What Remains of Her

by Eric Rickstad

  A customer ambled over from the aisle of awls and mauls. Malcolm LeFranc. A steer of a man. Mustachioed Frenchman. A tree cutter among generations of tree cutters. On the counter, he set a Timber Hookaroon, then brought out a wad of cash with fingers greased black.

  “If you’re talking about Jonah,” he said, “he’s got more to worry about than credit. I told him just earlier when I was up near his cabin that we’re going to be logging up there in the Gore. Come spring. It’s foregone. Right up to his old shack. And right on through it. That’s private forest. He’s squatting. Has been all along. It didn’t matter any when we didn’t want the trees for money. It matters now that we do. And I can tell you, Jonah, he’s got his back reared and teeth bared. He won’t go easy. That man is going to go the hard way.”

  Ed rang up LeFranc and counted his change.

  “It’s the act of building not what’s built,” Baines said. “That’s why Jonah wanted supplies.”

  LeFranc rolled his eyes and exited the store.

  “Makes an old man feel vital,” Ed carried on. “Jonah’s got nothing of import to do with his days.” Import? Who did anything of real import with their days, and where did Ed get such words? Lucinda wondered if Ed, single and forty, sat around at night trying to figure out where he could shoehorn his dictionary words into everyday conversation, or if the words just flew into his brain and out his mouth all on their own, in the moment. Tracking inventory and stocking shelves, busting out walls to make a coffee nook, where was the import in that? It all seemed a distraction from a life of import or at least the life she’d once imagined for herself, so many years ago.

  Her girlhood dream to escape Ivers and pursue archaeology or paleontology had disappeared with Sally and— Hell. She couldn’t even claim her dream had vanished with Sally. Who could say if she and Sally would have even remained friends. Many girlfriends in grade school became strangers, if not nemeses, by junior high. Lucinda’s dreams may well have gone by the wayside even if nothing had ever happened to Sally and the two girls had remained friends. One thing was certain: the natural course of their lives had been stolen from Sally and Lucinda. The disappearance had rendered it impossible for Lucinda to live the life she’d been meant to live. For years, Lucinda had clung to her friend’s memory, heard her friend’s voice and laughter, spoken to her, not just in her head, but aloud. She’d shared her secrets with Sally as if Sally were still here, because it felt as if she were still here.

  Yet, on her darkest days, as Lucinda entered the hormonal perdition of adolescence, Lucinda had resented Sally, who was always spoken of in a reverent tone, as if she’d never disobeyed her parents to explore the Big Woods, urged Lucinda to join her, or promised Lucinda to keep secrets, lies. In her most immature hours, Lucinda had wished she, Lucinda, had been the one who had disappeared, thinking: Sally’s probably enjoying her perfect self wherever she is.

  In her early twenties Lucinda had wondered if she’d used Sally’s disappearance, and hope for her return, as an excuse not to leave town. She’d felt as stuck as George Bailey in her favorite old movie, It’s a Wonderful Life. Except Lucinda had no guardian angel and no inclination to jump off a bridge. And, really, she was not stuck at all.

  She’d visited New York City in eighth grade for a 4-H trip to see dinosaur skeletons at the American Museum of Natural History and found, instead of a land of tall glinting buildings of silvery promise, one of gray, drab streets, narrow and sunless, the air stinking of sewage and sweat, a humid mealy air that stuck in her windpipe as flocks of people shouldered past with manic hurriedness. It was a city where all things were possible, including men who lay on steam grates, faces sooted with cab exhaust as they mumbled to the people who stepped over them.

  The trip had caused her to appreciate home, faces she knew. Faces that knew her. As she’d taken on more responsibility at the Grain & Feed, she’d told herself there was worth in helping those she knew with what they needed to get their jobs done and that if she left, she’d miss it here. True. What was also true was that she’d not dared pursue a dream Sally could not live. She’d told herself exploring for Algonquin and Revolutionary War artifacts in the nearby fields and riverbeds was enough to sate her, rationalized that if she’d not pursued her dream when younger perhaps there’d been a reason for her staying not yet made clear. A purpose. Import.

  This reasoning comforted her.

  Until a few years ago.

  She’d been on one of her Sunday hikes, bushwhacking on the other side of Strange Mountain in search of stone cellars rumored to be of Celtic origin, when she’d seen it: white against the dark earth. She’d gone to her knees and picked at the soil around it, brushed it away to reveal bone. Cupped like a bowl. The crown of a cranium. A child’s skull. A slender shaft of bone too. Straight as an iron rod. Yet delicate. Frail. She’d been certain of what she’d found. Sally.

  She’d returned with her father, who’d called the state police to meet at the site.

  The bones proved human. A child’s. A male child’s. At least two hundred years old. Likely Native American. Abenaki. Quite a find, though not the find she’d believed it to be. In that moment of discovery, however, Lucinda had regretted each ill thought she’d ever had toward Sally, and wished it had been Sally’s remains. At least then, the days of not knowing would be over.

  “Old women can garden,” Baines prattled now. “Cluck their tongues at one another. A man needs to keep doing in his old age, build, like Jonah does, to feel worth a damn.”

  “You men, horseshit. And you’ll never see me garden or cluck.”

  With a new hot dog dressed with red relish, Baines bit down as he ambled toward the door and tipped his half dog at Lucinda as though making a point, though he had no point to make, just relish dribbling down his wrist.

  He opened the door.

  The cowbell clanked overhead.

  “You think I was too harsh on him?” Lucinda said, the answer clear as spring water.

  “He was riled.”

  “You don’t think he’d do something?” Lucinda said, fearing for Jonah what she’d always feared, that he’d end things one day. Just give in. For years she’d worried that Sally and Mrs. B., their remains, would be found. And with that discovery, Jonah would have no reason then to continue a life without . . . import.

  “Jonah wouldn’t do anything to you. You’re a daughter to him, a—”

  “I don’t mean he’d do something to me, but to himself or to, I don’t know. Someone. He was so angry. If he ever went and did something . . . because of me—”

  “If Jonah does something, that’s on him. That’s a fact.”

  “I could have continued his credit. That’s a fact.”

  “World’s just full of useless facts,” Baines said as he exited the store.

  Lucinda opened the cash register drawer. She took out the envelope and tucked it into her jeans pocket, wedged it next to the fragment of soapstone whose edges had been worn down by her worrying fingers over the past twenty-five years.

  No

  Jonah fetched his .30-.30 carbine rifle from the corner of the cabin and levered its action. He worried his thumb over the hammer, worn so smooth he needed to be mindful not to let it slip and fall, fire the rifle accidentally.

  From a shelf above the woodstove, he took an oil can and a hank of flannel shirt, ambled onto the porch where he sat with the carbine across his lap.

  The afternoon had fallen cold. The season had turned and there wasn’t any turning it back.

  Jonah curled his palm to the rifle barrel, feeling its length as a finish carpenter feels a hand-turned spindle for imperfections. Cold. Always cold. Even in the hot guts of summer. That steel. He smoothed his palm over the walnut stock, wood grain like lines of a topographic map.

  He’d killed a lot of deer with the rifle, but sensed this year’s deer would be his last. This winter would be his last. If Lucinda could turn on him, what was left?

  Nothing.

  He ran the oil
ed rag over the carbine’s receiver, worked it inside the action, inspecting the black. With time, things grew only dirtier.

  How easy it would be to put the rifle muzzle to his forehead and use a stick to pull the trigger.

  How many times he’d imagined it.

  Legions.

  Each day’s urge stronger than the previous day’s urge, for going on ten thousand days.

  Yet he couldn’t.

  Didn’t dare.

  He got up and drank spring water percolating from a nearby ledge. At his ramshackle smokehouse, he jiggled a screwdriver set in the broken handle, opened the door, and took stock: a lone rack of jerked hare meat. He brushed away mouse droppings and grabbed a chunk of hare and sucked on it.

  He took up the rifle and sneaked under the hemlocks’ dark canopy, searching the woods for a flick of a white tail, twitch of an ear, the horizontal animal darkness among the vertical tree world.

  Jonah knelt at a track in the muck, the dewclaws set deep, toes splayed. A good buck. He’d seen it three months ago, in the green summer fields, antlers in velvet. Others had seen it; the young men tooling back roads in pickup trucks. They’d come up here soon, scouting for the buck they knew would head into the beeches for mast. If Jonah had his way, the deer would be jerky by then.

  Jonah’s knees clicked as he rose and picked his way down along the brook, the brook’s music masking his noise.

  He left the brook to work the edge where the spruce met beeches, skirted above a mess of blackberry cane, and leaned against a beech trunk shattered by lightning.

  He watched the blackberry cane, motionless. His mouth grew dry. His feet cold. The winter wind watered his eyes.

  Down below, in beech whips, a flick of motion. He squinted. Blackberry cane leaned in the wind.

  Another flick.

  A deer, bedded down? He’d shot more than one deer in its bed. But he couldn’t make it out clearly.

  His eyes were spent. Like the rest of him. Buck or doe, he’d shoot it. One shot. He couldn’t afford anyone to hear more than one shot before the season started. He didn’t need a game warden up here. He didn’t need anyone up here.

  Flick.

  He squinted.

  Whatever it was, it was in the thicket, hard to sneak a shot in there. He moved his head the slightest to gain a new angle. Flick. Deer. Or coyote? He’d eaten coyote. He’d eat it again.

  He shouldered the .30-.30, rested his elbow on his knee. He pressed his cheek to the stock and eyed down the barrel, took an easy, long breath. Let it out.

  He set his thumb on the hammer. His heart beat. His eye caught movement. Low to the ground. His finger curled against the trigger.

  Flick.

  Damn if he could tell what it was. Meat, that much he knew. He worked the hammer back.

  His thumb slipped on the worn hammer. The hammer fell.

  The rifle bucked. Roared.

  His ears rang and the sweet biting odor of cordite filled his nostrils.

  Nothing moved.

  He scrambled down the ridge, his hip aching.

  At a blowdown, he looked around. He could see nothing.

  Where had it—

  He saw.

  Beneath the sprawling nest of branches and vines.

  A pit.

  Like the one from so many years ago.

  Was it the same pit?

  No, he was too far up in the Gore for it to be. Wasn’t he?

  Whatever he’d shot was at the bottom of the pit.

  His heart drummed as he pushed back the fallen limbs and creeping vines. Thorns clawed at his hands as if to protect what was down there.

  He peered into the pit, and reeled backward.

  No.

  He looked up through the crowns of the trees high above where turkey vultures carved an arc in the sky.

  He looked back down.

  It was still there.

  She was.

  Impossibly.

  A child.

  A girl.

  A naked, bloodied, dead girl.

  What Have I Done?

  What have I done? Jonah thought as he leaned against a tree, panting.

  He’d broken the simplest of rules: Never aim a rifle at a target of which you are unsure.

  And now this.

  This . . . girl.

  How could such a young child have found her way up here? And why? Nothing good drove her here, a voice said. Not like this. Naked and torn.

  He looked at the girl, the same size and age as Sally had been when she’d gone missing. Had Sally ended up in the woods somewhere up here, she and her mother? Had they been chased to such a place? Were they still out here, fallen into a pit like this, or into an old mine shaft? Or had they been taken to some faraway place? Were they still being kept somewhere, alive, wondering why they had not been found? Or had their end come swiftly? All his years of searching, even to this day, had led to nothing.

  He paced around the edge of the pit.

  He’d killed the girl.

  Shot her.

  What was he going to do? How would he explain why he was even in the woods with a deer rifle when it wasn’t deer season for another week?

  He knelt at the pit, head pounding as he imagined her parents when they heard what Jonah had done to her, to their lives.

  He could not bear it.

  He sat against a tree with the rifle, ejected the empty shell, leaving the hammer cocked. A live round ready to fire. He wedged the rifle between his knees, pointed the muzzle at his face, grabbed a stick, and placed it against the trigger.

  Closed his eyes.

  What was that?

  A whimper. Soft and low. A soft cry, of the kind he’d heard long ago, in a different life. In Sally’s bedroom, that last night.

  He eased the rifle’s hammer down, set the rifle aside.

  He peered over the edge of the pit.

  The girl stirred. Jonah saw now where his bullet had struck a sapling near the lip of the pit. He’d not shot the girl; though knowing this did nothing to allay his shame for firing the rifle.

  The girl had been injured some other way. Her left thigh was a knot of raised, bruised flesh, her bare back livid with welts.

  His back tensed with the memory of such meanness exacted against the flesh.

  Who did such a thing? Too many people. He knew.

  Another thought, just as terrible, struck him.

  “Hey,” he whispered. “Hey.”

  He had to get her out of the cold and snow, or she surely would die out here.

  The girl remained still and soundless, cowered like a tiny forest creature, alert to the predator’s presence. Her face was turned to the side, and her hair, cut ragged, as if with a piece of broken glass, draped in her eyes.

  “Hey,” Jonah said. He’d not been so near a girl since Lucinda had taken him to a pit just like this. Perhaps it was the same pit. He could not be sure.

  He lowered himself into the pit, its edge coming to his chest. The girl cowered into the corner.

  He touched her shoulder gently with his fingertips. She tensed and hissed at him. Her skin was cold, corpse gray. He needed to get her inside. Now. Or she’d die. She might die anyway, if hypothermia had set in.

  “It’s okay,” he whispered.

  The girl coughed, a sound like seeds shaken in a dried gourd. Her rib bones were set in stark relief beneath her blue skin. She rolled over, nakedness revealed fully to him.

  He looked away, embarrassed, and stared up to see vultures scribing circles in the sky.

  He slung off his coat and covered her.

  She wailed and cradled her head with her arms to expose a thatchwork of lacerations on her wrists.

  “Okay,” he said and moved the jacket to lay it gently on her shoulders.

  The girl cried out with pain.

  Jonah pulled the jacket collar up round her neck. “Can you get up?”

  She stayed put, face hidden in her arms.

  “Okay. Here,” Jonah said. He slipped
his hands under her arms to lift her. She wailed.

  He didn’t want to hurt her or scare her more than she already was, but he had to get her out of this pit.

  Okay.

  With his palm, he rubbed gentle circles between her shoulder blades—Sally had liked that—then scooped his hands under her.

  She kicked, beat her balled fists at his face. He took the blows, his nose bloodied.

  “Easy,” he said, then counted three and stood with her. His legs buckled and he bit his tongue against a pain that set his hips on fire. He lifted her up and laid her on the ground outside the pit.

  She popped up and, despite her wounds and poor state, started to flee.

  With a groan and complaint of joints, he climbed out of the pit and chased after her.

  She tripped and fell and he scooped her up and set her down before him, holding her shoulders gently, her face hidden behind her ratty hair.

  “Don’t run. I’m here to help you,” he said. “Understand. You will die out here alone. I’ll take you inside. Warm you. Feed you. You run and I can’t find you, you’ll die. You will die without me.”

  The girl made no sound or movement, but she did not try to run.

  Jonah squatted in front of her. “Climb on my back,” he said, trying to keep his voice calm and soft.

  He looked back at her, over his shoulder. “Train’s leaving. I got warm food at home and a fire and blankets.”

  She said nothing, still would not look at him.

  “Do you want to die out here? Is that it?” he snapped. He’d not meant to be so harsh, had meant it as playful, a tone Sally understood as teasing.

  Her hair fell to the side as she glared at him.

  Those eyes.

  He—

  The girl was climbing onto his back, hooking her arms about his neck as she held fast.

  He rose, unstable; planted his feet wide.

  Those eyes.

  He took a step.

  He knew those eyes.

  And another step.

  They were Sally’s eyes.

  Now You See Her