Eden Mine

by S. M. Hulse

  A long silence. Broken by her name. “Emily’s is.”

  “Yes.” She is waiting for me in the darkness when I close my eyes, smiling in her school picture, lying in her hospital bed. I suppose she always will be. I open my eyes. Emily is gone, Samuel is there. “And that’s your fault, Samuel. Maybe … maybe it would be fairer if your life were over. Maybe it’s fairer that you have to live with what you’ve done. Fair or not, your life is not over. No, you can’t be who you used to be. But you can change again.”

  He looks at me, ashen and weak. I have never thought of that word in conjunction with my brother, weak. It makes him look frightened, and I know Samuel must have been frightened in his life, probably many times, but he has never let me know it, has never let it show. Maybe that’s what frightens him most of all: Being afraid. Being weak. But now he puts his bloodied hand on my cheek, turns my face and brings it low to his so he can see my eyes, so I can see his.

  “What if I can’t change?” His voice is fading, quieting to something lower and starker than a whisper. “What if this is all I am?”

  “Oh, Samuel,” I say, “you’re so much more.”

  And he looks at me, and looks at me, and after a long time I see something shift in his face, and I know he has finally remembered how to believe in something good.

  * * *

  I have been thinking a lot about what I say at the beginning of every prayer I lead with my congregation: Gracious and Heavenly Father. Not Lord. Not God. Father.

  Perhaps I haven’t been fair to You. It is not possible for any being to love another more than I loved Emily. And still I could not protect her. So I have allowed myself to consider the possibility that You could not protect her, either. Is that blasphemy? All-knowing, I have preached, all-powerful. But isn’t love the greatest power of all, haven’t I preached that, too? The greatest of these is. So maybe the fact that You didn’t protect Emily doesn’t mean You didn’t love her. Doesn’t mean You aren’t there.

  But it hurts, Father. I have a thought I can’t seem to rid myself of. It says: If I believed she was with You, it would not hurt this much.

  I keep remembering my own father praying the psalms outside my window at night. So many of those songs, even the ones that begin with blackest despair, have a turn. Somewhere before the end there is a revelation. A resurgence. Faith restored, emboldened. Jubilation replaces anguish; joy banishes sorrow. It seems impossible to imagine I might ever have faith so robust again. Lamentation resonates; elation does not. I am still in the desert, and I can’t imagine ever returning to the ocean of faith I dove headlong into as a young man on the side of a road. But perhaps one day I will make my way to a small oasis. Maybe I will have to content myself with a quieter faith than I am used to. A faith of still waters.

  You have promised that faith as small as a mustard seed can move mountains. And that is all I have left, Father: a mustard seed, and an especially tiny, fragile one.

  But I am surrounded by mountains.

  You will start reading here, won’t you, Jo? It’s where I’ve finished, the place I’ve avoided and worked relentlessly toward all the same. Home.

  So. A first thing to say, and a last. The obvious would be that I love you, but that is simultaneously too trite and too profound. I was thinking today, walking down the mountain with you, that Mom used to say it all the time. When we woke up, when we went to school, when we came home, before bed. Like she knew she’d have to work them all in before it was too late. I never said it much, did I? I hope it was plain enough anyway.

  You will tell them I’m here, if you haven’t already. Your phone in the bathroom. I forgot it in there, but only for a few minutes. After that I left it on purpose. Not because I want to be caught. If I wanted to be caught I could have hiked out of the mountains anytime; I didn’t have to wait for you. It’s not a test, Jo. You’ll turn me in. I knew it as soon as I saw Lockjaw outside the cabin, maybe before. And this isn’t blame, either. Lots of places I could have gone. Lots of opportunities for me to leave, had I wanted to. (I don’t know if I’ll let them take me when they come. Forgive me if I didn’t.)

  So how to explain it? Why did I go to the cabin, stay there until you came, leave the phone for you to find? Why am I here in the hall outside your old room, watching you sleep, instead of vanishing into the night? I’ve lost myself, Jo. Didn’t realize it until you told me the girl had died. (I can hardly make myself write it. Can you tell? Does it show in the way I ink the words?) I can’t understand how I became someone who could be responsible for that. I can’t see how it happened, or what to do next.

  It’s an unfair thing to lay at your feet. Something else I hope you can forgive me for. But I have made so many choices for you over the years, little Josie, hard ones, sometimes. Make just this one for me.

  In the end, maybe there is only this, Jo. Not as heartwarming as “I love you,” perhaps, but because you are my sister and you have known me all your life, you’ll realize it might mean more: I trust you.

  * * *

  I tape the map to a piece of board propped on my easel. Run my hand over the river of words along the Missouri, the smudges where Samuel’s hand crossed his own words over the Continental Divide, the thumbprint of blood near Prospect that he left when he handed me the map in the old house, made me promise to hide it from Hawkins and the rest. One last secret.

  I tilt the easel toward the southern window. This had been Kev’s bedroom, and its view is the best on the ground floor. Windows on two walls, south toward Elk Fork and the sun, and east toward the mines. No room for both my easels and my bed, so I sleep in the living room. Hawkins has called a couple times, says one of these days he’ll come up from Arizona to build an addition onto the back for me, or maybe an elevator. (He always forces a laugh here, and I can never tell him Samuel and I joked about the same thing in the old house.) But Hawkins is never coming back here; I know that even if he doesn’t.

  I’ve been to see Samuel twice. They’re keeping him in Great Falls for the trial, but it’s looking like he’ll end up at the supermax in Colorado. Won’t see him so often then. It will be letters, mostly. At least the map assures me he knows how to write one.

  I turn back to it now. Thin paper, already some small tears along the creases where Samuel folded and refolded it. I’ll have to take care not to get my paint too wet. This new house is higher on the hill than the one I shared with my brother, and farther south. The outline of the mountains is slightly different than I’m used to, the peaks over Eden and Gethsemane in equal balance through the window. I tilt my easel again, position my chair so I’m looking north, until the meadows and mountains that were once mine fill the frame.

  I dampen my brush, load it with the clay and ore and silt that flowed out of the mines, out of the mountains, the years of earth and labor and struggle that made this sullied, beautiful valley what it is. I brush it across the map, where it mingles with my brother’s words, his blood, blurs them all to a smooth wash that gentles the rivers and mountains and plains beneath. I angle the brush, move my wrist, my fingertips, and the paint obeys me, forms the familiar ridgeline along the top of the paper. Subtly different, yes—the perspective, the light—but familiar nonetheless, in a way that is both comforting and maddening.

  I return my brush to the water, the mud. Bring Eden into creation once again.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am grateful to the Ucross Foundation for its support at a key time during the revision of this novel.

  Thank you to Sarah Jackson for generously sharing her knowledge of mud painting.

  Many thanks to my agent, Lorin Rees, and my editor, Jenna Johnson. Thanks also to Lydia Zoells, Stephen Weil, and everyone else at Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

  ALSO BY S. M. HULSE

  Black River

  A Note About the Author

  S. M. Hulse’s first novel, Black River, was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction, an ALA Notable Book, an ABA Indies Introduce title, an Indie Next
pick, and the winner of the Reading the West Book Award. Hulse received her MFA from the University of Oregon and was a fiction fellow at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. An avid horsewoman, she has lived throughout the American West. You can sign up for email updates here.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Begin Reading

  Acknowledgments

  Also by S. M. Hulse

  A Note About the Author

  Copyright

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  120 Broadway, New York 10271

  Copyright © 2020 by Sarah M. Hulse

  All rights reserved

  First edition, 2020

  Title page art by bagi1998 / Getty Images

  Most scripture quotations in Eden Mine draw from the King James Bible, but some are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

  E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-71655-4

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