Prudence (16 page)

When he’d fallen to 1,500 feet he began to slow down drastically. He left the comfort of the tuck and spread his arms and legs to slow himself. It helped. By the end, he wasn’t falling so much as drifting, as a leaf would. He brought his knees forward and assumed a standing position, and as if by magic—but it wasn’t magic really, it couldn’t be—his feet touched the ground first, so gently, so softly as not even to make a sound, and he walked ahead, didn’t even break stride, because, really, now it was time to go
home.

THE PINES—CHRISTMAS 1944

F
elix didn’t lift the curtains again. Not the one on the small window facing the river, and not the one on the back side of the boathouse. It was early yet, not even nine thirty. He knew he would not see Prudence until much later, staggering across the river ice in her shoes, her nice ones, on her way back from the Christmas Eve party at the Wigwam, her coat pulled tight around her waist, her shawl clamped tight over her hair, her eyes bleary with booze and her breath carrying the shared smoke of some boy, a different boy, all different, and all the same somehow.

The way she took to the ice! Felix preferred not to see, not even to think about it; how she stomped across without a thought about how thin it was at the mouth of the river, how strong and deep the current. She must know, she wasn’t a white girl, after all. She must have known and not cared. If she were to break through, who would come? Would he have made it in time to save her? Or would someone from the camp across the river have noticed and come running? One of the Germans. Would they have saved her? They should. In a way they owed her a life.

As for the view out the other window, it never changed, had not changed since he carried Prudence from the woods, both of them covered in her sister’s blood, Frankie tailing them mournfully, the Winchester cast off in the brush. Some days later, Felix had gone
back for the gun. He’d pulled it from the ferns and cleaned it, but it had already begun to rust. No one except Felix took it down from its pegs above the mantelpiece anymore. For the past two years, there’d been no one else to do it anyway.

The big house hadn’t changed in that time, except to settle lower in the ground. Its face had always looked expectant to him as he waited for the ice to break up and for Emma to send a telegram for him at the Wigwam (even though he had no need for a telegram to tell him what the pussy willows told him, blooming, what everyone knew; that spring was coming). Now the big house didn’t look expectant so much as hollowed out. The dark door and shuttered upstairs windows resembled a mouth and eyes caught in a silent moan. Jonathan hadn’t come back, and neither had any of the others.

No one except Emma. She’d come back for two weeks the following year, and Felix had done his best to make the Pines the cheerful place she thought it had been. But whatever he did—painting the clapboard, installing storm windows, jacking up the porch and replacing the rotten spindles—was not enough. This past summer she hadn’t come at all, even though in the spring Felix got the place ready, gassed the boats and oiled the hinges on the doors and leveled the dock and got the girls from the village to promise they’d be around, though now Prudence did some of the work—sloppy, careless, angry.

Across the river, as if to mock their loss and the slow death of the Pines, the prison camp was thriving. Now there were at least two hundred Germans, singing their way out to the woods to build corduroy roads through the swamps, to cut the white pine and skid it out. Two hundred singing Germans to fix the track. They enjoyed work, if not their captivity. They shouted and cheered during their weekly boxing matches and soccer games. The windows of their cabins glowed with warm light during the short days of winter. The whole place emitted the cheer of shared hardship. And all the while
the Pines sank lower into the earth and the wind moaned across the shuttered windows.

All this in contrast to the humble cheer of the boathouse, which, with no one in the big house, was now truly Felix’s place. His and Prudence’s. There wasn’t much to it: in the back, sectioned off from the main part by wooden shelves as high as he stood (these had replaced the hanging wool blankets, which hadn’t offered enough privacy), was his bed; the front was crammed with a small table and two chairs, the barrel stove, the washbasin and sink, and Prudence’s bed, covered in a quilt made from men’s suits.

At the center of the table, a kerosene lantern stood lit, the wick trimmed low. Next to it lay a thick letter from Frankie, addressed to Billy. It had come in a larger envelope with a note and a silver chain with a heart-shaped locket for Prudence. Also on the table was a telegram from Emma that Felix had received along with the package from Clarence at the station. He turned from the window and adjusted the letter, the note, the telegram, and the locket so that Prudence would see them when she returned. She’d probably be too drunk to notice. He got up and moved all the mail to his bed so that the table was clear, except for the lantern. He fiddled with the wick and then moved the letter, telegram, and locket back to the table.

The water on top of the stove hissed from the heat, but even with the stove full of jack pine and some green birch on top to keep it going all night, the house would be cold soon. Even now, with the barrel stove shaking and hissing, the wind seethed through the pine-board walls of the boathouse.

Felix sat down on the edge of his bed but got up quickly. If only Prudence would come back, his agitation would ebb. If only she would come back, he would know what to do. He would be able to look at her and know what to do. And after he gave her the locket and the news, he would be able to get something done around the place. Would she cry? Would she want to be held? Would she sulk
with a magazine on her bed or writing at the table or split some wood outside, at war with the ax, if not the wood? There was no telling how she would react to anything. She was weather with no pattern he could guess. He tried. In the mornings he made as little noise as possible as he restarted the stove and put the kettle on. But he knew how to make tea the way she liked. When it was ready, he’d say, “
Biish
.
Biish, daanis
.” And she would stir, squinting up at the light of dawn if it was summer and the gloom if it was winter. She’d drink two cups before she got out of bed. By then he was outside, mostly to give her privacy to make water in the chamber pot and wash her face. At other times he lay on his bed, his hands folded across his stomach as she read magazines by lamplight on the other side of the divider. “Hey, Felix, did you know . . .” Something or other from one of her magazines. But other nights she’d say nothing. You never knew with her. You never knew. When he had chided her for breaking the ax handle she shrugged and said, “Cheap old ax,” but when they pulled nets, she’d whoop and holler if she got a big one, then huddle down in the front of the canoe as he paddled up the river, content as a stone.

If only he had done what Emma had asked and checked the dock instead of taking the boys out into the woods to look for the German, he might have had two daughters, two girls to care for, and the Pines, and all of it, would be as it was, only better. But he had not. There had been too much to do, too much to get done before Frankie and his friends arrived. He had been about to tackle the dead fish under the dock when Emma implored him with her eyes, in that way of hers, to go with Frankie and Billy and the others to look for the German.

*   *   *

F
rankie had been anxious to look for the German. He shook Felix’s hand and looked at him with that honest, boyish face, the one Felix had watched change from the soft, fleshy face of childhood
into the strong face of a man. Felix had been surprised at the tan, the strong lines around Frankie’s jaw, the firmness of his grip when he stepped out of the canoe onto the dock.

“We’re going to get us a German. How about that, Felix?”

“Good,” Felix had said. “Good, we’ll get him.”

“He doesn’t stand a chance with us on his trail, does he?”

“No. Not with us,” he’d agreed.

And he’d watched as Emma came striding from behind the house, her arms opened wide to receive Frankie.

No one had greeted Felix that way when he returned in 1919. The shack where his wife and child had died did not open its arms to him. He had left for the war and walked into death, and death was what he had come home to. His mother and father still lived in their wigwam on the trapping grounds. His father shook his hand. His mother made him sit and fed him. Later they went to the drum dance, where Felix was expected to tell the story of his kills. The old men who remembered 1862 and 1876 and 1891 listened and nodded. And when he was done they heaped blankets on his lap and pressed tobacco plugs into his palm and shook his hand. One old man gave him a knife and three silver dollars. But no one, not one person, had clutched him and held him close as Emma had hugged Frankie.

“My son, my boy,” Emma had said, trying to cup Frankie’s face in her hands. But Frankie had reared back and taken her hands in his and said, “Mother. Good, Mother, good.” That was when he had looked up and nodded at Felix.

“Old Felix. Old Felix, it’s good to see you. Really good.”

“Mr. Frankie,” Felix had answered. He’d felt like saying more. But he couldn’t act like they did. It wouldn’t feel natural. And he could see that Frankie was trying so hard to be a man, or to be thought of as one. So he’d left it at that.

“We’d best get after that German,” Frankie said. “The longer we
wait, the more time he has to cause trouble.” And that’s when he’d asked after the Winchester.

It was where it always was. Felix had no need for it. He didn’t have the energy to look for grouse and there wasn’t much to them anyway, not enough to spend what money he had on shells. Once in a while he’d sit at the point and wait for ducks, and if he got one or two mallards, that was plenty. He strung nets in the river and got enough ring-bills and canvasback to keep him happy, but mallards were nice to roast once in a while. Rabbits he snared. Deer he snared. Snaring was the best way to get game, not going out after it and shooting, shooting, shooting. Why Jonathan had brought the Winchester to the Pines was a mystery, as he never walked farther than the yard. Never even took the boat out on the lake. Maybe a shotgun was one of those things that white people liked to have around for show, like dogs or paintings.

Man though he’d become, Frankie hadn’t seemed capable of bringing in a prisoner. But soon enough they’d been, as Ernie put it, “loaded for man,” and the four boys and Felix had set out on the path behind the garden in the haze of heat, sweat dripping into their eyes.

As soon as they stepped past the windrow of spruce that bordered the yard and the first few feet of hazel brush it was as though they had stepped underwater. The brush was thick with moisture, heavy, still, hot. Sweat seeped into Felix’s eyes; the brush grabbed at his long sleeves and tried to hold him fast. This was no time to go for a walk in the bush. The mosquitoes, dormant in the heat, rose from the ground and from under leaves and covered his neck and forehead. He brushed them away at first, but then he sweated so much and his skin was so hot that he ceased to notice them. They could hear nothing except the slap of brush and the drone of deerflies and mosquitoes. Felix was in front, since he knew the trails better than
any of the boys, who were talking excitedly and laughing. Occasionally Frankie broke into song—cheerful, forced singing that seemed out of place in the woods.

The trail ended at the old tote road that ran along the northern edge of the reservation. Since the highway had been built, parallel to the railroad tracks to the south, no one used this older road much anymore, except as a skid trail in winter, for the last of the old growth and pulp from the second- and third-growth cuttings. In summer, the road disappeared under the leaf-heavy branches of basswood, maple, and ironwood. Grass and weeds waved high between the ruts, and the ruts themselves baked in the August sun until the clay hardened, shrank, and cracked. Here and there Felix saw the prints of deer that had been set during or shortly after the last rain. It looked as if the earth had been made with those tracks already in place, the deer just a rumor of life.

Felix stopped on the road, turned, and waited for the boys to catch up. They seemed so out of place, noisy and heavy-footed. Frankie kept forcing his voice louder and louder, making jokes, laughing when he tripped on deadfall, the gun waving back and forth. Maybe the double-aught hadn’t been a good idea.

The boys emerged from the brush and stood around Felix expectantly. It felt good to be looked at like that. Like he had the right answers.

“So what’s the plan, Felix? How are we going to bring him in?”

“If we find him, Mr. Frankie.”

“We will. We’ll find him, right, Billy?”

“Okay.”

“I won’t be home for a long time. And this is how I want the last time to be. It should be memorable.”

“We split up,” said Felix. “Mr. Frankie and Billy and Ernest go that way. Me and David will go this way behind the swamp.”

“Hey, Felix, is there any sign? Can you tell if there’s any sign? What can you see, Felix?”

Felix could only see the cracked ruts, the weeds and brush bent and crushed and browning in the heat.

He shrugged. “He might have gone this way. But maybe not. It’s the wrong season for tracking. Wrong time.” It was a long speech for him.

“Let’s split up, then.” Frankie looked at Billy when he said this, and Billy nodded.

Felix was anxious to get going, too, if only to get the search over with so he could finish his work at the Pines and give himself some peace. He began walking down the tote road, making a show of searching the weeds for sign. David followed behind him, doing the same. Frankie was saying, “Okay, if you want to cut up the middle, right off the trail here, Billy and I will follow the trail and turn off when it comes up to the lake.” Ernie must have agreed, because Felix could hear him step off the trail, the leaves and underbrush crackling under his feet. Frankie said something low and Billy laughed.

“Anything, Felix? See anything?”

Felix shook his head and picked up the pace. David struggled to keep up. He followed too close and the bent branches and hazel brush slapped him in the face. Felix said nothing. If David couldn’t figure out how to walk a few feet farther behind, then there was no point in telling him. He walked a few hundred yards down the tote road and then turned south into the woods. All the small sloughs and depressions in the ground were dry. Not even the clay could hold what little moisture there was. Here and there in the leaves Felix saw birch-bark baskets overturned at the base of sugar maples. Sugaring was a long way off. No one used the woods anymore. Not for sugar. Even with rationing, barely any families did it. He walked fast. If he could collect all the boys soon, then he could get back and check on
the dock. The important thing was to have the place in order; that way Emma would stop clucking so much, like a partridge right before flight.