Mink River: A Novel Read online

  Hope no more. Sit.

  I like watching you from here.

  You just like peering in windows.

  No, no—it’s seeing you in your kitchen. You fit.

  Come sit down. Where were you today?

  Recording osprey on the river.

  Osprey have oral histories?

  Sure they do. You could spend a whole lifetime studying them, May. The crook of their wings, the tuft of feathers by their eyes, the way their talons fold over to assure their grip on fish. Fascinating creatures. The construction of the nest, the tree they choose. They must pick certain trees for the angles of sight they provide to the river. The way they row through the air with their shoulders. The high-pitched cry, almost a scream. Like a hawk’s scream but more eaglish. A fascinating people altogether, the osprey people.

  Eaglish? she says grinning.

  Does this mean I fail sixth grade?

  Just the adjective part.

  A new word in the world. I should copyright it.

  Such a scholar.

  I had an interesting talk with your daughter this morning.

  Mm?

  About holes.

  Holes?

  She kept talking about the feeling you have when you know something’s missing in your life but you don’t know what it is.

  No Horses said that?

  She did.

  Hmm.

  Is she okay, May?

  I think so—she was here the other night with Daniel and she seemed fine.

  She seemed troubled to me.

  Did you tell Billy?

  I haven’t seen him all afternoon. He was going to make tapes for Daniel and then walk with the doctor. Figured I’d catch him here.

  Now he is late, Cedar. Can you peek out and find him? This bread will be ready in a minute and then we will have salmon with salmonberries, and you, my dear, will eat with us.

  I’m so honored. Have you ever invited me to dinner before?

  Hmm: forty years times a hundred dinners a year adds up to, let’s see, four thousand invitations. Or maybe eight thousand. And not one declined.

  I never said no? Ever?

  To my dinner?

  He grins.

  I’m off, he says.

  And you may do the dishes tonight.

  May I do the dishes, May?

  You may.

  Back in a minute.

  Thank you. I’m sure he’s coming up the hill but still.

  Don’t eat all the bread! he says his voice grinning and fading and she grins too but in the bottom of her belly she thinks of Billy.

  33.

  Moses, having paused in a hemlock to reconnoiter, commences to worry about Daniel and after a minute he jumps into the air and floats away black against the blackening night. Floats through a blizzard of gnats and snaps right and left to catch one as swifts and swallows do. Floats over spruce and cedar, the school, the church, the grocery. Ponders Daniel’s usual routes through town. Floats over the old hotel. Hotel reminds him of the old nun. Her laugh like the peal of a bell. When she gave him a bath in the sink. Water everywhere. Shaking with laughter. My belly hurts from laughing so hard, Moses. My empty belly. The fruit of thy womb. Sometimes I wonder, Moses. My salty sea. A boat of a boy a gull of a girl. The way she dried him tenderly in a towel and oiled his feathers with olive oil. I will anoint you as your namesake was anointed, Moses. The way she lit four white candles in the corners of the tub when she bathed. The four holy directions, Moses. Her breasts never sucked by man nor babe rising out of the soapy water like islands. My spirit ponders, Moses. The way she cut her own hair. The way he held the mirror for her while she cut her hair. The way she twirled a lock of her hair with her right hand while she wrote letters and cards with her left. The way she sang exuberantly in the tub. My voice rises to God and He will hear me, Moses. Her grave calm patience with her students. The way she said why, I was hoping it was you! whenever she opened her door for anyone at all. The worn tiny tattered creased photograph of her father she wore around her neck. I will meditate with my heart, Moses. The way she watched any and all storms as delighted and terrified as a child. The clouds poured out water and His arrows flashed here and there, Moses. The worn wooden prayer beads under her pillow. My voice rises to Him, Moses. The way she knocked on doors with both hands and wore only red hats and gave away books after she read them and wept at her desk sometimes for no reason he could see. Surely in vain I have kept my heart pure, Moses, and washed my hands in innocence. The way she counted carefully between thunderbolts so as to gauge their whereabouts. There is thunder in His whirlwind and the deeps also tremble, Moses. The way she finished each walk along the ocean by staring out to sea. Our paths are in His mighty waters, Moses, and so are holy and hidden.

  34.

  On the boat Declan unwraps sandwiches for himself and Grace and they eat silently. The grocer puts a handful of walnuts in his pocket for his little son who likes to crack them although he won’t eat them. Moses in flight snaps at a mosquito to see what it feels like to be a swift eating such swift little meats. The priest sips red wine and opens his mail. Owen is chopping carrots and potatoes and onions. The man who has beaten his son twice today is sitting on his back stoop smoking a cigarette. Anna Christie is serving steaming plates of pasta with clam sauce to her husband and the twin girls Cyra and Serena but George notices that she has not filled a plate for herself. The boy who was beaten twice today is eating frozen waffles straight from the box as he stands in the kitchen with the refrigerator door open. No Horses is hunched over with her arms wrapped around her legs and her nose pressed into her jeans through which she smells her skin, which smells like as Owen says cinnamon and firelight. The old nun licks her top lip, the last time she will ever do so. Cedar finds three salmonberries in his pocket and pops two into his mouth. Maple Head eats three salmonberries from the windowsill. The banker sips his coffee as he drives home. Worried Man stepping through the last pair of trees on the top of the hill walks right into a spider-web and gets a strand in his mouth and tastes it smiling and looks up to see that he is under a deck or patio from which the pain is emanating. The O Donnell brothers and their father Red Hugh are eating steak that one of the brothers has overcooked because he never cooked steak before. Sara feeds her daughters grilled-cheese sandwiches and apples. The man who lied in court is drinking beer on the beach near the wreck of the Carmarthen Castle. Michael is rubbing salt and oregano into a chicken for dinner with Sara after the girls are in bed. Rachel is in the shower with her head back and her mouth open and the hot water cascading into her mouth and between her breasts. The two cooks at the diner are eating stew in the kitchen before the dinner rush. Rachel’s boyfriend Timmy is eating his dinner, a chocolate bar. The woman who sells insurance during the day takes a salted roasted cashew from the bowl on the bar and chews it slowly. Daniel whizzing through the dark on his bicycle is chewing gum. The doctor finishes his last cigarette of the day on the porch and then stands at the cutting board in his kitchen and very slowly cuts a pear into small cubes and then very slowly eats each cube and then brushes his teeth and turns the heat down and checks the locks and turns out the lights and disrobes and gets into bed and takes off his spectacles and folds them carefully on his night-table and then he lies awake for hours with his eyes glinting in the murky dark.

  35.

  Daniel knows he is running late for dinner and he’d like to get home to change his clothes so he goes even faster than usual, which is astonishingly fast, and he also takes the dirt path through the woods rather than the road, because it’ll save him at least three minutes depending on how fast he can go in the dark. It’s full dark now and there’s no moon. The first segment of the path in the woods is a straight shot, flat and padded with spruce needles, and he leans down and pumps his legs as fast as they can go, and it seems even to Daniel who is a connoisseur of speed in all forms that he has never gone faster in the whole long length of his whole entire life. The wind is seething behind him and the
spruce trees are waving. His braids come loose from the exhausted rubber band he’s been using to bind them and his hair flies out behind him like comets’ tails red black brown. He goes so fast his backpack flaps and flaps against his back. At the end of the straight section of the path there’s a tight turn to the left where the hill runs out of hill and there Daniel slows down a little, leery of missing the turn, which would mean a hell of a fall, and he puts both feet down to use his heels as rough brakes, and he makes the turn cleanly, skidding and skewing only a little in the needles, but just as he comes out of the turn and leans forward again to get back into overdrive for the last slightly uphill portion of the path his long red braid catches for maybe a tenth of a second on a prickly spruce branch, which is enough to make even Daniel lose his balance, and the uncontrolled front wheel of the bike skews to the left and Daniel skews to the right, and the bike slams shuddering to a stop and Daniel flies over the edge of the cliff with his backpack flapping and his braids going in three directions and his mouth open but no sound emerging whatsoever.

  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.