Damnation Spring

by Ash Davidson

  “I remember the first time I saw your dad climb,” Lark said when they hit the straightaway, coasting downhill toward Crescent City. “Never saw another guy like him, until you. You know he used to walk up to scout that 24-7 tree? They knocked our dicks down into the dirt working. Fourteen-, sixteen-hour days. And still, every Sunday, he walked, all the way from whatever logging camp we were at. Miles. Like it was church. He ever take you along?”

  “Once,” Rich recalled.

  “You know what he told me, the day you were born? He said, someday, the two of you were going to fall that tree. You were just a scrawny little thing. Ugly too.” Lark grinned, his affection for Rich’s father warming his voice. “Not a lot of guys are born to do something.”

  August 7 COLLEEN

  Colleen held out Chub’s new yellow slicker, long in the sleeves. She heard Rich pacing out back, talking to Scout. Rich wasn’t much of a talker, but he’d been talking to that dog all week.

  “Where are we going?” Chub asked, holding on to her shoulder for balance.

  She stuffed his sock feet into his rain boots.

  “Your dad wants to show us something.” She pressed her thumbs into Chub’s dimples, his eyes still sugar-crusted with sleep. “Where’d you get these dimples?”

  “I got them at the dimples store.” Chub yawned. “Wait! My binoculars!” He ran back down the hall.

  She looked out at Scout pacing behind Rich in the backyard, as though man and dog were thinking through the same problem. She hoped this wouldn’t take long. Melody Larson was due in a few weeks and the baby was still breech. Colleen had promised her she’d stop by; she was the first mother to ask for Colleen’s help in months.

  The damp-swollen kitchen door whooshed when she yanked it open. Rich stopped in his tracks. He toed the grass, as though he’d dropped a screw or a washer, some small missing piece that might hold a conversation together. They’d hardly spoken since the hospital at Easter. Miscarried, as if, five months pregnant, Colleen had made some stupid mistake, some error in posture, in loading or lifting. And now here they were, the first Sunday in August, Chub about to start kindergarten, an only child.

  “Found them!” Chub reappeared, brandishing the binoculars.

  “Ready?” Rich asked. Dawn light caught in the crinkles at the corners of his eyes.

  The hospital nurse had set their tiny daughter in Colleen’s arms, and Rich had laid a hand on her, as if to transfer his own life force. He’d taken Colleen to visit the baby’s grave a few times. It’s nothing you did. Let it go, Colleen. The past isn’t a knot you can untie. Like grief was a sack you carried a month and then left by the side of the road, it was behind them now, he seemed to believe, like all the others. Five by Rich’s count, three more she’d never spoken of. But her Easter baby hadn’t been like the others, lost in the early weeks, the size of an apple seed, the size of a raspberry. She’d had ten perfect fingers, ten perfect toes, stillborn at twenty-two weeks, her poor sweet baby girl. And, unlike the others, this time people knew in town, she couldn’t hide it—she’d been showing and then, as the weight melted away, she wasn’t. Couldn’t Rich see that was different? Who would trust her to deliver a baby now, if she couldn’t carry her own to term?

  “Ready,” she said.

  Scout raced up the path through the blackberry brambles, climbing the hill behind the house. Chub ran after him. Colleen followed Rich up past the shed where creek water ran down through half a mile of rusted pipe into the tank that supplied the house. She needed two steps to match his one. Every day before he left for work, Rich disappeared for almost an hour up this path while she made coffee, fried eggs, packed his lunch. He returned breathless, carrying the scent of the woods, having checked the screen catch on the mouth of their gravity-fed water line three ridges away.

  At the top of their hill, where the trees began, Colleen looked back down at the house, the new Chevy crew cab a shiny white toy in the driveway. She still hated the sight of it. The weeping willow that marked their turnoff dripped morning rain, fog obscuring the coast highway and the wild ocean beyond it, though she heard the chop crashing against the base of the cliffs below Diving Board Rock. She took off her glasses and wiped the fogged lenses with the hem of her shirt, as though, if she got them clean enough, she might see back through time: Rich coming home, not late as he had been, but right at six, when the cramping started, in time to drive her to the hospital when her old truck wouldn’t start.

  “Want a ride, Grahamcracker?” Rich asked.

  He swung Chub up onto his back and headed deeper into the woods, trees shaggy with moss, vines draped like strands of Christmas lights, forest so close grown Colleen had to turn sideways. Snatches of Chub’s yellow slicker and Rich’s checkered hunting jacket appeared and disappeared through the trunks, and, all around them, the trickle of running water. They rock-hopped across Little Lost Creek and climbed up through the ferns and over the ridge behind it, dropping down to the marsh along Garlic Creek, the skunk cabbage chest-high, Chub vanishing into its waxy leaves. If she turned north here and walked a mile up the draw, she would end up, eventually, at the garlic farm out Deer Rib Road, where she and Enid had been raised. Instead, they topped the next ridge, jumped the spit creek at the bottom, and scrambled up to the backbone of 24-7 Ridge, where old-growth redwoods rose like the comb of a rooster. Lower down had been logged at the turn of the century, but this section had been too steep, back when they’d hauled logs out by rail. The 24-7 herself was so massive it would take a dozen people holding hands to circle her. Men still talked about her in town: the 24-7, the big fish that got away.

  Rich pressed a palm to the 24-7’s bark. Chub did the same. Colleen’s breath scraped at her lungs. After a moment, Rich stepped back and cleared his throat, pressed his thumb along his top lip as though he could smooth out the old scar that ran up to his left nostril. When Colleen had first met him, she’d thought the scar made him look mean. Now she knew the gesture well enough to understand there was something he wanted to tell her. She’d felt him turning it around and around in his mind all week, like a piece of wood he was deciding how to carve. He took her hand, squeezed three warm pulses. I. Love. You. Six months ago, it might have thrilled her, but now she knew there was no desire in it. The hospital had flipped a switch in him. As soon as she’d healed, she’d wanted to try again—the doctor had said: Wait a few healthy periods, try again. She longed to hold a living, squirming baby in her arms—but Rich refused. He’d stopped wanting her. I’m beat, he’d say, gently removing her hands, rolling onto his side, turning his back on her. Maybe it was age. She tugged her hand free from his warm, platonic grip and moved ahead down the path.

  “You’re it!” Chub tagged Scout, sliding down the far side of the ridge toward Damnation Creek, ducking into the brush to hide.

  “Where’s Chub?” Rich asked, sidestepping, favoring his bum knee. “Have you seen Chub?”

  “Boo!” Chub yelled, jumping out, struggling to disentangle himself from the brambles.

  Rich smacked a palm to his chest in mock fright. Chub beamed. Scout nosed his ear. Without brothers or sisters, the dog was his most loyal playmate.

  Rich swung Chub across Damnation Creek: twelve feet wide, clear and deep, numbing cold. One of the last creeks salmon still came back to. Colleen stood on the bank, watching Rich wade over to check the catch on the pipe that ran water around the bend and downgradient, all the way to their tank. Satisfied, he sloshed toward her. She stood over him. He smiled at the reversal in their heights, his sheared brown curls silver around the ears. He set his hands on her waist, and although she knew better, her heart leapt: his callused thumbs on her hipbones, heat and pressure, his clean-soap smell. He tipped her upside down over his shoulder.

  “Rich!” she shrieked.

  He splashed across and set her down, flushed and laughing, on the opposite bank. He was blushing too, that goofy lopsided grin of his. She felt a surge of foolish hope. Let’s try again. Let’s keep trying. She was onl
y thirty-four years old, why shouldn’t she have another child?

  By crossing the creek, they’d crossed into Lower Damnation Grove, company property. Old-growth redwoods as wide as houses towered overhead, shafts of morning light filtering down through the needles, casting a greenish tint over everything.

  “Where are we going?” Chub asked, hushed. The big trees made them all lower their voices.

  “Almost there,” Rich said.

  They climbed the steep rise toward the culvert, where Damnation Creek spilled out from under the gravel road that cut the grove in two, separating the lower half from the upper.

  “What road is this?” Chub asked.

  “No Name Road,” Colleen said. “The way we go to Aunt Enid’s.”

  The side leaving the woods was cratered with potholes, the roadsides overgrown with yellowing brush. The tank truck must have been by. The company did a good job of keeping the road sprayed. A company road was better than a county road, better than a Forest Service road. The government sprayed once, in the spring, but Sanderson’s spray truck worked year-round. By tomorrow, alder and brambles, trash trees and weeds, everything the spray had touched that wasn’t a needle tree, a cash tree—a redwood or a fir—would curl and die, leaving the road wide enough for two log trucks to pass in opposite directions.

  “ ‘What creek is this?’ is the real question,” Rich said, water gushing down from the upper grove.

  Chub thought for a moment.

  “Every Gundersen is born with a map of Del Nort County in the palm of his hand,” Rich hinted.

  Chub consulted his palm. The forest was a maze. Between the fog and the sound of falling water, it was easy to lose your sense of direction, rare to find a spot where you could see farther than the next ridge. Men who’d grown up in these woods still got lost hunting in them. Walk in one direction for a few minutes, and the forest rotated. Before long you stood dizzy, like a child spun in circles, blinking with the sudden disorientation of having a blindfold removed. But not Rich. Drop Rich in the woods in the pitch black and it would take him ten seconds to chart a path home. He was determined to teach Chub, the way he claimed his own father had taught him, though he hadn’t been much older than Chub when his father was killed.

  Rich ran a thumb up Chub’s lifeline to orient him.

  “Damnation Creek?” Chub guessed.

  “Good,” Rich said. “If you know your creeks, you can always find your way home.”

  A rusted sign was staked above the road:

  PRIVATE.

  PROPERTY OF SANDERSON TIMBER CO.

  KEEP OUT.

  Rich headed up toward it and Chub followed, Colleen bringing up the rear.

  “Where are we?” Chub asked.

  “Damnation Grove, the upper half.” Rich craned his neck, a penitent standing in the doorway of a church. “A hundred years ago, the whole coast was timber this size,” Rich said. “Two million acres.”

  Redwoods towered, disappearing into the fog above. So that was why Rich had brought them. He wanted Chub to stand here looking up at these giant pillars, ferns taller than he was, rhododendrons jeweled with dew, ground quilted with sorrel, to breathe it in before it was gone. Rich scratched the spot where stubble smoothed out into the leathered skin of his neck. She would be late if they didn’t turn back soon.

  “Come on,” Rich said.

  He led the way up to the pour-over where Damnation Spring spilled off a ledge into a deep pool, bubbling like he’d tossed in a handful of Alka-Seltzers. Rich crouched, splashed his face, cupped his hands into a bowl, and drank, then offered some to Chub.

  “It’s sweet,” Chub said.

  Drinking rain, Colleen’s father used to call good spring water.

  “When you turn on the tap at home, this is where the water comes from,” Rich explained. The spring fed Damnation Creek, their intake pipe downstream in the gravel bed, back on the downhill side of the road.

  “There’s a spider on you,” Chub said.

  Rich let the daddy longlegs crawl onto his finger. He could be stubborn, but there wasn’t a mean bone in Rich’s body.

  Together, he and Chub climbed up onto the boulders and looked south, down the Eel Creek drainage, Rich teaching Chub a rhyme to remember its course, how it spit out, finally, at Lark’s place. Chub held his binoculars to his eyes. Usually he played with a new toy for a week or two, then lost interest, but the binoculars—a tiny pair of high-powered lenses meant for hunting that Lark had given him for his birthday in May, too spendy a gift for a child, really—remained a favorite. Chub would have slept with them around his neck, if she’d let him.

  Colleen crossed her arms, drummed her fingers on her elbows. Melody Larson was waiting. To quell her antsiness, Colleen started up toward the next ridgeline, a hundred yards off. She’d never been any farther east than the spring. Her breath came quicker, climbing. Her heart pounded. When she reached the top, she heard herself gasp: mud and slash, branches and trash trees piled into teepees to be burned, hills crisscrossed with debris as far as the eye could see—a barren wasteland. She’d seen clear-cuts all her life, but never like this.

  “Mo-om?” Chub called from below.

  She turned. “Coming!”

  Chub stood in a clearing with Rich, examining three redwoods that had tipped over, root balls tearing swimming-pool-sized craters in the soft ground. The deadfall’s roots stood thirty feet high, rocks bound up in their tentacles. Chub watched her pick her way down the slope.

  “What’s up there?” Chub asked when she reached him.

  “Nothing, Grahamcracker. Just more trees.” She took his hand, eager to put some distance between them and the destruction she’d glimpsed on the other side. “What should we make for breakfast?”

  “Pancakes,” Chub said.

  Together they crossed the road, Rich ferrying them back across Damnation Creek. They spilled over the ridges toward home, Chub running ahead, chasing Scout, Colleen walking so fast that for once Rich, with his long legs, was the one struggling to keep up.

  August 8 RICH

  He lay for a moment, Colleen’s arm draped over him, heavy with sleep: three thirty a.m. on the dot, his body its own alarm clock. He held his breath, trying to slip free without waking her, but the moment his feet touched rug, she sat up. He groaned, getting his shirt on. His back ached from carrying Chub up to the 24-7 yesterday.

  “Want me to walk on it?” Colleen asked.

  “Maybe tonight.”

  He rolled his shoulder, laced up his boots. Out back, he let Scout off his chain and loped up the hill after him, into the white dark. His headlamp turned fog to gold. His heart knocked at his ribs. Like some young buck sneaking off to the joyhouse.

  I’ll think about it, he’d promised Jim Mueller. True to his word, Rich had thought of little else. The kitchen light glowed in the fog behind him, Colleen getting the percolator going, cracking eggs, dropping store bread into the toaster. She wanted another kid so bad it hurt to look at her. He longed to tell her, to roll the plan he’d been drawing up in his head out on the table like a map, but she wouldn’t want to think about letting go of the remodel money.

  Brambles snagged at his denims. Hack them down to nubs, dig them out by the roots, burn them: blackberries would survive the goddamn apocalypse. Couple more weeks and they’d ripen: Himalayans, long and fat as the first joint of his thumb. First of September they’d bust open and bleed in your hand, bring out the bears. Colleen would bake pies, boil berries down to jam.

  Scout trotted ten yards ahead, tethered to Rich, even off his chain. Dog came with a built-in tape measure, same as Rich, who’d never strayed more than a hundred miles from this exact spot.

  Years ago, back in the fifties, when Virgil Sanderson had hired the company’s first sprayer—the new chemicals kept the brush down, made it faster and cheaper to log—the pilot had let Rich ride along. He’d barely fit in the tin-can plane, knees pressed to rattling metal. They’d lifted off from the mill road, bottom falling out
of Rich’s stomach. The pilot had followed the coastline, turning inland at Diving Board Rock. It was Rich’s first and only bird’s-eye view of his life: the small green house with its white shutters set back on the bluff at the foot of Bald Hill, the cedar-shingle tank shed. The plane’s engine noise buzzed inside his chest, a hundred McCulloch chainsaws revving at once. They’d flown over 24-7 Ridge, the big tree herself lit by an errant ray of sun, glowing orange, bright as a torch, and, for an instant, Rich had caught a glimmer of the inholding’s potential—an island of private land in a sea of company forest. They’d flown over the dark waves of big pumpkins in Damnation Grove—redwoods older than the United States of America, saplings when Christ was born. Then came the patchwork of clear-cuts, like mange on a dog, timber felled and bucked and debarked, trucked to the mill, sawed into lumber, sent off to the kilns to be dried. The pilot had flipped a switch and spray had drifted out behind them in a long pennant—taste of chlorine, whiff of diesel—Rich’s heart soaring.

  Rich followed the memory of the plane east, slid down the steep back side of their hill to Little Lost Creek, running fast at the bottom of the first draw. If Eugene dropped a twig in up at his and Enid’s place, Rich could pluck it out here an hour later. It was roads that turned a few creek miles into twenty. Scout dug his snout in, drank. Rich took a running leap, felt a tweak in his right knee, leaving his doubt on the bank behind him.

  Up and down the first no-name ridge, choked with alder and piss-yellow Doug fir—even smelled like piss when you cut it—second- and third-growth redwoods. Nowadays, even the fir that shot up to fill the cutover ridge-sides—trees he’d fit two arms around growing up—was worth something. His dad could have bought it up for nothing.

  Who ever thought piss fir would be worth shit?