Among the Lesser Gods

by Margo Catts

  I didn’t answer. I meant to, eventually, but before I did he spoke again.

  “Have you ever talked about it?”

  “I—” The truth took over. “Not really.”

  “That’s too bad,” he said.

  The words trailed along behind us. Leo angled toward the base of the ridge, dipping us back into the trees. We rode in silence, the horses’ footfalls muffled by the spongy pine bed.

  “Well, there’s the creek,” he said after a few minutes. “I think.” He stopped beside a rivulet that had worn a crevice for itself between the trees. “He wasn’t kidding about small.”

  “We go upstream?”

  “Yup.”

  He swung his horse’s head to the side and started forward. My horse followed. I looked at the line of his back, the curve of his hat brim hiding his neck, the easy droop of his shoulders, the swaying fan of his horse’s dark tail.

  “It started behind the garage,” I said.

  29

  We followed the rivulet as it snaked through the trees and pulled us uphill. The story came out as I remembered it, which turned out to be fairly disjointed. It had been a hot, windy afternoon in the Los Angeles foothills, and I’d been playing with a neighbor boy. I was ten; he was nine. Trying to start a fire had been my idea, and it had skittered away from us into the weeds between the garage and the tinder-dry hillside. We sprayed it with water, thought we’d put it out. Then we heard the sirens as we ate dinner later. We evacuated to the junior high gymnasium, where the wind thundered around the building as I slept against the wall with a scratchy blanket.

  Leo had a lot of questions, and it surprised me how many I couldn’t answer. My memory was pierced and tattered, like a blanket that had been handled too much.

  “Wait—so the whole time you’ve been owning this you weren’t even alone? What happened to that other kid?”

  “I don’t know. We moved. And he was little when it happened.”

  Leo twisted around in his saddle. “Elena, you were the same age.”

  “He was—”

  “Shh.” Leo held both hands up to me, palms forward, ten fingers extended, then moved his thumb back and forth. Ten, nine. Ten, nine. “You were both kids,” he said. He turned forward again and picked up his reins. “How long after you set it do you think it was before you heard about the fire?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, what time of day was it when you started it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who were the people who died?”

  “A mother and two little girls—a baby and a three-year-old. She’d been the school secretary. Everybody knew her.”

  “Oh, man.” A pause. “What about the dad? Where was he? What happened?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I’d never known. I’d never wanted to know. The story I’d imagined might be horrible, but I feared a truth that might be worse.

  With the questions, it took a long time to tell. More than once, we stopped talking for long stretches, and Leo would ride ahead without saying anything while I wrestled to pull what had really happened out of memory that had congealed years ago into one great black mass. We meandered in and out of the trees, seeing small clearings and wondering whether Leo’s friend had overstated his claim, then picked the story back up wherever I’d left it.

  We came to the story’s end at the rivulet’s source, a lip of rocks that diverted the little brook from a larger creek, wide enough for us to allow the horses to dip their heads and drink.

  “So that’s it, then,” Leo said, pushing his hat back from his face.

  I nodded.

  “And you’ve never done this. Told the whole story like this.”

  A single shake.

  “How’s it feel?”

  “I don’t know. Different. Strange. I don’t know if I’ve ever really put it in order like that before.”

  “Better?”

  I looked at his kind face, his boyish cheeks and wide blue eyes, the sunny dimple just about to appear. A nice face. I gave a thin smile. The logic on which I’d based my identity had just turned out to be really, really illogical, so I didn’t have a good answer.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  He nodded thoughtfully. “I get that,” he said. Then he pulled his horse’s head up and started forward again.

  “You know those trees on a cliff that get all blown one direction, so they grow on just one side?” I blurted to his back.

  The brim of his hat tilted up and down. “Sure.”

  “That’s what I feel like. Like I’ve grown one way my whole life and now we’re cutting off the only branch I’ve got.”

  He twisted around, bracing himself with one hand against the back of the saddle to squint at me. “You know those trees are like a hundred years old.”

  “It’s the same idea.”

  He turned forward again. Steered around a clump of rocks. Then, as he was tilting a little to the side to watch his horse step over the uneven ground, he said, “Maybe it’s more like being one of those bean seedlings in a cup in first grade. If it’s growing toward the window, just turn the damn cup around.”

  The creek found a path deep between boulders, and we climbed a little rise around them to see a meadow open in front of us. “Well, well,” Leo said. “Just like he said.”

  I stopped beside him. I didn’t want to move. White flowers speckled the grassy slope leading back down toward the creek. Yellow, red, and blue dotted the green carpet laid out in front of us. A hedge of blue mountain irises outlined what must have been the bank farther upstream. Pines marked the far end of the meadow, while aspens danced and sparkled along its edges. Probably a thousand feet above us, bare slopes, tawny and pale, reached high above timberline.

  A cow and calf, belly-deep in grass at the far end of the meadow, lifted their heads and turned their white faces toward us. After a few moments’ assessment, they dropped their heads back down and became part of the landscape again.

  “Wow,” I said. There really was nothing else. The world, in this instant, was more perfect than it had ever been.

  “Lunch for everybody,” Leo said, looking at me with a grin.

  He swung down from his saddle and held the pinto’s head while I did the same. In short order the horses were hobbled and released to graze, and the picnic food and blanket were produced from the saddlebags.

  “Food first or exploring?” he asked.

  “Be nice to stretch my legs.”

  He held out his hand. “Come on, then.”

  He took my hand and kept it as we walked. We found a nest of lady’s slipper, studied the fine lavender tracings in a white gentian, nearly missed some tiny pink flowers that neither of us knew and were almost too small to see. I allowed myself to become absorbed in studying flowers, and with a world of tiny complexity in front of me and the sun on my back, I felt my mind slowly, slowly start to settle.

  “I seem to keep stopping for blue things,” I said as I squatted by a mound of alpine forget-me-not. “Especially the bells.” A small butterfly touched the flowers below me, then fluttered on. Leo’s hand brushed a lock of hair off my shoulder. Something a nice person would do. For another nice person. I didn’t flinch away.

  “Let’s head into the shade and look for columbine,” I said.

  Leo took both my hands as I stood so that we faced each other.

  “I’m glad we talked,” he said. “Are you?”

  I saw genuine concern. He didn’t seem to be fishing or trying to tell me to feel glad. But in truth, I was. I actually was. Perhaps what had come upon me, so unfamiliar and at first uncomfortable, was possibility.

  “Feel better?” he said.

  Different, yes. Better? It was possible. I nodded.

  I felt pressure against my hands, pulling me toward him. Why not go along? A person who needs rescue is in no position to be suspicious of rescuers. Especially kind, nonintrusive rescuers with an easygoing sense of humor. So when he tilted hi
s head to kiss me, I didn’t make him come all the way on his own. Which turned out to be a good thing. He was tentative and shy, but when he pulled back from the kiss, it was with a smile.

  “Come on,” he said, releasing just one of my hands. “Let’s look for columbine.”

  We meandered at the edge of the trees, closer together now. We found pink columbine first, and he reached around my waist to pull me close as we bent to peer under a spruce sapling for it. Deeper in the shade, he put his hand on the back of my head to point out the blue, with its creamy center reaching toward us and its delicate spurs drooping away beneath, then turned my face back toward his to kiss again.

  We worked through a margin of trees that crowded between the open meadow and the point where the mountainside lifted up at an angle too steep to climb. Found tiny mushrooms behind a rock. Peered under an overhang for signs that it might be an empty bear den.

  “Hey, look,” I said, pointing to another shadowed opening in the rocky face. “Maybe that one’s big enough.”

  We walked closer and bent at the opening, peering into the darkness and waiting for our eyes to adjust, which must have happened for us both at the same time. Just as I jolted upright and opened my mouth to scream, Leo’s hand against my shoulder shoved me away. But not before I saw three things:

  A human skeleton.

  A broken rope, with one end dangling from an anchor sunk into the rock and the other tied around the wrists.

  A spill of fabric, dulled by time and weather, but still plainly calico—with flowers.

  30

  I threw up. At no point in my pregnancy had I thrown up yet, but for the first time now, I felt the pain of mothers and children everywhere, of lost children, of suffering children, of children hoped for and adored, of children unwanted and unloved and abandoned, of what it meant to have another life drawn out of the center of your own, and I spilled it all onto the cradle of pine.

  “Oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God,” I sobbed. It was a prayer and an accusation. Leo’s hand was on my back.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s okay.”

  I shook my head, still hanging it over my feet. “No, no, no, no, no.”

  Tuah. My father. My child. My ruined family. At the spinning center of it, somehow, were these bones and scraps of fiber.

  “We’ll go down and tell the sheriff. They’ll take care of everything. I’m sorry. It’s over. It’s okay.”

  “No!” I shrieked, twisting away and pulling myself upright.

  “Elena! It’s okay! Calm down!”

  “That’s Benencia! That’s Tuah’s daughter! My father’s sister!”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  I doubled over, feeling another wave of nausea. The gaping skull. The rope. Tuah had been wrong. How could anyone dare tell her so? Or let her imagine what I had just seen? The small comfort she’d held on to for forty years was gone. Only horror instead. And now, as I replayed the scene, I wasn’t sure the bottom half of the skeleton had been there at all.

  I staggered a couple of steps sideways and threw up again.

  “Elena! Are you okay? What are you talking about?”

  I tugged at the sleeve of the sweatshirt tied around my waist and wiped my mouth, backing away from the spot and gasping for breath. Leo grabbed my arm and dragged me out into the sunlight, then took my shoulders, hard, and shoved me down into the clean grass.

  “Sit here. I’m gonna get you some water.”

  I nodded, then dropped my head, trapping it between my knees and crossing my arms over it. I took deep breaths through my mouth to keep the nausea down, and by the time Leo returned the breaths had turned to sobs. He sat beside me and handed me the water bottle, then wrapped his arms around my shoulders and pulled me against him.

  “What’s going on?” he said to the top of my head.

  I had only one clear thought: we had to hide it. No one else would ever find anything, and Tuah would never know the real end of her decision to let Benencia go, on a fall day, in her calico dress with tiny flowers. That, at least, was something I could do. I straightened and pulled away to look him full in the face. “You can’t tell anyone.” I struggled to catch the breath to speak. “You have to—promise. You can’t t-tell anyone. No one can ever know!”

  “You know I can’t promise that. We can’t just leave that—there.”

  “We’ll b-bury her ourselves!”

  “Elena.” He was firm, paternal. “You have got to tell me what’s going on.”

  My fingers and face tingled. I had to slow down and breathe. Look at something besides the insides of my eyelids and the picture etched there. I blinked at a clump of blue harebell that leaned away from my feet. Across the meadow were the horses, heads down exactly as they had been before any of this happened. White flower clusters of wild onion bobbed their heads above the grass. The cow and calf were gone. I think. I couldn’t be sure at this distance, as watery as my eyes were. I rubbed them with the heels of my hands. Behind me, woods and—

  I got up and walked away, rinsed my mouth, then stayed doubled over my knees until my head stopped spinning. In time, my breathing slowed. I took a couple of sips of water and went back to Leo, turning to face him as I sat.

  “Look,” I said. “Your brother. How did you feel—how did your parents feel when he disappeared—after the waffle?”

  He shook his head. “Awful, of course. Frantic. Helpless.”

  I nodded. Breathed. “Tuah had a daughter. Older than my father. She was—slow. When she was a just a girl—twelve or thirteen—she wandered off one day and disappeared. Up here—” I lifted my chin to take in the expanse of mountains and sky. “Forty years ago. She was never found. That’s why Tuah still lives up here.”

  I saw Leo’s Adam’s apple bob. A breeze caught a piece of hair that tickled my cheek. I brushed it away, then locked my hands together again under my thighs.

  “She still thinks she might come back?” he asked quietly.

  I shook my head. “No. But remembering living here together is all she has. She thinks Benencia got lost and hid somewhere because she was scared. It was fall. Tuah thinks she fell asleep somewhere in the cold, died, that animals got the body, and that’s why she was never found. That she died peacefully.”

  “That doesn’t seem very likely, does it?” he said quietly.

  In the face of the unbearable unknown, how do we decide what to cling to? Tuah had chosen the most comforting possibility and kept on living. I had chosen the least and withdrawn.

  I felt a returning tingle of nausea and took a deep breath to push it down. I shook my head. “No. I guess it doesn’t.” I looked across the grass. The brown horse, agreeing with me, shook its head as well, took a step, and kept grazing. “But it’s what she’s made herself believe. It’s what she needs to believe.”

  He looked down and nodded. I put a hand on his arm.

  “Do you see now why she can never know about this? It would kill her. I asked her a while back whether somebody might’ve done something, but she wouldn’t hear it. She said she knew everybody too well and she knew they never would. But I think …” I looked uphill to where the cow and calf had been. “Now I think it was because she couldn’t bear to think about anything so awful.”

  “Sure.” Leo put his hands to the sides of his face and rubbed. He glanced over his shoulder into the trees, then looked back toward me. “What makes you think it’s her?”

  “Tuah said she was wearing blue calico with pink flowers on the day she left.”

  “Oh.” He looked down. “Oh,” he repeated. Then he looked up at me, brows dug together. “The story—that’s why you asked me about the ghost story.”

  I nodded.

  “It’s your family.” He looked away. I imagined him running the story props through his memory. The lost girl. The ghost dog. The old miner who killed them. He rolled his lips together. “And it turns out a lot of it’s true,” he added. He looked back up at me. “Elena, we have to tell. This w
as a crime. They have to find out who did it.”

  “Are you insane? It was half a century ago. Everybody’s dead and gone. Whatever happened”—frayed edges of rope dragged between my thoughts—“it’s over now. It’s been over for a long time.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think so. This isn’t our decision. This is the sheriff’s business.”

  “Why? Why does he ever have to know? We could bury her here.”

  “What if you’re wrong? What if it isn’t her? What if there’s another family somewhere that wants to know?”

  “That wants to know this?” I waved one arm behind myself toward the woods, toward the— “No one wants to know this! It’s better to never know!”

  “Why do you have the right to make that decision? For anybody? Or even for Tuah?”

  “Are you out of your mind?”

  “Look—” He put both hands up, palms toward me. “We’re both pretty shook up. Let’s just let it be for now. Go home. Take some time. We’ll talk about it later.”

  His proposal was eminently reasonable. I knew it. But I didn’t like it.

  *

  We made the entire ride back down in silence. Leo glanced back at me often, but we had nothing left to say. We approached the cabin from its blind side, and after our feet were on the ground he put his hands on my shoulders and kissed me on the forehead, then said he’d find me at the Koffords’ when he was back in town in a few days. Promised he wouldn’t tell anyone, anyone before we talked again. Then he took the pinto’s reins in his hand, swung up onto the brown, and rode away.

  “You’re back early,” Tuah said brightly as I came into the cabin. She knelt in front of the stove, scooping ash out of its belly into a bucket. Her tone suggested she was perfectly happy at the chore.

  “One of the horses might be going lame,” I said. I tried to avoid her eyes, but I could tell my voice sounded strange. “And I’m thinking I should go down tonight, instead of in the morning. Make sure I get to the Koffords’ on time. Paul has to get going early after taking all this time off.”

  “Really.” She peered at me. “But you’re staying for dinner.”