My mother is not gone, Vale thinks, heart rattling, taking another drink of wine. She’s in a Shaw’s parking lot drinking in broad daylight. She doesn’t care. My mother is not gone.
Deb
OCTOBER 17, 2011
In the early evening Deb turns on the radio and hears about landslides throughout Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. Heavy rains and flooding. Eighty dead, according to the BBC. “Shit,” Deb whispers, going to her computer to look for an e-mail from Danny. She hasn’t heard from him for a month. She sends him a message. The BBC reporter says thousands of families have lost homes and crops. That the UN has classified Central America as one of the parts of the world most affected by climate change.
DEB TURNS OFF THE RADIO, GOES OUT TO GIVE HER BIRDS fresh water. She holds still in the late sunlight, the leaves on the trees around her outrageous colors—red, orange, yellow—and forces herself to breathe.
An hour later she gets a response: Mamá. Ten villagers killed. Unbearable. Coming home for X-mas to see Hazel and Vale and you. Love—your Danny.
Deb sinks into the chair on her porch. Leans her head back. Breathes deep, tears in her eyes.
He’s alive, her boy.
It feels as if they need him on this hillside right now. Not as savior but as company.
Bonnie still missing. Vale: distant, quiet, refusing to crack.
And Hazel more and more off. Was it too much, Deb wonders, the shock of Bonnie’s disappearance, for her aging mind? This morning Deb found Hazel in her nightgown in the middle of the living room, staring at a crack in the plaster wall.
“Where is Lena?” Hazel asked, turning toward Deb, her blue eyes strangely blank.
“Lena died many years ago,” Deb said, going to Hazel and touching her arm.
Hazel pulled away quickly, then went to her chair by the window and looked out at the field. Snow flurries, the first, a dusting, across the old apple trees.
“Oh. I thought for a moment she was here.”
“That happens,” Deb said. “I’ll get you some tea.”
In the kitchen things were out of place—clean dishes to the right of the sink instead of in the dish rack. A half-eaten apple in the cabinet next to the plates. The milk sitting, warmed, in the cupboard next to refrigerator. Hazel, Deb thought, heart sinking, reaching for the apple and putting it into the compost bucket near the door, pouring the sour milk down the drain.
When she returned to the living room her mother-in-law was asleep, head tipped back on the blue armchair.
Deb spent the rest of the day cleaning houses in town—a doctor’s renovated farmhouse, the apartment of a divorced lawyer. She doesn’t mind the work—she takes strange comfort in the gratification of a scrubbed floor and glistening countertops. What a shock it would be if the people she cleans for saw her own home, Deb thinks—its spider webs and rough pine walls that never get clean. The organism her home is, separated from the woods around it by a thin scrim only, and how she loves it that way. She considers it a strange instinct so many people have—the tireless struggle to keep nature’s chaos at bay.
From the porch where Deb sits now, the relief of Danny’s well-being settled into her chest, she sees a light flick on in Vale’s camper. A Thoreau line rings in her head (how often they appear there): The most I can do for my friend is simply be his friend.
Of course. Be her friend.
“I BROUGHT US WINE,” DEB SAYS, HOLDING THE BOTTLE out, when Vale opens the camper door.
Vale smiles. “Nice. Thank you. Come in.” The place is tiny, sparse, clean. Smells like coffee, and alcohol, and mildew, but there Vale is, reaching for two glasses, pulling over a chair.
She looks better than she has of late. Not quite so starved. Some color in her cheeks.
“I’m sorry I don’t come more often,” Deb says, lifting her glass to Vale’s. “It’s easy to grow solitary.”
Vale shrugs. “I know. You want to take these outside?”
They take their glasses out to the field where they can hear the creek and watch the moon rise. It’s unusually warm for this late in October. Freak dry spells, warm spells, cold spells: erratic, unpredictable, Deb thinks. Still, cool enough for a fire. Vale has made a simple fire pit out of a circle of river stones. She gathers sticks from the woods, crumples newspaper, lights a match. They sit in the damp grass, watching the flames swell, warming their hands. Deb tells Vale about Hazel’s spottiness. About finding her in her nightgown in the middle of the room in the middle of the day, staring at a crack in the wall. About the apple on her shelf and the sour milk in the cupboard. “What do you suppose is going on?”
Vale shrugs. Takes a sip of her wine, stares into the fire. “Haunted by ghosts?”
Deb laughs. “Yes. Me, too. I suffer from the same disease. To our haunted hillside,” Deb says, reaching her glass toward Vale’s. Soft clink. Sparks from the fire.
“You know what I’ve been thinking these days?” Deb says, tipping her head back. “How hard it is to learn how to love within the span of one lifetime.” She’s thinking of Stephen and Hazel. Her own mother. Bonnie. Reverberations in creek water. “How easy to pass along our flaws—our anger, sorrow, reserve, withholding.”
Vale nods, takes a sip of her drink.
“We deny them, so fiercely, our ancestors,” Deb says. “But really they’re written deep in our bones. Do you know about epigenetics? New research that says we carry the trauma—grief—joys—of past generations in our DNA.” She tells Vale about her grandmother, Zina, growing up on the farm outside of Vitebsk. How she is the reason Deb is here—the reason she came north on that highway thirty-five years ago.
“I didn’t know any of that.”
“There’s a lot we don’t know about everyone’s story, isn’t there?” Deb says, brushing a spark off her sweater. She thinks of Bonnie and Bonnie’s motherlessness, that trauma without stories to accompany it, to make sense of it, to take that poison and turn it into medicine, as only stories can do. Create maps of the past, which become maps for the future.
“And Bonnie had—has—her epigenetic trauma, too,” Deb says quietly.
“Yes,” Vale says, rising and throwing another stick on the fire. Raking the coals inward with her boot. “Hey, Deb.”
“Yeah?”
Vale stares into the fire and tells Deb about the photo of Marie tacked to her wall. Of what she has learned about the eugenics movement—the second wave of the destruction of a people and culture. The destruction of a way of living and knowing.
Deb hasn’t ever heard about the eugenics movement in Vermont. The complexity of place, she thinks: how long it can take to peel back the layers.
“My mother always said we were Native American,” Vale says. “I thought she was an appropriating asshole.” Vale laughs, staring into the fire.
“That is a powerful thing to know. Or half know,” Deb says. She closes her eyes and pictures Lena in her cabin. Pictures Stephen in his. If it’s true, it makes sense, epigenetically. This calling back to the land. Being drawn to woods, creeks, swamps.
“You cold?” Vale asks, passing Deb a scarf, and Deb nods, grateful, and wraps it around her shoulders. She leans back in the wet grass and watches sparks rise into the dark sky. Marie possibly Abenaki. Did Stephen know? She turns again to look at Vale. She’s gorgeous, this girl, lit by firelight, Deb thinks. As all girls are. If only they knew just how so.
Vale
OCTOBER 31, 2011
Vale drives to the barn on Cedar Street every day. The note she left is gone. There are no messages on her phone. She checks the pillows and blankets for body heat, for strands of dark hair—there are none.
Vale rips another small piece of paper out of that water-damaged Bible. Draws a heart in its center. Writes: Bonnie?
She leaves the barn and goes to the river’s edge. Lifts a large brick from the bank, hoists it above her head, and heaves it into the water. It crashes into a rock, splits in two.
THE DAYS BLEED INTO ONE ANOTHER. LEN
A AND MARIE’S photos, pinned to the wall, keep her company on the nights she does not go to see Neko. The storms hit and you think the world is over, Vale thinks, and then the storm passes and the world is not over. The riverbanks heal. The houses that were destroyed are torn down. The people that disappeared are still missing. The people they left behind get by.
Vale brings more bedding from Hazel’s attic. Obsessively scans news headlines on her phone. Drives the back roads and backstreets daily in Deb’s truck.
How long does one stay in a place looking for a body that will not appear? No Word for Time: Time is relative and elusive in nature.
She asks again at the drop-in center. At the homeless shelter. At the police station, where the woman behind the desk turns, busying herself, when Vale walks in. When Vale asks if she’s seen anything, the woman glances up quickly. Shakes her head. “No.”
VALE GOES TO THE TOWN OFFICE AND ASKS TO SEE THE marriage license of Henry and Marie Wood. The town clerk brings her into the vault, pulls out a thin sheet of paper, and hands it to Vale. Vale sits down at a small table and reads it. Married: 1901, the year the photograph was taken. Marie’s DOB: 1885. Place of birth: Mallets Bay, three hours north, along Lake Champlain. Her father’s name: Pierre. Her mother’s name: Louise. In faint pencil, along the edge of the page, barely legible: INDIAN.
“Holy,” Vale whispers, there by herself in the back room vault. A cool sensation along her spine.
AT THE CAMPER VALE PUTS ON HER COAT AND LENA’S hat and tucks a bottle of wine into her jacket pocket.
“Indian,” Vale says to Marie’s photograph, and Lena’s, grinning, on her way out the door.
She walks across the field and toward the woods.
She wants to find Lena’s cabin, that one-room shack at the top of the hill, overlooking the swamp, no doubt falling in by now. Vale hasn’t seen it for years, and even back then it wasn’t much—moss-covered, broken windows, the door swinging open in the wind. She hadn’t gone inside—Danny had been with her, had turned at the sight of it, said: “Hell no.”
Vale turns north and uphill along an old logging road. It might have been passable by truck or car forty years ago in good weather, but now it’s grown up in blackberries and hemlock saplings, is crisscrossed with fallen pines.
Maybe this is where I’ll go for the next great storm, Vale thinks, heading uphill, swiping the thick and low-hanging branches out of her face.
And then there it is. A roof at the top of the hill, nestled between the tall trunks of maples and birches and pines, overlooking the swamp.
I love the rain. I fucking love the rain! Bonnie calling out, standing in the middle of the river, rain dripping down her hair and shirt and legs. Vale, baby, come get wet with me!
Always courting the water’s edge.
Bonnie used to call Lena’s cabin “Stephen’s spot,” also refusing to go near it.
It looks like a body or a creature, there tucked into the hillside, rising out of the afternoon sunlight. One room, three windows, and one door. Asphalt roof shingles, green with moss. A few of the windowpanes cracked or missing.
Vale walks closer, thinks of that photo tacked to her wall—Lena standing here in her fedora, Otie on her shoulder.
The wooden door, green paint flaking, has blown open in the wind. She walks toward it and looks in. The floor is covered in leaves, pine needles, the abandoned homes of mice, squirrels, skunks, porcupines—who knows what other creatures.
Vale steps inside and takes a deep breath. The room smells like decay—a den, a lair, a part of the woods. But the light in here is lovely—slant light through the spider-web- and dust-covered windows. There are things on the windowsills. Vale steps closer to look. A glass jar full of feathers—turkey and owl. A parade of animal bones Vale can’t name. A collection of river stones—round and smooth, shades of cream, slate and iron, covered in cobwebs and dust. Vale picks up a round stone, polishes it with her sleeve, holds it in the palm of her hand. Takes a deep breath.
Lena’s things. All this time. Her grandmother—Bonnie’s mother—has been up here on the mountain, within these walls.
Vale looks to her left. There are some photos, cut out of magazines, tacked to the pine wall to the right of the window. Curled, mildewed, but the images still legible: a mountain lion in a stricken clearing, a Native American woman seated on a stump outside of a wigwam, a hawk on her knees. Vale touches the woman’s face with her fingers. Whispers, “Hello.”
There’s a single bed in the corner—the mattress full of mouse nests and holes. There’s a small, hand-built table with two chairs. A potbellied stove. A counter made of rough-cut pine. Above the counter are two china teacups hanging from two bent nails. Vale slips one off its nail and holds it in the palm of her hand—a dust-red rose in its center. Vale cleans it with the hem of her dress, sits down at the table, pulls the bottle of wine out of her pocket, and fills the teacup to the brim.
She holds the cup out in front of her.
“Lena,” Vale says out loud, her hands shaking slightly, toasting the other cup still hanging on the wall.
Her voice sounds strange within the empty walls. “Who are you?” Vale says. There’s a crow call from outside. The racket of Deb’s rooster down the hill. “I’d love to goddamn know.”
Vale sips her wine, looks around at Lena’s things. The cabin still. Eerily quiet. Dust lacing the sunstruck air.
Lena
JULY 18, 1956
Coyote—
Adele shows me jars full of herbs she’s gathered: juniper, pokeweed, black cohosh. She tells me a little more about them every time I come, teaches me how she dries them, stores them, adds a splash of this and a drop of that depending on the cure.
She leans toward me, winces.
“You smell like your body, Lena.” Smiles. Hands me a cup of steaming tea.
It’s sex I smell like, between my legs, but I don’t tell her that.
I pull my notebook out of my pocket. Write down the names of the herbs she tells me.
“Why you writing this stuff down?” she asks, piercing me with her dark eyes.
“Bad memory,” I say. “Is this okay?”
“Of course,” Adele says, rolling some tobacco.
I think of my grandmother, Marie, who died when I was four, a low and sweet-voiced singing. What were those songs?
I ask Adele if she knew Marie. She shakes her head, says, “No.”
I tell her I miss my grandmother and the sound of those songs. She smiles. Lights a cigarette. Walks out the door.
LATE THAT NIGHT WE WALK DOWN TO THE CREEK, OTIE and I. I slip off my pants, my shirt, my boots. I splash my armpits, my crotch, my nipples, with the ice-cold water. It smells like earth, like decaying animal, like ferns. Otie watches me from the bank, winking.
I call out toward him. “Come in with me, you loon bird you!”
He merely winks and turns away.
Another memory: my grandmother, in a field, me and Hazel by her side, pointing up at the stars above us. Words spilling from her mouth that sounded like they were underwater.
I’m about to climb up onto the bank when I see eyes at the edge of the woods. Umber. Earth-colored. I feel them before I see them. I think: Lex Starkweather, and close my eyes, grin. A musky heat there. But when I open them again it is that coyote. Sly, feral, brute, three-legged. It catches my eyes for a long moment. Our breath like invisible water, traversing between here and there. Otie flaps his one good wing, hops toward that dog, squawking. The coyote wheels, turns, disappears into the hemlocks and pines.
“It’s all right, Otie,” I say, rising from the water and slipping back into layers of thick wool. “It’s all right. Nothing to fear.” My whole body shaking. “Let’s go home.”
I shiver the whole way back.
The kerosene lantern on the table flickers; the night air sends goose bumps up my spine, up my ankles and shins to the top of my knees.
Otie hops from the bed to the chair to the floor. He pecks at th
e water-stained curtains, hanging from the windows. Torn. Fly-speckled. He begins to shred them. Furiously. I let him. He is building a nest. An ancient instinct—this craving for a mate. My mother used to say owls were a sign of the death of something old and the start of something new. Hear that? The death of something old and the start of something new, Otie, my friend.
PART III
Fields
Stephen
DECEMBER 14, 1986
Stephen sits in the dark on the hill above his parents’ farmhouse in the clearing he and Deb have made together, a quart of Jim Beam between his knees. It’s December and the air is cold, five degrees—colder? Dropping. The ground is covered in a couple inches of snow, a few stubborn leaves cling to the oaks and beech, the smell of woodsmoke drifts uphill from the cabin where Deb and Danny sit near the fire. Deb will be drinking wine now, and Danny—ten years old—will no doubt be bent over a Tintin, lost on some desert island. They fought, Stephen and Deb. “Goddamn you,” Deb yelled. “Why don’t you talk to me?”
The words caught in his chest, unformable. His silence ice castles in the air. And so he left, with his coat and this bottle. The woods his solace, always.
When Stephen built this place he had wanted it to be different: higher ground, above the valley where clouds hung half the day in summer and the sun didn’t settle for more than an hour in winter. A place apart from the unfit world. A place apart from war. But Reagan is back in office and British scientists have discovered an enormous hole in the earth’s ozone layer above Antarctica. Is this place he built on the hill—adze, log, nail, timber—immune from it all? He doesn’t think so anymore.
Heart Spring Mountain Page 10
