Mink River: A Novel (43 page)

23.

In the county of Limerick in the west of Ireland there is a hill that swells like a breast from the skin of the soil. Between Baile Geagoge and Baile na hAbhann, says Owen to Daniel, that’s the way my grandfather would say it when he tried to say where we were from.

Daniel stares at the small sea of the valley beneath them. Green squares like a quilt. Little rock walls that look like they have been there one million years.

More mud than grass eh, says Owen. Up we go, son. Just a bit more now. Your knees sore? Can I carry you now?

Yes please, says Daniel.

Just a bit more up through the trees, then.

This is so beautiful, dad.

It is that, Dan.

All the trees are up here on the hill, says Daniel.

Yeh, says Owen. Once there were trees all over the island thick as hair on the head of the king, but they were all cut down very long ago. A great shame. Mostly vast and epic oaks, they say. The old stories are full of forests that were all dark and mysterious and magic. Oak is still a holy wood here even though you hardly ever see an actual living oak, the poor things.

Daniel on Owen’s back sees the little house in the trees first.

Dad.

Here we are now, son.

Can I walk now, please?

Can you? You all right?

Yes.

Sure?

Yes.

They hold hands on the mossy porch. The house crouches beneath the pines. It’s dark among the thick arms of the trees. The wind seethes. There’s a yellow light in the house. Owen knocks on the mossy door. Daniel’s hand tightens in his father’s hand. A shuffle comes to the door. Owen knocks again. The wind is stuffed with pine. The door opens and the yellow light wanders out curiously and Daniel finds himself staring at an old woman exactly as tall as he is. They stare at each other curiously before the woman notices that Daniel’s hand is in another hand and her eyes sail up Owen’s arm to his face. The wind stops to listen.
A mhàthair,
says Owen,
seo do mhic, an bhfuil cead againn teacht isteach?
Mother, here are your sons, may we come in?

24.

Worried Man here telling stories into the tape for my grandson Daniel. Now, boy, you have asked me time and time again about Cedar, and I have told you what I know, which isn’t very much, how we met him by the river, and fished him out, and how he and I became the best of friends, and went into the public works business, and how eventually we did go to the holy mountain, with odd results, these things you know. But you have also asked me about Cedar and the war, and of that story there is not much to tell. He does not speak of it even to me or to your grandmother, and I know beyond a doubt that we are dear to him, and trusted, and at home in his heart. Some stories are not for everyone to tell, and that story is for you to hear from Cedar alone. All he has said to me is that being inside a war changed him utterly, that it wasn’t one memorable event but many small moments that built up to be a mountain in him, and that he emerged from the war sworn to build rather than destroy. I think he would have been good at whatever he turned his mind and hands to. He would have been an excellent priest or mayor or mechanic or a thousand other things. Why he never married I do not know. How he feels about not having his own children I do not know. There are some things about even the people you love the best and deepest that you will never know. That’s just how it is. Sometimes I will notice something that maybe means something but it’s not for me to ask. He has a scar that circles right around his entire neck at the top of his chest, for example, a serious scar, like someone drew a scar with a thick pale marker, but how that happened and why I do not know. The ring finger on his right hand doesn’t work, he has a deep fear of swamps, and whistles and sirens make him uncomfortable and irascible. Perhaps these things have to do with war. I do not know. Not even your grandmother knows, and she knows more about Cedar than anyone alive in the world at the moment. But I believe it is an error to wonder about what you do not know, at the expense of savoring the excellence of what you do know. No one works as hard as Cedar. No one cares more about the safety and cleanliness and health of this town and its beings of every species. No one has more creative ideas faster than Cedar. No one can build a fence faster and more thoroughly than Cedar. No one is as quick with his fists or as reluctant to be quick with his fists as Cedar. No one is as loyal as Cedar. No one likes salmonberries more than Cedar. No one can run as fast as Cedar, except, of course, your mother, who may be the fastest human being in the history of human beings, and human beings have been around for a very long time, even longer than me, and I am half a million years old. I have to finish studying the theory of evacuation piping now, so I will conclude this tape, but not before I say that
you
are the child of my heart, Daniel of the three-colored hair, prince of the sea.

25.

Getting Worried Man
out
of the robosuit at night was an adventure, and it took Maple Head a few nights to figure out the drill, but she got good at it right quick and could peel him like a banana and squirt him into the bed and have him naked and grinning between the sheets in less than twenty minutes. For the first few nights they made a game of it and set a stopwatch and laughed at the nuttiness of it all under the sadness of what amounted to a nearly complete loss of the body he used to have, but then one night in the dark came the moment both of them had secretly been dreading but in the end you have to sail straight into those moments or you are not really married at all.

What happened in the cave? she says.

There was a sort of … messenger, he says.

Tell me.

I don’t know if it was real, May. Maybe I just had a stroke and dreamed the rest.

Tell me.

We were quartering the slope, and Cedar went east and I went west, and I found a cave that was sort of secretly cut into the mountain, you know? Something about it just seemed, I don’t know … right. So I went in, and then there was a … voice. I didn’t
see
anything, really, but the voice was so clear and articulate and strange. The voice said it had two messages to deliver, one that Nora was lifted from a great darkness because there was a great work before her, which it didn’t explain what that work was, and the other was that I was about to have a major stroke and be paralyzed except for my brain. So I … negotiated.

You negotiated paralysis with a voice in a cave?

Well … yes.

Keep talking.

Believe me I know how weird this sounds.

Do you?

Long silence from his side of the bed.

I … I’m sorry I was so selfish, May. I’m so sorry.

Long silence from her side of the bed.

The whole thing was crazy, to go at all, he says. It was selfish.

Longer deeper silence.

It’s like you have a thing in your head that you’re absolutely sure you have to do or be, he says, and that shoves everything else out of the way, and you lose … proportion.

The day you left was the first day I ever felt like I didn’t care anymore, she says, so quietly that he almost doesn’t hear her but he does.

Silence as deep as a sea. Their hearts hammer quietly. Two owls in the firs behind the house whinny and burble. The first cold winds of winter stick exploratory fingers through the windows left open an inch. Two raccoon kits, on their own tonight for the first time ever, huddle on the fence and ponder independence and the fallen burst tomatoes in the garden.

What else happened in the cave?

I asked that not all of me be paralyzed.

And?

Request granted.

Don’t tell me ...

No, no, not that, he says, smiling in the dark. Tempting as it was. It’s my left hand. Works like a charm. See?

Can’t feel it.

Let me just walk it over these mountains here.

Foothills.

Mountains to me.

What happens if it walks south of the mountains?

Why don’t I start it walking that way and see what happens?

26.

Kid, this is totally going to work out, says George Christie to Nora. They are in her studio and he is surreptitiously looking for a place to spit. Look at these order sheets, kid, sweet mother of Christ, there’s fifty there easy, what did I tell ya, this is going to be easier’n making snot pie. I’d start with the alders was I you, that’s an easy wood to get, and then move into the spruces and meanwhile I will haul ass and find more hemlock and such. Hell of a fine beast your hemlock but it’s a bitch to yank it out of the ravines for which you need helicopters or teenagers or a real good horse. Horses are best. Teenagers are good but they eat more’n the horses do. These other woods I can get ’em in baby doses. Cherry and that sort of thing. Hazelnut, holly, white cedar. That’s for the spindly shit people like. Magic arrows and dreamcatchers and boxes for necklaces and that sort of female stuff. It’s a puzzle. People have their things though, is all. Yours looks to be what’s inside wood. You with me here, kid? You taking notes? You catching the font of wisdom here? Because I ain’t going to last forever, you know, one of these days old man hemlock is going to take revenge on old George for culling so many of the long green herd over the years, and that’ll be fair and square. They’ll find me out there wearing a big honking tree limb and staring blank at the stars and all the other trees’ll be talking how they finally cut down the old guy. Fair enough. Worse ways to go. You with me here, kid?

27.

The days are shorter and the mornings colder and it’s almost wet season. Grace starts a betting pool in the pub for the first day of the Rains. The priest takes All Souls Day. The doctor takes All Saints Day. Owen takes Halloween. Daniel takes Election Day. Worried Man takes November 28, William Blake’s birthday. Kristi takes November 13, Robert Louis Stevenson’s birthday, because she found a copy of
Kidnapped
in the doctor’s house and thought it was the coolest book she ever read, period. Maple Head, pretending to be a pessimist, takes October 15, Saint Teresa of Avila’s feast day, because Teresa was a tough bird who didn’t take guff from anybody. Cedar takes October 26, feast day of Saint Evaristus, because how often do you get a chance to back a Jewish saint in a race? No Horses takes December 8, the day the Buddha achieved enlightenment, at about five in the morning. Michael the policeman tries to take all of November by eminent domain until he is hooted down and has to settle on the day after Election Day because that’s the day every year he says when there is a perceptible rise in stupid general hope in the direction of the state and nation. Sara takes the day after that just to see her name next to Michael’s name. Grace takes Veterans Day and silently marks the square for Declan. Moses reaches into the hat blind and pulls out October 27, which he discovers later is the birthday of Captain James Cook, who sailed right past Neawanaka in the old days, and indeed there is a story passed down among the crows of an enormous tall boat with huge white wings flying up the coast through the rain toward the country of the ice where ravens are kings, although there are a lot of stories about boats among crows, they have been noticing boats for thousands of years here. Nicholas, grinning shyly, agrees with Nora that the rains will not come until December, and is razzed so thoroughly that he flushes and forgets to pick a day. Niall and Peadar O Donnell, and George and Anna Christie and their eight children, and Timmy and Rachel, and Michael and Sara’s three girls, they all get days in November, Stella cheerfully picking the dates out of the hat and refusing to choose a day herself no matter how much she is teased and razzed by the assemblage. At the end of the evening when everyone is putting coats on and shaking hands and settling tabs, she sits for a moment in a corner with the doctor and thinks about all the people who could have squares in the pool but don’t and no one even thought to speak their names aloud: Red Hugh O Donnell, and the quiet man in the wheelchair who went with Dec on the
Plover
, and Nicholas’ dad, and Kristi’s dad, and the nun who died in the old hotel, and Grace’s mother, and Rachel’s baby, the inch who went to sea. On their souls our prayers, she thinks silently to herself. Amen to that, says the doctor aloud, his cigarette glowing in the dark. Amen to that, Stella.

28.

Later, wrapped in a shawl on the deck, Stella asks the doctor what was the hardest thing he ever had to do as a doctor? Technically, she says, I mean, medically, not emotionally, I can only imagine the hardest things you have had to encounter emotionally. I mean surgically, I guess. He is silent for a while, his cigarette glowing, the thirteenth and last of the day, the apostle Matthias. I sewed a man back into his skin, he says finally. Did I ever tell you about that? Circumstances had conspired to remove the man’s skin from his chest, both anterior and posterior. He was, as it were, the nakedest of men. But circumstances had also conspired to put me in a position to address the problem immediately. The patient was thoroughly unconscious, and indeed he remained in a coma for several days after I sewed him back into his skin. I was lucky to have at that time an excellent assistant, who immediately coated the patient with a substance sufficient to fend off infection while I stitched the skin back together, and my assistant and I then slipped the skin back on the patient, a fairly arduous task. A little minor detail work here and there, and some patching, especially under the shoulders, and we were done. The only really noticeable scar was around the neck, that was unavoidable. I am not sure that such an operation had been done before. Probably it is now the surgical equivalent of child’s play, but then we were quietly proud of our work. The patient, as I say, remained in a coma for several days, and by the time he awoke, healing had progressed at such a rate that he was aware only of tightness of fit here and there and a sagging sensation under his shoulders. He chalked this up to the same event that had caused his original difficulty, and my assistant and I did not see fit to explain overmuch. Nor did we have the time or leisure in that environment to attend to patients as we would have in other circumstances. This patient for example had experienced trauma such that he was a changed man ever after, and his physical appearance was the least of his concerns. His objective in life became something else altogether from what it had been before the event. A most remarkable case both medically and psychologically. Observing his behavior since that time has been an education of inestimable value. You might think that a man who had survived a traumatic event of that enormity, and suffered loss on what can only be accounted an epic scale, would retreat into some sort of emotional refuge, or erect sturdy defenses against any hint of pain, or decline any and all responsibility for other people for the rest of his life; but indeed the reverse was true, and his sense of responsibility grew so vast and thorough that I sometimes wonder if it has bred its own set of problems. A most remarkable case.