Paul Doiron: Bad Little Falls

After I crossed into Township Nineteen, it occurred to me that I should’ve brought a gift of some sort. I had always relied on Sarah to take care of my manners. At twenty-six, I still had no feel for even the most basic social graces.

Even going slowly, I almost drove past Doc’s farm. His mailbox, already knocked off-kilter by a plow, sprang up like a ghostly apparition out of the frozen mist. I pressed the brake and felt the Jeep shudder and fishtail before it slid safely to a halt. When I looked again, the mailbox had disappeared into the gathering night. Peering through the flurries, I detected a fuzzy yellow glow on the hillside above me. It was Doc’s porch light. I turned the wheel and headed up what I hoped was the driveway-the paved way was indistinguishable beneath the drifts-toward the beacon.

I didn’t hear the dogs until I opened the door. Their cries were carried along on the howling wind, so that they seemed part of the storm itself. Larrabee had mentioned that he was also inviting his musher friend, Kendrick, to dinner, but I never imagined that the man would drive his sled here on a crappy night like this. I squinted into the side yard, where a few snow-laden fir trees were huddled against the cold, but I saw neither dogs nor sled. There was something eerie about that disembodied baying in the night.

I rapped hard on Doc’s side door and waited, shivering, for my host to let me in. After an eternity, he appeared. “I thought we might need to send a Saint Bernard looking for you with a cask of brandy,” he said.

“Sorry I’m late.”

“The snow’s supposed to stop later, so you should have a safer drive home.”

“Not if it keeps blowing like this.”

I stepped into the mudroom and stamped my boots to clean off the clumped snow. Doc had so many coats hanging from the hooks, there was no place for mine. After a moment, he realized my distress and said, “Let me take your parka. You can put on those moccasins, if you don’t mind removing your wet boots.”

I had never seen Doc without a coat, so this was my first gander at his spectacular belly. He looked as if he had swallowed a watermelon whole and it had lodged somewhere between his upper and lower intestines.

I sat down on a hardwood bench and began untying my laces. “Those must be Kendrick’s dogs I heard.”

“A storm like this is nothing to Kendrick. I think he’s half polar bear.”

A gray-snouted mutt came waddling on bad hips down the length of the hallway. Its tail swung slowly back and forth, and it held my gaze with two rheumy eyes. “Who’s this?” I asked, scratching its chin.

“This is Duchess.”

“How old is she?”

“Fourteen. Helen and I got her when she was just a puppy.”

A call came from the interior. “Hey, Doc! Where’s the hooch?”

“Excuse me,” Doc said, and with that, he disappeared down the darkened hall. The dog followed like his four-legged footman.

The moccasins Larrabee had offered to me were high-topped, flat-soled, and fashioned from bleached deerskin. They looked Indian-made, which would have made sense. The Passamaquoddies owned reservation land that brushed up against the eastern edge of my district.

I found Doc and Kendrick in a dimly lit room at the end of the hall. With its hooked rugs, birch rocking chairs, and horsehair sofa, it had more of the the feel of an old-time sitting parlor than a modern living room. Doc had the woodstove cranking, but its efforts were in vain. The storm was pulling heat from the building through every crack and seam.

I seemed to have caught Kendrick declaiming in mid-speech.

“There are strange things done in the midnight sun

By the men who moil for gold;

The Arctic trails have their secret tales

That would make your blood run cold;

The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,

But the queerest they ever did see

Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge

I cremated Sam McGee.”

Kendrick paused and took a sip from a cocktail glass filled to the brim with amber liquid and ice. He was something to behold: a handsome brown-bearded man with wild, curling hair, dressed in a buckskin vest over a flannel shirt, and wool logger’s pants that were rolled up at the cuffs, exposing a pair of long bare feet. How in the world were his toes not freezing?

Doc was holding an empty bottle. With his free hand, he gestured at his other guest. “Kevin can recite ‘The Cremation of Sam McGee’ from front to back. That and ‘The Shooting of Dan McGrew.’”

“That’s because I’m from Alaska, where it’s mandatory you learn those poems in kindergarten.” He leaned forward on the couch and extended his strong, calloused hand. “Kevin Kendrick.”

“Mike Bowditch.”

“Doc was just telling me about your frozen zebra. That’s what prompted my little poetry recital. You might have tried defrosting it in a furnace, like they did with old Sam McGee.”

“I don’t think it would have helped.”

Kendrick raised his glass and the ice clinked. “Maker’s Mark?”

“I’ll have a cup of coffee.”

Larrabee left us alone while he went into the kitchen. I settled down in a rocker near enough to the fire to melt whatever ice had formed in my veins. The chair creaked alarmingly as I leaned back. Doc’s elderly mutt plopped herself next to the woodstove with a heavy expulsion of breath.

“That’s one old dog,” I said.

“Doc’s going to have to put her down one of these days, I’m afraid. She’s riddled with tumors. It’s the humane thing to do. But he can’t bear another loss after Helen.”

“I heard your dogs outside,” I said. “They were really wailing.”

“Those wimps just need some toughening up.”

“How so?”

“A night like this focuses their attention,” he said. “I’ve got fifty pounds of bricks on that sled to build their endurance. That’s what I like about canines. Their bad behavior is correctable.”

Unlike people? Charley Stevens had told me that Kendrick was a professor at the University of Maine at Machias. He had probably had his share of incorrigible students.

“Doc told me you’ve raced in the Iditarod,” I said.

“Anchorage to Nome by dogsled, twice. But that was a long time ago, when I was young and foolish. Now I’m just middle-aged and foolish.”

I would have estimated Kendrick’s age as being somewhere between mine and Doc’s, but exactly where he fell along the spectrum was hard to guess. People who spend a lot of time outdoors develop sun wrinkles and burst capillaries in their faces, making them look older than they actually are. But the professor had piercing eyes and an aquiline nose I suspected women found appealing.

As was my habit when I met a stranger, I let my gaze roam casually over him, looking for clues about his background and inner life. The buckskin vest looked handmade; I was guessing Kendrick had tanned it himself. Around his neck hung a necklace of three bear claws. When he leaned back on the sofa, I saw a big hunting knife in a sheath on his belt. His entire outfit seemed like a costume.

He crunched down hard on an ice cube. “Did you hurt your hand?”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re rubbing your right thumb like it’s giving you trouble.”

I was unaware of doing this. “I broke a couple of bones last year, but they’re mostly healed.”

Doc Larrabee reappeared, carrying a tray with two cups of coffee and a new bottle of whiskey. He spilled a little whiskey over the rim of Kendrick’s glass. “You sure you don’t want a shot in yours?” he asked me.

I shook my head no and held the cup in both hands, warming them. Then I rocked back in my chair, looking at Kendrick. “Doc tells me you’re a professor at the University of Machias. What do you teach?”