A Doubter's Almanac (3 page)

Outside under the trees, he crossed as quickly as he could toward the garden, his feet today somehow obeying his commands. Next to the strawberries he lowered himself into the folding chair and used the coiled hose to dash a few palmfuls of water onto his shirt and hair. The sun was high. He ought to be sweating.

He heard the car throw gravel as it made the turn into the driveway. Then the engine shut off. A fan came on the way it did in French cars. Biettermann probably loved that fan. One door slam. Andret waited.

Then, a second.

He let them knock at the door to the cabin. His name called: “Professor! Professor!” This was an affectation. Then steps on the cluttered path to the back of the house, where he was bent low over the plants, pulling strenuously at the roots of a marauding false grape.

“Professor Andret!”

He turned to offer his greeting, squinting, wiping the spigot water from his brow. A shock: Earl Biettermann was in a wheelchair. He realized he’d heard something about that. From her, maybe?

He couldn’t remember.

She
was here, though—that was the important thing—and now she was guiding her husband in a wheelchair, pushing him in front of her across the bumpy ground like an offering. It could have been awful: but he saw immediately that it wasn’t going to be.

He also realized with a start that she’d been the one driving.

Impossible

M
ILO
A
NDRET GREW
up in northern Michigan, near Cheboygan, on the western edge of Lake Huron, where the offshore waters were fathomless and dark. The color of the lake there was closer to the stormy Atlantic hues of Lake Superior than to the tranquil, layered turquoise of Lake Michigan, which lapped at the tourist beaches on the far side of the state. Milo’s father had been an officer in the navy during the Second World War, a destroyer’s navigator driven by the hope of one day commanding his own ship; but at the age of twenty-four, after an incident in the Solomon Sea, he’d abandoned his ambitions. The incident had occurred in November 1943, just a year before Milo was born. Coming north out of the straits near Bougainville Island, the destroyer had been hit by a string of Japanese torpedoes, and in the wake of the explosions the ship’s life rafts had drifted into unknown waters. Milo’s father and another sailor had managed to get aboard one of the rafts, and before nightfall they’d picked up two more men. A week later, though, when a British cruiser finally sighted them off of Papua New Guinea, all but Milo’s father had been eaten by sharks.

By the time Milo was born, his father had been discharged back to Cheboygan, where he’d found work as a science teacher at Near Isle High School. It was a position from which, for the next thirty-nine years, he would neither be offered a promotion nor seek one.

Milo’s mother had been the first female summa cum laude chemistry major in the history of Michigan State University; but she too was willing to forsake her ambitions. She raised Milo until he was old enough to go to school, and then she found a job as a secretary in the sheriff’s department in Alpena, the county seat. In Alpena, she typed reports, brewed coffee, and made mild banter with a generally courteous group of men several years her senior, more than one of whom could neither read nor write.

This was most of what Milo knew of the lives of his parents.

After school his father graded homework in his office, and after work his mother sometimes stepped out for a drink with a few of the other secretaries from her building. On most afternoons, Milo walked up the hill from the bus stop to an empty house. By now it was the mid-1950s.

In those days Cheboygan was already something of a resort town, although Milo didn’t realize this fact until he was older. For most of his childhood, he knew only the deep woods that ran behind their property—350 acres of sugar maple, beech, and evergreen that had managed to remain unlogged during the huge timber harvests that had denuded much of the rest of the state. He spent a good part of his days inside this forest. The soil there was padded with a layer of decaying leaves and needles whose scents mingled to form a cool spice in his nose. He didn’t notice the smell when he was in it so much as feel its absence when he wasn’t. School, home, any building he had to spend time in—they all left him with the feeling that something had been cleaned away.

The shaded hollows of his particular tract were populated by raccoons, skunks, opossum, and owls, and by the occasional fox or porcupine. The small meadows were ringed with ancient birches that crashed to the ground when the younger trees crowded them out, their fallen, crisscrossed trunks making shelters and bridges for him to discover. The woods were in transition, his father had told him. When a great tree came down, the report could be heard for miles, a shifting crescendo of rustling and snapping as the trunk yanked away the limbs around it, culminating finally in a muffled thud like a sledgehammer striking moss. Whenever this occurred, Milo would set out to find the corpse. He had an intricate memory of the landscape’s light and shade and could tell instantly when even a small piece of it had been altered. Something in his brain picked up disturbance acutely.

How many hours he spent in those woods! He was an only child and from early in his life had invented solitary games—long treks into the landscape with certain self-imposed rules (two right turns to every left, exactly a thousand steps from departure to return, the winding brook crossed only where it bent to the west). These games passed the most precious part of the day for him, the too-short interlude between the time the school bus released him at the bottom of the hill and six o’clock, when his mother came out to the edge of the woods holding the lid of a garbage can and banged it three times with a broom handle to call him for dinner.

The Andrets lived fifteen miles from the beaches on Lake Huron; but it might as well have been a hundred. His father stayed to the land in a part of the state where everyone else was drawn to the water. This was no doubt attributable to his experience in the Solomon Sea, but Milo was too young to understand something like that. On weekends his father went hunting with his friends or tinkered around the house, or if the weather was poor he sat in a chair by the fire and worked puzzles from a magazine. In the Andret family, there was never any question of shared recreation—no canoe trips, no bicycle rides, no walks together at the shore. Such dalliances were from another universe. There were no pets, either, and no games other than a couple of boxes of playing cards and an old chess set of Philippine ivory that had been brought back from the navy. If Mr. Andret was at home, he was either grading schoolwork or performing household repairs, walking around with a tool belt and setting a ladder against the eaves. He would finish one job and move on to the next, never alerting anyone to what he was doing. If his mother was there, she was in the kitchen, at the small table by the window, with a glass and a book. If Milo wasn’t at school, he was in the woods.

The Andret house was an old-fashioned, darkly painted, thoroughly ornamented Victorian that had been built by a prosperous farmer at the turn of the century, as though it would one day sit on the main square of a town. It was three stories high with a steeply raftered roof whose scalloped tiles radiated a statuesque formality. But to Milo there was always something disappointing about this formality. From the time he was young it had seemed forlorn to him, like a woman in a ball gown sitting at a bus stop. (This wasn’t his own phrase; it was his wife’s, uttered many years later, when she first crested the hill.) The walls were an evening blue, both inside and out, and the exterior trim was a deep maroon. Everything a shade too dark. There was a sidewalk in front, but it ended at the property stake. A brass mailbox stood on a post at the head of the driveway, and an exactingly painted garage looked out from buttressed eaves at the rear. The property boasted all the details of a fine residence in a fine little town, except for the town itself, which had never appeared.

The Andrets’ house was the only one for miles.

—

E
VEN AT A
young age, Milo understood that he was in large part a replica of his father, this solitary, middle-aged man who shared their house with them but who appeared to will himself away from anyone even when he was at home. When Mr. Andret wasn’t grading schoolwork, he was walking unceasingly through his dominion, mending all sorts of breakage and deterioration that were apparent only to him.

Like his father, Milo himself learned at a young age to carve wood. Very fine objects, in fact. But also like his father, he never showed anyone what he’d made. He whittled ornate whistles that he rarely blew, detailed animal figurines that he abandoned in the undergrowth, and intricate talismans of celestial design, which he hid in the dimples of maple burls or inside the crevices of the twisted roots that emerged from the forest’s peat like tangles of surfacing snakes. For his finer work, he used a magnifying glass.

One day while whittling a whistle from a tiny piece of tamarack, he turned the magnifying glass a certain way and watched a scalding yellow dot lift a curl of smoke out of the bark.

Did others know about this?

He turned the lens the same way again and held it still. When the wood began to smolder, he wet his thumb and rubbed out the ember. Then he whittled away the imperfection and carefully burned a tiny star into the spot. After that, he began burning this tiny star into everything he made, as a signature. It wasn’t that he felt any particular pride in his work but rather that the miniaturized sun itself, inverted and shimmering as he guided its bead across the grain, seemed like a force that had been revealed only to him. The smoke lifted off and vanished: something from nothing. Magic. He was aware that other similar powers might exist in the universe. That morning, when he left the newly carved whistle in a bed of ferns, he felt that he was performing an act of humility before some unnameable entity.

—

O
NE NIGHT, DURING
the summer of his thirteenth year, a windstorm swept down the straits, and he was awakened in bed by a crashing from the woods. The next morning, at the edge of a ravine, he came across a stump that was as wide across as a tractor tire. It was a beech tree, broken off at the level of his waist. The rest of the tree lay several yards away, neatly divided into three, as though the immense thing had been scissored up, carried off to a safe distance, and placed down for his inspection. He took a seat on the rim of the broken base. For the whole morning he sat there, contemplating what had presented itself to him, until an inspiration arrived.

He spent the rest of the summer executing his idea.

Over the long days of July, then the shorter ones of August and September, he hardly came in from the forest. He found that he could work for ten or even twelve hours at a stretch, so that by the time fall arrived, he realized that he’d produced something miraculous. It was a single, continuous loop of wooden chain, more than twenty-five feet long, carved out of the top of the stump and resting above it on hundreds of tiny spurs that had been whittled down to the thickness of finishing nails. The chain coiled in a tightening spiral toward the center of the tree, then doubled back and coiled out again toward the rim, returning to the spot where the last link closed around the first. He’d carved a twist into each of the links, which produced a startling effect: if he ran his finger all the way around the surface of any single one of them, the finger would circle not once but
twice
around the twisted link before returning to its starting point. This strange fact felt like another secret to him.

Finally, one peat-scented evening in the warm October of 1957, he understood that he had finished. He had needed his creation to be perfect, and now it was. One last time, he ran his hands over the length of it, feeling for flaws. Then he severed the spurs and meticulously sanded away their nubs. At last, he lifted the whole thing into his arms, doubling it around and around his shoulders until the slack was gone. It felt like a living thing now, yet it was as smooth and heavy as stone. When he breathed, it tightened around his chest. Standing in the quietly darkening woods, as the lights began to come on in the distant house, he felt like an escape artist, preparing a feat.

—

T
HAT NIGHT, BEFORE
he went home, he stowed the chain in the trunk of a maple. The maple had been struck by lightning, and inside it was a cavity that he’d smoothed with a rasp, adding a meticulously carved cover piece that he’d cut with a wire saw and blended into the ridges of a burl. He’d carved the screw threads of the cover in reverse, so that even if his hiding place was discovered, his chain would be safe: nobody would think to unscrew a cover backward.

In his mind, this was the end of it. He would no more have shown his parents what he’d made than he would have asked what his father was fixing on the ladder or his mother reading at the table. Once, as a child, he’d come across his mother crying at the back of the kitchen, holding an old newspaper in her hands; but he’d never asked her what had been the matter. Since that day, silence had become their standard. He felt affection for his parents, and he understood that they felt affection for him. But the three of them hardly questioned one another, and they almost never revealed to one another anything of importance.

On the day he finished closing the chain inside the tree, however, he realized that he’d passed a milestone in his life: he’d long wanted to produce something worthy of concealing.

—

A
S IT TURNED
out, though, he did show the chain to somebody: a teacher. Mr. Farragut was the shop instructor at Near Isle High, and a year later, as he was lecturing on the industrial applications of ferrous metals, nonferrous metals, open-grain woods, and closed-grain woods, he mentioned that nobody, for example, would ever choose to make a chain from wood.

“Where’d you get this thing?” he said the next afternoon as Milo pulled the beechwood creation in long loops from a burlap sack.