The Courts of Love

by Ellen Gilchrist

  “Let’s go over to that stand of trees and tie down the supplies and get the tent cover and drag him on it,” Tammili said. “If you start crying I’ll smack you. What do you think we went to all those camps for? This is the emergency they trained us for. Come on. Help me drag his pack to the trees. Then we’ll come back and get him. Nothing’s going to happen to him. We can leave him for a minute.”

  They pulled Freddy’s pack to the stand of pine trees where they had left their own. They tied the straps around a sapling and then found the tent cover and went back for him. The sky was very dark now but they did not notice it because they were ten years old and could live in the present.

  They laid the tent cover down beside their father and tried to wake him. “You have to wake up and help us,” Tammili was saying. “You have to roll over on the cover so we can drag it up the trail. Come on, Dad. It’s going to rain. You’ll get washed down the river. Come on. Move over here if you can.” Freddy came to consciousness. He rolled over onto the tent cover with his left shoulder and tried to find a comfortable position. “Clear the rocks off the path,” Lydia said. “Come on, Tammili. Let’s clear the path.” They began to throw the rocks to the side. Working steadily they managed to clear a way from the riverbed to the trees. Freddy lay on the cover with the pain coming and going like waves on the sea. He rocked in the pain. He let the pain take him. There was no way to escape it. Nora Jane will call for help, he was thinking. I know her. This is where her worrying will come in handy. The truck runs. She will drive it into town and call for help. The rain was beginning. He felt it on his face. Then the pain won and he didn’t feel anything.

  Lydia and Tammili came back down the path to the unconscious body of their father. They folded the tent cover around his body and began to pull him along the path they had cleared. Every two or three feet they would stop and try to wake him. Then they would scour the next few feet for branches and rocks. Then they would move him a few feet more. The rain was still falling softly, barely more than a mist. “It’s good to get the ground wet,” Tammili was saying. “It makes the tent slide.”

  “You aren’t supposed to move wounded people. We could be making him worse.”

  “We aren’t making him worse. His ankle’s right there. We aren’t moving it and his arm isn’t moving. We’re just going to that tree. We have to get away from the riverbed, Lydia. That thing could turn into a torrent. Keep pulling. Don’t start crying. Nothing’s going to happen. We’re going to pull him to that tree and stay there until this storm is over.”

  “I don’t believe this happened. How did it happen to us? We shouldn’t have come up here.”

  “We only have a little more to go. Keep pulling. Don’t talk so much.” Tammili dug in her heels and pulled the weight of her father six more inches up and to the right of the path. Wind came around the side of the mountain and blew rain into their faces. She went to her father and pulled the tent cover more tightly around his body. She looked up at her sister. Their eyes met. Lydia was holding back her tears. “We only have one move,” Tammili said. “We take the king to a place of safety. I’m a bishop and you’re a rook. We’re taking Dad to that tree, Lydia. We can do it if we will.”

  “I’m okay,” Freddy said. “I can crawl up there. I’m okay, Lydia. Help me up, Tammili. This is just a rain. Just a rain that will end.”

  He half stood with Tammili supporting his side. He managed to hobble a few more feet in the direction of the tree. Lydia dragged the tent cover around in front of him and they laid him back down on it and pulled him the rest of the way.

  Nora Jane and Nieman climbed into the Volvo and started across the property toward the old gold-mining road that Freddy and the girls had taken earlier that morning. “It’s too low,” Nieman said, after five minutes of driving. “It will never make it down that riverbed. Let’s go back and get the truck.”

  “The truck barely runs.”

  “Well, we’ll make it run.”

  “Let’s call the ranger station again. I don’t think we can overdo that. My God, Nieman, what’s that noise?”

  “I think it’s a tire. It feels like something’s wrong with a tire.” He stopped the car and got out and stood looking at the left front tire. It was almost completely flat and getting flatter.

  “You have a spare, don’t you?” Nora Jane asked. She had gotten out and was standing beside him.

  “No. I left it months ago to be repaired and never went back to pick it up. We’ll have to walk back and get the truck.”

  “Call the ranger station first, then we’ll get the truck.” Nieman didn’t argue. He got the ranger station on the phone. “No, we don’t know they’re lost. We just know they didn’t know this weather was coming. You can put it in the computer, can’t you? So if anyone sees a warning flare in that area they’ll report it? He always has flares. . . . Because I know. Because I’ve been camping with him a hundred times. . . . Okay. Just so you’re on the alert. We’re going there now. It’s the old gold-mining camp below Red River Falls. The waterfall that is the source of Red River. Surely you have it on a map. . . . All right. Thanks again. Thank you.”

  “Insanity. Bureaucrazy. Okay, my darling Nora Jane, let’s get out and walk.”

  Halfway to the house it began to rain. By the time they reached the house they were soaking wet. They changed into dry clothes and got into the truck and started driving. This time they didn’t talk. They didn’t curse. They didn’t plan. They just moved as fast as they could go in the direction of the people that they loved.

  Tammili and Lydia had managed to drag Freddy almost to the tree. There was a reasonably flat patch of ground there and they surveyed it. “Let’s put the tent up over him,” Lydia suggested.

  “We’d have to move him twice to do that. We haven’t got time and besides we shouldn’t move him any more than we have to.”

  “So what are we going to do?”

  “We’ll cover up with the tent and put all the packs and some rocks around to hold it down.”

  “Water’s going to run in.”

  “Not if we fix it right. Get it out.” Tammili was pulling things out of the packs. “We’ll get him covered up, then I’ll set off flares.”

  “You better set them off before it rains any more.”

  “Then hurry.” They dragged the tent over to their father and draped it over his body. Lydia took the cape and wrapped it around his legs and feet. They pulled the tent cover up to make a rain sluice and set rocks against it to hold it in place.

  “Finish up,” Tammili said. “I’m going over there by the riverbed and set off flares.” She had found a pack of them in the bottom of Freddy’s pack. She pulled it out and read the directions. “Keep out of the hands of children. This is not a toy. Approved by the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Bureau of Standards. Remove plastic cap carefully. Point in the direction of clear sky. Da. Pull down lever with a firm grasp. If three pulls does not release flare, discard and try another flare. Okay, here goes.” She walked over to the cleared place. She pulled the lever down and a huge point of light rose to the sky and spread out and held.

  “Do some more,” Lydia called to her. Tammili set off four more flares. Then waited. Then set off two more. Rain was beginning to fall in earnest now. She went back to the pack and put the leftover flares where she had found them. Then she buckled up the pack and put the smaller packs on top of it. Then she dragged the synchilla blanket underneath the tent and she and Lydia lay down on each side of their father. The rain was falling harder. They arranged the synchilla blanket over Freddy’s body and then covered that with the cape. They found each other’s hands. The fingers of Lydia’s right hand fit into the fingers of Tammili’s left hand as they had always done.

  A volunteer fire lookout worker was in a fire tower ten miles from where they lay covered with the cape and tent. He was a twenty-year-old student who had always been good at everything he did. He prided himself on being good at things. Every other Thursday w
hen he spent his three hours in the tower he was on the lookout every second. He didn’t go down and fill his coffee cup. He didn’t read books. He kept his eyes on the sky and the land. That was what he had volunteered to do and that is what he did. Earlier, before he began his stint, he had pulled up all the local data on a computer and read it carefully. He had especially noted the memo about Red River because his mother was a geologist and had taken him there as a child. He saw the first flare out of the comer of his eye just as it was dying. He saw the second and the third and fourth flares, but lost the last two in the approaching storm. “I will be damned,” he decreed. “I finally saw something. It finally paid off to stay alert.” He called the ranger station and reported what he had seen.

  Nora Jane and Nieman were driving the four miles of rocky trail between blacktop and blacktop. They were driving in a blinding rain. Nieman was at the wheel. Nora Jane was pushing back into the seat imagining her life without her husband and her daughters. I don’t know why we built that crazy house to begin with, Nieman was thinking. I hate it there. Grass doesn’t grow. You can’t take a hot shower half the time. It’s a dangerous place. We should have been down in the inner city building houses for people to live in. Not some goddamn, lonely, scary, dangerous trap on a barren hillside. He shouldn’t have taken them up there, much less to Red River. As though they are expendable. As though we could ever breathe again if anything happened to them. But what could happen? Nothing will happen. They’ll get wet, then we’ll get them dry. He steered the old red truck down onto the blacktop and pushed the pedal to the floor. “I’m gunning it,” he said to Nora Jane. “Hold on.”

  “Don’t worry, Daddy,” Tammili was crooning. “Momma will send someone to get us. Remember when Lydia broke her arm and it got all right. Her hand was hanging off her wrist like nothing and it grew back fine.”

  “It sure did,” Lydia said. “It grew right back.”

  “Get behind the rocks,” Freddy said. “Don’t stay here. I’m okay. I’m doing fine.” A sheet of lightning blazed a mile away. It seemed to be beside them. “It’s okay,” Freddy said. “Cuddle up. Rain always stops. It always stops. It always does.”

  “Sometimes it rains for two days,” Lydia put in. She snuggled down into a ball beside her father. She patted her father’s chest. She patted his ribs. She patted his heart. Another burst of lightning flashed even closer. Then the rain began to fall twice as hard as it had before. The earth seemed to sink beneath the force of the rain, but they were warm beneath the cape and the tent and they were together.

  “These are Franciscan rocks,” Tammili said. “The whole Coast Range is made up of the softest, weirdest rocks they know. Geologists don’t know what they are. They used to be the ocean floor. Where we are, right now, as high as it seems, used to be stuff on the floor of the ocean.”

  “That’s right,” Lydia added. “Before that it was the molten center of the earth.”

  “The continents ride on the seas like patches of weeds in a marsh,” Tammili went on. “Fortunately for us it all moves so slowly that we’ll be dead before it changes enough to matter. Unless the big earthquake puts it all back in the sea.”

  “Who told you that?” Freddy tried to rise up on his good arm. The pain in the other one had subsided for a moment. He was beginning to be able to move his foot. “When the storm subsides we’ll put up the rest of the flares. They’ll be looking for us. Someone’s looking for us now.”

  “We could drive the car,” Lydia whispered. A third network of lightning had covered the mountain with clear blue light. Far away the thunder rumbled, but the lightning seemed to be only feet away. “One of us could stay with you and the other one could get in the Jeep and go for help.”

  “They’ll find us,” Freddy said. “Your mother will be right on top of this. If we don’t come back, she’ll send for help.” The rain was harder now, beating on the flattened tent. Still, they seemed to be warm and dry. “This cape wicks faster than synchilla,” Freddy added. “Just like Nieman to find this and leave it lying around.” The pain returned full force then and Freddy felt himself going down. Don’t think, he told himself. Turn it off. Don’t let it in.

  “Hold my hand,” Lydia said and reached for her sister. “Tell more about the coast and the ocean. Tell the stuff Nieman tells us.”

  “It was a deep trench, the whole coast, the whole state of California. And the ocean and the hot middle of the earth keep churning and pushing and hot stuff comes up from the middle, like melted fire, only more like hot, hot honey, and it’s very beautiful and red and gold and finally it turns into rocks and mud and gets pushed up to make mountains. Then the trench got filled with stuff and it rose up like islands and made California. Then the Great Plains got in the middle of the Coast Range and the Sierra Nevada and the Cascades. They are real thick mountains and all crystallized together with granite. But not the Coast Range. The Coast Range is made of strange rocks and there is jade left here by serpentine. And maganese and mercury and bluechist and gold and everything you could want.”

  “Serpentinite,” Freddy said. “Manganese.”

  Nieman was saying, “You stay in the truck and wait for the rangers. Work on the phone in Freddy’s Jeep. You might get it working. I’m going up.”

  They were standing at the base of the path. It was still pouring rain. Nieman was wearing a foul-weather parka and was laden with signal devices, everything they had found in the house and cars.

  “Go on then. Start climbing. I’ll do what I can.”

  “Do whatever you decide to do.” He looked at her then, this beautiful, whimsical creature whom his best friend adored, and he understood the adoration as never before. Her whole world was in danger and she was breathing normally and was not whining. Nieman gave her a kiss on the cheek and turned and began to climb. The rain was coming down so fast it was difficult to see, but he knew the path and he was careful. Maybe we should have gone for help instead of coming here. Maybe we should have done a dozen things. The rangers know. Surely to God they are on their way.

  The ranger helicopter had turned back from the lightning and now a truck carrying a medic was headed in their direction but the road had been washed out in two places and they had had to ford it. “Plot the coordinates of the flares again,” the driver said. “Are you sure twenty-four is the nearest road?”

  “There’s an old creek bed we might navigate, but not in this weather. An old mining road leads to within a mile. I’d rather take that. Here, you look at the map.”

  “Jesus, what a storm. A frog strangler, that’s what we call them where I come from.”

  “Two little girls and their father. I’d like to kill some people. What the hell does a man want to go off for with kids this far from nowhere? It kills me. I used to teach wilderness safety at the hospital. What a waste of breath.”

  “Land of the free. Home of the foolhardy. Okay, I think I can make it across that water. Let’s give it a try.” He drove the vehicle across a creek and made it to the other side. As soon as they were across, the medic put on his seat belt and pulled it down tight across his waist and chest.

  “Four hundred and three,” Nieman was counting. “Four hundred and four. Four hundred and five.”

  Nora Jane sat in the passenger seat of the Jeep and worked on the phone. Once or twice she was able to hear static and she kept on trying. She took the batteries out and wiped them on her shirt and put them back in. She moved every movable part. She prayed to her old Roman Catholic God. She prayed to Mary. She made promises.

  The storm was moving very slowly across the chaos of disordered rocks that is the Coast Range of Northern California. The birds pulled their wings over their heads. The panthers dreamed in their lairs. The scraggly vegetation drank the water as fast as it fell. When the sun came back out it would use the water to grow ten times as fast as vegetation in wetter climates. Tammili and Lydia held hands. Freddy slept. An infinitesimal part of the energy we call time became what we call history.

&nbs
p; “Six thousand and one,” Nieman counted. He wanted to stop and wipe his glasses but he could not bring himself to waste a second. Some terrible intuition led him on. Some danger or unease that had bothered him ever since the night before. He had come to where he was needed. It was not the first time that had happened to him. That’s why I hated those movies, he told himself. When no one believed what they knew. When no one learned anything. The beginning of Karate Kid was okay. The beginning of it was grand.

  He had come to a creek bed that was now a torrent of rushing water. I know this, he remembered. But how the hell will I cross it now? He stood up straight. He pushed the hood back from his parka and reached for his glasses to wipe them. A huge bolt of lightning shook the sky. It illuminated everything in sight. By its light Nieman saw the pile of tent and figures on the ground on the other side of the water. “Freddy,” he screamed at the top of his lungs. “It’s me. It’s Nieman. Freddy, is that you?”

  The rest was drowned by thunder. Then Nieman saw a small figure rise up from the pile. She came out from under the tent and began waving her hands in the air.

  “I’ll get there,” he yelled. “Stay where you are.” The rain was slacking somewhat. Nieman found a flat place a few yards down the creek and began to make his way across the rocks. Lydia met him on the other side. “Dad’s broken his arm and foot,” she told him. “We need to get him to a doctor.”

  The medic spotted the Jeep and the truck. “There they are,” he yelled at the driver. “There’re the fools. Let’s go get them.”