Mink River: A Novel (20 page)

Another pint for Declan, please, Stella, says Cedar.

And one for the Department here. You do fine work, Cedar. Took balls to talk to Grace. I worry about Grace. I can’t talk to Grace. She doesn’t listen. She does what she wants. She’s not a slut. Acts that way. Not a slut. She’s a bullhead. I’ve caught bullhead, you know. Brown bullhead. Ugly as sin. And hagfish. Uglier. Ugliest. And dogfish and rockfish and squawfish and skilfish. I’ve caught ’em all. Splitnose rockfish and sharpchin rockfish and shortbelly rockfish. Greenstripe and redstripe rockfish. I know my fish. Shark and swordfish and sandfish and saury. Box crab king crab hair crab tanner crab. They’ll pinch your fingers off in a second. Can’t blame ’em. Hauled out of their homes. Poor bastards. Sometimes I throw a fish back. I don’t know why. Some of them have the faces of people. It’s bizarre. I saw a soupfin shark once with your face and a blue shark with Worried Man’s face. Long thin fish too like him. Long and blue. With a white head. I threw that one back. Kept you though. We ate you. Things were tight then. When my mom left. We ate a lot of fish. A lot of mussels and clams. She used to read messages on shells. Really. I still do it. Grace won’t do it. Says she doesn’t remember. Liar. It’s like a code. Don’t laugh.

Another pint for Declan, please, Stella, says Cedar.

Cockle clams butter clams gaper clams softshells littlenecks, says Declan. Sometimes they spell words. Even urchins and mussels can be read. Like books. Grace thinks I’m nuts but there’s a lot we don’t know about the sea. There are a lot of worlds down there. I should know. I’ve hauled up skate bigger than the boat. I’ve seen sharks and whales bigger than the boat. I’ve seen whales with sucker marks from squid that must be ten times bigger than any squid anybody ever saw. I’ve seen sea lions that look just like beautiful women. I’ve seen lights in the water I can’t explain. You want another pint? We just caught the two biggest halibut I ever saw off a ledge where there were never any fish of that size before. Hippoglossus is the halibut, you know. Every one a different color. Green or brown or black. Not one the same. No one knows anything about the sea. It gives and it takes. It is what it is. It’s a woman. You can’t understand it. I don’t understand it. I don’t understand anything. I don’t understand my sister. I don’t understand why my mom left her children. I could see her leaving Dad, he was a hagfish, but not us, we were anchovies and herring. We were little fish. How could she do that? Where did she go? I think she went to sea. I think she is an albacore, fast and silvery and long gone before you can get a good look at it. Another pint please, Stella? And one for my friend Cedar who never says anything but just sits there smiling. Doesn’t he look like a fish, Stella? Doesn’t he?

38.

Worried Man and Maple Head walk home from the funeral arm in arm quietly. They have walked arm in arm for more than forty years. The first time they walked together, on the afternoon they met by the river, as Maple Head was drying the river of her hair, his arm swam gently toward hers and her hand slipped into the crook of his elbow and linked stitched woven touching skin to skin they walked and walked and walked. Their entire courtship was conducted on foot. Up hills and through forests and along the shore and through the town. Often not talking. Just walking. Thinking. Sometimes singing. One would sing and then the other. All sorts of songs. One day they came upon a cottage on a hill. Tucked in the elbow of the hill. Where the eyebrow of the hill would be if the hill was a face. It was for rent. Fifty dollars a month then. Long ago. Not long ago. The cottage smiled at them. They rented it with Maple Head’s first paycheck from the school. Worried Man and Cedar built a porch and shored it up here and there though neither knew what he was doing carpentrywise really but their repairs and renovations have generally held up though the back room, which was No Horses’ bedroom as a child and is now used as a guest room most often by Cedar, does slant a bit to the south just enough to notice and very slightly disorient a guest, which as Cedar says grinning is probably good for the guest. He says this sitting by the fireplace. There’s always a fire going in the fireplace. Owen says his in-laws must really be Irish because there’s always a fire in the hearth and two or three chairs huddled by the fire and two or three people poured into the chairs as comfortable as cats. Maple Head likes to curl in her chair as close to the fire as she can get without actually being in it so that all of her is equally and thoroughly warmed and Cedar likes to have just his feet by the fire and Worried Man doesn’t like to be in his chair at all but prefers standing right in front of the fire and expounding and fulminating and lecturing and pondering and wondering and singing and laughing and hogging the fire altogether according to Maple Head who has over the years developed the habit of reaching up one lovely leg and placing her left foot on her husband’s right thigh and pushing him gently over to the other side of the hearth which he doesn’t even notice anymore, he just steps unconsciously to the side when he feels her touch.

She does this now and he steps to the side but he doesn’t miss a beat because he has both hands on an idea now and wriggle as it will it won’t get away, he’s got it firmly to rights and he holds it out before him and examines it from every angle. As he speaks she watches his long face, his shock and tangle of long white hair with a black streak in it like a heron, the long excited quiver of his long lean body, his hands as big as nets whirling and swirling in the air as he juggles ideas. Sometimes when he gets to talking excitedly like this she likes him so much she wants to pull him down to the floor and cause a ruckus, which once in a while she does, just to keep him on his toes.

Now, May, he says. Consider this. We are aware of the quicksilver nature of time. Fast and slow and every speed in between. Sometimes it seems to stop. Sometimes it rushes by so fast we lose track of a day or two. I could muster a thousand examples but you know what I mean. So then time is not static energy. It is capable of changes in speed. Therefore it has a control mechanism either in the perceiver or in the delivery system. Something effects changes in speed either as perceived or as actually delivered. We will evade the question of system design and designer and focus on medium. The machinery of time, as it were. It is interesting to note that in most cases the speed of the time in question is simultaneously perceived. For example when we are exploring each other passionately we both experience timelessness. Time seems to stop. But then in moments of despair or crisis time rushes by at a terrific pace. When Daniel was hurt for example. Now if the speed of time is a matter solely of physical perception, of sensory analysis, as the doctor thinks, then understanding time is a physiological enterprise, something beyond my ken and life span, something for one of your bright young students to pursue over the course of a lifetime in the lab.

But if it is not solely a sensory matter, as Cedar and I believe, then analysis of the machinery is possible. Analysis of the delivery system. Understanding the nature of the machine. Such understanding of course leading to repair and renovation of the machine. For cleaner and more efficient operation. If you could, for example, choose moments to isolate, and slow them down, allowing for new action at the proper time, imagine the good you could do. On the local level you could rewind and repair unfortunate accidents as Daniel’s. On the regional level you could for example arrest the spread of smallpox, which essentially ended the culture of our People a century ago, leaving us stranded in our time with nothing but shards and shreds of words and stories that once wove people into this place like threads in a blanket. On the national and international level adjustments could be made in situations that lead for example to endemic famine. Talk about Public Works, May. It’d be the greatest Public Work of all time. You could repair the pain and despair of millions of people. Billions. But it can’t happen unless we find the machine. The locus of the delivery system. The black box.

And May: I know where it is.

And May: I have to go there.

39.

Moses floats home after the funeral and sits on the cupola of the tall house where he lives with Owen and Daniel and No Horses. He looks down through the kitchen window and sees No Horses standing there with her head bowed and her knuckles white against the white sink. He can’t see her face. She doesn’t look up. A shiver of fear goes through him. She doesn’t look up. He stares. She doesn’t look up.

When nervous or worried Moses hums, usually psalms taught him by the old nun, so he starts to hum, not knowing quite what he is humming, but after a minute he recognizes it, Psalm 34, the psalm of the broken heart, and he hums it louder and louder, and then sings his version of it in his cracked hoarse stutter of a voice like a plate breaking as Owen says like someone falling downstairs as Daniel says like an old truck wheezing its last as No Horses says:

the poor one cried

and the lord heard that cry

and saved that one from trouble

o the lord is near to them with broken hearts

and heals them with bruised spirits

and keeps them from afflictions

and keepeth all their bones unbroken

and no one will be desolate

no one no one

no one

no one

But she still doesn’t look up and after watching her a long while during which time she does not move a muscle but continues to stand there clutching the sink with all her strength he floats up and away and arrows south toward Owen’s shop, south where all the trouble comes from, he thinks, that’s what Worried Man says, old South Wind with his fingers stirring up trouble and pain.

40.

Rain in and on and over and through the town, gentle and persistent, gray and gentle, green and insistent, thorough and quiet, respectful and watchful. On Worried Man and Cedar in the Department of Public Works where they hunch over a table strewn and scattered with maps. On Declan staggering along the beach to the hulk of his boat. On Michael the cop as he drives gently through town humming Puccini and thinking of what to make for dinner for his wife Sara and their girls. On Sara as she spades their garden with the two little girls who are digging as fast and furiously as possible looking for worms because their daddy says if they find fifty worms he will take them fishing tomorrow morning rain or shine. On No Horses walking in the hills, up the old quarry road and through the forest and back along the old quarry road once twice three times. On the young female bear two miles upriver from the village where she found a dead elk calf. On Maple Head picking salmonberries in the dark mossy places near the creek near Owen’s shop. On Owen’s shop where he is hammering and cursing and Moses sits silently on the old football helmet. On the oldest house in town, a cabin built by two silent brothers long ago, which slumps to the wet welcoming earth with the faintest of sighs. On Rachel taking off her shirt with both hands in the deft graceful crosshanded way that women pull their shirts
over their heads and on Timmy sitting crosslegged before her watching. On George Christie the former logger oiling the teeth of his chain saw a mile from the bear. On his wife Anna who sits by the river listening to the river’s excitement after three days of rain. On Grace on her knees in the mud by her father’s grave in the southeast corner of the field where he thought he would die but didn’t. On Nicholas relentlessly lifting weights up down more weight up down more weight up down updown updownupdownup. On his father cleaning rockfish at the co-op: you make an incision in the vent of the belly and cut up through the rib cage remove viscera remove the head remove the tail cut filet cut other filet bones and skin tossed left and filets tossed right, next fish. On the man with thirteen days to live washing Daniel’s long hair in the sink of the doctor’s house. On Daniel with his eyes closed and his mind filled with the ocean and his plaster-prisoned legs throbbing. On the doctor smoking his third cigarette of the day, the one called James the son of Zebedee. On the priest in the confessional in the church as he listens to Rachel’s mother pour out her fears for her daughter that she too will conceive and bear a child while she is yet a child.

III

1.

Choose a morning in the Department of Public Works, any morning. Let’s say this morning. Tuesday, very early in June. Cedar in his office. His office is a warren and a welter and a jungle and a jumble but ah, he knows where everything is, every sheet of paper, every map, every survey, every report, every work order, every purchase order, every call record, every complaint sheet, every carbon copy of every letter sent by or received by the Department in the years he has directed the Department.