The loft was designed in a horseshoe around the small upstairs. The north side was furnished with a Japanese platform bed my mother had built from harvested white pine one summer when she was a teenager. There was a dresser and a vanity that had belonged to my grandmother, and two expandable mahogany steamer trunks filled with winter gear and wool blankets. The south side opened into a windowed alcove that looked through the conifers down across the lake. It was furnished simply with a small roll-top writing desk. A few candles were set about in jars. Two twin mattresses were built into the walls on board platforms that could be pulled down and folded back up. A narrow catwalk connected the two ends of the loft.
I was in the loft looking at the books when Roman found me. “That’s a good one,” he said.
I hadn’t been paying much attention. My finger was resting on A Fable by William Faulkner.
“Only time in history people decided to put down their guns and stop fighting a war. Too bad it’s fiction.”
“I don’t get it. What’s so bad about saying you won’t do something awful?”
“You’re as simple as a child, but the thing is you aren’t a child anymore.”
I was hurt but had no way of proving otherwise.
“Everyone wanted to leave. Only some of us had the guts to do it and shame our all-American mothers and fathers. I’ve been called scum, nigger, coward, cockroach, turncoat, traitor, and combinations of profanity I won’t get into. But you gotta break a cycle somehow, even if doing it kills you.”
Roman was studying the selection of books as well. “Try this one sometime.” He pointed to The Destruction of Black Civilization by Chancellor Williams. “And this.” And then to The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James.
“What are they about?”
“Being a fucked-up human being.”
Silence filled the hot air between us. The old dusty walls seemed to draw nearer, as if we were standing inside some ancient wooden lung. I pulled both books off the shelf and cradled them in my hands, turning them over, studying their weight, their look, taking in their smell and feel.
“Your uncle’s a weird dude,” Roman finally said.
“Yeah, I guess he is.”
“It was stupid calling him out earlier. I got it in my head that Canada was safer. But getting somewhere safer doesn’t mean getting dumb once you’re there.”
“Are there safe places?”
Roman shrugged. “Some people always live underneath a bootheel. But sometimes the heel lifts up just enough that you can’t see it for a bit.”
I found my thoughts drifting back down the bay, to Lyman Creel, to the girl he had assaulted on the river, and to the assault Link and I had carried out on him, proving ourselves no better or worse.
“I’m tired,” Roman said, “and it’s foolish hot up here. Think I’ll sleep in that rowboat down on the water.”
“I’ll read them,” I said as Roman walked away. “The books.”
He nodded slightly without turning. “That’d be a start.”
We lived alongside Roman Fitch for four days, until the foundation had been dug and set, the camp moved, and the walls entirely reshingled. When we shook hands down at the shore before climbing back into the rowboat to leave, Roman said he didn’t plan to stay too long. Probably just through the fall. He’d do what he could around the property to leave it better than he’d found it.
Our last night together, our muscles screaming from an entire day hammering shingles in place, we set out into town, a collection of rutted logging roads, bait shacks, a scandalous-looking roadhouse, and a small diner where the cooks and waitress switched between speaking French and English, depending on which choice would yield either the largest tip or the least trouble, as the area was as notorious for bumbling and entitled tourists as it was for loggers who liked to drink, fight, and grab.
Roman wanted to go to the roadhouse, a low-slung, concrete building. Old cigarette smoke bled from the walls. The floor was perpetually damp and sticky with beer and haphazard mopping jobs. We’d gotten inside and up to the bar itself, several long sheets of plywood butted together and propped on sawhorses, before the bartender spotted me, shook his head, and pointed at the door.
“Not happening, Reggie.” The man’s soft, reedy voice carried the slightest southern accent. He was wearing a leather apron and had a long silver ponytail, tied back with a piece of leather cord.
“Really, Tripp?” said Reggie. “You’re picking now of all times to finally turn adolescent business away?”
“Gotta make a stand sometime.” The proprietor, Tripp, disappeared into a room behind the bar. When he came back, he was holding a plate of fried haddock sandwiches. He tossed the plate down on a folding card table set up in the corner of the room. He poured two glasses of beer and then, of all things, a glass of milk. He looked from me to Reggie, and then to Roman. “This doesn’t mean I like any of you. Anyone else comes in here and decides they want to stab or shoot you, which has been known to happen, it’s not my problem.”
A long and pleasant silence filled the bar. The fish was grilled to perfection and slathered with lemon-dill mayo. I realized that Tripp, like most people my uncle knew, was far less the outlaw than he tried to seem, and a certain heaviness sank on me at the sheer spectacle of having to watch all the men I’d ever known challenge, groom, uphold, and coddle each other’s masculinity. We finished our sandwiches and, not knowing what else to do, rose to leave. As we were heading out the door, Tripp said, “Hey, you. Reggie’s friend.”
Roman’s shift was slight but unmistakable. His body began to lengthen and bristle, while his head sank and his eyes swept sideways, as if trying to go small and slide from the scene. An instant later Roman’s shoulders were back and his head up again.
“Fuck Vietnam,” Tripp said. “It was a useless war.” Then he went back to poorly mopping the roadhouse floor.
Eleven
Summer burned on. Adam and Molly mostly lived off what they grew. They fished and hunted when they could, rotating both where they went and the routes they used to come back to the house. It was impossibly hot. Out harvesting beans and turnips and carrots, they stood dripping sweat. Adam noticed that his daughter never seemed to tire, never seemed to drink, never stopped to curse the sun or rest in the shade. He kept working, kept fretting over the dropping level of the pond as the heat rose into early July. Molly could see it too.
“The more water we take, the more fish are going to die,” he said. “Eventually there won’t be enough oxygen left in the water.”
“We’ll eat the ones that die,” she said.
“Who die,” her father corrected. “That’s not the point. We’re trying to do as little harm as possible.”
But they were surviving. They were okay. Adam had become convinced this was a test. Not a test of one’s spiritual faith laid out by a potentially sadistic creator, but of the self’s ability to endure. Fall would come, and then winter. The world would become static, frozen. Then it would become passable again, and they would have to leave this place. Molly needed to be in school. He needed to be working. No one should have to live in the collapsing ruin of a dead English sea captain’s house, taking game on the sly and battling a shade-flooded garden to survive. It seemed reasonable to head north, over the Canadian border and into Micmac territory, where the ways and land were not theirs but not so different, and where US laws couldn’t follow them. They would start small. A rented room. A garage apartment. A bottom-rung carpentry job. He didn’t want to leave Penobscot territory, and Molly of course would hate him for it, but he knew that the next white face that caught his daughter pulling fish from the river might kill her. What father could take such a risk?
Some mornings, wild turkeys wandered out of the woods. Once, as the drought deepened, a starved and confused black bear came down from the hills. The bear was standing in the clearing on a rise in the meadow. Ragged patches of hair covered its body, and when the bear walked, it stumbled and sat down
in a heap and then slowly rose again. Mosquitoes swarmed the bear, and it did not seem to have the energy to flee or to drive them away. As the bear lifted its massive arm to swat at the mosquitoes, patches of cloud burst into view behind the creature. Molly thought it strange to see a bear, powerless and painted against the sky, cupped by clouds.
“What’s wrong with it?” she said.
“It’s dying,” Adam said.
“Why?”
“Mange. Stay with it. Don’t go anywhere.”
Adam went back inside the house. When he returned, he was carrying a rifle Moses had given them.
“Really, Dad?” she said.
Adam handed her the gun. “It’s what has to happen. It’s dying, suffering. We need meat.”
Molly held the gun out away from her body. It was polished and oiled and immaculately cared for. It was the most valuable thing they owned. The bear was lolling its head about, trying to escape the mosquitoes. It turned toward the woods and then tumbled down on its haunches and sat. When it tried to roar, nothing came out. Get up, Molly thought. Please. “It has its back to us,” she said.
“Bear meat is bear meat.”
“I’m not sure I can hit him.” She had shot plenty before, but never at something living.
“You can hit him. Take a deep breath and hold it. Blink once and bring the trigger back slowly. Think of it as pressing the trigger back, not pulling it back. Steady motion. No exhaling, no jerking.”
Following those directions, pressing back against the slender curl of steel, Molly fired, hit, and killed her first bear. The shot had taken the animal squarely through the heart. She felt both happy and sick at once. Her father did not try to touch her or speak to her afterward, and she was grateful.
They said a small prayer for the bear, thanking it. Then they spent several days with the animal, letting the innards and flaying the pelt back, running the knife between fur and fat and sinew. They would waste none of its gifts. The bear’s fur would warm them. The bear’s flesh would fill them. The bear’s fat, rendered into grease, would protect their skin and ease their bodies and lubricate their tools. Molly still found herself trying to figure out if theirs was a good life or not.
One rainy morning, as the leaves were beginning to change, a police cruiser appeared at the end of the driveway. It materialized from the trees as unexpectedly as the bear had weeks before. It nosed up the overgrown drive and then stopped after a few feet. Molly was in the woods, alone, foraging for mushrooms, and she watched in horror. Her father was inside the house. Squinting through the heavy rain, she was convinced she could see him up in the attic through the gable vent. She had the rifle with her in case she saw a partridge or pheasant or turkey, and now she lifted it to her shoulder. Sighted the driver’s-side door of the car, waited in complete terror for the car to keep coming down the drive. The clouds had darkened. Overhead the trees filled with a violent gust of wind. Starlings broke in waves between the yard trees. In the distance she thought she heard the thunder. Molly urged the world to stay quiet, the wind to hide, the birds to shut up—anything to keep from drawing the attention of the car. She knew she couldn’t shoot a person, but she knew she couldn’t let a person come take her father away either. So she crouched on one knee among the hemlocks with her arms aching from the weight of the rifle and silently whispered help over and over and over again for what felt like hours. She was crying as the cruiser backed down the drive and disappeared. Terror knocked through her body, and she was unable to move. The car was about to circle back. She was convinced this was some sort of trap. Then she felt her father’s hand on her shoulder from behind and heard him saying, “It’s okay, Molly. It’s going to be okay. Give me the gun.” Her hands were white from holding the gun so tightly, and her finger was resting on the trigger. She let her father lift the rifle from her hands and set it against a tree. Then he gathered her into his chest, and she hugged him as hard as she ever had, sobbing and repeating, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
The leaves on the trees began to curl and lift from their nodes. More fell each day, shaken loose by the wind or by small sudden waves of rain. A blanket of crimson and gold and orange replaced the lush green meadow grass. They went days without speaking. Then one afternoon in early November, just as the air was turning thin and brittle with the promise of snow, Molly woke to the sound of a hacksaw biting through wood.
Outside, rain still fizzled in the pines. Turning in bed, Molly watched the drops slip down the spines of the needles. They seemed to hang for a moment, frozen, filling with light, and then, with a gentle shake of wind, leap into the air. She had planned to explore the woods today, to see what this forest felt like as fall took over. But as she got up, swinging her feet down from the bed, she heard her father calling her name—his voice low and urgent, rising like a net from the steady sawing.
Molly went down the stairs and followed the noise into the backhouse. Adam looked up from his sawing, and she took in the room. Her father had pulled up the wide plank flooring. Golden boards were stacked all about him. The backhouse was built on concrete blocks. A foot below the exposed floor joists, Molly could see the packed dirt earth now. Adam had drawn an eight-by-eight-foot square by marking each joist with a pencil. Now he was sawing through the marked joists, effectively cutting a square out of the bottom of the house.
“It’ll collapse,” Molly said groggily.
“Not if I do it right, it won’t.”
“If you say so. What is it?”
“It’s a cellar hole.”
“For what?”
“Think about it, Molly. Use your head.”
The ground was freezing against her bare feet. Her eyes were full of sleep still, and she had to pee.
“It’s for us.” Molly noted the shovel and the spade in the corner of the room. “We’re going to dig.”
“How deep?”
She thought about it. The big house provided shelter. But the big house was cavernous and drafty, and they couldn’t risk a fire during the day. The backhouse was small, almost a shed, really, shielded from the elements by the big house, and it was sealed and insulated. The windows were intact. The roof was solid. “Deep enough to get below the frost line,” she said.
Her father set the hacksaw down across two joists and stood. “Go on.”
“If we can get below the frost line, we can get free heat. The earth produces heat, and the soil sucks it up during the year. The snows seal it in.”
“Exactly.” Adam was proud of his daughter for making the connection, for following the science. “Soil temperatures change daily at the surface,” he explained. “But the deeper into the earth we dig, the more the temperature lags behind time.”
“How much behind time?”
“Every five feet we dig saves us three months. Today is November fifth. The temperature at the surface is forty-seven degrees. The temperature five feet underground, however, is the same as the surface temperature was on August fifth.”
“So if we dig deep enough, we can basically live in summer in the middle of winter.”
“We’ll have to combat heat loss somehow, but that’s the idea. It’s a place for sleeping, not living, not unless it gets real bad.”
They spent the remainder of the week digging the pit, for that’s really what it was, an eight-by-eight-foot hole extending ten feet into the earth. It was the hardest thing either of them had ever done with their bodies. They dumped the wheelbarrow loads of dirt in the woods. In spring, Molly said, they had to fill the earth back in, run new joists, and replank the floor. “Any harm we do to the house has to be righted,” she said. Adam agreed. They used extra lumber in the barn to build a frame down in the cellar hole, and locked the structure by nailing horizontal boards across the studs. The frame prevented the hole from collapsing, but it was impossible not to look down at their creation from above and think of a cage.
“We’re not animals,” Molly said.
“We’re no better than them either,” s
aid Adam.
They hung a ladder on one wall, and laid the bearskin out on the floor for insulation. They found several padded furniture covers and sewed them to the back of a blue tarp. Then they rigged up the insulated tarp so it could be pulled overhead to make a roof. Home, Molly thought, gazing down into the sleeping hole. It never looked like what you imagined. She remembered the pink ranch house she now missed more than ever. She’d watched it bend into sight each day she walked home up the hill. She wished she’d thanked it for being there.
As the daylight hours shortened and the warmth waned, Molly watched the finches flit around against the cold. She loved the little birds who made the whole world grow. They had developed beaks to fit certain seeds, carried life impossible distances, filled the most barren mountains with trees. Miracles in plain sight, her father had called them all her life. She wondered which birds would stay, toughing it out with them, and which ones would go south in search of easier food.
Each day the plants seemed to droop a bit more. Molly methodically cut and collected as many stems and leaves and seeds as she could. Everywhere medicinal herb bundles hung about the old house. Finally a full heavy frost crystallized the earth. It was hard for Molly not to mourn the plants. Her father gathered up the dead stalks and stems. They would use them to further insulate the backhouse. They sawed the planks from the backhouse floor into three-foot sections. Then, to protect themselves from sight, they nailed the planks across the house’s windows. On sunny days they removed the planks from the southern windows, and hot vanes of light fell through the house. They stood in the light for as long as they safely could. Molly thought of the bear and how when her shot felled it, the sun behind it came into view, and she felt the light that had filled the creature fill her.
The Lowering Days Page 14