Night Soul and Other Stories

  The woman I’m telling this to tells me, “But you did hear a car coming in the driveway.” “I did,” I said, surprised at her, for I could hear across twenty-five or so years the curve, the new tread on the left front of Rob’s old rebuilt 6. “You and those tires, you were a sentry, you were in a war with no one to report to.” The woman looks at her watch.

  Maybe it wasn’t words at all sung by the person inside that summertime house, atheist sylph that she was. Singing she made it sound like words. How unusual for her, how alone and arrestingly mammal and limited and scented, time-bombish, and for my father, for that was how I’d link the wild, knowing tone, not any arc of performing, just little touches linked by instinct though with a terrible overall form to them, everything happening at once, inexorable to them, so that just before I heard car tires cut the driveway gravel out of nowhere I wondered if he had known how to spirit himself like a Sit-in, a Be-in, into the house a back way—by the field—past the woodpecker tree, My way I called it. Or he had never left, he was a residue left in her—as she knew how to not make words:

  :till, taking a scrap of sandpaper to a still bothersome gouge to see what a finish brought up out of the grain, the old owner’s once coarse, often folded sandpaper, I was aware that she wasn’t singing now. When I had in a flash gotten used to it, like something I might ask for; and thinking what to cut a very small rudder and tiller from unless I went to a sweep oar, I saw maybe not a boat after all, this thing manufactured for many days (off and on) at a time when these lifeboats were being made out of plastic…plastic burning sticks in your throat like liquid metal fumes—and the car turning onto our driveway off the county road part hidden by dull drooping midsummer spruce boughs was of course not my father—and I needed to go in the house and tell “that woman,” as my father called her to me, or tell her music, what I had discovered in the gunwaled hull, in really the bottom, of my boat, until I heard someone or something outside my shed:

  :till, hearing only an animal pressure upon the ground outside and, much further away, the house door stick shutting as if it had been left half open for a while having not been previously actively slammed by my mother—or Rob: and now, like a consequence of my thinking, Rob’s practiced, friendly singing voice damped by the house door shutting speaking with such a roundness of understanding more asking than commanding—silly, in even Rob my mentor (who was a nonpracticing minister who didn’t go to church who knew trees, clouds, wind direction, each herbal weed, bored to death with ferns, but “a passion for” local birds—that called our “pileated” woodpecker “sociable” and “frank” and “open, for all his crest”—(knows his shit, my father said)—I must answer what was nearby because I knew this animal pressure upon the ground outside.

  Covering it in my mind—the whaleboat—like a kayak—an old World War II seaplane pontoon—but seeing that I hadn’t wasted time on a model boat because whatever was in it still belonged to me though I envisioned (hand-witnessed) some bent-necked lute, great African flutes or nameless anti-War zithers I saw played on the streets of Manhattan and Burlington, I heard my name called. And a dumb impression passed through me. It kept the far sound and the near one apart—about that exact watchful listening animal sound outside my tool shed, husky, firm, it was a girl against the outer wallboards of this tool shed house of mine as close as a hand on my shoulder saying my name, confident it was I inside, a waitingly modest first name but aimed devotedly by her.

  “Your father was quite the speaker?” said the women listening to me.

  “Public.”

  The younger sister, Liz, my down-the-road or across-the-field neighbor, would I let her in? It was like good advice or my character, that closer noise outside my shed—Liz’s hands and bright, broad cheeks, a naïve lift in her walk, her devotion subtle—or some contemptible mistake I was going to make—thinking, What is it I deserve?

  Working my boat, I said.

  Their house with dark green tarpaper siding was weirdly incomplete, my father thought, for a guy in the construction business, and why the tarpaper? Liz and her sister and their parents lived there, slept, ate, went to the bathroom, undressed, and watched TV there, and left it empty when they went to town. Her father and uncle had added a platform pool in back. All year round Lisa and Naomi lived bodily in that house (which enabled me, for all my family, to rely on those girls, anyway Liz, who was almost my age).

  I laid the hull down on the bench carefully and went to unlatch the door just as Liz’s knock came upon it.

  The pig tails I was used to at her ears had joined and thickened to one great braid today, strange and of an intelligence and history that included me. I let her in and dropped the latch, the cork grip of her fishing pole swinging a little, why did she bring it in? Her chewing gum a gummy cinnamon closeness when she put her hand on the boat right away, we stood shoulder to shoulder, hand near hand, embarked on almost a project though what less than life? No need to say a thing, I was in my own place, and smelling in her hair bark or scalp or the ground between here and her house, her politeness in relation to the workbench and her taken for granted and, like schedules and habits and shared food, averagely authoritative knowledge of her older sister Naomi’s gait and sway and breasts so that, on my knees for a second before Liz came down beside me on the tool shed floor to see me sand a gunwale and spit on it, I smelled the new denim stiffness of her jeans—like sourdough bread or her body, her instinct I would now say; as if it could tell me what her older, harsh sister looked like dressing—as if that was the thing at stake—the accelerating unknown, or just a weather advisory.

  Liz took the whaleboat from me and turned it over and ran her thumb across it. “It’s a whaleboat,” I said. “Who’s gonna catch a whale with this?” she said—“they had harpoons,” she said. She smelled it—unlike a country girl—and put it to her ear and made a face. I looked at her and took it back. “They use them in the Coast Guard,” I said. I could do anything on earth—no problem—or I could be here with Liz or tell her to go. She looked at this pretty amazing little hull as if she was looking at me and took it back into her hands and then gave it back to me, as if I should say something.

  What? What did I know? That her dad had been looking for her and took a cello for a violin and the door creaked but I didn’t look around right away at him? I did him an injustice. It was me he came to see and Liz even that he looked for (visit his daughter at her friend’s?)—I saw she must have described my shed, my wood, my chisel work—though not my hands or their touch, my soothing height, my questions or puzzled pal’s love for her, but enough to stimulate her father; for, better than I, she must have known what you say and what you don’t, and today he’d come as an I didn’t know what, who had forgotten whatever it was he had to do and became a man with nothing to do but come over here. Interested in my mother, too. A country man, Liz’s dad could muster as much basic, staringly puzzled interest in another as any city hawk keeping in touch, pursuing a surprise conversation with an alien on the subway.

  Learning to notice eyes, I saw Liz had practically black hair and blue eyes but no hair on her arms whereas Naomi had fine flax-white hair. My sister, who would trim her hair into the sink and leave it there, spent an hour brushing her hair looking thoughtfully or irritably elsewhere so that I would ask her anything at all in the way I had with words. Liz had taken my hand pulling me somewhere without looking at me when I went with her and her mother and father (he put his hand on my head) and her sister Naomi to the IGA (my father debriefed me later). Today she had said, “You busy?”

  Naomi her sister is tall (“big-boned is what she is,” my father had said). I thought breasts, breasts either loved you or didn’t, and saw you always and waited, I liked all girls and all breasts, they were equally near. Naomi was always about to be a bully. Instead, she would say something funny—taking charge, though—so you thought you knew, but then you didn’t, as if her being nice was a coincidence or cut off from your hope that she would be. Last weekend she wen
t with her mother and father and Liz quite happily to see her mother’s cousin and her cousin’s son who had won a Purple Heart, which I had Liz describe. I decided to call Whelan “Whelan,” the way Naomi did.

  I told her this friend of my father’s was coming today from Vietnam, Frederick. Because she said, “Does he live there?” because I gave her a look. She asked what he was doing there, because I remember I said, “Prob’ly shooting gooks,” because I didn’t know honestly what he was doing, he wasn’t in the military but was against the war and had brought me a small, beautifully written-on thimble-size silver cup made by a Vietnamese once, and I had said “gooks” when Liz didn’t know what it meant, much less that we didn’t say that word, lest you be burned at the stake as a Hawk yet her father Whelan I found I couldn’t quite imagine saying it either, though I knew the word from my own father and his war against those who used it.

  It is afternoon, nobody called me to lunch, Liz’s fishing pole is leaning in a corner, why did she leave it? Was she mad? I step out of my shed and look around.

  The woman I am telling much of this to shakes her head, I see what you meant, that you were like the place. I laugh, but she does not. A pleasure in each of us.

  Down near the brook, I devise an unheard-of canoe route across Vermont west to the Hudson like an early white trader along our rushing stream, often shallow or going nowhere, portaging where I had to, and thence down to New York where my dad’s at his rally if I’m asked on this past July 4th. The war was magical, if I’m honest in the warm, remembering woods on the river bank among poplars and elder bush. Hearing “Mekong” in the mercurial eddy around a rock where a dark trout waited suspended in gloom. Hearing in the near distances “Cao Dai, Tayninh” from a crow, two crows, three crows, somewhere low overhead. Somewhat as I, minor and privately American and not quite my father’s son, if I’m honest, sitting on the toilet at night conceived the war historically and technically and as a promise of curious successes in my later life as if government men or their deeds my father worked non-violently and violently against and rightly abhorred were some type of money in the bank for me. The war a magic of commuting copter gunships frowning down on a screen and field of sniper-infested jungle foliage, leaning, banking, sliding to shape at the controls virtually the space of the air just above what was never to be fully known below the trees and down in the famous VC tunnels which enthralled me in their construction laid out for us in detail by a visitor, the mined geography of a war without front lines. Control, a technique of control, doing things at a distance employing remote lighted panels like NASA’s in Florida and Texas. The tools and equipment of war my great-uncle liked. In particular, the sonar gear on his 311-foot Coast Guard cutter which they would test in northern waters in the vicinity of blackfish or “bigger fry” though sonar was pretty much saved for annual maneuvers with the Navy. I had my woodwork still, a boat or viol; and my town friend coming out—I wanted to get my hands on his air rifle and wondered what sudden death was like; and, as I can explain, though guilty of disloyalty, I was at the same time riveted and inspired, tall for almost twelve—looked thirteen at least, a more independent type of person. Where do crows go in the winter? Nowhere much, said Rob, friend of the family, intimate of my mother, sometime Nature mentor of mine:

  :who knew two dozen mushrooms (not counting those that grew on a huge white ash in off the blacktop back near the covered bridge)—knew the scat of a dozen “critters,” had a moondial by his attic window at home and of the heavens had talked to me last summer and this at night trash astronomy I could tell he really felt though he offered me what would interest me and another evening brought his bronze sextant—the graduated “limb” a sixth of a circle (sex-tant, now more than a sixth) to teach me angular altitudes: the stars crowded and fixed, “astronomer, you’re always losing things,” a shooting star descending not as if overhead were the legendary canopy we hear of but a dark flat and deep field graphed briefly and laughably by this stroke fading across a screen—which took us to the summer triangle, Deneb to the left and Altair below and overhead to Vega and the tiny parallelogram harp above this island of Vermont a melancholy angle in his words and the voice, and how to bring the horizon up to the star.

  Surprising how little music in the constellations. Harp, lyre, swooping eagle (you see Altair, the brightest), falcon, vulture. I opt for vulture, Rob said, at odds one night the summer previous but he did not fret in front of me. “Harp star, tortoise,” he said drily. “That cold blue glare”—did I know Lovecraft?—“yaller to Australian telescopes, I understand, isn’t it green, don’t you think it’s green?” The herd-boy and Vega—the weaving girl—more “trashy astronomy” (Rob called it) that night, but it was the Pole Star, North Star, Polaris twelve thousand years ago and in twelve thousand AD it will be again. Our sun, our solar system moving in the general direction of Vega at twelve miles a second—it would take it 450,000 years to reach Vega—twenty-seven light years to Vega might as well be infinity. The cosmos is in fact unthinkably big, let it go, let it go bang.

  Of my boat, Rob said there was hard and soft maple, both of them hardwood. Mine was the soft variety. The woman to whom I tell these things can see the boy had a number of interests in those days. The boat…and the fishing pole…you and Liz went fishing.

  Yes, but…how was I like the place?—you said you saw what I meant.

  Yes. How were you like the place? You were there.

  CANOE REPAIR

  It was sunset and the boy was angry and wanted to be somewhere else. His father listened to him breathing. What did the boy expect? That’s the difference between you and I, Zanes’s fifteen-year-old son concluded cuttingly. And all Zanes had wanted to know was what was the use in soaring hundreds of feet above the granite hills and lakes in an expensive thing called a hang glider that might get you killed. Naturally Zanes would want to take a look at the contraption to see how it was made. What was so terrible about a father wanting to do that? The boy wanted to be somewhere else at this moment and at the same time he didn’t. Zanes saw dark lake water cooling the airs above so rapidly that, venturing into lake space, an airborne figure loses altitude and tilts steeply downward. They stood side by side staring at the lake. Zanes was glad of the lake and the long alien canoe passing along the far shore.

  It came out of a cove as quiet as deer swimming. The canoe was moving and it was still. Of that Zanes was certain. He and his son watched it and were absorbed in what had passed between them. What in hell is that thing? Zanes said. Remote were the glowing forms of two men paddling upright in unison and a woman amidships leaning back. Where were they bound? They were taking a spin. The man in a flowered shirt paddling stern was a black man. That’s no fiberglass, said Zanes, unless—it’s not a fake birch bark, is it? That’s an Indian canoe, said Zanes’s son, who knew everything, and Zanes breathed easier. Well, that’s no Indian paddling stern, said the father. His son laughed and punched him on the arm. Dad, he complained. His son was trying.

  I bet that boat can fly, the boy said. It looks, Zanes said—alive was what he nearly said—it looks like deer swimming. Deer? his son said. It would run rings around that old tub of ours.

  Against pale poplar and dark pine along the far shore the canoe moved slick and straight, its motion simple as the lake, hidden and obvious and still. Two houses back in that cove had been built by a contractor for summer rental. One of them materialized at sunset, towels draped on the rail of the deck; at sunset a window beamed blindingly like one long flash.

  I knew I would be called to give it up before I was ready. I think now that I have removed it in slow parts one after the other. Many a good canoe will have its thieves, though with the newer types of canoes it is harder to get the parts loose. Some don’t even seem to have parts. This was an old style, though quite new-made, one part bound to another.

  Once when I lived in the city I took a trip into the country. I entered a village and saw a laundromat. An elderly lady with blackest-dyed hair watched th
rough the plate glass window. She was not, somehow, doing her laundry. She was watching for someone. Her hands came to her hips, a panel truck pulled in at the curb. It was the dryer repair service. It had the same name as mine—Zanes. There was a barber shop next to the bakery, and I thought, I like this town, this village, and I will visit the lake. But first I will have a trim.

  It was a drab midsummer afternoon and Zanes and his son came out of the barn where they had been making a space in which Zanes was determined to start from scratch and try to build a kitchen counter and sink unit. They were getting along. They had come out apparently to feel the faint rain swept across the lake by a southeast breeze. The unusual canoe was out there along the far shore, and the black man and the blond woman were paddling not quite at the same pace. They worked together with an uncertain sedateness. You felt they were talking. The canoe’s animal flanks and low length absorbed the two paddlers, who seemed to be sitting on seats below the level of the gunwales. The two Zaneses watched with pleasure as an outboard, with a man in the stern and a small child facing him, passed the canoe close and the canoe took the wake.