Mink River: A Novel by Brian Doyle Read Free Book Online

his feathers.
    The mother on the porch calls: Rachel? Rachel?
    Moses sees the doctor on his porch and Grace at sea smoking a cigarette and Worried Man climbing uphill through salal bushes and Maple Head loping over the maple leaves and Owen shuffling longleggedly home and the teenage couple kissing gently in the trees near her house; but he doesn’t see Daniel.
    20.
    Worried Man pushes through the salal thickets, gets halfway up the hill, and has to stop and sit down. This has happened to him several times in recent weeks but he hasn’t told Maple Head. It’s like he hits a wall and his legs get so rubbery that he’s afraid that if he doesn’t sit down pronto he will fall down and he is old enough now to worry about broken hips and such.
    Twilight.
    He peers uphill, sees nothing but more salal, blackberry, elderberry, huckleberry, alder all grandfathered with moss; near the top of the hill an old spar tree from the logging days here before the war.
    He stands up and closes his eyes and feels for her pain. It’s straight uphill. He slogs ahead through the thickets, looking for deer trails. He’s lived his whole life in these little dense green hills, and he’s learned to cast about for the subtle trails that animals make and do not advertise, but this hill doesn’t feel familiar at all, which is a puzzle: he knows the town like he knows his face, its crannies and pools and slopes and angles and corners and scars.
    Up he goes.
    21.
    Cedar gathers up his recording equipment and goes back to the Department. As he passes under the lintel he sees the Mission Statement (BRAINS AGAINST PAINS!) pinned up there, and the photograph of the founder, George Christie. George had been a logger as a young man and wished to get out of the woods, having seen his partner decapitated by a falling fir limb. He went to the three-man County Planning Commission, two of whom were his cousins, and a day later he was appointed supervisor of the newly established Department of Public Works.
    The county paid George half of what he had earned in the woods but he figured he’d live longer and he could find some wiggle room in the budget for himself and the family he dreamed of nightly in his room at the hotel. Soon afterward he fell in love with the grocer’s daughter Anna, who loved him back, and they eventually had the family he had dreamed about and she hadn’t: six daughters and two sons. Eventually Anna drank heavily and the family shivered and teetered for a while, but as families sometimes do it turned its collective energies to caring for Anna.
    George ran the Department for thirty years, the last five with Cedar’s assistance, and when he retired he appointed Cedar supervisor. Cedar immediately appointed Worried Man co-supervisor, much as Captains Lewis and Clark were co-captains of their Corps of Discovery (which had been on the beach not far north of the town, many years ago, and in fact Worried Man’s greatgrandfather had met and conversed with Captain William Clark of the United States Army, whom he found to be a pleasant and efficient man, although a little obsessed with salt, and weary of eating elk, which they had eaten for seventy days in a row at that point, I hope to never see let alone partake of elk ever again in this blessed life, said Captain Clark, a line that Billy’s greatgrandfather found endlessly amusing).
    Just before George retired, he and Cedar drafted the Department’s Mission Statement and posted it publicly, as required by the county, and although the Planning Commission had fervently ignored it, Cedar kept it posted by the door and referred to it often. Below the firm pithy headline it read: This Department, will be responsible for, the construction and maintenance, of all necessary roads, paths, passageways, and trails, within the boundaries of the town, without regard to species of resident; e.g., deer and rabbit trails will be maintained at public expense, as well as waterways, of all sorts, heretofore