I cheerfully refuse, p.17
I Cheerfully Refuse, page 17
• probably doomed and perplexingly merry
EAST WE BORE along the coast of Michigan, dawn hours away and just enough wind to keep the sails from slapping. When Sol fell asleep in the cockpit I couldn’t wake her and finally hauled her below over my shoulder, setting her down in the forward bunk, which boasts the only privacy such a vessel affords. I had never picked up and carried a child before, and what I chiefly recall is what a furnace she was, her brow and temples a steaming bog despite the chill, and also her unlikely weight—truly I struggled to lift her, as if the whole substance and magnitude of her future were jammed into those spindly feverish limbs. I piled a blanket next to her, just in case, and went back up to squint at the chart book. We’d made about ten miles. Overwhelmed with weariness I rounded a headland and dropped anchor in calm water with pines reaching out from the shore. The place was called Misery Bay. I do not know the story. I lay down wrapped in a quilt on the cockpit bench, the long crescent of the tiller looming overhead against the stars.
White mist drenched me early. I went below to light the tiny stove and make coffee in the galley, the girl snoring up front, a reassuring sound. With steaming cup and damp charts I went out again in the first grainy light to try and see the future.
We lay at the base of a long curved horn of land reaching into the sea. Fifteen miles farther up was the opening of a waterway or canal that appeared to cut through the peninsula to the eastern half of Superior. The canal itself was thirty miles give or take using my thumb as a measure. That was the way to Redfield and the heroic Griff. I looked it up in Folsum’s Anchorages. Redfield had two hundred residents and a breakwater shaped like an ear.
Did it make me uneasy, delivering this girl to a pompadoured keeper with two griddles and a shadowy cupboard? What do you think? And when I asked for more about gallant old gramps she was very tight with details—not her usual shortcoming in my brief experience. However, that was me standing next to her when some friend of Richard hurled the rock that put her on the ground. That was me watching Richard’s eyes turn icy with approval. All respect to proverbs, sometimes they’re mistaken. Sometimes the devil you know is bad enough to chance the one you don’t.
We’d go find Griff and decide from there.
Another thing I liked about this plan: after leaving Sol behind, I could cruise up nearly to the center of the lake beneath the horn’s protection. I could take a breath and lay in wait for a fair westerly. When it came, I’d ride it in one swift daylong reach to the doorway of the Slates. I thought, Can you see me, Lark? Did you think I’d given up?
And this time I’d be careful. This time I’d pay attention: circle the islands, creep up to their channels, enter their arms by a different route. It seemed to me dubious that the jagged black cruiser would still be stationed there. Now I see the cruiser had taken on the attributes of phantoms. It flickered in the rain of memory; it was there and not there. As the horizon accumulated in the east, my conviction grew that whatever might befall me I would bear. Maybe Lark would meet me there or maybe not. Either way, thinking of her made me glad again.
Sunrise streamed through shoreside pines like evidence of something. Maybe our minds decide on things before we are aware. I knew already I’d try the Slates again. How could I not? The morning Lark bought her first large cache—more than a thousand volumes, a great risk for her—I said, How are you feeling? Her instant reply, Probably doomed and perplexingly merry, was a concise report of our handmade lives.
There was movement below as Sol rousted herself from sleep. I dried my face, looked toward shore, and sighed.
Forty feet away lay another risen corpse.
I didn’t want her to see it.
Oh, she’d certainly seen worse. She’d lived at Richard’s. Still, it seemed best not to expose her to this horror in the opening seconds of daylight.
“Maybe stay down there a minute,” I said, when she appeared scratching her head in the galley below.
At which she bounded up into the cockpit and spotted the thing straight off.
“Look at the uncle over there!” she yelped—pointing, practically waving, not startled in the least. In fact she looked a little rosy, as though she’d sighted a box of puppies and not a face-up bloated corpse with a lipless grin and strangely bright bad teeth glinting all directions.
I didn’t understand uncle but she explained she’d lost two uncles to Superior, one before she was born and another who worked alongside her parents in what sounded like a brilliant string of unlucky schemes. One fell off a fishing boat, the other “took a swim.” Neither ever surfaced. Every time she glimpsed something drifting in the shallows she assumed it was a relative.
“There’s nothing we can do for him,” I said. “Let’s raise sail. If the breeze holds, we can reach the canal by midday.”
But she was leaning over the stern, craning around for something. “You don’t have a boat,” she observed.
“It seems like I do.”
“I mean a little boat. A rowboat you tow along behind. You know, for going ashore.”
I admitted having no such thing.
Without further preamble she hopped overboard and swam in a noisy thrashing style toward the body.
“Sol,” I began, but she windmilled along purposefully and couldn’t hear. Reaching him quickly she circled him a few times and finally rested there supporting herself with a hand on his shoulder as though he were a piece of timber.
“Come on!” she called.
“Maybe I won’t swim with corpses today.”
“We got to bury him.”
I said, “Is he one of yours?”
“I can’t tell.”
“Then he isn’t. Come on back, let’s go.”
Her reply was to take hold of his shirt and start towing the old bruiser to shore. I was both irritated and impressed. He was a massive reddish moldering island and she looked made of twigs. Expecting she’d soon wear herself out I finished my coffee, went below and brewed another cup, climbed into the cockpit and sat down to drink it. The girl’s stamina was profound. Hitting the shallows she got to her feet and started dragging him a limb at a time up the shingly beach. Of course once she got his legs and arms pointing inland there was the immovable fact of his immense torso, and that was as far as he went.
“All right, good job, let’s go,” I called.
She did seem to waver in her commitment, wading toward the boat up to her knees. Then a pair of circling gulls who’d been talking to each other in low tones landed near the body. That made up her mind. Back ashore she went and shooed the birds and started scooping a hollow place in the sand.
There was nothing for it. Somehow I had become responsible for a stubborn person. There was a stupid little folding shovel in a cockpit locker. I held onto it and let myself over the side.
Up close he didn’t look as awful as he might’ve. Sure, there were the teeth and the missing eyes and nubby fingers and so forth. It was hard to tell clothes from skin over much of his surface. Still, the way Sol attended to him—as though he really were a blood relation she was glad to see, even in this condition—did allay the revulsion not to say grief and terror I’d experienced in previous encounters. We dragged him up out of reach of the waves and dug him a trench. He was incredibly heavy with rubber-tire flesh. Shoulders like hillsides the red-dirt color that blows in off the Mesabi Range. As the day warmed and we worked on the trench, I began to imagine him not just living and toiling in that primeval landscape but doing so as a kind of colossus. A towering steward of Earth whose rags could not conceal his nobility. We had to dig wide for his shoulders. We rolled him in face-up, then placed stones on him carefully. We did not hurry. At this scale all graves are bespoke. There was the sense, encouraged by Sol, that he might suffer if the mound were badly stacked. When we had a decent berm, she stood at its head and cast about for words, which in my memory were, approximately: “Wish I knew your name, I am Sol, you might be my uncle, you should rest now, me and Rainy have to leave, goodbye.” Without a pause she stepped in the water and set off swimming to the boat. I never got used to that boisterous crashing stroke of hers. By the time I swung gracelessly aboard, she had on dry clothes and was selecting our breakfast from the icebox.
With the sun high we got underway and plotted a course for Redfield. There was no question but to take the canal, which would shorten the distance to the righteous Griff by several days. I trimmed the sails and then to ease our restlessness I read aloud from Folsum. Here is what he said about the canal, whose entrance we hoped to reach by nightfall:
Let me praise this temperate region as the Venice of the Great Lakes. The climate—cool in summer, benign in winter—is a gift of the munificent Inland Sea, and ensures that cherries, peaches, and apricots are at the center of a vibrant local agriculture. If you are lucky enough to traverse the Canal in late summer, there is a Stone Fruit Festival in the sibling communities of Blinker and Brighton, engendering pleasant rivalry between their citizens. Prizes are awarded for best pies, tarts, and canned preserves, followed by an ecumenical service on the mighty Huffin Lift Bridge that joins the two small cities . . .
Well, it went on like this for pages, with exhaustive references to the beauty of local flora including redtop, orchard grass, and timothy. I didn’t mind. So what if Folsum was wordy? Sentiment is not deadly in small doses. Anyway, I liked imagining Folsum’s world, with its clean handshakes and belt-loosening suppers, its appreciation for pies, its competent mariners and tonking diesels. I remembered people who remembered those days.
But Folsum’s compliments and fripperies made Sol howl. “What is he talking about? Community suppers? Who is Timothy? What does ecumenical mean? Yesteryear is a dopey word.”
“Have some tuna,” I said, offering the can. She got very warlike when hungry. I didn’t want war. What I did want, from her evasive self, was a sense of Griff. For some reason he lurked in my imagination as an unmarked shoal off the coast of Michigan, and though she talked and talked about him, nothing caught for me. Nothing held. Everything she reported was a superlative. Papa Griff was the tallest and smartest and knew the most people, many of whom were important. Papa Griff played chess on a screen against Asian geniuses and just about always won. He caught a big fish and opened its belly in which were two gold rings and the bones of a human hand! And of course he’d built the secret closet and hid her in there with a loaf of bread and a jar of water when people came to collect her. They threatened Griff, but he was bold and stood fast. He scared them away! Nobody told Papa Griff what to do!
It didn’t put my mind at ease, but it did pass the time as we scooted at surprising speed up the coastal strand. I was beginning to be impressed by my own skill as a sailor—the shoreline with its twisting cedars and streaky boulders fairly flying past—until Folsum mentioned a strong current running northeast along the coast. So it was none of me. In any case the pace was welcome. The sea was weary of its benign mood and beginning to scowl. A line of compact storms gathered themselves in the north and made to join forces. The day suddenly seemed long. I spread the chart book over my knees and worried we’d somehow missed the channel entrance. Folsum said it was marked by a green light visible for miles. I saw no lights but did see storm clouds colliding on the northern rim. Lightning sizzled around inside them. Cold dark fingers crept forward over the sea. Then Sol, standing forward by the mast, shouted, pointing at a pale winged shape high in the air catching a late stray sunbeam—and there, below it, was the channel.
The entrance was no longer lit. We could’ve missed it easily. It was only a gap in the shore next to a ruined jetty. Twenty minutes later I clattered the sails down and we motored slowly into the silty mouth of the canal. Even as we did the atmosphere changed: the evening stilled, a yellowish luminescence seemed to rise off hillsides right and left. When the channel broadened I eased into a kind of pocket or backwater close to shore and let go the anchor in eight feet of depth.
“What’s that,” said Sol, pointing again at the shape in the air—the billowing triangle or delta that had brought our attention to the channel below. It darted and rattled and soared. It looked as old as the world. She shrank back against the mast—she was shaking hard.
“Have you not seen a kite before?”
She hadn’t. To put her at ease I described what it was, a bit of cloth stretched over a frame that came alive in the wind and went ranging around at the end of a long string.
“I don’t see any string. It’s just flying around up there, watching us.”
In fact we were too far away to see the string. The big kite did look autonomous and capable, not to say fierce as it dipped and spun in the darkening sky.
Spooked as she was, that kite felt to me like hope, even a reward, maybe for delivering her from the hand of Richard, which I felt proud of at that moment, or maybe for giving an enormous corpse, that very morning, a more or less dignified burial—though it was only Sol’s tenacity that kept me from leaving him to bob in Misery Bay. I knew if Lark were here she would interpret the kite as a sign of favor. An indication of the right track we were on. Lark always thought we were on the right track, even when we weren’t.
In this frame of mind I heated a tin of vegetable soup that we ate in the cockpit while waiting for the storm to arrive. A storm is nothing to fear if you’re snugly anchored with hot soup in a cup. But now the black clouds had separated again, like allies rethinking the arrangement, and seemed to chase one another with bursts of thunder and sheeting rain over the battered sea.
• bad thoughts about authority
OUR ANCHORAGE was a few hundred yards up the canal, close enough to watch the tireless waves marauding past the entrance. Again Sol took the forward berth while I stayed up reading under the paraffin. I liked Folsum’s admiration for the waterway before us—the placid miles lined by orchards, fields, and pastures, the lovely Huffin Lift Bridge ascending to permit the passage of ships and pleasure craft, the assemblies of children along sections of the canal, waving and holding up signs of greeting to sailors from afar! But the longer I read, the less helpful Folsum became. Even allowing for eighty years’ disintegration, he seemed rosy to the point of credulous. Glad as I was for this inland shortcut, I also felt exposed—moving in a slow straight line, with no option for the swift escape to sea.
Before turning in I checked on Sol, and it was startling how she’d drawn in on herself, all but vanished under that blanket, knees nearly touching her chin, her whole quantity no bigger than a cat. It was confounding: the clearest thing about her had been a sense she was larger than the space she occupied. Now in her sleep she seemed barely there at all. Was she even breathing? What reassured me was simply her concentrated heat. She was a celestial phenomenon, shrinking in size while gaining density. As I stood there her eyes opened, black with panic. “It’s all right,” I said. It’s all right. All’s well. There’s nothing to dread.
This reassurance was silly on its face. Nothing to dread? Far from all she knew, on a leaky boat, with a hunted fugitive?
Sol had everything to dread.
How I wished then for my bass guitar. Certainly a twelve-bar blues would calm her. Absolutely a sunlit riff would remind her she was not alone, and do the same for me. Into my head came a lullaby shuffle, the signature tune of an ephemeral brilliant band whose name I don’t remember. It has a walking bass line, this song, a sleepy saunter toward a place of rest. It often came to me at night. I tried to hum it for her but couldn’t hold the melody. Away it slipped like something pleasant I had dreamed.
Morning came clear and the big kite was back in the sky. Maybe it flew all night. There was a steady southerly and the wing hunted this way and that along the currents. Beneath it on sloping meadow lay a long stack of light-brown bales like a wall. Straw or marsh grass, the bales neatly piled. The barrier they made was taller than a man, longer than a freight car. Atop this architecture three kids stood elbowing each other. They were flying the kite.
“You see?” I said. “It’s nothing. A kite, a toy. People fly them for fun.”
We were in the cockpit drinking coffee. Sol grimaced yet claimed to love it. The coffee steamed in the cold and we watched the kids—all knees and ligaments—who had some sort of contest going, their happy yelps irresistible. Sometimes they looked at us over their shoulders. Even at that distance there was mischief in their faces.
“I thought it was something else at first,” Sol said, meaning the kite.
“What else could it be?”
“A death angel,” she replied.
Those early days she said many things to which I had no answer. While I sat riveted she explained this strain of angels in the sky, dour celestials stationed at intervals above the world. “They float up there seven or eight hundred feet watching us have bad thoughts about authority. They love authority. They love King Richard. They love all his friends. They aren’t sure about me.”
“Richard told you this?”
“He saw them every day, talked to them sometimes. I heard him do it. Every time I did something awful they wanted to take me away.”
She stated this without irony, though her level of belief was hard to gauge. Looking across the water at the kite fliers I wondered what Lark might say about immortals whose eternal obligation was to waft in the vicinity listening for truculence.
I said, “Sol, do you like pancakes? What we need is some pancakes.”
Her nod had an element of suspicion, as though my casual dismissal of death angels was the surest way to bring them hissing, but we lit the stove and took turns frying cakes that looked like tigers or plump sparrows or full-maned lions or lynxes with tufted ears. Sol loved the predacious cats. We had neither syrup nor honey but the cakes were excellent rolled up plain and eaten in the sun. We ate until all we could do was yawn and blink. There was no more talk of death angels or any other kind. I felt better. A rising breeze wrinkled the water.
