The bad summer storms made it a poor harvest. Soon we were done and it was time for the potatoes. Kathryn and I worked together on those. We hadn’t spent much time together since the night at Doc’s, and at first I was uncomfortable, but she didn’t seem to blame me for anything. We just worked, and talked potatoes. Working with Kathryn was exhausting. In the mornings it seemed all right, because she worked so hard that she did more than her share, but the trouble was she kept going at that pace all day, so I got hooked into doing more than a day’s work every day no matter how much I let her go at it. And harvesting potatoes is dirty, backbreaking labor, any way you do it.
When the harvesting was done we celebrated with a little drinking at the bathhouse. No one got overjoyed, because it was a bad harvest, but at least it was in. Kathryn sat beside me in the chairs on the bathhouse lawn to watch the sunset, and Rebel and Kristen joined us. At the other end of the yard Del and Gabby tossed a football back and forth. The flames of a bonfire were scarcely visible against the salmon sky. Rebel was upset about the potato harvest, even crying a little, and Kathryn talked a lot to cheer her up. “Pests are something you have to live with. Next year we’ll try some of that stuff I got from the scavengers. Don’t worry, it takes a long time to learn farming. It ain’t like those spuds are your children, you know.” Kristen smiled at that, the first smile I had seen from her since Mando died.
“Nobody will go hungry,” I said.
“But I’m sick of fish already,” Rebel said. The girls laughed at her.
“You couldn’t tell by the way you eat them,” Kristen said.
Kathryn sipped her whiskey lazily. “What you been up to lately, Hank?”
“I’ve been writing in that book Tom gave me,” I lied, to see how it sounded.
“Oh yeah? Are you writing about the valley?”
“Sure.”
She raised her eyebrows. “About—”
“Yeah.”
“Hmph.” She stared into the fire. “Well, good. Maybe something good will come of this summer after all. But writing a whole book? It must be really hard.”
“Oh it is,” I assured her. “It’s almost impossible, to tell you the truth. But I’m keeping at it.”
All three of the girls looked impressed.
So I thought about it some more. I took the book off the shelf again, and kept it on the little stand beside my bed, next to the lamp and the cup and the book of Shakespeare’s plays Tom had given me as a Christmas present. And I thought about it. When it had all begun, so long ago… those meetings with the gang, planning the summer. It wouldn’t actually be grave-robbing, Steve had said, and I had snapped awake…
So I started writing it.
It was slow work. Me trying to write is like Odd Roger trying to talk. Every night I quit for good. But the next night, or the one after, I would begin again. It’s astonishing how much the memory will surrender when you squeeze it. Some nights when I finished writing I’d come to, surprised to be in our shack, sweat pouring down my ribs, my hand stiff, my fingers sore, my heart pounding with the emotions of time past. And away from the work, out on the boats heaving over the wild swells, I found myself thinking of what had happened, of ways to say it. I knew I was going to finish that book no matter what it took from me. I was hooked.
The evenings of the autumn took on a pattern. When the fish were on the tables I climbed the cliff. No gang to meet me. Steadfastly I ignored the ghost gathering and hiked home, usually through the early evening gloom. At home Pa greased the skillet and fried up some fish and onions, while I lit the lamp and set the table, and we made the usual small talk about what had happened during the day. When the fish was ready we sat down and Pa said grace, and we ate the fish and bread or potatoes. Afterwards we washed up and put things away and drank the rest of the dinner water, and brushed our teeth with a scavenged toothbrush. Then Pa sat at the sewing table, and I sat at the dinner table, and he stitched together clothes while I stitched together words, until we agreed it was time for bed.
I don’t know how many nights went by like that. On rainy days it was the same, only all day long. Once a week or so I went up to Tom’s. Since I promised I was writing he had relented and agreed to give me more lessons. He had me in Othello, and I was pretty sure I knew why. I thought I had things to regret, but Othello! He was the only man in Shakespeare more fool than I.
“So they had eucalyptus trees in Arabia,” I remarked to Tom when I was done, and he laughed. And when upon leaving I demanded more pencils, he cackled wildly, and scrounged them up for me.
The days passed. The further I got in the story of the summer, the further away it was in time, and the less I understood it. Perplex’d in the extreme. One day it was raining and Pa and I both worked through the afternoon. We tried keeping the door open for light, but it was too cold even with the stove going, and rain kept blowing in when the wind shifted. We had to close it and light the lamps. Pa bent over the coat he was making. His hands moved as quickly as fingers snapping as he punched the holes, and yet the holes were perfectly spaced, in a line that could have been drawn by a straightedge. He slipped a thimble on his middle finger and stitched. Poke and pull, poke and pull… cross-stitches appeared in perfect X’s, the thread tugged so that the tension on it was constant… I had never paid such close attention to his sewing. His calloused fingers clicked along as nimbly as dancers. It was as if Pa’s fingers were smarter than he was, I thought; and I felt bad for thinking it. Besides, it was wrong. Pa told his fingers what to do, no one else. They wouldn’t do it alone. It was truer to say something like, Pa’s sewing was the way in which he was smart. And in that way he was very smart indeed. I liked that way of saying it, and scribbled it down. Stitching thoughts. Meanwhile his deft fingers plied the needle, and it kept slipping through the pieces of cloth, pursing them together, pulling the thread taut, turning, piercing again. Pa sighed. “I don’t think I see as well as I used to. I wish it were a sunny day. How I miss the summer.”
I clicked my tongue. It was annoying to be sitting in a dark box in the middle of the day, using up good lamp oil. In fact it was worse than annoying. I felt my spirits plunge as I took stock of the bare insides of our shack. “Shit,” I muttered with disgust.
“What’s that?”
“I said, shit.”
“Why?”
“Ah…” How could I explain it to him, without making him feel bad too? He accepted our degraded conditions without a thought, always had. I shook my head. He peered at me curiously.
Suddenly I had an idea. I jerked in my chair. “What?” said Pa, watching me.
“I got an idea.” I got my boots on, put on my coat.
“It’s raining pretty hard,” Pa said dubiously.
“I won’t go far.”
“Okay. Be careful?”