Faraday Comes Home: A Novel

By Robert Harlow

Robert Harlow is one of Canadas best kept literary secrets. A noted craftsman, he is also one its finest story-tellers. Born in northern British Columbia, he was a military pilot for a number of years, later a student at the Iowa Writers Workshop, then a producer and director for a decade-and-a-half at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation before joining the faculty of The University of British Columbia. He now lives and writes on one of the Gulf Islands off Canadas southwest coast.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 6, 2012
• ISBN: 9781477143926

Robert Harlow

SHORT BIO The author, most recently of Necessary Dark, a novel based largely on his experiences in WWll, Robert Harlow was born in Northern British Columbia in 1923, worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation from 1951 ro 1965, and was between 1965 and 1977 Head of the Department of Creative Writing at The University of British Columbia. He was short listed in 1972 for the Governor General's Award for Literature, and in 2001 he received the Terasen Lifetime Achievement Award for an outstanding literary career. Since 1990, he has lived with writer and artist Sally Ireland on one of the Gulf Islands that lie between B.C.'s Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island. When Tomorrow Dies

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Copyright © 2012 by Robert Harlow.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2012912672

ISBN:         Hardcover                               978-1-4771-4391-9

                   Softcover                                 978-1-4771-4390-2

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4771-4392-6

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Contents

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  4

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  6

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10

11

Also by Robert Harlow

Royal Murdoch

A Gift Of Echoes

Scann

Making Arrangements

Paul Nolan

Felice: A Travelogue

Saxophone Winter

Necessary Dark

For Sally. My love

Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.

King Lear

Act V Scene iii

  1

A NURSE APPEARS by Jamie’s bed to tell him the good news. Barring an unexpected set-back the doctor would discharge him tomorrow morning. There is going to be no set-back. He isn’t quite old yet. Old is the next thing to dead. Yes, he is weak. Who wouldn’t be? But since the day after his operation he’s been up and walking to the bathroom and along the corridor. The catheter and the drip into his arm had been removed some time ago, and that had felt as if he’d been awarded full freedom. His belly is still a tender concern even though the staples were pried out three days ago. A three by six inch Band-Aid hides the necessary damage done by the clever young surgeon who prowled around among his large and small intestines. Before being wheeled into the operating room Jamie had been happy that the huge pain in his belly would be cured, but he’d also worried that he’d have his bunghole sewn up and he’d be shitting in a bag for the rest of his life. Doctor Baker managed to tend to a blockage without cutting out a length of gut. The best possible luck.

So now he’s going to pick up his bedside phone and tell Amy, or his grandson Edward if he answers, to send Rourke in the Cessna to take him back north to Odgertown. But lying on top of ordering up the trip home—and threatening his need to be civil—is Amy’s decision to fly him here, to Nordston, when there is a hospital four minutes drive away from where he lives. A rehearsal is necessary to help smooth the edges of his discontent. Best to imagine the call. Or not to imagine it, just make a hand-on-heart promise that he will only say hello, I’m fine and how about sending Rourke to pick me up. But she’ll ask more of him than that, especially why he told the nurses that he wanted no visitors and no phone calls? Maybe he’d been half out of it when he gave the order, but he also had an answer for her: Concentration, Amy, on getting out of the fix I was in. Life or death. Here in hospital it’s been war, a specific kind, and how effectively could it be fought with family and visitors hanging about?

On this top floor semi-private ward his bed is the one that has a view out a window down into the parking lot, and beyond to the hospital’s access road, which is backed by trees—just spindly jackpine, but they grow close together, as if they are timothy grass, a bit of fraudulent wilderness that cuts him off from seeing the outer reaches of downtown Nordston. Back when it was half the size it is now he’d been born in the little hospital this one swallowed up a generation ago. Nothing of the town is attractive to him or relevant now, except maybe the graveyard where his father and mother and both siblings are buried—Tig recently, overtaken by age, and Franny a dozen years ago eaten by cancer.

He wants to get back to Odgertown to see if his old life is still there waiting for him. Being able to order up Rourke is part of that—and a reminder of his fifty percent interest in North Air. The other fifty percent has been given to Amy, but she’ll have to wait until he dies to own it all, something he isn’t ready to do. But it is a subject that keeps coming up, interrupting with no warning. The vicious attack on his gut might have been the forerunner of another, similar event that would actually kill him. A shriveling thought. Yes, he must, he will, he has to die, but the occasion, the process, the act has been, until twelve days ago, filed away as a natural disaster—like a murderous forest fire, a lightning strike, an earthquake—what the hell, a far-away tsunami—useless to think about. In truth, unthinkable. But his body has produced its first heads-up horror, harbinger of a greater horror even than death itself: losing control of life while having to die.

He had not existed for an infinite length of time before he was born, and so there is nothing unnatural about spending an equal length of time dead.

Nonsense.

There is the moment, the moment when. And now his body has stripped him of the privilege of ignoring being dead, and whatever way it might happen. Flying during the war, he’d learned to ignore the danger and he’d let luck referee the hours in the air going out and coming back, a defense that kept jeopardy at bay. Flak, fighters, searchlights, weather were dealt with as they happened, as best he could, and at the end of it he was still alive. He doesn’t want to return to believing in luck. He doesn’t want to do that any more than he wants to return to the pain in his gut.

What he wants most is his body back, and possibly his mind, as Amy appeared to suggest. When would the healing stop, health return and rogue thoughts cease? What he wants back is his life. He must not let Amy think he can’t cope. The facts of his case will make her concerned and she’ll push for him to get someone in to help out around the house. Permanently. What is there to say, calmly, to a determined daughter? Only this: Living alone is another necessary concentration. Another kind of war, a general, global one. Amy, I’m a country called Jamie Faraday and the fight to keep it sovereign is what makes me think I’m a person and not a goddamn problem. He can’t leave it there. More is required, to try to make her see. Look, I’ve been flying this crate you call your father for eighty years come June and it’s mine to stall out or fly into the nearest mountain or sit and watch the wings fall off. But she knows all that; it hardly needs to be said again. Out loud. Put it this way, Amy, there are no parachutes in life, and that’s what you’re going to try to give me. It’ll have holes in it, so leave me be. This is my trip and don’t ask me to call it off. The scenery’s still good, there’s petrol in the tank, enough to make it to my destination pretty close to my estimated time of arrival. Go on and talk all you want, just so long as you don’t expect me to listen because then we’d have to live through yet another stand-off. You’re the one who has to listen, girl: all life is flown at twenty-five thousand feet, upside down and nothing on the speedo but the maker’s name. So, what’s the answer? You die. Now, I’d like to be still strapped into my seat and fighting the controls till my kite falls, dives, disintegrates, whatever. Let’s leave it there.

Goddamn, that wasn’t a rehearsal, or, if it was, by the time he has Amy on the line he won’t remember anything of it. His breath is being hauled in and pushed out as if he is running uphill, and he has to lie back on his pillow and calm down before he reaches for the phone and slowly dials the number.

Hello. Amy? His voice sounds strong and he feels considerably in charge.

Dad, how nice.

He must try not to ask why she sent him here. But he does.

You know why. She is both surprised and annoyed. Lindeman was down with the ‘flu and the nearest surgeon was in Nordston. I explained it to you before I called Stevenson to fly you as a mercy flight.

You did? I must’ve been out of it.

That was when you started giving orders about not wanting anyone to go with you, or visit you in the hospital, or call.

The pain was pretty bad.

I know it was. But sometimes, my precious Dad, you can be a stupid old man. She sounded resigned, not angry.

Who says I’m old? Laugh, keep things light.

The calendar. It says 2003 on it.

Never mind. Move on. They say I’m due out of here tomorrow morning.

I hoped that’s why you called. I’ll schedule Rourke to make the flight.

Good. Tell him I’ll talk him in so he can make a decent landing when we get back. She didn’t laugh.

Got to go, Dad, someone’s on the other line. Hugs. See you tomorrow.

Amy? She is gone. He begins to dial her back, but she is busy and it’s best not to interrupt. Talk, rising up out of even a minor crisis in their lives might cause something unconscionable to come up without notice, like admitting guilt, or saying I love you. He puts the phone back on the bedside cabinet and gets up to pee, a necessity, but also an excuse for some exercise. He is much stronger now, ready to be discharged. A nurse told him that twelve days in bed meant spending twelve weeks getting back lost muscle. He lifts his gown and pees for a moment before he sees blood flowing down his legs, even dripping into the toilet.

Help, he shouts, I’m bleeding to death. He hears laughter coming toward him from the nursing station. He has not always been a good patient. They all jolly him, saying, What now Mr Faraday?

He lets the blood speak for him, and the tall auburn-haired nurse who comes to see what the matter is stops smiling and takes him by the arm and gently turns him toward her. The name plate pinned above her left breast reminds him that she is Janet. He wishes she’d embrace him, hold him from falling. Well, you are a mess, she says, and leaves him standing alone while she wets a towel and rubs down his legs. It’s stopped, she said, rising up in front of him again. Let’s get you back to bed.

The unexpected setback has happened. He walks in front of her, strong and angry. Lie back, she says, and motors his bed flat, then pulls up his hospital gown and peels away the bandage and tape so she can examine the incision. A bit of seepage, she tells him cheerfully. He feels her close and her fingers pressing down on his belly. It’s a good-sized haematoma. She presses once more on his belly and blood spurts up and she retreated as if it might be lethal. He laughs at her. She grins as if this is a game and she’s been bested. She reapplies the bandage. Covering his belly with his gown and pulling up the bedclothes to keep him warm, she says, I think the resident is on the floor. She turns away, a hint, he thinks, of concern about the move. But she faces him again and smiles. I’ll see if I can find her. Don’t worry. It’s okay, you’re not bleeding now. Haematoma is a bruise full of blood. Happens often after an operation.

What if he moves now? His gut will spill blood out over the bed. He lies still, thinking that doctors come when they can. Or must. Then there is Amy to call, Rourke to cancel, more days incarcerated. He feels disappointed, thwarted, and it makes him young, but knowing that doesn’t dismiss the emotion. It is unfair of his gut to deceive him. Before the operation, the pain during the flight to Nordston made him sure he was over Dortmund or Essen and his guts were being torn out by German bullets. Now he is weak in the mind as well as the body, and the Hydra that is his war is raising one of its many heads again; he hasn’t the strength to lop it off. An event is needed, an interruption that will keep him safe. Footsteps approach. Good. He opens his eyes and watches first Janet and then a young woman arrive at his bedside. Doctor Wilkerson, she says. I’m a surgical resident. He sees that she is comely, and that her smile is friendly. Janet takes away the covers and pulls back his gown. The resident doesn’t probe, just looks down at his incision and then up at him.

I’ve come apart?

Just a bit. What I should do is open you up some more and take away the haematoma. She moves back from the bed.

The young these days are all so beautiful. Where the hell has that come from? He laughs. I’m sorry.

Don’t be. On behalf of the young I thank you. She smiles again and goes away.

So, you’re a flirt, too, Janet says.

Just with a selected few.

You mean those who haven’t yet reached thirty.

He waves his hand, wiping away this talk. What happens now? Wheel me to the operating room?

Nurses don’t speak for doctors.

Janet covers him over again and leaves to attend to the new patient just waking up on the other side of the beige curtain that divides this semi-private ward. She’d been conscious for a while at breakfast time after two orderlies brought her in on a gurney from the recovery room and maneuvered her onto her bed. Then she slept, snored gently and now is stirring again. She clears her throat, and he can hear Janet murmuring about taking her temperature and blood pressure, telling her that she must practice breathing deeply to ward off pneumonia. Are you in pain? The doctor has ordered… .

No, no pain, the woman says, her voice struggling to deny the lie. I’m fine.

Good, Janet says. But if you feel you need something for the discomfort, just press the call button. Here, I’ll pin it on your pillow so you’ll know where it is.

All right, thank you.

Deep breaths, Janet says. Let’s see you do some now.

Air rattles obediently in her throat, but when she speaks again, the woman’s voice is strong and challenging. I told Connie this was nonsense, a waste of public money. I’m eighty four, impaired in a dozen ways. She pauses and coughs up phlegm. Deep breaths. Go look after someone who wants help.

You’ll feel better… .

I think not.

Tomorrow you can get up for a little while. Things will look different then, you’ll see.

You sound just like my daughter… . No, I’m sorry. You’re only doing your job.

And yours is to get well, Mrs Clausen. Janet laughs encouragement.

Mrs Clausen sighs. I’m ready. I want to be with Hugh and my baby Julia and Grandmother Lilly. Her voice is muffled by approaching tears. We laid her out in the parlour. I was eleven. That was a long time ago. Before the war when things were different. It’s not done any more. I’d like that to happen to me, but there’s no one left who wants to do it. Perhaps it’s against the law.

I’ll be back, Janet says, leaving, maybe escaping. Do some more deep breaths.

Jamie listens. Perhaps Mrs Clausen has more to say, something that requires an answer. But there is only silence. Maybe she is refusing to breathe, trying that way to die. He doesn’t want a dead body in the room with him. Death might decide to clear the ward.

The first couple of days are tough, he says toward the curtain. It gets better, you’ll see.

Hugh? The phlegm is gone from her voice and she sounds a younger. So good. Lead me. Away from here.

I’m not Hugh. I’m Jamie.

She doesn’t answer. Then, after a while, she says, Everything now is a disappointment. Her voice is old again.

Damn it woman, you can’t just wish yourself away. How do you know your people will be there, or anywhere?

What a waste if all of this life came to nothing. She is sounding stronger now. Jamie, are you old?

No. Not yet.

It will happen—or are you here to die?

I’m heading out tomorrow. Which now is a lie. It makes him shiver. That’s the plan, he tells her, cheerfully.

Will you be alone?

If he can manage it. No. I have a daughter, too.

"Your wife has gone on then?

A long while ago.

We’re orphans of bereavement.

He waits, thinking that is a joke and she might laugh, but she is quiet again. Listen, he says, as if he is riding to the rescue. Lighten up, take it as it comes. Your people won’t be there if you go before your time.

Yes they will. They’ve been waiting as long as I have.

Mr Faraday is a good talker, Janet says, returning. I think we’ll keep him around until you’re better.

A message. For sure he isn’t going anywhere tomorrow. Lighten up. Take it as it comes. Go with the flow. Jesus. He closes his eyes and behind them contrives to blow surgeon Baker out of his sterile operating room boots for having caused a haematoma. Where’s Doctor Wilkerson? he calls out.

She won’t be long.

What’s that? Mrs Claussen asks Janet.

The doctor thought a little more sleep would be a good thing right now.

Must you?

There. Just a pin-prick.

Janet goes away again. No doubt Mrs Clausen is drifting off. He closes his eyes once more and worries that Janet will come back, this time with a cart full of pre-operation routines for him. But the next voice he hears is Doctor Wilkerson’s. Ready? she asks, as if she might be about to have him test a parachute.

Ready for her to open him up again, without anesthetic? Here in this unsterile ward? The gods made doctors their deputies on earth, and they are not to be questioned. Yes, he says, and sees that Janet is back, and work on him had begun. She takes the pillow away from under his head so his view of his bared belly is obscured by the hospital gown bunched up on his chest. She is busy now swabbing around his incision with something cold. Alcohol. Two very young nurses, maybe probationers, whose names he can’t recall, appear and stand on Janet’s side of the bed looking on, an interested audience. Maybe this is an experiment they might not soon see again. Or is he an emergency that demands that he be saved without going to the operating room? Janet is at the foot of the bed motoring its whole length up as high as it will go.

The doctor turned from the rubber-wheeled table she’d brought silently into the room. She is gloved but not masked; her hair is attractively untidy. A gamin. Awfully damned young, he thinks, and only a resident. Will he be required to forgive her if she botches the job? She is smiling at him. They always smile before having to inflict pain. She holds up a syringe. Just like having a tooth pulled.

Serious now, she begins injecting around the incision and, he is sure, even down into it. She recharges the syringe. Good. There can’t be too much pain killer. Scissors come next. The three nurses lean forward while she probes and snips. I’m cutting out stitches to get to where the haematoma is. She stands straight again. That’s good red flesh there, Mr Faraday. Looks very healthy.

He feels nothing, but the procedure makes him imagine that what she is doing is bloody and he wants to tell her to please go easy. There, she says, and hands her scissors to Janet, who stands holding them ready in case they are needed again. The other nurses still lean forward, their expressions serious, but no doubt they agree that his flesh is red and healthy. He raises his head up, believing suddenly that not just a few stitches but all of them have been snipped out so that the incision is now slack and hanging like loose lips around a black hole full of blood. But the bunched-up hospital gown still blocks his view. Young Doctor Wilkerson glances at him. We’ll be through here in just a moment, Mr Faraday.

Gently admonished, he lies back. She murmurs to Janet. Doctors and dentists murmur to their assistants. He should be grateful for her care. He wants any help his body needs and she is cleaning it up so he can leave here in the best shape possible. Thank you, he says, as if they are having a conversation. You’re a fine young woman.

Head down, working, she teases, Just fine? When we first met I was beautiful.

But now this is serious business.

Only good business.

Not life and death?

Not either one. She lifts her head so he can see that she is amused by his anxiety.

Time for him to lighten up, too. So, when can I get up?

I think you should wait till I’m finished here. She holds a needle and is threading it. Janet comes around the bed holding what looks like a bloody bandage sealed in a plastic bag. The doctor begins stitching. What I like best about surgery is the sewing, she says, an eight-year-old closing up a wound in the sawdust-filled body of a doll. So she must be good at sewing. He watches her work and thinks again that he should be grateful. There. Done, she says to him and murmurs to Janet who holds one of those big Band-Aids that help hold the wound together. When it is fixed to his belly and his gown has been pulled down and modesty restored, Resident Wilkerson begins shedding her gloves and stands looking at him. She might even have promoted him from body to person, and he thinks that also she might like him.

Thank you, he tells her, too seriously, and laughs. Good of you to interrupt your routine to fix up an old fart.

I think you’re worth fixing up.

I’ve a bit of gas left in the tank, then.

No doubt.

When do you think I’ll be able to escape this Stalag?

Stalag. She gives her gloves to Janet. Means you were in the air force, doesn’t it?

Not necessarily, but I was.

Prisoner?

No.

My grandfather was. Stalag Luft Three. He came home unwell and stayed that way until he died. I never knew him. My dad used to read over his log book every November 11th and always he cried.

Yes. Yes yes. Well. Being younger than the war and being touched by it is dangerous. Might make you think log books and movies called The Longest Day or The Battle of Britain or Dambusters were real. Secondhand memories… . Wrong tone of voice. She isn’t smiling now. Jesus Jamie, hush up.

That was the best Dad could do. Granddad wasn’t a talker.

Not always an easy thing.

Daddy told me that the only concrete thing he said was he swivelled his gun turret around and tumbled back away from the plane.

He was a rear gunner.

I think so.

They’re either first killed or first out.

Something must’ve gone wrong in prison camp, but he never said. What about you, Mr Faraday? Did you get through it okay?

Wonderfully well. You know, I asked but you never said when I could get out of here.

I think Doctor Baker will discharge you tomorrow morning.

New stitches and all?

I’d say you’ve come through this huge operation wonderfully well.

He rolled up and grabbed her arm to keep her from turning away. She didn’t object, not yet. Grinning and nodding and scrambling for words, he finally opted for comedy. It’s a big story, that war. Take a while to tell it. Let’s have dinner.

But she didn’t laugh. What my father wanted was to know what happened.

He took his hand away from her arm and lay back on the bed. Maybe Grandfather didn’t know.

She shrugged. That’s one answer, but I think he did know and I think that was part of what stopped him from getting well. There’s lots of knowing that isn’t a bit helpful when it comes to getting on with life. Then she relented and laughed. You’re not Grandfather, that’s for certain. She holds out her hand. Get well. It would be a shame if we had to meet again.

He takes her hand, silent for once, and when she is gone, Janet moves in to take his temperature and blood pressure. Well, she says, that’s one for the books.

My huge operation?

Change of pace around here, but then she stitched up your tongue pretty good, too, eh?

People who stop tongues are maybe the ones we should listen to.

A philosopher. She begins to leave. I’m off shift soon. You’ve been fun, Mr Faraday. Get well, do well.

That’s a tall order. It feels like something I might need help with.

My guess is you’ve got a few miles to go before you’d ever ask for it.

It is a long day and a longer night before it is ten hundred hours and Doctor Baker discharges him. It feels even longer until fourteen hundred hours when Rourke comes by taxi, and Jamie leans on his arm and accepts the help that gets him out of the hospital’s wheelchair and makes him comfortable in the cab. Rourke flew here in the Cessna, his favourite aircraft when he was a pilot. Flying home is good, but sitting beside Rourke and waiting to get there is not comfortable. It isn’t the occasional pain that bothers him, it’s the feeling that his belly is a lump that holds—yes—pain, but whose business is to hide hope of a quick recovery, or even more life at all. This might be a waste of Rourke’s time, a waste of petrol. He could be dead on arrival, or too shortly after. Rourke lands smoothly on the Odger River and docks at one of North Air’s wharfs. Ten more minutes pass before he argues with Amy about recuperating at her house.

You have no choice, she tells him. Like nurse Janet, like Doctor Wilkerson, she also smiles.

Her car, a Honda of no beauty or consequence (Amy, the most hip of the hip in the 1970s could never get used to returning to a bourgeois life and money enough to buy a decent car and clothes from other than Value Village) but the trip down Odgetown’s main Avenue and up the hill to her place is neither long nor painful.

Edward comes from the house. Welcome, he says, kisses his grandfather’s cheek and takes his left arm while Amy holds his right. He can do nothing but let this arrest and incarceration happen. Doctor Baker has sentenced him to helplessness, to quiet healing and thus to staying away from his own home on the other side of town, without parole for at least a month. He leans on Amy and goes through her front door and down the hallway to her second bedroom (Edward’s quarters are upstairs in what had been an unfinished attic. He sits on the edge of the bed and looks up at his daughter, the fruit on his loins. Go with the flow, he says, and hears an edge in his voice that is unintended.

Amy leans down and kisses, not his forehead, but his cheek. Lie back and get well, she says, and he does what he was told. She covers him with a comforter. At the door, she turns, as if this is a movie. Be good, okay? Or I’ll break your goddamn arm.

  2

ON A FINE, fresh June morning Jamie is thigh-deep in pretty fast water fishing the Odger River down north from town, and where he stands there are boulders the size of his head. They could be a hazard, but he uses them to brace his feet against the current and the danger of sliding downstream. It’s only been two weeks since he’s become a dedicated fisherman, mostly to prove to Amy that he is over having been mauled by a surgeon. He believes he’s mostly got his body and brain back, and refuses now to talk about his intestinal adventure with anyone, even though he’s not sure whether his total soma has returned to normal. At his age by what standard is normal judged? By the length of his afternoon nap?

He has seldom fished before now, except to make an emergency meal when he and his pontooned aircraft were forced down by weather or engine failure on some wilderness lake farther north. But he woke one morning feeling suddenly stronger, better, and so, as if fishing were something important he forgot to do, he went to Herschel Gould’s Everything Store And Pharmacy to buy a rod and a good selection of tackle. In truth, the idea of taking up fishing was a good excuse to visit with Herschel, who filled prescriptions when necessary in the neat and immaculate dispensary situated just to the left of the Odger Street entrance. But more usually Hersch stands behind a short wooden counter in a small cleared space at the centre of his barn-sized store, surrounded by a huge litter of merchandise (a selection that runs from a John Deere tractor through women’s and men’s and children’s clothing, furniture, gardening tools, paint, work boots, dress shoes, yard goods, on down to half-inch flathead screws), all of which fulfills the promise that with perseverance everything can in fact be found here.

Herschel had stared at the mound of tackle on the counter. Jamie Faraday are you starting a junkyard or going fishing? His questions are always serious because he is a serious person. He is skin and bones, and with the profile of a perigrine falcon. He has a precious son, Peter, who is rumoured every day by Herschel to be returning to Odgertown from perilous adventures Jamie is sure Hersch makes up. There is a daughter, Marian, also a pharmacist; she actually runs the store, but a diminishing number of older people who came to town before 1950 and are therefore known to be pioneers, think of the store as their own and like to buy from her father, so Herschel, just young enough to have missed the Second World War, is still on hand to serve them.

How do I know what’s good to catch fish?

Why not ask around, read a book?

Not a difficult question. Why not? Instructions make me nervous.

Herschel shrugs. We know, we know. It’s a wail. He likes being the only authentic Jew in town (his children’s dead mother was Christian, so they can’t be Jewish). He is also a Zionist but would not go to Israel, even though it is written down in Jehovah’s own will that it is his inheritance. He will tell you, with his finger in your face, that those usurping nomad A-rabs have nothing but public relations to support their cause, and the terror loose now in the world is the new anti-Semitism.

There are fish in the Odger, Jamie says, pushing the tackle around on the counter. What they’ll go for has got to be somewhere here, so I’ll catch a few.

Trying this collection out piece by piece should pass the time pretty good. Herschel punches the button labeled Total on his cash register. Fifty-seven twelve.

For that kind of money I should be up to my you-know-where in fish. It takes only two minutes in Herschel’s company before he begins to talk like him.

Don’t complain. For you I made it practically wholesale. You’re old. I agree about the fishing. You need a simple hobby now you’re mind is failing.

Failing? I’m failing?

Reverting to childhood. It’s written all over you. Pretty soon we’ll see you at the little kid’s school playing in the sandbox with a make-believe friend.

For half a second back then it felt as if that might be a good thing, so he laughed when he said, Fuck you, Herschel.

This flat, straight stretch of water where he fishes is contained by a low bank of the river on the west; on the east there is a ten or twelve meter clay cut that’s treed on top with cottonwoods, alders and evergreens. Beyond them is the Reservation that belongs to the Willow Lake Indians. They’re called aboriginals now but they don’t look like aboriginals to him, they look like Indians, a species of homo sapiens he’s fond of. While he fishes, he has his back to the outskirts of Odgertown, three kilometers upstream. It is built on benches of land