Tiny Americans
Page 20
He stood in the hallway stunned. If she was snooping he hoped she was still too young to know what Helen’s pills really meant. If she was stealing, he wanted to tell her how sad that made him. He wanted to square her shoulders to the mirror and tell her to look at all the versions of herself she could become. He wanted to tell her there was no promise the world will catch you as often as it lets you fall. He felt the need to confront her, but he didn’t even know her. And it was too soon to have anything like that come up. He turned from the door and knew he would keep what he’d seen to himself. It made him dizzy how ingrained secrets were in his nature, or maybe even the nature of all social creatures.
Out in the foyer Helen pointed at the stack of shoes, and mock clapped at the pile of people in the home. She was beside herself with joy to have everyone there. He reached out and took her hand and pressed her palm against his cheek.
When they were all ready to go, they trekked out onto the deck, down the steps, and into the opening where he led them into the forest. Halfway across the field, when he could already hear the river, he stopped talking so they would sense it themselves.
When they stepped into the woods and could hear the distant push of the river, Tina and Dennis hurried ahead. Magpies sprung from the hemlock trees.
When Terrance and his two children caught up, Tina stepped a pale white foot into the water, then pulled it out. Cold enough to shock the system even at the height of summer. She got on her hands and knees on the bank. A rivulet of clear mountain water ran between two smoothed obsidian stones and now flowed over his granddaughter’s hands. She made a cup with her palms, the pinkies close as slow dancers, the stack of fingers curved upward and wanting. She brought the water up to splash her face, and made an exasperated auuugh sound that peeled off into a quick, happy laugh.
“There’s something else to show you,” Terrance said.
They followed him away from the river and deeper into the trees.
Jamie draped an arm over Tina’s shoulders. “Every one of these trees has a heartbeat. Right, Dad?”
“That’s right,” Terrance said.
“What is that?” Connor asked, and pointed to the clearing.
They silently walked into the open space with the giant bone creature.
Terrance stayed back and watched them walk up to and around the bone sculpture, now weathered and twice rebuilt from the wear of snow and winds. The polished bones glistened like coral.
He watched them each take turns reaching out to touch the creature and was overcome with having them here. He had dreamed of such a moment so fiercely that now it felt like a prayer coming true before his eyes.
“Did you make this?” Jamie asked.
“Yes.”
“This is amazing,” Connor said.
“It is,” Dennis said.
Terrance felt his heart tense and found it hard to talk. Connor was crouched by the foreleg gently running a hand over the base. Dennis and Tina both walked backward to take in the scale of the sculpture. Jamie slowly walked another circle around the statue. “You could put this in a show.”
“This was my first.”
“There are more?” she asked.
Terrance waved them to follow, and turning up the hillside, led them to the next, and then the next sculpture. The valley was a sculpture park now from years of his daily efforts. A herd of strange creatures run off from his imagination and frozen mid-stride, midlife.
One of the largest sculptures reared upright, antlers as hands reaching for the canopy above. Helen had wanted him to take pictures of what he had done and send them to the kids, but he never would. He wanted this. For them to see. For them to be here. For him to show them something he had done with his time.
Dennis made talons of his hands and held them over his head to pose for a picture next to the sculpture.
They spent most of the afternoon hiking from creature to creature. He kept stealing glances at all of them, making room for their visages to imprint upon his mind. Back in Olean, when he felt himself spiraling, there was that one selfish thought that grew so big it split him at the core. You get no more of me, some voice deep in him said. It was this thought, that he mattered most, should come first, that made his exit possible. This was also the thought that cleared space for him to get sober and heal from old pains, but which left a chasm for grief and the specter of his children to fill in. Now, he knew there was no getting out of life clean, and if they asked, he’d give his children anything. All his money, time, property, and attention. Now he knew everyone must do this in some form or another. Only with the surprise of that, which came to him when Helen came along, and now again with these adult-children-strangers-flesh-and-blood, did he feel how sweet life could become.
He led them back to the cabin to rest and to make them dinner. On the walk home, he picked harsh blackberries and wild rhubarb he’d boil together with sugar and pour over ice cream for their dessert.
Dennis wanted to see the barn with all the tools. Everyone else went back to the cabin.
“We can go look for antlers in the morning,” Terrance said.
“Can we make something like you did out of them?” Dennis asked.
“Sure.” He led Dennis to a ladder on the side of the barn near the compost heap. “Have a look up there.”
Dennis climbed up high enough he could see how the roof was covered with elk horns and other bones drying in the sun.
“There are so many.”
“Sometimes I saw the smaller antlers into six-inch lengths to sell to a local store for dog chews. Makes easy money. Gives me something to do.”
Inside the barn Dennis almost knocked over the bucket in the middle of the floor. He bent down to look closer inside of it, not sure what he was really looking at. It was half full of water and floating mice.
“What is this?”
Terrance walked closer and gave the bucket a tap with the toe of his boot.
“It’s effective.” There were two notches in the rim of the bucket where he laid a length of a smooth steel rod across the mouth. “Put a bit of peanut butter in the center and cover the pole with Vaseline. They can’t resist and slip right in.”
“They drown?”
“Yep. Keeps them from eating my horns.” Terrance looked at the slick crosswalk over the bucket and imagined a tiny version of himself on such a slick path, then he saw tiny versions of his family following right behind him.
“Do you leave them here?” Dennis asked.
“They’re not going anywhere.”
Terrance showed his grandson all the tools in his workspace. He looked at it anew with the realization Dennis was the only person other than Helen and the men who constructed the barn to have ever seen the inside of it. He saw his own footprints stamped into the bone dust and the racks of plaster of paris, papier-mâché, and hardware he’d used to bind the bones.
He looked at Dennis then and thought, If we both close our eyes at the same time and sit still we will hear the same blood pumping.
When he finished showing off his tools, Terrance and Dennis walked closer to the cabin.
Terrance pointed to a shaded brown bird with a bright yellow nape hopping on the ground. “That’s a horned lark. I don’t see those too often.”
On the porch, Helen was on the rocking swing with Tina. The two of them were so close their shoulders were touching, leaning into each other like old confidants. Something caught his eye up the road.
A bike glided down the driveway.
The rider wore a neon-green jersey and red helmet. Terrance watched the bike get closer.
The tires wobbled over the gravel and lifted up a chalky plume of dirt. The rider broke into a clearing of full sun and his whole body reflected the light. Terrance had to shield his eyes from the glow until the rider was close enough to make out his face—a little tired, handsomeness tinged by time or grief.
“Oh please,” Terrance gasped. “Please,” and a feeling of inner expansiveness that began with his fa
mily in the woods swelled again and engulfed him as this rider slowed to a stop in front of him. He felt the enormity of the moment as the rider cut through the blinding light and the vision felt like a reward for enduring everything he’d been given.
“Oh please, be you. Oh please be you,” he said as the rider damp with sweat and with bright clothes that glowed took him into his arms.
“Hi, Dad. It took me a while to find the place.”
Terrance bent into Lewis’s arms and knew he would endlessly re-create this day in his mind, and that the effort would take the memory of all his days to do it justice.
Acknowledgments
This book is the product of years of labor guided by many loving hands.
Special thanks to my remarkable agent, Rayhané Sanders, and editors, Laura Brown and Hannah Robinson, who lovingly coaxed forward the story of this complicated family.
Eternal thanks to everyone at Harper Perennial who made this book happen and to Erica Ferguson for helping get it all right.
For their guidance I owe a deep debt to Steven Schwartz, Jonis Agee, Jonathan Starke, and all my friends and colleges at St. Bonaventure University, Colorado State University, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, and Bradley University and all points in between.
Great and growing love to my family, especially my parents, Tony and Mariette Murphy, for their constant love and support. Hyat, Nora, and Jude, you fill my life with your joy, energy, and love. I am so grateful I get to watch you enter our odd and lovely world.
To Becca, so often I turn around and am shocked by your glowing presence and how much I love you. This one is for you. They all are.
About the Author
DEVIN MURPHY is the nationally bestselling author of The Boat Runner. His fiction has appeared in more than sixty literary journals and anthologies, including the Missouri Review, Glimmer Train, and Confrontation. He is an associate professor at Bradley University and lives in Chicago with his wife and kids.
www.devinmurphyauthor.com
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Praise for Devin Murphy and Tiny Americans
“In Tiny Americans, Devin Murphy skillfully weaves a series of vivid, unflinching vignettes into a complex portrait of a family struggling with alcoholism, abandonment, and anger. Each snapshot is an astute character study, exposing the desires and vulnerabilities of the family members as they fall apart from one another and forge new lives. Epic in scope, Tiny Americans is a poignant examination of the ties that bind a family, and how enduring those ties may be.”
—Kathleen Barber, author of Are You Sleeping
“Devin Murphy is a writer who can do it all. With Tiny Americans, he gives us the Thurbers, some of the most complicated, most endearing, and most memorable characters I’ve ever read. The smallest details of their lives are vested, effortlessly, with enormous power and exquisite prose. I turned the pages, breathless, and yet the scope of the novel is nothing short of epic. When people say fiction is true, this is the kind of story they mean—wherever you are and whenever you read it, you’ll see that Tiny Americans is the thing that you needed.”
—Nicholas Mainieri, author of The Infinite
“Absorbing and affecting, Devin Murphy’s Tiny Americans looks unflinchingly at a family’s early unraveling and tracks how such sorrow reverberates over the years. But in moments large and small, we also glimpse the characters’ great capacity for love and an aching hope for forgiveness and connection. A sweeping and powerful family novel.”
—Bryn Chancellor, author of Sycamore
“Luminous, tender, and wise, Tiny Americans is a strikingly realistic evocation of what makes and unmakes and remakes a family.”
—Emily Danforth, author of The Miseducation of Cameron Post
“An ambitious coming of age story. . . . Murphy’s debut novel is a purposely limited view of war, as was The Red Badge of Courage, but strong characters and compelling narrative convey the impact well beyond one family. An impressive debut.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“A stellar account of wartime sacrifice, loss, and suspense. . . . Jacob’s final salvation is satisfying and inspiring. As one character says, ‘It’s the incidents we can’t control that make us who we are.’”
—Publishers Weekly
“Devin Murphy’s fantastic debut novel The Boat Runner is a lot of things—thrilling, tragic, well-paced—but maybe most of all, timely. With prose reminiscent of Per Petterson, The Boat Runner is a book that asks its reader, When does a person stand up? When does a normal person take action? And how does a person resist against overwhelming power? The Boat Runner is a satisfying page-turner, sure, but it is also an allegory for our time, a reminder of world war not so long ago, when fishermen, factory owners, children, and mothers became reluctant heroes, standing bravely against a sudden and twisted evil.”
—Nickolas Butler, internationally bestselling author of Shotgun Lovesongs and The Hearts of Men
“Poignant . . . acts as a cautionary tale for our own times. . . . The young Dutch boy Jacob Koopman, together with his family, lives in the middle of a morality tale, in which doing the right thing is often obscured by the need to survive. Devin Murphy has given us a moving, powerful, and important work.”
—Joseph Kertes, author of The Afterlife of Stars and Gratitude, winner of the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction
Also by Devin Murphy
The Boat Runner
Copyright
Portions of this novel have appeared in slightly different version in the journals New Madrid, Confrontation, the Greensboro Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Cimarron Review, Shenandoah, Hawaii Pacific Review, the Missouri Review, Toad Suck Review, Many Mountains Moving, South Dakota Review, and the Pinch.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
TINY AMERICANS. Copyright © 2019 by Devin Murphy. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Cover design by Joanne O’Neill
Cover photograph © Wylius/ istock/ Getty Images (texture); © plainpicture/Mohamad Itani (main image)
FIRST EDITION
Digital Edition MARCH 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-285608-1
Version 01192019
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-285607-4
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