Literary Fiction
Date Published: August 26, 2020 (ebook); September 22, 2020 (print)
Publisher: Propertius Press
Tolan has always let her mother have one secret — how she got that scar on her face — playing along with her mother’s game of inventing outlandish tales to explain the wound away. But when she finds a manuscript on her mother’s computer that promises to reveal the true story, Tolan only hesitates for a moment before curiosity compels her to read on.
She’s hoping for answers, but instead, she finds more mysteries tucked away in her mother’s past. Her mother appears to be associated with Bo, a feisty photojournalist who flies to Cuba in pursuit of a story and becomes embedded with Castro’s rebels, but Tolan can’t quite work out their connection. She’s more clear about the relationship between her mother and Michael, a man twelve years her senior. They bond over their shared outcast status, and their friendship quickly becomes intimate, but the relationship antagonizes the self-appointed moral watchdogs in their small town, who start to convert their threats into action. Tolan is pretty sure that Michael is her father. Her mother told her he died years ago, but the book suggests their story had a different ending.
Almost overnight, everything Tolan thought she knew about herself and her family has changed. She wants answers, but to find them, she risks destroying her closest relationships.
CHAPTER TWO
A little girl, eight, almost nine,
shivering, half-asleep, sitting cross-legged on a raft of logs twenty meters
wide, northern hardwoods looming on either side of the river as it flowed north
into Canada. The girl knew from memory that there were spruce and white cedar,
quaking and big-tooth aspen, tamarack, hemlock, and birch, pine, poplar, and
maple, but it was an hour before dawn, now, and the trees were indistinguishable.
There was a rust-spotted bucket next to
the girl, a fishing pole and a creel basket, a black tin lunch pail with two
cheese sandwiches, a hard-boiled egg, and a quart of milk; there was a
dog-eared copy of Chapman’s Bird-Lore, and a tattered field guide to New
England flora and fauna.
Her father would be back after sundown,
sooner if he took a deer early on. In the meantime, she wasn’t to leave the
raft. She had a few squares of toilet paper in her pocket, and a feed-bucket to
do her dirt in.
It was hard not to fall asleep; they’d
left the house just after three that morning, she, her father, and two of his
friends crammed into a model A/AA pickup. The last twenty miles of the trip
were all logging roads, unimproved, deeply rutted swaths of mud and rock that
pitched her about the cab and made it impossible to sleep. They’d arrived at
their campsite around four-fifteen and her father had installed her on the raft
and left. The wind was coming off the river and she didn’t have a blanket, so
it’d been too cold to sleep, and by the time the wind stopped and the
temperature rose, she couldn’t let herself fall asleep because her father
wanted trout, and trout rise at dawn.
She’d never doubted that she or her
father knew what a trout was until she’d started reading the field guide he’d
given her and found out that trout were actually char—at least some of them—and
also drum. Salmonid: Salvelinus fontinalis and Salvelinus namaycush;
non-salmonid: Sciaenidae and Oncorhynchus. Cynoscion nebulosus wasn’t
really a trout, she remembered, then she thought about what her father would do
if he came back and found her empty-handed and she told him that char were all
that was biting, and she’d thrown them back because they weren’t really trout,
and quickly decided that she should try for the fish her father called trout,
whether they were actually trout or not.
She hoped she’d get a burbot today, too,
even though not even her father called a burbot a trout. Lota lota was
the only fancy name she could pronounce out of all of them, and though she
didn’t want to catch one, she knew Lota lota was the only gadiform
freshwater fish and the only member of the genus Lota, and that some
people called it mariah, the lawyer, which made her think of a fish with a
briefcase and a suit, which was funny.
Her parents argued, which wasn’t funny,
especially when it was about her: It’s not normal, Lester, her mother
would say. She’s coming with me, Alice. She’s a girl, Lester—a girl!
She’d seen them once, through the crack
of their bedroom door. She belongs at home with her sister! her mother
had said. Her father had ground his teeth: Enough, he’d said, slashing
the air with the blade of his hand. She’s going. End of discussion.
Her mother usually lost: about buying
their farm, about Bo going hunting, about Bo’s haircut and clothes. Bo had a
dress for Sundays and church socials, but the rest of the time it was pants and
a shirt.
Her mother lost even when she won: her
father had wanted Hunter or Reese, but her mother had prevailed and named her
Beatrix Rose.
Bo lay the pole across her lap and went
through the progression her father had taught her: backing to fly line, fly
line to leader, leader to tippet, and tippet to the fly. A.N.S.I., he had said.
Say it out loud, Bo. Backing to fly line with an Albright knot, fly line to
leader with a Nail knot, leader to tippet with a Surgeon’s knot, and tippet to
the fly with an Improved Clinch knot. A.N.S.I. Say it again—she had, and again,
he’d said, and again, and again: A.N.S.I., A.N.S.I., A.N.S.I., A.N.S.I.,
A.N.S.I.
She didn’t tell her father, but A.N.S.I.
had gone out the window within a month. She still used the Surgeon’s knot to
attach the tippet, but she mostly used a Blood knot for the leader, and either
a Palomar knot or a Surgeon’s loop for the fly, depending on whether she wanted
it tight or loose.
She was fairly certain he couldn’t tie
any of those knots.
“OW!”
A drop of blood slid down her thumb,
catching in the creases of her palm and spreading laterally; her fingers were
clumsy from the cold and she’d pressed too hard on the fly, sinking the hook
into her flesh past the barb.
It was just before sunrise—she had to get
it out quickly.
Bo looked around furtively—she wasn’t
supposed to go near the edge of the raft, but she did now, lying flat for
safety and holding her thumb beneath the frigid water. When she couldn’t feel
it any longer, she closed her eyes, counted to three, and yanked the hook from
her flesh, yelping agony and smelling metal as the world lurched and churned
and blood bubbled out over her ragged flesh and down the meat of her hand, and
she lunged to plunge her hand back into the icy water to keep from passing out.
Her father had only just started letting
her fish unsupervised, and if he saw her thumb he’d change his mind and she
wouldn’t be allowed to fish while he was gone.
She pulled her hand from the river and
looked down into the flesh. Toilet paper wouldn’t staunch the bleeding. It was
nearly dawn. She had to do something, so she unlaced her boots with one hand,
holding the other away from her so she wouldn’t bleed on her clothes, tugged at
her pants, pulling one side and then the other until she could kick them off.
She shucked her underwear; a brace of wind kicked up off the river, biting into
her bare flesh. Thumb or pants first? Thumb. She wound the fabric tight around
it, tied it off with her teeth, shoved her legs into the pants, leaning back
and pulling them up two- handed. She jammed her feet into her boots, tried to
tie her laces, failed, unwound the makeshift bandage and tore the fabric into
smaller strips, re-tied it, and managed her laces.
She had a fly in the water before the sun
broke free of the horizon, and all but filled her creel within the hour. Her
thumb was throbbing, but she kept on casting; one or two more and she’d have
her limit.
Back home, her sister would be scattering
corn for the chickens, feeding the rabbits, and milking their goats.
Cattle are expensive, Bo, her father had
said when they bought the farm, goat milk and rabbit meat are the future.
Bo was happier where she was, thumb or no
thumb. Her father never said so, but she knew he was proud of her. It was why
she got to go away with him on weekends. She wasn’t supposed to know about the
beer or whiskey he won off his friends by betting on her, but she did. Mr.
Hanley made the whiskey in his cellar, and Mr. Abbott brewed beer in his shed.
Bet you Bo can build a fire faster than you, Art, her father would say—bet you
she’ll dress our deer quicker than you can dress yours, Bill—bet you Bo catches
more fish.
Her father would probably win a few more
bottles when they got back and saw she’d made her limit.
She cinched the leather strap on her
creel, fastened it to the raft with a bowline and sunk it so the fish wouldn’t
spoil, took off her fishing vest and disassembled her father’s pole. He would
have returned by now if he’d taken a deer during the dawn window; she had a day
on the raft ahead of her.
An eel of nausea slithered up from Bo’s
ileum and coiled in her throat as she sat, and her hand throbbed, but the
bleeding was staunched, mostly, and the few crocodile tears her thumb wept were
no more than a nuisance. She removed the shirt she was wearing over her
t-shirt, folded it into a pillow and lay down, letting the warmth of the day
and the murmur of the river carry her to sleep.
Bo woke beneath a skin of sweat, hungry.
The angle of the sun made it about two o’clock. She opened the lunch pail; her
father liked hardboiled eggs so she left them for him and ate a sandwich, then
another after she realized he’d want to eat the fish she’d caught when he got
back. She halved the milk in a series of breathless pulls, wiped her mouth with
her sleeve.
She had to go to the bathroom.
These were the hardest hours, waiting for
her father to come back. She wanted to be moving, exploring and swimming and
tracking game, but her father would tan her hide if she left the raft. Worse,
he’d leave her behind the next time.
She invented games to play, counted and
watched and read. She recognized a fair weather cumulus and remembered parts of
a book her father had given her. She thought of her sister again, mending now,
or helping their mother in the kitchen, having already mucked out the goat pen.
Ruby was five years older, and smarter. She’d remember all of the book and
understand what thermal convection meant, and what cloud erosion was. The only
reason Bo knew the words was that her father brought her with him on his
weekend trips and made her sit in one place for hours with only a field guide
for entertainment. Ruby never said anything, but Bo knew she was jealous. She
wished she could give her a present, but it was hard because her sister liked
dresses and ribbons and had a picture of William Haines hidden amongst her
things and looked forward to being allowed to wear makeup, and there weren’t
any of those things in the woods, and Bo couldn’t make them, and didn’t have
any money to buy them. She’d given Ruby an eagle feather, a friendship rock, a
bird’s nest, bouquets of daffodils and daisies, an arrow head; Ruby always
smiled and thanked her, but Bo knew they weren’t things she really wanted.
Bo felt teeth and slapped at her leg,
came away with a splatter of blood on her hand, flicked the crushed carcass
into the river.
Ruby hated bugs, though she was
wrong about them just like their father was wrong about the trout. Bugs were
their own thing, Hemiptera, and the horse-flies and black-flies and
deer-flies and mosquitos and no-see-ums that made Ruby frantic were not Hemiptera;
Hemiptera were hemimetabolous and usually phytophagous, too, though Bo
couldn’t remember what those words meant. Horse flies and black-flies and
deer-flies and mosquitos and no-see-ums made her father slap himself and swat
at the air and say bad words.
She hoped her father got his deer today,
because the flies were thick, and if he got bit all day and didn’t get a deer,
they’d ride home in silence, and when they got home he’d wait for her mother or
sister to say something, and then explode and yell and pound his fists on the
furniture and walls.
He was always sorry afterward. Bo had
heard him apologizing to her mother, begging forgiveness —she’d even heard him
crying, her mother soothing him, whispering reassurances.
The sun began to set, the temperature
drop. Her father’s friends returned, and she was able to go off into the woods
and relieve herself while they built a fire. She came back and sat a short
distance away; if she were within arm’s reach they’d muss her hair and poke fun
at her, which she hated.
Her father appeared just after nightfall, emerging from the black with a
six-point buck.
“You stayed out any longer, and it’d be
the middle of next week,” Art ribbed. Bill cackled. “Guess I’m just not the
hunter you guys are—your deer already in the truck?”
“Go to hell, Les.”
Her father laughed.
“Help me get this into the truck, Bo.”
About the Author
Ciahnan Darrell's short stories and essays have appeared in several journals, most recently in The Columbia Review, and his story, 'What Remains,' was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He is a contributing editor at Marginalia, an international review of literature along the nexus of history, theology, and religion. He holds an MDiv from the University of Chicago, an MA in philosophy and the arts from Stony Brook University, and an MA and PhD in comparative literature from the University at Buffalo. A Lifetime of Men is his first novel.
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