The Brothers K

by David James Duncan

  “You could be injured, even killed,” she told him.

  “So could the guys who’ve been working there for years,” he replied.

  “They’re used to machinery. You’re used to books.”

  Peter shrugged. “That’s why I took the job.”

  “Listen to me,” Mama said firmly. “I think I see what you’re up to. But you’re not your father, and you’re not his replacement. You’ve helped us through a terrible time, and I’ll always be grateful. But you’ve got your own beliefs, Peter. And your college, I hope, to finish. You’ve got your own life to live. So if you took that job for me, or the twins, or Irwin, you can just go quit right now.”

  “I listened, Mama,” Peter said, smiling. “Now it’s your turn, okay?”

  She scowled, but kept quiet.

  “You’re right about books. They’re what I know. And I probably will go back and finish my degree sometime. But when I was growing up here, I didn’t just skip out on church. I skipped having a hometown. I skipped the woods when they were standing, and swimming in Lackamas Lake. I skipped the Wind and the Washougal. I tried to skip the tedious things too—like dirty dishes, and the weeds in the flower beds. I still can’t fix a toaster. Can’t tune a car. I was sincere in all of this. I really believed that traveling light was the fastest way to truth, and that plugs, points and toasters were for those without spiritual longing, those with nothing better to do. But the things I skipped kept getting bigger, till somehow it even made sense to me to skip having brothers and sisters, and Papa and you. ‘One-pointedness’ is what I called it. And I was sincere even in that. But last spring, in India, I found out very suddenly that every single thing I’d skipped had left a blank place inside me. Not a sharpened point, or an emptiness. Just a dull, amorphous area that couldn’t see or feel. By seeking a dharma that began where Camas ended, I had packed up and moved to a nowhere. Which left me pretty well useless. So that’s why I’m driving the forklift, Mama. Not to replace anybody. Just to fill in some blanks. To begin to be from a somewhere. Is that okay with you?”

  Mama didn’t nod or smile. It was just too soon. When any of us said or did anything she thought Papa would especially like, those became the very things that sent her reeling. But she did manage to murmur, “It’s very much okay with me.”

  –II–

  Myshkin E. Lee was born in Lake Havasu City, Arizona, on November 30, 1971, and within a week (so his ecstatic father informed us) became a prodigy in both literature and art.

  The claim was not entirely groundless. Within a week of his birth Myshkin really did begin to communicate directly with his incarcerated pop—via finger-paintings. The way he did it, though, was by hanging half asleep in a cloth sling while Natasha dabbled his limp limbs in dabs of paint she’d scattered across a big sheet of butcher paper. The tiny hand-, foot- and dimpled knee-prints thus created were just the literature Everett longed to read, however. So when he began to perceive—and to lecture his fellow cons upon—the “obvious deliberation” and “idiosyncratic flair” his son poured into his “work,” even the most irascible of them finally learned to nod at the paintings and say fine, what the hell, okay, Everett, the kid’s a bleeding prodigy.

  In a p.s. to one such “letter,” Natasha spontaneously added a life-sized full-on blue-and-green finger-paint print of her belly and breasts, just to show Everett what birth and lactation had done to her, shape- and size-wise. According to one reliable eyewitness—Moonfish, by name—the erotic dream and nocturnal emission this work of art inspired in my brother blasted a hole through the cinderblock above his cot, and five lonely Mexicans made a clean escape back home to their señoritas.

  –III–

  Though he’d recovered his speech, his health and a slightly thicker version of his old physique, Irwin’s old spark and sparkle just weren’t coming back. He never went anywhere unless we coaxed him. He never instigated a conversation, and when we tried to, he usually gave monosyllabic replies. He remained unemployed, possibly unemployable, and for two months after Papa’s death just sat around the house. Then, in January 1972—without a word to anyone but Peter (from whom he borrowed the tuition money)—he suddenly signed up for two different welding classes at the local community college.

  “That’s good!” Mama and Linda both told him. “Welders make good money.”

  Irwin didn’t agree, disagree, or try to explain. He just began, entirely on his own, to study woodstoves.

  For weeks he did nothing but read up on the things—every single evening, far into the night. Linda didn’t seem to find this obsessiveness much preferable to the nothingness that preceded it. I felt relieved just to know he could read.

  After a few weeks of this study he began to leave the House at dawn and spend entire days loitering around a couple of small Portland woodstove manufacturers. He also started scrounging—again with funds borrowed from Peter—for secondhand welding tools, reject sheet metal and a lot of inscrutable, clunky-looking equipment. Back home in the evenings he still ignored his family completely. But he no longer just sat there: he doodled on a sketch pad now, hour after hour, drawing a lot of strange-looking diagrams and stove designs.

  His welding classes still had several weeks to go when—again consulting no one—he cleared off Papa’s old workbench in the back of the garage, assembled his inadequate welding tools and materials, and began trying to piece together his first crude stove. I was living with Amy in a cabin up the Columbia, and still found it almost impossible to visit the vacuum Papa had left back home, so Irwin’s progress, or lack of it, went unremarked by me. Mama and the twins didn’t pay much attention either, except to say over and over that they hoped he didn’t blow himself up. Peter’s thought on the stoves was that, practical or not, anything that helped reacquaint him with gross reality was to the good. As for Linda, she’d gotten pregnant again (a huge surprise to everyone but Bet and Everett), and the prospect of providing for two kids and a stove-obsessed automaton had sent her scrambling back to school for a general equivalency diploma, with hopes of a realtor’s license somewhere down the line. Her situation also began to put an edge on her previously rather spongy personality. When Irwin failed to even respond to her request that he watch Nash during her school hours, for instance, she began to just stick Nash in a stroller, roll him wordlessly into the garage, and let his screams bring Irwin out of his work stupor. The funny thing was, once Irwin fitted Nash with a little pair of industrial earplugs and handed him a few tools to pound on his stroller with, he’d sit there babbling and banging and watching his dad for hours.

  When Irwin’s first finished stove broke a seam during a midnight test fire, dumped its coals, and burned a bear-sized hole in the back wall of the garage, I figured that might be the end of the new hobby. But the very next day—again consulting no one, and showing no concern for the ruin he’d left in the garage—Irwin nailed a fourth wall onto Papa’s old pitching shed, poured a rough concrete floor, built some crude shelves and a worktable, again set up his crummy equipment, and proceeded to spend longer days than ever, banging and clanging away at God knew just what. “Maybe his own crematorium,” Linda grumped.

  –IV–

  Peter hadn’t worked long at the mill before he and Papa’s old friend Roy had become buddies. In fact, when Roy learned of another machinist who didn’t want to work graveyard, he took the shift just so he and Peter could get better acquainted. Pete was living so close to the mill that he walked to work alone each midnight. But every morning, a little after eight, he and Roy would come driving up the Clark Street hill in the same old Travelall Papa used to ride to work in, and Mama would feed them breakfast, Roy would do a bit of handymanning around the house, Pete would drop off a book for Bet or Freddy, a toy or treat for Nash, or most of his paycheck for Mama. Then he and Roy would step out to Papa’s backyard shed.

  Peter’s sole interest in visiting the shed was, of course, to see how Irwin was faring—and the monosyllabic, humorless workaholic he’d find there
invariably left him depressed. Roy’s interest, on the other hand, seemed to be entirely in the woodstoves—and what Roy found, just as invariably, seemed to delight him. “Buck up,” he’d always tell Peter afterward. “Irwin’s comin’ along great!”

  Peter saw no point in calling Roy on this wishful thinking, but there was no question in his own mind that improvements in Irwin’s welding or riveting techniques were no proof of corresponding improvements in his psyche. After a few weeks, though, he couldn’t help but notice that the only person Irwin was ever truly attentive to—and even animated with—was Roy. And that’s when Peter realized that Roy was onto something: the stove work and the workman were somehow inseparable. Struggling though he was to return to life, Irwin was still living in a lonely, pared-down, almost subterranean place. “Stove Land,” Peter began to call it. And the reason Irwin grew animated when Roy came to visit was that Roy was the only person who really did visit: none of the rest of us pored over the joins and seams of his stoves with him; none of us really climbed clear down beside him to share the dull concerns of the gloomy chamber that was all the world he could manage so far. We simply demanded—with increasing impatience—that he somehow “snap out of it” and come all the way back to our world.

  Seeing this, Peter realized something else: since Papa had died, the rest of us had at least been able to share our grief. But Irwin—who’d been almost a part of Papa’s body at the end—was living in a place where one speaks of nothing but one’s work. He was doing his best down there. He was working every day till he dropped. But ever since Papa had left him, he’d been utterly alone with his unspeakable feelings.

  So. Ill equipped though he was for such a place, Peter began trying to follow Roy all the way down into Stove Land too.

  –V–

  letter from Wahkiakum/March/1972

  Dear Mama,

  A few weeks after Papa died, that little shaman, Freddy, swiped a snapshot from one of your old photo albums, stuck it in an envelope, and sent it to me without adding a word. I couldn’t imagine what she was up to. I mean, it wasn’t a photo of Papa or anything. But something about it did begin to fascinate me. I finally stuck it on the wall by my cot here, in a place where the all-night floodlights hit, so I could study it whenever I liked. And I’ve ended up liking a lot. In fact my feelings soon went way past liking. One night the little photo opened like a door, and I walked on in, and stayed. It’s become so much a part of me now that I no longer need to see it. It constantly pulls at my feelings like the moon pulls tides. And believe it or not, after that introduction, it’s a snapshot of you and me, Mama. You’ll know the one. Me sitting like a pudgy little buddha in the center of your lap in those washed-out bonegray bleachers down in Oklahoma, late spring or summer of ’52 …

  Not a pretty world, the one we’re perched in: the grandstands couldn’t be less grand, and they’re empty but for us; the edge of the infield looks like a big hot terracotta tile; the light, the entire sky is starkest white. But the starkness forces the eye to the two faces. And the thing they most remind me of (again, believe it or not) is a medieval icon. Oklahoma Madonna and Child, you could call it. Both faces flushed, both very serious, and both, above all, rapt. That’s where the icon quality comes in. And the reason for our raptness is, of course, not in the photo, but out on the ballfield, making graceful but ominous preparations, as the shutter opens and closes, to pour a five-and-a-quarter-ounce one-hundred-and-eight-stitched projectile past the bat of some far less gifted athlete.

  It’s a beautiful photo, Mama. Even though it’s just us. And though I’d forgotten what a looker you were, it’s not so much a physical or artistic beauty. It’s a unity. What’s wonderful here is that though one face is male and just four years old, and the other female and about the age I am today, they are the same face: we are the identically dark-eyed, identically short, identically intense admirers of the same unseen hero. And strange as it may sound, it consoles me every day, this little snapshot does—and not so much for its depiction of what we have been as for its suggestion of what we still are. The bleachers empty, but for us. The world around us a little stark, a little harsh. Both of us looking toward him, harder than ever now, day and night. So even the raptness. It’s all come true. I’m not saying this because I like it, or to make “meaning” of our loss. I’m just saying that he is no less wonderful to us, that this unites us, and that our feelings about him will never change.

  Trouble is, unless we do something about it, maybe neither will our feelings about each other. I don’t want to stir up old wasp’s nests, especially not now, but life does go on. And knowing us—our tempers, our industrial-strength opinions, our hands-on love for family—I imagine we’re bound to collide again one day. I just want to say, before we do, that I’d love to find a way to collide more gently. There’ll be no burying the hatchet for us, I don’t think. You and I, to start fresh, would have to bury a couple of battle-cruisers. I doubt that’s even possible. But mightn’t it be possible to just climb out of the damned things and let ’em drift away?

  It may have been his dumbest mistake, but Papa loved us both. What do you say, Mama? Wouldn’t it be good to keep a few of his classic mistakes going?

  Love,

  Everett

  –VI–

  In the spring of ’72, Irwin and Linda—or Linda alone, really—tried to honor Papa by bequeathing his name to their second baby. Poor kid. Even I was enough of a prophet to warn them that every TV-addicted brat on the block would nick the name to “Baby Hughie” after that moronic diapered duck on the cartoons.

  Be that as it may, one day in the midst of that first baseball-less spring, Uncle Truman drove down from Walla Walla—ostensibly to meet “Baby Hughie,” and to see how Mama was making out on her own. But when Truman—the lifelong body-shop man—heard the clanging of sheet metal out back in the shed, he didn’t even go to the house. He just grabbed a six-pack from his camper and stepped straight down into Stove Land. And except for meals—which he and Irwin would both wolf in near silence—Truman stayed in Stove Land for the rest of his two-day stay.

  Peter tried his best to cover for them, but Mama and Linda were, of course, offended. Men from small, dark worlds like Stove Land almost always offend women, because there is no gender or domesticity down there. Women and children are welcome in Stove Land, but for the same reason that men are welcome: to work on the stoves.

  The following weekend Truman was back again—with his camper so full of new tools and welding equipment from his Walla Walla body shop that he had bottomed out the shocks. “Merry Christmas,” he mumbled to Irwin, though it was April. And this time Truman stayed a full week: he had awarded himself a vacation (his first in years) for the “fun” of working fourteen-hour days with Irwin, and instructing him in the use of all the tools.

  Their first job had been to rebuild—with Roy’s weekend and after-hours help—the burnt wall of the garage, and to build new shelves and workbenches along every inside wall. “How nice!” Mama had told them as they were finishing up. And away she went to the store for dinner-makings, to reward them. While she was gone, though, they pulled a Christopher Columbus on her by hauling all of her and Papa’s old stuff down into the basement without her permission, and claiming the revamped garage for Stove Land.

  When Mama drove home to the sight of Papa-relics in motion, she got very upset—understandably. But before stepping out of the car to give the three stove-freaks a blazing piece of her mind, she waited for her tears to stop. And while she was waiting she heard Irwin suddenly call out to his cohorts in a tone of voice she hadn’t heard since before Vietnam. The nicknames he used were pre-’Nam too. “True” and “Royo,” he called them. That did it. Mama jumped out of the car—

  and told them that since they’d already stolen her garage and turned her basement upside-down, they might as well haul the old refrigerator up out of the basement and use it in the garage, too. “It’s noisy,” she said, “but that’ll hardly bother the likes of
you. Fill it with beer to feed Truman.”

  Stove Land had won another heart.

  Irwin’s next three trial stoves all burned cordwood without burning down buildings. But every time Linda asked how much he was going to charge for them, he’d mumble that he was still “just practicin’.” His fourth stove, however, was a refined little number with baffles to increase the efficiency and a glass panel in the door, all pieced together so tightly that when you spun the vents shut it killed the fire in seconds. Irwin still didn’t think much of it—which naturally miffed his destitute and neglected wife. But it burned so efficiently that Mama—as a show of faith, and a marital Band-Aid too, hopefully—had Roy and Irwin install it in her livingroom.

  Shortly after this installation, Roy’s interest in stoves became more than a hobby: with Irwin’s permission he sank a couple thousand of his hard-earned Crown Z dollars into equipment and sheet metal, then began spending three or four hours each morning after his mill-stint, working at Irwin’s side. The first stove the two of them built together was a slightly larger, more aesthetically-pleasing version of the one in Mama’s livingroom. And Peter—who’d been studying stoves and the stove business hard, if only to master Irwin’s new dialect—took one look at it and applied for a patent.

  Irwin didn’t seem to care what the patent application was: he just scribbled his name where Pete pointed. He did the same with the papers that incorporated Roy, Irwin and Peter himself into a business. Roy named the fledgling operation after Papa’s favorite fishing stream: Wind River Woodstoves, they called it.

  –VII–

  letter from Peter to the Wahkiakum Work Camp/March/1972