by Mary Emerick
He would think that, I knew. Sometimes late at night, when there was nothing but rain and darkness, my father would hold forth to his captive audience. Bear and salmon, salmon and trees, he lectured. A circle of life and death. Take too many of one out of the equation and the circle is broken. We have to be careful, become architects of this world we are given, he would say. Listening, I had been unsure. This country seemed so big, sprawling out like an outstretched hand. How could we make a dent in it? But then I would see the bear skins draped over the boat and know that it was possible.
“Roy told me and Ernie that things were changing, faster than we could even measure. Thunderstorms, when we’d never even seen lightning here in Southeast before. The glacier on Mount Snowy, getting smaller every year. Now the trees. A man can either shove his head in the sand or make a stand, he said to us. You know what kind of man I am, he told us.”
Sam picked up a boot and studied it. “Nothing ever dries out here,” he said. He did not meet my gaze. “There were a pair of timber cruisers in the bay, kids. From what Roy told me after, a bear had been in the area. They got spooked and shot. Not a kill shot. You know what happens with that.”
Suddenly cold, I shuffled closer to the fire. “You can’t leave a wounded bear out there. It lies in wait for you. Is that what happened? Did he stumble onto the bear without knowing?”
Sam said, “He told me to stay back at the lodge. I think he knew there would be trouble. But after he left, Althea asked me to follow him in the skiff. She made me promise. I remember it was the most beautiful day. The way the sun danced on the waves.”
It seemed to me that Sam paused a little too long. Then he said, “I decided to wait for Roy at the boat. I didn’t know about the bear yet. I had to stay with the boat. Tide was falling. You know how quick it falls in that shallow bay.”
I nodded. Even with a good Indian anchor, things sometimes went wrong. Then someone had to swim for it or wait for the tide to turn. It was possible.
“But you were always with him, though,” I said.
Sam looked away. “Not that time. Not when it counted.”
The wood was wet and smoke stung my eyes. I drew a deep breath.
“What happened after that?”
“He was in the hospital for a while. There were surgeries. He had to learn to walk again, as much as he can walk. Work the chair. See through one eye. Finally they let him out, had to, no health insurance in the bear hunting business. But things changed after that. Business dropped off. Way off. News got around. Bookings were cancelled. The booking guy in Anchorage quit. Nobody wanted to go hunting with him, people said he was unsafe. I told you he kind of operated on a shoestring anyway. Now it got worse. The other guides talked it up; they loved it. Less competition for them. They never liked him anyway; he never shared information with them, never helped anyone out. Roy couldn’t pay me anymore, but I stuck around. Just for a year, I thought. Just to make sure they would be okay.”
I should have come sooner. I did not realize I had whispered those words aloud. They were almost lost in the crackle of the fire, but Sam heard. He leaned in so close that our foreheads almost touched. I was surrounded by the scent of him. There was the acrid tang of his wool coat, washed a million times but saturated forever with the reek of fish, the clean scent of freshly cut spruce, wood smoke that coated his hair.
I swam in his scent like a salmon up a river, closing my eyes.
“Winnie,” Sam said. “Look at me.” He tipped up my chin with two fingers and looked right at me so intently that it felt like he could see all the way down inside to where everything simmered: fear, regret, sorrow.
“You did nothing wrong,” he said. “Believe me?”
I whispered, “Did they ever talk about me?”
“Fire’s dying,” Sam said. He dropped his hand. “It’s not worth the fight to keep it alive, is it? You know that they kept things on the surface with me. Once Roy told me that I had to quit asking about you. You would come back when you had found whatever it was you were looking for. I think they were just letting you go, Winnie. Isn’t that what you wanted?”
I had wanted more than that. I wanted some kind of magic, like the kind in my mother’s stories, the kind where good always triumphed over evil in the end, a hero realizing the error of his ways, the poison draining out, the curse lifted. I wanted them to grow entwined like trees, not two people on either side of a ragged, angry line. I had wanted the impossible.
Sam gave up on his boots and pulled them on, wincing as the water sloshing inside met his feet. “It just about killed us to see him out there on the dock, day after day. He kept trying to walk more than a few steps without the cane, without the chair. He was determined to get back to the way he was, no matter what the doctors had told him. He kept falling, clawing his way back up, over and over, until we got damn sick of it, but what could we do? He never would listen, wouldn’t accept our help. Not a damn cripple, he would snap. Then one day he just stopped. He had enough of the fight, I guess.”
The fire sizzled with each drop of rain that reached it. Fires here provided more smoke than heat, the heartwood steeped in water that had fallen as rain or percolated in from fog. Here water and wood were not two separate things, but one single entity, impossible to separate.
“Waiting,” Sam went on, even though I had not spoken. “Waiting for bookings that never came. And every day seeing the helicopters bring cruisers in, bay by bay. It broke his heart.”
I bowed my head, an invisible weight settling on my shoulders. The timber sales must have been a conquering flag run up a pole, a reminder of the real world that my father had tried to shut out with his barricades and guns and bad temper. I had always sensed the danger of the rest of the world, hovering out there somewhere past the points of our bay, past the mountains, past everything I knew and could see. Now it was here.
“They are all going to be clear cut, all these bays, starting next summer. Trees cut, sent to Japan.”
A light scatter of rain pitted the tarp. Long skirts of cloud brushed the mountains, shutting out the way we had come and the miles we still had to go. It felt lonesome here, cupped in the palm of this valley, as if we were the only three people left in the world.
The timber sales, the accident, my mother’s disappearance: it was all adding up to the one moment that my father had made a decision that he could not reverse. The ladder had disintegrated into a few rotten boards, not enough for someone to pull themselves out of the grip of the ocean. Even someone who changed his mind and tried. Especially not someone with beach stones in his pockets and an even heavier weight in his heart.
The tarp lifted under the moan of the wind. Now rain hit it like gunshots.
The memory of my mother’s letter burned inside me. What my father had asked her to do I could not keep to myself. “I thought it might have been just one of her stories. You know how she liked to tell stories. I thought she might be trying to get me to come back. I thought maybe he wasn’t as desperate as she made it sound.”
“I figured that was what he was after,” Sam said. “Roy Hudson wasn’t a man who gave up easily. When the fight went out of him, he was as good as gone already.”
“Did he ever ask you the same thing he asked her?”
“No. He wouldn’t have. I wasn’t someone he would have turned to for that. I knew something was passing between them, but to be honest, I didn’t want to be part of it.”
He guessed the question I did not want to ask.
“And I couldn’t have done it, either, even though it tore me up to see him that way. It’s a fact, I thought sometimes it would be better if he was to stop breathing in the night, but no, I would never have helped him do it. Would you have done the same?”
My father on the beach last night, caught hard between a whiskey bottle and the sea. The silhouette of his chair on the dock, a chair he would always need. Never again to feel the wind in his hair as he piloted a boat in clean carving turns through the ocean, dodging
driftwood and rocks. Never again to be the star of the show.
The fire sang with each leap of the flames. “No,” I said finally. I pictured myself with cold aluminum under my fingers. The ocean, waiting. My mind shrank back from the final push. “Nothing he said could have made me come close.”
I had always thought of my father as the bravest man alive. He threw himself into life without reservation. “I’ve got this,” he would say when facing a sea white with foam or a sulky client who couldn’t shoot straight. There was no room for doubt in my father’s mind. Despite all this, it had taken him months to summon up the courage to end his life. Only now could I see that his bravery might have been a mask covering up secret fear.
“We understand each other, then,” Sam said. “I thought we might. None of you really knew me back then, or wanted to know me. I had a purpose just like the boats did. Just like the guns did. Am I right?”
A protest died on my lips. Though I had dreamed about Sam most nights, the Sam I had created in my head was someone braver and stronger. He had been someone without a fault line, someone who would take me away from my hiding place. An escape route. The Sam I saw now was nothing like that imaginary man.
But still. There had been that moment when he looked at me as if he knew everything about me that there was to know.
“Now that Roy’s gone, after this, after we find her, I thought I might like a little cabin somewhere. Maybe there’s something dirt cheap for sale with a river because that makes for the best sleeping. Maybe it would be in the Rocky Mountains. Montana. Idaho. Kick around the Rock Creek country where it’s not so damn wet all the time.”
Sam fiddled with the fire, pushing the embers closer together with a stick. “You should see it there, Winnie. In the fall the leaves on the trees turn yellow as your hair. When the wind blows it’s the prettiest sight you’ve ever seen.”
Without looking at me, speaking so softly I had to lean close to hear, he said, “Thought maybe you might want to go there with me.”
Had he really said those words or had I imagined it? But there he was, looking intently at me, waiting for me to answer.
I stared down at my boots, suddenly shy.
It had always seemed to me that nothing or no one person would ever stick to Sam. My father had teased him about the bear hunters’ wives. Many of them had hung onto Sam’s arm just a little too long when being helped from the boat, had casually wandered down to the dock, cocktail in hand, to “help” him with a chore. They sauntered down to the boathouse and threw pebbles at his window, giggling. “Sam!” they called in city voices. “Come out and play!”
He treated them all the same though, with a studied indifference, escaping from them as soon as he could, one light in his room burning half the night. “Sam, he’s afraid of women,” my father had hooted, raising a glass in a toast. He then lowered his voice. “Maybe he plays for another team.” The wives tittered, clinking their glasses to his. Each one, I had thought, secretly believed she would be the one to make him crack. Failing that, they turned to my father, a much more receptive source.
“Why me?” I asked now, thinking of all of those possible women. “Why not someone else?”
“Winnie,” Sam said. His voice was still low; I had to strain to hear. “Don’t you know by now? I was waiting for you to really see me.”
I froze. It seemed to me as if everything paused too. Even the wind that had been worrying the tips of the bushes stilled to a whisper. The rain that had been dripping over the side of the tarp suddenly stopped. The whole world seemed to wait.
“Listen,” Sam said, “you’re different than all of the others. You’re not hard yet. Know what I mean?”
He saw that I didn’t. “Other women, they’ve got this hard shell over them. It’s like that candle wax on the lodge table, remember how it built up? Took a hell of a job to chip it off? Those women, you can’t chip away at them to see who they really are. They’ve hardened over, a guy doesn’t have a chance. You’re not like that yet.”
I remembered the candles flickering in the dark night, my father sitting up late with the bear hunters’ wives, the men passed out long before, my mother a silent storm cloud upstairs. The voices, low, teasing, too low for me to understand. His unsteady steps on the stairs, finally, late, too late for normal people. The wives’ footfalls, reluctant and slow, down to where their forgotten husbands snored.
“Always wondered what went on in the big house at night,” Sam said. “All those candles, it took hours for them to burn down. What were you all doing up there?”
Sam threw the stick in the fire and it blazed up briefly. We both watched it crumble into ash. I thought of what story my mother and I could make up about this. What if you have loved someone since you were fifteen? What if just being near him makes fog roll around in your head? What do you do then?
Before I could answer, he said, “Listen to me. The wilderness must be making me crazy. Forget what I said, all right?”
Without looking at me, he got up and went over to where his sleeping bag was laid out. Come back, I wanted to say, but I didn’t. The seconds ticked by and the moment was lost.
I sat next to the fire, its heat not enough to warm me. My body felt too small to contain the heart within. It felt swollen past its normal size, bouncing around in there with nothing to contain it. I thought that this might have been what my mother felt in the Hell and Gone, cigarette smoke over the day-drinking fishermen and over her like a second skin, the smell of sweat, fish, and desperation a bubbling stew she could almost taste. I could see it as if I had been there that day. My father striding in with his mind on a pint, slapping hands with the bar line-up.
The bartender would have rung the brass bell: my father, buying the house a round. Cheers going up and down the bar. She lifted her head to see a sparkplug of a man, only a head higher than herself, the rain dripping off his dark hair and beard, his black eyes snapping with life. He moved through the dust and lost dreams of the bar with a kind of grace that she only imagined could exist. He reached for her hand.
Standing there, she felt as though she had swallowed the sun.
Birdman crept out to join me with a flask and a rifle, pulling his hood over his face against the rain. Grateful for his silence, I reached deep in my pockets for warmth. The paper I had hidden there was sodden now. Of course, not a client’s wife, I realized. A client’s wife would have long ago destroyed this secret souvenir or taken it with her. Someone had written this to my mother.
I ran through a list in my head. Not Ernie; he often brought his Russian mail-order wife along with him on his trips. Equally stout, apple-cheeked, and indistinguishable in their Helly Hansens, they were inseparable. There were the clients, but they blew through in ten-day spans, and if they left gifts, they were mostly for my father; my mother and I just servants acknowledged only for the hearty meals we provided before each trip. We blended into the paneling, merely women who could not possibly understand the thrill of hunting. Women who did not look like the wives with their useless suede boots and tightly curled hair. Women who did not resemble the platinum blondes with naked skin as smooth as paint in the men’s magazines they snuck onboard the boat.
There had been assistant guides, several of them, lasting only for short spans. There had been fierce arguments out by the dock, each guide storming off onto a floatplane announcing that he would return only when hell froze over and he would make sure that any prospective applicants in town knew not to come either. My mother and I watched this from the sidelines, knowing not to grow accustomed to any of the men who came and went with the regularity of the seasons.
Who else had there been? Our world was so small.
There was only one other person it could have been.
Althea, Roy, and Dean. They both were in love with her, but she chose Roy.
I drew in my breath.
“What is it?” Birdman asked, already taking the rifle off his shoulder.
Dean. It had to be. Who else
could it be?
I looked at Birdman’s concerned face, a moon above his dark clothes.
He flew like he didn’t care if he made it back. My uncle had been in love with my mother. Had she loved him back? Had my father known?
All along I believed that my mother and I had no secrets. We shared everything—clothes and the halves of our sandwiches and the things that made us happy: a spray of blueberries, the fresh wash of sunlight through clouds. Even the things that made us afraid, like the deep rip current that lurked near the Trader Islands, forcing us to back paddle in our kayaks. The black-and-white slice of orcas through the water. The threat of a tsunami, born of an earthquake far out to sea, rolling in without warning. Now I realized that I had known only what was on the surface, the things easily seen.
I handed Birdman the note, explaining where I had found it and who I thought it was from. He clicked on his headlamp and squinted at it, his glasses covered in steam. “What does this mean? The night of the fog,” he said. “Why would she keep this? One night they were together? A night she regretted ever since? Or a night she never forgot?”
“Maybe both.” It was impossible to know. There were many foggy nights, nights in which we were muffled in white as thick as wool, nights when I had not even been able to see where land ended and sea began. Fog made my mother a little crazy, more reckless than I had ever seen her. “I want to scream,” she would say. “Run barefoot through the woods. Swim across the ocean.” In the end she did neither of those, just barricaded us into the lodge as if the fog could steal in through the doors and suffocate us.
Often this would happen when the men were out on a hunt, and there had been times when Dean had flown in to the lodge and was trapped there, waiting for their return. Anything could have happened on those nights, because they shut me out with their adult talk and glasses of wine. Bored, I would wander upstairs to my radio and the voices of people I would never know. The lights downstairs burned late on those nights.
