Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

Something loud sounded outside. My concentration flickered. The sheet was no longer a piece of the sky. It was just a piece of paper, and I noticed that it had been freshly pulled from the pad. In fact, it hadn’t been folded at all. The second-order folding of the figure had been achieved with my father’s pencil. He was an extraordinary artist. This fact split me in two.

“Say ‘I will never give up.’ ”

“What?”

“Say it, Hans.”

“Not again.”

“Remember— the will is everything . Remember, Hans — Andrets do not give up.”

I stood there until he looked over at me. A whiff of his cologne had reached me now, and I was following its different components like the separate stripes on a waving flag, back to a distant field of lime trees in the sun.

“Are you all right?” he said gruffly.

“Yes.”

“You’re still grinding them.”

“No. I stopped.”

He continued to look at me. “Go ahead,” he said, nodding. “Put it in the box.”

“What?”

“Put it back in the box.”

He pointed to my hand. The piece of paper was in it.

“Go ahead,” he said. “Put it back in the box.”

“Which one?”

But I already knew which one. The ??box had taken on the same blue glow now that the paper had, undulating in gentle ripples as though the sky had been reflected on water. I stepped over, carefully loosened the lid, and placed my scrap on top of all the others.

—

“WHAT THE HELL is this?” Dad said the next evening before dinner, waving an envelope in the air. “Is this a mistake?”

Above the kitchen sink, where in the past his bottles of Maker’s Mark had been stored, my mother had stacked her casserole dishes. She was reaching to lift one down. “Milo,” she said.

“What.”

“Leave him alone.” She set the casserole on the counter. A moment later, she added, “Perhaps his father’s the one who’s failed.”

“What the hell is this,” he said again, waving the envelope in front of my face, then holding it open so that the letter dropped out into my hands. “I’m hoping it’s a mistake.”

“Oh, that,” I said evenly. I unfolded it. “It’s my grade report.”

“From OSU,” he said. “And?”

“And I got an F.”

“Yes, you did, Hans. You got an F .”

“Only one, Dad.”

“Yes, that’s true — only one.” He cracked his knuckles. “But that’s all Fs, isn’t it? Since you just took one class! ” Then he leaned forward until his face was in front of mine. “You’re the math champion of the state of Ohio,” he said slowly. “And you’re proud that you got all Fs?”

“Math co- champion.” (Another boy had tied with me.) “And I didn’t say I was proud.”

“Then what happened, may I ask?”

I know what he expected me to say. Computational errors had always been my available excuse, all through my academic career. Like so many mathematicians, my father assigned almost no value to figuring. He was giving me an out.

Instead, I said, “You can’t make me into the thing you wanted to be yourself.”

I looked up to see how he would react. I was on the downslope of the afternoon’s yop and immediately felt the weight of my words. But I’d seen him furious plenty of times before, and nothing fazed me anymore. This was his chance to redeem himself.

Instead, he seemed to look right through me, as though he’d had a glimpse of one of his own solutions. His face went placid. “That’s right,” he said. “That’s exactly what I was thinking myself.”

—

THE NEXT WEEKEND, a few hours after I’d wandered home from the Ford plant, my father rounded up Paulie and me and put us into the station wagon. He drove us out Lincoln Road and along the banks of the Pitcote. This stretch of river was steadily coming back after decades of dumping from the polymer plant and the truck plant, and in one of its marshes now, to the derision of Tapington’s laid-off workforce, a conservation area had been established. In the sandy shallows, a long cedar boardwalk had been laid through the willows. The boardwalk formed a sort of widening maze over the inlets, which were as still as ponds. In the distance, the rows of smokestacks on the outskirts of Tapington were no longer connected to the heavens by their kinked ropes of white. Dad parked in the gravel lot and said, “We’re here.”

It was evening. Bernie loved this place, but he’d been left at home. Paulette and I followed Dad into the thicket of plankways. The water was swathed in a rug of algae, and the vegetation rang with peeper frogs. On the drive over, Dad had been unusually quiet, and now he was quiet again, striding purposefully ahead of us. The philanthropist who’d paid for the preserve had been from New York City, and instead of building a factory for the unemployed population of Spartan County, he’d bought hundreds of acres of prime industrial riverfront and turned it into a nature preserve. On most days, you could walk for the entire afternoon and not see another human being.

We’d been out for maybe half an hour, looping and backtracking along the decks, when Dad suddenly stopped and said, “Hans, Paulie — you two stay here. I’ll be right back. If I’m not back in twenty minutes, you can come get me.” He nodded. “I’ll be in the car.”

“What?” said Paulette. “I don’t want to be alone out here with him.” She pointed at me, wrinkling her nose.

“Hans, take care of her.”

Then he departed, nearly running. It seemed that Paulie and I were both shocked. From behind the wall of vegetation his footsteps thudded away like a line of rocks falling off into the water. Then they grew faint. Finally, the sound of the frogs rose again. Dusk was approaching, and their peeping was like an orchestra of piccolos waiting for a conductor.

“Great,” said Paulette, sitting down to dangle her legs over the water.

“Snapping turtles,” I said. “Watch your feet.”

“Right. This is terrific. Stuck in a polluted jungle with a paranoid dopehead.”

“What are you talking about?”

She didn’t answer, but she lifted her legs up onto the planks anyway. Then she stood and moved beside me. “Well, Hans,” she said. “If you haven’t guessed it yet, Dad’s pissed.”

“At me?”

“Yes, at you.”

“Why?”

“Are you kidding me? Look at you, you dopehead. You’re Captain Fuck-Up.”

“Because of the grade?” It had occurred to me, strangely, that my father, who never mentioned my trips to the truck plant, in fact knew all about them — while my sister, who accused me all the time of being a drug addict, had no idea.

She leaned down to pick at a sliver of board. We stayed like that for a time, standing alongside each other, waiting for the sunset. But the sky was cloudy and the air so humid that the sun never did set; it just gave up in exhaustion a few minutes later and disappeared. Before long, the bullfrogs began croaking. Soon they sounded like a bunkhouse full of alarm clocks, a new one going off every few seconds from a different direction. Finally, Paulie said, “He thinks he’s wasted his time on you.”

This meant something to her, I knew. We were both aware that she was mathematically talented, too, even if our father ignored it. I put my hand on her shoulder. “Those cattails look like priests,” I said, pointing to the row of white rectangles that glowed around us in the dusk.

“Quit it, Hansie. That doesn’t make me feel any better.”

“Look, Paulie, I just want to know where he went. What the hell’s he doing? He’s been away a lot longer than twenty minutes.”

“He wants to figure out whether you can find your way back, Hans.”