Andrea Barrett: The Forms of Water

“No business. I just need a place to stay for a while, until I figure out what to do.”

She had folded her hands in her lap. “I can’t stop you. When has anyone ever stopped you from doing anything?’

Her neck had rings around it, he saw, and her hands were as creased and worn as his. He gestured toward the book. “Could I borrow that — just for a while? I’d like to have something of Da’s with me.”

She’d let him take the book, which he now keeps on the floor by his cot, but he hadn’t been sure when they’d parted if she’d forgiven him and he’s still sorting out in his mind the acts for which he needs to be forgiven. For a few months he’d heard nothing from her, but then she started writing him letters after she learned that he’d finished the cabin. Cautiously friendly, guardedly open; letters in which he can feel her pushing herself to be kind to him. Guilt may be driving her, or pity or love; or maybe the letters are only a duty her church says she has to perform. Whatever they mean, he is grateful for them. She sends news of Wendy and Win and tries to answer the questions he asks.

Four sheets of paper, he wrote in his last letter to her. Lined, like they came from a notebook. The handwriting’s hard to read, but it looks like Da’s. What do you think they are?

Her answer arrived this morning, and now he reads her letter out loud to Marcus. He skips over the parts about the kids and about the job she plans to take, and also the lines where she asks him, for the tenth or twelfth time, why he’s wasting so much time on these old things. The past is the past, she writes. You can’t change it. And yet each time she writes him she seems to heal a part of their old estrangement.

“Listen to this,” he says to Marcus. “‘Those must be from Da’s notebook. After Gran died, but before Da was so sick he couldn’t hold a pen, he used to scribble things in this notebook with a speckled cover. He never let me see what he was writing. Then one day, after you took off with Kitty, I found the notebook under his bed with some pages torn out. All the pages left in it were blank. Maybe he stuck the ones he’d written in that briefcase before he gave it to you. But why would he give those to you and not to me?’”

Marcus reaches for the letter and reads the passage for himself. Then he asks, “Why would he?”

“I don’t know.”

Marcus shakes his head and pours them both a drink. “Might as well add it to your list.” His tone is mocking but affectionate.

The list Marcus is talking about occupies the back pages of the notebook Henry has been filling: unanswered questions, things to follow up. There are forty or fifty of these. They have to do with his father and the tale Marcus told in the van, which he hardly heard at the time; with Brendan’s request that they visit the dam before the land, which might have changed everything had he granted it; and with a score of other things related to Brendan’s last journey. Who were those people camped out in the house in Coreopsis? Why did Jackson stay in his garage? What happened to the broker in Buffalo who was caught robbing all those banks? And where did that army of uprooted men come from, the men who knocked on his door when he still lived with Kitty and wanted to shovel snow or clean gutters, the carpenter’s helpers and plumber’s assistants who hung around Coreopsis Heights begging for work and who now seem to be everywhere, their lives as twisted as his?

The rest of his notebook is filled with the stories Marcus has told, the information he’s gleaned from books and maps, and the fragments he’s been able to reconstruct of the tales Da and his father and Brendan told. Henry writes in this notebook every night, the act of writing so new, after years of dictating to willing secretaries, that his pen still stutters on the pages. Sometimes he feels like a monk himself, shut inside a medieval cloister and patiently copying manuscripts no one will ever read. Even Marcus, who delights in uncovering obscure facts and useless details, sometimes looks at what Henry’s doing and shakes his head.

“If you’re going to spend your time like this,” he says., “why don’t you put in some more stuff about everyday life before the reservoir? Why don’t you write a real history of what happened to the valley?”

What he means, Henry knows, is Why don’t you put in some more stuff about me? He can’t answer that; he knows that’s the question everyone else at the Visitors’ Center wants to ask as well. The bookshelves at the Center are lined with pamphlets full of facts. What day the men in their fancy suits first came into the valley; their names and ages and occupations; who said what at the endless meetings; what houses were razed and in what order. But the heap of paper he’s accumulating has a logic of its own, and he thinks that if he can understand it, he will understand what he’s doing here.

Marcus moves to the window facing the water. “It’s really coming down out there. We’ll have six inches by morning.”

“You’ll stay over?”

Marcus nods. He often spends the night on Henry’s extra cot; the path to the cabin is rugged and he has nothing to rush home for. Henry reminds himself to set the alarm clock, so he’ll have time to drop Marcus off. A load of sheet-metal stampings is waiting for him at the place in the valley where he sometimes works, and he’s so grateful to have his license back that he almost enjoys loading the pallets, unloading boxes, driving rickety trucks full of metal parts over bad roads. When he returns from his run to Springfield, he may stop at a bar and have three beers. No more — if he has four, he knows he’ll start to feel misunderstood. When he has four, he ends up telling other lonely drunks how he has come to be living like a hermit.

I messed up my marriage, he will say in a small voice. I took something that belonged to my sister and I ruined it. Then I took my uncle on a trip and couldn ‘t save him when he had an accident. Then I came here.

He will tell this over and over again, to anyone who will listen, and no one will understand how he has given up almost everything and gotten so little in return. No one will praise him for his sacrifices; no good luck will fall in his lap and no letters will arrive from his wife and daughters, begging him to come home. Wiloma told him that Delia threw out the framed copy of the Farewell Ball photograph that he sent as a wedding present. Lise won’t answer his letters. No one seems to understand what a struggle it is for him to walk these acres every day and resist the urge to change them.

He rises and stands by Marcus, near the nail from which dangle the knotted ties that didn’t save Brendan. It’s too dark for him to see the reservoir, but despite that he sees his uncle floating below the water and then all he might build on this land. Buildings would block out his visions of Brendan, as they have blocked out everything for years. The temptation to build is terrific; if he had money, he might not be able to resist. But he has no money, and no prospects for getting any.

What he has, instead, are the stories that fill his notebook — the ones Wiloma and Marcus have told him, the ones he remembers from Da and Brendan and his father. When he looks out the window, he sees families jumping off the cliffs at Marpi Point, plums arcing over a wall, Da dying while Wiloma reads to him about snow and water and clouds. He sees Roxanne moving her hands along Brendan’s legs and Marcus shooting into the night, just to be shooting at something. On Makin, Marcus has said, Henry’s father had been brave but he had not, and he had been one of the men who shot at nothing.

Henry wonders if he may be shooting at nothing himself. He might be writing Latin verse in his notebook, for all the good it will ever do; no one will read it, no one will care, his lost family is only one among a million. The words with which he tries to preserve them are only words, no more likely to survive than the words Da scribbled so long ago. And yet Da’s words lie on the table, on the pieces of paper that Marcus has set down, and Henry walks over and makes himself read them again.