Lake People (7 page)

“Out,” Paul said steadily. “You get out of this house.”

Malcolm had tears now, too.

“Don’t you ever come here again,” Paul said. He put his hand on Malcolm’s shoulder and began to shove him toward the door.

Malcolm didn’t fight back, but he did yell as he was pushed through the house. The words came out quickly and repeatedly, and it wasn’t until he was back in the fall air that he realized just what he was saying, and how awful it was. “That baby belongs to me, that is my brother’s baby, that baby belongs to me, that is my brother’s baby,” over and over again.

“Never come back,” Paul said.

The door shut and the secret was out and Malcolm looked up to the sky and thought, Dear God, help my mother, for the indecency is upon us.

In town Malcolm was standing at the grocery store with his hand wrapped around the doorknob, unsure if he was ready to see anyone, when he heard his name called.

“Father,” he said desperately, for it had sounded like him, and Otto’s store was right next door, and how Malcolm had wanted to go in there and sit down and be loved, but he had been ashamed of his own tears. Now, thankfully, here his father was.

“Malcolm,” the man repeated. Malcolm looked up and his
face reddened. Not his father at all. Still, this man placed a hand upon the boy’s head and gave his hair a tousle. In his adulthood Malcolm would realize that at that time, the man could not have been much more than twenty years old, but now, standing on Main Street in the fall wind, Malcolm believed the man to be weathered with age, and wise. Mike Shaw, his father’s boathouse tenant.

“I heard you like babies.”

“Sorry?”

“Babies?”

Malcolm shrugged.

“Clara Thorton. She says you got a way with the little shits.”

“I’ve got to get a turkey for my mother.”

“Woods got turkeys,” the man said.

“Yes. There’s a whole family of them at my house. Thirty, my mother watches and keeps track.”

“You wants a turkey you shoots a turkey,” the man said. Slowly he removed a bag of tobacco from his back pocket and opened its flap. Inside he already had a few cigarettes rolled. He took one out and put it to his lips. Then the man turned and unbuttoned his top button and lifted the loose slack of his shirt to his face to block the wind and in one try, using only one hand, he lit the match to light the cigarette. Even to Malcolm there was something attractive in these easy movements.

“Turkey got your tongue?” Mike Shaw asked. The cigarettes were without a filter and on the tip of his own tongue there lay a shred of tobacco. He pursed his lips and pointed his tongue and gave a little blow and that took care of it. “Old enough to smoke?” he asked the boy.

“I’ve got to get my mother a turkey.”

“Ain’t nothing a woman likes more than fresh hunted meat, believe you me. Come over, why don’t you.”

“I couldn’t.”

“I’ve got a baby and I need your help. My woman’s in a mood and it’s aimed straight at me. Heard you’re the one to look for, so come over. I’ll teach you how to get yourself a turkey.”

“I’d like to buy my turkey.”

“Go ahead in there then. I’ll wait right here. Tell you now they don’t got one, you got to order them ahead, don’t you know that? Your mother knows that. Go in and come back out and then we’ll see if you trust me.”

Malcolm went in. He looked in the freezer and he kept looking and finally Mr. Potter asked if he couldn’t help and Malcolm found out that Mike Shaw was right, you’ve got to order them ahead.

“What else goes in a Thanksgiving dinner?” he asked Mr. Potter.

“Potato, squash, don’t your mother grow that?”

“My mother keeps flowers mostly.”

“You know what a lady likes? Cornstalks, a little decoration. I got a barrel of them a dime a piece but I’ll give you two for free.”

“All right,” Malcolm said. He left the store with one big squash and two cornstalks and outside Mike Shaw told him that it did not look like his Thanksgiving dinner would turn out to be much, which made Malcolm want to sob right there on the street.

They rode silently in Mike Shaw’s truck. It was only a minute or two anyway. When they pulled up in front of the boathouse Mike leaned over and opened the glove box and took out a map and told Malcolm to go up and meet the missus, but Malcolm just sat there. Mike Shaw got out and unfolded the map and spread it upon the hood of the truck. The woman came out onto
the high porch then, and from the way she stood with her hand placed gently at the base of her stomach, Malcolm felt sure that she was pregnant again.

“Go on,” Mike Shaw said, and pointed his chin quickly upward, toward the porch, then let it fall slowly back into place. To Malcolm that was such a sure and firm motion, and in the coming weeks he would practice it in front of the mirror.

“I don’t remember her name.”

“She don’t know what’s right for a man, Malcolm. Go on up and fix her. Take the baby. Make her smile.” He set the map on the dirt driveway and placed a rock over it so it wouldn’t blow away, and then he punched the hood of the truck to make it open. “June,” he said. “June’s her name.”

When Malcolm approached the staircase she had already gone inside and the baby had begun to cry. He hadn’t spoken with these tenants before and his father had told him expressly not to. At the door Malcolm stood for some time, and when he looked down to Mike Shaw, the man pointed his chin again to say to just go in. Malcolm pushed the door open and called softly, “Sorry.”

“Well come in or come out,” the woman said.

The room was a flood of yellow—yellow linoleum floor and yellow countertops and one yellow metal table with two yellow metal chairs. The color was broken only by one wall lined with skis and trophies and medals. Malcolm stood in the doorway and gazed toward that wall. Karl had been a skier. He would have liked to know that the man who rented out their father’s boathouse apartment was the very same man who won every single race at the ski area.

The woman cleared her throat and Malcolm looked at her. “Sorry,” he said again.

“Shut the door behind you.”

“I’m Malcolm,” he said.

“I know who you are.”

Suddenly the baby wailed. There was an old, worn curtain patterned with cartoon racecars that hung from a doorway off the big room, and Malcolm could tell the boy was in there. The woman’s face was so red and so taut that he could see her veins.

“May I?” he dared. He was already across the room, had already lifted the curtain. Now he put his hands on that body, and there, Malcolm felt good once more. The life and sweetness of it filled him right up. He pulled the baby to his shoulder, and didn’t this one smell just like his brother’s? Yes, this one was just as good. There now, yes. You’re okay.

“Tea?” the woman said.

Malcolm shook his head.

“Coffee?”

“No thank you.”

“Well sit down why don’t you.”

With the baby in his arms Malcolm sat down at the table. This was the first apartment he had ever been in. It was in a cove—there was no vision of the open water from here—but still the view lifted Malcolm up in some real way. The front of the building was lined with windows and if Malcolm were to walk out of them he would fall and land straight in the water.

“He’s not even my husband,” the woman said as she handed Malcolm a bottle. “People in this town think we’re married but he wouldn’t have me. Do you think that’s terrible?”

“There,” Malcolm said, and rubbed at the baby’s cheek. “There now.”

Mike heard that. He had come up the stairs and now he came fully into the room. His footsteps made the floor tremble. “So you’ve got a way with the shits,” he said. “June ain’t got that.”

June rose and Mike Shaw took her seat and spread his legs and
untucked his shirt. “She’s got another bun in the oven and she’ll need your help, June will.” June was at the window now, looking out to the lake. “A deal,” Mike Shaw said. “Malcolm, let’s us men talk outside.”

The deal was that Malcolm would come in and check on June each day after school while Mike Shaw went out west to make a real go at being a ski racer. Malcolm was to play a game with June, see that the baby, Todd, quieted and she had her rest. See that she didn’t get into any funny business.

“Do you know what that means?”

“Indecency with a man,” Malcolm said quickly.

Mike Shaw hooted at that, and gave Malcolm’s back a tap so hard that the boy keeled forward. When he came back to, Mike Shaw said, “Out west, Malcolm. Open road, open land. A man needs his freedom, you understand. You like babies now but you’ll be a man one day.”

Malcolm said yes and asked only, “How long?”

Mike Shaw said, “Nope.”

That gave Malcolm courage. Or a kind of anger that he had not felt before and that certainly disguised itself as courage. He asked how Mike Shaw would hold up his end of the deal.

Mike Shaw clapped his hands together and gave a little laugh, and then, seeing the boy was serious, he said, “Anything you like.”

To care for his mother, to be a man, that is what Malcolm would like. He said, “A gun. I would like a gun and I would like to learn how to shoot it.”

“Well then,” Mike Shaw said.

They shot off the dock, with Malcolm saying a silent apology and prayer about the noise and the danger of it. It was a rifle and the first shot made him buckle back and fall into Mike Shaw’s firm body and Mike Shaw said, “There we go. Now you can
protect my woman.” Next shot he told Malcolm to kneel down so he didn’t fall again.

“I am not a child,” Malcolm said, and he shot the gun and did not waver and next he said, “I would like to take it home with me.”

“Your gun,” Mike Shaw said.

“You cannot expect me to carry a gun through town.” Where had his bravery come from? Malcolm could feel it, a slow boil in his chest.

“Well then,” Mike Shaw said, his voice lofty, a way to put an end to the child’s demands. Still, he went to his truck and found the boy a duffel bag, which fit nearly the whole gun into it, along with the squash and cornstalks. It would do.

“Look,” June said when they returned inside. She was at the window and Malcolm went to her just as a loon made its dive under. “Guess where it will come up,” she said.

Malcolm pointed and together they counted and in forty-eight seconds the loon rose just where he had said it would. Mike Shaw tapped the boy on the back and the boy slung the bag over his shoulder and it was the last Malcolm would see of him for years and years to come.

In his mind, things had been much different. Perhaps the turkeys will emerge sometime before Thanksgiving, he thought once, but the thought was fleeting. Mostly Malcolm thought that sometime in the future he could learn to hunt. First he would put the gun in the woodshed, where Sophie would not find it. Slowly Malcolm would grow accustomed to the weapon. He would carry it in the woods. The Randolph boys, they must know how to hunt, and Malcolm rather quickly imagined asking those boys to teach him. With this skill, oh, how he could
impress his father. Perhaps even teach his father. Shooting a turkey for this holiday was not something Malcolm had expected to do.

The lane of old maples stopped just as the hill crested and the land spread open and the two houses—Malcolm’s own and the Randolphs’—came into view. The Randolphs’ house lay to the west and Malcolm’s tall white colonial just twenty steps above. To stop and simply watch the sweep of the land—Malcolm was not accustomed to that, but now he did it and it felt the sort of thing a man would do. Standing in that way he decided that his house was beautiful, strong and solid, and that it looked like it had come from the time of the revolution. Instinctively he began to march his feet. Inside he hummed. The wind swept from the north, up through the lane of trees. Malcolm turned. There the biggest of all the turkeys stood perched on the stone wall. The gun was loaded. Without thought or complication Malcolm took the gun from the bag, aimed, and shot. The turkey’s chest rose outward like a balloon and then sank in a series of convulsions. The flutter of her family behind her was loud and quick. Now, alone, that great big turkey lay. From where he stood he could see a small red stream emerge. Was it a leaf? Yes, surely a red maple leaf. No blood, not even a trickle, Malcolm told himself. I did not shoot that animal. But already Malcolm could sense that never again would those turkeys return. Slowly he put the gun back in the duffel. He walked to the dead being and picked it up by its neck, then brought it in close to his body. It was warm against his chest and for a moment he believed he could call it back to life. “Forgive me,” he whispered. He put his nose into the animal. It smelled of deep, untouched forest. He held his breath so as not to cry. As he walked toward his house, Mrs. Randolph stood and moved her head in a slow, womanly way. It was not a message of approval.

Sophie was inside, at the kitchen sink, that old cookbook Hjalmar had given her all those years ago open beside her. She had meant to choose something to cook for her son but had gotten caught up watching those turkeys instead. When the largest fell, Sophie squeezed the glass in her hand until it splintered into pieces.

“Mother,” Malcolm said when he found her. He had left the dead turkey in the woodshed. He had forfeited his own wool jacket for the bird, wrapped her up in it and placed her on top of the woodpile. Now his mother’s own blood painted the dishwater that filled the sink. He reached for her hand but she pulled it back. It was clear that a piece of glass was lodged deep in her finger. “Mother,” Malcolm said again. “We’ve got to get you to the doctor.”

“Call Signe,” Sophie said. Once more when he reached for her she flinched. “Don’t you come near me. Call Aunt Signe and don’t you ever come near me.”

In the years to come, Sophie would look at that clean, precise scar that ran the length of the pointer finger on her left hand and she would recall the words that she had said to her son. With the turkeys gone (because they did disappear, every last one of them, forever) Sophie wandered from room to room and eventually in her steps she turned that anger at her son inward; how terrible she had been. Had she been so terrible to Karl? She took the letter opener from Otto’s desk and ran it down the length of the box that sat on her hope chest, beneath a pile of fresh towels. The name split in half,
KARL OT
on one flap and
TO WICKHOLM
on the other. Carefully Sophie untwisted the top of the plastic bag and plunged her hand into the remains of her son. Like sand she let him fall through her fingers. She took up only one handful
and placed it in a tin. Her finger still had its stitches, six of them, and she had already removed the bandage, so Karl’s ashes stuck to that moist line of cut. She did not wash them away.