The Nail Knot

by John Galligan

  “Shelly, too,” I said.

  “Yup.”

  “She fought with Ingrid today.” “I heard.”

  “And a little while later I watched her have a fight with the poacher. The milk truck driver. Lumen Bostock.”

  Junior was quiet about this. I asked her what she was thinking. We were nearly downtown, such as it was.

  “That little prick,” she said quietly. “He torments Shelly. He lets on like he knows something about the way her mother left town. So he can jerk her around, make some kind of claim on her. Shelly goes for it every time.”

  We were on Main Street now, taking the right-hand turn over the creek that would allow us to drive up the opposite side of Lake Bud to the cheese factory. It was just now dark. Pink and blue tavern lights spread their glow in the heavy air.

  “Just out of curiosity,” I asked Junior. “When did it happen? How old was Shelly Milkerson when her parents split up?”

  Junior thought about it a while. The stream sparkled behind us up to the frothy plunge pool below the dam. The algae-stink of Lake Bud filled the air. I could see the Cruise Master far across the way, a momentary silver speck in the headlights of a car on the county highway.

  “Five,” Junior concluded. “About five years old. And there was no split-up to it. Nothing like divorce. I told you Shelly’s mom was about twenty years younger than White. Turns out since Shelly was about three, Nanette Milkerson had been seeing this farm equipment salesman, and one day she just packed her bags and disappeared. Both of them. People say they went somewhere in Arizona, some kind of patriotic cult compound, but Shelly ran away down there when she was in high school and found nothing.”

  I rode quietly a while. I pictured Shelly in her bathrobe, heaving the fire pit rock at Lumen Bostock.

  “So what’s Bostock know about it?”

  “Nothing, probably,” Junior said. “He’s just a prick. That’s just his way of trying to get laid.”

  She turned onto a gravel side road. We rounded a birch-shaded curve and the cheese factory surprised me. I guess I had expected something grander, given all the hoopla one suffers elsewhere about the wonders of Wisconsin cheese. I guess I had expected elves in lederhosen, yodeling outside a gingerbread chalet. But Junior pulled up to a little low-roofed cinderblock rectangle that sat inside a weed-lined chain link fence. Various other structures had been appended lakeward to this windowless base, apparently over time and according to trends in bargain construction. A pair of good-sized trucks idled at the maw of a loading dock. A small sign near the door said Kussmaul Butter Käse. To our left, the woods along the shore of Lake Bud were lined with NO TRESPASSING and LOTS FOR SALE signs. The phone number on the sale sign, I guessed, was President Bud’s. Or his realtor’s.

  “So one day,” I recounted, trying to sum up the Milkerson story, “things are normal enough for Shelly. And the next day she has no mother.”

  Junior agreed.

  “Messed her up,” I said.

  “It messed them both up. She and her dad. They never really dealt with it. You can see how it messed them up. They don’t talk to each other.”

  I sat there a long time, grinding on this, staring near-sighted at the flaky white paint on the side of the cheese factory. In the stream that afternoon, watching Shelly stalk away down County K, I had heard a grunt and a splash and looked behind me. White Milkerson was awkwardly reaching out, cigarette in his trembling hand, trying to touch me. Poor guy, I thought. Poor, ruined father. I knew how he felt.

  “By the way,” said Junior finally, shaking me, giving me her grin. “That’s Dad’s friend, Einar. We’re here.”

  Jesus at the cheese factory

  Roly-poly old Einar, thumbs in suspenders, limped ahead, giving us the tour in his high, wheezy voice. The curing vats, the curd separators, the presses, the knives and rollers, the packaging room, cold storage, and the dock, where the last of the trucks had just pulled away for an overnight run.

  “Now, Mister, uh …”

  “Dog.”

  He shook his lumpy bald head. “Come again?” he squeaked.

  I told him again, and he gamely called me “Mister Dog” as he limped ahead into what appeared to be part storage and maintenance room, part office. There were tools, an air compressor, janitorial supplies, an old television, a pair of huge stainless steel coolers, and a ratty old sofa. The sour smell of milk solids permeated everything. I looked around. Einar was a Jesusand- Popular Mechanics guy, the Good Lord on a crucifix above the tool bench alongside the pipe wrench. Then I took a side view of Einar. He was one of those short, small-framed guys meant to weigh one-fifty, tops, but he had sculpted himself up to twice that and seemed perfectly old country about it. He had gotten himself fat on cheese. His earthly work was done.

  “Now, Mister Dog, out there is where I seen the light,” squeaked Einar, as if his windpipe were impinged. He indicated the view through a dusty little garage window above his sofa. “I figure it’s somebody night fishing. Off and on over the last couple months I see it and don’t think nothing of it.”

  He grunted and hauled open one of the cooler doors. His pudgy little hand was deft enough to grip two beer cans and set them on his workbench.

  “Then,” he said, “the other day it’s too windy to fish and I see that light anyway. So I figure President Bud and his people are out there laying the buoys for that noisy snowmobiles-on-water thing—doing it at night for some reason.”

  Next out of the refrigerator came a huge yellow onion, halved and festered on the open end.

  “Next day, though,” Einar said, shucking the half-onion on a cutting board and slicing off the bad end, “there’s no buoys out there. That’s when I got curious.” He pointed the knife at a large binocular case. I had mine too. Einar nodded with approval. He cut a couple fat disks of onion and laid them on a plate beside the beer cans.

  “So last night I laid in here with the lights off and them glasses ready.”

  He took a deep, wheezy breath.

  “About nine o’clock … I seen … I mean there appeared to me … gosh, I don’t know how to say it …

  I realized Einar was puffing now. This had suddenly gotten emotional for him. He was staring intensely from me to Junior and back again. “I seen …”

  He trembled.

  “Gosh I’m glad you’re here, Junior. You’ve always been such a good girl. Mel done right, raising you. And your Ma, too …”

  Junior gave him a slightly impatient version of the crinkly grin.

  “I seen Him!” burst the old man finally in a breathless squeak. He thrust a trembling finger toward the crucifix beside the pipe wrench. “Walking on water!”

  He stared into my eyes with jowly distress.

  “Walking toward me! His hand out!” He pointed out the window. “Right … out … there!”

  Perhaps I didn’t respond properly, because Einar switched his beseeching stare to Junior. His voice rose to panic.

  “And I’m thinking He’s going to speak to me. I’m thinking He’s going to ask me to do something, you know, go to South America and teach orphans or something, and I’m only six months from retirement! I … I …”

  Junior steadied the old fellow with a hand to the shoulder.

  “You came up and told Dad.”

  “I ran like the dickens!” squeaked Einar. “Six months, I got a pension here! It wouldn’t be fair. I mean, let Him appear to someone else. Someone, you know, who ain’t doing as well as me …”

  Junior looked at me. “That’s why he came up and told Dad,” she said. Then to Einar, “But Dad couldn’t come tonight, Ein. He’s home with Missus Sundvig watching him. Now why did you think it was … you know … Him out there?”

  He made bloodshot old goggle-eyes at her, like she had gone nuts.

  “Walking on water?” he squeaked. “You know anybody else?” “What did he look like?”

  The cheesemaker pondered this. “Kinda hard to say,” he decided. “His light was pointed down,
around his feet. So up above that he seemed kinda heavyset, dressed in purple—robes and shadows is what I figure. Lotta hair.” He gave a little jelly-bowl shudder. “Nice and friendly looking fella. Don’t worry about that.”

  He looked from one of us to the other. He was hoping, I realized, that the Lord would appear to us, instead of him, and that Junior and I would be the ones stuck with the South American orphan gig. As if in appreciation for our sacrifice, he opened the big stainless steel cooler again and brought out a wheel of the smelliest cheese I had ever encountered. He cut out two massive, reeking wedges and laid one atop each disk of raw onion. Handling the cheese seemed to calm him. He snapped the beer cans.

  “Okay then,” he announced. He gave us a big sigh and a smile. “You kids are all set.”

  He leaned toward me as if in confidence. “Don’t mind the smell. It’s Limburger. Best cheese ever made. We’re the only place in Wisconsin that still makes it.”

  He grabbed my arm.

  “You ever think I’m dead, Mister Dog, you put some of this cheese on a plate and pass it under my sniffer. At my funeral, you go right up to the coffin and do that. I don’t move to the smell of this Limburger, then I’m dead.”

  Einar snatched up his lunch bucket and a newspaper. Then, noting that Junior had gone to open the window, he gestured at me to come close again and wheezed, “Hey, Mister Dog.”

  The round old cheesemaker bumped his belly against my waist and pulled down on my shoulder. He leaned his lumpy head toward Junior. “Look sharp,” he whispered. “I heard she’s getting over Darrald.”

  Go ahead, ask me anything

  The Limburger smelled like the insides of an old pair of rubber waders after a hot day on the stream. Worse, actually.

  Junior turned from the grimy little window. “Those buoys are out there now,” she said. “The Jet Ski Jamboree is tomorrow, I guess.”

  “You don’t get involved in that?” I asked her.

  She flopped on Einar’s old sofa. A cloud of dust rose, but she didn’t seem to notice. Anything was cleaner than a barn, I guess.

  “Too much work in summer. I’m pretty good on a snowmobile, though. Winter, I get to play a little. Or I did, before Dad got so messed up.”

  She seemed to catch herself being wistful. She shook it off and gave me a grin.

  “So, Mister Dog,” she said. “Are you going to tell me your real name?”

  I said no.

  “How did you get called Dog?”

  Grade school, I told her. It came from my real name. But lately I’d embraced it. Accepted it. Become the Dog—and then gone feral.

  “I see,” she said, clearly unconvinced, and then she stood back up. I guess as only a farmer could, she put both hands on my shoulders, turned me around, trapped my arms, and bent me over—just like that. She could have shaved my back, or branded me, or gelded me. She had that much control. She was that strong. But instead she took my wallet.

  She studied my driver’s license. “Ned Oglivie,” she said. “I see the D … O … G in there, in the middle of the first and last names. Is that how it happened?” It was, but she had already moved on. She was raising the wallet, squinting at the license, and suddenly I understood she was probably trying to place the face in the picture. Sad, pudgy, pasty—the domesticated Dog, five years ago—in for his renewal photo, sleepwalking. I hardly recognized myself.

  Junior’s eyes bounced from me to the picture and back.

  “You look a lot better than this. Do you realize?”

  I shrugged.

  “I mean it,” she said. “A damn sight better.” Then, “Forty-two,” she mused. “I had you at closer to my age.” She eyed me. “You don’t weigh anything like two-thirty, either. You go about one-eighty now. There’s a story here, isn’t there?”

  I shrugged again. She smiled and sat down. “You’re just like Darrald. You’re not going to tell me a damn thing about yourself. I have to dig for it.”

  I came over and sat on the other end of the sofa. Junior seemed to read my mind. “Go ahead,” she said. “I’ll tell you my story first. Women like to talk about themselves. Ask me anything.”

  She faced me. She looked lovely in her work boots and jeans, her T-shirt with the dead watch hanging around her neck, her stumpy little ponytail sticking out the back of her John Deere cap. But she didn’t look quite the same as usual. There was something different about her that I couldn’t quite place. I asked her where she got the watch.

  “It’s Darrald’s watch,” she said, and stopped cold.

  I teased her. “That was a big bunch of talk right there. We’d better slow down.”

  “I answered your question, didn’t I?”

  “You miss Darrald?”

  “Of course I miss Darrald.”

  She was looking straight at me. Like she was daring me. I cleared my throat. “There’s a lot of talk around town about when you might get over him.” I paused. “I guess never, huh?”

  “No,” replied Junior. “I said I miss him. Missing someone and staying stuck on someone are two different things. It takes a while to separate them. I’m trying not to be stuck on Darrald,” she said. “But the missing part just goes on and on. And that’s okay. I mean, it has to be okay.”

  I sat a while and digested this. She hadn’t used any new words. She hadn’t expressed a single new idea. I had heard it all a hundred times before. Why then did Junior’s simple explanation make so much sense? Why did it make me breathe all the way down to my tailbone and then let the air go slowly and gently across the empty space in Einar’s hot little shack?

  “What I have trouble with is letting go of the baggage. Dickie Pee, for one thing, never said he was sorry for his part in taking Darrald away from me. That makes it real hard.”

  I nodded. I waited.

  “So when did Darrald’s watch stop?”

  She tipped her head and smiled again. “Thank you.”

  “What for?”

  “For asking.” Then she sat up straight, squared her shoulders and shivered slightly. “We were making love,” she told me. “Darrald said this was going to be the one hundredth time we had done it. I was laughing at him. Darrald was so bad at math. Any time that big old boy came up with a number, you had to just shake your head. We’d only been going out for a year at that time. And a hundred was way too much nookie, even for Darrald and me. But when we were done that morning he looked over on the nightstand and saw his watch had stopped. He just freaked. He was so happy. He thought it was so special. He said it meant we were on the right track. We were supposed to be together. He gave me the watch. He asked me to marry him. I said sure—as soon as … as soon as … shit, I don’t know what I said. My mom was still healthy, and she had her job at the clinic. Dad was fine. Darrald was the guy we hired to milk. He lived in that old summer kitchen out back. But I still had thoughts of going somewhere besides Black Earth.” She sighed and fingered the watch.

  “Three years later Mom was dead, Dad was sick, and Darrald and I weren’t married yet. Then one morning Darrald milks early and goes out hunting with Dickie Pee.” She made a long pause. “But anyway I kind of hung on to the watch.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Kind of.”

  We traded shy and slightly maudlin grins.

  “Darrald wasn’t the quickest fly in the barn,” she sighed, looking off toward the window and Lake Bud, “but he could sure ring my bell.”

  She scared me with that. After a quiet minute, both of us looking off in our own directions, she waved my wallet and said, “Okay, Ned Oglivie. My turn. Who’s this?”

  It was a picture of my son, Eamon.

  “And where is Eamon now?” she wanted to know.

  “Eamon is nowhere.”

  “What do you mean nowhere?”

  “I mean I don’t know where he is.”

  She scooted closer to me. I felt a rough hand on my own. “You’re divorced, aren’t you? Your wife has your little boy.”

  “I’m divorced,” I said s
tiffly. “But my kid is wherever kids go when they die.”

  Junior gasped. “You mean heaven. Your little boy’s in heaven. Oh my God.”

  She reached out her other hand and took my wrists. My answer to the touchy-feely he’s-with-Jesus statement was always the same. I met that crap with the cold hard fact. I thought the fact would keep me sane.

  “He drowned in the bathtub,” I told Junior.

  She slumped back. “You don’t have to tell me anything more. Don’t tell me. I’m not even asking.”

  She gave me back the wallet. It was Eamon’s pre-school portrait photograph. He was wearing his favorite striped shirt and looking a little subdued because he hadn’t been allowed to wear his Red Sox cap, which he liked to yank down over his eyes. No hats. School rules. He was four years old.

  I owned Oglivie Security back in those days. We did mostly physical security, guarding places, checking worker IDs at gates, video monitoring, fencing and lighting, that kind of stuff. I was working like a dog, right? Mary Jane, my wife, was working hard, too. She was a vice president in human resources for an insurance company. We both spent a lot of time talking about security, safety nets, guarantees, the social fabric, that whole bit. But somewhere in there we stopped connecting like we used to. I mean, if we had every really connected. Not much social fabric between the two of us. So we had Eamon. That’s when things got real tricky.

  From the look on Junior’s face I realized I was talking aloud. She wanted me to go on. But that didn’t matter. I was going on.

  “Time and energy,” I said. “They came to be such scarce commodities that Mary Jane and I began to barter them.”

  I paused. Did she know what I meant? Junior gave me a sympathetic smile.

  “We’d have these short, intense conversations—in places like both of us standing in the driveway with the car running, Eamon belted up and eating a Pop Tart in the back seat. We’d exchange scheduling information, negotiate, decide who was going to pick up supper, who got to go to the gym after work, who was putting Eamon to bed that night … and I thought I was handling it … I was a civic whirlwind. I was a dog in the pack—school board, Cub Scouts, pee-wee soccer, you know, the whole world was created for my kid, and I was out tending it, guarding it …” I stopped, feeling sick.