Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

—

THIS WASN’T A problem. Milo didn’t have friends.

It wasn’t that people didn’t like him. In fact, plenty of them did . On a fairly regular basis they would approach. But there was something about him that dependably turned them away — as a young boy he’d become aware of this unchangeable fact — some glancing force that never failed to deflect their attempts at friendship. And it wasn’t that he didn’t like other people himself. He did, generally speaking.

He just couldn’t figure out what to say to anyone.

The wooden chain came back home with him. He coiled it into its waxed burlap sack and stowed it again inside the trunk of the maple.

—

HE DID HAVE one friend, actually. Perhaps not a friend, but there was something different about a certain kid at school. Vene Wheelwright was the son of the lighthouse keeper at Cheboygan Point. He was an unusual boy. Self-reliant, like Milo. Quick to leave school at the end of the day, also like Milo. Slight of build — again like Milo — and adept in the woods, like just about every other boy around Cheboygan. But unlike Milo, Vene had a fire inside him. He was an ordinary-looking young man, sharp boned and rabbitish, but wherever he went, people gathered. Though he didn’t talk much, he always knew what to say. Vene was a great climber and would in a moment break free from a ring of classmates to scale the high schoolyard fence and sit gleefully at the top. Once, Milo watched him pull himself up the courtyard flagpole by its wire halyard until he was hanging by the crook of one elbow from the small globe at its peak. With the other arm, he was waving.

Vene and Milo sometimes spoke, though usually not more than a few words. They didn’t have any classes together, but whenever they passed in the hall, Vene would say something like “How’s it moving, Milo,” and offer his hand, which Milo would shake, saying something in return like “It’s moving along, Vene. How’s it moving on your side?”

What amazed Milo, though, was that Vene always seemed happy to see him.

Once, on a bike ride that Vene took one Sunday morning after church, he pedaled all the way out to Milo’s house. Mrs. Andret called Milo in from the woods, then baked cookies for the two of them. She hovered over the visitor, the way everyone hovered over him, and encouraged him to stay. After the cookies, Vene and Milo went back out to the woods, where over the course of the afternoon they walked together comfortably, almost without speaking. They whittled lances from hickory saplings. They treed a raccoon. They climbed a beech tree by crossing to its crutch from the limbs of a maple. It was a frightening traverse for Milo — although not apparently for Vene — and when the two of them were on the ground again, walking home, Milo felt a kind of calm that he’d never felt in the presence of another person. When he was with Vene, there was no pressure for either of them to say anything. This solved Milo’s great problem.

“A strange name” was all Mrs. Andret said later that afternoon as they watched Vene pedal away down the slope. She sat down again at the table and stirred her drink, but Milo could see that she maintained her gaze out the window until the bike had disappeared at the bend.

To be fair, Vene was happy to see everyone . But still, the fact that he was pleased to see Milo generally astonished him. Milo expected Vene’s affection to fade. It was another mystery to him, in fact, that it never did. Vene was reliably welcoming to him for all the time they knew each other.

Still, he wasn’t exactly a friend. They saw each other in school, and they spoke whenever they passed, and they shook hands in the halls the way they did and once in a while even ate together in the cafeteria. But Vene didn’t ever come to the house again.

It always seemed that he would have, though, if Milo had asked.

—

MILO HIMSELF WAS never truly pleased to see anyone, not even Vene.

This was just the world as he knew it.

His childhood was neither happy nor unhappy, and the thought of either would hardly have occurred to him. He lived in his woods like an animal, aware only of the hierarchy of necessary information — the nearness of evening or dawn, the overwarm humidity that meant a thunderstorm, the wintertime reversal of the prevailing breeze and the descent of a padded quiet from the southwest that meant, between October and May, the onset of snow. He kept a handful of books in an old metal tackle box in the crook of a stump and had built several shelters where he could read them even in a downpour. He liked Jack London and Willa Cather and Mark Twain, along with the occasional biography of a ballplayer or crime boss. He was unaware of the distinction between a young man’s books and an adult’s books, and in those days would read either one with equal pleasure.

The remainder of his world was as solitary as the woods. Now and then, his mother gave dinner parties, but he didn’t take much notice of them, eating his own portion silently and keeping his eyes averted, much as his father did. At school there were the ordinary problems with bullies, and he was knocked around a bit — not badly — once or twice a year, always in the fall. Then left alone. It was a ritual that seemed to establish whatever needed to be established at Near Isle High School. It happened to plenty of other kids, too. His father expected him to fight back, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Instead, he would go into the forest afterward by himself, the way a maimed animal might seek familiar shelter. Here is where his humiliation would transform itself. He’d pick up a fallen limb, then stride along, swinging it against the rows of trunks until it shattered. Then he would do the same thing with the fragment that remained, and with the one that remained after that, until finally he was swinging nothing but his own stinging hand, clamped around a shard. When he left the woods he felt absolved.

His mother, if she’d known of his solitary ritual, would have preferred it to fighting. But his father believed in the primacy of reputation. He would have been disgraced.

With the exception of these minor, fall-semester humiliations, however — which rarely resulted in anything worse than torn pants or a few welts on his cheeks, or sometimes a trail of blood drops across his shirt — the tough kids at school left him alone. They perhaps respected the fact that his father was a teacher there. For this, Milo felt a note of gratitude.

THEN ONE YEAR something different occurred.

This was December 1958. The sunless winter had painted the coast an unshadowed gray. On the news, integration was being delivered by bus to the public schools and another Pioneer rocket had failed to circle the moon. Not long before Thanksgiving, a local Great Lakes freighter, the SS Carl D. Bradley, had gone down in a gale off Gull Island, drowning most of the men aboard. A dozen kids from Near Isle High School had lost their fathers.

At school, services were held in the classrooms, sometimes instead of classes, and in the weeks that followed, a quiet descended on the building. It was like something Milo might have sensed in the woods, the approach of weather. Walking in the hallway one afternoon after the last bell, he was stopped by an upperclassman, one of the innumerable Polish kids whose fathers manned the freighters or worked in the quarries where their tumblehome hulls were loaded with calcite. Milo wasn’t unaccustomed to being approached by schoolmates he didn’t know. This one tapped him on the shoulder and said in a soft voice, “You carved some kind of chain?”

Milo leaned forward to hear. “I guess so.”

“What you do that for?”