; the little frenetic testy chittering skittering cheeky testy chickaree squirrels in the spruces and pines—Douglas squirrels, they are, their very name remembering that young gentleman botanist who wandered near these hills centuries ago.

  The herons in marshes and sinks and creeks and streams and on the beach sometimes at dusk; and the cormorants and pelicans and sea scoters and murres (poor things so often dead young on the beach after the late-spring fledging) and jays and crows and quorking haunted ravens (moaning Poe! Poe! at dusk) especially over the wooded hills, and the goldfinches mobbing thistles in the meadowed hills, and sometimes a falcon rocketing by like a gleeful murderous dream, and osprey of all sizes all along the Mink like an osprey police lineup, and the herring gulls and Caspian terns and arctic terns, and the varied thrushes in wet corners of thickets, and the ruffed grouse in the spruce by the road, and the quail sometimes, and red-tailed hawks floating floating floating; from below they look like kites soaring brownly against the piercing blue sky, which itself is a vast creature bluer by the month as summer deepens into crisp cold fall.

  6.

  Maple Head is in the sixth-grade classroom at the school. She is the teacher. The school is on the west side of town at the edge of the spruce forest. She is standing by the chalkboard. The school building was once a barn. She is a slim brown woman with long rich curling silver hair with brown leaping in it. The children call her Teacher. The lesson this afternoon is geometry: radius, diameter, circumference. Her eyes are brown and green and when she is angry the green parts of her eyes flash like fish leaping in a river. Barn swallows still nest in the school. She is glaring at the O Donnell boys who are as usual causing a ruckus. They are 16 and 14 and are guests in class today because of general recklessness and boneheadery and lazitude and punishness and detentionery. O Donnells have lived in Neawanaka for more than a century. They were among the Irish Catholics who came after the Hunger and rooted here because the land was no good for farming so nobody wanted to steal it from the People or shove the gaunt ragged foreigners off it. Green fish are leaping furiously in her eyes. The O Donnells were fishing people mostly. Maple Head is a very good teacher and a kind woman through and through but at the moment she is entertaining fishy green thoughts about the O Donnell twins and their motley clan in general and she contemplates her heavy ruler made of hemlock and the mule heads of the O Donnells and the closet with the lock in the basement of the school where one might, if one were so inclined, cram two O Donnells, but she doesn’t, although fish are leaping all over the place in her eyes.

  Her grandson Daniel should be in her class but instead he is in his father’s shop. He was sent over with a school typewriter to be repaired and he is lingering in the shop. He loves the inky oily smells there. He is a round boy with hair in three long braids of three different colors (red, black, brown) like his hero the legendary Irish warrior Cú Chulainn. Daniel’s eyes are brown with green flashes. He sits in the third row third seat. He is twelve years old. He likes to play basketball and read and ride his bike. He makes friends easily because he likes to listen and he is almost always cheerful, even with girls. He thinks about girls all the time. He likes to ride his bike in the woods as fast as he can go. Girls are beginning to think about him. A month ago he began to write poems and observations in a small black notebook that he hides in his closet. Two girls in particular think about him a lot but don’t say anything to anyone about their thoughts. He is ashamed of hiding his book but he cannot imagine showing it to his parents. He would be horrified if they read what he wrote. He is writing about himself.

  No Horses is in her studio at the Department of Public Works, the long low-slung building with the cedar shakes on the east side of town, where the hillside falls away to moist meadows down below. The meadows are brown and green and her eyes are brown and green. Her studio is at the south end of the building to get the most light. Her husband Owen built a little deck at that end and cut a door to it and cut a door-sized piece of glass for it. He’s good with his hands that way. The door is shaped like No Horses, a little humorous touch of Owen’s. He’s good with his head that way. There are two chairs on the deck and a little round table and a hummingbird feeder. Often from the deck she sees elk in the meadows, and hovering buzzards, occasionally a bald eagle. Once a young bear. Once a red-tailed hawk with a snake in its mouth—an image so immediately arresting that she ran from the window to her workbench and started a sculpture in sandstone that isn’t working yet though she has hopes.

  7.

  The doctor is in his office at the north end of town where the hill dives gently down to
ward the dunes. He has three patients left to see. They are waiting in his waiting room. One is coughing so hard that the second has a vision of him coughing his organs onto the floor one at a time: spleen, kidneys, liver, gallbladder in a steaming pile on the rug. The doctor is a small neat dark man with eyeglasses. The third patient sells boxes and containers of all sizes. The doctor has stepped out back to smoke a cigarette. The third patient likes to say that he sells air with boundaries. The doctor is on the tenth of his twelve daily cigarettes, “one for each apostle,” as he says. The third patient has a raging pain in his belly that will kill him in about three weeks. The third patient privately suspects that something is fatally wrong inside him but he has said nothing to anyone. The doctor is unmarried but he has private hopes. The third patient has thought seriously of telling his daughter about his fears but he has refrained. No one is sure of the doctor’s age; he is the sort of lean leathery man who could be forty or sixty. The third patient has refrained from telling his daughter about his pain, although he feels closer to her than to anyone else in the world, because she has just fallen in love with a boy, and she just lost her virginity to him, and she’s pretty proud now of being a woman, but the boyfriend is sleeping with another girl also, which he hasn’t told the third patient’s daughter. The doctor will confirm the third patient’s fears in about thirty minutes. The third patient’s daughter will find out that her boyfriend is a liar in about three weeks.

  8.

  Grace O Donnell is in the barn on her parents’ farm, patching tractor tires and cursing in new and interesting ways to make her brothers laugh. She spent the morning cutting apart a car with a blowtorch, and she is due out on a fishing boat in another hour, but she swore, so to speak, that she would get to the tires today because her father is now in his seventies and while he is still healthy and still mean he can no longer easily bend over and pick up heavy tools although he never admits or tells anyone that because he is Red Hugh, hard of hand and head, chief of the clan, asking no help or quarter, quick to lash fools and children with his long white rod, an slath ban, although he doesn’t dare lash Grace or Declan anymore, because of Grace’s cold eyes on him when he loses his temper and reaches for the stick and because Declan told his father one afternoon in the meadow that if ever you raise that fecking stick at me again I’ll yank it out of your fecking hand and cram it down your fecking throat, you hear me, old man? you hear me?