Heart Spring Mountain

by Robin MacArthur

  He cuts the hemlocks, the spruce, the birch, and the pines. The hard maples he leaves standing, for sap in spring, shade in summer, company come winter.

  How to live one’s life? Stephen’s friends—more than half of them—went to Vietnam. When Stephen’s card was drawn, two years ago, he walked into the woods with a jackknife and cut a half inch off the tip of his right-hand trigger finger. “Goddamnit!” he had screamed into the woods around him, wrapping the bleeding finger in the T-shirt he ripped off his shoulders. He wasn’t planning to do it. But he couldn’t go there. Do that. Kill. Or leave Bonnie, his cousin with the cracked heart, her body that looks like it might lift up from the ground and blow away. He drove himself directly to the draft office. “Sissy,” Fred Cole had whispered. “Goddamn chicken-shit sissy.” Breath like stale coffee. Breath like pennies. “That’s what you are.”

  His mother had said more or less the same thing.

  No matter how hard Stephen has worked since then, the words don’t leave his mind. They have rooted there, and into his muscles. Seventy-two hundred Vermonters served. One hundred thirty-eight did not return. Stephen works harder.

  He works at the sawmill during the day; in the afternoons and evenings he works on his cabin. He has made a small clearing with a chainsaw and an axe, felling the trees, cutting them into logs, and used his grandfather’s adze, unearthed from the back of the barn, to shape the logs into rectangles. It’s the way the barn below was built, and the old house, too—these wooden notches, wooden posts. The braces and beams he used to stare at for hours in his second-story bedroom, admiring the simple miracle of architecture.

  Bonnie comes sometimes up the hill in the afternoons. She is failing school, screwing too many people in the backs of pickup trucks. Her eyes are magnetic, her fingers aflutter and on fire.

  “Stephen-monkey!” she shouts. “Come smoke a joint with me.”

  He stops what he’s doing. Joins her in the clearing next to his favorite maple, overlooking the farm below.

  “Hazel’s on a tirade today,” Bonnie says, letting out a smoke ring and tipping her head back to face the clouds. “No way I’m going back there now.”

  Stephen nods, takes the joint, eyes his cousin: bell-bottom jeans and a skinny tank top. Motherless and coming of age in the post-Vietnam vacuum; inheriting all of the detritus of the 1960s without any of the hope, Stephen thinks. What is it people her age have to hope for?

  And Stephen? What does he have? He passes the joint back to Bonnie, who takes it between her thumb and forefinger. There’s not one of his childhood friends Stephen feels right with anymore. And so there is this house. This foundation: stone rooted up from old stone walls and dragged to this spot by hand.

  “Stephen,” Bonnie says, lying back in the grass, a smile across her thin lips. “Tell me about my mother.”

  Stephen has told her most everything he remembers—so little. About her barred owl, Otie, one-eyed, hit by a car and rescued from some roadside. When Stephen was young—five, six—he used to go and visit Lena and her owl at the old hunting camp on the hill overlooking the swamp. She’d laugh whenever she saw him. Serve him chunks of cheese with wild apples, say, “How goes your heart, Stevie?” She taught him how to feed Otie live mice from her traps, and how to hold him on his shoulder. He can still remember the feel of those talons digging into the thick denim shoulder of his coat and the lilt of Lena’s voice in his ear saying, Every bird is an omen, whether you know it or not. He can still remember the smell of the bird in that cabin, too—shit and feathers and something entirely other.

  He tells all this to Bonnie as he has told her before, his eyes closed, the pot going to his head, and it’s too late before he opens his eyes and sees she’s rolled onto her side in the leaves, tears streaming down her cheeks.

  He goes to her. Puts his hand on her shoulder. Holds it there. She squeezes his hand, stands, bows, and walks down the hill in the half dark that has somehow quickly descended, threading her way through the trees.

  “Damn,” Stephen whispers, watching.

  When she’s gone he remembers something else about Lena. Something he hasn’t ever told Bonnie. One day Lena told him a story—Passamaquoddy, she said—about a woman who married an owl. She was leaning back on a rock, her eyes closed, a piece of grass between her lips.

  In the story there was a beautiful girl who was too proud to marry. Her father promised to give her to any man who could make the embers of the fire blaze up by spitting on it. No suitor could, until a great horned owl, disguised as a handsome young man, showed up. He spit into the fire and the flames leapt into the night sky and the girl’s father gave her to the owl-dressed-up-as-a-man, who took her home and slept with her that night. It wasn’t until the morning that she saw his pointed ears and yellow eyes and true figure.

  “Is this real?” Stephen had asked, eyes wide.

  “Of course!” Lena replied, pinching his shoulder, laughing. She said she had heard the story from her friend Adele, who lived on the far side of the mountain. “But wait. There’s more.” The girl saw his true owl figure and fled. But he returned, again and again, in various disguises, until at last she accepted his devotion and his love, and, most enticing of all, Lena said, her eyes alight, “his alluring and bewitching song.”

  “So she married an owl?” Stephen asked.

  “Yes,” Lena said. “And they lived ever after in both worlds—human and creature.” She sat up and grinned at him. “That’s me, kiddo. Married to an owl.” She put her lips against his hair and breathed in, then elbowed his ribs until he laughed out loud.

  Stephen lies back in the leaves, his head spinning from the pot. He will have to tell Bonnie that story. He will have to tell Bonnie the next time she comes. The woman who married an owl. Is there an equivalent story, he wonders, for a man who does not quite belong in the human world?

  He looks at the shadow of his cabin. There are posts into soil. The clearing of darkness, the making of light. There is the plain old toil of it. Dedication of another kind—wood, light, this clearing, the trees he chooses to let branch here. Here, here, and, a better world, with every strike his adze makes, a world not of killing, or abandonment, but of self-reliance, of turning tall trees into the rectangular and sturdy and there-for-generations-to-come bones of a home.

  When it grows too dark to see, Stephen sits down on the earth in front of the pile of logs and stones and feeds himself—cold cuts and a can of beans he picked up that day, beer. The world goes dark around him. Fills with the company of creatures—coyotes down by the creek, owls, brown bats flitting from one branch to another.

  Deb

  JANUARY 17, 1975

  Deb’s happy at the commune, happier than she’s ever been, and yet. There’s still something adrift about it; these characters too much like her, with their wingless ambition, their unhardened dreams. Tim has left. Ginny cannot bring herself to slaughter the chickens or slaughter the ducks; the ones that stop laying live on in the coop, and Deb has to drive to Nelson for expensive chicken grain every week. When she doesn’t, the hens go hungry, cluck all day, watch her every move.

  Bird leaves, taking her Nina Simone and Bessie Smith and Gil Scott-Heron records with her. The farmhouse does not seem the same without their singing. “Too fucking white here, my loves,” she said on her way out the door, kissing their cheeks. “The snow and all of you. Who wants to be an anomaly?”

  The roof of the farmhouse begins to leak, and they climb up there with tarps and scraps of tar paper, move out of the rooms where the water pools, where the plaster drips and the wallpaper peels.

  Deb is broke. They are all broke. She knew she would be, and yet she’s never felt it in her bones before. She borrows Randy’s car, the only one they have, his grandmother’s old Ford, to drive to town, but its brakes are shot and she keeps her hand on the emergency brake the whole time, heart racing, ready to pull.

  She wanders the streets and the bright, nearly fluorescent aisles of the grocery store, eyein
g the facets of the material world, wanting them all with a hunger that surprises her. She wants oranges. Grapefruits. Pretzels. Lemons! Red tomatoes.

  The food they eat at the farm all starts to taste the same: potatoes and rice and beans. She craves meat, craves wine.

  “We’re too broke for wine,” Ginny has announced, and so they are drinking the rotgut homemade cider that Randy and Feather have made in the basement. They pressed the apples in an antique Mast & Co. cider press that came with the barn, added sugar, added yeast, have let it sit all year in wooden barrels. It tastes like vinegar, makes Deb’s stomach hurt, but it’s all they have, so they drink it. With fervor.

  Randy plays old folk songs he’s learned from Woody Guthrie records. The girl, Opal, winds around his feet and laughs. It’s Opal whom Deb eyes most often.

  She’s seven, beautiful, a string bean, her blond hair in tangles.

  “Here, let me,” Deb says, trying to brush it for her, but Opal screeches or laughs and runs away.

  Opal carries chickens in her arms, paints on the farmhouse walls, pees her bed at night.

  “Do you think she’ll go to school?” Deb asks Feather, who says, “I don’t know.”

  Opal crashes into the room; Opal spins. Opal cries out, “I’m hungry!” and Deb leaps up to fetch her an apple from the root cellar.

  WINTER IS LONG. THE ROOF CONTINUES TO LEAK. THEIR road isn’t plowed. They stay in and cook rice, cook beans, eat the potatoes and squashes and apples from the basement. The wood stove keeps them warm, if they stay inches from it; the records keep them sane: Dave Van Ronk, Aretha Franklin, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

  Randy plays his plunky banjo.

  “Do you know any other tunes?” Deb asks, staring at the wall.

  Deb moves into Bird’s empty room in the attic and wakes to frozen water in the jar beside her bed, wakes to limbs so cold she has to force herself out from underneath the covers. She never takes her long underwear off—top or bottom.

  “Screw this,” she whispers, running downstairs to warm her ass next to the wood stove. Her skin is slack, her hair thinning, she needs protein. And vitamin D. As does Opal.

  Deb writes her mother telling her of her cold bones. She tells her about Opal, that apple from the cellar. She writes, “I think I underestimated the hardiness of pioneers.” She thinks of her grandmother, Zina, in Russia, and what she might not have told her about life on a farm. The scarcity. The hard ropes of muscles in each of their arms. Deb walks the letter to the mailbox at the bottom of the road, and one week later a check for five hundred dollars arrives. Deb cries, she’s so happy to see it. She cashes it and drives Randy’s car straight to the grocery store, where she buys chicken and hamburger meat in bulk, the cheapest she can find. She fills a shopping cart with produce. She buys three jugs of sweet wine.

  She brings it home and cooks a feast on the wood stove, which they devour, Feather and Randy and Ginny and Opal and Deb. “Thank you,” Feather says, with tears in her eyes. “I’m so grateful.” Opal eats the meat with her fingers, laughing, runs over to Deb and gives her a greasy, meat-drunk hug.

  Deb sleeps that night in Bird’s attic room above the kitchen, limbs at last warmed from red meat, limbs warmed from wine. She picks up her Thoreau book and reads it by candlelight: “Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.”

  Deb laughs, drifting into sleep, while snow piles up on the roof and water drips from the rafters.

  Deb

  SEPTEMBER 28, 2011

  Morning, yous,” she says quietly, opening the door and letting the birds out into the damp and heady tall grass. They are ferociously happy—clucking and eyeing her, there is no mistaking the look—with gratitude. She dumps yesterday’s water, refills it with clean rainwater collected from a barrel out back. Fills the second bucket with grain. Throws the birds handfuls of scratch, which they come running for. “Thank you,” Deb whispers to them, gathering four still-warm eggs. Thank God for these birds and her garden on the hillside outside her cabin, small but robust, teeming with tomatoes, beans, corn, potatoes, kale, fall raspberries, all undamaged by the heavy rain.

  A Grace Paley line rings in her head: “Here I am in the garden laughing.”

  Isn’t that her, after all these years? Deb goes to the garden, picks the day-ripened heirloom tomatoes, their purple and mottled skin, their bruised husks and tender bodies sweetened to perfection, and places them gently in the basket.

  She laughs thinking of that year at the commune—candlelight and homemade rotgut cider, the basement full of acorn squash and soft apples. Their tomatoes that never ripened due to insufficient water, lack of fertilizer, insufficient sun. But look at her garden these days: enough to feed them for months! For half a winter. She’ll fill the root cellar Stephen dug years ago with carrots, potatoes, cabbage. Fill the Deepfreeze out on the back porch with peas, tomatoes, zucchini, beans.

  Deb brings the eggs and tomatoes inside, turns on the radio, though she hates to hear the news these days, can hardly stomach it at all since Bonnie’s disappearance. Sure enough, it’s more of the same: the pro-Assad army waging a cyber war in Syria; a family searching for respite in war-torn Somalia; a piece on the surprising number of extreme weather events in 2011: heat waves, Texas wildfires, earthquakes, dust storms, tornadoes, Irene. The director of the National Weather Service says he’s never seen a year like the “deadly, destructive and relentless 2011.”

  Deb sits down at the table. Pours herself a cup of cold coffee.

  She recalls Ginny quoting Yeats, drunk on that rank cider: “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” Ginny laughing, holding her side, suddenly crying. Bird going to her, kissing the soft lobe of her ear. Opal dancing in the corner, a goopy-eyed newborn kitten in her hands, sick with worms and fleas. The center cannot hold. How had they known it, and Yeats, before them? These apocalyptic fevers seem to always come and go—but is it real this time?

  Thank goodness for her Mason jars lined up on her shelf, full of beans, rice, lentils, quinoa. Raspberry jam. Plum jam. Apple butter. Self-reliant—is she? Those ten days with limited roads and no power she fed them all. But a year? Every day she makes a pot of soup—chili or lentil or white bean, full of tomatoes, potatoes, zucchini, summer squash, kale, sage, and thyme—a splash of pink sea salt from the Himalayas—and brings it, with a loaf of bread and a bottle of wine, to Hazel’s kitchen. Hazel hardly eats anything at all. Vale eats ravenously.

  “Thank you,” Vale says after each meal. “Thanks so much,” her eyes on the pine floor, before turning and heading out the door.

  Vale growing more distant by the day. Drinking too much wine.

  Deb thinks how the storm and the opioid crisis here are, in some ways, symptoms of the same illness. Pharmaceuticals and crude oil. Hurricanes and heroin. Flooding and fentanyl. All of them making their way upstream.

  “Goddamn money,” Deb says, rising, dumping the rest of her coffee into the sink.

  But there’s action brewing, too, according to the next news story: protests happening in New York. Thousands of people camping out at Wall Street to protest big banks and corporate greed. The journalist describes a poster of a dancer atop Wall Street’s charging bull. The words below it: BRING TENT.

  The spirit of the Arab Spring protests taking root here, too, Deb thinks, feeling an old flicker. Does this next generation have it in them to fight unbridled greed?

  Deb clicks off the radio. Goes outside to use the outhouse.

  Thank God for this, too, she thinks, a couple hens trailing by her feet. She leaves the door open three seasons of the year, loves the view from the seat: mountain and mist and fog and rain and sunshine, cresting the farthest hill. She has papered the walls with New Yorker covers, keeps a stack of magazines to flip through. She never minds the cool shock of the seat in midwinter (except on the coldest days, when she swears like a sailor), is always grateful to head back inside and warm another cup of coffee. Is there a gre
ater pleasure?

  Deb stands on the porch—feels the sun wash over the pores of her face.

  In the post-oil world, she thinks, I’ll be heating the water on the wood stove. Canning tomatoes in ninety-degree August heat. Only I’ll be dead by then, won’t I? Here we are, coasting on resources—the wheat, the beans, the coffee, the wine, the salt, the propane for her gas stove. How rich we are without knowing it.

  Deb turns to look at Hazel’s house down the hill. The irony, she thinks—that Hazel is the only one who might still know how to survive that post-oil era but she’ll be long gone by then.

  The sky is apricot colored, luminous with the sun’s rising. The birds come onto the porch and cluck by her feet, that familiar and comforting din. Undeniably changing, this world, but beautiful all the same, Deb thinks, tipping her head back. Songbirds still singing, stars still coming out each night, the earth still ripe with grass, leaves, dirt, apples. Isn’t that the heart of it, this living? Death and beauty. Death and beauty. Pied, over and over again.

  PART II

  Woods

  Lena

  JULY 6, 1956

  River—

  My sister Hazel does not dance. She sets up the tea and the coffee and makes sure there are fresh pies on the table and that the dishes are washed, and after the dance she sweeps the floor, gathers the tablecloths, nods to Lex and says, “I’ll see you back at home.” Most nights I go with her.

  But not tonight. It’s July and hot and the air is wonderfully thick and I have spun too much to get into my sister’s car with six-year-old Stephen and drive back to our mountain. “I’ll walk,” I tell her, and she stares at me and shakes her head, climbs into her car and pulls away. I sit on the town hall step and watch the stars pop, listen to the musicians pack their things, to the crackling of car wheels on gravel as they pull away. One by one the musicians leave, all of them husbands, many of them farmers, and then it is just Lex and me outside that town hall, the lights off, the air still reverberant with music, the apple trees across the road lit up with fireflies.