With one hand clenched around the dead woman’s locket and the other around the turtle, Laisvė jumped into the water.
Aster and the Fear of Falling
At the end of a day of labor, in the moments after the horn sounded, Aster would straddle the iron beams, locking his legs and closing his eyes, and then hold his arms out away from his body. Up at that height, the clouds and the descending sun seemed more like kin than faraway elements, and he felt held. If there was wind, it would find him, a strange pull toward the open sky, toward a kind of upward surrender, before he had to climb back down to land, to reality, to daughter.
How easy it would be. The leap.
It was a thought he could never stop.
He wished he could talk to Joseph. He missed Joseph terribly — missed him mostly in his legs. If Joseph was still there, he imagined, they’d have a talk before making their way back down to ground.
“Well, shit. It doesn’t matter to me where you’re from,” Joseph had said the second day he knew him. Aster had been told about Joseph Tekanatoken by a man from Ontario who had passed through the Yakutia territory in Siberia long ago on a geological expedition. Joseph in The Brook can get work, he said, for anyone crazy enough to walk the iron, work in the sky.
Every night that followed, Aster dreamed of a man walking on lines in the clouds. His dreams became a want in him. The want carried him like a craving, and then, like all addictions and contractions of the imagination, his want destroyed his life.
When Aster arrived in The Brook with nowhere to live, with grief larger than an ocean and a daughter whose face was blank with trauma and a baby boy who cried too much, Joseph Tekanatoken had let them sleep on the couch in his trailer. The trailer was parked on a patch of dirt far from water. All three of them came to rest there, like some strange animals braided into one another’s bodies. Joseph fed them eggs and cheese, and brought them milk. Every single day for a year.
One night the electricity went dead and the trailer was too cold for children to sleep. Joseph never said a word, but he brought in a giant thick blanket woven from wool and put it over them all like a tent. Then he surrounded them with his own body in a gesture that was as gentle as it was gigantic. (But that couldn’t be true, could it? That Joseph had been able to surround the whole of them with his body? It felt true to Aster.) The air was warm. The children slept.
It felt good to talk to Joseph, and in those days, almost nothing felt good to Aster. He tried to narrate to Joseph who he was, where he had come from, but every time he tried, the story split into too many tributaries. The one story he could replicate with any consistency was built from a tiny fragment of memory involving a woman who may have been Aster’s mother. The woman in the memory sat inside a long building with a long table. When she spoke, everyone in the room listened. If he closed his eyes, he could see her silver hair. Was the woman in the memory his mother? A mother? Or a dream he had conjured in place of a mother?
“She was probably an animal or tree soul,” Joseph said, and then they stared at each other while Aster tried to figure out if Joseph was fucking with him or not. Then came that laugh, something like car tires going over small stones in a road, and the sound of it made him wish what Joseph said was true. Whoever his mother had been, she’d been killed like an animal. Maybe the woman in his memory was just one of the women from the village who raised him; maybe she was just a woman who’d raised her voice at some shared and useless dinner. Maybe she was just a woman he’d seen in a movie or a book, someone who seemed like a mother. Maybe the woman in his memory was a ghost. Maybe she was a tree soul.
The only female in his present tense was his daughter, Laisvė, and his only job on earth was to get her safely to womanhood, to help her forward until some path — any path — appeared in front of her. It occurred to him she might have to swim open a path. Aster had never learned to swim.
When Aster started working with Joseph in The Brook, on the Sea Wall, he’d listened for hours as Joseph told him the stories of things from before. Told him about a line of men who might tell and tell and tell a story, as if it were a lifeline to something.
“You know, generations of us Mohawks have been coming down from Canada since the twenties to build the frames for buildings all over that city. Immigration tried to deport us as illegal aliens — stupid, right? They’re the foreigners. But then a court ruled that you can’t arrest and deport Mohawks, because we’re a people from a nation within two nations and treaty rights say we can move through our own tribal territories and their imaginary lines that are supposed to divide us. We have a special kind of freedom. Not that they still don’t try and make it a pain in the ass for us to go back and forth.” Joseph’s laugh emerged gravel-throated and deep from his chest, as if the sound had taken miles to grow. “Freedom of movement gave us the ability to pile ourselves up in the big city. Ain’t that some shit? We had the most skill walking iron. You know the Empire State Building?”
Aster hears Laisvė’s voice again in his head — one of her lists, her endless whispered recitals: The transcontinental railroad. The Canadian Pacific Railway. The Hell Gate Bridge. The George Washington Bridge. The Waldorf Astoria. The Empire State Building. The United Nations, Lincoln Center. The Twin Towers. The Freedom Tower. The Sea Wall.
Joseph continues. “The Twin Towers? We Mohawks topped off the Twin Towers. And we were there again for rescue and support when they fell. We knew them better than anyone. We helped carry out the dead bodies. We helped build the Freedom Tower.”
Aster sometimes said something stupid when Joseph would finish narrating, like “I don’t know if I can keep doing this,” and Joseph would say, “What this?”
“Staying alive,” Aster would respond. “That this.”
And Joseph would say, “That’s some stupid-ass shit. What kind of talk is that? You got a daughter, man.”
Sometimes Aster would stumble a little further—I have no origins, he’d say — but then he’d get lost trying to explain and Joseph would be silent for a while. Maybe night would fall. Maybe Aster’s arms would feel too heavy. And then Joseph would tell Aster how the Mohawk had always taken people into their tribes, for a hundred different reasons. War reasons. Family reasons. Love reasons. Hate reasons. Orphan reasons. Shelter and displacement reasons. Some reasons were brutal and some reasons were beautiful. But every one of those taken in were considered members of the clans and tribes into which they were adopted.
“Some are from ancestral blood and some are from migrations of the gut or heart,” Joseph would say, and then Aster would feel less like someone whose body was about to leave an orbit and spin off into space. “I barely knew my father. I mean, I knew him for a little while — about twenty years. Then he died. So what?” Joseph would clap Aster on the shoulder, then light a cigarette with one hand while driving, and take in and slowly release a drag. “But they say my grandfather John Joseph was the best iron walker ever. Worked on the statue, all that pretty copper. How’s that for pride? Tough to beat that. Shit, Aster, maybe it is in your blood, maybe not, but your body sure knows something. I’ve never seen anyone as sure-footed as you up there.”
Sure-footed. A father who could not save his wife, a father who lost his infant son. A father unsure how long he could keep his own daughter alive.
Once, Aster confided in Joseph his desire to surrender. Joseph, who had taken him in when they first arrived. Joseph, who’d taken care of him and his infant son and daughter as a father might have, or as Aster imagined a father might do. Joseph, who’d taught him how to walk.