The Dink Who Forgot
Saturday, December 5Ð
Rain escorted EZ and me into the clearing at 6 p.m. Like a pitch black hole, the air sucked up the flashlight's meager beam. No snow. Eight mouse carcasses are in varying degrees of decomposition at the bottom of the kitchen wastebasket. They fall in, slick sides prevent their escape so they starve to death. Gas light mantles are broken--the same type of silk-ash mantles as Coleman lanterns use. It's always a mystery to me why and how they can become ruined while hanging from a motionless fixture.
Lots of friendly noises tonight: woodstove cracking, stovewood settling, stovepipes clicking, raindrops splotting on the roof. Brought in an armload of firewood a few minutes ago. Realized it is wood cut and split and stacked at least five years ago. Dad probably had a hand in its being ready for us to burn tonight. How we measure the passage of time, Dad's participation before dying.
Am trying an experiment. I took off my watch and put it away for the duration. See if I can deny the habitual need to know the time.
Sunday December 6--
Gus Anderson died this summer past. I stopped into the Store late morning. Norma was clerking. The last time I'd talked to her was in August when she stopped to say "hi" along the road. Gus had been into and out of the hospital, then placed in a Sandstone nursing facility with an undisclosed ailment. His condition was dismal and he was not expected to get out. And that was fine with her.
"Well, morning, Norma. How's Gus?
"He died in September."
"Oh, I'm sorry. That's too bad."
"Yup, yup, yeah ... well, yup."
As a kid I rummaged through the overgrown and collapsing log cabin where he was born and grew up in, just down the road, dank and rotting furnishings, the heady smell of mold rising. In the early 70's he and second wife Norma retired from the Cities where he had owned a small grocery, and built a small house nearby where the old log structure had stood. The township road into their land we also used for access to our forty. Wholly inadequate for year around use, it was widened and lowered and laid with gravel road fill which contains just-right mixtures of clay and sand and gravel for maximum traction, and protection from erosion during rains. The new road pushed the trees back on each side and erased what had been a leafy tunnel in summer months. During fall colors we passed under a kaleidoscope canopy.
So we got neighbors. Gus raised chickens and cut crops of hay, picked berries and tapped maple trees, even bought a dozen wild turkey hatchlings, raised and released them into the surrounding woods. That was back when wild turkeys were unheard of in Minnesota. He said he planned to hunt them.
But he got more than he wanted. Turkeys on his roof, big turkeys tip-toeing across shingles in silent dark night, and troublesome turkeys unsettling the chickens and provoking his dog Luke into powerful brash recitations before dawn.
"When I open the door to shoot 'em they hear the latch click and fly up into the trees."
Gus fought turkeys for several years. The flock finally was extinguished or migrated away.
I sat down with an orange juice. Norma returned herself to an American Indian gentleman swearing continuously about urgent emergencies ransacking his life. But he wasn't angry, or perturbed. Or even alarmed.
"Goddamn the rain, the lice," the, "sumbitches down in Saint Paul." "Hardware store Bastard," who sold him a metric, not a normal snap-trap clasp and the dink who forgot to include a ball valve for his ramshackled sink.
He wore on his left breast jacket pocket a nametag which included the title "ELDER." I sorted through the two obvious possibilities and discounted his being Mormon. So, his position within the tribe must be a step beneath Chief although, with how quickly tribal regulations get changed, maybe he is Chief, but re-titled Elder to lend updated distinction to the role.
"My goddamn ex-wife is spending all the money at the casino and the assholes let her go right on givin' em the shit. Those bastards in the office don't back up the goddamn trucks and there won't be any end to the hot bullshit next week."
He arises, stands portly and proud. "Goddamn it. Guess I gotta' go and fight with the Goddamn Indians."
"You better watch out," Norma says.
"It's the goddamn truth!"
1:45 p.m.-
Hiking through Joe's park. EZ became concerned about the bulldozer parked in the dead weeds. She spied it then stopped 30 feet away, tail up, hackles raised. She looked back at me. I asked "what is it?" She turned back to the beast, edging sideways and growling.
2:30-
Walking along a trail I pinched off a trio of pine needles from a live tree, and sniffed the aroma. Instant transport back thirty-five years. A Christmas tree lot next door to our house in the seasonally shut Dairy Queen lot. Trees leaning and standing, unsorted piles and big trailer loads of Christmas laying softly inside. Balsam and spruce and long-needled white pines in pre-Christmas hush. The night sky was snowing; reflected city light made it bright overhead. The empty lot had sprouted a sweet-smelling forest and it was all mine. I climbed into a trailer, laid back and sank into boughs and looked up at the snow falling down without sound, the tang of evergreen sap circled into my head. I laid there for long, or so it seemed, cuddled, surrounded by such natural ease. Looking up at the sky through the fury branches, watching snow sift secretly from somewhere up there. Ambient light made each individual flake visible. I'd watch one, way high with millions of others and track its decent ... hoping it would land directly on my nose. Many did. But not the ones I escorted downward.
If somehow I were able to go back in time to that exact event -- I would most likely say "no, angel. You've got it all wrong. This isn't how it was."
She would say, "this is not a recreation of it. It is it."
"Cudjuling." Cuddling in a cajoling manner to get something desirable from the cuddle-ee.
