We, that is my family--the old man and my five brothers--are not a people of the water, of the lakes and rivers and streams, but a people, an ancient people if Dad is to be believed, of the land, keepers of livestock and reapers of grain, exiled to this remote corner of the Midwest with its fallow fields, its crushed stalks of corn, its dusty gravel roads that stretch on and on along empty plains and up gentle hills into the gray oblivion of open sky.  In the summertime our little house is adrift in a sea of massive green swells that roll toward the horizon.  Nothing stands between the prairie and the Appalachians but a dull patchwork of fields that act as a conduit for storms, feeding the high thin cirrus clouds with enough heat and moisture to build into angry black anvils that barrel dumb and pitiless across the county and wreak havoc on the lives of so many families, burying the dead beneath treacherous piles of debris, bowed and jagged and impenetrable.   


-2-

We own three barns, simple A-frame structures that from a distance look like wooden vessels skimming verdant waves, each in various stages of disintegration, two of them abandoned altogether and inhabited by screech owls that gobble up the maimed field mice we leave for them at twilight inside shoeboxes like a blood sacrifice from pagan days, offerings meant to appease the jealous and temperamental god who’s had his wary eye on us for quite a while now and who yearns to squash us one by one, slowly and with pleasure, for daring to transgress his laws, which are innumerable and wickedly contradictory.  So far our farm has been spared the sudden cloudbursts and the cyclones that corkscrew across the land.  Maybe the mice have had some effect, who can say, but with each passing storm we await not the return of sunshine and blue skies to our forsaken scrap of paradise but a deluge of apocalyptic proportions, and we wonder if Dad, who works alone for so many hours in the most distant of the three barns, neglecting his duties as a gentleman farmer, has been listening to urgent whispers of mysterious origin and has embarked on this obsessive enterprise to save us, his tragically misunderstood boys, from further catastrophe. 


-3-

We come to the village of Twisted Willows, banished from another town in a neighboring county, and take possession of the clapboard house and fields and barns as well as a twenty-acre tract of woods in the southeast corner of the property, an island of trees surrounded by a yellow haze of withered grain, virgin land, or so we think until we discover a labyrinth of narrow trails, a bit overgrown now but still passable, that leads us through a dense thicket of nettles and then into a dark ring of mature hardwoods, an ever-dimming course, past black oaks and chestnut trees, their gnarled and callused bark transformed into a gallery of leering faces, some with horns and protruding jaws, tricksters of misdirection.  We seem to be going in circles, but eventually the trails converge on a large clearing where shafts of sunlight pierce the dense canopy and reveal the ruins of a house, a modest country estate judging from its dimensions, though only the bleached and eroded stones of the foundation remain.  Not far from the foundation there is a rusted shell of a car propped up on cinderblocks, a Model T, something out of a silent movie, a one-reel black and white comedy accompanied by music from a tinny piano.  A bit further on, somewhat removed from the ruined house and partly concealed under a blue tarp, we find a wooden boat rotting away on top of a trailer, a cabin cruiser, thirty-five feet in length, with a small sinister galley and two narrow berths.  The hull has a hole in it.  The keel is infested with termites.  The warped planks of the deck groan and crack under our weight as we board the wrecked vessel.  “A ghost ship,” whispers Dad, eyes blazing like a fugitive who has at last found a way to elude his pursuers.


-4-

Dad speaks of long summer afternoons sitting on the bow, catching walleye and yellow perch and smallmouth bass for our supper, gutting and cleaning the fish dockside, tossing them in a batter of stale breadcrumbs, grilling them over open flames, and serving them with a side of sweet corn picked from our own fields, a can of beans, a case of his favorite brew.  This, he believes, is the way life ought to be, tranquil and serene after yet another winter imprisonment with six savages, but Dad is no dreamer, no sentimentalist either, definitely not the kind of man who looks forward to spending time with his boys.  What his true intentions are we do not know.  His is a fathomless and inscrutable mind and we accept the fact that we will never know anything more than what he wants us to know.     


-5-

Right away he puts us to work, cutting down a row of trees, their roots stubbornly anchored to the earth.  We saw them into sections, roll the pieces one by one across the packed earth and over to the house.  We spilt the wood and stack it neatly in cords for the cold winter months, and then we begin grinding the stumps.  After a month of hard labor we manage to clear a narrow passage and use our tractor to pull the boat into one of the abandoned barns.  There Dad has worked ever since, sanding and painting the hull an exotic shade of red, the color of tropical fruit, pomegranate maybe that has been crushed into a paste and splattered unevenly on the wood, paint that could be put to better use on our decaying barns.  But letters from town officials urging us to maintain our property, citing strict codes and ordinances by which every resident must abide, do nothing to deter Dad from achieving his goal. 



-6-

We quickly learn never to disturb Dad when he works, and we do not try to interpret the strange things he mumbles as he draws up his plans and measures boards to replace the old ones he rips from the hull.  To warn us away from the barn he throws a chisel, a small ax, a hand saw.  Sometimes he hits the mark, draws blood, so we flee to the woods where we explore the ruins of the old country estate, curious to know its secrets and to unearth its artifacts.  There is nothing of interest around the foundation, a rusty gas can, a pair of glasses with cracked lenses, a book whose pages are green with mildew, slimy with slugs.  After some excavation we discover buried beneath a layer of moss and dirt a heavy iron door that opens to a storm cellar.  With a makeshift torch we descend the creaking stairs.  Here the darkness is absolute, like a cavern.  Translucent bugs scuttle blindly across the floor.  The limestone walls are slick and plugged with lichens.  In the flickering firelight we see a row of storage shelves and on the shelves big glass jars that glow goblin green with their curious contents.  Small, fetal, fish-eyed things, bloated and bloodless masses of flesh float in a cloudy fluid.  We wonder how they came to be in this cellar, these sorrowful creatures.  Like mutant djinns eager to escape their magic lamps and bestow on their liberators three wishes, they tempt us with questions not easily answered: “What is it that you seek?  What is it that you need?  What is it that you intend to do?”


-7-

When we’re sure the old man has collapsed on the deck of the boat, drunk and exhausted, we return to our house, which is cluttered with bags of garbage and crawling with insects of every kind, beetles and ants and jumping spiders.  The field mice that took up residence in the cords of wood have migrated to our house, and though we have devised clever traps we can never rid the walls of them altogether.  At night they scratch at the crumbling plaster and scurry up the studs, and when we stomp through the rooms to hunt them down they squeal with fear and seek out dark corners.  They resist being fed to the owls and do not understand that there is innocent sport in it.  Unlike people, mice have yet to learn that in life it is sometimes best to resign oneself to fate.


-8-

Dad works with such industry, with such purpose, that he starts to resemble some biblical patriarch, stooped and bearded and slightly daft, as if trying to stave off an insidious, dictatorial voice that slithers snake-like into his brain.  Watching him we begin to understand why our teachers, such as they are, the grown children of goat herders and alpaca farmers, men and women in early middle age with degrees from community colleges, people slow to learn the collective wisdom of the world and quick to deny its irrefutable facts, are entranced by stories from their years in Sunday school and why they spend a great deal of time in class teaching us not math and science but beloved fables, of Noah and Jonah and Jesus who was, they say, a fisher of men.  In the school parking lot a glimmering fish is plastered to the back bumper of every pickup truck and sedan, a shiny emblem of the town’s faith, of its hypocrisy and intolerance, too.  People here are judgmental.  They believe, have been told, pressured to think that we are feral, that we are “not quite right,” that we are smokers and drinkers and brawlers and that Dad is an unfit father.  But who among the sinners of Twisted Willows has the impudence to cast the first stone?  Not those emasculated men who live in town, the salesmen and accountants, who fawn over their children, tuck them in at bedtime, read them stories and smother them with kisses before turning out the lights, men who lack courage to pursue the secret lives they invent for themselves, fantasies they indulge in when alone at night but are too ashamed to fulfill during the day.  If Dad ignores us it is not out of negligence but because he is grappling to meet the requirements of an extraordinary challenge, no matter how inane or outlandish it may appear.  He persists because he understands the meaning and consequences of defeat and because he doesn’t want the world to think of him as strange or crazy or just plain stupid.


-9-

The town is not altogether wrong about us.  In fact we do smoke and drink and fight, and it is for these reason, and others, that we are ultimately expelled from the high school.   The principal, a timid woman who lacks confidence in such matters, calls in a team of experts from the county--school psychologists and moonfaced bureaucrats--who arrive one morning to leaf through our files and “assess” us.   We are guilty of many things--of sleeping every day in the back of the classroom; of failing to submit any of our work; of setting fire to the chemistry lab, though no one can prove definitively that we are the responsible party; of stealing prescription medication from a teacher’s purse and sneaking off to the bathroom where we crushed the pills into a powder and snorted the lines with straws from the cafeteria; of running shirtless through the hallways, punching and wrestling each other and spitting blood on the floor; of cornering two girls beneath the stairwell and pawing at their tight jeans and tearing their T-shirts and pinning them against the wall and laughing as they begged to be released; things boys will naturally do if properly initiated into the world as it really is and not deceived by moralizing charlatans.  But in their inquisitorial longing to stamp out this heresy of ours and in their concern for the safety and well being of the other students, the experts decide unanimously and unequivocally to cast us out of the school with an explicit warning never to return.  Dad is not angry with us.  His disdain for educators is well known and he brands the town a Sodom of ignorance.  “One big mind fuck,” he mutters and continues working on the boat.


-10-

Where our mother is buried we do not know and Dad will not say, so in the woods, secretly, because we are afraid that if he sees it he will smash it to bits, we erect a little stone monument inscribed with the only letters that seem appropriate, RIP.  We place wildflowers against it, white trilliums and blue lupines, and we kneel and pray before it and, since no mortal woman will dare waste her love on us, we ask that our dear mother’s ghost, residing as it surely must in the center of heaven, visit us from time to time and sustain us in our moments of darkness.

-11-

Dad is not a superstitious man.  When asked about his religious convictions, he proudly proclaims his apostasy.  “God,” he says, “is for other people, not for us, descended as we are from a long line of peasant farmers who would have adopted stoicism as their religion if only it had been preached to them from the pulpit.”  But when he is drinking he takes certain precautions, searches around for a talisman, a rabbit’s foot, a sepia tone photograph of a revered ancestor, a pocketful of bottle caps, anything will do, and in a voice trembling with fear tells us that we came all at once, not like a litter of adorable pups, no, more like a twelve-armed twelve-legged mewling monster, pink and squirming and larval, a thing blind with rage and hunger, eager for the sustenance of Mother’s tit even though Mother, smiling stiffly and with unmistakable gratitude, was already turning blue and cold while he with his bare hands pulled us one by one from her slashed womb and set us aside in a cradle like hatchlings in a cardboard box.  Even then we squabbled and scratched at each other’s faces and tried to escape the light like a roving centipede. 


-12-

Dad does not call what happened that day a matricide though he does suspect as much and seems bitter about it.  Bitterness is a disease that afflicts the entire village of Twisted Willows, and there is much to suggest that the people who live here, with their reluctant smiles, slumped shoulders, rheumy eyes, pitted noses, have had their fair share of tragedy and suffering.  In silence they confess their history of hardship, but on Main Street the town puts on a convincing charade.  There is a hardware store and funeral parlor and a grain supply shop, all staffed by clerks who seem pleasant enough, and around the corner, not far from the square and the gazebo, there is a public library that containing exactly twelve rows of books, mainly paperback romances and mysteries and the odd collection of horror and science fiction stories.  Nowhere among those shelves can Dad find a single volume on how to restore an old vessel back to its former seaworthiness, and though he is no craftsman, as anyone can plainly see from the condition of our barns, he is forced to learn basic carpentry without the guidance of the old masters.  Since we own no books of our own we spend a great deal of time at the library and read every book, gorge ourselves on them, study their narratives, which like the streets of town are straight, perpendicular, Euclidean in their logic and formality.  The plots are cobbled together with prefabricated blocks of prose.  The characters inhabit a world that is precisely structured, carefully framed.  In these stories death is a farce, an amusing way to pass the time.  Writers sometimes forget, or maybe they cannot accept the fact, that the only true narrative is our own inevitable demise.
   

-13-

Even though we have been expelled from the high school we are not deterred from going to prom.  We do not enter the gymnasium where the dance is being held, nor do we mingle with the girls under the pink and yellow ribbons that stretch across the steel beams forming a pastel spider web, a fractal with a series of endlessly repeating loops and curves that swallow up the dancers in the near darkness, but we do sit outside in the parking lot in the bed of our pickup truck and swat mosquitoes and drink beer and listen to the thump and drone of music.  Couples sneak out to share a cigarette, take a quick swig from a flask, steal a breathless moment beneath the elms.  The evening air is swampy and thick with sin.  We watch with interest their clumsy attempts at intimacy, how they lose themselves in the confusion of lust and love, and when they reach that moment of pure irrationality, when their fingers start unclasping hooks and fumbling with buttons and zippers, we fly out of the shadows and threaten to take them for a ride down to the creek, stuff them head first into the tire swing, fuck their sweet virgin asses until they bleed.  They step away from us, slowly, as though from a pack of rabid dogs, and hurry back inside in the gym. 


-14-

At midnight, as the band plays the last slow song of the evening, we patrol the parking lot, peak through the car windows, sniff out misery and heartbreak.  In the passenger seat of a conversion van we find a sad lonesome thing, plump and acne-scarred and wearing an old hand-me-down dress with a pale green floral pattern, crying her little heart out and making an awful mess of her makeup.  It isn’t difficult to imagine how she has been treated tonight by her date and how in the years to come she will be treated by a dozen other men, the countless rejections and humiliations, marriage, abandonment, divorce, the hundred justifications she will use to convince herself that she deserves such treatment.  We descend like angels, offering consolation, swift alleviation from a lifetime of suffering.  She is wonderful.  She does not scream.  She is wonderful.   She accepts what is happening, has perhaps known all along that something like this was destined to happen.  She follows us to our truck, gives herself over to us completely.  So very wonderful. 


-15-

In the summer months the white oak that stands beside our house, shielding us from the worst winds of winter, provides no relief from the blazing sun.  Its leaves hang heavy and limp and we wonder if the thing has at last died.  There is no breeze, it hasn’t rained in days, and the ground is so parched and cracked that even weeds will not grow.  The attic rumbles like a kiln with heat, an uninhabitable inferno, and the pressure inside seems capable of crushing a person.  Whenever we go up there to visit the girl we gasp for air.  We bring her bottles of water, yellow with iron, pumped from our well and canned meat that looks gray and gelatinous.  She eats with her fingers since we do not allow her to have a fork and knife.  She doesn’t seem to mind the inconvenience and the mess that it makes and in fact seems grateful for whatever we bring her--an old mattress with mysterious brown stains, a pillow that she clutches to her breast like a child clinging to a stuffed animal, a comb that she runs through her tangled straw-colored hair, a damp washcloth that does little to disguise her odor, a bucket for her slops, toilet paper, and, since it is unfair to deprive her of her gods, a Bible that we have stolen from the library.   


-16-

Early morning is the time of day when the urge for a woman comes over us most powerfully, who knows why, maybe it’s the veil of pollen that settles over everything, the mailbox and porch and small granite slabs that form a walkway to our house, or maybe it’s the smell of manure fertilizing our fields, distant birdsong, the chiming of church bells.  Always there is conflict over who gets to see the girl first.  Sometimes we draw straws, though mainly we fight over her.  The victor, bloody and badly limping and panting with exhaustion, unlocks the latch and struggles up the stairs.  Despite the severity of his injuries he makes sure we can hear his grunts of excitement and the girl’s heavenly whimpers of anguish.  These contests continue for several weeks, each one bloodier than the last, until the police show up at our door and ask to take a look around.  We deny them entry, but they are insistent and say they will get a warrant from the judge if we do not comply with their demands.  We turn them away, and as they drive back to town their cruiser sends up a long thread of dust that curls and loops high in the air. 


-17-

We wait until dark, then enter the attic where we bind the girl’s hands behind her back and lead her naked and drooling out into the open air.  The torches have already been lit, and in a silent procession we march across moonless fields and under skies that flash with the purple phosphorescence of heat lightning and spin with constellations, with fortunes good and bad.  We travel along those serpentine paths through the woods, and come once again to the clearing and the ruined house.  We are familiar with its every shattered brick and stone and the nocturnal sounds that haunt the circle of twisted trees.  Together we lift the heavy iron door.  The girl moans.  She is not happy with this turn of events, and we give her a moment to stare into the pit before we push her down the stairs.  When she sees the glass jars and the things they contain, their cancerous tentacles and thin mocking smiles, she begins to scream and tries to cover her eyes.  We taunt her, pelt her with small stones, encourage her to break free of the ropes, but eventually she goes limp, slumps to the ground and her eyes roll up inside her head.  We gaze into the depths and see reflected in the glass jars our own faces distorted by the dancing death-fire of our torches and we feel a certain kinship with those lonely creatures floating forever in this dank and ominous vault.  We linger until daybreak, dreading the moment when we have to return to the house, but we know there is work still to be done.  To the song of the nightingale and the shrieks of the girl as she is roused from dreams we bury the cellar door, covering it with moss and pine needles and, once we feel certain it will go undetected by man and dog alike, we return home to get some sleep before the police arrive.   
         

-18-

In the barn Dad puts away his tools, his cans of paint, his bottles of beer.  He sweeps up the wood shavings and with a sigh of resignation tells the police that they are welcome to search wherever they please.  There are six officers altogether and they spend the day probing the house and fields.  They find no evidence of the girl and seem satisfied that she is, as they have always suspected, a runaway.  “It’s not the first time she has run away from home,” they tell us, “and it won’t bet he last.  That’s just how it is in the trailer park.”  Everyone knows that her mother has been arrested on numerous occasions for drug possession and solicitation, and the girl is the victim of regular beatings, of belts and straps and brooms that go swoosh through the air and crack sharply against bare flesh.  A chipped tooth, angry welts on her arms and legs, an indentation just above the left eye, a bald patch where the hair has been ripped from her head by the root and has never grown back to grace her with whatever limited beauty she may have once possessed.  In Twisted Willows ugliness reigns supreme, and beauty, if it can be found at all, exists only in the degree of ugliness, the ferocity of it.  Ugliness, if ugly enough, can be sublime. 
 

-19-

Dad tells us to pull the boat out of the barn and hitch it to the back of our pickup truck.  At last the boat is ready.  It is a two-hour drive to the lake, and when we arrive at the harbor we launch the boat without ceremony.  The water is calm, a serene shade of gray, like a perfectly smooth sheet of ice except for the infinite number of ripples that spread out in every direction.  It’s not like the creek back home where each ripple seems significant, charged with meaning.  Out here, in the immensity of the lake, a ripple is lost in a million others, one merging with and overlapping the next so that there is no distinction between any of them.  The chaos of it--or could it be order?--fails to mesmerize.  Our eyes are drawn instead to the far horizon and the setting sun. 

-20-

The boat doesn’t begin to take on water until we are ten miles out and the shore has disappeared behind us.  There are no lifejackets and no radio to send a distress signal.  Dad seems unconcerned.  He sits on the bow, drinking beer and casting a line.  “It’s for the best,” he says.  Twilight comes quickly and then darkness.  By then the boat is almost entirely submerged and we abandon ship.  We try to tread water but find it exhausting work.  Only Dad seems to have the strength to stay afloat.  Has he finally decided that our presence in the world is a mistake, that he should have destroyed us years ago when he had an opportunity, bottled us up and hidden us away for all time?  Or has he finally gone mad from a lifetime of failure?  Our greatest fear is that the man does not possess the wisdom to answer the question.  What his reasons are matter very little now.  The earth, blind to the needs of the people who inhabit it, incubates strange and monstrous things.  In the cellar the girl grows large with her brood and will no doubt find a way to escape.  We are filled with great sorrow that we will not witness this miracle.  Hours pass, our legs become numb, and the last thing we see before we disappear beneath the black waves is a thin band of pale pink light struggling to brighten the horizon and a fantastic blur of white gulls, their song a lamentation, circling the sky for carrion.