Immortality is a funny thing. My father did not live, but in each of his sons he lived on, albeit in slightly mangled ways. The fall after our father’s death, Simon dropped out of college and moved home. His plan was to complete every one of our father’s unfinished builds. He moved a bed into the office at the marina and started living there. The task took two years. My gentle older brother was gone. What emerged was sharklike—composed, confident, calculating. The new boatyard he would later open, a modern ship-building conglomerate that far surpassed anything our father had dreamed of, was well under way in his imagination. Two years later, Link and I would graduate. I knew then that I would move toward a life in medicine, while Link was spending more and more time hanging around the US Navy recruiter’s office in town.
“Do you remember my peach tree story?” my mother asked one afternoon.
We were boxing up shirts and blankets in the house. The photo albums had been packed already. Cardboard boxes and bubble wrap littered the kitchen, waiting for the dishes. Link was going into the military, and I was heading to college. My mother was leaving the river as well. She had decided to close up the house and move into an apartment above The Lowering Days.
I had long since stopped listening to her tales. I had stopped reading. I had stopped dreaming of the dark shapes of old ancestors and visiting ghost apples and believing in banshees. Like a fool, I thought then that I’d become too old for stories, too smart for fairy tales. In truth grief had slayed my capacity for wonder.
“Of course,” I conceded.
Had things gotten any better? My mother was still smoking. When people asked her how she was doing, she screamed at them in the streets, in the grocery store, anywhere and everywhere, until people simply stopped asking. Through it all, The Lowering Days came out each week, never missing an issue. Was that better?
“Some people give up.” My mother held up a charcoal-gray sweater to the window light. It was my father’s. “They get to a place where they’re ready to go and they go. Other people, they keep wanting to be here, and here they are. So you can stay, but you have to want it.”
She neatly folded the sweater and placed it in a cardboard box and came across the room. She cupped my face and held me there until my anger had nowhere else to go. I wanted to strike her for leaving. The only reason I didn’t hate her was because of how much I loved her.
“Don’t be mad,” she said. “I’m not betraying him. I’m not abandoning him.” She waved her hand across the sky, fanned her fingers down the river as it slipped among the woods, around the ghost apple tree, and out into the ocean. “He’s right here still, and he’s coming with me.”
My mother, Reggie, and Moses drove me from Penobscot Bay with my meager possessions loaded into the back of Moses’s truck. I didn’t understand why it took all of them, and my mother simply brushed away my concerns by saying, “Maybe it’s not about you.”
I hadn’t thought about that. Instead of asking further, I settled for a general air of sullenness and self-pity. Reggie was driving. We were headed into Canada, where I had decided to study. We should have headed north and then east over the Canadian border. Instead Reggie put his right blinker on, and we veered to the south, heading for Machias Bay and the mouth of the St. Croix River. No detour was surprising with Reggie, so I said nothing.
“I was hoping you’d get a little mad at least,” my uncle said. “There has to be some type of orientation schedule up there.”
“Probably,” I mumbled.
“I need to show you something before you go,” Reggie said.
“You always did love an agenda,” I scoffed.
“He means we need to show you something,” Moses added. My mother said nothing. She just stared out the window at the green trees bending past us.
It took another hour to reach Machias Bay. Moses told me about how it was Passamaquoddy country as we got out and stood shivering on a rocky beach while staring out at the tossing sea. The French had come and established New France just up the coast in 1604. Their first settlement was on an island in the icy jaws of the Bay of Fundy, where the St. Croix River met the ocean. By December of that year the river had frozen solid. The tides rose and fell and smashed the ice until the waters around the island were an impassable field of jagged terrain. Cut off from the mainland, they began to starve.
“For them it was the lost place,” Moses said. “The Passamaquoddy helped them survive. Then in the spring the French went farther up into what’s now Nova Scotia to start over.”
I studied the terrain, baffled at the stupidity of trying to colonize a cutoff island in the grip of the Atlantic. They had brought things like gilded dressers and ornate furniture but not bothered with heavy coats, winter boots, or extra provisions. Looking more closely at the shore, I noticed giant slabs of rock with faint carvings etched into the stone.
“What are they?” I asked.
“Petroglyphs,” my mother said. It was the first word she had spoken since we left home. “Some of them are three thousand years old.”
“Shamans used to carve an arc into the rocks,” Moses added, “before the French and other Europeans came. It showed them going up to the spirit world to seek guidance and then coming back down to their people with the knowledge they’d discovered. You saw these arcs, completed journeys, all over the place. Then Christianity took hold, and they started carving vertical lines instead. Arrows that showed them going up but never coming back.”
“I can’t do this right now,” I said. My father, the one not with us, hung heavy over the landscape.
“Death is a circle,” Moses went on. “But they made it a line. Over time the link between the world of the living and the world of the dead got broken in the people’s minds.”
“Arnoux isn’t some pre-Christian shaman,” I said. “Arnoux is gone.”
“I know,” Moses said. I felt the world level some with his admission.
“Maybe some people are more open to possibility than others,” said Reggie.
I didn’t want to hear what he was talking about. My chest felt hot and tight. I wrapped my arms about my body and shivered at a blast of sea spray. I thought I might cry. It had been years since I’d let anyone see me cry. I realized there was something terribly sad in that truth. “I’m tired of a life where every moment is a lesson.”
Moses nodded, and Reggie looked away. I thought it was over, until my mother spoke. “You’ve been hard ever since he died,” she said. “If you go away hard, I’m afraid you’ll never come back.”
Of course she meant more than geographically back. I raised my head and met Moses’s eyes, which were dark and patient. “Your father loved these rocks,” my mother said.
They would not look away from me, my people. The rocks waited. The roiling ocean waited. The breaking waves never seemed to end, and the wind was a constant battering ram. I shivered, imagining the barrage of a life lived at the edge of the world. I felt suddenly that the coast must have turned itself into rock and cliffs just to survive. Anything else would have been bent in two and broken in half over time. Yet people had persisted here for millennia.
Moses traced his hand along one of the larger stones. An image took shape under his fingers. Moments before, the rock had seemed smooth and gray and in no way unusual. It was like confronting anything that exists closer to another world, say the life of a bird or the consciousness of a tree: once I saw the truth of the stone, I could not stop seeing it.
“They call this spirit the Meda,” Moses said of the image. It was the rough shape of a face with large eyes and long ears hanging down to the sides. It had no mouth.
“The pictures don’t show themselves to everyone,” he said. “It was not a lost world for the Europeans, but a hidden world. This picture?” Moses questioned. “You know it.”
I suddenly remembered an old story my father told about a man with extraordinary powers. He had long ears that heard everything and large eyes that saw anything. In the story he didn’t need to speak to know everything that was happening. Now he was here before me in the stone.
“I had forgotten,” I managed.
My mother quietly took my hand. “That will happen from time to time.”
“That’s why we’re here,” added Reggie. “To remind you.”
I was embarrassed, ashamed, and enraged at the spectacle. I was also grateful to be here with all of them, though my father was gone, and the truth of that absence seemed to cover the entire sea, stretching from whitecap to whitecap, until I could no longer ignore it. I hugged Moses and then my uncle and finally my mother.
We decided to camp that night on a small island not far off the shore, surrounded by more petroglyphs, which seemed to emerge everywhere we looked. As we crossed the darkening water by canoe, my mother pointed out a great blue heron doing aerial maneuvers under the full moon.
I had the acute sense that a period of time in all our lives was ending. I pointed to one of the drawings beside our campsite. “When did Dad find these?”
“A long time ago,” my mother said. “Before you were born. We came here looking for your father’s father. A man who had known him put us up for a few days. He told us stories. Said it had been a hard life for your grandfather. He said he talked about his kid a lot but never knew him. The man said he drank too much. That he never got over your grandmother’s car going off that cliff. The man said he’d lost touch with your grandfather and that he could be anywhere now—working road crews still, in jail, building boats, dead. Then the man brought us here before we went home.” My mother went quiet then. I could tell she didn’t want to leave the memory. “He said it had been one of the only places your grandfather ever seemed at peace.”
“Arnoux was fascinated by this stuff after that,” Reggie added. “He’d come into the hotel for lunch and start telling me about shamans who had access to both good and evil spirits. He told me about different books on petroglyphs. Asked me to go to the folklore archives in Orono with him to do research. He said they could leave their bodies behind and travel from this world into others. Sometimes the other world detained them, evil spirits tricked them. Sometimes they couldn’t get back to their people.”
It hurt to learn something new about my father after he was gone. There were so many things I wanted to ask him. Moses seemed to sense my sadness and put an arm around my shoulders. “He would have brought you here himself,” Moses said. “He just ran out of time.”
Reggie rose, walked through the moonlight, and pressed a key into my hand. I knew it was to the cabin at East Grand. “You don’t lock it,” I said.
“You can start if you want.” Reggie gripped my shoulder. “You’ll have a place to go now to decide if you believe in arrows or arcs.”
“The ones who could go between worlds,” I said. “What happened if they stayed away too long?”
“They sat in a trance until they starved,” my mother whispered. “They died.”
“But what happened to their souls?”
“That’s the great mystery, sweetie.”