And sin no more. Years, tourists and the wonders of industrial progress kept passing Shyashyakook by without pausing, but small good things kept happening there. A film buff began showing rent-by-mail movies in her barn every Thursday. Four families combined skills and funds and opened a combination food co-op/hardware store/post office that made the town a little, but not too much, like a town again. A couple of enterprising strangers, pretending to be Prince George Pulp and Paper employees, spent two weeks stealing the metal guts out of Old Man Rusted-Out Sawmill, trucking them to Victoria and selling them for scrap. Scrub alders and Himalayan briars knocked Old Man Caved-In Salmon Cannery to the ground, buried him under a green shroud, and raccoons turned his remains into low-cost housing. The gardens got bigger and better. The kindergarten became a full-fledged grade school. The ex-millworkers and hippies got harder and harder to tell apart. The game warden never caught Roonie, but did his job well enough that the fishing, hunting and clamming began to improve. “I didn’t see it at first,” Everett wrote, again to Natasha, “but this isn’t a town of townspeople, really. This is a town of tribespeople. This is a bona fide bunch of modern-day hunter-gatherers with a female chief named Yulie, really and truly muddling their way from post-industrial ruin back toward a more Kwakiutl way of life. And even if you don’t visit me, Natasha, even if you stay in the room the Chief rents up over the Muskrat, you ought to come check it out. Because it’s a beautiful, painful, hopeful thing to see.”
But I need to slow down here a minute. My problem with Shyashyakook is that I loved it so much when I finally managed a visit that I have only to picture it and about half of me tries to fly back and live there. When Everett first arrived in 1970, though, several miserable moons passed before he ever suspected he’d crash-landed in a good place. I haven’t explained just where he lived, or how. More importantly, I haven’t explained why he was taking such pains to describe his new home so alluringly to a young woman whose last words to him had been: “I never want to see you again!” So let me swoop back around for another pass:
On the south slope of the Little Nessakoola estuary, directly across the river from the clamshell midden, stood three somewhat ostentatious, beautifully furnished, contemporary “second homes.” All three were owned by Vancouver, B.C., professional families. All three stood empty at least ten months of the year. But on the north side of a spruce grove directly behind the houses was a caretaker’s cottage. This was where Everett ended up. His job—in exchange for free rent and a hundred bucks a month—was to occupy the cottage full-time, to guard the three homes from possible depredation by the Shyashyakook hunter-gatherers, and to perform a few simple maintenance tasks on the buildings, road and land.
His most demanding task turned out to be the daily tethering of an enormous, taffy-colored, petroleum-scented billy goat who was supposed to serve the same general purpose as a lawn mower, but who, unlike any mower Everett had ever operated, had a ferocious preference for the cedar shakes on the owners’ houses to the grass that grew around them. After many lost tug-of-wars and several shake repair jobs, Everett renamed the goat Booger, found that didn’t really help much, headed down to the Muskrat to seek liquid therapy, met Chief Yulie MacVee instead, discussed his goat problem over a free beer, told her his life story and all the rest of his problems over four more, and ended up hiring Yulie’s twelve-year-old Dr. Do-Little-ish daughter, Corey, to deal with what the Chief saw as the one unnecessary difficulty in his life: the billy goat. Within weeks Everett found Corey so competent to deal with all of his caretaking tasks that he phoned his bosses in Vancouver, told how he’d befriended the chief of the Shyashyakooks, explained that his security-guard function was obviated by her stature in the community, and said he’d like to take a part-time job for the rest of the summer—eight hours a day, three days a week—vacuuming and polishing cars at a Rub-a-Dub in Victoria while Corey covered for him at home.
His bosses said fine, and the Rub-a-Dub days proved, as hoped, to be a mindless balm: Everett just did the work, prowled the city afterward till he’d filled his noise and chaos quota, drank a nightcap or two (in memory of his abandoned Seattle self) at a posh little pub called Churchill’s, slept in his car the two nights, collected his pay, and drove back home to his estuary. But the other four days of his week, the Little Nessakoola days, presented the same basic Velella velella situation he’d first encountered in the Underground motels of Seattle—and this time a small spheroid scar in the center of his chest wouldn’t let him forget that a woman’s body was no surefire cure for his dreadful sense of amorphousness.
“I don’t even know me,” he carped in his new journal one interminable May evening. “And if I don’t know me,” he added, boldly going where few Campus Rads had gone before, “no wonder I don’t know how not to get pissed off or restless. Because how can you control somebody you don’t even know? Maybe the real me isn’t pissed off or restless at all. Maybe this temperamental guy here is somebody else, somebody completely extraneous! So maybe what I need—besides a woman, which would always be nice but can possibly wait, since the pickings in town look damned slim, or damned the opposite actually, besides which Booger, speaking of ‘pickings,’ has a pretty okay-lookin’ little ass on him (just kidding, Posterity!)—is to do some inner work, some work on me, whoever that is, till I at least shuck this restless son of a bitch and this pissed-off guy here, slim myself down to its Basic Everettness, and take it a day at a time from there. (Shit O. Deer! Are all journals this dumb?)”
Dumb or not, there was nothing much else to do. And one way to seek “Basic Everettness,” my brother decided, was to fill in certain irresponsible gaps in his “Previous Everettness.” To that end he had Stoner Steve mail all his boxes of unread text and history books up from Seattle, then challenged the mildew in his cottage to a race to see who could get through them first! But the contest, to his surprise, gave him a new appreciation of his old college professors. Without their lectures, assignments, deadlines and tests the reading never developed into anything more than guilt-motivated drudgery: mildew won by a mile.
In July he mentioned in a letter that he was “trying to get back into poetry writing.” This didn’t sound all that promising, since I was unaware he’d ever left it; I told him to send along a poem as soon as he’d written one he liked. I heard no more about it.
In August he hit on the idea of reading books he wanted to read instead of books he’d hated in college, and enthusiastically began toting whole carloads of books home from the Victoria Municipal Library. But back on the estuary even the most alluring prose had a way of shriveling, by the time it reached his brain, into a dry blather that nearly crushed him with boredom. Everett had become sufficiently introspective by now to get a handle on the problem: he’d become addicted, during his radical years, to such a pugnacious, litigious style of reading that his capacity for solitary literary pleasure had atrophied. He began struggling to regain it. He tried reading aloud—but it only made him lonely. He had Corey MacVee lock him in a closet with a book and water for the better part of a day—and ended up peeing on the floor. He tried to read while walking, while eating, while rowing a boat, while driving his car, and even while hanging upside down to force more blood into his brain. No use. “I have literary anorexia!” he finally scrawled in his journal. He then reached in his pocket, pulled out the same plastic cigarette lighter he and the other draft-resisters had used back in Seattle, and torched his library card.
In September the various owners of the homes came to vacation, and Everett bagged the search for Basic Everettness in order to work hard and play with their kids and be a wit and raconteur and extrovert for a while—a huge relief. Then in October, Indian Summer, the air turned so soft, the sunlight so fragile, and each day’s loveliness so poignantly doomed that even self-ignorance and restlessness felt like profound states of being, and he just wandered the empty beaches and misty headlands in a state of serene confusion and awe.
But when November arrived, it
brought something terribly expected with it: his first 150-inches-of-rain Juan de Fucan winter. “All summer I worked in a car wash,” he wrote during the first six-day blow. “Now I live in one.” The rains flooded the estuary, they washed away the fall colors, they ended his beach walks, his daily chats with Corey, his strolls through downtown Victoria. The Little Nessakoola turned big, brown and ugly and stayed that way. His Olds 88’s electrical system drowned, so that he had to caulk a leaky pram, wait for incoming tides, and bail and row the three miles to town for groceries. His thoughts, his dreams, even his lust felt as though they’d begun, like his textbooks, to mildew. His old political concerns sat inside him like indigestible lumps of meat. His nonexistent concentration, nonexistent soul and nonexistent sense of vocation all made their nonexistences painfully known. “One sad sentence says it all,” he told me in a letter: “Muskrat burgers are the greatest joy of my life.”
Noticing his increasingly long, pale face, Chief Yulie tried to reassure him one day that the weather change was always tough on newcomers, but that in winter things got better. “You mean the rain quits?” Everett asked.
“No,” she said. “But sometimes it turns to snow.”
Yulie enjoyed his mighty groan, but then took pity. “Listen, Everett,” she said. “I’ll tell you a secret. It’s not the weather that gets better. It’s your ability to see.”
“See what?” he muttered, glancing outside at the ceaseless greens and grays.
“Whatever needs seeing,” she answered. “Maybe something in this world, maybe something in the spirit world. You’ll know when you see it.”
Seeing his guard go up, she added, “I’m not talking redskin hocus-pocus. Winter just happens to be the vision time here. Don’t take it personal. That’s just how it is.”
“But I’m not from here,” he said. “I’m a white guy from America, remember, Yulie? And white Americans don’t have visions.”
Grabbing his shirt so casually the gesture seemed playful at first, Yulie pulled him slowly but forcefully toward her face, then held him there, till the playfulness vanished and he could see and feel the full force of the anger that had come boiling up in her. “You listen to me,” she said. “You’re no white American. You’re a white nothing. You got no country, no people, no work, no plan. You’re dying for a vision, funny man. So don’t go joking about it to me.”
Everett was flabbergasted. She’d never attacked him before. He’d never seen her attack anyone like this before. And though she released him, and poured him a free beer, she wasn’t finished. “By pure accident,” she said, “no credit to you, you been doing one thing right. You been living alone on an estuary where, come winter, people often see the one thing in their life that most needs seeing. It’s been that way forever here. Smallpox and sawmills haven’t changed it. The likes and dislikes of some guy named Everett don’t change it either. We don’t push the spirit world around. Understand?”
Everett nodded like a good boy at Sabbath School.
“It’s the Bear. We’re the fleas. Understand?”
He nodded again.
“What you can do, though, is get horny and lonely and bitter and pitiful, decide this place and me are full of bull, and go be a funny white nobody someplace else. But I’m telling you, Everett—and I’m telling you because I like you—you been hopping around long enough. It’s time you at least tried to meet the Bear.”
Reading his face—which was straining desperately to appear neither sceptical nor condescending nor uncomprehending nor American nor white—Yulie laughed, and added, “Relax. I said no hocus-pocus, remember? All I’m really telling you is that unless you got a better idea—and we both know you don’t—you ought to promise yourself to stick it out on the Little Nessakoola for one whole Kwakiutl winter, even if all you ever see’s the rain.”
Everett had no better idea.
So back to his cottage he trudged, where he proceeded to see just that.
“Gray rain on green water,” he wrote in his journal. “Gray rain on green trees. Gray gulls grounded on gray sandflats. Gray-blue herons hunched in half-flooded sedge. Up in the green woods, the last chanterelles rot in the rain. Is this peace? Is this the stuff that we were begging the honkies to give a chance? No wonder they wouldn’t listen!”
He also passed the time by writing letters:
You really should pay me a visit, Kade. There are some exciting options here, activitywise. You can stand in the trees. You can stand in the rain. You can watch the trees stand in the rain. You can watch it rain on the trees. And with two of us (true mathematical fact!), it’ll be twice as great …
And kept trying his hand at poetry:
I think that I shall never see a car as boring as a tree …
Then he’d write in his journal some more:
November 9, 1970: Another day, another sou’wester. Booger looking smug as he munches another corner off a house—knows I won’t go thwack him till the gale eases. Nemo the Wandering Auto Mechanic here yesterday. Says the Olds needs an alternator, battery, plugs and wires and I’m looking at 120 clams, minimum. Jeddy Redstone says bullhockey, all it needs is time in a warm watertight building, and it just so happens he’s got barn space for $15 a month. Yulie says, “Everett honey. Listen. Just keep rowing your boat.” And she scares me. So I do. Though more days than not I feel awfully close to sinking.
But one sodden night in mid-November, Everett awoke in the night with an incongruous new urge. Not a vision. Not an insight. Not even a cogent thought, really. Just an urge. But it was his strongest in months. In fact, it wouldn’t let him sleep. So he sat up, lit a candle, grabbed his journal, and described it like this:
I know I tried books, I know I burned my library card, I know the whole idea’s ridiculous. But maybe that’s the point. At any rate, I have decided to read the Russian Literary Heavyweights and that’s all there is to it. No library cards this time. Payment is a commitment, so I’m buying the books. But to hell with the details. To hell with thinking it all to death. I’m hitching to Victoria tomorrow! I’m buying great Russian novels till I’m broke! I’m reading them cover to cover if it kills me! And that really is all there is to it!
Let’s face it, though: when, twice in one urge, a person takes the trouble to say “that’s all there is to it,” there’s very little chance that that’s all there is to it. Everett swears to this day that the sole purpose of his Russian reading project was to obey his mysterious midnight impulse. But I don’t buy it. I think his secret purpose, right from the start, was to attain some literary learning that would enable him to correspond as dramatically as possible with the unforgettable Natasha. I think he was out to wow her and woo her with honeyed Russian words. And far be it from me to find fault with that. His midnight intuition had probably revealed to him the single stratagem that might ever have worked. An epistolary romance, after all, is often a romance between two people who bear no resemblance to either person …
Natasha Lee’s love affair with Russian literature has always been an enigma to me. Everett once told me, back in his U-district days, that he had discovered her great weakness: any man, place or circumstance that made her feel like a character in any famous nineteenth-century Russian story or novel, he claimed, caused her to suffer a near-complete suspension of common sense. I didn’t believe him for a second. Russian lit was her major, and her love for the subject was obvious. But love for a subject is not the same as romantic credulousness. Having found Natasha quite hardheaded and clear-thinking myself, I figured our campus legend was just backbiting a woman who’d found him eminently resistible.
Yet Natasha herself admits that it was the passion, the humor, the indefatigability and above all the Russian flavor of Everett’s Shyashyakook letters which first led her to believe that the old Hippie Churchill might have undergone a promising personality change …
Of course Everett had always hated Russian novels. They were, after all, long, and his revolutionary span of attention, at least for nonnarcissis
tic activities, was exceedingly short. But the post-revolutionary possibility of writing long Russianistic letters to a beautiful woman overpowered his reservations about the literature since the letters could, in content if not in style, be almost entirely about himself. All he felt he needed from Tolstoy, Turgenev, Lermentov and Company were a few key characters, proper names, stylistic quirks and prose rhythms to get his correspondence off and running. To that end he began to read at a rate of about one volume per two inches of rainfall. When Natasha started writing back, he moved on to the satellite criticism and historical texts in search of obscure, gossipy details. As the winter grew colder and her letters warmer, he even got into accessories. First it was just a pound of Russian Caravan tea; then, in Victoria, he nabbed a handful of antique ink-pens—the kind you dip in a well—and a ream of parchmentlike paper upon which to scratch his increasingly high-flown prose; next it was a couple of open-necked white cotton “peasant shirts” and a pair of knee-high black rubber neo-peasant boots (leather was “too dear,” as he now put it); then it was some scratchy old Russian opera recordings, which he learned to sing at the top of his lungs, without a clue as to what he was saying. By December he’d even begun, quite by accident, to gain some respect for the literature. I remember him telling me, for instance, that Tolstoy’s novella Hadzhi Murad was the best account he’d ever read of how Vietnams happen. But he seldom wrote to me anymore. He was far too busy. He and his rubber boots had some fat tomes to wade through, and the letters to Natasha were pouring forth at a prodigious pace. Between the wry Chekhovian and dark Dostoevskian delvings into the lives of his human and animal neighbors, the broad Tolstoyan and fey Gogolian canvases of “our congenial lives of serfdom here in the forgotten village of Shyashyakook,” and the occasional Pushkinesque plunges into metered verse, his letters were a one-man nineteenth-century Russian Literary Renaissance. For all their scope, length and stylistic schizophrenia, though, they left out a few fairly crucial details. The twentieth century and its contents (including Everett), for example. The fact that much of his summer’s “serfdom” had taken place at an automated urban car wash, that he still spent the greatest share of his rubles on the likes of the Stones, the Doors, the Dead and the Who, and that, come evening, his entertainment of choice was to set literature aside, crank up his stereo, and, with cheap California wines and homegrown whatever, roulette his Russian brains out—these sorts of things were not considered worth mentioning.
The Brothers K Page 50