Fierce Little Thing

by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

  “You’re smart, Issy.”

  “Not the way Marta means. I get the names of plants all mixed up. Honestly, it’s pretty boring going out with her. I mean, you should definitely try it. You’ve been to school and stuff. You probably already speak Greek and Latin.” Issy gazed out the window. “It’s like … it’s like, Sarah’s teaching us how to live here forever, with this kitchen and the same beans, until we’re old. And”—here she whispered, as if this was something dangerous—“Marta wants us to go back into the world.”

  25

  “I had to make sure you weren’t hurting yourself.” Issy is blurry from the humiliating wash of tears. “Can I come in?”

  I wish I could say yes. I wish I could say anything.

  She lifts one foot over the threshold.

  “I don’t think you should do that,” Xavier mutters.

  “Will you please go do something useful? Elsewhere?”

  Xavier’s hand swipes back that hair. But he listens. His footsteps trail down the stairs. The light dazzles my old friend as she becomes just for me.

  26

  Abraham and Gabby and Philip came into the Main Lodge (Abraham, unavoidable as the sun; Gabby, sharp and careful; Philip with an unfamiliar expression that kept him far away). Sarah thunked down her wooden spoon; Nora shot out of the kitchen and onto Ephraim’s lap; Ephraim fed his daughter a bite of coleslaw; Teresa turned away from a debate with Jim; Jim rubbed Teresa’s shoulders while Tomas stuck his hand down her shirt; Issy sat up under her mother’s eye; Xavier watched his father; and Ben watched Xavier watching, and then turned to watch, too.

  “Good people!” Abraham called.

  The Homesteaders spoke as one: “We listen.”

  “You’ve met the newcomers.” Abraham gestured first to Philip (there was definitely something different about Philip; when I tried to catch his eye, he pretended not to notice). Next, Abraham’s long arm swept to Xavier, who raised his hand in a shy wave. Then he found me. I could hardly bear those soft brown eyes, the twitch of his smile.

  “Philip is a painter. He learned of us from our ambassadors in New York, where he was living at the time”—what a funny turn of phrase, as though yesterday was the distant past—“and he read my manifesto and they told him of this place, and I guess he liked the sound of what we’re up to!”

  The Homesteaders clapped.

  “We talk of Unthinging.” There were nods of assent. “We talk a lot about Unthinging.” Laughter. “Unthing. Unthing. Unthing. Unthing Yourself! We do our best to practice this. Sometimes we succeed. And we’ve learned”—now Abraham turned to Gabby, who was still at his other elbow—“that sometimes Unthinging can look a lot like Thinging.” Gabby nodded once, authoritatively. “We want to get off the grid. We all know that’s the only way we will Unthing ourselves of the trappings of the Thinged World. But to unburden ourselves will require machines that harness sun power and wind power. This great task of making our own oasis requires equipment, and unfortunately, equipment costs money.”

  “Equipment”—Gabby chimed in with a steady voice—“is a Thing. Acquiring it requires us to make tough decisions. It means considering choosing Things in the short run for the sake of being Unthinged in the long run. Is eventual Unthinging worth Thinging?” She gave Abraham a significant glance. He grinned like a child who’d been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “We disagree on this point.” She turned back to the group. “But we are only two voices. We need to know what you believe.”

  “Philip here”—Abraham clapped Xavier’s father on the back—“has offered us a good deal of money. He believes that we must Unthing ourselves. He likes the sound of getting off the grid. This giving is an act of Unthinging for his sake, too. We can help him with this Unthinging. But. This money Philip offers is tainted—by oil and by blood, by the military industrial complex. By patriarchy, and rape, and misogyny. By genocide. By racism. By the destruction of our planet. Using this money is not something we’ll do lightly. But Gabby and I believe it is something we must consider.”

  “No,” Amos said. The old man was whittling again, the owl almost finished. He didn’t look up. “We won’t take that money.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Jim said.

  “There is no self,” Amos grumbled.

  “Exactly. We decide things together.”

  Amos’s eyes found Philip. “We won’t take that money.”

  Jim’s hairy hand slapped the table. “That’s bullshit.” He turned to the rest of the room. “The old man doesn’t say what we do. No one does. Not even fucking Abraham.”

  Ephraim stood. “Abraham isn’t finished.” Jim’s eyes shot to the ground. Amos went back to his owl.

  Abraham nodded to Ephraim, who sat. “Think about this. Talk about this. Question it, as Gabby and I are. Help Philip here understand why we can’t accept his generous offer without considering the consequences”—Abraham’s mouth curled into a wry smile—“because he thinks I’m being a stubborn ass.”

  A roar of laughter swept the room, followed by a round of clapping. Issy leaned forward, and whispered, “You’ve been keeping secrets.”

  I was nauseous. Why was New York no longer our home? Why hadn’t Philip told us of his plan to bring us here? Had Philip really decided to give money to these strangers? Did Jane know about this? What was the reason for the giddiness I felt when Abraham looked at me?

  Issy rose to clear her plate. I grabbed her, pressing into the flesh of her forearm. “What is Unthinging?” My voice surprised me with its force.

  A look of pity crossed her face. The huddle of her breath was steady as she lowered herself to me. “Your suitcase—the one Nora took, with your special things—your favorite sweatshirt, your journal, whatever? None of it matters. Think about it. You’re born without a single Thing but your own body. But the world you grew up in—what we call the Thinged World—taught you to believe you need Things, because the system that operates it—capitalism—can only sustain itself as long as you buy more, get more. We’re all going to die, though. None of us is taking a Thing with us. And Things are going to kill us, at the rate we’re going. Here at Home we Unthing before our mortal endings. It’s the only way we’ll save the planet, but that’s not the only reason. Abraham says when we leave the lie of accumulation back out in the Thinged World, we get to live as we were meant to. Free.”

  Issy thumbed a fat tear off my cheek. She assumed that I was crying because Unthinging frightened me. But really, it was a relief to hear someone say what I’d understood since the very moment you left.

  27

  The house sighs around Isobel. We love her solid truth: the tizzy of her hair as she moves into the room, the thump of her feet, the impressive ridge of her breasts (she’s discovered what Grandmother would call a brassiere), her plum-shaped cheekbones, and her wide, open palms, which she uses to coax the books back into their stacks, like wayward lambs. Xavier would simply get them straightened but Issy glances at their spines.

  Or maybe she’s noticing how Thinged I’ve become. I feel the gentle tug of shame. I’m no better than a scrub jay—genus, Aphelocoma—caching junk. But Issy laughs and says, “You read a lot of romance novels.”

  “There are classics, too.”

  She sits at the bottom of the bed. “So, what’s all this nonsense?” She doesn’t mean the books. The woman before me resembles the Issy I once knew—eyelashes curling up, lips like pillows—but of course she’s different. Seventeen years have passed since that evening in the East Village, when she asked how I was doing and I told her I was happy as a clam—which wasn’t a lie, because who can say if clams are ever happy? Her ample smile lurks in the shadows of her older face, but as she studies me, it stays shy.

  28

  What a virtue I found it, to be moving toward the lightness of Unthinging. My body had started down that path on its own, but I’d been waiting for philosophy to justify it. Home, with its scarlet dawns and stockpiling chipmunks, with its soaring hawks and pine
needles pitter-pattering down like rain, was constantly shedding its former self in place of the present and future; the perfect expression of Abraham’s beliefs. No wonder I wanted him to see me: he noticed everything that mattered. Over morning congee, dressed with goat’s milk and maple syrup, he reminded us that we know how to Unthing the moment we are born: that to breathe, that to bleed, that to shit is to Unthing. The struggle comes after, as we are taught to accumulate.

  “The trick,” he said, his stare long—sometimes it seemed as though he didn’t need to blink—“is to get back in touch with your instincts and shut out what the Thinged World teaches. And lest you think I am above this same hard work, let me say it out loud—I, too, am weak.” He caught Gabby’s eye across the long lodge. She nodded, as though accepting an apology. “Every day, we go back to the beginning. Every day, we try again. With every step my feet take across the earth, I repeat: ‘Unthing Yourself.’ In this simple action, with every step, I start to make it so.

  “But let me ask you this: when is a Thing not a Thing?”

  There was a murmur of confusion.

  “Perhaps it’s better to ask: when is a Thing not only a Thing? When does it not being only a Thing mean it sails above our rules of Thinging and Unthinging?” He lifted his hand toward me. Everyone looked. “Show them.”

  I undid the bunny from inside my waistband, where I’d been tucking him every morning since he’d been rescued from Nora. I held Topsy up in a flush of embarrassment—Ben was frowning at the edge of my vision—but then I found Abraham again. His gaze steadied me. The bunny’s head listed to the right.

  “All this time, I’ve believed in two categories: Things and not. But see that little bunny there? That little bunny is not a Thing. It is not a bit of cloth and stuffing, or not just a bit of cloth and stuffing. It is Love. It is where Saskia’s brother William’s love resides.” I held my chin up. Philip was watching, tears brimming in his eyes. But I couldn’t tell if he’d packed Topsy.

  “I’ve been definitive in the lines I draw. We want to Unthing ourselves, and it is right to do so. But certain Things may be more important than others. Perhaps it is right to do away with the Things that are not filled with Love, and keep the Things that are. Out loud, in front of everyone, I want to thank Saskia for teaching us that.”

  Whispers filled the room. Ben’s arms were crossed and he was looking out the window. Why did he hate me?

  Abraham laughed at the effect of his speech. “I didn’t say everyone go to Kmart! Sarah’s sourdough starter—is that a Thing?” At the edge of the kitchen, Sarah blushed. Ephraim lifted his head as if he might have to defend her.

  “That’s food,” Amos said. He was whittling a fox now. “Doesn’t count.”

  “Your rake, Amos? Ephraim’s hammer.”

  “Tools.”

  “Philip’s paintings?”

  Philip held up his hands, in a gesture of count me out.

  “Philip’s money?”

  Amos looked up, and so did Jim, and Gabby and Ephraim both moved to the edge of their seats. Abraham put up his hands to stop them before they started. “Philip’s money, if used by us, will bring more Love into this world, there’s no doubt in my mind. It will allow us to share what we know with the Thinged World. But that money is a Thing borne of many terrible Things—many more terrible Things than that bunny right there in Saskia’s hands—and yet what that money could afford us to give back out into the world…? That feels like Love to me.”

  “I’ve got weeding,” said Amos, before Jim could open his mouth. Breakfast had lingered. So we scattered to our work.

  29

  I see myself through Issy’s eyes: a cowering pile.

  “Are you mute?”

  No. But I tell her with a shaken head.

  “Then what the hell’s wrong?”

  “It’s Xavier’s fault.” I sound like a whiny teenager.

  “I thought you and Xavier were besties.” Do I detect a note of envy?

  “He says Abraham is back.”

  “And you don’t like that?”

  “Do you like that?”

  “Do I like that he said it? Or do I like that he thinks Abraham is back?” Her graceful neck swivels to the window. “If I’m being honest, I never thought Abraham was dead to begin with.”

  “But his body in the—”

  “With Gabby, I knew she was dead. I couldn’t hear her anymore.” Her hand moves to her heart. Her eyes come back to find me. “Didn’t you know, with your brother?”

  Mother and Daddy, wrestling in that tight spot between the parlor and the foyer, the way she had him around the neck, the way he growled as he tried to throw her off, and how, in that moment, I realized I didn’t have to stand there and wait for whatever was going to happen to happen to me.

  Issy pats her chest. “If you listen, you’ll hear Abraham still inside you, telling you what to believe. He’s alive, Saskia. There’s no way we got off that easy.”

  30

  Something private swelled as the summer grew from June into July, something I couldn’t mention, even to Issy. It had begun the moment Abraham plucked that feather up on the day we arrived. I was a rational girl; I knew it was absolutely appalling to believe that it was you who’d offered up that feather from the beyond, telling me in your otherworldly way that Home was my true home, that on this land, I would be safe—but it was hard not to entertain the thought. Then had come the bit with Topsy, someone slipping him into my bag when all along I thought I’d left him in New York, and Abraham’s permission to Thing him as my own, and Abraham’s glow.

  I startled a cardinal; it flew so close that its wing brushed a kiss onto my cheek. How could it not be a kiss from you? The quiet of your pucker, the gamey smell of your scalp, the wind of your breath—all those tiny bits of you came to find me together in a single red-winged flash.

  Issy and I canoed out to Blueberry Island and played six rounds of Spit with her bent, dirty cards. We filled a metal pail, the blueberries falling off the bush by the handful. Back on shore, something invisible bumped the pail’s bottom, spilling the fruit across the ground. Tomas and Nora were upon it at once, giddy thieves. Your giggle burbled through my ears on a gust of wind, but when I turned to catch you, you were gone.

  On a warm night, symphonic with peepers, I sat out on the porch of the Main Lodge. The lakeside bonfire was roaring. There was laughter as Amos wove a Puritan tale of a punished whore and a penny-pinching gentleman. I had not taken a bite of bread, not yet—I wanted to savor the thought of it before I put it in my mouth. I set it down on the armrest of the Adirondack chair when Issy tried to tempt me into cards. I said I’d come soon, then watched the night swallow her. I picked up the bread. Cut into its crust was a surprise: the concise half-moon of your bite. The children were nowhere near—Nora was at the bonfire, and Tomas had been sound asleep in Teresa’s arms for hours.

  I was a reasonable girl, but the only reasonable explanation—unreasonable anywhere but the Unthinged World—was that you were making Home your home, too.

  31

  “So okay, what if Abraham is alive,” I offer. “So what?” The hair on my arms and legs is at attention, but my voice is calm.

  “Oh, I don’t know, Saskia, maybe he could tell our families, and our bosses, and the police that we killed—”

  “Shh.” I’m upright now, my hands on her hot mouth. It’s a reflex, like gagging on something putrid.

  She waits for me to claim my hands. “You think if we don’t talk about it, we can pretend it didn’t happen?”

  32

  Sarah kept the Mother in a paint bucket, covered with a piece of linen. She fed her every morning, and made a leaven every night, and early in the day, before the light lifted, she used the leaven to make bread. Sourdough consists of nothing but the Mother, salt, water, and flour, but it’s also temperature and light and humidity. Sarah spoke the language of those ephemerals fluently, able to sense how warm the water should be on a given day, and whether less
or more of it should be used than the day before, and how long, exactly, the rise would be. Everyone was game to devour the final product, but soon I discovered that having patience for the scale, and strong wrists, and not minding the Mother caking the hair on my forearms into a dry, wheaty crust, put me in rare company. Before long I was joining Sarah in the dawn kitchen, sticky with the scent of rising bread, which was how I discovered she was the one who did the drawings pinned around the room, of foxes and chickadees and rowboats. If I got there early enough, I’d find her alone with a cup of tea in that vast dark room, finishing up a sketch by the light of a candle. Once, I asked whether she’d seen that skunk in real life, and she stood and sputtered a question about the day’s menu, and I knew I’d invaded something so private I wasn’t even supposed to apologize.

  We worked in silence, with swift attention. Teresa would drift in around sunrise, to chop and dice and simmer. The Homesteaders would descend about an hour past that, which I liked to take as my cue to leave. But before I skipped off, Sarah would press a muffin or a hunk of sourdough into my hand, slathered with golden honeycomb or a knob of beef tallow. These small offerings seemed like more than Mother had ever passed along, even though she’d given me life itself.

  I didn’t mind the days starting early. Each one held a surprise: a heart-shaped rock in my path; a harmony of birdsong playing out the four beginning notes of the “ABCs.” Now that I knew you might be close, I was eager to collect evidence of your return.

  That windy day, ferns roiled my ankles as I set down the hill. I passed the chickens and goats, then the garden. It was still breakfast, but I’d already spent hours inside Sarah’s tasks. I noticed Ben coming up the path; something about the sun dappling the maple branches and the muffin in my pocket swelled me with hope. I was thinking of Sarah’s newest drawing, of a moose lifting one foot as it looked across a clearing, how even in the sketch, the animal looked more real than poor, decapitated Grimm hanging on the wall. Before Ben got too close, I said, “Your mom’s a really good artist.”