Damnation Spring

by Ash Davidson

  “We could be,” Rich said. “But we’re not.”

  “Listen, I know Colleen—your wife,” he corrected himself, “has lost a lot of pregnancies.”

  “She told you that?” Rich asked, a hitch in his voice.

  The man shrugged. “A town this size, she didn’t have to. Must have been rough on you, watching the woman you love go through that.” The way he said it—rough—it struck Rich he was talking down to him, molding his speech to match Rich’s own. “I don’t think I’d be able to take it.” The man went on. “I’d want to know why. I’d want to do something.”

  Colleen had had every test there was. If there was a reason, the doctors would have found it by now. What Rich could do was not get her pregnant again.

  “If there’s an answer, I want to help you find it,” the man said, misreading Rich’s silence.

  “I judge a man by what he does,” Rich said. “Not what he says.”

  “I hear you.”

  “See, that’s the thing. I don’t think you do. Stay away from my wife. You’re not helping her.”

  “She knows something isn’t right,” the man said. “She knows it in her gut. Just like you do.”

  “Colleen has been through enough. She doesn’t need you putting ideas in her head.” Rich stepped off the curb onto the wet gravel.

  “I’ll stay away from her,” the man baited him.

  Rich stopped, his back to him.

  “She wants to know why,” the man said. “Don’t you?”

  Rich had never struck a man in anger, but here he was, fists clenched.

  “Maybe you’re afraid you won’t like the answer,” the man called after him.

  Rich walked to his truck, climbed in, tossed the ignition coil onto the seat, backed out, pulled alongside the man and rolled down his window.

  “You ever talk to my wife again, you and me are going to have a real problem,” Rich said.

  “Is that a threat?” the man asked.

  Rich pushed air out his nostrils. “A threat? No. That’s a promise.”

  He pulled away, the man growing smaller and smaller behind him.

  January 14 COLLEEN

  Colleen leaned over the wheel. The bulldozers still hadn’t finished clearing the Last Chance slide north of them, cutting them off from Crescent City, and, after a rain like last night, there was no guarantee the road would still be where you’d left it. Chub kicked the back of the passenger seat.

  “Stop, please.”

  Had she put noodles on the list? It poked up from her purse, a quick reach enough to send them careening off the cliff. She gripped the wheel tighter, until finally they were inland, passing the mill, juddering down No Name Road. The truck’s tires spun in the mud.

  “I hope we don’t get stuck.”

  A mustard-colored VW bus was parked near the grove—not Daniel’s—tents pitched above the road. She slowed, but there was no movement. They passed the Deer Rib turnoff.

  “Aren’t we getting eggs?” Chub asked.

  “We’ll get some at the store, Grahamcracker.”

  Stay out of it, Rich had warned. Stay away from that woman.

  She pulled into Fort Eugene. The trailer house door swung open and Eugene himself appeared, still in his boxers. A cat slipped out through his shins, hopped up onto the carcass of a Corvette Eugene had been rebuilding since Marla was born. A goat bleated from its perch in the goat tree.

  “They still camped out?” Eugene called, cocky, as though he hadn’t noticed the bags under his eyes, his small mound of low-set belly.

  “A few,” Colleen called back.

  Enid came out with the baby, plopped into the passenger seat, knocked her muddy feet together, and swung her legs in. “This damn thing.” Enid pulled the seat belt out from under her.

  “Tell them they got an hour to clear out,” Eugene called.

  “Ignore him,” Enid told Colleen. “You leave it alone!” She slammed her door for emphasis.

  Colleen backed out. When they rounded the bend below the grove, the hippies were breaking camp. A scraggly-haired man stood near a plywood sign: STOP KILLING OUR MOTHER.

  “He’s peeing,” Chub said.

  “Don’t look,” Colleen said.

  “Not much to see,” Enid announced.

  The man zipped up, stuck out his thumb.

  “Pull over.” Enid reached across and yanked the wheel.

  Colleen slammed her brakes. “Are you crazy?”

  Chub looked alarmed when the man climbed in, bringing the smell of wet leather.

  “Thanks,” he said. “Cold out there.” He blew into his hands, reached forward to introduce himself. “Nathan.”

  “We don’t care what your name is,” Enid said.

  They surfed ruts to the paved road, so smooth Colleen had to remind herself to shift gears. They passed silently through Orick, Trinidad, McKinleyville, as though Enid had picked him up to avoid conversation. Chub traced shapes in the fogged window.

  “Here’s fine,” the man said when they got to the outskirts of Arcata.

  “Why would you do that?” Colleen demanded, watching him scramble down the shoulder.

  “Better us than Eugene,” Enid said.

  Mud clung halfway up the truck doors. Colleen sat with Chub in the clinic waiting room with Alsea in her lap, a soft tuft of red-blond hair, rolls of pearly flesh. Finally, Enid emerged, smiling. Colleen had assumed it would hurt, the way Enid had described it, some little T-shaped device they inserted that pumped out hormones, tricking your body into not getting pregnant.

  “Still not sitting up?” the nurse asked Enid, frowning at Alsea. “Bring her back for a minute.”

  Enid obeyed. Chub backed into Colleen’s knees. She lifted him into her lap.

  “Where’d you get these beautiful eyelashes?”

  “I got them at the eyelash store.”

  Enid came out with her jaw tight, nostrils flared. At the store, she loaded the basket with a force to dent cans.

  “How can you shop without a list?” Colleen asked.

  “It’s in my head.”

  “Just don’t ask me to drive you back when you forget something.”

  “I didn’t ask you to drive me here. You offered.” Enid reached for the baked beans.

  “I’ve got a coupon,” Colleen said, grabbing the cans out of the basket and returning them to the shelf. “Two for seventy-nine.”

  Enid reached for two more to replace them. “Eugene likes this kind.”

  “It’s the same thing.”

  “He’ll taste the difference.”

  Colleen steered her cart down the next aisle, stood before shelves of canning supplies, loaded up three boxes of jam jars—she’d filled almost all of Daniel’s—then checked out. Transferring her grocery sacks into the backseat, she felt around for the relish jar. She could picture its dark blue lid.

  “Forget something?” Enid asked.

  Chub was out cold by the time they passed Orick.

  Enid squirmed. “It’s only this big.” She measured an inch between her thumb and forefinger, pulled her skirt away from her crotch. Pills didn’t work for her; she forgot to take them. “What am I going to tell him about the string, though?”

  “I could never lie to Rich about something like that.”

  Enid pushed an angry puff of air out her nose.

  “What?” Colleen asked.

  “When exactly were you planning to tell me you caught Marla at the make-out point? At their wedding? Or were you going to wait for their tenth anniversary?” Enid demanded.

  How long had she known?

  “It wasn’t like that,” Colleen said quietly.

  “Oh really? What was it like?”

  Colleen felt her cheeks color, tried to focus on the road.

  “Marla only told me because she was scared of what I’d do when I heard it from you. But no, my own sister can’t bother to tell me my daughter’s out fooling around when she’s supposed to be in school.”

  Had
she already told Eugene? How long before Rich found out? What would she do then?

  “What else did she say?” Colleen asked, heart pounding.

  “Why don’t you tell me,” Enid challenged her. “You were the one who was there.”

  Chub turned over in the backseat but didn’t wake.

  She waited for Enid to spit Daniel’s name at her. Was it possible Marla hadn’t mentioned him?

  “I’m sorry,” Colleen said, popping the lid off the silence. She gripped the wheel tighter so that Enid wouldn’t notice her hands trembling. “I just—”

  “If you had a daughter, you would have told me.”

  “But I don’t,” Colleen said. “I don’t have a daughter. Say it, go ahead.”

  “This isn’t about you,” Enid said. “Is it?”

  January 15 CHUB

  Wyatt dropped down from the goat tree and stalked off into the grass as soon as Chub’s mom pulled away. Chub looked back at Fort Eugene, smoke unfurling from the stovepipe, his mom’s voice in his head.

  Don’t go far.

  “Where are we going?” Chub asked, catching up.

  “You’ll see.”

  It was a long way across the marsh. By the time they started climbing up into the woods, Chub’s overalls were wet, heavy, and swampy smelling. Wyatt cocked his head: a chainsaw, far away. They crossed Knife Creek, then another creek he didn’t recognize. He checked his palm. Suddenly there was Uncle Eugene’s truck, parked in the middle of the forest, and Marla’s boyfriend with the big head. Uncle Eugene wrestled a chain around a burl bulging out from the base of a tree. The burl was so wide he had to stretch his body across it twice. Marla’s boyfriend cranked something that made the chain tighten.

  “What are they doing?” Chub whispered.

  Uncle Eugene started his saw. It growled lower and lower, and then the burl dropped into a chain harness. The boyfriend cranked something else, Uncle Eugene jumped down, and the burl thudded into the truck bed.

  “You coming to help?” Uncle Eugene asked, like he’d been expecting them.

  The boyfriend moved the truck, then raked needles over the tire tracks backward to the cut tree, like he was sweeping up to a door.

  “Where are you taking that?” Chub asked. He smelled sap and sawdust.

  “I know a guy.” Uncle Eugene winked, lifted Chub up by the armpits into the truck bed, and patted the burl. “Polish this baby up, people all over the country will want a slice of her. All over the world. She’ll end up one slab in Los Angeles, one in New York City. Places nobody’s ever seen a redwood.”

  Uncle Eugene shook out a blue tarp and tossed it over the top of the burl, hooking bungee cords to the corners. Then Uncle Eugene and Marla’s boyfriend climbed into the cab, Wyatt scrambled up into the bed beside Chub, and the truck bounced downhill.

  “That thing starts rolling around back there, you bail out,” Uncle Eugene called back to them.

  It was bumpy for a long time. Then they got to the road.

  “If you tell anybody, I’ll kill you,” Wyatt said.

  “Tell anybody what?”

  Wyatt sighed, like Chub’s stupidity exhausted him. He flicked the burl through the tarp, then slit his own throat with his finger, so slow Chub felt its ghost. He swallowed.

  The tarp crinkled in the wind, truck picking up speed.

  January 16 RICH

  He ran another quarter-inch groove up a salvage board, redwood felled and sawed a century ago, heartwood from the old hotel as solid as the day it was milled, graphite marks where a carpenter had figured his wages, silt lines from the floods of ’64, ’55, ’53, ’27. Colleen swung in, gravel popping in the wheel wells. She got out, hitched a paper grocery sack up on her hip, let the screen door slap behind her.

  He turned off the table saw. Chub was splayed across the backseat, mouth-breathing. Rich smacked sawdust off his legs, caught the screen door behind him. He pulled a chair away from the table, just to make noise.

  “You eat?” she asked, snatching a block of cheese, taking the store loaf from the bread box, pulling out the silverware drawer so hard forks jangled. She was in a bad mood from taking Enid down to the clinic again, second time in a week. She held the new peanut butter jar to her chest, twisted, turned it over to spank the bottom, grunted in frustration.

  He held out a hand and she thunked the jar into it. The seal released with a pop.

  “What’s wrong with me?” she asked, tears streaming down her cheeks.

  “Nothing’s wrong with you,” Rich said.

  Her chin crumpled. “How do you know?”

  “You don’t have to be the one to drive her.”

  “She’s my sister.” Colleen sucked in her snot. “Could you carry Chub in?”

  Rich went out to the truck. The glove box hung open, exposing a pinwheel mint in a plastic wrapper. The man’s words echoed in his head—I’ll stay away from her. Rich smacked the glove box shut once, twice, until the latch engaged.

  In the kitchen, Colleen set the four neat triangles of Chub’s sandwich up on edge like the spines of a dinosaur.

  “Tyrannosandwich rex,” Chub said groggily.

  * * *

  A current of cold air woke him in the night. He found Colleen at the kitchen table, writing a list—names, addresses.

  “What are you doing?”

  Colleen laid her pen down horizontally at the top of the yellow legal pad. You can come this close and no closer.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” she said.

  January 27 COLLEEN

  She’d bought store eggs. She had stayed out of it, but now here was Joanna, huddled on the front stoop with her girls, behind a translucent curtain of rain, when Colleen came home from taking Chub to school.

  “Can you drive us to town?” Joanna blurted out, hand on her belly.

  “Is everything okay?” Colleen asked. The girls corralled the baby beside a wooden flat filled with eggs. They looked chilled. “Do you want to come in and dry off first?”

  “We’re fine,” Joanna said.

  The girls found the wool blanket and spread it over themselves in the backseat. When they got to the Beehive, the charity cases at the counter—old man Yancy, missing a leg; Olin Rowley, missing an arm—unshaven, hungover, turned around to stare.

  “I hope you girls brought some sunshine,” Dot said.

  Colleen felt a surge of gratitude.

  Jars of canned salmon gleamed in the refrigerated case beside a half-empty egg carton. Joanna laid a hand on Judith’s shoulder, pulling her back from the bakery case. Judith’s head bumped Joanna’s pregnant belly, her nose print left behind on the glass, level with the cinnamon rolls.

  “I have eggs.” Joanna bounced the baby on her hip.

  Dot glanced at the men’s hunched backs, then gave a quick nod. Joanna went out to get them, bell jostling over the door. Leah banged her palm on the glass.

  “How are you girls today?” Dot asked.

  “Fine,” Judith said, staring at the buns.

  “Rainy enough for you?” Dot asked. “Even the fish are complaining. It’s too wet!”

  Joanna came back with a gust of damp, set the flat on the counter angrily, and counted out ten dozen. Dot tonged two cinnamon rolls from the case, dropped them into a sack, and pushed them across the counter with a ten-dollar bill.

  “I can bring more,” Joanna said, ignoring the sack.

  Judith grabbed on to her mother’s skirt. Colleen took the rolls.

  Thank you, she mouthed.

  Dot gave a false-stern look—What in the world, Colleen?

  The girls stuck by Colleen, since she held the pastry bag. By the time the bell clunked over Colleen’s head, Joanna was already halfway across the road. The tank truck idled, spraying the weedy strip along the stream. Colleen ushered the girls into the truck. The man aiming the hose wasn’t Carl, of course not, but it took a moment to register the red cap. Joanna squared off in front of Eugene, baby on her hip, belly jutting.

  “What’s in there
?” Joanna demanded.

  “Just a little weed juice,” Eugene said, glancing across at Colleen. “It’s good for you.”

  The big-headed Sanderson kid hopped out of the cab and crossed his arms like a referee.

  Colleen’s nose itched: chlorine. The cowbell clunked.

  “Lost our walnut tree. Just shriveled up and died,” Dot said, coming out behind her.

  “You want a taste, you nosy bitch?” the Sanderson boy asked Joanna. “Eugene, give her a taste, if she wants it so bad.”

  The Sanderson boy grabbed the hose and misted her. For a moment, the air was sucked from Colleen’s lungs, from the whole street. Then it all came howling out the baby’s mouth. Judith tried to climb out of the truck, but Colleen blocked her, her own eyes stinging, even from this distance. Joanna coughed, dripping spray.

  “What’s in here?” She banged the tank with her palm, spat. “I’m calling the police.”

  “Call ’em. Merle will fucking bury you like he buried your husband.”

  The baby screamed in Joanna’s arms. Suddenly Joanna seemed to hear it. She came running back across the road, cradling the baby.

  “You watch them,” Dot told Colleen, the girls pressing their faces to the truck windows. “I’ll take care of her.” Dot hurried Joanna and the baby inside.

  Colleen got in the truck.

  “I want Mama,” Leah cried. “Mama!”

  “Hush now,” Colleen said. “She’ll be out in a minute,” Colleen assured them, though her own hands were trembling. She reached for the pastry bag, forgotten on the seat between them, and tore off sticky layers. They chewed dutifully. Finally, Joanna reappeared with the baby, eyes red.

  “Here she is,” Colleen said to the girls, surprised at her own relief.

  Dot opened the door, and Joanna climbed in, wearing a pair of Dot’s polyester pants and a baggy cardigan studded with costume pearls. She looked like a child dressed in her grandmother’s clothes. Dot watched them reverse out of the lot, eyes on Colleen. Careful now. Some places you go you can’t get back from.