Navigating Early (28 page)

Then Mrs. Johannsen was there in the room with me. She put a hot poultice on my hand. It burned, and my hand
felt like it was on fire. Then she brought me tea. It was too hot. She clucked and shushed until I drank it. It was bitter, but I kept it down. She said that I was a good boy and that she had missed me. She had gone back to thinking I was her son, Martin.

“I was by the waterfall. Looking for Early.” My mind floated and bobbed like a bottle drifting at sea, but the message inside was unable to get out.

“Don’t worry, now. You just need to concentrate on getting better. You know how you get when you don’t get enough rest. Cranky as a bulldog.”

Her voice sounded so much like Mom’s. I blinked, trying to make my heavy eyelids stay open, to focus on her blurred face.

She put a cool cloth on my forehead, and I saw her eyes gazing into mine. She held her hand to my face. It was so familiar. Her look. Her touch.

“Mom?”

I blinked. It couldn’t be her. It was the fever playing tricks on me again. It was just Mrs. Johannsen talking to her long-lost son. But it wasn’t. Maybe it was the way she held my hand. Maybe it was the way she smelled of talcum powder. Maybe it was her voice—a mother’s voice.

Which was crazier—Mrs. Johannsen talking to her dead son, or me hearing my mother’s voice?

“Mom?”
Just saying the word, I no longer felt like I was adrift. The listing motion I’d felt inside subsided. I could see myself stepping onto Dinosaur Rock on Fisher’s steeplechase, the current of water surging beneath me.

“I got lost.”

“I know, but you found your way back. Finding your way doesn’t mean you always know where you’re going. It’s knowing how to find your way back home that’s important.”

I ventured out further.

“And then I was mad. I shouldn’t have gone off like that.” Another step.

“It’s all right. Sometimes boys have to stretch their wings a bit. That’s hard for mothers.”

“But I wasn’t there. I was gone.”

“We all lose our way once in a while. I knew you’d come back. It wasn’t your fault.”

I hadn’t realized how much I wanted to believe that. To hear those words of absolution. They washed over me with as much force as a great waterfall, cleansing me from head to toe and carrying me away in a peaceful current.

“I miss you, Mom.”

“I’ve missed you too. But, you know, I’ve been here the whole time. Just a hop, skip, and a jump away.” She smiled and kissed my forehead, her hair brushing my face. “Now, you get some rest. You’re tired as the day is long. And it’s been a
long
day. Sleep well. You’re not lost anymore.”

“Good night, Mom,” I whispered as the door shut, and I knew she was gone. And I slept a deep, motionless sleep.

The next morning my hand still hurt like a son of a gun, but the sweating and chills were gone, and my head was clear. I knew in the light of day that it was Mrs. Johannsen who’d put a cool cloth on my forehead, whispering words of love and forgiveness to her son, Martin. I knew I had
chosen to see her differently. But how had her words meant so much to me, when she was speaking them to the son she thought had returned? Because she let me hear them as if they were being spoken to me. And, I guess, in a way I let her speak to me as if I were her son. Neither of us was fooling the other. But if a soothing balm is administered by someone other than a doctor, does that make it any less soothing?

I put on my shoes and went into the main room of the cabin to find Early. There he sat, at the kitchen table. I knew what he was going to say as sure as if I were saying it myself. Early was going to say he’d found Fisher. He probably had the woodsman tucked away somewhere, ready to be displayed as proudly as the picture in the trophy case back at Morton Hill Academy. I could see it all.

So when Early did open his mouth to speak, I was struck dumb by what he actually said.

“Mrs. Johannsen is dead.”

“What?” I said, even though I’d heard him loud and clear.

Early didn’t elaborate. That’s when I noticed he was sorting his jelly beans. I walked over to the table. I’d been around Early long enough to know that his sorting meant different things. If he sorted in groups of ten, that meant he was trying to organize his thoughts or solve a problem. If he sorted by color, that meant he was upset and trying to calm himself.

I watched as he took each jelly bean and scooted it with one finger into its place. Today he was sorting by color—red, yellow, green, blue, orange—and grouping them in
columns of ten. He was upset
and
trying to figure something out. It had to be about Fisher.

“Early,” I said, avoiding any mention of Fisher or the woodsman from the previous night, “what happened with Mrs. Johannsen?”

“Last night, after she got you settled, she was beaming like a lighthouse.” He studied his columns of jelly beans as if they were magic beans that held the secrets of life. “Not really. That’s just an expression. No one really beams like a lighthouse. Most lighthouses use five-hundred-watt lights, so that would be very bright. She was beaming more like a candle. A candle set in a window, but a closed window, so there’s no breeze to make the candle flicker. It was a steady glow like that.”

“What did she say?” I asked, keeping my voice low and calm to match Early’s, but his had a hint of pain in it as well.

“She just hugged me to her bosom—that’s what ladies call their chest—and she thanked me for bringing you to her. Then she blew out that lantern she keeps up in the window and went to bed. This morning I went in to ask if she’d like me to put some coffee on. And there she was. All laid out, so peaceful and still. It was just like she said. Her body had done the work of living, and then it did the work of dying.”

“And that man?” I asked tentatively. “The one who carried me here last night?”

“He’s gone,” Early said quietly, staring at his tidy rows of colored jelly beans, all sorted neatly by color. Everything was in order. Everything should have made sense. But I
could tell by the look on Early’s face that it didn’t make sense. For what might have been the first time in his life, he couldn’t figure it out. Just then, a tear rolled down Early’s face, and in one motion he swept all the jelly beans onto the floor in an explosion of color and chaos.

32
 

I
knelt down, gathering the jelly beans, wishing I could put them back in some order that would make sense. But I couldn’t, so I just dropped them in the jar, one after another after another, and screwed the lid back on.

I found Early on the porch steps, tears streaking his dirty face. He had papers and news articles from his journal strewn about. Early must have realized that the woodsman wasn’t Fisher. I opened my mouth to say what he’d already figured out. That his brother wasn’t coming back. That he was gone, lost forever near a bridge in France. But instead, I kept quiet, because I didn’t want it to be true. Besides, who was I to tell Early anything? He said we could build a boat, and we did. He said that Martin Johannsen’s death was an accident, and it was. He said there were timber rattlesnakes in Maine, and even with the swelling and redness gone from my arm, I knew that there were. Of course, he could be wrong about some things. He had thought I was
Mrs. Johannsen’s son. He had thought there was no color in Kansas. He had thought he could trust me before the regatta. There
were
times when Early was wrong.

But I of all people understood the need to believe that a loved one is alive, standing in front of you, loving you.

Early was surrounded by his array of articles and notes. His arsenal of reasons why Fisher was still alive. He stared at a particular newspaper clipping as if he were looking right through it. It was the picture of the bear hunter from Early’s bulletin board at school—the bear hunter I now recognized as Archibald MacScott when he still had two eyes. He was standing proudly by his prize, smiling a big smile, thinking he had killed the Great Appalachian Bear and won the bounty.

Seeing the picture made me wonder.

“He must have been a good hunter—a good shot, I mean. How is it that he missed the real Great Appalachian Bear yesterday, at point-blank range?”

“He wasn’t trying to hit her,” said Early.

“That’s crazy. I don’t know that much about hunting bear, but I do know that if you go shooting at a bear like that,
not
trying to hit it, you’re asking for whatever you get.”

Early just nodded.

“What?” I said. “You think MacScott wanted that bear to kill him?” Even as I said it, it made sense. MacScott had lived a long time carrying the guilt and shame of what he’d done.

“Didn’t you see it in his face?” Early asked. “He was asking that bear to put an end to his pain.”

I looked back at the picture from just a few months ago.
“I wonder how long it took for him to find out that he had killed the wrong bear back then,” I said. “Do you think he had to read it in the paper?”

“I don’t know, but Fisher knew it right away.”

“What do you mean? What does Fisher have to do with it?”

“Look at his eyes. He knows there’s a big fuss being made over the wrong bear.”

I looked at the picture more closely.

“What are you talking about, Early? There’s nobody in the picture except MacScott, the bear, and that”—my voice caught in my throat—“bearded lumberjack.” I stared at the face and, strangely, I recognized it. Not as the face in the trophy case, but as the bearded face of the man who had helped Early during his seizure yesterday.

“You think this is Fisher? So you saw this picture and thought Fisher was in these woods, and that’s why you set off on this wild-goose chase?”

“It
is
Fisher!” said Early, clearly frustrated that he’d been telling me the same thing over and over and I still didn’t seem to understand. “I’ve shown you!” he yelled. “It says it right here”—he grabbed a loose piece of notepaper—“and here and here and here.” He held a stack of crumpled articles and pages with notes in his clenched fist. “But you won’t listen.” Then he hunched his head down into a green jacket that he must have borrowed from Martin’s closet, looking for all the world like a turtle in an oversized shell.

I had no words left to argue with him. And they wouldn’t have helped, anyway.

“Fine,” I said. “You keep looking for your dead brother.
But for now, we’ve got to bury Mrs. Johannsen.” I grabbed the shovel that was propped up against the porch and set off to finish digging Mrs. Johannsen’s grave. “And then I’m done. I’m going back to Morton Hill. And I’m going to sleep in a bed. And I’m going to stay dry. And I’m going to mess up my sock drawer. And I’m going to listen to Billie Holiday when it’s not raining. Better yet, I won’t listen to Billie Holiday at all. I’ll listen to—”

I stopped short as I reached the clearing where I’d expected to find Mrs. Johannsen’s mostly dug and empty grave. Instead, where there was supposed to be a hole in the ground, all the empty space had been filled in with the dirt we’d set off to the side, and there was a cross made out of wooden planks positioned as a grave marker.

I took a tentative step forward, half wondering if Mrs. Johannsen had buried herself.

Early came up behind me. “You can’t listen to Billie Holiday when it’s not raining, and your socks—Hey.” He looked at the grave. “How’d she get buried so fast?”

“Good question.” I walked toward the cross to see the name that had been carved into the wood.

MARTIN JOHANNSEN

It was as if all the jelly beans in Early’s jar had exploded all over the place. This made no sense at all. And on the tree stump just beside the newly filled grave was a red tartan jacket, folded up and placed just so. I looked back at Early. He was wearing a different jacket, because he had left his back in the cave behind the waterfall, covering Martin
Johannsen’s bones. That was why he had been shivering during the night.

“Where’d you get that jacket?” I asked.

“I’m not going to tell you. You don’t believe anything I say, anyway.”

“Mrs. Johannsen probably gave it to you. It’s Martin Johannsen’s jacket.”

“Is not.”

“Is too.”

“Is not.”

“Then where’d you get it?”

“I’m not telling you.”

There was something familiar about the jacket. That drab olive-green canvas—very functional, very durable. Very military. I tugged at Early’s arms to see the front of the jacket where a name would have been sewn. At first he resisted, but then he let his arms go slack. There were capital letters, lined up neat and clear. Five letters.

AUDEN

My dream from the night before came to mind. Suddenly it seemed important. Early and the bear had been talking. What did they say?

Early had put his arm around the bear’s sagging shoulders. He’d said something to the bear, and his voice was small and sad. What was it? I struggled to recall. It was like trying to find the words of a song, guessing where to place the needle on the record.

Slowly the dream replayed itself in my mind.

You can come back
, Early had said.
Just like Superman did after the kryptonite almost got him. And like Pi did when he kept his eyes on the bright star named for him
.