Mink River: A Novel (4 page)

8.

Grace O Donnell is in the barn on her parents’ farm, patching tractor tires and cursing in new and interesting ways to make her brothers laugh. She spent the morning cutting apart a car with a blowtorch, and she is due out on a fishing boat in another hour, but she swore, so to speak, that she would get to the tires today because her father is now in his seventies and while he is still healthy and still mean he can no longer easily bend over and pick up heavy tools although he never admits or tells anyone that because he is Red Hugh, hard of hand and head, chief of the clan, asking no help or quarter, quick to lash fools and children with his long white rod,
an slath ban
, although he doesn’t dare lash Grace or Declan anymore, because of Grace’s cold eyes on him when he loses his temper and reaches for the stick and because Declan told his father one afternoon in the meadow that if ever you raise that fecking stick at me again I’ll yank it out of your fecking hand and cram it down your fecking throat, you hear me, old man? you hear me?

Grace notices that Red Hugh can no longer easily bend over and pick up heavy tools so she patches the tires.

She gets three tires patched before she notices that the first tire she patched is already flat again and this sets her going on a fit of cursing that even for her is inspired stuff, and she has been swearing like a cuckolded sailor since she was seven years old. It is a skill she learned in part from Red Hugh, a master curser who starts cursing even before he gets out of bed, and Hugh still can get a good burst going, given the right conditions, although he can’t sustain an hour’s worth of snarling invective like he could in the old days, not that any of his children miss his bile, which is now directed wholly at his wife, who isn’t there to hear it, because she packed a suitcase two years ago and walked out the door without a word. The suitcase was enormous. It was far too big for her to carry. The sound of it being dragged down the gravel driveway will stay with Grace and her brothers for ever and ever and ever.

9.

Owen and his pet crow Moses are in his shop at the south end of town, where the highway is. Officially his shop is called
AUTO & OTHER REPAIR
but Other Repair is the greater part by far of his business. The shop is split into two large rooms, one oily and fragrant and filled with many pieces of cars, and the other filled mostly with tables and shelves on which sit several thousand things and pieces of things, among them Moses, who likes to sit on an old football helmet over the long bench where Owen works.

It is a heroic clutter. It is the clutter’s dream of clutter. Close your eyes for a minute and think of all the closets you have ever crammed with stuff, and all the basement workbenches asprawl with tools, and the shelves crowded with fishing gear and sports equipment and paintbrushes and furnace filters and nails and eyelets and grommets and washers and such, and merge them all in your mind, not haphazardly but with a general sense of order, a relaxed and affectionate organizational sense, such that you would have a pretty good rough idea where something might be if you needed to find it, and when you went to look for it you would find it in less than a minute, and even when something took more than a minute to find, you would find something else that you’d been looking for not desperately but assiduously; then think of all the rich dark male smells you have ever liked, the smells that remind you of your dad, your grandfather, your uncle, your older brother. Paint in cans that have been imperfectly sealed so a touch of the smell leaks out, and flat whippy paint-stirring sticks half-coated in dried paint atop the cans, and if you are really good with the Nerves of the Expansive Nostrils, as Blake says, you could maybe distinguish the color of the paint from the smells—the vanilla smell of white paint and the fragrant-baby smell of blue, the loud smell of red like a car backfiring, the library smell of brown. And the smells of sawn cedar and maple and fir boards. Ashes. Varnish. Plywood. Cigars. Somewhere on a shelf a redolent piece of redwood. Sweat. Boots. Oil. A hint of gasoline as if it had been spilled quite a long time ago and cleaned up meticulously but the room remembers when it happened. Rubber. The cold impersonal greedy smell of metal. Sawdust. The handled smell of tools. Liniment. Coffee. The brown smell of boxes and cardboard. Beer. The vacation-cabin smell of pine. Oiled saws. Old newspapers. Woodsmoke. The burnt-wire smell of old radio and television tubes. Turpentine. The grandmotherly smell of old upholstery rising warmly from the sagging couch in the corner. Apples. Wet clothes. Bread. Crow.

Its stew of smells and sense of ragged order was the very essence of Owen’s shop; children loved it on first sight and old men felt so comfortable there that they would bring Owen things to fix that he knew and they knew didn’t need fixing, although he charged a flat fee of ten dollars per job for such things, which the old men paid happily, figuring that ten dollars was the fair cost of an afternoon spent poking around Other Repair, which they also loved because Owen let them poke around freely, without rebuff or boundaries, although he politely declined their inevitable requests to actually repair things, though unanimously they offered to work for nothing, and many of them had offered to pay for the privilege.

Owen’s son Daniel recently began a list of the things in this room: watches, alarm clocks, toasters, tape recorders, tape decks, microwave ovens, lawnmowers, half a boat, telephones, computers, kitchen clocks, chairs, tables, televisions, screws, bolts, an alarm system for a boat, answering machines, global positioning devices, fishfinders, fishing reels, hedge clippers, scissors, shears, trowels, the bottom half of an ancient cotton gin, a Beretta pistol, welding tools, hammers, pliers of every conceivable size (Owen maintains that the pliers is the greatest tool ever invented), saws, screwdrivers, an anvil, winches in three sizes, Moses, and taxidermy tools, which is where Daniel stopped recording what he saw, because the tools were being applied to the top half of a huge beaver and Daniel wanted to help, which he did, to the quiet pleasure of his father.

10.

Cedar pays a visit to the man who beats his son. The man works at the fish co-op. His son is in the eighth grade. They live alone. They moved here a year ago from away, the man and the boy. The father beats the son only inside the house. The son no longer cries when he is beaten but tries to make his mind soar out of his body like a bird while the father back on earth is punching and kicking him in the chest and ribs. When the father loses his temper he swings at his son’s face and once he has begun swinging he cannot stop although he shifts his punches to the boy’s chest and ribs so as not to leave marks and when the boy falls to the floor and curls up the father kicks him with his work boots. The son lifts weights three times a day. When the father is exhausted from beating the boy he goes out on the porch and sobs with great silent wracking sobs and the boy goes to the freezer where he has ice packs arranged by size and a fishing vest he has stuffed with ice. The boy explains his bruises in the gym by saying that he also lifts at home and is clumsy with the weights. The father feels twisted and foul. The boy has run away twice. The father beats the son two or three times a week. The second time the boy ran away Michael the cop found him sleeping in a cave on the beach in a sleeping bag made of old jackets wrapped with duct tape. Michael told Cedar about the boy. Cedar stands outside the back door of the co-op.

Tell me the thoughts of man that have been hid of old, he thinks. Blake.

He steps into the co-op. The father is cleaning a catch of scallops at a long table. The air inside the co-op is bone cold. Weathervane scallops, Cedar notes, the Public Works computer in his head automatically gauging their size. The man is sweating as he wields the shucking knife flick flick flick. The nuggets of scallop meat fly from the knife into a steel bowl.

You will keep your hands off that boy, says Cedar quietly, and the man’s head snaps up but his knife keeps shucking flick flick flick.

When the rage comes you will walk out of the house with your hands in your pockets, says Cedar, and the knife stops flicking and there is no sound at all in the room.

Your love for him will heal you, says Cedar, and the man drops the knife and whirls around but Cedar pins the man’s arms to his sides with a grip of stone and doom and he leans in closer and says, Your love will heal your boy also.

The man spits a huge gob of spit in Cedar’s face and Cedar puts his dripping nose against the man’s scarlet nose and says very quietly, If you hit that boy again I will break your fucking wrists like fucking twigs, and the man says nothing and there is no sound at all in the room except the two men breathing hard and the refrigeration unit chuffing.

11.

That is one honking huge beaver, dad.

Tis.

Where’s it from?

The Mink River. Grace found it drowned.

Must weigh fifty pounds.

You know prehistoric beavers weighed maybe five hundred pounds. Or more. They were the size of cars.

Really?

Really really. And they were smart. Imagine a really really smart beaver the size of a car.

Yikes.

Imagine you’re in the river waist deep fooling around and you see coming toward you a furry car that’s thinking maybe you are getting a little too close to its lodge. Which is itself the size of a city. You’d pee so fast you’d raise the river.

You make me laugh.

You know, I love this, when we work together.

Yeh.

I do really.

Me too.

Soon you’ll be off to college.

Not for years, dad. And who knows what will happen then?

You sound like my dad. He was always leery of the future.

Why?

Hmm. Good question. Well, he was leery of the present and past too, come to think of it. He was a leery guy. Guy Leery—sounds like a movie star.

Leery of what?

Hmm. Of what would happen, I guess. Or not happen.

Was he paralnoid?

Pa Ra Noid. Not really, no. He was a tough man, very brave in his way. He was just … worried. It was always in his face. A worried man. So to speak. Should have called
him
Worried Man and not your other grandpa. My dad never trusted that things would work his way, is the best way to put it. So they never did.

You’re cutting the beaver’s ear off.

Ah, so I am. Shit on a stick. Damn my eyes. Never talk and work. The work suffers.

You were saying.

Well, my dad had a hard life, Danno. He was a child of the Hunger, in a way,
an bhuchaill gorta
, and he never found work he really wanted to do, and I think he was lonely all his life.

Until he met Grandmother.

Well. He was lonely after that too.

Tell me.

Let’s finish the beaver first.

You should tell your dad’s story for the Project.

I could, that. Your grandpa Billy would like that.

Grandpa is making tapes for me.

How so?

Answering questions I ask.

Like?

How Mom got her name, how he met Cedar.

Ask him how a young Irish fella from County Mud & Blood bamboozled his one extraordinary daughter off him. He’ll laugh at that.

Grampa has a great laugh.

He does that. Ask him how a young fella with no prospects and education and hair black as the inside of a dog somehow against all odds and sense persuaded the stunning No Horses to marry him. Ask him was it some Celtic druidry or what that won me my wild wee wife.

How did you meet Mom?

Ah, there’s a thousand tapes in that story, son.

Did you ask Mom to get married or did she ask you?

I sank to my knees, son, on the highest hill I could find, and I asked her it straight out, with my heart hammering and yammering and warbling and whistling like a water bird in my ribs, and she smiled that sideways smile and said
yes
and your daddy has been a capering fox every minute since with few exceptions absolutely, as your grandpa would say. And now to the beaver.

12.

No Horses in her studio is a study of alternating currents of motion and stillness; a river racing and resting; electric femininity waxing and waning. When her hands are in motion the rest of her is still and vice versa. Often she walks in circles like her father; around her work table, around the room, around the Department building when she’s really frazzled and has to think out a piece of work, around the hills on which Neawanaka perches when she can’t work at all and has to go burn off the throttled electricity.

At work in clay or wood or stone she stares, she breathes evenly, she is riveted, she is lost. No phone. Music gently. Bach when she is in stone, rock and roll in clay, jazz in wood.

This afternoon there is a slab of spruce on her work table weighing perhaps two hundred pounds, as tall and broad in the shoulders as a man.

Maybe it will
be
a man, she thinks.

She circles the table.

I
like
men, she thinks, smiling.