Otherworldly Maine

by Noreen Doyle

  Not that that made any real difference. He didn’t look Indian, had never felt it. His dad had been white, a trucker from Denver, according to their mother. Gary’s dad was Hispanic, from Bar Harbor.

  Their grandfather had maintained pretty much the same posture—his face pressed against the passenger side window—in Gary’s beat-up Dodge as they escaped Lewiston, talking to himself, talking to the window, it was hard to tell. Their granddad just talked.

  “Glooskap, he was the one who set us free. So tall he always had leaves in his hair from scraping his head through the tree branches when he walked. Shot arrows into the ash tree—that’s where we was hiding. Made holes in the bark so that we could climb out. We would still be trapped in there, Glooskap hadn’t gotten us out.”

  He said all that with his lips pressed into the window, his tongue writing the words sloppily onto the glass. Morgan thought he might be drunk, drugged, or just addled, just old. They both talked about him as if he wasn’t in the car. Gary thought their grandfather was having visions. Gary said, “Stop thinking like a white man. You were always nervous around old people.”

  Morgan knew Gary was right. He wasn’t proud of it, but he’d never been able to get over the way an old person just seemed to shrink up until their skin was too big for them, as if they’d been marinating all those years. He didn’t know how to talk to somebody in their seventies or eighties. You knew they’d probably be dead in half a dozen years. With that in mind everything you tried to talk about seemed less than important.

  But what he said to Gary was, “You don’t know what you’re talking about. I just try to show a certain amount of respect and reverence and I listen—I’m not trying to talk his ear off. Do you think his skin is okay? It’s pretty dry and loose, and he keeps rubbing it up against things. Maybe he needs some lotion or something.”

  Then their granddad started telling stories again, and they listened. It was hard not to listen, although a lot of the stories were basically the same, with slight variations, and here and there he would introduce new elements into the narrative. “Glooskap got mad at Raccoon one day because Raccoon had gotten into his corn field and was eating all the ripe ears. So he came up behind Raccoon and grabbed him by the neck. But as everybody knows, Raccoon gots very loose skin so he twisted and twisted until he’d twisted right out of his skin and that’s how he got away. But at least Glooskap got a fur coat for his lost corn. That’s why you never know if a raccoon is really a raccoon, though—it might be another animal wearing his skin.” Then he turned to Morgan and asked, “So what’s your story?”

  “I don’t have a story, Granddad.”

  And his grandfather replied, “I’m sorry. That’s too bad.”

  Their grandfather was doing something with his lips now. It looked as if he was compulsively trying to kiss the wood. “So, what do you think he’s doing over there?” Morgan didn’t try to lower his voice—half the time he didn’t seem to know they were there.

  Gary looked up from the can of pork and beans he’d been scooping out with two fingers. They had spoons, but his brother apparently felt using his fingers appeared more Indian. He looked the part, at least from his perspective: lumberjack shirt, jeans, hard-soled moccasins, beadwork belt, beaded leather strap holding back his long, straight jet-black hair. Gary had been dyeing his hair since high school, back when he’d been a Goth, so he hadn’t far to go appearance-wise into Indian territory. He glanced over at their grandfather, nodded. “He’s seeing if that’s the tree he came from, as one of the original Indians. Or maybe he’s talking to the Indians still inside. He told me this morning that some Indians were left inside, and that they’ve been waiting all these centuries to be set free. I think he intends to make a swap—he goes into the tree, somebody new comes out.”

  “Well, that tree can’t be much over fifty years old. He’s ninety-two next month. Old, but not centuries. I still can’t quite get my head around how he thinks he’s one of the original Indians. I don’t want to say he’s senile—he’s been pretty coherent, so far. But I have to say, he gets weirder the longer he’s away from the home.”

  “You’re thinking like a white man again, brother.”

  “Cut the crap, Gary. I helped you sneak him out of the nursing home, risked a kidnapping offense, or whatever they might charge us with.”

  “He’s our grandfather, it can’t be kidnapping.”

  “We don’t have custody. And he wasn’t in there exactly voluntarily. They ruled him incompetent.”

  “Well, we got custody now. And you need to let go of this . . . linear way you were brought up to look at things. Grandfather says you can’t tell by appearances. He says the old look young and the young look old. It’s all happening right now. That’s his truth, and that truth is our legacy.”

  “I’m just afraid . . . he’s going to get sick and die on us. He’s so old. Look at his skin—it looks like it could tear any second.”

  “He’s already sick, he’s already dying. He wanted to see Katahdin before he died. I don’t care what his mental state might be, a human being is entitled to do what they need when they’re dying. It doesn’t matter what the State of Maine has to say about it.”

  Morgan didn’t disagree with that—it was a large part of why he went along with this in the first place. He hadn’t seen Gary in more than two years, but when his brother came to him, said “We can’t let our own grandfather die in a nursing home,” he went with him. But it wasn’t until they were loading their grandfather into the car, after Gary slipped out a back door with the old man and a pitiful laundry bag full of belongings, that Morgan realized how far over the line they had gone, and then he’d gotten scared. It had been Gary’s deal all the way—he just hadn’t been able to say no.

  They’d abandoned the car well away from the south gate to Baxter State Park and hiked their way in, avoiding the established trails. They didn’t want to answer any questions, and in any case the daily quota for day hikers would have already been filled (Gary said camping permits took months). The first time Morgan saw a bear not twenty yards away he knew he was in over his head. Gary led at first, but Granddad kept wandering off, so after awhile they just followed his lead. He appeared to know what he was doing; they just didn’t know what he was doing. He kept heading up these vague, trampled paths over layers of windfall, but the branches along the edges appeared neatly clipped. Their grandfather caught him examining one, said, “Moose. You don’t want to run into one, in the dark.” Morgan wanted to tell him there was no way he was going to be hiking in the dark, but the old man was already well up the ill-defined path, Morgan struggling after, feeling desperate from mosquito bites.

  Eventually their grandfather stopped his communing with the tree—apparently this wasn’t the right one—and they headed northeast toward the serrated crest of the Knife Edge, rising high above the world into mist and rain. Although their grandfather had not shared his intention as to their final destination, Morgan assumed they wouldn’t be going anywhere near there—none of them had the physical ability for such a climb. Morgan had never been to Mount Katahdin, in fact he had spent very little time in the northern part of the state. He knew the peak only as the background of the L.L. Bean logo.

  “You know this is pretty much the forest primeval, what we have here,” Gary stated importantly, stretching and filling his lungs. “The original paradise, kept in trust by the Indians, ruined by the white man.”

  Morgan was out of breath, his lungs working painfully, but still he couldn’t let his brother’s arrogant misinformation pass. “You know that’s pretty much a myth. By the time Columbus arrived the Indians had cleared forests, made grasslands, massively destroyed wildlife, created significant erosion. It was a humanized landscape. The environment actually recovered in some areas as the Indians depopulated.”

  “‘Depopulated’? What kind of mealy mouthed white man’s word is that? You mean they died from disease the white man brought, the plagues they introduced into paradise!”r />
  Suddenly their grandfather was between them, gazing up with milky cataract eyes. “You boys quarrel like jays,” he said, and headed off at a smart pace through a thick wall of trees. His grandsons scrambled to catch up.

  For a while that day, their grandfather seemed almost normal. He was friendlier, pointing out to Morgan a weasel, a raccoon, and once a bobcat, although try as he might Morgan couldn’t distinguish it in the indicated tree. They’d passed through the remains of an old lumber camp, the undergrowth jeweled with rusted metal, and something about that amused the old man. He sang a little song as he picked up old forks and spoons, a bottomless coffee pot, examined them, threw them back into the brush. He turned his face toward Morgan and grinned. Encouraged by the contact, Morgan tried to talk to him like a regular person. “Was the nursing home that bad, Granddad? Didn’t they take good care of you there?”

  His grandfather looked into the distant sky over Mount Katahdin. Something he saw there made him smile more. “They treated me okay,” he said, eyes still on something that obviously amused him. “They fed me well, and they talked to me, asked me how my day was going. A small thing, but it is something everybody should do. Do you ask people that, Morgan?”

  He couldn’t remember the last time. “Yes, yes I do,” he lied.

  “Then you should do it more often. It lets people know you understand that just trying to make it through a day can be hard for some people.”

  “Everybody needs a Glooskap, right?”

  “That is right. Everybody needs a Glooskap. They were okay, at the nursing home. But you grow older, you become less like you were. Your skin is hard, your skin is soft. You put on Raccoon’s coat and it swallows you.” He laughed. “Your pants don’t fit. Your insides don’t fit. You wonder why you are on this earth. It is time to go back where I came from, give you young ones a chance.

  “I have talked to Glooskap for many years. I have asked him many times, ’Were they all released?’ He has never answered my question, until now. His answer is ’No.’ This is what I have always believed—I was just waiting for him to say it. This is my story, Grandson. What is yours?”

  Dark came early, and their grandfather led them for a time through that dark, much to Morgan’s dismay, who kept his eye out for moose. Just as he decided he could not tolerate another branch slashed across his face, another step into barbed underbrush biting into calves and knees, his grandfather called a halt. They camped beside a pile of boulders, the wall of stone hiding the grandfather’s modest fire. Morgan admired the way he corralled and controlled it, feeding it the way a sculptor might add clay to a new work. The way the fellow stared at the fire, regularly making adjustments to its fuel, whittling away at its boundaries, Morgan imagined he might be shaping it to fit his recollection of some previous fire, made when he was a younger man with no grandsons to drag around.

  Of course that night by the fire their grandfather told them another story. It was essentially the same story he’d been telling them, with additions, reinterpretations of the more dramatic parts. Morgan thought he made it up as he went along, to fill the gaps in a failing memory. During one particularly loud and incoherent bit he whispered to his brother, “Did you hear that? He sees a firefly and that becomes a character in the story, he sees a squirrel and the squirrel suddenly walks on stage. Yesterday he saw that broken-down pickup and sure enough, it became a key feature in last night’s version.”

  “Don’t you see—the story goes on forever—it includes everything. No one could remember it all. So he tells us what he remembers, as he remembers it. The things he sees remind him of different parts. It’s all one story, really, it just has a thousand parts, a thousand different versions.”

  Their grandfather’s voice gradually became louder, as if trying to drown out their side-talk. “The giant Glooskap came walking into this land out of the sunrise. His head brushed the stars, while his feet scraped the ocean floor. There were no Indians here, only the Elves. Glooskap took his bow and arrows and shot into the basket-trees, the ash trees. The Indians lived inside there, hiding, sleeping. And wherever he shot the Indians woke up, and came out of that bark.

  “Glooskap then made all the animals. He first made the animals huge, the moose, the squirrel, but since he loved the Indian the best he remade the animals smaller, so that the Indians could kill them. Only the mammoth refused, but Glooskap knew a great flood would come and drown him.

  “We were like babies when we came out of the trees. We knew nothing. We cried and called for our mothers. Glooskap taught us how to build fires, how to make canoes, how to hunt the animals he had made for us.

  “At the end of his days Glooskap left the earth for fairyland. He promised he would return, but he never has.”

  By dawn Morgan had just about had it. He couldn’t sleep, finally passed out from exhaustion, woke up with sore spots up and down his torso from lying on uneven ground—rocks interspersed by mushy patches of damp ground, and half-eaten by the mosquitoes. He’d been so exhausted, and so cold, even under his fur-lined jacket, that he could not move enough even to get closer to the fire. He remembered worrying about his grandfather—he didn’t even have a jacket!—but he’d been unable to think it through enough to do anything about it.

  He gazed into the gray and pink-haloed light of morning, gasped as several deer wandered through with unexpected majesty, and saw his grandfather standing there, taking off all his clothes.

  “What the hell? Granddad! Gary! Gary, do something!”

  “Hey,” Gary’s voice issued from a pile of leaves on the other side of the dead fire. Morgan couldn’t help admiring his brother’s cleverness, and wished he’d built himself such a bed. “Hey, Grandpa. I don’t think you really want to do that.”

  But their grandfather did not appear to hear them, his lips moving rapidly, almost inaudibly, in prayer or story. Both brothers scrambled to their feet, struggled to get their shoes on.

  Before they could move to stop him, he had finished stripping off all his clothes, and was now passing through the trees, his arms outstretched, hands briefly caressing each tree as he passed. With each minute more light was exploding in the spaces between trunks and in the gaps of the branchy canopy overhead as daylight spread like an out-of-control fire. Morgan watched the aged legs as he stepped through low-growing bramble, winced as scratches appeared on his shins, blood mixing with wild blackberry stains over his flanks and wrinkled belly.

  It seemed impossible, but whether because of his forest skills or some hidden reservoir of strength, he was faster than either one of them. They managed to barely keep him in sight (and that only, Morgan suspected, because he allowed it), but they could not catch him.

  Finally he stopped before a stand of large trees and started dancing, gazing high up into the top branches as if he expected to see Glooskap’s head nodding there. He was naked, bloody, and completely out of his mind. The distant Knife Edge was just visible above the trees, a glistening shard of sacrificial metal in the new sun.

  Morgan and Gary stopped a couple of hundred feet away, and didn’t even try to approach him. Morgan was doubled over, his head raised just enough to keep an eye on his grandfather, but he thought he was in serious danger of passing out. It gave him grim satisfaction that Gary, for all his Indian pride, looked no better.

  “So that’s . . . ” He jerked his head to point. ” . . . our legacy.”

  “Bro . . . you’re not looking . . . at it . . . right.”

  “I see . . . a naked old man . . . exposed . . . to the elements . . . waltzing . . . through the woods . . . tearing . . . up his skin, trying to find . . . a particular tree . . . he’s going to climb inside, because . . . that’s where he originally came from. What else am I supposed to see?”

  “He’s doing something that means something to him. That’s more than we can say for you. Or for me either, most of the time.”

  The brothers finally managed to straighten themselves up. They gazed at their grandfather, who’d stopped
dancing. Now he just stood there, perfectly still, looking up into the tree.

  “That’s why he stopped,” Gary said. “Just look at those trees, so close together they might as well be a solid wood wall. He’s never going to get through them. You go over there and talk to him, try to calm him down. God, I hope he doesn’t have a heart attack! I’ll go get his clothes. He got to see the mountain, and all these trees. I think we can take him back now.”

  “Wait, I thought you said he had a right . . .”

  “He does. But I didn’t know . . . it would be like this. Did you?” Morgan shook his head. “But hey.” Gary turned back down the trail. “At least now he’s given us a helluva story to tell.”

  Morgan looked over at his grandfather, just as his grandfather walked into the trees.

  “There’s nothing to worry about,” Gary said, walking beside him. “Just look at this, you can’t move fast through here—I bet he’s not more than half a dozen feet away, probably sitting on the ground, leaning against one of these trunks. You know he likes the feel of the bark.”

  “I know,” Morgan said, straining his eyes, looking for a glimpse, any kind of indication their grandfather had been through here. Gary was right—it was slow going, almost impossible to move. The trunks were so close together, and the undergrowth so thick. A serious fire danger, he thought. He couldn’t understand why the parks people had left it this way. And no signs of their grandfather’s passage.

  Gary said, “Really old people get like that, I’ve heard. They get . . . fixated . . . on a texture, a feeling, even a sound. They get compulsive like that.”

  Eventually they split up to cover more ground, calling back and forth so that they, too, did not lose each other. Here was the forest primeval, it seemed. It was difficult to conceive of human beings controlling this kind of growth. Here the forest was sky, and ground, and everything in between. Here it was the air you breathed.