by Mesha Maren
She walked up the cabin steps, worry washing over her. A worry that when she saw Ricky she would not be able to stop herself from saying something, a worry that he would have noticed the missing clippings already, but maybe most of all, a worry that she would not be able to look at him in the same way.
From the porch she could hear Rosalba’s voice and Miranda’s laughter and as she blinked into the dim room she saw only the two of them standing at the kitchen sink, Miranda priming the pitcher pump while Rosalba squirted dish soap onto a pile of wet laundry.
“Where’s Ricky?”
Miranda glanced over her shoulder. “Hi,” she said.
“Hey.” Jodi peered past the woodstove and into the back bedroom. “You seen Ricky?”
“He was splitting some of that wood y’all cut. Why? What’s wrong?”
Jodi shook her head. “What’s this about a dog? Kaleb’s out there crying on the front steps,” she said, edging over to the bookcase where she slid the clippings quickly back in among Ricky’s papers.
“Oh, yeah,” Miranda said. “You know that little gas station down over on the other side of the mountain? We went to get some beer and Popsicles and the boys found a skinny old mutt there that they wanted to bring home.”
Jodi found Ricky out behind the woodshed, not chopping kindling but lifting Ross up onto his shoulders instead.
“They’re so loud!” Ross said, squirming in Ricky’s arms and leaning out toward a maple tree.
Jodi could not tell what was happening until she got close enough to hear the desperate bird voices and then see the nest perched in the crux of the limbs.
“And their mouths are so big!” Ross said.
Ricky bent his knees a little and repositioned himself, holding tight to Ross’s legs. “Don’t touch ’em,” he said. “The mama bird don’t like the smell of humans.”
Jodi stepped back, not wanting to interrupt the moment, and as she watched from the porch the glut of worries inside her loosened a little. Alone, out there in the woods, she had half-convinced herself that rescuing Ricky was the stupidest decision she’d ever made, but now, watching him lower Ross to the ground and brush the leaves from his hair, she thought it might be just the opposite.
Still, she could not stop watching him, staring at his tall, angular body and soft face across the dinner table, waiting to notice something she had not seen before.
“God, I’m tired of canned food,” Miranda said, poking at her plate of instant potatoes, peas, and corn.
“I think it tastes pretty good,” Ricky said, stirring the vegetables into his potatoes until they formed a rainbow slop in the middle of his plate.
What would he have been like without the accident, Jodi wondered, or did it even matter? She might as well have asked what she herself would have been like without eighteen years in prison. Somehow, though, she felt a little closer to him in his possible culpability. Maybe neither of us is innocent, she thought, watching him light a cigarette and walk outside into the grainy light of evening, but surely neither of us knew we were capable of causing such pain.
After the dinner dishes were done Jodi crouched at the woodstove, coaxing the damp wood that flamed and then sputtered out, and after a while she heard a sound like singing coming from the porch, a shaky but rising lilt. Far through the heart of this snow. She crossed the room and looked out the front door to see Ricky, blushing and singing while Rosalba hummed along.
“That is a beautiful song,” Rosalba said, and Ricky blushed deeper.
Jodi retreated back to the woodstove, knowing she should just be happy that he was singing, knowing she should not care who it was that he was singing for. But the tattered beast of old emotions lurched up inside her.
When Miranda asked her to fetch buckets of water for a bath Jodi insisted that Ricky help her, and Rosalba and the boys followed along. They walked in single file toward the springhouse, down a path littered with wet leaves and freshly sprung mushrooms and then up out of the hardwoods and into the dense coolness of a white-pine grove where the air hung heavy with the smell of sap. Jodi looked back at Ricky and the boys, their feet making a soft padding sound against the carpet of pine needles, and Rosalba, in line right behind her, looking sad and far away.
“Why did you leave Mexico?” Jodi said, the words spilling out before she had time to swallow them.
“Leave?”
Jodi turned to her. “You said you taught university.”
Rosalba’s shoulders tightened and she slowed her pace. “Everything was gone.”
“Your family?”
Rosalba stopped and tipped her face up toward the tops of the trees, eyes closed. “The land I grew up on, the way we used to live.” Opening her eyes, she looked straight at Jodi. “Now it is, if you do not grow for the cartel, you do not farm at all.”
Jodi stared at her sad eyes and she wanted to apologize and tell her it didn’t matter, she didn’t even know why she’d asked. She ought to be kinder to Rosalba, she thought, for really Rosalba did fit in here, running from her past just like the rest of them.
“I came north because I had the education.” Rosalba’s smoky laughter lifted up among the pine branches. “Here I am not teaching but at least I am sending money home.”
Jodi nodded and looked off, watching as a shadow-movement flitted behind a shagbark hickory.
“Hey!” Something was happening in Jodi’s dream and she could not untangle herself from it or the words she did not fully understand. Out in the yard . . . a man . . . in the yard.
A hand slapped her cheek and suddenly she was there, in the cabin, with Miranda’s face inches above her own.
“Jodi, there’s a man with a fucking shotgun in the yard.” Miranda’s cheeks were red and her eyes puffy.
Jodi sat up and her breath choked in her throat. “Stay here,” she said, reaching for her pants.
In the front room she pressed her face against the cloth and there, in the yard, she could see the old man and the dog out in front of the house, still and silhouetted in the morning fog. They did not move, even when Jodi stepped onto the porch, and for a moment she doubted. Eyeing the tall shotgun, she felt fear settle inside her.
“Hello?” she called, sighting the distance between them.
“More rains coming,” the man said. “Need to get you some boards over that back half.”
Jodi walked down the steps slowly. The fog was so thick she could not see past the nearest trees.
The man slung his rifle strap over his shoulder. “I’ve got some deer meat in the freezer too. You can’t just feed them boys on canned food. Gives ’em a bad temperament.”
Jodi nodded, wondering if he’d been keeping track of her nocturnal additions to the neighbors’ trash pickup bins.
“How’s y’all’s water? You don’t have a well here, do you?”
Jodi shook her head.
“You wanna see what them gas men have done to my well?”
Jodi cocked her head.
“You won’t believe your eyes. I’ll show you water that turns to flame.”
He introduced himself as Farren and as he talked Jodi felt a whisper memory of Effie out there in the yard with them. Farren was younger than Effie would have been but not by much and Jodi remembered his name, remembered Effie talking about a man who folks had told stories about, living alone with no company besides his hogs; children had spooked each other with his name and parents scrunched up their faces, trying to hide their laughter, saying he’d come home from the war not quite the same, whispering that they’d heard he sometimes wore his sister’s old dresses. When Jodi had repeated the stories, Effie had slapped her cheek, told her to quit, that he was a good neighbor, steady and dependable.
Once she knew they were safe Miranda had fallen back asleep, and Rosalba too lay curled in dreams, but Ricky and the boys tagged along behind Jodi as Farren led her across the field and out onto the paved road, down by the Nazarene church. He walked ahead along the gravel berm, his feet dragging a little
, shotgun strapped to his back and his shoulders hunched under the camouflage fabric of his coat. The dog followed closely, glancing hopefully at the old man’s hands as he rolled a fresh smoke.
“See, he’s got a dog,” Kaleb whispered, tugging on Jodi’s sleeve. “Why can’t we have a dog?”
“He’s got a gun too!” Donnie yelled. “Boom-boom-boom!”
At the head of a long gravel lane, Farren paused. “Got some wood in the shed,” he said, nodding toward a cluster of buildings out past the pigpens. “We ought to be able to find you a piece that’ll fit your roof.”
He walked on up the lane but Jodi hung back, pricked with shame over not having already fixed the roof herself and feeling also a nameless childhood fear as she eyed his mutilated right hand. “Hey,” she called to him, “hey, how come you’re doing this?”
He turned slowly and tilted his head.
“I mean helping us like this?”
Farren shrugged, or maybe he was just adjusting his rifle. “You’re the first young ones up on this mountain in more than twenty years,” he said, staring off down the road. “Rest of us is just a bunch of old-timers, be dropping like flies before too long. It’ll take new ones to save and keep this place.”
He kept walking then and after a minute Jodi and Ricky and the boys followed along past a little brown house with water barrels set under the corners of the roof.
“My well’s contaminated,” Farren said. “Got to drink rainwater now.”
He nudged a skinny white cat out of the way and waved them all over to an outdoor spigot.
“Watch,” he said, pulling a lighter from his pocket. He lit it and held it under the stream, and the water leapt, spurted, and then burst into flame. Jodi jumped back but Farren held steady as water poured down between his feet and the fire puffed up into his face.
“Boom,” Donnie yelled, leaning forward on his tiptoes.
Farren looked up. “Methane. Them gas companies have piped it up from the middle of the earth.” He stared down again at the clear stream circled by a juddering ball of flame.
It was Farren who reminded Jodi how to find the Lady Cake Caves. She was out on the back end of Effie’s property, picking blackberries with Farren, Ricky, and the boys, the six of them carrying cutoff milk jugs heavy with dark fruit, when she felt some old sense of directional memory.
“There are caves near here, aren’t there?” she’d asked.
Farren nodded. “Right over yonder’s the old road.”
They left their jugs of berries in the field and followed him down the foot road that hugged the cliff edge, the boys running ahead.
“Hold on,” Farren called as they rushed down the rocky path covered in poison ivy and wild grape vine. “Hold on, it gets snakey down in here.”
“Snakey?” Kaleb turned and looked back at Farren.
“That’s your entrance right there,” Farren said.
Jodi came to a stop. She wouldn’t have even seen the mouth of the cave except that Farren had slowed and squinted, brushing away the weeds with his walking stick.
Jodi entered first, crawling flat on her stomach, the darkness blinding her immediately. Behind her the boys’ voices bounced but each of them, as they slid into the cool, open room, went silent, one by one. Nothing but the sound of shallow breathing.
Farren told them to sit still until their eyes adjusted and slowly they found their voices again.
“There are snakes in here?” Kaleb asked.
“They’re more afraid of you. Just don’t go sticking your hand in any cracks or holes.”
Farren led them farther than Jodi had ever gone before, past the huge white mineral cake and on into a fourth cavern. The entrance was narrower than the others, nothing more than a three-foot gap, but halfway through, Jodi began to see a bright band of light. She dragged herself forward with her fingers and elbows, the roof of the tunnel only inches above her head. She breathed into the pressure of all that rock, the narrowness of the tunnel that led to a deeply rounded room.
The air smelled wet and full of the fungus-scent of plants that need no sun, the silt and sandstone, and something ranker, layers and layers of unseen earth. The band of light before her grew until she pushed out into a circular stone room with one wall completely open to the cliff face. The sunlight blinded worse than the darkness and she crouched with her eyes closed, feeling the rock at her back and the air before her. The wind flew in at them and funneled around, shuffling the dry oak leaves.
“Is this the house,” Donnie said, “where baby Jesus lives?” His voice bounced off the limestone and mixed in with Farren’s laughter.
Jodi opened her eyes to the billowing treetops, the miles of valley spreading below, and the timbered mountains extending endlessly like a wind-chopped sea.
“I never knew this part of the cave,” she said.
“Most folks expect a crack of a tunnel like that won’t lead to nothing.” Farren paced the limestone edge. “My daddy showed me here. He liked to tell how the Indians used caves like these in their ceremonies, for their boys when they were coming of age. They had to stay out here for a good number of days with no supplies and then make their way out the tunnels to the other side.”
This, Jodi thought, must have been what Effie meant when she complained of distance from the land, that children were no longer taught to test themselves against the earth.
She stood and joined Farren at the rock ledge. Below them the shadow of the cliff stretched across the shivering treetops; farther out, patches of cloud shade skated over the pastures. A cluster of blackbirds landed, bowing the branches of a tall oak, and above them, out of the clean blue, heavier wings lifted and dipped. Up from the flat glass river a pair of vultures skimmed, their circle ever tightening.
They were halfway back across the field, headed home, when Jodi noticed the brown sedan parked under the dogwood tree. Her heart jerked, though she had no specific hope or fear. Miranda had gone to town for groceries and no one else was expected.
“You’ve got visitors,” Farren said just as her father came around the side of the Oldsmobile.
Jodi let out a breath and watched him walk toward her, looking strange and small out there in the grassy yard with no beer can and no TV light spilling across his face. He pinched his cigarette between his lips and raised one hand in a noncommittal greeting.
“You been getting a lot of phone calls,” he said. “I figured I’d come up here and let you know. That lawyer called and then this woman’s been calling all week. I’ve been taking down her messages, something about land conservation. She’s anxious for you to come by her house and meet with her, says she wants to talk this evening.” Andy reached into his back pocket. “I got the address.”
Jodi took the scribbled slip of paper from his calloused hand: 614 Taylor Drive, Lewisville.
“Your car’s gone,” he said.
“Miranda’s at the grocery.”
Andy dropped his cigarette into the grass and stepped on it. “I guess I’ll run you on over there then.”
Jodi glanced up at his face. This was as close, she guessed, as she was going to get to an apology for his part in losing the land.
The tall white house at 614 Taylor Drive had stone gateposts and a long, smooth-paved lane. Andy pulled up front, squinted at it and nodded, then lit a fresh cigarette. From the driveway Jodi could hear music warbling out of the house.
“You must be Joanie?”
The voice seemed to come from the porch but Jodi scanned it and saw nothing until she tilted her head back to take in the balcony and a woman draped in what looked to be silk scarves.
“Jodi.”
“Oh, yes, come on up.”
The carpet inside was the deep red of old blood and so thick it sponged out under Jodi’s boots. She paused and looked back at the muddy footprints she’d left. She should have known to take her shoes off, she guessed, but it was too late now. She followed one side of the double staircase around to a pair of arched glass doors that
framed the balcony and the woman, swaying under her layers of silk.
“Joanie, I’ll be honest with you,” she said as Jodi pushed open the glass doors. “This is not my place, not my ancestry, but it fascinates me.” She waved her arm toward the row of mountains on the far side of town.
Jodi studied the back of her head, the dark buzzed haircut and sharp tendons running down her neck. So this was Lynn. She looked nothing like Jodi had imagined when Dunham spoke of her. She was so delicate and attractive, like some dark butterfly. Jodi had been sure she was on her way to meet with a hiking-boot-wearing Greenpeace activist.
“I don’t know, maybe it’s not permanent, this emanation, but I feel it right now.” Lynn turned. Her eyes were bright and wet. “This is the battleground. The raw core. The Iapetus Ocean trapped under the Appalachians for six hundred million years! You know there are still places here where freshly dug wells fill with salt brine?” She stepped forward and rested her hand on Jodi’s shoulder. Jodi flinched and stepped back. She wondered if Lynn were drunk.
“I’m sorry.” Lynn laughed and her laughter echoed in with the music. “Ethan must have told you I get emotional about this whole thing.”
The fabric of Lynn’s outfit was so thin that the movements of her breasts were clearly visible beneath. Jodi looked off toward the bright line of sky and the rust-orange sunset just above Skinner’s Peak.
“You mean Dunham?” she said.
“Yeah, you know I never know what Ethan really thinks of me.” Her silver bracelets clacked around her wrists. “I worry too much about what people think of me, though.” Her back was facing Jodi again and the white silk of her panties glowed under her shifting dress.
“So, um,” Jodi said, “you’re interested in buying land that’s in danger of being fracked?”
Lynn turned to her and the intensity of her gaze startled Jodi. “Yes, there’s nowhere else on earth quite like this place, right? I mean, I don’t even know how to describe it but you know what I’m talking about.” She smiled. “Ethan told me your story and I called immediately. You’re not easy to get ahold of.”
