Damnation Spring

by Ash Davidson

  Goddamn it, Merle, that ain’t a choice.

  Now Don coughed. He was the only guy Rich knew, besides Merle, who had any college. Started on a teacher’s certificate, did a hitch in the navy, came home after the strike ended in ’46. Barrel-chested ambition got him from choker setter to crew boss inside five years. Even guys who resented him respected him.

  Don lowered himself into the pit with a groan. He ran a tight ship, chased every last board foot like it belonged to him. In twenty-five years, he’d only lost one guy, when a log slipped its choker and bashed Tom Feeley’s head off like a rotted pumpkin. Made them triple-check every choker bell since. Wives all wanted their husbands on his crew. Don Porter didn’t cut corners. He did things right.

  Don stared down at the skull at his feet. Rich probed his gum, tasted rot. A breeze shivered through the timber.

  “Shit.” Don stooped, hooked two fingers through the eyeholes, and picked the thing up like a tiny bowling ball. Anybody could see it had belonged to a child.

  CHUB

  Chub pressed his nose to the kitchen door, his breath fogging the cold glass. He wiped a peephole and stared out at Scout’s snout, resting on the doorway of his doghouse. He reached for the doorknob: an electric spark.

  “Chub?” his mom called.

  She sat on the sofa, holding her sewing under the green lampshade. Light flickered on the lamp’s bronze rabbit base. The painted saw stretched across the wall above her: elk in a meadow, a lake, a red barn. The tree-climbing spurs his mom had helped him cut from a cereal box lay adrift on the carpet by her feet.

  He adjusted the slippery coffee can under his armpit. His new yellow slicker hung beside the front door. He hated its rubber smell. He tugged the doorknob, put the can down, and used both hands. The door whooshed open just enough to squeeze out. He pushed the can through first. Half in, half out, he smelled woodsmoke in one nostril, breakfast toast still clothespinned in the kitchen air in the other. He had a good sniffer. Like a goddamn bloodhound, Uncle Lark said, tapping his own nose with his stump-finger, bit off at the first knuckle. Every time his dad said goddamn, he was supposed to put a nickel in the jar. Uncle Lark carved wooden nickels.

  “Chub?” his mom called again.

  If she made him come back for his slicker now, he’d get stuck.

  “Don’t go far, okay, Grahamcracker? Stay where you can see the house.”

  Outside, it was misting. Scout lifted his head. Chub found two worms right away, satisfying plonks in the can. He pulled up a fistful of grass and sprinkled it on them.

  He held his binoculars to his eyes, pointed them up toward the big trees, and turned the dial the way Uncle Lark had taught him. He scanned the high branches for a flying squirrel spiraling down, furry arms spread, leather cape flapping. He would take him on a leash to visit Uncle Lark’s flyer, who broke her hip when she was a baby and Uncle Lark found her. He’d already made a nest in his bottom dresser drawer, snuck a handful of peanuts from the jar. A flying squirrel was better than a kitten.

  A breeze stirred the grasses at the edge of the yard. Beyond that, the hill was a tangle of brambles and ferns, thistles and stinging nettles, all the way up to where the forest started. Stay where you can see the house, his mom had said. But flying squirrels lived in the big trees.

  He looked down at the map in his palm, cupped his hand to make the creeks pucker. Scout rested his snout on his paws, but as soon as Chub started for the path, he raised it, cocking his head, black ear sticking up higher than his gray one. Chub heard the metallic slither of Scout’s chain, an almost-bark vibrating in his throat.

  “Shh.” He held up his hand, the way his dad stopped Scout in his tracks.

  He pulled off Scout’s collar. Scout zagged across the yard, nose to the ground, lifting his leg so high he almost toppled over, digging up fans of dirt, shoving his snout in, sniffing for moles.

  Chub flexed his palm, felt his dad’s finger drawing the map.

  Damnation Creek leaks down from the spring, water so clean you could almost sing.

  Scout snorted dirt and rocketed up the path. Chub hesitated—one one thousand, two one thousand—then bolted after him. The straps of his overalls yanked at his shoulders as he ran, his mom’s voice in his head: Don’t. Yank. Go. Yank. Far. Mist spritzed his cheeks. At the top of Bald Hill, Chub turned and trained his binoculars back the way he’d come: the ocean was out there, at the bottom of the cliff on the other side of the road, but he couldn’t see it. Fog floated around the sides of the house. The kitchen window was crowded with geraniums, leaves soft like the velvet between a horse’s nostrils, grasses swishing back and forth, back and forth, at the edge of the empty yard.

  COLLEEN

  Colleen fingered the pink satin roses she’d stitched along the neck of the baptism gown. The ten thirty whistle sounded in the distance. She’d heard Chub open his dresser drawer before he went outside and made a mental note to inspect it. A few weeks ago, she’d found one of Enid’s kittens nested in his socks. Rich had been sneezing.

  But Wyatt gave him to me, Chub had wailed, throwing himself facedown on the bed.

  She put away her sewing, got up, and went to Chub’s room. Brownie leaned against his dresser, the old hobbyhorse threadbare in the ears. She’d have liked to take him to Enid’s for the girls, but Chub still frowned when she suggested it. In the bottom drawer: twigs, a handful of strewn peanuts.

  She dropped the nuts into the kitchen trash and cracked the back door.

  “Chub!”

  She opened the bread box, dropped a slice in the toaster.

  “Chu-ub!”

  She took out jam. Her unfinished crossword still sat on the table. Desires, four letters, starts with a Y. The toast popped up. She pinched it out and buttered it. That lone Y a wishbone, a fork in the road.

  “Chub! Snack time!” She went out. Fog drifted up into the trees, rhododendrons lacquered with dew. “Chub! Let’s go get eggs!”

  She scanned the yard’s overgrown edges. If he hadn’t been hiding before, he was now. Rich had started it, smacking his hand to his heart when Chub leapt out. The coffee can lay abandoned in the grass. Chub lived for the moment Rich popped the lid off.

  Now we’re cooking with gas, Rich would say, tapping a worm out. Rich fished with flies, but he knew there was pride in work. Chub’s face lit with the praise, the same naked joy as when Rich had given him sink baths as a baby. He’d loved water, kicked and squirmed like a chub in a net, so Rich had started calling him one, until it became his name.

  There was Scout’s collar, hooked to his chain.

  “Scout?”

  He still had scabs from the last porcupine. Ocean wind swept inland. She scanned the hill, a prickle at the back of her neck.

  “Chub?” she called, forgetting the sadness she’d been holding off all morning.

  “Scout ran away!” Chub yelled, bursting red cheeked from the brambles.

  Colleen sighed. “He went to find your dad.” Every time that dog got free, he lit out for Rich. “Go wash your hands, mister.”

  Inside, Chub licked jam off his toast. She took the wart cream from the kitchen drawer. In a few weeks she would lose him to school. The red lunchbox she’d bought was hidden in the coat closet. All summer, every time she’d pushed a pair of waders aside, it had stared back at her.

  “Let me see your hand.”

  His shoulders slumped, but he held it out.

  He’s too well behaved, Enid complained. The wart was on his thumb, near the base. Colleen rubbed the cream in, her mind wandering back down the drugstore aisle. She twisted the cap back on, sealing the daydream inside, and tucked the crossword under the burl bowl for later.

  They walked up their hill and over the next ridge to Garlic Creek, turning north up the draw. If they were lucky, Scout would be collapsed on the front stoop when they got home.

  “What if he’s lost?” Chub asked, as if she’d said it aloud.

  “He’s not lost.”

  Chub ran ahead.
Soon he would leave her behind, the way Rich did every morning, coming home worn out and preoccupied by a world she could not enter.

  Kids are like puppies, Enid said. It’s easier with two.

  Enid got pregnant the way other women caught colds. Well, the getting wasn’t difficult, even for Colleen, if Rich would just agree to try. It was the staying. She gave her head a shake. Think of something else.

  “What creek is this?” she asked. The water burbled.

  “Garlic.”

  “Are you sure?” They’d made this trip a hundred times.

  “Garlic is good with salt and bread,” Chub recited. “It flows back and forth, all the way north. When you get to the farm, stretch out your arm. Go east over Deer Rib and far as it seems, you’ll see Fort Eugene.”

  “Isn’t there an easier way to Fort Eugene?”

  Chub looked into his palm. “You can just follow the Little Lost.”

  “The whole way?”

  He nodded. “But it’s longer.”

  Finally, they came to the edge of the clearing. Eight years since she and Enid had sold it, but there was still something comforting about the first glimpse of the cabin. Their great-grandparents had cleared this land, at the foot of Deer Rib Ridge. Their grandparents had farmed it. To their mother, eating store-canned had been a sign of coming up in the world. She’d wasted away to almost nothing in the end but would still eat a canned pear if Colleen poured it in a dish of its own syrup.

  Chub ran around front, charging the poultry flock. The birds separated, chickens scattering in a burst of clucks, ducks veering all one direction, a honking parade.

  “Chub!”

  “He’s okay,” Joanna called from the doorway. “They could use the exercise.”

  “So could he,” Colleen admitted.

  Joanna’s sweatshirt hung to her knees. One of Jed’s, though he wasn’t much bigger than she was. They used to tease him about having to sit on his Bible when he drove for Sanderson. Merle had fired Jed or he’d quit. Either way, people had stopped buying Joanna’s eggs in town. That was years ago, not long after the government swallowed up timberlands for the national park south of them, when jobs started leaking out of redwood country like blood from a lung shot and nobody wanted to get on Merle’s bad side. Jed had found work up in Oregon, gone five weeks out of six, but he’d fared better than most. Sanderson had laid off all the truck drivers in the end.

  That park’ll kill this town, Colleen’s mom had warned, though she hadn’t lived long enough to see it. That was one lucky thing about cancer.

  Joanna’s skirt dragged, brown at the hem, pushed-up sleeves bunched at her elbows. Diesel hung in the air, a chlorine tang.

  “They had a helicopter up there spraying all morning,” Joanna said, thrusting her chin toward Deer Rib Ridge. She looked like a cherub with her big eyes and round cheeks, but she was made of rawhide. Last winter, when Joanna and the girls had caught the crud, Colleen offered to drive them to the company clinic if they walked down the draw to the house, mud a foot deep on the Deer Rib Road. Jed had been away on a run.

  You can still go, Colleen had reminded her—even if Jed doesn’t work for Sanderson anymore hanging in the air unsaid. The clinic was free for employees, their wives, and their kids, and five dollars a visit as long as somebody in your family had once worked for the company. Joanna had snuffed her nose. Cut you with one hand and bandage you with the other, she’d said, handing Colleen her change.

  Now Colleen pinched an earring. “I hope we didn’t wake you?”

  “You’d have to get up pretty early in the morning. That baby’s part rooster. How many?”

  “Just a dozen.” Colleen removed the egg carton from her bag.

  Usually Joanna sent her oldest to gather the eggs. Judith was seven, homeschooled.

  Chub had cornered the ducks against the side of the barn, near where Bossy—the last of Colleen’s mother’s Bossys—grazed.

  “Chub, don’t get so close,” Colleen cautioned him.

  “He’s okay. That cow’s half dog.”

  Joanna dragged her boot across the coop’s ramp, clearing away scat. She’d done the bargaining when she and Jed bought the place. Pregnant with Judith, big as a barn, she’d marched Rich and Eugene around the cabin pointing out chinks between logs large enough to push a nail through.

  Joanna ducked into the coop. Even standing outside, the bird musk was so thick it brought tears to Colleen’s eyes.

  “That should do it.” Joanna came out, one arm bracing her back. From the posture, it struck Colleen suddenly—another one, already, the last still in diapers. She felt a pang of jealousy. Joanna looked out at the garlic fields and sniffed. “Really smell it now.”

  “Keeps the vampires away,” Colleen said, her mother’s line, though she couldn’t smell anything besides chickens.

  “The spray, I mean. Might as well spray us, the way the wind blows it,” Joanna said.

  The breeze carried the swish of pampas grass down from the Deer Rib clear-cuts. Colleen scanned the bare ridge for the half-built treehouse where, after her father had drowned, she’d gone to look for him, but even the stump of that tree was gone. Chub raced around the corner of the cabin, chasing the ducks straight at them.

  “Chub!” Colleen scolded, ducks parting around their legs, rubber feet slapping up the ramp.

  “There’s something in the barn you’ll want to see,” Joanna said, and disappeared into the cabin.

  “Did you scare those poor ducks?” Colleen asked.

  “No.” Chub toed gravel.

  “I think you did. I think they’re all hiding with their heads under their pillows.”

  Joanna emerged, towheaded Camber gripping her index finger, the toddler’s steps jerky and mechanical, stopping to grin at Colleen. Joanna had labored alone through the night with her—just luck that Colleen had walked up to the cabin for eggs that morning and found Joanna squatting in the kitchen. The cord had been oddly easy to snip once Colleen had tied the ends off with string: a vein and a single artery instead of two, the placenta shriveled. But now here was Camber, fat and satisfied with herself, smug with life, with no memory of her difficult passage into it.

  Joanna hoisted her up onto her hip. Leah and Judith flew down the steps next, as though they hadn’t been allowed out of the cabin in days. Chub took Colleen’s hand and they followed Joanna toward the barn.

  “What is it?” he asked, his fingers squirming with anticipation.

  “I don’t know.” She gave his hand three quick squeezes. I. Love. You.

  Joanna pushed up the barn’s brace board.

  “Ready?” Joanna asked. Colleen’s own curiosity swelled.

  The smell of hay tickled Colleen’s throat, barn lit only by the incubator bulbs. Leah mashed her face to the glass. Chub dropped to his knees, chicks and ducklings basking in the glow of a heat lamp rigged to a car battery.

  Joanna handed Camber to Colleen. The baby squirmed, thunked her head against Colleen’s breast—it felt so natural. Joanna slid the screen off the incubator.

  “Gently now,” she instructed the children.

  Chub bit his lip, as though submerging his hands in water he expected to be cold. He touched a chick, darted his hand back.

  Joanna scooped up a duckling. “Hold him close so he doesn’t get cold.”

  “He’s soft,” Chub murmured, cuddling his duckling against his chest. He would have been a good brother. Loyal and protective, like Rich. A sweet, sweet heart.

  The baby nuzzled Colleen’s nipple through her shirt. She offered her finger instead. When it was time, Chub lowered his duckling back in with both hands.

  “What’s wrong with that one?” he asked.

  Colleen saw the one he meant: small, with a crossed beak and a deformed wing.

  “Oh,” Joanna said. “That one’s special. Watch your fingers.” She lowered the lid.

  “Why?” Chub crouched, his nose to the glass.

  “Sometimes they just come that way, don’t
they? We love them a little extra.”

  “It’ll die,” Judith said. “The special ones always die.”

  “I’ll take her. I know she’s heavy.” Joanna hefted Camber out of Colleen’s arms.

  They crossed the grass, heat evaporating from the spot where the baby had rested against Colleen’s heart.

  “That cow is fat,” Chub said.

  “We’ll have another little Bossy running around pretty soon,” Joanna said.

  Joanna handed over the eggs, accepting Colleen’s dollar bill without thanks or embarrassment. Chub lifted the carton’s lid.

  “Wouldn’t that be something?” Joanna asked, palm on her belly, watching Chub’s hands hover over the domes of the eggs, as though casting a spell to hatch them. “If you could just want them to life?”

  * * *

  Colleen kept a hand on the canvas bag as they walked. At the flat rock where Garlic Creek hooked south, they rested, Chub’s head in her lap, his binoculars to his eyes.

  “What do you see?” she asked. He lowered them to his chest. “Why do you love these things so much, cookie-boy?”

  He shrugged, shy.

  “What should we make with these eggs? Broccoli casserole?”

  Chub groaned.

  “Brussels-sprout cake?”

  He wrinkled his nose. She pushed his bangs off his forehead.

  “Where’d you get these beautiful green eyes?” she asked.

  “I got them at the green-eyes store.”

  A branch snapped. Colleen turned. Up the ridge, an alder limb bounced, as though a bird had taken flight. Chub squirmed and she tickled him.

  “Stop!” he squealed, grabbing her hands.

  “Which way home?”

  He studied her palm, then pointed.

  “Why can’t you read your map?” he asked.

  “My dad never taught me,” Colleen said, realizing it was true.

  * * *

  Rich was chopping wood when they got back. Scout trotted over, threw himself down for a belly rub.

  “He found you,” she said, no longer a question.