They got rich. That was the essence of what befell them, if befell was a word you might assign to becoming rich.
They were, in the end, trying to recuperate a hidden and remote Truth known only to them, and not to their daughter, who grew to hate the wild, rejecting the silhouetted figure of her mother, a silhouette that grew to resemble her, so she hated it more and more.
What Ursula said of her daughter was that she had suffered from a lack of love. In certain bonds, a child could feel a loss from the strength of a union unavailable to her. It was so with Ursula and Nate.
Ursula spoke at times of how a mother in the wild will risk her life, give of her sustenance to an offspring, but, at a certain point, the bond dissolves, and the yearling leaves, or the mother eventually drives it away.
It happened with their daughter. She did not figure in their lives. She was committed to the fundamentalism of her Pakistani husband, but it reflected, in a way, Ursula’s mania, her reach for someone beyond the immediate tribe of her own. There were, Ursula said, discontented Eves among the tribes, women who bore the seed of nations and took up with other tribes.
She had done so with Nate. Every generation had such daughters, and they made the world a magical place of convergence; they bridged the divide between tribes.
It consoled Nate to a point. It made Ursula angry that Nate saw, in her death, an end to all that they had shared. She pulled at him and insisted he not forget her. She could hear him always if he had the strength to listen and hear her.
*
Ursula’s death took a long time. Nate made the mushroom recipe as he was instructed. She had been to the other side. They were making ready her arrival. It was not her deciding, when to leave, but theirs alone above, so she waited.
Her heart rose in her chest and lines formed on her face in the sudden consternation that she had deserved none of it, the good fortune. She never thought she would die rich. It troubled her suddenly. What good was money, what did it represent in the way you might leave something woven, a blanket or a basket behind that might be used and be a touchstone to your craft and skill?
She was not angry with Nate, but something was lost, something to her and him, and to a generation. She might have gone further north. It was determined she would have, if it were presented again, her life as an eagle or a wolf. Too many years had been lost somehow. She was the logo and not the person, and she had let that happen, her alone.
She touched Nate’s face. She wanted, again, solace in a study of accumulated history, histories he conceived as important, factual, and literal, because there was a great difference between them, her and him, and for this she loved him.
He completed a part of the unknown world. A mixing of blood was never troublesome to her people. Women had a status and were sent along with the early settlers to help them with new discoveries, women left to fend for themselves amidst the spirited restlessness of men who had not experienced the company of women in months, if not in years.
It was managed somehow. Women were a miracle shared, and there was no shame in it. They could walk as far and carry as much as any man, and, in the taking of pleasure, they were not demur, or filled with anxiety, and they took as much as was given, and, in the morning, they resumed their place, and nothing was lost in the act, and the great measure of a woman was how long she could walk between resting, just the same as a man, no different out there in the wilderness.
She wanted to die in the solitude and isolation of a single love, in proximity of the roar of a fire and a view of the lake in the natural light of the season. She reached for his face. Her hands, near the end, a collection of sticks, like kindling, brittle and dry, the swan of her neck giving in a sudden keel and slump of gathering sleep when a minute before she had been talking, so he was made ready for a coming sleep that would not end.
In the day, to appease and remind her of their past, he would sometimes play the fool and dress in the early Elmer Fudd cap he wore on arrival in Grandshire, which Ursula said made the men laugh so hard behind his back, they pissed themselves, but it was a hat that made her yearn for him so much more because there was so much improvement needed about him, and innocence, too, and yet a depth of great knowledge and compassion.
He was the opposite of Frank Grey Eyes in so many ways — the one going, the other coming. She had found them both here at the edge of nothingness. How was she so lucky?
To the antecedent history of the newly discovered Basque, Nate added a history preserved in the Viking Sagas, the banishment of Eric the Red, a fierce and flaxen-headed warrior, who, along with his followers discovered Greenland. His son, Leif Erikson, pushing ever west, arrived eventually into the far reach of the north, making settlement briefly in a new-found-land, where a grape particular to the land grew. He called the place of new discovery, Vineland.
And somewhere into that mix, in the trawl of stories and interests, he came upon the feat in an open boat of a Celtic monastic named Brendan, who might or might not have reached the Americas.
Ursula said Brendan was a name she would have chosen for a boy. In her native way, she pronounced it Bring Dawn, so its essence was unlocked and understood better. A name meant something. She could unlock a history, a hidden meaning, in the way there were men who spent a life cracking open rocks, discovering a great and distant past.
In the approach of death, all she wanted to hear was the consoling voice of Nate. The business was sold with this in mind when her sickness was apparent and how it would end. She did not want to die with the phone ringing, with someone wanting something of her, checking on a backorder, or making complaint, someone demanding a refund. With her death, so would go much of his life. He was at ease with it.
Ursula eventually slipped from life in his arms in an absence felt more than anything ever gained.
22
THOMAS STRAIT’S DAUGHTER, Lee-Ann, was all rural good looks with three kids under twelve who had taken nothing from her figure and filled her just right. She got out of the front seat while the bus was stopped, presumably at the mild reproach of her father as she got into the back of the car.
Thomas Strait quietly advanced with a dignity and hitch to his step of someone who had marched in military formation. He raised his hand as he walked toward Norman, beaming a smile, his face unshaven. He had on a medical orderly’s smock, of a pale blue starched material, stiff as cardboard, his hair, a steel grey and thinning, combed off his forehead.
Thomas Strait drove a first generation Saturn, a car Norman immediately recognized, and commented on for a conversation opener. There were no formal introductions. Norman remembered what he called the ballyhoo of patriotic commercials, a factory somewhere south, if he rightly remembered, free of the shenanigans of the UAW. He talked a mile a minute, the Saturn, a company his father had touted as part of the rebirth of the American automobile on the right side of organized labor this time, though, in the end, for all the soft pitch, for all the happy employees smiling and waving, for all the American flags, it didn’t make a damn difference because the cars were crap and cheaply made.
Thomas said, ‘You remember Saturn. I’ll be damned if you are not enlightened! God knows we need every good idea that’s out there. The Saturn, I’ll be damned if you don’t remember it just so.’
There was the preacher in his voice and issues of salvation never far from his mind. Thomas took Norman’s box, set it in the trunk then he went round his side of the car.
Norman got in. All the warning lights on the dash were lit.