Torch: Novel from the author of the huge bestseller Wild.

PREFACE

When I was nine someone gave me a blank diary. I don’t remember who. It was pure white and had a small golden lock that opened with a small golden key that was also meant to re-secure the lock, but never did. I loved that diary. I remember very distinctly knowing it was the best gift I’d ever received. I filled it with stories about princesses and kings, about horses ridden by girls whose fathers drove around in fancy cars. I wrote about things that were nothing about me.

When I was eleven a poet came to my school to teach a class for several days. She was called a poet-in-the-school, a special guest, a rare occurrence. Every minute she spoke it was like someone was holding a lit match to the most flammable, secret parts of me. One day the poet-in-the-school explained what metaphors were and then asked us to write a whole poem composed of them. I was a lion. I was an icicle. I was a kaleidoscope. I was a torn-up page. I was glass that other people took to be stone. Another day she told us we could write poems about our memories. She asked us to close our eyes and think for a while about when we were younger and then open our eyes and write. I wrote about running down the sidewalk in what I called beautiful, filthy Pittsburgh in my paint-speckled sneakers when I was five.

A week later the principal summoned me to his office. When I arrived he explained from behind his big desk that the poet-in-the-school had showed him my poem. You’re a good writer! he exclaimed. His name was Mr. Menzel. He was the first person to ever say this to me. He handed me a copy of my poem and asked if I would read it out loud to him and I did, mortified but also happy. After I was done reading he said it was surprising that I’d described Pittsburgh as being beautiful and filthy because most people would think it could not be both things at once. Keep writing, Cheryl, he said.

I kept writing.

I didn’t know that by doing so I was becoming a writer. I knew people wrote books, but it didn’t occur to me that I could be one of them until I was twenty and a junior at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, enrolled in an introductory poetry class taught by Michael Dennis Browne. I learned a lot in that class. I came to understand language in a way I’d never understood it. I wrote my first serious (though lousy) poems. But most important, I got to be in a room a few times a week with a writer who’d written not just one book, but many, and it was only then that it dawned on me that even though the gap between who he was and who I was seemed enormous, maybe—just maybe—I could bridge that gap and someday be a person who wrote a book too.

I’ve often been asked how long it took me to write Torch. There are three answers to this question and they are all true: four years, seven years, and thirty-four years. But the last answer is the truest. Torch is born of the little white diary with the lock that wouldn’t work, the poet-in-the-school who taught me what a metaphor was, the principal who said keep writing, the writer whose existence showed me the way. They are not in the acknowledgments of this book, but they are in its blood. Torch is the story I had broiling in my bones for the first thirty-four years of my life. It’s the story I felt I could not live without telling. The one that made me think I could die when I finished writing it (though I can’t and don’t want to). Perhaps every writer has this relationship to his or her first book. I worked my tail off when I wrote my other books, Wild and Tiny Beautiful Things, but Torch is the book that taught me how to write a book and because of that it was the one that demanded the deepest faith, the greatest leap, the furthest reach.

Torch is a novel about a family in rural northern Minnesota during a time of great loss. Because I grew up in a place not unlike the place depicted in the novel and because my family experienced a great loss not unlike that of the Wood/Gunther family in the book, many people read Torch as if it’s nonfiction, but it is not. Like a lot of novelists, I drew on my life experiences while writing Torch—those who’ve read my other books will undoubtedly recognize some details about my mother and her death and the general landscape and culture of rural Aitkin County, Minnesota, where I came of age—but the autobiographical elements were only the seeds from which I created a fictional world.

Though it’s true my family and I listened to radio shows of the sort Teresa Wood hosts in Torch on the very real community station KAXE, my mother wasn’t a radio show host and I can’t imagine she’d have wanted to be, given the opportunity. My brother didn’t go to jail for dealing methamphetamines like Joshua Wood does. My stepfather wasn’t an only child who obsessively listened to the music of Kenny G in his grief like Bruce Gunther does. I didn’t have an affair while my mother lay dying in a hospital in Duluth like Claire Wood does.

In writing Torch, I wanted to tell a story that had no obligation to what actually happened and yet what happened had everything to do with my need to write Torch. One of the great paradoxes of writing fiction is that it’s often only through imagination that a writer can reveal the greatest truth. I certainly felt that way as I wrote Torch. I don’t know precisely what it meant for my stepfather to lose his wife or for my siblings to lose their mother, but in Torch I tried very hard to know. Fiction gave me license to seek. It allowed me to tell the only story I could at the time, one that exceeded the bounds of my own particular grief—a grief that was so enormous I couldn’t hold it alone. I needed to cast it into other bodies, other minds, and also to pay those other people their due. They had lost my mother too. I put the story of my family’s sorrow on a larger, mostly make-believe stage so I could make sense of how any of us had managed to come out the other side. In doing so, my allegiance wasn’t accuracy. It was emotional truth.

That’s what I mean when I tell you that Torch was broiling in my bones. It was the story of my life and yet I made everything up. I created characters, even as I felt the people I knew and loved in every word I wrote. I set the story in a place that both was and was not home. I named the town in Torch Midden—the medieval word for a communal garbage heap—not because I wanted to imply my beloved hometown of McGregor was a dump, but because a midden is the most valuable find when archeologists do their excavations. It’s the place where we recover the hidden treasures, both grand and mundane. In middens, the story of a people and a place can be found, but only if we dig.

Torch is the result of my first sustained effort at digging. When I scratched beneath the surface as I wrote it, I came to understand I didn’t know what I was going to find as each layer revealed itself. It was only after I’d finished that I could see what I’d done: written a novel not only about grief and loss, but also about love in its many forms, about how we find light in the midst of the most profound darkness, about how we survive what we think we will not. And it’s only from this vantage point—years after Torch was first published—that I can see all of my books are about that. How things can be both beautiful and filthy at once.

PART I

The Woods of Coltrap County

Yet it would be your duty to bear it, if you could not avoid it: it is weak and silly to say you cannot bear what it is your fate to be required to bear.

—CHARLOTTE BRONTË, Jane Eyre

1

She ached. As if her spine were a zipper and someone had come up behind her and unzipped it and pushed his hands into her organs and squeezed, as if they were butter or dough, or grapes to be smashed for wine. At other times it was something sharp like diamonds or shards of glass engraving her bones. Teresa explained these sensations to the doctor—the zipper, the grapes, the diamonds, and the glass—while he sat on his little stool with wheels and wrote in a notebook. He continued to write after she’d stopped speaking, his head cocked and still like a dog listening to a sound that was distinct, but far off. It was late afternoon, the end of a long day of tests, and he was the final doctor, the real doctor, the one who would tell her at last what was wrong.

Teresa held her earrings in the palm of one hand—dried violets pressed between tiny panes of glass—and put them on, still getting dressed after hours of going from one room to the next in a hospital gown. She examined her shirt for lint and cat hair, errant pieces of thread, and primly picked them off. She looked at Bruce, who looked out the window at a ship in the harbor, which cut elegantly, tranquilly along the surface of the lake, as if it weren’t January, as if it weren’t Minnesota, as if it weren’t ice.

At the moment she wasn’t in pain and she told the doctor this while he wrote. There are long stretches of time that I feel perfectly fine, she said, and laughed the way she did with strangers. She confessed that she wouldn’t be surprised if she were going mad or perhaps this was the beginning of meno-pause or maybe she had walking pneumonia. Walking pneumonia had been her latest theory, the one she liked best. The one that explained the cough, the ache. The one that could have made her spine into a zipper.

I’d like to have one more glance, the doctor said, looking up at her as if he had risen from a trance. He was young. Younger. Was he thirty? she wondered. He instructed her to take her clothes off again and gave her a fresh gown to wear and then left the room.

She undressed slowly, tentatively at first, and then quickly, crouching, as if Bruce had never seen her naked. The sun shone into the room and made everything lilac.

The light—it’s so pretty, she said, and stepped up to sit on the examining table. A rosy slice of her abdomen peeped out from a gap in the gown, and she mended it shut with her hands. She was thirsty but not allowed a drop of water. Hungry, from having not eaten since the night before. I’m starving.

That’s good, said Bruce. Appetite means that you’re healthy. His face was red and dry and cracked-looking, as if he’d just come in from plowing the driveway, though he’d been with her all day, going from one section of the hospital to the next, reading what he could find in the waiting rooms. Reading Reader’s Digest and Newsweek and Self against his will but reading hungrily, avidly, from cover to cover. Throughout the day, in the small spaces of time in which she too had had to wait, he’d told her the stories. About an old woman who’d been bludgeoned to death by a boy she’d hired to build a doghouse. About a movie star who’d been forced by divorce to sell his boat. About a man in Kentucky who’d run a marathon in spite of the fact that he had only one foot, the other made of metal, a complicated, sturdy coil fitted into a shoe.

The doctor knocked, then burst in without waiting for an answer. He washed his hands and brought his little black instrument out, the one with the tiny light, and peered into her eyes, her ears, her mouth. She could smell the cinnamon gum he chewed and also the soap he’d used before he touched her. She kept herself from blinking while staring directly into the bullet of light, and then, when he asked, followed his pen expertly around the room using only her eyes.

I’m not a sickly woman, she declared.

Nobody agreed. Nobody disagreed. But Bruce came to stand behind her and rub her back.

His hands made a scraping sound against the fabric of the gown, so rough and thick they were, like tree bark. At night he cut the calluses off with a jackknife.

The doctor didn’t say cancer—at least she didn’t hear him say it. She heard him say oranges and peas and radishes and ovaries and lungs and liver. He said tumors were growing like wildfire along her spine.

What about my brain? she asked, dry-eyed.

He told her he’d opted not to check her brain because her ovaries and lungs and liver made her brain irrelevant. Your breasts are fine, he said, leaning against the sink.

She blushed to hear that. Your breasts are fine.

Thank you, she said, and leant forward a bit in her chair. Once, she’d walked six miles through the streets of Duluth in honor of women whose breasts weren’t fine and in return she’d received a pink T-shirt and a spaghetti dinner.

"What does this mean exactly?" Her voice was reasonable beyond reason. She became acutely aware of each muscle in her face. Some were paralyzed, others twitched. She pressed her cold hands against her cheeks.

I don’t want to alarm you, the doctor said, and then, very calmly, he stated that she could not expect to be alive in one year. He talked for a long time in simple terms, but she could not make out what he was saying. When she’d first met Bruce, she’d asked him to explain to her how, precisely, the engine of a car worked. She did this because she loved him and she wanted to demonstrate her love by taking an interest in his knowledge. He’d sketched the parts of an engine on a napkin and told her what fit together and what parts made other parts move and he also took several detours to explain what was likely to be happening when certain things went wrong and the whole while she had smiled and held her face in an expression of simulated intelligence and understanding, though by the end she’d learned absolutely nothing. This was like that.

She didn’t look at Bruce, couldn’t bring herself to. She heard a hiccup of a cry from his direction and then a long horrible cough.

Thank you, she said when the doctor was done talking. I mean, for doing everything you can do. And then she added weakly, But. There’s one thing—are you sure? Because . . . actually . . . I don’t feel that sick. She felt she’d know it if she had oranges growing in her; she’d known immediately both times that she’d been pregnant.

That will come. I would expect extremely soon, said the doctor. He had a dimpled chin, a baby face. This is a rare situation—to find it so late in the game. Actually, the fact that we found it so late speaks to your overall good health. Other than this, you’re in excellent shape.

He hoisted himself up to sit on the counter, his legs dangling and swinging.

Thank you, she said again, reaching for her coat.

Carefully, wordlessly, they walked to the elevator, pushed its translucent button, and waited for it to arrive. When it did, they staggered onto it and saw, gratefully, that they were alone together at last.

Teresa, Bruce said, looking into her eyes. He smelled like the small things he’d eaten throughout the day, things she’d packed for him in her famously big straw bag. Tangerines and raisins.

She put the tips of her fingers very delicately on his face and then he grabbed her hard and held her against him. He touched her spine, one vertebra, and then another one, as if he were counting them, keeping track. She laced one hand into his belt loop at the back of his jeans and with the other hand she held a seashell that hung on a leather string around her neck. A gift from her kids. It changed color depending on how she moved, flashing and luminescent like a tropical fish in an aquarium, so thin she could crush it in an instant. She considered crushing it. Once, in a quiet rage, she’d squeezed an entire bottle of coconut-scented lotion onto the tops of her thighs, having been denied something as a teenager: a party, a record, a pair of boots. She thought of that now. She thought, Of all the things to think of now. She tried to think of nothing, but then she thought of cancer. Cancer, she said to herself. Cancer, cancer, cancer. The word chugged inside of her like a train starting to roll. And then she closed her eyes and it became something else, swerving away, a bead of mercury or a girl on roller skates.

They went to a Chinese restaurant. They could still eat. They read the astrology on the placemats and ordered green beans in garlic sauce and cold sesame noodles and then read the placemats again, out loud to each other. They were horses, both of them, thirty-eight years old. They were in perpetual motion, moved with electric fluidity, possessed unconquered spirits. They were impulsive and stubborn and lacked discretion. They were a perfect match.

Goldfish swam in a pond near their table. Ancient goldfish. Unsettlingly large goldfish. Hello, goldfish, she cooed, tilting toward them in her chair. They swam to the surface, opening their big mouths in perfect circles, making small popping noises.

Are you hungry? she asked them. They’re hungry, she said to Bruce, then looked searchingly around the restaurant, as if to see where they kept the goldfish food.

At a table nearby there was a birthday party, and Bruce and Teresa were compelled to join in for the birthday song. The woman whose birthday it was received a flaming custard, praised it loudly, then ate it with reserve.

Bruce held her hand across the table. Now that I’m dying we’re dating again, she said for a joke, though they didn’t laugh. Sorrow surged erotically through them as if they were breaking up. Her groin was a fist, then a swamp. I want to make love with you, she said, and he blinked his blue eyes, tearing up so much that he had to take his glasses off. They’d tapered off over the years. Once or twice a month, perhaps.

Their food arrived, great bowls of it, and they ate as if nothing were different. They were so hungry they couldn’t speak, so they listened to the conversation of the happy people at the birthday party table. The flaming custard lady insisted that she was a dragon, not a rabbit, despite what the placemat said. After a while they all rose and put their heavy coats on, strolling past Teresa and Bruce, admiring the goldfish in their pond.

I had a goldfish once, said a man who held the arm of the custard lady. His name was Charlie. And everyone laughed uproariously.

Later, after Bruce paid the bill, they crossed a footbridge over a pond where you could throw a penny.

They threw pennies.

On the drive home it hit them, and they wept. Driving was good because they didn’t have to look at each other. They said the word, but as if it were two words. Can. Sir. They had to say it slowly, dissected, or not at all. They vowed they would not tell the kids. How could they tell the kids?

How could we not? Teresa asked bitterly, after a while. She thought of how, when the kids were babies, she would take their entire hands into her mouth and pretend that she was going to eat them until they laughed. She remembered this precisely, viscerally, the way their fingers felt pressing onto her tongue, and she fell forward, over her knees, her head wedged under the dash, to sob.

Bruce slowed and then pulled over and stopped the truck. They were out of Duluth now, off the freeway, on the road home. He hunched over her back, hugging her with his weight wherever he could.

She took several deep breaths to calm herself, wiped her face with her gloves, and looked up out the windshield at the snow packed hard on the shoulder of the road. She felt that home was impossibly far.

Let’s go, she said.

They drove in silence under the ice-clear black sky, passing turkey farms and dairy farms every few miles, or houses with lit-up sheds. When they crossed into Coltrap County, Bruce turned the radio on, and they heard Teresa’s own voice and it shocked them, although it was a Thursday night. She was interviewing a dowser from Blue River, a woman named Patty Peterson, the descendant of a long line of Petersons who’d witched wells.

Teresa heard herself say, "I’ve always wondered about the art—I suppose you could call it an art—or perhaps the skill of selecting a willow branch." And then she switched the radio off immediately. She held her hands in a clenched knot on her lap. It was ten degrees below zero outside. The truck made a roaring sound, in need of a new muffler.

Maybe it will go away as mysteriously as it came, she said, turning to Bruce. His haggard face was beautiful to her in the soft light of the dashboard.

That’s what we’re going to shoot for, he said, reaching for her knee. She considered sliding over to sit close to him, straddling the clutch, but felt tied to her place near the dark window.

Or I could die, she said calmly, as if she’d come to peace with everything already. I could very well die.

No, you couldn’t.

"Bruce."

We’re all going to die, he said softly. "Everyone’s going to die, but you’re not going to die now."

She pressed her bare hand flat onto the window, making an imprint in the frost. I didn’t think I’d die this way.

You have to stay positive, Ter. Let’s get the radiation started and then we’ll see. Just like the doctor said.

"He said we’ll see about chemo. Whether I’ll be strong enough for chemo after I’m done with radiation, not about me being cured, Bruce. You never pay attention." She felt irritated with him for the first time that day and her irritation was a relief, as if warm water were being gently poured over her feet.

Okay, then, he said.

Okay what?

Okay, we’ll see. Right?

She stared out the window.

Right? he asked again, but she didn’t answer.

They drove past a farm where several cows stood in the bright light of the open barn, their heads turned toward the dark of the woods beyond, as if they detected something there that no human could. A thrashing.

2

The sound of his mother’s voice filled Joshua with shame.

"This is Modern Pioneers! she exclaimed from all four of the speakers in the dining room of the Midden Café and the one speaker back in the kitchen that was splattered with grease and soot and ketchup. Joshua listened to the one in the kitchen as he scrubbed pots with a ball of steel wool, his arms elbow-deep in scorching, soapy water. Hearing his mother’s voice made his head hurt, as if a dull yet pointed object were being pressed into his eardrums. Her radio voice was exactly like she was: insistent, resolute, amused, wanting to know. Wanting to know everything from everyone she interviewed. So, how exactly, can you tell us, do you collect the honey from the bees? she’d ask, dusky and smooth. Other times she held forth for the entire hour herself, discussing organic gardening and how to build your own cider press, quilting and the medicinal benefits of ginseng. Once, she’d played Turkey in the Straw" on her dulcimer for all of northern Minnesota to hear and then read from a book about American folk music. Recently, she had announced how much money she’d spent on tampons in six months and then proceeded to describe other, less costly options: natural sponges and cotton pads that she’d sewn herself out of Joshua and Claire’s old shirts. She’d actually said that: Joshua and Claire’s old shirts. Claire was off to college by then, leaving Joshua alone to wallow in humiliation the first week of his senior year of high school.

Marcy pushed her way back into the kitchen through the swinging door, holding a stack of dirty plates with uneaten edges of food and wadded-up napkins. She set them on the counter where Joshua had just finished cleaning up and then reached into her apron for a cigarette. Joshua watched her, trying to appear not to, as he scraped off the dishes. She was in her late twenties, married, with two kids, short and big-breasted, which made her look heavier than she was. Joshua spent a lot of his time at work trying to decide whether he thought she was pretty or not. He was seventeen, lanky and fair, quiet but not shy.

His mother was talking to a dowser named Patty Peterson. He could hear Teresa’s animated voice and then Patty’s quavering one. Marcy stood listening, untied her apron, and tied it again more tightly. Next thing you know your mom will go down to Africa and teach us all about it. Maybe the way they go to the bathroom down there.

She would like to go to Africa, Joshua said, dumb and steadfast and serious, refusing to acknowledge even the slightest joke about his mother. She would go to Africa, he knew. She’d go anywhere, she’d leap at the chance.

They got an African over in Blue River now. Some adopted kid, Vern said from the back door. He had it propped open with a bucket despite the cold. Marcy was the owner’s daughter; Vern, the night cook.

Not African, Vern. Black, said Marcy. He’s from the Cities. That’s not Africa. She adjusted the barrette that held her curly hair up at the back of her head. Are you trying to freeze us all to death in here?

Vern shut the door. Maybe your mom will interview the African, he said. Tell us what he has to say for himself.

Be nice, Marcy said. She went up on her tiptoes and pulled a stack of Styrofoam containers down from the top shelf, clenching her cigarette in her mouth. Nothing against your mom, Josh, she said. "She’s a super nice lady. An interesting lady. It takes all kinds." With great care, she tapped the burning end of her cigarette on a plate, then she blew on it and put it back into her apron pocket and buzzed out the door.

Six years ago, when his mother had first started the show, Joshua hadn’t felt ashamed. He’d been proud, as if he had been hoisted up onto a platform and was glowing red-hot and lit up from within. He believed his mother was famous, that they all were—he and Claire and Bruce. Teresa had made them part of the show; his life, their lives, were the fodder. She made them eat raw garlic to protect against colds and heart disease, rub pennyroyal on their skin to keep the mosquitoes away, drink a tea of boiled jack-in-the-pulpit when they had a cough. They could not eat meat, or when they did they had to kill it themselves, which they did one winter when they’d butchered five roosters that as chicks they’d thought were hens. They shook jars of fresh cream until it congealed into lumps of butter. His mother got wool straight off a neighbor’s sheep and carded it and spun it on a spinning wheel that Bruce had built for her. She saved broccoli leaves and collected dandelions and the inner layers of bark from certain trees and used these things to make dye for the yarn. It came out the most unlikely colors: red and purple and yellow, when you might have expected mudlike brown or green. And then their mother would tell everyone all about what the family did on the radio. Their successes and failures, discoveries and surprises. We are all modern pioneers! she’d say. Listeners would call in to ask her questions on the air, or would call her at home for advice. Slowly at first, and then overnight it seemed, Joshua didn’t want to be a modern pioneer anymore. He wanted to be precisely what everyone else was and nothing more. Claire had stopped wanting to be a modern pioneer well before that. She insisted on wearing makeup and got into raging fights with their mother and Bruce about why they could not have a TV, why they could not be normal. These were the same fights Joshua was having with them now.

You’re going to have to clean the fryer too, said Vern. Don’t go trying to leave it for Angie.

Joshua went back to scrubbing, turning the hot water on full blast. The steam felt good on his face, opening the pores. Pimples bloomed on the rosy part of his cheeks and the wide plain of his forehead. At night in bed he scratched them until they bled, and then he would get up and put hydrogen peroxide on them. He liked the feeling of the bubbles, eating everything away.

You hear what I told you? Vern said, when Joshua shut the water off.

Yep.

What?

I said I did, he said more harshly, turning his blue eyes to Vern: a gaunt old man with a paunch and a bulbous red nose. One arm had a tattoo of a hula dancer, the other a hooked anchor with a rope wound around it.

Well, answer me, then. Show some respect for your elders. Vern stood near the door in his apron and T-shirt, which were caked with smudges the color of barbeque sauce where he had wiped his hands. He opened the door again and tossed his cigarette butt into the darkness. Outside there was a concrete landing, glazed with ice, and an alley where Joshua’s truck and Vern’s van were parked along the back wall of Ed’s Feed.

Joshua lifted the sliding hood of the dishwasher, and the steam roiled out. He slid a clean rack of flatware out and began to sort the utensils into round white holders as he wiped each one quickly with a towel.

Running behind tonight, ain’t you?

Nope. On the radio he heard his mother laugh, and the well-witcher laughed too, and then they settled back into their discussion, serious as owls.

Ain’t you?

I said no.

Maybe you’re gonna have to learn that when a man’s got a job, a man’s gotta show up on time, ain’t you?

Yep.

I seen you left the lasagna pan for Angie last night. Don’t go thinking that I don’t see. ’Cause I see. I see everything your shit for brains can think up about two weeks before you get to it. And I knowed you’re always thinking things. Trying to see what you can get away with. Ain’t you?

Nope.

Vern watched Joshua, slightly bent from the waist, a cigarette smoking between his lips, as though he were trying to come up with something else to say, running down the list of things that pissed him off. Joshua had known Vern most of his life, without having known him at all. It wasn’t until they worked together at the café that he even knew that Vern’s name was Vern—Vern Milkkinen. Before that, he’d known him as the Chicken Man, the way most people in Midden did, because he spent his summers in the Dairy Queen parking lot selling baby chicks and eggs and an ever-changing assortment of homemade canned goods, soap, beeswax candles, and his special chokecherry jam. It had never occurred to Joshua to wonder what the Chicken Man—what Vern—did to occupy his time in the months that he wasn’t selling things until he walked into the kitchen at the café and saw Vern standing there, butcher knife in hand.

On that first day working together, Vern did not indicate that he remembered Joshua, seemingly unconscious of the fact that he’d actually watched him grow up, from four to seventeen, laying eyes on him during those fourteen summers at least once a week, first as a child, when Joshua would go with his mother to purchase things from the Chicken Man, and then later when he was sent on his own. The DQ parking lot was the closest thing Midden had to a town square because it also shared its parking lot with the Kwik Mart and Gas, and Bonnie’s Burger Chalet. Every week he and the Chicken Man would exchange a nod or the slightest lift of the chin or hand. Once, when Joshua was ten, the Chicken Man asked him if he liked girls, if he had a girlfriend yet, if he’d ever kissed a girl, if he’d preferred brunettes or blonds.

Or redheads. Them are the ones to watch out for. Them are the ones with the tightest pussies, Vern had said, and then roared with laughter.

Vern had shown Joshua his anchor tattoo and asked him if he’d ever heard of the cartoon Popeye the Sailor Man.

Yes, Joshua said solemnly, holding out the money his mother had given him.

That’s me. That’s who I am, Vern said, his eyes wild and mystical, as if he’d been transported into a memory of a time when he’d been secretly heroic. Only I’m the original one, not a cartoon. And then he laughed monstrously again while Joshua faked a smile.

It had taken Joshua several years to fully shake the sense that Vern was Popeye, despite the fact that Vern’s real life was on obvious display. He had a son named Andrew, who was older than Joshua by twenty years. At work, when Vern was in a good mood, he would tell Joshua stories about Andrew when he was young. Andrew shooting his first deer, Andrew and his legendary basketball abilities, Andrew getting his arm broken by Vern when he’d caught him smoking pot in eighth grade. I just took the little bugger and twisted it till it snapped, Vern said. I woulda pulled it clean off if I could. That’s how he learned. I don’t mess around. Messing around’s not how you raise a kid. You mess around and then they never get toughened up.

Joshua hardly knew his own father. He lived in Texas now. Joshua and Claire had gone to visit him there once when Joshua was ten, but they hadn’t lived with him since Joshua was four. They didn’t live in Midden then. They lived in Pennsylvania, where their father was a coal miner. They moved to Midden without ever having known about its existence until shortly before they’d arrived on a series of Greyhound buses, their mother having secured a job in housekeeping at the Rest-A-While Villa through the cousin of a friend.

Marcy came back into the kitchen and sat on an upturned bucket that they used as a chair. I’ll have the pork tenderloin tonight, Vern. With a baked potato. You can keep the peas. You got a baked potato for me?

Vern nodded and closed the door he’d opened again.

Is it thinking about snowing out there? she asked, looking at her nails.

Too cold to snow, he said.

All three of them listened to Teresa ask Patty Peterson what she thought the future of dowsing held and Patty told her it was a dying art. The radio show wasn’t Teresa’s real job; she was a volunteer, like almost everyone who worked at the station. Her real job was waiting tables at Len’s Lookout out on Highway 32. She’d started there after the Rest-A-While Villa closed down ten years before.

Marcy grabbed the baseball cap off of Joshua’s head and then put it back on crooked. Tell Vern what you want for dinner so we can get the hell out of Dodge when it’s time. I’m gonna go sweep.

Onion rings, please, he said, and loaded up another tray of dirty dishes. On the radio, his mother asked what year the showy lady’s slipper was made the Minnesota state flower.

1892, said Vern. He opened the oven drawer and took out a potato wrapped in foil with his bare hands and dropped it onto a plate.

At the end of each show, his mother would ask a question and then would tell the listeners what next week’s show would be while she waited for them to call in and guess the answer. She practiced these questions on Joshua and Claire and Bruce. She had them name all seven of the dwarfs, or define pulchritudinous, or tell her which is the most populous city in India. The people who called in to the show were triumphant if they got the answer right, as if they’d won something, though there was no prize at all. What they got was Teresa asking where they were calling from, and she’d repeat the place name back to them, delighted and surprised. The names of cold, country places with Indian names or the names of animals or rivers or lakes: Keewatin, Atumba, Beaver, Deer Lake.

1910? a voice on the radio asked uncertainly.

Nooo, Teresa cooed. Good guess, though.

Vern stepped in front of Joshua holding the fryer basket with a pair of tongs and flung it into the empty sink. That’s gonna be hot.

1892, a voice said, and Teresa let out a happy cry.

Vern switched the radio off and Joshua felt a flash of gratitude. They wouldn’t have to hear where this week’s correct caller was from, wouldn’t have to hear Teresa say what she said each week at the end of her show. "And this, folks, brings us to the end of another hour. Work hard. Do good. Be incredible. And come back next week for more of Modern Pioneers!"

Your bud’s out there, Marcy said to Joshua when she came back into the kitchen. She put her coat on. I locked the front so whoever leaves last go out the back.

It’ll be this guy, Vern said, pulling his apron off. ’Cause it sure as shit ain’t gonna be me.

• • •

Joshua changed out of his wet clothes in the kitchen when Vern left and took his plate of onion rings out front, where R.J.