by Doyle, Brian
* * *
Maria’s mom finally sat down in front of the fireplace and tried to pray. She wasn’t much for prayers and religions and churches and all that theater and ritual and pomp and that sort of thing, but she was bone dry and at the bottom of her hope and at the top of her fear, and finally in complete and total desperation, she tried to pray. First she tried to remember the shapes of the prayers she had heard as a child, but as soon as they came back to her memory she knew them to be empty and lifeless, mere shells and jackets. Then she tried to aim her thoughts at some sort of divine being, but the very idea of the force that sparked the universe to life looking anything like a human being at all let alone a shaggy grandfatherly guy was so silly as to be cruel. Then she remembered her grandmother telling her once that the urge to pray was the prayer, so she spoke aloud to the firelight and the sifting snow and the uncountable beings on this the ancient holy mountain and asked that they bend their beneficent dreams toward her daughter, that she be safe and warm, that she be huddled and protected, that she soon be found and carried home, that she be unbroken and unafraid, that she be wrapped sooner than soon in the arms of her mother from whom she had come, smiling even at birth, mere moments ago in the larger scheme of things. In this way did Maria’s mother pray all night long by the fire until dawn.
37
THEY SEARCHED ALL NIGHT. Sure they did. Wouldn’t you? Everyone did. Miss Moss later counted more than fifty people all told who searched the woods and the road and the river and the ravines and every shed and garage and drainpipe and cut bank and bus shelter and outhouse on the chance that Maria had taken shelter from the storm. Nearly every person mentioned so far in the previous pages of this book was either out in the snow in the dark that night or ready in some way to assist in matters of information or transportation. Some took up sentinel positions along the route that it was thought Maria had taken, from the school into the woods and up to the cabin. Moon was one of these, and he kept himself warm by practicing rebounding off a fir tree, one hundred rebounds with the right hand leading, one hundred with the left hand leading, one hundred with both hands firmly on the ball, repeat. Cosmas in his bright-orange jumpsuits for once abandoned his bicycle and hiked every power line cut he knew for miles around on the chance that Maria would seek an opening in the woods so as to be more easily seen. Maria’s friends Alicia, Aidan, and Honora huddled together in Honora’s bedroom all night making WELCOME HOME MARVELUS MARIA! posters and cards to be pinned up everywhere at school, because she would be found, and after a day to sleep and recover, she would be back at school, and she would be fine, and that was that, as Alicia said over and over.
* * *
Emma Jackson Beaton almost found her; she and the morning waitress came down Snag Creek from where it met the Zigzag river and found the cedar tree where Maria had dropped half an orange peel; but this was farther down from the tree where Maria slept, and Emma and the morning waitress, even after ranging in ever-increasing circles from the orange peel, found nothing more. Maria’s dad almost found her; he hiked all the way down the river and Snag Creek trails, shouldering desperately through snowdrifts and then all the way back up again, his heart black; but he found neither hint nor hair, print nor sign nor her owl feather signpost, though he stared at every square foot of snow and bark and branch and rock and thicket for a message, a note, a missive however slight or coded … twigs arranged in an M, a frozen mitten pointing out where he should go to gather his baby girl into his arms and press her face into his chest and wrap her inside his jacket and smell the apricot shampoo she loved the best.
* * *
It was Mr. Douglas who found her, a few minutes after dawn. Dave was aboard Edwin, slowly making their way up the creek, Dave thinking the slightly higher vantage point would help. Mr. Douglas was ranging through the forest away from the creek, thinking that Maria may have holed up in a deadfall, when he saw the long crack in the cedar bole and went to investigate. To his surprise his heart flopped when he saw her red jacket. She woke only when he touched her neck to feel her pulse. For a second she was frightened, and then she recognized him, and he smiled, and she smiled, and neither said a word, and she stood up and reached for her socks and sneakers, but they were frozen, and Mr. Douglas took off his big gloves and put them on her feet, and she stepped out of the tree, blinking in the light, and he scooped her up as if she weighed six ounces and ducked out from the overhanging branches and called for Dave.
My backpack? said Maria. My sneakers?
We’ll get them later, Maria.
Thank you.
Any time.
Thank you for finding me.
My pleasure.
Did Miss Moss send you?
Yes, said Mr. Douglas. Yes, she certainly did.
* * *
Martin watched them go, the red jacket on the horse with the human animal who ran through the woods and a larger human animal following on foot. Then he came down the trunk and smelled Maria’s backpack and sneakers. There was something good to eat in the backpack, but tearing it open was too much trouble, and he was weary after a long night. By now the sun was actually hot, and the melt was starting in full force; indeed it would get up to seventy degrees today, and by the end of the third day after the storm almost all the snow was gone, and the creeks and rivers and ditches on the mountain full to bursting, so much so that the highway bridge two miles down the mountain would have to be examined by county road crews, what with the river slamming away at the center stanchion and throwing sheets of spray over the road. Martin made his way home, not even stopping to explore a little clearing where he was sure he could smell vole tunnels under the snow, and once in his burrow, he curled up and slept the rest of the day, dreaming for some reason of rabbits twice as big as any he had ever eaten, yet.
PART II
38
WE HAVE NOT SPENT as much time as we should have discussing the rest of the … what should we call Zigzag, a village? Not quite big enough. Certainly not a town, or god help us all a city. Settlement? That sounds prehistoric. A gaggle of cabins relieved by the occasional larger structure, none taller than two stories except for Moon’s house? An osmosis of small dwellings with a few communal in purpose, that is, a library, school, gas station, and store? A populated crossroads? What do we call a very small community? A hamlet? Is community even an accurate word if many of the people there have no particular interest in their neighbors and indeed moved there largely because of the paucity of neighbors and privacy thereof? There is more than one hermit here. There are people who do not ever answer a knock on their doors. There are people with bristling signs nailed to large trees around their cabins stating in no uncertain terms that solicitors are not welcome and trespassers will be shot. There is a man who wanders alone in the woods in summer stark naked playing an oboe, not very well. There is a woman who has built a vast city of her own device from small slivers and splits of wood in a trailer next to the trailer in which she lives alone. She takes photographs of the tiny city and pins them up on the inside walls of the trailers. There is a man who wears a Cub Scout uniform he has tailored and sewn himself whenever he is at home in his cabin, complete with the woggle that gathers his neckerchief. There are two men who started their own religion and are attempting to recruit lucrative disciplage. There are men who were in wars and never escaped. There is a woman who eats only plants she gathers herself from the forest. There is a man who escaped from prison more than thirty years ago and changed his name and burned off his fingerprints on a stove and makes his living as a technical writer for manuals for household utilities. What is a hamlet? You could draw any number of circles trying to contain all the people who live within a mile or two of the Zigzag River, and you would end up leaving people out, not to mention all the other beings of all the other kinds who live in those areas and were not counted, either. Is a community a verb more than a noun? Doesn’t it change every day, really? So the entity we call a hamlet is reduced, or added to, hour by hour? Is a haml
et more accurately measured as a story than a number? Especially if we are focusing in particular on human beings—we would be foolish to say of Miss Moss, for example, that the words female and storeowner and tall and thirtyish and kindly and unmarried describe much of real substance about her, isn’t that so? A great deal of who she really is are stories we do not know, stories she may or may not share, stories perhaps even she does not know the meaning and shape of quite yet. People are stories, aren’t they? And their stories keep changing and opening and closing and braiding and weaving and stitching and slamming to a halt and finding new doors and windows through which to tell themselves, isn’t that so? Isn’t that what happens to you all the time? It used to be when you were little that other people told you stories about yourself and where you came from, but then you began to tell your own story, and you find that your story keeps changing in thrilling and painful ways, and it’s never in one place. Maybe each of us is a sort of village, with lots of different beings living together under one head of hair, around the river of your pulse, the crossroads of who you were and who you wish to be.
* * *
Spring arrived on the mountain in layers or bands; up high, at six thousand feet and above, spring might finally arrive inarguably in June, whereas down low, below a thousand feet, it starts as early as February, with crocuses and forsythia and daphne flowers and tree frogs and snowdrops and daffodils. Mid-mountain, where the Zigzag River flows, it probably starts the day that harlequin ducks arrive in the creeks, or the day you hear flycatcher birds singing, or the first time you see a bright shocking tanager all red and loud and orange and defiant against the snow. Ground squirrels and chipmunks emerge from their dozing dormancy. Bears emerge and stagger downhill for grass and insects; they start their annual eating binge with salad and appetizers, as Mr. Douglas says. Some warblers pause and eat and then move along, and some like the hermit warbler arrive and stay. Lots more frogs start singing, as does every sort of owl. Deer and elk antlers start growing. Newts start crossing the roads and trails in such numbers that you have to watch where you are walking or suddenly you are oppressing the four-fingered populace with your cruel and unconscious heel.
Me, personally, says Maria’s dad to Maria, it’s the first time you hear a thrush in the woods. That’s when spring begins. Now that might be along about late May, in a late winter, but after that, winter’s done. It just doesn’t have any gas left after that. It might lose its temper and drop a last tantrum of a snowstorm, but it can’t keep up its bad temper. You hear a thrush, you know that we’ll have a summer day eventually. Maybe just the one summer day, same as usual up here, but by god, we will have one. I hope. You need help up there?
No, sir, says Maria from the roof, where she is scraping moss.
Make sure of your footing, remember.
These are my magic sneakers, Dad.
Ah yes, says her dad. Indeed, they are. In about an hour, you’ll grow out of those sneakers, you know, and then they go up on the mantelpiece with old Joel Palmer’s shoes. I think we ought to build a shoe museum for the greatest shoes ever. Imagine the shoes we could get for the museum. There’s Jesus’s sandals and Gandhi’s sandals and Meher Baba’s sandals. What is it with spiritual visionaries and sandals? Mohammed wore sandals, too. Although Mandela wore sneakers, didn’t he? And old Dorothy Day too. Although she lived on the beach and probably wore boat slippers. Probably a lot of the great visionaries wore sneakers but their hagiographers thought sandals were cooler for the hagiographic paintings. I bet Jesus wore high-tops.
What’s hagiography?
It’s when someone cool is reduced to only being a saint. It’s like a polite insult. You need help up there?
No, sir, says Maria. I think I am done. Can we go get a milk shake now?
Sure. Listen, can I ask you a question?
Sure.
Is something bothering Dave? He seems grumpy lately, and when I ask him, I get a lot of no answers.
He seems a little … remote.
You guys still talking at night before bed?
Not as much. I miss that. I miss Dave. Can we get a milk shake now?
You can get one for each mom you have, how about that?
* * *
Martin’s first birthday was the first wide-open wild-blue unclouded balmy gentle warm everything-melting-at-once day of April, and he celebrated by dozing most of the day, a habit he had developed during the long winter; there had been many cold days when he had been out hunting and eating for all of four hours and sound asleep for the other twenty. But day by day now, he felt something stirring in him—not just more energy, and a hunter’s utilitarian pleasure at lovely newborn things to eat, but some gnawing curiosity he had never felt before. He found himself ranging farther and farther afield again, much as he had in the fall when searching for the right den, but he did not know what it was that he wanted.
His travels this time took him all the way around the mountain, far up into the ice fields, and far enough down the mountain that he explored orchards and tree farms for the first time, marveling at their unnatural geometry. He met and sometimes bristled at, and three times fought with, other male martens; he met and was interested in but did not further pursue the first female martens he had seen other than his mother and sister. He briefly saw and certainly clearly scented an animal that looked very much like a very large marten and might have been a fisher; he saw scrawny tousled bears tearing up rotten logs for grubs and gorging on anything green they could find in bulk. Twice he saw the enormous elk who had shoved casually through the huckleberry jungle under his den, although both times he and the elk were more than twenty miles from Martin’s home in the cottonwood tree.
There is much else to report about Martin’s first winter, but it is his birthday, so let’s celebrate the manner in which he has not only survived, as many marten kits do not, but flourished. Before he was a year old, he struck out on his own, established a territory, found and furbished a suitable dwelling, became a skilled and enterprising harvester of meat and fruit, explored a great deal of a tremendous wilderness, survived a number of attacks and battles, discovered the first rudiments of a fishing technique unique among his species, and later familiarized himself with the doings and dwellings of human animals sufficiently to satisfy his curiosity without endangering his life, became an accomplished and soon-to-be-legendary robber of nests in his endless search for the golden glory of fresh eggs, learned how to catch and eat snakes without being lashed by their whipping tails, and discovered what amounted to a secret village of easily accessible squirrels and chipmunks around the lodge, a food source he wisely tapped only when he was very hungry on the general theory that the less he was seen, the safer he was. He had also discovered that the chipmunks in particular had relatively short memories—if he took one every other day, they became cautious and skittish and increasingly hard to kill, but if he only visited once a month, sliding out of the canopy at dusk and along the wall of the outdoor swimming pool and into the drainpipes, he was assured of a fat careless chipmunk scrabbling for the last scraps of food spilled on the trails around the lodge. Indeed, for his birthday present, let us give him just such a gift, which he snares with a sudden lightning dash from the drainpipe and carries back up into the canopy to eat in peace.
39
DID I EVER TELL YOU ABOUT KUSHTAKA, the Otter Man, who saves kids from freezing to death in the woods? says Mr. Douglas to the counter where Miss Moss would be if she was not in the kitchen making soup.
Yes, you did, says her voice, winding around the doorway where people have written their phone numbers for many years; if you squint a little, you can see Mr. Robinson’s first phone number, written in 1939.
Did I?
Several times. A number of times. Perhaps twelve. Or twenty.
A consistent peccadillo of mine, he says, smiling. Among many others. An incalculable calculus, Ginny. Your move.
You move for me, says her voice. I am amidships the soup.
I
wouldn’t think of moving for you, he says, coming around the doorway with the phone numbers; he notices Mr. Robinson’s number with a pang. No one can do anything for you. That’s sort of the problem.
I have a problem? she says dangerously.
That’s not what I meant, he says. I mean that you don’t let me do anything for you, and I would very much like to do things with you. For you.
Garlic, she says.
He crushes a head of garlic in his fist and hands it to her. What’s the soup?
Miscellaneous general kitchen whatever vegetable. Deliveries are tomorrow.
Would you like to come for a ride on Edwin? He’s restless.
He is or you are?
It’s a yes-or-no question, Ginny. No need to get terse.
I’m awfully busy.
I see.
And Dave’s not due in for an hour.
Noted.
But yes.
Yes?
Yes.
Yes, yes?
Yes to going for a ride on Edwin.
He and I are honored. Back in a bit.
No no—I’ll come with you now. The soup can wait. God forbid you ride up on a horse and sweep me away.
Would that be so bad?
Yes.
Yes, yes?
Yes, no.
* * *
It had been a long winter for everyone and everything. Moon’s father had politely asked Moon’s mother to vacate the premises after something somewhere somewhen had happened that neither Moon’s dad nor his mother would explain to Moon. I think it has something to do with wandering affections, said Moon to Dave. My dad explained it without explaining it. He’s good at that. I think that’s why he gets paid a lot of money by his company. He explained around it, you know what I mean? My mom wasn’t coming home anyway for another three weeks, so it’s sort of a moot point, their separation. Can you be separated if you are already separated? Isn’t that a double negative, which inherently negates the proposition?
