by Roger Wall
PRAISE
A beautifully written novel about love and disappointments, about the bonds we make and the ways they strengthen or break in moments of crisis. Filled with personality, earthy, guttural, the prose of the novel is crisp and suffused with poetic sentences. The setting details are vivid—the juniper trees, the caves, the mud brick stove. The landscape comes beautifully alive, as do other plot points in During-the-Event’s journey.
—Chinelo Okparanta, 2018 Permafrost Prize Judge and author of Under the Udala Trees and Happiness, Like Water
Roger Wall’s splendid, hauntingly strange During-the-Event strikes deep emotional chords. Part dystopian tale, part timeless allegory, part eulogy for the memorable Ancient Mariner figure of Otis, this is a beautifully cadenced novel with a philosophically melancholy heart.
—Howard Norman, author of The Ghost Clause
Set in a brutal time, when the havoc of global warming and rising seas have resulted in mass extermination and machine rule, Roger Wall’s During-the-Event brings a vivid warning. Through the innocent eyes of one young survivor, however, we experience the intricate delicacy, still, of creation, and a persistent journey toward renewal.
—Diane Simmons, author of The Courtship of Eva Eldridge
DURING-THE-EVENT
A NOVEL
University of Alaska Press
Fairbanks, Alaska
Text © 2019 Roger Wall
Published by
University of Alaska Press
P.O. Box 756240
Fairbanks, AK 99775-6240
Cover design by Martyn Schmoll.
Interior design and layout by 590 Design.
Author photo by David Current.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Names: Wall, Roger, 1955-author.
Title: During-the-Event : a novel / by Roger Wall.
Description: Fairbanks, AK : University of Alaska Press, [2019] |
Identifiers: LCCN 2018029047 (print) | LCCN 2018030477 (ebook) | ISBN 9781602233836 (ebook) | ISBN 9781602233829 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: | GSAFD: Dystopian fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3623.A4428 (ebook) | LCC PS3623.A4428 D87 2019 (print) | DDC 813/.6dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018029047
To Jan & Barret
PART I:
OTIS
“I want to see my grave. To make sure you’ve dug it properly.”
Otis spoke those words the day before he died. We were in the cave in Windy Butte, our home in the White Earth River valley in the former state of North Dakota. Otis was at the back of the cave, where the air was cool and damp, in a bed he’d made by nailing together peeling clapboard that he’d scavenged from the ruins of the Catholic church. I was standing near the cave’s entrance, beside the mud brick stove he’d built when I was an infant. (He’d worked with me strapped to his back with a strip of blanket, he’d told me.) I was holding a pot of corn mush and looking across the valley to Cemetery Butte, where I should have been digging his grave.
He said the first part, “I want to see my grave,” in a quiet, weak voice—maybe he had just woken up—but the words made me stop chewing and hold off on taking another spoonful of mush. I peered into the dim light at the back of the cave where he was rustling around.
He had thrown off the rabbit-skin blanket and was struggling to sit up. The bed squeaked. He coughed and hawked up phlegm, cleared his throat. Then in a stern voice, he said the second part, “To make sure you’ve dug it properly.”
He seemed to accent “properly,” as though he knew what I had been up to that morning: not digging his grave on Cemetery Butte but sailing the canoe on Lake Sakakawea, an act that put me at risk of drowning and us at risk of detection, or so Otis would have reasoned. He seemed to fear being rounded up by government agents more than he feared death, although neither he nor I, alone or together, ever encountered an agent in all of our days in White Earth River, perhaps because Otis sometimes rushed me into the basement or up to the cave to avoid what he insisted were agents slinking into our town.
I didn’t answer Otis right away, since I hadn’t expected that he’d want to inspect the grave and was worried he’d notice that I hadn’t dug it to his specifications. His breathing had become heavy in the past few days, as though he had to push each breath through a handful of silt to get it out. But I figured he could survive a trip up the butte. He was a tough old coot.
“Once I finish eating, I’ll take you there. On my back,” I said and then sunk the spoon into the pot of corn mush. I was starving.
“I don’t know about that,” Otis said.
“Do you want some of this?” I asked.
I held up the dented pot toward Otis. He was resting against the juniper trunks that lined the cave wall. He shook his head. There was hardly any mush left, anyway.
“Why are you stooped over?” Otis asked.
“My back is tired.”
“You look guilty.”
Otis seemed to know whenever I disobeyed one of his rules.
“It’s a weak posture, you’ll injure yourself in the garden,” he said. “Try to avoid it, for your own sake.” He hawked some more phlegm.
“Okay.”
I scraped the last scoopful from the pot and then dunked it into the wash pail.
“I’ll need my sweater. The cool season has come early this year,” he said.
“The warm season has just begun,” I corrected him. “You’ve been in the cave too long. You need some sun, that’s all.”
Where the light from the cave entrance fell off, a dresser stood with half of a broken mirror propped against the wall. I yanked on the mismatched knobs to open the warped top drawer. Inside, Otis’s red wool socks and navy blue sweater were arranged right to left.
The air at the back of the cave smelled of Otis, not just the usual smell of his body but also of his urine and feces. He hadn’t washed in a few days. Neither had he cleaned his teeth with the stick, which was perhaps why his breath smelled sour. Or maybe his lungs were infected and he was exhaling bits of decay and pus when he coughed up phlegm. I kneeled on the willow matting and began to dress him.
“Okay, give me a foot,” I said and rolled the red socks over the white cotton ones he had darned so many times that the toes and heels were a crosshatch of black threads. Over the socks I tied the wide deer-hide straps of his rubber sandals. I wore a pair of these, too; we had made them from the garden cart’s flat tire.
“Up with the arms,” I said.
I slid the heavy navy blue sweater over his head and then brushed wisps of thin gray hair out of his face and tucked them into his braid.
“There. Climb on up, now. Come on. Wrap your arms around my chest.”
I squatted, with my back toward him, and grabbed his bony thighs, one in each hand. He fell against me, and I hoisted him up into the small of my back.
“Don’t drop me down the butte,” he said.
He sounded scared, so I tried to make a joke: “You think you’ll be so lucky? Just hold on tight.”
Otis gripped my arms, but as I stepped forward, he swayed backward and groaned in panic. I countered by jerking him into my back.
“I told you to hold on!” I shouted.
“I’m so weak,” he whispered in a hoarse voice.
“Okay, let me get my footing, here,” I said.
The willow mats covering the cave floor flexed under our weight. I couldn’t see very well in the shadows. Otis had skinned the bark off the junipers to brighten the walls, but the split beams that held back the crumbly sandstone ceiling were covered with a film of soot and grease from cooking and seemed to swallow light. I crouched so Otis wouldn’t bump his head or smudge the figures I had dr
awn in the grime when I was young.
“Sunshine! I bet that feels good!” I said, trying to sound cheerful, when we reached the cave’s entrance. Otis’s skin had turned yellow over the past few days, and I hoped the sun would make it bronze again.
“I’ve never seen such bright light,” Otis said.
“It’s always like this.”
Maybe his vision was off; the whites of his eyes had become as yellow as his skin.
I cinched him up onto my hips and started down the wind-scoured trail, avoiding the steep sandstone flanks that I usually took to and from our cave in Windy Butte. Its flanks were so dry that they seemed incapable of supporting life, but as I carried Otis through a maze of low outcrops, we passed clumps of rabbit bush, goldenrod, and grasses, which were enough to interest the pronghorns whose faint tracks I often followed along this south-facing slope. I never saw them, only their hoof prints. Sometimes I thought the prints were from animals in the spirit world that Otis spoke of; perhaps their spirits lived in the cracks and crevasses and hollows of the butte so they could see their still-living brothers and sisters walking the trails and grazing in the terraces below. I was afraid of disturbing them.
“And you thought I’d drop you, huh?” I joked when we reached the base of Windy Butte. I was relieved I hadn’t and thought I deserved a little praise, which Otis provided by saying, “This is nice, being carried. You’ve become a strong boy. We’ll have to do this again.”
His breathing was calm, now; it didn’t sound gravelly.
“Sure, we’ll do it tomorrow. We can do it everyday.”
I lingered, there on the terrace, with Otis pressing into my back, and thought how well he’d done. He was fine. He wasn’t going to die anytime soon, I thought. I’m sure I was smiling, but Otis couldn’t see my face, and he didn’t say anything else.
From the base of Windy Butte, a series of terraces ran stepwise down to the road and garden along the White Earth River. During that period of my life, when Otis was dying and I was making daily trips from the cave to the garden and then Cemetery Butte and sometimes the boathouse, the terraces represented an in-between ground. Their lower elevation spared them from the dry wind higher up on the buttes, but they were well enough above the bottomland not to be haunted by the ghosts of the town people who used to tend the gardens along the river. Nor were they desolate like the abandoned boathouse and playing field and the jagged and flattened ruins of the town. They were gentle, rolling, and undisturbed, the only place in the valley not scarred by destruction or loss, and seemed to be waiting for a person to settle on their slopes and make a fresh start: the hillocks of grass, the gray leaves of sagebrush and willow, delicate ephemerals, and the spikes of orange and the soft purple of Indian paintbrush and coneflowers on the gentle slopes; and groves of box elder, a solitary elm, a patch of June berries, and a stand of chokecherry signaling that somewhere among the trees and shrubs there was enough moisture to provide a reliable trickle for drinking water. We should have lived there, instead of in the cave, especially once we were sure no one was going to wander into our valley.
I avoided the ruins of the town, which were far down and off to the right. Otis went limp as I crossed the road. For a moment I thought he had fallen asleep. I stopped short on the path to the garden and tightened my grip on his thighs. I shouted his name and bounced him up and down. He started to wheeze and then gasped.
“You’re hurting me,” he moaned.
I turned my head and spoke over my shoulder: “I didn’t want you to miss anything.”
“I’m not.”
“Okay, then.”
I backed him onto the bench in the cottonwood grove on the edge of the garden. A light breeze made the leaves tremble and show their pale undersides. Their sound calmed me. It was like the sail vibrating in the wind or water rushing along the hull of the canoe, but the sound of the leaves didn’t make me afraid, as the sound of the sail or water did. Otis’s wheezing became louder. His thin, bony frame rose and fell.
“I should’ve brought a blanket for you to sit on,” I said. “The bench . . .”
“I’ve sat on harder things,” he cut me off. “Ever wrap your legs around a steel girder? Now that’s hard. And cold! Up in that goddamn wind? Makes your balls run for cover.”
I started to laugh. Otis’s stories about iron work in the Center were some of my favorites, except for the one about the man who slipped off a beam and fell ten stories and died.
“I used to kiss Malèna on this bench,” Otis said. “After everyone else had finished working in the garden for the day and had gone home. I liked to kiss her to the sound of the river.”
He rubbed the smooth, worn bench with his fingers and looked away, avoiding my stare. I didn’t say anything.
He swallowed once and then looked me in the eye: “But I didn’t kiss her on the cheek, like I kiss you,” he said.
I worried that the story of kissing Malèna would remind him of her death, how her fever had forced Otis, perhaps, to stop kissing her and, before he knew it, take her on the train to the Center, where she died in a hospital, his last kiss probably on her forehead. She died before I was born.
“You want some water?” I almost shouted at him.
“I’m not drinking anymore.”
“Oh, yes, you are. Of course, you are.”
I dropped a grimy white plastic bucket knotted to a stiff gray cord down the defunct town well and listened for the splash, and then pulled until a half-bucket of foul, mineral-laced water appeared. I waited for the sediment to settle before pouring Otis a tin cup of the salty liquid. When I returned to the grove of cottonwoods, he was slouched forward with his hands folded in his lap. He reached for the cup and then gulped down the water. It seemed to give him energy because he cleared his throat, straightened his back, and said in a strong, energetic voice:
“Tony LePerle was a moron. He was a moron before and a moron afterwards.”
I was relieved that Otis was telling our story, the one about the destruction of the town and our survival, “The Vision Foretelling the Event and the Escape to Destiny,” and seemed to have forgotten his memories of kissing Malèna on the bench.
Otis had created our story around the time I was learning to read. It was more compelling than any of the simple ones I could struggle to read out loud, and every night I begged to hear it. With each retelling Otis added more detail and dramatic pauses and experimented with when to smile, frown, and meet my eyes to draw me into the action. The story’s pull, like a strong current, was too great to resist. Sometimes I resented becoming caught up in it, but that day, with Otis sitting on the bench, I was eager to play my part: our story gave him life. Although Otis could enter the story anywhere, his favorite place was the murder that Tony LePerle had committed.
I nodded my head in agreement and fed Otis the line that he needed to work up a fine rage, which would keep me on the verge of laughter for most of the story:
“Yes, he shouldn’t have returned,” I said.
I had to say this with anger, a touch of hatred. If I really wanted Otis to hoot and holler, I’d add, “that dirty half-breed son of a bitch.” That day, under the cottonwoods, I didn’t include the epithet, so he wouldn’t exhaust himself too quickly.
“I’m glad he got the job, because his family needed the money,” Otis continued. “But he was a moron. He wasn’t one of us. His father was a white, from up north, what used to be Canada. Good-for-nothing blood. His mother made a mistake. But we couldn’t turn her son away.”
“That’s right. What else could you do?” How many times had I said this? “What else could you do?” I loved saying that line.
Tony LePerle was in the Water Corps, stationed in what was at the time Rugby, North Dakota, which is now the Center, the capital of the North American continent. When Tony was sent to Bismarck with a crew to cut that city off from the water grid, a group of old people confronted him, told him that without water they’d die. He shut off the valve anyway, and they
probably did die, but his guilt made him run home to White Earth River. He boasted that he’d expose what the government was really doing: outright slaughter of people it couldn’t use, didn’t want to relocate, and couldn’t feed. But Sammy Goldrausch, the government representative in White Earth River, silenced the computer network that connected the town to the rest of the continent before Tony could send out his first message. Then, when Sammy tried to arrest him, Tony got his shotgun from his mother’s house and pumped a .12 gauge deer slug into Sammy’s chest. A town council discussion about whether or not to escort Tony to the Center and give him up dragged on for several nights. Factions developed, arguments broke out, and the few young men living in the town appeared at meetings armed with hunting rifles.
“Sammy wasn’t typical government,” Otis continued. “He’d read books about the Hidatsa, danced at powwows, gambled at the old casino. He was my friend. Killing him was wrong. We should’ve surrendered Tony. But he had that gun, as did the other young men. They got riled-up, thought they could protect themselves, defend the town. Everyone became afraid, of him, of his friends, of the government. If it weren’t for Tony LePerle, we could’ve lived out our lives in peace.”
“Yes, then they sent Helicopter.”
I used my most serious voice to say this because it would let Otis pause and rest his fury. He was already breathing hard. We were, too, entering a more desperate part of the story, where not just one person was murdered but the whole town was destroyed. Otis’s convention of personifying the machinery that carried out the destruction may sound childish (I was a child when I adopted this practice), but to Otis, and to me as well, the machines the government used against us had the aura of flesh-and-blood giants.
The government had targeted the windmills that powered the town and sent a helicopter to drop something, a cable, perhaps, to disable and break the turbines, disrupt the town’s energy supply. This all occurred before I was born, but I’ve climbed to the top of Windy Butte a few times—again breaking one of Otis’s rules—and found a few of the old wind turbines still standing on the prairie, their blades idle, squeaking in the breeze.
