Mink River: A Novel Read online

  Grace notices that Red Hugh can no longer easily bend over and pick up heavy tools so she patches the tires.

  She gets three tires patched before she notices that the first tire she patched is already flat again and this sets her going on a fit of cursing that even for her is inspired stuff, and she has been swearing like a cuckolded sailor since she was seven years old. It is a skill she learned in part from Red Hugh, a master curser who starts cursing even before he gets out of bed, and Hugh still can get a good burst going, given the right conditions, although he can’t sustain an hour’s worth of snarling invective like he could in the old days, not that any of his children miss his bile, which is now directed wholly at his wife, who isn’t there to hear it, because she packed a suitcase two years ago and walked out the door without a word. The suitcase was enormous. It was far too big for her to carry. The sound of it being dragged down the gravel driveway will stay with Grace and her brothers for ever and ever and ever.

  9.

  Owen and his pet crow Moses are in his shop at the south end of town, where the highway is. Officially his shop is called AUTO & OTHER REPAIR but Other Repair is the greater part by far of his business. The shop is split into two large rooms, one oily and fragrant and filled with many pieces of cars, and the other filled mostly with tables and shelves on which sit several thousand things and pieces of things, among them Moses, who likes to sit on an old football helmet over the long bench where Owen works.

  It is a heroic clutter. It is the clutter’s dream of clutter. Close your eyes for a minute and think of all the closets you have ever crammed with stuff, and all the basement workbenches asprawl with tools, and the shelves crowded with fishing gear and sports equipment and paintbrushes and furnace filters and nails and eyelets and grommets and washers and such, and merge them all in your mind, not haphazardly but with a general sense of order, a relaxed and affectionate organizational sense, such that you would have a pretty good rough idea where something might be if you needed to find it, and when you went to look for it you would find it in less than a minute, and even when something took more than a minute to find, you would find something else that you’d been looking for not desperately but assiduously; then think of all the rich dark male smells you have ever liked, the smells that remind you of your dad, your grandfather, your uncle, your older brother. Paint in cans that have been imperfectly sealed so a touch of the smell leaks out, and flat whippy paint-stirring sticks half-coated in dried paint atop the cans, and if you are really good with the Nerves of the Expansive Nostrils, as Blake says, you could maybe distinguish the color of the paint from the smells—the vanilla smell of white paint and the fragrant-baby smell of blue, the loud smell of red like a car backfiring, the library smell of brown. And the smells of sawn cedar and maple and fir boards. Ashes. Varnish. Plywood. Cigars. Somewhere on a shelf a redolent piece of redwood. Sweat. Boots. Oil. A hint of gasoline as if it had been spilled quite a long time ago and cleaned up meticulously but the room remembers when it happened. Rubber. The cold impersonal greedy smell of metal. Sawdust. The handled smell of tools. Liniment. Coffee. The brown smell of boxes and cardboard. Beer. The vacation-cabin smell of pine. Oiled saws. Old newspapers. Woodsmoke. The burnt-wire smell of old radio and television tubes. Turpentine. The grandmotherly smell of old upholstery rising warmly from the sagging couch in the corner. Apples. Wet clothes. Bread. Crow.

  Its stew of smells and sense of ragged order was the very essence of Owen’s shop; children loved it on first sight and old men felt so comfortable there that they would bring Owen things to fix that he knew and they knew didn’t need fixing, although he charged a flat fee of ten dollars per job for such things, which the old men paid happily, figuring that ten dollars was the fair cost of an afternoon spent poking around Other Repair, which they also loved because Owen let them poke around freely, without rebuff or boundaries, although he politely declined their inevitable requests to actually repair things, though unanimously they offered to work for nothing, and many of them had offered to pay for the privilege.

  Owen’s son Daniel recently began a list of the things in this room: watches, alarm clocks, toasters, tape recorders, tape decks, microwave ovens, lawnmowers, half a boat, telephones, computers, kitchen clocks, chairs, tables, televisions, screws, bolts, an alarm system for a boat, answering machines, global positioning devices, fishfinders, fishing reels, hedge clippers, scissors, shears, trowels, the bottom half of an ancient cotton gin, a Beretta pistol, welding tools, hammers, pliers of every conceivable size (Owen maintains that the pliers is the greatest tool ever invented), saws, screwdrivers, an anvil, winches in three sizes, Moses, and taxidermy tools, which is where Daniel stopped recording what he saw, because the tools were being applied to the top half of a huge beaver and Daniel wanted to help, which he did, to the quiet pleasure of his father.

  10.

  Cedar pays a visit to the man who beats his son. The man works at the fish co-op. His son is in the eighth grade. They live alone. They moved here a year ago from away, the man and the boy. The father beats the son only inside the house. The son no longer cries when he is beaten but tries to make his mind soar out of his body like a bird while the father back on earth is punching and kicking him in the chest and ribs. When the father loses his temper he swings at his son’s face and once he has begun swinging he cannot stop although he shifts his punches to the boy’s chest and ribs so as not to leave marks and when the boy falls to the floor and curls up the father kicks him with his work boots. The son lifts weights three times a day. When the father is exhausted from beating the boy he goes out on the porch and sobs with great silent wracking sobs and the boy goes to the freezer where he has ice packs arranged by size and a fishing vest he has stuffed with ice. The boy explains his bruises in the gym by saying that he also lifts at home and is clumsy with the weights. The father feels twisted and foul. The boy has run away twice. The father beats the son two or three times a week. The second time the boy ran away Michael the cop found him sleeping in a cave on the beach in a sleeping bag made of old jackets wrapped with duct tape. Michael told Cedar about the boy. Cedar stands outside the back door of the co-op.

  Tell me the thoughts of man that have been hid of old, he thinks. Blake.

  He steps into the co-op. The father is cleaning a catch of scallops at a long table. The air inside the co-op is bone cold. Weathervane scallops, Cedar notes, the Public Works computer in his head automatically gauging their size. The man is sweating as he wields the shucking knife flick flick flick. The nuggets of scallop meat fly from the knife into a steel bowl.

  You will keep your hands off that boy, says Cedar quietly, and the man’s head snaps up but his knife keeps shucking flick flick flick.

  When the rage comes you will walk out of the house with your hands in your pockets, says Cedar, and the knife stops flicking and there is no sound at all in the room.

  Your love for him will heal you, says Cedar, and the man drops the knife and whirls around but Cedar pins the man’s arms to his sides with a grip of stone and doom and he leans in closer and says, Your love will heal your boy also.

  The man spits a huge gob of spit in Cedar’s face and Cedar puts his dripping nose against the man’s scarlet nose and says very quietly, If you hit that boy again I will break your fucking wrists like fucking twigs, and the man says nothing and there is no sound at all in the room except the two men breathing hard and the refrigeration unit chuffing.

  11.

  That is one honking huge beaver, dad.

  Tis.

  Where’s it from?

  The Mink River. Grace found it drowned.

  Must weigh fifty pounds.

  You know prehistoric beavers weighed maybe five hundred pounds. Or more. They were the size of cars.

  Really?

  Really really. And they were smart. Imagine a really really smart beaver the size of a car.

  Yikes.

  Imagine you’re in the river waist deep fooling around and you see coming
toward you a furry car that’s thinking maybe you are getting a little too close to its lodge. Which is itself the size of a city. You’d pee so fast you’d raise the river.

  You make me laugh.

  You know, I love this, when we work together.

  Yeh.

  I do really.

  Me too.

  Soon you’ll be off to college.

  Not for years, dad. And who knows what will happen then?

  You sound like my dad. He was always leery of the future.

  Why?

  Hmm. Good question. Well, he was leery of the present and past too, come to think of it. He was a leery guy. Guy Leery—sounds like a movie star.

  Leery of what?

  Hmm. Of what would happen, I guess. Or not happen.

  Was he paralnoid?

  Pa Ra Noid. Not really, no. He was a tough man, very brave in his way. He was just … worried. It was always in his face. A worried man. So to speak. Should have called him Worried Man and not your other grandpa. My dad never trusted that things would work his way, is the best way to put it. So they never did.

  You’re cutting the beaver’s ear off.

  Ah, so I am. Shit on a stick. Damn my eyes. Never talk and work. The work suffers.

  You were saying.

  Well, my dad had a hard life, Danno. He was a child of the Hunger, in a way, an bhuchaill gorta, and he never found work he really wanted to do, and I think he was lonely all his life.

  Until he met Grandmother.

  Well. He was lonely after that too.

  Tell me.

  Let’s finish the beaver first.

  You should tell your dad’s story for the Project.

  I could, that. Your grandpa Billy would like that.

  Grandpa is making tapes for me.

  How so?

  Answering questions I ask.

  Like?

  How Mom got her name, how he met Cedar.

  Ask him how a young Irish fella from County Mud & Blood bamboozled his one extraordinary daughter off him. He’ll laugh at that.

  Grampa has a great laugh.

  He does that. Ask him how a young fella with no prospects and education and hair black as the inside of a dog somehow against all odds and sense persuaded the stunning No Horses to marry him. Ask him was it some Celtic druidry or what that won me my wild wee wife.

  How did you meet Mom?

  Ah, there’s a thousand tapes in that story, son.

  Did you ask Mom to get married or did she ask you?

  I sank to my knees, son, on the highest hill I could find, and I asked her it straight out, with my heart hammering and yammering and warbling and whistling like a water bird in my ribs, and she smiled that sideways smile and said yes and your daddy has been a capering fox every minute since with few exceptions absolutely, as your grandpa would say. And now to the beaver.

  12.

  No Horses in her studio is a study of alternating currents of motion and stillness; a river racing and resting; electric femininity waxing and waning. When her hands are in motion the rest of her is still and vice versa. Often she walks in circles like her father; around her work table, around the room, around the Department building when she’s really frazzled and has to think out a piece of work, around the hills on which Neawanaka perches when she can’t work at all and has to go burn off the throttled electricity.

  At work in clay or wood or stone she stares, she breathes evenly, she is riveted, she is lost. No phone. Music gently. Bach when she is in stone, rock and roll in clay, jazz in wood.

  This afternoon there is a slab of spruce on her work table weighing perhaps two hundred pounds, as tall and broad in the shoulders as a man.

  Maybe it will be a man, she thinks.

  She circles the table.

  I like men, she thinks, smiling.

  By God, she thinks. I’ll make a man. I’ll make one from scratch. My new man. Be fun to tell Owen.

  She checks grinning to see if there is a knob in the right place to make a man. Keeps circling the table. She never touches a raw piece of clay or wood or stone until she gets a feeling about it, and once the feeling comes she chooses her tools carefully, balancing various chisels and gouges in her hands to see who wants to work today, choosing music carefully for pace.

  She puts on Miles Davis and then reconsiders and puts on Chet Baker.

  No genius today, she thinks. Just dreaming. Just the right music by which to make a man, she grins: and o how very many men have been made to the music of Chet Baker, hmmm?

  Thinks about making love to Owen. His lips and hips arrowing into her.

  Such bony relentless hips, she thinks.

  In the rest of her studio are blocks and slabs and chunks of wood: maple, cedar, fir, more oak, walnut, alder, spruce, hemlock, cherry, ash, laurel, elm, myrtle, redwood. Sawdust and shavings and chips on the floor like tiny frozen leaves. There are tools everywhere: racks of chisels and gouges, mallets and mallet heads, planers, jointers, table saws, circular saws, chain saws, and bandsaws. There are routers, drills, sanders, clamps, glues, oils, finishes, a huge hydraulic hoist, and carving benches with attached wood vises. And sharpeners everywhere. There are more sharpeners than anything else in the room. Daniel counted them recently: thirty-nine, his mother’s age.

  13.

  Cedar on the Mink River sitting and thinking. Watching the ripples. His recording equipment whirring in the fern of the riverbank. Ospreys rowing through the air above. Two adults two young. Mergansers, kingfishers, ouzel on the river. Water water river river talking talking. He hears the low bass booming of rocks being turned over by the river. Like a low mutter. Basso? Baritone?

  He watches the ouzel and thinks of No Horses. Smiles; she is his goddaughter and the affection he felt for her during her childhood and adolescence has grown into a real respect for the woman she has become.

  No Horses, she is one tough woman, he thinks. Lovely, strong, patient, talented, kind. My sweet little Nora.

  But he thinks uneasily of the talk they had this morning in her studio, after he and Owen wrestled the spruce slab onto her carving table and Owen longlegged it back to his shop. A hard talk. A talk about holes. It began as a talk about carving holes in wood and then spun into holes in people, things missing; or as she said the feeling that something was missing that you’d never had and hadn’t known you didn’t have until suddenly you knew it.

  He chews on that remark for a while, as the ospreys row in their floating lines up and down the river.

  14.

  Dad, says Daniel.

  Yeh.

  Tell me how you met Mom.

  I should save it for a Project tape.

  Tell me now?

  It’s a long story, son. Suitable for telling by the fire.

  But Mom will be there.

  Is that bad?

  You’ll look at her.

  And?

  You know what I mean—when she’s in the room your eyes go there.

  When she’s in the room the temperature rises, boyo.

  Dad. That’s gross.

  Good thing for you I love your mama and versa vice.

  I love her too, dad, but sometimes.

  Sometimes what?

  Sometimes you pay more attention to her than you do to me.

  I don’t.

  You do.

  You don’t mean that.

  It’s okay. I don’t mind. Sometimes I mind.

  Well, when you’re married …

  You pay too much attention to Mom.

  What?

  Does she pay that much attention to you?

  Sure she does. Sure now.

  15.

  Moses the crow barks once and Daniel looks up at the seven clocks mounted above the workbench and says gotta go dad and hustles out of the shop and sails back to school on his bike his braids flying red black brown; he wants to be back in class just before school ends. Owen keeps rebuilding the beaver but now his mind is all awash and awander with No Horses. We met on this b
each. Salt and sea. We were walking each alone me north she south. In the afternoon. The way she walks leaning forward her hair pouring out behind her like a river a comet’s tail. O that hair as black as the back of midnight. An chuilfhionn, the maiden of the flowing locks. When we passed on the strand we paused and her eyes flashed and her hair whipped around her face mbeal-ath-na-gar ata an staid-bhean bhreagh mhodhamhail red ripening in her cheeks like a berry on a tree. Her graceful neck her lips like bruised fruit. I never saw anyone or anything like her ever. There was a zest in her eye. I wanted to say something courteous and memorable but out of my mouth to my utter surprise fell chailin dheas mo chroidhe, dear girl of my heart, because she had me all flustered there in the salty wind, and I was so surprised at myself I laughed, and she laughed, a sound like the peal of a silver bell, and she said what language is that? and I said O that’s the old Irish, walk with me and I’ll teach you a bit, I was surprised at my own boldness but do mharaigh tu m’intinn, she made my mind all feeble with her eyes.

  I will walk with you, she said, and we walked along trading words in our old languages, me in the Irish and her in the Salish, and soon we were trading stories in American, and soon after that we were trading salty kisses in our own language her long hair whirling around us like the salty arms of the salty sea.

  16.

  Worried Man notes the hour—golden russet slanting light, the hour when the angle of the sun heading toward the ocean illuminates everything seemingly from inside, so that plants glow greenly with their bright green souls naked to the naked joyous eye.

  Bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars. Blake.