My stubborn father never did start taking his keys with him into the woods, but he did begin unhooking the battery, and though that was an easy enough deterrent to get around, my uncle understood and left things alone after that. “She thinks I won’t be here that long,” my father said to Reggie one night. It was fall, and we were making stone soup as a family around an outdoor fire. I’m sure it was a conversation I was not intended to hear, but I was a child who never wanted to miss a thing, who was always quietly lurking at the edges of adult conversations. “Who knows, maybe she’s right and maybe she’s not. But why make life harder for one person so two people can get a laugh?” Reggie nodded and lit a cigarette. Wrapped my father in a great, endless hug.
Coming through town, I saw that the new truck was still parked beside Tripp’s, covered now with snow. The driver’s window was still cracked. There was a little steam-melted patch on the window where the dog had pressed out his nose and breathed while straining to look through the growing skin of snow. The clock on my dash was busted, but it must have been after nine. I did the math and almost put my vehicle into a skid swinging back around.
Inside two women were sitting in the back, eating pie. A man sat at the counter with a beer and a coffee. All locals. The dog’s owner was nowhere in sight. Tripp was perched behind the counter on his elbows, reading a National Geographic. “David,” he said. “You look cold.”
“Grill still on?”
“It is.”
“I’ll take ten cheeseburgers.”
“Ten cheeseburgers.” Tripp closed his magazine.
“Yes.”
“You realize if the doctor dies of a heart attack, it creates quite a calamity for the community.”
“Good thing I’m not your doctor. Just a paying tourist.”
“All factual statements.”
“So I’ll take ten cheeseburgers.”
For a moment I thought Tripp was going to argue with me. Charlie Parker and Count Basie were playing from the juke. I could picture sweaty couples spinning and swinging through the air. I watched Tripp’s eyes drift over my shoulder to the frosted window. The truck sat quietly under a white robe of snow now.
“God knows where that asshole is,” he said. “Yvette took water out a couple hours ago. We added it to the front seat. I’m reading an article here about coyote populations in Wyoming and the caldera in Yellowstone National Park. They say it poses one of the greatest threats to the human species. Someday its fire will supposedly reawaken and devour most of North America. It’s cheery stuff. You’d absolutely love it.” Tripp passed me the magazine, tied on his apron, and walked back into the kitchen.
“Happy Cataclysm Day to us,” I muttered.
“I’ll take a Happy Easter.”
“Happy Easter, Tripp.”
“Thank you, David.”
In the parking lot I waved a cheeseburger in front of the cracked window. The Bernese didn’t stir. Seeking some mode of universal communication, I took a bite, chewed loudly, breathed the cheeseburger air into the cab, rubbed my belly, and watched the dog slowly rise. I angled the rest of the burger through the gap. He was tentative, licking at the bun first. Finding no trick, he ate the burger in two bites as I pulled another one from the sack. Suddenly the poor, misbegotten ghost of a thing became a dog again. He started to pant, giant slab of a tongue lolling out, body shimmying all over. “You seem highly evolved,” I said, “but I don’t think you can unlock this door. That means I’m going to have to shatter the window.” The dog tipped his massive head thirty degrees. “I know. I don’t condone destruction of property either.” I shrugged. “But desperate times. This is going to be loud and messy. It could be scary. I’m going to need you to sit on the other side of the cab so you don’t get hurt.” I thought my explanation was direct and full, but the Bernese didn’t move. “Okay, I get it. You’re no dummy. Never do anything for free for a man holding a cheeseburger.” I tossed the burger as best as I could across the cab and the Bernese followed it to the passenger’s seat. “Good boy,” I said. “Now stay.”
I wrapped my jacket three times around my elbow and forearm and smashed the window. The dog started at the sprinkle of glass and then went to leap free. I held a hand up and raised another cheeseburger, and the dog sat up and watched me. “I’ve treated plenty of people for glass cuts. It’s nasty business,” I said. “I’m going to reach in here now. If you bite me, I’m eating the rest of your dinner.”
It was like wrapping your arms around a sack of doorknobs. The dog should have weighed as much as a small man, but he was all loose fur and skin over bone. He had a prong collar on. A name tag hanging from it: dog. “Jesus Christ,” I whispered.
I lifted the animal over the broken glass and was about to set him down on the pavement but stopped and carried him across the parking lot and set him down beside my truck on the passenger side. I got down on one knee, and the animal licked my face and wagged his tail. Cautiously I undid the prong collar and pushed it into my pocket. I opened the passenger door, climbed inside, and slid all the way across the bench seat. I kept my hands out of the cheeseburger sack and waited. The Bernese jumped in beside me and settled down on the seat, snout atop paws. Then the real test. I leaned over the resting dog, watching the contour of its fur for bristling, and gently closed the door. Together we sat in the truck, watching it snow. The flakes had thickened into a heavy curtain. I was very tired and confused. For perhaps the first time ever, I wished this place was big enough for streetlights. I wanted to watch the end of winter spin through the soft yellow cones of light.
“You’re right,” I said to the dog after a few minutes. “We should leave one.” I took a pad of paper from the glovebox and scribbled out a note.
My name is David Almerin Ames. I’m a doctor. The Bernese, who I’m thinking of calling Otto for reasons you need not know, is with me now. East Grand, Green Mountain Side. To be clear: This is a notice, not an invitation.
Otto followed me as I crossed the lot and left the note on the dash. I reached into my pocket and left the prong collar too. In the driver’s seat the shards of glass would be frozen in the puddle of water by morning. Together Otto and I drove home.
It was well after ten when we got there, the night cold and dark with a howling wind slipping between the stars. Still I took the dog all around. We walked down the seventy-seven steps to the water, where I pointed and said, “East Grand Lake, Rowboat, America (be leery).” Otto bounded through the woods, scaled glacial erratics, and leapt over stumps. In the yard, I pointed at everything I could, saying, “Window, gable, shed, spring box, woodpile, shitter.” At the ledge I introduced him to Cricket and stood in the starlight and swept my arm in a giant circle over it all. “Home,” I said, and he wagged his tail. The snow had thinned to a fine icy mist, and winter felt very alive. I pointed up to the sky and said, “Venus, Saturn, Gemini, Orion.”
Inside I set up a big bowl of water to wash down the cheeseburgers and showed Otto how to start a fire. Then we climbed the stairs into the loft. I wanted to read more Virginia Woolf but was exhausted. The glow of the fire was rising up from below, while from above the full moon cut down through the skylight, filling the cabin with white light. Climbing into the loft, I had the distinct feeling the stairs were multiplying. As I rose toward the moon, foot lifting over foot, hands pulling against the stair railing in desperate battle, I became convinced I would never reach my destination. I feared for a moment that I was having a heart attack or a stroke, until my rational brain again dissolved and I continued to rise. I climbed on into the night, weary and gasping, with Otto and his great heart at my side. I climbed until I was sure I had left the world of East Grand far behind and had risen through the stars.
Otto bulldozed into the bed and wrapped his body around mine. After five minutes, I forced him onto a pile of blankets on the floor, fearing the long-term effects of a life together completely without boundaries. The howling wind kissed every corner of the house. Through the skylight I watched
the shoulders of the swaying pines do their joyous and macabre winter dance. I was very tired, and the day had been strange and taxing and full of madness, but sleep would not come, so I went downstairs to write a note at the table.
The firelight cast eerie shadows all about the kitchen. Ash logs snapped, and warmth settled through the house in waves. Snow pelted the windows and softened the roof. The wind came around the walls in a loop, sharp and then flat. Surrounded by the peculiar music that exists only among the woods during a snowstorm, I listened for a river I knew was many miles away. For a moment I was sure I heard its trickle.
Not knowing who else to write my note to, I wrote to my mother.
Mom,
Wren called today to tell me about Lyman. I didn’t know what to do with the news, so I started to walk. I walked until I hardly knew where I was. Then I encountered a strange man. With him, I felt oddly and powerfully in the presence of a great love. Have you ever met a person who you felt was more than one person? Do I sound insane? After we parted, I walked for hours in the cold. A thick fog engulfed me. A storm had come in. I realized if I continued to walk, I would freeze to death. So I came down from the mountain. I stole a dog. I cried for Lyman. I sang old songs you taught me as loudly as I could to the woods. None of my behavior today has been very rational or even feels very real, yet the day feels more real than so many others I have lived. I wonder if you know the feeling. The spring equinox just came. You’d tell me we’re in a liminal time still, when the borders between worlds are thin and fuzzy. Maybe it’s okay to be with the ghosts for a while. I’m trying not to be scared. I miss you. And I miss Dad. I’m coming home soon. You’ll not see this note before I arrive. In fact you’ll likely never see this note, but I know you are listening. There’s no reason to fear. We’re not so very far away from each other now.
Love David
Twenty-One
I woke just after dawn, thinking I heard my father’s car coming up the road through the cedar trees. I could recall very little of the dream to which I had been lost, but coming up from sleep, the sensation was one of great joy. My father had never visited me in my adult life, and here he was in the yard. I had forgotten I was at East Grand. I had forgotten also that my father was dead. This happens more often than I like to admit. In most of North America there’s real risk in looking like a complete loon if you admit these things, so you keep the voices and visitations to yourself. Instead we go to dreams, where we are all eternally together. All I could remember from the dream was my father saying, “We must go to the shore.”
Being a fine opportunist, Otto had abandoned the floor in the night and snuggled his bulk under my arms. The snow had ended, and the cabin was very cold. There was nothing in the yard but golden cordwood drying in the soft blue light, a murder of crows mobbing in a tall pine. My father tried to talk to every living thing in its own language. If he had come up the road through the settling dawn, he’d be standing in the yard, cawing at the birds.
Five years ago I was stopped at a country store way out on Cape Breton when I became convinced I saw my father’s truck. The vehicle was backed around in the parking lot at a terribly disjointed angle to all the other cars but sat as fully as possible under the largest shade tree. This was a key reveal when it came to my father, who refused to “properly” park between parking lines in parking lots, opting for whatever patch, side, or corner presented the most shade. He claimed he couldn’t see the lines on the pavement, and when we pushed him for the truth, he would just shrug and say, “Can’t see ’em. Too bright, I guess. Best go find a shady spot.”
The truck was a beat-up GMC. Just like my father’s truck, it was missing the passenger-side mirror and sported the same oxidized green-and-blue patina. My heart was hitting like a sledge, but the possibility of some strange and mystical reunion broke when I peeked inside. This truck had a floor. No truck my father ever owned had a true floor for very long. When the floor rusted out of his GMC, he drove it for a summer with no floor at all. When Cal Hayes finally threatened to arrest him for child endangerment, he went and hammered out the cedar strapping from a dozen lobster traps. He pinned the boards together and fitted them into the bottom of the truck. For the rest of his life we rode to school with our feet resting on boards that had once lived beneath the sea.
I have no idea what my father and I would talk about now. I’d like to hear about what boat he was building and for whom, and I imagine he’d be captivated by even the most banal of my patients. I suppose we’d probably share a meal together, something I miss awfully. I’m sure he’d be intrigued and pleased that each of his sons grew into a different professional iteration of himself. I’ve often wondered if we would have taken the courses we did, had he been with us longer. I think we would have. Simon was destined to keep building boats. Link was destined to lead people. And as the youngest, I was destined to watch and try to help those I could.
There are things I’d like to tell him: how Simon built a house up the river a ways, on a high hill, a simple place, and lives there happily with his wife; how Link is stationed in Afghanistan in a special forces outfit; how Galen lives in the area still and became an artist and works for Simon as a painter, and though he has burn scars from the crash along his neck and arm and doesn’t speak much, most days he seems okay; how two years after my mother left the river, Grace sold her own house and convinced my mother to move back home. Together the two of them unboarded the windows and hooked up the water in the house my parents had built, and vowed to never again leave. And there the two of them remain, wild, strong, alive, and more or less happy in the woods, alone and not alone.
Obviously hungry, and possibly a critic of long reflections, Otto reared up on his hind legs and started slapping at every glass, plate, and appliance in the kitchen. His paws were the size of a bear’s. The cheeseburgers, of which only three remained, had suffered an awful night out on the counter. I told Otto it was too early to bother Tripp for more, so we settled for coffee, bananas, oatmeal, and dates. I was delighted to find that the mess of eggs I’d left on the floor the day before had been cleaned up nicely during the night. Exuberant with my decision to get a dog, I told my father I loved him and watched the light coming up and listened to the coffee percolating.
I went outside to survey the storm and tend to Cricket. In the yard the sound of a car brought me back to reality. I had forgotten all about Wren and Harold.
“You’re early,” I said as my visitors exited an old burgundy Saab coupe caked in slush.
“He drives fast,” Wren said, and hugged me. Harold was standing behind his mother with his head down, shuffling his feet. He’d grown a good three inches since I’d last seen him.
“Good practice,” I said.
The boy looked up and beamed.
Otto came bounding out of the house, made two frantic and playful circles around Wren, leapt over a snowy puddle, and came to a skidding stop within inches of barreling through poor Harold.
“You got a dog,” said Harold, laughing.
“Kind of.”
“Kind of,” said Wren. “What does that mean?”
I shrugged. “It means I suppose I did.”
There wasn’t much for luggage, but Wren launched into unloading the few bags on her own. She seemed like the Wren I knew, though there was a tightness to her gestures and mannerisms, as if letting too much movement into her body might break her open. It took me a moment to realize that what I was seeing was a great effort at concentration. Even the act of reaching for the front door was executed with extreme attention, and I tried to understand the great sadness that had engulfed her since she’d received news of Lyman’s death.
Harold’s hair was long, spilling over his forehead and his ears, giving him an unearned height. But he still had the wide, solid facial features of his uncle and his grandfather.
“I’m sorry about your grandfather,” I said.
“Thank you.” Harold went on scratching Otto around the neck and chin. “I guess. I
mean, I’m sad because somebody died. But I’m not sad the way I think I’m supposed to be, considering I lost a grandparent. Does that make sense?”
Wren moved from the porch back to the car, where she grabbed one last bag, an olive backpack I suspected was stuffed with about seven books. She paused for a moment, the first break in her focus, and watched a string of snow geese curve through the leaden clouds above the lake. Then she turned away and was gone again, drifting like sand back into motion from car to cabin.
“It does,” I said to Harold.
“I barely knew him at all.” Harold was looking off to the empty porch where his mother had just stood.
“You must be hungry,” I said. “Come inside. Come get warm. Come feel safe and loved. That’s why I got the dog.”
“Kind of got the dog,” said Harold.
“You don’t miss much.”
“We’ve established that, Uncle David.”
After Harold and Wren settled in, we went into the remaining snow to go sledding. The idea had been Harold’s, and his argument, which was entirely built around time and opportunity—What else do we have to do right now? and Come on, even Canada gets stingy with snow after Easter—was sound.
The Lowering Days Page 24