Under-Heaven Read online

  “Ah, now there is a story to be told. You might think those fellows with the long wings fill the skies of Heaven like fireflies in a country field, but the truth is there aren’t many of them left, at least not in comparison to the rest of us who have made Heaven one of the most popular stops this side of Niagara Falls.”

  “So you haven’t met any?”

  Just then Ricky came out onto the porch. I was happy to see his shirt was white and his pants were only tan-colored up to his calves. Ricky didn’t seem at all surprised that his uncle had roped me into a conversation. He didn’t interrupt.

  “I was just getting ready to tell your friend about my experience with the archangels,” his Uncle Sedrick said jovially.

  “You’ve met them?” Ricky asked, echoing my own curiosity.

  “Ahhh,” his uncle said, “young minds do think alike, don’t they. Oh, yes, I met one of the original angels, but you don’t so much meet them as bask in their presence.”

  “Bask?” Ricky said.

  “They are magnificent to watch, all white and glowing and powerful. There is strength in them that you can sense even from a distance. And when they talk to you, you feel as though you’re the only one they have ever focused on. They make you feel like the most important soul in the universe.”

  “How many times have you talked to one?” Ricky asked.

  I was glad my friend was there because I’m not sure I would have dared to ask so many questions, even though I was quite curious to know.”

  “Just the once,” his uncle answered.

  “What did he say?” I interjected, surprising myself.

  “I believe he said…‘Hello,’ a word with which a certain young gentleman has yet to acquaint himself.”

  In another circumstance, I might have been embarrassed or even upset by the humor-filled lesson, but Uncle Sedrick’s laughter took any sting out of the exchange. I laughed along with him. When Ricky and I bounded off the porch to begin our afternoon adventures, his Uncle Sedrick called out, “Another time I might tell you what he really said.”

  “What, like ‘goodbye’?” Ricky quipped.

  I chuckled and, in Maine fashion, waved farewell.

  10

  Ripped From My Cold Young Fingers

  Ricky’s uncle assured me that Grandma Clara was all right in Heaven, but he couldn’t or wouldn’t say why she hadn’t been to see me in the last three weeks. Other than Ricky and my occasional discussion with Ricky’s uncle, I found myself alone in Under-Heaven. Oh, there were quite a few souls around but, as always, but they tended to come and go so quickly that it actually made me feel lonelier to speak with them than to just keep to myself. There is something intensely sad about having a conversation with someone one day and finding him or her completely gone the next. Those alone times grew more and more difficult with each passing day. Up until then, I hadn’t realized how much I had come to depend on my grandmother. I missed her terribly and knew I needed her.

  As I sat on the bottom step of my front porch and held my trembling hands together, it occurred to me that this might be Grandma Clara’s idea of how best to help me. Maybe she believed that by forcing me to spend more time alone I would have to face my memories. The creature in my mind had grown so violent in the last few weeks that it felt like a vibrating motor running constantly in my head. My stomach was cramped with fear more often than not, and I had grown used to feeling nauseous most of the time.

  Possibly the only good thing that could be said about my troubled state was that looking at the lobster trap no longer seemed to matter. Coldwell, Maine was constantly on my mind now, and my body shivered all the time. Even movement didn’t seem to help. I got up and paced in front of my porch and, when that didn’t work, pulled off my sneakers—which were safely white—and socks so the grass could tickle my toes.

  Visions of Stretch McGraw’s dead body and my father’s bloody arm continued to fill my mind.

  How long could this feeling persist?

  How long would I let it go on?

  I could see at least a dozen people leaning over the fountain pool. The tall elegant cherub towered above them like a guardian. I wished I could go there and feel safe as well. For the briefest moment, I considered joining them. By then, I knew that a soul could stare into the pool and see his or her family back on Earth. It was not possible to talk to them or to interact with them, but at least you could see how they were—

  And remember!

  My stomach cramped with pain.

  I gasped, staggered back to my stairs, and collapsed onto the bottom step. My monster wanted out, and this time it seemed to be winning. I didn’t think I could take the pain much longer. I looked inward. The creature had riddled the prison door with so many dents and scars it looked more like scrap from a salvage yard than a security measure. One hinge had broken free completely, and the gash at the bottom of the door had spread to about halfway up. There was a loud crash and another large dent appeared. I knew my imprisoned beast was only seconds from freedom.

  Something had to be done!

  I doubled over with an especially fierce cramp. I might have screamed out with the agony. I was now face down, my shoulder and cheek pushed uncomfortably into the grass. Under-Heaven was blurred by tears that streamed freely from my nine-year-old eyes. I heard another monstrous crash and an inhuman roar. Looking inward, I was just in time to see the twisted remains of the prison door heave outward.

  It held, if only barely. I knew I had to fight back, but how? What could I do?

  I closed my eyes as physical agony railed against me. I had to fight this. I had to find a way to keep the beast entombed. I struggled to repair the door. I imagined the tear in the steel surface healing itself. Slowly, in my mind’s eye, the gap in the steel began to close.

  It was working!

  I redoubled my effort using every ounce of my personal strength. Though I could hear the beast clawing from the other side, and though I could feel the pain in my stomach and my sides, the rip in the door continued to heal. Next, I pushed inward on the dents with my mind. First one smoothed, then another.

  The beast snarled and roared. It was a frightening mass of anger.

  I turned my mind to the broken hinge.

  “Arrrrrggh, ssheeeee!” I heard.

  Fear gripped my chest. I couldn’t breathe. Could barely think.

  “No,” I whispered as the rampaging creature slammed again and again at the door. Metal screeched and tore. The last hinge snapped. Steel exploded outward.

  I wanted to run but….

  Through my pain, from somewhere a long way off, I heard Ricky’s voice.

  “I’m here,” he said. “I’m here with you, Nate.”

  But it was too late. The memories had me, and I sensed that an ocean of blood was about to flow…

  Since his arrest at the beginning of the summer, something in my father had changed. It was as though a black curtain had fallen over his eyes. He never laughed anymore, and it was seldom that a smile even came to his lips. Though my mother and I often tried to cheer him up, it was a rare occasion to see any joviality in him at all. Only my baby sister Vicky had any success getting through his somber visage, and even then the moments were brief and sporadic. I knew my mother had been pressuring him to leave Maine, but my father wouldn’t hear of it. If he had been committed to Coldwell before, it was as though the death of Stretch McGraw had securely moored him to the Downeast shoreline. He was staying and, by extension, so was his family.

  Though my father’s arm had healed within a few weeks, he still rubbed it absently at different times during the day. When he did, his eyes would glaze over, and I imagined he was reliving that frightful moment when another human being had been placed at the center of his gun sight. Though I couldn’t imagine killing another person, seeing what it did to my father convinced me I never learn.

  The entire dynamic of our family had changed. It used to be my father at the center of all communication with my mother mediating t
he rough spots. But now my mother seemed to handle everything. My father had become a ghost to us, a man who was almost but not quite someone we used to know. I sensed that my dad was still in there somewhere, but I also sensed that it would be a long time before he found his way back to us.

  Each morning, he would gather his lunch, his personal tools (which included a large, formidable fish-scaling knife that appeared after the probation ruling forced him to turn his rifle over to the sheriff) and his most recently repaired traps, which he would stack neatly in the back of his rusty old Ford pickup truck. Then, like a man going to war, he would kiss my mother somberly and drive off toward the docks.

  When he arrived at the pier, there would be a deputy sheriff’s car parked alongside Mr. Brett’s shanty, the same place it would be when my father arrived back at the dock late in the afternoon. I didn’t know if the sheriff’s department was trying to protect my father from the local fisherman or the other way around, but it had become a fact of life here in Coldwell, just as it was a fact that the locals no longer spoke to my father. It was almost as if he had gone from flatlander to alien, but I knew it was worse than that: my father had gone from flatlander to murderer. To make matters worst of all, he had murdered one of the stalwarts of Coldwell. Stretch McGraw had known and been known by everybody for miles around, and whenever his absence was noted, it was usually followed by the angry sentiment: “And that flatlander Thompson got off scot-free.”

  It was in August, on a Friday, when I saw my father pack up his gear and head for the docks for the very last time. Whiskey and I watched through my bedroom window until his truck spun up a cloud of dust pulling out of the driveway. That was the signal we waited for each morning. I slid the window open and Whiskey leapt out onto the porch roof with me not far behind.

  When we had first moved to Coldwell, my parents had though it odd that the original owners had built our house on the leeward side of the ledge when so many other locations on our lot offered spectacular ocean views. However, after our first nor’easter, one of the Maine winter storms that sweeps in from the frigid northeast Atlantic Ocean, they understood. Our ledge deflects the worst of the bitter winds and snows and keeps the house relatively comfortable, even during the worst of January’s and February’s rants.

  Whiskey darted several steps across the roof and easily leapt onto the high, adjacent granite plateau. It wasn’t nearly as easy a fete for me. I backed to the furthest edge of the porch roof then, like a long-jumper, I raced half a dozen steps and leapt as high and far as I could. It wouldn’t have been the first time I missed and fell down between the house and the sheer stone bluff where my father coincidentally deposited his grass clippings and fall leaves in a huge pile. But that morning I soared easily across the narrow alley and grabbed a sapling to steady myself from falling backwards.

  Whiskey and I mounted the small outcropping and stared out at what my father called God’s most beautiful puddle. The harbor was filled with dozens, maybe even a hundred fishing boats sailing in a mass exodus toward deeper waters. From there it looked as though the captains were playing a dangerous game of crisscross chicken. One boat would be heading north, another south and yet a third straight east. Unfortunately, the ocean didn’t have yellow lines or street lights, nor did fishermen moor their boats in a fashion that would allow them to sail out in orderly and safe lines. Instead, it was a melee of speed and skill to flee the harbor. Each morning, I marveled that with all the close calls none of the boats ever collided.

  We sat on the hilltop for a full thirty minutes before Whiskey yelped. Sure enough, the Miss Kane’s two distinctive masts had finally begun to move. Since the incident, my father’s boat was always the last to sail for open water, which probably had something to do with the large Coastguard cutter that appeared off the southeastern horizon at the same time each morning. Guarded on shore and at sea, my father was ready to set sail. Even so, I knew it wasn’t every man that would have been brave enough to do what he did. The Coastguard couldn’t watch him every minute of every day, and the sea was a big place filled with nasty characters, many whom had downeast justice on their minds.

  As if the death of Stretch McGraw hadn’t been bad enough, Stretch’s oldest son Karl had drowned recently while trying to man his father’s boat. The Coastguard found his Beal Boat—named after the nearly famous Maine family who builds them—listing to the side off the shore of Crane’s island. The Coastguard and Marine Wardens felt he had probably run aground on the island’s shallow reefs and had somehow drowned while trying to free the hull. By the time they found his body in a shallow pool, seagulls had already ravaged it.

  Karl had been seventeen.

  In the locals’ minds, my father had taken his second life.

  As my father’s boat dwindled to insignificance, I wondered what school would be like. Though the previous year had been pretty bad, it seemed certain this year would be worse. Already I was hearing kids holler out things like, “Murderer’s kid,” and, “Shotgun Junior”—never mind that my father had killed Stretch with a rifle, not a shotgun. Tommy Edds had once even called me, “Son of Satan.”

  Oh, yeah, the upcoming school year was going to be lots of fun.

  My mother begged my daily for my father to take us back to Rhode Island and find himself a new job.

  “What could be worse than this?” she would say.

  But I was convinced my dad had already left. The person left was no longer her husband or even my dad. He had become something different. The decent loving man we knew had been torn away, leaving only a body in survival-mode. I knew my father never intended to kill Stretch McGraw. But though we all wished it had never happened, it had and now we were trapped in a community that hated us.

  After the Miss Kane completely disappeared from view, I headed back down the short trail and made the much easier return leap down onto the porch roof. Whiskey was only a second behind me. Together we slipped back in through my bedroom window and traipsed downstairs for breakfast.

  To an outsider, it might have looked as though my mother loved to cook, but I knew the truth: it was her way of showing how much she loved us. Even in the best of times, lobstering just barely paid the bills, so like many poor people, my mother made everything from scratch. That didn’t stop her from tailoring the things she made to the tastes of her family. Yesterday, Whiskey and I had picked three quarts of raspberries over in the woods by the Huntington cliffs. This morning, I faced a veritable mountain of raspberry pancakes, one of my favorites. From the bright purple tint of the pancakes, it looked as though my mother was giving them all back to me in a single meal. The butter and tangy fruit aroma was irresistible.

  I dug in.

  Whiskey wasn’t forgotten, either. He got leftovers from two before. I could smell the pork in his bowl.

  “As soon as you two are done, I need you to get me some eggs and milk. I also think your father could use a couple rolls of twine.”

  I groaned.

  “Do we have to, Mom? Tommy lives only a block from the bait shop. I don’t want to listen to him again.”

  “I know he’s not very nice,” she said, brushing a brown lock of hair behind her ear and smiling understandingly, “but words won’t hurt you. I need you to do it.”

  I nodded. Maybe Whiskey and I could find a decent back trail to the bait shop. The last one we tried took us out on the other side of Wilson’s Motel, which was now run by a family with a long name ending in “-ski.” I could never remember it or even remotely pronounce it. My father said they came from Russia and were hard, honest workers. The man used to talk with my father outside the churchyard on the few Sundays we attended, but since the killing that had ended. My father understood and said just by talking to us, Mr. “-ski” would make things harder on his family. I knew from experience that outsiders in Coldwell already had it hard enough. Though, I doubted the “-skis” would have minded me riding through their yard, I felt certain there had to be a direct trail to the bait shop.

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sp; About the time Whiskey and I finished eating, my baby sister waddled into the kitchen. Her hair was tousled and stood at least four inches higher than the top of her head, and she wore only one of two pink slippers. I had to smile. I knew a lot of kids got jealous when a new baby came into the house, but I had never felt that way. Probably Whiskey played a large part in that: his love and dedication to me was complete; combine that with the unwavering love I had always received from my parents and I never felt shorted when the Vicky was born. And, now, watching my tiny sister, only half-awake and rumpled, was a treat.

  My mother leaned down so Vicky could leap into her arms.

  “Good morning, sweetheart.” My mother planted a loud kiss on her cheek. “Are you hungry?”

  “Cereal,” Vicky said.

  Her choice came as no surprise. Vicky had been eating warm oatmeal with maple syrup for breakfast almost since the day she’d been born. My mother had tried to feed her toast, eggs, pancakes and every other manner of morning food, but unless tears were wanted, oatmeal it had to be. Fortunately, my mother felt oatmeal was healthy so there was seldom an argument.

  “Okay, sweetie,” my mother said, putting the small pair of legs back on the floor. “Maybe after you eat we can brush that mop of yours, okay?”

  Vicky shrugged. My sister and I weren’t really hair people. Fortunately, mine was short so it usually looked okay even when I just woke up. Vicky, I knew, was in for a much tougher life. Her hair was already below her shoulders and still growing. It would be an ongoing battle to keep that mess under control. I couldn’t imagine having to comb and brush my hair all the time. Taking baths every other day was bad enough. Of course, I did brush my teeth twice a day, but that wasn’t so bad. Besides, it gave Whiskey a chance to drink cold, fresh water from the toilet bowl, something my mother would have been shocked to find out.

  As soon as my sister was situated in her highchair, a bowl of food on the tray, I accepted a short shopping list and two, one-dollar bills from my mother. She didn’t remind me to be careful. I’d run similar errands a dozen times already this summer, so she knew she could trust I wouldn’t lose the money or drop the groceries. Of course, I never told her how I had left her eggs in the hot sun on a granite ledge a few weeks before so that Whiskey and I could explore a creek down behind Miller’s Dairy Farm. The egg carton had been so hot when we got back, I was surprised the eggs hadn’t been hard-boiled when my mother took them out.