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Last updated Sunday, March 27, 2016 at 11:57

The Prodigal Parents, by Sinclair Lewis

Chapter 40

Howard laughed. Of late he had been more given to laughing. They were making the last portage, about Little Run Rapids, before returning to their permanent camp on the river and to the supper for which they had been longing this past hour. The portage was a gash between thick spruce, close as a closet, hot, lively with mosquitoes which jabbed at the sun-sore backs of their necks. The edges of the upturned canoe bit into their unaccustomed shoulders as they toted it, and their arms ached with the burden of blankets, paddles and cooking kit.

When they came out again on the river bank, with the sun glaring on rippling river, the sand flies pounced on them.

So Howard laughed. ‘Certainly a swell idea to come three hundred miles to get your neck chewed and have your shoulders feel like they’d been through a clothes wringer!’

‘Like it?’ grunted Fred.

‘Sure. As Mother would say: “Happy!”’

Their tent awaited them on the river bank, at the edge of an unknown country of jack pine, spruce and birch, through which the only highway was the Whitefall; it was not three hundred but three thousand miles removed from the clatter and contacts of Sachem. The world well lost, thought Fred. His son was ruddy again, and confident, and for three weeks now had lived in company with a whisky flask, without touching it.

Fred was certain now that the boy was neither an alcoholic nor cruel, but the victim of confused marriage and confused jobs in a confused world.

Fred was camp cook, and he celebrated their return that evening, by not merely frying bacon, with steaks of the lake trout and muskallonge they had caught at Lake Dead Man, but adding the inexpressible luxury of prunes. They gobbled; silent, content.

Howard stretched out luxuriously afterward, his head against a stump, droning:

‘You ought to be head of the Boy Scouts. You sure were a great little inspiration this afternoon.’

‘Well, what’s the daily insult now?’

‘Funny enough, I mean it! Seeing an old coot like you, the way you sweat at paddling and didn’t give up when you looked ready to drop, I got ashamed of how lazy I am.’

‘Thinking about starting in with the Triumph Agency again?’

‘I’d like to. I’d like to really learn it, so some day, possibly, I might succeed you . . . if you thought, then, I’d made good.’

‘Fine. Like to look at my book on internal-combustion engines now?’

‘Be glad to.’

That was all there was of the camp meeting and the mourners’ bench.

In the tent, by candlelight, sitting on his folded sleeping bag with a suit-case on his knees for desk, Fred was trying to answer Hazel’s anxious query from Paris:

Aren’t you coming back to join me, or shall I sail for home, whichever you think best. This is a lovely city, we would enjoy it so much here and Annabel is the nicest companion but not without you. Your loving Hazel.