Mink River: A Novel (30 page)

39.

Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days, that’s from Ecclesiastes, says the doctor, and smashes the bottle of champagne against Declan’s newly repaired boat, which accepts the blow wooden-faced.

I wish the crew of this boat fine fishing, safety, peace, joy, and halibut the size of doors, he says, and everyone cheers. Champagne droplets scatter like sweet rain across the heads and shoulders of those in attendance.

A suitable baptism, says the priest, smiling.

Fecking waste of wine, says Grace, smiling.

Cast thy champagne upon the waters, for it shalt sweeten all that salt, says Nicholas, smiling.

Thank you, each and every one of you, for coming this evening, says Declan, earnestly. And special thanks to Stella for all the beer. Speaking of which the first round is on me.

Sometimes in a town a small event grows into a big event. No one plans it, no one directs it. It just happens. It happens with wedding receptions and funerals and sporting events. Spontaneous parades after the high school team shockingly wins the league title. Hilarious evenings in the pub when a boat comes in loaded to the gunwales. Poignant evenings in church when a child thought drowned is found wandering dazed in the woods. Testimonial dinners. The Fourth of July. Car-wash afternoons that get wetter and funnier as the day wears on. Farmers’ markets that turn into block parties. Block parties that morph into neighborhood parties that last deep into the night and in the morning when you go to get the newspaper you see the street littered with beer bottles, lawn chairs, several bicycles, two folding card tables, torn bunting, scraps of cookies, tiny volcanoes of charcoal ash from grills and hibachis, hamburgers burnt to the color and consistency of charcoal, uncooked hot dogs, wine bottles, paper cups, plastic cups, two broken frisbees, a bra on a bush, and someone’s mangled eyeglasses.

In such a way did the rechristening of the
Plover
after its repair and renovation become an Event, morphing from three crew members and two dozen friends and family gathered at the main dock to what Michael the cop estimated at nearly a hundred people crammed laughing brawling kissing shouting weeping yelling wrestling grinning into the pub long past its official closing hour of two in the morning. Not even Michael, usually a stickler for rules and regulations as the fair bounds of human concourse, had the heart to close down the pub; and when Declan, with a half-drunk’s lurching majesty and rubbery grace, hopped up on the bar, Stella rapping at his legs with a mop handle to get him off, and grandly bought the last round of the night, Michael accepted the pint that Stella poured for him, and sipped it long, and toasted the
Plover
’s return to the sea. Then he did, without fanfare, with professional skill and calm, shut down the pub, table by table, group by group, couple by couple, with a quiet word; but he also without fanfare drove the incapacitated to their homes. Stella counted three round trips and seven passengers total for Michael before she too, after mopping the floor, went upstairs to bed.

40.

As he drove through the moist salty night with his singing or sleeping passengers Michael hummed Puccini but the rear of his mind was preoccupied with a big brown coat. If the guy was smart he’d ditch that coat right off, he thought. The coat’s a marker. The kid mentioned it, Cedar and Worried Man mentioned it, the guy was photographed in the coat at the station. He’s smart enough to know we’ll be looking for the coat. But he needs a coat. The nights are cold. He needs food. He needs a bed. He won’t go back to Trailer Town. He’d know we are watching it. He’s long gone. The guys at the station say so. But I don’t think so. I think he’s here. He’s angry. He wants revenge. He’s humiliated. He’ll want to get even with Cedar. He knows Cedar. He knows where they work. Did he see Worried Man? Does he know Maple Head? And he wants Kristi. He doesn’t know where she is. He’ll hang around the school looking for her. He’ll hang around Public Works looking for Cedar. Cedar can take care of himself. Maple Head is a slip of a thing, though. I’ll swing by their house with my lights off. Just in case. You never know.

41.

Maple Head has read every account of the birth of Neawanaka, which is to say that she has read both of them:
Some Annals of Neawanaka
, a booklet published privately in a limited edition of fifty copies by a Presbyterian minister named Youatt in 1901, and the mimeographed transcript of an interview with her father-in-law Sisaxai, recorded just before his death in 1933. The interview had been part of a high school oral history project, and the transcript, which ran for more than fifty pages, was wholly unedited, and so it faithfully recorded Sisaxai’s riverine speaking style, which veered off without warning into disquisitions on plants, animals, women, songs, myth, lore, medicine, spirituality, politics, timber, oceanic current patterns by season, music, bone density, skin grafting, geology, ethnobotany, evolution, literature, tribal relations in Oregon pre- and post-contact, Captain Robert Gray, sexual practices, dreams,
more
sexual practices, Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, sculpture, his wife Wocas, food, one last note on sexual practices, and the peculiar character of their young son Billy.

However Sisaxai did also mention three times in the course of his lengthy interview (which so addled the high school girl who interviewed him that she went on to later earn a doctorate in journalism) that Neawanaka had begun at the source of the Mink River. He gave three wildly different accounts of the town and the river, Maple Head noted with a smile, but in all three stories the place of nativity was clear: the town was conceived at the place where a spring emerges from the side of a hill that looks like a woman’s breast.

In one story Asayahal, the south wind, emerged from his cave on that hillside, and fell in love with Xilgo
,
the wild woman of the winter surf, whom he could see from his hill, tossing her long white hair, and he cracked the hill with his fist and made the river come out to carry him to her.

In the second story—told with the same complete assurance as the first—Asayahal, the south wind, grew so angry with the People that he blew ceaselessly for a month, drying up the creeks and streams and rivers, withering the trees and plants, choking the animals and birds with dust, until finally little Mink, brave beyond her size, bit into the very rock itself and brought forth the river named for her.

In the third story—told with such confidence that you would swear the teller had never even considered, let alone just
told
, any other possible story of the river’s birth—a woman named Queku became very sad and went off alone into the hills looking for hope. She wandered for one year, never resting in the same place more than one night. At the end of one year she was still without hope and she sat down on a rock to make an end of herself. She was a magic woman, a spirit doctor, a
sisasun
, and she thought she would try to suck out the hopelessness in her blood, so she cut her arm and sucked out some blood and spit it on the rock, and out of the rock came living water, clear and clean, a bright wriggling hopeful singing river, and she stretched out and let the river flow under and over and in and through her and hope came back into her and she was healed.

So say I, Sisaxai, and what I say is true, and I tell it so that you who hear it may be healed too.

42.

Declan takes the day off and Grace and Nicholas take the
Plover
out for halibut. They check gear before they go.

Bait? says Grace.

Salmon heads, says Nicholas, and mackerel guts, octopus, herring, crab, cod guts, and squid.

Jigs?

Lead heads, darts, zingers, stingers, spinnows.

Line?

Kevlar 80 and 120.

Beer?

No beer at work.

Huh. Lifejackets.

Two.

Float suits.

Two.

Beer.

No beer at work.

Brains.

One—mine.

Piss off, says Grace cheerfully, and guns the throttle and they roar out.

Neither says anything for the longest time as the boat hums and slices west into open water. The morning is clear and calm. They see a pod of sea lions heading south. They share coffee. Grace drives and Nicholas dozes in the stern. The water gets bluer. They see a solitary humpback whale big as a bus.

A few minutes later they stop over what Grace says is a valley on the sea floor and they set out their long lines. They have another sip of coffee.

Wonder if Declan is out of bed yet, says Nicholas.

Better be. He’s supposed to sell the fecking cows today.

Really? The whole herd?

The cows were my dad’s thing. We kids hated them. All that mud and shit and work. We hated it. It was some kind of Irish thing for my dad. Connection to the land. Connection to shit and snot machines, if you ask me. I’d be happy to never see another cow ever. My kid brothers have to take care of them now and they hate it more than me and Declan did.

What will you do for money?

Fish, I guess.

What about Peadar and Niall?

They still have years of high school.

You like fishing?

It’s better than mucking with cows.

They pull in lines and up come three small halibut, a vermilion rockfish that is the reddest thing Nicholas has ever seen, and a ling cod with a gaping mouth the size of China. They clean and ice the fish. Gulls wheel and dive at the offal flung into the water.

See? No snot, no shit, and birds clean up after you, says Grace.

Can I ask you a question? says Nicholas.

No.

Do you miss your dad?

No.

Is your mom dead?

No.

Should we bait up again?

Yes.

Am I bugging you?

Yes.

I’ll stop talking.

No.

43.

Declan rattles into town in his truck for his appointment at the bank. He is to meet an estate appraiser named McCann at ten in the morning. They were friends as boys. McCann has been out to the farm twice, has walked the boundary, has been in contact with state and county agricultural organizations as to the present value of cattle and land, and has a sheaf of reports as thick as his hand to show Declan.

Cut to the chase, Dennis, says Declan. What’s it all worth?

Less than you want, says McCann.

How could that be?

No one wants the cows and the land isn’t zoned residential.

Meaning what?

No one wants the land either. If you can’t build houses on it facing the sea then it isn’t worth much.

It’s decent farmland now, after a century of fertilizer.

It’s mud if there’s no buyer.

This is a joke, Dennis. A fecking joke. My father spent his whole life on that land. It’s cleared, well-watered, decent soil, a hillside view of the ocean. It can’t flood and there’s acres and acres of it. And most of it is forested.

You could log it.

Then it wouldn’t be forested, would it, Dennis?

Don’t get mad at me, Dec. I’m just telling you the facts. Property is only worth what a buyer thinks it is. If you have lots of buyers then it’s worth a lot. If no one wants it then it’s worthless.

Worthless.

Essentially.

Even the cows?

Especially the cows. The dairy market is very poor right now. I couldn’t even find a taker for a donation. I called all over the county. Not even the ag schools or high-school ag clubs will take them. They cost too much to maintain if you aren’t set up for them. Only a big co-op could take them and they’re selling surplus now too. It’s just a market thing, Dec. Don’t take it personal.

Feck.

Sorry.

This isn’t what I need right now, Dennis. I need the money. I’m fishing for a living, for Chrissake.

Hard work.

Fecking right it’s hard. And I have to take care of my sister and brothers. It’s not like the old bastard left us any money when the log punched him out.

Hard times, Dec.

Fecking right.

Sorry.

You want to buy six cows?

No, Dec.

The bank doesn’t want ’em? Your own herd, Dennis. You’d be the only bank in the country with your own herd. Think of the marketing possibilities. Cash cows. We herd your money right. Photo op. That kind of thing.

I have another appointment, Dec.

I’ll give you all the stuff that goes with ’em, Dennis. Milk cans, syringes, pasteurizers, all of it. Hell, I’ll give you the barn.

Dec …

We’ll take the barn down
and
cut it up for you, Dennis. Free wood. That’s good spruce, last you three winters I bet. Good firewood.

Dec.