The Ploughmen: A Novel (17 page)

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“I set him up with a pole and a chair and a gob of worms and then we took the boat out,” the man said. “We weren’t gone but half an hour and he’s nowheres. Must of started walking soon as we started the goddamn motor.”

“So you were gone about a half an hour.”

“Something like that.”

Val looked to the man’s wife for confirmation.

“I wish you wouldn’t swear right at this time,” she said to her husband. She turned to Millimaki. “It could of been an hour,” she said. “Up to an hour.”

“Might of been,” the man said. “It was like somebody just called him away to supper. Pole laying right there next to the chair with the line still out. It was all snagged up by the time we got back. I had to bust it off.”

The missing man’s daughter stood with her husband near the lakeshore, very slender and pale, holding herself quite still as if, like gossamer or a clutch of down, she might come apart in the merest movement of summer air. Both of them from their frantic pursuit of hunch and shadows among the hills and along the beach were sunburned a terrifying red. She said, “It’s like a switch you throw.” The irises of her eyes were the color of sapphires and seemed to Millimaki about to liquefy, integuments too frail to restrain such pain. She studied the infinity of sky beyond his head. “He’d be so good and normal, calling me by my right, real name and even the kids’ names and then it’s like a switch. He’d get this terrible look on his face like who was this stranger in his house trying to make him eat poison food. That’s how it was.”

“We fed him good,” the man offered.

“That’s not what I’m telling him,” she said.

“I know it isn’t.”

“Then just don’t say anything.”

She wept openly then, hugging herself like someone standing in a cold place. “Oh, Daddy.” Her husband seemed not to know how to comfort her, his hand wavering in the air above her head in a gesture of blessing and finally he merely rested it on the back of her sunburned neck.

Shortly and with a visible effort she composed herself. “He’d say he heard her calling, say, ‘There’s Clara,’ and up he’d get, didn’t matter from where. From the dinner table, wherever. In church. Up he’d get and go off.”

She stood with her red arms at her waist, the man’s hand on her neck. Beyond them the two children sat in the dirt in their bathing suits disconsolately batting an inflatable ball between them. The boy wore thick glasses and he looked up at Millimaki with enormous magnified eyes.

“So I know where he went,” the woman said. Millimaki looked at her and her husband looked away. “He’s gone out there looking for Mother,” she said. “She’s been gone three years and he’s out there looking for her in the hills.”

Tom sat at heel watching the ball and when the woman began to wail he turned to her, cocking his head side to side.

“I’m sorry,” Val said. The couple stood before him, the water beyond their backs as flat and reflective as plate glass. “Can you tell me what he was wearing?”

“Ain’t like there’s anybody else out there to confuse him with,” the man said.

Val looked up at him. Far out in the dazzling lake a floating island of ethereal blue pines and sage frissoned in the heat haze—a realm of myth as axiomatic as the ground under him and then that quickly it was gone.

“Colors,” he said. “I like to know what colors to look for.”

“T-shirt and these brown pants he always wore,” the man said. “Them khaki pants, same as he wore to work for thirty years, sweeping at the school.” He shook his head. “Some whatchamacall pull-on type shoes ’cause he couldn’t work the laces no more. Is that sound about right, Honey?”

The woman wiped at her eye with the back of her wrist. “A white T-shirt,” she said. “And a cap. I put a cap on his head when we left, for the sun. Just a ball cap of Jamie’s. I don’t know what was on it. It was black, I guess.”

The boy looked over, pouting. “It was NASCAR and it was my favorite and now it’s gone.”

The man turned to him. “Don’t you start that again.”

“’S true, though.”

“What color, son?” Val said.

“Purple and yellow and red with 26 on it.” He stared at the dog. “Can he find it? Can Whatever-His-Name-Is find it for me?”

“He’s Tom. He’ll give it a heck of a try.”

“Just a white T-shirt,” the woman said. “And the cap and the pants.”

“All right.”

Heat waves shimmered up from the camp trailer, the blue tarp canopied over the doorway casting a rhombus of meager shade. Two cinder blocks secured it atop the trailer and through the grommet holes two poles held it bellied over the dirt where spavined lawn chairs had been placed.

“I’d like some more water for the dog, and could you get a piece of your father’s clothes for me? A shirt or pants, something like that. It’ll help the dog getting started.”

Val went to the truck and began provisioning himself for the long day. The man came over, holding a pale blue windbreaker that had been his father-in-law’s.

“Sorry for what I said. It’s been pretty tough around here. She’s blaming me for it. I know she don’t mean it but she is.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Val said.

“I looked everywhere.” He gazed out over the flat surface of the lake. “Could he be out there? He might of just waded out in the lake and that was it.”

“Could have,” Millimaki said. “But Tom didn’t show any interest there. Sounds like he went walking. Pretty common with Alzheimer’s. They just walk and walk.”

“Don’t I know it.” The man stood awkwardly with his huge laborer’s hands buried in the pockets of jeans that had apparently been sheared off rudely at the knee with a knife or an ax. The tops of his gnarled feet were crimson and peeling. “Sometimes he just pissed in his pants,” he said. His voice cracked. “Sitting there. My wife changes him like a baby.”

“You did good,” the deputy said. “You did all you could.”

“I might go along with you.”

“No. Stay with your family. Tom anyway gets all flummoxed if he’s got to keep an eye on more than one.”

“All right. But ain’t there anything you want me to do?”

“If I don’t come back call out a sheriff and his dog.”

“Oh, hell.” The man took off his hat and ran his rough fingers through his hair and regarded the vast country sprawled behind them.

“I’m kidding,” Val said. “But you might get a good fire going once it gets dark and keep it going. Should be able to see it from a long ways off. Maybe get your missus to sit out there with you. Give her something else to think about.”

He adjusted the canteens on his belt and called the dog to heel and began to walk away when the man called after him. “Listen, I know you’re thinking what could he catch out of there.” He waved behind him at the murky lake just then the color of calcimine under the featureless sky. The water hissed softly on the graveled shingle. “I just wanted him to have something to do. Anyways, he might of tied into a carp or a goldeneye, something to tug on the line at least.”

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After they set out the shepherd was immediately drawn to a streambed entering from the south and the going in that direction was slow: deep troughs and cutbanks and a twisted wrack of weathered plank and post and deadfall from some headland flood of the previous spring. Queer rocks lay atop the dirt as smooth and round as Jurassic eggs, and pinecones tumbled and abraded by the torrent lay all about like spined sea creatures of a past age. Grasshoppers wheeled up before them and rattled off into the weeds and sage.

They walked on for some time, the dog working back and forth across the wash. Juniper and pine appeared atop the banks, the larger trees displaying weeping blazes where porcupine teeth had been at work. Roots snaked exposed over the parched ground, encircling stones as though to squeeze sustenance from them. Sandstone scarps filigreed with fossil fish and shells projected atop the cutbanks like the pulpits of sailing ships and everywhere startling columns of the ancient stone wind-carved and pocked like sculpture from a fever dream.

Atop a small rise an hour later they came upon a low homestead cabin of notched and squared-off logs and the dog raised his nose and angled toward it. A flicker of hope invigorated Millimaki and he jogged up the bank on which the cabin stood, the black rectangle of its doorway promising the only substantial shade for miles in any direction. They had not seen where the man had spent the night and Millimaki prayed he might be resting his old bones in the cabin’s cool interior.

But he was not. Tom whined and circled in the dusty dark and Millimaki could see in the pale dirt, among tracks of pack rats and skunk and badger, the man’s shoe prints trod in a circle no larger than a barrel lid. He had stood there turning and turning about for some time and had at last gone out into the bright alien world again.

It was very quiet there. Tom lay in the dirt panting. The cabin door was stove in, hanging atilt from a hinge fashioned from a boot sole and Millimaki, dizzy and half-blind in the sudden twilight, stood looking back the way they’d come. It was a strangely resolute course for a man who’d had difficulty navigating the hallways of his daughter’s home, a track not at all like the zags and insensate back-loops of so many of the poor souls he’d pursued over the years who’d wandered crazed or hypothermic through deadfall or thigh-deep in freezing creeks or like maddened fugitives scaled sheer cliffs, leaving bloody fingernails wedged among the fissures. The frightened woman at the campsite had said her father had gone off in search of his dead wife and perhaps she was right. He seemed to be drawn by something, and as Millimaki stood atop prints of the old man’s cheap shoes, the word “quest” came into his bleary head. Quest, he thought. What the hell, I’m losing it.

He had not slept in more than twenty hours, and fatigue crept down his bones in a slow paralysis. He imagined the old janitor himself standing there earlier, the adze scars on the logs transubstantiating into some long-ago wallpaper pattern his wife had chosen for their home. Where swallows flitted now among the bellied pine poles of the ceiling he heard the twitter of his children from their bedrooms. And then her voice again. It had brought him here but now moved on, a faint and musical rendering of his name on the wind and in the branches of the trees.

*   *   *

Shadows like viscous ink slid down the coulee sides and gave sinister shape to the sandstone totems and crags accoutered with high-water jetsam and there were shapes enough among them to populate any dream or nightmare, even in a sound mind. Box elder trees with their eveningtime shadows came to resemble groping mandrake creatures, and raptors planing high overhead gave voice to them, and the roots of the dark pines lay atop the rutted ground like vipers.

The day was far advanced when Millimaki and the dog stood among the bones of the ill-starred Hereford. He stared at the bleached jumble about his feet as if it might be an augury he was meant to decipher but in his diminished state he could hardly unriddle the mystery of his own compass. He was astounded the man, eighty-six years old, could have come so far in such country, driven it seemed by a love that had endured fifty years to pursue glimpse and figment, the specter of his wife beckoning at each bend of the baking streambed. Or was it that, like Tom, he merely followed the scent on the breeze of lilac or rosewater or the redolence of the soap that for two thousand nights she’d used before she came to lie beside him in their bed. Such feelings for Millimaki were as cold and remote as an expired star and he was better able to conjure images of the old man’s wife than of his own, grown faceless and undefined in the mere weeks since she’d abandoned him.

Millimaki rubbed at his afflicted eyes and consulted his watch. When he stared up and addressed the sky, gone lavender at the late hour, his tongue felt thick. “Where in the Christ are you, old man?”

The dog Tom at that moment began to whine, circling near a ravelment of roots and deadfall piled up by a long-ago flood; it looked like the den of some Pleistocene rodent. The grandson’s cap lay in the dirt and the ground was scuffed and gouged by the man’s shoes as though he had struggled there with a phantom.

The dog’s tail began to wag furiously and he bolted away, pink tongue hanging long from his mouth. He ran ahead and waited for Millimaki and ran again. After nearly a mile of this, the deputy saw a snatch of white far ahead—a color, save for bones, absent in all the dun and darkening landscape. He did not trust his eyes. He shambled the last short way on feet heavy as bricks.

A magpie stood on the man’s very back, pulling at the fabric of his shirt almost as if it merely wanted to wake him from his sleep. It flew on their approach and from a juniper branch assailed the dog with splenetic speech so nearly human the dog stood and stared. The man lay on his face and seemed to have fallen headlong as though pushed from behind. Every inch of his exposed pale skin was terribly burned and shot with blisters and he lay in the dirt slowly baking.

He had been bitten by a snake high in the groin, his left leg swollen horrifically so that the fabric of his trousers was stretched tight and discolored by the thin fluid seeping from the wound. The snake was a prairie rattler probably five feet long and thick as bridge cable and wound around the old man’s arm like strange Egyptian bijouterie. It seemed in his confusion and rage he had grabbed the snake behind the head and just hung on. The dog sniffed at him and warily sniffed the snake and finally merely sat. Val took out his small camera from the fanny pack he wore and circled, taking his pictures of the ground and the man in his repose and close pictures of the wound in the bloated leg. He snapped a frame of the snake locked in the man’s grip, an image he’d later think seemed strangely mild and as unthreatening as a sock puppet, with its extended tongue a thin filament dry as a strip of felt. At last he sat beside the dog, in the cup of his hand giving him long drinks of water from one of the canteens. He’d saved it for the old man but now he and the dog drank deeply. As the poison moved in his veins, the man with the snake in his grip plodded up the narrow watercourse for nearly a mile toward the timbered headland above, which now, as Millimaki sat regarding his rigid shape, sent down from its slopes on the breeze a perfumery of sage and juniper and pine. Millimaki was very tired and sat looking up at the bluff and at the trees silhouetted on a sudden pearl light. Presently he rose and moved to the corpse and turned it over. It was a wooden thing, a carving attired with a workman’s costume and a thespian’s mask of awe, of wonderment, eyes agape and painted the same heart-rending blue as his daughter’s.