On the River

“What is it? Really.”

“There’s nothing. It’s nothing. Or you know what it is. The country’s lovely. You’d better watch for the sign.”

“Christ, you know I’m watching for the sign. But I need it like these crops need rain, not at all. Some of the most miserable moments of my youth were spent here. Summers. Even after ten years you don’t forget roads.”

“It’s more like a trail.”

“I’m going as slow as I can. You can’t really expect gravel to stay long on top of straight granite.”

“I’m sorry. I know you’re taking it easy.”

“It’s the odds isn’t it. The fifty-fifty.”

“No.”

They parked the car by the barn. He knocked on the door of the house but nobody answered. He went out into the thin wedge of soil that made the vegetable garden and dug some worms. He felt the poverty of the land in the thinness of the mossy soil. The meadow was gone to weeds and he had to remember where the path had been. Age had worn it into the ground though, and once he could feel its pattern, he could not stray no matter how thick the weeds were. They were both damp almost to their knees by the time they reached the dock.

The boat was half-full of water and green with thin slime even after he had tipped all the water out by hauling the boat partially up on the dock. The near part of the bay was full of stumps and shore birds, but beyond that the river was clear and fresh looking.

“Let’s just forget about it all, babe,” he said. “Here I can promise you fish for sure.”

Her face was beautiful and yet when he had turned from it for a minute its outlines and clarity blurred and he couldn’t bring even a photograph of it back into his mind. It started to rain and she pulled a rain hat out of her pocket and adjusted it to cover as much of her hair as possible. Her gestures were still shy and cautious as though she were yet a girl. He pulled on the oars and took careful glances at her, measuring the angle of her cheekbones and the grace of her lips. Her eyes followed carefully the bobber as it danced on the water. If you took fine green glass, and filled it full of paraffin and a wick, and lit a flame that jogged and flickered as wind blew over the lip of the glass, that would be somewhat like her eyes. Her body was only beginning to bulge with this troublesome child and he realized that she was more appropriately dressed than he. The entire shore was totally familiar except where the brush had been cleared from what were hopefully cottage lots. It wasn’t likely that people would come this far, he thought. Yet here was he with his city man’s raincoat rowing in an almost water-logged boat. The oars dipped into the spools of fallen rain and he moved the boat farther from the shore.

They fished and let the boat drift. She used only a child’s line with the worms he had dug from near the old farm house, and she caught, as he knew she would here at this time of year, whether it rained or not, innumerable small sunfish. She hooked a small bass from time to time and he carefully released those. He cast his own plugs farther and farther out, looking for something larger. They moved across the river and tried the deeper shore and then moved farther up to where a rocky point jutted out and where he remembered there would be bass and there were and she caught some more sunfish while he boated several bass — large enough to keep, if the season were open.

“You’re getting cold,” he said.

“No, I’m fine. I’m really fine.”

“We’re just compounding our illegalities, we’d better go in.”

“If you insist.”

He felt he should return the fish to their own cold depths, but he saw her face glisten with rain and a smile and he realized he wouldn’t forget the way she looked there, so determined to keep herself under control despite everything and to enjoy their time on the water. It was a long row back to the dock, but the movement warmed him and the rain didn’t get any worse and he was glad they hadn’t drowned in the leaky, decrepit boat.

They carried their catch in the bailing bucket up the path to the barn. It had stopped raining and they began to feel the cold. He said that they ought to make a fire and she asked if she had not always been his furnace and pulled him towards her to kiss her, and their bodies, draped in clothes still wet from the river, met. He set down the bait bucket. They climbed into the loft which was full of dusty straw and they made love pleasantly and he could feel the fires within him and stronger within her and nothing was imperfect about it, except that he could not lose himself in his desire as he had once been able, he couldn’t somehow get beyond the world and he felt that they were not as close as they had once been.

He told her he was going to clean the fish and bake them on sticks against a fire and she said that was fine. He could tell that her anguish had caught her again and he did not mention what he had felt after the lovemaking nor ask her about that which she was choosing to hide from him. Her body was half hidden by the dusty straw and the lack of light from the rainy day. The first time she had been pregnant she had been awed by the changes in her body and had done a long series of sketches as her breasts slowly swelled and her hips widened and the child pushed her belly forward. She had made no sketches this time. He envied her ability to draw and kept his eyes upon the shapes of her body as long as he could without letting her know he was observing her.

He started a fire outside with dry straw from the barn and pieces of an old wagon seat which was rotting near the door. He cleaned the fish and set them on sticks in the ground so that they leaned near the fire and the fillets began to twist and curl about the sticks.

He didn’t hear his uncle come up behind him.

“You the fellows that were out in my boat?”

“George. Hey, I thought you were the warden there for a minute. How’ve you been?”

“It’s a dollar an hour for the boat and fifty cents for the worms. I seen you digging through the window.”

He stood up and looked at the old man. His eyes were still clear, his skin was dark, yet faded from the bright red of old sun-burning, haying days.

“There’s better boats, but it’s a dollar an hour.”

He argued with this suddenly strange old man for four or five minutes, reminding him of family ties, asking after his wife Martha, even telling him the name of the horse that had once pulled the mowing machine that sat rusting in the barn. The old man blinked his eyes unnaturally, but did not seem to be listening at all.

“Martha left of cancer some time back,” the old man said. “It’s a dollar an hour for the boats.”

“I’m your nephew, uncle George. For God’s sake, I used to come here every summer for four or five years. I know you. You should know me. You must know me. I helped you caulk that very boat once. I’ve been to America; and I’ve come home. I remember you. I remember you used to laugh at old Jenkins down the road who’d only been here twenty years and got taken for his suspenders and his drawers when he bought a piece of land down near the locks. Once I came up in the winter and helped you fill the ice-house. I’ve looked up the family records. I know which regiment your grandfather was disbanded from when he settled here and how all the men felt cheated when they saw how much rock there was in the land and demanded larger allotments. Remember that? You may not know me, but I know who you used to be. I know where you came from. I know who you are now.”

But the old man only looked at him somewhat queerly as if he couldn’t understand why anyone would raise his voice at an old man. He realized that he had been shouting and he pulled out his wallet quickly and paid this old man three dollars for the time they had been out on the river and fifty cents for the worms. Because he didn’t want his wife any more worried than she was now. The old man walked back up to the house and tried to lock the gate behind him, but it swung open and blew in the wind which was coming up after the storm.

She had come out to the door of the barn and was standing there with her eyes full of sorrow for him, that sorrow which he had always searched for when he was a young man and for which he had fallen so deeply in love with her, but he was sure of himself now, he didn’t need that anymore, and he wanted suddenly to hurt her, or to make her at least present her weakest side in acknowledgement of submission.

“It’s not the same,” he said. “Nothing’s the same.” He glared at her for a moment but he couldn’t sustain that confrontation. “Let’s get the hell home. The fish is so charred nobody’ll be able to tell what kind it is. I don’t know why you keep bashing away at me. My whole life is flowing away looking after you.”

She held herself stiffly and distant from him, as though she were willing the body which was softening for the child to a new hardness. The heater dried their clothes but she was careful to keep them neat about her as though she were a young virgin afraid of exposing herself.

When they got back to the city there was no bread in the house so he went around the corner to the College Bakery to get some challah.

He took number 66, although he saw 65 had already been replaced, but there was a blond man in front of the cash register who seemed to be taking all of Mrs. Mier’s time. He was obviously begging from her and she was shrugging her shoulders at him as though he were one of thousands she turned away every day. The two of them argued in a language he didn’t try to listen to, and then Mrs. Mier took a loaf of bread from the counter and gave it to the blond man. Then she took ten dollars from the cash register and gave that to him also. The blond man walked out. He had been quite handsome obviously, but his face was flushed red with years of wine and his eyes looked as though they were looking away from the objects in the store, away from the ice cream freezer, the wedding cakes, the spiced meats, the displays of small delicacies.

“Ah,” Mrs. Mier sighed. “What can I do for you?”

He ordered a loaf each of challah, rye, and whole wheat.

“You’ve been away,” she said. “I don’t see your wife so much anymore. To the country? All the English go up north for the summer. My husband he was always going to buy a little cottage, but the store took all the money and then he was gone.”

“I’m not English.”

“You’re not Jewish?”

“I’m not Jewish.”

“So what are you?”

“I’m an Indian,” he said. She looked very unhappy and he wanted to joke with her and cheer her up.

“Sure, sure. You’re dark, your wife’s dark, and your little boy’s got blond hair. Indians. You can never tell what’s happening. You saw that man who was just in? John? He frightened your wife last time. His hair is not really blond. What can you do? He’s from the same city in Europe as my husband, my own city. So we keep together here you know. And my husband always took care of him. At first we just gave him money; and when we had none we gave too. But then, you know, he was drinking; the world knew he was drinking. It was like pouring silver into a well. But my husband he never quit. He would just pay John’s rent for him direct to the landlord, and take groceries over and try to get him jobs. But you just look at him now, he’s not like ordinary. He would always quarrel, and fight even. Who fights? What’s to do? My husband would be feeding and sheltering him, and he would take the welfare money or from the United and spend that on wine. Sweet wine. Ah, then he was sick. And now vodka. He would argue even with my husband. ‘What’s your reason?’ my husband would shout at him. We knew that, we knew that. He saw the Germans kill his whole family. You can’t deny him reasons for being like that. But we all did — see horror. It gets too much for me sometimes and I just go up to my bedroom and cry for four or five hours. I can’t do anything except that and each time I feel that it won’t work, that I’m going to fall apart from sorrow this time. But after four or five hours my children bring me a little something to eat and I go on. It’s hard for them to understand and we drive them so and give them too much. They can’t understand why we give them so much and take so little ourselves, but then sometimes later they do, they find out that we don’t believe in all the things we collect about ourselves. And now it’s worse for the ones up in the high part of the city. If the children understand that, sometimes they’re all right; otherwise they go bad and we get drugs and disrespect for our troubles. Who can understand drugs? My son, he says John would be better off with marijuana. Can you believe that? But I think he’s getting worse. I just give him money now. I don’t know what to do. ‘Mrs. Mier, you’re rich,’ he says, ‘Look at all this about you; and three women in the back doing the baking. You’re rich Mrs. Mier. I have nothing.’ And ah, he frightened your wife. I can’t understand that. She is so beautiful, and with the small boy. Ich bin Yetzer Hara, he said to her. I didn’t want to give him anything, it seemed so useless, and then she came in and he said that to her and laughed at her. Ich bin Yetzer Hara. I thought that’s why you were going to Dominion for your bread.”

“My wife is pregnant,” he said as he paid. “She’s been having a bad time and the doctors say there’s a good chance she’ll lose the child.”

“Ah, I didn’t know. Why shouldn’t she tell me? But if she’s not sure. Ah, that John. Did he know? He is getting worse. It cannot be denied. How do you think he escaped? That is what he torments himself with. How do you think I escaped? Because I gave them up? Some did that, you know. Just to save their own skins. Ah, he is worse. Here, take. Take for the child. All will be well. Ah, I’m sorry for John. Tell that to your wife. That a man from my own city should say such a thing.”

She gave him an extra loaf of challah and he took it and left the clean store.

When he got home he put one of the loaves in the freezer compartment.

His son was kicking a many-coloured ball between the two brick walls which surrounded their garden. Though the boy was young, he could kick it hard enough so that it bounced from wall to wall and he could lose himself following it, turning and spinning and chasing after its flight. He wanted to go out and comfort his wife and have her drive out of him the fear that Mrs. Mier’s story had brought, but the telephone rang. It was his broker and he stood there in the kitchen, staring through the windows at his wife and son, while this man who dealt in shares of other men’s business and distant mines spoke to him about rising inflation and defending one’s position. He listened to him, but he watched his own son, and he thought of his uncle George, and he remembered himself when he was not much older than his own son, skipping stones from the point where today he had caught the fish. Three of his friends had been caught in a sudden storm and drowned and he had developed a game where he skipped stones at death.

The waves were paperchases in furrows of blue questionings. The stones skipped between them.

Hello death, are you a porcupine?

Three skips.

Are you a Lancaster bomber carved of balsa?

Seven skips. Flat.

Are you the spring where deer come, half a mile beyond the CNR station, where the water has made the ground all mushy and you have to walk on a board path to get to the place where it fountains among the rocks?

One skip. Overconfidence. Beware.

Are you the men who hung Mussolini by his heels?

Four skips. Caught in a crest.

Do you like blueberries?

Three skips. First repeater. He is not a porcupine.

Hello death. Do you have trouble getting through the locks that join this lake to the next? Do you know what it means to portage? Is it you who turns the lightning to thunder? Does 7-Up like you? May I cross the river?

Ten skips. Second time. The answer to the tenth question is no. Come back again tomorrow. Try me tomorrow.

Goodbye child.

Goodbye death.

He went outside into the garden they had built in the midst of the city. There was only twenty-two feet between the wall of the funeral chapel and the wall of the coach house that had been turned from an artist’s studio into two apartments, but they had filled the small space with grass and marigolds and odd pieces of stone work, angels and ornate stone flowers, which the mason who had built the house in the previous century had been unwilling to sell.

“The doctor phoned while you were out.”

“Good news?”

“He said it was sixty-forty now.”

“Well, that’s better.”

“I guess so.”

“I shouldn’t have been so sharp at the barn.”

“I hope you’re going to do something about your uncle.”

“God, I don’t know. I really don’t know. He’s my great-uncle really. There’s nobody left of his generation, but that’s not an excuse at all.”

“I don’t understand your family.”

“They’re solitary, that’s true. The only thing that held them together was the queen I used to think, and of course that’s absurd now. Now nothing holds them together. The land still frightens them. And poverty. I think everybody who came here was poor and is still afraid of it.”

He lay down on the sheet in the late sun beside her, filled with an overwhelming love of her endurance.

“I don’t understand you,” she said, her anger breaking out. “I used to think I did, but I don’t. Sometimes I think you want not to see me. Or to see me only as I used to be four or five years ago, when we were first together. When we used to spend all that time outdoors, running away from things. I get sick of it. I don’t see why I should be afraid of saying it; I get sick of it.”

He wanted to tell her that everything had been changed. That she was right. That he was sorry for how the blond man had frightened her. That he loved her for her courage of endurance, but he couldn’t get those words to come out.

“I bought you some fresh challah — so your traditions don’t die out in a new land. That was my broker on the phone. I’m even changing my opinions about them, the older ones. Somebody sent me some information about Levy Industries — which will double for sure — and I asked him about it. He told me I wouldn’t want to get rich out of the war. Surprised the hell out of me. He said the money was really coming from war contracts, helicopter gears or something. You just can’t escape it, I guess. Anyhow, I put the challah in the freezer. Mrs. Mier says hello and hopes you’ll stop going to the Dominion.”

“I’m not the same to you as I used to be. That’s it, isn’t it? That’s what you said to me by the barn?”

“Look,” he said, “you’re right. I’m not arguing with you. Let’s put the kid to bed and then we’ll come back out here and lie on the sheet and watch the stars and ignore the bloody soot.”

She agreed, her body loosening, and he realized that he had given in and by doing so had won a small victory. He knew he could never talk to her of the blond man, but he would be able to talk to her of how his gnawing desire for her had lessened as his fear of life had disappeared, as his acceptance of change and imperfection had increased almost miraculously, so that he no longer constantly desired to escape somewhere but was willing to accept everything, Mrs. Mier, the blond man from her city, his uncle George, the doctor’s fluctuating odds, Levy Industries, everything, and still allow desire to overtake his body, and he realized somehow that what he had always desired had happened and that he had got, somehow, beyond certain desires which had blinded his early life.

In the evening, once the child was asleep, they would come out and lie on the sheet on the grass and be protected by the ugly brick walls which rose on all four sides of the small garden and he would be able to talk to her and reassure her. In the winter the new child would come, safely.

“Did the doctor say why the odds were better?”

“No. I don’t know how he can tell without seeing me. He just said that if time goes by and nothing happens that even that is an improvement.”

“Okay. Okay.”