The boy’s name was Henri, and if you knew him only by his name perhaps you might think that he was born in Quebec, or maybe even France, or some other place where people with names like Henri are born. You might assume that he spoke French, and spoke English with an outrageous accent, rolling his ‘r’s like gurgles. But Henri was not from France, nor was he from Quebec, and ever since his father had scared him out of his stutter when he was ten he had spoken English perfectly.
He was born in Humber, a town in Iowa so small and untraveled that your GPS would not know how to say it, spitting back at you in concatenated noises – “Hu-me-beer”. He lived with his parents and sister by the river that gave the town its name, in a withered house his mother’s family had lived in for generations. He spent his childhood under the shadow of towering smokestacks and ancient trees.
They had almost named him George, or James, or something equally horrible and Iowan. In the weeks leading up to the birth his father spent minutes at a time pacing little circles around his mother – Alexandra was enough, bad enough to have Alex, bad enough to have to raise another’s – and said that his child would be normal and have a normal name. He spent weeks arguing with himself, and it wasn’t until the drive to the hospital that he decided on Henry. “A solid name,” he muttered as he drew to a stop at the intersection before the interstate. “Reliable. Hardworking. American.”
“Name him Henry,” he told his wife as they stepped out of the car, and she nodded with eyes held tightly shut. “That’s a good name for my boy,” he said as the nurses wheeled her to the maternity ward. “Henry.”
And after she gave birth to a son, and when they gave her the little sheet to sign, she held the pen in shaking fingers and wrote on the dotted line, “Henri.”
When Henri was young he and Alex often wandered off into quaint Humber, exploring what little there was to explore. Behind their house a shallow mud-slicked slope led to the river, and as they grew Henri and his sister spent countless afternoons amongst the tall grass, skipping rocks or trying to catch frogs. They managed to catch one in the summer of ’93, on a warm day in July. Henri’s father was working at the cannery across the river and his mother was in bed. Henri and Alex spent that afternoon poking about along the riverbank, taking careful steps to avoid patches of soggy-looking dirt. Their father hated it when they tread mud into the house, and the first thing he did most evenings when he got home was make sure the floors were spotless.
“That’s the first thing a visitor sees when they come in,” Henri’s father had scolded them earlier that summer as they cleaned the floor under his gaze. They had spent that day digging little holes in the silt against the riverbed and burying rocks like hidden treasures. “What does that say about a family? Laziness. Apathy. It’s disgusting.” Little pieces of dirt and sand had fallen into the cracks, and the old pitted floorboards scraped Henri’s elbows and knees when he went to scrub. When his father finally decided that they had done enough and sent them to bed Henri’s elbows were sore and mottled.
So the day they caught the frog they took great care to avoid stepping in anything that could stick to their shoes. They walked along the river from the top of the gentle slope, where grass stubble grew in tufts from among the pebbles. They went one, two, three, four houses down, scanning the river as they went. They got a few hundred yards from the river’s bend, where the water crashed against smoothed rock and the Richardson’s half-rotted pier jutted out at an angle. When Henri was six he and his sister took turns “walking the plank” on those greening boards, until one of the planks gave out underfoot. Henri sprained his ankle and Alex had to half-carry him home.
“Hey, look!” Alex was pointing down to their left. On a small rock lay a spotted frog, lazy in the warm sun. Its little beaded eyes stared over the water at the trees on the far bank. Henri crept down the shallow slope, taking care not to look directly at the frog. From the edges of his vision he could see Alex doing the same. The pebbles crunched under his feet.
They got within a few feet of it. The frog had not noticed them yet, or if it had, it did not yet realize the danger it was in. Henri lunged at the frog in one leap, hands outstretched. It bolted, jumping off of its rock where it left a damp imprint and ran right into Alex, who in one deft motion seized it by its torso and held it squirming in both hands.
“Yes!” Henri jogged over to where his sister stood clutching the frog in an outstretched fist. The creature’s head poked from between her fingers and stared bug-eyed out at nothing. One of its legs had bent at a strange angle and twitched uselessly.
“What should we do with it?” Henri asked. He put his face right up to the frogs, but still it seemed to look at some point behind his head. “Keep it as a pet?”
“It’s dead.” Alex said, more interested than disgusted. “I think I crushed it.”
Henri poked at the frog’s head and it didn’t react. “Oh.” Alex opened her hand and examined the body. Its legs were deformed and something sharp protruded from the skin. Its torso bent at an unnatural angle.
“That’s hideous,” Alex said matter-of-factly, as if commenting on a museum display of some prehistoric invertebrate, or a hated neighbour’s petunia garden.
“We should probably bury it,” Alex said, looking down at her victim.
“But we don’t have a shovel.”
“So use your hands.”
“Dad’ll get mad if my hands are dirty when we come home.”
“If you think he’ll be mad at you, imagine what he’d do to me.”
Henri frowned and looked out at the water and where the river bent and met the pier. “I know,” he said, “Let’s float him out in the water.”
“Viking-style?”
“Viking-style.”
Henri took off his shoes and stuffed his socks into them. The river was cool on his feet and the silt dug into his skin. In mock-solemnity Alex handed him the deceased, and gently Henri lay him upon the river. The frog sank quickly and before he could pick it up for another try it was swept away by the current. Alex and Henri tried their best to follow it as it went with the water downstream and was washed up against the shore at the bend near the Richardson’s pier. Its little broken body lay in a tiny heap under the rotting boards, and they left it there under the midday sun.
A few weeks after Alex left them, Henri’s father took him down to the river to do some fishing. “A man’s got to know how to fish,” he said on the drive down to the river. “It’s about time I taught you.” They stopped a short ways upstream from the overpass and pulled over onto the gravel. With rods in hand Henri and his father picked their way down the shallow slope towards the river.
The early morning fog had just begun to fade, and thin smoke-like tendrils floated across the river. Henri stood with his father on a layer of gravel where the river bent, under the shade of hanging branches. They practiced casting the line a few times until Henri could get it more than a few feet out into the water. They had no bait, so they left their floaters out in the water and leaned the rods against a tree. Henri tried to sit, but the gravel was uncomfortable and shifted under his weight. They stood there and watched the floaters drift in the water.
“When I was your age, the river was a lot faster,” his father said after a moment. “Couldn’t fish, couldn’t swim. I was terrified of falling in.” He turned, and from his bag produced two sandwiches covered in translucent wax paper. He handed one to Henri.
“They filled in the marsh with concrete and built up all those embankments,” he said as he peeled away the paper and shoved the trash into his pocket. “They built most of the big plants all in one summer. You should have seen it. Hundreds of people in Humber every day, working away at the buildings – Christ.” He shook his head. Across the river and behind the trees rose smokestacks, their tops blackened with years of soot. Henri closed his eyes and tried to imagine Humber without the factories, but in his mind’s eye the smokestacks stood as tall as ever.
“When I turned sixteen I took my first job at the meat plant,” his father said. “I stood on a line and stripped the skin from pork with an oversized potato peeler.”
“You want me to get a job,” Henri said.
His father frowned. “Let me finish.” Henry mumbled an apology.
His father stopped speaking for a moment and idly drove his heel into the gravel. Small rocks scattered under his worn boot. He rubbed at his arms. “I cut my hand five times on that damn thing,” he said, looking down at the sandwich. He turned to Henri and held out his left hand. “You see this?”
Henri had seen it. On the back of his father’s hand, clearly visible by the morning light, was a thick strip of hairless skin a lighter pink than the rest. His father was quite proud of it. Henri always thought that if he had a patch of skin like that he would be wearing gloves.
“Lost a chunk of my hand to the machine. Just grazed it, but that’s all it took. Like a razor. Came off before I knew it. A piece of me got mixed in with all the pork skin.” He laughed. “Can you imagine? A chunk of my own damn skin, ground up and turned into gelatin.”
Henri didn’t find it as funny. The first time his father told him this story was on his tenth birthday, at dinner. His mother had read in a Jell-O ad a recipe for “lime cheese salad”. Lime-flavored gelatin mixed with seafood and cottage cheese. Henri’s father launched into the pork skin story as soon as he saw it. He laughed, and Henri’s mother went very pale. The salad sat menacingly in the freezer for another week, uneaten, until Alex and Henri finally took it one day after school and spent the evening throwing little pieces of Jell-O into the river.
Henri’s father rubbed at the pink patch idly. “I went to the hospital. But I didn’t sue, or throw a fit. You know why?” He didn’t wait for Henri to answer. “Because I had dignity. I knew loyalty. I knew that I had to provide for my family. I was back to work the day after I came out of the hospital.”
He touched Henri’s arm and looked him in the eye.
“This is very important. Your mother. Your sister. They don’t – didn’t – understand.”
Henri wasn’t sure he did, either. “Understand what?”
His father snorted. “All these years – all these years, and – Christ.” He shook his head and took a deep breath. “What you have to understand, son,” said his father after a short while longer, “is that there is only one thing that matters for a family. Loyalty.”
Henri nodded. His father was breathing heavily through his mouth and his eyes were focused on some point behind Henri’s ear.
“Your mother – she was never – never loyal. Not since – well.” His father took a deep breath. “And your sister. I always knew she had too much of her mother in her. Ungrateful. I thought I could fix her, but some things just run too deep.”
He turned again to Henri. “This is important, boy. Your mother has problems. But she is still your family. You are still my family. True family doesn’t abandon each other. Do you hear?”
Henri nodded. “Yes.”
“Loyalty, son. That’s the key.” His father took a step closer and made as if to reach out, then thought better of it and shoved his hand back into his pocket. “Say it back to me,” he said. “Say it. Loyalty.” Henri looked his father in the eye. Their fishing poles lay forgotten in a tangled heap at the foot of the tree. The last remnants of morning fog had long since been scattered by the rising sun, and from the gravel riverbank and above the rushing water Henri thought he heard a viking’s cry.