All the Dead Yale Men

by Craig Nova

  He put a hand under his chin and drew it across the skin as though he was cutting his throat. I should have known what this meant: what is life but a series of problems with moments of unbelievable happiness? The happiness was gone. That black accordion was made up of problems. He was gray. His eyes were bloodshot.

  “You know how much one of these 6.5 mm cartridges cost?” he said. “Four dollars and fifty cents. So we better make sure we don’t use too many. Get some jeans on. And old shirt. Boots. A red jacket. Come on. It’s Saturday, so I know you don’t have to work.”

  “What’s going on?” I said.

  “Just get your stuff. I’ll have a drink while you get dressed. How’s Pia?”

  “Fine, fine,” I said.

  “Glad to hear it,” he said. “I think we’ll drive your German piece of junk. Der Grauer Geist.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “To the farm. Those Girls Scouts, or their leader, the one with the butch haircut and those glasses with black frames . . . ”

  “Buddy Hollyette?” I said.

  “Is that what you call her?” he said. “She’s complaining about a bear—it eats their garbage, and she says it was following a girl who had her period. Do you think that’s true?”

  “Could be,” I said.

  “Well, she says the bear comes from our land and that we’ve got to get rid of it. It’s a nuisance, she says. And since I have the hunting rights, she wants me to do it.”

  “It’s out of season,” I said.

  “You know, for a lawyer, you don’t see things very clearly. The law is made to be bent, to get what you want. I’ll show you. Come on.”

  So we drove the Audi to the farm, out 84, to the ridge of mountains along the Delaware Valley, and because the weather was so warm the mist hung there, over the river, like some ominous smoke.

  The Delaware was as constant and indifferent as any river on earth. We went up the dirt road that leads to the farm from the river and I drove through the woods, white oaks mostly, where a deer ran over the gray leaves left from the fall. We stopped in front of the stone house, the one built for my father’s dead brother.

  The main room was musty and a snakeskin hung over the mantle. The wood stove stood in the corner. One bedroom, where my father would sleep, was under the loft, and in the main room sat the dusty sofa. This is where the snake was supposed to live in the furniture’s wooden frame, where I was supposed to sleep.

  “You don’t mind a little snake, do you?” said my father.

  It was just dusk and that blue was about to absorb everything. We went outside and my father said, “That goddamned Girls Club. What do they think bears are? Stuffed, in the museum of natural history.”

  “If they’re eating garbage, they aren’t afraid of people,” I said.

  “Just whose side are you on?” said my father. “You’d think that bear would have enough sense to stay away from them. But I guess they are picky eaters and throw away a lot of good stuff. Bacon. You know a bear loves bacon. So, the two of us, you and me, we’re going to settle the bear’s hash. Screw it. I’m ready to make problems go away. Bang. I’ve got other things to worry about.”

  “Me, too,” I said.

  “No kidding, Frank?” he said. “Well, when the problems get bad enough, come to see me. I’ll set you straight.”

  That blue light darkened a shade: you never saw it change, but there it was, slightly more opaque.

  “By the way,” said my father. “Has Pia got a boyfriend?”

  “Some jackass from Harvard Square,” I said. “Thief, three-card monte stiff, small-time dope dealer, I guess, maybe a pimp for runaways . . . ”

  “Why don’t you call Tim Marshall. I’ll bet he’s got some bad medicine for this twit.”

  “She’s already warned me about that,” I said. “Have you ever played chess with her?”

  “Boy, was that a mistake,” said my father. He swallowed. “Does she worry about Jerry? Does she think she is stained?”

  “Let’s stick with the bear,” I said.

  The bear had a lineage, since it must have been the son or daughter of the bears that used to run around on this land when it was owned by my grandfather, large black bears that left scratches on the trees as they marked their usual paths, which they followed each day with astonishing regularity.

  So, as we started our walk in the evening, we didn’t need to say anything. My father was trying to decide whether or not to kill the bear, at least this one that had survived in spite of the houses that were springing up along the northern boundary of the land that my father still had left. More people came to poach deer on this land than even a few years before, but I didn’t mind that so much since in the closest town, where the railroad had failed, a lot of people were hungry. What got to my father about the poaching was the fact that the people who killed these deer ground them up and mixed them with hamburger helper.

  We walked in that smoking gloom of dusk, and as we went, he didn’t speak, although I now know he wanted to talk to me. He didn’t have enough money, and time was collapsing in front of him. Maybe he had done some funny stuff with the money that had been left to me. Was it time to talk about that? No. That wasn’t his style at all. Deny it to the end, which he knew was coming.

  So, we went looking for that bear, which was a stand-in, I guess, for a lot of problems like the money. My father’s attitude, his movement, the color of his eyes still linger (his eyes were blue, but pale, as though they were part of a man who is only partially here, who is so clearly only passing by this way, who has only the most tenuous grip on life).

  I thought I should just be quiet. And now, when I think back, it haunts me. Could I have comforted him? Well, probably not, given that the first part of comfort is admission of wrongdoing, and that would never happen. So, maybe that added to the bear’s chances: that my father was trapped by his own way of doing things. Me? he’d say. You’re barking up the wrong tree. I began to think that bear was in more trouble than previously. Here, my father could say to the director of the Girls Club. Here’s the dead body. It’s all yours.

  The wood road we took had been built two generations ago to drag logs to a sawmill that was long gone (nothing left but a saw blade rusted to the color of a scab), and now it was only a trail, but like a formal garden, since the trees made a bower over it. At the bottom a spring ran in this warm winter, and the air was filled with the scent of the early watercress. My father stopped in that ammonia scent.

  Above the spring an abandoned apple orchard had been overtopped by pines, and the apple trees looked like skeletons, the wood without bark, ghostly and white there in the increasing blue light of the evening.

  “See,” said my father. “Without a place like this, what have you got? But the taxes are killing me.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Don’t you dare be sorry for me,” he said. “I’m hanging on to this place so you can have a little of it. Don’t you see? I’m trying to give you something.”

  “I didn’t mean it like that.”

  He stopped in the blue light, under the bower of trees, where the scent of watercress was so strong.

  “You know, Frank, I’d like to talk to you about something . . . ”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Well, a little money was left . . . ,” he said.

  “I know,” I said. “Three hundred a month.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “Well, that’s right. Technically . . . ”

  “So?”

  He brushed the leaves with his boot one way and then another, and he made an open space on the ground just like a buck rub.

  “You wanted to say something?” I said.

  “No, no,” he said. He shook his head. “I’m keeping records. It’s all there. I’ll store them carefully.”

  “Where?” I said.

  “Down in the cellar. I’m getting it waterproofed . . . ”

  Then we walked through the orchard and into the woods where
the ash and oak were so big you couldn’t get your arms around them, and where, at this time of the year, the trees stood up from a layer of gray leaves. The entire landscape was gray, the bark of the tree, the leaves, the stone that stuck up: the only color was greenish lichen which, on the rocks, was the color of oxidized copper. A wild turkey pawed at the ground for an acorn. My father kept right on walking until he came to a spot that he liked.

  “Might as well cut down some of these trees. Have some logger in here,” said my father. “Get some money out of them. Why should we leave these trees here for the next guy to sell? That is, when you get rid of the place.”

  “I didn’t say I was going to do that,” I said.

  “I didn’t tell my father I was going to sell a thousand acres to the Girls Club.” He shrugged, as though seeing a dead friend on a road in Poland. It was a gesture far beyond despair. “You may think money isn’t important, but let me tell you. It comes back to bite you.”

  On the way back to the stone house, the bear came out of the shadows. We were at the spring where the watercress grew, and the bear was a blur on gray black, and its fur was the color of a can of black shoe polish, with that muted sheen. It came out of the abandoned orchard where the trees looked like what had been left over after a forest fire: trees without bark, just that hard white wood. The bear moved with a steady, sloppy gait. It was fat from grubs and, I guess, the garbage. Usually, at this time of the year, late winter, bears have just woken up and are skinny. But this one wasn’t skinny. Maybe the Girls Club threw away donuts and cheesecake, bacon fat and pancakes. Its belly swung from side to side and it moved its head one way and then another, its path going downhill, toward the stream. It stopped at a deadwood, a tree that had died a long time ago, and the bear tore at the trunk, its claws as white as the dead apple trees in the orchard, and as the punky bits came out, you could see the chips, the shreds, the black debris of half-rotted wood. Like something exploding. The bear found a grub here and there, ate it like a man consuming peanuts, and then continued downhill.

  It stopped. It was as though the bear was tasting the grubs, or what it had found in the deadwood, or maybe it was thinking about going all the way down to the bottom of the gorge, where it would just have to climb up again on the other side of the stream. Maybe it was getting tired of the routine, of that struggle to get to the top of the other side of the gorge. Then the bear turned its head with a muted and yet piercing fatality, his eyes going over the landscape with the most profound sense of farewell, of letting go of the place where it lived, although when he came to us, it stopped. The bear’s eyes appeared, with the white snout but black fur above it, like an entrance to a world we could never understand. The eyes had a sheen to them, like black marbles. Then the animal stepped toward us, its fat sides swaying just a little in that measured gait, which so clearly showed a sort of rumination, a thinking that was done not in the mind but in the body, in the way the claws touched those cinnamon-colored ferns, the way his old and probably arthritic joints squeaked, in the lingering taste of the grubs.

  “Stay still,” said my father.

  The thing kept on walking, coming back up to the watercress, where it stopped to have a drink in the spring and then went back to staring at us. My father stood without moving at all, not a quiver, not a breath, his pale eyes showing some deep consideration, some memory that he was still trying to make sense of: the flak that rose around him, his time in the air, swinging in his parachute like a target in a shooting gallery. I was just beginning to learn something about regret, just the first hint that there are things hidden away in the future and that we are trained not to think about them. For my father, the future had arrived.

  But there it was: he got through things by keeping his mouth shut or telling lies. And, of course, what did I know about that ticking clock, how the hand was moving, getting ready to point him out?

  The only movement was a few strands of hair on the side of his head that lifted and settled, feathers falling from a shot bird. The bear was close enough for its smell to come downwind: the entrails of a deer, the clean, silver scent of the stream, like dirty socks and the bitter sweet stink in the bottom of a garbage can, and something else, too, a wild, arctic perfume, not smelled but felt as when you can feel that snow is on the way.

  That odor became stronger, and for a moment it reminded me of a fish market, of the ocean. The bear breathed with a slow, laboring effort, all the more alarming because it seemed to be unexcited. It kept its eyes on my father, as though it knew (by scent, by my father’s gray hair, by his old clothes) that this was between the two of them. The bear stepped closer, not so much that we could touch it, but enough so that the nose was dark as a piece of coal.

  “The color of flak,” said my father. “Right after the red part, after the explosion.”

  The bear made that slow, steady huff, huff, and it was cold enough for the breath to show. Its head dropped, as though something important was on the ground, and when it looked up, its eyes settled on mine. The eyes fixed me, like the lens of a camera. I stared back, even though a bear takes this as a sign of hostility, of evidence that a fight was coming.

  In the woods, in front of the bear, my father turned his pale eyes on me, their expression one of mystification, not so much as in what he understood, but in his inability ever to sum it up. I guess all he really wanted to give me was the refusal to panic. He hadn’t panicked ever, not even in Poland. In fact, just the opposite was true: at the absolute worst, he panicked the least.

  “All right,” he said. “Let’s take care of this fucking thing.”

  The bear turned away, its fat belly swaying, its claws clicking when they touched the field stone that stood up between the trees, and as it walked downhill, a black snake flowed downhill, too, its skin like patent leather, its eyes like beads made of coal. It flowed around the stones, water going downhill.

  “Timber rattler. Just out of a den,” said my father. “Aren’t many left.”

  The bear looked over his shoulder at us, taking inventory. Yes, it seemed to say, we’ll meet again.

  And so my father and I walked up to the stone house, where we got the stove going, and with the damper open it made a huff, huff, huff, just like the bear. The stove had been made in Sweden, and it had three compartments to hold the smoke, one on top of another to get all the heat.

  “So,” said my father. “We’ve made the hard decision.”

  He sipped his drink. The stones of the house began to warm up and he sat there, looking out the window where he expected to see that bear.

  He gestured toward me, one hand out, fingers open, as though offering something and asking for something in the same moment: the sound of the stove, that huff, huff, so much like the bear now that it seemed like a hint of mortality. Did that make the coming moment, which could take almost any form (an exploding piñata, for instance) all the more real? Was he trying to tell me it was coming? Was that it? If I wanted to speak, I better do it then? So, I was left with the bear, my father, the unspoken thing, whatever it was, all in that sound, so asthmatic, so desperate for air.

  He sloshed more bourbon into my glass, although, at least, he didn’t add sweet vermouth. The stove made that huff, huff, huff. The clinking of ice in his glass matched that huffing, mean-spirited, ominous sound. He seemed to be back in Poland, because he said out of the blue, “Blood sausage.” The snow in Poland, the camps, the barbed wire, that violent, ghastly world that everyone seemed to think was disappearing but that was really just reconfiguring itself, finding new places to emerge again, to do its worst. I thought about that young man who had found a way to get between my daughter and me.

  “Tomorrow we’ll deal with that bear,” said my father. We knew what the bear’s run was. We even knew what its mother’s run or its father’s run had been, since we had been here for generations. We had bacon and eggs and toast, the eggs cooked in the grease in the pan while the stove made that sound. That huff, huff, huff. My father looked at me
across the table when we ate those basted eggs, clouded over from the hot grease he had used to cook them. We sat there, as though we had nothing to say, which is how people appear when they have everything to say. Then we went out the door in our coats, our blue jeans, our boots, my father with that Mannlicher. We closed the wooden door and it made a sucking hush in the frame.

  We went downhill in that light just before dawn, which is not the darkest but the most blue, with the trees emerging like imploring shapes, the limbs black on blue as though that world where all the phantoms exist gives up its hold on the earth grudgingly, and no more grudgingly than when a man and his son go out into the blue light to look for a bear. We went down the path, going almost by smell, since the watercress was strong after the cool night. The woods were silent, although as the black became dark blue, the first of the birds made a noise, but it wasn’t cheerful, wasn’t anything but a sound that pierced me, since here we were, in that dusk, in that chaos before the light.

  We went along that formal path, and then we turned uphill, into the woods that were a combination of red oak and white oak, bark as gray as an elephant. Spruce grew here, too, the needles as green as money. We kept to the high ground, up there where the rocks stuck out and where the lichen showed on them in gray-green blotches. And all along my father went ahead, bent over a little, going slow, carrying that Mannlicher (round chambered, safety on) in his right hand. Then he turned to me. His eyes were filled with tears.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “Oh, you’ll see,” he said. “Give it some time.”

  He bit his lip and then we started along that ridge that went above the stream.

  We were halfway up the slope, surrounded by that timber he thought we should sell some day, the trunks tall and cathedral-like. Down below, at the bottom of the gorge, the stream, Trout Cabin, flowed along, not frozen either in this odd, warm winter, from one pool to another, one silver spout above another. Then the sun began to rise and long slanting rays cut through the haze. We sat there, breathing, the mist from our breath rising.