The Very Long, Very Strange Life of Isaac Dahl, page 1
Books by Bart Yates
LEAVE MYSELF BEHIND
THE BROTHERS BISHOP
THE LANGUAGE OF LOVE AND LOSS
THE VERY LONG, VERY STRANGE LIFE OF ISAAC DAHL
And writing as Noah Bly
THE THIRD HILL NORTH OF TOWN
THE DISTANCE BETWEEN US
Published by Kensington Publishing Corp.
WHITE CREEK: A FABLE
Published by Citadel Press
THE VERY LONG, VERY STRANGE LIFE OF ISAAC DAHL
a novel
Bart Yates
JOHN SCOGNAMIGLIO BOOKS
KENSINGTON BOOKS
www.kensingtonbooks.com
Table of Contents
Also by
Title Page
Copyright Page
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
DAY ONE
DAY TWO
DAY THREE
DAY FOUR
DAY FIVE
DAY SIX
DAY SEVEN
DAY EIGHT
DAY NINE
DAY TEN
DAY ELEVEN
DAY TWELVE
AUTHOR’S NOTE
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.
JOHN SCOGNAMIGLIO BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
900 Third Avenue
New York, NY 10022
Copyright © 2024 by Bart Yates
OH GIRL
Words and Music by EUGENE RECORD
© 1971 (Renewed) UNICHAPPELL MUSIC, INC.
All Rights Reserved
Used by Permission of ALFRED MUSIC
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
The JS and John Scognamiglio Books logo is a trademark of Kensington Publishing Corp.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024934896
ISBN: 978-1-4967-5045-7
First Kensington Hardcover Edition: August 2024
ISBN: 978-1-4967-5047-1 (e-book)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Great thanks and love to:
—My fabulous editor, John Scognamiglio, and all the talented people at Kensington Books.
—Gordon Mennenga, Prince of Tales.
—Marian Mathews Clark, the better angel of my nature.
—Tonja Robins, dreamer and soothsayer; believer in neurotic novelists and odd books.
—Lisa and Edward Leff, creators of lovely moments and great memories.
—Abraham Assad, unrepentant goofball and occasional genius.
—Angel and Lindsey Dean, babysitters extraordinaire of wayward winos in Napa Valley.
—Debbie and Jacob Yarrow, the kindest souls in Sonoma County.
—Adrian Repasch, website guru and slayer of Demon Glaag.
—Pena Lubrica, Dave Dugan, and Allison Heady, gifted members of the Iowa City Show-And-Tell Society.
—Michael Becker, for sharing his knowledge of the mating habits of gastropods.
—My family and friends, for making my life both rich and strange.
I also owe a debt of gratitude to the following excellent historical resources:
—THE WORST HARD TIME: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, by Timothy Egan
—SHIP OF GHOSTS, The Story of the USS Houston, FDR’s Legendary Lost Cruiser, and the Epic Saga of Her Survivors, by James D. Hornfischer
—FOR THE GOOD OF MANKIND, A History of the People of Bikini and Their Islands, by Jack Niedenthal
—THE BOMB, by Theodore Taylor, a meticulously-researched and moving novel about the Bikini people in the final days before the destruction of their home.
DAY ONE
February 17, 1926. Bingham, Utah.
Each day is a story, whether or not that story makes any damn sense or is worth telling to anyone else. If you live a long time, and your memory doesn’t completely crap out, you end up with enough stories to fill a library; it’s nearly impossible to pick and choose a mere handful to write about—a stupid, arbitrary stricture I’ve been cowed into accepting by a dead bully. Why I lack the testicular fortitude to just say no is a vexing question, but what aggravates me even more is the fact that I have no idea where to start.
Okay, I’m lying.
I actually do know, but it irks me beyond belief to give Aggie the satisfaction of following her advice. That she now only exists in my head is beside the point: I’d like to maintain at least a smidgeon of autonomy in my own skull, for God’s sake. Is that so much to ask?
Sadly, in this case, it is.
You’re very unattractive when you whine, Isaac.
That’s what she’d say, of course, if she were still here. I find it both irritating and oddly comforting that I can hear her voice so clearly, without even trying. She may as well never have died, given that she’s every bit as exasperating in my imagination as she ever was in person.
Just get on with it and tell them about the giant.
* * *
Agnes and I were getting ready for bed—and fighting, of course, about whose turn it was to stoke the woodstove—when our mother lifted her head and told us to shush. Agnes was my twin sister, and Mama always claimed we came out of her womb mad as weasels, screaming hell and death at each other, same as every day afterward. (The midwife hauled me out only a few minutes ahead of Aggie, who no doubt thought the whole sordid business was my fault, and something I should have warned her about.)
“Shush, both of you,” Mama repeated. She was nursing Hilda, our baby sister, by the woodstove. “Did you hear that noise?”
“What noise?” Agnes asked.
“The giant,” I said.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Agnes said. “Giants aren’t real.”
“Shush!” Mama insisted.
I was eight and had just read Jack and the Beanstalk. I was a timid kid with a perverse imagination, and long before the story of Jack and his magic beans came into my life, I was jumping at phantom faces in every shadow. I believed the large rock beside our house was a troll turned to stone, waiting for the next dark of the moon to become flesh; I swore I could hear nymphs and demons battling for dominion in the restless water of Bingham Creek; I dreamt almost every night of warty, jaundiced witches, lumbering ogres, and pallid ghosts with milky eyes. Yet the old fairy tale about Jack the giant-killer—a murderous, thieving boy who not only got away with his sins, but was actually rewarded for them—unsettled me in a way few things did. Whatever my mother may have heard that night, I heard a vengeful relative of Jack’s slain giant, rousing to wrath somewhere up the canyon.
Agnes and I had just finished bathing in the claw-foot, cast-iron tub Father bought for Mama at Christmas. There was no privacy in our one-room house. Agnes and I shared a cramped bed on one side of the room, next to Hilda’s crib; Father and Mama’s bed was on the opposite wall, a few feet from the kitchen table. It was the only home Agnes and I knew, and we couldn’t imagine not bumping into each other every time we hunched over to tie a shoe. The two of us used the same towel to dry ourselves before slipping into our matching nightshirts—cut and sewed from the same bolt of blue flannel by Mama—and the smell of rye bread, fried onions, and boiled cabbage was still in the air from supper, three hours before.
“Oh,” Agnes said, cocking her head. “I hear it now, too, Mama.”
The winter cold was slithering like rattlesnakes through every crack in the walls and floors that night, and I tugged on gray wool socks and listened to the strange rumbling in the dark world beyond our walls. The only light in the room aside from the fire in the woodstove was from two candles on the kitchen table, flickering in the frigid draft blowing through the house. We lived in the Carr Fork area of Bingham with all the other Swedes, and nobody in Carr Fork had electricity. (Nor indoor plumbing, for that matter: For baths, Aggie and I had to cart in a few buckets from the outdoor water pump that Mama then heated on the stove.)
“The giant’s getting closer,” I whimpered.
Agnes rolled her eyes. “There’s no such thing as—”
“HUSH!” Mama cried, rising from the rocking chair, and it bronco-bucked on the floor behind her.
The entire population of Bingham, Utah, lived in a deep, narrow canyon in the Oquirrh Mountains, and all of us—fifteen thousand bipedal moles in a massive nest—were stuffed down together, in the earth. Ramshackle wooden houses, tenements, and stores all piled on top of each other, lining both sides of the canyon walls, clear to the rim. The Kennecott Copper mine was at one end of the seven-mile-long canyon, and the only reason for Bingham’s existence. The canyon itself was less than a city block wide, so every time a new house was built, it went to the end of the line like a naughty child, simply because there was no other place for it.
Father had come home for dinner that night, but he’d gone out again to play cards with his younger brother Johan, and their friends. Mama had begge
“Mama?” Agnes asked, now frightened herself. “What’s wrong?”
“Everything’s fine,” Mama murmured, staring hard-eyed at the door, but even Agnes knew she was lying.
* * *
Until then, it had been just a normal day. Father got up for work early in the morning, same as always, at four A.M.—he worked a ten-hour shift in the copper mine, six days a week—and Mama got up, too, to make his breakfast. They spoke softly, trying not to wake my sisters and me, but they needn’t have bothered. We never failed to hear everything.
“That’s the last of the sugar,” Mama said, pouring coffee in his thermos. “If you want more before Friday, we’ll have to ask Fergus for credit.”
Father was paid weekly. He gave his money to Mama and she ran the house. They bickered regularly over how little sugar she allowed him; she considered it a luxury, but Father had a sweet tooth and became irritable when none was left for his morning coffee.
“We’re broke already?” His chair scraped on the wooden floor. “How come?”
Mama sighed. “Isaac needed new shoes. His toes were poking out of the old ones.”
Before she became Mrs. Magnus Dahl, Mama’s name was Hilda Gwozdek. Her folks and five ignorant, brooding siblings also lived in the canyon, but in the Highland Boy area with the rest of the Poles. Father always said Mama only married him to get away from her priggish mother and her short-tempered father, and there was at least a little truth to that: Mama undoubtedly loved Father for himself, but she loved him even more for not being a Gwozdek.
“That boy’s growing too fast,” Father said. I had my head under the covers, but I knew he was looking at me. “He needs new clothes every damn day.”
“You want me to bind his feet like a Japanese girl? Make him stay small forever?”
“You betcha.” Father’s voice was a rumbling growl, but I didn’t need to see his face to know he was smiling. “So long as there’s sugar in my coffee.”
“Agnes is growing out of her clothes, too, by the way.”
“So? Just give her a potato sack and let her run barefoot.”
Agnes could never tell when Father was joking. She huffed indignantly beside me in bed, and I elbowed her to keep her quiet; she huffed louder and elbowed me back.
“How come you get new clothes and I don’t?” she hissed.
“It’s a joke, dummy,” I hissed back, rubbing my rib cage.
“Oh.”
“Go to sleep, the pair of you,” Mama ordered.
Father left for work and Mama returned to bed for a while, then rose again to get Agnes and me ready for school. Agnes got swatted for dawdling when Mama told her to get dressed, and she was still pouting when Mama kissed us and shoved us out the door. As usual, my best friend, Bo, was waiting on the porch, smiling as if somebody had just told him the funniest joke ever, even though his nose was running and his lips were blue from the wind.
“How many times have I told you not to stand outside in the cold, Bo Larsson?” Mama snapped. “Use the brain the good Lord gave you and come in the house next time, hear?”
“Yes, Mrs. Dahl,” Bo stammered, teeth chattering.
She reached out in exasperation and roughly tugged his cap over his ears. “You’re lucky you still have all your fingers and toes, child,” she said. “Run along now, all of you.”
We obeyed, Agnes dragging her feet as a form of protest until we were well out of Mama’s sight, then she brightened and sped by us. She pretended to dislike Bo, but not even Agnes could pull off a ruse like that. Bo was by far the most handsome boy we knew—his dimpled, freckled face and big green eyes made every girl in town dote on him, including my sister—but more than that, he was also the best-natured soul on earth, and there was nobody in the canyon who didn’t adore him.
“You don’t need to be afraid to come in the house, Bo,” I told him. “Mama won’t bite.”
He flushed. I couldn’t blame him for being scared: Everybody was scared of my mother. She wasn’t mean—far from it—but she had a tongue in her head and wasn’t shy of using it. (Agnes was sounding more like her all the time, and I dreaded the day the pair of them teamed up on me, one per ear.) Still, Mama loved Bo, just like the rest of us, and I think it bothered her to know he couldn’t see that.
“You have any of your Valentine’s candy left?” I asked. “Agnes stole all mine.”
“I didn’t either!” Agnes yelled over her shoulder.
Being different genders, my sister and I weren’t identical twins, of course, but we may as well have been: We both had blond hair, blue eyes, thin faces, and square chins. We also liked a lot of the same things—books, music, stories, puzzles, card games—so people were surprised that we squabbled as much as we did. Part of it was simple jealousy: I was annoyed that she was smarter than me, and she resented that most people liked me better than her. I suspect the main reason we butted heads all the time, however, was that we were so much alike, and both of us enjoyed nothing more than yanking each other’s chain.
Bo dug in the pocket of his thin brown coat and gave me a Tootsie Roll. He was shorter than me by a couple of inches, but I was skinny as a fish line and he was stocky and powerful. He already had a hint of his father’s massive shoulders—his daddy, Sven, worked in the mine with Father, and Father said he’d never met a stronger man—as well as the beginning of Sven’s barrel chest and thick calves. Bo could carry me on his back for blocks, and if I was dumb enough to wrestle him, I’d end up facedown in the dirt and hogtied before I even knew how I got there.
Agnes drifted back, staring at the Tootsie Roll I’d just unwrapped. “Can I have half?”
“Sure.” I popped the whole thing in my mouth and stuck out my tongue to show it to her.
“You’re a jackass, Isaac,” she said, running ahead again.
“You should be nicer to your sister,” Bo said mildly.
“She should be nicer to me.” We stepped around a drift of snow in front of Fergus’s General Store and a dried horse turd hit me in the face: Agnes had deadly aim. I stumbled and fell, but Bo caught me before I hit the ground.
“Dang you, Aggie!” I sputtered. She was already twenty feet ahead, laughing her fool head off.
I wiped my face with snow, swearing. A clump of slush had wormed its way inside my coat collar, too, and was wiggling down my chest, beneath my shirt. I could tell Bo was trying not to laugh and I almost said something mean, then realized he wouldn’t think of laughing if I hadn’t deserved it. He helped clean my face, his mittens gentle on my cheeks and forehead.
“I’ll get even with her,” I muttered, glaring after Aggie.
“You sure are a slow learner,” he answered.
* * *
Our schoolhouse was small because it was only for the twenty or so kids who lived in the Carr Fork area of Bingham. There were almost a dozen other schools in other parts of the canyon—Highland Boy, Lark, Dinkeyville, Frog Town, Markham, Freeman, Heaston Heights, Copper Heights, Terrace Heights—but none of them, save for the main school in Bingham proper, was much bigger than ours. Since we were mostly Swedes in Carr Fork, there was a disproportionate number of blond heads in the room when our caps and hats came off. Bo was a vivid exception to the general rule: His hair was the color of an orange peel.
