by Ash Davidson
Rich shrugged.
“You want to talk about it?”
Rich toed the floor. “Not really.”
Lark hacked, cough racking his chest. “That doctor’s a damn butcher. Should be wearing an apron. Says I smoked too many cigarettes. Hell, you ask me, I didn’t smoke enough of ’em. I’d be dead. Speaking of. Hey, Chub, bring that lamp on in here, will you? That one, in the corner. Unplug it. There you go.”
Chub carried the lamp in.
“Isn’t she a beauty?” Lark admired the lacquered driftwood and yellowed paper shade, tipped it over, and pried a pack of cigarettes loose from under the base.
The pack shot out, skimming across the floor and under the hutch. Chub dropped to his belly, turning his cheek to the floor to make his arm reach.
“Got it!” He drew out the pack, turned it over like he’d expected something better—bubblegum, baseball cards.
“Well, aren’t you just as bright as a dime?” Lark pulled the palmed coin from behind Chub’s ear and tapped the pack against the table edge. “Want one?”
Rich shook his head.
“How about you, Chub?”
Chub grinned and slid back into his seat. Lark lit up, inhaled, shook the match out.
“Your line still running clean off the creek?” Rich asked.
Lark leaned back, considered his cigarette. “We get a real good rain it’ll run brown for a day.”
“Ours is more mud than water,” Rich said. “That brush killer they’re spraying—”
“She’s really got you worked up.”
“We’re drinking it, whatever it is.”
“You run a new pipe already?”
“Nah, just a hose lay for now. But nothing’s growing. I mean, nothing—there’s nothing to hold the soil. We haul that cut out of the lower grove, the whole hill will end up in that creek.”
“Give it some time, it’ll green up.” Lark took a long drag, coughed. “Here comes the warden.” He pocketed the cigarettes, pushing up from his chair, grabbing his saw cane, hobbling over to the sink to put his cigarette out, and tucking the wet butt into his front pocket, his speed startling. “Chub, open that drawer there. Yeah, that one.”
Chub pulled open the hutch drawer. The flyer hopped out, skittering across the floor and up Lark’s leg.
“How’d she get in there?” Chub asked.
“How do you think? I’d lock Marsha in there if I could fit her fat ass.”
Marsha’s Dodge labored up the muddy driveway. Lark hobbled back to the table and leaned his cane against the wall.
“Hi, Rich,” Marsha said, coming in. “Heya, Chub. What are we, heating the whole county?” She pulled the door shut behind her.
“Leave that door open,” Lark said.
Marsha sniffed. “You been smoking in here?”
“My damn house.”
Marsha ignored him, set a sack on the table.
“What’s this?” Lark asked, drawing out a bear claw. “Damn blackberry seeds stick in your teeth, worse than a wood tick in your crotch hairs.” He drew out a turnover as big as a fist. “Ah, shit. What the hell do I need all this for?”
“You’re welcome,” Marsha said. “I’ve got groceries in the car.”
Rich went out to help.
“He show you the pack under the lamp?” Marsha asked, handing him a sack. “I leave a few, let him think he’s putting one over on me. He wants to kill himself, that’s his business.”
“He doing all right?” Rich asked, voice low, as though Lark might be able to hear from inside.
“Not great. But he’s hard to kill.” She led the way back in. “Good?” she asked Lark, flecks of pastry in his beard. “Sit down, Rich, I don’t want to interrupt your visit.”
“We should get going,” Rich said. He held the door and Chub scampered out.
Lark tore off a pastry claw. “You see that redhead, you tell her I’m looking for her,” he called after Rich.
“You’d be in trouble if you ever found her,” Marsha said.
“You show me another eighty-three-year-old man can still do ten chin-ups before breakfast.”
“Since when do you fix breakfast?” Marsha asked.
“What’s a man got to do to get a little peace and quiet around here?”
“You tried dying?”
Lark waved her off. “Hey, Gundersen,” he called out. “Don’t let them push you around.” The hog lifted his snout, catching a whiff of the pastries. “What are you looking at?” Lark demanded. “Your days are numbered, Merle, you old bastard.”
Colleen’s truck appeared at the edge of the clearing.
“Hey, isn’t that your tree hugger?” Lark asked.
Rich watched the white pickup falter, negotiating around ruts.
That morning, dulled by sleeplessness, after he’d turned back up his own driveway, he’d sat in the dark for a long time, staring at the house. The anger had burned off and underneath it the thought of losing her, of coming home to an empty house, a life without her, without Chub—the notion gutted him.
Colleen turned her engine off. Chub ran to meet her. She got out and stood, casserole pan in her hands, as though the muddy path to the cabin’s front steps were a long plank over a high river.
She found Rich’s eyes and searched them. He let the corner of his mouth tug up. Colleen released her held breath, gathered herself.
“You think your dick is your dumbest organ,” Lark said, watching Rich watch her. “But it’s your heart. Every damn time.”
March 5 COLLEEN
She took her keys from the burl bowl, morning light streaming through the windows.
“Roads are muddy,” Rich cautioned her, seeing the week-old newspaper tucked under her arm.
They’d talked for a long time in bed last night.
Eight? he’d asked, thumbing back through the Rolodex of his memory. It hadn’t occurred to her that it would hurt him, the pregnancies she’d lost without him.
The roads were soup, the Deer Rib turnoff so overgrown she almost missed it. Thorns screaked along the side panels. The company must have stopped spraying the road—That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? The truck jostled over ruts, brush thwacking the windows, and then came a dirt wall, so dark and high it took her a moment to understand it: the mudslide a mountain, casting its own shadow. She got out, the smell of turned soil filling her nostrils.
She trudged down along the edge, looked back up at the caved-in ridge. Blood beat in her ears. The cabin—where was the cabin? Even this far down from the road, mud stood ten feet high, too soft to climb.
“Joanna?” she yelled. Her voice boomeranged, taunting her. “Jo-ann-a-a-a?”
She tripped along the slide edge, until the mud was her height, then waist-high, then shin-deep, brambles catching her sleeves.
“Hello?” Her voice was hoarse. “Hello-o-o?”
She tried again to read the ridgeline, but the slide had changed the face of it. She sank a foot into mud, testing it, then trudged across, parallel to where she hoped the road was, though she no longer saw the truck. She was so focused on pulling her heavy feet free that she didn’t register the first whiff of woodsmoke until it went up her nose. She coughed. She was farther down than she’d realized—she’d come up behind the cabin, a square island, river of mud carved around it.
“Hello?!”
The back door swung open, banged. Joanna teetered out over where the steps had been torn away, center of gravity thrown off by her huge belly, as though holding her balance over deep water. She scanned the tree line, reached out, and pulled the door in. Colleen felt a surge of fear, as though she might close the door and unmoor the cabin, sink down like a submarine.
“Joanna!”
Colleen waved her arms over her head. She tried to run, but the mud was too deep.
“Go around.” Joanna gestured. “I shoveled.” She disappeared inside.
A narrow, waist-deep trench tunneled around the cabin’s side. Colleen’s jeans were heavy, boggi
ng her down. When she got to hard ground, she felt a strange lightness in her feet, as though she’d taken off skates. A square the size of a room had been dug out in front, mud sheared off like sheet cake on three sides, a patch of strangely green grass, a few pecking chickens.
“They said they’d bury us. I didn’t think they meant literally,” Joanna said from the doorway, streak of mud across her forehead.
Colleen looked over to where the chicken coop should have been.
“It ended up somewhere down there.” Joanna pointed. “We found most of the chickens on the roof in the morning. Boy, were they grumpy.”
The barn’s roof had slid off so that one corner touched the ground.
“Are the girls—?”
“In here.”
Colleen tried wiping her feet and crossed the threshold for the first time in years. The linoleum was patterned with brown fans where a rag had been rubbed in circles. The girls peeked out from the back room, standing on a triangle of wood where carpet had been pulled away. They looked cold. Sap popped in the woodstove.
Joanna poured water from a bucket into the kettle and set it to boil. One of Colleen’s mother’s old Blue Willow plates sat in the dry rack—they’d left everything behind when they sold it, as if the arrangement were only temporary.
“I should have known when the creek stopped running,” Joanna said. “Water must have just built up, all this time, since they buried Deer Spring. Lucky I kept the tub filled.”
Colleen rubbed her fingers together, mud crumbling off, ringing in her ears growing louder until it reached the pitch of the steam whistling from the kettle’s spout. Joanna crunched dried chamomile flowers into hot water. Mud was streaked along the baseboards.
“I thought it was an earthquake. Good thing it happened at night or we might have tried running. You think something as big as a ridge will stay put.”
“Where’s Jed?” Colleen asked.
Joanna shrugged. “Washington? Idaho? He’s getting spoiled by those truck-stop showers. All the hot water you want. He won’t be back for three weeks. I’ll have this place shoveled out by then. I thought it was the end, when it started coming in the door. We just prayed.” She held a strainer over a mug and poured a stream of tea, clumps catching in the mesh. The house smelled of mold and earth, a gritty scent Colleen tasted in her mouth. She was waiting, she realized, for Mom to walk down the stairs.
“Honey?” Joanna handed her the half-full jar and sat heavily.
Colleen held her mug by its thick handle, cougar tracks imprinted on the side. The heft of it made her remember it in her father’s hand—milk, two sugars.
“You can bury us, but you can’t keep us from digging our way out.” Joanna took a swig, winced. “Hot.”
The tea was weak. Bits of flowers stuck to the back of Colleen’s throat. She forced down a burning gulp. Camber toddled in. Joanna pulled her up onto her knee, against her pregnant belly.
“God took care of us, didn’t he?” Joanna asked her, tucking the girl’s soft curls behind her ear.
“Can you call Jed?”
Joanna made a phone with her hand, held it to her ear. “Dring! Dring!”
Camber giggled.
“From our house, I mean,” Colleen said.
Joanna rose, pouring Camber out of her lap. The child gave Colleen a dirty look, as though she were responsible for this sudden eviction.
“I have to get the carpets out,” Joanna said.
“You can’t stay here.”
“They stink like carcasses,” Joanna insisted, as if she hadn’t heard.
Together, they rolled the soiled carpet back and kneeled on the wood, catching their breath. Joanna stuck her arm under the bulky roll. Colleen’s end was waterlogged, smell overpowering—wet dog, moldy earth—too heavy to lift, but it seemed bad manners to point this out.
“Ready?” Joanna asked.
They strained and grunted, rolling the carpet over once, loose and sloppy, then again, until it slumped near the door. Joanna struggled to her feet. Colleen sat back on her heels. The girls climbed through the jumble of stacked furniture, slipping between chairs and end tables in the boneless way of cats. Joanna yanked the last stapled corner free.
“There,” Joanna panted.
“It’s too heavy.”
“We’ll slide it out. Open that door.”
Lifting wasn’t good for the baby, but Joanna was already positioning herself. The door handle was cold. Colleen looked out on the field of mud and debris, the leaning barn. The next wind would wreck it. She wondered about the chicks in their warming bed, the central pillar with its square-headed nails, where her grandmother had once hung the desiccated feet of rabbits.
Joanna issued a birthing groan, pulling, forcing Colleen to hop down to avoid being knocked over, roll dipping down from the doorway like a melting bridge.
“I don’t think—” Colleen caught the tail end, wet seeping through her shirt, struggling to settle it on her hip and follow Joanna through knee-deep mud, toward the woods.
Where the mud ended, Joanna veered and dropped her end to the ground, carpet scrubbing down Colleen’s side. The dull tinkle of a cowbell: Bossy browsing at the edge of the woods.
“There,” Joanna said, and then, as if the bell had triggered a release valve, tears.
“You can’t stay here.” Colleen lifted her chin at Joanna’s belly. “That baby’s not going to wait much longer.”
“We can’t just leave.” Joanna sucked air in through her nose.
“You have to. It’s not safe.”
“Who will take care of the animals?” Joanna protested.
When they got back inside, she tidied the kitchen, like everything would be fine if she could just get this one room in order. Colleen scrounged a few paper sacks and went upstairs to the small bedroom that had been hers. The first night she’d spent with Rich in this room she’d tried to lie still.
What’s the matter? he’d asked finally.
I can’t sleep, she’d said, her voice dragging its own weight, his body, lank and warm, breathing beside hers. I’m not used to another person. She’d never spent a night with Daniel; he’d always slipped away before Eunice Hamilton, her ancient landlady, could discover him, returning to his dorm to study, and she’d had no other experience. Without a word, Rich had slid out from under the quilt and begun to dress in the dark.
Don’t go. She’d touched his knee. I’d like to get used to it.
He’d climbed back in, lifted an arm for her to rest her head on his shoulder.
I’d like to get used to it too, he’d said.
Now, behind her, the bedroom door creaked.
“What are you doing?” Judith asked.
“This used to be my room.”
“This is my room.”
“I know, sweetie.”
She removed a pile of shirts from a drawer and jammed them into a bag while Judith watched. She felt her own mother standing in the doorway. Your father was a daydreamer. Look where it got him.
* * *
Outside, the air was cooling, mist gathering mass when they reached the edge of the woods. Joanna carried Camber, Colleen the sacks. The light was weak. Colleen began to worry she’d left the truck too close, that mud had collapsed and buried it, until finally she spotted it.
“I’m hungry,” Leah said.
“I know,” Colleen answered, since Joanna said nothing.
“Where are we going?” Leah asked.
“You’re coming to our house. We’re going to have a nice dinner,” Colleen said.
She waited for them to scramble up into the truck, then shoved the bags in. “Do you like grilled cheese?”
Joanna stared straight ahead, Camber in her lap. The girls squirmed in their muddy clothes.
“I want Papa,” Leah whined. “Ouch! Judy pinched me!”
“Girls, be nice to each other,” Colleen said. “Please.” Someday you’ll be all you have.
* * *
The shutters glow
ed white against the dark green house. Rich paused at the chopping block, taking in the mud barnacled to the side mirrors, the girls, Joanna.
“Who is that?” Leah demanded.
“That’s Rich,” Colleen said.
He leaned the ax against a stump, clapped his gloves, puff of sawdust like a cloud of magician’s smoke. In her mind, Colleen saw the evening unfold: girls jumping down from the truck, filing into the house; Rich wiping down the ax head so it wouldn’t rust, even-keeled, practical, keeping them warm and dry; Colleen running bathwater; sandwiches sizzling in a pan; Joanna phoning her uncle up in Medford; the horse trailer’s brake cherries disappearing into the fog. How, after all that, when, finally, they were alone, Rich would simply raise an arm, let her rest her head in the safe space at his side. That’s the difference between you and him. Rich doesn’t hold a grudge. It was Enid who had first pointed that out.
The girls stirred: hungry, cold. Leah squirmed with the itch of her unanswered question.
“That’s my husband,” Colleen said.
She herded them into the house, seeing them as Rich must have: two stringy-haired, mud-streaked girls; a fussing toddler; Joanna eight and a half months pregnant, barely more than a girl herself.
In the kitchen, Colleen opened and slammed drawers.
“What are you looking for?” Rich asked, coming in the back door.
“The can opener.”
He took it from the drawer beside the refrigerator and opened the soup cans, picking the lids off by their sharp edges. “This one’s tomato.”
She swapped it for another chicken noodle.
“What happened?” he asked, the girls’ high voices chattering over the bathwater.
She rifled through a drawer. “Don’t we have cheese?”
“Colleen.”
“What?” she demanded. Rich stood two feet away, still holding the can opener. “Deer Rib slid out.”
“How bad?” he asked.
“The whole ridge.”