Page 26 of The Bootlegger’s Bride

O n a sunny Saturday afternoon with the temperature rising toward sixty A.J.

guided the rowboat south on Long Lake, rowing easily.

He hadn’t been at the oars since late summer when football season started.

Over the intervening months he had grown another two inches, putting him near six foot tall, and added thirty pounds of bone, sinew, and muscle.

He could feel the difference through the oars as they sliced into the greenish water and propelled him effortlessly over the windless lake.

Soon he glided toward the dock at what had been his mother’s home and his father’s home and his home. Now it was his alone. Or would soon be, when he came of age. Though he didn’t know what to do with it. Or how he felt about it. Mixed memories, mixed emotions, for sure.

Nor was he certain how he felt about himself, who he had become as a result of losing both his parents.

He’d been thinking about it more lately, wondering whether he was on the right path.

A.J. recognized that he was all jammed up.

He was lonely a lot but didn’t much like being with other kids.

Most didn’t seem to take things seriously.

Did a lot of silly shit that he had no interest in.

He liked playing football. Nothing childish about it.

Willows along the shore were leafing out and catkins showing on the larger trees atop the lake bank. Sunfish stirred beneath the dock. High above, a red-tailed hawk circled searching for food. Spring was coming early this year. The air smelled fresh and expectant.

He lifted himself from the boat seat, climbed up on the dock, and stood feet spread gazing at the wooden stairs that led up the bank. Three years ago now that his mother had died. He’d not returned home since, nor shed a tear.

A.J. felt for the key in his jeans pocket, slid it out, and grasped it in his fist. Still, he could not move. Then he kicked himself mentally—What? You afraid of ghosts? He heard Coach Nordstrom growling, “Get up off the ground, you pantywaist!” A.J. climbed the stairs.

At the back door he turned the key and pushed into the den.

Was it the lingering spirits he’d have to face that had scared him off those three years?

Or something he’d have to confront inside himself, his conflicting notions of his mother and what she had done to herself and to him.

And then there was his father, who had also deserted him, though perhaps under duress.

He wasn’t sure about any of it. It was all a jumble.

He lit the green-shaded lamp on the end table by the divan.

The room lay cold as a crypt. He recalled the placid look on his mother’s face as she lay in her casket amid the sweet-smelling flowers surrounding her.

Hands folded together as if she were merely resting for a while, like she had decided to nap in a flowerbed.

He remembered too the next, cold morning when they lowered her into her grave. He had yet to return there either.

Now he reprised the image of her encased in the ice of the frozen lake, as he had hundreds of times, even in sleep.

A.J. knew that someday, somehow, he had to melt the ice that held him and inhibited him.

He just didn’t know how. But recently he came upon a quote from Franz Kafka in his literature class anthology that gave him a clue: “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” Those words had clung to him and now had compelled him to return home.

Though musty smelling, the room remained much as it was the last time he visited his mother just weeks before she died.

He guessed Aunt Helen had cleared out the library books that had been stacked throughout the den.

She likely returned them and insisted on paying the overdue fines.

But the books he sought today were from his mother’s lifelong collection dating back to her childhood and school days, to her college literature classes and beyond. Those would still be on her shelves.

He first went to her Charles Dickens collection, which numbered a dozen books. There A.J. pulled out Great Expectations, David Copperfield , and Oliver Twist . He moved left then, back down the chronologically arranged English fiction to locate Tom Jones and back right to Jane Eyre.

Next he ventured into the American lit section and withdrew Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes . That should do for now. A good start.

He reckoned that if he were ever to hack through whatever held him or affect a thaw, if he were ever to overcome the twin childhood traumas of his parents’ deaths and deal with that burden effectively, it might help to see how other orphans managed similar abandonment.

And what they might all have in common. He hoped that Pip, Oliver, Tarzan, Jane, Huck, and the others might point the way home.

He had seen that his mother had been attempting something similar: to come to grips with her husband’s death via literature.

However, she had taken off in the wrong direction.

Instead of looking inside herself to where she might find her strength and regain her bearings, she foundered in books cataloguing the chaos, stupidity, and futility of war.

That is, things she could do nothing about.

It was not self-healing she had engaged in but self-flagellation.

Similarly, being orphaned was nothing A.J.

could do anything about. That die had been cast. He could continue to be frozen by it emotionally and spend—or, rather, misspend—his life posing as an angry victim of parental abandonment.

Or he could respond to it in a way to free and actuate himself.

Perhaps with altruistic works like Superman, another orphan.

Or with guile and goodness like Huckleberry Finn.

Or with the resourcefulness and courage of Tarzan.

He would learn more from his close reading of their stories and others.

One thing he had already figured out was that despite the love of his aunt and uncle and the financial legacy of his father, he needed to be able to rely on himself, to love himself, if he was ever to be the hero of his own life.

Something he craved heart and soul. He searched for tools that might enable him to do just that.

Next A.J. moved to the bookshelves at the northern end of the room, to his father’s books.

Not as extensive as his mother’s lifelong collection and more a mixed bag, both topically and spatially.

History, philosophy, and mysteries; essays, poetry, and memoirs; American literature, varied nonfiction, and more, all shelved without any rhyme or reason that A.J.

could perceive. He knelt before the moldy-smelling shelves gazing up and down, left and right, to see what might further his quest.

Books by Montaigne, Mencken, Melville, Henry Miller, and Hemingway.

Others on English grammar, Australian aborigines, and songbirds; on economics and Siberian travel.

Then, tucked away on the bottom shelf, he discovered a title that struck him, describing himself to a T: Modern Man in Search of a Soul .

He pried the worn hardcover book from among the others and rifled through it—a discarded library book—finding many of the thick, yellowed pages dog-eared, with passages underscored in blue ink.

A.J. was not familiar with the author, C.G. Jung. In the front matter he read that the man was a preeminent Swiss psychologist. On the title page, again in blue ink, he found a quote inscribed in his late father’s emphatic hand:

“Until you make the unconscious conscious it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”—C.G. Jung

The words seemed to speak personally to A.J., even though he wasn’t quite sure what they exactly meant. He would find out.

A.J. rose, added that book to his stack, and retreated with his take through the back door. He had done what he came to do. Enough for one day. He could return later to wrestle with the ghosts in the rest of the house that he needed to subdue and dispel. Or, it occurred to him, embrace.