Great Circle: A Novel

by Maggie Shipstead

  “Would they just be bones now?” I asked Mitch, shouting over the Jeep’s flapping top and Pearl Jam on Canadian radio.

  “Probably,” he shouted back. “I don’t know how long any of that stuff takes.”

  “Why did he learn to fly?”

  “What?”

  “My dad. Why did he learn to fly?”

  “I don’t know. I never asked.”

  “Why didn’t you ask?”

  “I don’t know!” He seemed irritated, then softened. “He wasn’t someone who liked being asked to explain himself. Runs in the family.”

  Also, Mitch wasn’t great at remembering to be interested in other people. It’s not fair to blame him for anything, but the way some parents always repeat a mantra to their kids like “Treat others how you want to be treated” or “Actions speak louder than words,” Mitch would say “You only live once.” He would say it when he cracked a beer after three months sober or bet too much on a long shot at Santa Anita. He was the original YOLO guy. When I was little, I made casting agents laugh by solemnly parroting him whenever they asked me if I wanted to show them my biggest smile or be in a commercial for a water park. With my dirtbag Katie McGee–era friends, I didn’t even bother saying it. They knew.

  Mitch would never have called himself a parent anyway.

  On the lake’s northern shore, I learned from informational placards that mountains as big or bigger than the Himalayas had once stood there, maybe the highest mountains that ever existed, but they’d eroded away to nothing, time kicking down that particular sandcastle, glaciers scraping the rock bare and then disappearing, too. I asked Mitch other questions about my parents, but mostly he didn’t know or couldn’t come up with anything interesting.

  One night when we’d stopped at a diner, I said, “What if they didn’t die?”

  Mitch was smacking the side of a ketchup bottle. “What do you mean?”

  “What if they just went off somewhere and never came back?”

  He put down the ketchup and fixed me with a grave expression, not easy to pull off under the David Beckham faux-hawk he’d had at the time. “Hadley, they wouldn’t have done that to you.”

  “Or to you?”

  “They died. That’s what happened. You need to believe that.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I knew what I needed to believe, but knowing and believing weren’t the same.

  Where I was sitting, there’d once been mountains higher than Everest. Anything was possible.

  An Incomplete History of Missoula, Montana

  c. 13,000 b.c.–February 1927

  Fifteen thousand years ago.

  An ice sheet advances from the north. A long glacial finger reaches down and plugs the Clark Fork River west of where Missoula will be. A lake forms, grows massive and spidery, three thousand miles square, two thousand feet deep, reflects the shadowed undersides of clouds. Mountaintops turn to islands.

  Icebergs calve into the lake, float and drift. Sometimes boulders are locked inside them, carried south from far away: a journey of hundreds of years, maybe a thousand. When the bergs melt, the rocks plummet to the lake bed.

  The lake gets too big, too deep, paws and digs at the ice dam until it turns buoyant and cracks apart, releasing the water. Collapsing, the lake churns over what will be Idaho, Oregon, Washington. The whole thing drains in three days, emptying at ten times the combined power of all the rivers in our world, though no statistic can get at its marauding violence, its deluvianness. Like gleeful strongmen, the currents toss giant rocks and huge chunks of ice into the air. Canyons are dug, herds swept away. Mastodons and mammoths are caught up and drowned and washed into the slack water. Saber-toothed cats, too, and beavers the size of grizzlies and dire wolves and giant ground sloths and all that lost, oversize menagerie.

  From the north, the glaciers creep back down the mountains until the river is blocked again. Again, the lake fills. Again, the dam breaks. For two or three thousand years the cycle repeats, until something changes and the ice recedes. On the empty lake bed, where five mountain valleys come together like the twisted limbs of a sea star, where the peaked and porched and turreted Queen Anne house belonging to Wallace Graves will one day stand, grass grows. Saplings bend in the wind.

  At some point: people. Hunters with stone tools, walking from Siberia, leaving behind carvings and paintings on the rocks. (What do they make of this endlessly unspooling land? Who could imagine a blue sphere suspended in black infinity?) Leaves rustle, rivers bend through valleys. More hunters pass through with better tools, subtler languages, myths about a great flood. Tipis and sturgeon-nosed canoes. Dogs and horses.

  In 1805, white people make the scene: Lewis and Clark heading west, then back the other way ten months later, having seen the Pacific.

  A narrow and wooded canyon, good for ambushes, leads east out of the valley to plains coursing with bison. Hunters coming from the west are attacked there sometimes by plains people, Blackfeet possessive of the herds, and the bones of the dead are left behind.

  White people sidle in again. Porte de l’Enfer, French trappers call the canyon because of the bones. Hell Gate.

  In 1855, a treaty is signed between Isaac Stevens, the governor of Washington Territory, and the local tribes (Bitterroot Salish, Pend d’Oreilles, Kootenai). The document is a fine example of its pernicious genre, full of tricks and mutual incomprehension, implied promises of death and loss. At night Stevens dreams of scraping shovels and clanking hammers, of seams stitched with timber and iron.

  The grand metropolis of Hell Gate, population twenty, becomes the seat of Washington Territory’s new Missoula County (Missoula from a Salish word for cold, chilling waters). Before long there are tents and sod-roof cabins, a few rinky-dink farms, a saloon, a post office, thieves strung up by vigilantes. In 1864 Missoula County is made part of the new Montana Territory. A lumber mill and a flour mill are built upstream, and Hell Gate turns into a ghost town in a flash, everyone gone to Missoula Mills.

  More houses, stores, streets. Banks. A newspaper. A fort to protect the good people of Missoula from the Indians who have not yet been swept away. In August 1877, more than seven hundred Nez Perce cross the mountains from Idaho with their horses and livestock and dogs, retreating from the U.S. Army, looking for a place where they will be left alone, a place that no longer exists.

  They camp on a riverbank, are awakened by soldiers shooting into their tipis. The soldiers try to burn the tipis, have trouble getting the fires going, keep trying. Though most of the band scatters, some children have been hidden inside, under blankets, and are burned alive. The warriors regroup, attack. The soldiers retreat. In the night, the band moves on, toward what will be Yellowstone. They will try to reach Canada, Sitting Bull’s camp there, but most won’t make it. Most are sent to Fort Leavenworth.

  In 1883, the bleeding end of the Northern Pacific Railroad arrives in Missoula from the west, has to be pushed and pulled sixty more miles to meet tracks en route from the Great Lakes, not the first transcontinental line but still pretty good, still pretty epic, still pretty helpful as far as settling the wilderness. Ulysses S. Grant binds the continent to itself with a golden spike.

  More men arrive in Missoula, rough men, lonely men, thirsty men. Want a drink, boys? Want a girl? Try West Front Street, follow the red light. Madam Mary Gleim, fat and fearsome, owns half the place, maybe more. She’ll get you a girl from Chicago, a girl from China, a girl from France (ask for French Emma). She can get you Chinamen, too, if it’s workers you need. If your workers want opium, she’ll get that.

  Missoula gets a telephone exchange and electricity, becomes a new official city in a new official state (Montana, b. 1889). A farmer in his field scratches his head over the lonely boulder that seems to have fallen from the sky.

  A train crosses the plains. Wallace Graves, hungry for mountains he’s never seen, is heading west from Ne
w York. He gets off in Butte, tries Butte for a while, a bronco of a town, a Babel town, where men from far-flung places go into the copper mines together, come out, take their wages to the saloon or to the girls of Venus Alley. Fights in the streets every day, every night: miner versus miner, drunk versus drunk, Irish versus Italian versus Bohunk versus Swede, union men versus scabs.

  Wallace paints the jumbled structures of the mines, the gray figures walking with their tin pails, the headframe and machine buildings of the Neversweat mine and its seven slender smokestacks like cigarillos stuck in the ground. But it is not quite right for Wallace, this city. He boards a westbound train, disembarks in Missoula, stays.

  In 1911, Wallace goes with most everyone in town to a field near the fort to watch a pilot named Eugene Ely swoop up out of the bowl of mountains in his Curtiss biplane, breaching the ghostly surface of the forgotten ancient lake. Ely buzzes the crowd, dips his wings. A group of Cree have pitched their tipis nearby. They sit on horseback, watching the machine.

  “What a world,” Wallace Graves remarks to his lady friend, holding his hat to his head as he looks up.

  A train crosses the plains. Addison Graves looks through the portraits of his children once again, holding them carefully by the corners so as not to smudge.

  Wallace goes out to fetch his brother for breakfast and finds the cottage empty, nothing changed inside except the crates pried open. He finds his old paintings, sees they are not as good as he remembered. He chastises his younger self for his florid brushwork, his trite composition. The children are in the main house, back from the dawn ride he doesn’t know they’d taken because he does not trouble himself with how they spend their time. They are washed and combed (combed! of their own doing!) and sitting upright at Berit’s breakfast table, waiting to meet their father.

  “He’s gone,” Wallace says without preamble, coming inside. “No note or anything.”

  Berit, at the stove, says, “What do you mean he is gone? Gone where?”

  “Just gone.”

  “And his things? They are gone?”

  “He didn’t have any things.” Wallace remembers the cardboard portfolio. Addison had taken that, at least.

  Jamie bolts from the table, pounds up the stairs.

  “Is he coming back?” Marian asks, rigid with seriousness.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe he went for a walk.”

  “To be honest I think probably not. Are you upset?”

  She considers. “I thought he’d want to meet us. But it would have been worse if he’d met us and then left.”

  “I don’t know about worse.”

  “But he might come back.”

  “He might.”

  “I wouldn’t want him to stay if he didn’t want to.”

  “I suppose not,” says Wallace. Then with some venom: “Heaven forbid he should do something he doesn’t want to do.”

  “So things will stay the same?”

  “I suppose they will.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “You can be sad. You won’t offend me.”

  She looks out the window, says, “Where do you think he went?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I think I would be more sad if I knew where he went.”

  Wallace nods. Better only to wonder what he’d chosen instead of them. “I know what you mean.”

  For some time, some weeks, it seems possible Addison will return. But the leaves turn orange and the nights cold, and he doesn’t come back.

  “Why do you think he didn’t stay?” Jamie is sitting on a footstool in Wallace’s studio up in the house’s turret. With charcoal on scrap paper the boy is drawing minnows hovering over a rocky river bottom. “Why did he come here at all?”

  “I don’t know.” Wallace is at his easel, oils pungent on a palette, sketches pinned up around him. “I don’t know him very well. We were never close like you and Marian. I think he meant to stay, but he got spooked.” He leans to look at Jamie’s drawing. “That’s very good. I have a sense of water moving around the fish—it’s clever how you did that.”

  “Spooked by what?”

  Wallace’s brush nibbles at the canvas. By you. By the fact of you. “It’s only a guess, but I think he might not have liked the idea of owing us anything.”

  “Why would he think he owed us?”

  Wallace puts down his brush. “You are a very dear boy.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s a forgiving question, that’s all.”

  Quietly, to the charcoal fish, Jamie says, “I don’t think I do forgive him, though.”

  Life proceeds as before. Berit struggles to keep order. She tries and fails to get Marian to wear dresses. There is never quite enough money. Wallace is paid well by the university but likes to bet on cards. Sleeping dogs lie strewn through the house.

  In their bedrooms where they seldom sleep, preferring the porch, the twins hoard clattery jumbles of antlers and moose paddles and foraged troves of bones and teeth. Crumbling birds’ nests line their windowsills in the company of pinecones and interesting rocks. Feathers are pinned to the walls. The twins pick up human artifacts, too: arrowheads, bits of broken crockery, bullets, nails. Jamie makes drawings of what he finds, arranges still lifes and draws them, adding color with pastels or watercolors Wallace filches for him from the university. “Here come the naturalists,” Wallace says when they return to the house in the evenings, extravagantly dirty and with full pockets. “Here come the archaeologists back from the dig.”

  They do not always go to school. If it is a splendidly sunny day or an enticingly snowy one, they might wander away somewhere else. They have a friend who cuts with them, Caleb, wilder even than they are, a couple of years older, the son of a whore who lives in a sagging old cabin just down the Rattlesnake. (Gilda, Caleb’s mother, had chosen as a surname for herself and her son the name of the river that flows up from the south and joins the Clark Fork on the far side of town: Bitterroot.)

  Caleb is a graceful, feline child with long black hair loose down his back, so straight and glossy that people say his father must have been either an Indian or a Chinese. He picks pockets. He steals moonshine from his mother and sweets and fishhooks from the shops downtown. He hates the men who come to his cabin, hates what his mother does with them, but will brook no insult to her. He’ll sock Marian in the gut or arm as soon as he will Jamie, and in summer all three swim naked in creeks and rivers.

  Though Marian and Jamie have both gone at different times to watch through a gap in the curtains when Gilda is at work, they have not discussed what they saw. Jamie was troubled by how much bigger the man was than Gilda, the way he threw his body at hers with the mindless force of a pile driver. Gilda’s small feet in their dirty stockings bobbled. Helplessness upsets Jamie. He rescues drowning bees from the creek, brings home stray dogs, feeds abandoned baby birds with an eyedropper, then with worms he gets Marian to chop up. The birds look like angry old men with their wrinkled necks and open mouths. Some live, some die. Wallace offers little resistance to the dogs, the other creatures. “Poor soul,” he says, looking over a raven chick too weak to lift its head.

  “No more,” Berit says after every new addition, but she saves scraps for the dogs. Jamie has a recurring nightmare in which he is made to choose between shooting Marian and shooting a dog. He will not eat meat. “You will die with no meat,” Berit says, and yet Jamie lives on.

  He’d been reassured when, in the midst of all the ruckus, Gilda had reached up and coolly smoothed her hair back into place.

  Marian, during her turn at Gilda’s window, had been transfixed by how the man (a different man from Jamie’s) had become a wild beast, how his face had twisted and his back arched, how he’d shoved Gilda up the bed and gobbled blindly between her legs. Eventually, after he had mounted her the way a d
og or elk would, he went still. The beast vanished, and he became a man again, a friendly-looking man straightening his clothes. Marian began to study men after that—shopkeepers, neighbors, Wallace’s friends, Wallace, the milkman, the postman—peering too intently into faces, looking for beasts.

  Wallace knows Marian and Jamie slip off on adventures. He chooses not to go past the vaguest knowing, not to worry they might not return. He has adventures of his own. Sometimes he goes off after dark to find a poker game, a drink in a speakeasy or roadhouse, a woman. He is a quiet drunk but an ardent one.

  A check arrives from a bank in Seattle, a decent sum. A letter with it explains that Mr. Addison Graves wishes money to be sent periodically for the upkeep of the children. Wallace goes out and loses most of it right away in a roadhouse cardroom. (A larger check had come once, when the children were very small—their settlement from the estate of their maternal grandfather. He’d used it to settle a debt.) On his way home, at dawn, he stops and immerses himself in the oxbow pond where he’d taken Addison, but the water is cold and tea-brown and he does not feel cleansed, only scummy and sodden. Sullenly, floating, he mulls over whether the money from Addison was newly earned or from some reserve of his savings. He thinks his brother should have known better than to send him so much money at once, but then he remembers Addison knows nothing of his gambling.

  The cottage that was meant for Addison glows at night like a sturdy, neighborly moon because Marian has made it her place. After her father’s brief visit, she’d unpacked all the crates herself. Such wonders to be sorted through: Wallace’s paintings, books of all thicknesses and dimensions, and then the glorious, bewildering array of exotic souvenirs. Some were self-explanatory (rugs, vases) and others were mysterious, such as the seven-foot-long, sharp-ended, spiraled animal horn wrapped in burlap and packed in a long tube all its own. She’d propped the horn in a corner behind the stove, left it leaning there like the neglected staff of a sorcerer. She wishes she could imagine her father buying, say, a particular red-and-black wooden bowl, but she doesn’t know what sort of scene to visualize. A bustling city? A lonely fishing village? A hot place? A cold place? Why had he chosen this bowl of all the bowls in the world?