Mink River: A Novel (8 page)

In the cop car behind the liquor store Michael is thinking of Sara and humming:
Non la sospiri la nostra casetta
, Puccini’s song about a future rendezvous of lovers.

29.

As night falls Anna is sitting by a creek singing. Her husband George built a little bench there so that he and she and the children could watch the chinook salmon spawn every fall. Anna is trying to sing the baritone line that the creek is taking as it turns over rocks. Chinook are also called kings and tyees and hookbills and blacks and chubs and winter salmon here even though they don’t come up the creek in winter. Anna still tests the highest register of her voice even though it is shredded beyond repair. Fishermen north of Neawanaka also call the chinook
tshawytscha
. After a while Anna stops trying to anticipate pattern in the water and she just sings alto above the baritone growling of the rocks in the creek. Young chinook might stay in their birth streams for a year or two. Anna rocks back and forth as she sings. Once young chinook do make their run to the ocean they may stay there as long as three years before returning home. Anna rocks and rocks. After the chinook spawn they die. Anna loses track of the time. The exhausted salmon wash into eddies and pools and logjams and dissolve and feed a thousand creatures among them their own children who then sprint to the sea. Anna rocks and rocks until her daughter Cyra emerges from the fern on the riverbank and gently touches her on the shoulder and walks her home for dinner.

30.

Worried Man is still sitting by the spar tree in the dark but now he is thinking of the first time he ever saw Maple Head. She was standing on the bank of the Mink River combing her wet hair with her fingers. She was lithe and supple and slim and her hair fell brown and curling and swirling past her shoulders and he couldn’t take his eyes off her hair. Her fingers combed through her hair as the river quietly roared by and her hair looked like the river when salmon were whirling their way through it like living threads through living cloth. Her hair swirled under her fingers and she glared at him and he stood transfixed and all he wanted at that moment was to run his fingers through the cascading living water of her hair, the flashes of every other color in it depending on the angle of the light, her eyes like that too, flashing in green and brown, her hair and eyes rebellious and alive.

I took a step forward, and she took a step back, so I stepped back, to show her I didn’t mean any harm, and then she stepped forward, and we both smiled, and that was that absolutely ever since.

Our first dance together.

Every thing has its own vortex. Blake.

Thinking of Maple Head cheers him right up, and he stands, gingerly, still holding onto the tree, and stares uphill into the darkness, and gets a clear bead on the pain again.

And climbs.

31.

Maple Head in the kitchen of her little cedar house is humming. This morning before she left for school she had whirled flour and water and yeast and salt into dough and set it to rise all day. It’s risen so high during the day that the plate she put over it to keep out fruit flies and such is now perched helpless and teetering atop the bubbly mountain of dough. She scoops it out of the bowl and humming punches and hammers it down and sets it to rise again for a while and pours a glass of white wine. The night is warm and fragrant and she humming opens the kitchen window. She cleans sorrel and asparagus and puts lemon and wine and mustard on a piece of salmon and humming sets three plates on the table in the kitchen in case Cedar pops in for dinner.

She steps out on the porch to look for Worried Man but she is not worried—he is certainly finishing his walk and will be striding up the hill in a moment. Stares at the first stars, the last swifts chittering and swooping overhead, the first bats. Dreams. Sips wine. Thinks of Daniel’s hair. Daniel’s questions. Billy skinny as a stick. Tall. He stepped back politely. I liked that. His grave amused courtesy. His eyes. She sips the wine. Too early for owls. Swifts. Some of these are the new birds of the year, the fledglings. First flights. Scared and exhilarated.

Steps back into the kitchen, humming, and shapes the dough into two long thin loaves to bake, and slips the loaves in the oven, and then notices perhaps forty bright-orange salmonberries lined up in a long row on the windowsill, lined up by color, so the darkest are at one end and the brightest at the other. She smiles and says to the window
come in,
and Cedar’s face appears smiling.

32.

Where’s himself? asks Cedar.

Still walking. Come on in.

What’s for dinner?

For you, salmonberries. For us, salmon.

I was hoping for salmon
with
salmonberries. The delightful symmetry.

Hope no more. Sit.

I like watching you from here.

You just like peering in windows.

No, no—it’s seeing you in your kitchen. You fit.

Come sit down. Where were you today?

Recording osprey on the river.

Osprey have oral histories?

Sure they do. You could spend a whole lifetime studying them, May. The crook of their wings, the tuft of feathers by their eyes, the way their talons fold over to assure their grip on fish. Fascinating creatures. The construction of the nest, the tree they choose. They must pick certain trees for the angles of sight they provide to the river. The way they row through the air with their shoulders. The high-pitched cry, almost a scream. Like a hawk’s scream but more eaglish. A fascinating people altogether, the osprey people.

Eaglish? she says grinning.

Does this mean I fail sixth grade?

Just the adjective part.

A new word in the world. I should copyright it.

Such a scholar.

I had an interesting talk with your daughter this morning.

Mm?

About holes.

Holes?

She kept talking about the feeling you have when you know something’s missing in your life but you don’t know what it is.

No Horses said that?

She did.

Hmm.

Is she okay, May?

I think so—she was here the other night with Daniel and she seemed fine.

She seemed troubled to me.

Did you tell Billy?

I haven’t seen him all afternoon. He was going to make tapes for Daniel and then walk with the doctor. Figured I’d catch him here.

Now he
is
late, Cedar. Can you peek out and find him? This bread will be ready in a minute and then we will have salmon
with
salmonberries, and you, my dear, will eat with us.

I’m so honored. Have you ever invited me to dinner before?

Hmm: forty years times a hundred dinners a year adds up to, let’s see, four thousand invitations. Or maybe eight thousand. And not one declined.

I never said no? Ever?

To
my
dinner?

He grins.

I’m off, he says.

And you
may
do the dishes tonight.

May I do the dishes, May?

You may.

Back in a minute.

Thank you. I’m sure he’s coming up the hill but still.

Don’t eat all the bread! he says his voice grinning and fading and she grins too but in the bottom of her belly she thinks of Billy.

33.

Moses, having paused in a hemlock to reconnoiter, commences to worry about Daniel and after a minute he jumps into the air and floats away black against the blackening night. Floats through a blizzard of gnats and snaps right and left to catch one as swifts and swallows do. Floats over spruce and cedar, the school, the church, the grocery. Ponders Daniel’s usual routes through town. Floats over the old hotel. Hotel reminds him of the old nun. Her laugh like the peal of a bell. When she gave him a bath in the sink. Water everywhere. Shaking with laughter. My belly hurts from laughing so hard, Moses. My empty belly. The fruit of thy womb. Sometimes I wonder, Moses. My salty sea. A boat of a boy a gull of a girl. The way she dried him tenderly in a towel and oiled his feathers with olive oil. I will anoint you as your namesake was anointed, Moses. The way she lit four white candles in the corners of the tub when she bathed. The four holy directions, Moses. Her breasts never sucked by man nor babe rising out of the soapy water like islands. My spirit ponders, Moses. The way she cut her own hair. The way he held the mirror for her while she cut her hair. The way she twirled a lock of her hair with her right hand while she wrote letters and cards with her left. The way she sang exuberantly in the tub. My voice rises to God and He will hear me, Moses. Her grave calm patience with her students. The way she said
why, I was hoping it was you!
whenever she opened her door for anyone at all. The worn tiny tattered creased photograph of her father she wore around her neck. I will meditate with my heart, Moses. The way she watched any and all storms as delighted and terrified as a child. The clouds poured out water and His arrows flashed here and there, Moses. The worn wooden prayer beads under her pillow. My voice rises to Him, Moses. The way she knocked on doors with both hands and wore only red hats and gave away books after she read them and wept at her desk sometimes for no reason he could see. Surely in vain I have kept my heart pure, Moses, and washed my hands in innocence. The way she counted carefully between thunderbolts so as to gauge their whereabouts. There is thunder in His whirlwind and the deeps also tremble, Moses. The way she finished each walk along the ocean by staring out to sea. Our paths are in His mighty waters, Moses, and so are holy and hidden.

34.

On the boat Declan unwraps sandwiches for himself and Grace and they eat silently. The grocer puts a handful of walnuts in his pocket for his little son who likes to crack them although he won’t eat them. Moses in flight snaps at a mosquito to see what it feels like to be a swift eating such swift little meats. The priest sips red wine and opens his mail. Owen is chopping carrots and potatoes and onions. The man who has beaten his son twice today is sitting on his back stoop smoking a cigarette. Anna Christie is serving steaming plates of pasta with clam sauce to her husband and the twin girls Cyra and Serena but George notices that she has not filled a plate for herself. The boy who was beaten twice today is eating frozen waffles straight from the box as he stands in the kitchen with the refrigerator door open. No Horses is hunched over with her arms wrapped around her legs and her nose pressed into her jeans through which she smells her skin, which smells like as Owen says cinnamon and firelight. The old nun licks her top lip, the last time she will ever do so. Cedar finds three salmonberries in his pocket and pops two into his mouth. Maple Head eats three salmonberries from the windowsill. The banker sips his coffee as he drives home. Worried Man stepping through the last pair of trees on the top of the hill walks right into a spider-web and gets a strand in his mouth and tastes it smiling and looks up to see that he is under a deck or patio from which the pain is emanating. The O Donnell brothers and their father Red Hugh are eating steak that one of the brothers has overcooked because he never cooked steak before. Sara feeds her daughters grilled-cheese sandwiches and apples. The man who lied in court is drinking beer on the beach near the wreck of the
Carmarthen Castle
. Michael is rubbing salt and oregano into a chicken for dinner with Sara after the girls are in bed. Rachel is in the shower with her head back and her mouth open and the hot water cascading into her mouth and between her breasts. The two cooks at the diner are eating stew in the kitchen before the dinner rush. Rachel’s boyfriend Timmy is eating his dinner, a chocolate bar. The woman who sells insurance during the day takes a salted roasted cashew from the bowl on the bar and chews it slowly. Daniel whizzing through the dark on his bicycle is chewing gum. The doctor finishes his last cigarette of the day on the porch and then stands at the cutting board in his kitchen and very slowly cuts a pear into small cubes and then very slowly eats each cube and then brushes his teeth and turns the heat down and checks the locks and turns out the lights and disrobes and gets into bed and takes off his spectacles and folds them carefully on his night-table and then he lies awake for hours with his eyes glinting in the murky dark.

35.

Daniel knows he is running late for dinner and he’d like to get home to change his clothes so he goes even faster than usual, which is astonishingly fast, and he also takes the dirt path through the woods rather than the road, because it’ll save him at least three minutes depending on how fast he can go in the dark. It’s full dark now and there’s no moon. The first segment of the path in the woods is a straight shot, flat and padded with spruce needles, and he leans down and pumps his legs as fast as they can go, and it seems even to Daniel who is a connoisseur of speed in all forms that he has never gone faster in the whole long length of his whole entire life. The wind is seething behind him and the spruce trees are waving. His braids come loose from the exhausted rubber band he’s been using to bind them and his hair flies out behind him like comets’ tails red black brown. He goes so fast his backpack flaps and flaps against his back. At the end of the straight section of the path there’s a tight turn to the left where the hill runs out of hill and there Daniel slows down a little, leery of missing the turn, which would mean a hell of a fall, and he puts both feet down to use his heels as rough brakes, and he makes the turn cleanly, skidding and skewing only a little in the needles, but just as he comes out of the turn and leans forward again to get back into overdrive for the last slightly uphill portion of the path his long red braid catches for maybe a tenth of a second on a prickly spruce branch, which is enough to make even Daniel lose his balance, and the uncontrolled front wheel of the bike skews to the left and Daniel skews to the right, and the bike slams shuddering to a stop and Daniel flies over the edge of the cliff with his backpack flapping and his braids going in three directions and his mouth open but no sound emerging whatsoever.