The Music of the Deep: A Novel

by Elizabeth Hall

  Alex was watching her so intently she nearly bumped into the waitress from the Drift Inn. Her eyes shot back to the red-haired woman in front of her, and Caroline reached for Alex’s arms, trying to avoid a complete collision.

  “Whoa! You’d get arrested if you were driving like that.” Caroline laughed. “Hey! Don’t you own a raincoat?”

  Alex refocused her attention and shook her head. “No need for a raincoat where I come from. You just stand under a door and wait ten minutes. Might have to do that once a year or so.”

  Caroline snickered. “Well, you need one out here. Or maybe two, or three, or six. One for town, one for walking the dog, one for working in the muck . . .”

  Alex nodded. “Guess I need to go shopping, then.”

  “How was your first night at Mad Maggie’s?”

  “Mad Maggie? As in mad insane?”

  Caroline shrugged. “Not exactly insane. But she is forceful. And very . . . I don’t know what the word would be . . . inflexible? Determined? She’s a force to be reckoned with, that Maggie. Kind of like a thunderstorm.”

  Alex nodded, still too distracted by the woman with the white hair to really absorb what Caroline was saying. “I slept fine. Didn’t hear any chains rattling or doors slamming. No ghost that I noticed. Woke up too early. I think I’m still on Mountain time.”

  “Well, it won’t take long to adjust. Around here, we sleep ten hours a night in the wintertime and only six or so in the summer. Kind of like the light. Except, of course, that we have way more darkness than ten hours right now.”

  Alex followed the woman across the street with her eyes, watching as she stooped to gather dog waste. “Who is that?”

  Caroline looked where Alex was looking. “Her name’s Emmie Porter.” Caroline leaned closer to Alex, and her voice dropped to a whisper. “Some folks call her the village witch.”

  Alex turned quickly. “Oh?”

  Caroline tipped her head. “And some folks call her the most talented healer they’ve ever seen. Two hundred years ago, that would have been the same thing.”

  “I saw her early this morning, in the cemetery. Walking a dog—a different dog.”

  Caroline nodded. “You’ll see her out walking quite a bit. She’s kind of a dog whisperer. Always has an animal she’s working on. Dogs, cats, horses. I’ve even heard of her working on an alpaca at a little farm up the road.”

  Alex looked at Caroline. “Dog whisperer?”

  “They say she’s really sensitive. That she can feel energy. An empath. Kind of like Reiki or something. I’ve heard that she can look at an animal, put her hands on it, and she can tell where the animal is hurting. She can figure out what’s wrong.”

  They both watched as Emmie Porter shuffled down the street with her animals.

  “A lot of folks are a little afraid of her. There are even a few people who say she can read minds.”

  Caroline watched Emmie for a few moments. “Sometimes, she seems normal enough. If you watch her, it looks like she’s talking to herself all the time. But then you might notice a bird, or a cat, or a dog. Sometimes she talks to the trees.” Caroline turned back to Alex. “Some people even say that she talks to the dead. The ghosts.”

  Alex swallowed. “Oh?”

  Caroline shrugged. “That’s what they say, anyway. You know the whole town is haunted, don’t you? Every single building. Even some of the places outside the buildings. We have ghost tours and paranormal conferences. It’s a big business, you know. Ghosts.”

  “I heard that,” Alex murmured.

  Caroline turned and caught Alex’s eye. “People say that the whole place is filled with spirits. And that if the spirits want you to stay, you stay. And if they don’t want you to stay, then . . .” Caroline raised her hands to her sides.

  “Wow. You believe all that?”

  Caroline smiled and shrugged. “I don’t know. But I came here ten years ago, with my boyfriend. I’m still here. He’s not.”

  “He didn’t like island life?”

  Caroline pulled her bottom lip under her teeth. She shook her head. “Nope. We were here two weeks when he ran off with someone else. To California, I think.”

  “I’m sorry. That’s . . .”

  Caroline paused. “I guess the spirits didn’t want him to stay.” A moment passed before she spoke again. “They must not have liked him at all. He sure cleared out of here quick. Rotten bum. Left me holding the bag on the lease we’d just signed.”

  They stood together for a moment, neither one of them speaking. “Lots of folks around here say that Emmie’s the one who has kept their horses or their dogs or cats alive. We have horses on this island that are over thirty years old. Cats that live to be twenty or more. That’s not normal, you know.”

  The two women watched as Emmie Porter continued her way down the street on the opposite side.

  “I’m not sure I believe everything they say about her. Seems pretty far-fetched, a lot of it.” Caroline turned and met Alex’s eye. “She seems nice enough, any time I’ve been around her. Just a little—different, you know? But I can tell you one thing. I sure get nervous if she turns and looks at me for too long. It’s almost as if she can see right through me. Right down to every secret I ever had.”

  It was at that very moment, as if the entire scene were scripted by some omniscient director with a perfect sense of timing, that Emmie Porter stopped and turned in the direction of the two women. Caroline, however, was not the object of her attentions. She looked directly at Alex. Their eyes locked, for one brief moment. Alex turned away and shivered.

  SIX

  Emmeline Porter was a slender thread of a woman. Five foot seven in her stocking feet, still slim like a young girl, despite her sixty-five years. She added bulk to her frame with clothing, and she had a signature look that everyone on the island recognized: oversized sweater, jeans, and a long dark gray duster made of waxed canvas to shed the rain and keep her pants dry when she was out in the weather. As it happened, she was out in the weather quite often.

  Her hair had silvered in her late thirties, almost overnight, but Emmie had never attempted to dye it. Thick and wavy, dark coffee brown when she was younger, she had kept it long her entire life, and wasn’t about to change that now, despite what any fashion guru might say about appropriate hairstyles for women her age. As a child, her hair had been tamed into a thick braid, out of her face so that she could ride horses across the pastures of her father’s ranch. She loved the feel of the wind in her face, loved the warmth of the sun on her shoulders. She loved swinging up on the back of her pony, bareback, and racing her brother, feeling her long braid hitting against her back, feeling herself at one with the animal beneath her.

  Growing up on her father’s cattle ranch in Dalton, Montana, had been the perfect school for the study of human and animal nature. She and her older brother, Ethan, had spent most of the daylight hours outside, when they weren’t in school, and Emmie had developed the skill of quiet observation. Born into a man’s world, at a man’s time, and surrounded by the good old boys of her father and his generation, she learned to keep her thoughts to herself. But she watched—everything—from the births of kittens and puppies and cattle and horses, to the ways in which they could suffer and die. She had observed the keen intelligence of the horses, had learned to pay attention to every subtle change in their behavior. The horses always seemed to know, long before she did, if there was a coyote or a rattlesnake or a mountain lion nearby. Their ears would lie back against their heads; she could sense the alertness of the animal traveling up through her legs, even if she rode with a saddle. She learned to avoid being thrown off or surprised, simply by tuning in to the subtle clues of the horse.

  The ranching world was a hard-knock school for someone with such extreme sensitivities, and Emmie was considered something of an odd duck. She hated hearing about the men going out to shoot coyotes or setting traps for foxes outside the chicken coop. She couldn’t watch the news on television; she never r
eached for the newspaper that her parents shared over breakfast every morning. There was enough death and destruction on the ranch itself without borrowing any from other places. And while most of the people she knew were stoic and accepting of all the death around them, Emmie was not.

  It wasn’t, as her father believed, that she was too softhearted. It wasn’t sympathy, which implied feeling sorry for the creature or person that was suffering. What Emmie felt was the actual pain the animal felt. She could feel the sharp teeth of a trap, clamped around her own ankle. She could feel the rifle bullet, as if it were entering her own back, when the boys went out shooting coyotes.

  At seven years old, she had awakened one night, feeling an incredible pain in her abdomen, a pain so severe she could barely breathe. She lay in bed for a few moments, trying to figure out if the pain belonged to her own body, or to something else. And then she scrambled from bed and went to her parents’ bedroom.

  It was calving season, and her father kept all the cows that were about to give birth in the corrals and barn close to the house. That allowed him to get up every two hours and check on them, to make sure there were no cows or calves in trouble. He’d been outside just thirty minutes before, and all was well.

  “Daddy?” Emmie said, not too loudly but not whispering, either. Her father was exhausted, getting up so often every night.

  “Hmmm.” He rolled over in bed, forcing himself to wake up, yet again.

  “I can hear a cow,” Emmie said. “I can hear her . . . screaming, kind of.” Even at seven years old, Emmie knew better than to say that she could feel a cow in trouble.

  Her dad blinked for a minute, and then threw back the covers and pulled his Carhartts on over his long underwear. He never completely undressed during calving season; that would have been pointless.

  There was, indeed, a cow in trouble, and her father had to wrap chains around the calf’s legs, inside the womb, and pull. This wasn’t the first time, nor would it be the last, and Emmie, from her bedroom inside the house, could feel every spasm and shooting pain that the cow went through. She lay in her own bed, tears streaming down her face and into the pillow, clutching the blankets as the pain ripped through her own body.

  But they survived, both cow and calf, and at breakfast the next morning, her father put his hand on top of her head and whispered, “Good job, Emmie.” That was just about the full range of emotion for Frank Porter, and she knew that he was proud of her.

  This was Montana ranching in the fifties and sixties, and Emmie learned quickly that there was no room for intense sensitivity. When confronted with the pain and suffering of the humans and animals around her, she learned to minimize her reaction. She flinched. A shudder ran down her spine. And she turned away, distracting herself with some other activity so that she wouldn’t have to think about it. She learned how to block out any of the feelings that tried to lodge in her own body.

  Though she’d spent her whole life turning away, trying to avoid it, the pain caught her in its trap when she was a junior in high school. Her brother, Ethan, had joined the Marines and headed to Vietnam the summer before. It was 1967; Vietnam had taken over the news, another dark wave of stories that she tried hard to evade.

  Emmie hated the whole idea—the thought of war, the thought of Ethan in a jungle on the other side of the world. Though she had avoided the news in all its forms until Ethan left, afterward she developed a fascination with the protests against the war. She watched on their old black-and-white console television as people marched the streets in San Francisco, and Washington, DC, and college campuses across the country. She watched as Jane Fonda made impassioned speeches.

  Her father walked into the living room and turned off the television, shooting Emmie a look that made his viewpoint clear. Frank Porter had no tolerance for people who protested against their own government, or Hollywood actresses who questioned the sanctity of America’s decisions. But some part of Emmie hoped that those protestors could somehow magically end the war and bring Ethan home safe and sound.

  Ethan did come home, that spring of 1968. His body, what had been recovered of it, arrived in a plain box, covered with an American flag.

  Emmie vibrated with her own pain, but the pain of her mother and father was so strong she could barely manage being in the house. It radiated from their bodies, like the shafts of moonlight behind a patch of clouds. Her mother grew quiet. She never sang anymore, the way she had always done when she was cooking or working in the garden. She lost weight; her face grew gaunt and angular, as if all the life had been sucked out of her. She often sat in a chair by the front window, staring out at the day, knitting needles clutched in her hands but no progress being made.

  Her father spent more time outside than he ever had, looking for almost any excuse to stay out of the house where Ethan’s memory still permeated the air like the scent of a cigar, where the echo of his laughter still reverberated in the corners. Frank worked with the horses and cows; he spent hours chopping wood. When he had more than enough wood cut and split for two Montana winters, he began to tinker with machinery, taking things apart and putting them back together again. Anything to avoid remembering. Anything to avoid feeling. Anything to avoid the pain.

  Dustin Curtis showed up the following spring, when Emmie was a senior in high school. Her father always hired five or six cowboys in the spring to help him move the cattle to the high country, to the land they leased from the forest service in the mountains. A few of those cowboys were local men, but every year there would be a stranger or two in the bunch, someone from outside the town of Dalton and the confines of the Chugwater Valley.

  Dusty could ride and rope and manage a fence post as well as any of the others. But he was one of the few cowboys who actually stood taller than Emmie when they were all out in the corral. She couldn’t take her eyes off him. Emmie had never before ventured into the world of romance, partly because she had been constantly under the watchful eyes of her older brother and her father, but also because she’d never met anyone who would qualify as even slightly more interesting than her horse. Dalton, Montana, was a town of less than two hundred souls, and not one of the boys under thirty was able to look her in those dark brown eyes and carry on a conversation. Something about her caused every one of them to freeze up, to lose their ability to speak.

  Dusty had several admirable qualities, the least of which was being tall enough to look up to. He had seen more of the world than Helena and Butte, which made him much more interesting than any of the local boys. And he wasn’t completely tongue-tied when she was in his presence. A shiver ran through her every time she stepped into the corral and he looked at her and said, “Mornin’, Emmeline.”

  And then one day, she watched Dusty working with the horses, and it changed everything. Tom Holfield, one of the regular boys, had been trying to load a mare into the horse trailer. Emmie always hated it; she would walk away, if she could, so that she didn’t have to watch. This horse was young and very skittish. Emmie knew in her bones that the mare was deathly afraid of the trailer, of the metallic noises when she was going in, and the dark feeling of confinement, of the way the boys always yelled and whipped her to get her inside.

  Tom was losing his temper. His face was crimson, and he was snapping his whip, ready to haul back and teach that horse a lesson. Dusty stepped up and said quietly, “Let me give it a go.”

  Tom dropped the reins and stepped away, anger still flooding his face, and they all watched as Dusty kneeled down on the ground, about ten feet away from the mare. Her reins dangled on the ground, and Dusty made no attempt to grab them. He just sat there, scrunched down on top of his heels, and looked at her.

  Dusty didn’t move for what seemed like ages, and neither did the mare. When he did stand, he did it in slow motion, fluid and soft. The mare watched him for a few moments longer, and then walked right over to him, as if she had known him her whole life. He walked her around the pasture a bit, and stood next to her, holding her reins loosely in h
is hand, as they walked toward the horse trailer.

  He didn’t get her in all at once. Dusty took a few steps and stopped, waiting for the mare to adjust. Then a few steps more. It might have taken thirty minutes, but the mare was in the trailer, with no neighing or crashing against the sides, no stomping a foot or pulling her head back. No whipping or yelling involved.

  Emmie was spellbound. She had never seen anyone who used such a gentle approach with the animals. She met Dusty’s eyes and asked, “What were you doing? Staring into her eyes like that?”

  Dusty slapped his hat against his leg and met her gaze. “It’s called ‘hooking on.’ I was waiting for the horse to hook on to my energy. To get us in sync. Working together, instead of pulling apart.” He stared at her another moment.

  She watched him walk away, back to working the horses that were left in the corral. He had looked in her eyes just long enough that she could feel almost exactly what that horse had felt. Hooking on. She was hooking on to the energy in that blue-eyed cowboy.

  Her restlessness that summer only added to the spell he cast. She was eighteen; she had just graduated from high school. Ethan’s death had filled the house with a stifling darkness; her pores were overflowing with the ache of loss. Dusty crouched down and looked at a horse, and suddenly Emmie felt as if everything inside her had been stirred up, the way the dust kicked up in the corral when they were out working the wild ones.

  When her father caught them behind the barn, kissing in a way that left not a flicker of daylight between their two bodies, he did what any reasonable father would do. He told Dusty to get his things and get out. Dusty picked up his hat and knocked it against his pants. “Yes, sir,” he murmured, but his eyes met Emmie’s before he turned away, and in that look, she knew.