The Lowering Days

by Gregory Brown

  After that the waters began to return pieces of Sanoba. Every year a new bit washed ashore: the stones that had been his eyes, the sea grasses that had been his hair, the gnarled driftwood trunks that had been his legs. Unable to bear touching the wreckage herself, Nigawes sent her children up and down the coast to recover their father as she watched up on the bluff above the ocean. She grew old waiting. At night she dreamed of her husband’s hands—sliding around her waist, cradling their youngest son to his chest, stroking the back of her neck, gripping her thighs. When she woke, she found she could not move. Her feet had rooted into the earth. Fruit had begun to grow from the branches that had once been her arms. She closed her eyes. She lit the hanging fruit like red lanterns. She hoped her children would someday find their father and together come home.

  Four

  The next week, my mother printed the girl’s letter in The Lowering Days alongside this short editorial of her own:

  Around here, people talk about stolen land and people roll their eyes. They say there was no Trail of Tears. No Little Big Horn. No Sand Creek Massacre. That doesn’t mean we weren’t complicit in genocide as well. We maimed and killed Native people, took Native lands, outlawed acts of Native cultural expression, forced Native assimilation, and hoped for Native extinction.

  In 1790, the First Congress of the United States passed the first Non-Intercourse Act, declaring that any transfer of land from Native people to settlers had to be approved by Congress. Between 1794 and 1833, the state of Maine transferred the title to ninety-five percent of the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy people’s land to itself without congressional approval. It also began selling Penobscot islands in the river.

  We used that land. We logged it. We cleared it. We farmed it. We dammed it. We exploited it.

  Some who believe the soul is the animator of the body believe there is a source point from which it begins. Here in Penobscot territory, that source point is the Penobscot River.

  When I was a kid and went upriver to visit family, I used to see a thick foam everywhere along the shore. We’d spend all day in the water and come out covered in this stuff. We had no idea what it was. Boils and lesions appeared on our skin. Headaches tried to force us inside. It was all from the mills. This poisoned water ran straight through Penobscot lands. The fish they ate started to kill them.

  It seems a child could no longer stand by and watch that harm continue. This fire may cost us future jobs. It may cost us comfort. It may cost us what we feel we are entitled to: money earned from taken land.

  But think for a second about what it might save us.

  The phones at the newspaper went dead under a flood of angry calls and strange tips—the strangest perhaps a man claiming to have seen a young girl step off the Passagassawakeag Bridge, spread her arms into an arc of flaming wings, and soar off up the river into the mist. The county sheriff’s office issued a public warning, also printed in The Lowering Days, about the dangers of public vigilantism. They assured people they were searching for the letter writer’s identity and whereabouts, and that it was their search to carry out.

  In the aftermath of the letter, Grace Creel called a community meeting down on the harbor at The Fish House. All were welcome. Grace was there representing social services in the area. Cal Hayes came, both to keep order and to speak about the efforts of law enforcement. My mother was planning to speak as well. We found notes and scraps of paper all over the house. She talked things over with my father. She went up the river to sit with Moses Jupiter and talk to the Penobscot Nation. I imagine now that she must have felt very alone through it all.

  One hundred years ago the rafters of The Fish House had hung with the huge carcasses of four-hundred-pound drying cod. Now the place was a shack diner nestled atop the harbor’s seawall. The kitchen and the back storage room hung out over the bay. Ten cedar logs, pinned at one end to the bottom of the seawall, extended into the sky at a sixty-degree angle to support the structure’s underside. The whole building, which was painted four different shades of blue and capped by a mottled green asphalt roof, looked as though it were set up on a small, trembling tea saucer. Locals took bets on when the establishment would catch a wind stiff enough to dump it into the sea. “Going down to The Fish House to place another catastrophe wager,” they’d say.

  The diner was often something of a ghost town, empty except for a few stoop-shouldered men who sat about considering a second cup of oily coffee and filling the air with blue cigarette smoke. In the afternoon the lobstermen would come ashore, replacing the harbor workers and retired morning gossips to drink a dollar beer before heading home. Most days it seemed like Ruston Garvey, the owner, would be lucky to make a hundred dollars in profit.

  Now it was noon on an unseasonably warm Saturday in late April, and every chair at The Fish House was filled. The breakfast counter was packed two deep. People were even sitting on the edges of the fold-out card tables Grace had set up with coffee carafes and platters of doughnuts and cinnamon rolls that she, my mother, and Garvey had begun baking at sunrise.

  Wren and Galen were across the room, sitting behind their mother. Me, Link, and Simon stood near our father in the opposite corner. While we listened to my mother defend both the girl’s action and her own decision to print the girl’s letter, I could tell my father was proud. So was I. Link was worried about the danger our mother might be inviting. Simon was simply scared. He was about to turn eighteen. I imagined him lost in his own life, clinging to his dreams of leaving the bay for college and setting about becoming what he wanted to be in this world. Now it seemed a web was forming around us all.

  “That letter was a manifesto,” someone said. “She’s a terrorist.”

  The word bent the air with hate and fear.

  “No,” Grace cautioned. “It was a clarification, maybe even a call for understanding.”

  Most of the room balked at the idea.

  “What about the parts in Indian?” someone else asked. “How do we know they weren’t a threat?”

  “A threat.” My mother narrowed her eyes.

  The question asker looked a little embarrassed now. “Y-yes, ma’am,” she stuttered.

  “Telling choice,” my mother said. Her tone had shifted to take over the conversation, moving Grace and Cal aside. “Smarten up.”

  I felt Simon cringe beside me. Looking around the diner, I saw fear. I wondered why my mother had to play coy with a whole room full of hurt and scared people. She’d had Moses translate the Penobscot parts of the letter when she went to sit with him. She knew exactly what it said. So why couldn’t she just deliver the truth, if it mattered so much to her? What felt like an act of radical terrorism to many was, for this girl, simply an attempt to defend an ancestor—the river—and a plea to be seen and heard again after being made invisible for generations.

  “You bomb a mill, you’re a terrorist,” someone was saying now.

  “No,” Grace Creel answered. My mother seemed surprised and a little disappointed, as if perhaps she had forgotten she might have allies here. “It wasn’t a bomb. We’re not starting that.”

  “And it wasn’t a mill,” said my father. “It was an empty building.”

  “Come on, Ames.”

  “She’s wanted for questioning, is what she is,” Cal Hayes interrupted. “People need to stay home and listen to their scanners. Stop searching all over the countryside with a rifle and a homemade badge pinned to their hats. Let us do our jobs.”

  “She should turn herself in, then,” someone said from the back of the room. “Stop wasting our time and money.” It was a woman’s voice, gruff and tired. Several people around the diner nodded in agreement.

  “Don’t be simpletons,” my mother hissed.

  I felt the room recoil, rear up, and open its jaws as if to snap.

  “Falon . . . ,” my father started. There was an attempt at peace in his voice. Despite his desertion, the topic of which still trailed him like a dark shroud even at The Fish House, my father’s boats a
nd his dedication to the fishery kept him respected and perhaps loved around the harbor. Though he kept his small workshop in the woods near our house, by now he had established a larger boatbuilding yard down on the harbor front. Around the bay he built boats for local fishermen for next to nothing, while he charged the summer people outlandish amounts of money that left us bewildered and fearful that our father would be laughed to ruin by these rich men and women. As his renown grew, my father tossed out the sums—$40,000, $70,000, $90,000—without the slightest hesitation, and each winter the phone continued to ring with the voices of New York stockbrokers and Boston lawyers and Toronto architects looking for an Arnoux Ames–built wooden sloop or ketch. For my father, boatbuilding was a form of prayer. “When I’m working on a boat, I’m not even here,” he often said. “I’m somewhere totally else. I’m talking with my ancestors. You could shoot me in the heart and I wouldn’t die.” War records didn’t pay bills here. Fair fishing regulations, occasional dope deals, flush-with-cash tourists, and affordable, well-made boats did.

  “Don’t you dare, Arnoux,” my mother said. “This isn’t about you.”

  My father raised his hands and backed away. A man to his left grumbled, and someone in the back whispered “Coward” under their breath.

  “The soapbox is getting tired, Falon,” Garvey said from the front of the room. He looked small and frightened behind his white chef’s apron. I noticed he didn’t meet my mother’s eyes. “Might be time to let it rest.”

  “You don’t know me very well then, Rus. If this girl walks into any white newspaper, police station, or lawyer’s office and says, ‘I did it. Here I am,’ it could cost her her life.”

  “That’s not what I’m asking for,” Grace said.

  “Maybe not,” my mother said. “But what about the rest of us? When did our heads get too thick to mistake wanting justice for wanting blood?”

  I think it was the use of the word us that saved my mother from the mob in that moment. That, and a new voice cutting through the anger.

  Lyman Creel had come in off the wharf after a morning out on his boat. He walked into the diner like it was any normal Saturday. Bits of ice clung to his red beard, and his cheeks were raw and wind-hardened. He took a safety pin off his sleeve and began to dig black chips of grease out from under his nails. The room had gone silent. My mother was watching Lyman, along with everyone else. He slowly poured a cup of coffee into a small blue mug and then walked over to Grace and hugged her.

  “Hi, sugar,” she said, leaning in and kissing him.

  “Hey, baby,” Lyman answered with a sigh. “It’s been a long day.”

  “Sure has.”

  There was something touching and startling in this moment of intimacy. Somehow it seemed that Lyman, by ignoring us all, had reminded us of how to be human. He had a copy of the most recent issue of The Lowering Days under his arm as he moved across the room. Two men stood up from the corner table they’d claimed and let Lyman sit down with his paper and his coffee. In the soft, watery sunlight pouring down over him through the window, he appeared as content as I had ever seen him. Outside, gulls dove through the orange air, disappearing into the sea after the bloody chum fishermen were emptying into the ocean.

  “I think it’s good you gave that girl a voice like she asked, Falon,” Lyman finally said, shocking us all. His words moved through the crowded tension of the diner, and when he paused to take a breath, the slow, steady clicking of the ancient steam heating system was the only sound. “Maybe the mill was the original crime,” he said, “not the fire. Maybe we all failed to see it for too long.”

  Lyman’s eyes briefly found my mother before they both looked away. I felt my father tense at my side. “I don’t know what else to say.” He placed his hands in his lap and opened them, looking down at the callused welts worn into his thick fingers. Then he shrugged and bent back into his coffee. I watched Wren and Galen cross the room to be with their father. Galen passed Lyman a doughnut. Wren took her coat, comically small in this context, and draped it over her father’s heavy, rounded shoulders, damp still from another day battling the sea for a few dollars, just enough to keep the lights on, the mortgage paid, and food in their refrigerator.

  None of us knew what else to say.

  Part II

  Five

  The man listened for the dawn birds returning to the trees and added more wood to the fire. The logs were small and snapped in the soft gray light. There was an art to keeping a fire low enough to avoid notice but warm enough to survive the night. While a bright, high sun blistered the days now in April, the temperature often struggled to escape the forties still, and heavy snows drifted through their campsite. The man pushed up the coals in the fire, where a flat stone was heating. He laid two gutted and filleted fish on the stones and listened to the fat sizzle.

  The campsite was surrounded by thick woods and set in the shadows of Bald Hill. Though they’d put leaves and branches over the tent to better disguise it and packed in bales of straw for insulation, it wasn’t a home or a place for staying. Adam Greenwind was Penobscot and found it insanely strange that he was sitting over an early spring fire in the deep woods, essentially hugging an old migratory route, trying to figure out what to make of his life now.

  Two weeks before, he had stepped into the hallway of their little ranch house in the middle of the night and found his fourteen-year-old daughter, Molly, frantically packing a bag. She was terrified when she looked up at him. Out the hallway window he could see the silhouette of the birch-bark wigwam he and Molly had started building that fall for a tribal project about exploring family heritage. They’d raised the sapling frame and sheathed the structure in birch bark, but they’d been unable to finish the wigwam before winter. While he’d spent all February and March talking excitedly at breakfast about getting back out to finish the wigwam, Molly’s enthusiasm waned. Instead, in the mornings, her eyes continually fell on the unopened stack of bills and delinquency notices piling up on the table. When he moved the stack onto his dresser so she wouldn’t have to see it each morning, she’d retrieved the bills and put them right back at the center of the table. That was Molly. Not one to let things be pushed into the dark. He had started getting dressed in his work clothes again as soon as he woke, even though there’d been no work but odd jobs for almost two years, since the mill closed. It just made her more upset. “You can’t fool me into thinking things are okay, Dad,” she said. “I leave you behind and go to school. Every day you’re just here alone. I hate it.”

  The old grandfather clock working time over in the living room was the only sound in the house. He thought he heard deer or raccoons scurrying around outside under the moon. He imagined Molly’s horse, Cricket, curled up in her corral shelter, picking out the same night sounds. He thought he caught the whine of sirens in the distance and began to really worry. Dawn was two hours away, and he understood that light would be no help to whatever was happening here. He grabbed his own duffel bag and began stuffing supplies into it, packing light, but packing smart.

  Molly stopped. “You can’t come.”

  “See if you can stop me.”

  He thought she might start crying, but then her face changed, shaking a little, pushing something far down. “I messed up.”

  “We all do, sweetie.”

  “Stop acting easy, Dad. Stop acting cool. It isn’t you.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Then tell me what happened.”

  She had been honest with him. Now it seemed nothing would ever be the same.

  A fire that practically took an entire mill to the ground in an evening. How had Molly done such a thing on her own? He hadn’t raised his daughter to keep her head down and stay invisible. “Too easy to be an invisible Indian,” he often told her. “Too easy to give ’em exactly what they want.” He’d raised her to have a backbone and act in defense of those who needed defending. But not this: destruction, violence—those were angry ways, easy ways. He wondered now if it was his fault. Most
of her life Molly had watched him come home from the mill too tired to hardly think. While he’d tried to be careful, he had a big mouth, and it was just the two of them at home. Molly listening to him complain about how the paper company treated its workers, constantly putting more on them, skimping on safety supplies, slashing overtime, even canning free coffee in the employee lounge near the end. Listening to him rant about the chemicals and the waste and awfulness of a mechanized world. Listening to him talk about how hard it was to know your birthright was to caretake the earth, all while doing work that injured the river and traumatized the land. Of course causal relationships were complex, yet here they were.

  In the distance Adam could almost make out the high, sandy hill from which this place took its name. His grandmother used to tell him about Penobscot warriors who would race up the hill’s treacherous shifting sands. It was a hard run, and dangerous—a broken leg or ankle, a stumble and fall down the hill, a landslide coming down behind you, these were all real risks. So the challenge took great strength and endurance, but also intelligence and strategy. His grandmother had told him how Penobscot women made the sand run too, often winning the contest. He had first shown Bald Hill to Molly when she was five or six, and told her the same stories. He remembered how her eyes had focused and hardened at the idea of a female warrior besting the hill climb. There had been no shock, no surprise there, and he thought it interesting that when they left their house for the woods after the fire, they had almost instinctively traveled here, to the shadows of the proving hill.