All the Dead Yale Men

by Craig Nova

We’d stay in that stone house that had meant so much to my father and had hurt him in a precisely equal amount. It was a way of appeasing the dead of the previous generation. And, in fact, I had come up here, to this bathroom, to get some Band-Aids, since I have noticed that this is a critical item to have on a trip to this land. Someone was always bleeding, sometimes worse than others.

  Alexandra left this trip to me, since, she said, the land had always left her feeling like something was lying in wait. No, she said, if she got moody, she’d go into the small graveyard behind our house and spend some time with Juduthan and Polly Wainwright, or at least their fading stones and the stones of their children.

  So, you can’t say I hadn’t been warned about intensity. Pia stared into the distance, as though she could see the greatest of all mysteries: the arms of DNA combining like the collision of galaxies. I packed a picnic in a basket, and I carried it and a bag with some clothes and a sweater in it, one I always took to the farm, a leather one that had belonged to my grandfather and father. Sort of stinky like a cigar.

  I put the basket and bag on the floor in the study. Pia was on the couch. I sat down next to her.

  “What’s in the picnic?” she said, although she kept staring into the distance.

  “Pâté, raspberry tarts, white wine,” I said.

  “Sounds good,” she said as though I were describing a method of execution or the details of a hanging.

  “I’ve got something to tell you,” she said.

  “Oh?” I said.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’ve got something to tell you and I have made up my mind about it.”

  “All right,” I said.

  “All right?” she said. “Just like that? No questions, no chess games, no gambling, no bets, no deals?”

  “I saw the box upstairs,” I said.

  She shrugged.

  “I’m pregnant,” she said. “Is Jerry going to be up there, when we have that picnic? It’s going to be down by the river, right?” she said.

  “Well, I don’t know,” I said.

  “It will be by the river,” she said. “And we’ll ask Jerry. Do you know if he’s taking his phenobarbital?

  “I guess,” I said.

  “I guess he isn’t,” she said.

  The water dripped in the kitchen, a small, harsh tip, tip, tip. A breeze made the leaves hiss, one against another, a susurrus that filled the room with an intermittent pressure. Pia put her hands together, as though praying, and then put them between her knees.

  “Well, there’s Robert,” she said.

  We put his bag into the Gray Ghost, and Pia got in the back, where her eyes had that same distant gaze, that same expression of seeing into another life or another galaxy. Robert got in next to me and we sat in Pia’s silence, the sensation of it like a weight in the car.

  “A penny for your thoughts,” said Robert.

  “Contracts,” said Pia.

  “Are you going to take that this year?” I said.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m doing the reading beforehand. Serious stuff.”

  So, we went the same way I had driven my father’s ashes, carrying this time not what was left of him, but what might be part of him, one generation folding into another, although Pia had decided not to have the child.

  The prison on Route 2, with its perfectly gray walls, seemed different in the way it accused. Now the place seemed to have some special knowledge, some understanding, if only by association, of the damned. And as it went by in the gray blur, like everything I wanted to avoid, I was left with a sense of fatalism, and a certain awe, too, as though the mysterious side of things had been codified here, not our errors so much as the deepest fears we have about ourselves. The place had gravity, a tug or a suggestion of a scale that was beyond my understanding. You’d think a prosecutor would understand this gray concrete, but some essence, in its illusiveness, left me desperate.

  The Delaware Valley, from the top of the ridge, was a smoky blue, and the hawks were up in the thermals, wings stiff, alert to a mouse or squirrel that didn’t notice the moving shadows. We went along the river, the long straight glides marked by eel traps, shaped like the Vs of migrating geese. And here and there, close to the land my grandfather had owned, the trout made rings where they took a mayfly. Cream variants, I thought. White as apple blossoms.

  We went up the road to the farm, as always, the dirt track a little worse every year, and then we came to the stone house road and turned on it and went down to the house itself, the enormous cobbles of its walls seeming brutal, to be used for a stoning.

  We unloaded our things, but Pia stopped me when I took the picnic out of the car.

  “I don’t think we want to have that down by the watercress,” she said. “That’s what you were thinking, right?”

  “Maybe we’ll see the bear,” I said.

  “Too hot,” said Pia. “He’s got the sense to stay away right now, don’t you think?”

  “Probably,” I said. “Maybe he knows the Girls Club wants us to get rid of him.”

  “If it’s the same one,” she said.

  “It doesn’t matter about that. He’s getting in the way, isn’t he? Or maybe he’s a little suicidal.”

  Down below, about a hundred yards away, the seep where the watercress grew was a brighter green on the green of the ferns.

  “So, you want to have the picnic down by the river?” I said.

  “By Jerry’s,” she said with an air of sadness. “He’ll come along.”

  “Who’s Jerry?” said Robert.

  “My cousin,” said Pia.

  “Good. I’d like to meet him,” said Robert.

  “OK,” said Pia.

  Jerry’s house was as always: it suggested the disorder if not the violence of a junkyard, and the car hoods and pieces of metal picked up at wrecks along the river mixed perfectly with pieces of plywood he had found at fire sales to give the place the air of one of those small shrines that people make along the side of the road where someone has died, a warning and insufficient memorial to the trouble that had really taken place.

  Jerry sat on a broken lawn chair in his blue jeans and blue work shirt, a hat that said I WENT OVER THE FALLS AT NIAGARA, his hair gray now, sticking out from the sides of his hat. The river, on the other side of the road, was a silvery sheet, but here and there, around large rocks, it broke into foam.

  “Well, Cousin Frank. And Pia. How-how—,” Jerry said.

  Pia waited. I did, too.

  “How, how, how . . . ”

  Robert didn’t move. His expression the same as when he faced the garbage man in Boston.

  “How are you?” said Jerry.

  “Fine,” said Pia. “Good to see you, Jerry. I want you to meet a friend of mine. This is Robert.”

  “Nice to meet you,” said Jerry.

  He took Robert’s hand.

  “Sorry we’re going to have some lousy weather,” said Jerry.

  “Looks pretty clear to me,” said Robert.

  “Maybe,” said Jerry. “That blue starts slow, but it builds, you know?”

  “We’re having a picnic,” I said. “We’d like you to come.”

  “Isn’t that sweet,” said Jerry. “Sure. Over there by the river is nice.”

  Pia and Robert took the basket and went across the road, the cars making a sort of hush and tear as they went by on the two-lane highway between us and the river. Jerry took off his hat and brushed back his hair.

  “Are you taking that stuff they give you?” I said.

  “You mean the phee-pheee—,” he said.

  “Phenobarbital,” I said.

  “Don’t, don’t, don’t,” said Jerry. “Phenobarbital.”

  “Are you taking it?” I said.

  “Sure, sure,” said Jerry. “Just like clockwork.”

  We stood opposite each other.

  “You haven’t forgotten?” I said. “You could take one now, if you did.”

  “I told you,” he said. “Goddamn storm. Let
’s eat before it starts.”

  The road had been resurfaced with glassphalt, and when we went across it, the sun made the flecks of glass look like the track of an enormous snail, although it was more ominous than that, as though the flecks of light were tokens of ill will. Jerry put his head down and ran, just in front of a car, a black SUV. Robert stood up and watched and then Pia put her hand on Robert’s arm, and they took the tablecloth and spread it out, one of them on one end, one on the other, as though they were making a bed. The tablecloth settled with that gentleness of a hot air balloon as it landed.

  “Maybe it will hold off,” said Jerry. “But that blue is always a sure sign.”

  It was clear on the horizon, and yet, in the air, the scent of moisture hung. Maybe it was from the river. A mass of blue butterflies rose from the bank, the shudder of them like visible anxiety.

  The pâté had the hint of pepper and pork and fat, and the cheese was so sharp the blue veins, like marble, seemed to sting. I opened the wine.

  “Maybe it’s just the butterflies,” said Pia.

  “I don’t know,” said Jerry. “What’s that poem, Cousin Frank? I think of it when that storm comes.”

  “Hopkins?” I said.

  “ . . . li . . . li . . . the ooze of oil crushed . . . dappled dawn drawn . . . ”

  “This pâté is wonderful,” said Robert. “Jerry, would you like some?”

  Jerry put out his hand but he was looking into the distance.

  “What’s the blue like?” said Pia.

  “Like outer space, or something. A haunting sort of blue,” said Jerry. “Maybe like a pregnancy test. I saw a show on the Nature Channel about how fast the tests are.”

  Jerry took another piece of pâté.

  A drop of rain and then another fell out of a blue sky, a small tap, cool and lovely but mysterious.

  “I told you,” said Jerry.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Pia poured more wine.

  “It’s really coming up now,” said Jerry.

  “Where?” said Robert.

  “Over there,” said Jerry. “It comes from the other side of the river and then it gets closer and closer and before long you have it wrap around you . . . ”

  We sat while the river made that rumble, bumble, humble. Jerry stiffened, legs out, just like a board, as though he had been in some kind of experiment and they had turned on the current, and, of course, he made that noise, that ah, ah, ah, and then thumped the ground with the back of his head, but Pia had come around, or was trying to, but Robert was already there.

  “He’s got bridgework,” said Pia.

  Robert reached in, took it and put it in his pocket, just as Pia had, and I looked for a stick, but used the handle of the knife, made of wood, to get into Jerry’s mouth, although this was dangerous, since he could fall or roll or somehow get to the blade. Then Robert, with a gentle caress, put his hand under Jerry’s head and held him to keep the pounding from getting worse. But Jerry went on, legs kicking, spitting pâté, slobbering, the saliva as silver as the river, and Pia was already calling the ambulance, and the seizure became repetitive but different, as though begging for mercy, and Pia came to hold his head, too, after making the call.

  I held Jerry’s legs, not to restrain him, but just to make sure he didn’t turn over or bounce away. The slobber from his mouth started to bubble. Pia looked down at it and then directly into Robert’s eyes.

  She cried now, the sobs as deep, almost, as the heaving of Jerry’s chest.

  “How did he know about the blue?”

  “He sees it. Like something from the underworld,” I said. “Like a storm. He told me he could see it on TV, on the Weather Channel. Something coming his way.”

  Jerry kicked harder and that begging for mercy continued. It was so constant as to be like a man who is filing a bar in a prison with a dull saw blade.

  “Blue like the pregnancy test,” she said.

  Pia went on crying. Robert stared into her eyes.

  “Are you pregnant?” he said.

  “Yes,” she said.

  He held Jerry, and did what he could to comfort him, which was just to keep that banging from hitting anything hard. Overhead, in the air that really was blue, but perfectly clear, the most beautiful sky I had ever seen, a hawk turned with a precision that was so keen, so precise as to be like mathematics. Dapple dawn drawn . . . Jerry was right. The river broke up around those stones, and the butterflies arrived again in a blue, shuddering mass that hung in the air around the twitching, begging man.

  “Goddamn,” said Mary Drucker. “I don’t know what we’re going to do.”

  Her assistant gave Jerry a shot and the convulsions slowed down and then faded away.

  “Hit him with a two-by-four?” said Mary.

  “He’s stubborn,” I said.

  “Well, I guess it runs in the family,” said Mary.

  “That’s possible,” I said.

  “Here’s his bridgework,” said Robert.

  Mary put it in a little bag she had and then they brought down the gurney. The ambulance went away, toward Port Jervis, and then we sat down at what was left of the picnic.

  We splashed ourselves with the green water of the river, which seemed forgiving or maybe it was just soothing. Robert washed the blood and drool off his hands and some had even gotten on his face. He splashed some water on me, and then we sat on the bank.

  I tore a piece of bread. Had some pâté. Robert took a sip of wine, then a piece of cheese. The river went along with its sound, as though it was so indifferent to us as to leave us a little lonelier than before.

  “I didn’t want to tell you like that,” said Pia. “I’m sorry.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Robert. “The question is, what are we going to do?”

  •••

  Upstream the water was calm and it showed the fish had begun to rise: the rings formed with a gentleness, a precision of mathematics. And there, in that almost impossible delicacy, the mayflies like flecks of some god that decided to reveal itself for a moment, in that cool, oddly grassy perfume of the river, I thought, What is she going to do about the baby, related to the future of the Mackinnon family? But, of course, I already knew.

  The grass made that whip, whip, whip on my pants as I went up to the car. Robert just walked, head up, shoulders square, Pia next to him, her hair so bright in the sun and in the glare of the river that I was left with a sense of mystery again, as though I had glimpsed things as uncanny as that blue light Jerry saw.

  I put the picnic in the trunk. Robert got into the front seat. Pia in the back. No one said a word.

  So we went up the road through what had been my grandfather’s land, a deer going through the woods with an almost bouncing gait. Graceful and harsh. Neither Pia nor Robert looked at the deer. It just ran away and left them to their own thoughts.

  Then we turned down the road to the stone house, which needed to be graded, and I had to keep one wheel of the car on the hump in the middle. Pia’s silence was like a gas, or a hiss, or a physical presence, and I guess we were all afraid that if we started, if we spoke what was on our minds, we’d never stop. Or worse. We would say about five words and stop forever. Silence hiding the possibility of more silence: the worst there is. She didn’t want the baby, or she wanted it but thought she couldn’t have it. This only made the silence worse, or the worst silence is that one right after finality makes itself apparent.

  The car went over a rock that was pushing up out of the road a little more every year and now seemed to be like the crown of some enormous head that was coming up out of the dirt. The Audi’s undercarriage scraped as it went over it.

  “That rock gets worse every year,” I said.

  “I’ll help you get rid of it,” said Robert. “We’ll drill some holes and put in a couple of charges of dynamite. Nothing but chunks to take away.”

  “You need to wash your face,” said Pia. She said this to Robert and then to me, and both of us went
into the bathroom, one behind the other, using the pink bar of soap and the towel, which I threw in the hamper when we were done, a way to make all of this disappear, but as the lid of the hamper fell shut, that silence was there again.

  I sat at the table with a drink and Pia sat there opposite me. Robert sat down, too.

  “We’re done,” said Pia to Robert. “You and me. I’m not having the child. You know that.”

  Robert stiffened now, as he had with the garbage man.

  “Do you think I’m to be discarded, just like that?”

  She shook her head.

  “You heard me,” she said.

  I closed my eyes: if I could reach my father, my grandfather, my grandmother. What would they say? What advice? What wisdom had eluded me that I should be able to produce right here? In the midst of that sense of exclusion, as though time was darkness, Jerry’s cry hung, that surprise and profound need.

  “Please,” I said. “Please . . . ”

  “Please what?” she said.

  “Let’s sleep on it,” I said. “We’re tired.”

  “That’s all you’ve got to say?” said Pia.

  “Maybe he’s right,” said Robert.

  “I just don’t know,” Pia said. “I just don’t know.”

  She cried with a frank, easy motion.

  They read their law books until late. Then we all sat at the table under the yellow light, the shape of an enormous creature, like a five-foot bat, swept around us as a moth fluttered up to the fixture. It was like someone dragging silk across our shoulders. A moth in the house.

  “Good night,” said Pia. She put her damp face next to mine as she gave me that small, daughterly kiss, so soft, so much an expression of everything I wanted to protect.

  “Good night,” said Robert.

  Their voices came through the door of the downstairs bedroom, the one that had a door and a double bed, a vibrant buzz like a fly against a window. Did they talk about the law, lectures they’d have when school started, the river as shiny as foil? Still, I knew and they did, too, that not talking about some things is a way of really saying the most about them.

  In the yellow light the moth came to rest: it landed on the outside of the fixture, and in the lack of movement, in the disappearance of those enormous wings, the room was that much more silent.