You know, Jenny tells him, we still have our monkey ways.
The next day the sun is shining and the snow truck elbows past. There is a deep white road where minutes before there was none. A deep white road like the one his father is taking south, his winter hat on his head and his beautiful valise beside him. His mother, too, is traveling. On roller skates with wheels spinning so fast they are invisible. His mother tears down the white road in her tweeds all the way from Kahontsi across the frozen river carrying her lipstick and her keys, a brown paper bag with a fresh package of margarine, one blood-red spot smack in the middle, her hair fried and stuck to her head. Or maybe she will breeze in with hot Chinese noodles and a story she will tell them breathlessly, happy as a lark. Or she’ll come in angry, steaming, shouting: Why didn’t you answer the phone? And smack Stub, and smack Jenny, and Jenny will break apart and all her pretty pins and springs will spill out across the floor and that will be that.
Ever after he will wonder: Why was Jenny sent away? Two years later his mother, too, disappears, wanting more of the world, more of life. And there they are, Stub and his dad, sitting in silence face to face, the favorite green and white dishes scowling and cold to the touch, the linoleum purged of magic and Stub breaking the silence with another nagging question, the only question: Why can’t we bring Jenny home? Because of another mouth to feed, Jenny’s mouth a big hungry O eating the orange, seeds and all. Besides, no one knows where she’s gone. Kahontsi, maybe.
“Not Kahontsi.”
“Maybe Ohneka, then.”
“People don’t just disappear.”
“They do. All the time.”
His dad’s valise replaced by a box of plumbing tools. Lonely work. Sometimes it’s hard to persevere. (His father’s words.)
TWO
ALONG THE HUDSON RIVER, the world goes on forever, unspooling, and just when you think you know it, something happens, the summer is snatched away by an ice storm, a blizzard dissolves the spring, there are moths in sudden numbers, an unprecedented migration of geese. Autumn arrives unparalleled in its beauties. The river gleams, there are shad and snapping turtles, quantities of water chestnuts, and under porches: copperheads.
If America has gods, this is where they dwell — under rocks, in the branches of trees, in ivy, skunkweed, the hearts of fish, the flight of geese. But — everyone says it — things no longer shine as they once did. Ever since the war, everything is dimmer.
When he was very little he knew — if only for a brief moment — that the world was imbued with light. That he came into the world beaming and burning. He was always combusting. He was enchanted.
Here is a curious paradox: he is a man, quick as a whip, thin as a razor, by acts of will invisible, someone who snakes about, who is always needing (ah! This pesky need of his!) to puzzle the world back together again, to polish the pieces and make them shine. But as he was undone so early he cannot know — no matter how avidly he watches the lives around him unfold — where his pieces go, and this despite his desperate, his imperious need to gather the pieces together (and he is tireless), to see it all fall into place.
He grew up three miles down the road from the campus, in a place so small it was known by the name of its one bar: Annie’s. When he was growing up and a kid asked him where he lived, he’d say up the road from Annie’s. If they had not heard of Annie’s he’d say ’bout four miles east of town. Meaning Hawkskill, where the school was, the post office and dry-goods store — all that — and the hotel-restaurant that still fills up when folks drop their kids off, turn up for Christmas break, Easter, graduation. For this reason Hawkskill is called a college town, although there is not much there to attract students. The rest of the time the hotel clients are traveling salesmen, and in cider season, on the long weekend of the county fair, tourists.
When he was a boy, and this happened a year or two after his mother left, his father took him and his grandmother out for a big midday meal to celebrate his grandmother’s birthday. She had turned eighty and they ate roast beef and gravy with Yorkshire pudding and mashed potatoes. His father, usually taciturn, talked about what he’d seen and been bewildered by on the campus — students kissing in public, even mixed couples; he disliked the girls’ wild hair. Their bare feet and thighs. Their untamed, their graceful ways. Shameless, he complained. But the day he saw a kid playing a fiddle on the commons, playing it well, he thought it was tremendous.
When Stub turns nine, he decides to check out the campus for himself. Near summer’s end, he walks the three miles and finds it deserted. He wanders freely, enthralled by the expansive beauty of the place, the inscrutable stone buildings, the ink of their shadows, the impossible grass curving toward a forested horizon. Lying down in a saucer of grass beside a flagpole, its flag, too, at rest, he thinks he could haunt this place, move along the many dark recesses beneath the walls and plantings and not be seen. Somewhere a clock chimes the hour and he looks up at the sky and thinks that everything he learns must be put to good use.
In front of the library he comes upon kids his own age, faculty brats (his dad’s words), he supposes, playing kick the can. The can has been kicked, and as they scatter they look at him with disdain — or so he thinks — and dash away with a piece of him. He feels ashamed, somehow. Corroded. But the library is open, and bravely he walks in. As he passes the front desk the librarian welcomes him, standing up from his chair, which doesn’t make him any taller. “I am so pleased you have come in,” he says, “you’re the first person I’ve seen all day. But I haven’t seen you before.”
“My dad works here,” Stub tells him. “Fixing things.”
“What’s his name? Perhaps I’ve met him.”
“Jiggs Wiznet,” Stub tells him. “I’m Stub.”
“I know Jiggs Wiznet!” the librarian exclaims. “He fixed the library toilets and he did a nice job. It makes good sense you both share the same last name. I’m Axel.” As he speaks he scribbles something on a small square of stiff paper that turns out to be a library card. “If I were named Stub Wiznet, well. . it would be perfect. I’m the dwarf, after all.” He sighs softly. “Want to trade?”
“A dwarf?”
“Our time here is so brief — one day you’ll see what I mean — and it would be better to have a perfect name.” He hands Stub a card. “If I were a wrestler, well. . Axel would do me fine. Are you wanting anything in particular? The card means you can take books home.”
“Verner Vanderloon,” Stub says, surprising himself. “I’d like a book of his.”
“A book of Loon’s! I knew Loon. A recluse. No one has seen him in years.” He walks with Stub to the stacks. “We also have much of his library — a gift — in storage. . no room left in the stacks.” And then Stub is alone among more books than he imagined possible, Vanderloon’s eight volumes, all with the familiar green leather bindings, tightly shelved together side by side within an ocean of books. The first thing he does is sit down on the floor and look at the spines. At that moment he vividly recalls Jenny and is freshly stricken by an old suffering.