Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

I made it in ninety.

The thing is, I nearly missed the turnoff. That’s how different it all was. The gravel road that in my childhood had curved down into a cedar-strewn swampland and over a shaky wooden bridge had been paved and straightened. Asphalt so black it looked as though it had been laid that morning. White lines down the sides like the stripes on a Ping-Pong table. At the intersection sat a new hotel — a Lakeland Suites with its bright green shamrock, slowly turning. Next door, a slickly rounded Speedway station, its line of pumps turned gold by the evening light. I had the thought that if I continued down that shining slice of pavement, I’d find a business park at the end.

And I almost did.

It was a housing development. Gray and beige saltboxes with steep green roofs, the dark living-room windows reflecting a dozen shimmering balls of flame as the sun moved down below the trees. Closer to the bridge stood a longer, lower construction with the same steep roof. A parking lot wrapped around three landscaped sides. I thought it might be a gym; then maybe a bowling alley; then a school. Then I read the sign: A SINNING MAN NEVER PRAYS — AND A PRAYING MAN NEVER SINS.

My father was passing a mega-church now every time he went into town.

Just before the creek, I made the sharp turn onto the rutted two-track. This part was paved now as well — the same darkly glinting asphalt and shining white borders. All of it burnished to amber by the evening. The old trestle bridge had been replaced by a steel one, with a fenced-in foot lane. On the far side, peeking from the trees every hundred feet or so, were driveways that ended in carved mailboxes — smallmouth bass and startled owls and friendly bears with their jaws open for the postman. People had taken to naming their cabins: TEES FOR TWO, A LONG DRIVE, ANGER’S AWAY! I could see the screened-in porches through the boughs and the lamps burning in the living rooms. Suddenly a row of streetlights blinked on.

Streetlights!

I’d last seen my father on the night at Le Pinceau with Audra — the night we had the falling-out that Cle Biettermann mentioned — and I’d last been up here to the cabin several years before that, when I was still a student at OSU. This entire transformation had taken place without me knowing. The lake was still the same humid brown, but it was dotted now with tiny white lozenges suspended in the darkness — speedboats on their shore hoists, glimmering in the long dusk.

A couple of hours after our dinner together in New York, when Audra and I had left him to his nightcap, Dad had thrown a tumbler against the wall behind the bar at Le Pinceau. Then a bottle. Then he’d stood and made his way down the row of $10,000 mahogany-framed mirrors, smashing them with a stool. When he collapsed, an ambulance had been called.

I know these details because I paid for them.

But in the few times since then that we’d spoken — the week before the wedding for one, and a couple of other, rather strained conversations after that — he’d avoided the topic completely. What I knew was that he’d been sitting at the bar with a woman — a woman who’d been kind enough to call me from Dad’s phone when the paramedics arrived to take him to New York — Presbyterian. As I pulled the Audi along the darkening lane now, looking for the old gap in the trees, I suddenly realized why Cle Biettermann’s voice had sounded familiar: she was the one who’d called me. She was the one he’d been sitting with at the bar.

—

AFTER THAT, DAD and I stopped speaking almost altogether. In fact, the next time I remember talking to him was one Sunday morning at least a year after the wedding when he called me out of the blue. He’d somehow latched on to the idea again that I was an apologist and that along with Paulie and his soon-to-be-ex-wife, I was trying to ruin him.

The phone had rung while Audra and I were asleep. “Now he wants the whole house” was the first thing he said. No greeting.

“Who does?”

“The assassin.”

That’s what he called Mom’s lawyer.

“Well, you’ve got the cabin. She’s got to live somewhere, too, Dad. Jesus, what time is it out there?”

“The same as it is out there . It’s him, Hans. This is the assassin’s work. Your mother would never do anything like this.”

“She might.”

“What?”

“I said, she might .”

“Don’t tell me you’re on their side again.”

“I’m on nobody’s side.”

I thought I might have heard him take a swallow. I glanced at the clock. “It’s five-thirty, Dad. You know that, right?”

“Well, that’s what time I get up these days.”

I wasn’t sure what to say to that. He didn’t seem to know, either, so I waited.

“Are you keeping busy?” I said finally into the gap. “Are you working?”

“As a matter of fact, I am.”

“Okay, good. On what?”

“On something. When I’m alone like this up here, I can think. I’m back on track.”

“On track for what?”

His breathing changed. I could hear him deliberating. Finally, he said, “Who wants to know?”

“What?”

“Who asked?”

“ I did. I want to know how you’re doing. You just called me, Dad. You woke me up.”

A silence.

“Things get out,” he said.

“What kinds of things?”

“On the Internet. Things get taken.”

“You think someone’s trying to steal your work?”

“Computers have cameras now.”

“Cameras? You think someone’s taking screen shots of what you’re doing?”

“Your mother. The assassin. All of them. People record everything. I’m talking about the Internet.”

“I don’t understand, Dad. You think people are watching you? You think someone’s trying to steal your work off the Internet?”

“Kopter did.”

Another silence. I was listening for the knock of the glass. Finally, I heard it.

Just before he hung up, he said, “Don’t ever ask me to discuss my work again, Hans. Do you hear me? Don’t ever ask that again.”

—

ONLY THE LAST fifty yards resembled anything I remembered. Just before our turn, everything reverted, the pavement broken now by potholes and gashes and all the old spindly shrubs growing right through the blacktop. No streetlamps here, the Audi pushing slowly into the country dark. I opened the windows and smelled mud and iron. At the driveway, a fallen birch had been dragged just far enough to allow a car to pass. Rocks pinged the undercarriage. The parking area, which my mother had once cleared, and where I’d once watched my father bid farewell to Knudson Hay — and, later that summer, to all of us — had been taken over by wild. Curtains of vines around a narrow tunnel. At the end of it: the clearing. On the far side of that stood the cabin. Every light was off.

I’d called a couple of days before to remind Dad I was coming, but the connection had been bad. I’d given him the date and time, and right before we’d hung up he’d said in his thin voice, “All right, see you then,” as though I’d been phoning from the corner about stopping over with some takeout.

I tried his number again now from the car. From the cabin I could hear the ringing.

When I hung up, I flipped on the high beams. Along the near wall, the siding was hanging with moss and was still patched with the same grayed-out sheet of plywood that had been there on the day my mother and sister and I had left. I pulled in behind a junky-looking car, my lights catching the holes in the rear where the FO of the logo dangled. It was an old Taurus. The trunk was spotted with Bondo, and the windows were whitened with ghosts of mud, as though the clouds had been dropping pellets of dust all summer instead of rain. On the trunk, someone had written WASH ME.