The Lowering Days
Page 8
It was the type of answer we expected from our uncle: a bit profound and a bit baffling. Reggie lived in a small house stacked floor to ceiling with books and was a constant source of warmth, obscure knowledge, delightful bursts of profanity, and at times disturbing peculiarity. After his parents died, he had flirted with law school, then attended divinity school for a year, developing a fascination with eschatology that ultimately led him to drop out, start farming apples, and embark on a long and semi-dignified career in eccentricity.
While my uncle wasn’t some doomsday prophet wildly predicting the end times, the ending of things did fascinate him. He didn’t believe the end of a life could be as simple and cruel as Christianity claimed, where one’s final experience in the physical world was one of judgment—death, followed by an odd, divine verdict: heaven for you, hell for you. Instead he was convinced every ending was followed by some kind of reunion with the divine, whether that was a simple return to the earth or a wild celestial journey to some other plane of existence ruled by a grand, theistic being we’d yet to prove existed. In his eyes the end of the world, or the end of living, as we understood it, was not a terrifying premise at all but the first tilt toward reunion.
This isn’t to say his eccentricities didn’t become problematic at times. He once shot out an unplugged television with a Winchester deer rifle because he was afraid the droning voices of advertising had found a way to transmit their signal even when the machine was powered down. And after his parents’ death, he became increasingly obsessed with the doomsday clock created by the Atomic Scientists of Chicago after World War II. The clock tracked the level of continuous danger humans were creating for themselves with their preposterously large, inventive, violent, and misguided brains by monitoring the world’s proximity to midnight, a metaphorical number-time representing the tipping point of global catastrophe from which the species would not be able to return.
He became known in town for randomly giving those around him periodic updates on how close the world was to its end. I remember a year in the 1980s when I was just a child, and my uncle was red-eyed and jittery from too little sleep and too much gin. The Cold War was devouring the news cycle. Both the United States and Russia were stockpiling nuclear warheads. Reggie showed up unannounced on a Saturday in June, started a bonfire in our backyard without asking, and burned a truckload of garbage and apple waste. Then he sat down in our living room in a great, grandstanding whirl of trash-fire reek and announced that the world was “three minutes from midnight, according to the Atomic Scientists, and we best get our goddamned affairs in order.” I was only seven years old or so, and while I was scared, I was secretly grateful. If the world was ending, I believed I deserved a warning. Knowing the potential of death was present, that summer I set about memorizing every moment I could. I sat against the garden shed facing the woods, the hot cedar shingles rough against my back. The air smelled of river earth and sawdust. When I pushed my hands into the ground, the spongy carpet of moss sank just enough that my fingernails disappeared. Purple lilacs rose around the shed, hiding me from view, and it was here I sat reading books and imagining prehistory and the mammoths and giant beavers that once walked the land. The air filled with moisture as the tide moved in, and turned dry with heat as the sea went back out. I fell asleep and woke with the sun warming my feet and fell asleep again. I heard my father’s table saw buzzing and my mother’s heart singing. My brothers playing with a cap gun in the yard. They were all with me, and under the lilacs I closed my eyes tightly and knew I would never need anything else. And I never really have. My parents felt differently. They forbade Reggie from coming over until he got help. It remained the only time in my life that our door was ever closed to my uncle. A year later Reggie had gotten sober. He sold his apple farm and bought a hotel and attached bar downtown, near the newspaper office and our father’s boatyard. It was time to come in from the woods, he said, and be a little less alone.
That summer I spent as much time as possible at the hotel or the boatyard or the newspaper. I knew that at any of these locations, my mother would never be far from sight. The truth was, she was falling away from us, disappearing down into the story.
When she said “I’m going in to town,” we knew she meant she was going to visit the paper, and no one was to follow. Even when we were welcome, after school or during holiday breaks, we existed at the paper in a probationary limbo. The shelves of old books and ancient linotypes and tarnished printing equipment, the weight of dust and paper, the squares of hot orange light falling through the antique windows—all of them joined together to remind us we were intruders. She had never been a gentle woman, but here she was barely our mother at all. Once I picked up a water glass and crushed it in my fist to see if she’d react, and she sat right at her desk with her glasses slipping down her nose and went on editing a story as the blood oozed up between my fingers. At times like this, when some story came along and displaced the rest of the world, I believed it was up to us to sustain her.
As the rumors spread and our mother’s obsession grew, the land around the fire, somewhat stunningly, began to come to life. Willow shoots broke the charred earth around the mill. Fireweed shot up thick and flaming purple. Small families of hickory trees sprouted. Lupine emerged along ashy paths for forklifts and delivery trucks. Other plants came, too, rising into the summer. What had for more than a hundred years been a lifeless gray industrial landscape turned verdant. As people chased the arsonist and her father, looking for answers, for justice, the plants and trees ignored the noise and simply grew. Locals began to notice, then the news people as well. After that people began coming from all over the state. “We needed to see it,” visitors said of the mill site. “There’s something happening here,” a couple who came all the way from New Brunswick told my mother during an interview. “Don’t look away,” they said. “This is a work of life. Whoever did this had a plan.”
These people used the word pilgrimage, not knowing what else to call their journeys. “We just felt called.” Over and over a similar refrain was repeated in the diners, convenience stores, gas stations, coffee shops, hair salons, barbershops, beaches, river parks, and flea markets around Eastport as people came to see the land after the fire.
My mother had pointed out how rare the act really was. “White men blow things up,” she said. “Native American women don’t.” And she was right. If a Penobscot kid was going to perform an act that perhaps went against everything she’d ever been taught, there would have to be more to the story. Link and I sat at the newspaper office on a hot day in late June, reading more about willow trees, trees that just happened to clean and remove dioxin, heavy metals, and other toxins from the earth in which they grew.
“Imagine a tree doing that,” I said to Link. “Healing the ground around it.”
Link was about to respond when Cal Hayes walked in, carrying a deer skull under his arm. The sun had bleached the skull mostly white, but a few bloody strings of white fat and red gristle still clung to the jawbone.
“Those two have done it again, Falon,” Cal yelled on his way across the office. As Cal walked by, he turned the deer skull so it watched us the whole time. He was the smallest man we knew, so short in fact that from a distance it was easy to mistake him for a child.
Our mother had been working all morning on a story about pollution killing bald eagles along the river. “This game bores me, Cal,” she said, sighing. “I have better things to worry about than a deer skull. You could have at least cleaned the thing. It smells awful.”
“I was thinking you’d get mad if I did. Now you’re mad I didn’t.”
“Mad?”
“Pictures. I figured bloody pictures sell more papers. So I didn’t want to mess with it too much. If you’ve got a red marker, we could gore it up even more.”
Cal was joking, of course, but now our mother was actually mad. “That yellow-journalism garbage isn’t what I do.”
“I didn’t mean anything, Falon.”
“Where was it?” I asked.
“They found it along the river. Below Snub Point.”
Link went over to a desk in the corner of the room where USGS maps of the bay and the lower section of the river were spread out among a scattering of tacks, string, and sticky notes. The maps were marked and annotated with supposed sightings and call-ins.
“That’s fifteen miles up the river,” I said.
“Calls about sightings aren’t coming in from there anymore,” our mother said.
“You think they’re working their way downriver to the bay, don’t you?” Link said.
Our mother suddenly seemed far away and distracted. “I’m busy,” she snapped. “On a deadline. Go do something. Go be kids.” Then she disappeared into her office and closed the door, leaving Link and me alone with the maps and the musty smell of the deer skull.
Link left, but I stayed at the newspaper office for another hour, staring at the maps until the world around me had dissolved into visions of the river. According to the Penobscot people, years ago a giant frog monster descended on the river’s headwaters and selfishly gathered up all the water for himself. Dark, starving times gripped the land. People began to die in great numbers. The world became all shadow. The great Penobscot hero Gluskabe saw his people dying out and felled a tree on Akəlópemo, the frog monster, killing him. Then Gluskabe watched in awe as the crown and branches of the fallen tree slowly morphed into water, becoming the main stem of the river and its many streams and tributaries. Driven by thirst, some of the people jumped into the water, becoming fish, turtles, frogs, other sea creatures, and ensuring that the Penobscots would forever be related to the river and its animals.
Thousands of years later, white people began building dams across the Penobscot to generate power, again choking off the waters. Then something unprecedented in US history happened: the Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act returned three hundred thousand acres of land to the tribes, awarded them $81.5 million for development, and extended federal recognition, moving the tribes out from under state agencies and closer to actual self-governance, though, many argued, not nearly close enough, as the state continued to try to govern the tribes like municipalities, instead of recognizing them as sovereign entities. It returned the ancestral waters and islands of the Penobscot, and acknowledged the tribe’s right to fish and hunt their lands as they saw fit. Small, bitter victories, but victories still.
Now these two were moving through the land, hunting and fishing when and where they wanted. No one here ever had enough, so the French hated the Irish and the Irish hated the English and the English hated the Penobscot, and everyone hated anyone they thought got better breaks. My mother argued that the man and the girl shouldn’t be considered poachers. As much as a person could claim ownership of earth, the river and the lands around it were theirs. Some agreed, seeing two people of a sovereign nation entitled to subsistence hunting and fishing rights throughout their ancestral grounds. Others saw two fugitives exploiting a loophole.
I sat with both opinions for a long time and let my mind go back through the history. Don’t be mistaken: the goal was always destruction of a whole people. In 1755 Spencer Phips, then lieutenant governor of the province of Massachusetts Bay, issued a proclamation declaring the Penobscot people enemies of the crown. Phips called on all “his Majesty’s Subjects of this Province to Embrace all opportunities of pursuing, captivating, killing, and Destroying all and every of the aforesaid Indians.” That goal was quietly alive still in the minds of far too many here, I worried.
You drive through these small towns now and see gas stations and schools and idyllic waterfronts and nicely lit art galleries and stately libraries. Most people never know the truth, our true history: for instance, how there was once a small scalp station on the Sheepscot River near Wiscasset where British merchants paid colonists forty pounds for the scalp of a Penobscot man, twenty-five pounds for the scalp of a Penobscot woman, and twenty pounds for the scalp of any Penobscot child under the age of twelve years old. This was at a time when the average settler made less than a hundred pounds a year. And so the choice gradually set in: watch your children starve to death or rip away, maim, mutilate, and kill the babes of others.
Moses Jupiter was waiting in our yard with a horse when my mother and I got home. A tall gray-dappled mare. From the car, my mother and I watched in puzzlement. We were not horse people.
Moses had unloaded the horse from a trailer and was walking around alongside the animal. He led the horse into a trot, slowed, and made four big loops around the property. “Getting her ready for you all,” he called back to us.
The animal paused along the woods and nosed into a stand of witch-hazel trees to eat the berries, apparently taking a liking to their ancient, restorative qualities, and I grew a little fonder of the beast for her good taste in flora. Behind us, down the road back in the woods, my father’s saws buzzed and sang. Simon’s car was not in the yard, and Link wasn’t home either.
Moses brought the horse back into the dusty drive and produced a carrot from his pocket. “Think she’s getting there. I’ve been here for hours, letting her acclimate.”
My mother ignored Moses and started unloading groceries and boxes of files she’d brought home.
“You’ve just been hanging out in our yard?” I asked.
Moses shrugged. “No one came to greet me, and no one came to tell me to leave.”
Somehow I knew my father was aware of the scene playing out up at the house. “That’s pretty weird.”
Moses shrugged again. “Her name’s Cricket because she’s faster than the wind and quiet as a bug.” He turned to me with the carrot. “Hardly ever speaks.”
“Please tell me this isn’t actually happening.” My mother was scowling over the roof of the car. “That you didn’t actually bring us a horse.”
Moses stopped and collected himself. I could see him carefully working his way through his vocabulary, looking for another way to frame things. “I never was big on lying,” he finally said. “You want this carrot or not?”
“Just don’t.” My mother took the vegetable and threw it across the yard into the trees. The horse didn’t move from our side. “Where’s Arnoux?”
“Not here,” Moses said.
I pictured my father peeking out the northwest window of the shop, glimpsing Moses’s truck banging down the road, towing a horse trailer. He would have grinned and gone back to whatever he was working on. He wouldn’t have been foolish enough to immediately come out of the shop when he heard my mother’s car, either. It was one thing to pull in to see a horse in our yard. Another thing to pull in to see him standing beside a horse in the yard.
“That horse is a girl?” my mother asked.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Thank Christ. I’ll keep her then. This place is overrun with dicks and idiots.”
“Wait,” I said. “You’re serious?”
“Don’t worry. I’ve got more carrots.” I was amazed Moses could toy around like this and get away with it, but my mother had long been fond of him. “Wə̀lamto áhahso,” Moses said. “She’s a good horse, Falon. Pάlskʷawo. Proud. Just the right amount of rascally, too. She’ll eat all your tomatoes, but she’ll shit off to the side of the doorstep instead of right in front of it. She’s an Indian horse, though. If she doesn’t do something you ask, don’t get mad at her. It’s just the language barrier.”
“Why are you getting rid of her?” I asked.
“I didn’t say she was my good horse. Belongs to a friend who can’t afford to keep her.”
I tried to remember if any of the reports called in to the newspaper about sightings had mentioned a horse. “Where’s this friend now?” I asked.
“Look at the little journalist,” Moses said. “He’s taking after you, Falon.” His gaze slid through the tall green hemlocks standing in the yard. He raised his hand and fanned his fingers in the air. “Hard telling. In the trees, in the wind, here and there, I suppose.”
The sun had come west around behind the largest of the trees, a hundred-and-twenty-footer which towered over our house. I reached out, and Cricket nuzzled my palm. In the light my hand was green and the horse was green and her neck was warm with thumping blood. I felt the line between many worlds, animal and human, natural and man-made, collapsing. Her blood thumped louder, harder, under my hand, and mine beat back as well. She was full of unseen rivers. She was majestic.