The Fisherman (12 page)

Working on the Reservoir is not risk-free. Basically, the laborers are building a pair of enormous walls: the dam to hold back and contain the Esopus, and the weir that will divide the Reservoir into east and west basins. Once they’re done, and the valley floods, they’ll have constructed a lake roughly twelve miles long by three miles wide. There are a lot of unskilled men on the job. There’s a lot of machinery. Let’s face it, even skilled workers make mistakes. There are accidents. Men are hurt and killed. Medicine at this time isn’t like medicine, now. Say your arm is crushed by a block of stone: amputation’s going to be the procedure of choice. It’s the remedy to a wide range of problems. If you manage to avoid injury, you still have disease to worry about. The flu alone is a significant cause of death. I don’t think we really appreciate the difference a drug like penicillin’s made. There’s a hospital at the camp, but its facilities are limited. If you’re seriously hurt, or sick, you’re going to need to seek care in Wiltwyck—and you’re going to need to survive the trip there. And, of course, all this goes for the workers’ families as well. You might say that folks in general live much closer to death than do we.

When Lottie and her family have been at the camp about a year and a half, the woman who lives next to them is killed, trampled. There’s a mule barn at the camp, mules being the animal of choice for hauling the wagons used to transport pretty much everything. There are three mules hitched to a wagon, and they’re a pretty common sight. Every day at five, when the quitting whistle blows, the drivers of the wagons stage an impromptu race up the road leading to the mule barn. All the kids in the camp gather at the side of the road to watch the wagons roar by, the drivers standing up, one hand holding the reins, the other cracking the long whips they used, the mules’ legs churning. On the day of this particular tragedy, Lottie isn’t present—she’s finishing up at the bakery with Clara—but Gretchen and Christina are. Later, they’ll tell the rest of the family how, right as the teams were thundering down the final stretch of road before the barns, this woman, their neighbor, the Hungarian woman who never spoke to anyone, strode out in front of them. Her hair was unbound; she was wearing a plain blouse with the sleeves rolled up and a long skirt. It was as if she’d just stepped out of her kitchen. There was nothing any of the drivers could do. The wagons bore her down and crushed her. One of the drivers managed to turn his team around and race back to the spot where she lay broken and bloody. He leapt down from his seat, carried the woman to the back of his wagon, and made for the camp hospital like Mercury himself. The mule drivers are black, you see, and the woman they’ve run down is white. You can imagine what’s going through the fellow’s head.

Incredibly, the woman actually survives for half a day, long enough for her husband to appear at her side and collapse in sobs. I suppose it goes without saying that there’s nothing the camp doctor, or any other doctor, for the matter, can do for her. Asked the reason for her act, the woman refuses to say, but there have been stories circulating about her husband and another woman, one of Lottie and Clara’s co-workers at the bakery, a Swedish girl. The husband’s hardly what you’d call handsome, his hair thin, his face square, his body bony, but strange are the ways of desire. So far as anyone hears, the woman doesn’t speak a single word, just lies there gritting her teeth as she sees the bitter task she started through to its end. Her husband weeps freely and often, and, once the final breath has passed his wife’s ruined lips, and the nurse reaches down to close her eyes, throws himself across her body, howling his grief. It’s a couple of days before she’s buried. She’s a suicide, remember, and at this time that’s still a sin in the popular understanding. Finally, the Catholic church in Woodstock agrees to take her; although they insist that she be placed outside the cemetery proper. At Clara’s request, Lottie attends the funeral. While it’s a Catholic service, and the Schmidts have always been good Lutherans who keep a safe distance from the errors of popery, Clara is surprisingly insistent. “Those things don’t matter in this place,” she says, much to her pious daughter’s shock. At the funeral, the husband is in worse shape than the day before. There’s no helping the man, in part because no one speaks Hungarian and his English isn’t that good. Ironically, it’s at the woman’s funeral that Lottie first learns her name, Helen, and that of her husband, George.

After Helen is committed to the ground, George retreats to their house and doesn’t come out for a week. If he needs anything, he sends one of his children for it. The oldest child, a girl named Maria, tells Lottie that all her father does is sit in his bedroom in the dark. Once in a while, he laughs, or shouts something. Maria doesn’t say her father’s drunk pretty much all that time. She doesn’t have to. She’s doing what she can to keep him and the other children fed, but it isn’t easy, without their mother. She’s worried, and she’s right to be. Every day her father stays home from work is one day closer to him being fired. This is the days before labor unions, before compassionate leave and all that kind of thing. A man who’s newly lost his wife can expect a certain amount of sympathy, some leeway, but people’s memories are short for any sorrow that isn’t theirs, and his job has to be done. Over the course of those seven days, a number of people, including Rainer, try to talk to the man, with no success. Wherever he is in his dark room, he’s unreachable.

VII

As I said, a week passes, with everyone growing more uneasy as the wait for the axe to fall. Then, one night, Maria shows up at the Schmidts’ front door, her siblings in tow. She’s fairly agitated, and when Clara asks, “What’s the matter?” answers, “My father left the house this morning, and he didn’t say where he was going or when he’d be back. We haven’t seen him since. I don’t know what to do.” Clara takes them in, says, “He’s probably just gone out for a walk and forgotten the time. I’m sure he’ll be back very soon. You can sleep here tonight with my girls.” All the while, she’s thinking that there are thirteen bars between the camp and Stone Ridge alone, not to mention I don’t know how many whorehouses—more than sufficient opportunity for a man out of his head with grief to heighten the agony.

Clara is mistaken, however; George returns in the wee small hours of the morning and, looking for his daughters, comes chapping at the Schmidts’ door, himself. Rainer answers it. Later Lottie overhears her pa say that he nearly jumped out of his skin when he saw the look on the man’s face. He was grinning, Rainer says, but it was no happy smile. It was the smile of a man who knows that he’s committed a terrible act but is trying with all his might to convince himself that that isn’t the case. He figures if he keeps on smiling, he’ll be able to convince everyone else that everything is fine, and then maybe they’ll be able to convince him. He’s come for his children, George says. “It’s the middle of the night,” Rainer says, “they’re asleep.” The man doesn’t care. “Wake them up,” he says. Then he adds, “I have something wonderful for them to see. There has been a miracle.”

To say Rainer feels nervous is an understatement. It’s obvious that George is laboring under a heavy load, one or maybe two steps away from being crushed beneath it. Rainer can’t decide if the children will help the man shoulder his burden, or if they’ll be the extra weight necessary to break him. George keeps insisting that he has something wonderful for his children, which Rainer doesn’t like the sound of. Eventually, though, Rainer gives in to the man’s request and goes through to wake the children. As he tells Clara, he’s sure the kids will be happier knowing their father has returned, and he judges it better to give the fellow what he’s asking for than to deny him. If there’s any trouble—not that he can say what that trouble might be, but the thought crosses his mind—Rainer figures he’s only a house away. He’s right about the children. They’re happy and relieved to see their father’s returned, and rush to embrace him. For his part, George doesn’t seem any better. That grin modulates only slightly. But the children clutching his pants and shirt don’t appear to drive him any closer to the edge. Thanking Rainer profusely, his neighbor leaves, the children in tow.

Maybe five, maybe ten minutes after George’s departure, just enough time for Rainer to have climbed into bed, closed his eyes, and felt sleep waiting for him, the screaming starts. High-pitched and loud, there’s a lot of it. Rainer sits up; so does Clara. The screaming continues, hysterical, terrified. “That’s the children,” Clara says, meaning their neighbor’s, but Rainer’s already out of bed and heading for the door, cursing himself for a fool. He doesn’t bother stopping to put on his boots, but hauls open the front door and runs across to the neighbor’s house. All the while, the screaming keeps up. “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” Rainer’s muttering to himself. Other folks are at their front doors as Rainer lowers his shoulder and smashes into the neighbor’s. His blood is up. He’s ready for a fight. What he sees inside the house stops him in his tracks.

Directly in front of him, the children are gathered in a screaming knot around Maria, their faces full of tears and horror. To the other side of them stands their father, bent over slightly, his hands out to either side of him, as if he’s apologizing for something. He’s doing all he can to maintain that grin, though his face shakes with the effort. To his right, sitting on a chair, is his late wife.

When Rainer sees the woman there, his first thought is that George sought out her grave, dug it up, and carried the body back to the house. Then she raises her head and looks at him, and Rainer’s heart stops. He takes a step forward. Strange as it sounds, he actually moves closer to her. George is babbling on about miracle this and miracle that, but Rainer isn’t paying any attention to him. He’s studying the woman—Helen’s—eyes, which are different, somehow. Hard as it is to see in the light of the single lantern burning, Rainer is sure Helen’s eyes are gold, entirely gold, with tiny black pupils dotting their centers. He can’t remember what the woman’s eyes looked like before, but he’s sure it wasn’t this.

In the meantime, more folks have shown up at the front door. When they see what’s inside, some turn around and march straight back home. Others join the children in screaming. Still others start praying in whatever language they reserve for talking to God. One man, an Italian, Italo, who’s a stonemason with Rainer, runs into the house and hustles the children outside. When he’s seen them safely to his own house, a few streets over, he walks rapidly back to the house where Rainer is still gazing into Helen’s gold eyes. “Rainer,” he says, “what in the devil is this?”

The sound of his voice calls Rainer back from wherever the woman’s eyes have taken him. He shakes his head, then looks at Italo. His voice hoarse, he says, “This is bad business.”

Together the men turn to George, who’s jammed his hands in his pockets, for all the world like a little boy caught misbehaving. “How did this happen?” Rainer asks. George doesn’t answer him, just starts up again about what a miracle this is, how lucky they are to be here to see it, yes how lucky to see such a miracle. Italo crosses the floor to him, and slaps him. Rainer’s colleague is a small man, his bald crown making him appear older than he is, but George’s head swings with the force of the blow. His grin remains. Before he can pick up the thread of his babble, Italo slaps him again, and a third time. All the while, everyone’s doing their level best not to look at what’s sitting in the chair to George’s right. Helen had been pretty badly beaten-up by the mule-carts, most of the bones in her body broken, and she still looks, well, jagged, misshapen.

Finally, George, his lips and nose bleeding from Italo’s blows, drops the talk of miracles and says something about a man. “What man?” Rainer asks him. “The man in the house,” George says, “the man in the big house.” Neither Rainer nor Italo has the faintest idea what George is talking about, but he goes on. “He understands,” George says, that bloody grin making him look like a nightmarish clown. “The man understands what it is to
lose
—what it is to lose. He listens. He understands. He doesn’t see why a man should suffer for what he didn’t mean to do in the first place. Things happened, that was all. He doesn’t ask for what you don’t have. Strength—to add your strength to his. He gives you his cup. Not compassionate—no, he’s not compassionate; he’s interested, interested, yes. He will help you if you will help him. Things happened. Why not? Your strength. All he asks is that you drink from his cup. His task is almost done. Why not? He will help you if you will help him.” He repeats those words a half-dozen more times, until Italo slaps him. “He’s a fisherman,” George says, and something about that statement strikes him as so funny he starts to giggle, then to chuckle, then to laugh, then to howl. It doesn’t matter how many more slaps Italo gives him, he won’t stop laughing. When he looks at his wife, still sitting calmly in the chair, his eyes start and he laughs even harder. Rainer and Italo exchange looks, and leave the cabin, shutting the door behind them. You can still hear the fellow laughing. All the camp hears it. “This is bad business,” Rainer says again, and Italo agrees, it is.

There’s a crowd gathered outside the house, composed of maybe a third of the men and not a few of the women in the camp. Every one of them has a dozen whispered questions for Rainer and Italo. Yes, they all speak in whispers. Most of their questions the men can’t answer. Nor, it seems, can anyone answer Rainer’s only question: Who is the man in the big house, the fisherman?

By now, the sun is on its way up, and, hard as it is to believe after a night like this one, soon it’ll be time to start work. No matter what happens, your job is always waiting for you, right? The crowd breaks up. A couple of men ask Rainer and Italo to let them know when they learn anything. Inside the house, George’s laughter has worn itself down to a low moaning. Thinking that he should check on George one last time, Rainer steps toward the door. Italo catches his arm. “Not until we know,” Italo says, “not until we know what’s sitting in that chair.”