The Brothers K (103 page)

Wide-eyed and pleased with all of it, the boys kept nodding.

“You then sit down in your easy chair with a thickish novel, or your knitting, or your double margarita, and say, ‘Ready? Set?
Begin!’”

That was when it started. At first Irwin only jiggled (rather like the Attaboy) and shot air rapidly in and out his nostrils. But when the rest of us started laughing, the dam inside him finally burst. Loon sounds filled and overflowed the room. And though Nash, Myshkin and Amy were soon looking more than a little appalled, little Hughie—after a five- or six-second study of his father—began to let out the very same sounds in a higher octave, and to flap his arms while he did it, like a nestling who’s just realized he’s got wings. When this brought on a whole new wave from Irwin, the neophytes plugged their ears and Hoover ran for cover. But Irwin and Hughie stood face to face, howling till they were too tired to stand.

And Hughie laughs that same way to this day.

And Irwin has added the arm-flaps.

T
here’s not much more that I can say without slipping into the beginnings of stories that belong to other people.

I still run the warehouse and do the billing at Wind River Woodstoves, and I married Amy and had kids too. Make that kids three. There’s one beginning. But I bequeath that story to my children—who look unlikely to write or tell it at this point, though they may one day turn it into a truly strange Nintendo game.

Bet and Freddy went to college—Washington State, both of them. Bet dropped out twice, both times “for love,” and went some exciting places—Rome, London, Bali—but both times crash-landed back at Mama’s and went gratefully back to school. Freddy went straight through and became a veterinarian—and will curse me when she reads this, for making her very interesting life sound boring.

Everett ended up getting an M.F.A. at Washington, and Natasha a Ph.D. in Russian lit. Natasha teaches at Seattle University now, and Everett scrounges an income by free-lancing his kamikaze prose, by teaching writing workshops in prisons, community colleges and upscale retirement centers, and now and then by landing an actual one-or-two-semester position at a regular college—where he usually gets stuck teaching English comp, but saves wear and tear on his sanity by basing his courses entirely on Delmar (the basalt chunk) Hergert’s impeccable old ninth-grade grammar classes.

To Everett’s delight and Natasha’s mostly mock dismay, Myshkin now insists that everyone call him Mike.

Peter finished his master’s at Harvard and published the academic book on Maharashtran poet-saints. But he’s kept a part-time interest in the stoves, which remain his bread and butter. His latest passion—and the work he shares with the woman he now lives with (Marta is her name)—is teaching people, urban teenagers mostly, how to go into wilderness areas and achieve some kind of inner direction. “Vision quest” seems to be the going buzzword for such procedures. But Peter plays down the “vision” side of things. His experience of the inner life, he tells the kids, is more like a blind man learning to get around a dark but beautiful city with one of those long, sensitive canes. Going into wilderness alone is simply a way of getting your cane.

Irwin and Linda kept working fifteen-hour days till the woodstove business
was thriving and they’d completely resurrected their farm. Then the Boat People and other refugees started pouring in from Southeast Asia—and Irwin came out of Stove Land completely, and told Linda the secret dream he’d been working toward for years. I think their marriage might have ended if she hadn’t been willing to share it. And without her, Irwin’s dream could not have come true. But she
did
share it.

In November 1977, they drove down to San Francisco, fought their way through the last snarl of red tape, and adopted two Laotian orphans, for whom they’d been negotiating for months. They’d had names waiting for months too—and with Baby Hughie as the cautionary example, Linda and Irwin had nicked these names themselves. The four-year-old boy, Yao Tha, would be called by his initials, Y.T. And the two-year-old girl—formally Laura II, after Mama—would be called simply Two.

“What kind of name is
that?”
Laura One had snapped when she first heard it.

“Your
name,” Irwin responded.

“My name is Laura,” Mama huffed. “And one of me’s enough.”

“That’s why we’re going to call her Two,” said Irwin.

Which threw the conversation back to Square One:

“What kind of name is
that?”

“A strange name, because the world’s a strange place,” Irwin said.

Which appeased Mama not at all. But then Linda, with great sincerity, added, “I think Two makes a
lovely
girl’s name, Laura.”

And Mama—having spent nearly a decade telling Linda to stand up and speak her mind—was hog-tied. “She’ll be
your
child,” she muttered. “Call her what you like.”

They did. And Mama hadn’t seen anything yet. Everett III, alias Little Everett (a Cambodian boy who became an instant hit with his 5′8″ uncle by automatically shunting him into the Big Everett category), followed in 1978. Then came Mi Tu—a Vietnamese girl whose name Linda found so adorable that she left it unnicked. That gave them a Nash, a Baby Hughie, a Laura Two, a Y.T., an Everett Three and a Me Too. So by the time 1979 rolled around and they adopted a three-year-old Vietnamese boy, Hung Yi, it was Mama herself who suggested, since they first met him on the winter solstice, that they name him simply Winter.

With seven kids of four nationalities, twenty-some cattle, a dozen or so sheep, a hundred laying hens, five guinea hens, five guinea pigs, a turkey, three bass and bluegill ponds, Hoover the dog, feral cats, skunks, packrats and a booming woodstove business to drive him mad, Irwin regained all
the sanity he’d ever wanted, and way more of a laugh than all his kids except Hughie could want.

As for Mama, she sold the Camas home six years after Papa died, and moved into a house-trailer on Irwin and Linda’s farm, where she mostly orchestrates, but occasionally contributes to the chaos. “The eighth kid,” she sometimes calls herself.

“Ma,” Irwin tells her whenever she makes trouble for him.
“Prem se bhiksha dijiye.”

I want the magnificent American dream: a wife, a dog, a house, a bathroom
.

—Laotian refugee

I
rwin is in his easy chair, reading last October’s
Organic Gardening
. Winter is lying across his lap. Later Irwin will rise to his feet and the lap will divide into parts—green-and-purple rugby shirt, brown leather belt, faded blue jeans—but for now the lap is one thing: a ground, a region, an earth. Winter’s head rests on one wide, cushioned arm of the chair, his bare brown feet on the other. The rest of him rests on his papa.

Winter can’t see into the magazine or read the words on the cover. But he can see the cover photo. The straw-hatted gardener has a salt-and-pepper beard and a bright red shirt, and looks incredibly happy considering
he’s just standing there holding a turnip. But Winter’s father’s face is serious. And the hands that grip the magazine are blue-veined, huge, work-scarred, powerful.

Winter asks no questions. He stays quiet. He hears his father’s slow, even breathing. He feels his pulse.