Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

—

BY THE TIME we’d pulled the suitcases from the car and lugged them through the weeds to the doorstep, my mother had already appeared on the stairs with a broom. She held her nose, walked to the edge of the brush, and emptied the dustpan onto the ground. I saw a dark body and a long, reddish tail. Then she returned to sweeping.

The main floor resembled the dining hall of a long-abandoned summer camp. A gouged wooden table. A still-greasy iron pot and a stack of rusting enameled plates. An old fireplace that puffed the smell of wet ash when my father kicked open the door to the porch. Dusty, framed paintings of ducks on the walls.

Upstairs was a pair of plain bedrooms packed tight under the eaves. My mother pressed one of the mattresses with her fingertip, and a puff of dust shot from the button. She picked up the broom again.

“How long are we staying?” she called down to the living room.

“Till the end of the week,” came my father’s jaunty reply.

I had enough in the lining of my jacket to last about three times that long.

Mom looked over at me.

“That’s okay with me,” I said.

“Good,” she said. Then she added, “Perhaps I’ll have it clean by then.”

—

THAT EVENING, MY mother joined me at the dock, which stretched over the shallow end of a long, muddy cove. In one hand she held a glass of wine, which was unusual for her, and in the other the bottle itself, which was unheard of. She took a place beside me. I’d been pre-enjoying my next day’s dose.

“Well,” she said, “I believe your father has found the only mud-bottomed bog in the entire state of Michigan.”

“It seems he did, Mom.”

Around us, the fauna was bringing out its instruments for the evening. The crickets were marking out a metronomic beat, and a lone bullfrog, somewhere in the reeds, was blowing a contrapuntal bass run, over and over. A huge cloud of ungainly insects swirled above us, ricocheting off one another, then spinning down in frantic, coupling pairs to the water. Each pair would land on the surface and stir up a tiny, buzzing wake before a small, gulping splash would sound.

My mother looked up at the cloud of wings and feelers. “Mayflies,” she said.

“They seem to be committing suicide in pairs.”

“You’re right.” She leaned back and let out a sigh. “They’re mating.”

She took a drink, then laughed ruefully.

“I kind of like it here, Mom.”

She made no answer.

“It’s peaceful,” I offered.

“Sometimes I do like a glass of wine,” she said. “I really do.” She turned to smile at me, and when I lay back against the dock boards to look up at the sky, she did the same. The crazy looping of the mayflies had thinned by now, and soon the last straggling bachelors and bachelorettes were spiraling down to the lake. Before long, even the fish had lost interest. Then, as though a shift whistle had blown, a smaller species of insect sprung into being. Thousands upon thousands of furtively darting specks appeared, gradually whirling themselves into a single roiling cloud that hummed above us like a high-voltage wire.

“Hans,” she said, “would you mind if I asked you a question?”

“You already did.”

I waited.

“Well?” I said.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh.” She pointed up. The moon had risen now, and against its halo we could see that some kind of rapacious bird had entered the fray. It winged crazily into the thicket of insects, diving and lunging, snapping this way and that, then disappeared out the other end into the black. Soon there was another one, adding its dark, vulturine missile to the circus.

“Are those seagulls?” she said.

“I don’t think so, Mom.”

“Swallows?”

“I think they’re bats.”

“Bats?” She sat up. “Yes, you’re right. They’re definitely bats.” I heard the lup-lup of a pour, then the bottle being set down against the wood. Presently, she said, “Your father used to have a beautiful apartment, you know. Leaded windows and a stone fireplace. He was an endowed professor.” She sipped.

“It’s okay,” I said.

“Bats.”

“They’re mammals, Mom.”

“There were beautiful lanes all around Princeton, Hans. Country lanes where you could walk for an afternoon. There are plenty of lakes in New Jersey, too. And they’ve all been tastefully settled. You can get fried clams along the sea there. I hope you get to taste a fried clam on a beach someday, sweetheart. There are all kinds of worldly human beings in the East who do interesting things and travel to interesting places and work to elevate themselves.”

She rubbed her hand in my hair.

“Sometimes I think about that,” she said.

—

THE NEXT MORNING, I woke to the scrape of waves against the shore. From the rubberized mattress I sat up and looked out through the screens of the porch. On the other side of the pollen and spiderwebs, the water was as brown and still as a mudflat. That’s when I realized what the sound was: my mother was on the steps already, working a broom.

Paulie sat up behind me. “Why are you cleaning a rented house?” she called.

My mother stopped. “Because that’s what life is, honey.”

My sister smirked. “I don’t understand that,” she whispered.

“Think about it, Smallette.”

“I have thought about it.”

“It’s a simile,” I said. “Life is cleaning a rented house.”

“But it doesn’t pertain. It’s a logical phrase, but it’s not logic. That’s Mom for you. And for your information, Hans, it’s a metaphor, not a simile.”

“Please, Hans. Please, Paulette,” said my mother. She was standing against the screens now. “Let’s treat each other kindly. Can we do that? Can we do that for a week?”

“Sure,” I said. “Till Saturday.”

“God,” said Paulie. “I would enjoy that. But it would be a world record for him.”

“Enjoying anything would be a world record for you.”

“Please, you two — can we?”

And somehow, for a few days, we did. A truce. After breakfast, Paulie and I walked together down to the shore. By the time the sun was over the trees, we’d grown tired of catching the grapefruit-sized bullfrogs. After a few hours, we just sat down in the waist-high grass and waited like Buddhas for them to hop into our hands. This idea had come to me on the upslope of my dose. I’d rarely been on the upslope in the presence of anyone but my friends, and now I found myself regarding Paulie with an unfamiliar esteem. (In fact, I’d taken a smaller amount than usual — a yellow instead of a green — but by that point in my career, I could conjure most of the drug’s observatory powers without actually taking anything; nonetheless, it was exactly this sort of benevolence, exactly this sense of kinship with the world, that I craved. It suddenly seemed plausible to me that Paulie and I would be friends.)

“Wow,” I said. “Look at this. Look at all of this.”

“I am, Hansie.”

Our palms were slick with excretions. Around us in the tall reeds, the narrow blue bars of the damselflies jerked up and down like elevators. Closer in, amid the jungle of stems, an infinity of insects climbed and burrowed and hopped and marched. When I lowered my head I could see that entire civilizations had developed on the bottoms of leaves. When I lifted it, I could see that other civilizations had developed on the tops. Winged ants and dusty grass-colored moths. Tiny, six-legged, triangular helmets of green. Life was perched on every incline and level, either stalking or hiding. Egg sacs submitted their designs to The Encyclopedia of Tenacity or The Encyclopedia of Disguise . Evolution analyzed the data on dispersion versus adhesion. Spiderwebs attempted to prove what the tree limbs had merely conjectured. Alongside the cabin’s crumbling chimney, an enormous woodpecker in a bright red hat hammered at the roof. Below it, Mom rapped the ceiling with a broom handle.