The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks (7 page)

Merle picked up a new plank and with a stubby plane shaved blond, sweet-smelling curls off the wood. He lay the board against the first, cast his gaze down its length, retrieved it, and gave it another half dozen smooth strokes of the plane, until finally the plank fit snugly, perfectly, into place.

“Well, it
looks
good, anyhow,” Terry said. He shifted his toothpick and, placing one foot onto the high sill, dropped his right forearm onto his thigh and leaned forward and into the close, dim, resin-smelling interior of the bob-house. “Say, Merle, I was wondering, see, I’m outa work. Marcelle’s all done winterizing the park, so she don’t need me anymore until spring or unless the pipes burst or something, and there ain’t no work in this damn town in winter, especially for a black man. So I was wondering if you could help me out a little, till I could get some more work.”

“Sure.”

“I was thinking of maybe heading south this winter, getting some work in Florida. I got a cousin in Tampa, but it’ll take some bucks to do it. You know, for bus fare and after I get there, till I get a job.”

“What about your sister?” Merle asked without looking up. “She’d be pretty much alone here without you. Being colored and all. Come spring, you could get work again, maybe for the highway department or something. You don’t want to leave her all alone up here.”

“Well, yeah…” Terry let his glance fall across the oak framing of the structure, noticing for the first time how it had been notched and fitted together with pegs. “But I can’t take any more handouts from her. Maybe you could loan me enough to get me through the next three or four months,” he said. “I got problems, man.”

“How much?”

“Five, six hundred, maybe?”

“Sure.”

“Seven would be better.”

“Sure.”

“I’ll pay you back.” He stood up straight again and stepped away from the door as Merle got slowly to his feet and came out to the yard.

“Sure,” he said. “Money’s in the house.”

“Okay,” Terry said almost in a whisper, and the two men crossed the yard to the trailer.

There were other loans: Bruce Severance, the long-haired kid in number 3 who sold dope, needed $300 fast, to get a very heavy dude off his back, he said; Noni Hubner, the college girl in number 7, was recuperating from her first nervous breakdown and wanted to do what her mother had so far refused to do, buy a proper gravestone for her father’s grave, which, since his death two years ago, had gone unmarked; and Leon LaRoche, the bank teller in number 2, said he needed money to help pay his sick mother’s hospital bills, but it came out (only as a rumor, however) that his mother was not ill and that he was spending money recklessly to support a young man supposedly going to college in Boston and whom Leon visited almost every weekend; and Claudel Bing, who was no longer living at the trailerpark but still had friends there, and after having lost his job at the Public Service Company, said he needed money to pay for his divorce from Ginnie, who was living with Howie Leeke; Tom Smith was dead by then, but his son, Buddy, somehow heard about Merle’s good luck and wrote from Albany asking Merle for $500 so he could pay off the debts he claimed his father’s burial had left him with, and Merle mailed the money to him the next day; Nancy Hubner, Noni’s mother, insisting that she did not want the money for herself, explained that she had got herself into an embarrassing situation by pledging $1,000 to the Clamshell Alliance antinuclear people and had only been able to raise $750; Captain Dewey Knox, in trailer number 6, who certainly seemed affluent enough not to need any of Merle’s money, suddenly turned out to owe three years’ back taxes on the last bit of land his father had owned in Catamount, a rocky, hundred-acre plot on the northern edge of what had been the elder Knox’s dairy farm, and to keep the Captain from losing that last connection to his sanctified past, Merle loaned him $638.44; and then, finally, there was Marcelle Chagnon, the manager of the trailerpark, living in number 1, and needing money to protect her job, because the Granite State Realty Development Corporation was billing her personally for the cost of replacing all the frozen pipes in trailer number 11, then vacant, which Marcelle had neglected to drain last August when the previous tenants, a pair of plasterers from Massachusetts working on a new motel over in Epsom, had left. And then, well—then all the money was gone.

*  *  *

By mid-November, the sun was setting early and rising late, and the daily temperatures rarely got above freezing, the nights often falling to zero and below. Except for where the water rushed across the weirs, the lake was frozen over entirely. The bob-house was ready, and Merle’s tipups, lines, jigs, and chisels were repaired, cleaned, oiled, and packed neatly into the bob-house. First thing every morning, Merle pulled on his cap and mackinaw and trotted from his trailer down to the shore to read the ice. It was going to be a good winter for ice—no snow so far, very little wind, and lots of steady, unbroken cold. A Canadian high had moved southeast in late October and hunkered over northern New England for two weeks straight, so that, with clear nighttime skies, the ice had formed, spread, and thickened several weeks ahead of schedule.

So far as fishing went, winter or summer, Skitter Lake was Merle’s. Three sides of the lake adjoined the Skitter Lake State Forest, which made it fairly inaccessible from the road, except through the trailerpark, and people, strangers especially, were reluctant to drive through the trailerpark and stop their cars before the short, sandy beach at the end of the peninsula, get out their gear, launch their boats, canoes, or bob-houses, and commence fishing. It was a little too public, and also a little too private, as if the trailerpark were actually a boardinghouse with all the tenants watching you cross their shared front yard to get to their shared fishing place. The same went for ice skating and swimming. The residents of the trailerpark skated and swam Skitter Lake, but other people went elsewhere, which wasn’t much of an inconvenience, since in town there was the mill pond, and throughout the surrounding countryside there were dozens of small, accessible ponds and lakes where the fishing was as good as, if not better than, the fishing at Skitter Lake.

As a result, when Merle decided at the end of the first week in December that the ice was thick enough to support the weight of his bob-house, he made the decision alone. He couldn’t wait until someone less cautious or patient than he had dragged his bob-house safely out to the middle of the lake. He couldn’t wait until schoolboys from town, eager to play hockey, had crossed and crisscrossed the lake a dozen times the way they did down at the millpond, whacking the ice with hockey sticks and listening to the cracks and fault lines race away from the blow, rather than down, revealing in that way that the ice was now thick enough to support the weight of large human beings.

Merle took his long-handled chisel in hand and, tapping lightly in front of him as he walked, moved like a blind man carefully onto the ice. He walked twenty or so feet from the shore and parallel to the shore toward the marshy area west of the park, where the hermit they called the Guinea Pig Lady had built her shack. Here, he knew, the water was late to freeze, because of the several trickling inlets and the marsh grass and bushes, and here, too, the water was not very deep, so that if, indeed, it was not safe and he fell through, he would not be in any danger. It was late in the day, and the sky was peach-colored near the horizon and blue-gray where thin clouds had scudded in from the northeast. Merle, in his dark green mackinaw and plaid trooper’s cap with the fur earflaps tied down, tapped his way away from the trailerpark toward the swamp, then past the swamp and out along the point, crossing the cove, and then beyond the point, until he was over deep water. Below him, the lake was a hundred feet deep, and the ice was black and smooth, like polished obsidian. This first solitary walk on the ice is almost like flying. You leave the safe and solid earth and move over what you know and can see is an ether, supported by a membrane that you can feel, but cannot quite see, as if the difference between the ice below and the air above were merely a difference in atmospheric pressures. Later, your mind will accept the information coming from your body, and then there will be no difference between ice with a hundred feet of water below it and the frozen ground itself, so that when you cut a hole in the ice, and it fills with water, you will be surprised, but no more frightened than if you had dug a hole in sand at the beach and watched it fill with water.

Confident now that he could safely put his bob-house onto the ice, Merle spent the following day picking through the brushy, overgrown fields out by Old Road, collecting galls from dried stalks of goldenrod. Inside each gall slept a small, white grub, excellent bait for bluegills, and it wasn’t long before Merle had collected in his mackinaw pockets half a hundred of the woody containers. On returning to the trailerpark, he was hailed on the roadway just opposite Marcelle Chagnon’s trailer by Bruce Severance. Bruce drove his black Chevy van with the Rocky Mountain sunsets on the sides up behind the old man—it was midafternoon, but almost dark, and he probably hadn’t seen Merle until he was almost upon him. He stopped a few feet away, raced his motor until Merle turned, then waved him over to the driver’s side and cranked down the window.

“Hey, man, what’s happening?” The sweet smell of marijuana exhaled from the vehicle, and the kid took a last hit, knocked the lit end off the roach, and popped it into his mouth.

“Temperature’s dropping,” Merle said with a slight smile. He peered up at the boy, and his blue, crinkly-lidded eyes filled and glistened in the wind.

“Yeah. Wow. Temperature’s dropping. That’s what’s happening, all right.” Bruce swallowed the roach.

“Yep.” Merle turned to walk on.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you, man, I saw you this morning, when I came in from Boston, you were in those old fields out by the road. Then later I came back out, and you were still there. And now here you are again, this time coming in from the fields. What’s going on out there, man?”

“Nothing. Temperature’s dropping there, too. That’s all.”

“No, man. I’m curious. I
know
you know things, about herbs and things, I mean.”

Merle said, “You want to know what I was out there for? Is that what you’re wondering, boy?”

“Yeah.”

The old man reached into his mackinaw pocket and drew out one of the goldenrod galls. “These.”

“What’s that?”

“Goldenrod gall.”

“What’s it for, man?”

“I’ll show you. But you’ll have to spend a while first, helping me move my bob-house out on the ice tonight.”

“Tonight? In the dark?”

“Yep. Got to bait the camp with chum tonight, so’s I can start to fish tomorrow.”

With a slow and maybe reluctant nod, the kid agreed to help him. Merle walked around and climbed into the van, and the two drove through the park to Merle’s trailer.

When an old man and a young man work together, it can make an ugly sight or a pretty one, depending on who’s in charge. If the young man’s in charge or won’t let the old man take over, the young man’s brute strength becomes destructive and inefficient, and the old man’s intelligence, out of frustration, grows cruel and inefficient. Sometimes the old man forgets that he is old and tries to compete with the young man’s strength, and then it’s a sad sight. Or the young man forgets that he is young and argues with the old man about how to do the work, and that’s a sad sight, too.

In this case, however, the young man and the old man worked well together. Merle told Bruce where to place his pole so he could lift the front of the bob-house, while Merle slid a second pole underneath. The same at the back, until, practically on its own, the bob-house started to roll down the slope toward the ice. As each roller emerged from the back, Merle told Bruce to grab it and run around to the front and lay it down, which the young man did, quickly and without stumbling, until, in a few moments, the structure was sliding onto the ice, and then it was free of the ground altogether. It slid a few feet from the bank, and the momentum left it, and it stopped, silent, solid, dark in the wind off the lake.

“Incredible!” the kid said.

“Everything’s in the bob-house except firewood,” Merle said. “Put them poles inside, we’ll cut them up out on the lake.”

The kid did as he was told.

Merle walked around to the front of the bob-house, away from the land, and took up a length of rope tied to a quarter-inch-thick U-bolt. “I’ll steer, you push,” he called to the kid.

“Don’t you have a flashlight?” Bruce yelled nervously. The wind was building and shoved noisily against the bob-house.

“Nothing out there but ice, and it’s flat all the way across.”

“How’ll I get back?”

“There’s lights on here at the park. You just aim for them. You don’t need a light to see light. You need dark. Stop gabbing and start pushing,” he said.

The kid leaned against the bob-house, grunted, and the building started to move. It slid easily over the ice on its waxed runners, at times seeming to carry itself forward on its own, even though against the wind. As if he were leading a large, dumb animal, Merle steered the bob-house straight out from the shore for about a quarter mile, then abruptly turned to the right, and headed east, until he was a few hundred yards from the weirs, where the lake narrowed and where, Merle knew, there were in one place a gathering current, thirty to forty feet of water, and a weedy, fertile bottom. It was a good spot, and he spun the bob-house slowly over it until the side with the door faced away from the prevailing wind.

“Let it sit,” he said to the kid. “Its weight’ll burn the ice and keep it from moving.” He went inside and soon returned with a small bucksaw and his long chisel. “You cut the wood into stove lengths, and I’ll dig us in,” he said, handing the saw to the kid.

“This is really fucking incredible,” Bruce said.

Merle looked at him silently for a second, then went quickly to work chipping the ice around the runners and stamping the chips back with his feet, moving swiftly up one side and down the other, until the sills of the house were packed in ice. By then Bruce had cut two of the four poles into firewood. “Finish up, and I’ll get us a fire going,” Merle told him, and the kid went energetically back to work.