Zeno
He’s seven when his father is hired to install a new sash saw at the Ansley Tie and Lumber Company. It’s January when they arrive and the only snowflakes Zeno has seen before are asbestos fibers a druggist in Northern California sprinkled over a Christmas display. The boy touches the frozen surface of a puddle on the train platform, then yanks back his fingers as though burned. Papa pratfalls into a snowbank, smears snow over his coat, and staggers toward him. “Looks! Looks at mes! I big snowman!”
Zeno bursts into tears.
The company leases them an under-insulated two-room cabin a mile from town on the edge of a blinding-white plain that the boy will only later understand is the icebound lake. At dusk Papa opens a two-pound can of Armour & Company spaghetti and meatballs and sets it on the wood stove. The bottom half burns Zeno’s tongue; the top half is slush.
“This be terrific homes, yes, lamb chop? Tremendous, yes?”
All night cold seeps through a thousand chinks in the walls and the boy cannot get warm. Navigating the canyon of shoveled snow to the privy an hour before dawn is a horror so grim he prays he will never have to pee again. At daybreak Papa walks him a mile to the general store and spends four dollars on eight pairs of Utah Woolen Mills socks, the best they have, and they sit on the floor beside the register and Papa pulls two socks over each of Zeno’s feet.
“You remembers, boy,” he says, “there is no bad weathers, only bad clothes.”
Half the children in the schoolhouse are Finns and the rest are Swedes, but Zeno has dark eyelashes, nut-brown irises, skin the color of milk tea, and that name. Olivepicker, Sheep Shagger, Wop, Zero—even when he doesn’t understand the epithets, their message is plain: don’t stink, don’t breathe, stop shivering, stop being different. After school he wanders the labyrinth of plowed snow that is downtown Lakeport, five feet atop the service station, six feet on the roof of M. S. Morris Hardware. Inside Cadwell’s Confectionery, older boys chew bubble gum and talk of lamebrains and fairies and flivvers; they go quiet when they notice him; they say, “Don’t be a spook.”
Eight days after arriving in Lakeport, he pauses in front of a light-blue two-story Victorian on the corner of Lake and Park. Icicles fang the eaves; the sign, half-submerged in snow, says:
He’s peering through a window when the door opens and two identical-looking women in high-collared housedresses beckon him in.
“Why,” says one, “you don’t look warm at all.”
“Where,” says the other, “is your mother?”
Goose-necked lamps illuminate reading tables; a needlepoint on the wall says Questions Answered Here.
“Mama,” he says, “lives in the Celestial City now. Where everyone is untouched by sorrow and no one wants for anything.”
The librarians incline their heads at the exact same angle. One seats him in a spindle-back chair in front of the fireplace while the other disappears into the shelves and returns with a clothbound book in a lemon-yellow jacket.
“Ah,” says the first sister, “fine choice,” and they sit on either side of him and the one who fetched the book says, “On a day like this, when it’s chilly and damp, and you can’t get warm, sometimes all you need are the Greeks”—she shows him a page, dense with verse—“to fly you all the way around the world to somewhere hot and stony and bright.”
The fire flickers, and the brass pulls on the card catalogue drawers glimmer, and Zeno tucks his hands beneath his thighs as the second sister begins to read. In the story a lonely sailor, the loneliest man in the world, rides a raft for eighteen days before he is caught in a terrible storm. His raft is smashed, and he washes naked onto the rocks of an island. But a goddess named Athena disguises herself as a little girl carrying a pitcher of water and escorts him into an enchanted city.
The chief with wonder sees the extended streets, she reads,
The spreading harbors, and the riding fleets;
He next their princes’ lofty domes admires,
In separate islands, crown’d with rising spires;
And deep entrenchments, and high walls of stone,
That gird the city like a marble zone.
Zeno sits rapt. He hears the waves crash on the rocks, smells the salt of the sea, sees the lofty domes shine in the sun. Is the island of the Phaeacians the same thing as the Celestial City and did his mother also have to float alone beneath the stars for eighteen days to get there?
The goddess tells the lonely sailor not to be afraid, that it is better to be brave in all things, and he enters a palace that gleams like the rays of moonlight, and the king and queen give him honey-hearted wine, and seat him in a silver chair, and ask him to tell the stories of his travails, and Zeno is eager to hear more, but the heat of the fire and the smell of old paper and the cadence of the librarian’s voice join together to cast a spell over him, and he falls asleep.
Papa promises insulation, indoor plumbing, and a brand-new electric Thermador space heater ordered direct from Montgomery Ward but most nights he comes home from the mill too tired to unlace his boots. He sets a can of beef and noodles on the stove, smokes a cigarette, and falls asleep at the kitchen table, a puddle of snowmelt around his feet, as though he thaws a little in his sleep before heading back out the door at dawn to turn solid once more.
Every day after school Zeno stops at the library, and the librarians—both named Miss Cunningham—read him the rest of The Odyssey, then The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived Before Achilles, touring him through Ogygia and Erytheia, Hesperia and Hyperborea, places the sisters call mythical lands, which means that they aren’t real places, that Zeno can travel to them only in his imagination, though at other times the librarians say that the old myths can be more true than truths, so maybe they are real places after all? The days lengthen and the library roof drips and the big ponderosas standing over the cabin unload snow with great whumps that sound to the boy like Hermes plunging in his golden sandals down from Olympus on another errand from the gods.
In April Papa brings home a piebald collie from the mill yard, and though she smells like a swamp and regularly defecates behind the stove, when she climbs onto Zeno’s blanket at night and presses her body against his, letting off periodic sighs of great contentment, his eyes water with happiness. He names her Athena, and every afternoon when he leaves school, the dog is there, wagging her tail in the slush outside the split-rail fence, and the two of them walk to the library, and the Cunningham sisters let Athena sleep on the rug in front of the fireplace while they read to Zeno about Hector and Cassandra and the hundred children of King Priam, and May becomes June, and the lake turns sapphire blue, and saws echo through the forests, and log decks as big as cities rise beside the mills, and Papa buys Zeno a pair of overalls three sizes too big with a lightning bolt sewn on the pocket.
In July he is passing a house on the corner of Mission and Forest with a brick chimney, a second story, and a light-blue 1933 Buick Model 57 in the driveway, when a woman steps out of the front door and beckons him to the porch.
“I won’t bite,” she says. “But leave the dog.”
Inside, mulberry curtains block the light. Her name, she says, is Mrs. Boydstun, and her husband died in a mill accident a few years earlier. She has yellow hair, blue eyes, and moles on her throat that look like beetles paralyzed mid-crawl. On a platter in the dining room stands a pyramid of star-shaped cookies, their backs glistening with icing.
“Go ahead.” She lights a cigarette. On the wall behind her a foot-tall Jesus glowers down from his cross. “I’ll just throw them away.”
Zeno takes one: sugar, butter, delicious.
On shelves running round the circumference of the room stand hundreds of pink-cheeked porcelain children in red caps and red dresses, some in clogs and some with pitchforks and some kissing and some peering into wishing wells.
“I’ve seen you,” she says. “Wandering around town. Talking with those witches at the library.”
He does not know how to answer and the ceramic children make him uneasy and his mouth is full besides.
“Have another.”
The second is even better than the first. Who would bake a plate of cookies only to throw them away?
“Your father is the new one, isn’t he? At the mill? With the shoulders.”
He manages a nod. Jesus stares down unblinking. Mrs. Boydstun takes a long inhalation of smoke. Her manner is casual but her attention is ferocious and he thinks of Argus Panoptes, the watchman of Hera, who had eyeballs all over his head and even on the tips of his fingers, so many eyes that when he closed fifty of them to sleep he held fifty more open to keep watch.
He takes a third cookie.
“And your mother? Is she in the picture?”
Zeno shakes his head, and suddenly it feels airless in the house, and the cookies are turning to clay in his gut, and Athena whines on the porch, and waves of guilt and confusion break over Zeno with such force that he backs away from the table and hurries outside without saying thanks.
The following weekend he and Papa attend a Sunday service with Mrs. Boydstun where a pastor with wet underarms warns that dark forces are gathering. Afterward the three of them walk back to Mrs. Boydstun’s house, and she pours something called Old Forester into matching blue tumblers, and Papa switches on her Zenith tabletop wireless, sending big band music through the dark, heavy rooms, and Mrs. Boydstun laughs a big tooth-filled laugh and touches Papa’s forearm with her fingernails. Zeno is hoping she will put out another plate of cookies when Papa says, “You plays outside now, boy.”
He and Athena walk the block to the lake and he builds a miniature kingdom of the Phaeacians in the sand, replete with high walls and twig orchards and a fleet of pine cone ships, and Athena fetches sticks from up and down the beach and carries them to Zeno so he can throw them into the water. Two months ago he would have been ecstatic to spend time in a real house with a real fireplace and a Buick Model 57 in the driveway, but right now all he wants to do is walk home to the little cabin with Papa so they can heat canned noodles on the stove.
Athena keeps bringing him larger and larger sticks until she is dragging whole uprooted saplings through the sand, and the sunlight glitters on the lake and the great ponderosas quake and shimmy and send needles down onto his kingdom, and Zeno shuts his eyes and feels himself grow very small, small enough to enter the royal palace at the center of his sand island, where attendants dress him in a warm gown and lead him down torchlit corridors, and everyone is overjoyed to welcome him, and in the throne room he joins Ulysses and his mother and handsome, mighty Alcinous and they pour libations to Zeus the Thunderlord, who guides wanderers on their way.
Eventually he shuffles back to Mrs. Boydstun’s and calls for Papa, and Papa calls from the back room, “Three minutes more, lamb chops!” and Zeno and Athena sit on the porch in a halo of mosquitoes.
September closes around August like the pincers of a claw, and in October snow dusts the shoulders of the mountains, and they spend every Sunday with Mrs. Boydstun, and plenty of evenings in between, and by November Papa still has not installed an indoor toilet, and there is no brand-new electric Thermador heater ordered direct from Montgomery Ward. On the first Sunday in December they walk back from church to Mrs. Boydstun’s house and Papa switches on her wireless and the broadcaster says that 353 Japanese airplanes have bombed an American naval base somewhere called Oahu.
In the kitchen Mrs. Boydstun drops a bag of flour. Zeno says, “What’s ‘all auxiliary personnel’?” No one answers. Athena barks on the porch and the broadcaster speculates that thousands of sailors may be dead and a vein throbs visibly on the left side of Papa’s forehead.
Outside, along Mission Street, the snowbanks are already as tall as Zeno. Athena digs a tunnel in the snow and no cars come by and no airplanes pass overhead and no children come out of the other houses. The whole world seems to have been struck silent. When, hours later, he comes back inside, his father is walking laps around the radio, cracking the knuckles of his right hand with the fingers of his left, and Mrs. Boydstun is standing at the window with a glass of Old Forester, and no one has cleaned up the flour.
On the wireless a woman says, “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” and clears her throat. “I am speaking to you tonight at a very serious moment in our history.”
Papa holds up a finger. “It is wife of president.”
Athena whines at the door.
“For months now,” says the president’s wife, “the knowledge that something of this kind might happen has been hanging over our heads and yet it seemed impossible to believe.”
Athena barks. Mrs. Boydstun says, “Can you please shut that beast up?”
Zeno says, “Can we go home now, Papa?”
“Whatever is asked of us,” the president’s wife continues, “I am sure we can accomplish it.”
Papa shakes his head. “These boys have their faces blown off at breakfasts. They burns alives.”
Athena barks again and Mrs. Boydstun clenches her forehead with trembling hands and the hundreds of porcelain children on their shelves—holding hands, jumping rope, carrying pails—seem suddenly charged with a terrible power.
“Now,” says the radio, “we will go back to the program we had arranged for the night.”
Papa says, “We will shows these Jap fuck-fuckers. Boys oh boys we will shows them.”
Five days later he and four other men from the sawmill ride to Boise to have their teeth counted and their chests measured. And on the day after Christmas Papa is on his way to something called boot camp somewhere called Massachusetts and Zeno is living with Mrs. Boydstun.