David Vann - Legend of a Suicide

Well, maybe we can put some plastic over the wood, too, his father said.

That sounds good, Roy said. And it’s okay if just the bottom of the pile gets wet, right?

No. His father looked up at the roof, his jaw tight and dark from five days of stubble. But this is as good as it’s going to get for now. I should have made the shingles longer. Maybe when we take our little vacation and get our next load of supplies, I’ll bring some lumber back.

When are we going?

Don’t get too excited about it. It’s not happening for another month or two at least, and that’s if I get the radio working, although I suppose Tom’ll just drop in and check if we don’t call for too long. That’s what he’s supposed to do, anyway.

A month or two seemed impossibly long to Roy, a lifetime in a miserable place that was not home.

They checked the salmon before coming in, and it was ready. They left one tray to smoke harder into jerky, but the rest they brought inside. They put the rack on top of the stove and started eating. The outside had hardened and was sweet and salty but the pink meat inside was still moist and only delicately smoky. It wasn’t as good as with brown sugar but it was still delicious. Roy ate it with his eyes closed.

Stop humming, his father said.

Huh?

You’re humming when you eat. You always do that, and it drives me crazy. Just eat.

So Roy tried not to hum, though he hadn’t even known he’d been doing this. He wished he could just take his pieces off somewhere else and eat them alone and not worry about it.

By the time they were full, they had finished at least a third. The rest his father left out to cool, then put in freezer bags just before they went to bed.

That night, his father spoke to him again. Roy repeated, Only a month or two and then I’m out of here and I’m not coming back, over and over in his head like a mantra while his father whined and wept and confessed. I cheated on your mother, he told Roy. It was in Ketchikan, when she was pregnant with your sister. I just felt something was ending for me, I think, all my chances, and Gloria was always staying late and coming into my office and looking at me like that, and I just couldn’t help myself. God, I felt bad. I felt sick all the time. But I kept doing it. And the thing is, even after seeing all that that did, and all it destroyed, I don’t know for sure that I’d act any differently if I had the chance again. The thing is, something about me is not right. I can’t just do the right thing and be who I’m supposed to be. Something about me won’t let me do that.

He didn’t ask Roy any questions and Roy didn’t say anything back. His father just talked and Roy had to listen and he hated to listen to this and he thought of his mother and how she and his father had fought in Ketchikan and he didn’t know how to make sense of this new accounting of things. When they had told him they were getting divorced, they had told a different story, as if it were something neither of them could do anything about, and when Roy had asked if he could help, they had told him that he couldn’t, it was just a kind of thing that happened to people.

The rain was constant outside, and their room small and dark. His father whispering to him and sniffling and making odd, frightening sounds in his despair was only a few feet away and there was nowhere else to go.

In the morning, they ate cold cereal and powdered milk and didn’t start a fire in the stove because they needed to conserve wood. The rain continued on, the same as the day before. The windowsills turned dark as they soaked through, and there were a few drips in various places down the walls. His father stood looking at each of them with his flashlight and didn’t say anything but just felt above them where the wall met the ceiling and then looked higher up into the ceiling, moving the beam of light slowly up each slat and along every timber.

Roy read a book, one in the Executioner series. What he read for especially was the woman the Executioner always got, and he tried to imagine having sex with her himself.

Okay, his father said. Time for the drying rack, and you can check the bottom lines, too.

Roy checked the lines first, relieved to get out of the cabin and away from his father. It was still raining fairly hard. He was dry in his rain gear but it was so damp and cold he felt wet, as if everything were soaking through. The lines out front had nothing, but the line at the point had a dead Dolly at the end of it that was already turning pale. Roy wondered if it would be any good still. He gutted it at arm’s length, not wanting to get too close in case the guts were rotten and exploded or something, but it looked all right. It smelled a little more, but not too much more, and the meat looked okay. It was a male, with two long sacks of sperm instead of eggs, so he went back to the cabin for some eggs he had salted and tied those onto the hook with cheesecloth and put the line back in. Then he looked to the forest and thought it would be nice to jack off since he hadn’t in so long, but he didn’t feel the energy somehow and it was all wet and cold and he had a million layers on, so he just walked back to the cabin.

His father wasn’t around, so Roy hiked back into the hemlocks and found his father finally up higher in the cedars.

Hi, he said.

Looking for poles for the racks, his father said. Try to find them about six feet long at least. Any fish?

One small Dolly that was already dead. The meat looked all right, though.

Yeah. It’s fine. But we need more. Maybe you should just keep fishing while I build this. Although we really need wood, is what we need.

He stopped then and just stood in place looking down at the moss. Hell, I don’t know. Do you feel like chopping some wood?

Sure, Roy said. And he went back for the ax. He had only chopped wood once before, for fun. He had a feeling this was going to be different.

He started with the leftover pieces from the shed project, stood them up and brought the ax down, but they just whumped and bounced against the ground and the blade jumped back and he nearly got whacked with it before he remembered that he needed a stump or something solid beneath.

He looked around for a while until his father came back and asked him what he was doing. Roy hung back resentful as his father set one of the pieces on end and put another piece on top and chopped and it fell in half in one swing. He looked at Roy and handed him the ax.

All right.

You’re going to have to show some more initiative.

Okay, Roy said, but as his father was turning away he added, I’m already doing stuff.

His father looked at him. Don’t pout, he said. This isn’t a place for babies.

His father left then, back into the trees, and Roy took up the ax and chopped and hated his father. He hated this place, too, and listening to his father crying every night. What was he talking about, babies? He felt bad then, though, because he knew the crying at night was something else, something he was afraid to belittle.

When he had finished the leftover pieces, he went into the woods with the ax looking for dead wood. He found a few pieces, but they were too rotten. Should’ve known that, he said out loud to himself. When are you going to figure out how to do things right? So he went out to the point again and chopped down another tree and stripped it and sawed it into sections and dragged them back to the cabin.

His father was there working on the racks. Good job, his father said. It looks like you’re getting the wood together.

Yeah.

You’ll get the hang of all this. Me, too.

But his father cried again that night, and it seemed then to Roy that nothing at all was going to work. He tried to ignore what his father was blubbering to him and tried to have his own conversations in his head, but he couldn’t block his father out.