All the Dead Yale Men

by Craig Nova

  “Well,” said Alexandra.

  “That woman with the butch haircut should watch the way she talks,” said Robert. “You have to face up to being sassed. You know that?”

  “Not now,” I said.

  Alexandra leaned close, kissed me on the cheek, and said, “I’ll see you later.”

  In this heat, I supposed, the bear was down by Trout Cabin, someplace in those green shadows, which he would take like a verdant and cool blanket. Maybe he would even get into the stream and emerge, dripping long lines of water and gasping in the heat.

  The woods were that same mixture of eastern oak and pine, blueberries and cane, raspberries in the clearings. From time to time, if you were alert, you saw a deer or a fox, a grouse, or a snake, just as my grandmother had.

  Robert and I went to the top of the land, or the highest elevation, which was the swamp at the top of Trout Cabin, or at least where it originated. We stood by a spring there, where, in the gray clay bottom, the clear water bubbled up, spilled over the lip of the small pool, and made a silvery start downhill.

  “We’ll do it in an orderly way, from top to bottom, with stops at wet places. But he’s down there,” I said.

  “Fine by me,” said Robert.

  We went through the swamp until we came to the top of the stream. At the top of Trout Cabin the water flowed in long spouts from pool to pool, but even water had a metallic shimmer where the sun broke through the canopy. Then the landscape became steeper and we came to the V of the gorge, to the shadows, where I thought the animal might be waiting. And what would we do at that moment, face to face, as my father had left him to me? Of course, my father had known this moment was coming. How many times could this be avoided? Was it just a chore or something else?

  “You don’t want to do this, do you?” said Robert.

  “What do you think?” I said.

  We went along that stream, the noise of it not reassuring and bubbling but more penetrating than that, as though the repetitive sound made words and if I was just smart enough, I could understand them; but it was all opaque, a noise like arber-arber-arber, endlessly repeated until it sounded like a plea made at the end of fatigue, when something deeper than words was being employed.

  “But don’t you see?” said Robert. “The bear is eating garbage now. It isn’t afraid of people. You know that. And you know, too, that it’s just a matter of time before it mauls or kills a Girls Club girl. You know it.”

  “Does that make it right?” I said. “This thing was part of my father’s world, this land, this animal. It was how he grew up. Me, too.”

  “Listen,” said Robert. “You know that the majority of random attacks on people are made by black bears.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “So getting rid of it is the right thing,” said Robert. “Would you shoot a rabid dog?”

  Halfway down, in the hot shadows of the afternoon, in the lines of light and the scent of spruce, a hump moved. The bear traveled in the heat, his sides fat and glistening from the summer diet of raspberries and blueberries and god knows what, pancakes and sausages and the remains of Cheerios and hamburger that had been in the Girls Club’s garbage. His oily coat had a natural sheen. His fat sides swayed as he moved away from the relative coolness of the stream. The sweat ran down my sides and it tickled, too, where it ran out of my hair. Robert took a blue handkerchief out of his pocket and rubbed his face. Then the mosquitoes started in with that insane buzzing, as though they had to make you nuts before taking your blood.

  The bear was going to another spring, not so far up, a wet place where my father and I had seen him: a seep where the watercress grew, and where it was cool because the moisture made a sort of wallow. I should have known that’s where our appointment was going to be. That’s it: appointment. How could I ever have thought otherwise?

  So we went around the stones that stuck out of the hillside, scaled with lichen the color of old copper, and through the leaves, where a diamondback rattler would be so perfectly camouflaged. Some snakes were still in the gorge and this, of course, is the way that fate or chance found a delight in pursuing you in more ways than one. Today was a likely day to find the last timber rattler. So we climbed and went up the shelves of broken stone, putting my hands into places I couldn’t see and then coming into the abandoned and overtopped apple orchard, where the barkless and dead trees were as white as bones. The old wood road up to the stone house was overtopped by oak, and cool, and the grass grew there as though it had been mowed.

  The bear came to that wet place, dug at the watercress, tore at a piece of deadwood to get the white grubs, which, when disturbed, seemed to fall out in a mass of anxious movement. Then he turned, his face scarred, his eyes small and black, his expression one of constant consideration. So, it seemed to say, you’ve come back. What happened to the old man who was with you before? Where is he? Do I have to deal with you now? The bear dug in the grubs and looked up from time to time. Do you have what it takes? he seemed to say. Do you? The other one couldn’t.

  The bear seemed to me a perfect expression of everything that could go wrong mixed with everything that was beautiful and right. And it was that crack, that abyss between the two where uncertainty found a natural place to exist. An ordinary human being craves only a little clarity, just a touch of certainty in these matters. No, not craves. It’s more than that. We have a wild longing for it. So, as I looked at him, the creature seemed like a perfect example of the problem of being alive: why couldn’t I make a deal, or come to some understanding? Why couldn’t I say: Stay away from those girls, from the garbage, just stay away and I will protect you.

  The creature’s dismissal was a perfect expression of how, in our despair and longing, we made our appeals to every mystery there is, and yet we are ignored. And then something else lurked around in all this, which was the passage of time and the fact that this land, whatever it had been for my father, wasn’t the same anymore. Time had done its worst here, too. My father had the luxury of letting this creature go because he ignored the house trailers and ranch-style houses being built, each year, all with garbage cans out back. And somehow, in the bear’s constantly hungry presence, he was a reminder of what time had done and how it ground everything into dust. The creature stood there like mortality itself, like everything I couldn’t control, and that left me with the sense of approaching loss. And how close had I come to the abyss, which is the loss of love, all for some sleazy racket?

  And yet, it was still beautiful and a part of the world of my father and his father before him. Somehow, I just wanted to be a son of a man who had been a son, with all the attendant troubles. Killing this thing, because it had become dangerous, was a matter of killing part of my father’s world.

  Now the bear looked me in the eyes, and seemed to say, It’s endless, endless, you will never get away from the difficulty of being human, never. I’m here, causing trouble, to remind you. What did your father do? Why, he couldn’t face up to it, could he? Didn’t he cheat you? Wasn’t he a spook? Didn’t he lie?

  So, my father had said, when we had been here together before, when he was broke and worried and ashamed, at the bottom of the cesspool of despair, here—he’s yours. You figure it out. It’s yours now. How do you like it? Trapped, huh, Frank, between what you know and what you hope for? Between the complications of ugliness and the possibility for beauty.

  I sat down, put my elbows on my knees, held the rifle steady that way, flipped the safety off.

  “Head or heart?” I said.

  “Head,” said Robert.

  Here and there a bird, a chickadee or a crow or even a dove, flitted from place to place, and even though they didn’t make any noise, the movement suggested sound. All I could really hear was some interior hissing that I couldn’t shake, of being trapped by who and what I was and that no matter how hard I tried I was still found wanting.

  To do the right thing, I had to kill off the last of my father’s world. I was already imperfect, damag
ed, flawed, but still capable of love, I thought, and didn’t that count for something? What about the years with Alexandra and Pia? And even Pauline, for that matter, as messed up as it was. Maybe that is what my father meant when he passed this creature over to me: the sheer number of possibilities in being human will leave you feeling that you weren’t enough.

  The creature waited. It had its head down, eyes on me, his pink tongue lapping that scented water. And even so, with all the thinking, all the justification, all the attempts to explain myself, I was still left with that sense of self-accusation, of somehow wanting to hang on to what was going to have to go.

  The bear stood sideways, swaying a little above that trickle of water, its head turned toward me. The shadows of the woods fell over him like a cape, a shadow that he needed now that the moment had come. Then he looked uphill, perhaps to walk up to the stone house or maybe over to the swamp between here and the farm. That’s all I needed: for him to appear near the ponds before the night’s dinner.

  “Give me that,” said Robert. “I’ll do it.”

  “No,” I said.

  “The thing is going to get away.”

  He put his hand out.

  The bead in the rear sight was just behind the bear’s shoulder: a heart shot. Wasn’t this what my father and I had discussed, when we had been here before, when the three of us had met only to put this moment off? Then I swung to those lines that crossed, one drawn from the ear to the eye on the opposite side, and another line drawn the same way from the other ear, crossing just above the nose. The safety went off with a little click, Germanic, certain, final.

  The sound was as though the engine room of the world had been opened for just an instant. Then the steel door slammed shut. The bear sat back on its haunches, just like it had found a bag of garbage and wanted to go through it at its leisure, and then it looked at me, its eyes dark, penetrating. Then it lay down in the watercress, made a sort of rattling sigh, and stopped moving. The gout of blood flowed into the wet spot, through that scented watercress and then down with the silver flow into Trout Cabin.

  “The coons will get it,” I said.

  “Yes,” said Robert.

  “The ribs will look like a musical instrument. A xylophone.”

  I unloaded the rifle, the brass hulls collecting in my hand. Then, with the action open, the way it should be done, I gave him the Mannlicher. “Here,” I said. “This is yours.”

  “Why?” he said.

  “You’ll have to do the right thing one day,” I said. “Maybe it will feel all wrong. The reasons will seem right. But somehow you’ll still feel bad. One world ends. Another begins.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

  “Give it a little time,” I said.

  I passed it over and he picked it up as though he had been carrying it all his life. We went away from the wet place that, when I turned back, showed a stain, a mound, that looked as though someone had dumped a load of asphalt here to be used to pave a road. And, of course, I thought, Yes, that’s what will probably happen after all. Pia and Robert and their kids will want an apartment in Paris or Rome. The foxes and bears, the snakes and turkeys, they will have to move further west.

  We went side by side up that bowered path, and while I considered going through the swamp, I came to my senses, since while it was one thing to climb out of Trout Cabin in a hurry where there were a lot of snakes, it was another to go through a swamp at this time of the year. So we went by the stone house, where I waved to Alexandra, who knew the problem was gone because there was only one shot.

  We started up that road, which was hotter here than down below, the dirt looking like a mirage, that silver that shimmers in the road, although here there was an island in the middle, the high point between the ruts, so that it looked like a long island in a silver sea. The dust rose around our feet and we went through the shade of the pines. I wouldn’t want to say we had killed the bear. In the silvery dust, it seemed to be an expression of the godhead, of the complications of being human, which, or so it seems to me, are what the gods delight in. No generation can hang on to the past: its time comes and its time goes: the alternatives are all so dark.

  [ CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT ]

  ROBERT’S BEST MAN had a stutter and at the rehearsal dinner, held at the farm house, he got stuck, like a car in a mud hole, the tires spinning. Robert stiffened, waited, his eyes moving over the rest of us as though we better not try to help. We sat at a table that was in the shape of a T, the bride and groom at the head of the table, the parents on each side, the other guests along the T. White tablecloth, crystal glasses, good silver, venison and morels, a broccoli soufflé, and a chocolate soufflé for dessert. Light and cheerful in that room with white walls, the large fireplace next to which my grandfather used to brood and drink, and where my father had come home from the war, and where I came, too, for summer vacations and swore I would never be like them. The scent of a million cigars from my grandfather was just noticeable, as though he still existed, although his presence had obviously been disguised, or someone had tried to disguise him under a layer of latex paint. He hated latex.

  Then I took Alexandra and Pia down to the stone house, Pia on my arm, as I escorted her from the party as a good father should.

  The golden light in the stone house fell over us with all the haunting possibility of the passage of time, and the stories, too, that seem to have a life of their own: the time Pia got lost in the well, outside this house, and how I had used a tractor to drag a stone over the opening so she could never get in again.

  I poured myself a drink in that golden light.

  “You always made sure nothing went wrong,” she said.

  “Well, there’s always a chance,” I said.

  “What do you mean?” she said.

  “Anxiety,” said Alexandra. “That’s all it is. Right?”

  The scotch burned.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Guess that’s right.”

  “Then how come you seem worried?” said Pia.

  “Can’t fool you, hmpf?” I said. “Well, you have to remember this is one of those portals people go through. A daughter marries. Something changes. Not a thing you can do.”

  The stone house had a particular silence that came from the stone walls, which not only kept the sound out, but seemed to have distilled time, as though it was embedded in the centuries or millions of years it took to make the rock in these walls. We sat in that almost infinite silence, aware, at least for a moment, how our love for each other was strong and up against that hard infinity. Then I kissed Pia good night, took a drink upstairs, and got into bed. For a while, in the dark, Alexandra spoke to Pia in the downstairs bedroom, which came through the floor of the loft where it was as a buzz and stop, a buzz and stop, the advice of a mother to a daughter on the eve of a wedding, the hum, the vibration of it seeming to come not just through a wooden floor (which came from the white pine on this land) but through time as well. I tried to calculate this, back to the land between the Tigris and Euphrates, to Egypt, and just as I could see the muddy, broad Nile and the reeds at the side, which was a sign I was about to fall asleep, Alexandra pulled back the sheets and slid in next to me, sighed, took my hand, and said, “Well, what about that asshole Russian? The one who was threatening you?”

  In the morning the bridesmaids came in the door with their dresses, hair driers, combs, cases of makeup, bottles of perfume, new stockings for the ceremony. Then they went to work, taking showers, shaving legs and underarms, working on Pia’s hair, powdering themselves, using safety pins in more ways than I could count, and as they wiggled into their pantyhose, their clothes, they used the mirror in the kitchen where I tried to shave and then gave it up. They looked over my shoulder and said, “Sorry, Mr. Mackinnon. Tight squeeze.”

  My suit hung by the door, like a scarecrow at Buckingham Palace. Tie, shoes, vest, jacket.

  “You know, Frank,” Alexandra said. “This isn’t a place for a man. At
least right now.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “I think I better take a walk.”

  So, outside, beyond that cloud of perfume and lemon soap, shampoo and powder, cosmetics and delicate clothes, I turned downhill on the wood road that leads to the stream. There, next to one pool that poured a silver spout into the next, I went downhill toward the Delaware. Surely, this was a good time to stand next to a river and be there as the power of it, the liquid force, the delicate meniscus of the surface tension all floated by as though it always had been there and always would be. A poor man’s mysticism, I guess, but none the less necessary for all that.

  At the bottom of the stream the land opened up, or flattened out, and here the heat was more silver and more shimmering than in the woods. Well, it was the marriage not the wedding, I guessed, and maybe a little heat was a good thing, if only to remind Pia and Robert that nothing worked precisely the way you wanted it to.

  Still, the heat flowed along the river in layers, each packed against another, some layers hotter than others, but the entire mass of hot air moved above the Delaware’s serpentine path.

  At the mouth of Trout Cabin, just opposite the Delaware, I splashed a little water onto my face. Jerry’s house, that collection of the leavings of car wrecks, fires, construction debris, hubcaps, with a high-tech solar collector on top, was just behind me, a shrine to the dead.

  The river was on the other side of the road, a silver like mercury, something or someone moved with the same swaying motion of the heat. And as I stood and walked closer, as I came down to the road and put a hand over the glare, the shape there resolved itself into a woman, still attractive after all these years, ten years younger than me, still perfectly correct in that heat and the motion of the glare. Pauline wore a thin dress and high-heeled shoes. She came across the heat of the blacktop and said, “Frank, there you are. I’ve been looking all over.”

  The swaying of the heat from the pavement matched the swaying of her thin, almost transparent dress. The ten years she was younger than me were critical ones: she emerged from the hot, moist shimmer and took my hands, both of them, and looked into my eyes and then she embraced me. She wore nothing but that thin dress, and in the heat there was the press of the mons, the soft crush of a breast, the hard touch of a nipple, the aroma of perfume and sweat that rose from her neck, the scent of her hair, the tug of her arms on my shoulders, the light, tender, even loving touch of her fingers on my neck.