Mad Boy

by Nick Arvin

  Father looks thin, unkempt, and mumbles into his beard. He seems unsettled and hesitant amid the new circumstances. He doesn’t speechify or announce his opinions as he used to. He works harder than Henry has seen him work before, but that’s not much. He is often not looking at what his hands are doing. He gazes off at one thing or another—the prints of a cat in the mud, the leaves of a tree in the wind, the horizon. Does he hope to go there, or expect to see something coming? His attitude seems to suggest the latter, and that what he might see is likely to be of doubtful fortune.

  The baby has a name at last, which is George, named for the only president of whom Father approves, “Even if he was another damned Virginian.” It amuses Henry that a baby should be named after a president, and calling the baby George makes him laugh, and George likes the laughing, so they laugh at each other in mounting hilarity. George seems to have his father’s big body and his mother’s dark eyes, but also a confidence of his own. He puts a frog in Franklin’s boot. He laughs when Mary scolds him. He is no longer so solemn as he seemed when he was tiny, but still he seems never to blink, could stare down a wolf. Scattered around the cabin are the toys that Mary has brought him: nests, snake-skins, the delicate eggshells of songbirds, the skull of a vole, pretty stones, pieces of wood, flowers. Also in the cabin, besides the dogs, are a cat, a squirrel that sits in the rafters and scolds the cat, and three mice named Speck, Speckle, and Fleck, kept in a box.

  Franklin has planted acres of corn and potatoes. There is also flax, wheat, rye, geese, pigs, chickens, turkeys, a milking cow, and a vegetable garden. Franklin and Mary rise before the sun, and when there is moonlight they work well after sundown. The skin of Franklin’s face, neck, and hands is tanned deep brown. It seems as if he has been doing the work of two or three men. Mary comments on it to Henry, shaking her head. “A man is not a waterwheel,” she says. But to Henry’s eye she works as hard as Franklin.

  Franklin mentions that occasionally she takes George and goes wandering in the forests of walnuts, cherries, and oaks, that sometimes she is gone with him the whole day and into the night.

  Henry supposes the farm may become quite profitable, but it will need a decade or more. It seems to him that the others all look a little strangely at him, excepting George, who directs toward Henry the same unnerving stare that he aims at everything.

  Henry lasts two weeks.

  Franklin plans to dig a well beside the house, but for now water must be carried uphill from a spring nearly a mile away. Henry has carried up a pair of buckets for the animals, and his arms feel as if they may fall off. More water is needed for the laundry. Henry contemplates the buckets to be filled. He can endure the work, but it seems so dull. Mary shucks corn behind the shed. Franklin, in the far field, grubs potatoes. Most of the harvest is well in hand. He can hardly bear to think of the monotony of a winter in the little cabin. The edges of the leaves on certain trees are tinting red and gold. Returning through the mountains will be difficult when the hard cold arrives.

  As Henry stands looking at the buckets, Father wanders up. He stops suddenly, as if surprised to find he is not alone. “Well, Henry,” he says. “What does Mother say just now?”

  Henry says, “Nothing.”

  “Surely something? She always did talk.”

  “No,” Henry says crossly.

  Father squints, frowns. “My boy, you never could tell a tale.” He ruffles Henry’s hair. “Certainly not to your father. Be straight. What does she say?”

  Henry scowls, backs away a pace. But something in Father’s gaze makes his anger turn melancholy. Father, away from gambling and drink, with nothing much around but forest for a hundred miles—it’s as if in this place he doesn’t know who he is, how to be. As if he were a lost child. And Henry has a strange new fear, that this anger turning to melancholy is how life will go, that this is the feeling of growing older.

  He studies Father’s face, the watery pale eyes, the gray conflagration of his beard, the sagging bellies of flesh below the eyes. Father looks as if he doesn’t expect his luck to turn. Or as if his luck did turn, and perhaps he wishes now that it hadn’t.

  “Mother says,” Henry says, “that your luck is bound to turn soon.”

  Father grins. “She has always said so.”

  “Father,” Henry says. His own melancholy makes him angry.

  “Yes,” Father says.

  “I’m going to move on soon.”

  Father nods. “Of course. Anyone can see that.”

  “What I mean,” Henry says, “is now.” He realizes it in saying it. “I’m leaving now.” All he wants to do is run.

  Father says something, but Henry pays no heed. He is rushing away.

  It feels good to rush. In the cabin he seizes his rifle, some food, a jacket. He takes out Franklin’s quill and ink and starts to scratch a short note, but the ink splatters, and in frustration he throws the pen aside.

  In the door sits George, watching, gnawing a turnip.

  Henry tickles George, saying, “George! George!”

  Both laugh.

  Henry steps outside, saddles his pony, mounts, and departs.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thank you to the friends who read versions of this book and helped shape it: Amanda Rea, Erika Krouse, Jeremy Mullem, Thomas O’Malley, and Jacinda Townsend. Thank you to Eric Simonoff for his faith and effort on behalf of this book; to Michael Reynolds and the team at Europa Editions for making Mad Boy a reality with such care and enthusiasm; and to Jay Kenney for creating the incredible map in the front pages of this book. Thank you to the many historians who have documented and analyzed the early years of the United States and laid the foundations for this story; I am particularly indebted to the work of Alan Taylor and Neil H. Swanson.

  And thank you to Rachel and Cade for your support and patience with the quiet madness of a writer’s life.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Nick Arvin’s Articles of War was named one of the best books of the year by Esquire, Detroit Free Press, Rocky Mountain News, and The Independent. It won the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, the American Library Association’s Y.A. Boyd Award for Excellence, and was selected for the One Book, One Denver reading program. He is also the author of The Reconstructionist and the forthcoming collection, In the Electric Eden. Arvin lives in Denver.