by Robert Stone
The menu featured wurst, schnitzel, potato pancakes, noodles and dumplings. There were deer heads and antlers with brass plaques on the dark wood walls and scrolled mottos in gothic script. A polka was on the jukebox and the place was filled with hunters. At Ehrlich's many of the hunters had family members along. There were women and children, even babies. Happy couples danced. The entire place rejoiced in an atmosphere of good-hearted revelry.
"Boy, is this place ever different from the Hunter's," Michael said. "It's not just the food."
"Know why?" Norman asked.
"Different people," said Michael.
"Different folks," Norman said. "This is Prevost County. They're Germans here. They're peace-loving. Orderly. You gotta love 'em."
"Do you?"
"Sure. Whereas the Hunter's is in the fucking swamp. Harrison County. Irish, Scotch-Irish, French Canadian. They're poor and surly. They're over at the Hunter's getting nasty drunk and selling one another wolf tickets. While here, hier ist fröhlich."
He spread his arms and with a cold, false smile enacted a parody of gemütlichkeit.
"Maybe we belong over there," Alvin Mahoney said.
Michael and Norman looked at each other and laughed.
Norman raised his beer glass. "Here's looking at you, Alvin," he said.
Alvin laughed. He was nervous, drinkless. It might be safer driving, Michael thought, to let him have a belt.
Michael was aware of Norman watching him. "You didn't shoot today," Norman said.
Michael shrugged.
As they were waiting for the check, Norman said, "I have to ask you something. Over at St. Emmerich's, what are they teaching my friend Paulie about abortion? Me, I don't think there's much wrong with the world that doesn't come from there being too many people."
Michael poured out the last of the beer.
"I'm sorry," Norman said. "You're the only person I know to ask."
For the second time Michael was annoyed with Norman. Of course, sociology was the man's job. And he had never been subtle or discreet. He had been to Vietnam. He owned the big questions.
"They don't talk about it," Michael said. "Not at that level." He put a paper napkin to a tiny puddle of foam on the table before him. "They talked about hunting the other day." What he said was not exactly true. Paul was being taught that life began at conception. The rest, of course, would follow. But Michael was not in the mood to defend the theses of St. Emmerich's Christian instruction. Embarrassed, he flushed and hid behind his beer. He felt besieged. As though they were trying to take something away from him. Something he was not even sure he possessed.
Because I believe, he thought. They know I believe. If I believe. But faith is not what you believe, he thought. Faith was something else.
A blond waitress with a pretty, wholesome smile came over to them but she did not have the check.
"Is one of you guys Michael Ahearn?" she asked.
"Me," Michael said.
"Sir, you got a phone call. Want to take it in the kitchen?"
He followed her across the room, resounding with polkas, laughter, the rattle of plates and foaming schooners. In the kitchen three generations of women, the oldest in her late sixties, the youngest a little older than his son, worked purposefully. The warm room smelled of vinegary marinades. His wife was on the phone.
"Michael," she said. Her voice was distant and, he thought, chill. It made him think of the woods. Or of the light shining at the bottom of the freezing stream. "Paul is not accounted for. He was at the gym and then I thought he was going to Jimmy Collings's. But he's not there. And his school books are here. And Olaf is missing." She paused. "It's snowing here."
He remembered the deer at the edge of the stream. Its life ebbing, legs giving way.
"I suppose I called for moral support," she said. "I'm afraid."
"Hang in," he told her.
He walked unseeing back through the noisy room. Alvin and Norman were paying the check. Michael went into his wallet, took out two twenties and threw them on the table.
"That's too much," Norman said.
"Kristin is worried about Paul. He's out late."
It was snowing on Ehrlich's parking lot when they got to the Jeep. Alvin checked the lines securing the carcass of the deer. Michael took a back seat.
"You know," Alvin said, "kids are always getting up to some caper and you get all hot and bothered and it's nothing."
It was the last thing anyone said on the ride home.
The snow came harder as they drove, slowing them down. Michael watched it fall. He thought of the man with the deer in his wheelbarrow. By gad, sir, you present a distressing spectacle. If he could make it up somehow. His thoughts had all been mean and low. What he did not want in his mind's eye now was his son's face, the face on which he so doted. But it was there after all and the boy under snow. Hang in.
"Did I pass out?" he asked them.
"You were sleeping," Norman said.
How could he sleep? He had slept but forgotten nothing. His boy had been there the whole time. Prayer. No. You did not pray for things. Prayers, like Franklin's key on a kite, attracted the lightning, burned out your mind and soul.
When, hours later, they drove into town there were dead deer hanging from the trees on everyone's lawn. The lawns were wide in that prairie town. They supported many trees, and almost every bare tree on almost every lawn in front of almost every house had a dead deer or even two, slung over the low boughs. There were bucks and does and fawns. All fair game, legal. There were too many deer.
A police car was blocking Michael's driveway. Norman parked the Jeep on the street, across the lawn from his front door. Everyone got out, and when they did the young town policeman, whom Michael knew, whose name was Vandervliet, climbed out of his cruiser.
"Sir," Vandervliet said, "they're not here. They're at MacIvor."
MacIvor was the tri-county hospital on the north edge of town.
Norman put a hand on his shoulder. Michael climbed into Vandervliet's Plymouth cruiser.
"What?" Michael asked the young cop. "Is my son alive?"
"Yessir. But he's suffering from exposure."
And it did not sound so good because as they both knew, the cold, at a certain point, was irreversible, and all the heat, the fire, the cocoa, hot-water bottles, sleeping bags, down jackets, quilts, whiskey, medicine, nothing could make a child stop trembling and his temperature rise.
"Your wife is injured, Professor. I mean she ain't injured bad but she fell down trying to carry the boy I guess and so she's admitted also over there at MacIvor."
"I see," Michael said.
"See, the boy was looking for the dog 'cause the dog was out in the snow."
On the way to the hospital, Michael said, "I think I'm going to shoot that dog."
"I would," said Vandervliet.
At MacIvor, they were waiting for him. There was a nurse whose husband ran the Seattle-inspired coffee shop in town and a young doctor from back east. They looked so agitated, he went numb with fear. The doctor introduced himself but Michael heard none of it.
"Paul's vital signs are low," the doctor said. "We're hoping he'll respond. Unfortunately he's not conscious, and we're concerned. We don't know how long he was outside in the storm."
Michael managed to speak. "His body temperature ...?"
"That's a cause of concern," the doctor said. "That will have to show improvement."
Michael did not look at him.
"We can treat this," the doctor said. "We see it here. There's hope."
"Thank you," Michael said. Above all, he did not want to see the boy. That fair vision and he kept repelling it. He was afraid to watch Paul die, though surely even in death he would be beautiful.
"We'd like you to talk to ... toyour wife," the doctor said. "We're sure she has a fracture and she won't go to x-ray." He hesitated for a moment and went off down the corridor.
At MacIvor the passageways had the form of an X. As the doctor w
alked off down one bar of the pattern, Michael saw what appeared to be his wife at the end of the other. She was in a wheelchair. The nurse followed him as he walked toward her.
"She won't go to x-ray," the nurse complained. "Her leg's been splinted and she's had pain medication and we have a bed ready for her but she won't rest. She won't let the medication do its thing."
Kristin, huge-eyed and white as chalk, wheeled herself in their direction. But when Michael came up, the nurse in tow, she looked through him. There was an open Bible on her lap.
The nurse went to take the handles of Kristin's wheelchair. Michael stepped in and took them himself. Do its thing? He had trouble turning the wheelchair around. The rear wheels refused to straighten out. Do their thing. He pushed his wife toward the wall. Her splinted right leg extended straight out and when its foot touched the wall, she uttered a soft cry. Tears ran down her face.
"There's a little trick to it," said the nurse. She made a sound that was not quite a laugh. "Let me."
Michael ignored her. The wheelchair resisted his trembling pressure. Oh goddam shit.
"Take me in to him," Kristin said.
"Better not," the nurse said, to Michael's relief.
If he could see himself, futilely trying to ambulate his wife on wheels, Michael thought, it would be funny. But hospitals never had mirrors. There was a discovery. In the place of undoings, where things came apart, your children changed to cadavers, you spun your wife in wheelies, no mirrors. The joke was on you but you did not have to watch yourself.
When they were in the room she said, "I fell carrying him. He was by the garden fence—I fell in the snow." He could picture her carrying Paul up from the garden, tripping, slipping, stumbling. He took her icy hand but she withdrew it. "He was so cold."
"Lie down," he said. "Can you?"
"No, it hurts."
He stood and rang for the nurse.
Kristin took up the Bible as though she were entranced and began to read aloud.
"'Be merciful unto me, O God, be merciful unto me: for my soul trusteth in thee: yea, in the shadow of thy wings will I make my refuge.'"
Closing his eyes, he tried to hold on to the words. Listening to her read in her mother's strange featureless tone, he could imagine Luther's Bible the way her mother out on the plains must have heard it from her own parents. A psalm for fools in the snow. Really expecting nothing but cold and death in the shadow of those wings. Odin's raven.
"'Until these calamities be overpast, I will cry unto God most high.'"
Michael sat listening, despising the leaden resignation of his wife's prayer, its acceptance, surrender.
"'My soul is among lions,'" she read, "'and I lie even among them that are set on fire.'"
His impulse was flight. He sat there burning until the nurse came in. For some reason, she looked merry, confidential.
"I think we turned a corner," she said. "Michael! Kristin! I think we turned a corner."
Then the doctor entered quietly and they got Kristin into bed and she went under the medication. Even unconscious, her eyes were half open.
The doctor said you responded or you didn't, and Paul had responded. His temperature was going up. He was coming up. He would even get his fingers and toes back and his ethical little Christian brain going, it appeared. The doctor looked so relieved.
"You can have a minute while we get the gurney. We've gotta get her x-rayed pronto because she's got a broken leg there."
"You can see Paul," the nurse said. "He's sleeping. Real sleep now."
The doctor laughed. "It's very exhausting to half freeze to death."
"It would be," Michael said.
While they got the gurney, he looked into Kristin's half-open, tortured, long-lashed blue eyes and brushed the slightly graying black hair from them. With her long face and buck teeth she looked like the Christus on a Viking crucifix. Given her, he thought, given me, why didn't he die? Maybe he still will, Michael thought. The notion terrified him. He had stood up to make his escape when the orderlies came in to take Kristin away. Michael rubbed her cold hand.
The chapel was down at the end of the corridor. It had a kind of altar, stained-glass windows that opened on nothing, that were inlaid with clouds and doves and other fine inspirational things.
Michael had been afraid, for a while, that there was something out there, at the beginning and end of consciousness. An alpha and an omega to things. He had believed it for years on and off. And that night, he had felt certain, the fire would be visited on him. His boy would be taken away and he would know, know absolutely, the power of the most high. Its horrible providence. Its mysteries, its hide-and-seek, and lessons, and redefined top-secret mercies to be understood through prayer and meditation. But only at really special moments of rhapsody and ecstasy and O, wondrous clarity. Behold now behemoth. Who can draw Leviathan? Et cetera.
But now his son's life was saved. And the great thing had come of nothing, of absolutely nothing, out of a kaleidoscope, out of a Cracker Jack box. Every day its own flower, to every day its own stink and savor. Good old random singularity and you could exercise a proper revulsion for life's rank overabundance and everybody could have their rights and be happy.
And he could be a serious person, a grownup at last, and not worry over things that educated people had not troubled themselves with practically for centuries. Free at last and it didn't mean a thing and it would all be over, some things sooner than later. His marriage, for one, sealed in faith like the Sepulchral stone. Vain now. No one watched over us. Or rather we watched over each other. That was providence, what a relief. He turned his back on the inspirations of the chapel and went out to watch his lovely son survive another day.
2
NIGHT AFTER NIGHT during the Christmas season, Michael burned until dawn. Neither he nor Kristin could quite regain equilibrium. He tried repeatedly through words and small gestures to provide some setting where the two of them might rest, take comfort and exchange the burden of their hearts. The sweet meeting he longed for, the mutual summoning of assurances and insights, somehow never took place. Lengthening her long jaw like a sword swallower, pursing her thin lips, Kristin absorbed her son's return from the dead as though it were her medicine. Pale and shivering, dull-eyed as a snake digesting a rat, she contained the whole awful business. It glowed through her, stretching her translucent skin like a frame.
During Christmas midnight Mass at St. Emmerich's, Michael sat numb and grieving, appalled at his son's intense, clear-eyed devotion. At the Kyrie he accidentally met Kristin's gaze. There were no questions for him there, no promises or confidences or happy conspiracies. Her look was as blank as the face of things themselves. It filled him with the terror of impending loss. He was the only child of a widow; his father had died in Michael's infancy. His mother had been erratic, demanding, flirtatious, constantly threatening him with the abridgment of love.
Kristin's mother had come for Christmas, on furlough from the nursing home to which she had retired after her husband's death. The farm, the fifty ragged acres left of it, had been sold off. Kristin and her mother spent the December afternoons examining old photo albums, doting over the pictures of Pop. Pop and a caught walleye. Pop on a horse. Pop in a canoe or behind the wheel of a new 1955 Buick. Pop with baby Paul. On the drive back to the nursing home, the old girl was vague but lucid. From time to time, Michael looked from the road to find himself fixed in her blue-eyed silent inquiry.
The trip home from his mother-in-law's required an overnight stop. Michael spent it in a cheerless river town that housed the state penitentiary. The prison's original building was a hundred-year-old fortress with crenelated towers and razor-topped walls, shrouded that night in river fog. At one guard tower someone had put up a lighted Christmas tree. Michael stood in the darkness outside his second-story room in the brick and cement motel—a structure itself like a cellblock—and smoked his first cigarette in ten years. But that was the last. He threw the pack away in the morning. There wa
s Paul.
Nights were bad. He came to know the geography of night so well that he could tell the hour without looking at his watch. The stretch he knew best was between one and dawn. Light burned behind his eyes, resinous fires over which sparks whirled. In their glare his rage and dread brought forth bitter, unspeakable thoughts to be shaded, refined, reordered endlessly. Over and over the black insights appeared, one played on the last like tarot cards, spelling out the diminishing possibilities of life for him. Evenings he drank. And though he might sometimes pick up an early hour or two of sleep that way, the alcohol mainly served to keep him awake. He was aware of Kristin beside him and he knew that she was often sleepless too, often with pain, though her leg healed quickly. The bone had not separated and the cast was off by Christmas.
Still, he felt that some terrible misreading of the signs, some great incomprehensibility, was hardening between them. Every morning he got out of bed whipped.
A week after the winter term had opened, he went to his carrel in the university library to read. The campus was under deep snow, ice-crusted by weeks of boreal cold. Trudging up College Hill on a sunny January afternoon, he was blinded by the wind and the glare. The quiet world inside the double glass doors of Bride Library was warm and welcoming.
His small study was on the lower level, its thick-paned narrow window half submerged beneath the snow line outside. Only a pale winter light came, filtered through the needles of an adjoining pine grove. The fluorescent lamp in his cubicle was heartening and businesslike. Waves of heat shimmered against the lower windowpane.
The course he had designed for the spring semester consisted of works from early-twentieth-century vitalism—Frank Norris, Dreiser, Kate Chopin, James Branch Cabell. A hundred years late, his students were not entirely immune to its appeal. In the sterile ease of his afternoon's refuge, laboring under the same sadness he woke to each morning, he settled down with Cabell's Jurgen. It was a book he had liked very much as a youth, although recently he had seemed to run out of new things to say about it. After a weary page or two he went to sleep.
The exterior light was fading altogether when he heard a gentle rap at the door. It was Phyllis Strom.
