“Stop this,” I said, grabbing his pelt. I yanked him close. “You only get one mother,” I told him. “You only get one father.”
He pushed me away, then turned to the snow. In a moment, there was nothing but his footprints, framed by the twin lines of his sled, heading off into the night.
* * *
When I reached the door to the student art museum, my lungs were cold from breathing heavy, and my hands were shaking — that’s how worked up I was about Eggers.
Inside, occasional people loitered the corridors of the high-ceilinged, overly white gallery, and a quick scan for my father yielded nothing. A table at the door offered a fleet of wineglasses, prepoured with red and white. I knew better than to mix my liquors, but I grabbed a red, wondering how anyone could say such bitter things about a mother.
I felt the hot glow of burgundy in my mouth, and pictured Eggers out in the snow, heading to a campfire that he would share with a story he couldn’t tell. If there are ghosts on this earth, they are formed by the things you cannot utter, and they’ll outlive the black in your teeth, burn hotter than any hole in your stomach. Untold stories take on lives of their own. They silently eat dinner with you. Still as shoe trees, they stand over you, watching you sleep. They’ll make you pace all-night Laundromats or hunker down to a marathon night of bottom fishing — back to back in a boat with a ghost who mimes you with its heatless limbs. It’s what makes Farley stare down an ice hole, what put the tailwind on Trudy’s spear, what made Eggers’ litter so heavy as he dragged it alone. The title of my father’s untold story is Janis, and though he may want to tell it, it’s what keeps the ice in his drink from melting, what keeps him nervously turning his new ring. It’s the reason I went to a funeral alone.
I puffed my inhaler to ease my breathing, then downed the wine. I grabbed another glass and crossed the gallery’s hardwood floor. Descending on long wires from the rafters were small artsy lamps that cast tight cones of light on stray people, making them appear to be mingling. There were no rich people here, and certainly no millionaires. A few students avoided their poorly dressed professors, while a farmer or two in work bibs squinted at the art. I realized Eggers was right’—his parents had other plans tonight.
Everything about the gallery was making me uneasy, and I didn’t know how long I could wait for my father. I read the exhibition placard on the wall. It said the exhibit — entitled “We: The People”—was sponsored by the Thunderbird Casino, and, sure enough, all the student paintings depicted Native Americans. There was a young warrior drinking a can of Lakota-Cola, a council elder playing bingo, and a team of mounted scouts pointing binoculars toward the viewer, in the lenses of which were reflected blonde girls in bikinis, upside down. Everything hinged on the irony of culture clash, and it sickened me that none of the students had tried to tell the story of a people who, for all practical purposes, were gone.
I polished off most of my wine and made for the back door, averting my eyes from paintings that invariably included eagle feathers, trusty palominos, and cloudy-eyed braves with washboard stomachs. I was almost to the exit when a woman stepped right into my path. To keep from knocking her over, I put a hand out for balance, and it landed on her shoulder.
“Careful,” she said as I juggled my glass, nearly sloshing wine on her.
I felt the cool, silvery fur of her coat, which was made from a patchwork of rabbit pelts, and, realizing I’d let my hand linger a moment too long, I pulled back. She had pale, pale skin and dark hair, and her eyebrows lifted in a wry way, as if my touching her was a gesture so unexpectedly forward that she found it entertaining.
“Sorry,” I told her. “You okay?”
She smoothed the collar of her coat, then checked the state of her own wine. She regarded me over the rim of her glass, as if deciding what to do with me, and after finishing the last sip of white, she narrowed her eyes as if she’d made a decision, though something told me this look was for my benefit, that she’d made a decision before she crossed my path.
“You must really love this painting,” she said. “But there is room enough for everyone to enjoy the artwork without running people over.”
The way she unabashedly appraised me was commanding — there was some hunter in this woman — and though she was too skinny for my taste, though her posture was pitiful, something rose in me, and I decided to see where things might lead.
“What painting?” I asked.
“This painting,” she said. “This painting is not so bad.”
She pointed toward a large canvas, on which was a simple depiction: in a hammock made from an American flag, a woman snoozed under a blue stand of summer sun, surrounded by an atoll of prairie grass.
“The other paintings have too many people in them,” she said. “It is my experience that people come and go. I prefer landscapes.”
There was a slight honk to her voice, and an accent I couldn’t quite place.
She turned toward me, as if for my opinion, and the downy rabbit fur made her seem charged somehow, made me want to study the portrait more closely. Looking deeper, I saw how delicately the artist had captured the carefree recumbence of a woman in slumber: the way an ankle hangs in the air, how light cascades through hair, making it look as if the hammock swung with the wind.
But I didn’t want to seem uncritical, either.
I shook my head in minor disgust. “The artist seems completely unschooled in the depiction of mountainscapes,” I told her, pointing at the brown bumps on the painting’s horizon. “I suppose these are supposed to be the igneous formations common to local grasslands. The work is not without merit, however. I like the way the flag cradles the woman and rocks her to sleep. It lacks the irony that ruins the other pictures for me.”
“Perhaps,” she said, smiling. “Observe, however, that the hammock is strung between two saplings. These are birch trees, very brittle. And there is wind. I predict the woman will soon be on the ground. Though the artist may not intend this. It is my opinion that people rarely know their flora.”
Now I studied her more closely. Again, she was not my type, but I noticed how full her lips were, how her eyelids lowered when she spoke. “I don’t believe I’ve seen you before,” I said. “What brings you to USSD? Parents Weekend?”
She said, “Tomorrow I deliver an academic paper. This I have been with fever to finish. Now is time for personal amusement.”
“Really?” I put my hand out. “I’m Henry.”
“People call me Julie,” she said, though she didn’t shake.
I took a step closer. “So, Julie. What’s the topic of your paper?”
“Corn.”
“Corn?”
“Well, corn mostly. There is some talk of beans, especially the lima.”
There was a silence. I scratched the back of my neck.
“How fascinating,” I said, nodding. “The lima is one of my favorite beans. What’s your thesis?”
“There is no actual thesis. The paper is a summary of early migration and cultivation of Mesoamerican starches. I teach the history of agriculture at the University of Northwestern North Dakota.”
I nearly spat up my drink. I’d gone to UNND once on the lecture circuit. Talk about the middle of nowhere.
“I know this is not a glamorous university,” she said, pulling out a tube of nasal spray. “But where else may I do my research? North Dakota is also kind to my allergies, and the countryside reminds me of home.”
“No, no, corn is fascinating,” I said.
She proceeded to block a nostril before administering a whopping blast of saline spray. She then craned her head back to let it penetrate.