42: On the right bank . . .
42: On the right bank . . .
Little Follies, “Life on the Bolotomy,” Chapter 2 begins
2
On the right bank, as you drift toward the bay, note the occasional rude dwelling on stilts. These quaint huts are, like the people who live in them, vestiges of a simpler past.
Boating on the Bolotomy
RASKOL’S MOTHER staggered through the kitchen door, carrying an enormous kettle of chowder with both hands. As she struggled toward the table, the kettle swung, and bits of the chowder splashed out onto the floor.
“Ariane!” she shouted. “Get a rag and wipe this up!” To the rest of us she shouted, “Soup’s on!”
The Lodkochnikovs, Raskol’s family, lived in a small shingled house that stood on pilings at the very edge of the river, set back from the road behind a thick growth of cattails. At high tide, the water was only a foot or two below the floor, and Raskol’s mother would often drop a fishing line through a small trapdoor in the kitchen to see what she might come up with for dinner. At low tide, the house stood out of the water, over a slick slope of black muck and two generations of Lodkochnikov trash. From the day that I first set foot in it, Raskol’s house seemed to me a place outside the world that I knew. Even getting into the house was different from getting into the other houses that I knew: instead of the cement walks that led to the front doors of my other friends’ houses, the Lodkochnikovs had a long, springy plank, weathered to gray. When Raskol and I ran along the plank, we set it bouncing. Whichever of us was first, usually Raskol, felt as if he were flying, his steps amplified to soaring leaps by the spring of the board, but the second runner, usually me, found the plank going up when he was going down and sometimes fell off into the muck below.
The Lodkochnikovs themselves were as different from one another as they were from the families of my other friends. When I first visited them, I thought that a few people from the neighborhood must be visiting too, because no one seemed to resemble Raskol enough to be related to him.
Raskol’s father was a squat man with dark flyaway hair. He grinned a lot, but wasn’t often happy. He was always on the lookout for something that he didn’t like, his eyes shifting from side to side while he talked or listened or ate. His ears wiggled while he chewed, and he seemed to me to be turning them this way and that as a rabbit or a cat would, listening for something disturbing. At dinner, if one of his boys made a remark that he didn’t like or did something that annoyed him, the grin disappeared at once, and he reached for the length of broom handle that he kept beside his place on the table. After I had visited a few times, Mr. Lodkochnikov told me that I could walk into the house without knocking because he thought of me now as one of the family. From that day on, though I never did walk into the house without knocking, I was very careful about what I said and did at the table, because I was certain that being regarded as a member of the family meant that if I said something that rubbed him the wrong way he would use the broom handle on me, too. It lay to the right of his plate, as easy to reach as his spoon.
Raskol’s mother was half again as tall as Raskol’s father, and she had similar flyaway hair, but it was red. When they faced each other from opposite ends of the table and began wolfing their food, each holding a fork in one round fist and a spoon in the other, they looked as if they were engaged in a contest, a battle of some kind, with the smart money on the big redhead. Even though they seemed so mismatched physically, they were completely suited to each other, and so attached to each other that one without the other would have been as awkward as a single andiron.
Raskol’s mother laughed loud and often, and she often flew into screaming fits when something annoyed her, as many things did, especially Raskol, his brothers, his sister, and his father. She had a boundless fondness for me, and this was manifested in attempts to fatten me up at dinner and to squeeze me to death whenever I entered or left the house.
Raskol’s brothers, Ernie and Little Ernie, sat at the table on packing crates, because when they were much younger they had, in a fight over the relative sizes of the last two corn fritters on a platter that Mrs. Lodkochnikov had been quite fond of, broken their chairs and the platter, and their father would never let them sit on chairs or eat corn fritters again.
Once, Ernie had told his father that he wanted to get a clamboat of his own instead of continuing to work for the old man. Mr. Lodkochnikov had leaped up from his chair and grabbed the boy from behind, twisted his ears, and lectured him a bit on the subject of paternal respect. Ernie listened pretty politely for a while, but his father’s arguments were apparently not convincing enough, for when he had finished, Ernie stood up, lifting Mr. Lodkochnikov, who still had one arm locked around his head, and ran backward against the wall repeatedly until the old man let go and fell to the floor. Then he told his father that from now on he intended to do whatever he damn well pleased. Mr. Lodkochnikov said nothing. The table was cleared in silence, and the mood in the house that evening was murky. At night, when Ernie was asleep in the attic with Little Ernie and Raskol, Mr. Lodkochnikov crept up the stairs and tied a note to Ernie’s toe. The note said:
If you behave rudely again,
I’ll cut this off.
In the morning, Ernie went out clamming with his father as usual, and from then on an uneasy truce prevailed between them.
Little Ernie had none of his older brother’s ambition, and would never have challenged his father’s authority in any case, I think, but I know that the note tied to Ernie’s toe impressed him powerfully. I know it because, about eight years later, I learned that he had kept the note. At that time Little Ernie did me what he considered a favor. I had taken the Glynn twins, Margot and Martha, to a party at the Babbington Yacht Club, and when I pulled into the parking lot a very beefy and very drunk fellow, a stranger to me, reached into the car that I had borrowed for the occasion and pulled me out of it, without opening the door. He shook me around by the neck for a while, then banged my head against the windshield a couple of times, punched my nose a bit with his free hand, brought his knee up into my groin smartly four or five times, and tossed me back into the car. After a while, when I could move again, I drove the Glynn twins home, since I felt that I’d really had enough for one night, and went home to sleep for a couple of days. When I was out of bed and ambling around town again, I happened to narrate the events of that night to Little Ernie, and I may even have embellished them a bit to make certain that Little Ernie, who had some trouble catching things on the first run-through, grasped the full extent of the injuries to my person and pride. “Jesus shit,” he said at last, and I felt that he understood. The next morning, the beefy fellow was found in the parking lot at the municipal dock, much the worse for wear, naked and unconscious, with a note tied to his penis, the very note that Mr. Lodkochnikov had tied to Ernie’s toe years before.
You can listen to this episode on the Personal History podcast.
Next episode:
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can catch up by visiting the archive.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble” and “Do Clams Bite?” the first two novellas in Little Follies.