I cheerfully refuse, p.21
I Cheerfully Refuse, page 21
It appeared they would hang the three without further ceremony but someone cried out Alistair, Alistair, and the name became a chant. I watched through binoculars as he made his way out onto the bridge. He moved slowly, using the handrail and nodding at the sound of his name. An old black lion still heavy in the shoulders. As he neared, two of the smaller boys ran and took his arms to lead him the rest of the way, and he felt for their heads and patted them like a blessing. When he reached the condemned, all knots were affixed and the assembled stood quiet. Alistair said nothing but instead held out both hands. Someone placed the loose end of a rope across his palms. Without hesitation he took up the slack and with sudden force hauled down and jerked the littlest pagan into the air. While he thrashed, a few other men took the rope from Alistair and hauled him up farther and tied off the rope. The pagan spun kicking and managed to hook a bridge spar with his knees but soon lost strength and finally swung twisting with his feet a few yards above the roadway. Again Alistair was given a rope, the woman’s. Again the swift rough pull. Up she went and such was her will she denied them the spectacle of struggle. Last came the tall man, the painter apparently. He tried to speak but was struck on the mouth and sagged until Alistair and others hauled him up. But his knot was badly tied and came loose as he struggled. Down he dropped into the water, where he surfaced and kicked haphazardly for shore. This brought gasps and hoots, and two or three boys no older than Sol leaned out from the bridge and started taking shots at him with short-barreled handguns. Bullets striking water pop pop pop like flat stones. There followed a silence with people craning over the rail. Pointing at the spot where he had vanished. Diddy sink? Izzit him? There was frantic speculation lest he swim underwater to freedom. The kids sighted down their firearms in case he reappeared, but he never did.
Over the next quarter hour the gathering broke up and vanished.
Sol looked at me and I saw her question.
Now.
I raised the anchor out of the weeds and bundled the rope and tied it down. Essie’s nutshell lay alongside, the blades of its oars wrapped in flannel as she had recommended for silence. Sol was at Flower’s helm to point her true as I descended into the nutshell and quietly towed her out of the rushes toward the bridge. I stayed as near the island as possible. The fires had died down or been extinguished and no lights shone, while on the mainland at least two bands were playing and electricity danced in the windows. I would put Flower’s weight at four tons but she slid along smoothly behind the nutshell. Alistair remained static in his chair as we approached the bridge. Seventy yards, fifty, thirty. I concentrated on long slow sweeps and refused to look either at Alistair or at the center of the bridge where the two pagans still dangled among the beams and cables. It was only when I entered the full shadow of the span itself that a terrible fact became clear: Flower, now coasting up slowly to the bridgeway, was not going to fit beneath.
I stowed the oars, grasped the underside of the bridge, and caught Flower’s bowsprit before it touched. I’d stripped off the bow pulpit and all hardware, but the proud little sprit was inches too high.
There we sat. And across the water, there sat Alistair in his lit window. Knobby fingers scratching at his massive old head. He appeared to be gazing straight at us but raised no alarm and shone no spotlight.
I rapped lightly on Flower’s hull. In a few seconds Sol appeared at the bow. I explained in a stressed hush what she could clearly see for herself.
There were few options. We tried getting all possible weight onto the bow, but even when I hung onto it from below, it remained too tall to pass.
“We could still turn around,” I said.
Sol replied, “No. We got to sink the boat.”
Some solutions are too plain to see. In fact nothing’s simpler than letting water into your boat. There’s a hose to loosen, a lever to twist. It’s not a lesson I ever imagined having to teach someone, let alone in whispers under the blind gaze of a bridge troll, but as they say: a child could do it.
She slithered below and soon I heard water rushing into the bilge. Immediately Flower began to settle herself like a hen for the night. Standing in the nutshell I reached for the sprit. Already it was level with the bridge. Moments later we had a half inch to spare.
Alistair was moving. I’d slung my binoculars round my neck and watched. He had his big glasses on, and his eyes filled the lenses as he leaned forward. His right hand reached for something out of view.
I tapped the hull, heard the squeak as Sol twisted the sea cock shut.
And the spotlight came on with a whack—the light so hard we couldn’t move, Sol frozen emerging from below and me at the bow. Two flies on the sun.
Something crackled across the water and Alistair drew an amplified breath. I braced for his voice ordering us to declare ourselves.
Immobilized as I felt, I’d certainly have done so.
But Alistair did not speak.
He only cleared his throat, a rough sound roughly aborted. Essie was right. The man was nearly blind. Flower—covered with dried mud—was the color of the riverbank. Spotlight or no, Alistair wasn’t sure we were there.
In the pitiless light we stayed in place. Flower lifted on an infinitesimal swell. She seemed to breathe. I became conscious of the two pagans still hanging in the steel latticework above us. The woman’s loose sleeve rippling in the breeze.
At the squeal of an opening door I shielded my eyes and looked toward the bridge office.
Alistair was coming out.
He left the spotlight burning and he had besides a long flashlight in his hand. Just as before, he came feeling his way onto the bridge. A prodigious old brute of gravitas and cataracts.
When the walkway hid him from view I sat down in the nutshell and lifted the oars. The blades dead quiet in their flannel jackets. I pulled hard and Flower moved under the bridge. The bowsprit did not scrape, although later I would find it tipped with green moss where it had slid along the bottom of the span. We crept at the rate of agony into the shade and out of the damned spotlight, emerging years later on the far side, where I leaned into the oars and swept us away even as Alistair followed his flashlight along the bridge. Reaching the pagans he shone it briefly up into their ruined faces, then bent over the rail and looked down into the water exactly where we had been.
I focused on rowing and do not trust my memory of these next minutes. I imagine the sweat of fear at my neck. Sol standing at the tiller. Flower riding low with her bilges full and her decks besmirched, brave and at her finest.
I wonder still how Essie fared in that night’s cruelty—how she and all of Brighton could endure it. I couldn’t shake that spark in her gray hair; she seemed about to catch and burn. Down the canal we went a quarter mile, then found a quiet weedy dock where we could tie up briefly. It made me nervous to leave Sol there alone but this was the bargain I’d made with Essie—the return of her nutshell—so I set it on my shoulders and worked up into Brighton by back lanes and alleys. No easy trip. The streets had fallen silent, but some were rubbled and holed, with burst windows and torn canopies and paint sprayed on storefronts. Fires smoldered on the boulevards, and once I fell into a great sink in the pavement—down I went and the nutshell with me, but we were both undamaged. In the end I found Essie’s place and eased into the shed which she’d left unlocked. I tucked the boat into the rafters nesting on its flanneled oars. Her windows were dark and I left in silence. By then she must’ve known of the hangings. I still imagine her simmering anger. I didn’t know what to hope for and still don’t. When I complained to Lark about the last pages of Quixote she defended its author. Sometimes no right ending can be found.
It was a thick ten minutes getting back to Flower where she lay at the dock dismasted among the living weeds.
The wind rose.
A strange new glow came from the mainland, and I saw the base of the bridge was burning—not a conflagration but still a considerable flame slapping against the stone piling on which the bridgehead lay. It threw enough light to show on the water, enough to show the stretching forms of those poor suspended pagans. A man whacked at the fire with a blanket, doing little good. Climbing aboard Flower I called Sol’s name. No answer.
Where was she?
Where were you, Sol?
Did you even begin to wonder what I’d think, when I came slinking back and you were nowhere to be found? And yes I hissed your name, and yes I risked a shout, and yes I lost most of my temper, glassing shorelines up and down.
How did you know I wouldn’t leave?
It was moonless with little light except that thrown by the bridge fire. How did you think I’d ever find you in those binoculars, standing on the mainland, waving your bony arms?
• the djinn
IT WAS SHORT WORK crossing to the rocks where Sol waited. Climbing aboard on shrunken white feet, drenched from her swim across the channel, she shook too hard to speak. I wanted an explanation but first things first: every dry blanket we had. And coffee. She craved her bunk but was hypothermic and I needed her awake and in sight. Wrapped in wool and coffee steam, she watched me steer or watched the passing shorelines and barely spoke as miles murmured past. I struggled to speak myself. I never was anyone’s parent, so this rapid expansion of love and terror confounded me. Both things occupying the same space. Lark would’ve recognized it, known what it was. All I could do was steer the boat and keep Sol alert and watch the sky hinting at dawn. She groaned when I made her move her limbs, but Harry the drummer wandered off in a blizzard once and a doctor said only his refusal to be still had saved his life. Eventually I sang badly and roared out jokes and told stories of knights and maroons. We made it farther than I expected before the gas ran out. When the outboard sputtered it was nearly sunup, and I guided Flower into a patch of still water on the mainland side.
I had to carry Sol below. By now she wasn’t just warm but feverish, not just conscious but talking fast nonsense. Eventually scattered fragments began cohering. A tale emerged of the old brute Alistair at ease in his booth when he detected smoke near at hand. Up he leapt or let’s say creaked and hurried out with his sidearm and a jacket to beat out the flames. He couldn’t have seen Sol flitting in the shadows like a djinn from Arabian Nights, but that’s how it must have been. Himself sweating and woofing for help and flailing pathetically at the flames until his glasses slid clean off his face while Sol, the djinn, dodged into the firelight to scoop them away from his frantic old fingers. I’d have thought she embellished if she hadn’t produced two items from inside her cocoon. First was my waterproof gas match, which she’d strapped to her leg like one of Stevenson’s pirates before swimming across the waterway. Second—and more impressive—were Alistair’s massive specs, which she dropped clattering into my palm like a gigantic repulsive dead insect. God they were heavy. May all hanging judges be judged themselves at last. The pride I felt was unmistakable, though to be clear it’s rarely smart to burn a bridge.
Late in the morning Sol’s fever broke, and she slept while I put Flower in shape—pumped the bilge and cleaned her up, bolted hardware in place, set shoulder to spar and heaved it upright so we became a masted vessel again with all the world before us. In a soft southeasterly I lifted sail and we were off—Sol still asleep—the canal’s last miles smelling less like land and more like open sea.
•
At the lower entrance we tied up to a seawall, which in Folsum’s day was topped with flagstones for frolicsome picnics but now was a shoulder of cement rotting back to sand. I was eager to head upcoast to Redfield, but Sol was still fragile—unable to keep food down, sporadically feverish, thinning by the hour. A store nearby had rice, beans, and even a bunch of bananas, bright green when I bought them but soft and brown within hours as if catching my unease. Light hurt Sol’s eyes. At night she dozed, waking often to drink boiled broth and to demand stories. I never knew anyone so hungry for stories. This is what happens when you reach the age of nine without any. I told her what I could of the mythologies and planetary operas and Ratty and Mole and Robin Hood and all the Dickens and McMurtrys I remembered, but these retellings were superficial and I misplaced characters and got lost in thickets of detail while inventing new substandard endings to supplant what I’d forgot. Growing cranky with me, she asked for Molly Thorn, and I read a bit where Molly age six plants a garden in her yard. A salesman comes by peddling seeds—flowers, cucumbers, beans, melons—but what transfixes Molly is what the salesman calls the mystery packet, a diversity of kernels and pips all thrown together. Though her skeptical brother calls this ‘what got swept off the floor,’ Molly yearns for the mystery packet, and on his way out the salesman tosses her two of the plain yellow envelopes, completing, it seems, her world.
I couldn’t imagine wanting to know what the seeds were. Shouldn’t it always be a surprise? Shouldn’t you step out one morning to find your yard overwhelmed by blossoms whose names you don’t know and pumpkins of lunar immensity and peas so ripe they burst when you look at them? Plus I’d overheard Eloise at the bakery tell a customer she had “picked” two dozen cream horns for his event, which signified to me that these dazzling pastries were not made in kitchens but grew out of the Earth, no doubt on curling and beautiful vines, so surely the Mystery Packet would yield some cream horns or at least long johns as well as more conventional produce.
It struck me that while the stories I recounted were hit-and-miss, Molly never failed to connect with Sol. When Molly fought, Sol wrung her hands. When Molly imagined her outlaw self, Sol trembled. When Molly raked up a bit of yard and planted her ultimately dismaying mystery seeds, Sol sank into contentment and slept. Not only did she like being read to, Sol also seemed enthralled by the physicality of a book—she ran her fingers over Molly Thorn’s blue cover, riffled the pages for their comforting sound. Lark would’ve made a reader of this girl in about eight minutes.
I said, “Sol, do you know the letters?”
She shook her head no.
It was a clear night and dew had begun to form on the decking. I reached out and wrote with a fingertip in the moisture, tracing out the letters S, O, L. “See, that’s your name,” I said. She frowned and squirmed and said to do it again.
I wrote her name again below the first, with more intention, even a little elegance, and dew gathered at the edges of the letters. She looked at me as though I had performed something either godlike or unspeakably wicked.
“All right, listen, hang on,” I said, and I went below and found an old tool apron of Erik’s that was still rolled up in a storage nook above the folding table. Inside the apron’s pocket was a carpenter’s pencil, the wide kind you sharpen with a knife. I grabbed it and also the Field Guide to Animal Tracks by Olaus Murie and returned to the cockpit.
“Look here,” I said, flipping to the back of the field guide where there were a few blank pages. I rubbed the tip of the carpenter’s pencil with my fingertips so a little graphite came off, then flattened the open book against my knee and wrote Sol at the top of a page. “See, S, like a winding stream. O, like somebody’s head. L is just a straight line, north to south. There it is. Sol! What a good name you have. Now you try.”
I held out the pencil, but she shrank away as if I’d offered her a snake. She said, “You do it some more.”
So I wrote a few words, deliberately—boat, bird, Rainy, and so on—saying the letters aloud as they appeared.
Still she wouldn’t take the pencil. At one point she touched it only to yank her hand away. It was plain she felt some shifty wizardry was at work. Her face turned small and distant and she said, “It isn’t for me.”
Well, I wasn’t going to be weird about it. I just thought she’d be interested—someone who sparked and flared the way she did.
“It’s okay.” I closed the book. It had a faded paper jacket with a deer looking over its shoulder at the reader. Something about the deer caught me—maybe its curious expression. I said, “This was written by a man named Olaus, see?” I pointed out the author’s name. “Before it could be a book, Olaus had to write down all these words. Probably used a pencil, like this one. Wrote one word at a time, about the tracks of raccoons and bears and wolves and big cats. He even wrote about the tracks a maple leaf makes when it blows across fresh snow. And now this book”—I tapped its cover—“is Olaus’s track. Because of it, we know this guy Olaus was here before us, and he loved animals and knew all about them.”
“And maple leaves.”
“Right.”
She was quiet.
“Words are one way we leave tracks in the world, Sol. Maybe one day you will write a book, like Olaus did, or Molly Thorn. And people will read it, like I’ve been reading to you. And they will know that you were here, and a little about what you were like.”
Sol’s face remained far away. Her cheeks were white and hollow, but her eyes shone a bit, I was fairly sure.
• the phantom gramps
