Ernie's Ark Read online

  Often he turned on the floodlights in the evenings and worked in the cold till midnight or one. Working in the open air, without the iron skull of the mill over his head, made him feel like a newly sprung prisoner. He let the dog patter around and around the growing apparition, and sometimes he even chuckled at the animal’s apparent capacity for wonder. The hateful boys from Broad Street loitered with their bikes at the back of the yard, and as the thing grew in size they more often than not opted for the long way round.

  At eleven o’clock in the morning on the second day of the second week, a youngish man pulled up in a city car. He ambled down the walk and into the side yard, a clipboard and notebook clutched under one arm. The dog cowered at the base of one of the trees, its dime-sized eyes blackened with fear.

  “You Mr. Ernest Whitten?” the man asked Ernie.

  Ernie put down his hammer and climbed down from the deck by way of a gangplank that he had constructed in a late-night fit of creativity.

  “I’m Dan Little, from the city,” the man said, extending his hand.

  “Well,” Ernie said, astonished. He pumped the man’s hand. “It’s about time.” He looked at the bike tracks, which had healed over for the most part, dried into faint, innocent-looking scars after a string of fine sunny days. “Not that it matters now,” Ernie said. “They don’t even come through much anymore.”

  Mr. Little consulted his notebook. “I don’t follow,” he said.

  “Aren’t you here about those hoodlums tearing up my wife’s yard?”

  “I’m from code enforcement.”

  “Pardon?”

  Mr. Little squinted up at the ark. “You need a building permit for this, Mr. Whitten. Plus the city has a twenty-foot setback requirement for any new buildings.”

  Ernie twisted his face into disbelief, an expression that felt uncomfortably familiar; lately the entire world confused him. “The lot’s only fifty feet wide as it is,” he protested.

  “I realize that, Mr. Whitten.” Mr. Little shrugged apologetically. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to take it down.”

  Ernie tipped back his cap to scratch his head. “It isn’t a building. It’s an installation.”

  “Say what?”

  “An installation. I’m hauling it up to the college when I’m done. Figure I’ll have to rent a flatbed or something. It’s a little bigger than I counted on.”

  Mr. Little began to look nervous. “I’m sorry, Mr. Whitten, I still don’t follow.” He kept glancing back at the car.

  “It’s an ark,” Ernie said, enunciating, although he could see how the ark might be mistaken for a building at this stage. Especially if you weren’t really looking, which this man clearly wasn’t. “It’s an ark,” Ernie repeated.

  Mr. Little’s face took a heavy downward turn. “You’re not zoned for arks,” he sighed, writing something on the official-pink papers attached to his clipboard.

  Ernie glanced at the car. In the driver’s seat had appeared a pony-sized yellow Labrador retriever, its quivering nose faced dead forward as if it were planning to set that sucker into gear and take off into the wild blue yonder. “That your dog?” Ernie asked.

  Mr. Little nodded.

  “Nice dog,” Ernie said.

  “This one’s yours, I take it?” Mr. Little pointed at Marie’s dog, who had scutted out from the tree and hidden behind Ernie’s pants leg.

  “My wife’s,” Ernie told him. “She’s in the hospital.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Mr. Little said. “I’m sure she’ll be on the mend in no time.”

  “Doesn’t look like it,” Ernie said, wondering why he didn’t just storm the hospital gates, do something sweeping and biblical, stomp through those clean corridors and defy doctor’s orders and pick her up with his bare hands and bring her home.

  Mr. Little scooched down and made clicky sounds at Marie’s dog, who nosed out from behind Ernie’s leg to investigate. “What’s his name?” he asked.

  “It’s, well, it’s Pumpkin Pie. My wife named him.”

  “That’s Junie,” Mr. Little said, nudging his chin toward the car. “I got her the day I signed my divorce papers. She’s a helluva lot more faithful than my wife ever was.”

  “I never had problems like that,” Ernie said.

  Mr. Little got to his feet and shook his head at Ernie’s ark. “Listen, about this, this . . .”

  “Ark,” Ernie said.

  “You’re going to have do something, Mr. Whitten. At the very least, you’ll have to go down to city hall, get a building permit, and then follow the regulations. Just don’t tell them it’s a boat. Call it a storage shed or something.”

  Ernie tipped back his cap again. “I don’t suppose it’s regulation to cart your dog all over kingdom come on city time.”

  “Usually she sleeps in the back,” Mr. Little said sheepishly.

  “I’ll tell you what,” Ernie said. “You leave my ark alone and I’ll keep shut about the dog.”

  Mr. Little looked sad. “Listen,” he said, “people can do what they want as far as I care. But you’ve got neighbors out here complaining about the floodlights and the noise.”

  Ernie looked around, half-expecting to see the dirt-bike gang sniggering behind their fists someplace out back. But all he saw were FOR SALE signs yellowing from disuse, and the sagging rooftops of his neighbors’ houses, their shades drawn against the sulfurous smell of betrayal.

  Mr. Little ripped a sheet off his clipboard and handed it to Ernie. “Look, just consider this a real friendly warning, would you? And just for the record, I hate my job, but I’ve got bills piling up like everybody else.”

  Ernie watched him amble back to the car, say something to the dog, who gave her master a walloping with her broad pink tongue. He watched them go, remembering now that he’d seen Mr. Little before, somewhere in the mill—the bleachery maybe, or strolling in the dim recesses near the Number Eight, his face flushed and shiny under his yellow hardhat, clipboard at the ready. Now here he was, trying to stagger his way through the meanwhile, harassing senior citizens on behalf of the city. His dog probably provided him with the only scrap of self-respect he could ferret out in a typical day.

  Ernie ran a hand over the rough surface of his ark, remembering that Noah’s undertaking had been a result of God’s despair. God was sorry he’d messed with any of it, the birds of the air and beasts of the forest and especially the two-legged creatures who insisted on lying and cheating and killing their own brothers. Still, God had found one man, one man and his family, worth saving, and therefore had deemed a pair of everything else worth saving, too. “Come on, dog,” he said. “We’re going to get your mother.”

  As happened so often, in so many small, miraculous ways during their forty-five years together, Marie had outthought him. When he got to her room she was fully dressed, her overnight bag perched primly next to her on the bone-white bed, the ark cradled into her lap and tipped on its side. “Ernie,” she said, stretching her arms straight out. “Take me home.”

  He bore her home at twenty-five miles an hour, aware of how every pock in the road rose up to meet her fragile, flesh-wanting spine. He eased her out of the car and carried her over their threshold. He filled all the bird feeders along the sunporch, then took her out to survey the ark. These were her two requests.

  By morning she looked better. The weather—the warmest fall on record—held. He propped her on a chaise lounge on the sunporch in the brand-new flannel robe their son’s wife had sent from California, then wrapped her in a blanket, so that she looked like a benevolent pod person from a solar system ruled by warmth and decency. The dog nestled in her lap, eyes half-closed in ecstasy.

  He propped her there so she could watch him work—her third request. And work he did, feeling the way he had when they were first dating and he would remove his shirt to burrow elaborately into the tangled guts of his forest-green 1950 Pontiac. He forgot that he was building the ark for the contest, and how much he wanted to win, and h
is rage fell like dead leaves from his body as he felt the watchful, sunshiney presence of Marie. He moved one of Marie’s feeders to the deck of the ark because she wanted him to know the tame and chittery company of chickadees. The sun shone and shone; the yard did not succumb to the dun colors of fall; the tracks left by the dirt bikes resembled nothing more ominous than the faintest prints left by dancing birds. Ernie unloaded some more lumber, a stack of roofing shingles, a small door. He had three weeks till deadline, and in this strange, blessed season, he meant to make it.

  Marie got better. She sat up, padded around the house a little, ate real food. Several times a day he caught a sharp squeak floating down from the sunporch as she conversed with one of her girlfriends, or with her sister down from Bangor, or with the visiting nurse. He would look up, see her translucent white hand raised toward him—It’s nothing, Ernie, just go back to whatever you were doing—and recognize the sound after the fact as a strand of her old laughter, high and ecstatic and small-town, like her old self.

  “It happens,” the nurse told him when he waylaid her on the front walk. “They get a burst of energy toward the end sometimes.”

  He didn’t like this nurse, the way she called Marie “they.” He thought of adding her to the list of people and things he’d grown so accustomed to railing against, but because his rage was gone, there was no place to put her. He returned to the ark, climbed onto the deck, and began to nail the last shingles to the shallow pitch of the roof. Marie’s voice floated out again, and he looked up again, and her hand rose again, and he nodded again, hoping she could see his smiling, his damp collar, the handsome knot of his forearm. He was wearing the clothes he wore to work back when he was working, a grass-colored gabardine shirt and pants—his greens, Marie called them. In some awful way he recognized this as one of the happiest times of his life; he was brimming with industry and connected to nothing but this one woman, this one patch of earth.

  When it was time for Marie’s lunch, he climbed down from the deck and wiped his hands on his work pants. Mr. Little was standing a few feet away, a camera raised to his face.

  “What’s this?” Ernie asked.

  Mr. Little lowered the camera. “For our records.”

  Ernie thought on this for a moment. “I’m willing to venture there’s nothing like this in your records.”

  “Not so far,” Mr. Little said. He ducked once, twice, as a pair of chickadees flitted over his head. “Your wife is home, I see.”

  Ernie glanced over at the sunporch, where Marie lay heavily swaddled on her chaise lounge, watching them curiously. He waved at her, and waited many moments as she struggled to free her hand from the blankets and wave back.

  “As long as you’ve got that camera,” Ernie said, “I wonder if you wouldn’t do us a favor.”

  “I’m going to have to fine you, Mr. Whitten. I’m sorry.”

  “I need a picture of my ark,” Ernie said. “Would you do us that favor? All you have to do is snap one extra.”

  Mr. Little looked around uncertainly. “Sure, all right.”

  “I’m sending it in to a contest.”

  “I bet you win.”

  Ernie nodded. “That’s the plan.”

  Mr. Little helped Ernie dismantle the staging, such as it was, and soon the ark stood alone in the sun, as round and full-skirted as a giant hen nestled on the grass. The chickadees, momentarily spooked by the rattle of staging, were back again. Two of them. A pair, Ernie hoped. “Could I borrow your dog?” he asked Mr. Little, whose eyebrows shot up in a question. “Just for a minute,” Ernie explained. “For the picture. We get my wife’s dog over here and bingo, I got animals two by two. Two birds, two dogs. What else would God need?”

  Mr. Little whistled at the city car and out jumped Junie, thundering through the open window, her back end waggling back and forth with her tail. Marie was up now, too, hobbling down the porch stairs, Pumpkin Pie trotting ahead of her, beelining toward Junie’s yellow tail. As the dogs sniffed each other, Ernie loped across the grass to help Marie navigate the bumpy spots. “Didn’t come to me before now,” he told her, “but these dogs are just the ticket.” He gentled her over the uneven grass and introduced her to Mr. Little. “This fellow’s donated his dog to the occasion.”

  Marie held hard to Ernie’s arm. She offered her free hand to the pink-tongued Junie and cooed at her. Mr. Little seemed pleased, and didn’t hesitate a second when Ernie asked him to lead the dogs up the plank and order them to sit. They did. Then Ernie gathered Marie into his arms—she weighed nothing, his big-boned girl all gone to feathers—and struggled up the plank, next to the dogs. He set Marie on her feet and snugged his arm around her. “Wait till the birds light,” he cautioned. Mr. Little waited, then lifted the camera. Everybody smiled.

  In the wintry months that followed, Ernie consoled himself with the thought that his ark did not win because he had misunderstood the guidelines, or that he had neglected to name his ark, or that he had no experience putting into words that which could not be put into words. He liked to imagine the panel of judges frowning in confusion over his written material and then halting in awe at the snapshot—holding it up, their faces all riveted at once. He liked especially to imagine the youngsters in the art office, the redheaded girl and the boy with rings, their lives just beginning. Perhaps they felt a brief shudder, a silvery glimpse of the rest of their lives as they removed the snapshot from the envelope. Perhaps they took enough time to see it all—birds lighting on a gunwale, dogs posed on a plank, and a man and woman standing in front of a little door, she in her bathrobe and he in his greens, waiting for rain.

  At the Mercy

  Henry John McCoy, CEO, Atlantic Pulp & Paper

  I am not a patient man. My daughter is reading poetry, aloud, in the seat next to me, because (she says) she has always loved poetry. Her mouth opens and closes over the words—wide, narrow, wide, narrow—which is either the way people read poetry aloud these days or a signal to me that she suspects I might be unfamiliar with words like urticant or sidereal, which I am. My daughter’s abiding love of poetry is one of many facts that I have not (she says) managed to apprehend about her character, either because I was never home (which is true) or didn’t give a sweet goddamn about the machinations of her inchoate soul. She says.

  Why I agreed to this trip in the first place, I cannot say. I’ve got a paper mill famously on strike; a fleet of overpaid lawyers getting their intestines rearranged by a couple of crew-cut federal-type mediators in cheesy suits; a cabal of accountants secretly floating trial balloons to South African buyers; and a squadron of attorneys sifting every United States labor case since 1870 through an extremely fine sieve so that if I’m forced to fire the seven hundred replacement workers I hired eight months ago I can find a way to cut the damn place loose and stay out of jail in the meanwhile.

  In a word, I’ve got problems.

  Am I back at my office, badgering my spokesmen to come up with a sound bite the press can’t convert to nitroglycerin? No. What I am doing is looking for an exit off 95-North, in search of the country inn among the pines where my daughter claims we shall divest ourselves. Of what, I have no idea. Our shoes, is what I hope. Our cell phones. But I have known my daughter a long time, twenty-six years, long enough to understand that what she is on is a mission, and that her mission is not simple. Or, rather, that she is on a mission simple to her but impenetrable to me.

  This so-called poetry is the musing of a Vietnamese lesbian activist whose name contains diphthongs that ought to carry dental insurance. “I don’t get it,” I tell my daughter, suddenly bent on infuriating her, which, I confess, is part of my character, to infuriate people just to see what they will do. My daughter calls this habit of mine a demonstration of unresolved hostility toward my repressed Irish Catholic parents, God rest their repressed Irish Catholic souls. I have come a long way using this technique, and only recently has it turned out to bite me on the backside. My daughter looks up, studies me for a wordless moment
as if I were a road sign she finds interesting but irrelevant, and goes on reading without a discernible pause in the narration.

  After two more stanzas, if that’s what you can call them, she lowers the book and sighs. “What don’t you get, Daddy?” Part of her mission, apparently, is to call me Daddy for the duration, which she has not done, to my recollection, since second grade. This is a diversionary tactic that is working splendidly. She used to call me Henry, like everybody else. This “Daddy” business has me flummoxed, I’ll admit.

  “Her metaphors are so gloomy,” I suggest, “what with all the blood and barbed wire and urticants and so on. Maybe she’d have a better time of it in her own language.”

  My daughter slams down the book. “She happens to be an American, Daddy, just like you.”

  “I hardly think she’s just like me, sweetheart.”

  “You made this assumption, is what I’m saying.”

  I adjust my seat a little, just to try out the bells and whistles on this, the shark-colored Mercedes I paid way too much for; no doubt the repressed Irish Catholic parents against whom my daughter claims I am demonstrating unresolved hostility did a pirouette in their two-for-one grave.

  “I like poems that rhyme,” I say, sounding more old-mannish than I expect to. Because I am forty-nine years old and the CEO of an outfit that owns five paper mills, my daughter believes my sensitivities have been blunted, that I wouldn’t know a sonnet from a status report. Before she can get on her high prancing horse, I add, “Such as Dickinson. Longfellow. Frost. Shakespeare. Rhymers all.” Then I quote all four stanzas of “The Road Not Taken” to press the point.