Mink River: A Novel (15 page)

19.

The doctor’s spectacles are perched halfway down his nose and they are sliding ever so infinitesimally south. He is smoking his last cigarette of the day, the one called Matthias, while sitting at his table utterly absorbed in the Acts of the Apostles. The man who was numbered with us. Judas son of Iscariot. This man purchased a field with the reward of his iniquity. How very many fields have been purchased with blood money through history, mm? Judas falling headlong burst asunder in his midst and all his bowels gushed out. Intestines as a whole can be longer than one hundred linear feet in the adult male. That field is called
Aceldama
, that is to say, the field of blood. So many adult male fields of blood, mm? Cedar’s stories of the war. Billy’s stories of tribal wars. Owen’s stories of the Hunger. The thirsty fields. Fields washed with blood. So many dead children. Grace’s stories of her father. A hard man. Many men should never be fathers. The man who beats his son. But he loves that boy. At war with himself. Wars on land at sea in the air in the mind. Our stories are all of wars. We are all war stories. If violence is epidemic then it must be a disease. Must be curable. A good doctor could cure it. Violence a symptom of the human condition. Condition is chronic fear. Fear of the unknown. But everything is unknown. No one knows the hour. We are alone in the end. That sweet old nun dying alone in her room in the hotel. So we gather in circles against the darkness. Clans, tribes, families, nations, states, religions. Afraid to be alone. Afraid of time. Billy is right. Time the great silent enemy. We band together against time. Band together in circles. Circles enclose. But circles also divide. Inside or outside the circle. So there is war. So there is violence. So the cure is to be alone. I am alone: therefore I am cured. He closes the bible and goes to his kitchen and very slowly cuts a pear into small cubes and then very slowly eats each cube and then brushes his teeth and turns the heat down and checks the locks and turns out the lights and disrobes and gets into bed and takes off his spectacles and folds them carefully on his night-table and then he lies awake for hours with his eyes glinting in the murky dark.

20.

Red Hugh O Donnell, father of Declan and Grace and Niall and Peadar, chief of the clan, hard of hand and head, who asks no help or quarter, quick to lash fools and children with his long white rod,
an slath ban
, is cursing as he drives along the river. He is on the road too late and he knows it. The milk should have been delivered this morning and those fecking sons of his were nowhere to be found. Useless rat bastards. The Mink River glints and swirls and loops sinuous and serpentine through the fringe of trees along the road. The sucker fringe, an old logger like George Christie would say, left there by loggers to give drivers the impression that the forest remains vast and impenetrable. Steel barrels of milk jostle and slam and jangle in the back of his truck. Sometimes they make a high ringing noise like faraway bells. Ahead of Red Hugh is a log truck loaded with fir logs. Douglas fir, named for some fecking British rat bastard. One log is as big around as Red Hugh himself who is as round as a fecking milk barrel but the rest of them are what an old logger like George Christie would call sticks and splinters. Red Hugh’s white stick is in the passenger seat of the truck. Once Douglas firs grew fifty feet around, big as cabins and cottages. Red Hugh goes nowhere without his stick because as he says cursing some fecking fool will need it delivered to his fecking head for fecking sure. Once Douglas firs grew three hundred feet tall, taller than any church there ever was. Red Hugh needs his stick to lean on when he walks but he hides this need by cursing and brandishing the stick and calling everyone a fecking rat bastard. The Douglas fir has been judged variously a pine, a fir, a spruce, and a hemlock over the years but it is none of those things. Red Hugh has needed his stick to walk properly since he was twenty years old and was lost in the mountains for three days and lost both of his fecking big toes to frostbite. The Douglas fir has no family to speak of, being the only example of its species and the only species in its genus. The only person who ever knew that Red Hugh was crippled in his feet was his wife Maire who packed her fecking suitcase two years ago and walked out the door without a word. The Douglas fir is thousands of years old and was born in the time when ferns were dominant. The O Donnell clan is thousands of years old and was born in the time when the silent warriors called Tuatha de Danaan ruled the fecking world. The Douglas fir when young exhibits a remarkable pliability for a tree capable of such massive growth. Red Hugh when young was so exuberant and charismatic that his remote cousin Maire na Domhnaill fell in love with him and they ran away to America and married in the fecking mountains. One of the Douglas fir logs on the log truck in front of Red Hugh begins to work itself loose from its binding. Red Hugh curses his fecking useless rat bastard sons. The loose log waggles and shimmies its way out from among its brothers. Red Hugh curses the fecking milk cans. The log truck lurches and bounces. Red Hugh curses the fecking road. The loose log wriggles and skids. Red Hugh curses his fecking wife. The log truck hits a bump. Red Hugh curses his fecking daughter. The loose log flies into the air. Red Hugh curses the fecking darkness. The loose log slams through the windshield of Red Hugh’s truck and hits his chest so hard that his heart and lungs and ribs and skin and spine and veins and arteries are instantly crushed to wet pulp and he dies in less than a second and his truck skews shuddering wildly into the river where it comes to rest with both front wheels in the rushing water and the loose log jutting out of the windshield like a huge brown arrow. As his truck settles burbling bubbling in the river Red Hugh’s head sinks slowly toward the steering wheel and softly comes to rest and later when Michael the cop arrives it appears to him that Red Hugh O Donnell, hard of hand and head, who asked no help or quarter, quick to lash fools and children, is asleep.

21.

Red Hugh felt his self drift up into the air over his truck, as he had half expected would happen when he died, though he had not at all figured on dying in his truck. He had always figured he would die in his muddy field, a suitable death for a man mucking with cows, the death he expected, a heart attack pitching him face down in the mud that never dried not even in the hottest summer, not
his
fecking field, it was under some sort of fecking ancient water curse, as he had snarled many times to Grace and Declan, who themselves envisioned different ends for their father: that his hard cold cruel frozen hazelnut of a heart would finally rise up rebellious through his foul vulture throat and choke him to death (Grace’s vision) or someone would beat the relentless life out of the old troll with that fecking stick (Declan’s vision). Red Hugh however fully expected that his heart would stop on a howling wet day in his muddy field and he would pitch forward into a puddle and
drown
there, drowning in land, on land, his own land, his last breath, like his last penny and his last hope, buried in the sucking stinking mud of a field on a hill by the coast.

But no, here he was, or rather here what he was
now
was, drifting calmly up into the air above his truck settling bubbling into the river.

He sailed up slowly, eddying in the complicated air. He noticed all sorts of other creatures or former creatures or inexplicable beings or visions drifting up and around him. From them emanated all sorts of words and sounds. He didn’t
hear
their languages and songs exactly but he
was
them in a way he could not have explained even if he still had a tongue. He was in and of and infused with all of the beings who floated with him and he spoke all of their languages and he had always known them and been most intimately their brother and they loved him and had always been his most intimate brother also. Some of these creatures or former creatures were undefined areas of mostly sound but some were still recognizable versions or bright shadows of what they had been when alive. The air was dense and shimmering with uncountable millions of them, all floating and swirling down to the sea. They rose from the land in numbers beyond calculation, steadily but calmly. A gust of wind sent an uncountable number of them whirling into the forest where some caught in the spruce branches and hung there smiling and others tumbled away calmly into the vast and impenetrable woods.

He looked down and saw his long white rod,
an slath ban
, float out of the passenger window of his truck and set off merrily down the river bobbing and whirling, a bright clean line against the swirling circles of the water. From sheer bodily instinct he reached for his stick but having no actual hand anymore nothing happened and he remained floating gently, turning this way and that in the freshening breeze. He had a memory of his body, and he retained the shape of his body, but he was no longer actually
in
his body, which felt peculiar and wonderful. He smiled.

My toes! he thought, and he looked down and there they were, and there they weren’t, both things true at once, and he smiled again. He was also fat and old and young and thin and bitter and joyous all at once, which seemed wonderful.

Most of the beings or former beings floating above the river with him were too small to see and millions are or were infinitesimal insects but he could make out some familiar shapes amid the jostling beings: an enormous beaver, a sandhill crane, a rabbit, a blue jay. He saw a flotilla of tiny oval steel-blue creatures all floating together and it took him a minute before he recognized them. Mussels! he realized, smiling, and the instant he remembered them everything he ever knew or felt or thought about mussels hummed instantaneously through his mind as a chord or tone, and this tone was also a word, the word for what mussels are, for what they think of themselves as, and they sing it perpetually in voices almost too high to hear,
ataw ataw ataw!
they sing, a kind of a cheerful prayer or chant of musselness and musselhood, and the beaver sings himself,
tuqusu!,
in a gravelly baritone, and
gigiliw!
trills the smiling rabbit, and
aniza!
coughs the stately crane, and
waswas!!
shouts the jay again and again just as rough and exuberant as she’d been when alive, they sing themselves and their names in their languages, and Hugh finds that he too is singing chanting saying praying his song, his name in the old language, the language he was born into,
Aoidh!
Aoidh!
he sings, smiling and turning slowly end over end as he rises through the lowering light with everything else that has recently died, all of them singing to the sea.

22.

Declan O Donnell wakes up in the very last minute of daylight and realizes with a start that he has slept for ten hours straight and he swings out of bed and the instant his feet touch the floor the sun drops into the sea. He showers and dresses for a night on the boat and wonders where everyone is. He wonders who took the milk to the co-op and where the old man is and where Grace is because they have to catch the tide. He checks the tide chart on the refrigerator and makes sandwiches and coffee and throws his gear in his truck and roars off.

Pokes his head into the bar by the dock just to check Grace isn’t there. No reason for her to be there now, he thinks darkly, she’s already caught her daily limit of loser, but he sees Stella the bartender whom he likes and she grins at him and he grins back and then he sees the boy whose father beats him whom he knows from playing basketball in the winter rec league. Good kid. Good ballplayer. Strong as a bear, that kid. Wouldn’t shower with us because of the bruises. One time he had a bruise on his back the size of France. The old man must have hit him with a log or something. Some day that kid will hit back good and proper and there’ll be a funeral.

Hey, he says to the kid.

Hey, says the kid.

Want a beer, Dec? says Stella the bartender.

Nah. Going out tonight. Just looking for Grace.

Grace the gracious, says a guy at the bar.

What? says Declan.

Give you the shirt off her back and her pants too.

Some guys laugh.

Give you the stars in her eyes and her full moon.

Some guys laugh again.

Fuck you, says Declan to the guy.

No, fuck
you
, says the guy, and he starts to stand up, but Declan catches him with a fist in the face just as he starts to stand up, and the guy’s nose explodes and he falls backwards over the stool and knocks the next guy half off his stool, and then a friend of the first guy jumps on Declan’s back and smashes his head against a table, but the boy whose father beats him grabs the friend of the guy off and shoves him to the floor like you would flick a piece of dust off your shirt, and then Stella comes running out of the kitchen and screams get
out!
get
out!
so they get out, Declan and the kid, everybody yelling.

Declan hoists his gear over his shoulder and heads darkly for the boat and the kid walks with him for lack of anything better to do.

Thanks for the help in there, says Declan.

Sure, says the kid.