Starcarbon

by Ellen Gilchrist

  Olivia bent over and kissed the stones beside the fireplace where her grandparents would have had to brace themselves to lift a kettle down. Then she called out to the birds. “You crazy redbirds, didn’t you ever see a person before? I’m not after your babies. I’m leaving. You can have this place to yourselves again. But remember, don’t take any wooden earthworms.”

  She giggled delightedly at her own stupid joke and struck off into the woods. There was no path at all, nothing to tell her where she was going, but she had a compass and she knew that the lake lay to the north and she headed that way.

  Crow came in from the garden and answered the phone with hands still muddy from weeding lettuce. “It’s Helen Hand,” the voice said. “Olivia’s aunt up in Boston. I just wanted to talk to her, if she’s available. Is she there?”

  “I came in a while ago,” Crow answered, “and found a note. She’s gone off to the woods. On a lightning journey. Did you know she was going away?”

  “No. I just had her on my mind. What do you mean, a lightning journey?”

  “It’s something we do. When we need to think. We walk until we find lightning.”

  “Lightning?”

  “You know. After rain and thunder. Lightning makes the thunder. It comes before the thunder.” Crow was holding the phone with her shoulder, washing lettuce in the sink.

  “Is that good? Who is this, by the way? Is this Mary Lily?”

  “Wait a minute. Little Sun is here. I’ll let you talk to him. He just drove up.” Crow laid the phone down beside the lettuce and went to the back door and watched Little Sun getting out of the truck. “Olivia has gone off to find lightning,” she said. “The medicine is so strong someone’s calling her from Boston. You come talk to her. She sounds like she might be crazy. A lot of those people from Carolina are crazy. I think they might all be crazy.”

  Little Sun came walking up the stairs. He was carrying a bag of day-old bread and a manila folder the lawyer had given him to read about the titles for the land. He scratched his face. “Don’t talk so loud,” he said. “She might hear you. Who is it?”

  “Her name is Helen. She says she’s Olivia’s aunt.” Crow held out Olivia’s note to her husband. He read it and shook his head. “Good, now she will begin to see. She has barely been looking out of her eyes lately. Love blindness, the worst kind.”

  He went to the phone and picked it up. Helen was standing by a window thinking how crazy she was to be calling up people she didn’t even know. She was looking down on the Boston street. People came and went through the doors of apartment buildings. Cars drove up and down the street. A woman with three poodles on a leash walked by. A maid pushing a pram. A Federal Express truck screeched to a halt. The driver got out and ran into a building.

  Little Sun picked up the phone. “Hello,” he said. “This is Olivia’s grandfather. What can we do for you?”

  “I don’t know,” Helen began. “I was just worrying about her. I had her on my mind and I wanted to hear her voice. Where has she gone? Is it to a camp?”

  “I think our young woman has gone to find light to see by. When she comes back I will have her call you. Are you Daniel’s sister?”

  “I’m Helen. I love your granddaughter, Mr. Wagoner. We all love her. We think it was very generous of you to let her come and stay with Daniel all this time. Has she heard from him lately? Has she been talking to him much?”

  “I think so.” Little Sun smiled at Crow, who was standing by the door, wiping her hands and looking mean. “We have all joined our lives through her. It was good you were thinking of her today. Perhaps your thoughts gave her strength. She has gone off to test her strength and remember Cherokee ways now. No one told her to do this. This came to her and she followed it. She is not in danger. If she were, I would go and fetch her back. You must come here sometime and visit us. Do you ever come this way?” He was continuing to smile at Crow and she was softening up under the attention. She went back to the sink and began to dry the lettuce. She held up one brilliant green leaf and pretended to fan herself with it.

  “I want the best for Olivia,” Helen said. “She is very special, a very special girl. We all know that. I would like to come and visit there. Perhaps I will one day.”

  “She is doing fine.” Little Sun thought of her, how deep she must be into the woods by now, how quiet it would be and how bright with sunlight. “She is in love with a good young man. It’s a good time for her. The time of being young and in love.”

  Olivia had come to a place in the middle of the woods where a downed tree made a little forest pool. It was a very large old tree, as big around as a man’s arms could reach, and in the broken middle a pool had been carved out by water. The pool was edged with moss. A vine with red trumpet flowers grew up the side and curved around the trunk. One of the flowers turned its face to Olivia. Another looked off into the west, another faced the ground. Olivia sat down on a dry part of the trunk and felt the woods close around her. It was very noisy. Birds called, insects beat out an insistent rhythm, leaves burst open in the patchy light. The breath of their opening fell down the shafts of light. The air was thick with oxygen, heady and sweet. I will camp here, she decided, and began to look around for a place to build a lean-to.

  There was a small glade surrounded by flowers near the root system of the fallen tree. Two sycamores formed an arch that would be perfect to support a frame. Olivia took out the long-bladed pocket knife and began to cut limbs for a roof. In half an hour she had a structure and decided to stop and look for things to eat. She found wild berries and picked a hatful and sat down upon the log and ate them. Then she lay down beneath the uncovered structure and tried to decide what to use to thatch the roof. Oak leaves were thick but woven grasses were more beautiful. It must be beautiful, Olivia decided. I could sleep on the ground if all I wanted was some cover. She began to walk off two hundred feet in different directions, counting the steps, looking for materials. On the third sweep she found a bed of wild iris and cut an armload of the stems, saving the roots to cook for supper. If I can still build a fire, she thought. I may have forgotten how to make the sparks.

  The afternoon wore on. Olivia did not hurry. She covered the lean-to with two layers of plaited squares and then she took out the compass and took bearings and decided to explore. Little Sun could find her if he got worried. She had left a trail a baby could follow, much less her grandfather, with his sixth and seventh senses. I can make up the schoolwork, she told herself several times. But I can’t get up another morning and do that dull damn stuff. I’ve turned into a townie. Next thing I know I’ll be watching television. She checked her watch and compass and set off to the north.

  Bobby and Little Sun sat in the sun and talked it over. “If she wanted me to come, she’d have asked me,” Bobby said. “You think I ought to go find her?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think she wanted to go off and be alone. It looks like she would have left me word.”

  “She knows that you would call me and I would tell you.”

  “You don’t think I should go, do you?”

  “Do you think she will be all right if she is alone?” Little Sun was trying not to smile. He watched the young man fold and unfold his hands.

  “If nothing happens. There’re snakes in those woods. I got bit by a moccasin when I was ten. It’s no joke. If Dad hadn’t been there I would have died.”

  “Do you think she will be bitten by a moccasin?”

  “No.” Bobby laughed. “I guess I’m jealous, thinking of her out there. I wish I was in the woods instead of studying for a calculus exam. Well, I’ll go tomorrow afternoon if she isn’t back by then. Which way do you think she went?”

  “I think she would start back across the pasture. She always walked that way when she was small. Back by the old springhouse.”

  “I might just walk back there and see if she left a trail.” He stood up. “I’ll take my books and go back there and study.” He stretched his arms ove
r his head and looked down at Little Sun. “You think I ought to just leave her alone, don’t you?”

  “I do not think a moccasin will bite her. One has not bitten her yet.”

  “I’m walking back there. It’s nineteen ninety-one. People aren’t supposed to go off alone into the woods.” He walked over to his truck and got out a notebook and his calculus book and began to walk hurriedly in the direction of the pasture. Little Sun scratched his eye, thinking of how much excitement was always being generated in the world. So much excitement every moment. But then, of course, he laughed to himself, the world is made of fire.

  When Mike came home that afternoon, Helen was sitting at the table painting a watercolor of the flowers on the table. She got up when he came into the room and kissed him as she talked. “My niece Olivia has gone off to the woods to stay until lightning strikes her. I can’t get Daniel on the phone. And Jessie’s husband smoked dope but then he told them and he went to see his psychiatrist while he was still stoned. I can’t believe the things they do, Michael. I try and try not to call them. I want to live here, now, with you, but I start thinking about them, and then I call them up and they fill my mind all day. I wanted to get something done with that pile of short stories but I never did. All I did was talk to them and then I didn’t get anything done all day. I’m sorry.”

  “That’s how life happens, Helen. Come here. Let me see that. That’s good. I’ve never seen you paint. When did you start painting?”

  “I was driven to it. I got so worried about Olivia I went to an art supply store and bought some things and started doing it. It’s nothing. It’s just a diversion. I can’t paint.”

  “It’s lovely. It’s very, very fine.” Mike picked up the watercolor and held it up to the last light coming in the window. The colors were very intense, very sure. This woman could see color. This woman that he loved.

  “DNA,” he said. “How could I have missed it?” Then he took her into the bedroom and made love to her and this time the impregnation fantasies were mutual. What a child we could have made, he was thinking. This lovely soft woman, or her sister either. Only Anna couldn’t have them, could she? This is the one that could breed.

  “What are you thinking?” Helen said. “Tell me what you are thinking about.”

  “About loving you. About how much you mean to me. About writing about your family. Would you let me do that, Helen? The material is irresistible. I would disguise it, of course. Let it take place in Ireland or someplace far away. In California maybe. These stories you are always telling me. No writer could resist them. She went on a walkabout in darkest Oklahoma?”

  “Oklahoma isn’t dark, and besides she was raised by Cherokee Indians. She is a Cherokee. Her mother was the fiercest and strangest girl I ever met. She looked like she came from a different century from the rest of us. I don’t know how Daniel ever met her or why she liked him except he was fierce and indomitable too. He was so hardheaded no one could make him do anything a day in his life. I guess it was a match. Matched pair, that’s what the black people used to say.”

  “DNA,” Mike repeated. Then he closed her mouth with kisses and fucked her for a while very gently. Then he lay her down upon the bed and began to kiss her body, kissing every crevice and bend and soft and hard place on her body and making her come again with his mouth, just for good measure, just to make up for the usurpation that was about to begin.

  Olivia’s plan was to walk in the direction of the river until six o’clock in the afternoon, then to turn and retrace her steps and arrive back at her camp by dark. Then I’ll build a fire and cook whatever I can find. The less I eat the better. I’ve got plenty of fat. My body doesn’t need to eat every day. Those monks Georgia told me about don’t eat for days and days, then they can see very clearly and they know what to do.

  But what do I want to know? She had stopped beside a stream that ran over limestone rocks and trickled down into a meadow. She stepped out onto a flat rock and stood poised above the water, knowing she would be dumb to get her feet wet but wanting to wade on in. Well, I want to know what to do next. I don’t know about taking Bobby to North Carolina. What’s he going to do there? No one will even know who he is. But if I stay here, I’ll die. I don’t want to live my whole life in Tahlequah. Okay, I came out here to think. So this is thinking. Thinking drives you nuts. That’s why thinkers always sit around with their chin on their hand and their elbow on their knee. Thinking, what the hell, you think I ought to get my feet wet or not? I could take off my shoes and wade around barefoot and then put them back on. See what thinking does for you. It thinks of things you had forgotten.

  Olivia stepped back on the side of the stream and leaned over and took off her shoes and socks and sat them in the crook of a tree and began to wade. As soon as the cold water touched her ankles she had another thought. We could go up to Montana and start all over. We could go out west and build a world no one knows of yet. We could pioneer up to the real mountains. He said they were so vast and tall I couldn’t imagine them in a million years no matter how many pictures or movies I saw about them. He’s going with me to New Orleans. I could go with him up there and see what that’s about.

  Olivia waded up and down the streambed, forgetting she was on a quest for lightning. I think I’ve had about enough thinking for one day, she decided. I’m going back. There isn’t a cloud in the sky. It might not storm for weeks. I can’t stay out here for days waiting for lightning to strike. And I sure as hell don’t want to sleep in the woods all by myself. I’ll probably get about a hundred tick bites and chiggers if I don’t already have them. She sat down on a flat rock and put her shoes back on and checked the watch and compass and began to march back to her camp.

  When she got back to the lean-to a snake was coiled above it in the sycamore. A beautiful green and yellow and orange garden snake but it seemed a sign and all the more reason to go home and sleep in bed.

  She stopped by the pool in the tree trunk and took the water and made the sign of the cross on her head and chest and started back the way that she had come.

  When she left the woods there was barely any light left in the sky. Bobby was sitting on a blanket on the ground beside the springhouse, pretending to read a book. He had seen her coming. He had known she was walking his way by the way the birds flew up from the trees along the edge of the woods.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “Studying math,” he answered. “Looks like that’s the only way a guy can get laid anymore, is be a college student.”

  “You want to bet on that?” she answered. “I wouldn’t bet on that if I was you. If you’re sexy you get laid, if you aren’t you don’t. You haven’t got anything to eat, have you? I’m about to starve to death.”

  He pulled a package of Oreos out of a bookpack and handed them to her. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get on home. I’ve had about enough of this Indian bullshit.”

  “What’s happening with your dad?” Olivia asked. It was later that night, they were sitting on the corral fence with the stars spread out above them. The old horse, Bess, nuzzled Olivia’s leg. The cat, Desdemona, sat upon a fencepost listening for mice, a white owl was above them in the tree. It was a still night and for a long time Olivia and Bobby had been still. I have to ask it, she decided. I know it’s what he’s thinking about. “So how’s your dad?”

  “He’s coaching a baseball team. He says it could be worse.”

  “You can’t let it ruin your life.”

  “It isn’t ruining my life. But I think about it. You would too.”

  “So you want to drive to Montana when school is out?”

  “Do you want to? I’d sure like to see Tom and Sherrill.”

  “I can’t see us going to North Carolina. The longer I stay away the more I hate the thought of going back.”

  “So you want to do that then, just drive west.”

  “Yeah, I do. I hate that goddamn school. They’re not teaching a single thing that’s of use t
o anybody. If the lights went off, there aren’t fifty people in that place who could figure out what to do. If the lights went off and the telephones quit and they ran out of gas, half of them would die in a couple of weeks. That’s what I was thinking this afternoon. How lucky I am that I know how to live. I found some wild iris. Grandmother used to make soup out of them all the time. It’s got every vitamin and mineral in the world in it. You could live on that if you killed a bird every now and then.”

  “Okay. We’ll go then. As soon as school is over.”

  “I wish we could take Bess. I’d like to see her turned loose in a real wilderness.” The mare rubbed its head against Olivia’s leg. The constellations rode the night sky. The earth sailed on its appointed course.

  “I’m going into town with you.” Olivia reached over and touched Bobby’s arm. “I’ll tell them we’re going to study for a test.”

  “It might be a test.” He took her hand and held it against his chest. “To see if I can wait thirty minutes to get to fuck you.”

  August

  Chapter 43

  KING is dreaming he is dying. Crystal and her friends have turned into priests. They are standing in a circle wearing priestly garb. There is a tall white chair. They invite him to sit in it. It contains his death, a vial of poison he will drink. He has signed a paper or made an agreement to drink the poison, to sit upon the chair. Suddenly the idea of death dawns on King. The absolute nothingness of no existence, the no thing, and he stands up and knows he can overpower all of them and he says, No. I have changed my mind. I won’t sit in the chair or drink the stuff. Fuck you, Momma. I’m out of here. He turns to leave. They all follow him. They say, Oh, King, you promised. You said you’d do it. I can’t believe you won’t keep your promise. He keeps on walking. I don’t care, he answers. You’re crazy. I’m out of here.