His mother knew that. She had touched his hand to stay him. And then sipped her tea in quiet and he wanted to touch her hand, too, but couldn’t. Oh, he wished he could. He wished he could drag his father back to the table and they’d all say a prayer to Chris as his mother wanted. And act as though he was present in spirit like the good folks and ministers preached. But easier to envision celestial worlds floating through the firmament than Chris sitting in that empty chair at the table. And so Chris remained, foremost amongst them but hidden beneath their shirt collars like a great festering boil begging to be lanced.
A horned owl swooshed out of the trees above Kyle’s head with a loud ho-ho-hoo hoo and he ducked, cursing the bird. The snapping of sticks sounded behind him and his father broke through the brush, head down, shoulders down, walking heavy. Rowing against a poisonous river of grief for three years now, going nowhere. Time wearing past him. Threading grey through his glut of dark hair and thickening his belly and rutting that once strong face and throat. He caught sight of Kyle and grinned, the corners of his dark eyes tight. He’d been bawling back there.
“Thought you fell in and drowned,” said Kyle.
Sylvanus grunted. “That’s it now.” Laying aside his rod, he dropped his rucksack and sat on it with his back resting against a stump and pulled a flask of whisky from his inside coat pocket.
“Leave off, old man, for fuck’s sake,” said Kyle. “Mother’s going to kill you.”
“Think now, I’m scared of your mother?”
“Might help if you were. Another heart attack waiting for you.”
Sylvanus tipped the bottle to his mouth, his hand trembling. Hiking his shoulders, Kyle stood. “Not waiting.” He started downstream, ignoring his father calling after him, coaxing him to wait, to have a nip. Gawd, he hated that coaxing in his father’s voice, the greed in his eyes as he sucked back the liquor. As if it was going to fix the pain gnawing his innards.
Kyle kept to the path, his boots squelching through mud. He ducked through a tunnel of alders whose leafless limbs scratched his face and whipped cold past his ears. A few minutes later and he broke through onto a fetid muddied bank. The river ran swollen beside it, its surface flat and silent and white beneath its caul of fog. He trod past chip bags and wrappers partly submerged in mud and broken beer bottles and charred fire pits from night parties. He stopped, scuffed some of the glass into the river, picked up a couple of chip bags and stuffed them in his pockets, cursing the irresponsible young ones. He stood up, then leaped back with a yelp from a pale, pointed face sifting through the fog before him. Tawny hair and ruffs of sideburns, reddish like a fox. Fine green eyes, the dazed look of someone lost inside himself, and yet furtive, sharp with tension as though readying to spring.
“Ha ha.” Trapp’s silly, nasal laugh.
“Ha ha your fucking self,” said Kyle. He forced his shocked limbs to move and walked rapidly along the riverbank, coming to a footbridge beyond which his father’s truck was parked, a black smudge through the mist. Three crumbling concrete pillars from an old logging operation rose to the side of it like ancient ruins.
He got in the truck and started it and blasted the heat and pulled the stick into drive—and then pushed it back into park and slumped in his seat, cursing. Cursing at his fright and stirred up feelings from seeing Trapp, and cursing that he couldn’t go home without his father. She’d be there making supper. She’d be watching. She was always watching when they came through the door, noting Sylvanus’s bleary eyes and whisky breath. Kyle hated it. Hated her disappointment each time, her knowing that her husband was no longer finding his comfort in her. And then the bickering.
Three beer, Addie, three beer, I only had three beer.
And the whisky you washed them down with.
Now Addie, now Addie . .
Don’t now Addie me . .
The same. Always the same. Least the river kept on flowing, no matter how much crap it carried. Always shifting bedrock and cutting through ice and changing its song. Felt like he’d been circling the same eddy for so long now that he was outside the passing of time. Sometimes he was surprised to look up into a summer’s sky and see instead the trees shaking their yellowed leaves or snowflakes falling all too soon and soaking his lashes. Felt like the one long day for three years now. The one long dull day, caught on a cloud of grief hovering over his house.
Water dripped from his hair and trickled cold down his neck. He reached under the seat, found another of his father’s whisky bottles, and took a quick nip to warm himself. He watched the fog through the windshield sculpting itself into Trapp’s pale pointy face, shifting into the fierce blue of his mother’s eyes and then into the dark of his father’s, and then widening onto the dark blue hood of the truck. The cursed truck Chris had left home to pay for. That and the boat. The good lord had taken a hand in sinking the boat a week after Chris’s passing. Crushed it against the side of the wharf with a ton of drifting ice from the spring thaw.
He wished the ice had crunched up over the road and crushed the truck, too. Rammed it against the cliffs and crunched it down to a heap of metal. Kept him from driving it through the outport like a hearse the first couple of years after Chris’s accident, his father drunk and slumped against him, whimpering like a cut dog. Circled the outport so many times old men in their windows started keeping count. Thirteen times one Saturday. Seventeen times another. Each circle ending with Kyle parking near the graveyard down on the Rooms and looking past the crumbling granite headstones to the newest one lodged over the hole where Chris lay. Christopher Now. 1957–1980. Taken Too Soon. He’d stare for hours at that headstone, his father whimpering and suckling the whisky bottle beside him. Stared till his eyes turned to stone and his tears dried up like an old riverbed.
Shame, drinking over his passing and getting maudlin with your own sorry self.
Drinking! Now Addie . .
And having Kyle driving you around like that, not fit.
Now Addie . .
Don’t now Addie me, drinking before you leaves the doorplace in the mornings.
Three beers, I haves three beers . .
And the whisky you washes them down with . .
Don’t talk, don’t talk, for fuck’s sake don’t talk, he’d plead silently with his father each time he drove him home drunk before noon and she’d be standing there, waiting. But Sylvanus had the staying power of a sapling beneath an easterly wind when she took a swipe at him. Not that he’d ever learned from it. No, by jeezes, he’d never learn to keep his mouth shut, as though he could argue himself out of shame.
One beer, Addie, I had one beer.
Too drunk to see past your boots.
I can see far enough to the Rooms. That’s as far as I’m going—the graveyard on the Rooms.
Drinking yourself dead.
Now, Addie, the pope serves more in church than what I drinks.
You knows a lot about the pope, you do.
If what they’re preaching on TV is right, we’d all be better off not going. Sickos.
That what you says to the reverend when he’s burying our dead?
Now Addie . .
You