POACHINGS by Greg Brown

I
Mishaps

It was very late and cold when we heard the car coming down the driveway. Our father should have been home hours ago.
Quentin went to the living room window and then came and got me. “It’s Cal Hayes’ truck,” he said. “What should we do?”
“Wait,” I said. “Listen.”
I walked to the kitchen and Quentin followed and we heard Cal deaden the truck engine.
“Do you think it has to do with Mom?”
“It’s going to be okay,” I said.
It was thanks to Calloway Hayes that my brother and I knew the accident was not our father’s fault. Cal was a kind man who loved children and had a weakness for talking. There was no evidence that our father was changing the radio station in the car or reaching over and touching Anne Bruxal’s legs below her skirt. “It was simply an unfortunate night to make that turn,” he said. From Cal we learned how the car hit black ice, the tires skating sideways and the vehicle lashing into a spin. By cutting the wheel the opposite way our father was able to momentarily right the great skidding steel frame. For an instant he was a hero. But the car was still moving too fast as it spun into Ames Corner on the Prospect Hill Road, only a mile from our house, so close that had the sea wind been down, we might have heard the wreck. I imagined my father stomping the brakes, but ice greased everything. I tried to understand how helpless he must have felt as he cast a protective arm across Anne Bruxal’s chest and tried to keep his lover in this world with him.
The front door opened and our father stepped inside with the sound of the ocean howling around him. He was bent under a brown deputy’s coat and walking so gingerly we barely recognized him. Cal trailed behind. He’d parked his truck with the gold sheriff’s star beside our mother’s forgotten vegetable garden. The flashing light bar was switched off, and we took this to mean things must be okay. The truth was Anne Bruxal had not been wearing a seat belt and a human arm is only so strong.
Cal looked around the room, taking in the signs of our disrepair: the crusted dishes heaped in the sink, the counters covered with crumbs and gobs of peanut butter, the leaning stacks of unopened mail. He might have been thinking about our mother, how if she were here he could have left. Instead he went to the stove and made coffee and poured the black steaming liquid into two thick orange terra cotta mugs. Our father’s hand began to shake and he set the mug back down and stared at it for a long time. He seemed unable to focus on anything in the house and had not acknowledged us at all. For the first time in my life I felt completely invisible to him.
“What happens next?” he finally asked, breaking the silence. Living on the sea your imagination often expects the worst. Later Quentin and I shared our fear that the horrible silence Cal and our father had carried into the house with them that night would last forever. “Jesus, Cal.” Our father shook his head. “I’m a lawyer for chrissakes, and I’m asking what happens next like a damn fool.”
“Next there’ll be an investigation,” Cal said. “Next we’ll go do our jobs, Jace. But you’re not talking about that and you’re not a fool. What I have to do next is back out of your driveway, turn down that road, take that other fork, and go see Slim.”
Our father nodded. I could not make sense of how meek and small he suddenly seemed. It was as though his bones had been replaced with tiny sticks of dust. Cal began to button his wool coat, and when he’d cinched the last button, he asked, “Does Slim know the extent of it?”
“I don’t know.”
“But he has an idea of it.”
“Who doesn’t? Everyone always has an idea of it.” Our father pushed his mug across the table and put his head into his hands for a moment. When he looked up he was as empty as the wind. “She was never happy with him,” he said. “She deserved better than him, than this.”
Cal gripped our father’s shoulder. “You might not get many who’ll admit it now, but I’m sorry for your loss too, Jace.”
I held out my hand and Quentin took it and we stood there not knowing what to say. It was then Cal seemed to notice us watching in the corner. “There was an accident tonight.” Cal’s eyes, which were brown and always a little damp at the corners, softened. “But your father’s all right,” he said. “What I mean is he’ll be okay.” Cal was looking directly at me. “He’ll need to rest, though. He’ll need you to be a good daughter, Rowena. And he’ll need you to keep a good eye on your sister, Quentin.”

* * *

The morning after the accident our father readied for work like usual. Sitting at the kitchen table, we watched him comb his hair and knot his tie in front of the hallway mirror. Then he sank into the ladderback chair beside the hall table, slipped on his black dress shoes, and rose stiffly, stretching and cracking his back to one side and then the other like the fishermen down at the lobster pier when they came ashore. Early light was falling through the kitchen windows, yellowing his shoulders as he stepped into the room. Lifting his briefcase, he said, “Up and at ‘em. You’ll be late for school.”
“We haven’t eaten anything,” Quentin said.
“Right.” He touched his hair and the light from the window went up his arm. “Right, that is right. We must eat.” This would not have been forgotten before our mother left, before the accident. Our father had foolish little songs he sang in the mornings: an apple a day will keep the doctor away, a pad of butter to cure your stutter, the queen of hearts she made some tarts. He would glide around the kitchen, moving between the stove and the table, whistling, lifting his spatula for emphasis. Sometimes he recited poetry, or jotted out little rhymes he tucked in with our lunches. These were small but important things—they let us know he appreciated beauty and was able to feel joy. In the kitchen our dad was looking back down the hallway towards the mirror, which had belonged to our mother’s family. Lately he couldn’t pass it without stopping and squinting at his reflection. Quentin thought he was looking for a ghost etched in the glass. I thought Quentin thought the dumbest things. He said a girl wouldn’t understand about ghosts. I told him being a girl here still meant you had to understand more and say less.
Our father lit the gas burner and pulled the heavy cast iron skillet over the flame. Every day he left the old grease in the pan, where it cooled into a milky white tablet. Now he cracked six eggs into the grease and scrambled them with a fork. Then he used a paring knife to carve thick slabs of cheddar cheese into the eggs. His tie was thrown over his shoulder, and from behind, huddled up to the stove, he looked like the man we had known months ago, before the afternoon in August when we came home and found our mother gone again—carefree, capable, full of a belief that the world was still mostly filled with golden things. Our mom was living up the river in another Penobscot town in a small brown house with a man our father told us she didn’t love. “You have to understand this isn’t about you,” he said one night. “This is about your mother and I. If anything, she’s punishing me. She gets ideas, she has quite the imagination.”
“It’s like playing pretend,” Quentin said.
He nodded. “That’s a sensible way to look at it.”
But of course it wasn’t that, and we both knew it.
As summer cooled into fall, we looked for her around town—at the grocery store, the post office, the marina. Quentin drew maps, and I made lists of where she had not been. But we never saw her or the man she was pretending to love, and we did not dare ask our father where the little brown house was so we could go visit on our own.
In the kitchen now the smell of melting fat thickened the air as our father scooped the eggs from the skillet.
“You’re going to work for real?” Quentin asked him.
“We have to eat.” He set two plates down on the table. The eggs were still runny but we pushed our forks into them anyways. “And the thing is I need to work so we can afford to keep eating.”
“But should you be working yet?” I pushed.
“I’ve worked every day of my adult life and see no reason to stop now.”
“But Cal Hayes said—”
“Cal Hayes says a lot of goddamned things. That’s how sheriffs get elected. They talk and people think they have to listen to them because they wear those preposterous uniforms.” He was looking out the window and touching his tie. The knot had loosened and gone a little crooked with all the activity and his sudden, uncharacteristic anger. I didn’t have anything to say, but I wanted very badly to reach up to his neck and straighten that knot.
“Don’t forget the ridiculous hats,” I said. “Those hats make people do all manner of silly things.”
I caught a smile from him then and for a moment our dad seemed as though he’d come back to us. “Just please eat,” he said. “We need to keep to our schedule.”

* * *

Though he was not physically injured in the accident, it became obvious to me that our father had lost something fundamental to his way of being that year, the year when I was fifteen and Quentin eleven, first when our mother left that summer for the last time, and then again in late fall when he killed his lover at Ames Corner. He’d regain strength over the years, but he would forever after be a supremely cautious man, dogged by fears of small unforeseen disasters. When I started driving he kept my trunk stocked with a wool blanket, a bag of fifty fifteen-hour votive candles for a heat source, and two boxes of matches sealed in a Ziploc bag in case I ever broke down in a remote area during a fierce snowstorm.
But these are the ways he once was.
His foot started tapping slightly whenever he encountered music. He had broad, defined muscles in his back and loved the water and only really seemed at ease when he was swimming. He was an intense dreamer, keeping a dream journal all through our childhood, but he never spoke of the things which visited him in his sleep. He grew up in town with a younger sister named Alice and they were always building things and writing plays and songs together in the attic until Alice moved away to Florida after her young husband was killed in the Pacific during World War Two, where our father also served, operating as a Navy press officer and never seeing combat, a truth which both relieved and embarrassed him for the rest of his life.
He told great stories and made people laugh, but friendship took so much out of him. Men he knew from around town would come to the house to listen to baseball and drink beer and play poker. They would talk about the fishing season or the new mayor or property taxes or the OPEC embargo or the foolishness of Richard Nixon’s fall and our father would nod and joke along with them. When they left, he would stand and take a deep breath. Then he would sit on the porch steps as if recovering from something. Sometimes he smoked. Sometimes our mother went outside and joined him. She would sit down and put a hand on his wrist. Then she would rest her head on his shoulder, and he would coil an arm about her waist. They never spoke on those occasions, and I loved them like that, huddled together, completely silent, alone and happy in the dark, while inside the house Quentin and I listened to blues albums on our mother’s old Philco radio and turned about the small gleaming bits of gossip the men had carried out to us.
Your father has a voice that could split the sea and a laugh that could make even a banshee grin. People said that of him, but I knew it wasn’t natural. Capable of being charismatic and a little mischievous, he was nonetheless naturally soft-spoken and introverted. It was his powerful, melodic voice, along with his ability to make everyone around him feel just a bit more important than they actually were, which made him such a great lawyer. But that man was no longer living with us, and I missed him.

II
Transgressions

Seal Bay was a fishing town on the coast of Maine. We were pummeled by the ocean on three sides and hemmed on the fourth by a highway, dense forestland, and rolling mountains. Acres of wild blueberries swept the hilltop clearings and the constant buzz of logging chainsaws filled timber tracts. The mountains were small and hid very little. On foggy days they disappeared altogether. On those days some people seemed to miss them, while others hardly noticed them at all. Everyone’s house was constantly in some state of being painted. New roofs stayed partly shingled for years. Sheds were always being built, fields planted. Nothing ever seemed to be done.
Our house was solidly built, but it was small and poorly shingled in cracking cedar boards, and though we lived in the woods, the trees did little to hold back the elements. Water was always creeping into the wood and expanding the siding. Things were always being warped, pushed, nudged towards rot. At one time our mother had been happy here, and then she started wanting other things. She yelled and threw dishes into the sink. She ripped at the weeds in the garden. When she screamed that we were wasting away, our father tugged at his lower lip as if an answer might be stored there. “This is a fine house,” he said. “This is a house with a lot going for it.”
Though our father was a good lawyer, he never seemed very interested in the law. It was more like something placed in front of him he simply agreed to, a food consumed absently, without relish. What he seemed interested in was people, and he was well suited to practicing law in a small community because of how much he actually cared about what happened to people. He was respected and he was trusted. Even after the accident he managed to keep the love of a rural community, which is no small feat for an adulterer who caused the death of his mistress. I looked like our father, tall and dark and rib-thin, and thought more like our mother, while Quentin looked like our mother, fair and round-faced with deep blue eyes and thick auburn hair. Like our father, Quentin studied things until he knew them to the marrow, and then moved on to something else. I wasn’t satisfied with understanding: I had to grasp something and then find a way to change it into something else, something my own.
The prior November a lobster fisherman and close childhood friend of our father had shot and killed another fisherman. The accused man, Thaddeus Leopold, claimed the man he murdered, Reginald Conrad, who Thad had in court called “the epitome of a son of a bitch and a cheat,” was cutting his warps and pulling his traps. Reggie Conrad was our mother’s cousin, though they were not close. When confronted, Reggie told Thad he hadn’t laid a goddamn finger on any of his equipment but that he’d fish where he wanted to fish even if it meant putting the other man out of business. Thad responded by walking up Reggie’s driveway one morning at dawn and standing there. When Reggie finally came out, Thad shot him in the chest with a Winchester deer rifle. Emergency officials testified at the trial that Reggie might have lived had he gotten medical attention. But instead of calling 911, Thad drove back to his house and sat there with the rifle laid across his kitchen table until the sun had fully risen. It was nearing ten when Cal Hayes came out and got him.
“You want a cup of coffee, Cal?” Thad asked. “I’m full out of cream, but I’ve got sugar and scotch.”
“Maybe another time, Thad.”
“Let me write out a note real quick,” Thad said. “Just a quick one is all. I don’t want to trouble you none.”
Cal took the rifle from the table, holding it over his shoulder to keep from wiping away any fingerprints. Outside a murder of crows had begun mobbing in the pines. “That’s good, Thad,” he said.
Thad wrote out his note—a few lines addressed to his oldest nephew, who fished with him and often slept at the house, and which the boy would not find by the time he got home that afternoon because it had already been collected as evidence.

Miles –

I shot Reggie Conrad this morning and I guess the son of a bitch probably died. He always was a weak one. I went with Cal Hayes when he came out. There’s coffee on the stove and French toast in the refrigerator still. You probably ought to call some of the family when you get a chance. And maybe Jace Grayson. Reg weren’t his blood kin.

Your Uncle Thad

Even though it was clear Thaddeus Leopold had murdered Reginald Conrad, many people believed the killing had been justified. They said Thad had the right to protect his livelihood, and Reggie should have known better. But the cold-bloodedness of the act—driving up to a man’s house, shooting him in the heart without warning, and simply driving away—that was undeniable. While my father knew there was little he could do for Thad, he took the case in the spring anyways, believing his friend deserved better than a shoddy, over-worked public defender out of Bangor. To this day, I don’t think he took Thad’s case to hurt my mother, but I know it did hurt her. The proceedings kept our father away for long hours. We hardly saw him on weekends, when he spent a lot of time with the Leopold family. That May it was always raining and the days did not seem to pass by so much as drip by. Rivulets of drizzle streaked windowpanes. Socks and the insides of boots were perpetually damp. The rain made the smallest depressions of earth into deep puddled woodland basins which filled up with all manner of frogs. The world was turning green again and our mother spent mornings with us outside in the yard and the garden and passed the afternoons with us in the house. We hardly talked about our father. A few weeks into the trial, our mother started going out in the afternoons on unexplained trips, leaving me to look after Quentin.
As the trial lengthened into summer so too did our mother’s afternoon escapes. I fixed snacks. Then I fixed dinner. I made Quentin watch the birds darting through the trees and write out lists of which ones he’d seen. It was often well after dark when our mother came home, tired, flushed, her hair smelling like shampoo. I could tell the man she was in love with was not a new man. She had purchased no new clothing. She was not eating differently. She was not working out any more than usual. When she was home, she seemed like herself, not a ghost half in some other life. She told us stories of the great shipwrecks off Penobscot Bay. She sang songs. She tucked Quentin in at night and read to him and kept reading to him long after he’d fallen asleep. But there were signs that something was different this time. Quentin told jokes and she laughed far too loudly. I came into the kitchen and asked for a glass of juice and she poured it and set her hand on my head and held her palm against my hair for a beat too long. She looked at us when she did not think we were paying attention and she never seemed to blink or look away. For years she had been running out on us. She would go first and then our father would go after her. We told ourselves all families were like this, that this was simply how adults played hide and go seek: our mother leaving without warning, our father counting to ten thousand and then going off in pursuit. Unlike her past disappearances, this was not a sudden, impulsive act of separation. This was a slow pulling, gradually gaining and growing in force. It was a desire I believe she had been pushing back against for a long time in hopes of severing herself from it, falling out of love with this man, and staying with us.
One day, during the middle of the trial, she simply disappeared. Three weeks later she showed back up at home wearing a yellow cotton sundress with a deep scoop neck and large black buttons pinned up the back. Our father had bought her the dress years ago, and she often wore it to cookouts and family reunions, anywhere she thought she might be photographed. She drove us an hour to Bangor and spent the afternoon buying things we didn’t need and couldn’t afford—oriental rugs, Venetian table lamps, brand new school clothing. Late in the day, when the sun was dripping behind Tunk Mountain to the west and we knew we wouldn’t be home before our father (she often tried during these manic bouts to make it home before he got out of work and settle into a mode of domestic normalcy) she bought us ice cream cones at a small roadside stand and took us down to the harbor. The air had cooled, and I could barely feel my fingers as we sat on the pier with our legs dangling over the water.
Our mother pointed over the bay. “Do you see all those islands out there,” she said, “all those little peninsulas on them?”
Quentin took the last bite of his ice cream. I had hardly touched my own, and I passed the melting cone over to him and sat on my hands to warm them.
“They’re exactly the same,” she said. “Different people, but the same ratty, barnacled fishing boats, the same rickety general stores, the same touristy inns, the same fried seafood and country meatloafs being cooked in kitchens just like the ones in the houses here.”
Quentin was holding the second cone greedily in both hands. He bent down to it and ran his tongue around the edges. Out on the sea the masts of a few sloops and ketches cut lonely swipes through the sky as the boats rocked on the waves.
“I don’t know what you want us to say, Mom,” I said. “You’re miserable with us. I get it. But what’s there to say?”
“Who asked you to say anything? Most people have the opposite problem. They just say something. They don’t think first. Maybe most of my misery is because people spend too much time saying, saying, saying.”
My hands were very cold and I wanted to be somewhere else. Here on the pier there was no way to turn away from my mother’s frantic, agitated energy so I rushed at it head on. “Where have you been, Mom?”
It was the one question we never asked, and Quentin looked back towards the harbor parking lot, as if afraid someone might have heard.
“I didn’t bring you here to be attacked.”
“That wasn’t an attack.”
“That’s enough, Rowena. Really. I can only take so much ungratefulness.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Refusing to eat, criticizing me.”
“I know, Mom,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
Our mother’s face softened. She touched her forehead gently. “I didn’t mean that,” she started. “I mean I wish things could be different between us. I don’t like how I blow up.” I wanted to add “over nothing,” but let it slide, hoping we could all just be together, without unrest, staring at the glittering ocean, if only just for a moment.
“I like the boats,” Quentin said. Green pistachio ice cream was smeared across his cheeks.
Mom handed him a napkin and smiled.
“I know you do, baby.”
She got up off the dock then. She was almost always the tallest woman in any room. Now, standing beside us in her bright dress, she seemed impossibly beautiful. She ran her hands down her stomach, as if trying to press the thin dress tighter to her skin, and turned away.
“You will hurt a lot of people in your lives,” she said. “Ones you love and ones you don’t. Sometimes you won’t mean to, but it will happen. It doesn’t make you any less of a person. Remember that.”
It was well after dark when we got home. The front door was thrown open and our father was in the kitchen. He had made a key lime pie, our mother’s favorite, and was frying crab cakes in a skillet, standing at the stove in his dress pants and a sweaty white undershirt, a cigarette burning in the pink clay mug he used as an ashtray. Our father always did most of the cooking. He enjoyed it and he claimed it calmed his nerves. Mom could cook, too, but she was always ruining dishes on purpose to get out of the chore. She’d cut butter into a pan and heat it on high until the fat was rippling and smoking and the whole kitchen smelled like a grease fire and then crack the eggs into the rippling heat, which always made the most horrible snapping sound and turned the whites into little blackened discs in seconds. She put lasagnas in the oven and waited ten minutes to set the timer. She cut slits into steaks while grilling them, releasing all the bloody juices and leaving the meat as tough as leather. She wouldn’t do all these things all the time—every so often she grilled filets that were rare and perfect and fell apart between our teeth or made sausage gravy that was so fragrant and flavorful we pounded our forks against the table in anticipation—just enough so it became easier to let someone else cook and to avoid the potential culinary risk she represented.
In the house Quentin ran to our father and our father caught him with one arm and swung him up onto his hip. I stood in the doorway with our mother and held my breath. She was home for the first time in a long time, and I feared that if I stepped away from her side, she would be sucked back out the door on the wind. I touched her hip through the yellow dress, and when she stiffened I held my fingers tight against the hard knob of bone. Sometimes she felt so much like a ghost, and I wanted to remember this: the firmness of my mother’s hip, the heat of my mother’s skin pressing back through summer cotton.
“I didn’t mean to worry you,” she said.
Our father set Quentin down on the floor and retrieved his cigarette. “I’m too tired to worry anymore, Kay.”
“What do you do then?”
“I mostly argue about petty things all day. Monetary disputes. Custody battles. OUIs. Fishermen busted buying heroin. I try to keep Thad from spending the rest of his damn life in jail. I come home and take my shoes off. I smoke and sometimes bake pies. I hope for the best.”
“You hope for the best.” Our mother laughed, which was of course the exact wrong thing to do.
“If that’s how you want to do this.”
“It’s nauseating.”
“I’m sure it is. Yet here you are, back again.”
“It makes me sick how forgiving you are. Get angry. Smash something. Hit me.”
My father shrugged, well aware that his passiveness was punishing her far worse than any act of rage or violence. “I can’t help how you feel, Kay. But you should remember forgiveness only comes as a response to transgression.”
The trial ended in late August. Thad headed to the state prison in Warren on a reduced charge of manslaughter, a great victory of sorts for our father. One night in early September I heard our parents talking downstairs through the heating shaft.
My father was saying, “This is everything we once wanted. Tell me how it isn’t.”
“Yes,” Mom said, “it is,” and though she was speaking to my father, I imagined her looking out the window with her head lifted up slightly, as if trying to see over the tall, dark pines to the sea, to all those monotonous islands she’d never been able to escape.
In the morning she was gone and there was a note. There had never been a note before. It was cryptic and outlandish and so purely Mom we figured she’d without question be back in a few days and laughing about the drama of the whole thing.

Jace –

I wanted a life and you built a life. At first I was included. Then you stopped asking if what you were building, what you imagined at night, was the life I saw. Maybe you meant to build some romantic ark for us, but in truth you built a cage. You assumed another’s happiness. I have gone away from you so many times. I have been horrible to you. Don’t be mistaken. Me leaving has nothing to do with Thad Leopold. Your head is full of worry for other people, perhaps the wrong people, and I fear your heart is as well.

Love Always, Katherine

It was very cold in the house that night. Rain had come in earlier in the week and dropped the temperature and the winds had shifted: blowing from the north, they barreled into the walls and the windows, until summer was decidedly gone and a sudden season of ice seemed upon us. Our father fixed dinner as if nothing had changed. He put bowls of spaghetti on the table. He put meatballs atop the spaghetti. He poured thick, homemade marinara sauce fragrant with fried garlic and basil over the meatballs. He said nothing, and we ate in silence as if all was normal and the world around us had not been razed.

* * *

My father and Anne Bruxal had been coming home from a contra dance at Tranquility Grange when the car left the road. That they had been out together in public at all spoke to the community’s stance—if not one of acceptance then surely one of tolerance. It should have been a scandal. But people liked my father and felt uncomfortable around Anne’s husband, Slim. They said he’d carried a great distance in him even as a child, as if he were looking beyond people while they spoke. People whispered about how he was secretly cruel, though he never seemed like a bad man to me.
Seal Bay formed the headwaters to the Passagassawakeag River, an extension of the Penobscot Bay watershed. In town two bridges crossed the mouth of the river and connected the east and west sides of the bay—a tall trestle bridge built for cars and an old footbridge suspended only a few feet above the choppy surface of the bay and largely forgotten by all but the small group of men who smoked and fished for mackerel from it all day long.
Our Aunt Hannah called them vagrants, tramps, examples of stunted evolution. Hannah was our mother’s younger sister and she lived in a small rented house in town with her husband Leif and their two daughters. They had a wide, white-painted front porch and grape vines creeping up the sides of a trellis. From her house, where we often went after school, we could see the footbridge and the hulking sardine cannery churning away at the harbor’s mouth, constantly spilling its red froth of blood and guts into the water. Quentin was always staring at the footbridge, which carried a forbidden quality. It was a place of gruff men who smelled of beer and cigarettes and had wild, ragged beards and who seemed to spend entire afternoons sitting in the sun swearing and dangling fishing poles over the ocean instead of at work.
One afternoon I got up from Aunt Hannah’s porch and punched Quentin in the chest as hard as I could. “You’re the saddest thing I’ve ever seen.” When he didn’t speak or look away from the bridge, I said, “That’s it. We’re going fishing down there.”
Quentin’s attention snapped around then. “Can we?”          
“Who knows. But I’m not about to sit around and watch you pine after the idea of it anymore.”
I took two ancient bamboo fishing poles from Aunt Hannah’s garage and forced one into Quentin’s arms so he didn’t look like a fool showing up empty-handed with his sister carrying his gear. A man met us at the head of the bridge. He didn’t step aside, or speak, but just kept moving his cold, blue eyes across us.
“We’re here to fish,” I said.
He nodded.   
“We have poles,” Quentin foolishly added.
“That you do. How about bait?” The man lit a cigarette, and his grin through the smoke seemed skeletal. “Fishing’s more complicated than most folks think.”
Quentin looked down at his feet, and I was embarrassed by his meekness. The tide was low and everything smelled of rot on the bridge. The bay was still except for the men pulling mackerel up through the red scrim coating the water. Beside us, the larger bridge ran across the river’s mouth, ending in a sloped gravel embankment and a concrete abutment pinning the structure to the earth. You could leave the footbridge and walk along the shoreline towards the big bridge and then climb up the embankment and sit below the steel and the concrete and the passing cars as if in a little cave. There were always lots of things under there—roaches and cigarette butts, liquor and soda bottles, old used condoms, the ashes of small campfires, graffiti about god and heaven and angels and various memorials scrawled across the abutment’s concrete face. If you moved up to the very top of the gravel slope and climbed the concrete blocks you could reach your hands into the air and press your palms to the underside of the bridge. The passing cars would vibrate down through your fingers, and I’d try to guess what they were, imagining sedans and trucks, vans and the great rumbling semis, all of them going somewhere—towards some life, some other story. Older kids drank and got high down there. Girls lost their virginity. Boys did things and afterwards they turned hard and cold. It was a place where people gave away parts of themselves, really. Once a boy’s body had supposedly been found under the bridge, another time the body of a dog. All of these were stories we told, and all of them were suspect.
“Tell you what,” I said to the man. “You lend us some of your bait, and we’ll pay you back with half of what we catch.”
The man considered the arrangement, nodded, and continued to smoke.
“Fine,” he said, flicking his cigarette into an empty chum bucket. “Just no more talking. You’ve already done enough of that to ruin my entire day off.”
This man was Slim Bruxal. He was a state game warden and he was also our nearest neighbor. If you drove down the snarled gravel fire road through the woods towards our house and took the left fork as opposed to the right you’d end up a mile later at Slim and Anne’s house.
Slim wasn’t old but seemed ancient in how he moved, the careful way he held his back straight, how deliberately he placed his feet while walking, as if each step signaled a great decision. All of this sat at odds with his personality, which was playful and joking. He used to deliver eggs from his hens to our house in the mornings before driving to the ranger station on Tunk Mountain. For years he came and went, and we never thought a thing about him. Some mornings we wouldn’t even hear him; we’d just step outside and find the fresh eggs waiting on the porch. On other mornings his wife Anne delivered the eggs on her way to work. We didn’t know Anne Bruxal well. Only that she owned a bakery in town and was the type of woman who seemed to laugh easily and was messy—flour and sugar smeared across her clothing, empty soda cans and coffee cups knocking around the floor of her car, her black hair loose and wild and held up with whatever type of elastic she could find. Some mornings we passed the bakery and saw her stooping over a cake and squeezing frosting out of a little paper tube as the Beatles played loudly in the background. She would lift a hand and wave if she happened to notice us. Then she would take up her paper tube and bend back down to her cake.
A few weeks after our mother left, we went and stayed with Aunt Hannah for the weekend. On Sunday we rose early and walked home. Hoping to surprise our father, we came into the house through the back door and a small cloud of unfamiliar perfume rushed into our nostrils. As our eyes adjusted to the dim light, we noticed other things: a second bottle of beer on the table, a second damp towel hanging in the bathroom. That was when Quentin saw Anne standing on the front porch. She had noticed us though the screen door and paused but instead of waving she turned and hurried away.
Quentin raced after her. “Wasn’t a single damn egg out there at all,” he said when he came back inside.
I heard the toilet flush upstairs and the shower sputter on. “You really are clueless,” I said.
It’s hard to tell how these things start. How they happen or progress. My father’s office was beside the bakery and next to the movie theater in town. He often worked late and Anne did as well: one lost in the hopeless legal task of untangling the worst of peoples’ lives; the other frosting cakes, bringing people comfort through the shaping and molding of dough, the application of cinnamon and maple glaze. Maybe he wandered into the bakery one rainy evening for a pumpkin donut or a cup of coffee. Maybe he stayed longer than he should have. Maybe he told a small joke and made her smile. Maybe there was a look, her taking her bottom lip between her teeth, him running his eyes over her body while she poured his black coffee into a small cardboard cup. Maybe it was our father who approached her. Maybe he pinned her against the counter and kissed her, moving fast, moving hungry. Or maybe it was a gentle, cautious progression. Maybe she laid her palm on his shoulder, leaving behind a small flour handprint that haunted him for days after. I only knew what everyone else knew: that they often went to movies in the afternoon, sometimes walking over together from the law office or the bakery, sometimes meeting in the theater lobby. During the week one screen showed only black and white classics, and I wondered if inside those old movies our father and Anne Bruxal again felt like children.

III
Shipwrecks

Two days after the accident Slim Bruxal buried his wife. Our father took the day off from work and called us out of school. He dressed in his best black suit and sat at the kitchen table all day long as though he was waiting for some visitor to come down the driveway. At dusk he made us put our boots and coats on and told us it was time. In a great flurry of puzzlement and curiosity we followed him as he walked us out through the woods, past abandoned farm equipment and little tarpaper shacks. We found shed deer antlers beneath great oak trees. We found an old grouse den in a small pile of brush. We found two frozen goldfinches which Quentin picked up in his gloved hands and held for a while. We found the ashy remains of a charcoal fire, left behind by some hunters. Quentin wanted a rifle for Christmas, but our father would not allow it. There were rumors in town that fall about poachers, and we were always on the lookout for men moving about the woods out of season or for the headlights of trucks cutting through the trees at night.
Together we went through the woods following our father, stepping where his feet had stepped, naming all the ships we had seen in books or in the harbor or had on rainy afternoons imagined listing out beyond the bay.
Quentin elbowed me and whispered, “Schooner.”
I whispered, “Tug.”
Quentin whispered, “Cutter.”
I whispered, “Sloop.”
When we ran out of ships, we started naming famous shipwrecks: the Angel Gabriel, the Royal Tar, the Gypsum King. Almost everyone in town had a favorite wreck, and the stories were told over and over again, existing not as myth or legend, but as our own dark and mournful history. Quentin loved the Albany, a British prison ship that deposited a load of captives in Boston and then wrecked on the Triangles, a steep rocky ledge rising from the bottom of Penobscot Bay. Some of the survivors later froze to death trying to row to safety, and coins taken from the frozen bodies of those British sailors can still be found on Matinicus Island. I thought often about the Bohemian, a big passenger steamer which became confused when it drifted into a strange afternoon haze and smashed into Alden’s Rock. Two hundred and forty of the three hundred people on board survived. I wanted to know if they understood how lucky they were to have escaped the sea.
It was almost dark when we reached Slim’s property. I understood then that our dad had been waiting for the funeral to end and for Slim to come home from the ranger station or the Wounded Anchor bar or wherever it was he had likely gone after to continue grieving. Slim’s house was green with a steep roof and a small, roughly fenced paddock for his two horses, Henry and Clive. Slim was outside by his henhouses chopping firewood in a pair of wrinkled dress pants and a brown wool suit coat with leather patches on the elbows. His red face was pinched against the wind, and he kept blinking as if trying to rid his eyes of some disturbance. With a raised hand our father halted us at the edge of the woods. Then he stepped over a stone wall and slowly walked up to the house.
Out in the yard Slim kept swinging the axe down through the hunks of wood, splitting off clean golden columns which piled up about him on the ground. When our father reached the front porch, he stopped and seemed unsure of what to do next. Maybe he only wanted to say he was sorry. But he should not have been out there like that. I knew that much, and so did Quentin, who was picking things up off the forest floor—twigs and rocks and mushy clumps of icy birch bark—to avoid looking up at our father.
Slim went on chopping his firewood, and our father did something we had never seen any man do. He walked out into the center of the yard, sat down in the gravel, and drew his knees up to his chest.
Quentin whispered, “Rowe.”
“He’s just tired,” I said, and added, “You’re too young to understand.”
When Slim had cut the last of his wood, splitting and neatly stacking the pale, dry wedges, he carefully hung the splitting axe on the shed wall, walked past our father, and climbed the three sagging porch steps.
“Slim,” our father said. “I only came to—”
“You haven’t even got the right to show up here let alone sit down in my yard like some martyr, Jace.” Slim still hadn’t turned around. He was holding his hand against the front door and breathing so heavily that his curled shoulders seemed about to burst through his threadbare sport coat. “Getting awful cold,” he said. “Much too cold for those children to be out. I wouldn’t want your boy catching a chill.”
I glanced down then. Quentin was looking at Slim. His cheeks were no longer so red, and his eyes were a deeper shade of blue, as if intensified by interest. Our father was still sitting in the icy gravel dressed in his fine lawyer’s suit looking back at the horses.

* * *

The Seal Bay Elementary School was a red brick building backed up against a tract of pinewoods on the edge of town. A chain link fence ringed a small playground. Several of the swings were missing seats. There was a merry-go-round, but the iron bars were rusty and the wood planks often came loose. The grass was always too high, and in other parts scuffed down to dirt. The pavement was cracked and split by weeds and covered in chalk drawings and foursquare lines nearly rubbed invisible. Behind the school a slender path sloped through the woods down towards the ocean. Quentin spent his days at the elementary school, while I was across the street in my first year at the newly built high school, where everything was all waxy fluorescent lighting and huge polished windows, too much of both if you asked me. A boy had drowned in the Penobscot River years ago, and they had named the high school after him. I was pretty sure he would have hated its sterility just as much as I did.
One afternoon, Celia Tripp, the young receptionist at the high school, came into my English class and started whispering to my teacher. They were both looking at me from the front of the room, and I got up and went out into the hall before either could speak, hoping if they didn’t call my name, I might remain invisible to everyone.
Celia told me there had been an incident with Quentin at the elementary school. “He’s in the office,” she said. “He asked for you.”
Celia was thin and pretty with very bad teeth, which she hid by never fully smiling and by covering her mouth with her hand when she laughed. We all liked this about her—how she seemed as unsure of her body as we often did ours. “He asked us not to call your father.” She kept crossing and uncrossing her arms, and I could tell she wanted to touch my elbow. Instead Celia cracked her knuckles and looked down the hallway. Rows of maroon lockers lined both walls. Overhead, banks of lights glared down on new charcoal carpet. “I know about the accident,” she said after a few seconds. “And about your mother. I wanted to tell you I’m sorry, Rowe.”
Some of the fluorescent lights were flickering. One row went out entirely, and several lockers fell into a strange patch of darkness. I was tired of hearing about things I had no control over—my mother, my father, accidents and abandonments.
“She’s still here,” I said. “Anne Bruxal is the dead one.”
“I know. I just.”
“How about you just don’t. Pity isn’t that interesting. Just tell me what happened to my brother.”
In Celia’s crimson face I could see that she was both embarrassed and angry, but she didn’t push back. “Some of the other kids were teasing Quentin and he fought them. Mrs. Jones stopped it.”
I nodded. I had heard the whispers—everyone had: the talk, the songs, stupid foolish songs that barely made any sense at all yet left you cut to shreds at night.

Their mother up and left
And their father shall be next

Old Jace Grayson puts rotten people in jail
Someday he’ll end up right there without bail

Unoriginal garbage like that. They never seemed to tire of singing them. Quentin was the smallest kid in his grade, but I imagined him fighting them all. Never stopping his swinging hands. Not even when Mrs. Jones rushed out to the playground and threw her arms around my brother in a bear hug, lifting him from the ground.
“We had to call your father,” Celia said. “But Quentin asked for you.”
“Is he hurt?”
“No,” she said. “Not physically.”
When Celia looked up, her eyes were damp, and I didn’t know what to say. She turned down the hallway, and I walked along behind her watching the heels of her shoes coming up and going back down against the floor.
Quentin was sitting in a small plastic chair across from the receptionist’s desk. He didn’t say a word when I sat down beside him. We stayed in the office for the rest of the day. There was music coming out low and nice from a big wooden console radio like the one our mother kept in the living room at home. Outside it had started snowing. I knew by the shift in sound: in the space between songs from the radio, the silence was broken by ice clicking at the frosted windows. The snow came that way sometimes, blown up sideways and shrieking from the harbor, and it would not be long until it had swallowed the crumbling school and the ragged yard and the decaying playground and everything would look fresh and clean.
“Claude Morrow started it,” Quentin said.
“I know.”
“I was just about to whip him when that bitch stepped in and messed everything up. I mean Mrs. Jones is the best, but she’s a bitch for messing everything up.”
It was warm with woodheat and the crisp snow smell of winter in the office. I embraced my brother and imagined staying right here in the soft heat surrounded by the clicking of sleet for a long time. “I know you had them beat,” I lied.
The music kept playing, and we inched closer to the radio as the office windows turned gray and then black. Our noses were practically brushing the speaker when our father came in. Principal Schute stepped out of his office, smiling a little, and when he started to speak, our father raised one hand into his face to silence him, crossed the room, gathered us into his wet coat, and rushed us out into the cold, breaking our little afternoon sanctuary.
Me and Quentin rode in the back on the drive home. Scattered papers covered the front seat, and the floor was strewn with candy wrappers, peanut shells, and empty soda cans. Red Christmas bows hung from the stoplights in town—every weekend now people were up on ladders hanging decorations and lights. We drove past Alexi’s pizza joint and Garvey’s bar and grill, past the movie theater, past our father’s office, past the bakery, which Slim was already talking about selling to a couple from New York, infuriating almost everyone in town. To my father I think this proved Slim hadn’t loved his wife—how callously and quickly he set about erasing this thing she had cherished. I wasn’t so sure. I couldn’t say it, but I thought Slim might just be in tremendous pain and unable to look anymore at such a terrible reminder.
Our father drove down to the harbor—he had never been able to drive through town without detouring to the harbor to see what new boats had come in—and then he drove back through town and took the Prospect Hill Road, turning away from the neatly decorated street lamps and shops and moving out into the woods, towards the bend on which he had lost control of everything only a week before. The ice had thickened into clots of wet swirling snow, and our father kept re-gripping the wheel to steady his hands as the trees and power lines vanished in white gusts. He accelerated into the high banking of Ames Corner, as if challenging the road, but the wheels held true, and our father seemed in complete control. In the rearview mirror his eyes looked electric, and we did not ask him to slow down: we always had, and still did trust him.
In our driveway I asked what really happened to Anne Bruxal. My father said it was an accident and that as long as he lived he would never forget it. Quentin asked if he wanted Slim to be sad like he was, and our father reached up and adjusted the rearview mirror until his face slipped out of the glass. He told us no man should have to be sad, but that sadness was part of the agreement of being human.

       Late fall was always the hardest time in the bay because we knew winter was coming—the first shockingly cold nights, ice forming a skin on water troughs and ponds, and finally the big storms blowing down from Nova Scotia and leaving entire towns blanketed under thick white snowdrifts. Each day more fishermen were putting their boats up for the season. Dark came earlier every night. Some people drank too much. Others ate too much. Everyone was always cold and a little sad. Sometimes we needed to get away. And when we needed to get away, we went to visit the boat.
The boat was a half-built Friendship sloop, a variety of old wooden lobster boat, abandoned among the rocky blueberry balds. Our mother had first taken us there on a winter afternoon years ago when snow shut down the schools and sealed in most of the town. She dressed us in layers: longjohns, jeans, undershirts, sweaters, jackets, mittens, hats. She filled two thermoses with hot chocolate. She led us out into the cold on snowshoes. She called it an expedition. “Imagine we’re arctic explorers,” she said.
Two feet of snow had brushed the entire field the night before. “Why is it here?” I asked, and our mother said it was there because someone had forgotten to finish it. “Maybe they got bored,” she said. “Maybe they ran out of money. Maybe they died. Who knows. But their loss is really our gain if you think about it.” She told us she and Dad used to lie in the fields by the boat and listen to the ocean.
“We were much younger then,” she said and smiled. “I guess we were altogether different people, really.”
After witnessing our father sitting on the frozen ground at Slim’s and hiding his reflection from us in the car as we carved through our Christmas-lit town, we needed to get away.
A windfall scarlet oak sat just off our driveway. Beside it a stone cairn marked the head of the narrow foot trail up into the balds.
“This way,” I said to Quentin. “It’s the way Mom used to take us.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“It was a long time ago, stupid. We’re getting old.”
The ground was frozen in places and thawed in others, and with every other step our feet seemed to sink into the muddy earth. We passed the abandoned Hamsun barn, its faded red clapboards slowly falling away, the broken water wheel stalled in an ice-clear creek. It was most certainly haunted. Years ago, Mr. Hamsun had killed his wife and then hung himself in the hayloft. For a long time an airplane sat in the barn. Now the cavernous space was empty except for a few bales of moldy hay and some burlap sacks of grain. Beside the barn there was a small white house with shattered windows and crooked-hanging blue shutters and a squat cabin once used as a schoolhouse. It seemed a little eerie to build a school so close to a murderer’s den but no one in town seemed to think anything of it at all. I made Quentin hold his breath while we passed the barn and I did the same and it wasn’t until we reached the beech tree with a cross carved into its bark that we risked breathing again. A gravel fire road with a weedy ridge running down its center brought us into the blueberry fields. Great rocks jutted up from the low thorny bushes, raked of all their fruit now and burned into patches of soot at harvest’s end. Beyond the charred fields, in a snowmelt-watered clearing overlooking the sea, we found the boat—half built, forgotten, its wooden ribs curving into the sky, the whole of it like a skeleton left beside the ocean to fossilize. That was exactly how I thought of the boat: as a creature left to decay. First the salt would encase its body, devouring the moisture, cracking the skin. Then the blue wind would come off the waves, sucking and tearing at the loose skin until it all peeled away. After that the sun would dry the muscle, bleach the bones.           
“Does it have a name?” Quentin asked.
“No.”
“Everything has a name.”
“False. We just want things to have names because it makes them easier to remember.”
Quentin ducked between two of the hull staves, slipping inside the wooden skeleton.
“He might come back for it someday.”
“Who?” I asked.
“The man who started building it. I mean someone had to start building it.”
Quentin was looking up at the frame, the sun latticing his cheeks. “Can a boat get lonely?”
“Everything gets lonely.”
“Maybe we should stay with it then.”
I had not followed my brother inside the weathered frame with any idea of remaining, and frankly I thought the idea of staying with an old rotting boat a stupid one. But I said none of this, and couldn’t look away from Quentin’s face, twisted up in the wind, his blue eyes a little wet.
“Someone should stay,” I said. “To protect it.” I paused. “From thieves.”
“Body snatchers?”
“Exactly.”
Together we did just that. Climbing the staves, curling up against the hard ribs as though they were hammocks, sitting inside the skeletal frame shivering as the wind tore through the great empty space. I peeled off my sweatshirt and put it over Quentin’s shoulders and he wiped at his eye with the sleeve. We breathed into our hands. We imagined being a heart, and the boat was grateful.

* * *

When we got home, Slim’s green Forest Service pickup was parked in the yard. My father had driven out to the prison in Warren that morning to talk to Thad about his appeal and still hadn’t returned.
“He’ll be back soon,” I said.
“I didn’t come to see Jace.” Slim was sitting in my father’s chair on the porch. “I think I could go a long time without seeing your dad. I came to see you two.”
“Us?” Quentin said.
“That’s right,” said Slim. “You all ever hear about the time I was in the Army in the fifties and instead of sending me to Korea right away I ended up out in Montana keeping a fence lot of burros fed and watered?”
“How come you’d want to see us?” Quentin asked.
“I went and said how come already. Because I’ve got this story about feeding and watering the burros and I haven’t told it in a while. Burros and horses and mountains—I thought all that frontier shit was gone by the time I joined the army, but it wasn’t. Don’t tell me you’ve heard this story already.”
“No sir,” Quentin said. “I ain’t ever heard it at all.”
“Good,” Slim said. “Cause I was apt to tell it anyways.”
Slim talked about driving pack animals in the mountains between Montana and Canada, and how when they did finally send him to Korea he and his men had to pile up dead bodies and climb underneath them to keep from freezing to death while fighting along the Kaema Plateau. He’d never known such cold in his life, but even at thirty-five degrees below zero it never got cold enough that they couldn’t smell all the blood. He seemed to have no interest in the fact that we were fifteen and eleven and might possibly be disturbed by the idea of the living sheltering under the dead to survive. He told us about coming home and steering logs down the Penobscot River for a year, about becoming a game warden and hunting poachers around the state because he couldn’t stand a person who didn’t play fair with nature. He told us about falling in love with a black-haired girl who loved the Beatles and Bill Monroe and building a little house back in the woods together with their own hands.
“I’m sure your father has stories like these,” he said.
Quentin moved over next to Slim. “If he does he doesn’t ever tell them.”
Slim nodded.
“He’ll be home soon,” I said.
“I do believe you said that once already.”
“I think you should go.”
“All right then.” Slim reached down and squeezed Quentin’s shoulder. “Your sister here wants me to go, so I guess I better listen. I see she’s still making the decisions for the two of you.”
“You’ll come back, right?” Quentin asked.
“I’m not sure I will.” Slim was looking directly at me, and his eyes, which had always seemed a little boyish, now seemed dangerous. “A smart man knows enough to stay away from places he shouldn’t be.”
Slim was climbing into his truck when our father pulled into the yard. Both men rolled their windows down and spoke across the air, Slim of all things asking our father to come hunting with him before deer season ended and our father not answering at first, not even nodding or shaking his head.
“If you’d be interested in a thing like that, counselor,” Slim said.
He was looking beyond Slim’s truck to me and Quentin standing on the porch. “I don’t think I’ve even seen a deer in ten years,” he said.
“That’s practically criminal, Jace.”

IV
River Voices

My father spent all Friday getting ready, packing extra socks, tin cans of tuna fish, a pair of binoculars, a small Swiss Army knife he must have thought would be somehow useful. Slim came to the house just at dawn. He was wearing a bright red knit hat and looked as if he hadn’t slept in a long time. But he seemed to straighten and grow taller as he stood in the kitchen sorting through my father’s various provisions, pulling the items out one by one and leaving them on the table. With each item my father blushed and said, “I thought we might need that.”
“That’s your problem, counselor,” said Slim. “You think too much. Normally I believe that phrase to be a misnomer. A man or a woman can never think too much, but in the case of some I have seen a surplus of thought lead to a chronic paralysis of action.”
When they were gone, I fried eggs in the big skillet and did not clean out the grease after. Quentin came downstairs wobbling and foggy with sleep still. “Do you think this means Slim forgives him?”
“I don’t think it means a thing except they’re going hunting.”
After we ate, I went upstairs to the room my mother had kept as a pottery studio. The room was empty now except for a mahogany desk and a cedar trunk pushed up under the window. Even the walls, which had been covered in black and white photographs of cities she’d taken when she was young—narrow cobblestone alleys, corner cafes swathed in shafts of sunlight, parks circled in iron fences and populated by empty benches—were bare now. One weekend my father removed all the photographs, spackled the tiny nail holes, and repainted the entire room. For a week the room smelled of paint. Then my mother’s smell, something like sage mixed with the deep rich odor of garden compost, slowly began to come back.
I went over and stood beside the radiator in the studio, allowing the heat to slowly move me out of my nostalgia. It was very still in the room and very lonely. I worked my toes down into the thick wool rug my father had rolled up while he painted and then rolled back down when he was done. I thought he might paint the room again to erase my mother’s returning smell, but he never did. He kept the door closed, and for years after when he passed down the hallway he refused to even turn and look in its direction.
“Are you sad?”
I hadn’t heard Quentin come into the studio.
“No,” I said. “I’m just remembering things.”
Quentin opened the cedar chest and took out a photo album I hadn’t known was there. Together we sat on the rug in a little rectangle of sunlight falling through the window and held up old pictures—Mom at fairs, parades, trap day; Mom smiling widely in the yellow sun dress; Mom laughing and winking at the camera; Mom trying to shoo away our father, who was always taking pictures, as if convinced a moment had to be caged in a mechanical lens to last. Outside birch branches tapped against the window, and I expected to hear her voice singing as she came up the driveway.
“She always seemed happy,” Quentin said.
I nodded. “She was. Just not in enough ways.”

* * *

Slim and our father returned after dark. A few twists of snow were falling, and a deer was stretched out in the back of Slim’s truck. We pressed so near the kitchen window the chill stung our noses. We could hear them talking. “It ain’t contract law, Jace,” said Slim. The deer’s flank was matted red with blood and our father wrestled it from the truck and bent over it trying to catch his breath after. “You hang it, bleed it, and dress it.”
Our father didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands. He touched his coat pocket, his belt buckle, his ear. Eventually he admitted, “I don’t know how.”
Quentin shrank back an inch or two from the glass, just enough that I noticed.
“Of course you don’t,” said Slim.
Slim rigged a makeshift pulley with some rope from the barn and a cinder block counterweight and hung the deer from a thick cedar branch. After that he and our father sat beside the truck drinking coffee from their thermoses while the meat cooled. When it was time, Slim bowed his head and whispered a little prayer of thanks. Then he stepped to the deer and made the first cut, a long straight groove across the animal’s throat. The blood seemed hesitant at first, and then it seeped up through the wound. I kept waiting for the animal to wince, for the black domes of its eyes to flicker. Slim set about flicking the knife around the deer’s belly, the innards roping out into a tin milk bucket he’d placed down in the snow, Slim doing all the work since our father didn’t know how, since our father did his work inside a courthouse wearing a suit, never out in the cold winter light. “It’s a good deer,” Slim said. “Tagged in at a hundred and seventy pounds. Some men are lucky that way. They go out in the woods once a decade and get an animal like this.”
Our father balled his fists against his thighs. “Slim,” he said, his voice brittle.
Slim stepped away from the deer and placed his hand on our father’s shoulder. “Don’t mistake this for something it ain’t,” he said. “This is me taking you back to something you maybe once loved. Maybe when you were a boy. When you understood something about people and nature and the law, not that thing you call the law and come into each day in a fucking tie, but common human decency.”
Quentin dropped his head for a moment. When I reached down, he let me take hold of his hand. Together we watched the two men out in the falling snow with the deer hanging beside them. As the snow thickened, churning in a white fever around the men, Slim kept his hand, slick and wet with the deer’s blood, firmly on our father’s shoulder. I thought something more might pass between them, that Slim might draw my father close or hit him in the jaw—it seemed there was always something a little unexplainable and unspoken happening between men—but nothing did.

* * *

That night our father took the ladderback chair from the hallway and moved it to the living room in front of the radio. I waited for him to turn the radio on, but he just sat in front of it absently thumbing through a copy of The Sea Wolf he’d pulled from the bookshelf. When the phone rang, he didn’t even move. It was after nine, and I knew it was my mother.
When I answered, she asked if Quentin was still awake.
“Yes,” I said.
“He should be sleeping.”
“He’s in bed,” I lied. “He’s almost asleep.”
I held the receiver far away from my ear, afraid her voice might somehow burn me. But her voice was very soft and I missed her.
“Is your father cooking for you both?”
“Yes.”
“That’s good. And you’re eating real meals? Not snacks. Is he really cooking for you?”
“You could come home,” I whispered.
“Rowena, let’s not mistake the intention of this call.” Her words moved over the line between great fits of sudden coughing. “I heard about the accident of course.”
“Are you sick?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “I’m just tired.”
There was a long pause on the line.
“Mom,” I said.
I could hear Quentin up in his room. He had not spoken since Slim left earlier. I imagined him lying on his bed staring at the John Lennon and Jo Jo White posters tacked to his walls, the oddly colored rocks and remains of bird nests he found in the woods and kept neatly arranged on his dresser. The feathers he loved to collect.
Mom took a long time before speaking again. I listened to her light a cigarette and inhale the smoke. “You need to make sure your father is getting on okay. You need to make sure you’re eating. You need to make sure Quentin gets to school.”
The sound of her smoking crackled on the line. Outside it was raining now. There was nothing else.
“Mom,” I said. “Do you love him at least?”
“I’ll call again soon, baby.”
I thought about saying nothing else in hopes she’d miss us enough to come back. But there was danger in that. What if once she forgot the sound of our voices, her memory of our faces faded next? I pressed the phone hard against my ear so her voice felt closer. “You shouldn’t smoke so much,” I said.
“I’m fine.”
“You need to take care of yourself,” I said.
“Everything here is fine.”
Of course it was not, but I was a kid then still and didn’t know how to ask her about the problems in her life yet. Somewhere up the river my mother’s soft voice was filling another house’s rooms. “Where is here?” I asked.
“Tell your brother to be good.”

V
Partings

Time slid into mid-December, and every day a few more minutes of light were stolen from the world. Most days the sky was so gray it seemed stamped from a sheet of steel. There was speculation in town the bay might freeze that winter for the first time in fifty years. Being precocious and bored, I wondered about the effect on overall community morale and general historical life expectancy of such long bleak periods of cold and darkness, but no one wanted to hear the philosophical musings of a teenager.
On the Sunday before Christmas I woke up early and went downstairs. I made some coffee and cooked pancakes and poured a glass of milk. My father was out in the yard pounding some of the dents from his car. He refused to take the car to a body shop and I was convinced he meant to keep the dents as a punishing reminder of what he had done until he could fix them all himself.
Quentin was out front as well, kneeling in the snow beside our mother’s gardens. I stepped outside with the glass of milk, and he stood and brushed his hands against his thighs. There was a shovel behind him and a trowel at his feet. He had cleared away at least a foot of snow, and the fallen leaves, twigs, and autumnal debris had all been raked back from the beds as well. There were a few mounded spots where the frozen earth had been chiseled out and then pressed back down again.
“You planted something,” I said.
“Tiger lilies. I want it to look nice for her in the spring. She needs to come back to nice things.”
I set the glass of milk down in the snow. Quentin turned back to the garden.
“She has to come back,” he said. “She needs her things. She belongs here.”
I said nothing.
It was just after nine when Cal Hayes came down the driveway and cranked down his truck window. “Remember that investigation I mentioned?”
Our father nodded. “What happens now?”
“Nothing happens. You weren’t drunk, and you weren’t speeding. If anything you were careless, Jace, mostly just unlucky. And you’ll have to live with that.”
“Something always happens, Cal.”
“And I’m sure something will. But it’s going to happen right here with your family, not in court. Now you tend to them.”
Quentin turned to me. “He’s not going to take Dad away?”
“Why would you possibly want that?”
Quentin said he wanted him taken away because when they took one parent away they had to bring the other back. I had never heard such a stupid thing, and I told him that he was a foolish child who would be better off never speaking again. He punched me hard in the chest, but I did not flinch or cry out. I went to punch him back, but before I could move, Quentin turned and sprinted across the yard, darting past our father, swinging around Cal’s truck, and disappearing into the woods.

* * *

My father sat in front of the radio all afternoon listening to football games he had no interest in. Every so often he stepped out on the porch, gazed about the chilly woods for my brother, and stepped back inside. It had warmed into a hard rain and was dark by the time Quentin came back. He was toting a small green toy rifle over his shoulder, wearing a pair of brown rubber boots that were far too big, and carrying Slim Bruxal’s red wool hat.
“Where have you been?” Dad yelled. And when Quentin didn’t answer, he said, “Tell me just where in the hell you’ve been all day in this cold.”
“In the woods.” Quentin was looking at the floor.
“In the woods is not an acceptable answer. It’s a vague destination at best. Don’t you know how I worry? Don’t you understand that not everything is my fault?”
This time when Quentin didn’t answer, my father ripped the toy rifle from his hands. He stared at it as though shocked by his outburst. Then he lifted the gun high above his head, rage gathering and blooming with the motion, and smashed it against the floor until the plastic pieces exploded everywhere.
Before Quentin could pick up the pieces of the gun, my father thrust him back against the hallway mirror so hard that the glass cracked and Quentin started gasping.
“Will you answer me now? Or are you still too good for that?”
I stepped into the hall and touched my father’s shoulder. He was wild and oblivious to the contact. But I repeated his name until he released Quentin and took a step back, his hands already coming up to his face in horror. Quentin slipped under my arm and darted up the stairs, leaving us behind with the wreckage of the little toy gun.

* * *

The lack of sound woke me well after midnight. The rain had thickened back into snow, and when I came downstairs I found my father in the kitchen standing over the mounds of plates and dishes that had accumulated during the week. Thick rinds of food caked the porcelain and smeared the glasses. He’d swept up the pieces of the toy gun and placed them in a paper bag on the table. “Rowe,” he said, looking up as if caught at something.
“Dad. It’s late.”
“These things,” he said. “Sometimes I don’t even know where to start. I feel like I’ve spent most of my life lost in law books.”
He was looking down at the dishes, the dirty countertops, and I went over and took the dishes from the sink, pulling them away one by one, until the little mountain of cups and plates grew slowly smaller. I plugged the stopper into the drain and dumped in the soap and began letting the hot water steam into the basin. I took my father’s hand and held it for a moment. “Like this,” I said.
I washed the dishes with great care, like our mother had once done, making sure to scrub both sides of the plates and reach into the very bottoms of the glasses, where she’d once told us the cooties we were so afraid of as children were most likely to live. My father dried the dishes and washed down the counters with a warm soapy rag. When we were done, I helped him sort and stack the mail into three neat piles.
“You’re a good kid,” he said. “That was awful what I did to your brother.”
“He’ll forget,” I lied. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
Snow was falling outside and inside the lights were bright. The way they shined against the wet countertops made the room seem on fire. It was very late, and I should have been in bed, but I did not want to leave my father, fearing everything we’d done together towards order might fall apart.
I didn’t know what else to say, so I said the most important thing. “Dad. I love you.”
“You shouldn’t worry. I shouldn’t worry you.”

* * *

Two days later Slim came out to our house one last time. The snow had kept up, and in town there was talk again of the poachers after fresh kill sites had been found in the powder. Slim parked in the yard and our father came out carrying the brown rubber boots and red hat and the paper bag with the pieces of the toy gun.
He set the boots and hat on the porch. “These belong to you,” he said. Then he put the paper bag down beside the boots. “And I will not have this in my house.”
“I didn’t come for any of that,” Slim said.
“But you’ll leave with all of it.”
Slim nodded. “Jut get over it and come on. There’s something you need to see. We might finally have enough to prosecute these bastards.”
My father started to get his boots and coat on. Me and Quentin had been standing inside, and when we turned to go Slim stopped us. “All of you should see this.”
I took my mother’s heavy wool coat from the closet. Quentin retrieved Slim’s red hat from the porch and pulled it on. In the yard Slim handed my father the keys to the truck and told him to drive down the coast to the Selwyn farm.
“You know the place,” Slim said.
My father just looked at the keys resting in his hands. “You’d have me drive.”
“I trust you, Jace. I mean with your children’s lives, I trust you completely.”
Slim opened the passenger door. “You all get up in the cab. I’ve had the heater running and it’ll be warmer in there.” He lifted Quentin in and then held his hand out to me but I knocked it away. Smirking, Slim closed the door, scurried into the truck bed, and rapped his knuckles against the cab window.
Out on the road my father drove very slowly, gripping the wheel so hard his knuckles blanched nearly as white as the snowy hillsides. Cedar waxwings and the red flashes of cardinals snapped about the trees. Shelves of limestone cliffs rose in the west and then fell away to pinewood valleys where winter-hungry deer foraged desperately. Frozen streams veined long meadows and finally we saw the first rows of white-capped Christmas trees. A post was driven into the ground with a board nailed to it, SELWYN TREES painted in evenly spaced red letters.
The Selwyns’ road was a choppy ribbon of frozen mud. Broken cultivators and forgotten tractors littered the woodsline. Wes Selwyn met us in the yard. We could see his wife Lee inside the lighted house waving. Wes scratched at his patchy red beard, whispered something to Slim, and pointed towards the woods.
“About a half mile down that deer trail,” he said. “Near where the upper branch of Pigeon Creek forks. They did a real number down there. Had to close the farm today to deal with this.”
Wes spat into the frozen dirt, nodded to us. “Wasn’t expecting a crowd,” he said. “Lee wanted me to say hello. She doesn’t like this type of stuff at all. Won’t even be outside when it happens.”
An eagerness filled Slim’s gait as we went down the deer trail into the woods. He wound through slash piles, dense thickets of blackberry bushes, scrub stands of poplar. He carefully pushed branches down for us. He pointed to different trees and named them: blue spruce, mountain ash, bur oak, yellow birch, hornbeam, eastern larch, shagbark hickory, witchhazel, northern white cedar. Our father stayed back a step and didn’t touch any of the trees. When Quentin asked him what ones he could name, he shook his head. “Not many,” he said. “Not many at all.”
My hands were beginning to buzz with cold, and my heart beat like an axe against my ribs. After a while the eerie trickling of water filled the woods. The deer trail steepened down a ravine. Above us the branches thickened and wove together. Here the ground was untouched by sun and slick with frost. My father somehow saw what had happened on the banks of Pigeon Creek first, perhaps because he was the tallest. He rushed up to Slim, but Slim just held his gaze until he looked away.
At the edge of the creek a great red lump stained the frozen earth. The pile was all bones and gristle, blood melting into snow. When I spit I could taste blood at the back of my throat. “Foxes,” Slim said. I could picture their bodies then—the long bone snouts, the rows of sharp triangular teeth, the gaping eye sockets, the neat little paws, the long thin hind legs. But there was no fur. No skin that made them any animal I knew.
“They skin them out for the pelts,” Slim said. “Do it right here on the creek bank.”
Quentin was the one who finally spoke, asking Slim how they did it.
“Quentin,” my father said.
Slim didn’t hesitate before answering. “They set the snares along the game trails and down beside the drinking streams to catch them. At first they stand here on the bank just like we are. Then they kneel down this way.” Slim slipped his coat off and spread it on the earth. He got down on the coat very slowly until he was kneeling at the water’s icy edge. “They kneel down just like this. You see, it’s not so hard. They crack the ice and drown them.”
“That’s enough,” my father said, his hands clenched in tight little fists at his side.
“A man will club a fox and pass it to another man and that man will hold the fox under water. That way the coat doesn’t get ruined like it would if you shot it or cut its throat. If they won’t drown they snap their necks.”
“Goddamnit that’s enough. He’s a child. He’s my child.”
“Of course, counselor.” Slim raised his hands. “More than enough, I suppose.”
My brother edged towards the creek until he was standing beside Slim, still kneeling on the ground. “What about when you catch them?” Quentin asked. “Will you make them clean it up, Slim?”
“We won’t catch them. Poachers are smart. Smarter than a lot of game wardens. Probably smarter than some lawyers.”
“But not smarter than you.”
Slim grinned. “Maybe, maybe not.”
“So if you did catch them.”
“Then, yes. If we caught them we would.” Slim was looking back at my father. “In a just world people would be forced to clean up their mistakes.”
He rose and slid his coat back on. “Your dad’s right,” he said. “I suppose we’ve seen enough carnage for a long while.”
Slim reached out and took Quentin’s hand before anyone could stop him. I reached out for my brother’s other hand, but they were already too far away.
My father had not moved at all, and the only sound in the woods was the running of the cracked-ice water over the creek bed. When I took my father’s hand in my own, shocked at the coldness in his thick fingers, he didn’t even flinch. “Come on,” I said. “It’s cold and we should go. What happens next is we have to go home.”
I stepped firmly into the crusty snow, punching out small footsteps for my father to step into. Slim and Quentin were far up the game trail now. Through the branches I watched Slim pull Quentin close to his side and brush a bit of fallen snow from my brother’s hair. Quentin was laughing, happy somehow, and they seemed so very far away.
Squeezing my father’s hand as tightly as I could, I whispered, “Tug,” and my brother did not turn around.
Louder this time, I said, “Schooner,” and Quentin did not answer.
I called out, “the Royal Tar, the Gypsum King, the Angel Gabriel,” and only the wind answered.
I wanted my father to say something about how Quentin would come back to us when he was ready. But even in his shock my father remained an honest man, and he said nothing as we moved into the whiteness. His hand kept slipping from my own and I kept reaching back to grab it again. I had to be very fast to catch his hand each time. It became a game, and for a moment, recalling something he told me when I was still a small child—all the hard things can be stomached if you find a way to see the world as a game—I almost began to smile. My father was so pale and thin beside me and the wind was blowing viciously. I was afraid if he got out into that breeze I would never get hold of him again. You hear stories around here of people who get out into the wind and simply drift away. I would not allow my father to become one of them. I had my entire life to pull him through the breezy woods.

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Greg Brown’s stories have appeared in Shenandoah, Epoch, Narrative Magazine, and Tin House.