Brittle Innings

“That doesn’t answer my-”

“Shhhh,” Henry said, a mittened finger to his lips, exactly between the ugly labret holes at each mouth corner. “In this place, Daniel, before your father’s grave, and in the presence of his enemy’s uncommon integrity, you should stand speechless, humbly mute.”

“B-B-But I-”

“Shhhh.”

I bowed my head. Memories welled. When next I looked up, a bald eagle’d caught a towering updraft. It wheeled in the high Aleutian gauze. Its talons seemed to spiral through my feelings like the threads of a screw. Finally, I looked at Henry, almost blinded by the sting of the wind and the thin wax of grief in my eyes.

Henry reached into his pack and rummaged out a brand-new National League baseball. He flipped it to me. I caught it with both hands, like an amateur. I stood there for a minute turning that ivory ball in my gloves before it occurred to me to wedge it into the natural cup of the stone cairn supposedly marking my daddy’s grave. In that cup, the ball glinted like a lighthouse beacon and focused the whole of Attu Island around it, a pivot for the world to turn on.

I got out Mama’s Brownie and took a picture.

As evening drew on, Henry and I walked back to the hut where we’d spent the night. The ache in my knee had let up some, and my limp seemed less pronounced. I asked Henry what he’d done with his old man. He didn’t answer.

“Come on, Henry. You didn’t leave him in ’Bama, did you?”

He shook his head, still striding, still thoughtful.

“Then what? What’d you do?”

“He lies among a host of ancient Aleut mummies, fur- and grass-wrapped carcasses in a cave on one of the Islands of Four Mountains southwest of Umnak. I never intend anyone to move him again. His traveling days are over. There he will rest until the generative vulcanism of this archipelago drowns its islands, Daniel, or until the world expires in either fire or ice. I am resigned.”

Henry refused to fly back to Kodiak with Fego and me aboard Fego’s battered prop plane. He said he’d eventually return for a look-see to Oongpek, on Alaska’s Seward Peninsula, but in the meantime wanted solitude and a chance to sort through his options. He gave Fego a small stack of U. S. bills of various denominations, for flying us to Attu and for returning me to Kodiak to pick up a commercial flight to Anchorage. Then he hugged me and stood clear as Fego and I taxied for takeoff, under a streaky sky, in a moderate crosswind.

“Whachu thinka that Henry fella?” Fego asked me when were up and rippling over the ashy chop of the Bering Sea.

His question startled me because he didn’t talk all that much. I said, “Why do you ask?”

“Sumfin fu

“Which part?”

“Du

“How long’ve you known Henry, Fego?”

“Hey, I don’t know him. Joos met him lass winter. I work for him sumtimes since, thass it.”

“Oh.”

“He tol me you roomed with him. Gude. Cause I lak to know the pipple I fly bettern I know this beeg ol Henry guy.”

“Oh.”

“So whatchu thinka him?”

“I think he’s working hard on his soul,” I said. “I think he’s becoming a real person.”

Editor’s Note

Da

Always a famous raconteur. Boles learned to talk with the aid of a microphone-like amplifier that he held to his throat. The amplifier gave him a mechanical-sounding “robot” voice that he was still able to infuse with personality. To obtain the material assembled in his memoir Brittle I