“Some of them are,” she said.
He hesitated, then took a step through the threshold, going to examine the trees up close—the bristlecone pine first, its trunk bent into a fused U. “This one looks old,” he said.
“Trained two hundred years or so,” she said, and Nick pulled his hand back. “Don’t worry, they aren’t fragile. My grandfather valued hardiness,” she said.
“So you learned this from him, your grandfather?”
“Everything I know,” she said. A statement devoid of a lifetime’s worth of context.
“Latin?” Nick asked, glancing down. “Lonicera nat. Elegens?” His pronunciation close.
“It means honeysuckle.” Honeysuckle. What that word carried. Silva shifted in the chair, hoping Nick wouldn’t notice the bodies that revealed so clearly her own story of sorrow and loss.
He pointed to Eamon’s journal sketch. “Is that what the hackberries are going to become?”
“Hopefully.”
He didn’t know all he was asking, both of them still trying to gauge the other’s woundedness. She’d said the bonsai weren’t fragile, but it wasn’t true. It was as simple as making the cuts, pulling roots from soil.
* * *
She joined Nick in the kitchen after putting away Eamon’s notebooks and Isabelle’s paintings, leaving the bonsai in for the night. The smell of warm yeast filled the kitchen, a floury mass pliant under Nick’s hands, his shoulders working under his shirt as he moved, spreading the dough with butter, sugar, cinnamon, and raisins that looked as if they’d been stored for a decade.
“You know what you’re doing.” She sat watching as he rolled dough, as at home in the kitchen as he was in the barn. It had taken her days to even remember where the silverware was.
“I hated living in town. Flowered curtains and picket fences. All I wanted to do was run away. Tried it a time or two. My mother thought I needed to stay busy, so she took to making me help her in the kitchen. Pies, cakes, cookies, rolls—any sweet to keep me busy. I still remember how to make a few things. Breakfast for dinner, for instance,” he said, rolling the dough into a log and cutting it into pinwheeled pieces before scrubbing potatoes and skinning onions.
Silva’s stomach rumbled. She hadn’t realized how hungry she was. She thought of Eli’s soufflé recipe. Honeybees. Honeysuckle. Everything somehow connected.
As if reading her mind, Nick looked over at her. “Have you spent much time around honeybees? They have these intricate ways of communication—dances, the ways they fly—that tell the whole hive where a good batch of flowers are,” he said, each word punctuated by the chock chock chock of the knife on the board. “Work together for the whole hive’s good. Take care of the queen, the eggs, each other, better than people do. Never leave each other out in the cold. Treat them well, protect them, give them houses, feed them in the winter, and they do everything else—locate the nectar, make honey and beebread, fill their pollen baskets full. Pure simplicity.”
He lit the stove, oil sizzling in a cast-iron pan as he scraped in a heap of diced onions and potatoes and seasoned them with unlabeled things on the stove’s upper shelf Silva had been too afraid to try. The noise and smell of frying overtook the kitchen. He worked with his back to her, talking about hive production, honey quality, bee species—how Hells Canyon and bees were a perfect match. Yellow star thistle finally good for something. Nick was lean, almost sinewy, but he had a certain bulk to him, an energy that filled the room. The land seemed to be a part of him, evidenced in his body—brown and earthy, as if he’d been formed and baked out of the very dirt.
The onion and pepper made Silva’s eyes stream. She wiped her face, not wanting Nick to think she was weak to a little spice, but he was distracted, saying that all he had to do was pick up Eli’s hives and bring them back to the ranch, get the barn room set up for extraction. Bees the only thing nobody in the canyon had ever tried.
“Give them a home, and they do the rest,” he said. “No property lines to worry about, no equipment to break down, no need for thousands of acres. No stock to take care of, no fluctuating seed prices, no heavy machinery. Just bees. What could be easier than that? One good season can gross over fifteen thousand, and it only goes up from there.” He glanced out the window. “A gamble, but it’s time. It’s already been too long.”
But he didn’t need to convince her. Eli and his bees already had, even if bees weren’t something she’d been prepared for—that intimacy—but there was beauty to it. Something so small the answer all along, accomplishing what everything else in the canyon had failed to do.
Nick stopped for a moment and took a long swallow of water, then stirred cloudy blocks of paraffin into clear liquid in a coffee can he had heating on a back burner, a stack of stained egg cartons along with the paper bag full of pitch ready on the counter.
An early-evening breeze blew high cirrus clouds into furrowed rows outside while he fried strips of bacon and whisked eggs into a froth, the kitchen filling with the smell of browning things. He kept up a steady stream of conversation while he worked, talking about bees, pollination, honey, propolis, wax products. The steady tenor of his voice and the language he used—hive boxes, apiaries, flower crops, honey quality—comforting and somehow familiar.
Silva kept telling herself that this was not what she’d come here to find, not what she wanted, but she couldn’t stop herself from watching Nick move effortlessly through the space they now shared, couldn’t help herself from feeling the current of electricity that flowed between them, as real as anything she’d ever known.
When he was finished at the stove, Nick brought out the jar of honey she had seen on his bed stand. “Yellow star thistle makes the best, but people like the sound of clover better. One taste is all it takes, though.…”
He waited as she swirled a spoonful, picking out a distinct beelike leg and specks of unidentifiable things before sticking the spoon in her mouth.
He nodded, satisfied. “Good, isn’t it?”
“It’s good,” she said, the honey on her tongue, on her lips. She chewed the softened wax in between her front teeth until it dissolved. She wanted to scoop out spoonful after spoonful, wanted to cover herself in it, let Nick lick it off her skin.
Nick got the bag of pitch they’d gathered for fire starters and started putting chunks of it in the empty paper egg cartons, arranging the pieces of pitch carefully in each egg compartment. Then he got the coffee can of hot, melted paraffin and poured it over the pitch, the carton paper turning dark with saturation.
“There, all we have to do is let it cool and harden, and then cut into pieces, and voilà—the best fire starters you’ll ever use,” he said. He started singing the Jungle Book movie’s “I Wan’na Be Like You”—fire as the red flower of men’s power that all the animals sought. He laughed at the look on Silva’s face. “What? You didn’t want to be like Mowgli, swinging through the vines, living wild in the jungle, sleeping in trees, drinking water from their leaves? And making fire, of course, too.…”
Silva smiled. “I just always wanted to be a dryad in her forest.”
Both of them with some childhood version of magical woods.
They went out to sit on the porch and eat, leaving the hot kitchen to cool down. Swallows swept the air currents, their fighter-plane silhouettes dark against pale sky. On the river, trout leapt after insect quarry, their bodies wetly slapping the river’s surface. Dust devils blew up in the corral; a flock of sparrows surged like minnows. Earth, air, fire, water. Silva imagined Trawler, the cabin, the trees. The waters and the salt air. The smell of seaweed and old shells.
Eamon had always said that caring for the bonsai made you a part of something bigger than yourself. Brought on new growth—something so unfamiliar Silva didn’t yet have the name for it.
Once she tasted Nick’s food, she had to stop herself from shoveling it in as if she were starving. There was something about his penchant for spices, a heat that went deep inside, that she couldn’t
resist. All his talk of bees and childhood. Find a different angle, a different vantage point, and a scene could change entirely. Out of the dark you might see yourself—a woman alone, an embryo formed by an unknown body—but you might see other things, too.
She had become used to keeping herself like the bonsai—clipping and wiring, holding herself in—but now, despite everything, despite all the bad that had already happened, despite all the challenges still to come, she felt the stirrings of something new. Something like creation. It was as if a floral, southerly wind had blown in overnight, hot and buzzing with insect and bird calls, everything responding to its touch. All she had to do was find the source of its movement.
She put her hands on her stomach and let herself for a moment imagine a child playing in tree-dappled light, running through the summer sun, dragging her hands through the seeded tops of grasses, finding delight in the world.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Date: November 1, 1999
Title: Childbearing Ceremony
Subject: The Twelve Maidens, Almost Paradise’s pregnant and nursing mothers, and Faith the midwife
Setting: Almost Paradise Greenhouse & Garden
Medium: Watercolor and graphite on cold-press
Size: 14×20
Dearest Eamon,
We’ve come nearly to winter now. The river’s rising fog always brings me home to you, to the island, and I am thankful each time it swallows the canyon and transports me out of it.
We have just finished the Childbearing Ceremony, following training sessions led this time by Faith. At least there’s that, instead of the choking suffocation of Delores and her son. He has been working to draw me in, so sure of his own power, speaking words he thinks I would like to hear, as if I am one of his cowed and caved women, born into silence and submission. He has had many “wives”—his concubine women, along with the virgins he has married. More than I have been allowed to know. They come here willingly to be with him, to be given over to him. To believe in him and bear his children. I wonder how many there are? How many there have been over the years. Because that’s the thing—this has been forming for years now, Len and his followers, this compound, these beliefs. The twelve maidens, his virgin child brides, are just the newest addition—a way to build his holy family and army for the coming war of the millennium.
The pregnant and nursing mothers have come for the childbearing training sessions, but I think it’s more of an excuse for the women to gather together and speak freely than anything else. There’s a lot of coffee and pie, a lot of stomach stroking, a lot of birth-story sharing and quiet laughter. It’s the only time I’ve seen the women and girls smile, much less laugh. Delores leaves us alone. She is uncomfortable with this part of the training, it would seem. But Faith is a good midwife, a good leader. Quiet, sure, calming. I am glad for the girls to at least be in Faith’s care this way. One woman making a positive impact in this wretched place. Someone I wish could have attended me when I was a frightened girl giving birth instead of the man, the doctor, who handled me like a psych patient, strapping my feet wide and painting my inner legs brown with iodine, as though my thigh skin posed the most significant risk to my baby.
I asked Faith for a change in venue for this ceremony’s painting: the Almost Paradise garden—a giant greenhouse still humid with fall’s late coaxed growth, plants heavy with cabbage and cauliflower, broccoli and Brussels sprouts. When the men were gone, she gathered them there for me—the maidens and the pregnant or nursing mothers. I painted them all, Faith in their center flanked by green. Breathing in that air, just for a moment I felt it all could have been something else. Something bright with filtered light. Something with the promise of new life.
Only it isn’t. And it never will be. Instead, I reach again for you, this fog like my coming home.
When did we ever see anything but each other? When did I turn my face away? Forgive me for that inward turn, for not seeing what was right in front of me all along.
All my love,
Isabelle
CHAPTER NINETEEN
MAY 2001
One of the stories Eamon had told Silva as a child was about the holy neem tree—curer of all ailments, manifestation of the Hindu mother-figure goddess Shitala. It grew up through a Nanghan Bir Baba Temple room and its worshippers dressed its trunk in red cloth, adorning it with scarves and flowers and a golden Shitala mask, finding healing and hope by praying to it. She had found such comfort in the story she’d made Eamon promise to help her find their own holy tree on the island that they might adorn and pray to.
As a girl, Silva had devoured anything concerning holy or magical trees. The May Tree, used as a psychic shield for the innocent and vulnerable, particularly children at puberty, sensitive to change; the Tree of Enchantment, at whose roots worshippers sat to gain eloquence, inspiration, and prophecies; the Wish Tree, tied with prayer cloth, its crevices filled with change left by the hopeful. And just like then, she wished now, lying in her bed in the Larkins cabin, that she had a tree she might adorn and pray to, finding direction.
When she finally got up and opened her door to let Juniper out, her hair loose and tangled around her shoulders, Nick was dressed and sitting on his bed with his door open, as though he’d been waiting for her. She reached up subconsciously to smooth her wild hair. She understood what the sudden darkening of his eyes meant as he regarded her. She felt it, too, looking at him.
Juniper pushed past her and gave each of them a quick glance, as if he, too, were assessing this new thing.
“Juniper can come outside with me if you want. I’ll be careful, keep an eye on him,” Nick said, as if that’s what he’d been doing—waiting to be of service to her.
She met his gaze. He had been nothing but careful. Nothing but conscientious and polite.
When they left, she closed her bedroom door and leaned against it. What was she doing? She told herself again that this wasn’t what she’d come for. That she needed to be clearheaded in forming the terms of her decisions—even if she didn’t know yet what those terms would be, even if every decision was a part of Nick’s life, too, whether he knew it yet or not. Even if around him, her body was constantly warring with her mind, each of them after different things.
She got dressed and went out to sit on the porch steps. A robin fluttered into the nearest locust and chirp-clucked, its three hatchlings’ wobbly heads rising with frantic peeping. After stuffing beaks, the robin flew to the birdbath Silva had fashioned out of rusted implement scraps gathered from around the ranch—a shallow-cupped harrowing disc on the top of a rusted camshaft, anchored to the ground by an empty-toothed gear the size of a fifty-pound weight-lifting plate. She’d wrangled an old machine brake drum over to the house, sat it on some other rusted machine parts for a base, and made it into a barbecue. Nick had been impressed with her industry, examining each thing as if they were pieces of art.
The air held portent; she could feel it stirring the ground around her. A perfect growing season. Sun every day, no frosts, the air fragrant with warmth. As a child, the New Community garden had seemed enormous, a place where she’d happily lost herself in the plants. Suddenly all Silva wanted to do was expose black soil, plant, and grow. She pictured clematis winding up porch timbers and wisteria over the well house. The old Larkins garden was nothing but a patch of overgrown weeds, but it had perfect exposure and was shaded from the afternoon heat, the creek nearby for plentiful water. She could already picture it: a riotous mix of flowers and vegetables, Nick gathering the fruits of her labor long after she was gone, finding his way back to all he’d lost. At least one of them ought to be able to claim their inheritance.
She rubber-banded her hair and pulled on her cutoffs and the olive-green Wellies she’d been wearing for years, then walked quickly to the barn, Nick still working in the empty room, Juniper lying by his side, happily chewing on a horse hoof trimming.
“I have seeds,” she announced, smiling at the look of confusion on Nick’s face.
“The garden could be tilled and planted.”
He wiped his face with the back of a gloved hand and looking out the window toward the overgrown, inextirpable plot. “It’s grown nothing but weeds for too long now, that’s for sure.”
“Do you have a tiller?”
He wrinkled his brow and nodded. “Yes, although it hasn’t been run in years.”
“Can I use it?”
“Right now?” he asked, lifting his eyebrows in surprise, a grin stretched across his face. He went to the shed and came out wheeling an ancient, battered tiller, filled it with fresh gas and oil, changed the spark plug, and then pulled the rope until Silva thought either his arm or the rope would break, sweat dripping from his face. Finally, the motor turned over and roared to life, smoking and shaking with indignation like a beast disrupted from hibernation.
“Amazing the thing still runs after all this time.” He throttled it over to the edge of the garden plot and got it positioned, tines whirring. “You sure you’re up for this?”
Silva let the clutch lever out carefully, but the tiller still jerked and surged ahead, yanking her behind it. She leaned back, throwing her weight against its bucking rush, but it was all she could do to hold on. It felt as if she were wrestling a wild animal.
Nick, looking concerned, yelled over the engine noise, “Do you need some help?”
She shook her head and held on tight, the tines sinking into the weeds and pulling up rich black soil—the kind of soil that would grow anything. She breathed in the smell of exposed dirt and thought of the salsa she could make—a punch of hot alongside the cool zing of tomato and cilantro. Under her feet, the dark loam looked as if it were already a crop, ripe and ready to eat. She had to restrain herself from bending down to try it. Something hungry had awakened inside her, something insatiable. She felt a part of a bigger, symbiotic thing—bigger than the sum of her experiences, bigger than what she’d thought she’d come to understand about herself.
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