Labrador Read online

  I nodded my head. This was the same question he had used one week earlier, exacting from me a promise to accompany him to the nursing home and, as much as I hated the place, I’d acquiesced. In this way I had found myself, one drizzly afternoon, wandering at his side down that dark hallway, through which the bodies of very old people moved with excruciating slowness, their hands drawing them, by inches, along the varnished railing that ran the length of the hall or wrestling into motion the big rubber wheels of their wheelchairs. As we’d passed a gleaming stainless-steel cart piled with clean towels and bed linen, an old lady—her acorn eyes impassive, her mouth yanked in on a thread and knotted at the very back of her head, so that the lower part of her face puffed out like quilting—removed a pristine washcloth from its pile, blew her nose into it, and carefully replaced it.

  You might say that this incident had set the tone for the entire visit. Nana had been sitting in her bed, propped up by several pillows; the auburn hair of which she’d been so proud was dull white, and cut close to her skull. If we hadn’t known who she was, we might have mistaken her for a very old man. “Hattie,” she’d said, when I walked towards her, “the well is dry, the well is dry, the well is dry.” Her voice rose and fell, issuing from her tiny chest like sounds squeezed from an accordion by a monkey. “And who is this?” she’d asked, looking at Grandfather. “Is that you, Marcus? I hate to be the one to tell you this, but you’ve shrunk.”

  “It’s me,” Grandfather had said. “Jasper.”

  “And I saw a door open in heaven,” Nana exclaimed, “and He who was seated there appeared to me like a jasper and a sardonyx!”

  You see, it had been Grandfather’s intention to “set things right” with his wife; whether the mission had been Bella’s idea or his own no longer mattered. At least, this is what he’d told me, as we drove back to the house. “She was a beautiful woman, Kathleen,” he’d said, “and look where it got her. She was the apple of her father’s eye. History repeats itself—don’t think I haven’t noticed the way my son looks at that sister of yours.”

  But I found myself wondering—even days later, as I stood nodding my head in the barn, agreeing to travel in his company to that place where danger and magic, by all accounts, appeared interchangeable—whether Grandfather had been right. It seemed to me then that it did make a difference whose idea it had been that he come back to see Nana. My moral vision was unformed and hazy: because I loved him, I wanted to believe that he embodied all goodness. My usual mistake.

  “Here,” Grandfather said, reaching into a pack in the bed of the truck. He handed me a wonderful small boat, fashioned out of some animal’s skin stretched over the thinnest of bones. “I’ve got to see about getting into town,” he said. “Why don’t you take this down to the lake—see if it floats?”

  “Did you make it?” I asked.

  “You don’t happen to know if your father’s home, do you?” A sprinkling of dead leaves, heated by the sun, flew in through the open doorway. “No,” he said, “a friend of mine made it. Jobie Aleeki. Once we get this thing working again, you’ll be able to thank him in person.”

  Indian summer, Willie—the world was blown up full of thick air. It was just about noon as I walked by myself to the lake, holding the boat against my new breasts, saying to myself, over and over, “See if it floats.” When I thought about the conversation I would have to have with our parents, convincing them to let me go north with Grandfather, I pictured it this way: I stood breathing the gray fluff off the tops of dandelion stems, watching the fluff drift away. If I had any doubts about his reliability, I dealt with them similarly, although it was hard for me to forget the morning, not long ago, when he had insisted on taking me to see the night-heron rookery at the edge of the property: we’d stumbled around and around a boggy meadow, our clothing catching on broken cedar limbs, until finally he gave up.

  I took the shortcut past Bellmans’, where the hedge made way for me before compressing into stone. In front of me I could see the lake, a white lens, in the middle of which floated the wooden raft built by the summer people. The mosquitoes were out! You must remember. When you got home late that afternoon, wandering vaguely into the kitchen, Mama set down the block of frozen chops she’d been trying to pry apart with a knife, took one look at you, and said, “My God, you’ve been eaten alive.”

  The mosquitoes landed on my arms and legs; it felt as if they’d started their sucking while still in midair, so that my skin was drawn up, by just a fraction of an inch, to meet them. The sun was orange and appeared imperfectly round—everything in the landscape was being pulled this way and that. I set the boat in the shallow water at the lake’s edge and tapped it with my finger. It rocked a little, then moved in a semicircle, impelled, likewise, by an invisible current: one of the frigid springs that fed into the lake. I tried to focus my vision on the boat; I tried to imagine a tiny man, a double-bladed paddle, such as I’d seen in photographs, balanced in his two tiny hands, dipping first one blade and then the other into the water. But I couldn’t concentrate—no matter how hard I tried, I felt the range of my vision moving outwards, past the boat and the wriggling reflection of it on the lake. There were two figures on the raft. For once, I could see with great precision, as if I was looking through one of those viewers that provide an unnaturally three-dimensional look at, for instance, the Grand Canyon.

  You were sitting on the raft, Willie. You were wearing that blue two-piece bathing suit Mrs. McGuire called “indecent.” Your hair was pulled back and onto the top of your head, fastened in place with a barrette. As I watched, you removed the barrette and handed it to the person who was sitting there with you. I squinted to see better, but I wasn’t wrong—it was Rogni. His whole body: how had he gotten it back? Such white skin, whiter even than yours—together the two of you looked like a hole cut in the landscape.

  Rogni took the barrette, and your hair fell, all at once, down your shoulders and back. Then you stood up very straight and dove into the water, your body disappearing into the dent it made, sending out small waves in circles. You swam towards the opposite shore, your arms lifting and curving rapidly—I had no idea you were such a good swimmer.

  You swam for maybe five minutes, out and back, until I could see Rogni bending over to lift you onto the raft; it was as if I was seeing your thin white soul slipping from its silver sleeve. Rogni turned, finally, so that his torso blocked my vision; even so, I knew that he was leaning forward to kiss you.

  “Hey!” I yelled, but I’d been on the raft myself, and I knew how the plit plit of the water against its sides obliterated all other sound. I knew how the shoreline receded into tenuity, so that the trees and houses became as hard to see as the people on the other side of the earth, in China, raising grains of rice to their mouths with chopsticks.

  Rogni’s body folded down over yours, and then I saw that fluctuation of spine I had imagined so long ago, staring in through the window of Peter Mygatz’s bread truck.

  I ran off into the woods, cursing as I ran: Fuck, fuck, fuck—that word Bobby Hallenbach had taught me on the school bus, diffidently, as if it carried the same weight as “tree” or “cloud.” Of course, I thought. That’s why the emerald ring hadn’t been good enough. I paid no attention to where I was running; by the time I found myself in an unfamiliar softwood stand, the angle of light was closing in on the world, the shadows around me getting longer and longer, moving towards the single, thick line of nightfall. I sat down at the base of a wolf-tree—an old, useless maple, the trunk of which twisted into the forest floor, like a giant’s arm imprisoned in the act of seizing treasure. Grandfather had told me that there were no trees in Labrador. I thought of that, and I thought, as well, of how a land inhospitable to women might not be such a bad thing. I thought of you. “Mother,” I said out loud, experimentally, “I would like a sister.” But nothing happened. I could see the first star in the sky, through the heavy net of branches overhead. I drew in a deep breath, and the air, entering me, surprised
me: cooler, now; serous; it filled me up, finding its own level at the place just behind my eyes.

  When I got home, Grandfather was sitting on the porch, drinking a cup of coffee. The light was on in the kitchen, illuminating him from behind; he sat perched on one of the decomposing wicker rockers like those harvest figures we used to make with Mama’s help, in the old days, before she decided it was no longer fun to stuff Daddy’s clothes with dead leaves. “We’ve seen the last of the warm weather,” he said. “Tomorrow it’s going to snow.” He pointed to the moon.

  Suddenly I remembered the boat—I’d left it behind when I ran off. I’d forgotten it; I thought of it floating out towards the middle of the lake, solitary and small, and I wanted to kill you. “Grandfather—” I began, but he interrupted me.

  “I was right,” he said. “Stenk’s dead, but his son’s taken over the business. He says he’ll have the generator fixed in a couple of days.” He leaned forward and stared into my face. “That’s supposed to be good news, Kathleen. You’re not upset about Stenk, are you?”

  “The boat,” I said, and as I said it I felt like I was about to cry.

  “What happened? It sank? Come on, Kathleen, it’s not the end of the world.”

  “It didn’t sink,” I said.

  “So it floated off where you couldn’t get it. Kathleen,” Grandfather implored, because now I was weeping loudly, “listen to me. Nothing would make Jobie Aleeki happier than to hear that one of his boats took off on its own.”

  “But I forgot it,” I said. “I forgot all about it.”

  “Here,” Grandfather said. He handed me the same plaid handkerchief with which he’d wiped up Daddy’s blood; as I held it up to blow my nose I could see a little brown stain, shaped like a boat. “Why don’t you sit down here and tell me what’s bothering you?”

  “I told you,” I said. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him about you. I thought of that game called Parcheesi where, at any moment, one player could stop another from climbing their little ladder and going home.

  “By the end of the week,” Grandfather said, “we’ll be on our way. We’ll be sleeping under the stars, Kathleen. And you’ll see birds you’ve never seen before. Puffins. Ptarmigan. You’ve never seen a puffin, have you?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Well, you will. I promise you, we’ll get Jobie to take us out in his trap boat, and then you’ll see puffins to your heart’s content. How does that sound?”

  “I’d like that,” I said.

  And then you walked up, from around the side of the house; you were wearing one of Daddy’s sweaters over your bathing suit, picking your way through brush and stubble, your legs like the ivory points of a compass, defining white arcs in the darkness. “Look what I found,” you said. It was the boat, which you held up casually between your two hands.

  “Where did you get that?” I asked, as if I didn’t know.

  “Down by the lake,” you said. “It was caught in some weeds.”

  “That’s Kathleen’s boat,” Grandfather said, and you laughed.

  “Finders keepers, losers weepers,” you chanted, but you handed it to me, anyway. “Aren’t you two freezing out here? I’m going in. Does anybody know what’s for dinner? Road kill, as usual?”

  After you walked into the kitchen, we sat a little while longer on the porch, rocking back and forth in our separate chairs in silence, like the crazy people I had seen on the porch of the halfway house outside Conway, staring into the night. “Why do you let her get to you like that?” Grandfather asked, finally.

  “I don’t know,” I said, but of course I was lying. I waited, hoping Grandfather would catch me in my lie; I thought of how consoling it would be to be seen through, as if there were such a thing as clarity. Instead, he stood up slowly—his bones and the wicker making the same noise—and took my hand.

  “Come on, Kathleen,” he said. “If you’re going to be going to Labrador with me, we’ve still got one big fight ahead of us.”

  Inside the kitchen you sat at the table, scratching the welts on your skin. “You’re in luck,” you said. “Pork chops.”

  I sat down beside you, pulling my chair up close. “Why did you do it?” I whispered.

  “Do what? Take the boat?” You widened your eyes, presenting the perfect image of innocence affronted.

  “That’s my question,” Mama said. “I don’t care how warm it was, October’s no time to be going swimming. You could catch pneumonia, sweetheart.”

  “It was seventy degrees out, Mom,” you said, sighing.

  “Why don’t you answer me?” I asked.

  The pantry door swung open and Daddy walked into the room, joining us at the table. He had a pencil stuck behind his ear and the pleased look on his face that signified discovery. “It’s just possible,” he announced, “that we’ve got the whole thing backwards. I mean, who’s to say which way the arrow is pointing? What about spontaneous generation? What about proud flesh?”

  “Let’s hear it for proud flesh,” you said, standing up. “I’m going to go change, and then I’m going out.” You held up your wrist and I saw, for the first time, a small silver watch held in place by a black velvet band. “Madame’s coming to pick me up in about fifteen minutes.”

  “But your chop!” Mama wailed.

  “Give it to Kitty, she’s still growing.”

  You leaned over and kissed me, elaborately, on the cheek. “Where did you get the watch?” I asked.

  “It was a present from an admirer.” I realized I’d never seen you blush before: your ears turned dark red, the color smudging outward from them across your face.

  “Willie,” Daddy said, “as long as you’re up, could you get me a beer?”

  I sat there, thinking things over, as you walked to the refrigerator, scratching the damp place behind your knee. Rogni would never have given a watch as a present; I remembered what he’d said to me in the third-floor room, so many years ago, about angels and time. Nor could I picture him walking into Mr. Booker’s jewelry store and pulling a wallet from his pocket. “Who gave it to you?” I asked.

  “You’re suddenly full of questions.” You stood looking into the refrigerator. “I don’t see any beer,” you said, and then you walked back over to me, and stuck your lips right up against the side of my head, so that I could feel how moist they were. For my part, I was like ice, and it occurred to me that your lips might freeze in place there, the way my own lips used to freeze to the steering mechanism of my sled. “Peter Mygatz,” you whispered. “Satisfied?”

  I nodded. Maybe, I thought, I was wrong. Maybe it had been Peter Mygatz on the raft. I tried reawakening the image in my mind, but because I was fooling myself, it proved invulnerable to alteration—if anything it grew more damning, replete with new details: from the man’s back I saw wings unfolding, the feathers fanning out and extending downward, gathering you in.

  “Sweetheart,” Mama said, “there’s some calamine lotion upstairs in the medicine cabinet.”

  You drew away from me, looking at me curiously. “That’s great, Mom,” you said. “But I think what Dad wants is a beer.” And then you danced out of the room, laughing.

  I suppose it is just as well that you weren’t home for dinner that night. Certainly, with your love of family drama, you might have jumped into the discussion of Grandfather’s and my plan, fiddling around with my sense of purpose, re-forming it into something more closely resembling guilt. And if I hadn’t gone? Who knows whether that would have changed the course of events.

  Meanwhile, Grandfather was persistent. He pointed out the educational benefits of such a trip. “Kathleen’s a born naturalist,” he said, “in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “That’s great,” Daddy said. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t naturalists study living things? I don’t want to disappoint you,” he said to me, “but I don’t think you’ll find much alive up there.”

  “You’re wrong,” Grandfather said. “The tundra is teeming with life.”


  “He means flies,” Daddy said, “don’t let him fool you.”

  “I want to go,” I said. “Besides, there won’t be any flies this time of year.”

  “But, sweetheart,” Mama said, “what about school? What about your friends? What about us?”

  “I hate school,” I said. “I don’t have any friends.” Then I paused, because I didn’t know how to finish my statement. “You’ll be here when I get back.” I poked my fork angrily into a Tater Treat. “Willie always gets to do what she wants to do. And don’t tell me it’s because she’s older. She’s been taking ballet lessons ever since she was born.”

  “Kathleen, listen to me.” Daddy reached out and tried to take my hand, but I pulled it away.

  “Leave me alone,” I said.

  “All right, you don’t have to be friendly, but I want you to listen, just the same. I think it’s commendable the way you’ve developed a fondness for your grandfather. Only, I’ve known him for a long time. He’s not the easiest person in the world to get along with, believe me.”

  “I think he’s easy to get along with,” I said.

  “When he left here, Kathleen, he never told a soul he was going. He just took off, as if he didn’t have a care in the world, as if he didn’t have a wife and a family. The closest thing any of us had to advance warning was the fact that he’d suddenly begun buying camping equipment.”

  “You’re wrong,” Grandfather said. “I told Lessie. She knew all along. If she didn’t choose to tell you, then I’d say that was her problem.”

  “See,” Daddy said, “that’s just what I mean. He can’t take responsibility for anything.”

  I pointed out that I would be gone for only two months. I pointed out that I’d never asked for anything. What I didn’t realize then was that, if I were to leave, Mama and Daddy would find themselves alone together; even if they were oblivious to the fact, that was the fate they were trying to forestall.