Northern Lights
Northern Lights
Tim O’Brien
The acclaimed novel from the award-winning author of ‘If I Die in a Combat Zone’, ‘Going After Cacciato’ and ‘In the Lake of the Woods’.The action in ‘Northern Lights’ takes place not in Vietnam but back in the USA, as Tim O’Brien explores the after-effects of that war – on those who served, and those they left behind.Set in the frozen wilderness of north Minnesota, it concerns two brothers, one who served in Vietnam, and has returned tough, cynical and world-weary; and the other who stayed at home. When they take off on a long skiing trip together through the frozen woods, they quickly get lost in a blizzard, and are tested to their limits as they face a battle against the elements and each other.
TIM O'BRIEN
Northern Lights
Copyright (#ulink_dd0d53ca-a3f2-52cc-838a-8f460e682efa)
Fourth Estate
An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk).
Published by Flamingo 1998
First published in Great Britain by Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd 1976
Copyright © Tim O’Brien 1975
Tim O’Brien asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780006551485
Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2015 ISBN: 9780008133146
Version: 2015-09-10
With gratitude
to the Arrowhead people,
who will know perfectly well that
there is no such town as Sawmill Landing,
that Grand Marais doesn’t sponsor ski races,
that these characters are purely fictitious
and that this is just a story.
Dedication (#ulink_66505a9e-8f09-5f1b-8e7b-9bcd4e39e0c9)
For Ann
… and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood. And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind. And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places … For the day of his wrath is come. And who shall be able to stand?
REVELATIONS
Contents
Cover (#u48f2dbcc-0f19-574d-8dd6-1d6ccdedfaa9)
Title Page (#u8a10915d-3bdd-5566-a44c-5ab01e0766c2)
Copyright (#ulink_cc86ee04-a0b4-5553-8167-840d6c10e2f4)
Dedication (#ulink_eb738087-8648-54f9-83c7-a4fb1c0b2e5b)
Epiloguge (#u53a3008e-1791-5476-a55a-ebcf9e198860)
One
Heat Storm (#ulink_1d09fceb-deda-56a6-b0f6-4da54120e3f8)
Elements (#ulink_8e0434b6-cf29-56c7-a507-f8532770070c)
Shelter (#litres_trial_promo)
Black Sun (#litres_trial_promo)
Two
Blizzard (#litres_trial_promo)
Heat Storm (#litres_trial_promo)
Elements (#litres_trial_promo)
Shelter (#litres_trial_promo)
Blood Moon (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Praise (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
ONE (#ulink_30c5f814-bce7-537d-a2e5-1f4028f758e3)
HEAT STORM (#ulink_b8d781b7-a547-5e68-af3c-68f683c35cbd)
Wide awake and restless, Paul Milton Perry clawed away the sheets and swung out of bed, blood weak, his fists clenching and closing like a pulse. He hadn’t slept. He sat very still. He listened to the July heat, mosquitoes at the screen windows, inchworms eating in the back pines, the old house, a close-seeming flock of loons. What he did not hear, he imagined. Timber wolves and Indians, the chime of the old man’s spoon in the spit bucket, the glacial floes, Harvey hammering at the half-finished bomb shelter, ice cracking in great sheets, the deep pond and Grace’s whispering, and a sobbing sound. He sat still. He was naked and sweating and anaemic and flabby. Thinking first about Harvey, then about the heat, then the mosquitoes, he’d been sailing in a gaunt nightlong rush of images and half-dreams, turning, wallowing, listening like a stranger to the sounds of his father’s house.
He sat still.
Harvey was coming home.
There was that, and there was Grace, and there were the mosquitoes crazy for blood against the screen windows.
‘Lord, now,’ he moaned, and pushed out of bed, found his glasses, and groped towards the kitchen.
He returned with a black can of insecticide. Then he listened again. The bedroom was sullen and hot, and he was thinking murder. Carefully, he tied the lace curtains to one side. He ignored Grace’s first whisper. He pushed the nozzle flush against the screen window. Then, grinning and naked, he pressed the nozzle and began to spray, feeling better, and he flushed the night with poison from his black can.
He grinned and pressed the nozzle. His fingers turned wet and cool from condensed poison, and he listened: mosquitoes and Junebugs, dawn crickets, dawn birds, dragonflies and larvae and caterpillars, morning moths and sleeping flies, bear and moose, walleyes and carp and northerns and bullheads and tiny salamanders. It was dark everywhere. The black can hissed in the dark, ejaculating sweet chemicals that filled the great forest and his father’s house. He sprayed until the can was empty and light, then he listened, and the odour of poison buoyed him.
He sat on the bed. Harvey was coming home, and he was dizzy.
‘Bad night,’ Grace whispered.
‘Lord.’
‘Poor boy.’
‘Poor mosquitoes.’
‘Shhhhh,’ she always whispered. ‘Shhhh, just lie back now. Come here, lie back. You’re just excited. Phew, what a stink! Come here now. Lie back.’
‘Killed a billion of them.’
‘Shhhh, lie back.’
‘No use. What a night. Lord, what a crummy awful night.’
‘Relax now. I heard you all night long.’
‘Mosquitoes, the blasted heat, everything.’ He sat on the bed. He was still holding the defused can of insecticide. Poison drifted through the dark room.
‘Poor boy. Come here now. Here, lie back. Lie back.’ Her hand moved to his neck. ‘Here now,’ she whispered. ‘Lie back and I’ll rub you. Poor boy, I heard you tossing all night long. Just lie back and I’ll give you a nice rub and you can sleep and sleep.’
‘I’m going for a walk.’
‘None of that. You just lie still and I’ll rub you.’ Her hand brushed up his spine and rested on his shoulder. Vaguely through the cloud of poison he heard the hum of returning insects, thousands and millions of them deep in the woods, and he began scratching himself. He was flabby and restless. ‘I’m going for a walk.’
‘Poor, poor Paul,’ she said. She removed his glasses. ‘There now. Just lie back and I’ll give you a rub. There. There, how’s that now? Better now? Poor boy, you’re just excited about Harvey coming home, that’s all, that’s all. Just lie back and I’ll rub you and you can sleep.’
‘What time is it?’
‘Shhhhh. Plenty of time. Still dark, see? You just lie still now.’
‘Lord,’ he moaned.
‘A nice rub?’
‘I’m going for a walk.’
‘Shhhhh, none of that. Let me rub you.’
‘Damn mosquitoes.’
‘I know.’
‘Scratch. There.’ He lay back. He grinned. ‘Guess I killed myself some lousy mosquitoes, didn’t I?’
‘I guess you did.’
‘Massacred the little buggers.’
‘Hush up. You killed them all. You’re a brave mosquito killer and now you can just go to sleep. Roll on to your tummy and I’ll scratch you.’
He turned and let her scratch. He felt better. The room sweated with the poison. He lay still and listened to the returning mosquitoes, the dawn insects, listened to Grace murmur in the dark: ‘There, there. Is that better? Poor boy, I heard you all night long. Just excited, that’s all. Aren’t you excited? Harvey coming home and everything, I don’t blame you. Poor boy. Now, how does that feel? Better now? You just go to sleep.’
‘What time is it?’
‘Sleep time,’ Grace said. ‘Plenty of time.’
Her fingers went up and down his back. He felt better. ‘There, there,’ she was whispering, and Perry grinned and thought about the poison sweeping like mustard gas through the screen windows. He felt better. He pressed his nose into the sheets, lay still while she massaged his shoulders and his neck and his scalp. ‘There, there,’ she was whispering, softly now, her hand moving lightly. She whispered like a mother. She smelled of flannel. He felt much better. Gradually, she stopped rubbing and after a time he heard her slow breathing. Her mouth was open and she was asleep. Her teeth were shining.
Then he tried to sleep. But soon he was listening and thinking again, thinking about Harvey.
He tried to imagine what great changes the war might have made in his kid brother. He wondered what they would first say to each other. It was hard to picture.
All night, he had been thinking.
There would be some changes. The wounded eye, for sure. It was hard to imagine Harvey with a wounded eye. Harvey the Bull. The blinded bull. It was hard to picture. In a stiff and static way, he remembered his brother through a handful of stop-motion images, a few images that had been frozen long ago and captured everything important. All night the images spun in his head: Harvey the Bull; Harvey digging the bomb shelter; Harvey off somewhere in the woods with the old man; Harvey playing football; Harvey the rascal; Harvey boarding the bus that would take him to a fort in California and from there to Saigon or Chu Lai or wherever.
It was annoying. The few sharp images were all Paul Perry really had. It was as though he’d lived thirty years for the sake of a half-dozen fast snapshots, everything else either forgotten or superfluous or lost in the shuffle, and all night long the few sharp images flopped before him, gaunt summary of three decades, growing up on the old man’s sermons and winter stories, learning to swim as the old man watched without pity, college, marriage, returning to Sawmill Landing, the bomb shelter and the old man’s death, a job, winter and summer and millions of pine and Norway spruce and birch, billions of bugs. All collapsed around the few images. But even the images offered no natural sequence. They were random and defiant, clarifying nothing, and Perry spent the long night in myopic wonder, trying to sort them into an order that would progress from start to finish to start.
He lay still. The mosquitoes were back. On the far wall, the first light formed patches against Grace’s dressing mirror.
Again he swung out of bed. He dressed quietly and carried his shoes to the kitchen. Outside, the sky was chalk coloured. It would be another dry day. Sunday. Standing on the porch, he urinated into Grace’s green ferns, then he laced up his shoes, hurried across the lawn, passed the bomb shelter without looking, followed the path by memory to Pliney’s Pond.
There he sat on the rocks.
He practised melancholia and self-pity.
He scooped a handful of green water from the pond and let it trickle through his fingers, indifferently inspecting it for life. Harvey the Bull, he was thinking. The blinded bull. It was hard to picture. Hard to tell where it all started or even why. He took more water from the pond. Swirling it in his hands, he captured tiny capsules of cellulose, tiny larvae and mosquito eggs.
He waited for the sun to rise.
The forest stood like walls around the pond. Roots of older trees snaked along the rocks and disappeared deep into the water.
‘Pooooor me,’ he moaned.
It was hard to tell where it started. He squinted into the algae, dipped in for more water, let it dribble through his fingers.
It may have started that October in 1962, the October when Harvey quit high school football in order to finish the old man’s bomb shelter. It was one of the images: the October in 1962 when the old man’s prophecies of doom suddenly seemed not so crazy after all. When the Caribbean bustled with missiles and atom bombs, jets scrambling over Miami Beach and everyone in Sawmill Landing sat at their radios or hunched over coffee in the drugstore, saying: ‘Maybe the old gent wasn’t so crazy after all.’ When people were asking one another about the hazards of nuclear fallout, asking if it really rotted a man’s testicles, does it hurt, would it reach into northern Minnesota, would the winds be from the north or south or does it matter? That October in 1962, eight years ago, when the Arrowhead blazed with red autumn, when Harvey dug a great hole in the backyard, poured cement, strung lights from the pines in order to work in the night so as to finish the bomb shelter for the dying old man.
It may have started then.
Or it may have started further back.
As kids.
He couldn’t remember.
That day when he dressed up in his father’s vestments, practising to be a preacher, to follow the old man into the pulpit of Damascus Lutheran Church. It may have started or it may not have started. It may have been the afternoon when the old man ordered him to swim in Pliney’s Pond. ‘Jump in,’ the old man had said without pity. It may have started then, at the moment when he waded bawling into the fecund pond, or it may have started another time, that day, that day, or innumerable other days that washed together, that day when Harvey boarded a bus for California and the war. Or the day he married Grace, a day he barely remembered. ‘Looks like somebody’s mother,’ the motherless old man had once said. Or other days.
That day.
It was the perfect melancholy hour, and he practised silence.
He sat on the rocks and peered into Pliney’s Pond. Pushing his glasses close, he leaned forward and scooped a handful of algae from the pond and rubbed it between his fingers until they were stained green.
It may have started or it may not have started. It was partly the town. Partly the place. Partly the forest and the old man’s Finnish religion, partly being a preacher’s kid, partly the old man’s northern obsessions, partly a combination of human beings and events, partly a genetic fix, an alchemy of circumstance.
Harvey was coming home and the sun was already coming up.
He was restless and afraid. It was hard to imagine Harvey with a wounded eye. Harvey the Bull, the old man’s pride, the brave balled bullock. Careful not to fall into the stinking pond, Perry sat on the rocks and peered into the waters and listened to dawn respiration. It was Sunday. He sat quietly, practising silence, letting the night restlessness drain, listening as the forest swelled and expelled like a giant lung: oxygenation, respiration, metabolism and decay, photosynthesis and reproduction, simple asexual chemistry, conversion and reconversion.
Finally, when he was ready, he returned to the house. Grace was still sleeping.
The old timbers creaked. He put coffee on the stove, moved into the bathroom, showered, scrubbed the algae from his hands, dusted himself with his wife’s baby powder. It was six o’clock. He drank his coffee, watching the sunlight come in patches through the woods. He was sluggish and lazy and soft-bellied. Sipping his morning coffee and sitting at the table, he considered knocking off some sit-ups. Instead he fixed breakfast. When it was ready, he crept into the bedroom and woke Grace. ‘Breakfast,’ he said.
‘Phew.’ She emerged from the sheets. ‘Phew, I had a dream … I was dreaming somebody was spraying insecticide. Did you have that dream? Phew.’ She was a handsome woman. When she smiled, her teeth shined. From September through May she taught school. Now it was summer. ‘Come here,’ she said.
‘Breakfast’s already on.’
‘I want some nice cuddling. Come here.’
‘Don’t you want some nice breakfast instead?’
‘Hmmmm,’ she said. ‘First some nice cuddling. Poor boy, you had a bad night, didn’t you? Come here and I’ll give you some nice cuddling.’
Perry shook his head. ‘Better hurry,’ he said. ‘Harvey comes home today, you know.’
‘Poor boy,’ she smiled. ‘Poor Paul. What you need is some cuddling.’
He backed the car into the yard, turned past the bomb shelter and drove out towards Route 18. Gravel clanked against the sides of the car. At the end of the lane, he stopped and Grace leaned out to check the mailbox, then he turned on to the tar road and drove fast towards town.
The road swept through state park land. Another dry day. Branches hung over the narrow parts of the road.
After passing Bishop Markham’s house, Grace moved over and put her hand on him. ‘Happy?’ she said.
‘Sure. Wonderful.’
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing. I’m happy. Can’t you see how happy I am? Watch out or I’ll drive into the ditch.’
The road ran in a drunken narrow valley of the forest, bumpy from winter frost heaves, old tar with a single white line painted down its centre, unwinding towards Sawmill Landing, where it would pass by the cemetery and the junkyard, disappear for a moment at the railroad tracks, then continue on into town, past the John Deere machinery yard, the silver water tower, into the hub of Sawmill Landing. Perry drove fast. He knew the road by memory: twelve years on a school bus, in his father’s pick-up, in his own first car, shuttling back and forth between the paint-peeling timber town and the old timber house. The road had no shoulders and the ditches were shallow rock and the forest stood like walls on each side, sometimes hanging over the road to form a kind of tunnel or chute through which he drove fast, opening the window to let the July heat in, lighting a first cigarette. It was a hypnotic, relaxing drive. Without recognizing anything in particular, he recognized everything in general – the sweep of the road down to the iron bridge, the sound of the tyres on the pine planks, the slow curve past the cemetery and junkyard.
‘If you’re happy, then, let’s see a nice smile,’ Grace was saying, snuggling closer. ‘There, isn’t that nicer? You have to smile when Harvey gets off the bus. Okay? You have to start practising right now.’
‘All right,’ he said.
‘Then smile.’
‘Okay,’ he smiled, despite himself. She was like a gyroscope. A warm self-righting centre, soothing with those whispers.
‘Isn’t that better now?’
‘Yes.’
‘You see?’
‘Priceless.’
‘Don’t be that way. Be nice.’
‘I am nice. I’m priceless. Don’t you think I’m priceless? Harvey’s a soldier and I’m priceless. That’s the way it always seems to go. Perfectly priceless.’
‘Stop that.’ She pouted, puckering her lower lip. ‘I’m only … just trying to perk you up a little. Here, I want you to start smiling. Shall I turn on the radio? We’ll listen to some church music.’
‘If you want. Sounds priceless to me.’
‘Poor Paul.’ She turned the radio dial to find WCZ in Duluth. The car filled with July heat and the sound of pipe organs and a choir.
Perry concentrated on the road.
He felt her studying him, that vast womanly, wifely, motherly sympathy and understanding that both attracted and repelled him, often at the same time. ‘Like somebody’s goddamn mother,’ his father had said. In college, more than ten years ago, it was her heavy-breasted, sympathy that brought them together. She’d taken him in like an orphan, soothed him through four years at the University of Iowa, calmed him when he dropped out of the divinity school and steadied him when he started at the ag school, decadent Hawkeye sympathy that oozed like ripe mud. After all the years with his father, after pursuing the old man’s winter tracks, ice fishing and hunting and fiery sermons, after all that Grace had come with her whispers and understanding, and marrying her after graduation had been as easy and natural as falling asleep in a warm bath. By then the old man was dead.
She was still studying him, snuggling close. ‘Well,’ she finally said. ‘Well, Harvey sounded all right on the telephone. Don’t you think? I do. I think so. Actually, don’t you think he sounded pretty cheerful?’
‘I guess so. He sounded the same.’
‘You see? You see, he’s still cheerful and he sounded fine and everything will be perfect. You’ll see.’
‘I guess.’
‘So you can smile now. You can be cheerful just like Harvey.’
‘He lost an eye.’
‘Well …’ She trailed off as if recognizing the fact but not its importance. The radio played church music. Perry turned the car along the slow curve of the lake. He was nervous and he lit another cigarette. ‘Well,’ Grace said, ‘I’ll tell you this. I’m just glad you didn’t have to go. I’m glad about that much anyway. Aren’t you? I’m just glad you were too old for the dumb thing. I mean I don’t know. It’s awful about Harvey and everything. But I’m just glad you didn’t have to go, that’s all.’
‘Priceless.’
Again she pouted, and the road bumped across the rusted railroad tracks, straightened and descended through a tunnel of white pine that opened into the town. Sometimes he got pleasure out of making her worry. ‘Priceless,’ he muttered just for that purpose. On the right, an enamel sign said: SAWMILL LANDING. It gave the population as 781, which had been about right until 1947 when the last lumber company had left town, taking thirty families with it.
The road made a sharp turn and became Mainstreet. Perry parked in front of the bank.
Church bells were ringing as they walked to the drugstore.
Except for two dogs, one sniffing at the other, the streets were as dry and motionless as a postcard. Sunday morning. Sunday morning, four dozen cars parked about the stone church, Jud Harmor’s pickup in front of the town hall, Sunday morning, paint peeling, pine rotting, the forest growing into vacant lots and abandoned lawns, fallen timbers, Sunday morning and even inside the drugstore everything was quiet.
Grace found a Sunday paper and they sat at the counter. A Coca-Cola clock showed eight minutes to eleven.
Perry kept his head down. He rambled through the comics and Sunday morning headlines. Grace read the Living section. A wall of mirrors faced them, running from one end of the long counter to the other, plastered with ads for ice cream and Pepsi and Bromo Seltzer, reflecting the rows of toothpaste and stationery and mouthwash and Kleenex, reflecting like a long mercantile mural, reflecting Grace who was gazing at him placid and soft-eyed, featureless as warm milk. He looked away. He looked away and continued through the newspaper until Herb Wolff swung behind the counter.
Without asking, Wolff poured coffee and put the cups down and wrote out a bill.
‘Coffee?’ he said.
‘Thanks, Herb.’
‘No problem.’ He waited to be paid. Then he rang up thirty cents on his cash register, poured himself a cup of coffee and sat down beside Grace. ‘So,’ he said slowly, ‘so … what’s up?’
‘Not much. How’s your pa?’
Wolff shrugged.
‘That’s good.’
‘Keeps holding in there,’ Wolff said. ‘So. What’s up? He had a deep voice that never stopped surprising Perry.
‘Nothing, Herb. What about you?’
They sat without talking. For hours at a time, people sat in Wolff’s drugstore without talking. Stirring coffee and looking at themselves in the long mirrors, listening to Wolff’s cash register, watching Mainstreet, asking folks who came in: ‘What’s new? What’s up?’
Wolff rearranged a pair of salt and pepper shakers. ‘So. Not in church today.’
‘Not today, I guess.’
‘So what’s up then?’
‘Nothing. We’re here to meet the bus.’
Wolff raised his eyebrows, waiting for more, then he sighed. ‘Relatives, I guess.’
That’s about it, Herb. When the devil do we get some rain?’
‘I reckon next week. That’s what everyone’s saying.’ He paused a moment as if trying to frame a difficult question, then very slowly he said, ‘Relatives, I reckon.’
‘That’s right.’
‘That’s what I thought.’ Again he raised his eyebrows. He was dressed in a starched lab coat. It didn’t seem to Perry that he’d changed at all since high school. Wolff was one of the Germans. There were Swedes and Finns and Germans, and Wolff was pure German – impeccable and stiffly manicured, greedy eyes, a bristling crewcut and a voice that rose like deep magic from his sunken little torso. Wolff was proud of the voice. Back in high school, when it finally changed, it saved him from an adolescence of constant scorn, pity, practical jokes and half-serious innuendo about his malehood. He now loaded the voice with authority, successfully straining out most of the German accent, always speaking slowly and only after long and apparently tormenting thought. ‘A relative,’ he said.
‘That’s about it. You got any more of this coffee, Herb?’
‘Right.’ He sighed, giving up. Wolff refilled their cups and wrote out a new bill and they sat quietly and listened while the Coca-Cola clock ticked. ‘I reckon you know Jud Harmor’s got cancer,’ he said.
‘I’ve heard that.’
‘It’s true.’
‘Did Jud tell you?’
Wolff shook his head. ‘Nope, but I heard it. I hear it’s bad, too.’
‘He’s tough.’
‘He’s old.’ Wolff was playing again with the salt and pepper shakers. ‘He ought to step down from being mayor if he’s got cancer like I hear he’s got. I don’t say he has to quit. I say he should quit. It’s for the better.’
‘I guess it is.’
When the Coca-Cola clock showed two minutes after eleven, Wolff got behind the counter and began making coffee for the church crowd. He still had the disjointed swagger that Perry remembered from high school, a sailor’s roll that joined with his deep voice to defy everything else about him.
‘Anacin and aspirin and all that stuff,’ Wolff was saying, talking to Grace like a teacher. ‘It’s made in these big vats, you know, and all it really amounts to is plain acid. And you know what acids are. Dangerous. You got to be careful.’
‘Why sell it?’ asked Grace.
‘Oh. Well, it is a medicine. That’s all I’m saying, honey. Aspirin is medicine and people forget that. I’m just saying you got to be careful because it’s not sugar. Not candy. Aspirin is a very potent medicine. Aspirin isn’t sugar. Sugar is organic, see? Sugar’s got carbons in it, but aspirin’s plain acid and acid is something you got to be careful of, see?’
Grace nodded. Then Wolff nodded. He straightened his lab coat and checked his watch against the Coca-Cola clock. ‘So,’ he said crisply, ‘bus gets in at eleven twenty. Who’s this relative anyhow?’
Grace laughed. ‘It’s no big secret, Herb. It’s Harvey. We just thought it would be best not to …’
‘Harvey?’
Grace smiled.
‘Harvey!’ Wolff wailed. He held his hands to his mouth like a girl. His voice sailed up an octave. ‘Harvey? Well this is … Harvey!’
‘It’s no secret,’ Grace said. ‘We thought he’d just want to get off the bus without any fuss.’
‘Geez,’ Wolff moaned. ‘Well, this is something. Harvey? Geeeezzzz. You should’ve told somebody. For Pete’s sakes. Harvey. Well, how is he?’ Wolff looked about the store. ‘For Pete’s sakes! You should’ve told us. He’s coming on the bus? Geez, I got to get some people here.’
‘I don’t think he wants that,’ Perry said. He decided to cut Wolff off fast. ‘Let’s just let it be a nice easy thing.’
‘We got to!’ Wolff wailed. ‘He’s coming home, isn’t he? Geez. I got to make some phone calls.’ He yanked his lab coat down, dusting it and hustling for the phone.
‘Herb. Forget it, will you?’
‘The whole town’s in church.’ Wolff banged the phone down and went out into the street and came back. ‘Geez, this is … I can’t believe any of this. Harvey. I just can’t believe it. He’s coming home. I mean, we got to get some people out for him, don’t we? How is he? I mean, how’s the eye and everything?’
‘He’s fine,’ Grace smiled. ‘We talked to him on the phone and he sounded cheerful and fine.’
Wolff rubbed his crewcut. ‘Well, we got to do something. Don’t we? Maybe … Maybe I ought to run over to the church and make an announcement or something.’
‘Forget it,’ Perry said.
‘What?’
‘Just forget it, Herb.’
‘But … I mean, shouldn’t we get some people here?’
‘No,’ Perry said.
Wolff frowned. He looked shaken. ‘At least the mayor?’
‘Nobody.’
‘Geez,’ Wolff moaned. ‘Somebody should be here when he comes. Don’t you think? If I’d known about it, why, I’ll tell you, I’d’ve had the whole council here. I’ll tell you.’
‘Leave him alone, Herb.’
Perry went outside and sat on the kerb.
The streets were dusty.
Jud Harmor’s pickup was gone now, but the two dogs were still there, curled in wait on the steps of Damascus Lutheran. Beyond the peeling buildings there was nothing but forest.
He cleaned his glasses and leaned back. Then he cleaned his glasses again. In a while Grace came out and sat with him.
‘Wolff still phoning people?’
‘Oh,’ she laughed. ‘I think I settled him down. He’s in there grinding fresh coffee for Harvey.’
‘Some creep, isn’t he?’
‘Paul.’
‘I’m sorry. You didn’t see the time in there?’
‘Few more minutes.’ She took his hand. ‘You all right now?’
‘Sure. I’m okay. I’m priceless. I’ll bet that damn bus is late.’
‘Shhhhh. You just relax and start smiling. Have a bright face.’
He gazed up Mainstreet to where the bus would turn in and hiss and stop. The street was silent. The heat seemed to absorb sound. Sitting on the kerb, he felt like a boy again, waiting to be picked up from school, or waiting in a stifling theatre for the curtain to draw up and the lights to fade and the movie to begin. He felt he’d been waiting a long time. He was restless. The long night had caught up with him and he needed a cigarette. He was restless. He needed a cigarette and the pack was empty. Grace sat silently, twisting her wedding band, toying with his hand until he pulled it away and stood up. Across the street and down a way, he saw the shoddy frame building where he had his own office. The Venetian blinds were down, forming a white backdrop for the lettering on the window: PAUL MILTON PERRY, and below his name, painted in orange, DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE, COUNTY FARM EXTENSION. Sucking the Federal Titty. Harvey always stated the unstated.
‘Awful hot,’ Grace finally said.
‘Damn bus is late. I knew it.’
‘Shall I see what time it is?’
‘Yes. And get me some cigarettes. And make sure Wolff isn’t on that telephone again.’
He walked to the end of the block and back again. One of the dogs trotted over to be scratched. The town was dead. He could hear the muffled sound of the organ inside the church. The town did not particularly depress him, but at the same time he often wondered why anyone still lived there. Wolff was there to sell coffee and medicine. The barber was there to cut Wolff’s hair into a flat crewcut once a week. The grocer was there to sell food to the barber. The farmers were there, trying to grow corn in the forest to sell to the grocer, and Perry was there to keep the farms going, to tell them when to use fertilizer, to fill out subsidy applications and loan applications, to watch the Swedes try to grow corn on land meant for pine and Indians. He didn’t know. It didn’t make sense. Once he’d asked his father why they didn’t just move on to Duluth, and the old man went crazy, charging into one of his fiery sermons about the virtues of hardship and how Perry’s grandfather had built the house out of the forest’s own timber and how a town was like tempered steel and how a transplanted tree never grows as tall or as fine as one rooted in native soil. The lesson of the sermon, if not the logic, always stuck with Perry. The old man died and Perry stayed on. And Harvey got drafted. Old Harvey. Harvey was different. Ever since the old man died, Harvey talked about leaving the town, and one day with the help of the draft board he did leave. A confused time. Harvey the Bull. He was a bull but he was no soldier. As kids they hadn’t even played war games. Indians were better, better targets for games with their leather jackets, sour faces, bad teeth and greasy hair, Chippewa mostly. They’d stalked the Indians, crawled on bellies in the weeds behind the house, yelped and bellowed. But never war games. Nothing serious. Trapping games and capture-the-flag and forts in the forest, not far from Pliney’s Pond, snow forts in winter and tree forts in summer, great camouflage in the fall, but never war games. And no one in Sawmill Landing knew a damn about the war anyway. It wasn’t talked about in the drugstore. Then gangbusters, bang, old Harvey gets drafted, good old Bishop Markham and Herb Wolff on the draft board – sorry, Harvey’s number was up, something like that, proper optimism and good humour, a little sympathy, proper pride. Perry stayed out of it. Nothing he could do, and the war wasn’t real anyway, and, besides, it seemed somehow natural that a rascal and bull like Harvey was the one to go off to the war. In that sleepwalking, slothful departure there had been no time to counter the nagging thought that the speed of it all, the blinding foggy invisible force behind it, was a sure sign that Harvey would come home maimed. Because no one knew a damn about it. Vietnam was outside the town orbit. ‘A mess,’ was what people would say if forced to comment, but a mess was still not a war, and it did not become a war until Harvey went to fight in it. Two Indian boys went with him. Their picture was on the front page of the town paper, Harvey in the centre, grinning and posing, his arms wrapped around the two dull-eyed Indian boys. In September, one of the Indians got killed and the paper carried a short obituary with an American flag stencilled in. But even then it wasn’t really a war. It wasn’t a war until Harvey got himself wounded and the paper carried another front-page story, pictures of Harvey in his football uniform, pictures of the old house, pictures of Perry and Grace, a picture of the dead old man in his preacher’s robes, a long history of the family, and for a time the war was really a war, though even then it was all jumbled and formless. No sides, no maps to chart progress on, no tides to imagine surging back and forth, no real battles or victories or defeats. In the tangled density of it all, Perry sometimes wondered if the whole show were a masquerade for Harvey to dress in khaki and display his bigballed outdoorsmanship, proving all over again how well he’d followed the old man into the woods, how much he’d learned, to show forever that he was the Bull.
The dog trotted back to the church steps.
Perry sat on the kerb again, cleaned his glasses, leaned back. Tips of high pine poked over the store fronts.
Grace came out with cigarettes and coffee. ‘Eleven thirty,’ she said. ‘Herb says it’s always a little late.’
‘I just wish that bus would get in.’
Then he saw it. It was as though it had been there all along, poised in turn around the corner, waiting to be seen. He saw it and heard it simultaneously. It was the giant Greyhound. It might have been the same silver monster that took Harvey to war in the first place.
It swung off the tar road, changing gears and growling.
Herb Wolff hurried out. ‘There she is, there she is!’ he wailed. He brushed his coat and stood erect. ‘There she is, all right.’
The bus cleared the turn.
‘Sure wish everybody was here for this,’ said Wolff. ‘This is something. Harvey! I can’t believe it.’
Perry took a step and stood alone. The Greyhound’s brakes hissed and forms moved behind the tinted windows and Perry searched for familiar movements. The door opened with another strange hiss, and the great grey cave was transfixing dust and trembling. Perry peered into the tinted glass.
Harvey stepped off alone. He carried a black bag with white stitching.
‘Well, hey!’ he said.
Without seeing, Perry gave him a great hug.
‘Hey!’
‘Yeah, you look fine. You do!’
‘And my God, here’s Grace! Grace. You’re beautiful.’ They hugged and Grace was smiling and wet-eyed and Perry was grinning.
‘Yeah, yeah. You’ve got some tan there.’
‘Sure!’
‘You look great. You do, I can’t believe it.’
‘Skinny! Look at that.’
‘Hey, it’s old Wolff! How the devil is old Wolffie?’
‘This is something. It is. You look great, Harv. You do. This is really something.’
‘I’m fine. I am. Where’s my parade? Shouldn’t they have trumpets and flags and things? How’s my honey-Grace?’
Grace kissed him again, still clutching his arm. ‘Happy, happy,’ she said. ‘You’re so skinny, aren’t you?’
‘Skinny? Lean and mean. How’s my brother? How’s brother Paul?’
‘I’m fine. Here, let me have that bag. I can’t get over it, you look great. Really.’
‘I am great,’ Harvey said. ‘Now where the devil is everybody?’
‘Sunday.’
‘Sunday? Is it Sunday? Sunday! Incredible.’
‘Give me that blasted bag.’
‘Come on,’ Grace said. ‘Let’s get you home. Some skinny hero.’
Everybody started hugging again, then Harvey released the bag and Perry took it and they stood in a circle on the street. Harvey’s bad eye was barely noticeable. He was tall and too skinny. His voice had the old nasal tinkle. ‘Sunday!’ he said. ‘Some bloody day to come home on. Where’s old Jud Harmor? Thought sure old Jud would be here with bands and ticker tape and stuff.’
‘He’s around. Here, let’s get into the car and we’ll get you home. You did get skinny, didn’t you?’
‘Sure, and you got chubby. You look great anyway. And Grace. Grace is still a honey. And even old Wolffie looks good, so what we need is a good drink to celebrate. Hey, Wolffie! You got a nice drink we can all celebrate with?’
Wolff blinked and shook his head.
‘No bloody drink?’
‘No. Geez, I’m sorry. Really. Nobody said anything about … I would’ve had the whole town here if somebody just …’
‘No bloody drink? No parade, no drink. Where the devil is everybody? Some awful hero worship.’
‘Everybody’s in church, Harv.’
‘Some hero worship.’ Harvey grinned and pointed at his bad eye. ‘So, how you like my pretty souvenir? Better than a lousy limp, don’t you think?’
‘Doesn’t look bad at all.’
‘I’m thinking about patching her up. You know? A little class.’
‘Doesn’t look bad at all, Harv.’
‘Glad you like it. Now all we need is a drink and everybody’s happy. Are you happy, Wolff?’
Wolff vigorously shook his head, grinning.
‘Fine. Everybody’s happy.’
Grace took Harvey’s arm and walked him towards the car. Church bells began ringing. One of the dogs began to bark, sitting back on its haunches with its nose up towards the steeple. Perry was trembling. He opened the trunk and threw the bag in and slammed it shut.
‘Remind me never to come home again on Sunday,’ Harvey said.
‘Anytime is a good time. You look great.’
‘Glad I didn’t wear my uniform. Look plain silly coming home in a uniform and no parade.’ Harvey shook hands with Wolff, then stood with his hands on his hips and looked up and down Mainstreet. The bells were ringing loud.
‘Let’s get you home.’
‘So long, Wolffie,’ Harvey said. ‘You’re a helluva man. Good man. War’s over, baby.’
Wolff grinned.
Perry started the engine and backed up and drove up Mainstreet.
‘That weasel,’ Harvey said.
Perry awoke before dawn. He went to the pond, sat on the rocks, waited for daylight. Then he showered and dressed and had coffee and drove into town. It was still early and the shops were closed. He cruised up Acorn Street, past Addie’s boarding house. Her window was on the top floor but it was shuttered and there were no lights. He drove back up Mainstreet. It was Monday, there was nothing much to do. He unlocked the office, rolled up the blinds, sat at his desk. The pens were in their glass jar, papers were in folders, the desk was clean and in order, the folders were filed. He put his head in his arms. His mouth was dry from a night of drinking beer and laughing and listening to Harvey tell about the bus ride from Minneapolis, the hospital, a few things about the war.
After a time he got up to sweep the office. Then he switched on the ceiling fan. He typed out a loan application for a dumbeyed farmer named Lars Nielson. Then he made coffee. Then he put the application into an envelope and typed the address on to a sticker and stuck the sticker to the envelope, then he drank his coffee. There was nothing much to do. He should’ve become a preacher he thought. The town needed a good preacher. Stenberg, the crusty usurper. And Harvey was home. And Grace was happy and wanted a child. There was nothing much to do. He drank more coffee and passed the morning at the window, watching the town come to life, watching morning shadows come out of the eastern forest, pass over the town. He was melancholy but it was an entirely rational melancholia, nothing outright crazy about it. He should’ve become a preacher. And Harvey was home and Grace was happy, except she wanted a child, and the old man was dead, and Perry was thinking that things would have been better if he’d become a preacher. With the old man gone, the town needed a good preacher.
The ceiling fan spun round and round. He typed out soil reports, read the morning paper, then towards noon he gave up, locking the office and walking on to the street to mail the Nielson application. He felt flabby and restless. It was another hot day. The tips of some of the pines were turning brown. Standing on the post office steps, he looked up the street and wondered what to do next. A tractor turned off Route 18. Black smoke coming from a pipe on the hood obscured the farmer’s face. Perry decided to find Addie for a long lunch.
She was not in the library. He browsed the stacks, waiting, finally taking a world atlas into the reading room where he smoked and looked at the maps and pictures. It was something he and Harvey used to do, a passion for maps and exotic unseen places. He sat over the atlas a long time. Except for the fans and a woman stacking books behind him, the library was quiet.
He was not sure how long he slept, if at all, but suddenly he was wide awake, surprised to find himself in the chair. The atlas had fallen to his lap. He’d been thinking about Harvey’s bad eye. Thinking or dreaming, he wasn’t sure. The eye was brilliant blue, rolling untethered like a marble, opaque and shining as though lighted from within. The dead eye seemed to have its own life, rolling about in the socket, reckless and eager and full of trouble and blue light.
Feeling a little foolish, Perry blinked and rubbed his eyes and returned the atlas to the shelf.
It was nearly one o’clock.
The woman stacking books looked at him suspiciously.
He grinned at her and shrugged. ‘Just waiting for Addie,’ he said.
‘Snoring, too.’
‘I’m sorry. You don’t know what time Addie’s coming in?’
‘I guess I know, all right, Mr Perry,’ the woman said. She was eyeing his shirt. He looked down and saw a cigarette burn the size of a quarter. ‘Addie’s off today, anyhow,’ the woman said. ‘Monday, you know. You oughta know that by now, Mr Perry.’ She didn’t smile. ‘She works Saturdays so she’s got Monday off, you oughta know that by now.’
‘I forgot.’
He bought a case of beer and some groceries. Walking back to the car, he came across Jud Harmor. Jud saw him first. The old mayor was standing in front of the town hall, hands in his hip pockets, brown shirt and brown cotton pants, the straw hat pushed back on his skull.
‘Been lookin’ for you,’ Jud said.
‘Hey, Jud.’ Perry shifted the groceries to his other arm and prepared to listen.
‘I been lookin’ for you.’
Perry nodded and waited. There was a bright sun on Jud’s face. Under his chin, a large cancer splotch cut down the throat and disappeared under the old man’s shirt. He was lean and tough-looking and sly-looking and he looked like Perry’s father sometimes. At a certain age, all the old men began to look alike.
‘Anyhow,’ said Jud, ‘I been lookin’ for you. Wolff says Harvey’s back.’
‘Yesterday.’
Jud nodded, looking up Mainstreet.
‘Came on the bus yesterday,’ Perry said. ‘He called a few days ago – last week.’
Jud nodded, still surveyed the hot street. ‘Guess somebody should’ve told me.’
‘Sorry, Jud. We were just thinking he’d want to ease back in. You know? No big show or anything.’
‘Somebody should’ve told me, anyhow. I should’ve been there.’
Perry nodded. ‘Sorry.’
Jud squinted up the street. There was no traffic. The two lonely dogs were sleeping on the steps of Damascus Lutheran. ‘Anyhow,’ said Jud, ‘I should’ve been there. Harvey being a hero and all.’ He laughed into a cough.
‘Oh, I wouldn’t say he’s exactly a hero, Jud. I wouldn’t say that. He got his eye hurt and that’s about the end of it really.’
‘Shit,’ the old mayor said, ‘you think I don’t know that? Bound to happen sooner or later. Like your old man, you know, same damn thing. Anyhow, he’s gonna want a parade now.’
‘What?’
‘A parade, for Chrissake! I guess he’ll want a parade now, horns and sirens and floats.’
‘Oh.’
Jud squinted and coughed and shook his head. He brought up a wad of phlegm from his throat, leaned forward and casually spat into the street. ‘Well, ahhhh, I guess you can tell your pa I’ll get that parade arranged. I guess I can do that much.’
‘He’s dead, Jud,’ Perry said carefully.
Jud squinted. ‘Thought he just got himself wounded in the eye?’
‘No, my old man. He’s dead.’
Jud laughed. ‘Shit! You think I didn’t know that?’
Perry grinned. He shifted the groceries again.
‘Anyhow,’ said Jud, ‘you get the word to Harvey, okay?’
Jud coughed and spat a big bubble of mucus into the street. ‘Shit! Wolff says it’s the first thing of Harvey asked about … a parade. Don’t worry, I’ll get it for him, ram it right through, no problem at all.’
‘There’s no need for it, Jud.’
‘Just tell him, son.’ The old mayor sighed. ‘You better get on home then. Groceries there are leakin’ all over you.’ He pushed the straw hat forward. ‘You say hey to your pa, now.’
Perry grinned. ‘Okay, Jud.’
Jud cackled. ‘Your pa’s dead!’
‘Yeah.’
I never said he was crazy, you know.’
‘I know, Jud.’
‘What about your ma?’
‘She’s dead, too, Jud.’
‘Jesus.’ Old Jud spat into the street. ‘Dropping like flies, aren’t they? Well, what about Harvey?’
‘Harvey’s fine.’
‘Mother of Mercy.’
‘Right.’
‘Don’t let your old man shove you around, you hear me?’
‘Okay, Jud. Thanks.’
‘Not Harvey either.’
‘Okay.’
‘So long now, Reverend.’
Perry grinned and saluted and started off, then stopped. ‘Jud?’
The old man was staring after him.
‘Jud, you haven’t seen Addie?’
Jud Harmor pulled off his hat to think. His skull was shiny.
‘Addie. The girl who works in the library. You haven’t seen her today?’
‘Addie,’ Jud said, looking about. ‘Newcomer.’
‘A year or so. She works in the library. Just a kid. You call her Geronimo sometimes.’
Jud grinned. ‘Shit, you mean ol’ Geronimo. Some ass, right? Sure, I know her all right. You’re talkin’ about ol’ Geronimo.’
‘You haven’t seen her?’
‘Wish so,’ Jud said. ‘Wish I had. Some ass, don’t you think? No disrespect, Reverend. What you want ol’ Geronimo for?’
‘Nothing. Just looking for her. Thanks, Jud.’
‘Aren’t thinkin’ of converting her? That’d be some awful wasted hunk of redskin ass, I’ll say that.’
‘Don’t worry, Jud.’
‘No disrespect, Reverend.’
‘So long, Jud.’
‘Say hey to your pa, now.’
Perry smiled and waved.
‘He’s dead!’ Jud hollered.
‘You’re some politician, Jud.’
‘And you ain’t exactly a reverend, neither.’ The old man waved. ‘Take care, son. Tell that brother Harvey I’ll get his blasted parade for him, hear?’
‘Okay.’
‘You tell him now. Get his medals patched on.’
‘I will.’
‘And listen. Hey! I wanted you to tell him this. Tell him that losing one eye never hurt a blind man. You tell him that for me. Perk him up.’
‘Okay, Jud.’
‘Tell him the town thinks he’s a hero. Tell him we’re all proud.’ Jud was grinning, waving his hat. ‘Tell him anything you want. A pack of lies, anyway. Okay? Hell, tell him he’s lucky to be alive, that’s what. Tell him I thought he was dead or something, that’ll clear his head awhile. That Harvey. Some rascal, isn’t he? You got to be careful now.’
‘Okay, Jud.’
‘Take her easy, son.’
‘Okay.’
‘Geronimo!’ he wailed, and coughed, and spat in the street.
Perry decided to try the lake.
He swung off Route 18 and parked along the path leading to the beach. He walked fast, beginning to worry about the time.
At a small footbridge he slowed for breath, then kept on at an easier pace as the path gradually widened and the forest thinned out, finally ending in a sandy clearing that looked down on the lake.
He stopped there. He was but of shape and sweating. Addie’s Olds was parked along the gravel lane that ran from the lake to the junk yard. He felt a little better. He found some shade and sat down to wait.
The lake was hard grey-blue, so calm it looked iced over, and there were no clouds, and it was mid-afternoon of summer with nothing to do. He put his hand down and squeezed the roll of fat under his ribs. Harvey’d never had that problem. Why not? Something to do with dominant and recessive genetics, most likely; or breeding, the old man’s feeling at the time, or their separate moods, black bile and yellow, it was hard to say. The Bull, said the old man about Harvey, and that was that, and it was too bad. And like Jud said, maybe the old man wasn’t crazy after all. Thinking about old Jud, Perry started grinning. Hard to tell if the old mayor was playing a great fool’s game, darting in and out of time as if it didn’t matter or exist, always confusing the living with the dead and Perry with Harvey and both of them with the old man. Every two years either Herb Wolff or Bishop Markham opposed Jud in the town elections, and every two years Jud got re-elected. Everything was always the same, Jud and the trees and the lake.
He sat in the shade and waited. He pitched stones down the embankment and watched them roll to the beach. He thought awhile about doing some exercises. Sweat off the fat rolls, turn lean, watch Grace’s happy face, stir up some energy, get healthy, sit-up and push-up himself into bullhood and happiness. It was awfully hot.
The first movement was gentle. It was just a splash of light in the lake. He watched the splashes lap towards him like waves, moving in delicate arcs closer, and he stood up to watch.
She swam close to shore then turned and swam on her back.
Her arms reached from the water and dipped. He was too far away to hear the sound of her swimming.
After a time she waded ashore. She bent forward, her hands braced on her knees, her hair flopping forward in a wet black bunch.
She was very slender. She walked on her heels, and she was wet and her skin was walnut-coloured and shining.
Perry moved down the embankment for a better look. He was smiling. He found a log and sat down again, his hands folded nervously.
She wore a white swimsuit.
With her back to him, she walked on up the beach, stopping now and then to bend down, picking things up, throwing pebbles out into the lake, skipping rocks. She was slender and she walked and played like an athlete, bent forward and swinging her arms and walking on her heels. She walked a quarter mile up the beach. For a moment she disappeared in a stand of pines, then she was back and coming towards him.
She walked with her chin forward. Perry wanted to laugh. He was smiling and watching and sweating. Her hair lay over her shoulders in two black heaps, and she was lean and athletic, walked with long loping steps, on her heels, her arms swinging.
Perry watched her come down the beach. Her shoulders were brown.
Then, like a deer, she stopped. She seemed to look in his direction, her head turning up. Then she sprang for the water.
It startled him. He called out, but she dived headlong for the lake and white spray flashed and she was gone under and the lake bubbled ivory from the spot where she dived.
Finally emerging, she shook her head. Then she sprang high like a fish. She seemed to hover there, a strong golden arc suspended over the water, then she went under, her feet kicking at the last instant.
She emerged again further out.
‘Addie!’ he shouted. He stood up and waved.
She raised her hand. He couldn’t be sure if it were a wave or another swimming stroke, for the hand poised for only a moment then it was gone and she was swimming again for the centre of the lake. He grinned. She could be very quick. He could not make out her face. He waved hard.
She swam straight out, long arched strokes, and soon he saw only the wake of her swimming. He felt fine. He walked away slowly, for it was a hot day.
That July was quiet. The forest was being burnt out. People in town talked about forest fires, and the farmers talked about how the corn was already ruined, and Perry and Harvey walked and fished and played some tennis.
Except for the heat, it was not a bad time. Harvey was cheerful, always eager to get into the woods. He talked about building a house in Nassau, about taking a bike tour through Canada, about going to live in Montana or Oregon. While he never talked much about the war or losing his eye, he didn’t seem bitter and even sometimes appeared to treat it all as a great adventure that, if opportunity came, he wouldn’t mind repeating. At night they sometimes played Scrabble, sometimes watched television, sometimes drove in for a beer at Franz’s Glen. It was not such a bad time. The newspaper sent out a reporter and Harvey was written up again, the lead story, and Grace clipped the piece and pasted it into a scrapbook. She had a scrapbook for Harvey and another for Perry. Harvey’s was nearly full. She said she was keeping them for her old age and for her children when they came. In town, everyone asked about Harvey, raved about the newspaper article. There were pictures of Harvey and Perry and Grace and the old house.
‘It’s a pack of lies,’ said Harvey.
‘It says you’re a hero. See here?’
‘True, true enough,’ he said. ‘But it’s still a pack of lies. I’m gonna sue and retire to Tibet. I’ve always wanted to retire to Tibet. You two can visit me. How does that sound? I’ll have you flown out. I’ll sue them for every penny.’
‘It calls you a hero,’ Grace said. ‘Look at that. You’re a hero.’
‘That’s the only truth in the whole article.’
‘It says you’re fondly remembered by everyone in town. Look, it’s got Herb Wolff saying what a fine fellow you are. And Bishop Markham and the mayor. It says the mayor’s going to give you a parade.’
‘Should hope so. My God. How many heroes does one town need before they fork over a few parades? I should hope so. Maybe I won’t sue if they fork over a nice parade. Does it say the hero lost his eye?’
‘No,’ Grace said. ‘It says you were badly wounded and that you served your community and country and everything.’
Harvey had his stocking feet near the fire. He was lying on the floor, head on a pillow. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘This is some ticklish decision. I’ll have to get myself a crooked lawyer. I don’t know. Suing is always ticklish, you know. Maybe I’ll just accept the parade and sordid apologies. A tough decision. What do you think? Tibet sounds awfully good, doesn’t it? Or maybe Africa. A hundred thousand could take us a long way. A trip to Africa, small enough price for a pack of lies. Let’s have a beer. Let’s drink to Jud’s parade, what do you say?’
Harvey’s face was red by the fire. It was relaxing time, after-supper time, and they drank beer and played Scrabble.
In a while, Harvey got up and went outside. Perry knew where he was going. An hour later, Harvey was still in the bomb shelter.
Through July, they stayed close to the house. Harvey settled himself into the upstairs bedroom, sleeping late, sometimes walking alone into the woods.
There was no rain.
They stayed close to the house, but with Harvey there was a new sense of motion, energy that seemed to bundle and gather. At night Perry sometimes heard him through the old timbers, pacing upstairs, moving things, flushing the toilet, going out to sit in the bomb shelter. They stayed close to the house and surrounding woods. Perry would drive in to work, roll up the blinds, daydream, drive home. He didn’t see anything of Addie. She was awfully young anyway.
Harvey talked about Africa and Nassau, talked on and on. He talked about fishing and the woods and the old days with their father. He talked about buying a sailboat and sailing the Mediterranean with a locker full of food and drink, getting a tan, getting healthy, enjoying things, having some adventures. He talked about buying a house in Alaska. Or Boston or Miami or Las Vegas or Berlin or Australia, jumbling them all together sometimes, getting red and eager.
‘We’ve got to get out and really see these woods,’ he said one Saturday. ‘Seriously. Do you realize these woods are the best left in the entire country? Seriously. Lord knows how long they’ll last. You’ve got to get deep into them. None of this piddling around on the outskirts, you’ve got to get right in. When you start to think about it, there just isn’t a lot of forest left anymore. We ought to go, you and me.’
‘Not me, Harv. Mosquitoes and all that. You know how I hate mosquitoes.’
Harvey made a face. ‘Some day it’s going to be maggots. Think about old Jud. All he’s got to look forward to is worms and maggots. Seriously. We could go deep into the woods. Bring backpacks and make a trip out of it. I can show you some of the places the old man took me.’ He picked up steam. ‘I mean, seriously. You can’t believe how wild it is once you get a way in. Nothing but trees and lakes. Wild is the wrong word. What’s the word?’
‘Nasty.’
‘Wild.’
‘Bugs.’
‘Then we’ll go this winter. How’s that? You won’t find mosquitoes in the winter. I’ll guarantee it.’
‘Snow.’
‘You don’t like snow? What the devil’s wrong with some snow? God’s own stuff. Clean and pretty and white. Beautiful stuff. God’s own stuff.’
‘Snow, cold, freeze. They go together. They give me the creeps. Why don’t we go down to Iowa for a nice vacation? That sounds better. We can visit Grace’s folks and have a fine time.’
‘Iowa,’ Harvey said with scorn. ‘Some adventure. What we need is a good adventure.’
‘I have an adventure,’ Perry said. ‘I’m a pioneer in this town. Scratching for a living, married, trying to help a bunch of crazy farmers grow corn in the woods, living in my father’s house. That’s an adventure.’
‘Curses to you.’
‘Ha.’
‘Damns and darns.’
‘Sorry.’
‘We’ll go to Africa then,’ Harvey said. ‘Off to Africa. Do you have a problem with Africa?’
‘I suppose not. More bugs. Tigers and lions and cannibals. Minor stuff. Do you know anything about Africa, Harv?’
‘I’ll learn. I learned about My Khe. I can learn about Africa.’
‘My Khe. Is that in Africa?’
‘My Khe is a place in Asia,’ Harvey said. ‘Asia, Africa, Australia, Alaska. The big As. Adventure, the big A.’
‘You’ll forget yourself, Harv. Let’s go see about Grace’s supper.’
‘Grace is such a good sort.’
‘Come on.’
‘And the Arrowhead, another big A. You have to think about all this stuff. When you think about it, it’s awfully interesting. You have to think about all the adventurous places that go back to the first letter of our alphabet. Think of Afghanistan. Think of Algiers and Atlantis and Allen-town. Aruba and Athens. Athens, Lordy. I’d love to go to Athens. We ought to go. Just pull out of this burg and go.’
Grace came to the porch.
‘You’re really an extraordinary sort,’ Harvey said. ‘You must be American.’
‘Through and through,’ she laughed. ‘Come have supper.’
‘Full-breasted American, I like that. You don’t see many full-breasted Americans in Africa. Will you go to Africa with us?’
‘Oh, yes. I’ll start saving for it.’
‘You have to start talking my brother into it. Paul is very down on Africa. Paul is actually very down on the big A, you know. He didn’t pay attention as a kid. Didn’t listen to the old man, and look where it’s got him. Doesn’t respect the big A! Grace, you’ll have to persuade him to join us. Otherwise, well, we’ll run off together, how’s that? We’ll capture inchworms. Have ’em stuffed and mounted on the walls. Brother Paul loves stuffed inchworms and all other of God’s bugs. Don’t you? Sure. Brother Paul is actually quite religious. Learned it from the old man, right?’
‘Sure.’
‘Just like you loved the old man, right?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Let’s eat,’ Grace said.
She guided them inside, lit candles and snapped out the lights. She served supper.
‘Inchworms!’ said Harvey. ‘My God, how did you know? My favourite.’
Afterwards Harvey wanted to go into town. Grace stayed home, Perry drove. Harvey was already tight, drinking beer from an aluminium can. It was a clear night, and the sky was high and the headlights lit a narrow tunnel through the woods. Along the road there were crickets and mosquitoes.
‘I’m home,’ Harvey said.
‘Sure.’
‘I am. I’m really home.’
The town was small, a few quiet campfires in the fog, and the forest grew everywhere, to the edge of town, into the vacant lots, on to lawns, brush and high pine. Perry drove around the sawmill hub and out to Franz’s Glen. Cars and pickup trucks filled the parking lot. ‘I’m home, all right,’ Harvey said. ‘Make me behave.’
‘I will.’
‘What the hell do I say?’
‘Tell them you’re a hero.’
‘Perfect!’ Harvey grinned and mashed the aluminium can in his hands. ‘Just like the old days.’
‘Sure.’
‘Everything’s the same, right?’
‘Exactly.’
The tavern was crowded. Addie was there. She was with a group of young people, young to Perry. On the floors there was red sawdust and spilt beer.
Addie saw them and waved.
‘Same place,’ said Harvey.
‘Never changes.’
A Hamms sign revolved behind the bar. In the corner a jukebox was playing loud music, and Addie was dancing with a stupid-looking boy. She Was barefoot. Everyone was happy. The old men sat at the bar in brown cotton pants and flannel shirts buttoned at the wrists, and the kids were all at Addie’s table, and others sat at the tables and booths, a middle group of married people, the in-betweens and stalwarts. The jukebox was very loud.
‘It’s the same,’ Harvey grinned. ‘This is a very lecherous place. Don’t ever let your kids come here.’
‘Right.’ Perry watched Addie dance. She was a fine dancer. She smiled while she danced and he liked that. He didn’t care much for the fellow she danced with. No matter, though. Addie waved again and Perry grinned and waved back, and a young waitress with a beehive hairdo brought them tall bottles of beer. Harvey took her hand and told her she had a lot of class.
‘Perfectly exquisite,’ Harvey said when she left. ‘Very tight-assed and exquisite. Someday she’ll be a virgin, I’m sure.’ His face was turning red.
‘Awfully young, Harv.’
‘I’m young. Who says I’m not young?’
Addie was dancing with a new partner. The place was noisy, Saturday night. She held her sandals while she danced. Bishop Markham and Herb Wolff and another fellow were playing pinball machines under a giant walleye that hung on a wall.
Harvey asked the waitress to sit down.
‘We’re having a great homecoming party,’ he said, ‘and you have to join us. Really. You’re a very classy girl, you know. Exquisite and quite classy.’
She was very young. She had no expression. She was somebody’s daughter. ‘I seen your picture in the papers,’ she said, staring at his bad eye.
‘Ah, and very observant, too. Classy and observant.’
‘I seen your picture,’ she said. ‘Who are you anyhow?’
‘A dentist,’ Harvey smiled. ‘This is my assistant Dr Watson. We pull teeth. I might add that we do a very classy job of it, cut rate. Two for a buck. You might have seen our ads in the paper.’
‘Prob’ly,’ the waitress said.
‘So,’ Harvey smiled. ‘Why don’t you just sit with us awhile and tell us your life history. I’m sure it’s classy.’
‘Can’t,’ she said. She gave his bad eye a last look and wiggled towards the bar.
They sat and drank the beers and watched the groups move about. Perry cleaned his glasses. The jukebox kept playing and the place was loud with bottles and music.
‘Hey, it’s Harvey! Hey, Harvey, for Christ sake!’
It was Bishop Markham. Herb Wolff trailed after him, both of them grinning. They shook Harvey’s hand, and Bishop beamed and ordered beers all around.
‘Where the blazes you been hiding, boy?’
‘Here and there and nowhere.’
‘Sonofagun! Well, let me say we’re proud of you,’ said Bishop, holding up his glass. ‘Really proud. Really. You’ve heard it before and you’ll hear it again, we’re proud.’ Bishop wore a bow tie and crew cut. ‘You really made it, Harvey. And you look like a million bucks. Seriously. Doesn’t he look good?’
Wolff nodded fiercely. ‘He looks terrific. You look absolutely terrific, Harv. By God, I’d say you look like a million bucks.’
Addie was still dancing, a slow number. Her new partner had red hair. Her face was in his red hair.
‘Crummy war,’ Bishop was saying, ‘but you did yourself proud, Harvey. I mean it. A goddamn war hero! I remember …’ and he talked about Harvey’s football days. Bishop was a classmate of Perry’s. Now he sold life insurance and real estate and sat on the Chamber of Commerce and the draft board and chaired the Kiwanis Club. He loved to talk.
Perry went outside for air. When he returned, Bishop Markham and Wolff and the others were playing the pinball game. Harvey was with the young waitress. The place was frantic and loud. Addie was still with her crowd, they were all dancing. He stood alone until the music ended and Addie came up.
‘Hey,’ she said. Her face was brown and wet. ‘Not awfully fond of dancing, are you?’
‘No. Where did you get all those jolly young friends?’
‘Oh, them. They’re all right. The Whole lot is from Silver Bay and they love to dance. Franz is going to play his accordion and we’re all going to dance polkas.’
‘Wonderful.’
‘Sure.’
‘I saw you at the lake,’ he said.
‘Ah,’ she smiled. ‘Yes. I waved. Did you see my wave?’
‘I saw.’
‘You were playing a peeping tom, weren’t you? You were out there spying.’
‘I happened along.’
Addie took his arm.
‘How’s the dancing?’
‘It’s okay. You haven’t been in the library. You’re going to go illiterate. I’ve been saving all these books for you.’
‘I haven’t felt much like reading. I don’t know.’
She leaned against him. ‘I’ve been drinking, Paul. I have to go to my friends. I’ll make an excuse and come to your table.’ She turned, jerked a thumb towards Harvey. ‘Is that your brother the war hero? He looks like some fine war hero.’
‘That’s him.’
‘He must be a pirate. He looks like a pirate.’
‘I guess he does.’
‘All right,’ she said. ‘You hang tight. I’ll make my excuses and come to your table. But you can’t feel my legs and you have to promise to dance the polkas. You promise?’ She released his arm and it felt red where she’d been holding it. The tavern was thumping. ‘And you must stop spying,’ she said.
‘Oh, it’s not …’
‘Promise?’
‘Sure.’
‘I’ll hurry over.’
Harvey was wooing his young waitress. He was getting drunk and the girl watched him carefully.
‘Hey, Paul! You met my classy friend, Linda?’
‘Lorna.’
‘Lorna, Linda, no matter. Have I told anyone how classy you are? Imagine finding a classy person such as yourself in such an unclassy part of the world. Imagine that. I’m boggled by it. Paul, aren’t you boggled by all the classy people you meet in unclassy places?’
‘Always.’ Addie was still talking with her young friends. She had her hands on her hips, palms in. It was her odd way of standing, her pelvis forward and her eyes black and bright. Sometimes her eyes looked Indian, sometimes Asian, and she wore a white scarf on her hair. She wore sandals and white shorts.
‘This is Linda,’ Harvey said. ‘Linda’s going to get us more beer.’
‘Lorna,’ she whined. Her brown hair was strung in a great nest towards the rafters.
‘Linda, Lorna. Something like that. Am I close?’
‘Lorna.’
‘Yes, that’s it. And this is my brother. Together we’re a classy group, don’t you think? My brother is my assistant, you know. He thinks I don’t behave sometimes. He keeps me reined in, so to speak. Isn’t that right, brother? I’m a quite famous and reputable dentist.’
‘I hate dentists,’ the girl said.
Her mouth snapped shut. She snuffed out a cigarette.
Harvey kept after her. ‘Don’t take it wrong now. You’re classy. It’s just the teeth. Here, open up.’ He touched her lips with a finger. ‘Come on, honey, open up. That’s it.’
Tentatively, the girl’s mouth opened. Harvey touched her front teeth. Her eyes rolled down. She held an unlit cigarette in one hand.
‘Not so classy in here,’ said Harvey. ‘We’ll need some time. Atta girl, hold still now. See here, Paul? Cap this baby. Build a bridge here.’
‘Stop it,’ Lorna grunted. She spoke between her teeth, holding them bared, but Harvey had her by the neck, craning over and pivoting.
‘Easy does it,’ Harvey purred. ‘Ack! These things. Have to yank ’em, no question. Then drill a nice hole right … here … and do a canal job on the nerve, no problem. Open up now. What do you think, doctor?’
Harvey kept after the girl. She had a great red mouth.
‘Infected,’ Harvey said solemnly. ‘Right here. Does this hurt? The girl squealed and her cigarette rolled to the floor. ‘Ha! Infected, all right. No doubt about it. A very infectious young lady. Hoof and mouth, I suspect.’
‘Take it easy,’ Perry said.
‘And these molars, my Lord! Look at ’em. All rotten and infected. Open up now.’
‘That’s enough,’ Perry said.
‘Ha.’ Harvey held her mouth open. ‘I must have a beer. Will you get me a beer, young lady?’
The girl fiercely nodded.
‘All right then. And will you stop by on Tuesday? Make an appointment with my assistant here?’
The girl nodded.
‘Very well then. Very well. Just bring me my beer.’ He released her and the girl went for the bar.
‘She loves me,’ Harvey grinned.
‘You were a little rough.’
‘She loves me. You see? He waved and the girl waved back. ‘You see?’
‘All right.’
‘You see?’
Someone unplugged the juke box.
‘Franzie!’ Harvey got up and clapped. ‘Nothing ever changes.’
‘Getting older.’
Everyone started clapping. Franz came out in knickers and a hiking cap. A monstrous accordion was strapped around his neck. ‘What you wanna hear?’ he called and everybody kept clapping, so he smiled and played a song and everybody got up to dance polkas. The crowd whooped and Perry leaned back, feeling swallowed in all the fun. Addie was there in the centre of the crowd, dancing with one of the Silver Bay boys, and the wood floor and walls bounced and the crowd whooped and stomped and the room was brightly lighted. The young waitress took Harvey to the dance floor. Everyone cheered him and Harvey did a deep bow.
Perry stepped outside.
He stood very still. Music strained like lost Old World through the walls and rose to the forest and floated away in a single resonant chord that slowly swallowed itself. He could not get into it. He lit a cigarette. Old Addie, he thought. Addie could get into it.
He stood quietly. In the grass there were crickets and the air was warm and soggy. Down the road, out of sight, the lights of the town were eaten by fog. Old Addie. He smelled methane and ammonia. Mosquitoes, Junebugs. He urinated against the foundation of the old tavern and Bishop Markham came out and peed beside him. ‘That Harvey is some rascal,’ Bishop said.
‘That he is.’
‘He’s having a helluva time. No bitterness there. Wolff was worried he’d be bitter.’
‘Not Harv.’
‘A hard charger.’
‘That he is.’
Markham went inside and Perry smoked another cigarette, listened to the music. He flipped his butt into the gravel parking lot and went through the doors.
Addie waved. A Silver Bay buck had her tight, they were reeling, half polka and half two-step, Du, Du, liebst mir im Herzen, Du, Du, liebst mir im Sinn, Du, Du … the Black Forest, the Magic Forest, back and forth, the great camp-fire, tribal rhythms. Perry watched them all dance. Addie was hot and wet and brown. There were red callouses on her heels where the sandal straps rubbed.
‘Come on,’ she called, ‘dance, dance.’
He grinned, shook his head. He was a little drunk.
‘Dance!’ Harvey called.
Bishop Markham hollered something and waved. Herb Wolff, holding a big woman, also waved. Franz beamed and played the accordion.
When the song ended, everyone clapped and Addie’s friends thumped the accordion player and bought him a beer.
Harvey sat down. It was too noisy to talk and they drank their beers and watched people.
In a while, Addie joined them. She could be very gay.
‘You should dance more,’ she said, sitting down, ‘It makes everyone happy when they dance. Is this your hero brother?’
‘This is the monster.’
‘You look something like a pirate. Do you know what the reason is?’
‘Everyone says that.’
‘This is Addie.’
‘She looks like a bloody Indian.’
‘Everyone says that, too. Actually I’m from New Guinea.’
‘Really? No shit? I plan to go there someday.’
‘Look up my relatives,’ she said.
Perry found himself grinning. ‘Addie-works in the library. She’s a kind of assistant librarian or something. She saves all the good books for me.’ He wrapped his hands around the bottle and squeezed. It was a great blur.
‘You look just like an Indian,’ Harvey said. ‘Sure you’re not Indian? You could make a very classy Indian.’
‘Sure,’ she said.
‘She is part Indian, Harv.’
Addie was very gay. She talked about dancing and swimming and people. Harvey became quiet. Franz came out again with his accordion and Harvey asked her to dance and Perry sat alone and watched them, and when they came back he felt tired.
‘You must learn to dance,’ she said. ‘A great picker-upper. All my friends have to dance.’ Addie moved beside him. ‘Here, I’ll show you how. You can’t be watching all the time, come on. I’ll show you a tricky polka.’
He put his glasses on the table. It was a long, exhausting dance. He was out of shape. Over her shoulder, he saw Harvey watching.
Afterwards he went outside to pee. It was a ritual that the men peed outside and the women peed in the women’s room. He breathed some fresh air.
Inside again, Harvey and Addie were dancing. The Hamms beer sign was revolving. She was bright and fun and she danced on her heels. He got a beer and watched Harvey and Addie and Bishop Markham and the others.
Jud Harmor came in, took a stool at the end of the bar, refused a beer, and pulled his straw hat down. People gave him lots of room.
Harvey held Addie, whooping on the dance floor, and the old timbers were rocking.
When the dance ended, the young waitress took Harvey back to the floor.
Addie was wet and smiling.
‘He’s a real pirate,’ she said. ‘He can dance.’
‘I was watching.’
She touched his arm. ‘Peeping Paul.’
‘Yeah. Ol’ peeping Paul peeped a peck of pickled trouble.’
‘So clever.’
‘Would you like a beer?’
‘Here, let’s us sit down,’ she said.
They took a corner booth. Addie watched Harvey and the beehived waitress dance. ‘He is a fine dancer,’ she said.
‘Sure.’
‘Tell me about your brother the pirate.’
‘There’s nothing to tell. He’s a nice guy. Everybody says that. He’s a rascal and a scamp.’
‘A pirate!’
‘I guess so.’
Addie was barefoot. She put her sandals on the table.
‘There’s nothing like a pirate to brighten things up. Why isn’t Grace here? You should have brought Grace. Then we would have been a group, and groups are always more fun. What happened to his eye?’
‘He was wounded.’
‘Well, I know that. How did it happen?’
Perry shrugged. He had a tight fever. ‘The telegrams just said he’d been wounded, I don’t know. He’s all right now. He hasn’t said anything about it.’
‘That’s silly. I’ll drag it out of him then. I’m good at that. I’ll drag out the whole gruesome story and make him feel all better about it.’
‘You’re the one to do it, Addie.’
‘Want to dance with me?’
‘Not that. Not now, I’m pretty tipsy.’
‘Such a pirate.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Let’s dance. That’ll make it better.’ She got up and held his arm.
‘Don’t be so happy.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Everything gets better, you know.’
‘Let’s dance then.’
‘I’ll dance barefoot.’
‘Spectacular, Addie.’
‘Hmmm.’ She removed his glasses. ‘There, how’s that?’ Very slowly, she pulled him up. ‘Very tribal, don’t you think? Firewater and campfires and wild rhubarb, all erotic.’
‘Stop that.’
‘Don’t be silly. You should be barefoot, too.’
She was lean and athletic.
‘Isn’t this a nice song? Very erotic, isn’t it? Don’t step on my bare feet.’
‘Jesus.’
‘Isn’t this better now?’
‘It’s fine. I’m pretty hot.’
‘Dance closer. You don’t have to be so stiff. That’s better. See how? One, two, three. One, two, three. Isn’t it nice? Think of campfires and firewater.’
The accordion music was slow and swaying, deep forest. People were singing.
‘Don’t you like me?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘And isn’t it nice to dance a little?’
He saw Jud Harmor watching. Jud smirked, raised his hat.
It was a long slow dance.
‘We should all go for a swim. Is that your brother’s girl friend?’
‘Are you looking at them? I thought you were dreaming with your eyes closed.’
She laughed. ‘I was dreaming. Is that his gift friend?’
‘Her name is Linda or Lorna or something. She’s a patient of his.’
‘We should all go swimming.’
She was light and the skin was tight across her shoulders.
‘We really should go for a swim now,’ Addie said. ‘Wouldn’t that be good?’
‘I have to go home.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘There’s always that, isn’t there?’
In town, the dry spell was all they talked about. The air was crisp and inchworms were eating up the forest. At night, trying to sleep, Perry heard them munching with the sound of rainfall. But it did not rain. The days were hot and dry, and it did not rain.
It kept him busy. Meagre to begin with, the corn crops were baked away. One by one, the farmers slipped into the office, shamed, filled put their loss statements and applied for loans. On the highway into town, the hands of the fire danger clock pointed to high noon. Forest Service firefighters checked into the U-Rest Motel, arriving in green trucks and jeeps. The town turned out to watch them arrive. People were excited. In the drugstore, they swapped stories about earlier fires. It was suspenseful and important. Heat killed the mosquitoes. It killed the grass on Perry’s lawn. A dog dropped dead on the church steps. Everyone talked about it: the town was built of timber, white pine that had been cut and sawed and planed and notched and moulded, hammered together and lifted up and painted bright. The paint was peeling. The forest crept up to the town and into the parks and on to the lawns and kept going, and if the forest burned, then the town burned, too. There was no distinguishing it.
Perry watched the excited faces through his office window. The twelve-man fire brigade was put on alert.
‘You gotta sign up,’ Wolff insisted. ‘Your ass burns with the rest of us, you know.’
‘Not me, Herb. I’ll watch it from the window.’
‘Harvey joined up.’
‘Harvey’s good for that.’
‘Geez,’ Wolff prodded, ‘you don’t join anything around here. You ought to show a little more citizenship.’
In late July a Forest Service agent stopped at the office. The skin was black and flaky in the hollows of his face. He wore a silver badge. He was solemn. He told Perry they were moving in another crew of firefighters. ‘Doesn’t look good,’ he said. ‘One spark, that’s all it’d take. I’m not kidding.’ He told Perry they worked for the same boss – ‘Good old Uncle Sam, the USDA. We’re going to have to use your office for a headquarters, just till this thing blows over.’
Perry turned over the keys. He left quickly. He celebrated with a beer, drove home and went to bed.
Grace worked hard on the garden, watering the soil, protecting the tomatoes and green beans, fed them fertilizer, cooed to them. And she taught Sunday school.
Harvey prepared in other ways. He cleaned out the bomb shelter, throwing away all the rakes and hunks of hose and old furniture Perry had stored there. He swept the shelter down, hosed it out, repaired the air filter, filled the water tank, put in a new store of sheets and blankets and pillows.
That July was hot. There was small-town suspense.
Perry stayed away from the bomb shelter. He didn’t say so to Harvey, but he thought the place dark and depressing and buried away.
‘The old man wasn’t so crazy after all,’ Harvey kept saying.
‘Right,’ Perry said.
‘You don’t have to be so damn arrogant about it.’
‘I’m not.’
‘He wasn’t dumb or crazy. You don’t have to smirk.’
‘I’m not smirking, Harv. It’s a solid bomb shelter.’
The floor was laid in massive tumulary stones. The air was musty. Tepid air, a mouldering preservation. The past and extended future. A stack of magazines lay in one corner. There were books and games, a typewriter, liquor and candies and soap. Boxes of canned food were stacked to the ceiling. There were cots and flashlights and folding chairs, candles and rope and wire, tools and cigarettes and matches, foul air, electric lights connected to a small generator, string and blankets, paper and silverware and pots and plates and survival gear.
Harvey’s eye shined. ‘We could last it out in here.’
‘What?’
Harvey shrugged.
Gleaming, the streets were white metal.
Thursday, the last day of July.
There were jeeps and trucks and firefighters, the streets were fizzing with people, everyone was waiting.
It was Harvey’s birthday. Grace held the party on the lawn.
When the sun faded, Perry turned on the spotlights and lit battery-powered lanterns in the trees. Then the guests arrived. Harvey received them in front of his bomb shelter. He drank beer from a paper cup. The sky was changing. Headlights flowed up the lane. Lantern shadows, sky shadows. The wind was changing. The party comers moved like electricity through the night, trooped in bearing gifts and loaves of bread, hot dishes, meat loaves. Old people and young people. Bishop Markham brought his wife and children. Reverend Stenberg brought candlesticks. Hot beans, hot corn, fruit salad, biscuits, burgers, ham and chops, baked potatoes, warm salted butter, pies, a birthday party. The ladies of Damascus Lutheran brought plates and tablecloths, their husbands carried ice. The sky was changing. The headlights kept coming up the lane, new voices. High above, in the highest depths, the sky budded new stars and the patterns developed. Herb Wolff brought his father, pushing him in a wheelchair. The forest was full. Jud Harmor came in his pickup and straw hat and talked about the war and garbage. Addie came alone. Grace was busy and happy. There was potato salad and talk about the dry spell. It was a birthday picnic, and the evening was dark and the lanterns played on the trees. Town shadows flowed about his yard. Addie was there. Now and then he saw her passing by a lantern. ‘Geronimo!’ wailed Jud Harmor. Grace was happy. She served people’s plates and cut the birthday cake. She fixed a smile on the festivities and held Perry’s hand and bustled for paper cups. She was breathless and soft. She kissed him. ‘Isn’t it nice? Everyone’s here.’
‘You invited them. You’re the attraction.’
‘It’s so nice. Is Harvey enjoying it?’
‘I think so,’ Perry said. Harvey was sitting on the bomb shelter with Addie.
There were forms and shadows and the sky was changing.
‘Hey, Paul.’
Perry walked to the shelter, head down.
‘Addie says you have a secret.’
Addie giggled. ‘Hop up here, Paul. It’s a fine place to watch the party.’
‘Tell me the great secret,’ Harvey said.
‘There’s no secret. Tell him, Addie.’
Addie giggled and took his arm. The party seemed far away. The townspeople were silhouettes and old shadows.
‘What’s this great and wonderful secret?’ Harvey demanded.
‘Nothing. I swear. Tell him it’s nothing, Addie.’
‘If we told our secret, we would die and go to hell. That’s what happens when people tell their secrets. People must always keep all their secrets secret, if you follow me.’
‘Tell me,’ Harvey said.
Addie giggled. She still held Perry’s arm. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘But first you tell us your secret, Harvey. Tell us how you hurt your eye, all the gory stuff.’
Again the party poised.
‘Nothing,’ Harvey said softly.
‘Tell us all about the eye, Harvey. And tell us how you were a war hero.’
‘Nothing.’
‘Okay, then I’ll just have to tell you the sad facts,’ Addie laughed. ‘You see, Paul and I are running away together. To the badlands of South Dakota.’
Harvey stared at her. He was a bit drunk.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We’re going to Rapid City or Deadwood. I’ll sell Indian carvings and Paul will … I don’t know what Paul will do. Anyway, that’s the secret. We’ve been planning it for ages.’
‘Rapid City,’ Harvey muttered.
‘Isn’t that a fine secret? Now you promised. Tell us about your eye.’
‘Crap.’
‘What? What’s that? Harvey, now you promised.’
‘This is a bunch of crap.’
‘It’s a fine secret,’ Addie teased.
‘I’m going to Africa,’ he said.
Addie shrugged and giggled. ‘Don’t be a silly. It wouldn’t be the same at all. Who’ll buy Indian carvings in Africa?’ She giggled and there was new movement around them, in the air and woods. It stopped. It became quiet and for the first time Perry felt the transformation. The air was soggy.
‘Wouldn’t touch the badlands,’ Harvey muttered.
‘It’s actually quite clean in the badlands,’ said Addie. ‘Isn’t it?’ She touched Perry’s arm.
‘Sterile,’ he said.
‘See? Ha! Paul’s taking me there.’
‘I don’t believe it.’
Addie moaned. ‘Tell him, Paul.’
‘Never.’
‘Oh, you will. Tell him you will.’
‘I won’t. Let’s go back to the party.’
‘You’re both silly,’ Addie said. She turned to Harvey. ‘I swear he promised.’
‘Never.’
‘Betrayed,’ she giggled.
Perry left them. The new forest motion was back. And there was sound. The groups were mingling. Like compounds forming, electrons splitting and taking new orbits, shared spheres. From somewhere, music was coming on to the lawn, the lanterns were swaying. Bishop Markham was lecturing, Jud Harmor was squinting towards the sky. There was a hum in the forest. Perry wondered if old Jud felt it, or heard it.
He watched Grace move through the crowds. It was a fine big party, she was good at it. She listened to people. She wore dresses; it wasn’t often she wasn’t in a dress: in the garden, walking, combing her hair out. She wormed through the crowd and hooked his arm. ‘Hungry?’ He shook his head. ‘You aren’t drunk?’
‘Nope. Don’t always ask that.’
‘A nice party, isn’t it?’ She was whispering.
‘Yeah. You did a nice job.’
‘Be nice then. Talk to people,’ she whispered.
‘Okay.’
‘You aren’t sick?’
‘I’m fine, hon.’ He pulled free and held a paper plate that leaked potato salad. ‘I’m okay, really. How are all your lovely church friends? How’s the Reverend Stenberg?’
‘Stop that. He’s a nice man.’
‘I know it. I’m sorry.’ He glanced over at the bomb shelter. Some luck, he thought. He rambled the yard and listened while people told him about things.
‘A heat storm.’
‘What?’
It was Jud. His hat was pushed back. ‘A heat storm,’ he said. ‘Just a heat storm.’
People began looking up.
‘Rain,’ said Bishop Markham. ‘It’s rain, all right.’ Bishop was GOP, Jud was Democratic-Farmer-Labour.
‘Shit,’ Jud cackled. He shook his head and winked at Perry. ‘Guess I know a heat storm when I see it.’
The first cool air came in one breath, and a dark splotch in the sky spread out, sliding down and out like a vast sheath or covering or mask. ‘Heat storm,’ said old Jud. He pulled his hat down to settle it. People stood with hands on hips to watch. Lars Nielson hustled his family to the car and drove away.
Others began to leave.
‘It’s a heat storm all right,’ said Jud Harmor. There was a single long wind and the lanterns blew horizontal. Jud’s face was turned up. ‘I can see it,’ he said.
The wind died, turned warm, then turned cold, then turned warm again. Headlights were snapping on.
‘Where’s Harvey?’ Grace was beside him. ‘People are leaving, he should be here.’
The wind whipped the tablecloths.
People rushed for their cars. Jud Harmor stood alone, gazing at the sky with hands on hips. The wind was rushing to Lake Superior. Motors and headlights and opalescent beacons were flaring. Perry carried things inside, rushing, returned for armloads of bottles and cups and plastic forks, papers and bottle openers, party trash, wrappings and containers and leftover birthday cake.
‘Where’s Harvey?’ someone hollered.
Perry folded up the chairs and carried them inside, stacked them on the porch. ‘Where the devil is Harvey?’
‘Heat storm, heat storm,’ Jud Harmor chanted. He was now in a lawn chair, his straw hat gone. His bony face was sawed into a million upward-thrust planes. his eyes were pointed to the sky. ‘Lo,’ he chanted, ‘a heat storm. Watch the mother come.’
Perry touched his shoulder. ‘Better be moving on, Jud. She’s coming in fast.’
The old man cackled. ‘Nothin’ but a miserable heat storm. Can’t see what all this fuss is. You won’t see but a heat storm.’ Lightning flashed and the old man’s skull shined like a jewel.
‘Okay, Jud.’
Grace came out wearing a sweater. She was hugging herself. ‘Where’s Harvey?’
The old mayor cackled. ‘Takin’ target practice. You two gotta watch that boy. Ha, ha!’ He started to cough.
Perry went to the shelter. Some rotten luck. Rusty old jealousy. The emotion surprised him. He climbed the bomb shelter and stood on its roof. The wind was hard. Lightning showered in big fluffy puffs, and through the forest, looking out to Route 18, he saw the parade of retreating tail-lights winding towards Sawmill Landing. He called out and listened and heard a soft answer. Some rotten miserable awful luck, he thought.
Inside the concrete shelter, lanterns swung from the ceiling and the old generator was going.
‘Ha! Not so crazy after all!’ Harvey was grinning, rocking in the old man’s discarded rocking chair. He faced a cement wall. Addie lay on a cot. The shelter was strangely warm and livable. ‘Beginning to worry for you,’ Harvey said. ‘I was just telling Addie how worried I was. Thought you got caught in it. Nuclear war, you know. You got to be careful. Got to be careful ’cause that fallout is powerful stuff. Rots your testicles off.’
Addie chuckled.
‘Just a heat storm, Jud says.’
‘Ha! Old Jud doesn’t have to worry about his testicles.’
Grace came in smiling, carrying the birthday cake. She handed out pieces on scallop-edged napkins.
‘An end-of-the-world party,’ Harvey said happily. He was loud. ‘Can’t think of a better place for it, can’t imagine nicer people to end the world with. Too bad the old man’s not here.’
‘It’s quiet outside,’ said Grace.
‘Ah,’ Harvey said. ‘The solemn silence. The silent solemnity.’ He stared at Perry. ‘Sure you want to stay, brother? Don’t remember you giving me much help building this thing. Sure you want to stay?’
Perry shrugged. Grace cut more cake and the lanterns dangled from the ceiling.
‘It’s just a heat storm, Harv.’
‘Ha. Tell that to your testicles. Just ask the buggers. See what they say.’
‘Let’s just all go outside.’
‘And be doomed?’
Gently, Grace bent over Harvey, felt his forehead. ‘You’ve a fever. Are you sick?’ She inspected his face, frowning. The lanterns dangled from the ceiling.
‘He’s just a silly pirate,’ Addie said.
Harvey stood up. He was loud. ‘Right! Absolutely right. Addie, that Addie’s something, isn’t she? When all this blows over and the streets are safe again, then I’m taking Addie to the swamps of New Guinea. I’ve decided.’ He struck a pose that could have meant anything. Addie laughed. ‘Yes, I’ve decided. We’ll begin a new life. Yes. Yes, we’ll plant seed, new seeds, seeds that I’ve prudently set aside for just such catastrophes. I have many seeds. A bull, you know. Yes. Yes, we’ll sail on a blighted sea for a new land, we’ll arrive … arrive, so to speak and so on, arrive on a new and dawning day, again so to speak, and Addie will make Indian carvings, reminders to our hordes of forthcoming descendants, and I … yes, I’ll search the jungles for food and shelter and primitive niceties, and we’ll start afresh.’
‘You’re drunk,’ Grace said.
‘Or perhaps Africa,’ said Addie, who seemed to be enjoying it. ‘You haven’t forgotten Africa?’
‘Don’t egg him on.’
The bomb shelter was very warm, concrete hot, and the lanterns were swinging.
‘Africa,’ Harvey stammered. ‘Ah, yes. Where are we going?’
‘Outside,’ Perry said.
Harvey stared. ‘Think of your testicles, man.’
Addie helped with him. They led him outside.
‘The old man wasn’t so crazy, you know. Not all that bloody crazy. Do we have a beer?’
‘Gallons.’
‘Thank God for that.’
‘Can you walk?’
‘Can I walk? Am I mad? What bloody nonsense. A time of national-emergency and of course I can walk. I can walk, be damned! A beer.’ Harvey threw an arm around Addie’s brown shoulder.
They came out of the bomb shelter.
Mammoth clouds had stiffened over the forest, very high and well to the southwest. Tumbling, flopping like earth under a spade, swirling in, coalescing and darkening and fusing into a single expansive element over the forest.
Harvey sniffed the air. ‘Mustard gas. Jesus of Mercy, who would’ve thought they still had mustard gas?’
The promise was great.
There was certain rhythm.
Jud Harmor still sat in his lawn chair. His eyes were closed.
‘Poor old Jud,’ Harvey muttered. ‘Stuff got to him … We must all now buck up. The end is coming and we shall go with class. A little class never hurt. Buck up, chaps. Let us mourn old Jud, a finer man, parades and all.’
The clouds swirled high, a breathing, soft respiration. Harvey filled a paper cup with beer. ‘A toast to Jud! A finer man we could not find, a finer man …’ Odours rose from the forest tissue, compounds of chlorophyll and wastes. Great cavities opened, steam rose from the leaves, the clouds tumbled high, vapours filled the forest, obscene smells of salamanders and pine. ‘The end is with us,’ chanted Harvey. ‘And the old man was not crazy at all.’ The clouds stiffened and swelled. Old Jud lay in the lawn chair, eyes closed as the clouds rolled towards Lake Superior, huge and threatening but refusing to rain. ‘Let us … let us mourn old Jud,’ Harvey was saying. ‘A free spirit. A false prophet. A free spirit, thank God, free, free at last, old Jud.’
‘Hush,’ Grace whispered. ‘He’s sleeping.’
‘Ha! Aha, you’ll see. You’ll see. The fallout’s got him, sure as hell. Look at him. Let’s examine the old gent’s testicles. Ha, that’ll tell the old tale.’
‘Just relax.’
Perry brought out four chairs. They watched the clouds roll towards the great lake.
Jud suddenly sat up. He started cackling, raised his fist up. ‘What did I say?’
The air was hot.
Energy charged out of the clouds. The sky went, wild. Thunder created a wind of its own.
‘Marvellous,’ Addie breathed.
The clouds moved fast.
‘Heat storm,’ Jud cackled. ‘What did I say?’
The storm tumbled over on itself, and there was no rain. Grace pulled her sweater tight. Addie lay back in her chair. Harvey was shivering. A slice of electricity shot like white ribbon from the clouds. ‘Marvellous,’ Addie murmured. Her eyes were black. The clouds tumbled and flopped, rushing eastwards, the lightning exploding in fluffs, the whole forest stopped. Grace whispered something. Addie’s eyes were black. She was barefoot. Her feet were under her, her legs were dark. The sky crashed. Grace was whispering. He watched Addie. Her cheekbones were high and shining. Asiatic, Indian, primitive, shining, upward looking, and the lightning flashed again, and her hair was long and back over her shoulders without knots or bows or curls. ‘We should be going in,’ Grace was whispering, but the heat storm thrashed in the forest, all around them, and the wind swept in hot, and Addie’s eyes were lighted, and Grace whispered, ‘We should go inside.’ She whispered, ‘I’m cold, hon.’
‘What?’
‘I’m cold.’
He heard her. He curled an arm around her. She could embarrass him.
Slowly the storm rolled overhead, high like a battle far off. It rolled towards the east and left a clean night sky behind it. There was no rain.
Jud Harmor stood up. ‘Show’s over,’ he announced. He’d found his straw hat. ‘I’ll be going.’
Harvey did not get up. His eyes were wide open to the sky.
Perry helped the old man to his truck. Jud climbed in and slammed the door. He leaned his head out. ‘Just a lousy heat storm,’ he said. ‘You gotta watch your brother. I think he’s insane.’
He lay there. The storm was over.
Restless, he got out of bed and went to the window. A light was burning in the bomb shelter. He showered, lay down again. ‘Sleep,’ he said. He tried not to think. Addie. It didn’t matter. Grace was awake. She whispered something.
He got up, went to the bathroom and shaved. Then he dressed. He roamed about, restless, tried to read, sat at the kitchen table. Then he went outside. The crickets were back. The lawn chairs were empty. The bomb shelter light was off and everything was quiet. He followed the path to Pliney’s Pond.
The smell could be awful. All in the mind. He sat on a rock. Addie and Harvey, the names rattled back and forth. The water was deep and quiet. The creature he’d met as a child. Pincers and black eyes attached by cords to the ganglia. A body shaped like a barber’s electric clippers. And the deep-down pond, he remembered. Addie and Harvey. No matter. The place could stink. It was algaed and full of primitive organisms.
No matter, he was older now, he wasn’t a kid, he had a wife and his father’s house. His father had taken him to the pond to learn to swim. His father. Harvey had come, too. That had been another July, and they’d gone the three of them to Pliney’s Pond and his father had said, ‘This is where you’ll learn to swim. No back talk, just jump in.’ Perry remembered undressing slowly. ‘It stinks,’ he’d cried, going in. Mosquito eggs, crayfish, larvae, slime and Junebugs, frogs and newts and snakes and toads and lizards, Indian shit and rot, and Harvey had gone in, too. Harvey had gone to the middle of the pond. ‘No back talk,’ the old man ordered, and Perry waded in, waded in and fell headlong into the stinking water, eyes in terror and sobs choked in sewage. Ash and sewage, he remembered it. Then the creature, its pincers and dangling black eyes, an inch from his face, a quarter-inch, a real monster closing in, and he’d sobbed, sucking in more of the thick water, and the creature came.
The pond did stink. There was no question. Addie and Harvey.
Perry sat on the rock. It didn’t matter. The place was quiet, the forest grew to the edge of the pond, and the pond was quiet. He relaxed. Things could be put in perspective. That was what had to be done. He dipped into the pond and took out a handful of water and let it straight through his fingers. Harvey and Addie, some luck. The water left a black residue. It was late. It was always getting late. He decided it was time for reformation. Begin exercising. Eat less. He would be kind to Grace; she deserved it. He would be kind to Harvey. He would get involved, paint the house, go into the woods, go deep. He heard a loon. It was far off. It wasn’t such a bad night. It was getting cool. Harvey was fine. Addie was fine; she was something else again. The way she walked, heels down. Grace was fine, too. The loon called again and he got up.
Things were always better. He brushed himself off, followed the path to the house. There were no lights. The bomb shelter crouched low in the yard. There were no lights anywhere.
He folded up the lawn chairs, carried them to the porch and stacked them. He was careful to be quiet. He looked up and smiled. The sky was surprisingly light, and there was a moon and many stars.
‘Feel better?’ Grace whispered.
‘Yes. I had a walk.’
The sheets were cool now, and Perry held her.
‘Tired?’
‘Hmmm, I was sleeping. Storm over?’
‘All quiet. Getting nice out there.’
‘Rain.’
‘No. No rain yet. It’ll come.’
She whispered. ‘Your face is burnt.’
‘It’s all right. I feel better. I don’t know what gets into me.’
‘Let’s put some cream on your face.’ She gently touched his nose. Perry took her hand. ‘You are a woman,’ he said. ‘Gee,’ she whispered. She got the cream from the nightstand. They undressed and Perry lay face up on the bed. He closed his eyes. He breathed easy. He felt the lotion on his chest. He did feel better. He breathed slowly. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Putting lotion on you,’ she whispered. ‘Hold still now.’
But he wasn’t thinking. He was tired. Wings clipped by the old man. No bulls here. Rushing from nowhere to nowhere and learning to swim. ‘Just lie still now,’ she whispered. But he wasn’t listening because the thick waters were against his ears. ‘Shhhhhh,’ she whispered, ‘does that feel good now? Lie still, lie still,’ part of the pond, soft as water. He concentrated, finally opening his eyes, and she smiled at him. She reached in the dark for a tissue and wiped him. ‘Such a fountain,’ she whispered.
‘Come here.’
‘Can we have a baby someday?’
‘Come here.’
Soft as water. He tightened his arms, squeezing, and he held her and squeezed, all his energy, squeezed until she said to stop.
ELEMENTS (#ulink_c18ee9bc-2b71-5278-85f1-3df5cb84e423)
They called it a dying town. People were always saying it: Sawmill Landing won’t last another decade. But for all the talk, Perry never saw the death, only the shabby circumstances of the movements around him. It was a melancholia, seeded in the elements, but he had no idea where it started. It might have started with the Ice Age. Four glaciers advancing and receding over the course of a million years, freezing, stinging with crystalline cold, digging out boulders, ice a mile deep, a permanent stillness. Then the Stone Age. Indians. First the Sioux, later the Chippewa. In the basement of the town library there was a museum that housed all the relics: broadheads, pottery, clay pipes, hides and drawings. Then the French, taking what they could. Then the Swedes. The Swedes built houses. Pine planks, dirt floors, hard-rock fireplaces. The Swedes hacked at the forest, broke their backs and ploughs trying to turn the Arrowhead into corn-bearing land.
In 1854, the Chippewa ceded their timber and fish and game for a few hundred square miles of reservation.
In 1856, the Swedes named their hamlet Rabisholm. Fourteen houses, a blacksmith, twenty-six horses, a stable and a store. That same year Minnesota became a state.
In 1857, the Germans came. And a few Dutch and the Finns.
In 1858, an Indian boy was hanged for intention to rape. In 1859, an Indian family was found frozen in the snow, dead of starvation before freezing. In 1860, two full-grown Indian males were shot dead while stealing corn from Ole Borg. In 1862, while the southern Sioux were going crazy with revenge, three Chippewa renegades slipped into Ole Borg’s house and cracked his skull with a hatchet. The renegades were later captured by a cavalry troop dispatched from Fort Snelling. They were hanged until dead.
In 1863, the town celebrated its first Ole Borg Day.
In ten easy years, the Indians were gone, pushed north and west.
Perry learned about the hardships. Hardship was something the old man stressed. He learned that the Swedes broke ploughs on base rock, got robbed on prices, seeded soil meant for spruce and not corn, wore silent hard faces. They were blond. He learned that they left Sweden in famine and, in perfect irony, came to Minnesota just in time for more of the same: locusts and drought, fierce winter and boulders; they left bad soil for worse soil, rock for rock, pine for pine. In some miserable genetic cycle, they did not leave at all and they did not arrive.
The Germans came later. The Germans came late enough to see that their future was not in the land. Instead they opened taverns and a hardware store and an implement shop, taking the Swedes’ money, extending credit, turning the bundle of tiny farms into a hamlet. Within a few years it became a predominantly German village, both in numbers and power, but the Swedes still remained vital to the tight circle of economics, because without them there was no need for German shops. Old World rivalries persisted, and Perry heard the story often: In 1863 a meeting was convened to choose the village’s soldiers for the war against slavery. No one understood the war, but everyone wanted to fight it. They hadn’t heard how many were dying. At the meeting it was decided that only a few could go, and after hours of haggling the number was fixed at fourteen, a quarter of the able-bodied men. The Germans, citing their new predominance, insisted on supplying ten of the fourteen. The Swedes wanted the war party split equally, arguing that they’d been the first to settle the forest, that they had eight more corpses in the cemetery, and that their farming sustained the small community. In short, Perry’s father had explained with relish, in short they were arguing about the right to die. ‘Well,’ the old man said, telling the story, ‘the Germans threatened to foreclose on two mortgages. Herb Wolff’s great-grandfather was one of the bastards. Anyhow, the Swedes told them to go to hell, threatening to take their corn and trade into Two Harbors. So the krauts threatened to close down their shops. And the Swedes threatened to boycott the shops. And the krauts threatened no more credit. On and on. Well, next thing you know there’s a scuffle and somebody knocks over a lamp and the meeting hall catches fire, threatening a forest fire, threatening everything. And that, if you see the point, that was the final threat.’
‘Yes,’ Perry had said.
‘And what’s the point?’
‘A big forest fire. The end of the whole village.’
‘Exactly,’ the old man had crowed, opening his Bible. ‘The end of everything. The end of the world.’ His voice rang like an old bell.
In the end, a single young Swede went to the war and fought with the Minnesota First at Gettysburg. He was buried in the Swedish half of the cemetery, solidifying the Scandinavians’ grasp on the land, another root sunk deep in. For reprisal, the Germans convened a secret meeting and voted to change the name of the place from Rabisholm to New Köln. The Swedes simply ignored the vote, and until 1887 the village had two names and the matter was taken quite for granted.
In 1887, the timber companies moved in.
They built their sawmill on Dunkle Creek and named the place Sawmill Landing.
It became a logging town – a town now and not a village. Simple frame houses went up, each identical to the next with their wide porches and crawl spaces and stone fireplaces and upstairs bedrooms. It became a company town. Using the sawmill as a hub, the timber companies laid the streets like spokes into the forest, seven spokes that radiated into the timberlands, and as the forest was cut and gutted, the spokes were simply extended and the town expanded. Each spoke was given a name: Acorn Street, Larry’s Lane, Moose Street, Apple Street, Broken Axle Road, Sawmill Street and Mainstreet.
For nearly thirty years the logging companies ran the town, and the population climbed over a thousand. A school was built. And a jail and a town hall. The timber companies tarred Mainstreet and cut a highway out to North Shore Drive. An undertaker set up shop. A railroad spur was laid, a depot was built, new wells were dug, a water tower went up. The timber companies built a pulp mill and a planing mill, changed Ole Borg Day to Paul Bunyan Day, and, indirectly through the labours of their wage earners, paid for the construction of Damascus Lutheran Church. ‘That,’ Perry’s father had said with a customary spit at progress, ‘that was the only decent thing.’
The timber companies also brought a second wave of Finns into Sawmill Landing. They were gaunt families, blank-eyed and harsh and disciplined by tundra spirits, wide foreheads and black eyes and strong arms. Among the new Finns was Perry’s own grandfather.
The facts of Pehr Peri’s life were as bare and brittle as the scattered bones of some ancient reptile. All that was known came from the memory of Perry’s father and from a tiny packet of papers buried in the attic. Up to a point the story was typical. Pehr Peri was born in a fishing community north of Helsinki. At sixteen, for reasons unknown, he boarded a boat for America, spent a year of near starvation in Baltimore, worked his way west to St Louis, then boarded another boat that took him up the Mississippi as far as Red Wing.
For the next five years, young Pehr Peri was swallowed in a dark succession of lumber camps and pine forests, gradually moving north with the advancing timber companies, working first as a shanty boy, later as a swarmer hacking branches from felled trees, and finally as a fully-fledged lumberjack. While the specific events of that lustrum were murky, it was probably the story of thousands like him: immigrants homesick for the Old World, hard winters, danger, relentless work, fist fights, mosquitoes and loneliness and barracks yarns, campfires and boredom, northern hardships, frontier trials. Whatever the specifics, Pehr Peri emerged at the age of twenty-two in a camp outside Sawmill Landing – tall and strong, virtually illiterate, speaking a hybrid of Finnish and English and Norwegian, unmarried. And the father of a young son.
Sometime during those dark five years, in circumstances that could only be imagined, the young Pehr Peri had spent enough time out of the cold to sire a son, to see it through birth and to take the child with him. It was never explained. The identity of the mother, as well as the means by which Peri gained custody of the boy, was never told. The only clue – a minor one – was that the child was baptized Pehr Lindstrom Peri, and it was assumed that the mysterious woman, wife or mistress or lover, belonged to one of nearly three hundred Lindstrom families scattered between Red Wing and Sawmill Landing. But it was never known. In customary and callous disregard for reminiscence, Pehr Peri raised the child as though he alone were responsible for its propagation, refusing to talk about the mother, ignoring the very fact of motherhood, an asexual northern temperament that excluded and eventually scorned things female. ‘I didn’t have a mother,’ Perry’s father once explained, ‘because I didn’t need one.’
For more than a year, Pehr Peri continued working the forests outside Sawmill Landing, leaving the child in the daytime care of assorted shanty boys, camp cooks or idlers. Then, in August of 1901, his right arm was crushed in an incident that again went unexplained. In one of the few scraps of paper he left behind, Peri referred to the accident as a ‘thing which happened’, accepting the crushed arm as a timber wolf might accept a broken leg, without bitterness or remorse, burning eyes, a natural thing of the north. Hardship was to be expected. At any rate, Perry’s grandfather was out of a job, saddled with a motherless child, crippled, stranded in a town that offered nothing but hard work. So he became a preacher.
Despite the contradictions and ironies – semi-literate, not a trace of prior religious zeal, barely able to speak English – Pehr Peri became a successful stump preacher, shuttling from camp to camp, travelling by foot with his young son and a secondhand Bible and a store of winter tales, preaching a mixture of folklore and Christianity and Finnish mythology, relying as much on his native Kalevala as on Matthew, Mark, Luke or John. In time he became something of a hero in the outlying camps. He spoke their idiom, shanty talk that blended accents with nationalities and common experience. And he was also a born preacher. A preacher, not a minister. His sermons called for no acts of repentance, offered no hope of salvation, anointed nobody, elected nobody, promised nothing to the choppers and swarmers and barkers, ignored heaven and delineated only hell. His promise was that things would get worse, and his theme was apocalypse: forest fire, death in the snow, a new Ice Age. He was a preacher of the elements, more pagan than Christian, appealing to the only true emotion of his frontier congregations, which was fear. Looking through a few of the old sermons, Perry saw in his grandfather a simple glacial floe and a frozen spirit. The sermons called merely for heroism. Urho, in the Finnish. Practised endurance, silent suffering, fortitude. His symbols were snow and timber wolves, the forest afire, the world ending, the town collapsing. His hero was the bull. The Bull of Karelia, a moose with antlers gone and head down in the dead of winter. Pehr Peri left the lumber camps with the certainty that there was no alternative but to go on, which was what everyone was best at anyway. So, with a reputation anchored in realities, it was a natural course of events that culminated in his assuming the pulpit of a brand-new church called Damascus Lutheran. And even with a congregation of shop owners and farmers and wives, Pehr Peri never relented in his stern predictions of hardship and collapse. The more vivid his prophecies, the more popular he became, drawing audiences from as far down as Two Harbors and as far north as Grand Marais. Never exhorting, he merely laid down hard principles: the strong will not survive forever, but they may survive longer than the weak; things are bad now but in the winter they will be much worse, so take advantage of the present and prepare for the future. Since his ultimate prophecy of doom was always rooted in stories of present suffering, and since there were always ample cases of forest fire, hard winters, drownings or freezings or death, he could never be faulted for poor vision nor accused of promising too much. He saw no hope and offered none. Strokes of good fortune, he reminded the Damascus Lutherans, are forever followed by bad fortune; summer to winter; birth to death; construction to destruction; the elements. He was never wrong. He preached simple heroism. What cannot be escaped must be endured, and if it must be endured it might as well be confronted.
Pehr Peri taught his singular lesson with conviction. And he taught his son, who listened.
So in 1915, when the timber companies left Sawmill Landing, it was seen as something to be endured, a dying town, a minor collapse in a world of collapse, so inevitable that no effort was made to save the place. Rusting machinery, uncut weeds, unpainted buildings, unstopped forest. And in 1919, when Pehr Peri hanged himself from the rafters of Damascus Lutheran, his son was ready to endure, having listened. In a natural succession to the pulpit, Pehr Lindstrom Peri presided at his father’s funeral, buried him in pine in the old cemetery, and the following Sunday preached that Sawmill Landing was a dying town, that there was no sense trying to escape it because the next town may already be dead and the next on the verge of death, that the Ice Age was returning, ice a mile thick, a glacier that would level the forest and fill the lakes, the sun would turn black and the moon red as blood. And as though to demonstrate the flux, Pehr Lindstrom Peri journeyed the next day to Silver Bay, where he changed the family name to Perry and eliminated his middle name, his mother’s name, for he did not need it.
Perry’s first memory of his father was neither striking nor unusual: a holiday, Thanksgiving or Christmas, snow on the ground, his mother only a pleasant shadow beside him as they huddled in the house to wait out a storm, his father nervously watching the snow through the kitchen window. His second memory, unconnected to the first except through later association, was of a long sobbing sound, the snow still blowing, a baby crying and his father wiping bloody hands. His third memory was of great loss. The house was stone cold. His father was holding a child, rocking before the fire, and the sobbing sound ran through the house like the wind.
The three memories might have been separated by years or seconds.
Later, as he recognized Harvey as a brother, he remembered other things: his father preaching the apocalypse, the word throbbing in four full-bodied syllables like the chiming of a bronze bell. The cold house. Harvey and the old man going off somewhere in the woods. The feeling of cold. Harvey playing football. The old man watching with blank eyes. Harvey fighting. The old man dying, ringing with a spoon in his spit bucket. Harvey digging a bomb shelter for the dying old man, pouring cement, stringing electric lights so as to work at night. Gaunt nightlong images, partly a combination of human beings and events, partly the town, partly the place, partly a genetic fix, an alchemy of circumstance. He could not find the start.
Perry carried the rucksack, Harvey plunged ahead. They passed Pliney’s Pond and continued on. Hornwort and water moss grew along the path, in the shallow-cut parts of the forest. It had finally rained and the forest was soggy. Twice the path appeared to end in a tangle, but Harvey would push away the brush and the path was always there. They walked single file. The bushes leaned in from both sides, parting like water and Harvey pointed out the trees and gave their Latin names. He showed where mushrooms grew and explained how they should be eaten and how a man could survive for years in the woods if he knew what was what. The trail was black dirt. It twisted through alternating growths of birch and pine, slim white trunks with maroon leaves. The earth was springy from decay and rot. Harvey seemed very happy. They crossed a meadow, turned on to an old logging road that followed a creek into the thick forest. Perry walked fast. He’d lost nearly five pounds. It was a fresh day. Sometimes he could hear the creek rushing off to the left, bubbling against the rocks, and Harvey kept talking, explaining things, pushing on. He showed where poison ivy and poison oak and maidenhair grew. He was quite expert. The forest grew high and thick, big enough for harvesting, monster trees with gnarled roots that lay like fossils across the path.
Eventually the trail ended, facing dead into the woods.
‘Nice, isn’t it?’ Harvey said.
‘Fine.’
‘This is really it. I told you it was nice. What do you think?’
‘I like it. Spectacular.’
‘I told you.’ Harvey pointed into the brunt of the forest. ‘Out there is the real stuff. That’s the wilderness.’
‘Where do we swim?’
‘Out there,’ Harvey grinned. ‘These trails we’ve been following are white-man made. Loggers mostly. But this is as far as they come, and out there you won’t find anything. This is where the logging stopped.’ He pointed to where the trail widened. ‘See here? The wagons turned around here and went back. This is as far as they ever came. Isn’t it something?’
‘Real history.’
‘Right. No kidding.’ He waded into the brush, motioning for Perry to follow. ‘See this?’ He picked up a rotted piece of leather. ‘Dad showed it to me. It’s an old horse brace. See? You can imagine how it fitted over the horse’s neck. The straps went here and were attached to a go-devil. All kinds of junk is lying around here if you can find it.’
Harvey scrambled about the clearing, picking things up and explaining them. He held up a long pole. ‘See? This thing’s called a peavey. They used it to manipulate the logs. See? The point’s rusted off, but it used to have this sharp point on the end and they’d use it to pry logs.’
‘Where do we swim?’
It was hard going. Perry was sweating. His jeans ripped in the thigh. Harvey plunged ahead. The forest had been cut by glaciers, chunks of silicates and rock ripped up and carried forward by advancing ice, blistered and dried, holes and crevices and long strips of gully bulldozed southward. The good soil was skimmed off, carried south. And when the melting started and the glaciers receded, ice turned to water and the water filled the holes and crevices and strips of gully, becoming lakes and ponds and rivers and tributaries, a circulatory system, the land of ten thousand lakes. Only the tough things grew. Pine, birch, bristled brush, primitive kinds of fish, walleyes and pumpkinseed sunfish, bullheads and crayfish and northerns. Tough mammals, too: wolves and beaver and bear and moose, and the Indians and the Swedes and the Finns, all tough.
The country began to drop. It was a different kind of forest than he was used to. It was thick and blurred and impenetrable, going out and out.
Then he heard the water again. Then he was in it, up to his knees.
He followed Harvey up the creek. It was cold water. On each bank the trees grew like mutants, huge and old, and the water ran faster. He was in it. Harvey was moving fast and Perry lifted his knees high to keep up the pace, sweating, his glasses sliding down his nose. Bugs hovered just over the water. There were dragonflies and bugs Perry did not know.
Gradually the creek widened and flattened out and the water got deep.
Harvey stopped in a shaded part of the creek.
‘A good spot,’ he said. ‘You like it?’
‘It’s fine. Water’s freezing.’
Harvey smiled. ‘Dad showed it to me. You’ll get used to it. You want me to carry the pack awhile?’
‘No. I guess I can handle it. Where the devil are we going?’
‘Just a way farther. The creek empties into a small lake. We used to go there to fish. You’ll like it.’
‘I’ll bet.’
‘Nice, isn’t it?’
‘Spectacular. I hope to hell the creek doesn’t get any deeper.’
‘Maybe you better let me carry the rucksack.’
‘No.’
‘All right,’ Harvey grinned. ‘We’ll take her slow.’ He gazed up the stream. ‘Nice, isn’t it? Even better when you get deeper in, but we’ll go slow this time.’
‘That’s the ticket.’
‘You’ll love it.’
‘I’m freezing. Let’s go.’
Harvey waded up the creek. The water rose to his waist and then stayed even. The stream kept widening. Wishing he’d turned over the pack, Perry worked hard to keep up. He decided to stop smoking. He felt awkward and out of place.
Hooking in a last long sweep, the stream opened into a lake completely surrounded by pine. A beaver dam spanned the mouth of the creek. It was all quiet.
Harvey crawled on to the bank, waited for him, then they walked along the forest edge to a rocky beach. Harvey helped him out of the rucksack, pushed it underwater and weighted it with a rock.
‘What do you think, brother? Didn’t I say it was nice?’
‘It’s fine. It is. Didn’t know there was a lake out here.’
‘Nobody knows. Farther out there are hundreds of them. This one’s not even on the maps. Dad and I named it Lake Peri. With an i, the old way. What do you think?’
‘Spectacular,’ Perry said.
‘Come on. Let’s swim then.’
They swam until midday. The lake water was cold and clean. The sun got hot and the mosquitoes, were back, breeding after the rain. Perry stayed close to shore, but Harvey twice swam to the far side, disappeared into the woods and came back. He drew up the rucksack and popped open two cans of beer.
‘Not so bad, is it?’
‘No. It’s great. Really.’
Harvey nodded. ‘I knew it. You only have to try it, that’s all. You should have come when we were kids. You know?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Dad would have liked it.’
‘I know.’
‘He was always a little … I don’t know, a little sad when you didn’t want to come. I don’t know. You know how he was.’
‘Sure.’
‘Anyhow.’ Harvey smiled.
‘Sure. It is fine. I like it.’
‘I knew you would.’ Harvey went out to swim again and Perry sat with his beer and watched. Later they ate cold meat and apples and had another beer. It was all right. Harvey seemed happy, tall and very lean and strong, and the air was good. Perry enjoyed it. For once, everything aside, he felt some sibling fusion. It was all right. It was a fine day and a fine lake.
They sat together with their beers and looked down on the beaver dam. Perry felt a little sleepy.
‘What do you think of that Addie?’ Harvey finally said. ‘She’s some super wench, isn’t she?’
‘You like her.’
‘Yes. She doesn’t have to say a word.’ Harvey lazily held up his can and the sun glittered off the wet aluminium.
‘I know.’
Harvey closed his eyes. For a while he was quiet, toying with the empty can. The sun was very hot. ‘You didn’t have anything … You and Addie?’
‘No.’ Too bad, he thought. Some rotten luck.
‘I was just asking.’
‘No. She’s pretty young.’
‘I know,’ Harvey said. ‘You can never be sure, though. She likes you. She’s always talking about going off to the badlands with you.’
‘Dumb talk is all. Don’t know where she gets that stuff.’
‘She’s something, all right, isn’t she?’ Harvey said. He seemed relieved. ‘So maybe I’ll take her to Africa with me.’
‘Sure.’
‘Is she truly Indian?’
‘I’ve heard that,’ Perry said. ‘She’s always giving a different story. I guess she could be a quarter or half blood. You can’t get a straight answer out of her.’
‘Some fine half-breed,’ Harvey said.
‘For sure.’
Harvey smiled, his eyes still closed. ‘You’re a good man, brother. Did I ever tell you that? Sometimes I forget we’re brothers, you know? It’s a strange thing.’
‘I know.’
‘We’re a little different, aren’t we?’
‘A little. Not so much as I used to think.’
‘Right,’ Harvey said. ‘Exactly. Anyhow, I just wanted to ask because you can’t ever be sure.’ He stretched in the sun. ‘I wonder if I can get her to go to Africa with me.’
‘Sure, no problem. Flash your funny eye at her.’
‘You’re a good man.’ He got up. ‘Maybe you should come to Africa with us.’
‘Maybe so. We’ll fish for alligators.’
‘Kill Zulus.’
‘Only in good cause. For truth and justice.’
‘Should we swim?’
‘Why not?’
‘Let’s swim in the stream.’
Harvey dived into the deep water behind the beaver dam. Perry waded in, feeling the way with his hands. The water was very cold and hard. The bottom was littered with the slime of the forest. He lay back and floated against the mud dam. Then he turned on to his belly and swam hard upstream, following Harvey, finally rolling on to his back and letting the current carry him back towards the dam. He opened his eyes and had the sensation of great speed, the grotesque pines sweeping overhead, a single blackbird splatting wings high.
The stream carried him down. He heard Harvey call. The sky was a blur and he was moving fast. Suddenly, as though it had been shot into veins by a needle, he felt fear. He fought the stream, righting himself, trying to stand. There was no bottom. The stream twisted him and he lost sense of proportion and distance, and he pushed towards the mud bed but it wasn’t there, and suddenly in a lush blur he was thinking again, coloured images, and he heard Harvey call, and lazily he called back and his lungs were as hot as white fire, filling like a balloon, and he was tumbling and thinking calmly that only a moment before the day had been fine, everything was calm and fine, then he felt arms surrounding him, straightening him, and sunlight flooded and blanched the images, and he was bobbing in the stream. Harvey holding him high, saying, ‘Drop-off, I called out to you.’
Perry blinked, staring into Harvey’s dull dead eye.
‘I called out. It’s a drop-off.’
He felt no terror. Harvey’s arms were strong and buoyed him high and the current raced all around.
‘All right?’ Harvey’s marble eye rolled. A shark eye. ‘You’re all right?’
He felt no terror but he was angry. He pushed away, and Harvey reluctantly released him, hovering close by. ‘You’re okay? Take it easy.’
Fighting back, Perry rolled on to his back. He was sick but he reached back and swam, kicked, thrashed for the bank. He smelled the hard water inside him.
He waded out, sat down, put on his glasses.
‘You all right?’
Perry nodded, not looking up.
‘You hear me call out? I did call out.’
‘I heard you. I’m all right. I would have been okay.’
It was so fast he didn’t remember it. He lay back. Harvey chuckled and shrugged.
‘I can swim,’ Perry insisted. ‘I was all right.’
‘You’re some great fish, all right.’
They rested awhile. Then without talking they dressed and followed the creek to a footbridge, got on to a path that carried them to Pliney’s Pond and from there to the house.
Harvey did not talk about the near-drowning, and Perry pretended it hadn’t happened. He convinced himself it hadn’t. That evening Harvey drove into town to see Addie and Perry stayed up late watching the driveway, and he fell asleep thinking coloured thoughts: Addie, Grace, the beady-eyed creature and the cold water rushing through him.
He stuck to his rigours. He exercised. He ate cottage cheese and eggs. He went to bed early, arose early, worked enough to satisfy his conscience, took care to be kind to Grace.
In September school started and Grace resumed the teacher’s routine: seven a.m. mornings, lipstick and makeup, talk of her new kids, bright talk that showed interest and concern and affection. He drove her in each morning, dropped her off, had coffee, then watched the leaves change through his Mainstreet window. He did not see much of Addie. Most evenings, Harvey would take the car and Perry felt no great desire to ask questions.
He began paying attention to things. He took short walks into the surrounding woods, sometimes alone and sometimes with Grace or Harvey. He looked for colours and connections. It was hard to tell where it started.
Unwinding towards the simple past, he was searching in a vague way for the first elements. Complexity to elementals, a backward tracing. It was not easy. He did not have the old man’s extraordinary sense of the past or future. That had been one of the problems. He preferred warmth to cold, and from one of those early memories he recognized a lingering sense of great warmth loss, as if yanked sleeping from a bed, or as if something warm had been pulled from him. He did not know where it started. It may have started with the elements. He knew them from college, ninety-two chemical elements. He saw them around him, or imagined them. The elements of matter, the red tinge in the soil, the ore country periphery. Chlorophyll in the leaves being beaten away by September, revealing other pigments, autumn coming, and he tucked it away as knowledge to spring on Harvey. And the alchemist’s elements: fire, water, air and earth. And the great anatomical humours, the cardinal humours that flowed like north woods tides: cold blood, phlegm, yellow bile and melancholy sacs of black bile. Black bile struck him as important. He learned of it somewhere. He pricked open capsules of cellulose and inspected the pulp. He opened bulbs of honeysuckle and smelled the grease. Inside himself, he suspected, he would sometimes find a sac of black bile, and he would prick it open and smell it, too, rub his nose in it. He exercised, took the walks, listened to Harvey, kept his eyes open.
In a moment of openness, he told Grace about the sac of black bile he carried around in his belly.
‘You mean pus?’
‘Black bile. It’s hard to explain. It could be responsible for all this.’
‘You’re sweet,’ she said.
‘Thanks.’
‘I won’t tell the relatives.’
‘Thank God.’
‘But I want ice cream. Otherwise I’ll squeal. I’ll tell them all that you’re loony and carry around black bile in your gut. Maybe the black bile causes your pot.’
‘What?’ He stiffened. ‘I’m exercising. I’m looking pretty good. Look here, don’t you think so?’
‘Yes,’ she smiled.
‘Really.’
‘Tarzan. You’ll look like Tarzan someday, just keep it up.’
‘Seriously. Don’t I look skinny?’
‘Black bile,’ she whispered. ‘Pus gut.’
‘Okay for you.’
‘I won’t tell the relatives if you take me in and buy me some ice cream. Is it a deal? Pus gut.’ She kissed him.
‘You’re a sleeper.’
‘That’s another good idea,’ she whispered. ‘Smothered by ol’ pus gut.’
They drove in and ate ice cream in Wolff’s drugstore. It was Friday night. Wolff was doing a good business. The stores were open along Mainstreet and the August shoppers were out.
Grace held his hand and they walked up the street, the streetlamps were on, Grace looked in the windows. She liked clothes. She tried on capes and sweaters in the J. C. Penney store. Perry stood with arms folded and watched the high-school girls.
She showed him a garment. ‘Do you like it?’
‘I guess. What the hell is it?’
‘A smock.’ Her lower lip dropped.
‘I don’t know. Try it on.’
‘If you don’t like it …’
‘I don’t care, try it on. I’ll tell you then.’
It was tight on her. She was heavy in the chest. She stood before the mirrors, turning. The fabric was filled with printed apples. She put it back on the rack.
Outside, squat women stood with baskets on their arms.
Up and down Mainstreet, boys were driving their fathers’ cars, an elbow out the window, radios on, sniffing the Friday night air. The high-school girls roamed the streets in tight frantic bands, heads together. Perry watched them. Their tiny asses and spangled jeans.
The movie was letting out.
Harvey and Addie were crossing the street. They looked good. Harvey was talking and they were together and holding hands and Addie’s black hair bounced on her back. They both walked fast, taking long steps, and they crossed the street and Addie waved. Perry watched them come up.
‘We’re going swimming,’ Addie said. ‘It was an awful movie so now we’re going swimming.’
Grace smiled.
‘What do you think?’
‘You both ought to come,’ Harvey said loudly. ‘I can vouch that Paul is one great swimmer. He can be lifeguard. You both have to come.’
Addie pried Grace’s hand off Perry’s arm. ‘We’ll go out to the lake. I know the perfect spot. It’ll be a perfect night.’
Grace stuck to her smile.
‘We were just in town for ice cream and shopping.’
‘A night swim,’ said Addie.
‘That’s all right.’
‘Okay then,’ she grinned. ‘Poop on you. Too bad for you.’
Perry looked at her sandals.
‘Have a good swim.’
‘Crumb,’ Addie smirked.
On the drive home, Grace sat apart.
‘You didn’t want to go did you?’
‘Doesn’t matter.’
Her lower lip stuck out. ‘You could have gone if you wanted to. I didn’t know.’
He shrugged. ‘Doesn’t matter.’
‘Well, you could have gone.’
‘But not you.’
‘Well.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Well. They were together and everything.’
‘True.’
Grace sat still and he drove the car up the tar road.
‘Addie’s awfully pretty, isn’t she?’
‘Not all that pretty.’ He had to watch the road.
‘You could have gone. I just don’t enjoy that kind of thing, that’s all.’
‘What do you enjoy?’
She was quiet. ‘Are you mad?’
‘No, just forget it.’
‘Black bile? she whispered.
‘I guess that’s it.’
‘Old pus gut.’
‘You put the finger on it.’ He glanced over at her. ‘Forget it. I didn’t want to go.’
‘Really?’
‘Nope.’
He noticed, cleaning a walleye, that the fish’s eyes were attached to the brain by a braided grey cord with hard little knots scattered along its length.
He noticed that Grace bathed and dried her hair and combed it and went to bed with a book and read until he joined her.
He continued his inspections, seeking the bottom of things. He noticed that Harvey sometimes drank beer for breakfast and hid the bottles in the trash.
He noticed that three families had moved away from Sawmill Landing over the past year and that no one had come to replace them.
The insights had to be separated from apparitions. Often he saw the old half-memories, patches of colour, gleamings, and the illusions dissolved on a closer look. Once Grace appeared to resemble his mother, whom he knew only by photographs. But when he examined the pictures and puzzled over the problem, the differences jumped out, the mirrors reflected back and forth over time in a dazzling series of contradictions.
‘The trees will be turning,’ he observed.
‘Look closer,’ Addie said. ‘They are changing.’
‘Not much. In a week you’ll see something.’
‘I already see it. Look close.’
‘Where the devil is Harvey?’
‘He’ll be along. Don’t be silly, stop worrying about it.’
‘I just asked where he was.’
‘He’ll be along soon. Do you see what I was saying about the leaves?’
‘Yes, I see. I saw it before.’
She was tall. He was glad they were lying on the beach. Long brown muscles ran up her thighs. The calves were long and all bone.
The trees above them were elm and sweet maple. Across the lake it was all pine.
‘Are you taking Grace on a vacation this winter?’
‘I guess so. I don’t know. She’s been talking about Iowa. I guess she wants to go down.’
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Tim O’Brien
The acclaimed novel from the award-winning author of ‘If I Die in a Combat Zone’, ‘Going After Cacciato’ and ‘In the Lake of the Woods’.The action in ‘Northern Lights’ takes place not in Vietnam but back in the USA, as Tim O’Brien explores the after-effects of that war – on those who served, and those they left behind.Set in the frozen wilderness of north Minnesota, it concerns two brothers, one who served in Vietnam, and has returned tough, cynical and world-weary; and the other who stayed at home. When they take off on a long skiing trip together through the frozen woods, they quickly get lost in a blizzard, and are tested to their limits as they face a battle against the elements and each other.
TIM O'BRIEN
Northern Lights
Copyright (#ulink_dd0d53ca-a3f2-52cc-838a-8f460e682efa)
Fourth Estate
An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk).
Published by Flamingo 1998
First published in Great Britain by Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd 1976
Copyright © Tim O’Brien 1975
Tim O’Brien asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.
Source ISBN: 9780006551485
Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2015 ISBN: 9780008133146
Version: 2015-09-10
With gratitude
to the Arrowhead people,
who will know perfectly well that
there is no such town as Sawmill Landing,
that Grand Marais doesn’t sponsor ski races,
that these characters are purely fictitious
and that this is just a story.
Dedication (#ulink_66505a9e-8f09-5f1b-8e7b-9bcd4e39e0c9)
For Ann
… and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood. And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind. And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places … For the day of his wrath is come. And who shall be able to stand?
REVELATIONS
Contents
Cover (#u48f2dbcc-0f19-574d-8dd6-1d6ccdedfaa9)
Title Page (#u8a10915d-3bdd-5566-a44c-5ab01e0766c2)
Copyright (#ulink_cc86ee04-a0b4-5553-8167-840d6c10e2f4)
Dedication (#ulink_eb738087-8648-54f9-83c7-a4fb1c0b2e5b)
Epiloguge (#u53a3008e-1791-5476-a55a-ebcf9e198860)
One
Heat Storm (#ulink_1d09fceb-deda-56a6-b0f6-4da54120e3f8)
Elements (#ulink_8e0434b6-cf29-56c7-a507-f8532770070c)
Shelter (#litres_trial_promo)
Black Sun (#litres_trial_promo)
Two
Blizzard (#litres_trial_promo)
Heat Storm (#litres_trial_promo)
Elements (#litres_trial_promo)
Shelter (#litres_trial_promo)
Blood Moon (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Praise (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
ONE (#ulink_30c5f814-bce7-537d-a2e5-1f4028f758e3)
HEAT STORM (#ulink_b8d781b7-a547-5e68-af3c-68f683c35cbd)
Wide awake and restless, Paul Milton Perry clawed away the sheets and swung out of bed, blood weak, his fists clenching and closing like a pulse. He hadn’t slept. He sat very still. He listened to the July heat, mosquitoes at the screen windows, inchworms eating in the back pines, the old house, a close-seeming flock of loons. What he did not hear, he imagined. Timber wolves and Indians, the chime of the old man’s spoon in the spit bucket, the glacial floes, Harvey hammering at the half-finished bomb shelter, ice cracking in great sheets, the deep pond and Grace’s whispering, and a sobbing sound. He sat still. He was naked and sweating and anaemic and flabby. Thinking first about Harvey, then about the heat, then the mosquitoes, he’d been sailing in a gaunt nightlong rush of images and half-dreams, turning, wallowing, listening like a stranger to the sounds of his father’s house.
He sat still.
Harvey was coming home.
There was that, and there was Grace, and there were the mosquitoes crazy for blood against the screen windows.
‘Lord, now,’ he moaned, and pushed out of bed, found his glasses, and groped towards the kitchen.
He returned with a black can of insecticide. Then he listened again. The bedroom was sullen and hot, and he was thinking murder. Carefully, he tied the lace curtains to one side. He ignored Grace’s first whisper. He pushed the nozzle flush against the screen window. Then, grinning and naked, he pressed the nozzle and began to spray, feeling better, and he flushed the night with poison from his black can.
He grinned and pressed the nozzle. His fingers turned wet and cool from condensed poison, and he listened: mosquitoes and Junebugs, dawn crickets, dawn birds, dragonflies and larvae and caterpillars, morning moths and sleeping flies, bear and moose, walleyes and carp and northerns and bullheads and tiny salamanders. It was dark everywhere. The black can hissed in the dark, ejaculating sweet chemicals that filled the great forest and his father’s house. He sprayed until the can was empty and light, then he listened, and the odour of poison buoyed him.
He sat on the bed. Harvey was coming home, and he was dizzy.
‘Bad night,’ Grace whispered.
‘Lord.’
‘Poor boy.’
‘Poor mosquitoes.’
‘Shhhhh,’ she always whispered. ‘Shhhh, just lie back now. Come here, lie back. You’re just excited. Phew, what a stink! Come here now. Lie back.’
‘Killed a billion of them.’
‘Shhhh, lie back.’
‘No use. What a night. Lord, what a crummy awful night.’
‘Relax now. I heard you all night long.’
‘Mosquitoes, the blasted heat, everything.’ He sat on the bed. He was still holding the defused can of insecticide. Poison drifted through the dark room.
‘Poor boy. Come here now. Here, lie back. Lie back.’ Her hand moved to his neck. ‘Here now,’ she whispered. ‘Lie back and I’ll rub you. Poor boy, I heard you tossing all night long. Just lie back and I’ll give you a nice rub and you can sleep and sleep.’
‘I’m going for a walk.’
‘None of that. You just lie still and I’ll rub you.’ Her hand brushed up his spine and rested on his shoulder. Vaguely through the cloud of poison he heard the hum of returning insects, thousands and millions of them deep in the woods, and he began scratching himself. He was flabby and restless. ‘I’m going for a walk.’
‘Poor, poor Paul,’ she said. She removed his glasses. ‘There now. Just lie back and I’ll give you a rub. There. There, how’s that now? Better now? Poor boy, you’re just excited about Harvey coming home, that’s all, that’s all. Just lie back and I’ll rub you and you can sleep.’
‘What time is it?’
‘Shhhhh. Plenty of time. Still dark, see? You just lie still now.’
‘Lord,’ he moaned.
‘A nice rub?’
‘I’m going for a walk.’
‘Shhhhh, none of that. Let me rub you.’
‘Damn mosquitoes.’
‘I know.’
‘Scratch. There.’ He lay back. He grinned. ‘Guess I killed myself some lousy mosquitoes, didn’t I?’
‘I guess you did.’
‘Massacred the little buggers.’
‘Hush up. You killed them all. You’re a brave mosquito killer and now you can just go to sleep. Roll on to your tummy and I’ll scratch you.’
He turned and let her scratch. He felt better. The room sweated with the poison. He lay still and listened to the returning mosquitoes, the dawn insects, listened to Grace murmur in the dark: ‘There, there. Is that better? Poor boy, I heard you all night long. Just excited, that’s all. Aren’t you excited? Harvey coming home and everything, I don’t blame you. Poor boy. Now, how does that feel? Better now? You just go to sleep.’
‘What time is it?’
‘Sleep time,’ Grace said. ‘Plenty of time.’
Her fingers went up and down his back. He felt better. ‘There, there,’ she was whispering, and Perry grinned and thought about the poison sweeping like mustard gas through the screen windows. He felt better. He pressed his nose into the sheets, lay still while she massaged his shoulders and his neck and his scalp. ‘There, there,’ she was whispering, softly now, her hand moving lightly. She whispered like a mother. She smelled of flannel. He felt much better. Gradually, she stopped rubbing and after a time he heard her slow breathing. Her mouth was open and she was asleep. Her teeth were shining.
Then he tried to sleep. But soon he was listening and thinking again, thinking about Harvey.
He tried to imagine what great changes the war might have made in his kid brother. He wondered what they would first say to each other. It was hard to picture.
All night, he had been thinking.
There would be some changes. The wounded eye, for sure. It was hard to imagine Harvey with a wounded eye. Harvey the Bull. The blinded bull. It was hard to picture. In a stiff and static way, he remembered his brother through a handful of stop-motion images, a few images that had been frozen long ago and captured everything important. All night the images spun in his head: Harvey the Bull; Harvey digging the bomb shelter; Harvey off somewhere in the woods with the old man; Harvey playing football; Harvey the rascal; Harvey boarding the bus that would take him to a fort in California and from there to Saigon or Chu Lai or wherever.
It was annoying. The few sharp images were all Paul Perry really had. It was as though he’d lived thirty years for the sake of a half-dozen fast snapshots, everything else either forgotten or superfluous or lost in the shuffle, and all night long the few sharp images flopped before him, gaunt summary of three decades, growing up on the old man’s sermons and winter stories, learning to swim as the old man watched without pity, college, marriage, returning to Sawmill Landing, the bomb shelter and the old man’s death, a job, winter and summer and millions of pine and Norway spruce and birch, billions of bugs. All collapsed around the few images. But even the images offered no natural sequence. They were random and defiant, clarifying nothing, and Perry spent the long night in myopic wonder, trying to sort them into an order that would progress from start to finish to start.
He lay still. The mosquitoes were back. On the far wall, the first light formed patches against Grace’s dressing mirror.
Again he swung out of bed. He dressed quietly and carried his shoes to the kitchen. Outside, the sky was chalk coloured. It would be another dry day. Sunday. Standing on the porch, he urinated into Grace’s green ferns, then he laced up his shoes, hurried across the lawn, passed the bomb shelter without looking, followed the path by memory to Pliney’s Pond.
There he sat on the rocks.
He practised melancholia and self-pity.
He scooped a handful of green water from the pond and let it trickle through his fingers, indifferently inspecting it for life. Harvey the Bull, he was thinking. The blinded bull. It was hard to picture. Hard to tell where it all started or even why. He took more water from the pond. Swirling it in his hands, he captured tiny capsules of cellulose, tiny larvae and mosquito eggs.
He waited for the sun to rise.
The forest stood like walls around the pond. Roots of older trees snaked along the rocks and disappeared deep into the water.
‘Pooooor me,’ he moaned.
It was hard to tell where it started. He squinted into the algae, dipped in for more water, let it dribble through his fingers.
It may have started that October in 1962, the October when Harvey quit high school football in order to finish the old man’s bomb shelter. It was one of the images: the October in 1962 when the old man’s prophecies of doom suddenly seemed not so crazy after all. When the Caribbean bustled with missiles and atom bombs, jets scrambling over Miami Beach and everyone in Sawmill Landing sat at their radios or hunched over coffee in the drugstore, saying: ‘Maybe the old gent wasn’t so crazy after all.’ When people were asking one another about the hazards of nuclear fallout, asking if it really rotted a man’s testicles, does it hurt, would it reach into northern Minnesota, would the winds be from the north or south or does it matter? That October in 1962, eight years ago, when the Arrowhead blazed with red autumn, when Harvey dug a great hole in the backyard, poured cement, strung lights from the pines in order to work in the night so as to finish the bomb shelter for the dying old man.
It may have started then.
Or it may have started further back.
As kids.
He couldn’t remember.
That day when he dressed up in his father’s vestments, practising to be a preacher, to follow the old man into the pulpit of Damascus Lutheran Church. It may have started or it may not have started. It may have been the afternoon when the old man ordered him to swim in Pliney’s Pond. ‘Jump in,’ the old man had said without pity. It may have started then, at the moment when he waded bawling into the fecund pond, or it may have started another time, that day, that day, or innumerable other days that washed together, that day when Harvey boarded a bus for California and the war. Or the day he married Grace, a day he barely remembered. ‘Looks like somebody’s mother,’ the motherless old man had once said. Or other days.
That day.
It was the perfect melancholy hour, and he practised silence.
He sat on the rocks and peered into Pliney’s Pond. Pushing his glasses close, he leaned forward and scooped a handful of algae from the pond and rubbed it between his fingers until they were stained green.
It may have started or it may not have started. It was partly the town. Partly the place. Partly the forest and the old man’s Finnish religion, partly being a preacher’s kid, partly the old man’s northern obsessions, partly a combination of human beings and events, partly a genetic fix, an alchemy of circumstance.
Harvey was coming home and the sun was already coming up.
He was restless and afraid. It was hard to imagine Harvey with a wounded eye. Harvey the Bull, the old man’s pride, the brave balled bullock. Careful not to fall into the stinking pond, Perry sat on the rocks and peered into the waters and listened to dawn respiration. It was Sunday. He sat quietly, practising silence, letting the night restlessness drain, listening as the forest swelled and expelled like a giant lung: oxygenation, respiration, metabolism and decay, photosynthesis and reproduction, simple asexual chemistry, conversion and reconversion.
Finally, when he was ready, he returned to the house. Grace was still sleeping.
The old timbers creaked. He put coffee on the stove, moved into the bathroom, showered, scrubbed the algae from his hands, dusted himself with his wife’s baby powder. It was six o’clock. He drank his coffee, watching the sunlight come in patches through the woods. He was sluggish and lazy and soft-bellied. Sipping his morning coffee and sitting at the table, he considered knocking off some sit-ups. Instead he fixed breakfast. When it was ready, he crept into the bedroom and woke Grace. ‘Breakfast,’ he said.
‘Phew.’ She emerged from the sheets. ‘Phew, I had a dream … I was dreaming somebody was spraying insecticide. Did you have that dream? Phew.’ She was a handsome woman. When she smiled, her teeth shined. From September through May she taught school. Now it was summer. ‘Come here,’ she said.
‘Breakfast’s already on.’
‘I want some nice cuddling. Come here.’
‘Don’t you want some nice breakfast instead?’
‘Hmmmm,’ she said. ‘First some nice cuddling. Poor boy, you had a bad night, didn’t you? Come here and I’ll give you some nice cuddling.’
Perry shook his head. ‘Better hurry,’ he said. ‘Harvey comes home today, you know.’
‘Poor boy,’ she smiled. ‘Poor Paul. What you need is some cuddling.’
He backed the car into the yard, turned past the bomb shelter and drove out towards Route 18. Gravel clanked against the sides of the car. At the end of the lane, he stopped and Grace leaned out to check the mailbox, then he turned on to the tar road and drove fast towards town.
The road swept through state park land. Another dry day. Branches hung over the narrow parts of the road.
After passing Bishop Markham’s house, Grace moved over and put her hand on him. ‘Happy?’ she said.
‘Sure. Wonderful.’
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing. I’m happy. Can’t you see how happy I am? Watch out or I’ll drive into the ditch.’
The road ran in a drunken narrow valley of the forest, bumpy from winter frost heaves, old tar with a single white line painted down its centre, unwinding towards Sawmill Landing, where it would pass by the cemetery and the junkyard, disappear for a moment at the railroad tracks, then continue on into town, past the John Deere machinery yard, the silver water tower, into the hub of Sawmill Landing. Perry drove fast. He knew the road by memory: twelve years on a school bus, in his father’s pick-up, in his own first car, shuttling back and forth between the paint-peeling timber town and the old timber house. The road had no shoulders and the ditches were shallow rock and the forest stood like walls on each side, sometimes hanging over the road to form a kind of tunnel or chute through which he drove fast, opening the window to let the July heat in, lighting a first cigarette. It was a hypnotic, relaxing drive. Without recognizing anything in particular, he recognized everything in general – the sweep of the road down to the iron bridge, the sound of the tyres on the pine planks, the slow curve past the cemetery and junkyard.
‘If you’re happy, then, let’s see a nice smile,’ Grace was saying, snuggling closer. ‘There, isn’t that nicer? You have to smile when Harvey gets off the bus. Okay? You have to start practising right now.’
‘All right,’ he said.
‘Then smile.’
‘Okay,’ he smiled, despite himself. She was like a gyroscope. A warm self-righting centre, soothing with those whispers.
‘Isn’t that better now?’
‘Yes.’
‘You see?’
‘Priceless.’
‘Don’t be that way. Be nice.’
‘I am nice. I’m priceless. Don’t you think I’m priceless? Harvey’s a soldier and I’m priceless. That’s the way it always seems to go. Perfectly priceless.’
‘Stop that.’ She pouted, puckering her lower lip. ‘I’m only … just trying to perk you up a little. Here, I want you to start smiling. Shall I turn on the radio? We’ll listen to some church music.’
‘If you want. Sounds priceless to me.’
‘Poor Paul.’ She turned the radio dial to find WCZ in Duluth. The car filled with July heat and the sound of pipe organs and a choir.
Perry concentrated on the road.
He felt her studying him, that vast womanly, wifely, motherly sympathy and understanding that both attracted and repelled him, often at the same time. ‘Like somebody’s goddamn mother,’ his father had said. In college, more than ten years ago, it was her heavy-breasted, sympathy that brought them together. She’d taken him in like an orphan, soothed him through four years at the University of Iowa, calmed him when he dropped out of the divinity school and steadied him when he started at the ag school, decadent Hawkeye sympathy that oozed like ripe mud. After all the years with his father, after pursuing the old man’s winter tracks, ice fishing and hunting and fiery sermons, after all that Grace had come with her whispers and understanding, and marrying her after graduation had been as easy and natural as falling asleep in a warm bath. By then the old man was dead.
She was still studying him, snuggling close. ‘Well,’ she finally said. ‘Well, Harvey sounded all right on the telephone. Don’t you think? I do. I think so. Actually, don’t you think he sounded pretty cheerful?’
‘I guess so. He sounded the same.’
‘You see? You see, he’s still cheerful and he sounded fine and everything will be perfect. You’ll see.’
‘I guess.’
‘So you can smile now. You can be cheerful just like Harvey.’
‘He lost an eye.’
‘Well …’ She trailed off as if recognizing the fact but not its importance. The radio played church music. Perry turned the car along the slow curve of the lake. He was nervous and he lit another cigarette. ‘Well,’ Grace said, ‘I’ll tell you this. I’m just glad you didn’t have to go. I’m glad about that much anyway. Aren’t you? I’m just glad you were too old for the dumb thing. I mean I don’t know. It’s awful about Harvey and everything. But I’m just glad you didn’t have to go, that’s all.’
‘Priceless.’
Again she pouted, and the road bumped across the rusted railroad tracks, straightened and descended through a tunnel of white pine that opened into the town. Sometimes he got pleasure out of making her worry. ‘Priceless,’ he muttered just for that purpose. On the right, an enamel sign said: SAWMILL LANDING. It gave the population as 781, which had been about right until 1947 when the last lumber company had left town, taking thirty families with it.
The road made a sharp turn and became Mainstreet. Perry parked in front of the bank.
Church bells were ringing as they walked to the drugstore.
Except for two dogs, one sniffing at the other, the streets were as dry and motionless as a postcard. Sunday morning. Sunday morning, four dozen cars parked about the stone church, Jud Harmor’s pickup in front of the town hall, Sunday morning, paint peeling, pine rotting, the forest growing into vacant lots and abandoned lawns, fallen timbers, Sunday morning and even inside the drugstore everything was quiet.
Grace found a Sunday paper and they sat at the counter. A Coca-Cola clock showed eight minutes to eleven.
Perry kept his head down. He rambled through the comics and Sunday morning headlines. Grace read the Living section. A wall of mirrors faced them, running from one end of the long counter to the other, plastered with ads for ice cream and Pepsi and Bromo Seltzer, reflecting the rows of toothpaste and stationery and mouthwash and Kleenex, reflecting like a long mercantile mural, reflecting Grace who was gazing at him placid and soft-eyed, featureless as warm milk. He looked away. He looked away and continued through the newspaper until Herb Wolff swung behind the counter.
Without asking, Wolff poured coffee and put the cups down and wrote out a bill.
‘Coffee?’ he said.
‘Thanks, Herb.’
‘No problem.’ He waited to be paid. Then he rang up thirty cents on his cash register, poured himself a cup of coffee and sat down beside Grace. ‘So,’ he said slowly, ‘so … what’s up?’
‘Not much. How’s your pa?’
Wolff shrugged.
‘That’s good.’
‘Keeps holding in there,’ Wolff said. ‘So. What’s up? He had a deep voice that never stopped surprising Perry.
‘Nothing, Herb. What about you?’
They sat without talking. For hours at a time, people sat in Wolff’s drugstore without talking. Stirring coffee and looking at themselves in the long mirrors, listening to Wolff’s cash register, watching Mainstreet, asking folks who came in: ‘What’s new? What’s up?’
Wolff rearranged a pair of salt and pepper shakers. ‘So. Not in church today.’
‘Not today, I guess.’
‘So what’s up then?’
‘Nothing. We’re here to meet the bus.’
Wolff raised his eyebrows, waiting for more, then he sighed. ‘Relatives, I guess.’
That’s about it, Herb. When the devil do we get some rain?’
‘I reckon next week. That’s what everyone’s saying.’ He paused a moment as if trying to frame a difficult question, then very slowly he said, ‘Relatives, I reckon.’
‘That’s right.’
‘That’s what I thought.’ Again he raised his eyebrows. He was dressed in a starched lab coat. It didn’t seem to Perry that he’d changed at all since high school. Wolff was one of the Germans. There were Swedes and Finns and Germans, and Wolff was pure German – impeccable and stiffly manicured, greedy eyes, a bristling crewcut and a voice that rose like deep magic from his sunken little torso. Wolff was proud of the voice. Back in high school, when it finally changed, it saved him from an adolescence of constant scorn, pity, practical jokes and half-serious innuendo about his malehood. He now loaded the voice with authority, successfully straining out most of the German accent, always speaking slowly and only after long and apparently tormenting thought. ‘A relative,’ he said.
‘That’s about it. You got any more of this coffee, Herb?’
‘Right.’ He sighed, giving up. Wolff refilled their cups and wrote out a new bill and they sat quietly and listened while the Coca-Cola clock ticked. ‘I reckon you know Jud Harmor’s got cancer,’ he said.
‘I’ve heard that.’
‘It’s true.’
‘Did Jud tell you?’
Wolff shook his head. ‘Nope, but I heard it. I hear it’s bad, too.’
‘He’s tough.’
‘He’s old.’ Wolff was playing again with the salt and pepper shakers. ‘He ought to step down from being mayor if he’s got cancer like I hear he’s got. I don’t say he has to quit. I say he should quit. It’s for the better.’
‘I guess it is.’
When the Coca-Cola clock showed two minutes after eleven, Wolff got behind the counter and began making coffee for the church crowd. He still had the disjointed swagger that Perry remembered from high school, a sailor’s roll that joined with his deep voice to defy everything else about him.
‘Anacin and aspirin and all that stuff,’ Wolff was saying, talking to Grace like a teacher. ‘It’s made in these big vats, you know, and all it really amounts to is plain acid. And you know what acids are. Dangerous. You got to be careful.’
‘Why sell it?’ asked Grace.
‘Oh. Well, it is a medicine. That’s all I’m saying, honey. Aspirin is medicine and people forget that. I’m just saying you got to be careful because it’s not sugar. Not candy. Aspirin is a very potent medicine. Aspirin isn’t sugar. Sugar is organic, see? Sugar’s got carbons in it, but aspirin’s plain acid and acid is something you got to be careful of, see?’
Grace nodded. Then Wolff nodded. He straightened his lab coat and checked his watch against the Coca-Cola clock. ‘So,’ he said crisply, ‘bus gets in at eleven twenty. Who’s this relative anyhow?’
Grace laughed. ‘It’s no big secret, Herb. It’s Harvey. We just thought it would be best not to …’
‘Harvey?’
Grace smiled.
‘Harvey!’ Wolff wailed. He held his hands to his mouth like a girl. His voice sailed up an octave. ‘Harvey? Well this is … Harvey!’
‘It’s no secret,’ Grace said. ‘We thought he’d just want to get off the bus without any fuss.’
‘Geez,’ Wolff moaned. ‘Well, this is something. Harvey? Geeeezzzz. You should’ve told somebody. For Pete’s sakes. Harvey. Well, how is he?’ Wolff looked about the store. ‘For Pete’s sakes! You should’ve told us. He’s coming on the bus? Geez, I got to get some people here.’
‘I don’t think he wants that,’ Perry said. He decided to cut Wolff off fast. ‘Let’s just let it be a nice easy thing.’
‘We got to!’ Wolff wailed. ‘He’s coming home, isn’t he? Geez. I got to make some phone calls.’ He yanked his lab coat down, dusting it and hustling for the phone.
‘Herb. Forget it, will you?’
‘The whole town’s in church.’ Wolff banged the phone down and went out into the street and came back. ‘Geez, this is … I can’t believe any of this. Harvey. I just can’t believe it. He’s coming home. I mean, we got to get some people out for him, don’t we? How is he? I mean, how’s the eye and everything?’
‘He’s fine,’ Grace smiled. ‘We talked to him on the phone and he sounded cheerful and fine.’
Wolff rubbed his crewcut. ‘Well, we got to do something. Don’t we? Maybe … Maybe I ought to run over to the church and make an announcement or something.’
‘Forget it,’ Perry said.
‘What?’
‘Just forget it, Herb.’
‘But … I mean, shouldn’t we get some people here?’
‘No,’ Perry said.
Wolff frowned. He looked shaken. ‘At least the mayor?’
‘Nobody.’
‘Geez,’ Wolff moaned. ‘Somebody should be here when he comes. Don’t you think? If I’d known about it, why, I’ll tell you, I’d’ve had the whole council here. I’ll tell you.’
‘Leave him alone, Herb.’
Perry went outside and sat on the kerb.
The streets were dusty.
Jud Harmor’s pickup was gone now, but the two dogs were still there, curled in wait on the steps of Damascus Lutheran. Beyond the peeling buildings there was nothing but forest.
He cleaned his glasses and leaned back. Then he cleaned his glasses again. In a while Grace came out and sat with him.
‘Wolff still phoning people?’
‘Oh,’ she laughed. ‘I think I settled him down. He’s in there grinding fresh coffee for Harvey.’
‘Some creep, isn’t he?’
‘Paul.’
‘I’m sorry. You didn’t see the time in there?’
‘Few more minutes.’ She took his hand. ‘You all right now?’
‘Sure. I’m okay. I’m priceless. I’ll bet that damn bus is late.’
‘Shhhhh. You just relax and start smiling. Have a bright face.’
He gazed up Mainstreet to where the bus would turn in and hiss and stop. The street was silent. The heat seemed to absorb sound. Sitting on the kerb, he felt like a boy again, waiting to be picked up from school, or waiting in a stifling theatre for the curtain to draw up and the lights to fade and the movie to begin. He felt he’d been waiting a long time. He was restless. The long night had caught up with him and he needed a cigarette. He was restless. He needed a cigarette and the pack was empty. Grace sat silently, twisting her wedding band, toying with his hand until he pulled it away and stood up. Across the street and down a way, he saw the shoddy frame building where he had his own office. The Venetian blinds were down, forming a white backdrop for the lettering on the window: PAUL MILTON PERRY, and below his name, painted in orange, DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE, COUNTY FARM EXTENSION. Sucking the Federal Titty. Harvey always stated the unstated.
‘Awful hot,’ Grace finally said.
‘Damn bus is late. I knew it.’
‘Shall I see what time it is?’
‘Yes. And get me some cigarettes. And make sure Wolff isn’t on that telephone again.’
He walked to the end of the block and back again. One of the dogs trotted over to be scratched. The town was dead. He could hear the muffled sound of the organ inside the church. The town did not particularly depress him, but at the same time he often wondered why anyone still lived there. Wolff was there to sell coffee and medicine. The barber was there to cut Wolff’s hair into a flat crewcut once a week. The grocer was there to sell food to the barber. The farmers were there, trying to grow corn in the forest to sell to the grocer, and Perry was there to keep the farms going, to tell them when to use fertilizer, to fill out subsidy applications and loan applications, to watch the Swedes try to grow corn on land meant for pine and Indians. He didn’t know. It didn’t make sense. Once he’d asked his father why they didn’t just move on to Duluth, and the old man went crazy, charging into one of his fiery sermons about the virtues of hardship and how Perry’s grandfather had built the house out of the forest’s own timber and how a town was like tempered steel and how a transplanted tree never grows as tall or as fine as one rooted in native soil. The lesson of the sermon, if not the logic, always stuck with Perry. The old man died and Perry stayed on. And Harvey got drafted. Old Harvey. Harvey was different. Ever since the old man died, Harvey talked about leaving the town, and one day with the help of the draft board he did leave. A confused time. Harvey the Bull. He was a bull but he was no soldier. As kids they hadn’t even played war games. Indians were better, better targets for games with their leather jackets, sour faces, bad teeth and greasy hair, Chippewa mostly. They’d stalked the Indians, crawled on bellies in the weeds behind the house, yelped and bellowed. But never war games. Nothing serious. Trapping games and capture-the-flag and forts in the forest, not far from Pliney’s Pond, snow forts in winter and tree forts in summer, great camouflage in the fall, but never war games. And no one in Sawmill Landing knew a damn about the war anyway. It wasn’t talked about in the drugstore. Then gangbusters, bang, old Harvey gets drafted, good old Bishop Markham and Herb Wolff on the draft board – sorry, Harvey’s number was up, something like that, proper optimism and good humour, a little sympathy, proper pride. Perry stayed out of it. Nothing he could do, and the war wasn’t real anyway, and, besides, it seemed somehow natural that a rascal and bull like Harvey was the one to go off to the war. In that sleepwalking, slothful departure there had been no time to counter the nagging thought that the speed of it all, the blinding foggy invisible force behind it, was a sure sign that Harvey would come home maimed. Because no one knew a damn about it. Vietnam was outside the town orbit. ‘A mess,’ was what people would say if forced to comment, but a mess was still not a war, and it did not become a war until Harvey went to fight in it. Two Indian boys went with him. Their picture was on the front page of the town paper, Harvey in the centre, grinning and posing, his arms wrapped around the two dull-eyed Indian boys. In September, one of the Indians got killed and the paper carried a short obituary with an American flag stencilled in. But even then it wasn’t really a war. It wasn’t a war until Harvey got himself wounded and the paper carried another front-page story, pictures of Harvey in his football uniform, pictures of the old house, pictures of Perry and Grace, a picture of the dead old man in his preacher’s robes, a long history of the family, and for a time the war was really a war, though even then it was all jumbled and formless. No sides, no maps to chart progress on, no tides to imagine surging back and forth, no real battles or victories or defeats. In the tangled density of it all, Perry sometimes wondered if the whole show were a masquerade for Harvey to dress in khaki and display his bigballed outdoorsmanship, proving all over again how well he’d followed the old man into the woods, how much he’d learned, to show forever that he was the Bull.
The dog trotted back to the church steps.
Perry sat on the kerb again, cleaned his glasses, leaned back. Tips of high pine poked over the store fronts.
Grace came out with cigarettes and coffee. ‘Eleven thirty,’ she said. ‘Herb says it’s always a little late.’
‘I just wish that bus would get in.’
Then he saw it. It was as though it had been there all along, poised in turn around the corner, waiting to be seen. He saw it and heard it simultaneously. It was the giant Greyhound. It might have been the same silver monster that took Harvey to war in the first place.
It swung off the tar road, changing gears and growling.
Herb Wolff hurried out. ‘There she is, there she is!’ he wailed. He brushed his coat and stood erect. ‘There she is, all right.’
The bus cleared the turn.
‘Sure wish everybody was here for this,’ said Wolff. ‘This is something. Harvey! I can’t believe it.’
Perry took a step and stood alone. The Greyhound’s brakes hissed and forms moved behind the tinted windows and Perry searched for familiar movements. The door opened with another strange hiss, and the great grey cave was transfixing dust and trembling. Perry peered into the tinted glass.
Harvey stepped off alone. He carried a black bag with white stitching.
‘Well, hey!’ he said.
Without seeing, Perry gave him a great hug.
‘Hey!’
‘Yeah, you look fine. You do!’
‘And my God, here’s Grace! Grace. You’re beautiful.’ They hugged and Grace was smiling and wet-eyed and Perry was grinning.
‘Yeah, yeah. You’ve got some tan there.’
‘Sure!’
‘You look great. You do, I can’t believe it.’
‘Skinny! Look at that.’
‘Hey, it’s old Wolff! How the devil is old Wolffie?’
‘This is something. It is. You look great, Harv. You do. This is really something.’
‘I’m fine. I am. Where’s my parade? Shouldn’t they have trumpets and flags and things? How’s my honey-Grace?’
Grace kissed him again, still clutching his arm. ‘Happy, happy,’ she said. ‘You’re so skinny, aren’t you?’
‘Skinny? Lean and mean. How’s my brother? How’s brother Paul?’
‘I’m fine. Here, let me have that bag. I can’t get over it, you look great. Really.’
‘I am great,’ Harvey said. ‘Now where the devil is everybody?’
‘Sunday.’
‘Sunday? Is it Sunday? Sunday! Incredible.’
‘Give me that blasted bag.’
‘Come on,’ Grace said. ‘Let’s get you home. Some skinny hero.’
Everybody started hugging again, then Harvey released the bag and Perry took it and they stood in a circle on the street. Harvey’s bad eye was barely noticeable. He was tall and too skinny. His voice had the old nasal tinkle. ‘Sunday!’ he said. ‘Some bloody day to come home on. Where’s old Jud Harmor? Thought sure old Jud would be here with bands and ticker tape and stuff.’
‘He’s around. Here, let’s get into the car and we’ll get you home. You did get skinny, didn’t you?’
‘Sure, and you got chubby. You look great anyway. And Grace. Grace is still a honey. And even old Wolffie looks good, so what we need is a good drink to celebrate. Hey, Wolffie! You got a nice drink we can all celebrate with?’
Wolff blinked and shook his head.
‘No bloody drink?’
‘No. Geez, I’m sorry. Really. Nobody said anything about … I would’ve had the whole town here if somebody just …’
‘No bloody drink? No parade, no drink. Where the devil is everybody? Some awful hero worship.’
‘Everybody’s in church, Harv.’
‘Some hero worship.’ Harvey grinned and pointed at his bad eye. ‘So, how you like my pretty souvenir? Better than a lousy limp, don’t you think?’
‘Doesn’t look bad at all.’
‘I’m thinking about patching her up. You know? A little class.’
‘Doesn’t look bad at all, Harv.’
‘Glad you like it. Now all we need is a drink and everybody’s happy. Are you happy, Wolff?’
Wolff vigorously shook his head, grinning.
‘Fine. Everybody’s happy.’
Grace took Harvey’s arm and walked him towards the car. Church bells began ringing. One of the dogs began to bark, sitting back on its haunches with its nose up towards the steeple. Perry was trembling. He opened the trunk and threw the bag in and slammed it shut.
‘Remind me never to come home again on Sunday,’ Harvey said.
‘Anytime is a good time. You look great.’
‘Glad I didn’t wear my uniform. Look plain silly coming home in a uniform and no parade.’ Harvey shook hands with Wolff, then stood with his hands on his hips and looked up and down Mainstreet. The bells were ringing loud.
‘Let’s get you home.’
‘So long, Wolffie,’ Harvey said. ‘You’re a helluva man. Good man. War’s over, baby.’
Wolff grinned.
Perry started the engine and backed up and drove up Mainstreet.
‘That weasel,’ Harvey said.
Perry awoke before dawn. He went to the pond, sat on the rocks, waited for daylight. Then he showered and dressed and had coffee and drove into town. It was still early and the shops were closed. He cruised up Acorn Street, past Addie’s boarding house. Her window was on the top floor but it was shuttered and there were no lights. He drove back up Mainstreet. It was Monday, there was nothing much to do. He unlocked the office, rolled up the blinds, sat at his desk. The pens were in their glass jar, papers were in folders, the desk was clean and in order, the folders were filed. He put his head in his arms. His mouth was dry from a night of drinking beer and laughing and listening to Harvey tell about the bus ride from Minneapolis, the hospital, a few things about the war.
After a time he got up to sweep the office. Then he switched on the ceiling fan. He typed out a loan application for a dumbeyed farmer named Lars Nielson. Then he made coffee. Then he put the application into an envelope and typed the address on to a sticker and stuck the sticker to the envelope, then he drank his coffee. There was nothing much to do. He should’ve become a preacher he thought. The town needed a good preacher. Stenberg, the crusty usurper. And Harvey was home. And Grace was happy and wanted a child. There was nothing much to do. He drank more coffee and passed the morning at the window, watching the town come to life, watching morning shadows come out of the eastern forest, pass over the town. He was melancholy but it was an entirely rational melancholia, nothing outright crazy about it. He should’ve become a preacher. And Harvey was home and Grace was happy, except she wanted a child, and the old man was dead, and Perry was thinking that things would have been better if he’d become a preacher. With the old man gone, the town needed a good preacher.
The ceiling fan spun round and round. He typed out soil reports, read the morning paper, then towards noon he gave up, locking the office and walking on to the street to mail the Nielson application. He felt flabby and restless. It was another hot day. The tips of some of the pines were turning brown. Standing on the post office steps, he looked up the street and wondered what to do next. A tractor turned off Route 18. Black smoke coming from a pipe on the hood obscured the farmer’s face. Perry decided to find Addie for a long lunch.
She was not in the library. He browsed the stacks, waiting, finally taking a world atlas into the reading room where he smoked and looked at the maps and pictures. It was something he and Harvey used to do, a passion for maps and exotic unseen places. He sat over the atlas a long time. Except for the fans and a woman stacking books behind him, the library was quiet.
He was not sure how long he slept, if at all, but suddenly he was wide awake, surprised to find himself in the chair. The atlas had fallen to his lap. He’d been thinking about Harvey’s bad eye. Thinking or dreaming, he wasn’t sure. The eye was brilliant blue, rolling untethered like a marble, opaque and shining as though lighted from within. The dead eye seemed to have its own life, rolling about in the socket, reckless and eager and full of trouble and blue light.
Feeling a little foolish, Perry blinked and rubbed his eyes and returned the atlas to the shelf.
It was nearly one o’clock.
The woman stacking books looked at him suspiciously.
He grinned at her and shrugged. ‘Just waiting for Addie,’ he said.
‘Snoring, too.’
‘I’m sorry. You don’t know what time Addie’s coming in?’
‘I guess I know, all right, Mr Perry,’ the woman said. She was eyeing his shirt. He looked down and saw a cigarette burn the size of a quarter. ‘Addie’s off today, anyhow,’ the woman said. ‘Monday, you know. You oughta know that by now, Mr Perry.’ She didn’t smile. ‘She works Saturdays so she’s got Monday off, you oughta know that by now.’
‘I forgot.’
He bought a case of beer and some groceries. Walking back to the car, he came across Jud Harmor. Jud saw him first. The old mayor was standing in front of the town hall, hands in his hip pockets, brown shirt and brown cotton pants, the straw hat pushed back on his skull.
‘Been lookin’ for you,’ Jud said.
‘Hey, Jud.’ Perry shifted the groceries to his other arm and prepared to listen.
‘I been lookin’ for you.’
Perry nodded and waited. There was a bright sun on Jud’s face. Under his chin, a large cancer splotch cut down the throat and disappeared under the old man’s shirt. He was lean and tough-looking and sly-looking and he looked like Perry’s father sometimes. At a certain age, all the old men began to look alike.
‘Anyhow,’ said Jud, ‘I been lookin’ for you. Wolff says Harvey’s back.’
‘Yesterday.’
Jud nodded, looking up Mainstreet.
‘Came on the bus yesterday,’ Perry said. ‘He called a few days ago – last week.’
Jud nodded, still surveyed the hot street. ‘Guess somebody should’ve told me.’
‘Sorry, Jud. We were just thinking he’d want to ease back in. You know? No big show or anything.’
‘Somebody should’ve told me, anyhow. I should’ve been there.’
Perry nodded. ‘Sorry.’
Jud squinted up the street. There was no traffic. The two lonely dogs were sleeping on the steps of Damascus Lutheran. ‘Anyhow,’ said Jud, ‘I should’ve been there. Harvey being a hero and all.’ He laughed into a cough.
‘Oh, I wouldn’t say he’s exactly a hero, Jud. I wouldn’t say that. He got his eye hurt and that’s about the end of it really.’
‘Shit,’ the old mayor said, ‘you think I don’t know that? Bound to happen sooner or later. Like your old man, you know, same damn thing. Anyhow, he’s gonna want a parade now.’
‘What?’
‘A parade, for Chrissake! I guess he’ll want a parade now, horns and sirens and floats.’
‘Oh.’
Jud squinted and coughed and shook his head. He brought up a wad of phlegm from his throat, leaned forward and casually spat into the street. ‘Well, ahhhh, I guess you can tell your pa I’ll get that parade arranged. I guess I can do that much.’
‘He’s dead, Jud,’ Perry said carefully.
Jud squinted. ‘Thought he just got himself wounded in the eye?’
‘No, my old man. He’s dead.’
Jud laughed. ‘Shit! You think I didn’t know that?’
Perry grinned. He shifted the groceries again.
‘Anyhow,’ said Jud, ‘you get the word to Harvey, okay?’
Jud coughed and spat a big bubble of mucus into the street. ‘Shit! Wolff says it’s the first thing of Harvey asked about … a parade. Don’t worry, I’ll get it for him, ram it right through, no problem at all.’
‘There’s no need for it, Jud.’
‘Just tell him, son.’ The old mayor sighed. ‘You better get on home then. Groceries there are leakin’ all over you.’ He pushed the straw hat forward. ‘You say hey to your pa, now.’
Perry grinned. ‘Okay, Jud.’
Jud cackled. ‘Your pa’s dead!’
‘Yeah.’
I never said he was crazy, you know.’
‘I know, Jud.’
‘What about your ma?’
‘She’s dead, too, Jud.’
‘Jesus.’ Old Jud spat into the street. ‘Dropping like flies, aren’t they? Well, what about Harvey?’
‘Harvey’s fine.’
‘Mother of Mercy.’
‘Right.’
‘Don’t let your old man shove you around, you hear me?’
‘Okay, Jud. Thanks.’
‘Not Harvey either.’
‘Okay.’
‘So long now, Reverend.’
Perry grinned and saluted and started off, then stopped. ‘Jud?’
The old man was staring after him.
‘Jud, you haven’t seen Addie?’
Jud Harmor pulled off his hat to think. His skull was shiny.
‘Addie. The girl who works in the library. You haven’t seen her today?’
‘Addie,’ Jud said, looking about. ‘Newcomer.’
‘A year or so. She works in the library. Just a kid. You call her Geronimo sometimes.’
Jud grinned. ‘Shit, you mean ol’ Geronimo. Some ass, right? Sure, I know her all right. You’re talkin’ about ol’ Geronimo.’
‘You haven’t seen her?’
‘Wish so,’ Jud said. ‘Wish I had. Some ass, don’t you think? No disrespect, Reverend. What you want ol’ Geronimo for?’
‘Nothing. Just looking for her. Thanks, Jud.’
‘Aren’t thinkin’ of converting her? That’d be some awful wasted hunk of redskin ass, I’ll say that.’
‘Don’t worry, Jud.’
‘No disrespect, Reverend.’
‘So long, Jud.’
‘Say hey to your pa, now.’
Perry smiled and waved.
‘He’s dead!’ Jud hollered.
‘You’re some politician, Jud.’
‘And you ain’t exactly a reverend, neither.’ The old man waved. ‘Take care, son. Tell that brother Harvey I’ll get his blasted parade for him, hear?’
‘Okay.’
‘You tell him now. Get his medals patched on.’
‘I will.’
‘And listen. Hey! I wanted you to tell him this. Tell him that losing one eye never hurt a blind man. You tell him that for me. Perk him up.’
‘Okay, Jud.’
‘Tell him the town thinks he’s a hero. Tell him we’re all proud.’ Jud was grinning, waving his hat. ‘Tell him anything you want. A pack of lies, anyway. Okay? Hell, tell him he’s lucky to be alive, that’s what. Tell him I thought he was dead or something, that’ll clear his head awhile. That Harvey. Some rascal, isn’t he? You got to be careful now.’
‘Okay, Jud.’
‘Take her easy, son.’
‘Okay.’
‘Geronimo!’ he wailed, and coughed, and spat in the street.
Perry decided to try the lake.
He swung off Route 18 and parked along the path leading to the beach. He walked fast, beginning to worry about the time.
At a small footbridge he slowed for breath, then kept on at an easier pace as the path gradually widened and the forest thinned out, finally ending in a sandy clearing that looked down on the lake.
He stopped there. He was but of shape and sweating. Addie’s Olds was parked along the gravel lane that ran from the lake to the junk yard. He felt a little better. He found some shade and sat down to wait.
The lake was hard grey-blue, so calm it looked iced over, and there were no clouds, and it was mid-afternoon of summer with nothing to do. He put his hand down and squeezed the roll of fat under his ribs. Harvey’d never had that problem. Why not? Something to do with dominant and recessive genetics, most likely; or breeding, the old man’s feeling at the time, or their separate moods, black bile and yellow, it was hard to say. The Bull, said the old man about Harvey, and that was that, and it was too bad. And like Jud said, maybe the old man wasn’t crazy after all. Thinking about old Jud, Perry started grinning. Hard to tell if the old mayor was playing a great fool’s game, darting in and out of time as if it didn’t matter or exist, always confusing the living with the dead and Perry with Harvey and both of them with the old man. Every two years either Herb Wolff or Bishop Markham opposed Jud in the town elections, and every two years Jud got re-elected. Everything was always the same, Jud and the trees and the lake.
He sat in the shade and waited. He pitched stones down the embankment and watched them roll to the beach. He thought awhile about doing some exercises. Sweat off the fat rolls, turn lean, watch Grace’s happy face, stir up some energy, get healthy, sit-up and push-up himself into bullhood and happiness. It was awfully hot.
The first movement was gentle. It was just a splash of light in the lake. He watched the splashes lap towards him like waves, moving in delicate arcs closer, and he stood up to watch.
She swam close to shore then turned and swam on her back.
Her arms reached from the water and dipped. He was too far away to hear the sound of her swimming.
After a time she waded ashore. She bent forward, her hands braced on her knees, her hair flopping forward in a wet black bunch.
She was very slender. She walked on her heels, and she was wet and her skin was walnut-coloured and shining.
Perry moved down the embankment for a better look. He was smiling. He found a log and sat down again, his hands folded nervously.
She wore a white swimsuit.
With her back to him, she walked on up the beach, stopping now and then to bend down, picking things up, throwing pebbles out into the lake, skipping rocks. She was slender and she walked and played like an athlete, bent forward and swinging her arms and walking on her heels. She walked a quarter mile up the beach. For a moment she disappeared in a stand of pines, then she was back and coming towards him.
She walked with her chin forward. Perry wanted to laugh. He was smiling and watching and sweating. Her hair lay over her shoulders in two black heaps, and she was lean and athletic, walked with long loping steps, on her heels, her arms swinging.
Perry watched her come down the beach. Her shoulders were brown.
Then, like a deer, she stopped. She seemed to look in his direction, her head turning up. Then she sprang for the water.
It startled him. He called out, but she dived headlong for the lake and white spray flashed and she was gone under and the lake bubbled ivory from the spot where she dived.
Finally emerging, she shook her head. Then she sprang high like a fish. She seemed to hover there, a strong golden arc suspended over the water, then she went under, her feet kicking at the last instant.
She emerged again further out.
‘Addie!’ he shouted. He stood up and waved.
She raised her hand. He couldn’t be sure if it were a wave or another swimming stroke, for the hand poised for only a moment then it was gone and she was swimming again for the centre of the lake. He grinned. She could be very quick. He could not make out her face. He waved hard.
She swam straight out, long arched strokes, and soon he saw only the wake of her swimming. He felt fine. He walked away slowly, for it was a hot day.
That July was quiet. The forest was being burnt out. People in town talked about forest fires, and the farmers talked about how the corn was already ruined, and Perry and Harvey walked and fished and played some tennis.
Except for the heat, it was not a bad time. Harvey was cheerful, always eager to get into the woods. He talked about building a house in Nassau, about taking a bike tour through Canada, about going to live in Montana or Oregon. While he never talked much about the war or losing his eye, he didn’t seem bitter and even sometimes appeared to treat it all as a great adventure that, if opportunity came, he wouldn’t mind repeating. At night they sometimes played Scrabble, sometimes watched television, sometimes drove in for a beer at Franz’s Glen. It was not such a bad time. The newspaper sent out a reporter and Harvey was written up again, the lead story, and Grace clipped the piece and pasted it into a scrapbook. She had a scrapbook for Harvey and another for Perry. Harvey’s was nearly full. She said she was keeping them for her old age and for her children when they came. In town, everyone asked about Harvey, raved about the newspaper article. There were pictures of Harvey and Perry and Grace and the old house.
‘It’s a pack of lies,’ said Harvey.
‘It says you’re a hero. See here?’
‘True, true enough,’ he said. ‘But it’s still a pack of lies. I’m gonna sue and retire to Tibet. I’ve always wanted to retire to Tibet. You two can visit me. How does that sound? I’ll have you flown out. I’ll sue them for every penny.’
‘It calls you a hero,’ Grace said. ‘Look at that. You’re a hero.’
‘That’s the only truth in the whole article.’
‘It says you’re fondly remembered by everyone in town. Look, it’s got Herb Wolff saying what a fine fellow you are. And Bishop Markham and the mayor. It says the mayor’s going to give you a parade.’
‘Should hope so. My God. How many heroes does one town need before they fork over a few parades? I should hope so. Maybe I won’t sue if they fork over a nice parade. Does it say the hero lost his eye?’
‘No,’ Grace said. ‘It says you were badly wounded and that you served your community and country and everything.’
Harvey had his stocking feet near the fire. He was lying on the floor, head on a pillow. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘This is some ticklish decision. I’ll have to get myself a crooked lawyer. I don’t know. Suing is always ticklish, you know. Maybe I’ll just accept the parade and sordid apologies. A tough decision. What do you think? Tibet sounds awfully good, doesn’t it? Or maybe Africa. A hundred thousand could take us a long way. A trip to Africa, small enough price for a pack of lies. Let’s have a beer. Let’s drink to Jud’s parade, what do you say?’
Harvey’s face was red by the fire. It was relaxing time, after-supper time, and they drank beer and played Scrabble.
In a while, Harvey got up and went outside. Perry knew where he was going. An hour later, Harvey was still in the bomb shelter.
Through July, they stayed close to the house. Harvey settled himself into the upstairs bedroom, sleeping late, sometimes walking alone into the woods.
There was no rain.
They stayed close to the house, but with Harvey there was a new sense of motion, energy that seemed to bundle and gather. At night Perry sometimes heard him through the old timbers, pacing upstairs, moving things, flushing the toilet, going out to sit in the bomb shelter. They stayed close to the house and surrounding woods. Perry would drive in to work, roll up the blinds, daydream, drive home. He didn’t see anything of Addie. She was awfully young anyway.
Harvey talked about Africa and Nassau, talked on and on. He talked about fishing and the woods and the old days with their father. He talked about buying a sailboat and sailing the Mediterranean with a locker full of food and drink, getting a tan, getting healthy, enjoying things, having some adventures. He talked about buying a house in Alaska. Or Boston or Miami or Las Vegas or Berlin or Australia, jumbling them all together sometimes, getting red and eager.
‘We’ve got to get out and really see these woods,’ he said one Saturday. ‘Seriously. Do you realize these woods are the best left in the entire country? Seriously. Lord knows how long they’ll last. You’ve got to get deep into them. None of this piddling around on the outskirts, you’ve got to get right in. When you start to think about it, there just isn’t a lot of forest left anymore. We ought to go, you and me.’
‘Not me, Harv. Mosquitoes and all that. You know how I hate mosquitoes.’
Harvey made a face. ‘Some day it’s going to be maggots. Think about old Jud. All he’s got to look forward to is worms and maggots. Seriously. We could go deep into the woods. Bring backpacks and make a trip out of it. I can show you some of the places the old man took me.’ He picked up steam. ‘I mean, seriously. You can’t believe how wild it is once you get a way in. Nothing but trees and lakes. Wild is the wrong word. What’s the word?’
‘Nasty.’
‘Wild.’
‘Bugs.’
‘Then we’ll go this winter. How’s that? You won’t find mosquitoes in the winter. I’ll guarantee it.’
‘Snow.’
‘You don’t like snow? What the devil’s wrong with some snow? God’s own stuff. Clean and pretty and white. Beautiful stuff. God’s own stuff.’
‘Snow, cold, freeze. They go together. They give me the creeps. Why don’t we go down to Iowa for a nice vacation? That sounds better. We can visit Grace’s folks and have a fine time.’
‘Iowa,’ Harvey said with scorn. ‘Some adventure. What we need is a good adventure.’
‘I have an adventure,’ Perry said. ‘I’m a pioneer in this town. Scratching for a living, married, trying to help a bunch of crazy farmers grow corn in the woods, living in my father’s house. That’s an adventure.’
‘Curses to you.’
‘Ha.’
‘Damns and darns.’
‘Sorry.’
‘We’ll go to Africa then,’ Harvey said. ‘Off to Africa. Do you have a problem with Africa?’
‘I suppose not. More bugs. Tigers and lions and cannibals. Minor stuff. Do you know anything about Africa, Harv?’
‘I’ll learn. I learned about My Khe. I can learn about Africa.’
‘My Khe. Is that in Africa?’
‘My Khe is a place in Asia,’ Harvey said. ‘Asia, Africa, Australia, Alaska. The big As. Adventure, the big A.’
‘You’ll forget yourself, Harv. Let’s go see about Grace’s supper.’
‘Grace is such a good sort.’
‘Come on.’
‘And the Arrowhead, another big A. You have to think about all this stuff. When you think about it, it’s awfully interesting. You have to think about all the adventurous places that go back to the first letter of our alphabet. Think of Afghanistan. Think of Algiers and Atlantis and Allen-town. Aruba and Athens. Athens, Lordy. I’d love to go to Athens. We ought to go. Just pull out of this burg and go.’
Grace came to the porch.
‘You’re really an extraordinary sort,’ Harvey said. ‘You must be American.’
‘Through and through,’ she laughed. ‘Come have supper.’
‘Full-breasted American, I like that. You don’t see many full-breasted Americans in Africa. Will you go to Africa with us?’
‘Oh, yes. I’ll start saving for it.’
‘You have to start talking my brother into it. Paul is very down on Africa. Paul is actually very down on the big A, you know. He didn’t pay attention as a kid. Didn’t listen to the old man, and look where it’s got him. Doesn’t respect the big A! Grace, you’ll have to persuade him to join us. Otherwise, well, we’ll run off together, how’s that? We’ll capture inchworms. Have ’em stuffed and mounted on the walls. Brother Paul loves stuffed inchworms and all other of God’s bugs. Don’t you? Sure. Brother Paul is actually quite religious. Learned it from the old man, right?’
‘Sure.’
‘Just like you loved the old man, right?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Let’s eat,’ Grace said.
She guided them inside, lit candles and snapped out the lights. She served supper.
‘Inchworms!’ said Harvey. ‘My God, how did you know? My favourite.’
Afterwards Harvey wanted to go into town. Grace stayed home, Perry drove. Harvey was already tight, drinking beer from an aluminium can. It was a clear night, and the sky was high and the headlights lit a narrow tunnel through the woods. Along the road there were crickets and mosquitoes.
‘I’m home,’ Harvey said.
‘Sure.’
‘I am. I’m really home.’
The town was small, a few quiet campfires in the fog, and the forest grew everywhere, to the edge of town, into the vacant lots, on to lawns, brush and high pine. Perry drove around the sawmill hub and out to Franz’s Glen. Cars and pickup trucks filled the parking lot. ‘I’m home, all right,’ Harvey said. ‘Make me behave.’
‘I will.’
‘What the hell do I say?’
‘Tell them you’re a hero.’
‘Perfect!’ Harvey grinned and mashed the aluminium can in his hands. ‘Just like the old days.’
‘Sure.’
‘Everything’s the same, right?’
‘Exactly.’
The tavern was crowded. Addie was there. She was with a group of young people, young to Perry. On the floors there was red sawdust and spilt beer.
Addie saw them and waved.
‘Same place,’ said Harvey.
‘Never changes.’
A Hamms sign revolved behind the bar. In the corner a jukebox was playing loud music, and Addie was dancing with a stupid-looking boy. She Was barefoot. Everyone was happy. The old men sat at the bar in brown cotton pants and flannel shirts buttoned at the wrists, and the kids were all at Addie’s table, and others sat at the tables and booths, a middle group of married people, the in-betweens and stalwarts. The jukebox was very loud.
‘It’s the same,’ Harvey grinned. ‘This is a very lecherous place. Don’t ever let your kids come here.’
‘Right.’ Perry watched Addie dance. She was a fine dancer. She smiled while she danced and he liked that. He didn’t care much for the fellow she danced with. No matter, though. Addie waved again and Perry grinned and waved back, and a young waitress with a beehive hairdo brought them tall bottles of beer. Harvey took her hand and told her she had a lot of class.
‘Perfectly exquisite,’ Harvey said when she left. ‘Very tight-assed and exquisite. Someday she’ll be a virgin, I’m sure.’ His face was turning red.
‘Awfully young, Harv.’
‘I’m young. Who says I’m not young?’
Addie was dancing with a new partner. The place was noisy, Saturday night. She held her sandals while she danced. Bishop Markham and Herb Wolff and another fellow were playing pinball machines under a giant walleye that hung on a wall.
Harvey asked the waitress to sit down.
‘We’re having a great homecoming party,’ he said, ‘and you have to join us. Really. You’re a very classy girl, you know. Exquisite and quite classy.’
She was very young. She had no expression. She was somebody’s daughter. ‘I seen your picture in the papers,’ she said, staring at his bad eye.
‘Ah, and very observant, too. Classy and observant.’
‘I seen your picture,’ she said. ‘Who are you anyhow?’
‘A dentist,’ Harvey smiled. ‘This is my assistant Dr Watson. We pull teeth. I might add that we do a very classy job of it, cut rate. Two for a buck. You might have seen our ads in the paper.’
‘Prob’ly,’ the waitress said.
‘So,’ Harvey smiled. ‘Why don’t you just sit with us awhile and tell us your life history. I’m sure it’s classy.’
‘Can’t,’ she said. She gave his bad eye a last look and wiggled towards the bar.
They sat and drank the beers and watched the groups move about. Perry cleaned his glasses. The jukebox kept playing and the place was loud with bottles and music.
‘Hey, it’s Harvey! Hey, Harvey, for Christ sake!’
It was Bishop Markham. Herb Wolff trailed after him, both of them grinning. They shook Harvey’s hand, and Bishop beamed and ordered beers all around.
‘Where the blazes you been hiding, boy?’
‘Here and there and nowhere.’
‘Sonofagun! Well, let me say we’re proud of you,’ said Bishop, holding up his glass. ‘Really proud. Really. You’ve heard it before and you’ll hear it again, we’re proud.’ Bishop wore a bow tie and crew cut. ‘You really made it, Harvey. And you look like a million bucks. Seriously. Doesn’t he look good?’
Wolff nodded fiercely. ‘He looks terrific. You look absolutely terrific, Harv. By God, I’d say you look like a million bucks.’
Addie was still dancing, a slow number. Her new partner had red hair. Her face was in his red hair.
‘Crummy war,’ Bishop was saying, ‘but you did yourself proud, Harvey. I mean it. A goddamn war hero! I remember …’ and he talked about Harvey’s football days. Bishop was a classmate of Perry’s. Now he sold life insurance and real estate and sat on the Chamber of Commerce and the draft board and chaired the Kiwanis Club. He loved to talk.
Perry went outside for air. When he returned, Bishop Markham and Wolff and the others were playing the pinball game. Harvey was with the young waitress. The place was frantic and loud. Addie was still with her crowd, they were all dancing. He stood alone until the music ended and Addie came up.
‘Hey,’ she said. Her face was brown and wet. ‘Not awfully fond of dancing, are you?’
‘No. Where did you get all those jolly young friends?’
‘Oh, them. They’re all right. The Whole lot is from Silver Bay and they love to dance. Franz is going to play his accordion and we’re all going to dance polkas.’
‘Wonderful.’
‘Sure.’
‘I saw you at the lake,’ he said.
‘Ah,’ she smiled. ‘Yes. I waved. Did you see my wave?’
‘I saw.’
‘You were playing a peeping tom, weren’t you? You were out there spying.’
‘I happened along.’
Addie took his arm.
‘How’s the dancing?’
‘It’s okay. You haven’t been in the library. You’re going to go illiterate. I’ve been saving all these books for you.’
‘I haven’t felt much like reading. I don’t know.’
She leaned against him. ‘I’ve been drinking, Paul. I have to go to my friends. I’ll make an excuse and come to your table.’ She turned, jerked a thumb towards Harvey. ‘Is that your brother the war hero? He looks like some fine war hero.’
‘That’s him.’
‘He must be a pirate. He looks like a pirate.’
‘I guess he does.’
‘All right,’ she said. ‘You hang tight. I’ll make my excuses and come to your table. But you can’t feel my legs and you have to promise to dance the polkas. You promise?’ She released his arm and it felt red where she’d been holding it. The tavern was thumping. ‘And you must stop spying,’ she said.
‘Oh, it’s not …’
‘Promise?’
‘Sure.’
‘I’ll hurry over.’
Harvey was wooing his young waitress. He was getting drunk and the girl watched him carefully.
‘Hey, Paul! You met my classy friend, Linda?’
‘Lorna.’
‘Lorna, Linda, no matter. Have I told anyone how classy you are? Imagine finding a classy person such as yourself in such an unclassy part of the world. Imagine that. I’m boggled by it. Paul, aren’t you boggled by all the classy people you meet in unclassy places?’
‘Always.’ Addie was still talking with her young friends. She had her hands on her hips, palms in. It was her odd way of standing, her pelvis forward and her eyes black and bright. Sometimes her eyes looked Indian, sometimes Asian, and she wore a white scarf on her hair. She wore sandals and white shorts.
‘This is Linda,’ Harvey said. ‘Linda’s going to get us more beer.’
‘Lorna,’ she whined. Her brown hair was strung in a great nest towards the rafters.
‘Linda, Lorna. Something like that. Am I close?’
‘Lorna.’
‘Yes, that’s it. And this is my brother. Together we’re a classy group, don’t you think? My brother is my assistant, you know. He thinks I don’t behave sometimes. He keeps me reined in, so to speak. Isn’t that right, brother? I’m a quite famous and reputable dentist.’
‘I hate dentists,’ the girl said.
Her mouth snapped shut. She snuffed out a cigarette.
Harvey kept after her. ‘Don’t take it wrong now. You’re classy. It’s just the teeth. Here, open up.’ He touched her lips with a finger. ‘Come on, honey, open up. That’s it.’
Tentatively, the girl’s mouth opened. Harvey touched her front teeth. Her eyes rolled down. She held an unlit cigarette in one hand.
‘Not so classy in here,’ said Harvey. ‘We’ll need some time. Atta girl, hold still now. See here, Paul? Cap this baby. Build a bridge here.’
‘Stop it,’ Lorna grunted. She spoke between her teeth, holding them bared, but Harvey had her by the neck, craning over and pivoting.
‘Easy does it,’ Harvey purred. ‘Ack! These things. Have to yank ’em, no question. Then drill a nice hole right … here … and do a canal job on the nerve, no problem. Open up now. What do you think, doctor?’
Harvey kept after the girl. She had a great red mouth.
‘Infected,’ Harvey said solemnly. ‘Right here. Does this hurt? The girl squealed and her cigarette rolled to the floor. ‘Ha! Infected, all right. No doubt about it. A very infectious young lady. Hoof and mouth, I suspect.’
‘Take it easy,’ Perry said.
‘And these molars, my Lord! Look at ’em. All rotten and infected. Open up now.’
‘That’s enough,’ Perry said.
‘Ha.’ Harvey held her mouth open. ‘I must have a beer. Will you get me a beer, young lady?’
The girl fiercely nodded.
‘All right then. And will you stop by on Tuesday? Make an appointment with my assistant here?’
The girl nodded.
‘Very well then. Very well. Just bring me my beer.’ He released her and the girl went for the bar.
‘She loves me,’ Harvey grinned.
‘You were a little rough.’
‘She loves me. You see? He waved and the girl waved back. ‘You see?’
‘All right.’
‘You see?’
Someone unplugged the juke box.
‘Franzie!’ Harvey got up and clapped. ‘Nothing ever changes.’
‘Getting older.’
Everyone started clapping. Franz came out in knickers and a hiking cap. A monstrous accordion was strapped around his neck. ‘What you wanna hear?’ he called and everybody kept clapping, so he smiled and played a song and everybody got up to dance polkas. The crowd whooped and Perry leaned back, feeling swallowed in all the fun. Addie was there in the centre of the crowd, dancing with one of the Silver Bay boys, and the wood floor and walls bounced and the crowd whooped and stomped and the room was brightly lighted. The young waitress took Harvey to the dance floor. Everyone cheered him and Harvey did a deep bow.
Perry stepped outside.
He stood very still. Music strained like lost Old World through the walls and rose to the forest and floated away in a single resonant chord that slowly swallowed itself. He could not get into it. He lit a cigarette. Old Addie, he thought. Addie could get into it.
He stood quietly. In the grass there were crickets and the air was warm and soggy. Down the road, out of sight, the lights of the town were eaten by fog. Old Addie. He smelled methane and ammonia. Mosquitoes, Junebugs. He urinated against the foundation of the old tavern and Bishop Markham came out and peed beside him. ‘That Harvey is some rascal,’ Bishop said.
‘That he is.’
‘He’s having a helluva time. No bitterness there. Wolff was worried he’d be bitter.’
‘Not Harv.’
‘A hard charger.’
‘That he is.’
Markham went inside and Perry smoked another cigarette, listened to the music. He flipped his butt into the gravel parking lot and went through the doors.
Addie waved. A Silver Bay buck had her tight, they were reeling, half polka and half two-step, Du, Du, liebst mir im Herzen, Du, Du, liebst mir im Sinn, Du, Du … the Black Forest, the Magic Forest, back and forth, the great camp-fire, tribal rhythms. Perry watched them all dance. Addie was hot and wet and brown. There were red callouses on her heels where the sandal straps rubbed.
‘Come on,’ she called, ‘dance, dance.’
He grinned, shook his head. He was a little drunk.
‘Dance!’ Harvey called.
Bishop Markham hollered something and waved. Herb Wolff, holding a big woman, also waved. Franz beamed and played the accordion.
When the song ended, everyone clapped and Addie’s friends thumped the accordion player and bought him a beer.
Harvey sat down. It was too noisy to talk and they drank their beers and watched people.
In a while, Addie joined them. She could be very gay.
‘You should dance more,’ she said, sitting down, ‘It makes everyone happy when they dance. Is this your hero brother?’
‘This is the monster.’
‘You look something like a pirate. Do you know what the reason is?’
‘Everyone says that.’
‘This is Addie.’
‘She looks like a bloody Indian.’
‘Everyone says that, too. Actually I’m from New Guinea.’
‘Really? No shit? I plan to go there someday.’
‘Look up my relatives,’ she said.
Perry found himself grinning. ‘Addie-works in the library. She’s a kind of assistant librarian or something. She saves all the good books for me.’ He wrapped his hands around the bottle and squeezed. It was a great blur.
‘You look just like an Indian,’ Harvey said. ‘Sure you’re not Indian? You could make a very classy Indian.’
‘Sure,’ she said.
‘She is part Indian, Harv.’
Addie was very gay. She talked about dancing and swimming and people. Harvey became quiet. Franz came out again with his accordion and Harvey asked her to dance and Perry sat alone and watched them, and when they came back he felt tired.
‘You must learn to dance,’ she said. ‘A great picker-upper. All my friends have to dance.’ Addie moved beside him. ‘Here, I’ll show you how. You can’t be watching all the time, come on. I’ll show you a tricky polka.’
He put his glasses on the table. It was a long, exhausting dance. He was out of shape. Over her shoulder, he saw Harvey watching.
Afterwards he went outside to pee. It was a ritual that the men peed outside and the women peed in the women’s room. He breathed some fresh air.
Inside again, Harvey and Addie were dancing. The Hamms beer sign was revolving. She was bright and fun and she danced on her heels. He got a beer and watched Harvey and Addie and Bishop Markham and the others.
Jud Harmor came in, took a stool at the end of the bar, refused a beer, and pulled his straw hat down. People gave him lots of room.
Harvey held Addie, whooping on the dance floor, and the old timbers were rocking.
When the dance ended, the young waitress took Harvey back to the floor.
Addie was wet and smiling.
‘He’s a real pirate,’ she said. ‘He can dance.’
‘I was watching.’
She touched his arm. ‘Peeping Paul.’
‘Yeah. Ol’ peeping Paul peeped a peck of pickled trouble.’
‘So clever.’
‘Would you like a beer?’
‘Here, let’s us sit down,’ she said.
They took a corner booth. Addie watched Harvey and the beehived waitress dance. ‘He is a fine dancer,’ she said.
‘Sure.’
‘Tell me about your brother the pirate.’
‘There’s nothing to tell. He’s a nice guy. Everybody says that. He’s a rascal and a scamp.’
‘A pirate!’
‘I guess so.’
Addie was barefoot. She put her sandals on the table.
‘There’s nothing like a pirate to brighten things up. Why isn’t Grace here? You should have brought Grace. Then we would have been a group, and groups are always more fun. What happened to his eye?’
‘He was wounded.’
‘Well, I know that. How did it happen?’
Perry shrugged. He had a tight fever. ‘The telegrams just said he’d been wounded, I don’t know. He’s all right now. He hasn’t said anything about it.’
‘That’s silly. I’ll drag it out of him then. I’m good at that. I’ll drag out the whole gruesome story and make him feel all better about it.’
‘You’re the one to do it, Addie.’
‘Want to dance with me?’
‘Not that. Not now, I’m pretty tipsy.’
‘Such a pirate.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Let’s dance. That’ll make it better.’ She got up and held his arm.
‘Don’t be so happy.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Everything gets better, you know.’
‘Let’s dance then.’
‘I’ll dance barefoot.’
‘Spectacular, Addie.’
‘Hmmm.’ She removed his glasses. ‘There, how’s that?’ Very slowly, she pulled him up. ‘Very tribal, don’t you think? Firewater and campfires and wild rhubarb, all erotic.’
‘Stop that.’
‘Don’t be silly. You should be barefoot, too.’
She was lean and athletic.
‘Isn’t this a nice song? Very erotic, isn’t it? Don’t step on my bare feet.’
‘Jesus.’
‘Isn’t this better now?’
‘It’s fine. I’m pretty hot.’
‘Dance closer. You don’t have to be so stiff. That’s better. See how? One, two, three. One, two, three. Isn’t it nice? Think of campfires and firewater.’
The accordion music was slow and swaying, deep forest. People were singing.
‘Don’t you like me?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘And isn’t it nice to dance a little?’
He saw Jud Harmor watching. Jud smirked, raised his hat.
It was a long slow dance.
‘We should all go for a swim. Is that your brother’s girl friend?’
‘Are you looking at them? I thought you were dreaming with your eyes closed.’
She laughed. ‘I was dreaming. Is that his gift friend?’
‘Her name is Linda or Lorna or something. She’s a patient of his.’
‘We should all go swimming.’
She was light and the skin was tight across her shoulders.
‘We really should go for a swim now,’ Addie said. ‘Wouldn’t that be good?’
‘I have to go home.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘There’s always that, isn’t there?’
In town, the dry spell was all they talked about. The air was crisp and inchworms were eating up the forest. At night, trying to sleep, Perry heard them munching with the sound of rainfall. But it did not rain. The days were hot and dry, and it did not rain.
It kept him busy. Meagre to begin with, the corn crops were baked away. One by one, the farmers slipped into the office, shamed, filled put their loss statements and applied for loans. On the highway into town, the hands of the fire danger clock pointed to high noon. Forest Service firefighters checked into the U-Rest Motel, arriving in green trucks and jeeps. The town turned out to watch them arrive. People were excited. In the drugstore, they swapped stories about earlier fires. It was suspenseful and important. Heat killed the mosquitoes. It killed the grass on Perry’s lawn. A dog dropped dead on the church steps. Everyone talked about it: the town was built of timber, white pine that had been cut and sawed and planed and notched and moulded, hammered together and lifted up and painted bright. The paint was peeling. The forest crept up to the town and into the parks and on to the lawns and kept going, and if the forest burned, then the town burned, too. There was no distinguishing it.
Perry watched the excited faces through his office window. The twelve-man fire brigade was put on alert.
‘You gotta sign up,’ Wolff insisted. ‘Your ass burns with the rest of us, you know.’
‘Not me, Herb. I’ll watch it from the window.’
‘Harvey joined up.’
‘Harvey’s good for that.’
‘Geez,’ Wolff prodded, ‘you don’t join anything around here. You ought to show a little more citizenship.’
In late July a Forest Service agent stopped at the office. The skin was black and flaky in the hollows of his face. He wore a silver badge. He was solemn. He told Perry they were moving in another crew of firefighters. ‘Doesn’t look good,’ he said. ‘One spark, that’s all it’d take. I’m not kidding.’ He told Perry they worked for the same boss – ‘Good old Uncle Sam, the USDA. We’re going to have to use your office for a headquarters, just till this thing blows over.’
Perry turned over the keys. He left quickly. He celebrated with a beer, drove home and went to bed.
Grace worked hard on the garden, watering the soil, protecting the tomatoes and green beans, fed them fertilizer, cooed to them. And she taught Sunday school.
Harvey prepared in other ways. He cleaned out the bomb shelter, throwing away all the rakes and hunks of hose and old furniture Perry had stored there. He swept the shelter down, hosed it out, repaired the air filter, filled the water tank, put in a new store of sheets and blankets and pillows.
That July was hot. There was small-town suspense.
Perry stayed away from the bomb shelter. He didn’t say so to Harvey, but he thought the place dark and depressing and buried away.
‘The old man wasn’t so crazy after all,’ Harvey kept saying.
‘Right,’ Perry said.
‘You don’t have to be so damn arrogant about it.’
‘I’m not.’
‘He wasn’t dumb or crazy. You don’t have to smirk.’
‘I’m not smirking, Harv. It’s a solid bomb shelter.’
The floor was laid in massive tumulary stones. The air was musty. Tepid air, a mouldering preservation. The past and extended future. A stack of magazines lay in one corner. There were books and games, a typewriter, liquor and candies and soap. Boxes of canned food were stacked to the ceiling. There were cots and flashlights and folding chairs, candles and rope and wire, tools and cigarettes and matches, foul air, electric lights connected to a small generator, string and blankets, paper and silverware and pots and plates and survival gear.
Harvey’s eye shined. ‘We could last it out in here.’
‘What?’
Harvey shrugged.
Gleaming, the streets were white metal.
Thursday, the last day of July.
There were jeeps and trucks and firefighters, the streets were fizzing with people, everyone was waiting.
It was Harvey’s birthday. Grace held the party on the lawn.
When the sun faded, Perry turned on the spotlights and lit battery-powered lanterns in the trees. Then the guests arrived. Harvey received them in front of his bomb shelter. He drank beer from a paper cup. The sky was changing. Headlights flowed up the lane. Lantern shadows, sky shadows. The wind was changing. The party comers moved like electricity through the night, trooped in bearing gifts and loaves of bread, hot dishes, meat loaves. Old people and young people. Bishop Markham brought his wife and children. Reverend Stenberg brought candlesticks. Hot beans, hot corn, fruit salad, biscuits, burgers, ham and chops, baked potatoes, warm salted butter, pies, a birthday party. The ladies of Damascus Lutheran brought plates and tablecloths, their husbands carried ice. The sky was changing. The headlights kept coming up the lane, new voices. High above, in the highest depths, the sky budded new stars and the patterns developed. Herb Wolff brought his father, pushing him in a wheelchair. The forest was full. Jud Harmor came in his pickup and straw hat and talked about the war and garbage. Addie came alone. Grace was busy and happy. There was potato salad and talk about the dry spell. It was a birthday picnic, and the evening was dark and the lanterns played on the trees. Town shadows flowed about his yard. Addie was there. Now and then he saw her passing by a lantern. ‘Geronimo!’ wailed Jud Harmor. Grace was happy. She served people’s plates and cut the birthday cake. She fixed a smile on the festivities and held Perry’s hand and bustled for paper cups. She was breathless and soft. She kissed him. ‘Isn’t it nice? Everyone’s here.’
‘You invited them. You’re the attraction.’
‘It’s so nice. Is Harvey enjoying it?’
‘I think so,’ Perry said. Harvey was sitting on the bomb shelter with Addie.
There were forms and shadows and the sky was changing.
‘Hey, Paul.’
Perry walked to the shelter, head down.
‘Addie says you have a secret.’
Addie giggled. ‘Hop up here, Paul. It’s a fine place to watch the party.’
‘Tell me the great secret,’ Harvey said.
‘There’s no secret. Tell him, Addie.’
Addie giggled and took his arm. The party seemed far away. The townspeople were silhouettes and old shadows.
‘What’s this great and wonderful secret?’ Harvey demanded.
‘Nothing. I swear. Tell him it’s nothing, Addie.’
‘If we told our secret, we would die and go to hell. That’s what happens when people tell their secrets. People must always keep all their secrets secret, if you follow me.’
‘Tell me,’ Harvey said.
Addie giggled. She still held Perry’s arm. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘But first you tell us your secret, Harvey. Tell us how you hurt your eye, all the gory stuff.’
Again the party poised.
‘Nothing,’ Harvey said softly.
‘Tell us all about the eye, Harvey. And tell us how you were a war hero.’
‘Nothing.’
‘Okay, then I’ll just have to tell you the sad facts,’ Addie laughed. ‘You see, Paul and I are running away together. To the badlands of South Dakota.’
Harvey stared at her. He was a bit drunk.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We’re going to Rapid City or Deadwood. I’ll sell Indian carvings and Paul will … I don’t know what Paul will do. Anyway, that’s the secret. We’ve been planning it for ages.’
‘Rapid City,’ Harvey muttered.
‘Isn’t that a fine secret? Now you promised. Tell us about your eye.’
‘Crap.’
‘What? What’s that? Harvey, now you promised.’
‘This is a bunch of crap.’
‘It’s a fine secret,’ Addie teased.
‘I’m going to Africa,’ he said.
Addie shrugged and giggled. ‘Don’t be a silly. It wouldn’t be the same at all. Who’ll buy Indian carvings in Africa?’ She giggled and there was new movement around them, in the air and woods. It stopped. It became quiet and for the first time Perry felt the transformation. The air was soggy.
‘Wouldn’t touch the badlands,’ Harvey muttered.
‘It’s actually quite clean in the badlands,’ said Addie. ‘Isn’t it?’ She touched Perry’s arm.
‘Sterile,’ he said.
‘See? Ha! Paul’s taking me there.’
‘I don’t believe it.’
Addie moaned. ‘Tell him, Paul.’
‘Never.’
‘Oh, you will. Tell him you will.’
‘I won’t. Let’s go back to the party.’
‘You’re both silly,’ Addie said. She turned to Harvey. ‘I swear he promised.’
‘Never.’
‘Betrayed,’ she giggled.
Perry left them. The new forest motion was back. And there was sound. The groups were mingling. Like compounds forming, electrons splitting and taking new orbits, shared spheres. From somewhere, music was coming on to the lawn, the lanterns were swaying. Bishop Markham was lecturing, Jud Harmor was squinting towards the sky. There was a hum in the forest. Perry wondered if old Jud felt it, or heard it.
He watched Grace move through the crowds. It was a fine big party, she was good at it. She listened to people. She wore dresses; it wasn’t often she wasn’t in a dress: in the garden, walking, combing her hair out. She wormed through the crowd and hooked his arm. ‘Hungry?’ He shook his head. ‘You aren’t drunk?’
‘Nope. Don’t always ask that.’
‘A nice party, isn’t it?’ She was whispering.
‘Yeah. You did a nice job.’
‘Be nice then. Talk to people,’ she whispered.
‘Okay.’
‘You aren’t sick?’
‘I’m fine, hon.’ He pulled free and held a paper plate that leaked potato salad. ‘I’m okay, really. How are all your lovely church friends? How’s the Reverend Stenberg?’
‘Stop that. He’s a nice man.’
‘I know it. I’m sorry.’ He glanced over at the bomb shelter. Some luck, he thought. He rambled the yard and listened while people told him about things.
‘A heat storm.’
‘What?’
It was Jud. His hat was pushed back. ‘A heat storm,’ he said. ‘Just a heat storm.’
People began looking up.
‘Rain,’ said Bishop Markham. ‘It’s rain, all right.’ Bishop was GOP, Jud was Democratic-Farmer-Labour.
‘Shit,’ Jud cackled. He shook his head and winked at Perry. ‘Guess I know a heat storm when I see it.’
The first cool air came in one breath, and a dark splotch in the sky spread out, sliding down and out like a vast sheath or covering or mask. ‘Heat storm,’ said old Jud. He pulled his hat down to settle it. People stood with hands on hips to watch. Lars Nielson hustled his family to the car and drove away.
Others began to leave.
‘It’s a heat storm all right,’ said Jud Harmor. There was a single long wind and the lanterns blew horizontal. Jud’s face was turned up. ‘I can see it,’ he said.
The wind died, turned warm, then turned cold, then turned warm again. Headlights were snapping on.
‘Where’s Harvey?’ Grace was beside him. ‘People are leaving, he should be here.’
The wind whipped the tablecloths.
People rushed for their cars. Jud Harmor stood alone, gazing at the sky with hands on hips. The wind was rushing to Lake Superior. Motors and headlights and opalescent beacons were flaring. Perry carried things inside, rushing, returned for armloads of bottles and cups and plastic forks, papers and bottle openers, party trash, wrappings and containers and leftover birthday cake.
‘Where’s Harvey?’ someone hollered.
Perry folded up the chairs and carried them inside, stacked them on the porch. ‘Where the devil is Harvey?’
‘Heat storm, heat storm,’ Jud Harmor chanted. He was now in a lawn chair, his straw hat gone. His bony face was sawed into a million upward-thrust planes. his eyes were pointed to the sky. ‘Lo,’ he chanted, ‘a heat storm. Watch the mother come.’
Perry touched his shoulder. ‘Better be moving on, Jud. She’s coming in fast.’
The old man cackled. ‘Nothin’ but a miserable heat storm. Can’t see what all this fuss is. You won’t see but a heat storm.’ Lightning flashed and the old man’s skull shined like a jewel.
‘Okay, Jud.’
Grace came out wearing a sweater. She was hugging herself. ‘Where’s Harvey?’
The old mayor cackled. ‘Takin’ target practice. You two gotta watch that boy. Ha, ha!’ He started to cough.
Perry went to the shelter. Some rotten luck. Rusty old jealousy. The emotion surprised him. He climbed the bomb shelter and stood on its roof. The wind was hard. Lightning showered in big fluffy puffs, and through the forest, looking out to Route 18, he saw the parade of retreating tail-lights winding towards Sawmill Landing. He called out and listened and heard a soft answer. Some rotten miserable awful luck, he thought.
Inside the concrete shelter, lanterns swung from the ceiling and the old generator was going.
‘Ha! Not so crazy after all!’ Harvey was grinning, rocking in the old man’s discarded rocking chair. He faced a cement wall. Addie lay on a cot. The shelter was strangely warm and livable. ‘Beginning to worry for you,’ Harvey said. ‘I was just telling Addie how worried I was. Thought you got caught in it. Nuclear war, you know. You got to be careful. Got to be careful ’cause that fallout is powerful stuff. Rots your testicles off.’
Addie chuckled.
‘Just a heat storm, Jud says.’
‘Ha! Old Jud doesn’t have to worry about his testicles.’
Grace came in smiling, carrying the birthday cake. She handed out pieces on scallop-edged napkins.
‘An end-of-the-world party,’ Harvey said happily. He was loud. ‘Can’t think of a better place for it, can’t imagine nicer people to end the world with. Too bad the old man’s not here.’
‘It’s quiet outside,’ said Grace.
‘Ah,’ Harvey said. ‘The solemn silence. The silent solemnity.’ He stared at Perry. ‘Sure you want to stay, brother? Don’t remember you giving me much help building this thing. Sure you want to stay?’
Perry shrugged. Grace cut more cake and the lanterns dangled from the ceiling.
‘It’s just a heat storm, Harv.’
‘Ha. Tell that to your testicles. Just ask the buggers. See what they say.’
‘Let’s just all go outside.’
‘And be doomed?’
Gently, Grace bent over Harvey, felt his forehead. ‘You’ve a fever. Are you sick?’ She inspected his face, frowning. The lanterns dangled from the ceiling.
‘He’s just a silly pirate,’ Addie said.
Harvey stood up. He was loud. ‘Right! Absolutely right. Addie, that Addie’s something, isn’t she? When all this blows over and the streets are safe again, then I’m taking Addie to the swamps of New Guinea. I’ve decided.’ He struck a pose that could have meant anything. Addie laughed. ‘Yes, I’ve decided. We’ll begin a new life. Yes. Yes, we’ll plant seed, new seeds, seeds that I’ve prudently set aside for just such catastrophes. I have many seeds. A bull, you know. Yes. Yes, we’ll sail on a blighted sea for a new land, we’ll arrive … arrive, so to speak and so on, arrive on a new and dawning day, again so to speak, and Addie will make Indian carvings, reminders to our hordes of forthcoming descendants, and I … yes, I’ll search the jungles for food and shelter and primitive niceties, and we’ll start afresh.’
‘You’re drunk,’ Grace said.
‘Or perhaps Africa,’ said Addie, who seemed to be enjoying it. ‘You haven’t forgotten Africa?’
‘Don’t egg him on.’
The bomb shelter was very warm, concrete hot, and the lanterns were swinging.
‘Africa,’ Harvey stammered. ‘Ah, yes. Where are we going?’
‘Outside,’ Perry said.
Harvey stared. ‘Think of your testicles, man.’
Addie helped with him. They led him outside.
‘The old man wasn’t so crazy, you know. Not all that bloody crazy. Do we have a beer?’
‘Gallons.’
‘Thank God for that.’
‘Can you walk?’
‘Can I walk? Am I mad? What bloody nonsense. A time of national-emergency and of course I can walk. I can walk, be damned! A beer.’ Harvey threw an arm around Addie’s brown shoulder.
They came out of the bomb shelter.
Mammoth clouds had stiffened over the forest, very high and well to the southwest. Tumbling, flopping like earth under a spade, swirling in, coalescing and darkening and fusing into a single expansive element over the forest.
Harvey sniffed the air. ‘Mustard gas. Jesus of Mercy, who would’ve thought they still had mustard gas?’
The promise was great.
There was certain rhythm.
Jud Harmor still sat in his lawn chair. His eyes were closed.
‘Poor old Jud,’ Harvey muttered. ‘Stuff got to him … We must all now buck up. The end is coming and we shall go with class. A little class never hurt. Buck up, chaps. Let us mourn old Jud, a finer man, parades and all.’
The clouds swirled high, a breathing, soft respiration. Harvey filled a paper cup with beer. ‘A toast to Jud! A finer man we could not find, a finer man …’ Odours rose from the forest tissue, compounds of chlorophyll and wastes. Great cavities opened, steam rose from the leaves, the clouds tumbled high, vapours filled the forest, obscene smells of salamanders and pine. ‘The end is with us,’ chanted Harvey. ‘And the old man was not crazy at all.’ The clouds stiffened and swelled. Old Jud lay in the lawn chair, eyes closed as the clouds rolled towards Lake Superior, huge and threatening but refusing to rain. ‘Let us … let us mourn old Jud,’ Harvey was saying. ‘A free spirit. A false prophet. A free spirit, thank God, free, free at last, old Jud.’
‘Hush,’ Grace whispered. ‘He’s sleeping.’
‘Ha! Aha, you’ll see. You’ll see. The fallout’s got him, sure as hell. Look at him. Let’s examine the old gent’s testicles. Ha, that’ll tell the old tale.’
‘Just relax.’
Perry brought out four chairs. They watched the clouds roll towards the great lake.
Jud suddenly sat up. He started cackling, raised his fist up. ‘What did I say?’
The air was hot.
Energy charged out of the clouds. The sky went, wild. Thunder created a wind of its own.
‘Marvellous,’ Addie breathed.
The clouds moved fast.
‘Heat storm,’ Jud cackled. ‘What did I say?’
The storm tumbled over on itself, and there was no rain. Grace pulled her sweater tight. Addie lay back in her chair. Harvey was shivering. A slice of electricity shot like white ribbon from the clouds. ‘Marvellous,’ Addie murmured. Her eyes were black. The clouds tumbled and flopped, rushing eastwards, the lightning exploding in fluffs, the whole forest stopped. Grace whispered something. Addie’s eyes were black. She was barefoot. Her feet were under her, her legs were dark. The sky crashed. Grace was whispering. He watched Addie. Her cheekbones were high and shining. Asiatic, Indian, primitive, shining, upward looking, and the lightning flashed again, and her hair was long and back over her shoulders without knots or bows or curls. ‘We should be going in,’ Grace was whispering, but the heat storm thrashed in the forest, all around them, and the wind swept in hot, and Addie’s eyes were lighted, and Grace whispered, ‘We should go inside.’ She whispered, ‘I’m cold, hon.’
‘What?’
‘I’m cold.’
He heard her. He curled an arm around her. She could embarrass him.
Slowly the storm rolled overhead, high like a battle far off. It rolled towards the east and left a clean night sky behind it. There was no rain.
Jud Harmor stood up. ‘Show’s over,’ he announced. He’d found his straw hat. ‘I’ll be going.’
Harvey did not get up. His eyes were wide open to the sky.
Perry helped the old man to his truck. Jud climbed in and slammed the door. He leaned his head out. ‘Just a lousy heat storm,’ he said. ‘You gotta watch your brother. I think he’s insane.’
He lay there. The storm was over.
Restless, he got out of bed and went to the window. A light was burning in the bomb shelter. He showered, lay down again. ‘Sleep,’ he said. He tried not to think. Addie. It didn’t matter. Grace was awake. She whispered something.
He got up, went to the bathroom and shaved. Then he dressed. He roamed about, restless, tried to read, sat at the kitchen table. Then he went outside. The crickets were back. The lawn chairs were empty. The bomb shelter light was off and everything was quiet. He followed the path to Pliney’s Pond.
The smell could be awful. All in the mind. He sat on a rock. Addie and Harvey, the names rattled back and forth. The water was deep and quiet. The creature he’d met as a child. Pincers and black eyes attached by cords to the ganglia. A body shaped like a barber’s electric clippers. And the deep-down pond, he remembered. Addie and Harvey. No matter. The place could stink. It was algaed and full of primitive organisms.
No matter, he was older now, he wasn’t a kid, he had a wife and his father’s house. His father had taken him to the pond to learn to swim. His father. Harvey had come, too. That had been another July, and they’d gone the three of them to Pliney’s Pond and his father had said, ‘This is where you’ll learn to swim. No back talk, just jump in.’ Perry remembered undressing slowly. ‘It stinks,’ he’d cried, going in. Mosquito eggs, crayfish, larvae, slime and Junebugs, frogs and newts and snakes and toads and lizards, Indian shit and rot, and Harvey had gone in, too. Harvey had gone to the middle of the pond. ‘No back talk,’ the old man ordered, and Perry waded in, waded in and fell headlong into the stinking water, eyes in terror and sobs choked in sewage. Ash and sewage, he remembered it. Then the creature, its pincers and dangling black eyes, an inch from his face, a quarter-inch, a real monster closing in, and he’d sobbed, sucking in more of the thick water, and the creature came.
The pond did stink. There was no question. Addie and Harvey.
Perry sat on the rock. It didn’t matter. The place was quiet, the forest grew to the edge of the pond, and the pond was quiet. He relaxed. Things could be put in perspective. That was what had to be done. He dipped into the pond and took out a handful of water and let it straight through his fingers. Harvey and Addie, some luck. The water left a black residue. It was late. It was always getting late. He decided it was time for reformation. Begin exercising. Eat less. He would be kind to Grace; she deserved it. He would be kind to Harvey. He would get involved, paint the house, go into the woods, go deep. He heard a loon. It was far off. It wasn’t such a bad night. It was getting cool. Harvey was fine. Addie was fine; she was something else again. The way she walked, heels down. Grace was fine, too. The loon called again and he got up.
Things were always better. He brushed himself off, followed the path to the house. There were no lights. The bomb shelter crouched low in the yard. There were no lights anywhere.
He folded up the lawn chairs, carried them to the porch and stacked them. He was careful to be quiet. He looked up and smiled. The sky was surprisingly light, and there was a moon and many stars.
‘Feel better?’ Grace whispered.
‘Yes. I had a walk.’
The sheets were cool now, and Perry held her.
‘Tired?’
‘Hmmm, I was sleeping. Storm over?’
‘All quiet. Getting nice out there.’
‘Rain.’
‘No. No rain yet. It’ll come.’
She whispered. ‘Your face is burnt.’
‘It’s all right. I feel better. I don’t know what gets into me.’
‘Let’s put some cream on your face.’ She gently touched his nose. Perry took her hand. ‘You are a woman,’ he said. ‘Gee,’ she whispered. She got the cream from the nightstand. They undressed and Perry lay face up on the bed. He closed his eyes. He breathed easy. He felt the lotion on his chest. He did feel better. He breathed slowly. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Putting lotion on you,’ she whispered. ‘Hold still now.’
But he wasn’t thinking. He was tired. Wings clipped by the old man. No bulls here. Rushing from nowhere to nowhere and learning to swim. ‘Just lie still now,’ she whispered. But he wasn’t listening because the thick waters were against his ears. ‘Shhhhhh,’ she whispered, ‘does that feel good now? Lie still, lie still,’ part of the pond, soft as water. He concentrated, finally opening his eyes, and she smiled at him. She reached in the dark for a tissue and wiped him. ‘Such a fountain,’ she whispered.
‘Come here.’
‘Can we have a baby someday?’
‘Come here.’
Soft as water. He tightened his arms, squeezing, and he held her and squeezed, all his energy, squeezed until she said to stop.
ELEMENTS (#ulink_c18ee9bc-2b71-5278-85f1-3df5cb84e423)
They called it a dying town. People were always saying it: Sawmill Landing won’t last another decade. But for all the talk, Perry never saw the death, only the shabby circumstances of the movements around him. It was a melancholia, seeded in the elements, but he had no idea where it started. It might have started with the Ice Age. Four glaciers advancing and receding over the course of a million years, freezing, stinging with crystalline cold, digging out boulders, ice a mile deep, a permanent stillness. Then the Stone Age. Indians. First the Sioux, later the Chippewa. In the basement of the town library there was a museum that housed all the relics: broadheads, pottery, clay pipes, hides and drawings. Then the French, taking what they could. Then the Swedes. The Swedes built houses. Pine planks, dirt floors, hard-rock fireplaces. The Swedes hacked at the forest, broke their backs and ploughs trying to turn the Arrowhead into corn-bearing land.
In 1854, the Chippewa ceded their timber and fish and game for a few hundred square miles of reservation.
In 1856, the Swedes named their hamlet Rabisholm. Fourteen houses, a blacksmith, twenty-six horses, a stable and a store. That same year Minnesota became a state.
In 1857, the Germans came. And a few Dutch and the Finns.
In 1858, an Indian boy was hanged for intention to rape. In 1859, an Indian family was found frozen in the snow, dead of starvation before freezing. In 1860, two full-grown Indian males were shot dead while stealing corn from Ole Borg. In 1862, while the southern Sioux were going crazy with revenge, three Chippewa renegades slipped into Ole Borg’s house and cracked his skull with a hatchet. The renegades were later captured by a cavalry troop dispatched from Fort Snelling. They were hanged until dead.
In 1863, the town celebrated its first Ole Borg Day.
In ten easy years, the Indians were gone, pushed north and west.
Perry learned about the hardships. Hardship was something the old man stressed. He learned that the Swedes broke ploughs on base rock, got robbed on prices, seeded soil meant for spruce and not corn, wore silent hard faces. They were blond. He learned that they left Sweden in famine and, in perfect irony, came to Minnesota just in time for more of the same: locusts and drought, fierce winter and boulders; they left bad soil for worse soil, rock for rock, pine for pine. In some miserable genetic cycle, they did not leave at all and they did not arrive.
The Germans came later. The Germans came late enough to see that their future was not in the land. Instead they opened taverns and a hardware store and an implement shop, taking the Swedes’ money, extending credit, turning the bundle of tiny farms into a hamlet. Within a few years it became a predominantly German village, both in numbers and power, but the Swedes still remained vital to the tight circle of economics, because without them there was no need for German shops. Old World rivalries persisted, and Perry heard the story often: In 1863 a meeting was convened to choose the village’s soldiers for the war against slavery. No one understood the war, but everyone wanted to fight it. They hadn’t heard how many were dying. At the meeting it was decided that only a few could go, and after hours of haggling the number was fixed at fourteen, a quarter of the able-bodied men. The Germans, citing their new predominance, insisted on supplying ten of the fourteen. The Swedes wanted the war party split equally, arguing that they’d been the first to settle the forest, that they had eight more corpses in the cemetery, and that their farming sustained the small community. In short, Perry’s father had explained with relish, in short they were arguing about the right to die. ‘Well,’ the old man said, telling the story, ‘the Germans threatened to foreclose on two mortgages. Herb Wolff’s great-grandfather was one of the bastards. Anyhow, the Swedes told them to go to hell, threatening to take their corn and trade into Two Harbors. So the krauts threatened to close down their shops. And the Swedes threatened to boycott the shops. And the krauts threatened no more credit. On and on. Well, next thing you know there’s a scuffle and somebody knocks over a lamp and the meeting hall catches fire, threatening a forest fire, threatening everything. And that, if you see the point, that was the final threat.’
‘Yes,’ Perry had said.
‘And what’s the point?’
‘A big forest fire. The end of the whole village.’
‘Exactly,’ the old man had crowed, opening his Bible. ‘The end of everything. The end of the world.’ His voice rang like an old bell.
In the end, a single young Swede went to the war and fought with the Minnesota First at Gettysburg. He was buried in the Swedish half of the cemetery, solidifying the Scandinavians’ grasp on the land, another root sunk deep in. For reprisal, the Germans convened a secret meeting and voted to change the name of the place from Rabisholm to New Köln. The Swedes simply ignored the vote, and until 1887 the village had two names and the matter was taken quite for granted.
In 1887, the timber companies moved in.
They built their sawmill on Dunkle Creek and named the place Sawmill Landing.
It became a logging town – a town now and not a village. Simple frame houses went up, each identical to the next with their wide porches and crawl spaces and stone fireplaces and upstairs bedrooms. It became a company town. Using the sawmill as a hub, the timber companies laid the streets like spokes into the forest, seven spokes that radiated into the timberlands, and as the forest was cut and gutted, the spokes were simply extended and the town expanded. Each spoke was given a name: Acorn Street, Larry’s Lane, Moose Street, Apple Street, Broken Axle Road, Sawmill Street and Mainstreet.
For nearly thirty years the logging companies ran the town, and the population climbed over a thousand. A school was built. And a jail and a town hall. The timber companies tarred Mainstreet and cut a highway out to North Shore Drive. An undertaker set up shop. A railroad spur was laid, a depot was built, new wells were dug, a water tower went up. The timber companies built a pulp mill and a planing mill, changed Ole Borg Day to Paul Bunyan Day, and, indirectly through the labours of their wage earners, paid for the construction of Damascus Lutheran Church. ‘That,’ Perry’s father had said with a customary spit at progress, ‘that was the only decent thing.’
The timber companies also brought a second wave of Finns into Sawmill Landing. They were gaunt families, blank-eyed and harsh and disciplined by tundra spirits, wide foreheads and black eyes and strong arms. Among the new Finns was Perry’s own grandfather.
The facts of Pehr Peri’s life were as bare and brittle as the scattered bones of some ancient reptile. All that was known came from the memory of Perry’s father and from a tiny packet of papers buried in the attic. Up to a point the story was typical. Pehr Peri was born in a fishing community north of Helsinki. At sixteen, for reasons unknown, he boarded a boat for America, spent a year of near starvation in Baltimore, worked his way west to St Louis, then boarded another boat that took him up the Mississippi as far as Red Wing.
For the next five years, young Pehr Peri was swallowed in a dark succession of lumber camps and pine forests, gradually moving north with the advancing timber companies, working first as a shanty boy, later as a swarmer hacking branches from felled trees, and finally as a fully-fledged lumberjack. While the specific events of that lustrum were murky, it was probably the story of thousands like him: immigrants homesick for the Old World, hard winters, danger, relentless work, fist fights, mosquitoes and loneliness and barracks yarns, campfires and boredom, northern hardships, frontier trials. Whatever the specifics, Pehr Peri emerged at the age of twenty-two in a camp outside Sawmill Landing – tall and strong, virtually illiterate, speaking a hybrid of Finnish and English and Norwegian, unmarried. And the father of a young son.
Sometime during those dark five years, in circumstances that could only be imagined, the young Pehr Peri had spent enough time out of the cold to sire a son, to see it through birth and to take the child with him. It was never explained. The identity of the mother, as well as the means by which Peri gained custody of the boy, was never told. The only clue – a minor one – was that the child was baptized Pehr Lindstrom Peri, and it was assumed that the mysterious woman, wife or mistress or lover, belonged to one of nearly three hundred Lindstrom families scattered between Red Wing and Sawmill Landing. But it was never known. In customary and callous disregard for reminiscence, Pehr Peri raised the child as though he alone were responsible for its propagation, refusing to talk about the mother, ignoring the very fact of motherhood, an asexual northern temperament that excluded and eventually scorned things female. ‘I didn’t have a mother,’ Perry’s father once explained, ‘because I didn’t need one.’
For more than a year, Pehr Peri continued working the forests outside Sawmill Landing, leaving the child in the daytime care of assorted shanty boys, camp cooks or idlers. Then, in August of 1901, his right arm was crushed in an incident that again went unexplained. In one of the few scraps of paper he left behind, Peri referred to the accident as a ‘thing which happened’, accepting the crushed arm as a timber wolf might accept a broken leg, without bitterness or remorse, burning eyes, a natural thing of the north. Hardship was to be expected. At any rate, Perry’s grandfather was out of a job, saddled with a motherless child, crippled, stranded in a town that offered nothing but hard work. So he became a preacher.
Despite the contradictions and ironies – semi-literate, not a trace of prior religious zeal, barely able to speak English – Pehr Peri became a successful stump preacher, shuttling from camp to camp, travelling by foot with his young son and a secondhand Bible and a store of winter tales, preaching a mixture of folklore and Christianity and Finnish mythology, relying as much on his native Kalevala as on Matthew, Mark, Luke or John. In time he became something of a hero in the outlying camps. He spoke their idiom, shanty talk that blended accents with nationalities and common experience. And he was also a born preacher. A preacher, not a minister. His sermons called for no acts of repentance, offered no hope of salvation, anointed nobody, elected nobody, promised nothing to the choppers and swarmers and barkers, ignored heaven and delineated only hell. His promise was that things would get worse, and his theme was apocalypse: forest fire, death in the snow, a new Ice Age. He was a preacher of the elements, more pagan than Christian, appealing to the only true emotion of his frontier congregations, which was fear. Looking through a few of the old sermons, Perry saw in his grandfather a simple glacial floe and a frozen spirit. The sermons called merely for heroism. Urho, in the Finnish. Practised endurance, silent suffering, fortitude. His symbols were snow and timber wolves, the forest afire, the world ending, the town collapsing. His hero was the bull. The Bull of Karelia, a moose with antlers gone and head down in the dead of winter. Pehr Peri left the lumber camps with the certainty that there was no alternative but to go on, which was what everyone was best at anyway. So, with a reputation anchored in realities, it was a natural course of events that culminated in his assuming the pulpit of a brand-new church called Damascus Lutheran. And even with a congregation of shop owners and farmers and wives, Pehr Peri never relented in his stern predictions of hardship and collapse. The more vivid his prophecies, the more popular he became, drawing audiences from as far down as Two Harbors and as far north as Grand Marais. Never exhorting, he merely laid down hard principles: the strong will not survive forever, but they may survive longer than the weak; things are bad now but in the winter they will be much worse, so take advantage of the present and prepare for the future. Since his ultimate prophecy of doom was always rooted in stories of present suffering, and since there were always ample cases of forest fire, hard winters, drownings or freezings or death, he could never be faulted for poor vision nor accused of promising too much. He saw no hope and offered none. Strokes of good fortune, he reminded the Damascus Lutherans, are forever followed by bad fortune; summer to winter; birth to death; construction to destruction; the elements. He was never wrong. He preached simple heroism. What cannot be escaped must be endured, and if it must be endured it might as well be confronted.
Pehr Peri taught his singular lesson with conviction. And he taught his son, who listened.
So in 1915, when the timber companies left Sawmill Landing, it was seen as something to be endured, a dying town, a minor collapse in a world of collapse, so inevitable that no effort was made to save the place. Rusting machinery, uncut weeds, unpainted buildings, unstopped forest. And in 1919, when Pehr Peri hanged himself from the rafters of Damascus Lutheran, his son was ready to endure, having listened. In a natural succession to the pulpit, Pehr Lindstrom Peri presided at his father’s funeral, buried him in pine in the old cemetery, and the following Sunday preached that Sawmill Landing was a dying town, that there was no sense trying to escape it because the next town may already be dead and the next on the verge of death, that the Ice Age was returning, ice a mile thick, a glacier that would level the forest and fill the lakes, the sun would turn black and the moon red as blood. And as though to demonstrate the flux, Pehr Lindstrom Peri journeyed the next day to Silver Bay, where he changed the family name to Perry and eliminated his middle name, his mother’s name, for he did not need it.
Perry’s first memory of his father was neither striking nor unusual: a holiday, Thanksgiving or Christmas, snow on the ground, his mother only a pleasant shadow beside him as they huddled in the house to wait out a storm, his father nervously watching the snow through the kitchen window. His second memory, unconnected to the first except through later association, was of a long sobbing sound, the snow still blowing, a baby crying and his father wiping bloody hands. His third memory was of great loss. The house was stone cold. His father was holding a child, rocking before the fire, and the sobbing sound ran through the house like the wind.
The three memories might have been separated by years or seconds.
Later, as he recognized Harvey as a brother, he remembered other things: his father preaching the apocalypse, the word throbbing in four full-bodied syllables like the chiming of a bronze bell. The cold house. Harvey and the old man going off somewhere in the woods. The feeling of cold. Harvey playing football. The old man watching with blank eyes. Harvey fighting. The old man dying, ringing with a spoon in his spit bucket. Harvey digging a bomb shelter for the dying old man, pouring cement, stringing electric lights so as to work at night. Gaunt nightlong images, partly a combination of human beings and events, partly the town, partly the place, partly a genetic fix, an alchemy of circumstance. He could not find the start.
Perry carried the rucksack, Harvey plunged ahead. They passed Pliney’s Pond and continued on. Hornwort and water moss grew along the path, in the shallow-cut parts of the forest. It had finally rained and the forest was soggy. Twice the path appeared to end in a tangle, but Harvey would push away the brush and the path was always there. They walked single file. The bushes leaned in from both sides, parting like water and Harvey pointed out the trees and gave their Latin names. He showed where mushrooms grew and explained how they should be eaten and how a man could survive for years in the woods if he knew what was what. The trail was black dirt. It twisted through alternating growths of birch and pine, slim white trunks with maroon leaves. The earth was springy from decay and rot. Harvey seemed very happy. They crossed a meadow, turned on to an old logging road that followed a creek into the thick forest. Perry walked fast. He’d lost nearly five pounds. It was a fresh day. Sometimes he could hear the creek rushing off to the left, bubbling against the rocks, and Harvey kept talking, explaining things, pushing on. He showed where poison ivy and poison oak and maidenhair grew. He was quite expert. The forest grew high and thick, big enough for harvesting, monster trees with gnarled roots that lay like fossils across the path.
Eventually the trail ended, facing dead into the woods.
‘Nice, isn’t it?’ Harvey said.
‘Fine.’
‘This is really it. I told you it was nice. What do you think?’
‘I like it. Spectacular.’
‘I told you.’ Harvey pointed into the brunt of the forest. ‘Out there is the real stuff. That’s the wilderness.’
‘Where do we swim?’
‘Out there,’ Harvey grinned. ‘These trails we’ve been following are white-man made. Loggers mostly. But this is as far as they come, and out there you won’t find anything. This is where the logging stopped.’ He pointed to where the trail widened. ‘See here? The wagons turned around here and went back. This is as far as they ever came. Isn’t it something?’
‘Real history.’
‘Right. No kidding.’ He waded into the brush, motioning for Perry to follow. ‘See this?’ He picked up a rotted piece of leather. ‘Dad showed it to me. It’s an old horse brace. See? You can imagine how it fitted over the horse’s neck. The straps went here and were attached to a go-devil. All kinds of junk is lying around here if you can find it.’
Harvey scrambled about the clearing, picking things up and explaining them. He held up a long pole. ‘See? This thing’s called a peavey. They used it to manipulate the logs. See? The point’s rusted off, but it used to have this sharp point on the end and they’d use it to pry logs.’
‘Where do we swim?’
It was hard going. Perry was sweating. His jeans ripped in the thigh. Harvey plunged ahead. The forest had been cut by glaciers, chunks of silicates and rock ripped up and carried forward by advancing ice, blistered and dried, holes and crevices and long strips of gully bulldozed southward. The good soil was skimmed off, carried south. And when the melting started and the glaciers receded, ice turned to water and the water filled the holes and crevices and strips of gully, becoming lakes and ponds and rivers and tributaries, a circulatory system, the land of ten thousand lakes. Only the tough things grew. Pine, birch, bristled brush, primitive kinds of fish, walleyes and pumpkinseed sunfish, bullheads and crayfish and northerns. Tough mammals, too: wolves and beaver and bear and moose, and the Indians and the Swedes and the Finns, all tough.
The country began to drop. It was a different kind of forest than he was used to. It was thick and blurred and impenetrable, going out and out.
Then he heard the water again. Then he was in it, up to his knees.
He followed Harvey up the creek. It was cold water. On each bank the trees grew like mutants, huge and old, and the water ran faster. He was in it. Harvey was moving fast and Perry lifted his knees high to keep up the pace, sweating, his glasses sliding down his nose. Bugs hovered just over the water. There were dragonflies and bugs Perry did not know.
Gradually the creek widened and flattened out and the water got deep.
Harvey stopped in a shaded part of the creek.
‘A good spot,’ he said. ‘You like it?’
‘It’s fine. Water’s freezing.’
Harvey smiled. ‘Dad showed it to me. You’ll get used to it. You want me to carry the pack awhile?’
‘No. I guess I can handle it. Where the devil are we going?’
‘Just a way farther. The creek empties into a small lake. We used to go there to fish. You’ll like it.’
‘I’ll bet.’
‘Nice, isn’t it?’
‘Spectacular. I hope to hell the creek doesn’t get any deeper.’
‘Maybe you better let me carry the rucksack.’
‘No.’
‘All right,’ Harvey grinned. ‘We’ll take her slow.’ He gazed up the stream. ‘Nice, isn’t it? Even better when you get deeper in, but we’ll go slow this time.’
‘That’s the ticket.’
‘You’ll love it.’
‘I’m freezing. Let’s go.’
Harvey waded up the creek. The water rose to his waist and then stayed even. The stream kept widening. Wishing he’d turned over the pack, Perry worked hard to keep up. He decided to stop smoking. He felt awkward and out of place.
Hooking in a last long sweep, the stream opened into a lake completely surrounded by pine. A beaver dam spanned the mouth of the creek. It was all quiet.
Harvey crawled on to the bank, waited for him, then they walked along the forest edge to a rocky beach. Harvey helped him out of the rucksack, pushed it underwater and weighted it with a rock.
‘What do you think, brother? Didn’t I say it was nice?’
‘It’s fine. It is. Didn’t know there was a lake out here.’
‘Nobody knows. Farther out there are hundreds of them. This one’s not even on the maps. Dad and I named it Lake Peri. With an i, the old way. What do you think?’
‘Spectacular,’ Perry said.
‘Come on. Let’s swim then.’
They swam until midday. The lake water was cold and clean. The sun got hot and the mosquitoes, were back, breeding after the rain. Perry stayed close to shore, but Harvey twice swam to the far side, disappeared into the woods and came back. He drew up the rucksack and popped open two cans of beer.
‘Not so bad, is it?’
‘No. It’s great. Really.’
Harvey nodded. ‘I knew it. You only have to try it, that’s all. You should have come when we were kids. You know?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Dad would have liked it.’
‘I know.’
‘He was always a little … I don’t know, a little sad when you didn’t want to come. I don’t know. You know how he was.’
‘Sure.’
‘Anyhow.’ Harvey smiled.
‘Sure. It is fine. I like it.’
‘I knew you would.’ Harvey went out to swim again and Perry sat with his beer and watched. Later they ate cold meat and apples and had another beer. It was all right. Harvey seemed happy, tall and very lean and strong, and the air was good. Perry enjoyed it. For once, everything aside, he felt some sibling fusion. It was all right. It was a fine day and a fine lake.
They sat together with their beers and looked down on the beaver dam. Perry felt a little sleepy.
‘What do you think of that Addie?’ Harvey finally said. ‘She’s some super wench, isn’t she?’
‘You like her.’
‘Yes. She doesn’t have to say a word.’ Harvey lazily held up his can and the sun glittered off the wet aluminium.
‘I know.’
Harvey closed his eyes. For a while he was quiet, toying with the empty can. The sun was very hot. ‘You didn’t have anything … You and Addie?’
‘No.’ Too bad, he thought. Some rotten luck.
‘I was just asking.’
‘No. She’s pretty young.’
‘I know,’ Harvey said. ‘You can never be sure, though. She likes you. She’s always talking about going off to the badlands with you.’
‘Dumb talk is all. Don’t know where she gets that stuff.’
‘She’s something, all right, isn’t she?’ Harvey said. He seemed relieved. ‘So maybe I’ll take her to Africa with me.’
‘Sure.’
‘Is she truly Indian?’
‘I’ve heard that,’ Perry said. ‘She’s always giving a different story. I guess she could be a quarter or half blood. You can’t get a straight answer out of her.’
‘Some fine half-breed,’ Harvey said.
‘For sure.’
Harvey smiled, his eyes still closed. ‘You’re a good man, brother. Did I ever tell you that? Sometimes I forget we’re brothers, you know? It’s a strange thing.’
‘I know.’
‘We’re a little different, aren’t we?’
‘A little. Not so much as I used to think.’
‘Right,’ Harvey said. ‘Exactly. Anyhow, I just wanted to ask because you can’t ever be sure.’ He stretched in the sun. ‘I wonder if I can get her to go to Africa with me.’
‘Sure, no problem. Flash your funny eye at her.’
‘You’re a good man.’ He got up. ‘Maybe you should come to Africa with us.’
‘Maybe so. We’ll fish for alligators.’
‘Kill Zulus.’
‘Only in good cause. For truth and justice.’
‘Should we swim?’
‘Why not?’
‘Let’s swim in the stream.’
Harvey dived into the deep water behind the beaver dam. Perry waded in, feeling the way with his hands. The water was very cold and hard. The bottom was littered with the slime of the forest. He lay back and floated against the mud dam. Then he turned on to his belly and swam hard upstream, following Harvey, finally rolling on to his back and letting the current carry him back towards the dam. He opened his eyes and had the sensation of great speed, the grotesque pines sweeping overhead, a single blackbird splatting wings high.
The stream carried him down. He heard Harvey call. The sky was a blur and he was moving fast. Suddenly, as though it had been shot into veins by a needle, he felt fear. He fought the stream, righting himself, trying to stand. There was no bottom. The stream twisted him and he lost sense of proportion and distance, and he pushed towards the mud bed but it wasn’t there, and suddenly in a lush blur he was thinking again, coloured images, and he heard Harvey call, and lazily he called back and his lungs were as hot as white fire, filling like a balloon, and he was tumbling and thinking calmly that only a moment before the day had been fine, everything was calm and fine, then he felt arms surrounding him, straightening him, and sunlight flooded and blanched the images, and he was bobbing in the stream. Harvey holding him high, saying, ‘Drop-off, I called out to you.’
Perry blinked, staring into Harvey’s dull dead eye.
‘I called out. It’s a drop-off.’
He felt no terror. Harvey’s arms were strong and buoyed him high and the current raced all around.
‘All right?’ Harvey’s marble eye rolled. A shark eye. ‘You’re all right?’
He felt no terror but he was angry. He pushed away, and Harvey reluctantly released him, hovering close by. ‘You’re okay? Take it easy.’
Fighting back, Perry rolled on to his back. He was sick but he reached back and swam, kicked, thrashed for the bank. He smelled the hard water inside him.
He waded out, sat down, put on his glasses.
‘You all right?’
Perry nodded, not looking up.
‘You hear me call out? I did call out.’
‘I heard you. I’m all right. I would have been okay.’
It was so fast he didn’t remember it. He lay back. Harvey chuckled and shrugged.
‘I can swim,’ Perry insisted. ‘I was all right.’
‘You’re some great fish, all right.’
They rested awhile. Then without talking they dressed and followed the creek to a footbridge, got on to a path that carried them to Pliney’s Pond and from there to the house.
Harvey did not talk about the near-drowning, and Perry pretended it hadn’t happened. He convinced himself it hadn’t. That evening Harvey drove into town to see Addie and Perry stayed up late watching the driveway, and he fell asleep thinking coloured thoughts: Addie, Grace, the beady-eyed creature and the cold water rushing through him.
He stuck to his rigours. He exercised. He ate cottage cheese and eggs. He went to bed early, arose early, worked enough to satisfy his conscience, took care to be kind to Grace.
In September school started and Grace resumed the teacher’s routine: seven a.m. mornings, lipstick and makeup, talk of her new kids, bright talk that showed interest and concern and affection. He drove her in each morning, dropped her off, had coffee, then watched the leaves change through his Mainstreet window. He did not see much of Addie. Most evenings, Harvey would take the car and Perry felt no great desire to ask questions.
He began paying attention to things. He took short walks into the surrounding woods, sometimes alone and sometimes with Grace or Harvey. He looked for colours and connections. It was hard to tell where it started.
Unwinding towards the simple past, he was searching in a vague way for the first elements. Complexity to elementals, a backward tracing. It was not easy. He did not have the old man’s extraordinary sense of the past or future. That had been one of the problems. He preferred warmth to cold, and from one of those early memories he recognized a lingering sense of great warmth loss, as if yanked sleeping from a bed, or as if something warm had been pulled from him. He did not know where it started. It may have started with the elements. He knew them from college, ninety-two chemical elements. He saw them around him, or imagined them. The elements of matter, the red tinge in the soil, the ore country periphery. Chlorophyll in the leaves being beaten away by September, revealing other pigments, autumn coming, and he tucked it away as knowledge to spring on Harvey. And the alchemist’s elements: fire, water, air and earth. And the great anatomical humours, the cardinal humours that flowed like north woods tides: cold blood, phlegm, yellow bile and melancholy sacs of black bile. Black bile struck him as important. He learned of it somewhere. He pricked open capsules of cellulose and inspected the pulp. He opened bulbs of honeysuckle and smelled the grease. Inside himself, he suspected, he would sometimes find a sac of black bile, and he would prick it open and smell it, too, rub his nose in it. He exercised, took the walks, listened to Harvey, kept his eyes open.
In a moment of openness, he told Grace about the sac of black bile he carried around in his belly.
‘You mean pus?’
‘Black bile. It’s hard to explain. It could be responsible for all this.’
‘You’re sweet,’ she said.
‘Thanks.’
‘I won’t tell the relatives.’
‘Thank God.’
‘But I want ice cream. Otherwise I’ll squeal. I’ll tell them all that you’re loony and carry around black bile in your gut. Maybe the black bile causes your pot.’
‘What?’ He stiffened. ‘I’m exercising. I’m looking pretty good. Look here, don’t you think so?’
‘Yes,’ she smiled.
‘Really.’
‘Tarzan. You’ll look like Tarzan someday, just keep it up.’
‘Seriously. Don’t I look skinny?’
‘Black bile,’ she whispered. ‘Pus gut.’
‘Okay for you.’
‘I won’t tell the relatives if you take me in and buy me some ice cream. Is it a deal? Pus gut.’ She kissed him.
‘You’re a sleeper.’
‘That’s another good idea,’ she whispered. ‘Smothered by ol’ pus gut.’
They drove in and ate ice cream in Wolff’s drugstore. It was Friday night. Wolff was doing a good business. The stores were open along Mainstreet and the August shoppers were out.
Grace held his hand and they walked up the street, the streetlamps were on, Grace looked in the windows. She liked clothes. She tried on capes and sweaters in the J. C. Penney store. Perry stood with arms folded and watched the high-school girls.
She showed him a garment. ‘Do you like it?’
‘I guess. What the hell is it?’
‘A smock.’ Her lower lip dropped.
‘I don’t know. Try it on.’
‘If you don’t like it …’
‘I don’t care, try it on. I’ll tell you then.’
It was tight on her. She was heavy in the chest. She stood before the mirrors, turning. The fabric was filled with printed apples. She put it back on the rack.
Outside, squat women stood with baskets on their arms.
Up and down Mainstreet, boys were driving their fathers’ cars, an elbow out the window, radios on, sniffing the Friday night air. The high-school girls roamed the streets in tight frantic bands, heads together. Perry watched them. Their tiny asses and spangled jeans.
The movie was letting out.
Harvey and Addie were crossing the street. They looked good. Harvey was talking and they were together and holding hands and Addie’s black hair bounced on her back. They both walked fast, taking long steps, and they crossed the street and Addie waved. Perry watched them come up.
‘We’re going swimming,’ Addie said. ‘It was an awful movie so now we’re going swimming.’
Grace smiled.
‘What do you think?’
‘You both ought to come,’ Harvey said loudly. ‘I can vouch that Paul is one great swimmer. He can be lifeguard. You both have to come.’
Addie pried Grace’s hand off Perry’s arm. ‘We’ll go out to the lake. I know the perfect spot. It’ll be a perfect night.’
Grace stuck to her smile.
‘We were just in town for ice cream and shopping.’
‘A night swim,’ said Addie.
‘That’s all right.’
‘Okay then,’ she grinned. ‘Poop on you. Too bad for you.’
Perry looked at her sandals.
‘Have a good swim.’
‘Crumb,’ Addie smirked.
On the drive home, Grace sat apart.
‘You didn’t want to go did you?’
‘Doesn’t matter.’
Her lower lip stuck out. ‘You could have gone if you wanted to. I didn’t know.’
He shrugged. ‘Doesn’t matter.’
‘Well, you could have gone.’
‘But not you.’
‘Well.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Well. They were together and everything.’
‘True.’
Grace sat still and he drove the car up the tar road.
‘Addie’s awfully pretty, isn’t she?’
‘Not all that pretty.’ He had to watch the road.
‘You could have gone. I just don’t enjoy that kind of thing, that’s all.’
‘What do you enjoy?’
She was quiet. ‘Are you mad?’
‘No, just forget it.’
‘Black bile? she whispered.
‘I guess that’s it.’
‘Old pus gut.’
‘You put the finger on it.’ He glanced over at her. ‘Forget it. I didn’t want to go.’
‘Really?’
‘Nope.’
He noticed, cleaning a walleye, that the fish’s eyes were attached to the brain by a braided grey cord with hard little knots scattered along its length.
He noticed that Grace bathed and dried her hair and combed it and went to bed with a book and read until he joined her.
He continued his inspections, seeking the bottom of things. He noticed that Harvey sometimes drank beer for breakfast and hid the bottles in the trash.
He noticed that three families had moved away from Sawmill Landing over the past year and that no one had come to replace them.
The insights had to be separated from apparitions. Often he saw the old half-memories, patches of colour, gleamings, and the illusions dissolved on a closer look. Once Grace appeared to resemble his mother, whom he knew only by photographs. But when he examined the pictures and puzzled over the problem, the differences jumped out, the mirrors reflected back and forth over time in a dazzling series of contradictions.
‘The trees will be turning,’ he observed.
‘Look closer,’ Addie said. ‘They are changing.’
‘Not much. In a week you’ll see something.’
‘I already see it. Look close.’
‘Where the devil is Harvey?’
‘He’ll be along. Don’t be silly, stop worrying about it.’
‘I just asked where he was.’
‘He’ll be along soon. Do you see what I was saying about the leaves?’
‘Yes, I see. I saw it before.’
She was tall. He was glad they were lying on the beach. Long brown muscles ran up her thighs. The calves were long and all bone.
The trees above them were elm and sweet maple. Across the lake it was all pine.
‘Are you taking Grace on a vacation this winter?’
‘I guess so. I don’t know. She’s been talking about Iowa. I guess she wants to go down.’
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Tim O’Brien
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: The acclaimed novel from the award-winning author of ‘If I Die in a Combat Zone’, ‘Going After Cacciato’ and ‘In the Lake of the Woods’.The action in ‘Northern Lights’ takes place not in Vietnam but back in the USA, as Tim O’Brien explores the after-effects of that war – on those who served, and those they left behind.Set in the frozen wilderness of north Minnesota, it concerns two brothers, one who served in Vietnam, and has returned tough, cynical and world-weary; and the other who stayed at home. When they take off on a long skiing trip together through the frozen woods, they quickly get lost in a blizzard, and are tested to their limits as they face a battle against the elements and each other.