Bill Clegg: Did You Ever Have A Family

After I heard Will had died, I walked down Pacific Avenue to the rez. Thing was, that Landis kid also got under the skin of Joe Chenois. He was a leader, someone who fought to get back stolen land for the Quinault. The one time I ever asked him a favor was to give the Landis kid a shot. He was done cleaning gutters and stripping sheets and hauling trash at the Moonstone and was ready for something else. He never shut up about the rez and was itching to find out as much as he could. So I went down to Joe’s office and asked him to put him to work, and before long the whole place was calling him Little Cedar. He loved it there and he worshipped Joe. All of them over there did. Tall, like Dad. Had his green eyes, too. Will still came by a few times a week to help out at the Moonstone, or he’d come by the house and barge up the front stairs full of stories from the rez: how Joe had scored some victory against the state, what the carvers who made the old canoes charged tourists for a paddle up the beach. Those old boys loved to tell him the legends and myths of the tribe, and he sucked it all up like a sponge. He’d get extra excited about the stories involving the spit of sand between here and the rez that used to be a camp for the young Quinault girls who’d come of age but were not yet married. The old-timers still say mermaids protected them from men or whatever else might harm them. Anyone who’s grown up around here has heard these stories a thousand times. But the way Will told them opened my ears. He loved every inch of this place. He couldn’t get enough of the people here and their history, and though I’d spent most of my life avoiding the rez and the shaming eyes of the tribe, I liked to hear his version of it.

Just before he went East to college, he talked me into going down to the rez to see a canoe he’d worked on. After four years and a mess of help from Joe and the carvers, he’d done it. I had no intention of going when he first brought it up in May, but by August he’d worn me down, and I agreed to walk down the beach with him one evening after work. I could hear Joe coughing before we entered the long woodshed. I hadn’t heard coughing like that — the kind that sounds like lungs ripping apart — since Ben. Joe was around my age, but standing in the bright work lights of the woodshed he looked twenty years older, stooped, his skin wrinkled and dry. I could see a pack of Camels bulging from his shirt pocket. You got quite a boy, he said, greeting me as he always had: friendly, cautious. He’s not mine was what I think I said. Joe smiled and shook his head and half whispered, We had no say in the matter.

He coughed, pointing to the only canoe in the shed, propped up on sawhorses and at least thirty feet long. How do you like that? I could see it was a traditional Quinault — long and wide and carved from a single cedar log. It had a high prow and a low, snug stern, with four cedar planks crossing the middle. I remember Dad telling us stories of how it could take as long as two years to make a canoe like this. How the master carvers would chisel the shell, and to seal it, they’d fill it with water and drop in burning rocks to make it boil. They’d then let it sit through the winter and spring to season. I hadn’t thought of him telling us those stories in a long time. I walked around the back to the prow and could see that every inch of the boat’s outside had been painted. I couldn’t make out the design right away, but as I got closer to the prow, I could see the face of a woman on one side and the face of a man on the other. Both had long, silver hair that flowed from the prow to the stern in waves that looked like the sea. In the waves were green fish, black whales, and blue and gold mermaids. Neither face was recognizable, but I knew. Joe came up beside me and put his arm around my shoulders. In all our years we never so much as held hands. Even at our father’s funeral we kept our distance, just as we had our whole lives.

Joe died a year later. Another good man who smoked himself to death. Will came home from college and we went together to the memorial. Some folks on the rez had always looked at me sideways, and I’m sure a few did that day when I showed up with Little Cedar. But it’s none of my business. My sisters didn’t go, just like they didn’t go to our dad’s funeral. Not because they didn’t love him, but the truth was that, for us, Dad existed in our kitchen and no place else. He was like a handsome neighbor who dropped in and lit the place for a few hours and left. The rez was his world, his people, and though he never said so, we weren’t welcome there. Still, I went to Dad’s funeral because Ben insisted, and I’m glad I did. Just like I’m glad I went to Joe’s. He was a hero on the rez and a thorn in the side of anyone who tried to keep from the Quinault what he believed was theirs. Hundreds of people turned up, and Will, among many others, said a few words. I was proud to watch him stand up before the people I avoided my whole life and tell them how Joe always had time for him, and how by example he taught him to want the kind of life he lived, the useful kind.

Ben and I didn’t have kids. We never tried but we never tried not to, either. It just didn’t happen and I don’t think about it much. But that once-in-a-blue-moon wonder about what kind we might have had came up as one by one people stood and spoke their good words. I knew Joe was a leader and someone people looked up to, but I was surprised to see how many lives one man could affect. You could say I felt proud. Of Joe, of Will, of myself for pointing them at each other. But more than that I missed Ben and wished he were next to me, listening to Will speak about Joe. I don’t waste time wanting things to be different than they are. But on that day it hurt how much I wished Ben had stayed around long enough to know the only boy I would have been proud to call mine.

The world’s magic sneaks up on you in secret, settles next to you when you have your head turned. It can appear as a tall boy who smells like fish who pulls your braid one night in a bar and asks you to marry him. Or it can be a kid who shows up on your doorstep. Will didn’t show up empty-handed, and he didn’t go without leaving something behind. Not only did he give me a little bit of Ben when I was missing him the most, and good company that didn’t ask for anything but chores to do and to be nearby, but when I wasn’t looking, he tricked me into remembering half of who I am.

When the invitations for Will’s wedding came, I checked the box that said regrets and mailed it back the next day. He knew I wasn’t flying on some plane across the country. But I was happy he’d found someone. He brought her here their first summer to show her where he was from. I made them soup and we walked the beach and I listened to the waves as he told his love the old stories of mermaids and magic. Unlike most people, Will didn’t bend a tale or make it more with each telling. He told each one to her as Joe told them to him when he was a boy, just as Dad told them to me.

After Will died, I expected I’d run through all the surprises. That everyone who would play a part or turn up would have done so by then. I settled in and did my bit at work and at home, and that, I thought, was that. And then a woman who called herself Jane checked into Room 6. And she stayed.

It is winter and there are no cicadas, but he hears them. He crouches next to the boxes of Ball jars, his back to the stone shed, and he hears the night frogs. They sound wild, tropical. It is cold but he can remember the warm air, the too-bright moon. He is where he was. And everyone is as they were, everything is still intact. He can see and hear it all. The words, the porch door, Luke’s white shirt glowing across the field, June following behind.