Damnation Spring

by Ash Davidson

  “Hazard of the trade.” He cleared his throat. “Sorry I just showed up the other day.”

  All the questions she wanted to ask swelled in her chest, but there was Helen, standing at the screen door. Colleen slipped past him, up the walk.

  “Helen?” she asked, forcing brightness. “I’m sorry to get you up. I just wanted to leave this.”

  Helen pulled her robe tighter, pushed the screen door open. “I’ve been up.”

  She was solid and thick legged; with the robe, it was hard to tell Helen had just had a baby. She made no move to take the pan, her hair loose and unbrushed, but stepped aside to let Colleen in. There was the granny square thrown over the back of the couch, the burl clock on the wall, the bear-paw dish filled with yogurt-coated somethings, just as Colleen remembered. A car pulled into the driveway.

  “Who the hell is it now?” Carl asked, still in his coveralls. “Oh, hi, Colleen.” He thumbed up a slat in the blinds. “Christ. It don’t stop.”

  “Did I get my day wrong?” Colleen asked.

  Out front, Gail Porter lugged herself out of the driver’s seat and opened her back door. Two small feet appeared underneath it.

  “He’s missing that bus on purpose,” Helen said to Carl.

  Luke shuffled across the wet grass. The car door slammed and there was Chub, holding his red lunch box.

  “What—?” Colleen handed the stroganoff to Carl and went out.

  “Dad didn’t come get you?” Colleen asked. Luke brushed past her. “Mrs. Porter, I’m sorry, Rich didn’t come?”

  “Must have got held up. Well, this saves me a trip.” Gail Porter got back in her car.

  “Thanks for bringing them,” Colleen called.

  “Couldn’t leave them.”

  Gail Porter backed out. Chub followed Luke inside. The cake. She’d forgotten the cake. She hurried out the gate, retrieved the Bundt cake and the bowl of frosting.

  “Hello?” she called in the screen door.

  “In here.”

  She followed Carl’s voice to the kitchen. He was frying hamburger in a pan, sting of onions in the air, Helen at the table.

  “Can I frost it real quick for you?”

  Carl hunted around in a drawer, held a knife out handle-first. “This work?”

  He turned back to the stove, swell of fat slopping over his belt. He’d been a few years behind her and Helen in school and she couldn’t help but feel a little maternal toward him. Maybe Enid was right. Maybe being married to Rich did make her act old. Colleen uncrimped the foil from the bowl. Helen folded it in half, then in half again. Carl batted onions around in the pan.

  “What did Daniel want?” Colleen asked, spreading frosting, trying to sound casual. How long had Helen watched out the door before she’d noticed her? She’d never told Helen about that first day in the movie theater in Arcata, how she’d cut her finger on the sharp mouth of the Coke can she’d been fiddling with, how, in her nervousness, the sight of the blood made her woozy. She’d never told Helen, told anyone, how Daniel had slipped her finger into his mouth and drawn it out clean, then pressed it until the bleeding stopped.

  Blood makes me sick to my stomach.

  You just have to learn how not to let it.

  She’d never told Helen how there were days she’d stare out the window of the real estate office, unable to concentrate on anything but the clock ticking down the minutes until Daniel would vault up the back stairs, but Helen had once been her best friend.

  “He wants us to sign some petition,” Carl said.

  Helen dipped her finger into the frosting, as though taking its temperature.

  “Says the sprays are poison.” Carl added salt to the pan.

  “He came to our house too,” Colleen confided.

  “Oh yeah? Gets around. Lucky somebody hasn’t shot him.”

  “I think Eugene tried.”

  Carl chuckled, shimmying the fry pan around on the burner.

  “I did spray around here a lot, while she was pregnant. Kept the blackberries down. Better than her getting out there on her hands and knees. Those Himalayans take over. They’ll pull a fence down.” Carl turned the burner off. “You know Helen can make a rock grow. Did you see her roses out front?”

  Helen gave a weak smile. “One time I didn’t get out of the way fast enough. Oh, I was itchy.” Helen scratched her arm at the memory. “And my nose. Just bled and bled. You remember, Carl? He almost took me to the clinic. He’s never had any problems with it though. Maybe a rash once in a while, but that’s it.”

  “I never got pregnant,” Carl said.

  Colleen raised her head, listening for Chub.

  “They’re in Luke’s room,” Helen said.

  Carl scraped hamburger onto plates and brought them to the table. Helen pushed hers away, like the smell sickened her.

  “Guy cares more about fish than people.” Carl shoveled crumbled meat into his mouth. “Kill a town to save some trees? Something wrong with that picture.”

  Colleen smoothed the last strokes of buttercream.

  Helen stared at the cake. “I can’t even cook.”

  Colleen set the knife in the sink. “A little rest never hurt anybody.”

  “That’s what I keep telling her,” Carl said.

  Helen pushed back in her chair. Carl watched her go.

  “Baby died Sunday night. They told us a day, but he was a fighter. Made it ten.”

  “Oh, Carl,” Colleen said. “I’m so sorry.”

  He nodded, eyes brimming. “We’re just a crying circus around here.”

  Colleen smiled. “I should go. I’m sorry I barged in.”

  “Nah. Don’t be.”

  She followed the boys’ voices and found Helen standing in the doorway of the nursery. A new swaddle, embroidered lumberjack in the corner, hung over the side of the crib. Colleen recognized it from the Sanderson gift basket. Chub had had the same one. Across the hall, Chub and Luke lay on their bellies, cards spread facedown on the carpet.

  “They said something wasn’t right on the what’s-it-called,” Helen said quietly. “That day I saw you at the clinic. Ultrasound.” Helen snorted at the memory. “I wouldn’t believe it. I told myself he’d come out fine.”

  Colleen touched her arm, but Helen gave a little shake of her head. Don’t upset the boys. She dug a tissue from the pocket of her robe, her face crumpling.

  “I’m sorry, I know you’ve—” She shook her head. “So caught up in my own pain I can’t see anybody else’s, you know?”

  “I know.” Colleen nodded. “Chub, honey, time to go. Help Luke clean up.”

  The boys sat up, turning over cards.

  “I was going to guess that one!”

  Colleen ushered Chub out the front door ahead of her.

  “We’re not signing anything,” Helen said through the screen. “If anybody asks.”

  Colleen nodded.

  “Thank you,” Helen said, dropping the hook into the hasp, locking the door from the inside. “For the cake.”

  RICH

  Rich braced his good arm against the seat in front of him, gut clenched, back straight, ready to launch himself upright if the crummy hit a rut. Lew could load a five-ton log onto a truck without spilling a drop from a coffee cup balanced on the dash, but when it came to driving crummy, all bets were off. Jolt to the tailbone was about all it would take to put Rich out of commission. Wrenched his back pretty good, when he did his shoulder.

  Don crouched in the aisle up front, on the lookout. There’d been a dozen hippies blocking the road that morning on the way in, like nobody had told them the rains were here. Today was their last day on Deer Rib, last day of the season; nobody would be harvesting shit until spring.

  What size are Dolly Parton’s feet? Lew had asked, letting the crummy idle. She doesn’t know either! Lew had floored it, hippies scattering.

  The whole thing hadn’t cost them two minutes, but it had thrown the day off-kilter, right up until Rich had spotted the deer from above.
He’d slipped his rope, the ten-foot free fall popping his shoulder out of its socket, leaving him dangling in the air, grunting like a one-armed gorilla. One day that arm’s going to tear off, Pete said after Rich got himself down, rammed a fist into his armpit, and walked backward into the trunk of the spar he’d just finished rigging to pop his shoulder back in.

  Now Lew slowed, approaching the curve. The road was deserted, muddy tire tracks in the brush, a few empties. That would get Don’s goat—if there was one thing he hated more than hippies, it was their trash. Then came the high-pitched whine of wet brakes. The crummy lurched to a stop, stray thermos thunking down the aisle.

  “Son of a bitch!” Don bellowed.

  The morning’s half dozen longhairs had swelled to a noisy throng of fifty or so, bobbing signs, plus a bullhorn.

  “Gun it, Lew!” somebody yelled.

  “Can’t just drive over them,” Lew said.

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Have to move those first.”

  The log truck they’d loaded with pecker poles a few hours earlier was stopped ahead, gyppo driver smoking near the back tire of his empty truck, his haul spread out across the road, like he’d been waiting on Don to show up and fix this. Don yanked the metal ball that folded the crummy door open and stormed out.

  “He’s going to give himself a heart attack,” Lew said.

  Younger guys jockeyed down the steps. Lew radioed Harvey, hung the CB back in its cradle, and turned the wipers on, clearing the windshield enough to read the signs: SAVE DAMNATION GROVE. Chanting rattled the windows. The bullhorn blipped on and off, Don shoving through the crowd, as though he meant to commandeer it.

  “Better get out there,” Pete said. Rich raised an eyebrow. “What are they gonna do?” Pete asked. “Break my nose?”

  Rich got to his feet, careful of his shoulder.

  “You coming?” Rich asked Lew.

  “Nope.” Lew crossed his arms over his big belly.

  It felt good to step out into the fresh air, until the full force of the chanting hit. Don was screaming in the skinny bullhorner’s face. A bearded guy held a boy on his shoulders a year or two younger than Chub, the boy and Rich the two tallest heads in the crowd. The kid squinted, as though the noise were being sprayed in his face.

  Don grabbed the bullhorner by the shirt. A camera flashed. Suddenly, the chanting stopped. The mob went quiet. Even Don paused, red-faced, and in that split second of stillness a hoarse song rose from the crowd, voices swelling.

  This land is your land, this land is my land.

  Because he knew the words, Rich almost joined in. Don shook his head. Look at these idiots.

  From the redwood for-est. The note hummed in the air, busted into a cheer.

  Don cracked his neck, whirled around, and clocked the bullhorner. The child gripped handfuls of his father’s hair. Glass shattered out of a crummy window. Something struck Rich in the head and his hand came away wet. He’d left his hard hat on the seat.

  “Motherfuckers!” Pete yelled.

  Two men cowered near the log barricade, attempting to cover their heads, chained there. Curses, shouting, the crunch of gravel underfoot, then the roar of a chainsaw cut through. Eugene stood in the bed of his truck, saw rearing up, an animal he wasn’t fully in control of. Longhairs scattered, scrambling through brush, hoofing it for cars up around the curve.

  Don was busy yelling at the two chained men, nose blood running down his chin, soaking the neck of his shirt. Eugene came up next to him, lowered the saw onto the log six inches from a man’s hand, and lopped off the end, hippie coughing in the spray of sawdust.

  “Somebody better unlock these guys in the next ten seconds!”

  A cluster of hippies stopped; one had an eye already swelling shut.

  “Ten, nine—” Eugene lowered the saw into the log and lopped off another two-inch round.

  The chained men were yelling now.

  “Somebody got the key to this thing?” Eugene called.

  A man came forward, pulling keys from his pocket. “Calm down, man.”

  “Me calm down? Me calm down?” Eugene was so riled up if you threw him against a wall, he’d have bounced off it.

  The hippie fit a key into the cuffs. The men rubbed their wrists, still crouched like prisoners. Eugene killed the saw.

  “You’re only hurting yourselves, man,” one of the hippies said.

  “Fuck you,” Eugene spat.

  “You think they give a fuck about you? You’re working yourselves out of a job.”

  Eugene leaned into the man’s face. “Fuck. You.”

  He made the remaining longhairs roll the logs to the side of the road. Rich wanted to get back on the crummy, but Lew stood inside the door.

  Lew lifted his chin in Eugene’s direction. “My brother wouldn’t take that asshole out on a boat for a million dollars.”

  Eugene’s saw got pinched in a log too heavy to budge and amid the swearing and opinion-offering it took to free it, the hippies made a break for it. Younger guys took off after them.

  “Leave ’em,” Don called.

  Two longhairs remained, supporting a third, bell rung pretty good.

  “Man, you have to take us to the hospital.”

  Don snorted, pressed a finger to one nostril, and blew out a plug of blood. “Town’s that way.”

  “Come on,” the other man told his friend. Together, the three limped off.

  Rich and the rest of the crew climbed back into the crummy, picked up speed, gravel clattering. The mood rose, a team coming home from a big win. They’d have to haul the loader out to get those logs back onto the truck, but for now, they hooted and hollered, rattled the windows as they passed the three hippies, injured man walking on his own now. Harvey came flying up the road, siren wailing. Rich’s head pulsed where a soft egg had risen.

  Back at the mill lot, Rich dug out his keys, slip of paper coming with them. Shit. Colleen’s voice rose from the note. Chub, aftercare, 5:30. Don’t forget. School would have called her by now. He started the truck, leaned back a moment, head throbbing. Go home and get some ice on it. He put the truck in gear. This land is—a lot of work is what this land is.

  COLLEEN

  Rain pelted the truck, windshield a blur, even on fast wipe. The downpour had let loose almost as soon as they’d left Helen’s.

  “You waited out front the whole time?” Colleen quizzed Chub.

  Chub nodded. Rich had never forgotten him before. Should she check the mill lot? Gail would have said if something had happened, wouldn’t she? Worry pulsed in Colleen’s mind—Please, please—so consuming that when she bounced up the driveway and saw his truck parked out front, it took a moment for anger to leak in. Chub disappeared to his room.

  Rich was laid out on top of the bedspread, still in his work clothes.

  “You forgot Chub?” she demanded.

  “I’ve got a hell of a headache.” Rich squinted at her, dropped his head back onto the pillow.

  “A headache? You forgot your son.”

  “I put my shoulder out,” Rich explained. “They blocked the road off. ‘Save Damnation Grove.’ ”

  “Again?” she asked. He reached for the painkillers on the nightstand. “You’re only supposed to take two.” She picked the extras out of his palm, snatched the empty water glass, filled it at the bathroom sink, and thrust it back.

  “Thanks. You okay?” he asked.

  She should have been furious with him still—buying that land and not telling her—but here were the tears she’d been holding back since she’d seen the swaddle hanging over the side of the crib at Helen’s.

  He lifted his good arm. “Come here.”

  She crawled in. He raked hair out of her eyes. He smelled of sawdust and gasoline. He took her hand, guided it to the egg.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “For a bunch of pacifists, they got a funny way of showing it.”

  She slid her hand down the side of his neck.


  “Up on the Rib today,” Rich said, “there were these three dead deer, just laid out in a clearing. Not a scratch on them—” He shifted uncomfortably, hissed air through his teeth. “I really did a number on it this time.”

  She helped him out of his shirt, cupped her hand over the swollen lump on his head, like she could heal it.

  Once Rich fell asleep, she went into the kitchen, opened the cabinet below the junk drawer, and removed a single jam jar, a masking-tape label across the lid—Daniel’s scrawl, handwriting she recognized from the lab notes she’d sometimes helped him type up, from the little pad he’d kept in his pocket to jot down things to look up at the library later, but never, not once, from a letter addressed to her. She’d thought the label would say her name, but it read only DC-31. She unscrewed the gold ring, pried off the canning lid underneath, filled it at the tap, closed it tight, and labeled it, 11/22/77, then slid it back into the cupboard. If Rich could gamble on seven hundred acres of trees, refuse to tell her what it cost, she could do this.

  November 23 COLLEEN

  She turned the engine off and looked up through the windshield at Whitey’s. Paint peeled off the building’s plywood sign: WHITEY’S SHOE HOSPITAL OR SAW REPAIR. Can’t have both, the joke went.

  She grabbed Rich’s caulks and went in. There was a pause in Whitey’s hammering. Whitey’s had once been a bar—three people had survived the ’64 tsunami on the roof here—and the moldy smell of spilled beer still off-gassed from the floorboards, counter stacked with ammo cans and jugs of chain oil, more storage unit than store. Whitey bellied through the saloon doors like a badger in Coke-bottle glasses, white mane combed back with its single black stripe.

  Whitey took the boots and turned them upside down to examine the soles, as he did every year at the end of the season, when Colleen brought them in to have the plugs replaced. Beyond his appearance, there was his badgerlike gruffness, open 365 days a year.

  “Thursday.” He was of the generation that didn’t speak to women except to issue a verdict on their cooking.

  “Next Thursday?”