Little Faith, page 1
Dedication
For Jim & Lynn Gullicksrud
& In Memory of Dave Flam
(1945–2017)
THIS NOVEL WAS INSPIRED IN PART BY
TRUE EVENTS THAT TRANSPIRED IN WESTON,
WISCONSIN, ON MARCH 23, 2008
Epigraph
The earth was plowing the men under, and the horses under, and the plows. No generation sees it happen, and the broken new fields grow up forgetting . . . All the living were breasting into the crest of the present together. All men and women and children ran spread in a long line, holding aloft a ribbon or banner; they ran up a field as wide as earth, opening time like a path in the grass, and he was borne along with them. No, he said, peeling the light back, walking in the sky toward home, no.
—ANNIE DILLARD, THE LIVING
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Spring
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Summer
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Fall
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Winter
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Spring
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Nickolas Butler
Copyright
About the Publisher
Spring
(1)
THE LITTLE BOY GIGGLED AS HE RAN HIS SMALL SOFT HANDS down the old man’s furrowed forehead, over his graying eyebrows, eyelids, and eyelashes, and then settled the blindfold just above his nose and ears before running off into the sunlit cemetery to hide.
“Count to twenty, Grandpa,” the boy called out.
“One Mississippi . . . two Mississippi . . . three Mississippi . . . ,” said the old man loudly, in no hurry, patient as a dusty cabinet clock in a dining room corner.
The sound of laughter receded. Lyle Hovde continued slowly counting. Pressed against his brow and eyelids, Lyle’s red faded cotton handkerchief smelled of his worn Wrangler blue jeans: diesel, gasoline, sawdust, the golden butterscotch candy he favored, and the metallic tang of loose pocket change. Before six he heard the boy’s breathing, his little footsteps growing fainter, the occasional crunch of a pinecone or fallen white-pine branch under a sneaker, the squeak of long vernal grass in thick shadow, and giggling. By twelve, there was just the sound of a crow caw-caw-cawing in the crown of a pine. At seventeen, he felt his heartbeat slowing. The April sunlight warming his face felt good, his old barn jacket a comfort, like a tucked-in bed blanket. There was the desire to simply nod off, fall into the soft black sea of sleep. His counting slowed nevertheless, and at twenty, he pushed the blindfold up, opened his eyes, and the world was still there in a thousand different shades of fragile budding green and gently faded browns and yellows. There was no traffic on Cemetery Road. Not a single car. No tractors tilling. In the sky, two sandhill cranes descended toward a far-off pond. His back was against his son Peter’s headstone. He stood slowly, heard his knees pop in protest. He steadied himself against the granite slab.
“Ready or not,” he hollered, “here I come.”
It was a small cemetery. No more than a couple of hundred headstones. His shadow tipped away from his boots, long in the fading light. This grandson of his, Isaac, the only grandchild he knew, this five-year-old boy, what energy he enjoyed. All day long, while Lyle’s wife, Peg, and their daughter, Shiloh, shopped in Minneapolis, Lyle had been left to entertain Isaac, which was no hardship, no hardship at all. But my lord, did the boy run and run and run. . . . It was only late afternoon and already Lyle felt as tired as if he’d been laboring all day long, splitting wood perhaps, or throwing field rocks onto a stone boat.
“When I find you,” Lyle called out, “when I find you . . .”
He walked slowly among the headstones. Walked by the graves of old women and men he had known so many years ago, when, about Lyle’s own age now, they populated Redford, filling the pews of St. Olaf’s Lutheran Church, or standing in the narrow, crowded aisles of Hanson’s hardware store, pointing fingers at paint chips, studying cans of insecticide, or slope-shouldering bags of feed. Or there, again, pushing wobbly-wheeled carts through the IGA, the husband navigating while the wife held her long scroll of a list, so much of their life meted out in delicate cursive. Old teachers, farmers, postmen, loggers, milkmen, mechanics, short-order cooks, secretaries, dentists, doctors, firemen, butchers, bank tellers, barkeepers, taxidermists . . .
He almost walked right by Isaac, but the boy chortled, and Lyle spotted him in the shadow of old man Egdahl’s gravestone. Part of the fun, Lyle knew, was in being found. So he fell upon the boy, tickling his soft belly, his armpits, and his neck, until Isaac had to catch his little breath. Satisfied, Lyle sat on the ground beside his grandson, and noticing the boy’s shoelaces untied, went about knotting them anew.
“You didn’t make me take a nap today,” Isaac said, licking his chapped lips.
Lyle patted the newly knotted shoes, reached into his pocket, and handed the boy a small yellow pot of Carmex.
“You’re five years old. You can’t take naps forever.”
“Grandma says that a person never outgrows naps. She says everyone should take a nap. Every day. She says that in Spain and Portugal, they shut everything down in the afternoon so people can take their siestas.”
“What do you know about Portugal?” Lyle asked.
The boy squinted at Lyle, dabbed a finger in the balm and painted it on his lips.
“You take naps sometimes, Grandpa.”
“What’s that you say?”
“You take naps. In your chair. Watching TV. You even snore.”
“Those aren’t naps,” Lyle smiled, “they’re breaks. Your grandpa is just taking a break.”
“I don’t think people are supposed to snore on their breaks, Grandpa.”
“I don’t snore.”
The little boy laughed. “You do, too. Mom even recorded it on her phone. And Grandma told me once that sometimes you even wake yourself up with your own snores.”
Lyle mussed up the kid’s blond hair.
“C’mon now. Let’s clean up your uncle’s headstone and then we can go visit Hoot. He’s expecting us. Bet he might even have some ice cream waiting for you.”
From an old pipe located at the center of the cemetery they filled two aluminum pails with cold well water and Lyle dripped in a few beads of blue Dawn dish soap from a small plastic bottle he’d brought from home and then circulated his hand about the pail, making bubbles blossom in swirling rainbow iridescence. Lyle carried the sloshing pails to the grave of his lost son, Peter, and together, sun on their shoulders, and shining through the thin translucent skin of their ears, he and Isaac washed the gravestone with steel wool bunched between their fingers. The afternoon was cooling with every passing minute. Their hands grew pink and cold.
“Tell me again,” said the boy, “how he . . . what happened to him?”
Lyle worked his steel wool against the stone, scouring out bits of lichen and dirt. He looked at his grandson then, felt a surge of love for him, for he was such a kind, sensitive, and curious boy, and more than anything, these were qualities Lyle increasingly valued in the world.
“He just wasn’t healthy,” he said at last, omitting the tragic specifics. “He wasn’t meant to stay, I guess.”
“How long was he around? I mean, how old was he when . . .”
“About nine months.”
The boy nodded, kept on with his scrubbing, might have thought to himself, I’m so much older than him, then, after a few moments, said, “Grandpa, can we go to Hoot’s now?”
Rising from his knees, Lyle wiped his brow with the sleeve of his jacket, and emptied the pails of sudsy water in long arcs out and away from the gravestones. “One last thing,” he said. “Fill up this bucket here, will you? We’ll rinse the stone clean and then we can head on out of here.”
He watched the boy race off with the empty bucket. Watched him at the spigot, water sloshing near his tennis shoes. Watched him lean down and open his mouth as if at a bubbler—some drinking fountain—water splashing against his tongue and lips and down his chin. Watched him turn the tap off, and then return, water spilling copiously from the bucket with every labored step.
Lyle took the bucket from his grandson and in three graceful motions sent splashes of water glancing off the face of the stone.
The world, he knew, was divided into two camps of people, as it so often is, or as it is so oftentimes and simply reduced to being: those who find cemeteries places of sadness and eeriness, and those, like him, who felt here a deep and abiding unity and evenness, as if the volume in his life were suddenly dimmed down, the way he imagined it might be, floating in outer space, looking out over everything—the immensity of it all. For Lyle, this was a place to be close to people long gone. A free and quiet place off to the side of things. A place to touch not just his memories, but his future.
“Come on,” he said, taking his grandson by the shoulder. “Let’s go. Hoot’ll be waiting.”
“Grandpa, I need to pee.”
Lyle glanced around, pointed toward a huge white pine on the periphery of the cemetery. “Go water that tree over there,” he said.
Hustling toward its vast wide trunk, the boy was already tugging his pants and underwear to his ankles. Lyle looked elsewhere: at an untilled field, a nearby dairy farm, the forests that filled the coulees. By and by the boy returned to him.
“You’re the only person I know who needs to pee more than me,” Lyle said. “But I’ve got an excuse. I think my bladder has a hole in it.”
“A hole?” the boy asked, squinting up at his grandfather.
“Must be a hole. Or a few holes.”
“How did you get a hole?”
“Shot. An arrow, it was. Passed clean through me. Left this hole right here.” He touched his belly button.
The boy laughed. “Grandpa, that’s where your umbilical cord was. The one that connected you to the placenta. I’ve got one, too. Everyone does.”
“Oh,” said Lyle. “I forgot about that. Thought that’s where I was shot.” And how does he know these things? Placenta? Portugal?
He guided the boy to his old Ford F-150, opened the passenger door for him, shut it firmly. Then he walked around the back of the truck and, turning, looked at the little boy’s head, simply staring forward, waiting for him. He ran his hands along the rust of the tailgate, the scabby flakes of chipped paint. He climbed in, sat heavily behind the wheel, breathed in the cab’s dust and gasoline, its mildewed AAA maps, and . . . cinnamon.
He turned to the boy. “You been stealing my gum?”
But the boy only smiled and continued chewing, giggling just a little.
“So that’s where all my gum goes. I thought the mice were taking it.”
(2)
THE TRUCK EASED OFF THE KNOB OF A HILL WHERE THE CEMETERY sat, surrounded by its pickets of white pines and arborvitae, and in every direction, the manifold fields of future corn or beans, the occasional red barn, patches of forests, and a half mile off, the proud steeple of St. Olaf’s church, the place of Lyle’s baptism, first communion, wedding, and somewhere down the line, he knew, his funeral. Farther west ran the Mississippi River, rolling its slow, swirling way just a bit faster than Lyle’s after-supper stroll.
Hoot lived not far from Lyle, in a smallish ranch-style house on the edge of town. Hoot’s home was otherwise immaculately kept but was dense with the smell of cigarette smoke. Older than Lyle by a few years, and long since retired, he spent his days perusing the newspaper’s grocery store circulars, scissoring out coupons, and later, strolling the aisles of the big-city grocers (in La Crosse mostly, or maybe up to Eau Claire) for “deals,” or perhaps, more accurately, “savings.” His nights were rote—about twenty happy sorties to the refrigerator for a cold can of Old Milwaukee, maybe a T-bone or pork chop to flip in the cast-iron skillet, and burning his way through a pack or two of Camels before retiring to his bed, where he slept fitfully, rising frequently to evacuate all the evening’s beer. Aside from Peg, and perhaps Pastor Charlie, Hoot was Lyle’s best friend. They were different in any number of ways, but they were both kind, and of course, kindness is a great measure of one’s ability to befriend and perhaps love other people.
Lyle parked in Hoot’s driveway and, scooching across the bench seat, Isaac followed him out of the truck, racing ahead of his grandfather to poke at the doorbell, a little pale yellow glowing O.
“Well, who the hell we got here?” Hoot croaked out in his deep, sticky voice as he opened the door. “Oh, you two troublemakers. C’mon, fellas, come on in here.”
Lyle shook his hand. “We won’t keep you too long,” he said. Then, quieter, “Just wanted to swing by and hear about those test results.”
“Well, I’m still alive. So I’ve got that going for me.” He rapped a set of knuckles against his skull. “Knock wood.”
“Peg wanted me to check in, see if you needed anything.”
“Right now, all I need is another cold beer,” Hoot said. “You may as well have one, too.”
There are many different kinds of alcoholics in the world, and Hoot belonged to that class of drinkers reliant almost exclusively on cheap, domestic, canned beer. He was not a fall-down drunk, never passed out, became belligerent, mean, or even goofy. Hoot just liked to surf the humble tube of a beer buzz, coasting along with just enough magic in his bloodstream to soften the edge of things a little bit. It was many years since he’d divorced, and the cigarettes and beer—the smoke and wet, cheerful bubbles—were his own best company as he sat in the kitchen listening to a baseball, football, or basketball game through the fuzz of his old radio. He was gentle and lonesome, even shy. Lyle could not count the number of nights Peg had invited him over to their house for dinner and how, without fail, Hoot politely refused. We’re having pork chops, Peg would say. Are you sure you won’t stay? We’ve got plenty. We even have some of that beer you like in the fridge.
Lyle nodded, took note of the half dozen or so empty cans neatly lined up beside Hoot’s sink, smiled. “That sounds about right,” he said. “Thanks, Hoot.”
“And how about you, young man? Can I get you a glass of water? Milk? A Coke? I prolly got a can of Coke kickin’ around somewhere.”
“Grandpa said you had some ice cream,” said Isaac.
“He did now, did he?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You thirsty, too?”
“The kid’s always thirsty,” Lyle remarked, and it was true. “Shiloh can’t pump enough water and food into him.”
Isaac took a seat at the small circular kitchen table, and carefully explored the contours and ridges of the heavy glass ashtray marking its center. Self-conscious about the smell of his house, Hoot repainted the place every single spring, Lyle knew, throwing open the windows to roll thick coats of white over all those yellow-tinged walls and ceilings. He’d once shown Lyle a bathroom in the basement with a crucifix hanging above the toilet. Hoot took the crucifix down off the wall, and there, left in faded white against a backdrop of yellowy-brown, was the foggy image of the cross, left over. Hoot joked that his house was held together as much by nicotine residue as by wood or nails. Lyle wondered about Hoot’s beleaguered lungs and a recent trip to the doctor’s office, which was about as out of character for Hoot as going for a brisk seven-mile jog, or bragging about a new pink yoga mat.
“Well, he’s working hard, aren’t you, Isaac?” said Hoot, placing a small glass of water beside the boy’s wrist. Now Hoot scratched at his immaculately combed hair, still very dark after all the years. “Ice cream, you say?”
Isaac shrugged. “That’s what Grandpa told me.”
“Well, you know you can’t listen to everything your old grandpa tells you, don’t you?”
The boy wriggled on his wooden seat, smiled, unsure how to answer. Lyle took a chair beside him. It is a remarkable thing, watching children develop their own sense of humor, that radar that allows us to laugh at our world, our shortcomings, disappointments, even horrors.
“Huh,” Hoot said, “now I’m gonna have to rummage around in this icebox for a second or two. Don’t mind me. Ice cream, eh . . .”
“Icebox?” Isaac whispered to Lyle.
“Aha! Here we are. Now we’re in business,” Hoot said. “Neapolitan. I like it because a person gets three flavors in one. You ever have this stuff? I’m also partial to spumoni. High-end Italian-type ice creams.”
Isaac peered at Lyle, any doubt well-eclipsed by curiosity.
“Well, it’s a goddamn miracle. Three separate ice creams in one container. Like the holy trinity, I’d say. And better than sherbert, for chrissakes. Just a bunch of frozen fruit juice.”
He ran an old scooper under the kitchen tap, then dug out two rough orbs of tri-colored ice cream, and placed them in a dish with a spoon before Isaac. The little boy began eating, nodding his head in approval. Satisfied, Hoot took two Old Milwaukees from the refrigerator and passed one to Lyle. They cracked open their cans, raising them up to each other.
