Free Mink River: A Novel by Brian Doyle Page A

never cried before and never did again in all his long life.
    Then he came back into the little house and made a fire and boiled oak leaves and grass and made a soup. The father and the mother seemed stronger after the soup but in the morning when my greatgrandfather awoke he found them both dead with the man holding the woman’s feet to his chest inside his raggedy shirt.
    That man died trying to warm his wife’s feet.
    There are many other stories about my greatgrandfather Timmy Cooney, but I will tell just one more now.
    Many years after that morning he came back to that place to mark the graves of that family. He found the little creek where he had buried the girl but there was no trace of the little house and no graves marked for anyone. My greatgrandfather was very old then but he took a spade and marked out three graves by the creek and then took his hat and brought water from the creek and gave them to drink of their own water, as he said, the pure water washing away their pain and sorrow.
    My grandfather who was there that day told me that story.
    40.
    The front door of the Department of Public Works is never locked, Cedar and Worried Man being of the shared opinion that a public service project should never close, and over the years they have found many things when they opened the door in the morning, including once two babies the size of two fists.
    Worried Man wrenches the door open and runs straight through the building, sure of his way in the dark, through the reading room and cavernous central shop and warren of little offices in the back, his fear rising what is the matter with Nora? and he reaches her studio door and wrenches at it and just as he does he feels a stab of her pain like a train running right through his head and he wavers there by the door, his grip loosened for a second as he feels blindly for the source of the pain— my child! Nora! —and he wrenches ferociously at the door again but it’s locked! shit! shit! and he hammers on the door with all his might which is considerable even in his later years he having been all his life a sinewy and passionate man and he yells Nora! Nora! and then suddenly the door gapes open and she stands there sobbing and he half steps half stumbles into the studio the half a wooden man looming on her table in the dark and she leans into her father and he bends down and folds his daughter into his arms hunching over her longleggedly like a heron and she tucks her head under his chin and weeps and weeps and he doesn’t say a word but keeps his mouth buried in the black river of her hair and they stand like this for so long that her tears soak twin circles into his shirt and those circles never actually do wash out of his shirt and eventually the shirt fades away to rags and ribbons but the circles remain inviolate and one morning he joins them together reverently and folds them into his prayer bundle where there are many things like that.
    As she cries into him he makes deep wet sounds in his throat.
    Finally he says into her hair talk to me talk to me but she can’t speak and he leads her to the porch and she puts her face on his long knees and cries again his long hands stroking her black hair he says what? what? with the front of his mind frantic for Nora and the back of his mind feeling for the pain he felt at the door, and that’s how they are when Moses floats up to land plop on the railing and yells
    Daniel is hurt! come! come!
    She leaps up and takes two quick steps and sails right over the railing like a deer.
    Worried Man shouts run! run!
    Moses with two terrific strokes of his wings like twin black tents is away over the tops of the trees below him No Horses flies down the path her hair a river of black in the black night between the twin lines of black trees her heart black black.
    41.
    Owen Cooney here at home telling stories for my son Daniel.
    I will continue with stories of Timmy Cooney.
    Timmy Cooney was fifteen years old when the Hunger came.