Solar Storms

by Linda Hogan

  Bush said, “I dreamed you bought two mummies.”

  “What? How did you know? I want to start a museum someday. They were a good trade.”

  I thought quickly. “Do you want some coffee?” I asked them.

  “Well,” she said, “I dreamed them, LaRue. I heard them say they want to go back to clay.” She sounded businesslike, the way she did around LaRue.

  “No,” he said, looking at her, surprised.

  “I heard them.” She said this louder, as if it would make a difference to him.

  I heated the water, my back to them. LaRue took advantage of my absence. Certain I was out of earshot, I heard him say, “But why not? You might even like me.”

  He was ruining my plans for him.

  I heard her chair scrape the floor. “That’s it, LaRue. I don’t work for you any longer! I quit. Now.” She tried to sound calm. She got up and began to pack bones back into the clean white boxes, even bones she’d already put together.

  Before more damage could be done, I poured the water quickly and hurried back with coffee that, like LaRue, wasn’t warm or strong enough.

  Bush pretended, for my sake, that nothing had happened, but her face was red. She sat back down.

  “Here’s the coffee,” I said. It barely had an odor.

  After only a moment, she got up again and bustled around the room. She took apart the wolverine bones, put them in a white box, and put them on the table for LaRue.

  I thought quickly. I decided to go back with LaRue and the bones. I said I had errands.

  Bush was relieved not to be forced to tell our secret to Agnes and Dora-Rouge.

  “I’ll be back tonight,” I said. I wouldn’t leave Bush alone again. “I promised Agnes I’d help paper some shelves.”

  Bush, still mad, raised an eyebrow. “Agnes? Paper shelves?”

  I thought of Agnes and her messiness. It was a poor excuse. “Well, really I want to see Tommy. You know.”

  She had doubts, I could see that, but there was no reason for her to keep me there and she did know Tommy and I were sweet on each other.

  I felt guilty, and sneaky. I was doing the unthinkable. I was going to manipulate her life. I was going to manipulate LaRue, the only man there in her age range. Whether she liked him or not, her world was too secluded. Sometimes, accustomed to her aloneness, she’d speak as she cooked. She’d say, “Kettle. Onion.” When she brought in sweet-smelling wood, she spoke it by name, “Spruce. Birch.” And at times her eyes would get a faraway look to them. I wondered how it must have been before I was there, when she was alone in cold, deep solitude, in winter darkness.

  As I went out the door with LaRue, I called over my shoulder, “I’ll see you tonight.”

  Almost as soon as we were on the lake, I looked square at LaRue and said, “You will never get her like that. Or any other woman either.”

  “What?” His eyes opened wide. He skidded sideways on ice as he looked at me, then straightened out the wheel. He said nothing. Silence by then was familiar to me, so I didn’t mind. I let it be for a while. Then I said, “Your approach is all wrong. Turn on your car lights.”

  He stared straight ahead, and when he finally spoke, he looked at me and said, “You know what? Your problem is you think you know everything.”

  “Well, what about your problems?” I emphasized the plural. “If I were her I wouldn’t want you either. Hey. Watch where you’re going.”

  We lapsed again into silence. He swallowed, I noticed, and his face was somewhat flushed. After a while, I said, “I have some suggestions. Do you want me to tell you?”

  “What? No.” As if offended.

  But I went on anyway. “No woman would want a man who kept mummies. Those things have got to go, LaRue.”

  TEN

  IT WAS TOWARD SPRING that Bush gathered up the maps to go to the mainland. By then she had our course fixed in her mind and she was easier about things. “Come on,” she said impatiently.

  I followed. The ice of the lake, while still frozen, was beginning to thaw and it was slushy as we walked over it.

  All around us, spring was a wonderful quickening, a smell of newness in the air, a brightening of light. Trees, freed up, were being moved by the wind. They creaked as the wind spoke through them, telling winter to hurry away, singing back the sun, the green new shoots of living things. At the roots of dry brown grasses were new soft beginnings. The tips of gray rocks were emerging from snow. Everywhere was a sound of water dripping, running, surfacing.

  Spring was a statement of faith, trust that all would be well, that light would return. The faithful earth was swept with the religion of the season. Opening. Rising. Muddy, soft, and renewed. I believed spring entered not only our dreams but those of the moose and wolves. Soon we would all be about, back to our lives.

  DORA-ROUGE and Agnes were glad to see Bush. They’d worried about her and now they greeted her with warmth and love. But she was too occupied with the journey to be civil. Almost as soon as we stepped inside the door, before my boots were even off, before she removed her coat, Bush announced, “I’ve thought it over. I’m going. No matter what you say.” She was ready for an argument. She sounded unlike herself.

  “Where are you going?” asked Dora-Rouge.

  “You’re getting kind of busty,” Agnes said to me.

  I pretended not to hear. But I’d seen myself in their new mirror and yes, I was changing.

  “I’m going up to the headwaters and bay.” She was abrupt, as if they would try to change her mind.

  “Take off your coat, dear,” said Dora-Rouge.

  “Maybe you didn’t hear me.” With an edge of stubbornness. It wasn’t so much that she thought they would argue her out of it; it was because when thaw comes, everything moves more quickly, even words.

  “Where did you say you are going?” said Dora-Rouge.

  “To the Fat-Eaters.”

  Dora-Rouge lit up, hearing about our plans. “How wonderful.” To me, she said, “I was born up there, you know,” as if I’d forgotten about the First World in the divided waters and lands of the farther north, her stories of the Fat-Eaters, who lived three human territories to the north of us and who were our ancestors. “It’s where I want to go so I can die in peace.”

  “We’re going to take you with us, Dora,” said Bush. Her voice was soft again.

  I hadn’t heard about this part of the plan. My mouth dropped open. Against my will, I said, “What?”

  Agnes looked dismayed. If Dora-Rouge went, it was to her death. So far Agnes had kept her mother alive by not going home. Not only that, but if Dora-Rouge was going to her final resting place, Agnes had no choice but to go along or seem uncaring.

  Dora-Rouge could not hide her excitement. “Really? You’re taking me?” She said this with wonder, but after she heard our plan, her spirits fell, as if for the first time she grasped reality. “But I’d just be a burden to you. It would be such a hardship to take me along.”

  “Traveling there, Grandmother, everything is a burden.”

  At least Bush was honest. She could have denied it.

  She turned then to Agnes. “We will take you, too. I know you wouldn’t want her to go without you. And she wouldn’t go without you. But it will be hard work. We will have to walk over several portages and distances on land.”

  Bush had plotted out the easiest route with the least number of places, portages, to cross on foot. Still in her coat, she unfolded two maps before them. “We’ll be traveling out of the way at times, but in a roundabout way that will make it easier in the long run.”

  “Take your coat off. Make yourself at home,” Dora-Rouge said. “How have you been?”

  “I’m going to do it,” Agnes said, even though a furrow formed between her brows. “I can handle it.”

  I knew she’d go whether she wanted to or not. This journey seemed unfair to Agnes. Sitting next to her mother, she leaned forward to look at the maps. Two gray-haired women at the kitchen table, water steaming
on the stove. “No, I’m sure I can make it.”

  I didn’t know then what all was involved. I knew only what Bush had told me. Dora-Rouge would have to be carried. “No problem,” I’d said, when Bush told me this. I’d calculated Dora-Rouge’s weight to be not much over seventy pounds. I was strong and even though my back was bent from bad beds, it was not hurt from lifting, so what was Dora-Rouge to carry, I thought, such a light weight. I didn’t yet know the heaviness of canoes and all the rest that we would carry, lift, and drag.

  “I was always good at rapids,” Agnes said. She spoke the truth. I had heard about her safe traveling through rapids and white-capped waves. She was something of a legend. Tommy told me that the old people had seen her go down small falls and sit erect and guide the canoe safely to its destination in situations where other people would only cower or cover their heads and toss it all to fate.

  “But there is a way,” Dora-Rouge said, “where we can stay in the water most of the time. I remember it. It was how they brought the whale down. It was the route they used to carry all the furs away from their bodies.”

  These, the furs of my sleep.

  Bush looked at Dora-Rouge for some time. Dora-Rouge’s way was not the path she had planned, I was certain. Doubt was a shadow on Bush’s face and I could see the thoughts that crossed her mind, hear the words her tight lips wanted to say. She didn’t want to disagree with Dora-Rouge, but I saw that she thought the older woman might be wrong.

  I looked at Bush’s face, trying to read her expression. Her eyes were like the small, round pictures of Mary and Jesus, or the little mirrors we’d so desired, mirrors our lives had fallen into, our faces had died inside. In her eyes, too, I could almost see the carrying of Dora-Rouge across land, through mud, over stones, inclines, and drops. It was as if it were inside me already, the future, alongside a memory of place, people, and even hardship. And in my mind’s eye, I saw the freighter canoes with scores of men and tall mounds of skins taken from the naked backs of beaver and marten and fox, the open-eyed, childlike animals that lived in the Hungry Mouth.

  Husk had told me once about planaria, that when fed pieces of their ancestors, they would remember tasks the gone ones had known. It was a cell-deep memory, he said. Maybe that was why I saw and thought what I did. Maybe places and people are like this, too, with a sad homing, a remembering of what has gone before us.

  “Yes,” Dora-Rouge said, confirming her own words. “It was called the Million-Dollar Trail. We used to travel it. It was an old waterway. It offered hides and skins to the Europeans who never dreamed this land, who had no eyes for it. But I remember it.”

  I, too, saw the watery paths. I’d dreamed them, lakes clear as glass, lakes that were black water and rocked against land, sure as tributaries of my own blood.

  Agnes said, “Mother, you are not that old.”

  “Yes. Yes, I am.” She looked directly at Agnes. “This time I really am.”

  Dora-Rouge had already told me that there were plants up north that made useful medicines. She longed to find them. I could see her mind already clicking. We’d collect seeds, roots, beginnings.

  Bush squinted at the map, as if losing her focus would yield to her eyes Dora-Rouge’s open way. She softened. “Where is it? I’ve looked for it.” She placed her elbows on it. “I’ve looked and looked and I just can’t see it.”

  Dora-Rouge placed her hand on Bush’s arm. “These maps are not our inventions. Maps are only masks over the face of God. There are other ways around the world.”

  As WINTER CONTINUED to slip away around us, I watched small islands of ice move down the river. At first I felt excitement about our journey. We were going. Four women, each of us with a mission. I was going to meet my mother, who lived near the Fat-Eaters. Bush was going to see what was happening to the water, to see if what the two men had said was true, to help the people. Dora-Rouge was going, first, after plants that were helpful to the people, and then to die in her ancestral homeland. It was Agnes whose task was going to be the hardest. She was going to deliver her mother to that place and grieve. Agnes began to sadden from that day on, even to the point of agreeing with everything her mother said. Even when Dora-Rouge was clearly wrong, Agnes kept silent. This worried Dora-Rouge. “Are you all right, Ag?” she’d ask. Husk, too. He tried to comfort her. He said death was only matter turning into light or energy, that we were atoms, anyway, from distant stars, and that we’d once been stones and ferns and even cotton. But I, too, was selfish. I wanted to keep Dora-Rouge.

  One day, as it rained lightly, Frenchie arrived at dinnertime, her neatly arranged charcoal hair misted with the rain. She wore a long blue chiffon scarf around the neck of her jacket; it matched her eye shadow precisely and it trailed like a river down her chest. And she pushed an office chair, the kind on four wheels, with a seat that swiveled. It was gray. “This was poor Helene’s. She brought it home with her. Dora-Rouge, I think you can use it.”

  Frenchie’s eyes were swollen. She’d been crying for days. Thaw had come and now she was miserably sad. She wanted nothing more, she said, than just to see Helene’s face and touch her hand one more time. All she could see inside her mind was Helene curled up and settled at the bottom of water with the whalebones, the Skidoos, and old trucks. And Helene was such a vulnerable vision floating in those maternal waters of Lake Grand, like an infant waiting to be born instead of a woman who’d just gone into death.

  THAT NIGHT, LaRue came by on the pretext of bringing us some fish, but he was coming to see Bush. I knew he’d seen us walking to the mainland. He was out that morning, returning from his trapline. I’d seen his steps. I recognized his footprints by now. It was one of the talents of the north that I gained.

  “How was the trapping?” Husk asked him.

  “They were all empty. No good. It’s the wrong time of year, I suppose.” He eyed Bush.

  Agnes said, “But surely they are hungry after winter. And moving about.”

  “Maybe they are hunted out.” Husk shook his head. “That has happened before.” I could see that Husk remembered the time he’d been forced to trap and hunt the last of dwindling populations.

  “Hey, where’d you get the chair?”

  Dora-Rouge said, “From Frenchie.” She was learning to push herself in the chair, using a crutch with a rubber tip as an oar.

  “I didn’t even know you typed.”

  “Real funny, LaRue,” I said. I caught the scent of LaRue’s cologne. It was no wonder he had such bad luck snaring anything, animal or female. It was his smell. He might as well have carried a radio. But I didn’t tell him. I wanted his luck with animals to be bad. As I looked at him, I wondered why I had made it my work to bring together Bush and Rue, two people so unlike, LaRue believing animals felt no pain and Bush, like the traditional people, knowing the world was alive and that all creatures were God. I had wanted, before now, to tell LaRue about pain and animals, but I knew he would never believe a girl. I would have to wait for science to back me up, watching the magazines for hard evidence. I’d learned this from Husk. And I knew LaRue believed in things like science and printed words. But Husk said some things were so obvious the scientists couldn’t even see them.

  “Guess what?” Dora-Rouge said to LaRue. “We’re going north!”

  He stared at her, then at Bush. “What? Is that what that map business was all about?”

  When Rue heard the full details of our travel plan, he looked at us and shook his head as if we were victims of a dreadful malady. “Hey! It’s spring. What else can I say?” And he laughed, certain we wouldn’t go, certain that we joked.

  “Thanks for the encouragement,” Bush said. She sounded cold. But he was right in a way. Spring was a season of madness. The warming air and thawing water brought people to a kind of hysteria that could not be helped. After winter’s numbness and isolation, people were suddenly possessed by a great restless longing. I felt it, too, and it was beyond describing. It caused men to rush across ice in pursuit of some
thing they themselves could not quite see or track, and to fall through the dark fissures growing in ice as it separated from itself. Women moved out of their homes, headed for another man or town or country. Younger men, powerless against it, shot themselves. And as we sat there at Agnes’ table with LaRue, Frenchie sat on the cot and continued to cry. Later, after Rue left, she hit herself in her own heart with a grief that had built all winter.

  John Husk gave her some brandy.

  She drank it, leaving her lipstick on the rim of the glass.

  WE STAYED over that night. Early the next morning I put a kettle of water on the stove. The stove wasn’t quite hot enough. I poked in the coals and blew air on them, saw the orange fire flare up. I clanged the lid back on.

  About LaRue. I thought, even as distasteful as his comments had been, he was still the only prospect for Bush. I dropped hints to her. I boiled water. I said, “He’s kind of good-looking, don’t you think?” It was part of my plan to make him seem desirable.

  She was surveying one of Husk’s fishnets for rips, a ball of twine and a large, curved needle in her lap. “Not really.”

  “I think he has potential. He’s kind of cute.”

  “No, he’s a lost cause.” She said it cut-and-dry, without a thought. She put twine through the large hole in the needle.

  Suddenly she looked at me. “Why are you so interested in him? Is there anything going on?

  “What? Between us? No. Not me,” I said quickly.

  • • •

  THE FOLLOWING DAY, there was a memorial for Helene at Frenchie’s house. It was a small house and crowded with people. There were even some I had never seen. They’d all been closed inside most of the winter and looked thin and pale. I was late. I’d been talking with Dora-Rouge, who decided not to attend. It was too much trouble for her, she said. She was resting for our trip.

  As soon as I walked in the door, I was handed a plate and sent to the table to fill it. The table was heaped high with food—breads, rice, stews. I wasn’t hungry, but I ate. Death meant eating, as if food would protect us from our own. There was plenty of food that year, as if to celebrate, even at a funeral, that hunger had not again taken up residence with us.