He just shrugs again, but now I feel like talking, even if it’s just to myself, so I do: “Remember those Adventists that came from Ohio last fall for a visit?”
He doesn’t even shrug this time, but I go on with the story: “The World Series was on, but Mama made us go out and greet ’em anyhow. And it was a nice clear day, with a nice strong breeze. We couldn’t smell the mill at all. But the first thing the Ohio people did when they climbed out of their car was go, ‘Eeeeeeuuu! What’s that smell?’ Mama started apologizing, as if it was our fault, saying it always smelled like that around here. But before she could explain why, Everett cut in and told ’em, ‘Yep. Don’t you folks worry. It’s just a little medical problem. Poor Winnie here. It’s his crack.’”
Remembering their faces, and Irwin’s face, and Mama’s, I burst out laughing. Papa just sits, staring off into the fog. “That wasn’t even the best part!” I gasp. “The great thing was how, even after Mama explained it was really the mill, for the rest of their visit every time Irwin walked past one of them, they’d start copping nervous peeks at his rear!”
I laugh so hard it warms me right up. Papa doesn’t even smile. “Remember?” I ask, and he tilts his head toward his left shoulder, then straightens it again. But I can’t tell if that means yes, or that his neck is stiff. So I give up. I stare into the fog too.
There’s nothing in sight but the mill clock, but you can actually watch time pass on this clock, so that’s what I do: I watch the tip of the phone-pole-sized aluminum minute hand glide across the concrete face of the building. I remember Irwin once saying that he liked the mill clock because it made a person stop and think. And I remember Everett replying that it made you think all right: it made you think it might not be a bad idea to go buy yourself a big ol’ horse pistol and blow your brains out. I don’t feel quite like blowing my brains out, but when I try for a while to move my hand as slowly and steadily as the mill clock’s hand is moving, it’s sure not fun. The human mind and body just aren’t built for anything so slow and boring. If Father Time has a brain, I’ll bet it’s about the size of a BB.
I guess what the mill clock makes me stop and think about is the Aesop fable of the tortoise and the hare. The clock seems like the victorious tortoise, and the men filing in and out of the mill seem like the stupid speedy hares. I’ve always hated Aesop’s stories. Especially the little punchlines at the end where he plays preacher and tells you what everything supposedly means. If Aesop was alive today I’ll bet he’d be writing yarns for Pathfinder Magazine, calling them things like “Why Tommy Tortoise Told Satan No.” I’ll bet Aesop’s brain wasn’t much bigger than Father Time’s. I wish there really was such a thing as a Time-Clock Puncher, though. I wish some gigantic, surly, stone-fisted, Soap Mahoney-type guy went wandering around the world smashing every clock in sight till there weren’t any more and people got so confused about when to go to the mill or school or church that they gave up and did something interesting instead.
Papa snaps on the radio, twists knobs, punches buttons, and gets several kinds of static before he remembers the thing went dead last summer. He sighs in Lucky smoke, then sighs it out again. I wish he’d say something. Maybe he’s tired of me always joking. Maybe he’d like me to be serious for a change. “What’s it really like,” I ask, “I mean, what do you actually do inside the mill?”
“Nothin’ much,” he mumbles.
“Do you ever do anything you like doing in there?”
He sucks his Lucky right down to his fingertips. “Don’t matter,” he says. “I’d still have to do it.”
“What does Roy do?”
“’Bout the same.”
“But what really goes on?” I ask. “After all these years I don’t even know.”
“Nothin’ much,” he mutters again.
I look at the mill: the night lights have all come on—whole constellations of them—spotlights and floodlights and huge square-bulbed power lights, suspended and shining from walls and wires, lighting the fog from here to the middle of the Columbia; the mill’s got its own railway system, with full-sized boxcars rolling in and out of buildings; it’s got its own fleet of tugs, dragging football-field-sized log rafts, one after the other, in off the river; it’s got wings as big as whole office buildings, with snarls of exposed vents and flumes and overhead or underground pipes feeding them a steady river’s worth of water, some of the pipes and flumes big enough to drive semis through; I can count fourteen lighthouse-sized smokestacks just from where we’re sitting, with steam pouring so thick out of nine of them that they look like the source of every cloud on earth; I can feel the fog vibrating from the machinery in the building behind the giant clock. I look back at Papa. “Sure doesn’t look like nothin’ much.”
He rubs his temples. “Look,” he says irritably. “This mill is a bunch of machines making paper out of trees. Me and Roy and a thousand other yo-yos work the machines. That’s all it is, Kincaid. You seen one mill, you seen ’em all.”
“But I’ve never seen even one! Not on the inside.”
“Then you’re lucky,” he says. As if that’s that.
But why should it be? It’s not as if him sitting there sucking down cigarettes till they stain his fingers orange is more important than talking to me. No longer trying to keep the defiance out of my voice, I ask, “How exactly do they make paper out of trees?”
Sliding another cigarette up out of his shirt, Papa mutters, “Where’s that Roy?”
“How do they make paper out of trees?” I repeat. “I want to know.”
“It’s complicated,” he says.
“I’m smart,” I tell him.
“If you were smart,” he growls, “you’d know that how mills make paper out of trees isn’t worth talkin’ about.”
“What if I own a mill someday?”
“If you were smart,” he says, “you’d know you won’t be owning any mills.”
“If I was smart,” I snap right back, “maybe I could figure out a way to get my own dad to talk to me now and then.”
He turns on me. His eyes are slits. “You’re runnin’ off at the mouth and thinkin’ it’s clever,” he says. “And I’ve had enough.”
“You’d call any talking runnin’ off at the mouth!” I tell him.
“One more word,” he says, his mouth a slit now too. “You want to know about the mill, look out the goddamned window.”
I look out the goddamned window. It’s too goddamned foggy and dark to see. “If the place where you spend every day of your life isn’t worth talkin’ about,” I ask, “what is?”
“You’re the smart one,” he says, and the words are literally muffled by his mouthful of smoke. “You tell me,” he says, inhaling it.
I try to think of something great—something truly fascinating—just to show him. And to my surprise, I do. “There’s a harelip at church!”
This seems to get his attention, but it’s not exactly how I meant to begin. “She, uh, she’s just my age. And she looks normal, and seems nice enough for a hare—er, she is nice. Except when she goes to talk, the lip makes everything sound like it starts with n. Like baseball would be nasenall, or Jesus Nyeesus.”
He smokes his Lucky.
“The thing is, there’s an operation that’d fix her right up, but her parents won’t let her have it. They claim the lip’s a cross, see. Like Christ’s cross. And some people think the parents are nuts, and some think they’re right. So what I wondered was, what do you think?”
“Take a vote,” he sighs.
I feel myself getting mad. It makes me talk even faster. “Her name’s Vera, and she’s a good person, you’d like her I’ll bet. Except there’s one thing about her, besides the lip I mean, which isn’t exactly normal, and I don’t know if you’d like this thing or not.”
Smoke runs like water up his nostrils. He stares straight ahead at nothing. I can tell he doesn’t give a shit what the thing about Vera even is. Which makes me all the more determined to describe it.
Papa doesn’t react.
“Seems weird, doesn’t it? But brave too. Don’t you think?”
No answer.
“She said one today, and they laughed so bad Beal started hollering ‘Thank you, Vera,’ just hoping to end the noise. But it was like she couldn’t hear, like the noise never mattered, because she really was praying, see, not just pretending, so no one counted to her, except maybe—you know. God, or something.”
Papa’s face is so empty I shut my eyes to keep from having to see it. I want to shut my mouth too, but I feel a little like Vera must have felt; this thing has me in its grip; I’ve got to speak. “We talked about it, driving home—about Vera’s parents calling the lip her cross and all. And Mama said we shouldn’t take sides. She said, ‘Judge not lest ye be judged.’ Then Irwin said that when we see somebody with a cross we should help them carry it, like the guy did for Jesus in the Bible. But then Everett hauled off and said, ‘Great, Winnie! Carry Vera’s cross! Yeah! Except what does that mean? Does it mean beat up the sixty twerps who laugh at her? Does it mean we wink and flirt with her as if the lip isn’t ugly as sin and her parents aren’t batty as hell for leaving it that way? Does it mean we should mangle our own lips nand nall snart snalking nike niss? Or is it just a piece of pious crap you’re belchin’ up to keep from having to do anything real to help her?’
“And man oh man! Mama got so mad I thought she was going to get us in a wreck … But then Peter broke in in that calm way of his that grabs your attention even better than Mama or Everett getting mad. There were some crucial things Vera’s parents were forgetting about crosses, was what Peter said. One was that Jesus was nailed to His by enemies, not by Mary and Joseph. And another, he said, was that it killed Him. Christ’s cross killed Him. We’ve got to remember what crosses are, Peter said. They’re not just decorations on steeples. They’re murder weapons, he said, the same as guns, or gas chambers, or electric chairs. Only much, much slower. So Vera’s parents, he said, were one of two things. They were either fools without the slightest idea what Christianity or crosses are. Or they were unbelievably evil.
“And not even Mama could argue with that. But then Everett spoke up again, saying that if any of us really wanted to help Vera, we would march straight up to her parents next Sabbath, and tell them exactly what Pete had just told us. And you should’ve seen Irwin! He got all excited and started nodding his head like he not only agreed but planned on doing it. But when Mama saw him in the rearview mirror, she said, ‘Don’t you dare!’ But I wouldn’t be surprised if he does dare, Papa! I really think Winnie might! So what do you think? I mean, should he? Do you think Irwin should tell them?”
“Tell who what?” he murmurs, rubbing his eyes—
and suddenly something in me hurts more than I can stand. “Weren’t you listening? Didn’t you hear?”
He takes a drag so long and deep it can’t leave his lungs by the time he needs to breathe again, so he inhales the same smoke twice. “I don’t know what all goes on at your church,” he says. “That’s your mother’s department.”
I want to control myself, I want to calm down, but I also want to slug Papa so hard I knock the smoke right out of his head. Because it’s a lie. It’s a bald-faced, idiotic lie for him to sit there with his wrecked thumb and dead eyes telling me that Vera and her lip and his own sons and crosses are all “Mama’s department.” “Quit fidgeting,” he tells me. And I can barely keep from blurting that he’d fidget too if his father was a liar. “What’s with you today?” he grumbles. “You’re squirmin’ like a two-year-old.”
I can’t breathe, I can’t see, I can’t sit still.
“Get those muddy boots down off that glove box!” he snaps.
And out it comes: “Then you quit smoking!” I shout. “And quit lying! And quit sitting there like a goddamned corpse out of some damned—”
I see the fury come into his eyes, but I don’t see the fist that smashes the left side of my face. My head snaps hard into the seat and bounces so quickly back to where it had been that for a moment I think, Nothing happened. Then my skull feels like it’s caving in. My mouth fills with blood. I cover my head and fall sideways. “Kade!” Papa cries, grabbing my shoulder. I shove his hand away, and crawl over against the door. “Oh, Jesus! Kade! I’m sorry!”
I feel a stabbing in my eye, and a roar like the mill’s in my ear. I feel Papa’s hands on me, hear wild apologies tangled in the roaring. The blood keeps welling, keeps pooling in my mouth, so I pull myself up to spit it all over his fucking car. But when I glance at him first, to be sure he’s looking, I see he’s white-faced, staring at his left hand—and the hand is trembling harder than I’ve ever seen anything human tremble. I swallow the blood, and turn back to the window.
“Oh God I’m sorry!” Papa moans through the roaring. “Kade, I’m sorry! But what is it with you? What do you expect from me?”
I don’t answer, don’t move or make a sound, except to swallow more blood.
“You know, millwork isn’t baseball,” he says, and his voice too is trembling. “You—Everett—Peter—do any of you understand that? It’s not a game, not an art, it’s not even a goddamned skill. It’s just a dead thing I do for money so we can eat. I’m a millworker, Kade. And millworkers are the people who can’t be who they wanted. Do you understand that?”
I don’t answer. Let him see how it feels to pour your heart out to a statue.
“Listen!” he begs, sounding broken. “Please! I never should have hit you! I never will again. I’m terribly sorry, and want to show it. So tell me please, right now if you possibly can, what it is you want from me. Tell me what you and your brothers think I should be doing different, and if it’s in my power, if it’s possible at all, I swear I’ll try to do it.”
For a moment I say nothing, fearing I’ll sob, or choke on blood, if I speak. But then words well right up with the blood, I’m helpless to stop them: “I know you hate the mill,” I tell him, and tears come the instant I speak. “I know you love baseball, and aren’t doing what you want. But at least Vera fights. She says her dopey prayers no matter what!” I lean against the door, gasping for air and strength to finish. “All I want is for you to fight, Papa. To fight to stay alive inside! No matter what.”
For a moment it seems he’s turned to stone again. Then I hear him moving toward me, till he’s just inches away. I don’t look or turn, but I feel it now—not just his hand or voice but his entire body, right up against mine. And it’s quaking like a cold wet dog’s. Or like Vera’s when she prayed. He’s just like me! I think, amazed despite the pain. He’s just a grownup boy, stuck in a body, stuck in a life. And his life isn’t working. It’s not working at all. And he’s got no father, his mother can’t understand, he’s got no one to help him fix it.
Feeling this, knowing it, I turn and try to hold my father, as he’s so often held me. He makes a small rasping sound when my arms slide round him, then wraps me up, very gently, and holds me back. He says nothing more, but I feel his broken breath, his broken love, his fear and heartbeat.
We’re still sitting this way, and still trembling, when Roy’s faded red plaid jacket appears in the window.
BOOK TWO
Dogmatomachy
CHAPTER ONE
The Shed
Unable to function as plants, we must serve as manure.
—Edward Conze
Camas/Spring/1963
On Sunday
morning, the day after he punched me, Papa donned his old Schenectady White Sox training sweats and a pair of six-dollar running shoes, hopped in the Fortyford, drove up the hill to the McLoughlin High School track, and did sixteen quarter-mile laps as fast as he could run, walk, or stagger them. When he got back home he was blotchy-faced, gray-skinned, and smelled so close to dead that Peter involuntarily retched as he walked past. I about retched too, when the first thing he did upon limping into the kitchen was grab his Lucky Strikes down off the top of the refrigerator. Instead of lighting one, though, he grabbed the carton in a stranglehold, hissed, “You did this to me!,” ripped open every pack, shredded and pulped every last cigarette, then swept up the whole mess and flushed it down the toilet. From that day forward he ran four miles every day after work, and didn’t smoke another cigarette.
On Sabbath morning a week after he hit me, Papa drove down to an abandoned commercial dairy beside the new Reynolds aluminum plant on Vancouver Lake and spent the day salvaging beat-up studs and cedar siding from one of five barns that were about to be razed and burned. The dairy—Jazzy Jersey Farms it was called; everybody in Camas used to drink their milk—had gone out of business shortly after the aluminum plant came on-line, for the most basic reason imaginable: the cows had all died. The bovine mass death was front-page news for several days running, and for a week or two a lot of people seemed to want to shut the plant down. But when Reynolds Metals bought the dairy for about three times its worth and started grazing beef cattle in its supposedly lethal pastures, the public outcry died as quickly as had the dairy cows. The only person who stayed worked up about it was Everett, who happened to meet a girl at church who swore on three Bibles that her dad worked at Reynolds Metals, and that his job was to patrol the pastures in a tractor every morning before daylight, and to drag away and bury any beef cattle that had dropped dead in the night. Everett called The Vancouver Guardian and The Oregonian with the story, but nobody would believe him, so he borrowed a friend’s flash camera, got up at three o’clock one morning, and started off on his bike for the Reynolds plant in hopes of documenting the cover-up himself. Unfortunately a state cop stopped him two miles from our house, asked what he was doing bicycling in the dark without a head- or taillight, and when Everett told the truth, three Bibles and all, it inspired the cop to escort him all the way back home, wake our whole neighborhood with a siren blast, and tell Mama and Papa that their son was going to end up behind bars if he didn’t quit telling smart-aleck lies to officers of the law.
The Brothers K Page 13
