by Inmon, Shawn
Nathaniel set his container of rice aside and picked up the plastic glass of water. He held the straw so Donelly could drink.
The ghost of a smile crossed the old man’s cracked lips. “Say, I didn’t mean to sound so cross. You seem like a decent fellow.”
That could be because I’ve barely spoken. We all seem more decent when we’re not talking.
“Anyway,” Mr. Isaac continued, “eventually those damn digital cameras came along and that job faded away, too. Now, I suppose, everyone just takes pictures of what they want to sell with their phones, don’t they.”
“They do, yes.”
“Another good career gone. What are kids going to do when all the jobs are gone, or being done by robots?”
“Maybe they’ll learn to build the robots.”
“Until the damned robots learn to build themselves, then we’ll all be in a hell of a jam, won’t we?”
Nathaniel picked up the rice again and went back to eating his dinner.
“So, is this what you do? Just come and sit with people that are fixin’ to die?”
“Yes.”
“You’re real, though, right? Flesh and blood, and I’m not imagining you.”
“I’m every bit as real as you are.”
Donelly raised his eyebrows at that. “Don’t know how reassuring that is. I could’ve died an hour ago for all I know, and this is just the beginning of my eternal torment.”
That made Nathaniel smile. “Is that what you think is next? Eternal torment?”
Donelly thrust his chin out in initial defiance, but thought better of it, and sadly said, “I suppose I do.”
“Why?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“That’s fine. I understand. It’s a sensitive subject.” Nathaniel went back to his dinner and sat in companionable silence.
Finally, Donelly said, “It’s my brother. I think I killed my brother.”
“That’s usually not something you have any doubt about—if you kill somebody, that is.”
“We were partners. Donelly Brothers Photography. We didn’t need cutesy names then. Things were more solid. We opened the business in ’62. Things went fine, for a while, mostly because I was doing everything we needed to keep us afloat. If there was a wedding to shoot, or a family portrait, old Isaac was the man for the job. Otto always had his head in the clouds, wanting to shoot pretty landscapes that we could put up in our window.”
Even more than fifty years later, he scoffed at the memory.
“I got tired of it. Who wouldn’t? What did he expect? For me to keep doing all the heavy lifting, while he did all the artsy stuff that made the young girls swoon?”
Did young girls swoon at photos of sunsets and lakes? I suppose maybe they did.
Donelly cast a canny glance at Nathaniel to see if he was paying attention, judging him.
“In the end, I cut him out. He was terrible at paperwork, contracts. It wasn’t hard to do. He was crap at the details. One day, when he strolled in, twenty minutes late, just like usual, he noticed that the name on the door had changed to just Donelly Photography. He never said a word. He just looked at me for a long time, standing behind the counter, looking right back at him, then he turned around and left.”
“Unless you shot him as he left, you probably didn’t kill him, then.”
“Not right away, you’re right. It was worse. I should have seen it. I needed him, and he needed me. I didn’t understand it. I did all the real work, but once Otto left, the business disintegrated. I had to close the doors a year later. And Otto. He just drifted away.”
“I’m willing to bet he didn’t just disintegrate, though.”
“You’re right, he didn’t, but even if he had I wouldn’t have known or cared for a long time. I was busy trying to run the shop. Then after that closed, I had to find a job to pay the bills. I didn’t think about Otto for years. Maybe ten years later, I ran into a classmate who had been friends with him. He told me Otto had died years earlier. He drank himself to death.”
“And you blame yourself for that.”
“Of course. If I hadn’t taken the company from him, he wouldn’t have ended up like that.”
“Perhaps. We all make hundreds of decisions every day, and each one of them changes not only the rest of our lives, but the lives of countless others. We rarely take much responsibility for that unless we feel guilty.”
Donelly turned his eyes away from Nathaniel and looked out the window into the darkness.
“I’m glad I’m dying. I’m tired of carrying this around. I hope Dante was wrong.”
“How so?”
“I don’t want to end up in some circle of Hell, lugging something heavy around, just like I’ve lugged this memory around in life.”
“I don’t blame you.” Nathaniel finished his rice, wiped his mouth and put the container back in his brown bag.
Donelly looked at him suspiciously. “That’s it? You’re going back to sweeping floors now?”
“It’s my job, so yes. Why?”
“I don’t know why, but there’s something about you. I thought I was going to tell you my troubles, and then you were going to tell me a parable or something that would make me feel better.”
Nathaniel rested his hands on his knees. “Would you like me to tell you a parable?”
“God, no.”
“There you are.” Nathaniel smiled. “I do have some advice that might help you, but the worst advice in the world is the unwanted kind. Do you want to hear it?”
Isaac Donelly was not a man who had wanted or taken advice often in his life, but standing here, at the yawning precipice to whatever was next, he softened.
“I guess I would.”
“Don’t worry, it’s painless. I won’t tell you to let go of all this heaviness you’ve carried around for so many years. Instead, I’ll tell you to think about your life as objectively as you can. Look honestly at what you did, and why. Think about the core reasons why you pushed your brother away. Then, plant a marker in your mind at the point you made that decision. That way, when you come to it again in your next life, you’ll have a better chance to recognize a similar situation and make a different choice.”
Nathaniel stood, stepped next to the bed, and put his hand out. Donelly hesitated, but eventually reached out his own hand, shaking with palsy. Nathaniel took it and held it. Immediately, the shaking passed. The wheeze of Donelly’s breathing quieted, and the tension in his body eased.
“What did you do? I’m ready to go.”
“No need to worry. I didn’t stop that, just eased your way. It’s hard to think when you are wracked by pain, or dulled by drugs, so I took that away.”
Donelly’s face, which had been a hard mask since Nathaniel had walked into the room, eased into a more human expression. Tears sprang to his eyes, and he grasped Nathaniel’s hand fiercely.
“Thank you.”
“Use this time wisely, Mr. Donelly.”
Two minutes later, Nathaniel Moon was pushing his broom down the corridor, tracing a path he had traced thousands of times before.
Chapter Twenty-One
The next day, Nathaniel and Brutus set off from the back porch, headed straight for the foothills that marked the western boundary of his property. His neighbors, who owned the 100 acre parcel behind him, used that portion of their land as a privacy buffer to keep anyone else from building behind their home. They had given him permission to hike the hills any time he wanted, and on sunny days, he often took them up on their offer.
Nathaniel had filled out some over the years, but he would always be lanky, with long legs and arms that swung wide when he hiked. Brutus ran ahead of him, then back, then to the side, and then back. Where Nathaniel might hike three or four miles on one of their jaunts, Brutus likely ran ten. He slept very well on the nights after their outings.
There was a small, rough path that Nathaniel had worn to the foothills over the years. It wasn’t straight, but wound its c
rooked way via the easiest passage. He and Brutus walked up the side of the first hill and down the other, with Nathaniel humming a musical idea that had come to him the night before. Brutus pointedly ignored his humming, as he shared the same opinion of Nathaniel’s music that the rest of the world held.
Once they crested the hill, there was a short descent into a small valley that ran as a channel before another hill. They descended the trail to a year-round stream. It was small, but Nathaniel often saw trout and even the occasional salmon swimming in it. When they arrived at the stream, Nathaniel laid on his belly and drank his fill of the cold water, while Brutus did the same, somewhat more noisily.
He looked around, picked out a solid looking fir tree with a level area around it, and sat with his back against the trunk. He fished his book out of his small backpack—he was rereading The Lathe of Heaven, by Ursula K. Le Guinn—and leafed through it until he found his spot, reading for a few pages.
Soon, however, he laid the book down and looked at Brutus, lying next to him with his massive head perched on his knee. “I think it’s too nice a day even to read. There’s only one thing for it. A nap.”
Brutus agreed with him by already being asleep. Nathaniel leaned his head back, laid the book over his eyes and, thanks to the serenade of the stream and the birds overhead, was asleep instantly.
A WEEK LATER, JON DROPPED by before Nathaniel went to work at the hospital. It wasn’t unusual for Jon to stop by unexpectedly, but it was out of the ordinary to do so when he should have been at work.
“Have you seen what’s on YouTube?”
Nathaniel actually laughed a little, and then, so did Jon.
“Of course not. What was I thinking? I forgot I was talking to a Cro-Magnon man. One of these days, you’ve really got to get internet here in the house.”
“I will,” Nathaniel agreed, “as soon as you can give me a single valid reason as to how it will improve my life.”
They’d had this conversation a number of times before, and Jon knew he held the losing cards, so he said, “Okay. Let’s back up. You know what YouTube is, right?”
“A website where I can go if I want to listen to album cuts of John Coltrane or Chet Baker? Which, by the way, is the closest I’ve come yet to a valid reason why I might want to get the internet here. Close, so close.”
“Yes, right. Musical clips. But, people can shoot their own videos and upload them, too.”
“Lovely. Video democracy in action.”
“Sometimes, not so lovely. Here, look at this.” Jon took his smart phone out of his pocket, did a quick search, then turned the phone sideways. It showed a clip of someone walking through a wooded area, taking videos of various flora and fauna.
As he did, he gave a running commentary of what he was seeing, punctuated with, “Oh, isn’t that a beautiful specimen,” or “Would you look at that? What a gorgeous example of Polystichum munitum.”
“I know, I know,” Jon said. “Not exactly scintillating stuff, but keep watching.” He tapped the screen and moved the slider bar at the bottom. The camera jumped and panned as the narrator nearly tripped over a root, but then steadied on an image: a pair of legs and hiking boots floating six inches off the ground.
“What in the world?” the narrator said. The cameraman moved the shot slowly up the torso, which also was floating above the ground. Just before he panned up to the head, a huge series of barks came from his left, and the camera dropped to the ground and showed only dirt and pine needles. Shortly after that, the video ended.
“Good thing he didn’t get your face or Brutus on tape, or the jig would be up. But it’s still not good, is it?”
Nathaniel shrugged, and said, “I’m still not sure why I do that. I don’t really have any control over it.” He tapped the video and scrolled down to read the comments. “Ha! Look at this. God love the internet.”
Jon took his phone back and read. He shook his head. “I saw this same trick on America’s Got Talent.” “Fake news!” “Nice try, bozo, but people have been doing this trick in India for generations.” He looked up at Nathaniel. “They don’t believe it. They think it’s a hoax.”
“Of course they do. Why would they believe their own eyes, when they can believe their own sense of ironic detachment?”
“Should I report it, maybe get it taken down?” Jon asked.
“No, no, it’s hilarious. If I had internet, I’d set it to stream constantly, to remind myself not to fall asleep in the woods.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Violet Moon was in her late fifties, and the firm lines of her chin had settled into softer edges. Woe be to anyone who thought her actually soft, though. Her laugh lines had deepened, and the years allowed her fear to lessen. As the years and decades had passed, she had done her best to forget about her life in Minnesota, and, to a lesser extent, Arkansas. For her, life had begun anew the night that she, Andi, and Nathaniel had rolled into Middle Falls.
She had been the director of the Middle Falls Medical Center for ten years, and had offers to run larger enterprises, if she had been willing to move north to Portland, or south to San Francisco, but she didn’t consider it.
Just as Nathaniel had no interest in being promoted from swing shift custodian, Violet had no thoughts of ever leaving Middle Falls for career advancement. Five years earlier, she had bought an exceptional two-story house in a good neighborhood, with quiet neighbors, and she was completely settled into her life.
Violet had spent her early life bending to the will of others, just to survive. She had promised herself she would never be in that position again. She had made protecting Nathaniel her number one priority, but had to admit that he didn’t need a lot of protecting any more. He was capable of handling any adversity that came his way, not to mention the fact that he had Jon and Brutus to protect him.
She hadn’t been thrilled when Nathaniel told her that his life’s ambition was to work sweeping and dusting Middle Falls Hospital.
“I know you could be so much more, have so much more,” she had said.
“More what? More money?” he had answered. “I couldn’t care less about money. More responsibility? To what end? Working my way up the corporate ladder? I’ll keep my peace of mind and stay happily on the ground floor. I only want two things. To live a normal life, and to help as many people as I can, in my own way. I can do both those things as a janitor at the hospital.”
They had never spoken about it again, and over the years, she had come to accept the wisdom of his decision and kept any further doubts to herself.
Violet and Nathaniel both worked Monday through Friday, so they made sure they got together every Saturday evening for dinner and a movie. They took turns picking the food and the film every other week. Many weekends, Jon and Melissa spent their Saturday nights overseeing slumber parties, but they were still able to get away from time to time.
This particular Saturday was one of those nights. Nathaniel’s theme for the weekend was “Fish and Film.” In that vein, he had chosen a spread from Sushi Sushi, and The Incredible Mr. Limpet, the classic film where Don Knotts got turned into a fish. Nathaniel and Jon loved the movie, but Violet and Melissa were less than thrilled.
“That’s it,” Violet said, “We’re watching The Notebook again next week. But,” she said, deftly plucking a California Roll and popping it into her mouth, “I have no complaints about the food.”
Nathaniel scooped up Katie, put her on his hip, and stood facing Violet, Jon, and Melissa. “Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you, for one night only—“
“—we hope,” Violet interjected.
“—hush, Mom. You can make me pay next week. For one night only, the wit, wisdom and absolute genius of Mr. Don Knotts.” He pressed play on the remote and hunkered down on the floor with Kate on his lap. “Best movie ever,” he whispered to Katie, who giggled happily.
A blare of trumpets, and the Warner Brothers Home Video logo appeared on the screen.
At that moment, the do
orbell rang.
Jon jumped up and said, “I got it, I got it. Probably the paperboy wanting his two dollars.” Without looking, Nathaniel reached up and gave Jon a fist bump for the Better Off Dead reference. “Don’t stop it, I’ve seen this at least six times. I’ll catch up.”
Jon walked down the hall and opened the front door. A smallish man with long dishwater blond hair and a thin mustache stood on the porch. He held an old cap in his hands and smiled, almost apologetically. “Hey,” the man said in a strong Southern drawl. “Vivian here?”
Jon cocked his head. “I think you’ve got the wrong place. Hang on just a second, I don’t actually live here.” Over his shoulder, Jon raised his voice and said, “Violet, there’s somebody here looking for somebody named Vivian. Anybody you know?”
In the living room, Violet shot a surprised glance at Nathaniel. A moment later, both Violet and Nathaniel appeared in the hallway and eyed the man outside.
Violet stepped toward the door. “Can I help you?”
The man smiled tentatively. “Vivian, is that you?”
Violet blanched, but did her best to smile. “Wh—who are you?”
“I shouldn’t expect you to recognize me. It’s been a long time—more than thirty years. It’s me, Harry Spitton. You probably remember me as Pup—that’s what everybody always called me. I’ve come a long ways, looking for you and your boy.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
“Pup?” The color drained away from Vivian’s face. “Really?” She stepped forward and peered at him. “My God, you look exactly the same. I should have recognized you sooner.”
“I’m sorry to just stop by without calling, but I didn’t have a number for you.”
