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

in groups.
    He realizes quickly that groups of words are more powerful than the individual words are and one bright summer afternoon when she is bent over her desk in the window he floats over from the top of the refrigerator to her desk and says to her pain mud mother. A sentence neither of them ever forgot.
    24.
    Worried Man reaches the spar tree near the lip of the hill and holds on for dear life. He’s really dizzy now and he’s worried.
    He sits down.
    He’s lost the trail of the pain for a moment; his own pain shoved it out of his head.
    Room for only one pain at a time, he thinks. Well. There’s a lesson. Take a note, Billy. Get that down on tape. His head spins. He stretches out on the ground. Fern. Bracken? The base of large trees, he has noticed over the years, are often draped in fern. Wonder why. Like skirts. Fern skirts girdle female trees? Huge wooden women. Like Anna Christie. Huge wooden woman. Not wooden, turns out. Fascinating woman. Not pretty but what grace and dignity. Not pretty but beautiful. And what a singer. And what a drunk. A howling drunk. Felt her pain all the way across town. What a voice. Her pain had something to do with her voice, he remembers; he remembers that her pain quivered in a curious way. Quavered. Some women have a pulsing energy almost too sharp and salty to endure and when they are in pain their pain is ferocious and shatters all over the place. Her pain had wobbled his knees and by the time they got to the Christies’ house Cedar had to help him hobble up the stairs. Where they found Anna screaming drunk that night and her family escaped to a motel. Broken glass everywhere. Broken dishes. Puke and blood. Music blasting. Opera. When I turned off the music I thought she would kick me to death. Her boots in my ribs. Cracking my bones. Cedar talked to her all that night, his voice like a cello. He and Anna sang in the dark. Songs with no words. The river sang too. Anna big as a bear. I couldn’t sing. Her voice like a river. They sang by the river.
    He sits up and draws a bead on the pain above him and gets it clear in his head again. It’s a young woman, he realizes. The pain is raw, uncut by experience. Whoever she is hasn’t felt pain of this sort ever before and it is flowing out of her like blood from a severed vein.
    25.
    I’ll tell you a story about working in the woods, says George Christie to his daughter Cyra. They are sitting comfortably in their kitchen. We wore what we called tin pants, which were wool pants coated with paraffin to keep the rain off. Cyra and her twin Serena are the last of George and Anna’s children. At the end of the day the guys would hang their wet socks and unmentionables and shirts around the stove in the middle of the bunkhouse and the smell had hair on it. This fall the girls go off to college. Sometimes there were sixteen of us fellas bunking in one shack all together and we had us some fun, I can tell you that. Cyra once found her mother passed out in the creek and for a long moment hesitated to pull her out. We played us a lotta cribbage, and fellas who could play harmonicas and fiddles, they were popular fellas. Cyra is frightened of college but thrilled that it’s far away. We ate like bears, we did, pancakes and potatoes and bacon and steaks, as much as we could cram home, Cy, but we were none of us fat, as you burned it off so fast, and if ever you saw a fat man in the woods you knew there would be three accidents that day. Cyra thinks she might want to be an actress or maybe a filmmaker. It was more deadly than war, was your daddy’s life then, and I saw fellas cut up in all sorts of ways, but when my friend Minor got killed that was the end of it. Cyra wonders how her dad can still love her mom after all the screaming. We had our own language there in the woods, words I don’t hear anymore, and I miss ’em, Cy: barberchair and bullbuck , and chaser and choker , and crummy and gyppo , and highballing and hooking , and kerf