Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

As for me, when happiness arrived it felt like lethargy — like a distant, narcotic stillness that laid itself over my unease. The disquiet that had for so long existed within me — a disquiet that I’d hardly noticed, strangely, until it began to wane — became more apparent with each day it diminished. One morning, I woke before dawn and hiked to the head of the marsh, where I found a family of beavers swimming in the pools. One of their tails slapped the water like a rifle shot, and in an instant the whole group vanished into the depths. But soon they were abiding me. Before long, I was their regular visitor. I would rise each morning, take my dose, and hike to their lair, where I would sit on the shore and watch them work their dam. That dam was a marvel: a crisscrossed wad of tightly tied brush anchored by barkless trunks that had been sharpened at their felled ends like pencils. The first time I’d seen it, I’d thought it was the ruins of an old railroad bridge; but one morning I witnessed a forty-foot birch being toppled and added to the girding. It slapped the water like one of their tails. I sat there as a clan of swimming rodents floated it expertly into place.

Ordinarily I would have wanted to tell somebody. But the drug now was a friend in itself. Not only did it tell me things, but I could tell it things.

The feeling I had then — the feeling that I told the drug I had then — with the sun just beginning to halo the trees, with the glinting, silver wakes of a family of beavers fanning out in the stillness, was unmistakable: I was happy.

On my way home that day, my roll finally fading, I passed through the woods behind the shed. There, through the tiny window, I stopped for a moment and watched the back of my father’s head. It dipped. It rose. It dipped. I felt another charge of joy. Like the beavers, he was working.

—

THAT EVENING WHEN he finished in his shed, he sauntered down to the beach in his bathing suit. He kicked off his flip-flops, waded into the water, and stood hyperventilating in the shallows at the end of the dock. A few feet away, the rest of us lay on the boards in the last of the afternoon heat. It was during this period that Dad, even when I wasn’t rolling, was becoming a creature of particular interest to me — a pale-skinned, nervous, highly familiar being and at the same time something entirely strange. I suppose it was typical for a boy my age to begin taking notice of his father. He was part of me and not part of me. Part of all of us and not part of all of us. What could I actually learn of his life beyond my paltry and distorted view of it? A tic shook the stringy muscle of his shoulder. He splashed lake water on his face and rubbed his hands through his hair. Then he bent at the knees and ducked under.

The muddy brown inlet closed over him, and all we saw then was his bulging wake plowing forward, as though a great, determined sea creature had somehow found its way into our cove. I glanced out at the spot, a few feet farther than the one from which he’d emerged the week before, where his shaking head would soon pop back up into the air.

The surface grew still. A pair of minks peeked out from the boulders. Partway up the beach, Bernie sat up and barked.

Suddenly Paulie said, “Why can’t he just be like everyone else?”

Mom looked over at her.

My sister shielded her eyes with her hand, shook her head, and dropped herself back to the dock. “Why does he always have to be working on something?”

My mother turned to the deep then, where the prow of his wake had appeared again, pushing steadily along the surface. “Because it’s the only thing he knows how to do,” she said.

—

IF YOUR FATHER was never like other fathers, if he never tossed the ball with you, if he never talked with you about your day at school while you walked the dog together in the evenings, if he never brought you to a hockey game or played tag with you in front of the house when he arrived home from work, if he was always late when he picked you up, if he swore when he tripped on curbs and stumbled when he got out of cars, if he spent his days in battle with the underpinnings of the universe and his evenings with the bottle, then you might understand what it felt like, at that susceptible age, to live for a few months with the buoyant, outgoing man who seemed to emerge in the woods that summer from the dark husk of another man’s ruin.

I had no idea whether his work was going well. It might have been. At times I could sense what felt like hopefulness.

One afternoon, I heard an unfamiliar noise coming from the bushes, and when I walked up to the road I found him standing at the end of our drive alongside a towering heap of soda bottles. They were piled all the way to the limbs of the cedars, as though a dump truck had just dropped them off. He was busily dividing them into garbage bags. I watched him from the cover of the trees. Half liters were going into one bag, liters into another, two liters and jugs into a third. As soon as one bag was filled, he would pull out a replacement. There must have been a thousand empty bottles in front of him.

Without looking up, he said, “I’m assuming you know about the economy here in Michigan.”

I stepped out. “As a matter of fact, I don’t.”

“Bad,” he said. “B-a-d. I’d say Detroit’s already a goner.” He pulled out a roll of duct tape and sealed off a bag with it. “A Faygo plant went under out on Sixty-nine.”

“What’s a Faygo plant?”

“A bottling plant, Hans. Faygo’s a soda — local company. I got their clean stock. At least, it was supposed to be clean.” He tossed one of the bags into the driveway, where it bounced down the slope like a beach ball. “Ten bucks,” he said. “This whole pile cost me ten bucks, and we’re going to make something you’ll remember for the rest of your life.”

The man in front of me still looked like my father.

“Yes, Hans,” he said. “They won’t soon forget.”

“Who might that be, Dad?”

“You. The neighbors. Everybody. The whole goddamn world. Even your mother.” He pointed up and down the cove, then pulled a pair of bottles from the pile and wound them together with tape. “This is our mahogany.”

“Okay.”

He squeezed the taped bottles together until a popping sound erupted and the structure suddenly deformed. “Polyethylene terephthalate,” he said. “Radially corrugated. Remarkably resistant to compression.”

“I see.”

“Hundreds of them, Hans. All we have to do is lash them together. The corrugation is the brilliance. It’s what makes the structure achievable. You can figure the displacement yourself.”

“Of?”

“Of what else, Hans? The hull .”

—

“AND HOW MANY bottles would bring neutral buoyancy?” he asked that night at dinner.

“What size are the bottles?” said Paulette.

“Two liter.”

The questions in our family always went to my sister first. If she made an error, I would get my turn.

“Who’s in the boat?” she said.

“I am,” answered Dad.

“In fresh water?”

“Good question, Paulie. Yes, fresh water.”

“How much does a bottle weigh?”

“Fifty-two grams exactly.”

“Empty?”

“Of course.”

“With the cap?”

“Yes.”

“Well,” said my sister, “how much do you weigh, then?”

Dad shook his head. “Estimation is a mathematical skill.”

“Of course it is,” I added. “Otherwise it’s just arithmetic.”

“Brilliant, Clever Hans.”

“Excellent point, Smallette.”

“And what about the ullage?” she said.

We both looked at her.

“And what about the what ?” said Dad.