Olivia, Mourning (25 page)

Olivia huffed along behind Jeremy until they came to a large flat rock that jutted out into the water. Jeremy stepped onto it and offered his hand to Olivia, and they both stood facing upstream. The river flowed straight as a ruler until the next bend. Tall willows, oaks, and maples lined the banks, skirted in the bright red of sumac. The trees arched over the water, as if trying to join hands, but the river was just that much too wide.

“This is the place that gave the river its name,” Jeremy said.

“I’ve been wondering why it’s named after Jesus.”

“It isn’t. Its name is G-e-e-s-i-s.” He spelled the letters out. “The G should be hard. Geesis is Algonquin for sun. If we had time to wait for the sun to set, you’d see it framed perfectly between the trees on either side of the river and leaving a long reflection, right down the middle. Some white man must have written down the name and then when other folks
saw
it instead of
hearing
it, they all mispronounced it.”

“How do you know things like that?” She bent to pick up a stone and skipped it over the water.

“Mostly from talking to people over at the new university in Ann Arbor. They’re thinking about setting up a faculty for the study of Native American culture.” Jeremy found a flat stone and tried to do as Olivia had, but it plunked into the river. “You’re pretty good at that,” he said.

“Mourning taught me. When we were kids. He can make five jumps. Do you have brothers and sisters?” she asked.

“Four sisters – all of them schoolteachers until they married. And one younger brother. He took over the family printing business.”

“Do we have time to sit here for a few minutes?” she asked.

“Sure.”

Olivia removed her work shoes and socks, rolled up her trouser legs, and dangled her feet in the cool water. “Oh, that feels good. Why didn’t
you
? Take over the business. If you’re the oldest son, shouldn’t it have gone to you?”

“Didn’t want it. Never liked being inside.” He sat beside her and pulled off his own footwear – soft, comfortable-looking leather boots. Olivia eyed them jealously, thinking he must have gotten them from an Indian. “Anyway, my father wasn’t all that keen on having me in the business.” Jeremy tried his luck with another stone, managing one half-hearted skip. “He was set on me being the first Kincaid to attend college. Get a piece of paper says I’m smart. I went for a while – took some classes in history and literature.”

“That must have been interesting.”

“Not really. A bored professor stands at the front of a hot lecture hall, reading texts to bored students. You might as well sit somewhere more comfortable and read them yourself. And having removed us from our parents’ care, the college felt obligated to provide adequate supervision. So it felt more like being in prison than being educated.”

“Did you have a sweetheart?” Olivia imagined Jeremy in a frock coat, strolling along a riverbank and holding an open book. At his side was a faceless girl, twirling her parasol and listening in rapture as he read Emerson aloud.

“Where was I going to find a sweetheart at a college that accepted only men? But I surely got one when I returned home for the summer. Before I knew what was happening, I was engaged to be married. To a nice girl named Francie Everman.”

“Did you love her very much?” she asked softly, prepared to hear a tragic end to this story.

He took his feet out of the water and wiped them on his pant legs as he said, “I didn’t love her at all.”

“Then why did you want to marry her?” She began drying her own feet.

He leaned back on his elbows, knees bent, face turned up to the sun, eyes closed. “Never told you I did. Like I said, Francie was a nice girl and certain to grow up to be an excellent woman. At my mother’s urging, we started keeping company. You can imagine my surprise when I heard that a wedding date had been set. By my mother and hers.”

“Surely you must have proposed.”

“Not that I recall. Those women were arranging the ceremony before I got around to objecting.”

“So why didn’t you tell your mother that you didn’t want to get married? At least not to Francie?”

He sat forward and shook his head. “I couldn’t think of a good enough reason why not. It would have seemed such bad manners. After all, she was a nice girl. Pretty. She was always baking pies and things. There was nothing wrong with her. Nothing I could have told my mother that she would have understood and accepted. Francie was a nice-looking, well-mannered girl, and her family had money. My mother couldn’t imagine anything else a man could ask for.”

“What else
would
you have asked for?”

He glanced at Olivia, his face seeming to close up. “Not pies and lace tablecloths,” he said and pulled his boots on.

Olivia grimaced. Was he thinking about the embroidered tablecloth she had put on the table, when what he’d wanted was to sit outside and eat with his fingers? Good Lord, what if she had shown up at his door bearing a pie? That picture almost made her laugh.

“To be left in peace. Allowed to find my own way. To find someone who is my intellectual equal.” He looked up at the sun and said, “We’ve got to get going,” and got to his feet.

Olivia hurriedly tied her shoe laces. She expected Jeremy to offer a hand to help her up, but he didn’t. “But you have to tell me what happened. How come you’re not married to Francie Everman?”

“I ran off like a dog, a month before the wedding.”

“The poor thing!”

He stepped off the rock onto the river bank and turned to give Olivia a tolerant smile, as if she were a small child first learning the ways of the world. “I never did worry my mind much about old Francie. Figured I’d done her a big favor. I was right, too. It wasn’t six months before she got herself wed to someone respectable and well-fixed. Bit of a dullard, but I’m sure she’s far happier with him than she would have been trying to keep up with me.”

“Have you seen your family since then?”

“Yes.” He started walking and talked over his shoulder. “About a year after I left. I wanted to set things square with them. You see, when I ran away I helped myself to some of their money. I had inherited a little from my grandmother, but I also walked off with the cash my father was keeping in his top bureau drawer, for my next year’s college tuition. It wasn’t a large sum, but stealing is stealing. I tried to pay him back, but he refused to take it. I thought he’d be furious, but it turned out he wasn’t the least bit angry. He even slipped some more coins into my pocket and said it had all been for the best.”

“I guess parents can forgive their children for just about anything.”

“Well, yes, I suppose they can, but I think it was more than that. That was the first time I’d ever thought much about
his
life, and I think he might have been more envious than indignant about what I’d done.”

“What on earth would he be jealous of?”

“He’d probably spent his own life regretting not having the nerve to run out on my mother, when
her
mother started talking about when would be the best date for them to get married.”

Olivia couldn’t hide the look of dismay on her face. Mourning was right; Jeremy seemed to consider all women a dreadful fate, to be avoided at all cost.

Well, I can’t complain
, she thought.
I keep telling myself it would be different if I only knew what he felt and thought. So now I know
.

“We do have to get going.” Jeremy started up the trail. “Won’t be time for coffee. Just enough to show you where I live.”

“Have you had any jobs since you left home?” she asked.

“A few. First one was up in the northern peninsula, looking for copper. But working in a mine is no life for a man. Certainly not for a man like me. Then I worked for a while as a guide for tourists. After that I –”

“Tourists? What tourists?”

“Silly rich people who come out here from New York and pay a lot of money to dress up as Daniel Boone and shoot a buck or a bear. Some of those fools are just as happy to let you shoot it for them, as long as they get to take the antlers or skin home. Most of them don’t even want to eat the meat. Most sickening job I ever had, but those touring companies do a steady business. After that, I went to work for a blacksmith. Even clerked in a general store for a while. Then I built my cabin and I’ve been here ever since. I invested my father’s money in a tract of land up north, with plenty of good timber on it. By the time I’m skint, I figure the lumber companies will have moved out this way and be ready to start slaughtering up there. Should show me a good profit. And once I get a little cash together, I’ll start giving people mortgages.”

“You mean like a bank?”

“Folks out here would rather deal with a face they know than a bank. And there’s good money in it. Going rate of interest is 7%. But no one who has any money comes to someone like me in the first place, so most of them can’t make their payments. You can foreclose or, if they have it, you can charge them 20% shave money to let it ride. After that they only pay the 7% interest each year, but nothing on the capital. If that goes on for eleven years, you’ve got all your money back, and they still owe you their farm.”

“Doesn’t ‘foreclose’ mean to take their farm away?”

“Yes.”

“But that would be awful, to force people out of their home.”

“Well, they could always stay on and work it for a percentage. You know, like hired hands. I wouldn’t be throwing their children into the snow.” He made a sad face. “Their choice.”

“Still. I think that would be awful.”

“Then business is awful. But if you’re going to take someone’s money and not pay it back as promised, you’ve got to accept the consequences.”

Olivia could think of no response to that. “Didn’t you ever want to be a farmer?” she asked.

“Live at the mercy of the Chicago grain pits? Never. When they get done robbing you, it’s the turn of the railroads, elevator companies, and steamship lines. Farmers work harder and get paid less than anyone in America. They work like fiends all spring, summer, and fall, and hibernate in their holes all winter. And their wives. Lord. Who do you think is filling up all the insane asylums they keep building?” He stopped for a moment to face her. “But don’t worry, I don’t plan to spend all my time dispossessing local farmers. I also write articles for a journal that the university puts out. A page every month discussing what I learn about the plants and animals around here.”

“So
that’s
why you sit out in the woods.”

“I sit out in the woods because I enjoy doing so.” He resumed his brisk pace. “Fortunately for me, other people are willing to pay to read about the experience.”

“You write about bears?”

“Bears, wolves, snakes. Last month’s article explained why a rabbit being chased will always head for high ground. I don’t suppose someone like you has ever wondered about that.”

“Never chased enough rabbits to notice that’s what they do.”

“Well it is. I could never make sense of it. One would think there’d be more places for them to hide down low. Fallen trees, thick underbrush, and such. But when you chase a rabbit, it always heads up. You can’t figure out why, unless you watch them long enough. A rabbit can outrun anything going up, but on a downhill slope I or even you could catch one. Reason is, its hind legs are much longer than the front ones. That’s what gives it so much force when pushing itself up. But going downhill it gets all tangled up in itself. I’ve seen them flip right over. You see, no one would know things like that, if men like me, with a feel for the world and the intellect to understand it, didn’t sit out in the woods watching. People try to study animals in zoos, but you can’t learn anything with them locked in a cage. It won’t be long before those professors over in Ann Arbor set up a faculty of the Life Sciences. They’re extremely interested in my work.”

It occurred to her that she hadn’t been showing nearly enough enthusiasm. She began stumbling through her first attempt at gratifying a male ego.

“Well, of course they’re interested. Those articles you write are so important.” The words felt thick and sticky coming out of her mouth. No wonder she’d had no gentleman callers. She had no idea how to talk to a man. First she insulted him by not showing enough interest in his work, and now she had probably angered him by spewing empty flattery, as if he were a five-year-old showing her one of his drawings.

He surprised her by brightening, stopping to face her again, and saying, “I can give you some of them to read.”

“That would be grand,” she said and changed the subject. “Before, when you were talking about your land, you said that they’d be ready to start
slaughtering
the trees. That sounds like a funny word to use.”

He turned back to the trail. “That’s what the loggers call it when they first come in, to cut off the valuable wood. I didn’t make up the word, but I do think of it as a slaughter. They move in, strip the land bare, and move on. We need another president like old Andy Jackson, to put a stop to things like that.”

“My brother says we should be grateful to the lumber companies for giving jobs to so many people.”