“I want to follow the river home,” Harold said to me after a final pass down the hill. We were walking back up into the hot sunlight. Above us, at the precipice, Wren was standing with her hands on her stomach, staring out at the pines.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“It’s pretty simple, really. You cross this lake back over the border. Then you take the Mattawamkeag River west to the main stem of the Penobscot. Then you take the main stem all the way south to the bay.” The boy opened his jacket like some huckster about to deal me a fake Rolex. He had an old state map neatly folded and tucked in his pocket. “I know the way,” he said. “I’ve already showed my mom.”
Over the lake, a pair of eagles darted into the open, flying circles around their nest pine. They were the first eagles I had seen since fall. I pointed to the birds, and Harold looked up at them twisting under the clouds. What Harold had said was completely true, and I was stunned I hadn’t thought of it myself. I had been following the Penobscot River out into the world my entire life. Somehow, I’d never thought to follow it home.
“I really want to paddle it,” Harold said. “The ice is probably out. But it would be a really hard trip, and I’m worried about my mom. We can still drive the route though, all the way there.”
“Okay, Harold,” I said. “I think that’s a wonderful idea.”
We were inside, hanging our wet clothes around the woodstove, when I heard the suck of heavy tires on a slushy hill road. Harold had heard it too. He paused with a pair of borrowed thermal underwear in his hand and looked at me. I looked at Otto. Wren looked at me and smirked, sensing a certain victory, I suppose. Thirty seconds later the sound materialized in the form of Frances Hurdle’s brown-and-white sheriff truck weaving between the trees.
Frances’s knock was not unkind, but I could tell she wasn’t happy about a fool’s errand like this, having to drive out to the high side of the lake on a cold afternoon near the end of winter.
“There are at least two advanced degrees in this room that I know of,” she said after I let her in and she took stock of our little gathering. “It’s good to see you, Wren,” she added. “Been a while.”
“Likewise, Frances,” said Wren.
“So you’re probably sharp enough to know why I’m here.”
“Otto,” I said and hung my head.
“Who?”
“The dog.”
“Ding, ding, ding,” said Frances. “I don’t like to approach strange animals. I see this one doesn’t have any collar on or identification of any kind, but the markings and his size match—”
“Sorry about that.” Harold spoke up from the corner. I supposed I looked as shocked as Wren. Harold was an almost nauseatingly polite human being, and I couldn’t remember him ever interrupting someone.
“What?” said Frances.
Harold cleared his throat. “I’m sorry he’s not wearing a collar. We left in a rush, and I forgot it at home. I’m not usually so reckless.”
“Who are you?”
“Harold.”
“He’s my son,” said Wren.
“I see. Well it’s good to meet you, Harold. Now what is it you’re saying? Are you trying to tell me this is your dog?”
“I am telling you this is my dog, miss. So yes.”
Harold made a clicking sound with his tongue, and Otto uncoiled from the floor and shambled over to the boy. He collapsed at Harold’s feet and rolled belly-up for a scratch. For a moment Frances seemed more amused than angered, but as the implication of what the boy was saying sunk in, her face drew down into a hard, dark mask.
“Actually,” Wren chimed in from the corner. “That’s not exactly true. Otto is technically my dog.”
“Harold, Wren,” I said. “You don’t have to do that.”
“Nope.” The voice came from behind Frances, and at first we all turned to her in confusion. Then it registered it was drifting in from outside. “It’s not that they don’t have to, it’s that they better not try.” The voice was my uncle Reggie’s. We had not heard the second vehicle arrive during the showdown. My uncle walked into the house now with his arms raised. “Frances,” he cried. Reggie had known the sheriff for close to thirty years. “You found him!”
“What is all this, Reggie?”
“You found my fucking dog.” Reggie threw his arms around Otto’s massive brown-and-white neck. Otto’s panting grew thunderous. “That’s what this is about. I’ve been looking for this guy everywhere.”
“Your dog?” Frances lifted an eyebrow and looked at Wren.
“Wait.” A second voice came from the porch. “I thought he was mine.”
Roman Fitch was standing outside, a wool suit coat draped over his arm and a cigarette in his hand. He was doing all he could not to crack into laughter. It had been years since we’d seen each other, though we’d talked often over the years. He lived in Toronto now with his daughter, who was grown, and together they ran a large bank. I was not surprised Roman had eventually made it in the north and ascended into some position of power in the business world, but I was surprised anyone had ever convinced him to wear a suit.
Frances put her hands to her face and held them there for a good thirty seconds. I could practically calculate her weighing the ethics of returning the dog versus not while also doing the math on the work involved. Frances was a small-town sheriff and a Buddhist, a combination embodied by very few in this part of the world, and much to her credit she brought to her job an idea of justice that was more karmic than legal or punitive.
“The dog looks loved,” she said.
“Smothered, even,” I quipped, watching Harold and Reggie coo and chortle and stroke the beast with levels of attention and joy that essentially erased their fifty-year age gap. They had both become children.
“I’m going to go home now,” Frances said. “I’m cold and I’m tired, and it’s obvious you all have more important things to do than entertain or frustrate me. This is not me agreeing with what I’ve been told today, because unlike many here I value truth, but it is me willing to let things be, for now. The guy from Connecticut, he wanted to come out here with me. I told him to stay put.”
“Thank you.”
Frances moved to the door. “Oddly enough, he didn’t really seem to care that much. My sense was that he wanted blood more than his dog back.”
“The confounding beast that is man!” Reggie hollered from the pile of dog and raised and shook his hands.
“Don’t push my patience,” said Frances.
When Frances had left, I turned in shock to Reggie and Roman and hugged them both. “How?” I managed.
“I called them,” answered Harold. “We should be together.”
Wren turned to her son. “And who else did you call?” I could not tell if she was angry.
“Falon, Grace—I mean grandma—Uncle Galen, Link, Simon.” Harold listed off the names as if they were just names, completely detached from history or context, old bitterness or old joys.
“Are they coming here too?” she asked.
“No,” he said.
“But they’ve been called,” Reggie said.
Harold said, “They’ve been called.”
“Good boy,” said Reggie.
“Should we go tonight then?” I asked. “Back to the bay.”
“No,” said Wren. “I need more time. In the morning.”
“An Easter drive,” Harold said.
“An Easter drive,” Wren agreed. “We can see the grove in spring,” she added. The grove was what we called the improbable patch of life that Molly Greenwind had started in the ashes of her fire. As her court case made headlines across the nation, several conservation groups banded together and purchased the mill site, then wildly growing into a returned forest. That alone seemed a great coup: How often in the history of our country had a mill site been sold off to become forest again? Then, a few years later, the site was returned to the Penobscot Nation, where it persists today as a medicine forest nurt
ured by the tribe.
“I don’t know how to say this.” Reggie cleared his throat and paused. He was looking at Wren. “It’s been with me the whole drive up here, and I can’t be with it the whole drive down to the funeral.”
“Just say it then,” said Wren.
“I hated him,” Reggie said. “But I love you more. So I’m here.”
Wren looked hurt, but she nodded.
“Nətαpi-nisóhsepəna,” Harold said, surprising us all with the phrase, which I could tell was Penobscot.
“Did Moses teach you that?” I asked.
Harold shook his head. “Molly, actually. By way of Uncle Galen.”
“What do you mean?” said Wren.
“Uncle Galen said she whispered it in his ear when she and her dad carried him out of the woods that day—”
“When one father died,” I interrupted, and then saw Wren trying to hide that she was crying. “And another may have too,” I added, coming back from the edge of anger.
Harold nodded.
Wren wiped at her eyes. “What does it mean?” she asked.
“We return together.”
We cooked and ate an afternoon meal of skillet cornbread and chipotle-seasoned rice and beans with a winter squash and cheddar frittata. Then Reggie and Roman went outside and began stacking wood and cardboard for a fire. Other things would wait. The dishes could be done when we returned from our journey, which would begin in the morning. I wondered if I should take Otto. I wondered if Frances would look in on Cricket. I wondered if she would look in on both Cricket and Otto. I wondered how much was pushing it.
Outside Reggie had the fire started. The blaze was six feet high and cutting a strong orange cone into the darkening sky.
“I brought marshmallows,” Roman said. “Graham crackers. Shit like that.”
We all pushed back from the table and made our way out to the fire. It was still light, though not much day remained. In the corner of the yard, Harold sat on an Adirondack chair with Otto lying on top of his feet, undeterred by the cold, snowy ground. The boy spread his maps out on the Bernese’s back and leaned in to study the routes in the twilight.
“Do you think you’ll ever go?” Wren asked at my side. We were in separate chairs, but under the same wool blanket. She was looking at Harold looking at his maps. “To the bay.”
I shrugged. For the first time in a long time, I wasn’t sure. I’d been here a long time. This place, East Grand, felt permanent, eternal. But my work, the clinic downeast, it could have been nearing an end. There was never enough help, never enough money, and lately rarely enough patients. The caregiver’s dilemma persisted, of course—How do I leave my patients, few as they may be?—and its near enemy as well—How do I learn to live without being desperately needed? But starting over in the bay, there was that chance.
I told Wren the truth. “I honestly don’t know.”
I thought of my yearly trips down to clear the brush around the ghost apple tree on the bluff. How I would pull into the yard, and my mother would come out of the house in an old field coat with a green thermos of sun tea and a bright orange cap on, no matter the time of year. Grace, who was usually off visiting her clients, was never at the house when I arrived, but she was there when we returned from our work. Food was often cooking. My mother hugged me. Never asked too many questions. Then we made the trek through the woods to the bluff with the clippers and shears and scythe and started the delicate work of clearing brush and cutting and trimming and knocking back the long grass. My mother would help for a while and then wander off to the tree, where she would sit with her back against its base, still the only one after all these years to ever touch it, and stare out at the ocean. Sometimes she cried. Sometimes she swore. Sometimes she was silent. When we were done with the work, she’d press her hands against the bark and whisper goodbye before we walked home. I understood the truth now. Like Sanoba, my father was the man of flight and flames, a victim of the violence and the aggression and the insecurity of a certain male world stalked by shadows and old hurts, all brilliant color and terrible darkness, pride and hubris and wonder and love and heartache, forever doomed to be taken by the sea. My mother was the ghost apple tree, strong and ever-present, no matter how much quiet pain she carried. And I was one of the children, the boy still searching.
“The ghost apples,” I said then to Wren. “Have I ever told you the story of the tree?”
“No,” she said, “I don’t believe you have.”
“All these years.” I shook my head. “That seems almost impossible.”
Wren reached across the space between us, took my hand in hers. “It’s surely criminal, David.” I turned to her with the same wonder that had always been there, knowing that through the years, Wren had lived the stories right alongside me in her own way.
“Soon,” I said. “We have a long drive still.”
Roman was in the yard, staring out at the hills. Reggie was on the porch. Harold was lost in his maps. Otto was snoring. It was just Wren and me, and while I realized how much I had missed her company in my life, I had really missed the company of them all.
“He was a good father,” Wren said.
“I know.”
Harold rose and put another branch on the fire and went back to his chair. I could not hate Lyman when I was a boy, and I could not hate him now. They were both gone now, my father and the man who had taken my father’s body from the world, and in every glimpse of every old green truck, and in every sauntering fisherman, and in every black bird passing overhead, I look up and remember them both. No, that’s not true. I look up and snap around, expecting to find them beside me.
“There’s so much I still want to know,” I said.
“About my dad or yours?” Wren asked.
“About both of them.”
“Me too.” After a long pause, Wren said, “In a different life, I think they would have been friends.”
According to Wren, we can only account for about seven percent of all the matter in the known universe. What this means is that you’d be a fool to believe that what you can see, feel, and comprehend is more important than what you cannot. Probability would dictate that what exists in the other ninety-three percent of matter may hold great importance. So the perplexing truth is that there are quite possibly other worlds playing out that we can’t see or even begin to comprehend. It’s not just that our fathers might be living different lives in some different dimension, but that different concepts of father and of friend and of enemy may exist, or not exist at all.
“There were”—I paused, looking for the right word. “Similarities.”
I could barely see Wren beside me. It was nearly dark.
“I think it’s time,” I said.
“Time for what?”
“To go to the lake shore.”
Harold looked up from his maps. “Why?”
“I don’t really know. It was in a dream.”
Roman looked back from the horizon and nodded. Reggie stepped down into the yard and shrugged. I could see Wren doing the math in her head, looking for the logic, tapping into cosmic equations to calculate the likelihood that walking down seventy-seven steps together in the freezing near dark on Easter Eve would matter or make any difference to anything. “Fuck it,” she finally said. “Maybe the adventurer isn’t supposed to understand the adventure.”
On the wind, the pines were fresh. A soft rot was there too. The new snow was melting. Easter would bring a return to fertile ground. I could see the buds beginning on the trees, and I closed my eyes and followed those buds down into their stems, forcing my consciousness through each branch, funneling into the warm trunk, falling down through the roots into dirt that was frigid at its surface yet warmed with each descending inch. From there it was just a matter of imagination, of flight, to travel from root to root through the earth, marking the world, hearing the bodies of insects shift and awaken, diverting my trek around bedrock, pushing up through damp earth into the vernal pools wher
e life would again emerge. If I paid enough attention, I was convinced, the earth could carry us all home where the ghost apples waited.
In the morning we would leave, while the world here went on opening without us. Across the lake the sun was sinking beneath the western hills. A vane of red spread across the sky, and I gasped.
“What is it?” Harold asked.
“That sunset,” I said. The red line of the horizon was the same shade as the odd card the stranger had given me the day before.
“It’s gorgeous,” said Wren.
I reached into my pocket and traced the cardboard edges of the Minotaur card. It truly was. I looked at Wren and Roman and Reggie. I looked at Harold and Otto. Squeezed on the shore, our bodies seemed to form a strange mosaic. I heard the call of a newly returned loon. The wind spoke up and down the trees. The stars were waiting to emerge. To the west, out over the long indigo lake, we could see into America. To the east, where twilight mottled the vast conifer-swept valleys, we could see into the heart of Canada. We could see north and south as well. I had the great sensation that together we could see anywhere.
No one spoke. At my feet the still water reflected the dimming sky, and I was taken back to a day with my father when I was a child. I am eleven years old, and we are standing on the banks of our Little River. The water holds a perfect reflection of the sky. I can see white clouds, blue light, rust-colored branches, golden leaves, my father, myself. It is October, just weeks before my father’s birthday, and on the ride home from school I have been watching the whorls of color blend in the trees while trying to think up a suitable gift. My father has been eerily silent on the drive. Now at the river he holds up a long and narrow bedroom mirror he removed from the back of a closet door and carried down to the water earlier in the day. I can tell he has been waiting all afternoon to show me this. His movements are incredibly precise, yet I see the nerves harrowing his face. He wants this to work. He wants me to be impressed. He turns the mirror so it is facing down, lifts it as high in the air as he can, and then extends it out over the river like a plank. He tells me to scoot under it and look up at the glass. Suddenly the water is a mirror of the sky, and the mirror is a mirror of the water-sky. But the magic is only beginning. Between glass and water, between mirror and mirror, the reflections multiply. Cloud and sky and tree and my father and myself nest inside one another endlessly. My father tells me this is an infinity mirror, and I can hardly breathe with wonder. My father tells me the reflection will go on forever.
The Lowering Days Page 25