Mink River: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

that sideways smile and said yes and your daddy has been a capering fox every minute since with few exceptions absolutely, as your grandpa would say. And now to the beaver.
    12.
    No Horses in her studio is a study of alternating currents of motion and stillness; a river racing and resting; electric femininity waxing and waning. When her hands are in motion the rest of her is still and vice versa. Often she walks in circles like her father; around her work table, around the room, around the Department building when she’s really frazzled and has to think out a piece of work, around the hills on which Neawanaka perches when she can’t work at all and has to go burn off the throttled electricity.
    At work in clay or wood or stone she stares, she breathes evenly, she is riveted, she is lost. No phone. Music gently. Bach when she is in stone, rock and roll in clay, jazz in wood.
    This afternoon there is a slab of spruce on her work table weighing perhaps two hundred pounds, as tall and broad in the shoulders as a man.
    Maybe it will be a man, she thinks.
    She circles the table.
    I like men, she thinks, smiling.
    By God, she thinks. I’ll make a man. I’ll make one from scratch. My new man. Be fun to tell Owen.
    She checks grinning to see if there is a knob in the right place to make a man. Keeps circling the table. She never touches a raw piece of clay or wood or stone until she gets a feeling about it, and once the feeling comes she chooses her tools carefully, balancing various chisels and gouges in her hands to see who wants to work today, choosing music carefully for pace.
    She puts on Miles Davis and then reconsiders and puts on Chet Baker.
    No genius today, she thinks. Just dreaming. Just the right music by which to make a man, she grins: and o how very many men have been made to the music of Chet Baker, hmmm?
    Thinks about making love to Owen. His lips and hips arrowing into her.
    Such bony relentless hips, she thinks.
    In the rest of her studio are blocks and slabs and chunks of wood: maple, cedar, fir, more oak, walnut, alder, spruce, hemlock, cherry, ash, laurel, elm, myrtle, redwood. Sawdust and shavings and chips on the floor like tiny frozen leaves. There are tools everywhere: racks of chisels and gouges, mallets and mallet heads, planers, jointers, table saws, circular saws, chain saws, and bandsaws. There are routers, drills, sanders, clamps, glues, oils, finishes, a huge hydraulic hoist, and carving benches with attached wood vises. And sharpeners everywhere. There are more sharpeners than anything else in the room. Daniel counted them recently: thirty-nine, his mother’s age.
    13.
    Cedar on the Mink River sitting and thinking. Watching the ripples. His recording equipment whirring in the fern of the riverbank. Ospreys rowing through the air above. Two adults two young. Mergansers, kingfishers, ouzel on the river. Water water river river talking talking. He hears the low bass booming of rocks being turned over by the river. Like a low mutter. Basso? Baritone?
    He watches the ouzel and thinks of No Horses. Smiles; she is his goddaughter and the affection he felt for her during her childhood and adolescence has grown into a real respect for the woman she has become.
    No Horses, she is one tough woman, he thinks. Lovely, strong, patient, talented, kind. My sweet little Nora.
    But he thinks uneasily of the talk they had this morning in her studio, after he and Owen wrestled the spruce slab onto her carving table and Owen longlegged it back to his shop. A hard talk. A talk about holes. It began as a talk about carving holes in wood and then spun into holes in people, things missing; or as she said the feeling that something was missing that you’d never had and hadn’t known you didn’t have until suddenly you knew it.
    He chews on that remark for a while, as the ospreys row in their floating lines up and down the river.
    14.
    Dad, says Daniel.
    Yeh.
    Tell me how you met Mom.
    I should save it for a Project