Northern Lights

  “Stop that. He’s a nice man.”

  “I know it. I’m sorry.” He glanced over at the bomb shelter. Some luck, he thought. He rambled the yard and listened while people told him about things.

  “A heat storm.”

  “What?”

  It was Jud. His hat was pushed back. “A heat storm,” he said. “Just a heat storm.”

  People began looking up.

  “Rain,” said Bishop Markham. “It’s rain, all right.” Bishop was GOP, Jud was Democratic-Farmer-Labor.

  “Shit,” Jud cackled. He shook his head and winked at Perry. “Guess I know a heat storm when I see it.”

  The first cool air came in one breath, and a dark splotch in the sky spread out, sliding down and out like a vast sheath or covering or mask. “Heat storm,” said old Jud. He pulled his hat down to settle it. People stood with hands on hips to watch. Lars Nielson hustled his family to the car and drove away.

  Others began to leave.

  “It’s a heat storm all right,” said Jud Harmor. There was a single long wind and the lanterns blew horizontal. Jud’s face was turned up. “I can see it,” he said.

  The wind died, turned warm, then turned cold, then turned warm again. Headlights were snapping on.

  “Where’s Harvey?” Grace was beside him. “People are leaving, he should be here.”

  The wind whipped the tablecloths.

  People rushed for their cars. Jud Harmor stood alone, gazing at the sky with hands on hips. The wind was rushing to Lake Superior. Motors and headlights and opalescent beacons were flaring. Perry carried things inside, rushing, returned for armloads of bottles and cups and plastic forks, papers and bottle openers, party trash, wrappings and containers and leftover birthday cake.

  “Where’s Harvey?” someone hollered.

  Perry folded up the chairs and carried them inside, stacked them on the porch. “Where the devil is Harvey?”

  “Heat storm, heat storm,” Jud Harmor chanted. He was now in a lawn chair, his straw hat gone. His bony face was sawed into a million upward-thrust planes. his eyes were pointed to the sky. “Lo,” he chanted, “a heat storm. Watch the mother come.”

  Perry touched his shoulder. “Better be moving on, Jud. She’s coming in fast.”

  The old man cackled. “Nothin’ but a miserable heat storm. Can’t see what all this fuss is. You won’t see but a heat storm.” Lightning flashed and the old man’s skull shined like a jewel.

  “Okay, Jud.”

  Grace came out wearing a sweater. She was hugging herself. “Where’s Harvey?”

  The old mayor cackled. “Takin’ target practice. You two gotta watch that boy. Ha, ha!” He started to cough.

  Perry went to the shelter. Some rotten luck. Rusty old jealousy. The emotion surprised him. He climbed the bomb shelter and stood on its roof. The wind was hard. Lightning showered in big fluffy puffs, and through the forest, looking out to Route 18, he saw the parade of retreating taillights winding towards Sawmill Landing. He called out and listened and heard a soft answer. Some rotten miserable awful luck, he thought.

  Inside the concrete shelter, lanterns swung from the ceiling and the old generator was going.

  “Ha! Not so crazy after all!” Harvey was grinning, rocking in the old man’s discarded rocking chair. He faced a cement wall. Addie lay on a cot. The shelter was strangely warm and livable. “Beginning to worry for you,” Harvey said. “I was just telling Addie how worried I was. Thought you got caught in it. Nuclear war, you know. You got to be careful. Got to be careful ’cause that fallout is powerful stuff. Rots your testicles off.”

  Addie chuckled.

  “Just a heat storm, Jud says.”

  “Ha! Old Jud doesn’t have to worry about his testicles.”

  Grace came in smiling, carrying the birthday cake. She handed out pieces on scallop-edged napkins.

  “An end-of-the-world party,” Harvey said happily. He was loud. “Can’t think of a better place for it, can’t imagine nicer people to end the world with. Too bad the old man’s not here.”

  “It’s quiet outside,” said Grace.

  “Ah,” Harvey said. “The solemn silence. The silent solemnity.” He stared at Perry. “Sure you want to stay, brother? Don’t remember you giving me much help building this thing. Sure you want to stay?”

  Perry shrugged. Grace cut more cake and the lanterns dangled from the ceiling.

  “It’s just a heat storm, Harv.”

  “Ha. Tell that to your testicles. Just ask the buggers. See what they say.”

  “Let’s just all go outside.”

  “And be doomed?”

  Gently, Grace bent over Harvey, felt his forehead. “You’ve a fever. Are you sick?” She inspected his face, frowning. The lanterns dangled from the ceiling.

  “He’s just a silly pirate,” Addie said.

  Harvey stood up. He was loud. “Right! Absolutely right. Addie, that Addie’s something, isn’t she? When all this blows over and the streets are safe again, then I’m taking Addie to the swamps of New Guinea. I’ve decided.” He struck a pose that could have meant anything. Addie laughed. “Yes, I’ve decided. We’ll begin a new life. Yes. Yes, we’ll plant seed, new seeds, seeds that I’ve prudently set aside for just such catastrophes. I have many seeds. A bull, you know. Yes. Yes, we’ll sail on a blighted sea for a new land, we’ll arrive … arrive, so to speak and so on, arrive on a new and dawning day, again so to speak, and Addie will make Indian carvings, reminders to our hordes of forthcoming descendants, and I … yes, I’ll search the jungles for food and shelter and primitive niceties, and we’ll start afresh.”

  “You’re drunk,” Grace said.

  “Or perhaps Africa,” said Addie, who seemed to be enjoying it. “You haven’t forgotten Africa?”

  “Don’t egg him on.”

  The bomb shelter was very warm, concrete hot, and the lanterns were swinging.

  “Africa,” Harvey stammered. “Ah, yes. Where are we going?”

  “Outside,” Perry said.

  Harvey stared. “Think of your testicles, man.”

  Addie helped with him. They led him outside.

  “The old man wasn’t so crazy, you know. Not all that bloody crazy. Do we have a beer?”

  “Gallons.”

  “Thank God for that.”

  “Can you walk?”

  “Can I walk? Am I mad? What bloody nonsense. A time of national emergency and of course I can walk. I can walk, be damned! A beer.” Harvey threw an arm around Addie’s brown shoulder.

  They came out of the bomb shelter.

  Mammoth clouds had stiffened over the forest, very high and well to the southwest. Tumbling, flopping like earth under a spade, swirling in, coalescing and darkening and fusing into a single expansive element over the forest.

  Harvey sniffed the air. “Mustard gas. Jesus of Mercy, who would’ve thought they still had mustard gas?”

  The promise was great.

  There was certain rhythm.

  Jud Harmor still sat in his lawn chair. His eyes were closed.

  “Poor old Jud,” Harvey muttered. “Stuff got to him … We must all now buck up. The end is coming and we shall go with class. A little class never hurt. Buck up, chaps. Let us mourn old Jud, a finer man, parades and all.”

  The clouds swirled high, a breathing, soft respiration. Harvey filled a paper cup with beer. “A toast to Jud! A finer man we could not find, a finer man …” Odors rose from the forest tissue, compounds of chlorophyll and wastes. Great cavities opened, steam rose from the leaves, the clouds tumbled high, vapors filled the forest, obscene smells of salamanders and pine. “The end is with us,” chanted Harvey. “And the old man was not crazy at all.” The clouds stiffened and swelled. Old Jud lay in the lawn chair, eyes closed as the clouds rolled towards Lake Superior, huge and threatening but refusing to rain. “Let us … let us mourn old Jud,” Harvey was saying. “A free spirit. A false prophet. A free spirit, thank God, free, free at last, old Jud.”

&n
bsp; “Hush,” Grace whispered. “He’s sleeping.”

  “Ha! Aha, you’ll see. You’ll see. The fallout’s got him, sure as hell. Look at him. Let’s examine the old gent’s testicles. Ha, that’ll tell the old tale.”

  “Just relax.”

  Perry brought out four chairs. They watched the clouds roll towards the great lake.

  Jud suddenly sat up. He started cackling, raised his fist up. “What did I say?”

  The air was hot.

  Energy charged out of the clouds. The sky went wild. Thunder created a wind of its own.

  “Marvelous,” Addie breathed.

  The clouds moved fast.

  “Heat storm,” Jud cackled. “What did I say?”

  The storm tumbled over on itself, and there was no rain. Grace pulled her sweater tight. Addie lay back in her chair. Harvey was shivering. A slice of electricity shot like white ribbon from the clouds. “Marvelous,” Addie murmured. Her eyes were black. The clouds tumbled and flopped, rushing eastwards, the lightning exploding in fluffs, the whole forest stopped. Grace whispered something. Addie’s eyes were black. She was barefoot. Her feet were under her, her legs were dark. The sky crashed. Grace was whispering. He watched Addie. Her cheekbones were high and shining. Asiatic, Indian, primitive, shining, upward looking, and the lightning flashed again, and her hair was long and back over her shoulders without knots or bows or curls. “We should be going in,” Grace was whispering, but the heat storm thrashed in the forest, all around them, and the wind swept in hot, and Addie’s eyes were lighted, and Grace whispered, “We should go inside.” She whispered, “I’m cold, hon.”

  “What?”

  “I’m cold.”

  He heard her. He curled an arm around her. She could embarrass him.

  Slowly the storm rolled overhead, high like a battle far off. It rolled towards the east and left a clean night sky behind it. There was no rain.

  Jud Harmor stood up. “Show’s over,” he announced. He’d found his straw hat. “I’ll be going.”

  Harvey did not get up. His eyes were wide open to the sky.

  Perry helped the old man to his truck. Jud climbed in and slammed the door. He leaned his head out. “Just a lousy heat storm,” he said. “You gotta watch your brother. I think he’s insane.”

  He lay there. The storm was over.

  Restless, he got out of bed and went to the window. A light was burning in the bomb shelter. He showered, lay down again. “Sleep,” he said. He tried not to think. Addie. It didn’t matter. Grace was awake. She whispered something.

  He got up, went to the bathroom and shaved. Then he dressed. He roamed about, restless, tried to read, sat at the kitchen table. Then he went outside. The crickets were back. The lawn chairs were empty. The bomb shelter light was off and everything was quiet. He followed the path to Pliney’s Pond.

  The smell could be awful. All in the mind. He sat on a rock. Addie and Harvey, the names rattled back and forth. The water was deep and quiet. The creature he’d met as a child. Pincers and black eyes attached by cords to the ganglia. A body shaped like a barber’s electric clippers. And the deep-down pond, he remembered. Addie and Harvey. No matter. The place could stink. It was algaed and full of primitive organisms.

  No matter, he was older now, he wasn’t a kid, he had a wife and his father’s house. His father had taken him to the pond to learn to swim. His father. Harvey had come, too. That had been another July, and they’d gone the three of them to Pliney’s Pond and his father had said, “This is where you’ll learn to swim. No back talk, just jump in.” Perry remembered undressing slowly. “It stinks,” he’d cried, going in. Mosquito eggs, crayfish, larvae, slime and june bugs, frogs and newts and snakes and toads and lizards, Indian shit and rot, and Harvey had gone in, too. Harvey had gone to the middle of the pond. “No back talk,” the old man ordered, and Perry waded in, waded in and fell headlong into the stinking water, eyes in terror and sobs choked in sewage. Ash and sewage, he remembered it. Then the creature, its pincers and dangling black eyes, an inch from his face, a quarter-inch, a real monster closing in, and he’d sobbed, sucking in more of the thick water, and the creature came.

  The pond did stink. There was no question. Addie and Harvey.

  Perry sat on the rock. It didn’t matter. The place was quiet, the forest grew to the edge of the pond, and the pond was quiet. He relaxed. Things could be put in perspective. That was what had to be done. He dipped into the pond and took out a handful of water and let it straight through his fingers. Harvey and Addie, some luck. The water left a black residue. It was late. It was always getting late. He decided it was time for reformation. Begin exercising. Eat less. He would be kind to Grace; she deserved it. He would be kind to Harvey. He would get involved, paint the house, go into the woods, go deep. He heard a loon. It was far off. It wasn’t such a bad night. It was getting cool. Harvey was fine. Addie was fine; she was something else again. The way she walked, heels down. Grace was fine, too. The loon called again and he got up.

  Things were always better. He brushed himself off, followed the path to the house. There were no lights. The bomb shelter crouched low in the yard. There were no lights anywhere.

  He folded up the lawn chairs, carried them to the porch and stacked them. He was careful to be quiet. He looked up and smiled. The sky was surprisingly light, and there was a moon and many stars.

  “Feel better?” Grace whispered.

  “Yes. I had a walk.”

  The sheets were cool now, and Perry held her.

  “Tired?”

  “Hmmm, I was sleeping. Storm over?”

  “All quiet. Getting nice out there.”

  “Rain.”

  “No. No rain yet. It’ll come.”

  She whispered. “Your face is burnt.”

  “It’s all right. I feel better. I don’t know what gets into me.”

  “Let’s put some cream on your face.” She gently touched his nose. Perry took her hand. “You are a woman,” he said. “Gee,” she whispered. She got the cream from the nightstand. They undressed and Perry lay face up on the bed. He closed his eyes. He breathed easy. He felt the lotion on his chest. He did feel better. He breathed slowly. “What are you doing?”

  “Putting lotion on you,” she whispered. “Hold still now.”

  But he wasn’t thinking. He was tired. Wings clipped by the old man. No bulls here. Rushing from nowhere to nowhere and learning to swim. “Just lie still now,” she whispered. But he wasn’t listening because the thick waters were against his ears. “Shhhhhh,” she whispered, “does that feel good now? Lie still, lie still,” part of the pond, soft as water. He concentrated, finally opening his eyes, and she smiled at him. She reached in the dark for a tissue and wiped him. “Such a fountain,” she whispered.

  “Come here.”

  “Can we have a baby someday?”

  “Come here.”

  Soft as water. He tightened his arms, squeezing, and he held her and squeezed, all his energy, squeezed until she said to stop.

  Elements

  They called it a dying town. People were always saying it: Sawmill Landing won’t last another decade. But for all the talk, Perry never saw the death, only the shabby circumstances of the movements around him. It was a melancholia, seeded in the elements, but he had no idea where it started. It might have started with the Ice Age. Four glaciers advancing and receding over the course of a million years, freezing, stinging with crystalline cold, digging out boulders, ice a mile deep, a permanent stillness. Then the Stone Age. Indians. First the Sioux, later the Chippewa. In the basement of the town library there was a museum that housed all the relics: broadheads, pottery, clay pipes, hides and drawings. Then the French, taking what they could. Then the Swedes. The Swedes built houses. Pine planks, dirt floors, hard-rock fireplaces. The Swedes hacked at the forest, broke their backs and ploughs trying to turn the Arrowhead into corn-bearing land.

  In 1854, the Chippewa ceded their timber and fish and game for a few hundred squa
re miles of reservation.

  In 1856, the Swedes named their hamlet Rabisholm. Fourteen houses, a blacksmith, twenty-six horses, a stable and a store. That same year Minnesota became a state.

  In 1857, the Germans came. And a few Dutch and the Finns.

  In 1858, an Indian boy was hanged for intention to rape. In 1859, an Indian family was found frozen in the snow, dead of starvation before freezing. In 1860, two full-grown Indian males were shot dead while stealing corn from Ole Borg. In 1862, while the southern Sioux were going crazy with revenge, three Chippewa renegades slipped into Ole Borg’s house and cracked his skull with a hatchet. The renegades were later captured by a cavalry troop dispatched from Fort Snelling. They were hanged until dead.

  In 1863, the town celebrated its first Ole Borg Day.

  In ten easy years, the Indians were gone, pushed north and west.

  Perry learned about the hardships. Hardship was something the old man stressed. He learned that the Swedes broke ploughs on base rock, got robbed on prices, seeded soil meant for spruce and not corn, wore silent hard faces. They were blond. He learned that they left Sweden in famine and, in perfect irony, came to Minnesota just in time for more of the same: locusts and drought, fierce winter and boulders; they left bad soil for worse soil, rock for rock, pine for pine. In some miserable genetic cycle, they did not leave at all and they did not arrive.

  The Germans came later. The Germans came late enough to see that their future was not in the land. Instead they opened taverns and a hardware store and an implement shop, taking the Swedes’ money, extending credit, turning the bundle of tiny farms into a hamlet. Within a few years it became a predominantly German village, both in numbers and power, but the Swedes still remained vital to the tight circle of economics, because without them there was no need for German shops. Old World rivalries persisted, and Perry heard the story often: In 1863 a meeting was convened to choose the village’s soldiers for the war against slavery. No one understood the war, but everyone wanted to fight it. They hadn’t heard how many were dying. At the meeting it was decided that only a few could go, and after hours of haggling the number was fixed at fourteen, a quarter of the able-bodied men. The Germans, citing their new predominance, insisted on supplying ten of the fourteen. The Swedes wanted the war party split equally, arguing that they’d been the first to settle the forest, that they had eight more corpses in the cemetery, and that their farming sustained the small community. In short, Perry’s father had explained with relish, in short they were arguing about the right to die. “Well,” the old man said, telling the story, “the Germans threatened to foreclose on two mortgages. Herb Wolff’s great-grandfather was one of the bastards. Anyhow, the Swedes told them to go to hell, threatening to take their corn and trade into Two Harbors. So the krauts threatened to close down their shops. And the Swedes threatened to boycott the shops. And the krauts threatened no more credit. On and on. Well, next thing you know there’s a scuffle and somebody knocks over a lamp and the meeting hall catches fire, threatening a forest fire, threatening everything. And that, if you see the point, that was the final threat.”