Among Other Things, I've Taken Up Smoking Page 2

  In this age, the last age, the first tree is hewn, the first ship built. Man finds freedom in trickery, and as his sails fill with wind his affections scatter. Jealousy and hatred take root and flourish between lovers and friends. Iron, stolen from the bowels of the earth—and even worse, gold—fuel the fires of war. Finally the brutes covet the gods’ own sanctuary, and, piling mountains one on top of another, attempt to reach the stars. Jove, watching with disgust, throws a thunderbolt through Olympus and the mountain shatters, crushing the entire foolish race. But when still another, crueler race springs from the blood-soaked earth, the gods meet in council and decide, once and for all, to flood the world.

  Ovid’s description of this flood takes up many verses, and my father was particularly proud of his translation of it. Though he couldn’t tell, looking out our kitchen window, where the wind was coming from, he would read to me with relish of how Jove darkened the world and locked up the North Wind to let the South Wind rule. The South Wind’s beard and hair were permanently dripping with rain. He spread the sea with waves and filled the air with water. When there was not water enough in heaven, Neptune summoned rivers and springs with a strike of his trident, and fed the ocean until it had no shores. Dolphins took to the woods; birds, finding no place to rest, fell into the waves. The earth, at last, was nothing but liquid: it lay before the gods like their own unending mirror.

  If we were reading from the beginning, this was the end of the story. This was bedtime, lights out, and the murmur of my father and Mr. Blackwell downstairs, the clink of ice, a whiskey bottle against a glass. There are fifteen books in Ovid’s poem about the transformative power of the gods from the beginning of the world to his own time. The flood is not even the end of the first. There are endless myths and fantastic legends to come, and my father read these too: passionate love stories and wonder tales of miracle and change.

  It was Mr. Blackwell who finally asked what happened after the flood, and my father told us both without interest: two representatives of mankind are spared. They are in a rowboat which runs aground on the peak of Parnassus. Deucalion is the son of Prometheus, and Pyrrha is the daughter of a Titan. They are husband and wife. Later he read, with something like scorn, about how they made their way through the mud to kiss the damp marble of a half-submerged temple of Themis, its majestic columns discolored by foul moss. The oracle told them to depart from the temple, veil their heads, loosen their garments, and throw behind them “the bones of your great mother.”

  Deucalion and Pyrrha were horrified. How could they disturb the graves of their mothers? This riddle thrilled me. Deucalion and Pyrrha struggle at first. Pyrrha, trembling, refuses the oracle’s bidding and begs her forgiveness. But Deucalion surmises that the oracle is holy and would never ask such a thing. The answer is that the oracle was speaking of the mother earth; the “bones” are stones buried in the earth’s body. Once I heard this story I wanted my father to read it over and over again. I loved knowing the answer to the riddle. And I loved how they went down the hillside with veiled heads and loosened tunics, throwing stones behind them: it was like a silly game I might have played on the beach. I used to imagine them giggling, glancing fearfully at each other, afraid to look over their shoulders at the trail of dumb rocks, trying to make themselves believe in it.

  The stones, needless to say, began to transform. Aside from the story of Galatea, this was one of the few metamorphoses in which human beings were the final and not the original form. They grew up behind Deucalion and Pyrrha like unfinished statues. They’d lost their previous hardness and the damp earthy parts took the form of flesh; the dry, inflexible parts became bone. In time they became women in the hands of female sculptors, and men in the hands of male sculptors.

  “So we’re made of rock,” Mr. Blackwell responded, amused. Though I knew he loved my father’s stories, he always greeted them with healthy skepticism.

  “In Latin it reads: ‘inde genus durum sumus experiensque laborum / et documenta damus qua simus origine nati,’” my father answered, showing off. “‘Hence come the hardness of our race and our endurance of toil; and we give proof from what origin we are sprung.’”

  “Well, some of us give proof,” Mr. Blackwell teased.

  Mr. Blackwell had been a fisherman all his life. His mother was a Passamaquoddy Indian, but she’d worked in the sardine factories and raised him on the docks. When he was growing up sardine factories had lined the waterfront: Whistles blew all day long for incoming boats—two for fish, four for packers, five for machine operators. At the sound every woman in town picked up her apron and scissors and went to the docks for a ten-hour shift of snipping fish heads. Children came after them, packing the cans into crates.

  Everyone in Yvesport but my father and I called Mr. Blackwell “Blackie.” His first name was Jonas but in the summer his skin tanned to a deep red-brown and he was darker than all the other fishermen. His long, almond-shaped blue eyes got as light as the sea. Still when fishing was good there wasn’t a boat in town that wouldn’t take him on as crew. He had crewed on one of the first big American purse seiners, which netted huge schools of herring in open water, a method of fishing which—though none of the fishermen knew it then—turned out to be the beginning of the end of the industry. Eventually he’d made enough money to buy his own boat, the Sylvia B., and hired two or three men to come out with him for weeklong seining trips in season.

  He’d never been married, and I think at first it seemed natural that he’d help us out. Everyone in town, except for Mr. Blackwell, called my father “the professor”—but the joke, of course, was that he didn’t know anything. Mr. Blackwell, on the other hand, knew everything. There wasn’t any way to run telephone wires or electricity out to the house, and it was Mr. Blackwell who helped my parents set up a radio and a generator, and buy a small fishing boat, Miss Suzy, for when the weather was too rough for the dory. After my mother died he taught my father how to cook, and that spring he built a swing for me off the old oak in front of the house while he and my father fixed the roof and rebuilt the porch. When I was old enough he taught me how to skin a fish, how the tides worked, and how to steer the dory through fog as thick as milk.

  It was his idea that I go to school. I was five, and my father, who was already teaching me to read, didn’t see the point in my spending time with “illiterate children.” Mr. Blackwell didn’t argue with him: he signed me up for Yvesport Elementary and told him he was taking me. He helped me make molasses cookies for the first day, carefully counting out enough for each of the fifteen children in the class to have two. I was excited. I packed the cookies in a tin and in the morning I asked Mr. Blackwell to braid my hair tight. I held the tin close on the way over, to keep it from dropping into the cold ocean, and wouldn’t let go even to hold his hand on the walk up the hill from the dock. But when I got to the classroom all I could do was hold on to his pant leg and stare.

  The mothers were there with their children, holding on to the girls and scolding the boys, who were already chasing each other and knocking down chairs. I remember thinking there were too many people—I didn’t have enough cookies and I wanted to go home. The teacher came over and introduced herself. She leaned down encouragingly and asked my name, a thin gold necklace with a little heart on it swinging forward between her breasts. “Do you want your father to stay a little while?” she said.

  I looked up at her, my mouth shut tight, and Mr. Blackwell looked down at me and winked. I nodded. It felt like the first lie I’d ever told and I remember the excitement of it, the intimacy of having a secret, like love itself. I held his hand again and together we watched the mothers kiss their children goodbye. The children picked up toys, joined in games, and forgot their mothers before they were out the door.

  “Should we give the cookies to the teacher?” Mr. Blackwell asked me.

  I nodded and he waited until she’d said goodbye to all the mothers, and then he brought me over. “Miranda made some cookies for the kids,” he said. “T
here’re two for each of them.”

  “How nice!” she said. “Did your mother help you make them?”

  I shook my head, looking at Mr. Blackwell. Were we going to lie about this too?

  “Her mother’s passed away,” he said. “I’m just taking her in for her father. They live out on Crab Island.”

  “Oh,” she said, looking at me with surprise. “I’m sorry.”

  Everyone in Yvesport knew about my mother and I can only remember a handful of times that I had had to explain it; it must have been the same for Mr. Blackwell, who took me everywhere those days.

  “She’s doing alright,” Mr. Blackwell said warmly. “Her father’s kept her busy with learning to read.”

  I saw her look at him like she hadn’t really heard. For some reason telling people your mother is gone always makes them think of themselves. In the stories my father read me from Metamorphoses the mothers were the ones looking for their daughters: Ceres, goddess of the earth, searching for the missing Proserpine, stolen in the midst of gathering flowers, by Pluto, the tyrant of the underworld, and brought by his dark horses to sit beside him in his lonely palace.

  There is a Sicilian water nymph, Cyane, who rises from her pool in an attempt to rescue Ceres’s daughter, and when Pluto, determined to have his prize, hurls his royal scepter to the earth and breaks open the gates of his kingdom once and for all, Cyane begins to weep and cannot stop. Her limbs melt away, her dark hair, her hands, her feet—into a whirl of current, until finally she is only a spring in the pool where she was once a powerful spirit. When Ceres, continuing to search without rest for her daughter, comes back to Sicily and visits Cyane, the mournful nymph has no mouth or tongue with which to tell her where her daughter has gone. In desperation Cyane stirs her own waters until Proserpine’s girdle floats to the top.

  When Ceres sees the telltale garment her panicked search turns to rage: still uncertain whom to blame, she turns against her faithful earth, causing seeds to spoil and crops to perish on their first shoots—now by too much sun, now by torrential rain and storms. It takes the interference of yet another nymph to stop her destruction: Arethusa tells her she has seen her daughter in the underworld, enthroned beside the king of darkness. Ceres demands her daughter back, but Jove, who is the father, forces her to compromise: he will return the daughter to her mother for one half of the year, but the other half she must spend with her husband.

  The story, of course, is meant to explain the winter and spring: when Proserpine is gone her mother is sad and the world is barren and empty; when she returns the world erupts in cheerful sunshine and new growth. When I asked my father what would have happened if Ceres had died instead, Mr. Blackwell had piped up from the kitchen: “There’d be no more farmers and everyone would be a fisherman.”

  “But neither would Proserpine have any reason to leave her kingdom,” my father had replied, more to Mr. Blackwell than to me.

  Mr. Blackwell was at the stove with his back to us. “I bet she could think of a reason,” he’d said, flipping over the grilled cheese sandwich he was making for me.

  I knew he was my reason, and that he was my father’s too. When we were alone my father and I were in our own dark kingdom. I was quiet in the house, and if my father was not writing or reading a book, he was often staring blindly out the window. I didn’t think he was thinking about my mother. We almost never spoke of her, and the few pictures we had up of her in the house had begun to look unfamiliar to me as soon as she was gone. Mr. Blackwell said she was shy, but in the pictures we had she looked distant, as if she had stepped into a fog to lose herself just before each shutter snapped.

  When another winter came around and the island was covered with snow Mr. Blackwell still came over for supper, brought venison in season, leaned against the counter with a drink while my father chopped onions the way Mr. Blackwell had taught him—rocking one long knife back and forth with both hands, getting it done quick as possible, to shorten all the crying. More often than not he stayed after dinner, and he and my father took a bottle of whiskey into the living room and sat by the fire after I went to bed.

  After I started going to school Mr. Blackwell went to the Peavey Library to get me the books I told him we were reading—silly rhymes and colored creatures I knew my father would disapprove of. I would not read them in front of the other children in school, but I read them for Mr. Blackwell while he cooked, and he nodded discreetly as I struggled to get to the end of each page. Once, as I was stumbling along, my father joined in from his desk in the living room, in a funny high-pitched voice.

  “Who was that?” Mr. Blackwell said to me when I looked up in surprise.

  “The grouch,” my father answered, making a face.

  All three of us burst into laughter, me in wild giggles, and for a moment I felt happiness sweep across the room like a beam from the lighthouse.

  I helped them paint the porch they built together that spring, and later when Mr. Blackwell persuaded my father to help him repair the roof they let me come up the ladder as long as I sat close against the chimney. There was a chill in the air but they worked with their shirts off, my father’s back and shoulders pink from the sun, his chest a frightening white. Mr. Blackwell moved as if he were on level ground, and my father strained to keep up with him, concentrating on every nail, straightening up only to wipe the sweat from his glasses. Across the water I could see the harbor, Yvesport clustered on the other side of the channel, the boats and houses and empty sardine factories leading around the point to Estes Head Pier and Deep Cove. I leaned against the chimney’s warm, sooty-smelling bricks, glad that we had left the rest of the world behind.

  3

  If you aren’t born in Yvesport, then you are “from away,” no matter how young you are when you arrive. I knew that this alone would always separate my father and me from everyone else in town, much the way, despite his local heritage, Mr. Blackwell’s Indian blood would always separate him. But then each of us also had our own particular way of not fitting in. My father almost never landed the boat properly when he picked me up, whether he was driving the dory or Miss Suzy, and when Mr. Blackwell was on a fishing trip I dreaded going down to the dock after school and waiting for my father to come in, revving the engines and swearing at the gap between the boat and the dock.

  Mr. Blackwell never rushed the Sylvia B., and always pulled her up to the dock to rest her there within an inch of where I was standing. If he wasn’t at sea he was usually waiting for me when I got out of school, fixing something on her, or was somewhere around, leaning over another fisherman’s engine well to diagnose an unfamiliar rattle or repair a slipped crank. Whomever he was working with would quietly finish up their questions as soon as they saw me, letting him go as if his shift had begun. We would get in the Sylvia B. together and I would untie the lines while he let the motor amble.

  She cut through the water with a hefty kind of grace, and once we were out of the harbor in open water, his gaze would settle somewhere beyond her bow, and they would find their own pace, like a horse and rider might, whatever the length of the journey.

  I wouldn’t see inside his house on the mainland until after he and my father stopped speaking, but I had seen it from his truck on the rare occasion that he had to pick something up and brought me with him. It was a trailer on the south side, down the hill and well away from school in a cluster of other small houses and mobile homes. He had built a neat porch outside the front door and had a small yard which he kept mown in the short summer months. Beside the other houses, with their patched-up windows and piles of couches and bicycles out in front, it had an unmistakable air of propriety and privacy; it was not the sort of house that invited you inside.

  The only house I visited with relative frequency in Yvesport when I was a child was Julie Peabody’s. Her father owned the bank, and she might have been the only girl in my class who had enough social status to be able to afford a friendship as odd as mine.

  “I have that book,” she said
to me one day in my second year of school, when I was inside reading during recess and everyone else was out in the playground.

  “I’m just looking at the pictures,” I said, closing it.

  “Why don’t you come outside?” she said, as if she didn’t care whether I could read or not. She had her hair in two perfect, bouncy ponytails, red baubles attached to the elastics that matched the strawberries in her pretty dress. My hair was long, and I knew it was snarled and matted. Mr. Blackwell often said I ought to cut it, which I wouldn’t have minded, but neither of them liked doing it themselves, and sometimes it was years before one or the other of them remembered to take me to the hair salon in town. Julie’s shoes matched her dress, and I thought she must have a whole lineup of colored shoes at home. She was like a doll, and probably had a whole lineup of them too. I looked at her, not sure if I was frightened or jealous.

  She looked right back at me and asked if I was from New York. When I said yes she said her mother had been there, the same way she’d told me she owned the book I was reading, but as she said it I finally saw a spark of jealousy. Once I had something to offer it was different; I went outside with her to play. From that moment on no matter what clothes I wore, or how infrequently I washed my hair, she made sure that I was the one whose hand she held when we were marched into town, that I had a desk next to hers in every class, and that we were on every team together. I never let her down. She knew how to play the games, but I was a fast runner; I could read and spell but she was the one with the neat handwriting; I knew the answers but she put her hand up.

  Her house was on Favor Street, north of school. When I visited her mother would give us a glass of milk and two store-bought cookies on a plate. She had a younger brother, who liked to duck under the table. “I’m a dog!” he would say, and Julie’s mother would look frightened, as if she almost believed him, until Julie gave him a kick and made him cry. Then her mother would pick him up and hold him as if he were a baby.