Mink River: A Novel

by Doyle, Brian

  15.

  The doctor in his study reading. First light. There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job, he reads. The ocean below his window is a swirl of mist. And that man was perfect and upright, and he eschewed evil. Ebb tide, the doctor notes. What? says Job, shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil? The three clocks in his study murmur together. Wrath killeth the foolish man, and envy slayeth the silly one. He removes his spectacles and examines them patiently and opens a drawer and takes out a tiny pristine towel and cleans his glasses thoroughly and folds the towel and puts it back exactly as it was. Despise not thou the chastening of the One: for he maketh sore, and bindeth up, he woundeth, and his hands make whole. The first cormorant of the day whirs heavily over the house. Now my days are swifter than a post: they flee away, they are passed away as the swift ships, as the eagle that hasteth to the prey. The mist over the sea is shredded and the face of the ocean revealed. Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble. A parade of pelicans sets forth, somehow flapping and cruising in unison, how do they do that? He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not. The first heron of the day lands in the surf and conducts sand-crab research. I have said to the worm, Thou art my mother, and my sister. The heron changes tactics and takes up the one-legged ballet stance. How long will ye vex my soul, and break me in pieces with words? Question, writes the doctor in his daybook: how long on average does a heron wait to make a play? The light shall shine upon thy ways, and he shall save the humble person, and he shall deliver the island of the innocent, and it is delivered by the pureness of thine hands. And what, continues the doctor in his neat crisp handwriting, does a heron think about while waiting? God speaketh, yet man perceiveth it not. Or is the heron keyed to a terrific pitch of attentiveness? In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falleth upon men, in slumberings upon the bed, then he openeth the ears of men. And how do they manage to stand for so long on one leg? Behold, God is great, and we know him not, neither can the number of his years be searched out, for he maketh small the drops of water, they pour down rain according to the vapour thereof, which the clouds do drop and distil upon man abundantly. By now the morning mist is dissolved, and the ocean laid bare in its roiling majesty, and upon it are boats and the animals of the skin of the sea, and in the distance leviathan; gray whales, thinks the doctor, noting that they are heading south earlier than usual. Hear attentively the noise of his voice, and the sound that goeth out of his mouth, he thundereth marvellously with his voice; great things doeth he, which we cannot comprehend. He checks his notebooks for whale migration dates for the last ten years. Fair weather cometh out of the north, and a terrible majesty. A quiet voice comes to the doctor from the kitchen, and the sheer surprise of another voice in the house, and the gentle salt of the voice, and the realization whose voice it is, causes him to pause in his labors, and he lifteth up his head, his spectacles glinting. Hast thou entered into the springs of the sea? He puts down his pen, and closes his notebook, but does not shelve it properly among its numbered predecessors, and he rises to his feet, and stands at the window, and bows his head, and turneth to leave; but as he passes under the lintel of his study, he opens his mouth, and out therefrom issues his voice, saying, I would love a cup of tea, Stella, thank you.

  16.

  Cedar checks his watch and has a sinking feeling in his stomach. He had a heart attack, the old goat, and he died, and he’s frozen stiff. Bastard. No flare. Shit. He works back across the ice field to the northwest sector and slowly and steadily works his way back and forth across the field of caves. Shit. Finds bootprints, enters cave, finds Billy supine and unconscious. Shit. Medical training, United States Army. No broken bones. No dislocation of neck or spine. Pulse normal. No apparent injury or trauma. Smelling salts. Billy wanders awake. Croaks unintelligibly and then grins. Flexes left hand. Grins again.

  What are you smiling about, you old goat?

  Billy tries to explain but his mouth isn’t working right.

  You aren’t making a whole lot of sense, as usual.

  Yes.

  Can you sit up?

  No.

  Did you fall?

  No.

  Heart attack?

  Stoke, says Billy, working away at the s for a bit. Stork.

  Does anything work?

  Head. Hand.

  Any pain?

  No.

  I’ll carry you out.

  Yes.

  Let’s get down to the lodge and I will call Owen.

  Yes.

  I got you, Billy.

  Yes. Good.

  I’m going to tie your hands around my neck, okay?

  Yes.

  It’s a long way down. Stop me if you are hurting.

  Yes.

  We’ll go slow but we’ll get there.

  Yes.

  I owe you a rescue, eh?

  No no.

  You’ll be okay. You’ll be all right. We’ll find a way through this, Billy. The doctor will know. All right. Here we go. You ready?

  Yes.

  What are you grinning about?

  Time, says Billy distinctly.

  You’re in shock, says Cedar.

  Seventh, says Billy.

  Pipe down and rest.

  Yes. Yes.

  Cedar, who has terrific peripheral vision still, notices and doesn’t notice the startling depth of the cave as he hoists Billy to his feet and wraps him around his back; and later he will wonder if he saw or dreamed or wished to see a glint of metal in the rear of the cave, some kind of silvery flash, as if some big machine was huddled there; or an immense spool of some kind, as May would quietly say one afternoon, neither of them saying anything about it again, but both thinking about it more than they would ever admit.

  17.

  Down and down and down through an afternoon the color of bobcats and new footballs and fresh-sawn wood. Not golden but buttery. Faintly the simmer of surf. Down and down they come, Nora first, Maple Head putting her hand on her daughter’s shoulder sometimes in steep passages. That bony shoulder like a wing. Tucked against me when she nursed. When she ran her shoulders flexed faster than they eye could see. My girl in flight.

  Past the little copse where the chickarees came out to chitter and stare.

  Pausing for tea and cookies.

  There are doors and windows everywhere, Mom, says Nora. I see that. I see that. I didn’t see that.

  If the doors of perception were cleansed, says Maple Head,

  We would see everything as it is, infinite, says Nora. Dad says that all the time. He says a lot of things all the time. He spends all his time saying lots of things. That’s William Blake, isn’t it? What’s the deal with Dad and William Blake?

  He’s wiser than he knows, your dad. Let’s not tell him that.

  What happens when this comes again?

  Maybe it won’t.

  Probably it will.

  Probably it will.

  Will you walk with me then?

  As long as I can walk and long after that too.

  There’s no medicine, is there?

  Just the doors and windows.

  Did you…?

  Sometimes. Sometimes. Sometimes we had no money and no prospect of ever having money and that wears and eats at you. Sometimes we were ill and hungry and the rain was relentless and I couldn’t see any way we would ever get out. Love doesn’t save anybody. But I found doors and windows. I think maybe they are always there and we don’t see them too well. This is why people invent religions, to map doors and windows maybe. Maybe that’s what art is in the end. Who knows. But they’re there. Consider the fowls of the air. Consider the water ouzel. This is one of those things that maybe the more you talk about it the more stupid it sounds, but there are a lot of things like that. You are like that for me. I can’t explain more than a jot of how I feel about you but as long as there is a you I have joy in my bones. The fact that the
re was a you is a joy beyond calculation. It hurt when you were born and it hurts still. Let me keep my hand on your shoulder the rest of the way home. I think my hand is hungry for your shoulder.

  Down and down and down and once they find a whole thicket of thimbleberries crammed with waxwings so eager and ravenous and foolish and gluttonous that they can hardly lumber off when Maple Head and Nora approach.

  They look like little stuffed couches, don’t they? says Nora, and they burst out laughing again.

  18.

  Declan dozing on the bow in the broad calm light thinks sleepily of sails and the lovely windy words of the craft of enslaving air. Yardarms and lugsails, gaffs and rigs, jibs and booms, luff and clew and tack. Boats buffeted by breezes. Westering winds. He’d always been interested in boats and ships from before he could remember—he vividly remembers his father hammering him for not paying attention to the work at hand because he was staring out at the vast barges and timber rafts and tankers that loomed on the horizon, not to mention the occasional skidding scudding sloops and yachts and daily slogging chugging fishing boats bristling with lines. Nothing half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats, that was the line from one of the books Grace used to read aloud at night when they were little, tucked up in their rooms in the attic, the fragile plaster wall between them, her bed against one side of the wall and his on the other and her voice coming through the little hole he punched through, the size of a dime, the hole he surreptitiously enlarged week by week, and eventually added a little screen in it, like a confessional! said Grace with delight after she’d endured her first confession, mortified because she had nothing to confess, Declan magnanimously lending her some of his sins, a small theft, a mink trap that killed a pregnant grouse, a silence as a boy was bullied at school. Jesus, the books she read through that screen! There must have been hundreds. And he’d never read one back to her, not one. What did I do for my sister, exactly, other than rag her relentless every day for six thousand days? The one girl. We thought she was spoiled but maybe it was the other way around. The Boys, we hated that, the three of us labeled genderically, mom and dad never said the Girl, did they, but maybe it was harder for Grace, eh? Then mom bags us and there’s no one there but Red Hugh hard of head and hand. Ach, the poor old bastard, an apt and suitable death, pierced by a wooden spear. Like the Tuatha. Jesus, what a clan. Good that I leave. Maybe it’s best I leave. She can find her own way. Maybe without me everyone has more room to grow. Like trees in the woods. Speaking of trees, O Donnell me lad, isn’t there a stepping-hole for an emergency mast on this ship, and didn’t you and wharf rat Nicholas lay in not one but two whippet spars for just this sort of eventuality? Aye, captain, we did. Look lively then, boy! And scrounge around for a mainsail while you are down in the hold. Aye, captain! Right away, sir!

  19.

  Of course Owen made Worried Man a most amazing and unusual robochair, using the wheelchair the doctor had loaned Danny. He and Dan and Moses disappeared into Other Repair for days on end and there was a continual clanking and whirring of crowbars and sanders and fan belts and compressors and the wailing of many machines shaping a new thing that had never been in the world before.

  Anyone can make a wheelchair, said Owen, but we will make something else.

  And when they came out, Owen and Daniel and Moses, after six days of very nearly round the clock labor, and buckled Billy into his new electric body, there was wonderment and merriment everywhere, on every face tears, in every mouth laughter. Cedar laughed so hard he nearly choked and Owen had to bang him on the back a while until he got clear, and No Horses laughed so hard she had the hiccups until dinner. Silvery it was, the robosuit, a sort of mobile metal parka, something like a race-car and suit of armor all at once, with a panel of buttons for the left hand by which everything was controlled, speed and cornering and even shiftable gears for hills and bad road conditions. It had heating and air-conditioning functions, a storage area for interesting things found along the journey, a sort of extendable mechanical arm on the right side for exploration, and subtle mirrors set all around so the occupant could easily see with a glance in all directions. It even had evacuation piping, in case the occupant was caught short, and an ejection apparatus, in case of emergencies. It had spare wheels cunningly set into the main body of the body, it had spare batteries, it had night lights fore and aft, and it would have had a radio antenna, said Daniel, if we thought you wanted to hear music all day, but we figured you didn’t. Do you like it, gramp? Is it okay? I love it, Daniel, said Billy quietly, and his face shone also. Will you and Owen help me into it? If you hold it steady there Owen can perhaps hoist these old bones. I am more grateful than I can easily say, Owen. You are a prince among men. I am blessed and graced to have you as a son. The day Nora fell in love with you, that was a good day. This button operates the arm? And this button opens and closes the fingers? Can I make a fist? If I touch someone do they get an electric shock? Imagine the possibilities.

  20.

  Final project, says Maple Head to her class. In the last fifteen minutes of class today, write down some things you believe in that don’t make sense. Write an essay, but don’t worry about coherence and shape and narrative style. Just make notes. Play with words and ideas. Are there things that you believe with all your heart that don’t make the slightest sense, if you examine them in the cold light of day? Try to use corners of your brains you don’t usually visit, and take this seriously, don’t be giving me flip essays about chipmunks and Oregon State football. Stop and think for a moment, about your family, your people, organizations, civic and religious and cultural entities, about core beliefs, about things you really and truly care about, and then write from your heart. Again I ask you to take this seriously, and try to just pour down substantive thought. Don’t worry about coherence and shape and clarity, for once, just write freely. But be honest. We will not be reading these aloud in class, only I will read them, in private, so you don’t have to pose and wear your usual masks. I’ll give you one example, which you cannot use, and then off we go. For example: friendship. Does friendship really make sense? If, in the end, those who know you best are exactly those who can deliver you the most pain, who know your weak points and flaws and can with exquisite accuracy find and irritate those sore places, then why bother to get close to people? Similarly marriage, does marriage make any real sense in a world of serial infatuation, a world in which evolutionarily the distribution and dissemination of genes is better aided and abetted by a deliberate refusal to commit to monogamous relationships?

  That’s two examples, Mrs. M, says a boy named Blink. So we can’t write about marriage either?

  You married, Blinky?

  Not anymore, Mrs. M, which gets a general giggle.

  Well, then.

  But Blink is stuck on thinking about marriage, and he figures he’ll take a flyer on it in his fifteen minutes, because it turns out he is a majorly serious student of the marriage he sees up close and personal, which is his mom and dad, who have a tumultuous but interesting marriage, as far as he can tell, although the range of his experience with marriages is thin, whereas as far as he can tell his mom and dad are the only people in the history of the extended Blink clan to actually get married or stay married; here and there an aunt dove into marriage but quicksprinted right out, like one time, this was his Auntie Antonia, her marriage lasted three days, and ever after she talked of it as a crucifixion followed by three days in the tomb followed by a miraculous resurrection.

  As my mother says Marriage doesn’t make any sense whatsoever and is clearly an agreement between two fools for the Perpetuation of a foolish race, writes Blink. However, I believe that Marriage has its uses and utilities. However, it is a good example of a thing that makes some Sense but not much. Most of the time Marriage appears to be a Difficulty because the parties involved come from different planets and have to find common or overlapping Orbits. This seems mostly unworkable in the Personal Sphere just as it is in the Ast
ronautical Sphere as we have seen recently in class. Observationally I speculate that arguing about Money and making humorous remarks is the key to Marriage. In conclusion Marriage does not make sense but I believe in it because I have seen it applied to real-world Problems and its curious Effects are something to be studied very carefully in the future by careful scholars. Further study is called for perhaps by the Government or a Married Committee or the Department of Public Works.

  Time! says Maple Head. Pencils down. Pass your papers up your row to the front please. Ladies and gentlemen, I thank you. Away you go! Off! Away!

  21.

  Sara is on her knees in the garden and Michael is in a wheelchair at the edge of the garden and the girls are running around the house the younger trying to hit the older with a water balloon and the older sister is staying tauntingly just exactly out of her sister’s flinging range which she, the older girl, knows to within the whisper of a whisker of a wren. Sara plants garlic, beans, carrots, tomato starts, broccoli starts, and, experimentally, eggplant. Second crop, she thinks. Second chance. She finishes the last row and mills through the whole patch again for weed seed and finally calls it a day and leans back against Michael’s chair. He runs his hands through her hair. Fingers her ears. Lord, woman, he says, even your ears are attractive. She snorts. Were I not at the moment somewhat incapacitated, he says, bending down to murmur this in her ear, I’d carry you inside the house and lock the doors and remove every thread of your clothing and make those ears burn, yes I would. She giggles. I’d rub everything I got against one ear and then an hour later start on the other, he whispers, and now she’s laughing, and he keeps murmuring cheerfully about how he will eventually end up rubbing against the exquisite sensual foothills of her extraordinary ankles, and this is such a peculiar phrase that she laughs so hard her cheeks and stomach hurt, and she stands up, laughing, to stretch her stomach, and as she turns around and reaches out a hand to touch his face her water breaks.