Michael Collins - The Death of All Things Seen

The anger was suddenly gone from his father. He was exhausted. He took another drink. They talked again eventually, or his father did. What he described was not the act of desertion, not the act of disgrace, but something far nobler, something connected to the Feldman past.

They were heading up into Feldman territory connected to a band of heroic Norwegians going generations back. They were, in fact, more Ingebretson than Feldman. His father turned and faced Nate in the compelling sense that this was all true, or it should be believed.

Nate could do nothing but acquiesce and listen.

It was a complicated story. The Feldman name had entered the family through a mercurial Norwegian who had given birth to a daughter of immense beauty, but also petulant character, who broke camp eventually and was seduced and bedded by a fur trapper named Feldman, so the mirthless Ingebretson Norwegians, those dumbfounded giants who had come across the Atlantic, had their bloodline infused with a sagacious, nomadic taxidermist from the Urals who knew something about fox fur and ermine and its value to the Imperial Court of czarist Russia. This, according to his father, was how a rarified beauty, a daughter who struck out and found another life, saved the Norwegian side of the family from a great obscurity.

His father had been brought up outside Saint Cloud, Minnesota. The family name was Engelstad, and he was christened Angar, a name he had always associated with a clod driving oxen, so that when he distinguished himself in school and left Saint Cloud eventually, he took the lifeline of the ancestral, Semitic Feldman name. As for Theodore, he chose the name from a haberdashery storefront sign seen fleetingly through the window of a train on his way down through Saint Paul, believing he might find favor in circles of money in the metropolis of Chicago, Philadelphia or New York. He did. He was such an anomaly with his flaxen hair and great strength, and to be counted a Jew, to have that lineage.

He earned a scholarship to Cornell, enrolling in ROTC simply because he had no respectable civilian clothes. He wore his uniform exclusively, compensating in the way certain men can turn disadvantage to advantage. He was described in the Yearbook as a student of great patriotism, featured in his uniform, inspiring and deferential, and he came to understand that you could be a fraud, or not a fraud exactly, but that your true self, what you felt and thought, could be so concealed from others, and from yourself, too.

He had a head for applied mathematics and a penchant for philosophy, and also the steady hand of a carpenter, given the thunderhead Norwegian Engelstad and Ingebretson in him. His height and his looks gave him a physical stature. He was wildly courted and admired. This was an established fact. There was nothing he couldn’t do, because you had to do everything in Saint Cloud, Minnesota, and he had done everything well by necessity.

A Vanderbilt had her claws into him at Cornell. She didn’t care a whit where he had come from, not then, but he knew it would come against him, and yet, for a time, he described a growing self-awareness, how he could elicit a recklessness in women. They were rough in their lovemaking, and there was always the possibility he would sire a child. There was that much in him, that much explosive charge. This was the frontline of a war that might be won, the war over the heart.

Nate had heard the story. His mother had verified certain facts during the trials and rows of a contentious marriage, relaying what his father could have had, and what he left behind in the first great act of selfless love in leaving behind his Vanderbilt. There was a lamenting sense that he had passed on true love and was never whole again. So it wasn’t the war entirely that had changed him, but what he left behind, what could never be recovered, and would most surely have ended, if there had been no war, anyway.

Nate dared not ask about the Vanderbilt. It wasn’t a question of facts and understanding, but a story of perceptions and deepening influences. His father described how he had been influenced by his studies in philosophy and engineering at Cornell, where, notoriously, existential devotees of Sartre and Camus regularly committed suicide at any of a number of bridges along the gorges near campus. He revealed how, during his sophomore year, he used to walk out toward the gorges with his Vanderbilt debutante, both sharing the mutual understanding that suicide was a genuine option in a world without a God, and that, each time neither jumped, they were making an existential choice to go on living and felt the better for consciously making a choice.

His father held the whiskey between his knees. He drank liberally, looking out into the unfolding landscape. There was the surging sense of what had passed, the rush of great and undeniable passion, and all of it begun before his father was Nate’s age, the indictment laid out before Nate.

At times, his father found it hard to contain it all, the car swerving so it had to be corrected and accounted for, but, thankfully, there was nobody going north or south along the funneling timberline. These were stories pulled from his father’s head and his heart, the stream of words, the Feldman nomad and the giant Swedes, or was it the giant Norwegians? Yes, the goddamn Ingebretsons . His father corrected himself, lost in the quiet incantation of how life could be otherwise invented and lived, peopled by great and noble nomads who must surely have existed in how the land was first discovered.

Nate listened, his father coming round toward an awareness of his own disaffection, tendering the tremulous and humble opinion that, at a certain point in history, just before the Industrial Revolution, when men still lived without the hitch of industry and machines, when distances meant something, a man could find the measure of his strength and temperament in Nature, in lands yet uninhabited.

He alighted on the story of a great ox of a man, Per Ingebretson, their Norwegian primogenitor, who, of his own volition, neither from religious persecution nor any real ambition, just a wandering sense of wanting to see the greater world, had left home at age sixteen, crossed Iceland and Greenland, before making shore in North America. Per, a towering, uncomplicated figure in the tradition of Paul Bunyan, a man who would find his true calling logging in what would eventually become Minnesota. His passage to America had been secured through a trading company out of Hudson Bay, his first true landfall along a meandering river at a bleak outpost near Pictured Rocks on Lake Superior at a supply shed on the way to nowhere, where he was given the vague mandate to begin work further north and simply keep chopping until someone came and got him. There was enough in a lifetime to keep him busy.

His father told the story driving into the upper mitt of the Michigan peninsula in a thinning tree line of spruce and pine. How he knew the most intimate details of Per Ingebretson was not up for debate. It was just understood he did.

His father shifted, took his hands from the wheel, and, describing the strength of Per, made the halted chop at something that could never be felled in a single blow. He described the stance, the measured series of blows, the angled cuts, impressing at all times the absolute isolation of it all.

In those years of first discovery, he explained, men lived rough, authentic lives and gathered in encampments at season’s end in the trade of goods and services. A breed apart from others, they were all alike among their own kind, because of the physicality of the work, their shoulders broad, their arms and legs thick, hands like shovels. But, lamentably, they were a sort others did not willingly suffer drawing alongside, the comparison too striking in their collective favor, so, when camp broke, each giant went its own way.