The Bully of Order (23 page)

We left the shed, and not knowing what else to do, I walked with her back to her house.

At her gate she stopped. “I'd have never hurt you like that.”

“You're all I have.” I looked at her, the house behind her full of light.

“I don't want you to leave,” she said.

“I guess I'll be around.” I left her standing there because if I said anything else I didn't know what I'd do, cry or what.

I walked among the tents, all but a few of them dark and quiet. Dogs roamed in packs but paid me no mind. I decided that there were several kinds of sadness and disaster, and like timber it had grades. Death and fire, heartbreak; I didn't know how they stacked up to one another, or if it even mattered—it wasn't a contest. All I did know was that in their wake all that remained was the funereal candle and canvas glow, linked and common in my mind always as the color of change, the hue of hard starts.

I spent the night curled into the heat of the spare boiler at the shingle mill. In the morning I trudged home and Uncle Matius was there.

“You, devil boy,” he said when he saw me, and swung his ax down, snap, and the blade went easily through the limb and sliced into the mud.

“What's this?” I asked. He'd usually hire his labor out if he couldn't pin it on me.

“Contracted with Michelson for posts.”

“Sounds desperate. What about yer splashdam?”

“Foundered against legalities. I've not enough friends.”

The ground was torn and trampled, and finished posts spilled over the wagon edge. The one man Disston rested on the cradle. The horse, Samson, looked on.

“You've no friends at all,” I said.

My uncle leaned on his ax and studied me. “I'm starting to think I'd prefer you to stay away, a permanent situation.” He was breathing from the work, and his suspenders had crowded his shirt collar up to his ears.

“Where'd this come from?” I asked.

“Been here waiting for you.”

“Do I get a reason?”

“Ms. Eunice and I might shack up.”

“Who the fuck is Ms. Eunice?”

“My lady friend by way of Olympia.”

“Since when?”

“The Indian princess appeared.” He pointed proudly to the road, then with his hands made the shape and size of a piece of bread, held it there in front of his crotch, the ax leaning against his thigh. “She made me a gift of these dried-out salal berry cakes. They aren't dessert-like at all, but you eat enough and they put a serious bull in you. You understand what I'm getting at?”

It felt like I should congratulate him, but it struck me as being a bit slint. “Fine, you want me to leave, I'll go.”

“She feeds me salmonberry sprouts postcoitus.”

“I said I'd go.”

“Good, because there's another thing.”

“What?”

“Charlie Boyerton sent a few dipshits out here looking for you.”

“They say what about?”

“No, didn't say anything about the why. I told them you'd be in town somewhere. Check with those fucking McCandlisses, I said. You've got yourself into some trouble. What'd you do?”

“Maybe I had too many salal berries.”

“Scrawny, low-down fucking prick. I hope they do find you. I really do. You're as worthless as your father.” And he swung the ax again without taking his eyes off me and it glanced off the log and he buried the blade in his boot. “Oh, oh my,” he said, and fell to the ground with his arms out and made a
cuh cuh
sound that repeated and repeated and after twenty times or so transformed into
God God
. The blood came fast around the blade, and when he pulled it out, it came faster. I was unable to move for a moment, but then I perked up and helped him wrap his coat around his boot. All that blood turned my stomach, made me spit and spit again. It looked like he'd split his big toe from the rest nearly to the ankle joint.

“Help me inside.”

At the table I cut his boot free with a rusty set of pinking shears and spread the gash and didn't like that at all, either of us. A womanly wound spotted with bone and a velvet core. I fetched water from the pump and poured it over his foot to clean it and then bound it with an old sheet. There was blood everywhere, looked like we'd killed something of size. My uncle's face was the color of pus.

“I'll get the doc.”

“I don't want him.” The blood on the floor was dark and red and even foamed a little where it had pooled.

“Yer foot fuckin does.”

“Get me some more water.”

Matius drank, hands shaking, water down his front.

“That ain't gonna heal on its own,” I told him. “It's too deep. There's bones and tendons cut too.”

“Get out. Leave me be.”

“You don't want nothin? Do you want me to stay?” I wanted to help him. As bad as he'd been to me, it didn't matter. What's family but a reason to do right by somebody?

“Leave me alone.”

“I'll tell Jonas what you did, and he'll come out here and drag you to town by your ear. You want that?”

“Better than having to look at you.”

“Fine, if you want to take the dogwatch as chief invalid, I'll let you have it.” I went to my room and packed my father's old bindle with a few things. “I'll leave the cave bear to his fuckin cave,” I yelled.

I went through the living room and out the door without looking at him. When I was walking away Matius called after me, of course, changing his mind. “Duncan, you can't leave me out here. Hey. You can't leave me.”

I kept walking, feeling more free and more evil with every step. It came down to the fact that for once in this goddamn life I'd wanted him to be nice to me.

I
studied my hands folded
across my chest, pale and pitchy, a thumbnail bruise like blood dripped on ice, hard candy. I've got bad hands, the devil's hands. I touched the tips of my index fingers to the tips of my thumbs and made two eyes to look back at myself with. Three days since I'd seen Teresa, two since I'd seen Matius. He might be dead by now. The day before yesterday he didn't even see me when I came in and spied on him. Bleary, drooly, avuncular pile. Where's your Miss Eunice now? I wondered if maybe he made her up, knowing that I might argue with being run off by Boyerton but not by being disgusted enough with him breaking the bed to go and leave of my own free will. But he'd told me one and then told me the other. Always one for overkill—he used to get carried away whipping me with his belt, and to get higher or more slint he'd pick up a stick or ax handle or tangle of wire, whatever was in reach, and carry on with that till he was wasted and blown, or he'd just beat me with his fists and then I'd be the first out, and I'd wake up not knowing where I was or what happened. He contained a fanatical anger and apparently he'd beaten it into me, and now it was showing a clean pair of heels.

I'd told Jonas about Matius just like I said I would, waited in the shadow of the bunkhouse for him to arrive, said: “Go and fetch yer father. He's a red mess and won't listen to reason.”

“You doin here?” I couldn't answer him then but I could now.
I can't even think her name. Nowhere to go. Jonas, I need help.
But I ran off without saying anything and left him standing.

Through the forest I could hear my home river, the Wynooche, part of a great and final alluvium washing into the Pacific. Once, not long ago, this was land claimed by the fathers of Miss Eunice's grandfathers, and then it slutted around with everyone with a fur hat, rose to a territory, got hacked, settled abreast the river of slaves. The same thing happens in mud puddles, the little rivers pushing dirty water like the heart pushes blood. I once held a still-beating salmon heart in my mouth until it stopped and then I chewed it up and swallowed it. The small things never hid from me for long. They build to make the world. My blood; it's a river too. My soul is that of a slave. My heart beats in the mouth of my chest. Show me a rain cloud and I'll show you my breath.

Beneath the sky, the only one I'd ever known, I was open to the possibility that I was a dream of dirt and everything else was vapor. No family, no trees, no thimbles or aprons or axes, nothing. I invented breathing at dawn and finished the day with a fart.

The treetops above cradled the gray, touched it and sucked from it like a wick drawing oil. The wind pushed through the upper branches in gusts, and dead and green needles alike rained down upon me. I was under the spell of the ebb, suctioned to whatever tidewater interlude was occurring beneath my provisional bed. I turned on my side, and I could hear water running, rivulets; a disgusting word.

I let my eyes close and saw it in my mind. Age eight. I'd found the steelhead frozen in the creek ice behind the house. I squatted down above the fish, and the banks of the creek offered shelter. I'd rested in rowboats to the same effect. The day blustered on above me, without me; I woke at the shore. I put my hands flat to the ice and tried to feel for movement but they soon went numb. Can you feel people moving on the other side of a window if you press your hands to the glass? I'd done some peeping and knew that you could feel something, not like you were actually touching them but something. Teresa liked to window-watch. She said she went without me some nights. I'd assumed alone, but now I doubted my assumptions, save: Love is a cudgel.

I used a sharp black rock found tangled in the roots of a blowdown spruce to chip the fish from the ice. They were in water, below the level of the ice, and it seemed that they were alive but when I grabbed one by the tail it was dead. It took a moment for me to be sure because I was slipping my grip and moving it around and my heart was racing, but it was dead. I pitched the fish toward the bank one after the other. They flew like carved pieces of wood. I thought they might have been moving when I was watching them and then just died. They could've died from me watching. The water wasn't flowing; it was as sealed as a glass bowl. But they had to have died at some point. Why not while I was watching? I was eight and it was a time when all sorts of things were freshly discovered and mislabeled and sent to the wrong place. Half of forever was how long it took to cut down a tree, forever was how long it took them to grow. I was the first person to think this. There is no fool like a little fool. I cut a willow branch and ran the fish through the gills and dragged them home to Mother. I told her how I'd come by so many nice fish without a pole or net or money, but I didn't tell her they were already dead. She looked upon me that day as a bright boy, and I savored the memory. The fish hadn't been a part of anything until I went home and Mother saw them. Of course they had their own piscine lives full of departures and returns, oceans and rivers; but the question was this: Had they been delivered to me by way of some biblical or beyond biblical precept? Not likely. No, it seemed that they'd been caught landlocked and froze. That's to say, they'd had some bad luck. Ice is a truncheon. There was no parchment list that said those fish needed to be there at that time and I needed to find them to take to my mother. And if there was no list for the fish, then there was no list at all, no order to any of it. Yet people thought there was. Teresa did. Like things with like things, she thought; but half of me was defined by her and the time we spent together, while the other quarters were all Harbor and ramble, Matius and misery.

The graveyard where Mother had been buried was on the hill above town. From there you could see the edge-of-the-world cloudbank at the coast. I'd been at her grave last week, during that first snow, and the wind was blowing hard enough to knock down the new wooden markers, seven dead in the last month. Here on the hill, here, for the last stop on the mudboat.

The mound of earth atop her had settled; she was resting, had been for years, finally. No sky for her, and no birds. Mother would watch birds for hours if given the chance. She could tell the difference between the unchangeable gulls and gave them names like pets or people. Harold the Mad, Muddy Mesmer, Margaret the One-Posted, Baron du Potet. And the birds liked her too; they'd gather around the house and sing and squawk and leave malicious little shits on the windowsills. Perhaps she'd swum away into the underground lake and escaped. She could be anywhere by now, free in the open ocean. But I didn't think she knew how to swim. When would she have learned? Jonas had taught me, when it should've been my father. Jacob the Teacher. There's a title he earned. Like the mountains earn snow.

On my feet I shook off the chill and gathered my stiffened jacket around my throat. I gauged the day by the hidden sun, as a fish by his shadow, ice by its bubbles, and I could see my breath and thought I might be wrong about the rain. It might snow.

Through the logged mess the path continued to the Ellstrom plot, No. 164, a mire of downed trees and stumps; huge, tangled slash piles walled up like animal dens, all of it waiting for the strike of a match, a solitary month of dry weather. It was hard to believe that we'd done this work on purpose, this voracious enterprise. There is no machine so wolfish as the able man. Jonas had taught me to swing an ax, how to snap it down like it was connected to my very bones by steel tendons. The chips would fly out thick as the Old Testament, then New.

Matius once told me that the day the windows were set in the house, a robin hit the glass and broke its neck. He said the Finns thought it was an omen and that they'd taken time to bury the bird to ward off the curse. Matius thought this to be the top of comedy. Better or worse, I side with the Finns; and when you die, you find your fortune in worms.

The thin afternoon light filtered through the stragglers, ragged striplings we'd spared or simply missed—an opening in the clouds, a sliver of moon low in the sky, the angle of incidence from the heavens to the mud-stamp homestead, weighted with cold, barn-red and murky; the house: promittor—the light of transition, thunderstorm light at the moment the sun goes. Matius was in there behind the walls. It's possible that stubbornness has killed more than it has saved. To have one leg is a world better than having those evil black veins like elk antlers shooting up to your crotch and into your heart. One leg is something to stand on, but Matius says he prefers to be buried with two. Ashes to ashes, dumbshit to dust. Life is so often compulsion. Take your place among the millions.