The Hearts of Men

by Nickolas Butler

  DEDICATION

  For my mom, and all the mothers who

  place books in the hands of children

  For my dad, who did his best

  And for Regina, Queen of the North

  EPIGRAPH

  Where stars that died gave out, gave up, gave in—

  Where no one meant the promises they made.

  Oh, and one more thing. I send my love

  However long and far it takes—through light,

  Through time, through all the faithlessness of men.

  “DEAR MISS EMILY,” BY JAMES GALVIN

  “Have faith, old heart. What is living, anyway, but dying.”

  “KNOWN TO BE LEFT,” BY SHARON OLDS

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part I: Summer, 1962: The Bugler Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Part II: Summer, 1996: Stardust Supper Club & Lounge Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Part III: Summer, 2019: Orienteering Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Part IV: Fall, 2019: The Drakensberg Mountains Chapter 48

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Nickolas Butler

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PART I

  SUMMER, 1962

  THE BUGLER

  1

  THE BUGLER NEEDS NO ALARM. IN THE MUSTY CLOSE canvas darkness, his smallish hands fumble for the matchbox, scratch the blue sulfurous tip against the box, the match catching and burning, and finally the golden kerosene glow of the lantern, the wick burning like a lung on fire. He yawns, rubs the sleep from his eyes. In this new light, he seeks and finds his glasses, and now can make out the familiar particularities of his tent, its shadows, his things. An owl hoots from the crown of a nearby maple as the boy flaps open the tent and shivers in the predawn cold. His bare feet move lightly over the well-trod camp soil. He tugs his white underwear down and, trembling, sends an arc of piss onto the big accepting fronds of the unseen ferns. It is a pleasant sound. Like rainwater bouncing off a canvas awning. Then back into the tent, now that much warmer for the flame of the Coleman. It is a race until dawn.

  The youngest in his troop of some thirty boys, Nelson sleeps alone. His possessions are neatly organized into piles: socks, underwear, shorts, books. Shirts and trousers hang from a line that he has erected to follow the tent’s central pole. Mornings, he is glad of the tent’s solitude, but at nights, the campsite and forest are alive with the low murmuring and high giggling of boys and their nocturnal conversations. This reminds him of his loneliness. It is the fifth summer he has visited Camp Chippewa, and the second time he has had a tent to himself. Sometimes, he creeps out around midnight, to watch the Kabuki theater of the other boys’ flashlights, hear the pages of comic books turning and the plastic crinkling of candy wrappers, smell their contraband cigarettes. His father halfheartedly volunteered to bunk with him, but both parent and son recognized in this gesture something ultimately embarrassing. No, it was better for Nelson to be on his own. Perhaps at some point in the week, he might gain a roommate, some other young Scout badly homesick or alienated by his peers and in need of refuge. Some boy who’d accidentally wet his sleeping bag. Nelson would be ready. Ready to consolidate his belongings to one side of the tent as necessary, ready to assemble another cot, ready to be: helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, cheerful.

  Now he carries a woven birch-bark basket out of his tent, toward the camp’s fire ring of black-scarred rocks. He walks past tents whose canvas walls seem to ripple with snores and dream-noises rattling out into the night. Up above, the Milky Way spills out over the forest canopy, in tiny pockets as purple and sparkling as amethyst or as pale blue as the heart of a glacier. He bends down beside the fire ring, holds his little hands over last night’s coals. Residual heat radiates against his palms, warms the soft pads of his fingertips. He lowers himself to his knees and leaning into the fire pit, begins blowing at the embers, his lungs well practiced from the bugle. After a minute or two of patient puffing, the fire begins to glow a drowsy red. From the basket he removes a ball of dried grass, some pinecones, and sets this tinder on the coals. And then he blows and blows again, until at last a fire licks up, small flames, like the petals of some primal night orchid. The tinder catches and now his hands go into the basket for more twigs, more pinecones. The fire leaps higher still.

  He stands, so limber and awake, and begins making a teepee of fire, using larger sticks now, until the fire is crackling and pushing the darkness back, back toward the roof of the forest where the owl wings softly off, away from the roiling sparks and cone of fire reaching up toward the early morning sky. Nelson makes his way to the picnic table now, finds the grimy teakettle all covered in creosote and ash. He shakes the kettle, hears no sloshing. Walks all the way back to his tent and returns to the now-crackling fire with a heavy canteen. Fills the kettle and sets it on the fireside grill to boil. Finally allows himself to exhale. He has always been a good fire starter.

  Nelson has no friends. Not just here, at Camp Chippewa, but also back home in Eau Claire, in his neighborhood, or at school. He understands that this is somehow linked to his sash full of merit badges—twenty-seven to date, allowing him the rank of Star. It isn’t that earning merit badges is uncool, but the speed and determination with which he has added weight to his sash seems to be enviable, perhaps even pitiable. Possibly, his unpopularity is linked as well to his eyeglasses, though it might just as easily be his inability to dribble a basketball or throw a spiral, or, worse yet, the nearly reflexive way his arm shoots into the classroom air to volunteer an answer. Nelson likes school, actually enjoys it, strives to win his teachers’ approval, the gratifying surprise in their faces when he delivers some bit of arcane historical trivia—the machinations of our legal system, say, or the rarer elements on the periodic table. He can’t pinpoint it, that one thing about his personality, his being that, if changed, might win him more friends. But he dearly wishes he could. Wishes his mornings and afternoons weren’t limited to hallway wanderings or endless games of solitaire at otherwise abandoned cafeteria tables. Then again, maybe this is just who he is, and sometimes, when he is feeling brave, he embraces this notion, imagines himself as a wolf without a pack, roaming, free as can be, a solitary forest creature.

  At his thirteenth birthday party, he sat in the backyard on a sweltering Sunday afternoon in June, waiting for his fellow Scouts to arrive with their BB guns and coonskin caps, the wrapping paper of their presents dampened with summer perspiration and torn in places. The night before, against his bette
r judgment, he’d allowed himself to imagine a stack of gifts: books and model airplanes, baseball cards and candy.

  A giant glass jar of lemonade sweated profusely on a side serving table, as if under interrogation. The plate of frosted cupcakes had already moved back into the icebox, after sitting outside long enough to attract the unwanted attention of hornets and flies. He and his mother had sent invitations to each of the boys’ houses a full month in advance. Yet, as the afternoon wore on, not one boy arrived, and so he spent the hours sending arrows toward the primary colors of a target’s bull’s-eye affixed to the trunk of the yard’s noblest elm.

  At supper that night, it was difficult restraining his tears, and when they came, they poured hot and wild down his sunburnt cheeks as his mother and father looked on from across the family picnic table, a red and white gingham cloth clinging to the redwood planks in the June humidity, two unmoving balloons framing him on either side in the close summer air, without so much as even twisting on their flat plastic ribbon strings. His mother moved around the table, sat with him, placing her arm around his shoulder.

  “I don’t understand,” he cried, “we sent them the invitations! We sent them weeks ago! Where is everyone? Where are they?” Surely he did not want his voice to leak out as the whine it did, but there it was, higher pitched than the eight-year-old neighbor girl’s, just then skipping past the house, barefoot as could be, trailing her beloved jump rope. He might as well have inhaled all the helium in the less than festive balloons beside his head.

  “Oh, dear,” his mother said, shushing him, “it’s summertime. I’m sure they’re all at their cabins or on vacation. And, why—well, you’ve had a wonderful day, haven’t you? Here with your father and me? Hasn’t it been a splendid day? And there are still presents to open, aren’t there, Father?”

  Clete Doughty looked on, through his own thick, thick glasses, the lenses murky as quartz. He swatted at a vectoring hornet orbiting his head.

  “Now, Nelson,” he said flatly, “this flubbering here—about this flubbering . . . Now, I’ll tell you something, and it may sound harsh, but it’s not. These boys, these so-called friends of yours? They won’t be around for the long haul, so to speak. I can assure you of this. They never are. Look at me, for instance. You see me off gallivanting with a bunch of chums? No. There comes a time when you have to be on your own, see, and maybe that time is now, sorry to say.” He harrumphed indignantly.

  The boy, though, for all his efforts to stifle the hot, hot tears, the hiccups of embarrassment and loneliness and shame, wept that much harder.

  “There’ll be no crying, now!” Clete snapped. “You’re thirteen years old, Nelson! Men don’t—there will be no more crying! Is that understood?”

  “Let him be,” said Nelson’s mother, as sternly as Nelson could ever recall, for rarely did Dorothy Doughty dare challenge her husband. “Poor boy. You let him be.”

  Nelson had noticed an air of tension in the house over the past year, an anxiety he could only manage to trace back to himself; something was awry. Doors slamming with greater frequency and volume. Father arriving home late for dinner and marching straight to the bedroom or plopping right down in his chair. Mother, weeping quietly over the dishes and then, when he asked her what was the matter, well, she would rush to the bathroom, close and lock the door, the only response the sound of the sink water spilling into the basin. In the backyard, the once-immaculate carpeting of fescue was steadily losing a battle with the dandelions and creeping charlie.

  “But it’s true, Dorothy. And you know it! Name one friend of yours from high school that you still see. One.”

  “Clete, this isn’t about me—or you, for that matter. This is Nelson’s day, and the poor boy—”

  “I’ll tell you where you make friends. You make friends in the military, in the trenches, on the front lines. Men that will take a bullet for you, that will share their only Lucky Strike, the last drops in their canteen. It’s not about birthday cake and candles, Nelson. Being friends with someone is about loyalty. Lifelong loyalty. You’re almost of an age when that will become more and more apparent. Soon, there will be no toys and no cake, no parties or friends. It will just be days upon days, stacked up so that you can’t remember what you ate for breakfast that very same morning. Now, I’m sorry to have to say that to you on your birthday, but there it is. The truth.”

  Nelson was silent a moment. “I thought they liked me,” he whined. “At least well enough. Well enough to come to a birthday party. And no one bothers to even show up? No one!” The volume of his voice was something he could not seem to control, like a yellow balloon untied and drifting up into the sky.

  “Oh, darling.” His mother held him closer, their bodies both so hot, and he aware of their garments sticking together, of how his own body did not feel small enough to be held this way by her, and yet, how his heart was not big enough to manage the breaking he now felt, the rejection. “I love you so,” she whispered in his ear. “I love you so, so much.”

  “I just want people to like me. Aren’t I a nice person? I mean, aren’t I?”

  “Of course you are, Nelson; of course you are.”

  “Aren’t I? Aren’t I a nice person, Mom?”

  “Stop that flubbing now!” Clete ordered. “Stop it this instant!”

  “Ignore that old grump, Nelson,” she cooed. “We can sit like this as long as you’d like. Happy birthday, my sweet little boy.”

  “I’m sorry that I’m crying,” he managed. “I don’t want to cry. I don’t want to at all.”

  “It’s okay, baby.”

  “Stop it!” shouted his father. “Stop that crying!” His voice as sharp as the finger he extended toward his son’s face, like a pistol. Sweat made his glasses ski down the slope of his nose. And then he was on his feet, unhitching his belt and trying to whip it loose of his slacks, the cotton of the belt loops moist, and the leather tacky. He yanked violently, as if ripping the cord on a lawn mower, but the belt stuck tight to his waist, his sweat-slickened glasses falling off his face to land in the green faux turf of the plastic carpeting on their back porch.

  “Clete, no!” his mother said. “Clete, not today, okay? No, Clete!”

  Clete’s disciplining of Nelson had taken on a new intensity of late, causing Dorothy to absorb some of the violence intended for her son, a phenomenon that startled all three of them, even Clete, who on one occasion had stood over her body where she lay, near the kitchen sink, his hands trembling visibly, his bottom lip quivering.

  But now the belt swung loose as a viper, its buckle a shining menace in the last of the afternoon light, its prong like a single fang, and Clete Doughty snapped the belt in the air to make it pop like a bullwhip. “Stop that crying, young man, you hear me? I won’t have any more of it!”

  How Nelson shrank smaller and smaller into the lap of his mother, so painfully aware of his own size, of the precipice he stood on—close to growing, to becoming something like a man, and yet, just a boy, still just a boy, cowering, whimpering against his mother’s breast, waiting for the blow to come . . . But surely he won’t whip me here, in her arms, not here . . .

  They had been more frequent of late, the whuppings. If not the belt, then a wooden spoon, or a carefully selected switch from the weeping willow in their neighbor’s yard. Nelson had never before hated a tree, a species of tree, until that willow; until he had been sent out there to select the very weapon that would make his bottom so sore that for the next two nights he could only sleep on his belly. Nor was choosing a weak switch a viable option, for his father would just have used that selection until it broke, and then demanded another.

  “Excuse me,” came a hesitant voice just then, the sound originating from around the garage, on the driveway, as unexpected as the telephone ringing, or every bell in the city sounding out in unison.

  The sun, so hot where it hung in the western sky, seemed to have cooled its own furnace a bit. A pair of cardinals landed on the backyard feeder and began s
inging, as if they had accompanied the driveway guest. Wiping his hair back from his forehead, Clete stooped to retrieve his glasses, while Dorothy, relaxing her arms, looked up, her chest slowing its heave.

  And Nelson’s cries diminishing, but how? How could, how could this be?

  “Golly, I’m sorry,” said Jonathan Quick, appearing from around the house now. “I’m just . . . so sorry to be late.”

  “Oh, not at all, Jonathan!” Dorothy said. “Why you’re just in time for cake and ice cream!”

  Nelson madly wiped his nose, wiped his eyes. Miracle of miracles! Jonathan Quick, Life-Class Scout, fifteen years old, and already six feet tall. Varsity swimmer, junior varsity starting tailback, junior varsity backup shortstop, member of the glee club and the model railroaders. Jonathan Quick, standing in Nelson’s driveway, holding a box wrapped all in newspaper funnies with a red bow sitting on top. He cast a furtive glance in Nelson’s direction, the present in his hands like a hot potato he would so very much like to pass elsewhere.

  “Well now,” Clete said. “Jonathan. What a nice surprise.” The belt sneaking its way back around his waist as he circled the picnic table to extend a hand toward Jonathan. “Delighted you could join us.”

  “I do apologize, sir,” said Jonathan, now seeming to inch just slightly backward, retreating down the driveway from where he first appeared, “I can’t stay too long, see. My granny had a tree limb come down in her backyard last night and I told her I’d be over to get that all cleaned up. I should’ve been here earlier, but my younger brother Frank was stung by bees today and we had to rush him off to the hospital. I didn’t even know a person could be allergic to bees? Did you, Nelson?”

  Nelson was just so happy, to be acknowledged in this way by Jonathan Quick, all the tears of just moments before this suddenly so trivial. “Want to shoot some arrows?” he blurted out.

  “Ah . . . sure,” Jonathan said. “Only—like I say, I can’t stay overly long. ’Cause of my granny and all.”