Northern Lights - Tim O’Brien

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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 Junebugs, 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.

      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 square 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

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