All the Winters After

by Seré Prince Halverson

  • • •

  Two salmon and four cod, along with three starfish, four sea anemones, and half a dozen Dungeness crabs, all a fraction under legal size, not that anyone was checking. Nadia let the crabs go anyway—the bigger ones had more flavorful meat—and turned her attention to the salmon and cod. They eyed her warily, flipping and then resting, stillness except for gills gasping. She did not like this particular requirement. A part of her wanted to free them, but she clubbed each once, swiftly, with enough muscle to get the job done.

  She identified with each fish tangled in the net, with each rabbit she trapped, each chicken whose neck she wrung, each spruce hen she shot. She was the Vladimir in their story.

  • • •

  He had shown up at the new village, Altai, explaining that he’d come from the community in Oregon, that he’d felt the world encroaching and wanted freedom to worship in the purest of the old ways. But it was all just a story. Vladimir did not worship anyone but himself.

  He arrived two years after the villages split over their differences. Two years after Niko had married Katarina without a second thought. Nadia’s parents hadn’t pressured her into marriage. There were no available suitors anyway; she was the oldest of the children in their small group. She had felt such betrayal and despair over Niko that she’d put the thought of ever marrying out of her head and instead focused on her studies. But all that changed when Vladimir arrived.

  At first, she’d been frightened only by his alarming beauty. He had everyone in the village swooning, even the men, who were small in number and could use his strong arms and legs to speed up the building, which had already taken too long. It didn’t matter that he was already well into his thirties and unmarried—although now Nadia questioned the validity of that story too. His eyes were the color of irises; his teeth sparkled and shone white even against a backdrop of clean snow. There was his nose, strong but not too large, and the planes of his face depicted strength and wisdom. His beard looked like an inviting place to rest one’s head.

  Excitement rumbled through the whole village. Finally! Nadia would have a husband. If you listened hard enough, even the wind through the trees seemed to be saying the same thing. At last! At long last! Because Nadia, at almost sixteen, was considered an old maid. A spinster.

  If they could see me now, she thought. If they could only see me now.

  In those days, Nadia had spent much of her free time embroidering. Now she read books, but back at the village, the women were expected to become experts in handiwork. In the weeks leading up to the wedding, she and her mothers and sisters prepared her trunk with the intricately woven belts all Old Believers were required to wear, along with beautiful sheets and pillowcases, dresses, blankets, and needlepoint to hang on the walls of her new home. Vladimir, accompanied by the men, came to “buy” the trunk, another old ritual that was bathed in braga and full of laughter.

  At their wedding party, Nadia was so nervous and excited, she didn’t touch the food. Braga flowed freely. Plated towers of pelmeni and gruzdi v pyerog and katleti were passed around, aromas of meat and mushroom fillings and potatoes and dough filled the hall, but all she did was nibble on a sweet pryanik.

  Vladimir whispered, his lips touching the lobe of her ear, “You must eat, yes? We will both need our strength.” He winked and rested his hand on her thigh, over her skirt, beneath the table. The warmth of his hand spread everywhere, as if he touched much more than her skirted thigh.

  But that night, he drank too much and fell into bed, snoring. She slept in the chair in her wedding dress, afraid to change if he should wake. She fingered her braids, trying to get used to wearing two instead of one.

  The next morning, he didn’t speak, and she wondered what she’d done wrong. She fixed him kartoshka s echkam—potatoes with eggs—and he shoveled them into his mouth without looking at her before leaving for the day.

  Nadia stood in front of the mirror throughout the afternoon. Did she have some deformity to which she was blind, something Niko and now Vladimir had seen and been repulsed by? Certain that must be the problem, she ran to her grandmother’s house. But her baba took her in, heard her fears, and reassured her she was indeed a beautiful, smart woman any man would be honored to marry. “So he had a little too much of the braga. The man is embarrassed, that is all. Tonight, you act like nothing happened. You make him my galushki for dinner, you brush your lovely hair and turn your flawless face to Vladimir—and he will be the happiest man in the village and beyond.”

  At dinner, he spoke kindly; the charming Vladimir was back. After she washed the dishes, she changed into the wedding nightgown she’d planned to wear the night before. Vladimir approached her gently at first, kissing her for a long time. Then he turned over abruptly, punched the pillow, swore, and went to sleep. This continued for many nights. Long sessions of kissing—sometimes he would touch her breasts—but then he would stop suddenly and fall asleep or get up and clomp outside. Had she been misinformed about sex? She had definitely expected more than this. She definitely wanted more than this.

  But the fifth night, after he kissed her for a while, when he pulled away, he reached under the bed and brought out a hunting knife.

  “Let us try this,” he said. “It will help me.” He held the knife by the opening to Nadia’s nightclothes and sliced apart the blue ribbons she and her mother had sewn on. Terror pulsed through her. She opened her mouth to scream, but the scream came out soundless.

  “Why would you try to scream, my princess? I am your husband. I mean no harm.” His eyes teased; he seemed amused as he unbuttoned his pants. “Ah, this is what I was looking for. Look at that piece of steel, would you? They call me the Stallion. I knew I still had this. Just needed a little prop is all.”

  He grinned almost sheepishly and held the knife to her neck. “I am sorry you have been full of desire for so many days. You are going to forget that you ever had to wait for me.”

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-ONE

  Leo barked, and Nadia, who was hunched over the fishing net, jumped and then slowly straightened, thinking about her shotgun five paces away, expecting to see a bear thrashing through the bushes to the beach. Sometimes the bears stole from her net and tore huge holes in it that required mending. But she saw nothing. When Leo stopped barking briefly to listen, she heard music. Guitar music, but from over by the trailhead.

  Kache emerged from the woods, walking and playing like one of the minstrels in a king’s court she’d read about. Nadia couldn’t keep from smiling and then laughing—not at him but out of relief that he was no longer angry and from the joy spread across his face as he sang out. His voice was as Elizabeth had quoted a reporter, “both wound and wonder.”

  He threw back his head and sang:

  “Nadia, you unknotted me.

  Nadia, you undeniably

  Nadia, you unarguably…

  Nadia ah ah… Nadia ah ah… Nadiaaah…”

  He splayed his arms, held out his guitar by its neck, and shook it. “Twenty years! Twenty years, and no one could get me to get my nose out of my navel long enough to play. And all you did was hand me my guitar when a certain heartbreaker of a song was playing. I swear, you’re psychic.” He waited for her to respond. She’d never heard so many words come out of his mouth at once. He went on. “Thank you. I’m sorry for being such an asshole. I freaked out, but I can’t believe how quickly it’s coming back. My fingers keep tripping over one another, but they know where to go. They’re just out of shape. Wow. Looks like you’ve been busy.” He bent down to examine the pail of fish. “I figured I’d find you down here, but I thought we might have to collect mussels. Let’s eat right here. We can make a fire and cook that salmon.” He pulled his backpack off. “Look, I brought a couple of beers and some green beans and bread.”

  How quickly his moods shifted. She finally saw the joy Elizabeth had written about surging out of him. He
chattered as fast as a squirrel, and she half expected him to race up a tree trunk next, jump across from branch to branch before inviting her for a dinner of gathered pine nuts.

  Instead, he handed her a beer and got busy collecting driftwood and coal for the fire, humming his new song with all the inflections of her name. She hadn’t heard her name spoken in all those years alone, had never heard it sung. The acknowledgment of her existence bloomed a bit in her chest. Why was pride so highly ranked by those who ranked sins, always followed by an inevitable fall? Why was pride even a sin? A little pride seemed like a good thing, something that sent the shoulders back, the chin up, made you feel like you wanted to give even more of yourself to the betterment of the world…or at the very least to the betterment of a man named Kachemak Winkel.

  From the backpack, he pulled out a lighter, the rack from the roasting pan, a knife—even though she’d brought hers to clean the fish. Seeing the knife held in his hand made her wince, but it was a physical reaction, not from her head; she understood now that she didn’t need to fear Kache. He opened his own beer and then clinked his bottle to hers. “To…what?”

  “What?” She tilted her head and waited.

  “I don’t know what to call this.”

  “Call what?”

  “This…this!” He grabbed her arm, but not the way Vladimir grabbed it. Instead, it was with a childlike excitement. “It’s strange. Sad. But I feel we could help each other. If you’re willing?”

  “I do not understand.”

  “I’ve been thinking. You keep teaching me about running this place, and I’ll bring a computer out, hook us up to the Internet. You can go anywhere, see anything. Without leaving. Not that you don’t already know a lot; you’ve read more books than I’ll ever read. But there’s so much out there that will blow your mind.”

  What he couldn’t know from her staring wordlessly back at him was that this was exactly what she wanted. She was afraid to go to town, to even go up to the main road. But if she could see the world? If she might somehow be lifted from this piece of land and bypass the road and town and be dropped at the Golden Gate Bridge, would she do it? Without hesitation. She wasn’t afraid of the world out there. She was afraid of Vladimir. She was afraid of the pain it would cause her family if they discovered she’d been lying to them all this time. She was as alive as she’d ever been, right that minute, standing on a beach next to a fire, toasting to…what?…with Kache.

  “Yes,” she finally said.

  “Yes to…?”

  “The computer. The interconnect. All of it, I would like. Oh, and of course I am more than willing to teach you what I know about this land. For this, I would be privileged.”

  “Okay. Then it’s not just a toast. It’s a deal. We need to shake on it.”

  “Shake on it? Ah, a handshake, yes?”

  He held out his hand, and then she held out hers, both of their hands suspended until he reached forward and took hers—so odd to be touching, skin to skin—and pumped her hand up and down until she couldn’t help smiling again.

  After they ate, they followed Leo up the trail, but then he veered right instead of left, and so they took the longer way home, along the canyon. She loved the canyon. It was an extremely deep and sudden jagged cut into the land, and sometimes she stood and stared down into it, trying to imagine what had caused it. A glacier? An earthquake? A meteorite? Elizabeth had written about this canyon many times, describing it as the largest and deepest on the peninsula. It was mysteriously stunning but dangerous, and it had haunted Elizabeth.

  Kache said, “Come here, Leo. Don’t let him get too close to the edge.”

  Nadia knew why, but she wasn’t worried. All she ever needed to do was share a look with Leo—which she now did—and he walked alongside her as they passed the canyon.

  “When I was a kid,” Kache began, “I had a dog named Walter. He was a great dog, except he had this thing about chasing birds and butterflies. He would jump and run as if his hundred pounds of dog had a chance in hell of taking flight. It was the funniest thing to watch. Pure joy, determination, and frustration all at once. We all loved that dog.” Kache stopped walking, took a deep breath. “One day, when I was ten, he and I were heading down this same path. He started chasing some butterfly, and I thought nothing of it. He chased it—he chased it right off the edge of the canyon. I watched him leap, and when I raced to the edge, he was still falling, you know? Falling into that great abyss, a tiny drop of black. I ran to get my dad. He followed me to the edge and put his arm around me. But he refused to go get him. It was too dangerous. He and my mom told me that Walter was probably fine and would have a good life down in the canyon, as if I were young enough to believe that.” He smoothed his hand from his forehead back over his curls. “The next night, I snuck out and tried to hike down, but I knew I’d never make it out alive either. I never forgave myself—or my dad—for not going down there. I’m sure Walter was dead on impact. Still, the possibility of him all broken up and suffering haunts me.”

  Nadia knew she should not say anything, but she could not keep entirely quiet. She said, “Have you considered ever that perhaps your father, he did go down this hill to get your dog?”

  Kache shook his head. “He was adamant. Besides, if he had, they would have told me so I’d quit harping on them about it.”

  “You were a boy, yes? And if Walter the dog was dead, which we both know that he most likely was, or close to death, your parents, they might have thought they were protecting you from the truth. You can see this?”

  Kache kept shaking his head. “No, look at that incline. My dad was a tough man, but he wasn’t an expert climber. It might have taken ropes to get all the way down there. Hell, they’d need some kind of search and rescue team. I understand that now. I’ve been mad at him my whole life for so many things. Some of them are justified. But maybe this wasn’t.”

  “So about Walter, you are no longer angry?”

  Kache started toward the homestead while Nadia and Leo followed. “There was this song that came out several years later. It was a big hit, and they played it on the radio all the time. ‘Dog and Butterfly.’ Whenever it came on, my mom would change the station. There weren’t many stations, and sometimes it was playing on the other station, so my mom would flip off the radio. Not a memory any of us wanted to dwell on.” Kache leaned down, rubbed Leo between the ears, looked up at Nadia, and smiled. “But you know?” His voice caught, and he shook his head. “That dog finally did fly.”

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-TWO

  Snag stood on her front step, gripping the banister. Faint guitar music trickled from inside. These had been the strangest couple of weeks she’d ever experienced, and things were only getting stranger. She was lodged in a slingshot, pulled back, back, back. All this tension, pulling, resistance. Pretty soon, she’d have to change her name to Snap.

  But there it was, and you had to love it: Kache picking up the guitar again. Playing. She pressed her ear to the door and listened. The music worked like a massage on her temples, her shoulders, her arms. Even her grip on the doorknob relaxed. What a gift that boy had. That man, she reminded herself once again, not boy. He was a grown man now. And she was an old, tired, stressed-out woman, suddenly feeling not so tired, not so stressed-out.

  “If you feel the need to hide

  I’ll cover you and go bare.

  If you can’t walk another mile

  On my back I’ll take you there.

  “If you can’t cross the water

  I’ll lie down and be your bridge.

  And if you lose all hope and vision

  I’ll paint the sky from edge to edge.”

  When the music stopped, Snag wiped her eyes and then her feet and opened the door. Kache sat on the edge of the sofa, the guitar still on his knee. He jumped up, a little embarrassed, a little pleased too, she decided.

&nb
sp; She untied her laces and set her shoes next to Kache’s boots. “Oh, good,” she said. “I was afraid your gorgeous playing was just a forlorn memory acting up. But it was real, Kache. Real.” She hugged him and his guitar with one wrap of her arms. “It sounds like you never stopped.”

  “Thanks, but no. I’m beyond rusty. Still, I’ve got to admit, it feels good.”

  She sat in the rocking chair by the woodstove. The cat jumped onto her lap. She liked coming home to a warm house. “I don’t remember that song, and it’s beautiful.”

  “Thanks. Something I’m working on. Where were you?”

  “Oh, I left the same note sitting there from last night because I was at the same place.”

  “The Spit Tune again?”

  “Gilly’s been playing therapist for me. She gives good advice, and all it costs me is to buy her a Sexy City or whatever-you-call-it drink. Then we listen to the band play.”

  “How are they?”

  “All right. They’d be a helluva lot better if you were playing with them.”

  He shook his head. “I’m already spending my days in the same house I did as a teenager. If I start playing with them again, I’m liable to start breaking out in acne and having to take ridiculously long showers.”

  Snag snorted. “Oh, stop it, Kache.” It was better than wonderful to have him playing again, and he seemed lighter every day. “Speaking of the house, should I plan on a trip out soon?”

  He was back to picking out a tune on his guitar, just playing background to his thinking. “I guess it’s about time. It’s just… Nadia. I know it sounds strange, but I have to prepare her. She knows a lot, but she’s experienced so little. I’m going to get us hooked up to the Internet.”