Mink River: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

The air inside the co-op is bone cold. Weathervane scallops, Cedar notes, the Public Works computer in his head automatically gauging their size. The man is sweating as he wields the shucking knife flick flick flick. The nuggets of scallop meat fly from the knife into a steel bowl.
    You will keep your hands off that boy, says Cedar quietly, and the man’s head snaps up but his knife keeps shucking flick flick flick.
    When the rage comes you will walk out of the house with your hands in your pockets, says Cedar, and the knife stops flicking and there is no sound at all in the room.
    Your love for him will heal you, says Cedar, and the man drops the knife and whirls around but Cedar pins the man’s arms to his sides with a grip of stone and doom and he leans in closer and says, Your love will heal your boy also.
    The man spits a huge gob of spit in Cedar’s face and Cedar puts his dripping nose against the man’s scarlet nose and says very quietly, If you hit that boy again I will break your fucking wrists like fucking twigs, and the man says nothing and there is no sound at all in the room except the two men breathing hard and the refrigeration unit chuffing.
    11.
    That is one honking huge beaver, dad.
    Tis.
    Where’s it from?
    The Mink River. Grace found it drowned.
    Must weigh fifty pounds.
    You know prehistoric beavers weighed maybe five hundred pounds. Or more. They were the size of cars.
    Really?
    Really really. And they were smart. Imagine a really really smart beaver the size of a car.
    Yikes.
    Imagine you’re in the river waist deep fooling around and you see coming toward you a furry car that’s thinking maybe you are getting a little too close to its lodge. Which is itself the size of a city. You’d pee so fast you’d raise the river.
    You make me laugh.
    You know, I love this, when we work together.
    Yeh.
    I do really.
    Me too.
    Soon you’ll be off to college.
    Not for years, dad. And who knows what will happen then?
    You sound like my dad. He was always leery of the future.
    Why?
    Hmm. Good question. Well, he was leery of the present and past too, come to think of it. He was a leery guy. Guy Leery—sounds like a movie star.
    Leery of what?
    Hmm. Of what would happen, I guess. Or not happen.
    Was he paralnoid?
    Pa Ra Noid. Not really, no. He was a tough man, very brave in his way. He was just … worried. It was always in his face. A worried man. So to speak. Should have called him Worried Man and not your other grandpa. My dad never trusted that things would work his way, is the best way to put it. So they never did.
    You’re cutting the beaver’s ear off.
    Ah, so I am. Shit on a stick. Damn my eyes. Never talk and work. The work suffers.
    You were saying.
    Well, my dad had a hard life, Danno. He was a child of the Hunger, in a way, an bhuchaill gorta , and he never found work he really wanted to do, and I think he was lonely all his life.
    Until he met Grandmother.
    Well. He was lonely after that too.
    Tell me.
    Let’s finish the beaver first.
    You should tell your dad’s story for the Project.
    I could, that. Your grandpa Billy would like that.
    Grandpa is making tapes for me.
    How so?
    Answering questions I ask.
    Like?
    How Mom got her name, how he met Cedar.
    Ask him how a young Irish fella from County Mud & Blood bamboozled his one extraordinary daughter off him. He’ll laugh at that.
    Grampa has a great laugh.
    He does that. Ask him how a young fella with no prospects and education and hair black as the inside of a dog somehow against all odds and sense persuaded the stunning No Horses to marry him. Ask him was it some Celtic druidry or what that won me my wild wee wife.
    How did you meet Mom?
    Ah, there’s a thousand tapes in that story, son.
    Did you ask Mom to get married or did she ask you?
    I sank to my knees, son, on the highest hill I could find, and I asked her it straight out, with my heart hammering and yammering and warbling and whistling like a water bird in my ribs, and she smiled