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When Abel found his wife’s body, her lungs swam in river water and mud and her arms and legs were scraped and broken and bloated with water, wrapped around the roots of a tree that had been brought down by the rushing river. Nonetheless, he longed to keep her with him and he chipped away at the ice that had formed around her body with his own bare hands. Gently he pulled her fingers and hair from the ice and lifted her body from the creek. He carried her back to the cabin and sat her body in the rocker and tried to dress her in the cream-colored satin and lace he had bought a year before in anticipation of her return. Charles came home and found his father in this hopeless endeavor and talked gently to his father, but when his father didn’t appear to hear him, Charles shouted at the man, who still didn’t hear him, but kept on working with the body and the satin and the lace, and finally Charles slapped his father, but Abel barely noticed even that and only cried softly, while Charles told him they must bury her. In the end, Abel couldn’t help and Charles buried her alone, leaving a wooden cross to mark the spot until he could get a stone. The next day he dragged his father into town to help him choose and load a stone onto their wagon for the grave, and the two men, one working as mechanically as a machine, set the stone at her grave just as the sun set, a rare and bright magenta, and Abel remarked it was a passionate color in the sky that evening and asked his son for his mother’s name, for she had never told him her Indian name, and she had never allowed him to call her Rosie.
Now it was Charles who couldn’t speak and his father would die never knowing the name of the woman he had loved. They walked back to the house, but Abel would not go in. He said goodnight to his son, and those were his last words to anyone. Then he found the ancient oak tree that leaned perpetually into the large boulder, caught between life and death, and he wedged himself into the spot where he had first awaited Rosie 18 years ago and in his mind he counted each fall, each winter, each spring and each summer of her life as he remembered it, feeling her pain now on top of his own. He fell asleep and awoke only when Charles came looking for him and found him huddled against the rock like a runaway child and lifted him out and helped him stumble back to the house. There, Abel rocked back and forth in the chair that was her chair, knowing it was over, that he had counted each day, his days and hers too, and he ate nothing, drank nothing, just counting them, those days they had shared until he died, just before Charles was about to tell about the snake on the porch on a long ago summer evening. This was his penance, his amends to her, and he felt forgiven.
It was an aging Peter who helped Charles load a second grave stone in his wagon and center it at the head of the grave dug next to Stillbird’s. After carving Abel’s name, birthdate and date of death, Charles carved a small bird into his mother’s blank stone, just the tiny bird, no words or dates, and then he enfolded his hard-muscled body around the hard granite, nearly blank but for the small, secret figure, and he cried and cried, gripping the stone tightly, the way an infant clings to its mother’s body in a world too large and new.
Charles was 17, the same age his uncle Jamie had been when he had lost his mother, and had to leave Scotland to come to a new land. Abel and Jamie had traveled from New York to Virginia their first year in the new land, and thence to the southwest mountains of West Virginia. Abel had told Charles about those days when Charles was just old enough to begin exploring their own farmstead, and often thereafter, he would ask his father to tell him again and tell him more, so he had a mental map of places he longed to see and how to get there. He might even go to Scotland. He decided he’d get a job on a ship and wander until he felt at home. But at the same time he knew he’d miss this home, and the day after he buried his father, he was up at dawn to watch the mist lift from the hills, and he memorized every mood of the landscape from dawn until darkest night and walked every mile of the county, slowly and carefully storing up memories for the next phase of his life as he imagined it would be, lonely and dangerous and, of course, mysterious, like the fairy tales his father had told him, almost right up to the end.
Charles had no trouble finding a couple to purchase his land and the cabin. What he needed was cash and a horse to carry him far away. He had meant to bury the satins and laces that his father had bought for his mother, but had forgotten because of grief and the need to worry about his father, so he was embarrassed when the wife found those fine fabrics and the pieces of torn dresses and looked at him with curiosity. Blushing with shame he took the pile out of her arms and disappeared into the woods and laid the laces and satins one by one on top of her grave, and then he lay down to sleep a while in the late afternoon sun and awakened with the evening chill, and a light rain fell upon him. He left the graves then and went directly to his horse. The cash was in his jacket, and he rode down the mountains toward Roanoke, while the woman watched from the porch, curious still.
Part II
John Banks
VI
Stillbird Page 19
