The Moon Pinnace

by Thomas Williams

  “I’m sorry,” John said. “I’m a big boy now. Ancient resentments and all that. But if you used to be Sylvan Hearne, how come you’re now Oval Forester?”

  “I didn’t want to leave you, Johnny. I loved you more than anything in the world.”

  “Yeah. Okay.”

  “Oval?” Bonnie said.

  “You had to live with your mother. It’s the law. And then when Amos wanted to adopt you…”

  “We can forget that part,” John said. “The whole idea is a little nauseating.”

  “I don’t blame you for blaming us. But we always loved you, Johnny, both of us, no matter what.”

  “Oval!” Bonnie said. “I don’t understand! Is it true? And all the things about truth? You never would have told me?”

  “Bonnie, dear,” Oval, or Sylvan, said. “I’m sorry. Of course I’ll explain. I took a man’s place, that’s all. He was afraid and I was too old to be drafted, with Thelma as a dependent, so I took his name and he took mine. It doesn’t matter. The Good Lord knows who we are.”

  “And you were drafted?” John said.

  “I enlisted in the Navy as Oval Forester.”

  “She told me it was Amos made her cut off any contact with you.”

  “Be easy on her, Johnny. She wanted something else. She wanted the best for you.”

  “It’s amazing. You can’t disbelieve everything, no matter how cautious you are,” John said.

  “That’s so true,” Bonnie said. “You’ve got to believe something. Oval never was your real name. How can I believe anything now? What happened to Thelma when you went in the Navy? Where was your wife? How did you get away with it? Is it true at all?”

  “My wife was long gone by then, and his mother—Oval Forester’s mother—took care of Thelma. I had a monthly pay allotment sent to her. I couldn’t tell you because the man who’s called Sylvan Hearne has a family now. Only he and his mother know the truth. Listen, Bonnie, dear, please. He’s the kind of person who’d have been destroyed in boot camp, let alone in combat. Some people just can’t do what you have to do in the service. They have talents, but not that kind. As for getting away with it, who cared in 1942? The country got its sailor.”

  “You could have trusted me,” Bonnie said. “There’s something wrong with all of it.”

  “Do you want proof? Here’s my son who recognizes me from another life. There’s an honorable discharge from the Navy in that drawer there with my thumbprint on it. Maybe it was all a lie, but I don’t think God would chide me for it, even if my reasons weren’t so noble. I wanted a vacation from a boring job and also, I have to confess, from taking care of poor Thelma, bless her heart. So I got to cruise around the Pacific for a couple of years on a submarine tender. Meanwhile Thelma got loving care from a grateful woman. Does the Lord judge me a cheat? It’s not for me to ask.”

  Bonnie got up and went to a window, where brownish gauze curtains made the light seem old. “It sounds possible,” she said. “It sounds noble, too, except for leaving Thelma. It’s just that I can’t believe you wouldn’t have told me. There’s nothing I haven’t told you, nothing. I bared my soul to you and you weren’t even the person whose name I called you. All the time you had a secret from me.”

  Oval said in his sweet, light voice, “Dear Bonnie, no one hates secrets more than I do. If it was a secret it wasn’t my secret, it was his and his mother’s secret. As for me, I’m Oval now and I’ll always be Oval. When we bared our souls to Christ and to each other I was Oval.”

  “Oh, I don’t know! I don’t know!” Bonnie cried.

  A preacher’s grave tonality came into Oval’s voice. “Let us put our faith in a loving, all-wise, all-powerful God,” he said. He went up behind her and put his hands on her shoulders. “A God everywhere present, knowing we are His children, made in His image and likeness, whole and complete in His eyes. With such faith our names, our worldly goods, our reputations, are nothing, for we will be our true selves, linked to the inexhaustible forces of the Infinite Mind of the Universe.”

  John could see that Bonnie was not convinced; while she wanted to be convinced, she kept finding herself unconvinced. Her shoulders softened, then grew straight again. She turned, her mouth drooping, questions shading a face pretty even as it pouted and felt sorry for itself.

  He listened with an irritating sense of loss, as if coins were falling out of his hands into deep water and he couldn’t ever get them back. Oval—it was better to think of the man as Oval—kept talking Lord, God, Christ and love, love, love. John, if he ever had to name the man, his father, would call him Oval as a sort of necessary evasion, the way he always used the word “love” as if it had quotes around it.

  Soon Bonnie let herself be calmed. She put her head on Oval’s green chest for a moment as if bowing to a superior force. In the quiet of this brief ceremony Thelma came thumping in. “I’m a bee!” she said in a throaty voice like a burp. “I’m a bee!” Evidently Thelma had learned at school how to be a bee.

  “Yes, they’re coming,” Oval said. “I’ve got to work all night tonight getting the trays set up.”

  “I’m a bee coming!” she said. She took John’s hands in hers, her lopsided head squashed with delight, her amorphous body parts galumphing. “I’m a bee coming, John!”

  This, by God, was his half-sister, his sister, flesh of his flesh, who wanted to play ring-around-the-rosy, good nature spilling from a leaky vessel. Here you are, Thelma, a foundering ship, whoever built you, and here is your half-brother, son of an untrustworthy mother and this implausibly pseudonymous saint whose voice, he believes, is linked to the inexhaustible forces of the Infinite Mind of the Universe.

  Thelma’s skewed blue eyes looked gleefully into his, one more accurately than the other. “John wih hep you, Daddy!” she said.

  “Come, Thelma,” Bonnie said. “Let’s get all the finger paints off you. Let’s get all cleaned up so we’ll be nice and neat.” Bonnie’s idea was to leave father and son alone to catch up on the lost years, but when they were alone they found it hard to look at each other. After a silence long enough to have become meaningful, the father said, “You must have got this address from Estelle.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you remember Winota? Did you meet anyone else besides Estelle? She’s such a wonderful person.” His smile seemed too pleased, his lips bowed to the point of recurve.

  “I remembered being pretty happy there,” John said. “I met Estelle’s niece, Gracie Lundgren, and Miles Wagner. His parents said you were ‘a clean man.’ ”

  “George and Ada Wagner! I had some wonderful friends in Lou’ Qui Parle County!”

  “My mother told me once that you were ‘playing around’ with Estelle. Was that another of her lies?”

  “You’re still back there, aren’t you, Johnny? I don’t blame you. I guess you got a raw deal, all right. I met Amos Sylvester once and he seemed like a pretty mixed-up sort of fellow. The question about Estelle I can’t answer because, forgive me, Johnny, that’s her business.”

  His father’s version of the divorce, which John hadn’t really intended to get into, was that Martha was simply “bowled over” by Amos Sylvester. Also she was sick of Winota and wanted to go East—you couldn’t blame her. She was twenty-six years old, a pretty and lively young woman, and she felt she was in a dead end. Who could blame her for having those feelings? She’d go to Minneapolis a lot with a friend of hers, Esther Peterson, just to be in the city. Meanwhile, Estelle Lundgren was living with them above the Herald, and one thing led to another and people began to talk. After Martha went away with Amos, Sonny Hilberg got him fired from the Herald. Estelle didn’t know that, so don’t ever mention it. Anyway, he took off for California, like half the people in the country, it seemed. Those were hard times. When he got a job in San Diego he wrote to have Johnny maybe spend some time with him, or at least keep in contact with him, but Martha thought it would be best not to, that Amos was his father now. “I didn’t have much money, and in a
way I guess I wanted to believe it might be best for you, but I missed you, Johnny. I always did.”

  There was still that fading, this amiable man washing out before his eyes. Resentment seemed wasted, too complicated for such pale and kindly good nature. But he had to answer his father’s questions, filling the blank places, wondering how to sum up his childhood in Leah, where he’d navigated by dead reckoning among willful children and childish adults. Well, he got here somehow and it wasn’t all that bad, even if he had been eager to go into the Army. Georgia, Okinawa, the end of the war, Japan, Fort Dix, the university, no major yet. Yes, Martha was fine, Amos his usual pain in the ass. No real complaints.

  He didn’t go back to the long seasons of dread and evasion, when the world of adults seemed insane and he hid with books and fantasies of rescue. He had some friends, later, when old enough to have the time with friends. There were lots of fights, embarrassments, but maybe that was normal. High school was boring, dumb, avoidable a lot of the time because his mother was always ready to sign excuses, no matter how dishonest.

  His father’s wide blue eyes stared at him, unselfconsciously avid, and he thought: What good would this father have been? At least there would have been no broken glass, gin fits, howls, unpredictable giants crashing through doors, a child with no place below a roof to hide. Imagine abandoning your own child.

  Oh, well, he got through those years all right, and here he was. There was no way now to tell what kind of person he might have been.

  At supper Bonnie told what had happened with Urban Stumms. She was subdued, and didn’t make John quite the hero she’d seemed to think him at the time, as if she might now know the real truth about what had happened on the roof peak. His father (Oval, he thought: Oval) thought it a brave and responsible thing to have done, and said so, praising him, the praise a faint music for another time.

  “I’ll stop in and see Urban on the way to the Co-op,” Oval (his father) said.

  “I’m a bee coming!” Thelma said, and John understood that she’d meant lima beans. “John wih hep you, Daddy!”

  So he did help. They drove in Oval’s ’40 Buick to the Church Ovarian Apocalyptic and Maria let them in, relieved to see them. “He sleeps, maybe,” she said. Oval went on upstairs and in a little while returned to the kitchen.

  “He’s coming with us,” he said. “He’s getting dressed.”

  “You watch him,” Maria said, meaning that Oval would know how to watch him.

  Urban came down buckling his belt and shaking his head like a stunned creature, expressionless in his scar tissue. Goo had run out of his eye slots, so Maria dampened a paper towel and delicately wiped it off. In the process an eye glinted at John. “Hi, there, sport,” Urban said, meaning it was okay but maybe they had further business to discuss.

  At dusk they parked next to a factory building that was so long it diminished in haze toward the vanishing point, steam venting from it here and there, lighted windows at odd places. The long building rumbled and hissed as it slept by its railroad siding. A watchman nodded to Oval as they entered the gate and crossed a catwalk into the vaulted interior of the place. Here was the freezing machine itself, a girdered cube two stories high. Oval turned on more lights. There were two narrow doors on this side, one at each corner, refrigerator doors with frosted hatch-wheel closures, neither more than four feet high. Above one someone had written in chalk on the board-and-batten siding: OVAL’S FOLLY, and beneath that: ABANDON HOPE, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE. Above the other door the same wit, perhaps, had written: ARBEIT MACHT FREI.

  Oval paid no attention to these signs. “Trays and more trays,” he said. The trays he had trucked from Seattle were stacked beside the freezer, at least a hundred of them. They were aluminum, about ten feet long, just wide and deep enough to accept frozen-food packages. Several battered lockers stood next to the trays, and Oval searched through them until he found surplus Air Corps flight suits that fit Urban and John. They were alpaca-lined, with hoods. He also found them Air Corps lined leather gloves and fleece-lined leather flight boots. Urban muttered about never having thought he’d have to wear such shit again. “Suit, flight, lined,” he read from the labels. “Gloves, flight, lined. Boots, flight, fleece, fuck.” But when they were all outfitted he bent to enter the thick, four-foot door, into a brittle arctic world, the iron-secret world of below zero.

  “The fans aren’t on full,” Oval said. “But don’t let your skin touch anything. Poor fellow lost the tip of his nose.”

  They were in a small space surrounded by trays hung on drive chains that were like motorcycle chains but bigger, the chains weaving through large and small sprockets. Next to the door was a slot with a rubber flap, where the packages would enter the machine from a conveyor belt and fill the tray positioned there at the time. “Then they go up through the machine,” Oval said with no pride of inventiveness, his voice smaller and higher, as if frozen in transit. Frost flowers grew on the chain links and I beams near the door and the package slot. “But they bend and buckle and break sometimes. I never know where or when it’s going to happen and it doesn’t make sense.”

  He led them up a narrow iron ladder to the next level, where the chains and sprockets took the trays horizontally. Here the trays had twisted and torn themselves from their hangers, and at least one chain was off its sprocket. “No reason for it,” Oval said. “The chains are in sync, the sprockets all free. Why does it run perfectly sometimes and other times it eats itself up? Don’t ask me.” He’d gone from lithium-based grease to cold-weather aviation lubricants to powdered graphite, but that didn’t seem to make much difference. In a day or two the lima beans would come by the billions and they’d have to run night and day. A hundred women up the line would be culling, blanching and boxing lima beans and they had to be frozen immediately, right now, this instant. Some would go into another freezer on hand trucks but this machine had to function. And it had to be helped and supervised all the time. “You can stay inside about twenty minutes at the most, then you have to go outside and thaw for ten to get the feeling back in your fingers,” he said. He took them higher, up near the roof where the fans blew across the Freon coils. Up here the trays were turned in an arc so that they could proceed around and down by stages through the back of the freezer, where each paused at another slot and a plunger disgorged the packages onto hand trucks that were then wheeled to the main storage freezer. It was here, though, at the roof level, where the worst carnage could happen. He dreamed, Oval said, of metal coiling and wrapping over and around itself while the pure, clean lima beans were torn from their boxes, bruised and thrown down through the machinery. “A waste, a terrible waste,” he said in sorrow. In his hood he looked like a mourner, like a monk, pale except for flushed fever spots on his chilled cheekbones.

  They walked single file on narrow planks bolted to I beams. SECTOR 3, a small sign said. There were five sectors in all, and in each was a kill switch for the main drive motor.

  That night they repaired chain with replacement links, and wrestled with, removed and replaced twenty trays. After a few minutes the simple act of fitting a wrench to a nut became difficult, as though their own hands were mechanical claws directed inefficiently by remote control. The metal, too, behaved strangely, almost as if it were fused, brittle as glass, so that a careful, mounting pressure of torque was necessary, rather than a sudden force. This was not just the severe cold of outdoors in winter. In spite of the constant wind it was stifling, alien, of another magnitude altogether. The rules of physics no doubt applied here, but what should have been the simple, learned rules no longer wholly applied, as if this were an alternate, crystalline universe, their breath wisps of dusty ice.

  On one ten-minute break they sat on piles of folded cardboard cartons, John and Urban smoking cigarettes. Urban said he was going to have to rent out his church. “Even if anybody comes tomorrow I’d be useless,” he said. “I’m going to do something else for a while and rethink the Ovarian Doctrine. Something’s wrong there,
Oval. It’s knocked the shit out of my calculations.”

  “Work here with me while you meditate,” Oval said. “Let this be your wilderness.”

  John looked closely for humor or for the slightest tinge of patronization but found none. They were both pastors, fellow professionals in the mumbo-jumbo business, and evidently weren’t about to have arguments over doctrine.

  “Also,” Urban said, “Maria’s knocked up, she informed me around noon today, so I’ve got to make an honest woman of her.”

  “Why, that’s wonderful!” Oval said. “Congratulations, Urban! Maria’s a wonderful woman! She’ll make you so happy!”

  “Happy,” Urban said with a bitter laugh. “That’d be the worst sin of all.” He looked at John, not unkindly but it was hard to tell, and said,

  “You can safely give me back that pistol barrel.”

  “Okay,” John said.

  “I suppose I appreciate what you did even if it made me look like a damn fool,” Urban said.

  “Well, I…,” John said.

  “Course I wouldn’t have looked any less a damn fool if I’d blown my brains all over the neighborhood.”

  “Now, Urban, old pal, that’s all in the past,” Oval said.

  On breaks they took their wrenches and crowbars out with them so their tools would warm a little and not suck so much warmth through their gloves. On another break Oval seemed nervous. He looked here and there, to the right of John and to the left of him, and said, “What about you, Johnny? The job pays well—a dollar-ten an hour, time and a half after forty hours, double time on Sundays. You might have to put in a lot of hours, but that’s good money. You can stay at the parsonage and save rent and take a peck of dough back to school with you. What do you say?”

  John thought for a moment. The man was wholesome, like Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy, or a lankier Superman, good and simple. He was afraid he’d found out what he could find out about his father. He could not dislike him, but then nobody could. It was all too easy. When his motorcycle was fixed he should pay for the repairs, sell it and take a bus somewhere, maybe straight back East. His far past now contained few mysteries, and they were probably disappointing. It was all too easy. “Okay,” he said unexpectedly, “if I can chip in for groceries.”