She examined the wires she’d twined up the hackberry’s branches and read more: First the foundation is laid, then the structure is built, then the painting and decorating is done. Each stage has a different goal and therefore a different technique.… One must never stop looking at the larger picture—a lifetime of reenvisioning.
Hundreds of years’ worth of reenvisioning and reshaping. Losing the honeysuckle along with Eamon had been like losing a conjoined twin, the presence of it torn violently from Silva’s body, leaving her mortally wounded, without equilibrium just when she’d needed the stability of her roots the most, weighted with all the possibility of future growth.
Finally, she planted the wired hackberry trees together and examined her work. Although they were stripped and bound tight, she could see the way they would grow together—the grace they could achieve with the right constraint. They, too, would learn to survive with trimmed and cramped roots, branches wired and bent. She peered at them, reading their destiny in each nodule and bud, the bodies they would create when woven together. Two shapes grown into one.
This she could understand. This she could control. Roots, branches, trunks. Through containment she would set them loose.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Date: October 15, 1999
Title: Religious-training Ceremony
Subject: Twelve Maidens
Setting: Almost Paradise Sanctuary
Medium: Watercolor and graphite on cold-press
Size: 10×12
Dearest Eamon,
We have moved on to the next stage of preparation: the maidens’ religious training undertaken by Mother Delores. Len’s sermons each Wednesday night and Sunday morning bookend the training sessions, highlighting god’s holy will toward a woman’s place with her husband-master. The scriptures they cite and compel the maidens to memorize would take pages to document, handpicked bits they string together into their own self-fashioned edicts. I’m only surprised they aren’t more militant in their requirements, adding more subjugation, more covering, more retreat to the list. As it is, the maidens have withdrawn into near full silence, speaking only when spoken to, and even that predesigned—scriptures spoken back and forth like some kind of riddle they might solve with enough devotion, enough erasure of self. A thorough brainwashing of the order we know is possible with any religiously motivated radical regime. Each morning they process through their chanting/singing, on their knees in the sanctuary, rice scattered beneath them on the wood floor in mimicry of Christ’s suffering. They end each evening the same, heads draped in veils. Their voices echo in my head all night long, haunting my dreams. That is something I cannot capture in this painting—the sound of their retreat, the sound of their internment, the sound of their pain and belief.
They are kept separate from the rest of the compound, dwelling in their own walled-off harem space that nobody is allowed to enter. I am given access to them only in their training sessions, and then only when it is something Delores deems open to outside observation, important enough that it might be visually rendered and thus remembered. And so I paint them—again and again. They treat me like one of their many ruling matrons, but with more fear, deference, and even a tinge of amazement. What I can capture, what I can reproduce of them—even they understand that power. They look at me with eyes that cry out, eyes that I’ll never be able to forget.
This composition is much like the last, a sanctuary scene, except here the maidens are kneeling in a half circle around the altar, Len Dietz standing as their deity behind it. Their heads are bowed and covered, their faces hidden. As is pleasing to their master. As is pleasing to their god.
I find my own retreat only in their garden—a space run by Faith, who allows me the quiet, the solitude. A space that brings me back home once again to you, where I can believe in reality again. Where I can find relief in growth, in greenness, in soil and insect and root. I picture your trees, I picture you. I find some measure of succor.
All my love,
Isabelle
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
APRIL 2001
Juniper slept on the porch, shaded from the afternoon heat while Silva made pass after pass with the ancient lawnmower, getting everything ready for the outfitters’ arrival. As she finished the lawn’s back perimeter, she caught movement up the trail. She’d seen animals use the path and thought at first that was what she’d spotted—deer drawn to the smell of fresh-cut grass—but then she saw a rider, horses.
She killed the mower and quickly pushed it to the house, Juniper still asleep on the porch, having completely failed his guarding duties. The exact scenario she’d been worried about: her alone at the Larkins house and a stranger showing up—whether Juniper’s old owner or one of the Lenites, if there was even a distinction between the two.
It didn’t take long for the man to appear from where the trail dropped down to creek—close enough that she could see him now, loose and solitary, lanky limbs and wide shoulders, sun-faded clothes, face shadowed under his hat. Nick, two days early.
He rode in slowly, a pack string behind him, and glanced at everything: the newly cleared water intake, the patch of bushes she’d thinned and mulched, the wire she’d put around a sapling to keep the deer from chewing its bark, the conifer ladder-fuel trimming she’d finished.
Finally alert to the intrusion, Juniper woke and jumped up, let out a series of deep warning barks that echoed off the canyon walls.
Nick pulled up his horse hard, the gangly gray gelding behind him rearing and dancing sideways, eyes white-rimmed and wild. Working the reins, Nick called out, “Whoa, whoa,” trying to keep the pack string in line.
Silva ran to hush Juniper. “You’re going to cause a rodeo,” she scolded as Nick circled the stock, trying to keep them from rioting, the wild-eyed gelding behind him snorting and throwing his head.
“We weren’t expecting you yet,” she called out, trying not to make it sound like an accusation. Nick was the Larkins Ranch owner, after all—sort of, maybe, whatever that meant.
“Sorry about that. Thought I could maybe get some things wrapped up here early, before the group arrives. But don’t worry, I’ve got my own supplies. I’ll stay in the barn, keep out of your hair,” Nick said, his voice calm, seemingly at ease despite the animal ruckus.
But of course he would be. He’d grown up there, memorizing each clump of bunchgrass, each rock bluff.
“Didn’t know you had a dog,” he said, reining his horse from the side.
“I didn’t. He showed up a while ago,” she said, thinking about the dead sheep. What else the river had delivered.
As Nick took the stock to the corral, Silva led Juniper into the house where he couldn’t charge anyone and hastily assessed things with an owner’s eyes. She checked her reflection quickly in the wavery mirror that hung next to the door. When she opened the screen, Juniper darted past her and went straight for Nick’s legs. At first, she thought he was going to latch on, but instead, he nosed Nick’s hand enthusiastically, wagging his whole back end in greeting.
Nick leaned over and ruffled his tattered ears. “Hello there, handsome. Thought we were going to have a little Wild West action for a minute,” he said, grinning disarmingly at Silva—the same smile as his mother’s portrait in the house. “What’s his name? Looks like a little Yoda—those brown eyes. Like some kind of wise sage…”
“Juniper,” she said, and the dog’s ears pricked forward, his thoughtful eyes meeting hers. Some kind of sage indeed. “Found him in the river, half-drowned. Nobody came to claim him,” she said, relief flooding her again over this fact—Nick instead of an unknown previous owner.
“Lucky for him,” Nick said looking at Silva. “There’s sets of class-IV rapids up above. It’s rough country for people and dogs—especially one that looks so much like a wolf.”
Silva pictured the dog bobbing and banking over whitecaps, taking on water. She knew the feeling. “Two shot-up mountain sheep carcasses washed downriver, too,” she added.
Nick frowned, a dark expression passing over his face. “ ‘Shot up’?”
“Like someone used them for target practice. I called it in, but they said there was nothing to do about it except keep an eye out. I thought I heard shooting up above when I got here.”
“It’s good you have a dog. It’s not always safe, being down here by yourself,” Nick said, communicating more than his words. Why he’d come early—checking in on her. Nobody comfortable with her being alone in the canyon. All she’d risked in coming here, seemingly no closer to finding Isabelle than she’d been before.
He glanced around. “You’ve been busy. The place looks great.” He walked over to the bonsai sitting on the table in the porch shade and touched the larch’s branches carefully. “This a tamarack?” he asked.
“A deadwood larch, yes,” she said, surprised. The tree, bent and shaped for decades into something other than itself, wouldn’t have been easy for most to identify by either of its names.
“A firewood tree, although this one wouldn’t provide much warmth I’m afraid,” he said, touching the silvered streak of deadwood grown into the trunk, twined perfectly with the live wood, anchoring branches and leader.
She shuddered at the thought of it—a hundred years of meticulously trained growth gone in one quick spit of flames. She had the quick urge to run over and soak all of them down, to drench every tree in sight.
Nick looked at her quizzically. “Where did you come from, anyway? There aren’t many bonsai masters in these parts.”
She wiped hair away from her sweaty forehead, feeling as out of place as Eamon’s gnarled trees. “A long way from here,” she said. She offered Nick a drink and went in to get it, glad he stayed outside even though he had every right to come in. It was his place to claim. All those wall markings, Nick 12 yrs. She wondered who he’d been—a boy who tamed snakes, a boy who rode the river like Huck Finn?
She sat next to him on the front steps. “Your name’s in the kitchen, on the wall,” she said, holding a hand up in measurement.
He shook his head and smiled. “My mother always did love to keep a record of things.”
“That’s her in the house pictures? Brown hair, your same smile?”
Nick glanced over at Silva, surprised.
“There’s a lot of family pictures. You look like her.”
“Yeah, I guess so, although as a kid I hated that, people saying I took after my mother. Thought that was a bad thing somehow.” He shrugged. “You know, as a boy.”
“There are worse things than having your mom’s smile.”
“Ah, but a boy’s ego is a very delicate thing,” he said with a grin.
Silva tried to imagine Nick as a child, possessor of a delicate ego, but it seemed as farfetched as herself as a small girl, carefree and happy in her mother’s New Community garden.
“So, how do you like it here?” he asked, squinting out at the fresh-mown lawn, but the question seemed personal somehow—her staying in his house, on his property.
“It’s nice,” she said, trying to figure out what kind of terms they were on. Sweat prickled her scalp, the sun beating down with late-afternoon intensity, a harbinger of the flames he had warned of. She had to resist fanning herself like an overdressed church lady. “I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to clean the barn, too? Mack didn’t leave any instructions.…”
Nick shook his head. “It’s my father’s mess. I just haven’t been able to get to it yet.”
She turned to him before she could change her mind. “You don’t need to stay in the barn. It isn’t fit for a horse, much less a person. There’s an empty bedroom in the house—no reason for you not to use it. It is your place, after all,” she said, no matter how awkward it would be—two tiny bedrooms so close together they seemed practically connected.
“Not yet,” Nick said, looking out. “But thank you. If you’re sure you don’t mind.…”
“Of course,” she said, but suddenly she realized she didn’t know which bedroom had been Nick’s. She might have been sleeping in his childhood bed all along. He’d learned to walk on the cabin’s uneven floors, eaten his first meals inside its walls, said his first words. She was living among the details of his beginnings, sharing his family intimacy.
She swiped at a sweat fly hovering around her face, but it knew its calling. Despite the breeze that had kicked up, she could feel sweat breaking under her breasts, sticking her shirt to her stomach’s translucent skin—skin grown pliant in preparation for its upcoming stretching.
Nick stood. “Guess I better tend the crew. Would you like to meet them? They don’t bite—well, at least most of them.” The scar on his face moved like a fault line when he smiled.
They went to the corral, Juniper sniffing noses with the chestnut mare Nick had ridden.
“This is Sage,” he said. “She’s a good one. Tiko, on the other hand…”
As if on cue, the gelding came skidding up to the fence, blowing at Juniper.
“The rest belong to friends I work for,” Nick went on. “Mule One, Mule Two, Mule Three, and the horses—Savage, Nit, and Killer. Their names, not mine.”
Silva offered her palm to Tiko, who snorted and looked at her from under long eyelashes, his eyes rimmed as black as a showgirl’s. He lipped her palm before Nick pushed his head back.
“Look out,” he said. “You can’t trust this one.”
She dropped her hand. There were certain lines to be maintained. Even if she was already calculating in her head, remaking her plans. A fit horse could average five miles an hour, easily covering the distance to Almost Paradise and back in a day’s ride—even carrying two people.
She’d learned to ride on Trawler. One of Eamon’s wealthy customers had an arena and a barn full of papered Arabians not much bigger than ponies. They had traded tree work for riding lessons, and Silva had bonded with a fourteen-hand dapple-gray named Sunchero Siete Cielo, who at twenty-five years old had hardly mellowed enough for pleasure riding, always tossing his arched neck and high-stepping as if he were adorned with tassels and bells. For a year, Silva had imagined herself an Arabian princess, always galloping about, whether on the horse or not. But then Sunchero had died suddenly. Silva had insisted on going to see him one last time; she still remembered the morning glory twined around a post, and light through the barn’s battens, the Bobcat’s lugged tires driving through the talcum-powder dirt, its bucket levered out, metal teeth biting into dry grass, dust throbbing up, wrinkling into the texture of her skin. The sharp odor of earth and pine—roots peeled flesh white and slick, poking out of the dark earth like broken ribs. The driver wrapping a rope behind the horse’s front legs and withers, hitching it tight to the bucket, the Bobcat’s tires spinning, spraying up bits of straw and dirt as they gained purchase against the gelding’s weight, his slick gray neck stretched out, his head twisting behind him. Sloughing horsehair and abraded hide, the smell of dirt and wet flesh. Dust-caked eyes and nostrils and flesh. Eamon had tried to make Silva look away, but she’d refused, the air thick and gray with fog, blowing damply against her face.
* * *
Nick stayed at the barn taking care of the stock, and Silva tidied up, sweeping grass from the porch. It was a small thing, she told herself, Nick spending a few nights while she was there. Although it didn’t feel small, any of it. She checked the room she’d offered him: bed, side table, window. Feet away from her door. So close they would be able to hear each other sleep.
Finally, she went back to work, thinning the overgrown alder brush behind the house, out of sight of the barn, the sun setting behind the hills, shadows grown long. When Nick came back to the house, arms loaded with pack bags, he didn’t see her at first. Silva could hear him unpacking inside through the open windows as dusk settled outside.
When he passed the bedroom window, he looked out and spotted her. “Working in the dark?” he asked, smiling through the window screen.
She felt herself blush. “Just finishing up,” she lied.
She washed in the creek, the canyon transforming into its night self, everything already altered in Nick’s presence.
When she went back inside, she wasn’t sure what she should do. Was she supposed to feed him, too? Instead, she joined him in the living room, where he was reading a newspaper. She sat on the floor next to Juniper, trying not to act as awkward as she felt, a houseguest who wasn’t really a guest.
“Anything new going on with the occupation?” she asked.
“Well, the latest demand is that the government hand over control of the Hells Canyon Wilderness Area. Two hundred thousand acres or so. The Lenites videoed themselves burning the visitor center’s Native American displays. Just your friendly neighborhood bullies playing G.I. Joe and destroying priceless cultural and historical artifacts. So, no, nothing new, really.”
“Why isn’t anyone stopping them—the cops, the feds?”
“The Lenites would love nothing more than a Ruby Ridge–style siege—give them a chance to go full-out, play the martyr, especially after Y2K came and went, and The End along with it. People are coming in to support them, readying to make something happen this time.”
“Is Len going to be staying there?” She tried not to show her hope—the occupation keeping him busy long enough that she might be able to find Isabelle without having to confront him again.
“Long enough to get some more press attention. Struts around in his occupation outfit acting important whenever there’s a photo op, gives reporters sound bites, then goes home to be served a warm meal and a bed with one of his acolyte girls so he can make more little Lenites for his growing army.”
Silva felt the bile rise in her throat and wished she hadn’t said anything, the image of Len so strong she had to shut her eyes a moment to rid herself of it.
“Listen, I’m going to get out of your way, go work on the barn,” Nick said, seemingly as wary of talking about Len Dietz as she was now that both of them were within riding distance of Almost Paradise.
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