True North Page 6

  My father owned plenty of barely used fishing and hunting equipment, plus various sailing outfits though our sloop barely ever made it out of port except when two young men were hired to take it up to the Club just north of Big Bay. He needed all the equipment for the outings he took with a real wealthy friend and Yale classmate from Duluth, Minnesota, named Seward, who Cynthia had described as “another pervert.” I noticed in the spring when this man had visited that he paid special interest to Cynthia and Laurie dancing to Hullabaloo on television, affecting a special interest in the program. He and my father both made a fetish out of fine French wines which they drank with dinner after loading up on gin martinis. When I stole a bottle of French wine Glenn said, “This shit doesn’t have enough sugar in it.”

  We caught a half dozen brook trout and saw an osprey. It had always been a toss-up for me whether I’d rather be an osprey or a dog, with the osprey winning because it spent its life looking for fish to eat. My mother had gone through a period when she believed in reincarnation but was disappointed in my choices. The proper one was to want to come back as the king of England or a French count. I stood fast in favor of the osprey.

  Thus began the best two months of my life up to that point, and perhaps since. The manual labor, which was mostly digging and building footings for the cement curbs, was an unalloyed freedom from my problems and abstractions. Within ten minutes of starting that Monday morning I was back within the pleasure of helping Clarence dig the garbage hole. I made four dollars an hour, which was more than enough to pay for my share of the cabin and food. Glenn’s dad had taken up with a sassy waitress from an Italian restaurant, Ventana’s, and twice a week we would splurge there rather than cooking at the cabin. We would order spaghetti with enormous meatballs and sausage, or spaghetti and steak if we felt flush. Most of the time, though, we’d eat a hurried meal at the cabin so we could take off trout fishing on the long summer evenings. The hard work made me tired the first two weeks but after that I was in good enough shape not to be drowsy during the evening’s fishing, though one evening when I dozed off on the bank I awoke to find a bobcat staring at me from across the narrow river. On Saturdays we’d go farther afield over to Bruce’s Crossing where we’d fish the Middle Branch of the Ontonagon. I was the driver because Glenn in the same manner as his father was always drinking beer when not actually working. This habit pretty much shitcanned his life, as they say locally, by his mid-thirties.

  I suppose it was simpleminded to take so much pleasure from the elementary economic principle that work directly equals food and a bed but I was earning my own keep for the first time and sensed the possibility of independence from my parents. I loved my sagging bed in the cabin, the linoleum floors, the drizzling shower, the food that always seemed delicious because you were very hungry, the excitement of finding new streams to fish.

  Only three things went wrong during those two months and they seemed minor at the time, though one of them proved not to be. In the middle of the second week a young lawyer from the firm that handled our family stuff showed up and it was embarrassing to talk to him with other workers watching from a distance. Of course my parents had sent him over. I told him I was fine and he wondered if I needed money or anything. I said no and went back to digging so he drove off in his MG. The other laborers except Glenn and his dad thought I was in some sort of trouble.

  The second item was a mixture of the good and bad. Glenn and I had met some local high school girls at lunch at a hamburger stand. We asked them to go to the movies that evening but when we picked up my date at her parents’ small bungalow her father, a miner with crippled legs from over near Republic, was quite upset when we were introduced and he caught my name. Standing there before their front door which had a stack of cement blocks for steps he asked me to repeat my name and where I was from. I did so and felt sweat arising all over my body. His dowdy wife stood right behind with her arms crossed but looking sympathetically at her daughter who stared down at the ground. “I don’t think you have good intentions toward my little girl. You come from a bad family, you bring her straight home after the movie.”

  Her name was Polly and we didn’t go to the movie but drove around with four of us in the front of the pickup, then took a walk in the twilight on a country two-track. I was so self-conscious that it felt like my insides had shrunk. Polly was a happy-go-lucky girl and at the same time quite intelligent. In fact she was smart like Cynthia but without the abrasive edges. When she tried to apologize for her father by saying that his legs hurt all the time I said that her father wasn’t wrong. I said that any self-respecting union man should have shot my grandfather and great-grandfather and then she said, “Then you wouldn’t exist.” We laughed about that. “Why not your father, too?” she asked. “He never did much of anything except spend money. There’s no reason to shoot him. At least I don’t think there is.” Polly was graceful and I had never met anyone so serenely pleasant. She kissed my cheek when I dropped her off and we met the next four days at the hamburger stand for lunch after which she had to go over to Escanaba with her mother because her grandfather had had a stroke and they couldn’t afford to keep him in a hospital. We exchanged a few letters and then faded away from each other but only for the time being. Polly had a strange off-brand beauty to her, and a peculiar way of talking from being half-Finnish and half-Italian. I knew my father would have loathed her but that wasn’t what made me adore her. She simply didn’t have any neurotic twists, no half-demented hidden sorrows in her character.

  The third thing that went haywire and that I chose not to believe was when Donald drove Laurie and Cynthia over to see me one Saturday morning in early August. I was irritated because I had had no success rousing Glenn from his sleep in order to pack up and go up to the Porcupine Mountains for an overnight fishing trip and now the plan was being interrupted. Donald was evasive and wouldn’t quite meet my eyes. I asked him as a pissed-off favor to get Glenn out of bed and pitch him in the river. He did so with Glenn yelling “you fuckin’ Indian.” This was funny but only for moments. Cynthia and Laurie approached me from the other side of the cabin yard and Cynthia blankly said, “Laurie missed two periods since late June. We’ll know before school starts after Labor Day.”

  “How do you know it’s me?” I asked with an intended air of cruelty. Being a secret lover does not discount all the others.

  “Because you’re the only one she screws who is stupid enough not to use a rubber,” Cynthia hissed and Laurie turned away.

  “And she’s stupid enough not to take the pill.” I walked over, got in the pickup, and drove off with Glenn yelling and chasing the truck in wet underpants. I stayed away for only a half hour, unable to bear my own stupid cruelty. Simply enough, driving away wasn’t Christian.

  When I reached the cabin they were sitting in the yard drinking beer and smoking a joint. I walked over and took Laurie by the hand and led her to the rowboat.

  “Don’t drown her,’ Donald yelled and Cynthia slapped him.

  We rowed quite a while before I could say anything and she was no help sitting there in the back seat sniffling and red-eyed, looking suddenly smaller and younger than her years so that I felt deceived by her previous somewhat coolish confidence about life, her imitation of Cynthia’s flippancy when she didn’t have Cynthia’s mental equipment.

  “I’m sorry,” she finally said, and then sobbed. “I mean I don’t know for sure.” More sobs.

  I couldn’t imagine that I had fathered a child. It was out of the question despite biological facts. Once in a private experiment I tried to put on a condom I got from Glenn but it seemed both silly and bizarre. While rowing I glanced at Laurie’s tummy in her pale blue shorts and decided it was impossible that there was a living piece of me inside those blue shorts. As a goofy alternative I felt sexually aroused and suggested that I pull the boat up and we make love in the woods.

  “I don’t feel up to it.” Her voice was especially small leaning over the boat’s gunnel to look at he
r reflection in the dark water. Now she looked lovely again with a leg stretched out for balance. The rejection somehow spun my mind back to the Gospels. The mind is capable of bad timing.

  “I got this feeling you’re not pregnant.” Reassuring a waif was definitely Christian. “I’ve read up on the subject and there are a lot of reasons a girl can miss a period.”

  “Two. I missed two since Grand Marais.”

  “There are a lot of reasons a girl can miss two periods. Physically active girls in gymnastics or who run marathons miss periods,” I recalled from reading about medicine in Time magazine.

  “I’ve been in three tennis tournaments this summer,” she said hopefully.

  By now my head was throbbing and I had to go to the toilet though there was a slight feeling that I had convinced myself.

  Back at the cabin Laurie kissed me good-bye before they drove off. While we packed for our camping trip Glenn, who had heard the whole story from Donald, said that he could easily find ten guys that had screwed Laurie so there was no way that I had to bear the responsibility by myself. I rejected this nasty idea without saying anything. Unlike other teenage males I couldn’t get angry at Laurie’s apparent promiscuity because I had known her since we were little children and I simply didn’t know if the very popular word “love” had anything to do with us. I certainly couldn’t run away because I was already in Iron Mountain. Asking advice from my father or the Baptist preacher was out of the question and Fred was back in Ohio, and besides he might still be angry at me. Clarence wasn’t a possibility, partly because he had several illegitimate children from his wilder days and I knew from comments that he tended not to take middle- and upper-class concerns very seriously. His main ambition was to put food on the table. Once when I went to a fish fry at their ramshackle house in the woods, really a trailer with additions, I couldn’t sort out the children, grandchildren, who belonged to whom. Some looked more Chippewa and some looked more Finnish. I had Jesse in reserve and idly wondered what the Mexican attitude to the problem might be. As the years passed he had taken on more responsibility and several times a month he would put on a trim blue suit and visit the accountant, the broker, the bank, and the legal firm. Once when I was twelve and we had visited one of my father’s cousins in Palm Beach on spring vacation my father had introduced Jesse as a “whiz” or a “jack-of-all-trades.” I hated the place except for the two days Jesse had taken me up to Stuart to go deep-sea fishing. I caught a sailfish which seemed the most beautiful creature I had ever seen. Other than that I followed sanderlings down the beach and noted how they would reach a certain point then fly out over the water returning to the point on the beach where I had first encountered them, and then there would be a new group of them. Cynthia never had any problems wherever we went. She read and danced. Once in New York City we were in a fancy hotel only an hour when Cynthia found a girl her age down the hall who also wanted to practice dance steps. It occurred to me that dancing for Cynthia was the same as the pleasure I took in manual labor or fishing. Maybe everyone was better off in a state of physical exhaustion.

  Our trip began as a bust with a cold rain off Superior, and a screwed-up carburetor in the truck when we reached Ontonagon. I had lamely left my money in my suitcase back at the cabin. This disgusted Glenn who said that I didn’t know the “value” of money, then regretted it and apologized. Of course he was right. Cynthia and I directly received fifty bucks a week from a small trust set up by my deceased grandmother on my mother’s side. She had disliked and distrusted my father and had no intention of letting the money be funneled through his office. She wasn’t very likable herself though she had a black man, Sam, who worked at her home in Evanston who would take me to museums in Chicago, also to Brentano’s bookstore where I could have any books I wished. I also got to have a pizza and once went into a black restaurant and met some of Sam’s friends and relatives. Anyway, I stored my money in my room what with having an aversion to going into banks, and now I had none to speak of.

  So our asses were in a sling. We stood in a gas station drinking pop and watching it rain while a mechanic determined that it would require fifty dollars to get a carburetor from the junkyard and install it. We had only twenty-five between us and the gas station wasn’t inclined toward credit. I was brain limp from dealing with Laurie or I would have figured it out sooner. My dad had a third cousin, named Sprague, an old bachelor who lived near Ontonagon who we saw only at rare funerals at St. Paul or in Evanston or Lake Forest. He was cranky but talked to me because of our common interest in fishing. My mother said he always wore the same suit he had had tailored in London in the 1920s. He seemed to dislike everyone in the family and there was the joke that he came to funerals only to make sure that so-and-so was dead. I called him and then put him on with the station owner who then told me the truck would be ready by dinnertime. Sprague sent over his hired woman, an enormous Finn, in a wood-paneled Ford station wagon from the late forties. The car was rusted out around the fenders and the woman drove it at top speed, slamming on the brakes at stop signs and then accelerating as fast as the car would go.

  Sprague’s house was large and gabled and had been past due for a paint job forever. He was more gaunt and frail than ever which made his Burkett jaw look larger. He shuffled when he moved around the den showing us a large collection of Indian blankets, pottery, and weapons from the Southwest where he spent the winters near Tucson.

  The fried-chicken dinner was good but the conversation was harsh with Sprague railing against our family’s “shameful” behavior in the 1880s and 90s in the timber era. “They cut twenty thousand acres they didn’t own just west of here,” he said, pointing at the wall. I said I had been looking into the matter and mentioned a number of details that pleased him. He hadn’t touched his dinner and the huge Finnish woman, Nelmi, pushed the full plate toward Glenn who, though slender, could eat as much as anyone.

  “I’m on my way out,” Sprague said, then pinched my arm. “No one’s had muscles in our family since the last century. You’re breaking the mold.”

  “I’ve been behind the shovel for two months,” I said, then with no hesitation told him a little about my project about finding the source of evil in my family.

  “You’re naive as hell. Do you think you can be honest when you have their feed bag around your neck? I taught school until I was forty-five then gave myself over to leisure, you know, fishing and travel and collection stuff, all the while convincing myself that most big money is dirty. Now I believe that some is a lot dirtier than others. We were people of immeasurable greed. We suffocated a hundred children up in the Keweenaw and don’t you forget it.”

  “There’s not much evidence one way or another from that long ago,” I offered. “I’ve researched this and the newspapers said it was simply panic.”

  “Bullshit. If you’re going to dig, dig deep. It was murder. The goons yelled fire in a crowded hall. That’s murder.”

  That was that. Nelmi brought out a bottle of brandy and a pencil and paper. Sprague poured a large glass for himself and small ones for Glenn and me, and then drew us an intricate map for fishing including the combination to a gate lock saying it was only about a hundred acres but to fish where a small creek emptied into Superior, and after that there was a good beaver pond up the creek behind the cabin. We were welcome to stay in the cabin but there was “nothing” there. He also said he would ship me a carton of “research” material. He shuffled out on the porch with us to say goodbye looking at the sky critically and noting that the breeze had clocked around to the south. “Your father was only good at war, do you know that? Afterward he mostly spent money.” I nodded though in fact my father never mentioned World War II and belonged to no veteran’s organizations, though Jesse had told me that if he had stayed in the service he would have become a general. This was impossible for me to believe though it later occurred to me that if there was no vast stretch of land, big as some states, to devour you could thrive only in a global war.

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nbsp; Sprague’s cabin was unlocked and eerily empty though immaculate. It was about twenty by twenty with a small fieldstone fireplace, a single bed, and a table with one chair. On the table there was a typed card for intruders that read, “There’s nothing here so don’t bother looking.” There was no stove, toilet, pump, or any other amenities. Glenn said, “This spooks the shit out of me,” so we went fishing for hours and camped down near the beach. I had noticed that the cabin was perched on a hillock in such a way that you could only see Lake Superior out the front window.

  The property was pristine with huge white pines and some hardwoods shading the ground so that there was little understory except the alders around the beaver pond. The land was bisected by a small clear creek and when we reached the mouth we ducked back having seen a school of coasters which are lake-run brook trout and not very common. We were jittery when we rigged our fly rods and flipped a coin for the first cast. Glenn won and caught a two-pounder and then it became apparent that the fish weren’t gun-shy so we could both cast. We caught a dozen before dark and released all but two which we kept for a midnight snack and ate with a six-pack of beer Glenn had stowed in the cold creek. The northern lights were astounding, whirling sheets and cones of rose and green and bluish lights so strong they gave off a tinny metallic sound. Glenn said that if we had some pussy it would be the most perfect night in the world. I pretended to agree in the general enthusiasm but inside I was relieved not to have thought about Laurie in half a dozen hours.