Ernie's Ark Read online

  Ernie’s Ark

  Also by Monica Wood

  Secret Language

  My Only Story

  Ernie’s Ark

  Monica Wood

  Copyright © 2002 by Monica Wood

  Jacket art (top right) by Fairfield Porter, The Bay, 1964

  © Fairfield Porter Estate.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual people, places, or events is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available.

  eISBN: 9-780-8118-7067-2

  Designed by Laura Lovett

  Chronicle Books LLC

  680 Second Street

  San Francisco, California 94107

  www.chroniclebooks.com

  for Cathe, who remembers everything

  and in loving memory of our parents

  Contents

  Ernie’s Ark

  At the Mercy

  That One Autumn

  The Temperature of Desire

  The Joy Business

  Visitors

  Take Care Good Boy

  Solidarity Is Not a Floor

  Shuffle, Step

  Ernie’s Ark

  Ernie Whitten, pipefitter

  Ernie was an angry man. He felt his anger as something apart from him, like an urn of water balanced on his head, a precarious weight that affected his gait, the set of his shoulders, his willingness to move through a crowd. He was angry at the melon-faced CEO from New York City who had forced a strike in a paper mill all the way up in Maine—a decision made, Ernie was sure, in that fancy restaurant atop the World Trade Center where Ernie had taken his wife, Marie, for their forty-fifth wedding anniversary last winter, another season, another life. Every Thursday as he stood in line at Manpower Services to wait for his unemployment check he thought of that jelly-assed CEO—Henry John McCoy, with his parted blond hair—yucking it up at a table laid out in bleached linen and phony silver, figuring out all the ways he could cut a man off at the knees three weeks before retirement.

  Oh, yes, he was angry. At the deadbeats and no-accounts who stood in line with him: the Davis boy, who couldn’t look a man in the eye; the Shelton girl, with hair dyed so bright you could light a match on her ponytail. There were others in line—millwrights and tinsmiths and machine tenders whose years and labor had added up to a puff of air—but he couldn’t bear to look at them, so he reserved his livid stare for the people in line who least resembled himself.

  He was angry at the kids from Broad Street who cut through his yard on their dirt bikes day after day, leaving moats of mud through the flowery back lawn Marie had sprinkled a season ago with Meadow-in-a-Can. He was angry with the police department, who didn’t give a hoot about Marie’s wrecked grass. He’d even tried city hall, where an overpaid blowhard, whose uncle had worked beside Ernie nineteen years ago on the Number Five, had all but laughed in his face.

  When he arrived at the hospital after collecting his weekly check, Marie was being bathed by a teenaged orderly. He had seen his wife in all manner of undress over the years, yet it filled him with shame to observe the yellow hospital sponge applied to her diminishing body by a uniformed kid who was younger than their only grandchild. He went to the lobby to wait, picking up a newspaper from among the litter of magazines.

  It was some sort of city weekly, filled with mean political cartoons and smug picture captions fashioned to embarrass the President, but it had a separate section on the arts, Marie’s favorite subject. She had dozens of coffee-table books stowed in her sewing room, and their house was filled with framed prints of strange objects—melted watches and spent shoelaces and sad, deserted diners—that he never liked but had nonetheless come to think of as old friends. He had never known her to miss a Community Concert or an exhibit at the library where she had worked three days a week since she was eighteen; every Sunday of their married life, Ernie had brought in the paper, laid it on the kitchen table, and fished out the arts section to put next to Marie’s coffee cup.

  The weekly was printed on dirty newsprint—paper from out of state, he surmised. He scanned the cheap, see-through pages, fixing on an announcement for an installation competition, whatever that was. The winning entry would be displayed to the public at the college. Pictured was last year’s winner, a tangle of pipes and sheet metal that looked as if somebody had hauled a miniature version of the Number Five machine out of the mill, twisted it into a thousand ugly pieces, then left it to weather through five hundred hailstorms. Not that it would matter now if somebody did. The Burden of Life, this installation was called, by an artist who most likely hadn’t yet moved out of his parents’ house. He thought Marie would like it, though—she had always been a woman who understood people’s intentions—so he removed the picture with his jackknife and tucked it into his shirt pocket. Then he faltered his way back up the hall and into her room, where she was sitting up, weak and clean.

  “What’s the latest?” she asked him.

  He sat down on her bleach-smelling bed. She herself smelled of lilac. “McCoy’s threatening to fold up shop.”

  “Sell it, you mean?” She blinked at him. “Sell the mill?”

  “That’s the rumor.”

  She put her fragile, ghostly hand on his. “It’s been eight months, Ernie. How long can a strike last?” She was thinking, of course, of his pension held hostage, the bills she was racking up.

  “We’ll be all right,” he said. The word we always calmed him. He showed her the clipping. “Can you feature this?”

  She smiled. “The Burden of Life? ”

  “He should’ve called it The Burden of My Big Head.”

  She laughed, and he was glad, and his day took the tiniest turn. “Philistine,” she said. “You always were such a philistine, Ernie.” She often referred to him in the past tense, as if he were the one departing.

  That night, after the long drive home, he hung the clipping on the refrigerator before taking Pumpkin Pie, Marie’s doddering Yorkshire terrier, for its evening walk. He often waited until nightfall for this walk, so mortified was he to drag this silly-name pushbroom of an animal at the end of a thin red leash. The dog walked with prissy little steps on pinkish feet that resembled ballerina slippers. He had observed so many men just like himself over the years, men in retirement walking wee, quivery dogs over the streets of their neighborhood, a wrinkled plastic bag in their free hand; they might as well have been holding a sign above their heads: Widower.

  The night was eerie and silent. FOR SALE signs had popped up even in this neighborhood of old people. This small, good place, once drenched with ordinary hopes and decent money, was beginning to furl like an autumn leaf. At the foot of the downhill slope of Randall Street, Ernie could see the belching smokestacks of Atlantic Pulp & Paper, the dove-gray plume curling up from the valley, an upward, omnipresent cloud rising like a smoke signal, an offering to God. Cancer Valley, a news reporter once called the city of Abbott Falls, but they needed the steam, the smoke, the rising cloud, the heaps and heaps of wood stacked in the railyard, even the smell—the smell of money, Ernie called it—they needed it. He thought of the son of a bitch working his very spot, this very night, wiping the greasy heat from his forehead; he wondered which of life’s cruelties had converged upon this man to impel him to cross a picket line, step over a man with a dying wife, and steal his job. Did he, too, have a dying wife? Eight months ago, watching the first of them marching in there under police guard, he could not have mustered a human feeling for the stranger hooking up chlorine cars or running pipe in
the bleachery. Ernie’s own circumstances, his own livelihood, seemed to melt further into dream every day. Every few weeks there was word of negotiation—another fancy-restaurant meeting between McCoy’s boys and the national union—but Ernie held little hope of recovering the bulk of his pension. That, too, felt like knowledge found in a dream.

  As he turned up his front walk, he caught the kids from Broad Street crashing again through his property, this time roaring away so fast he could hear a faint shudder from the backyard trees. “Sonsabitches!” he hollered, shaking his fist like the mean old man in the movies. He stampeded into the backyard, where Marie’s two apple trees, brittle and untrained, sprouted from the earth in such rootlike twists that they seemed to have been planted upside down. He scanned the weedy lawn, dotted with exhausted clumps of Marie’s wildflowers and the first of the fallen leaves, and saw blowdown everywhere, spindly parts of branches scattered like bodies on a battlefield. Planted when their son was born, the trees had never yielded a single decent apple, and now they were being systematically mutilated by a pack of ill-bred boys. He picked up a branch and a few sticks, and by the time he reached his kitchen he was weeping, pounding his fist on the table, cursing a God who would let a woman like Marie, a big-boned girl who was sweetness itself, wither beneath the death-white sheets of Western Maine General, thirty-eight miles from home.

  He sat in the kitchen deep into evening. The dog curled up on Marie’s chair and snored. Ernie remembered Marie’s laughter from the afternoon and tried to harness it, hear it anew, make it last. The sticks lay sprawled and messy on the table in front of him, their leaves stalled halfway between greenery and dust. All of a sudden—and, oh, it was sweet!—Ernie had an artistic inspiration. He stood up with the shock of it, for he was not an artistic man. The sticks, put together at just the right angle, resembled the hull of a boat. He turned them one way, then another, admiring his idea, wishing Marie were here to witness it.

  Snapping on the floodlights, he jaunted into the backyard to collect the remaining sticks, hauling them into the house a bouquet at a time. He took the clipping down from the fridge and studied the photograph, trying to get a sense of scale and size. Gathering the sticks, he descended the stairs to the cellar, where he spent most of the night twining sticks and branches with electrical wire. The dog sat at attention, its wet eyes fixed on Ernie’s work. By morning the installation was finished. It was the most beautiful thing Ernie had ever seen.

  The college was only four blocks from the hospital, but Ernie had trouble navigating the maze of one-way roads on campus, and found the art department only by following the directions of a frightening girl whose tender lips had been pierced with small gold rings. By the time he entered the lavender art office, he was sweating, hugging his beautiful boat to his chest.

  “Excuse me?” said a young man at the desk. This one had a hoop through each eyebrow.

  “My installation,” Ernie said, placing it on the desk. “For the competition.” He presented the newspaper clipping like an admission ticket.

  “Uh, I don’t think so.”

  “Am I early?” Ernie asked, feeling foolish. The deadline was six weeks away; he hadn’t the foggiest idea how these things were supposed to go.

  “This isn’t an installation,” the boy said, flickering his gaze over the boat. “It’s—well, I don’t know what it is, but it’s not an installation.”

  “It’s a boat,” Ernie said. “A boat filled with leaves.”

  “Are you in Elderhostel?” the boy asked. “They’re upstairs, fifth floor.”

  “I want to enter the contest,” Ernie said. And by God, he did; he had never won so much as a cake raffle in his life, and didn’t like one bit the pileup of things he appeared to be losing.

  “I like your boat,” said a girl stacking books in a corner. “But he’s right, it’s not an installation.” She spread her arms and smiled. “Installations are big.”

  Ernie turned to face her, a freckled redhead. She reminded him of his granddaughter, who was somewhere in Alaska sharing her medicine cabinet with an unemployed guitar player. “Let me see,” the girl said, plucking the clipping from his hand. “Oh, okay. You’re talking about the Corthell Competition. This is more of a professional thing.”

  “Professional?”

  “I myself wouldn’t dream of entering, okay?” offered the boy, who rocked backed in his chair, arms folded like a CEO’s. “All the entries come through this office, and most of them are awesome. Museum quality.” He made a small, self-congratulating gesture with his hand. “We see the entries even before the judges do.”

  “One of my professors won last year,” the girl said, pointing out the window. “See?”

  Ernie looked. There it was, huge in real life—nearly as big as the actual Number Five, in fact, a heap of junk flung without a thought into the middle of a campus lawn. It did indeed look like a Burden.

  “You couldn’t tell from the picture,” Ernie said, reddening. “In the picture it looked like some sort of tabletop size. Something you might put on top of your TV.”

  The girl smiled. Ernie could gather her whole face without stumbling over a single gold hoop. He took this as a good sign, and asked, “Let’s say I did make something of size. How would I get it over here? Do you do pickups, something of that nature?”

  She laughed, but not unkindly. “You don’t actually build it unless you win. What you do is write up a proposal with some sketches. Then, if you win, you build it right here, on-site.” She shrugged. “The process is the whole entire idea of the installation, okay? The whole entire community learns from witnessing the process.”

  In this office, where process was clearly the most important word in the English language, not counting okay, Ernie felt suddenly small. “Is that so,” he said, wondering who learned what from the heap of tin Professor Life-Burden had processed onto the lawn.

  “Oh, wait, one year a guy did build off-site,” said the boy, ever eager to correct the world’s misperceptions. “Remember that guy?”

  “Yeah,” the girl said. She turned to Ernie brightly. “One year a guy put his whole installation together at his studio and sent photographs. He didn’t win, but the winner got pneumonia or something and couldn’t follow through, and this guy was runner-up, so he trucked it here in a U-Haul.”

  “It was a totem,” the boy said solemnly. “With a whole mess of wire things sticking out of it.”

  “I was a freshman,” the girl said by way of an explanation Ernie couldn’t begin to fathom. He missed Marie intensely, as if she were already gone.

  Ernie peered through the window, hunting for the totem.

  “Kappa Delts trashed it last Homecoming,” the girl said. “Those animals have no respect for art.” She handed back the clipping. “So, anyway, that really wasn’t so stupid after all, what you said.”

  “Well,” said the boy, “good luck, okay?”

  As Ernie bumbled out the door, the girl called after him, “It’s a cute boat, though. I like it.”

  At the hospital he set the boat on Marie’s windowsill, explaining his morning. “Oh, Ernie,” Marie crooned. “You old—you old surprise, you.”

  “They wouldn’t take it,” he said. “It’s not big enough. You have to write the thing up, and make sketches and whatnot.”

  “So why don’t you?”

  “Why don’t I what?”

  “Make sketches and whatnot.”

  “Hah! I’d make it for real. Nobody does anything real anymore. I’d pack it into the back of my truck and haul it there myself. A guy did that once.”

  “Then make it for real.”

  “I don’t have enough branches.”

  “Then use something else.”

  “I just might.”

  “Then do it.” She was smiling madly now, fully engaged in their old, intimate arguing, and her eyes made bright blue sparks from her papery face. He knew her well, he realized, and saw what she was thinking: Ernie, there is some life left after every
thing seems to be gone. Really, there is. And that he could see this, just a little, and that she could see him seeing it, buoyed him. He thought he might even detect some pink fading into her cheeks.

  He stayed through lunch, and was set to stay for supper until Marie remembered her dog and made him go home. As he turned from her bed, she said, “Wait. I want my ark.” She lifted her finger to the windowsill, where the boat glistened in the filmy city light. And he saw that she was right: it was an ark, high and round and jammed with hope. He placed it in her arms and left it there, hoping it might sweeten her dreams.

  When he reached his driveway he found fresh tire tracks, rutted by an afternoon rain, running in a rude diagonal from the back of the house across the front yard. He sat in the truck for a few minutes, counting the seconds of his rage, watching the dog’s jangly shadow in the dining-room window. He counted to two hundred, checked his watch, then hauled himself out to fetch the dog. He set the dog on the seat next to him—in a different life it would have been a doberman named Rex—and gave it a kiss on its wiry head. “That’s from her,” he said, and then drove straight to the lumberyard.

  Ernie figured that Noah himself was a man of the soil and probably didn’t know spit about boatbuilding. In fact, Ernie’s experience in general—forty years of tending machinery, fixing industrial pipe the size of tree trunks, assembling Christmas toys for his son, remodeling bathrooms, building bird boxes and planters and finally, attached dramatically to the side of the house, a sunporch to please Marie—probably had Noah’s beat in about a dozen ways. He figured he had the will and enough good tools to make a stab at a decent ark, and he was right: in a week’s time he’d completed most of a hull beneath a makeshift staging that covered most of the ground between Marie’s sunporch and the neighbor’s fence. It was not a hull he would care to float, but he thought of it as a decent artistic representation of a hull; and even more important, it was big enough to qualify as an installation, if he had the guidelines right. He covered the hull with the bargain-priced tongue-and-groove boards he picked up at the lumberyard, leftover four-footers with lots of knots. Every day he worked from sunup to noon, then drove to the hospital to report his progress. Marie listened with her head inclined, her whispery hair tucked behind her ears. She still asked about the strike, but he had little news on that score, staying clean away from the union hall and the picket lines. He had even stopped getting the paper.