Mink River: A Novel (14 page)

14.

The doctor’s house faces the sea. The front of the house is one long room with many windows all facing the sea. The room is filled with chairs and small tables. On one table there is a wooden carving of a sea lion, a gift from No Horses. There is a chess set and a wall of books about the sea at one end of the room and a telescope and a wall of maps of the sea at the other end. The maps are mounted in a massive hemlock frame, a gift from Owen. Along the back wall unobtrusively are two beds. When no one is in the beds the doctor uses them as couches. Usually there are people in the beds and in two or three of the chairs, for the doctor uses this room as a ward for those of his patients who cannot afford hospital or clinic fees, who have been discharged from the hospital but require his steady attention, who prefer for one reason or another not to recuperate in their own homes, or who have no homes. Today there are two people in the beds. Some patients are here for a day and some stay for weeks. One man stayed for months. He had been in the navy during the war and twice had been lost at sea. He would sit in his chair under the maps and tell stories of the sea. I was in the sea for days and days, he would say. The sea was in me for days and days. I still hear the sea in my head. Both times I was holding onto a big piece of wood and the sea kept licking me lap lap lap like a dog. This went on all night long. Those nights were so black. I said my rosary over and over, the joyful mysteries and the sorrowful mysteries and the glorious mysteries. I said them all because I couldn’t remember what day it was. You say the joyfuls on Mondays and Thursdays and the sorrowfuls on Tuesdays and Fridays and the glorious on Wednesdays and Saturdays. My wife liked the joyfuls because they celebrated a woman’s joys: Mary hearing the angel, Mary visiting her cousin, Mary having a baby, Mary getting the baby christened, Mary finding her lost child. My wife’s name was Mary. She was the prettiest woman you ever saw. There was no one ever prettier than my Mary, not ever. I lost her a couple of years ago. She went to the sea in the sky. The first time I was lost at sea I was rescued by a fishing boat and the second time by a gunboat. The gunboat was also lost, isn’t that funny? They were lost and I was found. After the second time I couldn’t sleep anymore if I couldn’t hear the sea lapping, so for the rest of the war I had to sleep on the beach, which was a problem, but the guys in my unit understood. They built me a little shelter on the beach, with a sand roof and a hidden door. Those guys could build anything. If you didn’t know where that little shelter was you could never find it. I bet it’s still there. Kids probably use it now as a secret fort or clubhouse or something. It was a real good place. You could hear the sea all night long there licking the land lap lap lap. I was there when the war ended. The guys came running to tell me that the war was over. I could hear their voices coming and their feet hitting the sand as they ran. Funny the things you remember: I remember their feet had exactly the same rhythm as the sea.

15.

No Horses in her studio is carving the oak man and thinking about men so as not to think about her boy. She wants to get lost in her head so she ticks off all the men she has ever kissed. That boy with the curly hair who stuck his tongue in my mouth. He was cute. He was shorter than me. We went steady for nine days. Eighth grade. The tall boy who gave me a ring. Tenth grade. He never said anything. He felt my breasts. I didn’t have any breasts yet. I was so embarrassed. I was having my period too. He felt my pad. The boy who called himself Red who was in town for a weekend basketball tournament. Twelfth grade. Mm. The windy beach. The boy with the two dogs. I remember the dogs watching us as we made love in his truck. College freshman. He was sweet. He was a liar. He was sweet. The man with the long hair and the motorcycle. With the tattoo on his thing. The man from the library who just held me all night and wouldn’t do anything. I liked him. There was something sweet about him not doing anything. I wonder if he couldn’t. I fell asleep finally but he didn’t. The quiet man from the canoe trip. We kissed that one night by the fire when everyone else was asleep and then he wrote me all those letters. Mm. He didn’t tell me he was married. His wife found my letters to him. Mm. She wrote me a brave letter. Where is her letter? I saved it for the longest time. The strength of women. How could she forgive him? I couldn’t forgive him. If Owen was with another woman. If I was with another man. He wouldn’t forgive me. Would he? I wouldn’t. He might. He wouldn’t. Would I? I couldn’t. Who would I go with? O stop. O just for a laugh who? Mm.

16.

Where and what is Neawanaka? Maple Head poses this question to her class. In one page or less explain our position, character, and/or unique properties. Extra credit for imagination. No copying. I’ll give you ten minutes. Ready? Begin.

Answers: Neawanaka is a coastal village of approximately five hundred inhabitants. Neawanaka is a song sung by a wren in the rain. Neawanaka is a settlement at the mouth of the Mink River. Neawanaka is a seething melodrama of shocking proportions. Neawanaka is a town bordered to the north by a salt marsh to the south by a mountainous headland to the east by forested hills to the west by the Pacific Ocean. Neawanaka is what you call in geology a dingle or a dell, which is sort of a bowl in the earth. Neawanaka receives eighty inches of rain a year however there have been many years when rainfall exceeded one hundred inches the modern record for rainfall is two hundred and eleven inches; that was the year my cat drowned. Neawanaka is a town infested by Catholics who worship pieces of wood. Neawanaka is a brooding isolated rotten stump of a town where divorce is endemic depression is normal and alcoholism is all you can hope for, that’s what my mom says. Neawanaka is the muddy fiefdom of two old men who have for many years manipulated county and state public works budget allocations to fund an endless series of foolhardy and very probably criminal enterprises, that’s what my dad says. Neawanaka is a town invented by a Salish healer or holy man named Sisaxai or Sisaixi who lived a long time ago. Neawanaka is a small village on the coastal highway where weary travelers can pause to refuel and refresh. Neawanaka was from prehistoric times an aboriginal settlement of at least one hundred year-round inhabitants judging from the anthropological efforts of Poole and Callaway in 1913; see specifically their reports of gargantuan shell middens on either side of the river. Neawanaka is a moldy crummy scummy trap of a town that I can’t wait to leave the minute I turn sixteen and can blow out of this wet hole for someplace where the sun shines more than ten minutes a year someplace like California where there are pretty girls not like here. Neawanaka was in former times a timber camp noted for the high grade of its cedar and spruce; indeed the phrase Neawanaka-quality is still heard wherever old loggers and millworkers gather to swap stories of the old days in the big woods. Neawanaka today offers one hotel of historic interest and bed-and-breakfast accommodations by inquiry at the colorful Stella Maris Pub, where fishermen and fisherwomen gather to talk shop and the ale is brewed on the premises by the cheerful proprietor herself. Neawanaka is still the home of a small fishing fleet that may be glimpsed heading to sea accompanied by the cries of gulls trailing the wakes of the picturesque boats. Neawanaka is the site of a working fish cooperative that last year according to statistics filed with the state processed more than a thousand tons of halibut, cod, perch, cabezon, rockfish, yelloweye, quillback, snapper, crab, sturgeon, salmon, rays, and trout (sea and river). Neawanaka is where I was born twelve years ago the seventh child born the seventh day of the seventh month. Neawanaka is the place where I am writing this exam paper for my teacher Mrs. Mann who is a really great teacher the best I ever had. Neawanaka is noted among birders for the variety of its bird population, which includes occasional appearances by pelagic species blown shoreward. Neawanaka is where my grandparents came from the old country seeking a new start in life. Neawanaka is a small coastal village of no particular economic, cultural, or scenic interest. However there is a public restroom adjacent to the grocery store.

17.

The boy in the south bed in the long room of the doctor’s house facing the sea is asleep. In the north bed is the man who sells boxes and containers of all sizes. He is asleep also. Daniel’s knees were shattered into more pieces than the surgeon at the hospital could count even with special magnifying lenses that made him look like a huge alien insect. The man who sells boxes and containers had a raging pain in his belly that turned out to be a tumor the size of a fist. The surgeon who put Daniel’s knees back together told jokes as he worked and argued cheerfully with the nurses about what radio station to play and shook hands exhaustedly with them after they had finished working for him. The same surgeon was the man who cut open the man who sells boxes to get at his tumor the size of a fist and said only fuck fuck fuck when he saw the tumor’s fingers and tendrils all woven intricately and relentlessly all through the middle of the man and he silently sewed him back together and none of the nurses in the operating room said anything when he was done. The man who sells boxes now has nineteen days left to live. Daniel now has nineteen pins and screws and bolts in his legs. The doctor used to smoke nineteen cigarettes a day, but then somehow he got himself down to fourteen, one for each apostle including the two apostles proposed to replace Judas after he hung himself, and then he managed somehow to quit the fourteenth cigarette, which he called Barsabbas or Justus, the names of the man who wasn’t elected an apostle, poor fellow, and the doctor never actually smoked the thirteenth, which he called Judas, who for a handful of coins betrayed the man he loved, because the doctor couldn’t bear to enjoy a cigarette named for the betrayer, not even once, and so he got right down to twelve, one for each of the eleven original apostles and the last for Matthias, the man elected to replace Judas, but there he stayed.

Despite a sincere and heartfelt desire to quit smoking altogether, for both personal and professional reasons, as a man fully cognizant of the subtle dangers of smoke and tar and nicotine inhaled into the tender pink tissues of the lungs, which are membranes as moist and vulnerable and innocent as the gates of a woman’s desire, the doctor is stuck at twelve, for he is a man of great imagination, and each cigarette during the course of his day has taken on the flavor of the man for whom it is named. For example his first cigarette of the day, which is called Peter, is the foundation for all else to come, raw and headlong and rough and wonderful, and his fourth cigarette of the day is sweet John, gentle and best loved, inhaled peacefully right after lunch, and his seventh of the day is Thomas the Doubter, which he usually smokes late in the afternoon, when he is tired and riven with the pain of his patients, and fully aware, painfully aware, uncomfortably aware, that the specific assigned mission of the twelve apostles themselves, the real men who walked the earth long ago, fishermen and tax collectors and laborers and such, prickly and confused and exhilarated, was to cure and cleanse every disease and every illness, and drive out the demons in the minds of men and women and children, and accept no coin for their belts, nor sandals, nor walking sticks, but to be sheep in the midst of wolves, shrewd as serpents and simple as doves.

18.

Worried Man here by Daniel’s bed, telling stories as he sleeps.

I will tell more stories of our People for my grandson.

We were the First People, you know. That’s why other people called us Grandfather, because they came from us. If you were trading at Celilo, let’s say, or you were at a potlatch up the coast where the grandfather of rivers, Nchiawana, meets the ocean and they fight all the time and make a wall of water, and you met someone from another people—Tenino, let’s say, or even Nez Perce from the great mountains to the east—that person would call you Grandfather, because they knew right away you were one of the People. Now, some people wouldn’t call us Grandfather, because they were absolutely sure they came from another people. Some people even maintained that they were the First People, and that we came from them. Like those Cheamhill people! They said that! Those crazy Cheamhills! They were a wild people absolutely. They had heads like stones. Once they got something into their heads you couldn’t get it out again no matter what. In the old days we went to war with them all the time. That’s when we would wear our elk-leather armor. We would fight them when we came to berry in their valley in summer or they would fight us when they came to the sea for fish in the fall. When we fought them we beat them like drums. We never did lose a fight with those wild Cheamhills. One time they got the Luckiamute people and the Tualatin people and a few of the Calapuyan people together and brought us a war, but we beat them all like drums. We had some help in that war, of course. We were a brave and strong people absolutely but not that strong. We flew in our canoes up and down the coast and got all the people of the sea together from the Clatsops and Kathlamets to the north, up by Nchiawana the grandfather of rivers, all the way to the Tututni and Chetco and Tolowa in the south. The Tolowas sent only one man but he was a great fighter, that man. There were so many languages in that fight! My grandfather said it was a wonderful thing to hear so many languages. There were more languages than there are fish in the sea, he said. My grandfather was in that fight and lost a finger off his south hand. A Cheamhill man swung a knife at him and he put his south hand up to fend off the blow and his last finger jumped off and ran away. My grandfather used to tell us to keep an eye out for that finger. I sure could use that finger back, he would say. It was a good finger and my other fingers tell stories about it at night. Sometimes they sing a song for its return. They sing very quietly. When you children are in bed tonight you listen and you might hear that song. The thumbs start singing in their deep voices and then the other fingers join them and finally the last finger on my north hand sings alone for its lover in the south to come home. It’s a really sad and beautiful song. You listen closely and you just might hear that song.