Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

Nothing came of it, of course. We eventually found the caves. But the trip took an hour longer than it should have, and by the time we came out onto the pair of tightly pinioned boulders that mark the entrance to the first cavern, we’d done a five-mile hike instead of a three-mile hike, with seventeen boys between the ages of six and ten, most of them in new boots, and one girl, in a pair of red-and-white high-tops. Scoutmaster Granting believes that this is a coddled generation, so there were no snacks and only one stop for water.

You can imagine.

From there, we found our way down into the caves. In the dimness below the ground, we stood on a planked horizontal outcropping of shale lit by a single yellowish light on the wall. To get there, we’d crawled through a dozen narrower rooms, a couple of them no wider than my shoulders. I could hear the younger kids whimpering and a few of the older ones trying to soothe them, their voices chiming bravely in the gloom. I flipped on the lantern that I’d carried in, and the scouts lifted their eyes to the opposite wall, where the Haudenosaunee glyphs climb the rock in clusters and the faded, red-tinted bison narrow into running herds. I looked down at their faces. Dried tears on some of them (though not on Emmy’s or Niels’s); mosquito bites on them all, along with sweat and mud and the slash-shaped welts that are the telltale mark of the stinging nettles that grow around here in hellish profusion.

There was the usual amazement. Cub Scouts are appreciative by nature. I tilted the light from our narrow shale balcony toward the underground river that runs below it, a wide stream of nearly fluorescent liquid sludging past like frozen limeade poured from a can. The exclamations grew louder. Kids that age truly do love this kind of thing. But underneath the cool s and awesome s, I still heard the not-quite-squelched hiccups of a few of the younger ones who’d been whimpering at the end of the hike. Blisters from the new boots, probably, and all the hot irritation of the mud. I knew with dread in my heart that to reach the vans we’d be walking home along the same route.

When we came out of the caves, Emmy turned around again and made a quizzical face at me. Both of us were blinking in the brightness of the trailhead. If we went to the right, we’d cut short the return by a couple of miles. But Mr. Granting led us to the left again, following our own slouching footprints back into the jungle.

After a few minutes, Emmy slowed, until finally she’d fallen back to the spot just ahead of me.

“Okay,” I whispered from behind her. “Look at it this way. If we walk at this pace, how much longer will it take us?”

“Depends on average speed.” She glanced sideways at me. “Like, duh .”

“Well, you’ll have to figure out that part, too,” I said calmly. “Otherwise it’s trivial. Now catch up to where you were.”

We all made it home, of course. But when the boots came off in the vans, there were blisters and nettle scars and vicious red stripes everywhere. And back at headquarters, when the kids saw their parents already waiting in the lot, a few of the younger ones started crying all over again. The older ones were eerily silent, like soldiers liberated from the trenches.

But all in all, it turned out fine. I’d brought a change of clothes for Emmy and Niels, and on the drive home the three of us stopped for slushies. Later that evening, when we pulled up in front of the house, Niels bolted from the car, no doubt to tell his mother about our adventure. But Emmy stayed in the seat behind me.

I could hear her breathing as I went about with forced good cheer collecting our boots and clothes from the floor.

“Fifty-two minutes,” she said from behind me. “Fifty-two minutes and maybe about forty seconds more.”

“Good.”

I whistled nonchalantly and finished packing up. But underneath all the pleasant sounds I was making, I could hear that she was still thinking. Emmy thinks the way my father used to — silently, for long periods, and in the midst of others.

Finally, I had no choice but to turn and look at her.

“You could have figured that out, too,” she said.

—

ONE AUTUMN EVENING, not long after I’d noticed my father’s belly at the pool, he leaned back at dinner and said to my mother, “Temptation sell everything, force ’em forward till the nigger strains.”

“Pardon?” she answered. In those days, my mother was somewhat conservative politically, but my father had always been a wild liberal, a man who ranted at the car radio about all the various strains of bigots who lived around us in southern Ohio.

“All the curlings,” he said (or something like that — he wasn’t speaking clearly), “sky, bit-grass. Feed of it, for all know — to the nigger strains.”

My mother’s eyes went to his glass: about half full.

He stood up. His evening gait had always been distinct — getting up from dinner, he tended to walk like a man on a ship, his head lowered and his eyes pinned to the spot where he was heading — the liquor cabinet, usually, or the reading chair. Now we watched him totter to the kitchen door. “Front, back, front,” he said, though I’m not sure any of us could understand him.

My mother rose halfway from her seat.

At the threshold of the room, he coughed once, harshly, without bringing his hand to his mouth. It took me a moment to connect this action with what I saw a moment later on the doorframe — a dark purple blotch the size of my fist, as though someone had smashed a pomegranate against the wood. I watched it slide slowly to the floor.

As it turned out, he’d caught hepatitis from some contaminated seafood, exacerbating what must have been, for some time by then, his hidden condition.

He recovered quickly — after only two nights in the hospital. But it gave our family the first glimpse of what would one day come home with him to stay.

—

A WEEK LATER he was back teaching his classes, churning out another generation of Fabricus baccalaureates to the nursing schools, secretarial corps, and real-estate agencies of the upper Midwest. And his belly, just like that, had receded — the integral had gone to zero. Yet I couldn’t help remembering the blotch of dusky purple on the wall, which I’d cleaned up later that night, after he’d been admitted to the GI ward at Southern Ohio Lutheran. By then the color had faded to an unremarkable brown against the white linoleum floor, and the surface had hardened to a dry, stretchable crust, like the skin inside an old can of paint. But from underneath it when I scraped — also like the old can of paint — an eruption emerged of brilliant crimson. I allowed the blood to spread onto my fingers and then forced myself to examine it: my father was coming undone in my hands.

AT THE AGE of eleven, I entered Tapington North High School. By that point, of course, I’d already been tutored for several years by my father in serious mathematics and encouraged by my mother in various aspects of English, civics, and the arts. But for my first year at Tapington North (there was no Tapington South, just fading hopes for one) I worked diligently all the same, not because I needed to study but because I knew of nothing else. There were no woods to explore behind our house.

What there was was Old Blair Creek, a narrow depression at the bottom of a low ravine that rose with runoff in April and was mud by the end of July. Our yard lay downstream from a Ford light-truck factory that had been shuttered a decade before, but a scattering of chemical and manufacturing plants still thrived in the county and accounted for a good part of my backyard entertainment. At certain times in the spring, I could sit on our porch and watch sluggish continents of brownish foam drift past the property. Sofa-sized icebergs of leaf-flecked suds would slide along, rotating in the eddies, until they either made it around the bend or were caught by the branches of the willows. It was a game of mine, betting on how far each one would reach. It’s a complicated problem — wind, current, and angular velocity, to name a few — but even at that age I was convinced that the outcome wasn’t exactly random.