All the Dead Yale Men (16 page)

“That's a nice fish,” he said. Then he looked around the room and came back to it. “Yeah, that's nice. Can I pick it up?”

The shape of the ancient fish, so perfectly etched on that stone, sat in his long fingers, and he moved it up and down, as though its value could be determined by weight, or that movement was a kind of assay. Then he said, “It's probably not worth that much, I guess. In terms of money. Maybe it's just more sentimental value.”

“You could say that,” I said.

“It's funny about that,” he said. “How people get hurt. Why sometimes things get going wrong and you don't know where they're going to end up.”

That smile again. And yet, he carried himself with an air of the tragic, or the romantically doomed, his hair long, his skin pale as moonlight, his entire aspect one of intensity in the face of long odds. Yes, it was Kurt Cobain. That was the look.

“Your daughter really thinks the world of you,” he said. “Do you know that?”

“Are you threatening me?” I said.

“Oh, Frank,” he said. “What do you take me for?” He brushed his hair out of his eyes.

NOW
,
AFTER MY
father has died, and I think of him in those months before that piñata party, I realize he was dying right before my eyes. It was as though he was facing an enormous, black accordion and it was closing up, getting closer, until it would be flat against him.

So, in those months when my difficulties began to build, he came to see me, but I missed the details that should have told me the time was getting closer. Fourteen months. Twelve months. Getting closer. He seemed gray, although I thought this was just a hangover, and sometimes he stared at nothing, or through the world around us. He could hear the clock. I could not. Sometimes, though, he seemed to carry an odd whiff, as though he wasn't all here, or he was part of some experiment that left him marked in a way that only those about to die were marked. More a mood than a fact.

So, the winter when Aurlon showed up, when he began his work, we had no snow and unseasonably high temperatures, and we didn't even have snow on the land my father owned. It was so warm the bears were out, too.

We knew this because the Girls Club was taking advantage of the open winter. They sat around the fireplace in what had been my grandfather's house, sang songs, toasted marshmallows, and took walks in the woods that were gray, but at least not snowy. The springs were already running and the stream, Trout Cabin, wasn't frozen. But a particular bear was out, one my father and I had known about and seen for years, and he was hanging around the Girls Club, digging through their trash, scaring the ones from Scranton and such places to death. Then the bear, old, enormous, waddling, but seeming malevolent to the Girls Club, walked across the property line of my father's land and disappeared into the swamp there.

The Girls Club's camp director called twice a day. “We just can't have this,” she said to my father. “What would happen if the bear mauled a girl? What then?”

So, in the midst of this dogfight with my daughter, when my father was getting closer to that explosion in his head, his pink Cadillac, the one he would later run into the Charles and which would end up in a junkyard, pulled into my drive, the car leaking hydraulic fluid as always. The car came to the end of the drive, the tires locking when my father pulled on the brakes. Then he kicked open the door and stepped out in his retro preppy pants and a hunting jacket, a khaki coat with a Pendleton blanket lining, which he always said would have been handy in Poland. Now, he came up to the door, opened it without knocking, came into the study, where I sat at my desk with a file (bones found in a furnace, but the DNA showed they were not related to anyone in the house where they were found). He opened the gun cabinet,
took out the Mannlicher and the ammunition, and said, “You know, Frank, I let you keep this. And it's sort of yours. But I need it. And you, too. Come on. I've got a problem. You know, there are times when I've had it up to here with problems.”

He put a hand under his chin and drew it across the skin as though he was cutting his throat. I should have known what this meant: what is life but a series of problems with moments of unbelievable happiness? The happiness was gone. That black accordion was made up of problems. He was gray. His eyes were bloodshot.

“You know how much one of these 6.5 mm cartridges cost?” he said. “Four dollars and fifty cents. So we better make sure we don't use too many. Get some jeans on. And old shirt. Boots. A red jacket. Come on. It's Saturday, so I know you don't have to work.”

“What's going on?” I said.

“Just get your stuff. I'll have a drink while you get dressed. How's Pia?”

“Fine, fine,” I said.

“Glad to hear it,” he said. “I think we'll drive your German piece of junk. Der Grauer Geist.”

“Where are we going?”

“To the farm. Those Girls Scouts, or their leader, the one with the butch haircut and those glasses with black frames . . . ”

“Buddy Hollyette?” I said.

“Is that what you call her?” he said. “She's complaining about a bear—it eats their garbage, and she says it was following a girl who had her period. Do you think that's true?”

“Could be,” I said.

“Well, she says the bear comes from our land and that we've got to get rid of it. It's a nuisance, she says. And since I have the hunting rights, she wants me to do it.”

“It's out of season,” I said.

“You know, for a lawyer, you don't see things very clearly. The law is made to be bent, to get what you want. I'll show you. Come on.”

So we drove the Audi to the farm, out 84, to the ridge of mountains along the Delaware Valley, and because the weather was so warm the mist hung there, over the river, like some ominous smoke.

The Delaware was as constant and indifferent as any river on earth. We went up the dirt road that leads to the farm from the river and I drove through the woods, white oaks mostly, where a deer ran over the gray leaves left from the fall. We stopped in front of the stone house, the one built for my father's dead brother.

The main room was musty and a snakeskin hung over the mantle. The wood stove stood in the corner. One bedroom, where my father would sleep, was under the loft, and in the main room sat the dusty sofa. This is where the snake was supposed to live in the furniture's wooden frame, where I was supposed to sleep.

“You don't mind a little snake, do you?” said my father.

It was just dusk and that blue was about to absorb everything. We went outside and my father said, “That goddamned Girls Club. What do they think bears are? Stuffed, in the museum of natural history.”

“If they're eating garbage, they aren't afraid of people,” I said.

“Just whose side are you on?” said my father. “You'd think that bear would have enough sense to stay away from them. But I guess they are picky eaters and throw away a lot of good stuff. Bacon. You know a bear loves bacon. So, the two of us, you and me, we're going to settle the bear's hash. Screw it. I'm ready to make problems go away. Bang. I've got other things to worry about.”

“Me, too,” I said.

“No kidding, Frank?” he said. “Well, when the problems get bad enough, come to see me. I'll set you straight.”

That blue light darkened a shade: you never saw it change, but there it was, slightly more opaque.

“By the way,” said my father. “Has Pia got a boyfriend?”

“Some jackass from Harvard Square,” I said. “Thief, three-card monte stiff, small-time dope dealer, I guess, maybe a pimp for runaways . . . ”

“Why don't you call Tim Marshall. I'll bet he's got some bad medicine for this twit.”

“She's already warned me about that,” I said. “Have you ever played chess with her?”

“Boy, was that a mistake,” said my father. He swallowed. “Does she worry about Jerry? Does she think she is stained?”

“Let's stick with the bear,” I said.

The bear had a lineage, since it must have been the son or daughter of the bears that used to run around on this land when it was owned by my grandfather, large black bears that left scratches on the trees as they marked their usual paths, which they followed each day with astonishing regularity.

So, as we started our walk in the evening, we didn't need to say anything. My father was trying to decide whether or not to kill the bear, at least this one that had survived in spite of the houses that were springing up along the northern boundary of the land that my father still had left. More people came to poach deer on this land than even a few years before, but I didn't mind that so much since in the closest town, where the railroad had failed, a lot of people were hungry. What got to my father about the poaching was the fact that the people who killed these deer ground them up and mixed them with hamburger helper.

We walked in that smoking gloom of dusk, and as we went,
he didn't speak, although I now know he wanted to talk to me. He didn't have enough money, and time was collapsing in front of him. Maybe he had done some funny stuff with the money that had been left to me. Was it time to talk about that? No. That wasn't his style at all. Deny it to the end, which he knew was coming.

So, we went looking for that bear, which was a stand-in, I guess, for a lot of problems like the money. My father's attitude, his movement, the color of his eyes still linger (his eyes were blue, but pale, as though they were part of a man who is only partially here, who is so clearly only passing by this way, who has only the most tenuous grip on life).

I thought I should just be quiet. And now, when I think back, it haunts me. Could I have comforted him? Well, probably not, given that the first part of comfort is admission of wrongdoing, and that would never happen. So, maybe that added to the bear's chances: that my father was trapped by his own way of doing things. Me? he'd say. You're barking up the wrong tree. I began to think that bear was in more trouble than previously. Here, my father could say to the director of the Girls Club. Here's the dead body. It's all yours.

The wood road we took had been built two generations ago to drag logs to a sawmill that was long gone (nothing left but a saw blade rusted to the color of a scab), and now it was only a trail, but like a formal garden, since the trees made a bower over it. At the bottom a spring ran in this warm winter, and the air was filled with the scent of the early watercress. My father stopped in that ammonia scent.

Above the spring an abandoned apple orchard had been overtopped by pines, and the apple trees looked like skeletons, the wood without bark, ghostly and white there in the increasing blue light of the evening.

“See,” said my father. “Without a place like this, what have you got? But the taxes are killing me.”

“I'm sorry,” I said.

“Don't you dare be sorry for me,” he said. “I'm hanging on to this place so you can have a little of it. Don't you see? I'm trying to give you something.”

“I didn't mean it like that.”

He stopped in the blue light, under the bower of trees, where the scent of watercress was so strong.

“You know, Frank, I'd like to talk to you about something . . . ”

“Sure,” I said.

“Well, a little money was left . . . ,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “Three hundred a month.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “Well, that's right. Technically . . . ”

“So?”

He brushed the leaves with his boot one way and then another, and he made an open space on the ground just like a buck rub.

“You wanted to say something?” I said.

“No, no,” he said. He shook his head. “I'm keeping records. It's all there. I'll store them carefully.”

“Where?” I said.

“Down in the cellar. I'm getting it waterproofed . . . ”

Then we walked through the orchard and into the woods where the ash and oak were so big you couldn't get your arms around them, and where, at this time of the year, the trees stood up from a layer of gray leaves. The entire landscape was gray, the bark of the tree, the leaves, the stone that stuck up: the only color was greenish lichen which, on the rocks, was the color of oxidized copper. A wild turkey pawed at the ground for an acorn. My father kept right on walking until he came to a spot that he liked.

“Might as well cut down some of these trees. Have some logger in here,” said my father. “Get some money out of them.
Why should we leave these trees here for the next guy to sell? That is, when you get rid of the place.”

“I didn't say I was going to do that,” I said.

“I didn't tell my father I was going to sell a thousand acres to the Girls Club.” He shrugged, as though seeing a dead friend on a road in Poland. It was a gesture far beyond despair. “You may think money isn't important, but let me tell you. It comes back to bite you.”