Then Again

By M. James Thalman

Just before supper on the coldest February eleventh ever in Sevier County, Utah, farmer Evan Oakerlund, age fifty, goes out to look for the family dog and doesn't come back. An hour later, Evan's wife, Nona, finds his body not fifty yards from their back porch. Three hours after that, the news of Evan's sudden death reaches his son Robbie, who is six thousand miles away in Austria and just four days  from completing a two-year Mormon mission.

Then Again is the story of Robbie’s trip home. He hastily leaves the glaciered majesties of the Central Alps for the lava-domed hayfields where he grew up. He is warmly welcomed back to his tiny home town by his grieving loved ones, but they have become not quite his family. Vermillion is a place like home, but not home, and he finds that his youth is a past that is there to stay.

• Language: English
• Publisher: M. James Thalman
• Release date: Sep 4, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386579014

Book preview

THEN AGAIN

a novel by

M. James Thalman

Then Again © M. James Thalman

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission of the author. This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations and events are products of the author’s imagination.

Proof Reader: Beverly Noyce

Cover design by Robert Noyce

Cedar post image by Rylee Thalman

Formatting by NovelNinjutsu.com

Summary:

Just before supper on the coldest February eleventh ever in Sevier County, Utah, farmer Evan Oakerlund, age fifty, goes out to look for the family dog and doesn't come back. An hour later, Evan's wife, Nona, finds his body not fifty yards from their back porch. Three hours after that, the news of Evan's sudden death reaches his son Robbie, who is six thousand miles away in Austria and just four days from completing a two-year Mormon mission.

Then Again is the story of Robbie’s trip home. He hastily leaves the glaciered majesties of the Central Alps for the lava-domed hayfields where he grew up. He is warmly welcomed back to his tiny home town by his grieving loved ones, but they have become not quite his family. Vermillion is a place like home, but not home, and he finds that his youth is a past that is there to stay.

To anyone who has ever been told:

You think too much and you take things too hard.

Things never were the way they were,

and they never will be again.

Photo by Rylee Thalman

BOOK ONE

Passing Away

The Mountains High

I

Just after three in the morning one recent February eleventh, the Arlberger Express barreled across the skirts of Central Alps onto the rim of the Inn River basin. The Schnellzug out of Bregenz had been anything but fast. By the time it reached Innsbruck’s main train terminal, the always- punctual three-car commuter would be an unprecedented ninety minutes late.

The train’s cluster of high-beam headlights briefly parted the flat- black early hour like a dropped flashlight sliding down into the Dachstein Ice Caverns. Passenger Robbie Oakerlund, the young American and lone occupant in the train’s rear-most cubicle, shook himself out of his bole of blankets and put his face against the ice-speckled window. He searched for a line of horizon or any sign of the city’s natural skyscraper—the Nordkette. He made blinders with his thick-gloved hands but all he could make out were the ridges of his own reflection.

I might as well be trying to look for a crow in a coal mine, Robbie said aloud, shaking his head. He took his hands away and watched the gray circle of his breath dilate and dissipate. He leaned his elbows into the armrest. Even inside the glass vestibule, nothing seemed familiar: The square panes of glass on the opposite side of the compartment looked rounded at the corners; the rectangle of laminated partitions and sliding glass doors separating the space from the passenger walkway bulged in the middle; the chrome window frames and steel support poles formed a weird geometry of angles that went every which way; the car’s barrel-shaped ceiling looked flat in the reflection. The hum of harnessed electricity that had lulled him to dozing on previous trips kept him awake this time. The metronome of iron wheels clicking over sections of steel rails below couldn’t find the beat that morning. Robbie sank back into his leather cocoon, lost in the false infinity between the windows.

II

Fourteen hours earlier and five thousand miles west in the tiny Utah farming town called Vermillion, Nona Oakerlund stared into the darkness before the dawn. She had fallen fully clothed into a white, fitful sleep, dozing between exhaustion and the startling comprehension that her husband was dead. The Baby Ben wind-up alarm clock ticked loudly in the headboard. The tiny gold hands were approaching six a.m. when the siren sounds started up again. She came to fully and let her mind replay the ambulance ride to the hospital the night before. Above the wailing she heard again her own urgent cry: Oh, God, our eternal Father-in-Heaven, please don’t let him die. Please don’t let Evan die.

The emergency technicians had done all they could to save her husband before loading him into the ambulance despite telling each other in glances that the guy was dead before he hit the ground. Protocol being that only the hospital in Richfield could call a DOA, and with the cab full of the woman’s fierce praying, the EMTs stuck to their exaggerated futile ministrations all ten miles to town. At times, one of the paramedics would lay a hand gently on Nona’s back, a gesture that was more an act of pity than reassurance.

Nona’s prayers would not be answered; Evan Oakerlund’s only movements matched the jostling ambulance. She stopped watching her husband’s vacant face after a while. With each passing mile marker, her shock dissipated, slowly replaced by a kind of numbing sorrow. Her plea to God became a conscious and hollow chant, and she let herself collapse into a soft but searing sob as she rocked side-to-side on the small padded seat at the foot of her husband.

Barely forty-five minutes had passed since she had sent Wade out to the machine shed to look for Evan. Your dad’s out hunting for Gus, she said. That dog just will not stay home lately. I found him up at Rhoda’s yesterday, and she let me know in no uncertain terms that she’d happily shoot him the next time.

When the ambulance swerved into the hospital parking lot, Nona and the siren had gone quiet.

III

Evan Oakerlund was already flat on his back when Nona sent the boy out. He was lying there looking up at the shed’s corrugated roof and thinking it was pretty funny he would pass out like that. The sun had just set but he could see well enough. He thought about standing up but the ground started spinning; he closed his eyes and let it come to rest. He lay next to the shed’s main supporting cedar post, its bark frayed and dusty and peeling away.

He opened his eyes and focused a moment on the tiny circulating furrows of the borer beetles that had once resided in and ultimately killed their host. He turned his head to the left and saw the elaborate chrome and steel works of the sugar beet digger, its forward plows caked with hardened mud and starting to rust. It was still attached to the Farmall tractor, and he mildly chastised himself for not properly cleaning and storing the machinery. He had hoisted the contraption on hydraulic jacks but hadn’t finished the job before the first snow.

He heard a fluttering noise somewhere above and turned to it. A wintering sparrow had crammed itself into the remnants of a nest stuffed between a stud and the shed’s metal roof. Evan noticed bits of red had been jammed into the wad of debris, and he realized it was the handkerchief he’d used to keep the diesel fuel from sloshing out of the Farmall tractor’s tank whenever the cap came up missing. He had wondered what the hell had happened to it. Now he wondered what the hell the fumes were doing to the bird. Can’t be doing it much good. Evan closed his eyes.

Daaad, he heard his youngest son call. Evan answered but his voice caught; he swallowed and tasted copper, just like the water from the new drinking fountain at the church house, only the taste was intense, and thick. He was checking for any other physical sensations when Wade called again, closer this time.

I’m right here, Evan tried to call back, but the cedar post or the tractor or the beet digger, he wasn’t sure what, fell onto his chest. A pain exquisite and sharp cut him lengthwise and radiated down his left arm and up the back of his neck. He made a fist and tried to sit up, but whatever lay across him just sat down harder. His chest shattered like a windshield hit with a baseball and tiny cracks opened in the bones in his arms and legs. He was sweating and sinking in nausea.

If he could just throw up he’d be all right. He got dizzy again, and a little worried. He put his chin forward and tried to see why his chest hurt so bad, but all that rested on him were the buttons of his coat. He shut his eyes tight and thought he was going to faint again but forced his eyes open. He thought he could see his boy coming toward him but it was too dark to tell. Everything was turning gray; he widened his eyes and blinked to sharpen his sight but things stayed fuzzy and out-of-kilter. The farm’s two- hundred gallon diesel fuel tank he could see just outside the first bay door looked flat, like a cardboard cut-out. The pain subsided but he had never felt so weak and tired. Must be like those guys who’d got shot in the Philippines in the war, he told himself out loud. He swallowed again. Definitely blood. Panic took over. Damn it all to hell. Not now . . . Not here . . . Dear God Almighty . . .

IV

Earth as black as Russia rose up in silhouette out the window as the Arlberger decelerated into its approach of Innsbruck’s main station. The dark horizon angled into pointy clusters of conifers, squared into farmers’ squat dwellings then mounded in to the other varicose array of creatures that had burrowed beneath a bitter and unmovable winter.

As the train lumbered alongside the passenger platform, Robbie stood and stretched the ridge of cold tar that had once been his backbone. As he teetered up onto his concrete legs, he peered bleary-eyed out from his carapace of coats. His limbs tingled and his mind blinked awake as the train wound down to a stop. He stood, momentarily entranced by the station’s flashing reader board: Innsbruck . . . 3:34 . . . -23.8 C. The temperature had dropped five degrees since his 23:40 departure from the far west end of Austria.

Passengers began to stir then shuffle down the catwalk toward the car’s bi-fold exits. They entered the caverns of the lobby and began, enmasse, demanding that the one ticket agent on duty transform immediately their travel status from Just-arrived to Just-departed.

Robbie, a veteran of railway travel the previous two years, lingered beyond the scrum, pacing leisurely. He was indifferent to the racket of re- ticketing. He manned the margins with the cool-headed superiority of the veteran traveler who seems to know that delays are just another way of being way ahead of schedule.

The nice-looking young man with the dark eyes and firm chin wasn’t just ahead of schedule; he was, to be exact, four days early. Robbie Oakerlund wasn’t to be in Innsbruck on his way to Vienna until February fifteenth, the date his two-year stint as a Mormon missionary was to officially end. The trip had been moved up unexpectedly the evening prior by order of Austria Mission President, Connely J. Fuchs. The president had telephoned at the exact moment Elder Robert O. was stowing his framed family portrait into a box full of Austrian memorabilia he’d planned to ship home the next day. Robbie was studying his father’s face and pondering what it would be like if his own father had died suddenly, just as Grandpa Jens had died back in l957.

"Herr Oakerlund, Frau Rasinger called up the stairs leading to the missionary’s apartment. Der Präsident, aus Wien, möcht’ mit ihnen sprechen. Sofort, bitte."

Robbie removed the photograph from the frame, and slipped it into the inside pocket of his suit jacket. He put the frame between two of his ten Baedeker maps, and went quickly, as requested, to the phone. Die Frau wore her usual crisp white apron but had a worried look as she gave Robbie the handset.

President Fuchs skipped any greeting and went right to being sorry that Bro. Oakerlund’s service in the Austria mission field was coming to an end four days early. The Lord was blessing the twenty-two-year-old missionary, Fuchs said, because He had waited to call home your father, Brother Evan, long enough for you to finish up your work helping build up the Kingdom of God here in Austria.

I’m sorry, what? the bless-ed missionary said.

Your dear and kind father died suddenly last evening, the president said in a subdued tone of voice between a prayer and reading a dictionary out loud. You’ll be home in time for your dad’s funeral, the mission’s top executive said, almost cheerfully. It’s a blessing, if you ask me.

Fuchs was not being asked; Robbie didn’t ask what had happened, either.

Well, your dad went out after supper last night to look for the dog and just didn’t come back, Fuchs said, adding again how sorry he was to be the one to have to tell Robbie the news. He then reminded the young elder that far worse things have happened in other missions, true tragedies—missionaries being murdered or killed in senseless accidents. The president, barely ten years older than the band of youngsters under his charge, said "Es tut mir leid."

The President had been called to Austria because of his marketing acumen back home in Salt Lake City, Utah. His business was outdoor mountain climbing gear. His products were world-class and his business was verging on international success. He himself was already an eight-digit success. His company made high-end, high-elevation sleeping bags and pop-open tents, and he knew his business, especially how to make deals. His products were not schlock. Robbie had seen the company’s logo on ski jackets at Church members’ homes and in ski schools and winter sports shops all over Tirol. Mormon Church leaders had been inspired to call the young entrepreneur to Austria as mission president because his name was highly regarded as someone who knew his way around survival in the high and mighty Alps. Maybe, the Lord willing, Fuchs could get the high and mighty Catholic and Protestant and, especially, the growing membership of agnostics to come around to the new, one, true religion on earth. The calling was a challenge, and Fuchs had not the first idea how big by that evening when he called Elder Oakerlund with the bad but mostly good news about the sudden death of the young man’s father.

Connelly J. Fuchs didn’t say so on the phone, but part of his personal suffering he claimed over Robbie’s situation was that Elder Oakerlund would miss the rollout of his ingenious, probably inspired, new marketing strategy to raise the abysmal number of Mormon converts in Austria. Since World War II, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ membership had hit about four thousand souls nationwide and stayed there.

President Fuchs, who presented himself as a big brother to the hundred and ten young men and four women missionaries in Austria, brought the phone call to a halt by telling little Brother Oakerlund he’d have more details about his father’s passing tomorrow.

We’ll see you in the morning. Have a safe trip. Oh, just one more thing, Fuchs said in a tone solemn as a closing prayer. This is a pretty tragic loss – I mean your dad was only fifty years old. But even this is all part of the plan that Heavenly Father has for each and every one of us. We just can’t know all the details right now. Just be certain of that in your heart, and you’ll be fine.

Robbie listened reverently, then replied softly, See you tomorrow, President, and hung up. His heart was certain of only one thing: He was at least five thousand miles away from being fine.

V

Three hours later, standing in front of the tiny two-story house at 1201 Muhlweg in Bregenz, Robbie was having one of those too-jovial, too- long parting chats with his landlord. The conversation was meant to buffer the reality of Robbie’s sudden, sad departure. It only magnified it. Othmar Rasinger (Oakerlund’s favorite landlord and probably his favorite Austrian of all) as a farewell gift handed the young farm kid from the Wild West called Utah the coat off his back. It was a quilt of sheepskin pelts thick as a horse blanket. Oakerlund didn’t demean the gesture by saying it was too generous or that Herr Rasinger certainly needed it more. He pulled it on and cinched it tight as a saddle.

If Evan Oakerlund could have been there at that moment—and Robbie hoped that maybe his father was watching the scene somehow from the abiding but invisible hereafter that Mormons believe in—he would have said Robbie looked as forlorn and frozen as he did the night he showed up at home when he was supposed to be at a Boy Scouts winter campout.

Robbie was twelve and old enough to know better than to run off like that, and not say a word. Before his wayward knothead of a son closed the front door, Evan had him in the family station wagon heading right back up the seven miles to the camp where Robbie had gone AWOL. As Evan slammed the Delta 88 into park back at the campsite, he turned to the bawl-baby seated next to him and scolded, You better stop blubbering right now, or I’ll really give you something to cry about.

VI

Now, ten years later, at the end of Robbie’s mission in a city so far west in Austria it should have been Switzerland, Robbie’s father had really given his son something to cry about. Robbie Oakerlund, the kid who had always been just kind of different and who thought too much and for some reason liked to take things in life way too hard, was taking off for home again. There with his landlord, further from the hayfields of Sevier County than he would ever be, Robbie waited for the taxi to the train station, heading back home to Southern Utah, heading to a funeral instead of homecoming. He was more numb than cold, not shivering, not crying.

VII

Wade’s third Daaaad? echoed around and came back at him. There was no sign of that cuss of a dog Gus, either. Maybe he’d gotten through a hole in the fence and Dad had chased after him. Wade stood in the doorway of the shed and checked for noise. His own breath was all he heard. He held it a moment and decided not to call out again. He squinted into the cavernous place and picked his way past the workbench, along the old grain truck and the stupid Massey-Ferguson runt of a tractor.

Wade stepped to the back of the big Farmall and steadied himself by grabbing a thick wedge of tire tread. He squatted and noticed a shiny dot of fresh oil on the dark circle of stain growing in the dirt under the tractor. He also saw what he first thought was a stump of wood sticking up near the front wheel. Hope more than dim light briefly spared him the realization that he was looking at his father’s work boots. He shut his eyes, let go of the tire and felt his way along the gearbox, manifold, generator and the curve of the radiator cover. He stepped around the front wheel axle, opened his eyes and let reality fill in the lines his mind had already drawn. No sound, no breath. Dad? Nothing.

Wade was up the stairs and into the kitchen before the storm door on the back porch slammed behind him. It’s Dad, he said, panting. His mother turned away from the sink. Dad’s in the shed. Hurt. Hurt bad I think. Nona looked at him as if he were wearing a baseball mitt for a hat. She wiped her hands on the dishtowel that had draped her shoulder, folded it lengthwise in fourths, then the opposite way into thirds, then set it on the stove.

Show me where he is, she said. As she stepped past the storm door, she put her arms through the sweater she kept buttoned around her neck, folded them against the cold and ran, holding herself, across the frozen yard.

She twisted on the switch to the overhead lights just inside the shed door and walked in the direction her son pointed. The pace of her heart slowed as the bass drum in her head grew louder. A wake of tiny dust devils followed her, kicked up from a layer of powdered dirt left by the pulverizing and incessant passage of farm implements. Two tiny plumes jumped and hung in the air when her knees dropped to the earth next to her prone and quiet husband.

She felt her heart break and her soul coming apart. Evan. Evan? Evan, what’s the matter, dear heart? Evan, honey, what’s the matter? Wake up. Please wake up, my dear, sweet man. Please!

She looked the body over frantically for some sign of injury or explanation for why her husband had fainted, and in the machine shed of all places. She shook him, not hard, but hard enough to wake him even from a deep, snoring sleep. Nothing.

She prayed: My Father-in-Heaven, please don’t take this man from me. Don’t take him from his children. He’s worked so hard to support his family and they’re his only joy in life. She stopped and opened her eyes in the half hope that what was happening was as unreal as it felt. Utter panic hit again and she closed her eyes against it.

Please don’t take him. He has served Thee and done Thy work. He has only sought to do what is right by other people and has lived Thy Commandments. He has been Thy faithful servant and has trusted always in Thy divine power and guidance.

The membrane over her heart that usually kept her true feelings safe inside tore open. Please, Father, don’t turn away from him now. Dear God in Heaven, please help him be strong enough to endure whatever threatens him. He is needed in this life now, not the next. I would ask a special blessing as his wife and his children’s mother that he be spared. Forgive me for being a burden to him. Please don’t let him die. Evan, talk to me . . . Say something!

Wade had kept his eyes open and on his father as his mother prayed. The world was coming to a crashing halt in a deafening silence. Wade heard Nona’s bitter pleas to Heavenly Father to spare his earthy father. He watched his father’s body lying before them, its inner lights flickering and going out. His father’s barrel chest offered no sign of life; no rising, no falling; no sign either of the hole in his heart or the blood filling his lungs. His burley brown cow-milker’s hands pressed in his mother’s, not squeezing back the gesture, probably for the first time ever. Any reason or point to Evan’s prime of life passing were nowhere in the sudden void opening in their lives from that moment on.

Evan had just gone on to a different plane and a higher purpose on the other side. That’s what the most stalwart Mormons, yet least compassionate residents of the tiny town, would claim. Evan’s sacred obligation was to be a good husband, father and provider in this world, but now it wasn’t. Not that it didn’t matter; it just didn’t matter as much all of a sudden.

At that moment, there was no Peace be with you whisper from above into Nona’s heart, nor any sign of a God who had been close enough to bless the evening’s supper, but who now did not hear the deepest prayer of Nona’s life.

VIII

The low hum of the resting electric motors greeted a cluster of yawning, bleary-eyed passengers who boarded the wide-body repurposed commuter train heading east. Robbie’s companionless trip cross-country would continue from the city of Silent Night aboard one of two early morning express trains to Vienna, each scheduled to stop briefly in Austria’s factory-laden City of Industry—Linz. He had transferred himself to the commuter almost as soon as the Arlberger had sidled to a stop in the Innsbruck terminal.

Oakerlund, looking bovine in his thick sheepskin coat, ambled down the platform to the last car. His mental image of every cubicle being packed with the percolating energy of early birds flocking to work was a projection conjured by his sleep-deprived mind. He welcomed himself into the empty space as eagerly as Mormon pioneers sought shady groves along their great migration west.

His lungs defrosted and his glasses glazed with condensation the second he entered the warm vapors of his glass bubble at the back of the train. He drew closed the pleated curtains on the aisle-side and stuck a Besitzt card in the narrow fold of the door that announced the occupied status. He looked unsuccessfully for the sure-thing detour to seat-shopping passengers: außer Betrieb, for he was indeed out of order.

Robbie’s suitcase was given a seat and his messenger bag, tight and fat as a rolled-up sleeping bag, took its place in the arms of the booth’s faux-leather bench seat facing backward. He flopped into the adjustable one- seater and immediately posted his right arm on the small triangle cushion attached to the neck of the chair back next to him. The gesture was a silent, stern warning to any seat seekers that any head not attached to Oakerlund’s pair of weary shoulders should seek rest elsewhere.

Robbie felt a stiff breeze from boarding passengers, but the chill of having to endure the cold stares and icy demeanors of the losers in the morning’s deadly serious game of musical chairs did not intrude.

The train rocked from standstill to locomotion. The slow momentum nudged Brother Oakerlund to a fuzzy headed awareness that his trip home was again under way. He was momentarily relaxed as the self-appointed prelate of his vestibule. As the train traced the tines of tracks out of town, Robbie shoved his left wrist out from behind his coat sleeves to check the time. Instead, glancing into the three-cornered face of the reliable three- needled ticks of seconds, minutes, and hours of his Hamilton Ventura, he saw its ghost—a telltale stripe of pale skin between his tanned forearm and gloved hand.

For a few seconds, Robbie didn’t know where the Sam Hill the watch could be. Then he remembered. The arrowhead-shaped timepiece was now a ball of toothy shards inside a handkerchief safely out of harm’s way inside his suit coat four layers deep. A tiny web of cracks in the crystal met Robbie’s thumb pad as he gingerly felt the face of the watch with the half hope it had been fixed miraculously. Still shattered. He cussed himself under his breath. How could he have been so careless? How stupid does a guy have to be to try to put a watch on, especially that watch, while running to catch a train in the middle of the night? Why hadn’t he just stopped and put it on? Well, for the same stupid reason that the same stupid kid can’t stand to just stay still and look around a minute when the harrow or baler or beet digger loses a bolt or a hasp or a clevis pin. For the same reason the same stupid kid thinks that walking all over the field looking for a missing part of the swather is the best way to find it; like a dog that thinks he’ll eventually unearth a bone if he throws enough dirt.

No, really, your way is the best way, chided his older brother, Lynn. He had told his dumb little dork of a little brother countless times, Robbie, if you had a brain, you’d be dangerous. And now, Lynn’s anger flared: That’s the best way to lose something quick and forever, you good- for-nothin’ cuss. The day on Robbie’s mind at that moment some fifteen years hence, Lynn had said the same thing seven or eight times through seven or eight dammit-all-to-Hells." Lynn then jumped into the old flatbed Chevy pick-up, slammed the door, and threw it hard into reverse while shaking his head at his dipstick little brother. Lynn would grind the pick-up into first, stomp on the gas pedal and kick up a high-flying dirt rooster tail. As he sped away, Robbie watched Lynn do a bouncing waddle across the furrows headed over to town in hot pursuit of another new part that Robbie had for umpteenth time carelessly broken.

Robbie, the poor cuss of a returning missionary, had heard the awful grinding pop under the heel of his Barker Black wingtips, he’d hoped he’d stepped on an all-day sucker. But the only sucker was the young American in the black horn-rimmed glasses boarding at Gleiß 5. He hadn’t even dared to check if the poor ol’ thing was still working. He checked now. As heavy as his aggravation was with himself, he got an equal surprise: The watch was still running. There was something else. But the jeweler he would cart the wrecked heirloom to when he got home would be the first to notice. The second hand had somehow gotten crimped so that the tiny arrow now shot forty-five degrees off true, putting its tip eight seconds ahead of its tail. The bend was at such a sharp angle that it looked, the jeweler would say after checking through his strongest magnifying glass, like the thing had been machined that way.

Robbie didn’t need to assure the watchmaker that it hadn’t been made that way; the small, balding keeper of time knew that. Robbie would recall, however, as he told the sad story, about how his life had seemed to lurch slightly ahead of itself the day he had let the ticking talisman fall underfoot. He had started to say, but then didn’t, that he had the most unsettling sensation in the train to Innsbruck that things were somehow haywire, that time had gone out of joint. He’d fallen off the train somehow but had jumped back on two cars behind himself. And come to think of it, that’s exactly how he’d felt that afternoon at the reservoir when he and Wade had almost drowned. Or like that day when he totaled the old Oldsmobile. Or when President Fuchs had called him to tell him he was being sent home early.

IX

That February had been as heavy and dark as coal, and the earth itself had lost its grip. Out there in the pre-dawn, out there in the vacuum of deadest winter, time had stopped still. Compasses spun and pointed between magnetic poles but nowhere toward any place like home in-