Mom said she loved them. She never pointed out that tomato cages are supposed to be narrow at the bottom and wide at the top—I’d crafted flags for upside-down tomato cages. From that year forward she placed the tomato cages so that they looked like miniature oil wells out in the garden and at the end of each growing season would carefully roll up the flags and then duct-tape the roll so that the flags wouldn’t be affected when the tomato cages were stacked in the pole barn.
Mom had had a good October day two years before, tending to her garden, preparing it for the winter and for a spring planting the doctors correctly predicted she wouldn’t see. I helped her do some raking and told her she didn’t have to tape the flags on the tomato cages. By that time I knew how stupid I’d been and was embarrassed that the neighbors might see our upside-down cages and think I was just a kid.
“We should just throw those out,” I said.
“Nonsense, Charlie. I love my flags,” Mom said. I was growing up, in my eyes, but she sometimes still treated me as a child.
She tenderly taped each flag in a thick roll atop the cages, then straightened, putting a hand to her face. “Whew. Let’s put these away tomorrow; I need to go lie down.”
The way I remembered it, she never really got out of bed after that, not in a way that didn’t make me feel as if she were invisibly tethered to it. By April of the following year, my dad and I were standing numbly in a spring snowstorm, listening to Pastor Klausen talk about what a wonderful woman Laura Hall was, while the wet built up on the casket in a way that made me want to towel it off to save the gloss from being ruined. My dad held my hand and his fingers were like ice.
Most of the people wore black. I resented the ones who gave me pitying glances and I resented the ones who lacked the courage to look at me and I resented the ones who reacted to the wet weather with distressed expressions. I knew it wasn’t fair, but there was nothing fair about any of it.
I didn’t cry until we got back home, where Mom’s presence was still everywhere, palpable, defying the unreal fact of her death. And then, when I cried, it was as much out of guilt for what I had done as anything else.
So that’s why I hated my father for bringing up the tomato cages. Why now? Why did he even care?
Touching them was the last normal thing my mother had ever done. As long as they still stood sentry out there in the garden, it was as if they were waiting for a woman who was coming back any time now.
The next morning, instead of obeying my father’s instructions to yank the tomato cages, I deliberately chose to embrace a glorious disobedience. I’d long before discovered the small tin in my father’s bedroom drawer that contained the key to the gun cabinet. I loved to pull the guns out and sight down on small prey in the backyard and “pow!” they’d be blown to imaginary bits. The .30-06, a huge, heavy rifle, had a small telescope on top, two thin hairs intersecting on pretend wolves and bears across the valley. The slugs rolled around in my hand with a thrilling weight and snicked into place when I loaded each weapon.
Dad told me when we first moved to Idaho that when I was big enough he’d teach me how to handle guns. But he was never going to teach me; he hadn’t even opened the cabinet in two years.
I spread a kitchen towel on the table and lined up my tools. I glanced at the sweep hand on the clock and saw that it was just ten seconds away from 11:50 A.M. I decided to see if I could disassemble a weapon in two minutes, the way recruits did in boot camp movies. The second hand passed over the 12 and I began confidently dismantling my dad’s .30-06 rifle.
I went further this time than ever before, basically taking the gun completely apart. I examined each piece of metal, a few of them very small, as I freed them from the main assembly, placing them on the towel like a surgeon lining up scalpels before an operation.
Just before noon I realized I’d failed to track when my two minutes were up, but it didn’t matter because I’d just heard something that made me freeze, my eyes wide open, disbelieving.
We seldom got much traffic up in these hills beyond town. Anyone turning off the paved road, County Highway 206, was either lost or on his way to one of only six houses clustered up here on Hidden Creek Road. A long climb, full of switchbacks, would take you to our place, and a little farther on you’d crest the hill and then make your way back down to join Highway 206 again, the downward half of the loop just as steep as the upward half.
I knew that climb well. The school bus always went to the opposite end of Hidden Creek Road first, so that our house was the last stop. This was fine for the morning because it meant I had a few more minutes to sleep in, but in the afternoon I was too impatient to make the full loop and would get out with a handful of other students who lived just off Highway 206. Then I’d run home, my breath getting ragged as I chugged up the steep switchbacks on Hidden Creek Road. And I mean run, because my mom was sick and I wanted to see her and make sure she was okay.
I never told her the reason I raced up Hidden Creek Road as if being pursued by outlaws was that I was running home to her, but I’d like to think she knew. She was always glad to see me. Walking in the front door to her welcoming smile was often the high point of the day.
Whenever a vehicle turned off the pavement and headed up our way, we could hear it in the valley. I’d long ago learned which sound meant the mail truck was coming; which clanking, grinding noise meant that the neighbor lady Mrs. Beck was driving her husband’s stick shift; and which throaty roar meant that my father’s Jeep had turned the corner.
It was this last that came to me clearly through the open kitchen window to me now. What was he doing home? Did work let out early?
And what really mattered: I had just a few minutes before my father came into the house and saw me sitting there with his forbidden rifle broken apart on the table. I jumped up and my motion jerked the kitchen towel and the gun parts fell to the floor in a shower of metal.
chapter
TWO
THE sound of the front door opening coincided perfectly with the firm click of the gun cabinet door as I shut it. I whirled and faced my father, who stood on the threshold and stared at me. Behind me I could feel the .30-06 rifle vibrating in its slot. I’d reassembled it with an alacrity that would put a smile on the face of any drill sergeant, but I was still standing right in front of the cabinet with no excuse for why I was there, guilt painted all over my face. I eyed my father with fear. I read in his expression that he knew what I’d been doing, and my heart sank with it.
“Charlie?” he said, his tone puzzled.
I drew in a breath. My fists clenched the gun cabinet key in my hand, its tiny teeth digging into my palm.
“Charlie? You’re not ready?”
I blinked at this, unsure.
“Get a move on. It’s Saturday; did you forget what day it was?”
Truthfully, I had. It was summer vacation, and I had lost all sense of the calendar. Saturdays my father took me to the YMCA for junior-lifesaver training. I was supposed to be wearing my bathing suit.
“Oh!” I could have laughed with relief. I ran down the hall, stealthily replaced his key, then tiptoed back to my bedroom and slipped into my trunks and grabbed a towel. He was already back out in the driveway when I emerged from my bedroom and skipped past the gun cabinet, giving the rifles a parting glance.
Dad started the Jeep as I slid in. He backed out of the driveway and we bumped along in silence.
The air was so clear it seemed to shine as the Jeep rattled down the curvy, rutted road. I looked out at the perfect day and tried to think of something to say to my father.
The county road snaked along next to the river, Dad’s thickly treaded tires buzzing on the pavement. When we first moved to Selkirk River five years ago, I noticed the quick transition from utter wilderness to town, a sudden clutch of buildings jumping up from the riverbank as if in surprise. It was like, I told my mom, a house here and a house there got together and said, Well hey, we might as well have a town while we’re at it!
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Selkirk River put everything it had into about five square blocks and then seemed to lose ambition. Downriver the homes and occasional stores continued a ways, and the shop where my dad’s employer turned out customized furniture parts was another couple of miles in that direction, but after that there was nothing to the south until you got to the city of Sandpoint. Up north there were only mountains and Canada, both seeming to stretch forever.
My dad wheeled into the parking lot of the YMCA, turned off the Jeep, and then twisted in his seat to look at me. I felt a rising, unspecified guilt and cast about for something to attach it to. Could he know about the rifle?
“I need to talk to you, Charlie.”
“Yessir.” I swallowed.
“It’s about where I was this morning. Do you remember me telling you I had business to take care of?”
He’d never told me that. I could recall with absolute clarity everything my father had said to me the past month, the past two months, maybe even stretching all the way back to Mom’s funeral, because he spoke so seldom now. I wondered if this meant he was talking to me in his head, like I often did with him, and that he was confused over what was real and what he had imagined.
“I don’t remember that.”
He thought about it. “I guess I meant to. Charlie, I’ve decided to go into business with Rod; you know Rod Shelburton, has that ranch where we all rode horses a couple times? Him.”
Dad was watching me intently. I tried to understand what sort of reaction was expected of me. “Okay,” I finally said.
“The thing is, I’m investing some money with him. What’s left from your mom’s life insurance after we paid off the medical bills. You understand? So it’s like it’s not just my money. It’s our money, Charlie, yours and mine both. So in a way, I’m investing for the both of us.” With that, he stuck out his hand like we were closing a business transaction.
I guess I’d known there was some money after my mother died, but I never thought of myself as having any claim to it. I gripped Dad’s hand and shook it, baffled.
“Okay then. You have a good time in Lifesaving.”
I was dismissed. Still a bit unclear, I swung out of the Jeep and headed toward the building. I heard the Jeep start up behind me but didn’t turn around to wave, because I hated when I did that and my dad wasn’t looking at me to wave back. My hand would just hang there in the air, waving at nothing, noticed by no one.
I was one of only two eighth graders in Junior Lifesaving. The rest were seventh graders and one sixth grader. Seventh graders were in the lowest grade in junior high school and considered to be among the most worthless life-forms on the planet. They were referred to as “sevies.” I didn’t talk to them or acknowledge them because they were so far beneath me.
I had been a seventh grader myself until just a few weeks ago.
Back in my bedroom I had a photograph taken of me when I was in Little League in Prairie Village, Kansas. I’m standing there with the rest of my teammates, and here’s why the picture was on my wall: I was a big kid. Not the biggest on the team but easily one of the three or four largest. My coach called me Slugger.
What happened then was we moved to Idaho and the clean air and water apparently stunted my growth. I just stopped growing, stopped gaining weight. As I stood shivering and wet by the indoor pool at the YMCA, I was acutely aware that I was shorter than any of the despised sevies and barely had any height on the sixth grader. Every one of my ribs was clearly on display, and my scrawny legs stood storklike out of baggy swim trunks, as if someone had put shorts on a tomato cage.
Our instructor’s name was Kay. I thought of her then as an exotic older woman, but looking back on it I suppose she was no more than eighteen or nineteen years old.
I had decided to take junior-lifesaving classes because I harbored a fantasy about saving Joy Ebert, a blond, blue-eyed girl in my grade, from the river rapids. She’d be drowning and I’d plunge in and pull her to safety and she would love me and marry me. I had been in love with Joy since fourth grade and had even talked to her a few times.
Then I went to the first junior-lifesaving class and Joy was forgotten: I was totally in love with Kay. Kay had a thin figure she kept wrapped in a taut one-piece bathing suit—both of us had some blossoming to do, I figured, so maybe she wouldn’t care about our age difference so much. In a part of the country where the faces were as pale and uniformly bland as uncooked biscuits in a pan, Kay was deliciously exotic, some kind of Asian blood adding spice to her look. Now it was Kay, with her short black hair and almond-shaped eyes, whom I pictured rescuing from the river waters; she would be pleased one of her students had learned so well and she would love me and marry me.
I was sort of big on the idea of marriage, which was somewhat of an unusual attitude for an eighth-grade boy, but I liked the permanence it implied. You married a girl and she was yours forever; there was even a law about it.
“Now these are your manuals,” Kay said to us, holding up a pamphlet with the Red Cross on it. “Who wants to pass them out?”
As one all seven of us surged forward, and Kay backed up, laughing a little. “No, I mean one person to hand them out. Here,” she said, turning to Danny Alderton. “Pass these out.”
The rest of us tried to hide our jealousy.
Danny Alderton was a neighborhood friend, though at that moment I didn’t have much use for him, because Kay had picked him over me. He lived up the road from us, next door to the Becks. His skin turned a little pink, his freckles burning, as he accepted the pamphlets and handed one each to his classmates. “Here,” he muttered as he thrust one at me.
“Be sure to study the chapter on mouth-to-mouth resuscitation,” Kay lectured us. “Once you have someone out of the water, you need to make sure their lungs are clear, and you need to give them mouth-to-mouth until they can breathe on their own. In two weeks, we’ll have a class on it. Okay? You don’t need to wear your swimsuits that day. We’ll be practicing the whole session. Yes, Matthew.”
The sixth grader had his hand up. I never asked Kay questions lest she thought I was unworldly. That’s why God invented sixth graders.
“What do you mean, ‘practicing’?” Matthew asked. His teeth were chattering from the cold and it gave his question a trembling-with-fear quality.
Kay didn’t understand the question. “What do you mean what do I mean?”
Matthew struggled to put it into words. He gestured to us, his classmates. “Practice?” he asked tremulously. “On who?” As in, do mouth-to-mouth with each other?
The thought hadn’t occurred to me, but now that Matthew had brought it up I figured if his assumption was correct I’d probably skip that lesson.
“Oh,” Kay said, getting it. She shrugged. “On me.”
She turned away to pick up some life rings and thus missed the shock that passed over our faces. I was so flabbergasted I forgot my boycott of the seventh graders and exchanged stunned expressions with them.
I realize times have changed, but it was a more simple era then, and I had never before kissed a girl. The previous year a torrid wave of making out had rampaged through the school like a fever, but it had passed me by as if I had been inoculated. The idea that my first lip-to-lip experience would be with a womanly woman like Kay drenched me with excitement and dread.
We spent the afternoon pulling each other out of the water. Half the time I simulated drowning and half the time I simulated saving, but all of the time I was in a full-out swoon, going through the motions. In two weeks I would be mouth-on-mouth with a woman. I had an appointment.
Dad picked me up and asked me how my lesson went and I said, “Fine.” He asked me if I wanted burgers for dinner and I said, “Fine.” He suggested I go fishing in the creek while he went back to work with Mr. Shelburton; I said, “Fine.” I was in a fog.
What pulled me out of my daydreamy state was what I saw as I headed out the back door with rod and creel. My father had been busy while I’d been dragging fake
drowning seventh graders out of the water at the YMCA.
Mom’s tomato cages were gone.
Our paved driveway descended steeply from Hidden Creek Road and swooped into the two-car garage, which was set into the ground floor of our house. If you ignored the curve and went straight, a dirt driveway branched off and ended ten yards away at a pole barn. It looked more like a big garage than anything, with a two-car-wide garage door in front and a person-sized door on the side.
The top of the side door was glass, so I didn’t have to go inside to confirm that the tomato cages were stacked in a neat pyramid over on the far wall; I just peered in the window. I stared at them for a long time.
What was I going to do, put them back? Then it would be by my hand, not my mom’s, that the cages stood sentry in the garden.
I didn’t understand why my father didn’t see any value in leaving Mom’s things alone. I hated it when my dad’s older sister came to town after the funeral and cleared our home of Mom’s clothing and shoes; I despised the way he acted as if her toothbrush in the bathroom meant nothing to him and tossed it in the trash for me to take out with the used dental floss. What was wrong with him?
I trudged down the path to the creek, kicking at rocks. I’d walked that path probably a thousand times; it was my main destination whenever I went outdoors. My mother didn’t like me in the creek because most of it was hidden from the house, etched into a steep crease in the valley floor well past our property line. She preferred I climb the opposite shore and go into the trees where she could see me again, though if I went all the way to the top, where a rocky spine marked the ridgeline, she got nervous because she thought I’d fall from there and tumble all the way back down the hill, like Jack and Jill or something. And if I went over the ridge I was hidden again, and she wasn’t too fond of that, either. It was difficult to have any fun at all under such circumstances.