Mink River: A Novel

by Doyle, Brian

  7.

  Worried Man and Cedar find a table under a spruce and sit for a minute and split a bottle of beer and handful of salmonberries that Cedar has requisitioned from one of the kids in Maple Head’s sixth grade. The two men eat the berries and sip the beer very slowly. The kids collecting thimbleberries blackberries run past in pairs and trios with their buckets and bowls thumping against their legs. By now the football field is a seething laughing sea of people and smoke from the grill is pouring into the sky in a geometric gray curtain that obscures the coughing O Donnell brothers Peadar and Niall.

  You know, says Worried Man, looking at his friend through the brown beer bottle, in the old days here, when the People set out adventuring, there was always a feast first. You wouldn’t think of a major journey or voyage without a major meal. It was a sort of communal prayer. So the scent of grilling meat must be in the topographical memory of Neawanaka. The old trees remember it. Maybe the hills themselves.

  And the sea.

  And the sea. My grandfather now, says Worried Man, grinning, he used to tell stories about the great feasts he remembered. He said they always got delightfully out of hand. He said maybe that was what great feasts were for, to let things get out of hand. He said sometimes there were fights and sometimes there were trysts. Sometimes there were fights and then trysts. Sometimes there were fighting trysts and trysting fights. Sometimes the people who were supposed to leave in the morning were nowhere to be found in the morning. Feasts changed things. All that gathered energy.

  And meat.

  And meat. My father now, he used to say he did a lot of healings at feasts. People were more open then and sadness could be driven out. One time … Are you going to eat that last berry?

  Let’s split it. Be a good omen for tomorrow. Shared load.

  They split the berry carefully, grinning.

  How often have we done this?

  Thousands of times.

  Forty years?

  I disremember exactly.

  Let’s say forty.

  Times, say, three hundred lunches a year.

  Or so.

  Or so.

  That’s twelve thousand bottles of beer.

  Or so.

  A thousand gallons easy.

  Or so.

  And God knows how many berries.

  God knows.

  Does God know?

  God knows. The doctor says so. Not a sparrow or salmonberry falls but the Father knows.

  8.

  The pub is filled with a rich golden buttery sunlight so dense and thorough that it seems for a minute to the doctor that maybe he is having an epiphany or a vision like Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus but when he, the doctor, pushes through the swinging screen door to the kitchen he finds Stella under the stove cleaning the grease trap. All he can see of her are the bottoms of her shoes. The bottoms of her shoes are filthy.

  Stella?

  I’m busy. Come back later.

  I’ve come to help with the beer for the picnic, Stella.

  Hang on.

  She inches backwards and he watches her emerge feet first as if breeched from a dark metal womb.

  Ah, doctor. Hang on a minute. I’m a mess.

  He watches with a professional eye as she washes up.

  Kind of you to help, she says, looking sideways at him.

  Happy to help.

  Place is a mess. Sorry.

  I know the feeling, he says politely. My office is a mess. Books and papers everywhere. I should hire an office manager but I can’t afford it.

  I’d hire someone to replace me if I could afford it, she says, smiling. Funny how owning a place means you work the hardest and get paid the least.

  Do you like owning the pub?

  I used to, she says simply. Not any more.

  Why?

  I’m tired of it. The grease, the stench, the drunks. You see a lot. It’s fun sometimes early in the evening, when people stop in for a beer on the way home, and there’s that companionable feeling in the room. But then it gets edgier. More sour. And the work never ends. Cooking and cleaning, purchase orders, deliveries messed up, the staff drinking up all the profits, the breakage. It’s a hard business. But so is your business, eh? I mean, you’re in the business of fixing broken people. That must be hard.

  It’s hard when I can’t help, which happens a lot.

  Do you … is it awful when a patient dies? I don’t mean to pry. Sorry.

  No, no. Well, yes, it’s hard. But it happens and you have to … adjust. You never get used to it but you have to deal with it. You do your best and accept what happens. It’s hardest when it’s a child, of course. That just seems cruel. That has happened to me eight times and I remember every taut pale face. Five girls and three boys. I think of them as my children somehow sometimes. Because I lost them.

  Sorry to ask.

  No, no. It’s actually a bit of a relief to talk about it openly. I don’t talk about it much. It’s good to talk.

  We better deliver the beer.

  Yes, yes. The beer. Well. How can I help?

  Thanks for talking, she says, watching the sunlight glint off his glasses.

  Thank you, Stella, he says, making the slightest of bows.

  All right then, she says.

  Here we go, he says, but neither of them moves, not a muscle, not a finger, not the twitch of an eyelid, the dense yellow light filling the little kitchen, glinting off the pots and pans, the grill, the steel sink, the stack of empty steel barrels, the racks of mugs, the towers of plates and saucers, the mound of freshly washed silverware, the cracked wall tiles that had once been white, the scrawl of penciled phone numbers on the wall by the phone, the battered old yellow phone, the battered old yellow boots by the door, the battered old yellow door covered with yellowing notes.

  9.

  The smoke and smell of the grilling meat rises and spreads and soaks through the hills and draws the most heartfelt and genuine attention from a most remarkable variety of creatures in most every element. The bear who can smell meat from half a mile away cuffs her cubs into parade position and all three of them trundle cautiously toward the picnic along the old sand quarry road. The old bobcat who lives in the sand quarry and is gruff lord of all he surveys there smells the meat and has dark squirming visions of all the sorts of meat it might delightfully be and he too sets off evanescing through the salal and huckleberry thickets. The two adult eagles nesting in the third cove south of town, the one that you can’t get to except by sea or air, the one where the sea lions haul up at low tide to preen and bake and flirt, actually float through a column of smoke over the football field on their way north to see if anything good to eat died in the river, and their awkward new daughter trailing them, still wobbly on her wings after only a few weeks aloft, veers to avoid the column of smoke, not quite sure if it’s a sudden amorphous cliff or a really tall gray tree or what, and she nearly falls out of the air altogether absolutely while making a most uneaglelike sound, a sort of terrified sqwork? Elk and deer smell the smoke and know what it means and drift silently deeper into the woods. Cows smell the smoke and do nothing. Vultures see and smell the smoke and in the mysterious sky code of vultures they come from miles around, even from adjoining counties, riding thermals along ridges to get enough loft to turn and cruise the rising south wind toward Neawanaka, each one seeing the next one dropping toward meat and following it so there is a ripple of vulture in the air for many miles. The smoke swirls and eddies and intrigues dogs and cats, weasels and martens, butterflies and bobcats, snails and slugs, squirrels and scrub jays, crows and cougar, mice and voles, foxes and fox sparrows, gulls and geese, dragonflies and damselflies. Most of all the redolent greasy smoke rivets the lean intense raptors of the insect world, the clan of wasp and hornet, who rise humming from every dell and dingle and rill and hill, from their holes and nests and dens and secret humming caves, and turn to face the sweet smoke, and fire themselves humming toward its source as if from a thousand angry yel
low rifles.

  10.

  Owen and Grace jounce in his truck toward Auto & Other Repair for ten more tables but along the way Grace says can we swing by my house, I hafta get my tools, so they do, driving up the ridge road and up the serpentine driveway along the pasture line where Declan shot the cows.

  Ought to be a historical marker there, says Grace.

  Owen grins.

  They pull up by the house and Grace hops out and goes to get her toolbox from the shed. Owen turns off the engine and sits meditatively for a minute and then gets out and walks the fence line. The grassy golden meadow curves gently down into a dark ravine filled with the thick matted jungly stand of spruce and hemlock that Red Hugh never cut; a second meadow curves up from the shadowy ravine, and beyond that second gleaming coppery meadow is the endless green sea. The morning haze has burned off and Owen can see for miles and miles. Not a cloud in the sky. Goldfinches are working the thistle in the meadows and swallows are mowing the insects rising from the warming grass.

  Is mo lau nad muir n-oited imma-rau, he whispers, thinking of his greatgrandfather Timmy Cooney.

  What’s that mean? says Grace, who is suddenly next to him.

  It is many a day since I sailed on the sea of youth, says Owen. My greatgranddad used to say that when he was old.

  Was he a sailor?

  No no. He was a teacher, sort of. A storyteller.

  Here?

  Ireland.

  He still alive?

  Died when I was a kid. He was a great guy.

  Sorry.

  Yeh.

  We better go.

  Yeh.

  They get back in the truck and as Owen turns the key Grace says, tell me about your family?

  Not much to tell, says Owen. My greatgranddad survived the Hunger and had a son, his name was Cathol, who married my gram, her name was Maighread, and they had one son, my dad Martin, and he married my mum, her name is Maire, and they had me, and here I am.

  How did you get here from Ireland?

  Ah, there’s a long story there, Grace. It’d take all day.

  I have all day.

  Short version is, I took a ship.

  Come on. Tell me.

  I ran away from home, basically, and got on a cargo boat in Galway, as a loader, and we went across the pond to Rio, and then around the Horn, and then back up the other side. The ship was supposed to dock in Seattle for repair work but by the time we came past here I had had enough. It was a scummy hole of a boat and I never got paid. So as we passed the headland there I jumped off.

  Out there?

  Yeh. I was a good swimmer, it was a calm day, I figured what the hell. I was young and strong and stupid. Nearly broke my neck. Nearly drowned too. Landed on the beach right near the doctor’s house. I was tired, I can tell you that. I was never so tired in my life. Nora says I was born from the ocean like Cedar was born from the river. Daniel gets a kick out of that. I hear him telling his friends that his da was born at sea.

  How is Dan?

  Better. Doesn’t get woozy like before.

  How’s Nora?

  Good. I guess.

  You guess?

  She’s, ah, not feeling well. Lately.

  Sorry.

  Yeh.

  By now they are at Auto & Other Repair and they hop out to get the tables.

  I had to store ’em in the auto half, says Owen, leading the way through an unimaginable welter and thicket of car parts and pieces of cars and towers of tires. You take five and I’ll take five. They’re not that heavy. Strong kid like you can handle ’em, maybe.

  Piss off, says Grace sweetly.

  The tables are stacked on an oily dark table in the oiliest dark corner of the shop and as they lean over to get a good grip on the tables their shoulders and hips and thighs align firmly for an instant, half a second maybe, not long, bone to bone, just long enough for Grace to shiver and Owen to cough. They carry the tables out to the truck, blinking when they emerge from the cool dark of the shop into the bright heat of the afternoon, and drive back to the picnic, talking about ships.

  11.

  The picnic gets louder and louder as the afternoon deepens. Near dusk Maple Head finally sits down to eat at a table in the end zone of the field under the uprights. Her daughter is there talking animatedly with George Christie the former logger and as Maple Head folds herself on to the bench and slices a piece of steak and sighs with pleasure at the masterful grilling job No Horses turns to her and without a word folds her arms around her and leans her head on her mother’s shoulder and Maple Head is wise enough to say nothing whatsoever but to just sit and accept and savor these arms, this face, these tears.

  Anna Christie the singer is sitting next to her husband rocking a little and she stares at the mother and daughter across the table and says nothing. Next to her is Michael the cop’s wife Sara with one of her girls asleep in her lap and the other running around crazy with a bunch of other kids at the edge of the woods beyond the end zone. Sara is humming Puccini. Every time she gets to a passage where the tone deepens her baby kicks her in the spleen. The dusk deepens infinitesimally minute by minute, as if someone was adding grains of darkness to the bowl of brimming light on the field, and at exactly the right sifting moment for swifts to appear they appear far overhead, chittering and flittering, taking over the sky from the barn swallows, who swirl and whirl into their muddy tenements and fold themselves up tightly and cleanly as gleaming blinking blue and black and orange knives.

  It gets dark enough for Owen and Nicholas and the wrestling team to ring the field with hanging lanterns, which cast gentle scalloped pools of light on the dark field. Talk and song and hubbub and laughter and shouts rise and fall. Smoke still towers from the grill and the

  O Donnell brothers Peadar and Niall are black-faced and grimy and grinning. Cedar finds a corner and has a long talk with Nicholas. The doctor and Declan O Donnell go to get the man with one day to live from the doctor’s house and Declan carries the man in his arms from the house to the truck and from the truck to a chair by the bonfire and Daniel wheels over to chat and Kristi toasts marshmallows for the three of them. The night sifts down like charcoal mist. Bats take over from swifts. Worried Man quietly folds himself onto the bench on the other side of No Horses and takes her in his arms and she puts her head on his chest like a boat docking. Owen, passing by with Nicholas to fix the handful of burned-out lanterns, leans in and kisses his wife’s turbulent hair.

  Michael the cop walks the fringe of the field, no particular reason, just keeping his eyes peeled, not looking for anything in particular, not breaking up the teenage couples leaning against trees, not breaking up arguments, not even breaking up a wrestling match starting to boil over and ringed by shouting boys, just walking, just keeping an eye peeled, just keeping the legs loose, no problem, listening to the music, grinning at the teasing he gets from those who notice him, accepting a beer that Stella hands him as he passes the kegs but not drinking it, clapping the priest on the shoulder as he walks by, waving to a table of teachers, glaring at a table of boys drinking too much beer, just walking, just keeping moving is all, no problem, noticing as the old folks put their sweaters on and then their jackets and coats, noticing coats hung on chairs, noticing a coat made of gleaming silver, which turns out, when he casually walks over and looks at it closely without looking at it directly, to be the nylon lining of a coat that’s been turned inside out, a brown coat, he keeps walking, no problem, keep moving, stay calm, no problem, but when he comes to the corner of the field where an old hemlock offers its ancient shaggy darkness he quietly leaves his beer on an empty table and steps under the hemlock and vanishes.

  12.

  That guy weighed about fifty pounds, says Declan to the doctor. I’ve carried fish weighed more than that guy. His wheelchair weighed twice as much as him. He can’t have much more to go. The guy’s all edges. His skin is like paper. Nice guy. Quiet. Was he a little guy before?

  Not especially, says the doct
or.

  That’s amazing, says Declan. You wouldn’t think a guy could get that papery and all. You wouldn’t think he could stay alive and all. He’s hardly there. It’s like all his insides got sucked out and all’s left is the shell. Like gulls do with crabs that get caught up the beach.

  He has what we call a voracious tumor, says the doctor.

  So it’s eating him from the inside?

  Essentially.

  Man. That’s evil. Poor guy. You couldn’t take it out?

  No.

  Man.

  They both watch the man with one day to live as he sits by the bonfire. Daniel leans in grinning and says something and the man grins and Kristi kneeling by the fire grins and offers the man a marshmallow smoking on her stick which the man declines gently with a wave of his hand nearly as slender as the stick.

  He loves the sea, you know, says the doctor.

  I thought he was a sales guy.

  That was his job, yes.

  Did he fish?

  No. He just loves the sea. He was born here, you know.

  Yeah, well, I was born here and I hate the sea.

  Really?

  Well—I hate depending on it. I hate working it like it was a farm. It’s alive, you know. It moves around. You can’t trust it. It does what it wants. It’s not like land. Nothing’s ever the same twice out there. Never the same color or weather or smell or anything. Everything moves around. You find the best fishing spot ever and the next time you go there’s nothing there. And there’s a lotta ways to get killed. I might like the ocean if it wasn’t my job. I’d like to like it from a safe distance, you know?

  Are you going out tomorrow?

  Yeh. Way out. Out to the shelf. I need big fish. Going alone. Grace and Nicholas bagged out on me. Chickenshit.

  Why don’t you take him with you?

  Who—him?

  He’d like that.

  He’s dead weight. So to speak.