Northern Lights. Tim O’Brien

      ‘Forget it,’ Perry said.

      ‘What?’

      ‘Just forget it, Herb.’

      ‘But … I mean, shouldn’t we get some people here?’

      ‘No,’ Perry said.

      Wolff frowned. He looked shaken. ‘At least the mayor?’

      ‘Nobody.’

      ‘Geez,’ Wolff moaned. ‘Somebody should be here when he comes. Don’t you think? If I’d known about it, why, I’ll tell you, I’d’ve had the whole council here. I’ll tell you.’

      ‘Leave him alone, Herb.’

      Perry went outside and sat on the kerb.

      The streets were dusty.

      Jud Harmor’s pickup was gone now, but the two dogs were still there, curled in wait on the steps of Damascus Lutheran. Beyond the peeling buildings there was nothing but forest.

      He cleaned his glasses and leaned back. Then he cleaned his glasses again. In a while Grace came out and sat with him.

      ‘Wolff still phoning people?’

      ‘Oh,’ she laughed. ‘I think I settled him down. He’s in there grinding fresh coffee for Harvey.’

      ‘Some creep, isn’t he?’

      ‘Paul.’

      ‘I’m sorry. You didn’t see the time in there?’

      ‘Few more minutes.’ She took his hand. ‘You all right now?’

      ‘Sure. I’m okay. I’m priceless. I’ll bet that damn bus is late.’

      ‘Shhhhh. You just relax and start smiling. Have a bright face.’

      He gazed up Mainstreet to where the bus would turn in and hiss and stop. The street was silent. The heat seemed to absorb sound. Sitting on the kerb, he felt like a boy again, waiting to be picked up from school, or waiting in a stifling theatre for the curtain to draw up and the lights to fade and the movie to begin. He felt he’d been waiting a long time. He was restless. The long night had caught up with him and he needed a cigarette. He was restless. He needed a cigarette and the pack was empty. Grace sat silently, twisting her wedding band, toying with his hand until he pulled it away and stood up. Across the street and down a way, he saw the shoddy frame building where he had his own office. The Venetian blinds were down, forming a white backdrop for the lettering on the window: PAUL MILTON PERRY, and below his name, painted in orange, DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE, COUNTY FARM EXTENSION. Sucking the Federal Titty. Harvey always stated the unstated.

      ‘Awful hot,’ Grace finally said.

      ‘Damn bus is late. I knew it.’

      ‘Shall I see what time it is?’

      ‘Yes. And get me some cigarettes. And make sure Wolff isn’t on that telephone again.’

      He walked to the end of the block and back again. One of the dogs trotted over to be scratched. The town was dead. He could hear the muffled sound of the organ inside the church. The town did not particularly depress him, but at the same time he often wondered why anyone still lived there. Wolff was there to sell coffee and medicine. The barber was there to cut Wolff’s hair into a flat crewcut once a week. The grocer was there to sell food to the barber. The farmers were there, trying to grow corn in the forest to sell to the grocer, and Perry was there to keep the farms going, to tell them when to use fertilizer, to fill out subsidy applications and loan applications, to watch the Swedes try to grow corn on land meant for pine and Indians. He didn’t know. It didn’t make sense. Once he’d asked his father why they didn’t just move on to Duluth, and the old man went crazy, charging into one of his fiery sermons about the virtues of hardship and how Perry’s grandfather had built the house out of the forest’s own timber and how a town was like tempered steel and how a transplanted tree never grows as tall or as fine as one rooted in native soil. The lesson of the sermon, if not the logic, always stuck with Perry. The old man died and Perry stayed on. And Harvey got drafted. Old Harvey. Harvey was different. Ever since the old man died, Harvey talked about leaving the town, and one day with the help of the draft board he did leave. A confused time. Harvey the Bull. He was a bull but he was no soldier. As kids they hadn’t even played war games. Indians were better, better targets for games with their leather jackets, sour faces, bad teeth and greasy hair, Chippewa mostly. They’d stalked the Indians, crawled on bellies in the weeds behind the house, yelped and bellowed. But never war games. Nothing serious. Trapping games and capture-the-flag and forts in the forest, not far from Pliney’s Pond, snow forts in winter and tree forts in summer, great camouflage in the fall, but never war games. And no one in Sawmill Landing knew a damn about the war anyway. It wasn’t talked about in the drugstore. Then gangbusters, bang, old Harvey gets drafted, good old Bishop Markham and Herb Wolff on the draft board – sorry, Harvey’s number was up, something like that, proper optimism and good humour, a little sympathy, proper pride. Perry stayed out of it. Nothing he could do, and the war wasn’t real anyway, and, besides, it seemed somehow natural that a rascal and bull like Harvey was the one to go off to the war. In that sleepwalking, slothful departure there had been no time to counter the nagging thought that the speed of it all, the blinding foggy invisible force behind it, was a sure sign that Harvey would come home maimed. Because no one knew a damn about it. Vietnam was outside the town orbit. ‘A mess,’ was what people would say if forced to comment, but a mess was still not a war, and it did not become a war until Harvey went to fight in it. Two Indian boys went with him. Their picture was on the front page of the town paper, Harvey in the centre, grinning and posing, his arms wrapped around the two dull-eyed Indian boys. In September, one of the Indians got killed and the paper carried a short obituary with an American flag stencilled in. But even then it wasn’t really a war. It wasn’t a war until Harvey got himself wounded and the paper carried another front-page story, pictures of Harvey in his football uniform, pictures of the old house, pictures of Perry and Grace, a picture of the dead old man in his preacher’s robes, a long history of the family, and for a time the war was really a war, though even then it was all jumbled and formless. No sides, no maps to chart progress on, no tides to imagine surging back and forth, no real battles or victories or defeats. In the tangled density of it all, Perry sometimes wondered if the whole show were a masquerade for Harvey to dress in khaki and display his bigballed outdoorsmanship, proving all over again how well he’d followed the old man into the woods, how much he’d learned, to show forever that he was the Bull.

      The dog trotted back to the church steps.

      Perry sat on the kerb again, cleaned his glasses, leaned back. Tips of high pine poked over the store fronts.

      Grace came out with cigarettes and coffee. ‘Eleven thirty,’ she said. ‘Herb says it’s always a little late.’

      ‘I just wish that bus would get in.’

      Then he saw it. It was as though it had been there all along, poised in turn around the corner, waiting to be seen. He saw it and heard it simultaneously. It was the giant Greyhound. It might have been the same silver monster that took Harvey to war in the first place.

      It swung off the tar road, changing gears and growling.

      Herb Wolff hurried out. ‘There she is, there she is!’ he wailed. He brushed his coat and stood erect. ‘There she is, all right.’

      The bus cleared the turn.

      ‘Sure wish everybody was here for this,’ said Wolff. ‘This is something. Harvey! I can’t believe it.’

      Perry took a step and stood alone. The Greyhound’s brakes hissed and forms moved behind the tinted windows and Perry searched for familiar movements. The door opened with another strange hiss, and the great grey cave was transfixing dust and trembling. Perry peered into the tinted glass.

      Harvey stepped off alone. He carried a black bag with white stitching.

      ‘Well, hey!’ he said.

      Without