by Annie Proulx
Nils summoned other followers of the signs to come in and pray over her. They tossed serpents to one another, sang and struck the tambourine, the anointing came over all in the room but one, Elise, and they spoke in tongues while she moaned help, help, but nothing worked right and a young man from the next farm died of drinking the rat poison, and it was clear Elise’s time was coming. Yet how slowly.
When the phone rang on Sunday he picked up the receiver, said, she’s sleeping, into Conrad’s ear, and hung up.
One morning Nils felt the sun’s heat when he put his hand on the bedroom wall. The house was silent in the warm morning, the heat coming up, no sound from the spare room where Elise lay. “Oh Lord,” he mumbled, “let her be dead in the night, let her be taken home in the night and have it over and ended.” He got up, staggered along to the bathroom where he stood in front of the toilet waiting for his water to start, but the ruined petcock wouldn’t open until he turned the sink faucet to get the idea across. Still nothing from Elise. He sloughed out to the kitchen and put the kettle on. He wouldn’t look in her room, wouldn’t risk breaking the fine silence until he’d had the cup of tea. Oh let her be taken to the Lord in the night. The sun struck through the window over the sink. A hot square fell on the refrigerator, showing up the trails of spilled food, his greasy handprints. The water boiled and he poured it onto the tea bag in his chipped cup, waited impatiently until it went a strong reddish brown, dribbled in the milk, but the milky tan was disturbed by fine curds precipitated by the acid brew. The milk must be on the turn. Never mind, he thought, and sucked it in, hot and rank with spoiled milk. There it was. The first moan trembling behind the door cheating him of the blessed silence. “Help. Help.”
He wouldn’t bear it any longer. Anger swelled over guilt and pity. He strode out the front door and went around to the back. Help me. The splitting axe was in the block by the chicken coop. He passed it by, went into the shed where his old broadaxe stood, seized the helve, felt the head to see if it was loose—a little—and went inside. “Here is your help,” he said and struck.
“If I Had the Wings of an Angel”
There was blood all over the room. Elise had been full of blood, gallons of it, purple red, and it spattered, gushed, drenched. It dripped noisily and some kind of gurgling was louder than the silenced cries. Silence evaded him. So close, but not yet achieved.
He climbed up to the top of the silo on the outside ladder and sprang toward heaven, knowing that Jesus would catch him or there would be hell to pay.
The oldest son, Conrad, cried like a cloudburst when they brought the news.
“She wanted to go on an Elderhostel trip to Alaska if she went into remission,” he sobbed. “She never had a chance to go anywhere. That bastard.”
But Ivar only nodded and kept on scraping paint off an old table, the kind of response you’d expect from someone they said was more or less retarded.
The light of fear
Ivar’s shack was dark, on the dark end of town. When he put out his light at night the place was swallowed up in darkness, the greensick leaves smoked leaden, the shadows like gigantic rolls of black wool. He could move soundlessly over his paths, knowing the stones by memory and touch, his hearing perked sharp and nostrils flared for the smell of weasel hair or fox breath, sensing without seeing the loom of posts as do the blind. And sometimes he threw himself down in the damp grass with the beetles and watched the blinking sky, always found the pleasure soured by the orange wash of streetlights from the village, the sky abuzz and streaked with planes and satellites and, too often, the gnashing clatter of a helicopter; in short, the darkness destroyed. He said what he thought to his dog, Rock, a rough-made animal with weak eyes who accepted Ivar’s harangues as conversation, for the man was voluble in privacy.
“Here we got a whole country afraid of the dark, millions of people never seen the stars or sky except on TV where it’s blazing rockets and comets hanging off the name of a laundry. We get born in a bright light, raised up with nightlights and headlights and streetlights and lighted signs and lighthouse lights on skyscrapers and store windows blazing all night long, lights in refrigerators and in watches, clocks that shine in the dark, headlights, airplane lights, fountain pen flashlights, keys with high beams, in the houses at night all kinds of little red and green eyes shining out of the telephone and the television and the security system and the hot water heater and the stove and the switch plate. Then comes the worst damn thing, Christmas, flashing it up in windows and on trees, on roofs, wrapped around houses, dangled all over the main street, every cheap gas station looks like the Titanic going down.” He named safety lights and farmyard lights, walkway lights, Americans’ sucking need for light, the darkness banished to space and the crazy craving for luminescence translated into burning fires all over the world, furnaces fueled with coal, wood chips, oil, gas, uranium, electricity generated by windmills and solar panels, the rise and fall of tides, turbines moved by dammed rivers and nuclear fission. Trees, fluids, gases, ores, air, sunlight, all transmuted to blades of light whetted to lance the black boil of night.
Ivar’s break
Ivar’s setup was this: long tables of sawhorses and planks beside the road, a display of scavenged goods, pitchers, canning jars, bits of ironmongery, each fluttering a white tag on a white cotton string, the price marked with ballpoint pen; an easel sign that blew over in the wind announced FLEA MARKET & ANTIQUES. He turned a good dollar from the travelers and tourists and kept quiet about it. Let them think he was Crazy Ivar living on fried grasshoppers.
When Waldemar Sulk of Sulk Funerals died in 1988, his daughter came back to town to take care of things, her damp white face screwed into a pained expression. The place seemed unchanged since her childhood; the Toole sisters might still be in the bushes ready to scream “yah yah Patty, Dead People Fatty!” and “yah yah, Sani-Flush, brush yer teeth with the toilet brush!” mortifying her out of Old Glory as soon and as far as she could get.
She walked helplessly through the musty, stinking rooms, that gagging smell that had seeped into the clothes and bedding, sofas and newspapers, into the kitchen cupboards, flavoring oatmeal and shredded wheat, rice and butter, scenting the curtains and carpets and childhood itself. Out on the sagging porch she stood in the river mist and smoked a cigarette, locked her gaze on her car as though she had never seen it before, stared at the rotting porch boards. A few cars went past, the occupants turning their heads to look at her. She could imagine them saying, who’s that on Sulk’s porch, must be the daughter, don’t you think, pity she couldn’t make it when the old man was still alive, but then she didn’t make it for her mother either, hard as glass, that one.
Wacky Ivar came down the street, pushing his cart, almost empty except for a few clinking beer bottles. He sucked gently on a cherry Life Saver, a sharp little ring almost at the point of dissolution. He watched the woman run her left hand through her dyed, frizzy hair, slap dandruff from her black-suited shoulders, scrape bits of French Creme polish from her nails.
He drifted up to the porch, whistling a single note.
“What you gonna do with all the stuff in there?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know. It smells awful.”
“That’s the embalming fluid, I’d say.”
She thought yes, and the cigars and the whiskey and the dirty old clothes and the yellow sheets and the rat turds and the crusty pans and the stinking old cats.
“It’s a nightmare.” She fingered her watch without looking at it. “The house isn’t worth nothing. Who’d want to buy a stinking old house here? If it burned down, save me some trouble. Who’d buy it, smelling like it does?” She looked east—the direction of Minneapolis.
“I can take the furniture off your hands,” said Ivar. “You don’t think there’s anything you can get for the building, donate it, donate it to the fire department for burning-down practice, you don’t want it to stand empty, the kids get in there and smoke dope and get diseases, you’d get in
touch with Leo Pauster, the fire chief, take the tax deduction, then you got you a nice clean lot you can realize something on.”
It was good advice and the daughter took it. She signed a bill of sale to Ivar for the contents of the house, received a crumpled dollar bill and a promise of immediate action, and drove off to call the fire chief and get the hell out of Old Glory.
(During her return journey a freight train derailed near the state line, crashing from an overhead trestle onto the highway. The backed-up traffic caught her in a three-hour jam; she blamed her dead father. She began to have trouble making choices. There were too many flavors of cat food; shapes and sizes and brands of ballpoint pens; kinds and sizes of shampoo; types of canned tomatoes—whole, crushed, sauce, paste; panty hose and tights in countless shades with control tops or glitter legs, sheer or opaque, in dozens of fibers, with reinforced toes and crotches or not, petite, queen, tall, regular and irregular; brands of toothpaste; shapes and bristle grades of toothbrushes; sheets in thread counts from 180 to 320, a hundred colors, floral, striped, dotted, cartoon figured, linen, damask, Egyptian cotton, checked, satin, embroidered, monogrammed, flannelette; too many apple cultivars; soft drinks from finger sips to gallon jugs, and juices and water from uncountable pure springs; and the stores themselves, surreal, brightly lighted, cloned in extravagant malls, the source of tedious and endless choices that were no choices at all. A year to the day after her father’s death, on her way to northern Michigan to see a client—she was a spirit channeler for an ice age hunter who gave advice on domestic problems through her—she suffered a panic attack on the Mackinac Bridge, stopped a third of the way across and froze, hands clenching the wheel, her head on her knuckles, terrified of seeing the hard, crenelated water below. Traffic hissed and roared around her, horns blared and she could not move. She was weeping and trembling when a middle-aged woman opened the door and nudged her into the passenger seat. “I’ll drive you across,” the woman said cheerfully. “I work for the bridge authority. You’re not the only one, it happens all the time. Truckdrivers, even those big guys on Harleys. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”)
What Ivar found
Ivar was three weeks at the dirty work of emptying the funeral home. He sold all the ancient embalming equipment and the back issues of Today’s Funeral Director to the Museum of the Mortuary Arts in Minot, North Dakota. He climbed a rickety ladder to the attic, prowled the churned kitchen, he cracked open musty bedrooms like eggs, shuffled around the rooms dragging bureaus and chests away from the wall, lifting them, his fingers clamped, embracing each piece as though it were a wooden bride. He rented a U-Haul with cash from his secret reserve and day after day carried off the stuff: a rolltop desk, four glass-fronted bookcases crammed with first editions of the books of Jack London, six Stickley chairs in fumed oak, the soapstone sink. He took some things to his repair shop, a ground-floor room that he rented for twenty dollars a month in the abandoned woolen mill.
In Sulk’s attic he found bundles of yellowed racist newspapers, The Klansman’s Kall, Pure America, White Knight, sold them to the American Civil Liberties Union library. He spray-painted hundreds of wire hangers lime green and flashpoint red and unloaded them at local dry cleaners, a dollar per fifty, removed the old pull-chain toilet and griffin-footed bathtub which went for a good price to the Wolf Pelt Inn in Hiawatha Falls. Unusable bits he tossed into an upstairs room—cracked plastic belts, torn overshoes, broken plastic eyeglass frames, unmatched buttons, a box of fishhooks rusted into a single barbed block.
He began his examination of the undersides of the tables and bureau drawers, found a twenty-dollar bill taped under the kitchen table, more twenties pinned to the back of the chifforobe with rusty thumbtacks. The old man’s reeking mattress was a cornucopia.
He emptied the house, then prised away baseboards, crawled over the floors pulling at boards, groped in unused chimney flues, steamed off wallpaper (some of the wallpaper had value to decorators needing purple plumes and deep stripes) where the wall bulged slightly. His vigor was rewarded with wads of cash totaling eight thousand dollars, a jar of Kennedy half-dollars.
By the end of 1989 Ivar had made $111,999 profit from his dollar investment. He bought the old woolen mill on the river and branched out into used furniture just as hundreds of savings and loan banks failed. From the offices and lobbies of the ruined banks came a bonanza of fine furniture: walnut desks with silver fittings, hand-rubbed cherry filing cabinets, teak customer service desks, bleached oak magazine tables, computer workstations in Finnish birch. He filled three floors with this rich stuff, which was not perfect, for many drawers were fretted where executives had clawed at the wood with their nails while listening to bad news on the telephone.
It was the foundation of his fortune. One hand of his business clenched on old Victorian houses, dismantled them and sold walnut library panels, stained-glass windows, portico columns, fretwork, balusters, and claw-footed tubs in the great house-building boom. Another picked up choice designer office furniture and garden statuary. His Out West Antiques chain, regional emporia with false fronts and hitching posts, showcases crammed with spurs, barbwire lengths for collectors, ten-gallon hats, cow skulls, he supplied through cross-country rambles to country auctions, picking through pawnshops and small-town secondhand stores. With him traveled Devil Basswood, a specialist in Americana who had once worked for Sotheby’s, twenty-nine years old and dressed in Giorgio Armani pleated silk trousers, a collarless Russian shirt and white braces. A semitrailer followed them and when it was filled Devil called for another empty. (Basswood drowned in the winter when his iceboat plunged into a lead of open water in Lake Vermilion.)
By his forty-eighth birthday Ivar owned a ranch in Montana, a beach house in Tahiti, but he looked very much the same, the long dusty ropes of hair hanging over the shoulders of his soiled linen jacket, his feet in black sneakers. He still picked up unclaimed deposit cans in his path, still took an interest in wrecked bikes. In a ragged Montana town too small to spit at he bought the contents of the Little Boy Blue Pawnshop, including an aged saddle stamped on the cantle with the maker’s name, A. D. Seitzler & Co., Silver City, New Mexico, ropes and shepherds’ crooks, a magazine rack with a carved bowlegged cowboy on the side, a beehive radio with speaker fabric in a honeycomb design, a basket of tarnished spoons and an old green accordion as misshapen as though a horse had stepped on it. The promising items went to his research center for identification and evaluation (in this way he recovered a lost Remington painting of a cavalry charge, and the carved magazine rack turned out to be a desirable piece by the crabby and eccentric Thomas Molesworthy). The worn spoons were good for nothing but the silver smelter, and the accordion went to the dollar bargain table in his Old Glory warehouse, open twenty-four hours, day and night, a mecca for collectors who drove hundreds of miles to see what they could find in the bins of junk.
Underground
Elise Gasmann was only one of an extraordinary number of Old Glory inhabitants diagnosed with various cancers. The town’s fatigue rate was far above the national average; men slumped for long periods of time in front of their television sets, women lurched to their jobs, nodding off in the commuter vans. Alarmed health officials visited outlying farms, taking soil, water and air samples, testing the local corn and hogs. Someone thought of the limestone caves beneath the black soil. Many people had complained over the years of hearing a low-pitched hum coming from underground that in certain seasons deepened to a ceaseless grinding as if nonstop subterranean trains were rolling to hell, as members of the Pentecostal Holiness Church believed, or harsh winds were blowing through a resonating underground chamber, as the town historian conjectured. The state sent its geologist down and she in turn summoned teams of scientists who came with odd equipment and reported that indeed a low-level sound was coming from under the caves, a steady vibration of seventeen cycles per second, an accompanying harmonic of seventy cycles per second, and pulsing overtones of much higher frequencies, of unkno
wn cause; certainly it was scientifically intriguing. In addition, there were dangerously high levels of radon gas in the caves leaking into the basements of Old Glory. The town made a rush to sell, to move out. Houses begun were never finished, their skeleton frames casting scribbled shadows, the piles of brick and sand on the sites sprouting fireweed.
Ivar’s brother Conrad Gasmann
“That’s why we got them damn white pheasants. The radon.” Conrad Gasmann, sitting at the table in the old Gasmann farmhouse with his wife, Nancy, spit an unchewable piece of bacon rind onto his plate and tossed his head to throw back the grey curl that hung over his forehead. He had the long and bulbed nose of his father, Nils, ice-blue eyes set close enough together to give him a squirrelly look, and ears that lay close to his head. The farm had been deeded to both brothers, but Ivar, after requesting a day alone in the house, sold his share to Conrad who got rid of the land except for the four acres surrounding the house and kept on working for Rudy Henry at the gas company. (When his daughter, Vela, was small, he told her he had to work there because his name was Gasmann. Then, when they hired John Roop, he told her Roop was the name of a rare invisible gas that made birds fly.) With the house he inherited a photograph of dead Aunt Floretta in her Wild West regalia sitting on a stump in a flurry of aspen leaves, her white-blond braids descending from an enormous white cowboy hat, her gloved hand resting on a braided lariat, a little heel spur catching the light, and, in a holster on her right hip, a pearl-handled revolver supplied by the photographer.