Heart Spring Mountain

by Robin MacArthur

  “Too shy,” I say, looking out the window, downing my coffee. Suddenly itching to be elsewhere: field, woods, hill, creek.

  Adele shakes her head. Whispers, “Squirrel,” with a smile on her lips, as Otie and I nod our thank-yous, slip out the door.

  We take the long way home, around the backside of Heart Spring Mountain. How deep the woods must have been in 1803, when my ancestors moved here! Old-growth forests, Indian foot trails. I try to imagine clearing this forest with an axe and a two-handled bucksaw. I smell the log cabin where Ezekial and Zipporah slept with thirteen children while building themselves their house on the hill. Parting the trees for light. Parting the trees for air. How grave their God must have been back then, Otie! How severe.

  Hazel

  SEPTEMBER 1, 2011

  This girl walking up the driveway. Which one is she?

  It seems a trick of her mind, this girl in gray, rising out of the mist. Something the storm dragged in. Hazel steps closer to the window and looks out. Disheveled dark hair, a red dress, tall boots, dark eyes. It all seems a trick of her mind these days. What is happening to it—her mind? The past slipping in and out. All that rain. The torn-up roads. And Bonnie missing.

  “A bridge,” Deb said, knocking on her door in the early morning several days ago. “High water.” Tears in her oblique eyes. No word since then and the power still out, like it used to be when Hazel was a girl here, eighty-some years ago. How quiet the house is without electricity. How long the nights.

  And now the knock on her front door, sturdy and real.

  Hazel goes to the door and opens it.

  The girl is standing there, dark hair in a braid down her right shoulder, dark makeup around dark eyes.

  “Hello, Aunt Hazel,” she says, a thick gray sweater wrapped tight around her waist. “It’s Vale.”

  Hazel’s mind spins. Fishes for that name. Oh! Vale. Bonnie’s daughter. It’s been so long. How long?

  “Vale. Hello. Come in,” Hazel says, opening the door wide. The girl looks like a drowned cat. Like a ghost. Is she? Hazel wonders for a moment too long, standing there in the open doorway.

  “Thank you,” the girl says, voice cool as silver, cool as the dark rooms in the back of the barn, where someone hid, years ago. Who was it? Hazel’s mind—a leaky ship, full of holes.

  Hazel goes to the table, picks up her white teacup, carries it to the sink. The girl follows her inside.

  “I’m staying in the camper,” Vale says. “For a few days. Can I have something to eat? And borrow some blankets?”

  Hazel looks at the girl. “Oh, yes.” Yes, blankets. Yes, food.

  But what does she have to offer? Three days since the storm, and there is so very little in her cabinets.

  “Of course,” Hazel says, placing the cup in the sink. “Bread? Butter?”

  “That sounds good. Thank you.”

  The girl eats quickly. Does not talk or look up. When she’s finished she asks if she can go upstairs for some blankets, and Hazel nods, and so the girl disappears, the clunk of boot soles on pine.

  Like Bonnie, when Bonnie was young. Coming home late, climbing the stairs to that room with low-hanging eaves at the top of the stairs. Hazel pretending to sleep but not sleeping; the radio flicking on until ungodly hours of the night. Awful music—full of rage. As if the house was not made of two-hundred-year-old thin bones. Hazel had no idea what to do with this girl—her sister’s daughter—not her own.

  But she did her best, didn’t she? Food on the table. A warm bed.

  Vale returns, arms loaded with wool blankets. She asks if she can take one of the jugs of rainwater lined up near the door, and Hazel says, “Oh, sure,” keeping her body turned toward the sink, and then the girl slips back out the door, calling over her shoulder, “Thank you.”

  Hazel calls back, “You’re welcome,” though she doesn’t think Vale hears. What Hazel doesn’t say is: Wait. Come back. Nothing is right here. Not the roads, not the creek, not the weather. Not me. I’m so sorry about your mother. They will find her. Won’t they? Also: I think I am dying. I am sure of it. In every single bone.

  The others don’t know—Deb or Danny or her doctor—but Hazel knows. It’s been happening for months, these spells of confusion, these potholes in her mind. Two days ago she rounded the corner of the house, expecting to see the barn, and instead found the well shed, unused for sixty years. This morning she went out the back door to use the outhouse, stood in the wet grass, barefoot in nothing but her threadbare nightgown, but the outhouse wasn’t there. She could see it perfectly when she closed her eyes—that building she used every morning for the first thirty years of her life—a quarter moon carved into the door. The smell of it—not a bad smell—human waste, sawdust, pine shavings, moss. But it was gone. For how many years? Just a patch of overly ripe green grass.

  Hazel hasn’t told Deb, who comes every morning and every evening since the storm to check on her, that she is afraid. That she can feel death like a bear lurking at the edge of her fields.

  She wants to chase that bear with her broom, her scythe, her tractor. She doesn’t want to die. What will happen to this house and this land when she dies? Who will care for this mountain, as she has? Heart Spring Mountain, the place her great-great-grandfather, Ezekial Wood, and his wife, Zipporah, settled in 1803, a man who walked for three days with a horse and an ox and a wagon from Cornwall, Connecticut, until he came to a place where no one else lived, a place no one had yet claimed: a piece of land with a brook running through it and a south-sloping hill, springs scattered throughout the bedrock, little white flowers called bloodroot. How do you choose a house site? The way one has always chosen a place to live: water, white pines, land you can dig with a shovel. Higher ground, above floodplain. He chose this slope and Hazel is happy for it. She has lived every one of her ninety years here and is sure Ezekial chose the perfect spot: the spot that catches sun earliest in the morning and sits downhill of the deepest spring. In August when her neighbors’ wells run dry, spring water still trickles through the pipes into Hazel’s basement and into the roadside spring down the hill, too. Eternal water: Heart Spring he named it.

  Hazel looks out the window. She looks toward the barn and cannot help but think of those dark rooms in the back of it. And who was just here? Bonnie?

  No, Bonnie is missing. Heart Spring, the headwaters of Silver Creek—is where those eleven inches of rain settled, grew, began. The headwaters that became the river where Bonnie was last seen. Heart Spring Mountain. Because the heart springs eternal here, she had told herself as a girl, and as a young woman, and in middle age. But was that true?

  And Bonnie—where is she now? Hazel turns and calls out toward the living room: “Bonnie?”

  Vale

  SEPTEMBER 2, 2011

  Vale dreams she is back in New Orleans. A party at the edge of Lake Pontchartrain, the deserted beach where the amusement park used to be. Shante plays her ukulele, wears a blue dress that shimmers in starlight, has a pair of black wings tacked to her shoulders. She howls, the lyrics to her song guttural punctuations, indecipherable. Flicker of headlights crossing the causeway. Vale and Jack and others are there, too: they are dancing in slow motion to Shante’s song. There is a bass drum—they move their hips to it. Sirens. Flashes of far-off lightning and the steamy, fish-heavy air of mid-August. Jack puts his lips against Vale’s spine, inches them up toward her neck. Vale laughs. Turns. Twists away. Shante sings louder—cackles of laughter. Shrieks of verve. Vale steps into the water, pulling her dress up over her knees, and opens her lips to say something—the word, pearly and half-formed, the color of milk, birthing itself on her tongue—

  But Vale’s heartbeat is suddenly loud as thunder under her ribs and the world returns: the stench of the camper. The rushing hum of creek water.

  The sucker punch: Bonnie.

  Yesterday Deb called the police from a neighbor’s phone, but they still hadn’t found anything. Four days she’s been missing. Vale’s stomach tangl
es. “My mother’s life is not my own,” she whispers.

  It’s dawn, according to the cast of pink in the eastern sky.

  Vale wants to return to the dream: Jack’s lips rising up her spine. Jack, a friend she sometimes sleeps with: a left-handed illustrator of hawks and eagles and peregrine falcons, half-Creole, who sleeps in a tree house in the backyard of a house full of musicians in the Ninth Ward. She doesn’t love Jack. It’s the easy coupling of their bodies she returns for; that tree house, the sounds of the city through its open windows. When the levees broke in 2005, Jack stayed put there in that house tacked to trees while the water rose around him.

  What tree is Bonnie in? What abandoned apartment/trailer/spot-below-a-train-bridge has she called her own?

  Vale rises. Pours water into the rusted teakettle. Strikes a (miraculously) dry match and the stove’s front burner bursts into flame.

  When the water boils she makes a cup of instant coffee and reaches for her backpack. She pulls out her black notebook and slips the photo of Bonnie and her out from between the pages. Rubs her finger over her mother’s narrow shoulder bones.

  There’s another photo, too, which she places on the table next to the first one. It’s of Bonnie’s mother, Lena, who died of a fever a few days after Bonnie was born. In the picture Lena stands outside the door of her cabin—a place set back in the woods somewhere on this hillside—in a dark fedora, a one-eyed barred owl perched on her shoulder. She wears a threadbare flannel shirt, blue jeans and tall boots, has a dark braid reaching halfway to her waist. Who the hell, Vale asks herself, looking at that photo and at that bird.

  She only knows what Bonnie knew: that Lena lived in the one-room hunting camp at the top of the ridge overlooking the swamp with that owl named Otie. “My mother? Lunatic, bat-shit crazy, unwell,” Bonnie would say, shrugging, laughing. “No wonder we’re a little odd, V-bird.” Vale wonders: Bipolar? Schizophrenic?

  Three years ago Vale got a tattoo of an owl on her left shoulder in honor of that bird of Lena’s: same markings, same eyes.

  Vale finds thumbtacks in a drawer and tacks the photos to the wall above the table.

  Bonnie never knew who her father was, either. “Who cares,” she said, wrapping her arms around Vale in that bed where they slept together most nights until Vale was thirteen. “I have you and you have me.” Sheets covered in yellow roses. Bonnie’s long neck, the soft and warm skin of her belly.

  The last time Vale spoke to Bonnie was two months ago. Bonnie was breathless. She told Vale about the love of Jesus and how it had found her. Her voice jittery and quaking—her thoughts disconnected—high on something—junk or Jesus or both. “His love is bright burning, honey. All-loving. Holy!” A hoarse laugh that turned into a cough. She said she’d joined a church somewhere. Told Vale it had changed her. That everything was finally making sense. “A new leaf, Vale-honey. I’m cleaning up, I swear.”

  “Are you?” Vale had asked. She was sitting on the fire escape of her room in Marigny, looking out over a sea of backyards: shrines, bicycles, vines, Christmas lights strung from rooftops.

  “Sure I am,” Bonnie said, before hanging up.

  VALE FINISHES HER COFFEE, PUTS THE CUP IN THE SINK, and walks up the hill toward Deb’s cabin.

  They’d had dinner at Hazel’s last night—a brief conversation, warm stew. Deb begged Vale to stay at her place in Danny’s old room, but Vale declined. Said, “I like it where I am. All creeky.”

  “Can I borrow your truck?” Vale says now, standing in Deb’s open doorway, her hands in her sweater pockets. Deb’s cabin looks the same as it did eight years ago: the long porch running along one end, books and houseplants scattered everywhere, the yard one continuous tangle of garden. Deb stands in the kitchen with a cup of coffee in her hand. Her hair looks more gray in the morning light, her eyes more tired, but her face is still beautiful.

  “The roads—”

  “I don’t care,” Vale says. “I need to get there.”

  “Okay,” Deb says, setting down her coffee and reaching for the keys. “I’ll go with you. I’ll drive.”

  The damage is everywhere. They wind their way down back roads in Deb’s rusted blue Toyota, the seats patched with duct tape, seeking a pathway. They turn around four times at washed-out culverts, try different routes.

  Deb tries to make small talk, but Vale keeps her face turned to the window, mumbles her replies. “Let’s try this way,” Deb says quietly, pulling down yet another back road.

  On every one they pass more destruction: new bends to old creeks, houses torn from their foundations, water carving new pathways through hillsides. Fluid—that’s how the wrecked landscape looks to Vale. Not fixed, at all, as she had always presumed it to be. In New Orleans, sure. But here? She’s always thought of this landscape as abhorrently stable.

  IT TAKES THEM AN HOUR, BUT AT LAST THEY FIND A WAY through.

  Vale steadies her hand on the truck’s door handle as they pull into the parking lot of Bonnie’s apartment building.

  Deb puts her hand on Vale’s shoulder. “We’re here. You all right?”

  “Yes,” Vale says, looking out the window at the torn-up river, at a house the color of mint ice cream across the street, at a woman turning from that house and walking toward a shed out back. Bent shoulders. A red coat. Not Bonnie.

  Such pretty houses, Vale thinks. And inside so many of them: OxyContin, meth, heroin, fentanyl. Creeping into small towns like this one: a mill town, a hippie town. Winding its way up riverbanks. Anywhere poverty nestles. Where options and jobs are few.

  Vale climbs the wooden, exterior staircase to that third-floor apartment—robin’s-egg-blue Formica counters and a pink claw-foot tub, resting on rotting linoleum. She stops at the top of the stairs, closes her eyes, and breathes in. She wants her mother to open the door when she knocks. She wants Bonnie to put her arms around her and say, “Ha! And they thought I’d disappeared.” She wants to see what her mother’s eyes look like, lit up with her newfound love of Jesus. What might that love look like?

  Deb puts her hand between Vale’s shoulder blades. “You okay?”

  “VALE,” DEAN SAYS, OPENING THE DOOR. SHE HASN’T seen him in eight years. He’s worse for wear: arms shaking, jazzed pale-blue eyes. He opens the door wider, letting them in. “Long time no see. Come in. They’ll find her. They will.”

  He’s wearing gray sweatpants and a white tank top, has bruises threading up and down his thin arms.

  Vale walks into the kitchen. Looks around. “You haven’t seen her?”

  He goes to the couch and lies down, sticks an unlit cigarette between his lips. “No. But she’ll be back. She always comes back,” he says quietly, closing his eyes.

  Vale walks around the apartment slowly. Fast-food containers in the sink, pizza boxes in front of the TV, piles of clothes in corners. Vale settles in front of the windowsill where Bonnie’s crystals are still lined up—dust-covered amethyst and quartz.

  Beside them is a stack of tarot cards, a book on astrology, books on Native American mythology, and beside that, the Jesus stuff Vale’s never seen before: a New Living Translation Holy Bible; a postcard of Mary holding the baby Jesus, his strangely thin limbs, small head, and adult features; a selection of brightly colored votive candles; a bowl full of rosaries.

  Vale doesn’t know what church her mother joined. Something within walking distance: Catholic, Baptist, evangelical. Vale notices how the rosaries, all shapes and colors and sizes—likely picked up at the thrift stores in town—make a bird’s nest of sorts in the white bowl where they’ve been placed. Vale pockets a blue rosary.

  Scrawled, with a black Sharpie on the wall next to the window, are the words: Whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. —Matthew, 4:13.

  “She was high,” Dean says from the couch, his eyes still closed.

  Vale turns to look at him, her hands shaking in her pockets. “What?”

  “She was high. She’d just shot up. Thought you’d want to know th
at.”

  Vale looks out the window: the creek and, on the far side, train tracks. “Goddamn you,” she says, not looking at him.

  He doesn’t respond.

  I’m cleaning up, baby. Getting clean, I swear! Bonnie said, the last time they spoke on the phone.

  Vale goes to her mother’s closet and sifts through the sweaters and T-shirts and jeans piled on the floor until she finds what she’s looking for: the old peach-colored silk dress, full of holes, that her mother used to wear around the apartment when she was happy, gloriously drunk, at ease.

  “This dress was my mother’s,” Bonnie would say, slipping it over her shoulders. “The only thing I have of hers. Don’t I look like a movie star in it? Glamorous like Rita Hayworth!” Rising and putting her arms around Vale’s shoulders. Putting her cheek against Vale’s cheek, making a kiss-face into the mirror.

  Vale puts her nose into the dress: cigarette smoke, jasmine, sour sweat.

  Deb touches Vale’s arm. “You ready?”

  Vale nods, heads toward the door.

  “Don’t worry,” Dean calls out, grinning. “She’ll come back. She always does.”

  Vale holds on tight to the stair railing on her way down.

  DEB NEEDS TO GO GROCERY SHOPPING, BUT VALE WANTS to look around. “Pick me up here when you’re done,” she says, walking toward where the green bridge once stood. It hasn’t yet been rebuilt; the street dead-ends in a gorge of broken concrete and twisted metal. For thirty feet downstream there’s a tangle of branches, trees, boulders, rusted iron. The water has receded to its normal height. Water—so illusorily peaceful.

  The air is cold, damp. A few raindrops slash against Vale’s skin.

  She lets out a slow breath, wraps her sweater around her shoulders.

  “What on earth were you thinking?” Vale whispers, scrambling down the river’s bank, pushing her way through and over downed branches and sumac. Tangled piles of rocks, river silt, trash. Plastic bottles. Metal cans. A sock—white and small. Vale bends and touches it. A child’s sock. The heel threadbare. Vale sits down next to it. Closes her eyes.