Prudence (3 page)

Frankie sent his own books, first from Fenwick’s and then from Princeton. Judging from the receipts, Emma saw that Frankie sent him a lot of confusing modern novels, which Emma doubted anyone, much less Billy, actually read: among the titles were two strange ones,
All the Conspirators
and
The Memorial
. Oh, well. Even though he had graduated, Billy would most likely end up working a trade, if he was lucky. A carpenter, perhaps. Or a welder. Lord knows they needed a lot of both because of the war. Emma wondered if sending him such lofty books might set up the poor boy for disappointment down the line. The kind of attention Frankie lavished on him and the books they sent might make Billy dream of things he could never have. But Frankie had wanted to make the gesture, and who were they, the Washburns, to decide what someone like Billy could and couldn’t have?

“Billy is here today, isn’t he? Billy’s coming?”

“Yes, ma’am. He’s with the others.” Betty pushed her lower lip out in a quick pout, pointing with her lips toward the front of the Pines, the lake, the prison camp, and beyond. Why these people didn’t point with their fingers Emma would never understand.

“Is he still a good boy?”

“Yes, ma’am. He a good boy.”

Emma felt blessed with a son like Frankie. He would never betray himself or these girls and get one pregnant. Emma looked down at Stella. So pretty. And she’d probably be fat and pregnant in a few years. Emma hoped she’d look back fondly on her time at the Pines.

“Well, finish the food and then the ironing. No wrinkles, okay? Potato water, that’s the key.”

They murmured overlapping
yes, ma’am
s.

“Is Felix down by the boathouse?”

The girls shrugged.

“Well, if you see him, tell him I am looking for him.”

Emma walked out the back door into the bright sunshine of the early afternoon.

Felix wasn’t in the kitchen garden. Of course he wouldn’t be there now, in the heat of the day. He liked to wake early and do the heavy work between five and seven o’clock. He was quite a find. Emma didn’t know what they’d do without him. An Indian, up at five o’clock, hoeing and weeding the garden! Not that she ever knew it. He went about his work quietly. He was never in a rush. Never loud or hurried. He took his slow, deliberate time doing everything. But the work got done, and that’s what counted. And if he said he’d be someplace—in the village to meet her train or down at the dock with the Chris-Craft gassed and ready, a metal cooler filled with bait and sandwiches wrapped in wax paper for a fishing party—well, he was there, waiting.

Emma saw that the gardening had been done for the day: the rows had been hoed into shape, the furrows lined with straw. The weeds, which grew so rapidly between the plants, were cut out and piled in the corner with the compost. The hoe, spade, and rake leaned in formation on the low white picket fence to the right of the gate. The kitchen garden was a joy, and it filled Emma with pride of ownership to look out on it on a fine morning; to look out on the even rows of corn, beans, peas, and the delicate fronds of carrots and radishes that belied the strong, woody roots below the loosened earth.

The girls had their work to do—they had the peas going but they had not picked the beans or any fresh carrots. There was no corn to speak of, still too early, which was a shame, because it was doubtful that Frankie would get anything resembling fresh corn in the Air Force.

Felix must be down at the boathouse. It was nearing noon and he would have ceased all the chores that sent him into or near the
woods; swiping away at the weeds or stacking wood for the kitchen stove, or cutting up the two spruces brought down by that storm a few weeks earlier. The cabins had been swept out and the screens repaired the week before, in case anyone from the party caught an early train and wanted to come up to do some fishing or just to relax. By tonight, Emma hoped, all the cabins would be full. Frankie was sleeping upstairs in his old room, naturally. Ernest and David would be staying in the cabins with one or two Princeton boys whose names Emma kept forgetting. (It wasn’t like her, but if she were honest with herself, she was a little unnerved by the fact that Frankie had a life separate from hers now, and most of the people he knew she did not know; this is a hard fact for any mother to accept.)

Felix must be down at the boathouse. He wasn’t around the cabins or the back of the big house, and he was clearly finished with the kitchen garden. Emma didn’t need to keep on him like she did the girls. If you told Felix to do something, it was done. Simple as that. She’d had her reservations about him at first. She’d seen him around the depot in the village, where he worked as a handler, but aside from registering his size and strength and the darkness of his skin, she’d stopped thinking about him until Harris over at the Wigwam had suggested to Emma that she hire him as a handyman.

“Good God, the man is strong,” Harris had said in approval.

“I don’t doubt it. Anyone can see that. But is he dependable? Will he show up more than once? You know how it is.”

Harris had looked at her with that amused look locals gave her and Jonathan when they first bought the Pines. And still, sometimes, now.

“No, not really. How is it?”

“You know. Will he whiskey up after we pay him? And then not come back? Things like that.”

Emma was still in the phase where she thought being a resort owner, a businesswoman, was a matter of being shrewd with people,
of not letting workers “get one over” on her. When she thought back on these early interactions, she actually blushed, not a little ashamed at her lack of trust.

“Well, that depends on you. That depends on how you are with him. He’s seen a lot of the world, you know. He’s been around. He’s something of a big shot around here with the other Indians.”

“What skills does he have? Can he read? Or write?”

“You hiring a handyman or a bookkeeper?”

“I suppose that would be a lot to ask.”

She hired him to put in the dock. Just to see how he did. If that went well, she’d have him work on the house, but not until he proved himself. She wasn’t going to let just anyone work on the Pines. The dock was one thing. The actual house was another.

The dock had gone in beautifully. Felix had worked steadily from start to finish. First he felled tamaracks along the river and boomed them together and dragged them behind the old boat to the beach in front of the Pines. Then he cut them to length and built the cribs, spiking the green tamarack together into box shapes that he filled with river stone. Then—and this was clever, the way he did it—he used ropes and the old boat to pull the long timbers into place. By the end of the week he was all done, and had, as a flourish, carved wooden cleats, which he pegged to the dock boards. Emma, impressed, asked him to fix the cabins. And then the main house. Before she knew it, she had grown to depend on him. Aside from Jonathan’s two weeks in August, she was alone for the most part, except for Frankie, and some of their friends who came up once in a while to fish. And back then Frankie was just a child and could offer only the company and protection a child can offer, which isn’t much, not much at all. It was nice to have a man about the place. Emma imagined that Felix scared off would-be intruders. He was so tall and broad-shouldered, with such enormous hands. His black hair, even now without a trace of gray (he must have been twenty-seven or
twenty-eight in 1925, when she hired him), was cut short. When he sweated, she could see his scalp between the black barbs of his hair. He had a large nose and his eyes were set deep in his head. He was slow to answer when addressed directly and slow to speak, as though he were counting out his words on his fingers. Passingly, Emma had wondered what the world looked like to someone who couldn’t read. When Felix accompanied Emma to town and they happened to run into someone from his tribe, he spoke to them in the Indian language, and as far as Emma could tell, he spoke with the same slow deliberation.

Within a couple of years, Emma had come to depend on Felix so much,
trusted
him so much, that she offered him the boathouse as a year-round place for him to live. It was a large cabin, and the back could be set off from the work area in the front. The room in back wasn’t big, but it could hold a small stove, cot, table, and two chairs, and that was enough for a bachelor like Felix. Emma didn’t wonder whether he might want a bigger place, somewhere he could entertain friends or even a woman. She never wondered whether he had a love life. It was more or less impossible to imagine. Sometimes, though, in the summer, usually in late May and again in September, Felix would disappear for a few days. He would approach Emma with his hat in his hands and say that he had some things to take care of but he wouldn’t say what, and Emma didn’t ask. He would pack a small backpack and take one of the canoes and paddle out along shore. He was gone, as he said, a few days, but he always came back.

He must be down at the boathouse now. But there was much to be done. They had to get the boat back from the search party. They would need it to get Frankie and the others across the river. And the beach still needed to be cleaned. This time of year was terrible for the beach; it was awash with weeds and broken bulrushes and the large, tuberous roots of lily pads that the beavers pulled up from the river. And the fish often died from the heat and washed up there and
it didn’t take long for them to rot. Jonathan said that fish begin to decompose the minute they die. It was easy to believe.

There was quite a stink down there now and Emma hoped that Felix had seen to raking the beach and burning the fish in the burn barrel. But then it would be good if someone from the Pines helped with the search, even if it were only Felix. He was dependable, but there were too many things to worry about at once, so Emma would have to make sure, to make
double
sure, that everything, every
last thing
, was in
place.

F
elix sat in the folding wooden bridge chair he had salvaged from the big house on the south side of the boathouse, facing the river and the German camp. Two summers earlier Emma had declared the chair too rickety for the big house and exiled it. Felix had taken the chair to the boathouse, and when he was done working for the day he had inspected the joints and tightened the nuts that held the legs on, and finally had soaked some stiff rawhide in boiling water and wound it around the splices below the seat. They dried tight and the chair became his and held his weight without complaint.

He sipped his tea and looked out across the water, remembering a woodworker in his village who, with nothing more than a dull knife and a bent saw and an ax, made the most wondrous things. Cradleboards of ash bent so far as to form what looked like rabbit ears. Ironwood frozen at right angles. New drum legs, bowed almost in circles near the top, like lacrosse sticks, to replace those burned during a long drunk over an especially hard winter. The woodworker took tobacco and money and did whatever was asked of him, more patient and cunning with the wood than hunters on the game trail. As a child, Felix had been convinced that he used some kind of magic. At seventeen, Felix had asked him to make a cradleboard for
his own first baby, due in a matter of months. “Too soon,” said the woodworker, “you’re asking too soon. Wait till after the baby comes.” But Felix was greener than the wood itself, and the baby wouldn’t be there until after he and his brothers walked north across the border and joined the Canadian army, and so he had to ask, even though he knew better. In 1919 Felix burned the cradleboard along with the rest of his wife’s and child’s things. The woodworker had been right.

The camp across the river had come together just as magically. It was on the high ground overlooking the Pines. Felix had come there often as a child with his parents and the others, to rice the edges of the river and to set nets for whitefish in late fall and pike in early spring. But seemingly overnight, cabins and a mess hall and a fence had risen out of the grassy bluff, like mushrooms after a rain. The cabins were made of rough-cut pine and covered with roll roofing. They seemed snug and tight and comfortable. Not like the boathouse. The boards were gappy and the two windows—one facing the river and the other facing the big house—were loose in their sashes and rattled in the wind until Felix, for lack of glazing putty, had soaked rags in paraffin and tucked them in the gaps with a filet knife. The boathouse was small, twelve feet by sixteen. Bigger than the wigwam he had grown up in, bigger than the house he’d built for his wife, but small nonetheless. Just inside the door to the left was a cookstove. To the right was the barrel stove. The left side of the cabin, facing the lake (if there had been a window), held his cot; opposite were a few wooden crates with his clothes and other possessions. He had nailed orange crates to the walls to keep his pants and shirts away from the mice. The small sleeping area was set off from the front of the cabin with wool blankets he’d tacked to the rafters. His parents had done the same thing in their wigwam, and it felt right to do that in the boathouse, though he had no one from whom he had to separate himself, no one for whom he could perform his rites of modesty, which persisted nonetheless.

Felix leaned back and sipped his tea and looked out over the rim of chipped enamel to the camp across the river, to where Frankie would appear soon, with that other boy, the sneering one, Ernie. He could do without Ernie. Felix was agitated. It had been a year since he’d last seen Frankie. And soon, right after his visit, he would be joining the war.

It was very hot. The painted pine was warm against his back. No wind ruffled the surface of the river. There was something soothing in drinking hot tea on a hot day. It was as though he were taking the day into himself. The heat was close and still. The sky was clear. Not a cloud to be seen over the lake or upriver, to the west, where the bad weather usually came from. This was the worst time of year. The swarms of dragonflies were gone. The bats had begun migrating south. There was nothing to stop the flies and mosquitoes, no line of defense. They just came and came and kept coming, like the Germans had over the top of the trenches, like he had done, too.

The camp was alive with activity, but although it was no more than three hundred yards from the Pines, the sounds that came across the river seemed to be muffled by velvet or flannel. There was a lot of movement in the yard and outside the commandant’s cabin. Whistles were being blown, and the volunteers from the village and the sheriff and his deputies were organizing themselves into clumps. All for one prisoner who had escaped. When they didn’t know what to do, and even when they did know, white people couldn’t help themselves, they just buzzed and buzzed and buzzed. The British and Canadians he had served with in the Great War had been like that too, digging, moving, barking orders, moving again, digging again, retreating, advancing; a great hive of activity that did little except create a constant drone, like a mosquito. Mosquitoes couldn’t help it, of course, it was just how their wings worked. But that sound, so distinct, was what made it possible to slap them—to reduce them to a tiny little smear where once there had been life.

Emma was like that, buzzing and buzzing around ineffectually—she couldn’t help herself. That was just how her wings were made. When Harris had first told him that Emma was looking for a caretaker and Felix raised his eyebrows as a way of asking about her, Harris laughed and shook his head. “
Binekaaz
,” he’d said. And he’d been right. More like a partridge than a mosquito, clucking and clucking and drumming her wings, jumping up on logs and down again, circling her chicks (though she had only the one, Frankie, unless you counted in her brood, as well you might, the Pines itself—the big house and the small cabins out back). As though all that activity, all that energy, were some kind of defense against the life that was out there stalking them. But it was always the ones who moved fast and without purpose who were eaten—mosquitoes, partridge, soldiers, too. The ones who stalked, who moved slow through the brush, they were the ones who did the killing.

It was past ten o’clock and Frankie wouldn’t be at the Pines till one at the earliest. There was still a lot to do. He closed his eyes.

Emma had been unusually antic for the past week, as anxious for Frankie to return as Felix was. And since the German escaped she had hardly sat down. She was sure it would ruin everything but it was hard to see how that was possible. A man wasn’t so dangerous after all. Just one white man alone in the woods. All the same, she had been standing at the front window all morning, retreating to the kitchen to check on the girls, going back to the window, looking out the kitchen window at the garden, as though that would somehow change, and then back to the front window again. As for him, Felix had gotten up before the sun. He had hoed the garden so that when the girls got there they could begin to work on the vegetables. He’d mended the garden gate so it didn’t squeak, and after the sun came up and the bugs retreated farther into the woods, he took the scythe and cut back the grass and goldenrod around the edges of the Pines. After that he’d made a slow circle of all the cabins, inspecting the
screens for holes. He made sure each cabin had a pail of water near the door, a box of kindling by its small three-dog stove, and a full pitcher of water on the washstand. More kindling had been needed, so he had gone out to the woodpile next to the trail that led to the tote road and, using the felling ax in one hand, had split enough wood for all the cabins and extra for the cookstove, which was sure to be going nonstop for the next two weeks. All the other resorts used bottled propane, which he had mentioned to Emma a few years before but she wasn’t so sure propane was safe.

When the sun was high in the sky, around seven thirty, he’d raked the front lawn, clearing it of sticks and pinecones so it would be safe to go around the place barefoot. He’d saved this task for later because it was the kind of thing that Emma and Jonathan wouldn’t even notice unless they saw him doing it. He knew white people well enough to know that unless you drew their attention to something it was likely to go unnoticed. And Emma in particular was so worked up about Frankie’s arrival that he wanted to assure her that everything was in order and the visit would be a great one. No one would go barefoot, though. He was sure of that. Frankie was too old now for such things.

He used to go barefoot all summer. From the minute he came up in May, his shoes came off and they didn’t get put back on till late August. Felix smiled at the thought. Frankie and Billy both ran around that way, even after Frankie had stepped on an old piece of metal during some game of hide-and-seek and Emma had fretted for days about lockjaw. Nothing came of it. Nothing ever did. By the end of the summer, those years back, Frankie’s feet were as tough and brown as Billy’s.

Every summer, Emma and Frankie had come up on Memorial Day to reopen the Pines. There had been weeks filled with work for Felix before then. He’d opened the shutters and repainted them, hung clotheslines, put up wood, fixed the dock, taken the Chris-
Craft to the marina to make sure it worked. Every three years he sanded it down and re-varnished the wooden hull and deck. Bats had to be cleared out of the chimney. Once a raccoon had made a nest in one of the stoves in the cabins and he’d had to kill it and its pups. And every spring, no matter how hard he worked, Emma stepped off the Chris-Craft with Frankie and looked at the Pines with a grim look and said something like, “There’s so much to do! The place is falling apart!” Felix said nothing. Nor did he say anything much when Frankie fell in by his side and they split wood together or drove the Confederate into town to buy supplies for the summer—kerosene, flour, sugar, lard, seed. Without fail, the mosquitoes would already be out. They bothered Emma and she took to wearing long, flowing skirts and blouses with billowy sleeves to keep them off her arms. Frankie slapped at them and scratched his ankles and Emma made a great fuss of pulling him aside and applying calamine to his legs and arms and neck, practically bathing him in the stuff. Frankie let her do it. Felix said nothing. Even when Frankie was in the middle of helping Felix with some chore and Emma called him he came and stood there in the sun, embarrassed, and let her rub him down with the lotion while Felix pretended not to notice. It must have been humiliating for him.

Felix, for his part, helped Frankie in his own way. When he was behind the wheel of the Confederate and Frankie was beside him, he waited until the first mosquito landed on his arm and then he plucked it off and placed it on his tongue and swallowed it. It didn’t taste like anything—a bit of bark, ash, nothing. This is what his parents had done. His father would say, “Oh, look, the first mosquito!” and he would pinch it between his thumb and forefinger and place it on his tongue and swallow. “There,” he said, “now they won’t bother you.” The thinking was that if the parent ate the first mosquito of the season, the rest of the mosquitoes would attack the parent instead of the child. It wasn’t true. His father did it all the same. And Felix did
it for Frankie. But he didn’t say anything, didn’t draw Frankie’s attention to the act. He wouldn’t be able to explain it. Not to Frankie. Not to Emma. So he said nothing. He leaned back against the wall of the boathouse and sipped his tea.

The boathouse wasn’t much more than a shack—walls of rough-cut pine and a metal roof. He had been born in a wigwam. Bent poles covered with bark and tin and canvas, whatever they could find. They had a dirt floor and a fire pit in the center until his father had salvaged a small stove from an abandoned lumber camp. They hung all their possessions from the poles with cord, or
wiigoob
, so they wouldn’t get stepped on or mildewed. An old wool blanket served as a door flap, which they weighted down with canoe paddles or logs during the wintertime. When he visited his parents after the war, he was surprised to notice how everything—their clothes and blankets and cooking utensils and hats, even the pots—smelled like wood smoke. And though his mother swept the place out and cleaned everything all the time—she was a small, precise, fastidious woman—there was a sheen to everything, as if the whole place was covered in grease. He tried, after he was grown, to find in his memory the discomfort of growing up there, but he couldn’t. Just him and his brothers and parents, and the low light of kerosene, and the murmur of his brothers’ voices as they told jokes before going to sleep, his parents moving around the wigwam silently in the morning and evening.

Felix and his brothers traveled a lot in those years. When they were in their teens they worked the lumber camps as far away as Orr and Big Falls. In the summer they guided for the tourists who came up to fish for pike. When he was sixteen, in 1915, he and his family were at rice camp on the Bowstring, where many Indians from farther north had come down to rice because their own had been rained out. He saw a girl from across the border there with her family. She was short and plump and she worked hard around her parents’ camp.
She yelled at her younger sisters and brothers in a cheerful, ringing voice and got them, somehow, to help her jig the rice, put up wood, and haul pails of water from the lake for dishes and laundry. Felix didn’t say much to her. She had quick, deft hands. Her hair, in its tight braids, was very shiny. He tried not to look at her. But when her family laughed loudly at something, he couldn’t help himself and peeked over the rice sacks he was packing and caught her pretending she was fiddle-dancing in the rice pit, her dress held high in her hands, her jigging moccasins tied high just below her knees. He saw her thighs, which were thick and strong and smooth. And then the joke was over and she dropped her hands and got back to work.

That night he lay awake till very late. The wind was blowing hard across the lake and he thought about how much rice was being blown from the stalks into the water and he thought, too, of her legs—how quickly they had appeared and then disappeared—and how he would give a lot to see more of them.