“You were driving a boat.”
“And you were causing a scene.” Moses’s own anger caught him off guard.
“He was going to kill me.”
Moses shrugged in a way that said Maybe, maybe not. “That’s why I started shooting.”
“And you could have shot me.”
“That would have been unfortunate,” Moses said, and turned away from her.
Three days later he drove his truck in as close to their camp as he could and parked on a service road near a power company substation. A few moments later Adam and Molly slipped out of the trees, each carrying a pack on their shoulders. Moses pulled a green tarp back. He had filled the truck bed with leaves and pine boughs.
“That’s your genius plan?” Molly almost spat.
“Molly,” cautioned Adam.
Without another word, he tossed his pack into the bed and climbed in himself. Molly grudgingly followed. Moses arranged the branches and boughs over them as well as he could. Then he pulled the tarp, punctured with a few rips and holes for ventilation, back across the truck bed. It was not a burial, he reminded himself as he secured the ties. Their story was not over yet.
“You have to be joking,” Molly said a few hours later when she first saw the abandoned house high in the wooded hills rising over Penobscot Bay. “We’re trading the woods for this wreck?”
Moses had parked his truck several miles away, down in a logging cut on the land of a white family he knew. Moses and Adam followed him blindly through the woods as the older man silently and steadily picked his way along old game trails. It was obvious that he knew exactly where he was going. Still he took his time, measuring the surroundings, listening, doubling back to make a secondary trail every so often. Thrushes whistled. Currents of wind moaned life into the pines. No one else was around for miles. Molly loved the adventure, and for a few hours at least she felt all the fear and anger of the last few weeks lift.
Now they stood in the trees, eyeing the massive house. A sprawling white colonial with a wraparound porch and a mansard-style roof, it sat in a hilltop clearing that was slowly being retaken by the woods. The driveway was a long grown-in dirt road, and there wasn’t another house for miles. Woods completely surrounded them. The house itself twisted and undulated and sank and swelled along every surface.
She was furious when she saw there was a long, curling driveway, severely overgrown, but passable still. “We could have just driven here,” she said, incredulous.
“Could do a lot of things that might end in a jail cell,” Moses quipped, and Molly glared at him.
“It isn’t ours,” Molly said. She looked around at the land. Imagined the awful act of clearing so many trees for this, a forgotten monument to vanity. She thought she might puke.
“No,” her father said as he breached the tree line and took a step into the long golden clearing. “It also isn’t anyone’s at this point.”
“It’s a rich white person house,” Molly said finally. “Awenóhčəwahki.”
“And maybe the last place they’d think to look for a couple Indian outlaws,” said Moses. Indian outlaws. Molly liked the phrase and the idea. She wanted to smile, but bit her lip to keep from doing so.
“It’s going to keep you safe,” Moses added. He was tired of the anger between him and his goddaughter. Rabid dogs were kinder to each other.
“It’s going to be a home,” Adam said with a forcefulness that dared anyone to question him.
“For how long?” asked Molly.
“As long as it’ll have us,” said her father. “Through the winter at least, I hope.”
As long as it’ll have us. Molly was comforted by the phrasing. Her father had a constant habit of imbuing things with living traits. Molly had not thought it unusual until she went to school and found that other fathers didn’t do this. She had been sullen, angry, ashamed for weeks, until her father forced the truth out of her. “Why do you do it?” she had asked. “I don’t know,” her father admitted. “I just always have. I think it makes me pay closer attention. I think it’s taught me to be gentle.” This was not what she wanted to hear—she did not want her father to be uncertain or gentle, she wanted him to be tough and confident and direct and as brave as the legendary chiefs and warriors in the bedtime tales she’d grown up on—but she understood that he was being honest. Slowly, she learned to accept his vulnerability. It would be a long time still before acceptance turned to pride, and she finally understood all the dimensions of bravery.
“Lots of people have had it a lot harder than this,” Adam said.
Moses nervously rubbed his hands against his thighs and turned back into the woods. “I can’t come out here the same way once the snow starts,” he said. “Too many tracks. But I’ll come as long as I can. Only if you want.”
“You’re welcome any time, Moses,” Adam said. Molly grudgingly nodded.
That night father and daughter camped at the edge of the clearing. In the morning they’d begin exploring the house itself. Adam gave Molly two books. One was a survival narrative about a group of unlucky settlers going through Donner Pass in the mountains of California. Molly read the back cover and the first two pages and then understood what having it harder could mean. The second book was a pocket dictionary. A page about two-thirds of the way through was dog-eared, and the girl scanned through the entries until she came across the word squatter. At her elbow in the semidarkness, her father said, “You’ve been called a lot of awful shit in your life already, Molly. That’s so you know what else people are going to call us. It’s also so you have time to think about what you are and what you aren’t.”
“Will we become thieves?” There were abandoned summer homes and cottages, remote fishing cabins, and shuttered lake camps throughout the county. So far they had not had to resort to breaking into any of them for supplies.
“Not if I can help it,” Adam said.
In the morning they cautiously left the woods. The house had a stone foundation and a dugout dirt cellar. The entire house had begun to sag and slide into the earth. There wasn’t a single straight line in it anywhere anymore. Molly pictured a huge, proud animal that had had its spine broken and yet somehow still limped through the days. A backhouse for wood and storage, long and empty, was built off the kitchen.
Out back was a cavernous detached horse barn with gaping holes in its roof. It was as if the shingles were gradually being sucked down through the openings.
“They had horses here once,” Adam said, and Molly went quiet, remembering Cricket and another life.
When they pushed the massive door open and stepped inside, instead of swallowed shingles and splintered rafters, they found an old tractor that wouldn’t start, a 1932 Packard with only the rusty frame remaining, and an array of odd junk and farm machinery that seemed shoulder deep. Every step through the property was like wading through an ocean of dead, forgotten things.
Inside the house the floorboards had been removed, leaving just the joists spanning the cellar, a chasm of dense brown earth. Remarkably, despite the lack of light, the forest surrounding the house had managed to start growing inside as well. Tall vines and clematis and pokeweed and lupines and patches of Solomon’s seal sprouted from the dirt floor and rose through the rooms.
Molly didn’t understand how the land had survived here, how it had been left to start returning to its natural state, why some rich person hadn’t bought it up and cut it all down and made it their own again.
“Moses told me a descendant of the original owner, some ship captain, still owns the house and land,” her father said, as if able to read her thoughts. “He lives somewhere in Europe. Pays a fortune in taxes he mails across the Atlantic each year to keep things just the way they are.”
“Trashed?” Molly asked.
“More or less,” her father smiled.
In the main parlor, under a mildewed sheet, the girl found a dusty upright piano, hand-stained a dark coffee brown. She looked at her father, and he nodded. Sh
e pulled the sheet all the way back and gasped. There was a smell to the wood, even among all the swirling dirt and dust falling through the room. It was the smell of music. Her hands were shaking as she carefully lifted the keyboard cover, afraid that the entire thing might fall apart in her hands, this dream of dust and old wood. She traced her fingers along the gold letters, mehlin & sons, new york, until she could picture them with her eyes closed. She sat at the worn keys for the rest of the afternoon, imagining notes, arranging and rearranging the sounds in her head, not yet daring to try to play, too afraid of the disappointment should the piano fail to still produce sound.
They slept in the attic, wrapped in horse blankets from the barn. Through a porthole window, Molly could barely see a blue sliver of ocean through the trees. Sometimes her father hummed old cowboy songs he knew. Molly made vomiting noises and reminded him he was supposed to sing the Indian songs. Her father blushed and agreed, said he wished the television had played more of those when he was a kid. During the day she practiced strange public school word problems from a book her father had brought, recited animal names and traits, and wrote long lists of what plants around the property were medicinal or edible—coltsfoot and bloodroot for a cough; five-finger grass and mugwort for a fever; goldenseal for wounds; horseradish for torpor; milkweed, dock, mustard, plantain, chicory, cattail, burdock, and fireweed for food and other medicine. At night they listened to the wind rustling in the plants below the floorboards. Molly began to think of them as family members quietly asleep downstairs. On these nights the world seemed to exist outside of time. She didn’t think she ever wanted to go back.
Adam was not so sure. They were living a subsistence life of the most extreme order. Some of that was circumstance, but some was choice. There were easier places to go, but he wasn’t sure about going to them. He remembered the fervent tales of monastics pushed by the Catholic schools of his youth. When he cut through all the doctrinal bullshit, he realized that the point of the stories was that some people had to detach from the world to find the clarity to live rightly in the world. He thought of Saint Benedict. Of all the peddled religious figures, Benedict was the only one he had ever liked. Benedict wasn’t a fanatic. He wasn’t a firebrand rabbi like Jesus of Nazareth, or a zealous woodland preacher like John the Baptist. He was simply a man who couldn’t bear how hideous the world had become. The gluttony, the hedonism, the debauchery that infected human life after the fall of Rome—it was all too much. Unable to cope with his heartbreak, Benedict left for the hills. He lived alone in a cave for three years. He studied, and he prayed for a return to a moral world. After he left the woods, Benedict’s work slowly gained traction. Over time people started to love their neighbors. They planted gardens. They took care of the poor and the suffering in their communities. Adam thought now about the redemption of his own world. When he and Molly left this place, what would they find? Would the anger and desire for punishment over the vanished mill jobs have been magically replaced by something else? Would her crime be any less of a crime? What about the crimes of the mill owners who had decamped overnight to foreign markets and devastated entire communities without warning? What about those who had first built the monstrosities, and tied generations of family livelihood to the work they created? Despite the hardship, there was clarity here in the abandoned house. To catch something to eat, you did this, not that. To stay warm, you did this, not that. To stay out of sight, you did this, not that. To live, you did this, not that. But how did you make a place accept you again, and how did you make a people see you as human, not simply a monster lurking in the woods?
In the morning Adam woke to the sound of music. It was soft, barely registering in the attic, but it was there. He closed his eyes and fell back asleep, smiling, among the old horse blankets.
“What was that?” he asked Molly later in the day. “This morning.”
“I’m calling it ‘The Winter King.’”
“It’s yours?” He was stunned and proud. “I was afraid I was dreaming. The sound, it was so beautiful.”
“It’s been coming for a while now,” she said. “Since the fire, I guess. Pieces and pieces come to me here and there. I guess I’m just gathering them up.”
Adam took a moment before answering, let the word sit between them. They almost never talked about the fire now, even though it surrounded everything they did.
“How?”
“In my head. Between digging for roots to gnaw on and escaping angry white lobstermen.” She smiled. “Can we keep it?” she asked. “The piano.”
“What else would we do with it?”
“You told me about this family on the island that took the doors and the trim boards off the inside rooms of their house and burned them to stay warm one really bad winter. You said they even burned the kitchen cabinets.”
Adam tried to remember the story, found it eventually. It seemed it had been about someone his grandmother had known, in the years before there was a bridge from the mainland to the island reservation, in the years where a Penobscot family risked starving to death or breaking through the ice and drowning while trying to cross the river to the grocery store.
“Yes,” he said, letting the old stories come back over him. “Of course,” he said, thinking about music and the idea of what happiness could mean. Sometimes even the sad notes, if played properly, could be joyful.
The wet season passed into the warmth of the growing season. Eagles began to nest in the tallest pines. And the mountains slowly took on a deep purple hue at sunset. Molly came downstairs one morning and found her great-grandmother’s seed box sitting on the makeshift kitchen table. She thought for a moment she was dreaming. Then she began to cry. Of course her father had brought it with them from the house.
“It’s time to plant,” a voice said behind her. Her father was standing in the doorway, leaning against the jamb. He was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt. Dirt caked his hands, and his cheeks were red from the morning cold. His eyes were as damp as his daughter’s.
“The seed box,” Molly said, wiping at her face. “I thought I’d never see it again.”
“And now you have.” Her father smiled. “Some things are meant forever.”
They spent weeks bushwhacking the land and breaking the earth in a large, sun-filled clearing deep in the woods. When it was done, their garden was fifty feet wide and nearly a hundred feet long. It was also well hidden. They planted it half full with greens and corn and squash and beans. They filled the other half with storage crops. Beets. Potatoes. Turnips. Carrots. Onions.
Molly and Adam worked into the heat, which came early, cruel and smoking, the air in June bending with steam and heat vapor as if it were late August. They tended the garden. Collected rainwater in troughs and barrels. Watched the heat as it moved from tepid to ravenous, until they seemed to be able to see the sun cooking the air right in front of their faces. They did not slow. They did not relent.
Adam built a simple ramp pump from materials he salvaged around the property. They set the pump on the edge of a small wooded pond and built a box to cover it. Moses brought out four hundred feet of coiled hoses. Molly helped him unkink and lay the water line through the saplings and stumps and underbrush from the pump to the garden. When they were done, Moses recited a prayer of thanks: “Kchi-niweskw: Wəliwəni nəbi. Wəliwəni wskitkamikw. Wəliwəni wəjawsən. Wəliwəni skwəde. Wəliwəni məzitte nədalαgomak. Great Spirit: Thank you water. Thank you earth. Thank you wind. Thank you fire. Thank you all my relatives.” Then they danced together in the garden and sang old songs to the plants.
The pump had no motor and worked without electricity or any power source at all. A simple hydraulic system, it used gravity and two valves to create a hammer effect that pushed water into a pressure tank and then drove it up the hill and through the hoses to the garden. The pump held a steady twenty-eight pounds per square inch of pressure, and they found they could pull up to one thousand gallons of water a day without doing a thing. Molly took the fiv
e-gallon pails she’d envisioned having to lug back and forth from the pond to water with, turned them over, and set about playing them like drums. Her father grinned. Secretly she was disappointed. She had envisioned laboring under the weight of the water buckets, growing muscled, growing stronger, growing even faster.
Eight
The bateau peeled out through the water as I watched our path for obstacles and Link worked the steering handle on the outboard. It was September, and the air was heavy still, so humid it felt like a damp net stretched against our skin. With the new moon overhead, heat humming in the dark, and water all about us, Link dropped the outboard to a soft purr. I could hear the waves lapping against the hull, but the petrol stink of exhaust and the low vibrations in the seats raised a mechanical wall between the natural world and us.
“Kill the engine all the way,” I told him. Stealth was paramount, and I wanted to better feel the night, note all its sounds around us. Anything could be out there.
“His buoys are orange-and-blue striped,” Link said, deadening the motor.
“You think I don’t know that? I’ve lived here all my life.”
“Don’t act tough, Almy. Just watch for buoys and rocks.”
Each buoy was tied to a string of lobster traps, and those traps—steel cages dripping with the sea and slick with rockweed and ocean moss—weighed eighty pounds apiece. Coming alongside a buoy, I watched Link reach out with the gaff hook and snag the warp line. He strained against the line, and the bloated trap bubbled to the surface, pouring seawater back into the night. He pulled the cage up onto the gunwale, and I leaned the other way, counterweighting the bateau. If you got tangled in the line and the cage slipped, if it fell back overboard, it would take you with it, all the way to the black bottom of the breathless sea. Five dark lobsters crawled over each other inside the trap. One by one Link tossed them back into the ocean. I thought it was over then. We had made our point. Link was about to push the trap back overboard when he paused. The blade of his pocketknife glinted in the dark, and then I heard the rapid sawing of sharpened steel on rope.
The Lowering Days Page 10
