by Nora Carroll
So she would take a little walk in the woods with Russ. She was sure he would soon tire of looking at trees. Russ went into the bedroom to get ready, and when he came out, Jess bit back a laugh. Out of his usual city garb, he was wearing a neon-yellow Columbia Sportswear jacket and hiking boots that looked like they had been designed to withstand a trek into the Himalayas. In one hand, he held The Field Guide to the Deciduous Trees of North America, and in the other, a little combo gizmo that looked like some kind of a compass/flashlight/hunting knife.
Instead of turning left at the front walk that led back toward the other cottages and the beach, they turned right where the walkway shortly turned into the woods and led over a rustic footbridge. It soon became a narrow path, so thickly covered with pine needles that their footsteps made a hollow, thumping sound when they walked.
Just beyond the footbridge, not more than twenty yards into the woods, Jess noticed a sign that she did not recall having seen there before: LITTLE TRAVERSE CONSERVANCY. CONSERVATION LAND. NO HUNTING, FIRES, OR DISTURBING PLANT LIFE. STAY ON CLEARLY MARKED PATHS.
“That’s funny,” Jess said, reading the sign. “Mamie always told me that these woods were part of our property. Her father made his fortune in lumber, but Mamie told me that when the loggers were set to clear-cut through these woods, he bought the land right out from under them and then left it untouched. Supposedly, almost all the hardwoods were gone by then, but this little patch was left because it was farthest away from the mill.”
“An early visionary of conservation?”
“No, not exactly that. What I heard was that the loggers would have set up camp in the woods—Miss Ada, my great-grandmother, didn’t want the camp there, on account of the smell.”
“What smell?”
“The Indian smell.”
“Well, maybe your grandmother donated the land—it’s not a bad write-off, you know.”
“Oh, that’s impossible,” Jess said. “Margaret would have told me. Besides, Mamie wasn’t exactly the nature-preserve type. She hated the woods. Never set foot in them, as far as I know.”
“The whole story about your great-grandfather was probably just made up. Most stories like that are, you know.”
Russ was hitting his stride. He had his Peterson field guide open and was reading from the introduction—reading, with a tone of authority, about single leaves and leaf clusters, leaf scars, and leaf buds. It had seemed a bright day when they had set out, but now Jess suspected that the sky had clouded over. Though she couldn’t really see the sky through the canopy of leaves, it was dark in the woods, and little sunlight seemed to be filtering through. The woods did appear to go on forever, but if she listened carefully, she could hear the low rumble of cars out on the highway. Jess looked over her shoulder and saw that the cottage had already disappeared from sight, even though she knew it couldn’t have been more than a couple of hundred yards away.
“The paper birch tree . . . ” Russ was reading to her all about the unusual tree with the white scored bark that gave the North Woods their distinctive look. “The bark was used for canoe making and as a treatment for rheumatism . . . ”
Jess felt relieved that nothing around them looked familiar. She saw trees everywhere, some birch, some beech with the smooth gray-green trunks, a few of last winter’s pale, dry leaves still clinging to the lower branches under the canopy of green. She felt no special resonance here, their quiet footsteps on the forest floor, Russ’s loud voice. These woods, she thought, evoke nothing.
Then, without warning, she realized that they had entered the stand of giant white pine. Around her on all sides, there were tall tree trunks, ruddy brown and covered with rectangular markings. The trunks rose up straight as the masts of schooners and then disappeared above the beech, poplar, and maple leaves. Jess knew that the branches of the giant white pine spread out above them, forming a supercanopy over the other trees.
“Russ,” Jess whispered, her voice hushed. “Look!” she said.
Russ glanced up from the field guide for a moment, and looked around him.
“What is it?” he said in a voice that seemed to Jess to be much too loud. “I don’t see anything.”
“It’s the giant white pine—see the dark trunks of the taller trees?”
Russ looked around, and then back down at his book.
“Giant white pine, giant white pine . . . Ah, here it is . . . Nope! There aren’t any around here. Logging. They’ve all been gone since the turn of the century.”
Jess looked at the spot where she remembered once feeling deep reverence. She could hear the echo of a modest, worshipful voice. Jess felt tired then, and she sat down on a sawed-off tree stump, a stump that still bore the traces of hacking and burning left by loggers—poachers, no doubt—almost a hundred years before. She could hear birdsong now. A lone pine warbler, wasn’t it? At first, she felt sure it was a pine warbler . . . but then she felt less sure, and finally decided she did not know. She watched Russ’s yellow jacket bobbing down the path ahead of her, and then she stood up and followed the path out of the wood—to where the sidewalk started up again, flanked on either side by the green of neatly clipped lawns.
Just as they stepped out of the woods, it started to pour. Russ pulled the rip cord tight on his Gore-Tex jacket, smiling the smile of a little boy with a new toy. Jess felt the cold raindrops penetrate her thin T-shirt, and with a shiver started to jog back to the cottage.
The rain did not let up. They returned to the cottage—Jess damp, Russ dry—where Jess lit a fire in the fireplace. The old cottage was shadowy inside. Russ got absorbed again in doing research on cottage architecture, and Jess roamed around the cottage aimlessly, feeling as if she was looking for something but couldn’t quite remember what.
A stack of leather-bound photo albums caught her attention. Mamie had been a meticulous album maker, carefully labeling her photos and aligning them with little black paper corners. Jess looked through the albums, starting with the ones that showed herself as a child, always prim and proper with a white ribbon in her hair. She remembered posing for pictures, always doing Mamie’s bidding: Here is Jess with her dress on, on the way up the walk to dinner. Here is Jess in her first two-piece bathing suit, with the little strawberries that dangled from the bows on the side. When Jess stopped to think about it, Mamie must have bought most of her clothes. Jess had always worn American clothes; she remembered that her clothes used to arrive in boxes from time to time: Florence Eiseman dresses, and patent-leather Mary Janes that had to be buttoned with a little metal hook.
Jess put aside the pictures of herself and looked at the pictures of her mother. There were few pictures of Margaret, and in most she seemed a little out of focus: Here she was on her tricycle. Here she was swinging on the hammock. In this one, she was twirling on the lawn; in another, she was running away and laughing, looking over her shoulder. Jess could just imagine that Mamie would have had little patience for that, could imagine her saying: Margaret, I won’t take your picture at all if you won’t stand still. Jess knew Margaret had never minded Mamie very well. She had always wondered how her mother had dared to defy her grandmother.
Most of the pictures showed Mamie’s family in their prime. There were stiff formal portraits of Mamie’s parents. Mrs. Ada Tretheway dressed in heavy brocades that only exaggerated her ample bosom. Mr. Harris Tretheway had a long, thin face and bright, clear eyes—looked more like Lila than Mamie. Even though Mamie’s father died when she was in her teens, Mr. Tretheway had left enough money to keep Mamie throughout her life, even paying Margaret’s way through expensive private schools and colleges. But his death had taken an emotional toll on the family. After he died, his wife took ill, then, a few years later, Mamie’s sister drowned. The family that had once joyously filled the rooms of the large cottage had shrunk down. During all the summers that Jess had spent with Mamie, the cottage had always seemed cavernous and lonely, and
Jess imagined that her mother’s childhood must have been much the same.
Jess studied the images of Lila. In a picture with her husband, they appeared the image of 1920s sophistication, both in light-colored golfing clothes; both fair, they looked like pictures she had seen of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Jess studied the picture of the young fair-haired man, his foot resting on the running board of a two-seater roadster. In brown, spidery script on the white border was written the name Chapin Flagg. Though Mamie never talked about Lila, Jess had heard her mention Chapin Flagg from time to time when talking to her old friend May Lewis. Jess had always thought it an odd name. She had understood, without really being told, that Chapin Flagg was somehow a bad fellow. If it hadn’t been for that Chapin Flagg, Jess had heard her grandmother say more than once. She had no idea what he might have done, or what had ever become of him, but she had understood that it was somehow his fault that Lila had drowned.
There was one picture in particular that really grabbed Jess. It showed the two sisters, Mamie and Lila, wearing woolen bathing suits that came down to their knees, with towels wrapped around their heads and bulky wool fisherman’s sweaters pulled around their shoulders. The caption read: Mamie and Lila, setting out to swim across Pine Lake. Mamie looked radiant, her smile wide and full of life, some of her wild curly hair escaping from under the turban, somehow making the photo look more modern, more lifelike. Lila, standing next to her, eerily pale, even in the photo, had a smile on her face too, but a look in her eye, so vacant, so haunted, that she seemed to see herself drowning already, sliding under the blue water.
After that, there were no more pictures of Lila or Mamie. In fact, it was the last photo in that album.
Jess realized that Russ was looking over her shoulder.
“We can use those.”
Jess looked up at him, confused.
“They’ll look good in the pictures. I like that old-album look in this kind of a setting. It helps evoke the twenties thing we’re going for. You can unload them after that if you want.”
For a second, Jess felt stunned. This was her family, her life history. Russ wanted to sell them? Then, she tried to imagine the albums, dusty, taking up space in her tiny apartment. Life with Margaret had taught her to be disciplined about what she saved and what she discarded. “You’re right,” she said, reluctantly closing the album and placing it back on the pile. “I don’t think I’ll keep them. I just don’t have the space.”
“They’ve got some sale value,” Russ said. “You’d be surprised how many people are poking around antique stores shopping for likely-looking ancestors.”
Later that afternoon, the sun came out, and Jess and Russ went into town. Russ wanted to see if he could find more books about local architecture, so they headed for the bookstore. When they got there, the shadowy interior didn’t look as appealing to Jess as the bright day outside, so she decided to take a walk down along the marina while Russ was looking for books, and to meet him at the coffee place in a few minutes.
The day was balmy and the air was dry, so pleasant in contrast to the humidity of the New York summer. She looked at the boats in the little city marina—big, hulking cabin cruisers with folding lawn chairs on the decks, enormous sailboats with their names painted in gold leaf: The Harriet Ruth, Tipsy Topsy. There was an art fair going on in the park in front of the marina, artists with their wares spread out under white tents. The paintings were mostly bright watercolors with summery themes: sailing boats and lighthouses, children in striped bathing suits with sand buckets on the beach.
Jess saw families walking around, dressed in crisp vacation clothes, bright white tennis shoes and polo shirts in pastel colors. Jess saw two brothers, certainly twins, maybe about six years old, throwing pieces of bread to the ducks that swam along in the sullied water just at the marina’s edge. Both children had tousled brown ringlets. She saw one boy bending forward on chubby legs, fingers wrapped around a bit of bread he was getting ready to throw, the other hand pressed down on the blue baseball cap he was wearing. His brother, his brow furrowed in concentration, was holding the bag carefully.
Some of Jess’s colleagues at the library had children. She would sometimes see them on their way to private schools, the boys wearing blazers, the girls bare legged with knobby knees above their woolen kneesocks. That was probably how she had looked as a child—crossing city streets with her hand gripped roughly in a nanny’s hand, or climbing awkwardly into a taxi with her satchel, her violin case whacking her uncomfortably in the knee.
The boys ran out of bread and sprinted back to their mother, who was wearing black bike shorts and a white sweatshirt with pictures of sailboats on it.
“Come on, guys,” the woman said. “Let’s go meet Daddy for a Happy Meal.” And off they walked.
Jess imagined that if she and Russ ever had a child, it would be more likely to slurp sesame noodles out of a paper takeout carton than to ever eat a Happy Meal. A Happy Meal . . . Well, she and Russ hadn’t discussed having children much, except for the obvious fact that in New York City, they would never be able to afford to have more than one.
Jess walked back to the coffee place, where she saw Russ sitting at an outside table with a black coffee and a stack of books in front of him.
“What did you find?” she asked him.
“There is some pretty good small-press stuff here. Look, here’s one about the history of lumbering in this area. This one’s about the Earl Young houses, these cottages on the north shore made out of stone. This one’s even up your alley—it’s got some poetry in it.”
Russ handed Jess the slim paperback volume, bound in shiny blue paper. She turned it so that she could see the title: Cathedral of the Pines: Musings of a Sometime Woodsman. She didn’t even need to read the author’s name, because there was his face, on the back cover.
She opened the book slowly. The dedication caught her eye.
For J.
CHAPTER NINE
JESS, AGE SEVENTEEN
As it does in the north part of Michigan, the weather had suddenly turned colder and stormy, and there was an almost autumnal feeling in the air. Outside the warped glass windows, the lake had gone silver, studded with scallops of whitecaps. The tree branches that hung down over the window were shaking, and the sky over the lake was gray streaked with purple: dark, menacing, and cold.
It was Thursday, the day each week when Mamie went to Petoskey with May Lewis, and this Thursday was no exception. Mamie had put on her raincoat, snapped plastic galoshes over her pumps, and tied a pink kerchief around her head; then she had left as usual, gliding her town car down the back road toward The Rafters, where she would stop and pick up May.
When Jess heard the screen door closing behind Mamie, she felt herself relax, just a little. It wasn’t until she felt her shoulders drop an inch that she realized how tightly she was holding herself. She was still stunned by what had happened at the beach picnic the night before.
Jess was wondering whether she should have called her mother. Of course, it wasn’t easy to reach Margaret in Namibia. She was following rebel camps in the South, but the AP could always get in touch with her, and, as Jess knew, she frequently flew out to Johannesburg for R&R. She might be at the Sofitel right now, and Jess could just pick up the phone and dial.
Then again, they weren’t much in the habit of speaking to each other during the summer. Jess rarely tried to get in touch with her on assignment. Just the idea of trying to reach Margaret in Namibia gave her a headache. Jess thought about Margaret and Mamie. No use to her, either one of them. She would, as she usually did, forge on alone.
Just a few minutes after Mamie left, she saw Daniel’s white pickup pull into the spot next to the garage where Mamie’s Lincoln Town Car usually sat.
Her first thought was to run upstairs in the cottage, to hide and pretend she wasn’t there. But it was too late. He had caught sight of her thr
ough the window, and his face, so serious-looking, had eased into a smile. She stood up from where she sat at the kitchen table folding clothes and walked to the back door, pushing it open.
There was an awkward moment of silence, Jess staring down at the scuffed green-and-white linoleum, unable to meet his eyes. She thought he was going to offer sympathy, and felt that the slightest kind word would send her dissolving back into sobs. She stared resolutely at her feet.
But Daniel did not offer sympathy. Instead, he grasped her arm gently and guided her out the door into the soft rain.
“If it’s okay with you, I want to show you something.” Holding his green windbreaker over their heads as they walked, he headed them toward the path into the woods.
“Where? Where are we going?” Jess was walking along beside him, close enough to bump elbows, ducking to stay under the impromptu canopy.
“Just a minute, I’ll show you.” He slowed to a walk as the path into the woods got so narrow that they had to walk in single file. He still held the windbreaker over both of them. The air underneath it was close, with a vinyl odor. Fat raindrops were falling on it occasionally, making loud splats.
Daniel stepped off the path and led Jess through the thick, wet, knee-high brambles that slapped against her pant legs as she stepped, trying to avoid the thorny vines. After a moment, he stopped, pushing the edge of the windbreaker off his head, and he knelt down on the wet forest floor, assuming a posture that looked almost like prayer. It wasn’t raining hard now, just the occasional splatter falling through the trees.
“Look, Jess. Look here.”
Gently, he held back the branches so that she could see, but she didn’t see anything special, just green leafy underbrush hugging the ground.
