Northern Lights (2 page)

Her fingers went up and down his back. He felt better. “There, there,” she was whispering, and Perry grinned and thought about the poison sweeping like mustard gas through the screen windows. He felt better. He pressed his nose into the sheets, lay still while she massaged his shoulders and his neck and his scalp. “There, there,” she was whispering, softly now, her hand moving lightly. She whispered like a mother. She smelled of flannel. He felt much better. Gradually, she stopped rubbing and after a time he heard her slow breathing. Her mouth was open and she was asleep. Her teeth were shining.

Then he tried to sleep. But soon he was listening and thinking again, thinking about Harvey.

He tried to imagine what great changes the war might have made in his kid brother. He wondered what they would first say to each other. It was hard to picture.

All night, he had been thinking.

There would be some changes. The wounded eye, for sure. It was hard to imagine Harvey with a wounded eye. Harvey the Bull. The blinded bull. It was hard to picture. In a stiff and static
way, he remembered his brother through a handful of stop-motion images, a few images that had been frozen long ago and captured everything important. All night the images spun in his head: Harvey the Bull; Harvey digging the bomb shelter; Harvey off somewhere in the woods with the old man; Harvey playing football; Harvey the rascal; Harvey boarding the bus that would take him to a fort in California and from there to Saigon or Chu Lai or wherever.

It was annoying. The few sharp images were all Paul Perry really had. It was as though he’d lived thirty years for the sake of a half-dozen fast snapshots, everything else either forgotten or superfluous or lost in the shuffle, and all night long the few sharp images flopped before him, gaunt summary of three decades, growing up on the old man’s sermons and winter stories, learning to swim as the old man watched without pity, college, marriage, returning to Sawmill Landing, the bomb shelter and the old man’s death, a job, winter and summer and millions of pine and Norway spruce and birch, billions of bugs. All collapsed around the few images. But even the images offered no natural sequence. They were random and defiant, clarifying nothing, and Perry spent the long night in myopic wonder, trying to sort them into an order that would progress from start to finish to start.

He lay still. The mosquitoes were back. On the far wall, the first light formed patches against Grace’s dressing mirror.

Again he swung out of bed. He dressed quietly and carried his shoes to the kitchen. Outside, the sky was chalk colored. It would be another dry day. Sunday. Standing on the porch, he urinated into Grace’s green ferns, then he laced up his shoes, hurried across the lawn, passed the bomb shelter without looking, followed the path by memory to Pliney’s Pond.

There he sat on the rocks.

He practised melancholia and self-pity.

He scooped a handful of green water from the pond and let it trickle through his fingers, indifferently inspecting it for life. Harvey the Bull, he was thinking. The blinded bull. It was hard to picture. Hard to tell where it all started or even why. He took more water from the pond. Swirling it in his hands, he captured tiny capsules of cellulose, tiny larvae and mosquito eggs.

He waited for the sun to rise.

The forest stood like walls around the pond. Roots of older trees snaked along the rocks and disappeared deep into the water.

“Pooooor me,” he moaned.

It was hard to tell where it started. He squinted into the algae, dipped in for more water, let it dribble through his fingers.

It may have started that October in 1962, the October when Harvey quit high school football in order to finish the old man’s bomb shelter. It was one of the images: the October in 1962 when the old man’s prophecies of doom suddenly seemed not so crazy after all. When the Caribbean bustled with missiles and atom bombs, jets scrambling over Miami Beach and everyone in Sawmill Landing sat at their radios or hunched over coffee in the drugstore, saying: “Maybe the old gent wasn’t so crazy after all.” When people were asking one another about the hazards of nuclear fallout, asking if it really rotted a man’s testicles, does it hurt, would it reach into northern Minnesota, would the winds be from the north or south or does it matter? That October in 1962, eight years ago, when the Arrowhead blazed with red autumn, when Harvey dug a great hole in the backyard, poured cement, strung lights from the pines in order to work in the night so as to finish the bomb shelter for the dying old man.

It may have started then.

Or it may have started further back.

As kids.

He couldn’t remember.

That day when he dressed up in his father’s vestments, practising to be a preacher, to follow the old man into the pulpit of Damascus Lutheran Church. It may have started or it may not have started. It may have been the afternoon when the old man ordered him to swim in Pliney’s Pond. “Jump in,” the old man had said without pity. It may have started then, at the moment when he waded bawling into the fecund pond, or it may have started another time, that day, that day, or innumerable other days that washed together, that day when Harvey boarded a bus for California and the war. Or the day he married Grace, a day he barely remembered. “Looks like somebody’s mother,” the motherless old man had once said. Or other days.

That day.

It was the perfect melancholy hour, and he practised silence.

He sat on the rocks and peered into Pliney’s Pond. Pushing his glasses close, he leaned forward and scooped a handful of algae from the pond and rubbed it between his fingers until they were stained green.

It may have started or it may not have started. It was partly the town. Partly the place. Partly the forest and the old man’s Finnish religion, partly being a preacher’s kid, partly the old man’s northern obsessions, partly a combination of human beings and events, partly a genetic fix, an alchemy of circumstance.

Harvey was coming home and the sun was already coming up.

He was restless and afraid. It was hard to imagine Harvey with a wounded eye. Harvey the Bull, the old man’s pride, the brave balled bullock. Careful not to fall into the stinking pond, Perry sat on the rocks and peered into the waters and listened to dawn respiration. It was Sunday. He sat quietly, practising silence, letting the night restlessness drain, listening as the forest
swelled and expelled like a giant lung: oxygenation, respiration, metabolism and decay, photosynthesis and reproduction, simple asexual chemistry, conversion and reconversion.

Finally, when he was ready, he returned to the house. Grace was still sleeping.

The old timbers creaked. He put coffee on the stove, moved into the bathroom, showered, scrubbed the algae from his hands, dusted himself with his wife’s baby powder. It was six o’clock. He drank his coffee, watching the sunlight come in patches through the woods. He was sluggish and lazy and soft-bellied. Sipping his morning coffee and sitting at the table, he considered knocking off some sit-ups. Instead he fixed breakfast. When it was ready, he crept into the bedroom and woke Grace. “Breakfast,” he said.

“Phew.” She emerged from the sheets. “Phew, I had a dream … I was dreaming somebody was spraying insecticide. Did you have that dream? Phew.” She was a handsome woman. When she smiled, her teeth shined. From September through May she taught school. Now it was summer. “Come here,” she said.

“Breakfast’s already on.”

“I want some nice cuddling. Come here.”

“Don’t you want some nice breakfast instead?”

“Hmmmm,” she said. “First some nice cuddling. Poor boy, you had a bad night, didn’t you? Come here and I’ll give you some nice cuddling.”

Perry shook his head. “Better hurry,” he said. “Harvey comes home today, you know.”

“Poor boy,” she smiled. “Poor Paul. What you need is some cuddling.”

He backed the car into the yard, turned past the bomb shelter and drove out towards Route 18. Gravel clanked against the
sides of the car. At the end of the lane, he stopped and Grace leaned out to check the mailbox, then he turned on to the tar road and drove fast towards town.

The road swept through state park land. Another dry day. Branches hung over the narrow parts of the road.

After passing Bishop Markham’s house, Grace moved over and put her hand on him. “Happy?” she said.

“Sure. Wonderful.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. I’m happy. Can’t you see how happy I am? Watch out or I’ll drive into the ditch.”

The road ran in a drunken narrow valley of the forest, bumpy from winter frost heaves, old tar with a single white line painted down its center, unwinding towards Sawmill Landing, where it would pass by the cemetery and the junkyard, disappear for a moment at the railroad tracks, then continue on into town, past the John Deere machinery yard, the silver water tower, into the hub of Sawmill Landing. Perry drove fast. He knew the road by memory: twelve years on a school bus, in his father’s pickup, in his own first car, shuttling back and forth between the paint-peeling timber town and the old timber house. The road had no shoulders and the ditches were shallow rock and the forest stood like walls on each side, sometimes hanging over the road to form a kind of tunnel or chute through which he drove fast, opening the window to let the July heat in, lighting a first cigarette. It was a hypnotic, relaxing drive. Without recognizing anything in particular, he recognized everything in general — the sweep of the road down to the iron bridge, the sound of the tires on the pine planks, the slow curve past the cemetery and junkyard.

“If you’re happy, then, let’s see a nice smile,” Grace was saying, snuggling closer. “There, isn’t that nicer? You have to smile
when Harvey gets off the bus. Okay? You have to start practising right now.”

“All right,” he said.

“Then smile.”

“Okay,” he smiled, despite himself. She was like a gyroscope. A warm self-righting center, soothing with those whispers.

“Isn’t that better now?”

“Yes.”

“You see?”

“Priceless.”

“Don’t be that way. Be nice.”

“I am nice. I’m priceless. Don’t you think I’m priceless? Harvey’s a soldier and I’m priceless. That’s the way it always seems to go. Perfectly priceless.”

“Stop that.” She pouted, puckering her lower lip. “I’m only … just trying to perk you up a little. Here, I want you to start smiling. Shall I turn on the radio? We’ll listen to some church music.”

“If you want. Sounds priceless to me.”

“Poor Paul.” She turned the radio dial to find WCZ in Duluth. The car filled with July heat and the sound of pipe organs and a choir.

Perry concentrated on the road.

He felt her studying him, that vast womanly, wifely, motherly sympathy and understanding that both attracted and repelled him, often at the same time. “Like somebody’s goddamn mother,” his father had said. In college, more than ten years ago, it was her heavy-breasted sympathy that brought them together. She’d taken him in like an orphan, soothed him through four years at the University of Iowa, calmed him when he dropped out of the divinity school and steadied him when he started at the ag school, decadent Hawkeye sympathy that oozed like ripe
mud. After all the years with his father, after pursuing the old man’s winter tracks, ice fishing and hunting and fiery sermons, after all that Grace had come with her whispers and understanding, and marrying her after graduation had been as easy and natural as falling asleep in a warm bath. By then the old man was dead.

She was still studying him, snuggling close. “Well,” she finally said. “Well, Harvey sounded all right on the telephone. Don’t you think? I do. I think so. Actually, don’t you think he sounded pretty cheerful?”

“I guess so. He sounded the same.”

“You see? You see, he’s still cheerful and he sounded fine and everything will be perfect. You’ll see.”

“I guess.”

“So you can smile now. You can be cheerful just like Harvey.”

“He lost an eye.”

“Well …” She trailed off as if recognizing the fact but not its importance. The radio played church music. Perry turned the car along the slow curve of the lake. He was nervous and he lit another cigarette. “Well,” Grace said, “I’ll tell you this. I’m just glad you didn’t have to go. I’m glad about that much anyway. Aren’t you? I’m just glad you were too old for the dumb thing. I mean I don’t know. It’s awful about Harvey and everything. But I’m just glad you didn’t have to go, that’s all.”

“Priceless.”

Again she pouted, and the road bumped across the rusted railroad tracks, straightened and descended through a tunnel of white pine that opened into the town. Sometimes he got pleasure out of making her worry. “Priceless,” he muttered just for that purpose. On the right, an enamel sign said: SAWMILL LANDING. It gave the population as 781, which had been
about right until 1947 when the last lumber company had left town, taking thirty families with it.

The road made a sharp turn and became Mainstreet. Perry parked in front of the bank.

Church bells were ringing as they walked to the drugstore.

Except for two dogs, one sniffing at the other, the streets were as dry and motionless as a postcard. Sunday morning. Sunday morning, four dozen cars parked about the stone church, Jud Harmor’s pickup in front of the town hall, Sunday morning, paint peeling, pine rotting, the forest growing into vacant lots and abandoned lawns, fallen timbers, Sunday morning and even inside the drugstore everything was quiet.

Grace found a Sunday paper and they sat at the counter. A Coca-Cola clock showed eight minutes to eleven.

Perry kept his head down. He rambled through the comics and Sunday morning headlines. Grace read the Living section. A wall of mirrors faced them, running from one end of the long counter to the other, plastered with ads for ice cream and Pepsi and Bromo Seltzer, reflecting the rows of toothpaste and stationery and mouthwash and Kleenex, reflecting like a long mercantile mural, reflecting Grace who was gazing at him placid and soft-eyed, featureless as warm milk. He looked away. He looked away and continued through the newspaper until Herb Wolff swung behind the counter.