by Jean Hegland
“It’s okay,” she said. “You can nurse him if you want.”
“There’s nothing left for him. I dried up my milk. Besides, you were right—he’s your baby.”
“No,” she answered, “I was wrong. He is his own.”
We sat for a minute, and then Eva spoke again. “It’s good to be here,” she said. “This is a good place.”
“Yes,” I said.
“I’ve missed you.”
All my missing of her came welling up, strangling my answer. Our eyes met. I nodded and she smiled. I rose, handed her son back to my sister. I put a pot of water over the fire, and we waited while it boiled and the rose hips steeped. She handed me some dried fruit, a baked potato still warm from home. I drank and ate, and the fire seeped back into my cold and wild bones.
When the food was gone and our cups were empty, Eva spoke. “Nell. There’s something we’ve got to do. Something I want you to help me with.”
“Okay,” I said. “What?”
“All this time we’ve been living in the past, waiting to go back to the past. But the past is gone. It’s dead. And it was wrong, anyway.”
“Wrong?”
“Look, even if we could go back, even if the electricity does return someday, where will we be?”
She swept her arm in a circle to include the forest and the stump. “Can you imagine living in a dorm room at Harvard? Or me dancing Coppelia now?” She tilted her head and rested her chin on her cocked wrists in a pose so ridiculously coy and doll-like I had to laugh.
“This is our life,” she went on with a new urgency. “Like it or not, our life is here—together. And we’ve got to fix it so we won’t forget it again, so we can’t make any more mistakes.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I want us to live up here.”
“Here? In the stump?”
“Remember the gas?” she asked, abruptly changing the subject.
“Yes.”
“I won it, right? When I bet Robert was a boy.”
“Yes.”
“I want us to use it. Now. Tonight.”
“Tonight?”
“I’ll show you. We’ll say it’s Christmas. Tonight we’ll celebrate Christmas. Okay?”
“Okay,” I promised, imagining Handel’s Messiah, electric lights, hot showers, and Eva dancing, imagining the celebration we had been planning for what seemed like centuries.
“Okay,” I said again, “we’ll do it. We’ll have a party. Let’s say it’s Burl’s birthday party, too.”
“And I can use the gas however I want?”
“It’s your gas,” I said. “However you want.”
Her mood changed. She lost her intensity and became gleeful, playful. She thrust Burl into my arms, and, running ahead, led me back down the hill to the house, teasing me, promising me the best Christmas ever, while I lumbered along behind, clinging to the sleeping infant in my arms.
When we got to the house, it startled me. It was a lair, reeking of chemicals and stale flesh, harsh and cramped, leaking and crumbling. For a moment I saw it with the eyes of a forest creature, with a distrust and distaste that made me reluctant to enter. But when I crossed the threshold, it was once more the only house I had ever known. It still smelled of my childhood, still held the ghosts of both my parents, the ghosts of all my former selves.
“So,” said Eva, with an animation that made me think of Father, “I’m going for the gas.” She hurried outside while I stood on the floor I had learned to walk on, in the rooms that had cupped most of my life, holding Burl against me and thinking how good it felt to be home.
Eva returned, breathless and pink-cheeked, lugging the gas can. She took the lid off, and its vapors were released in the room. On them I traveled back once more to the gas stations of my childhood. I breathed greedily, closed my eyes, felt as though I could touch my hurried mother and the warm, purring car.
When I opened my eyes, Eva was pouring gasoline on the sofa.
“Hey!” I yelled. “What’s going on?”
Fiercely she turned to me. “You said I could use it any way I want.”
“But what the hell are you doing?” “Burning down the house.”
She left the room, trailing a stream of gasoline which soaked into the floor like a splash of oily tears. I raced after her, watched in shock as she doused the curtains of her studio, and then headed to the kitchen.
“Stop,” I cried. “At least talk to me.”
“Okay,” she said, turning the can upright and hugging it against her, her eyes already glowing with the promised fire. “What do you want to talk about?”
“What are you doing?”
“I told you.”
“But why?”
“I told you that, too.”
“But can’t we just leave?”
“It’d be too easy to come back. I want us to have no choice. Robert needs you, and I need you. And you need us. We can’t afford to get confused about that again.”
“We won’t. We’ve learned our lesson.”
“This house wouldn’t last much longer anyway.”
“We can fix it.”
“With what? There’s nothing in Father’s shop to repair the roof or rebuild the utility room.”
“We’ll improvise something.”
“We need to spend our time on other things. Besides—”
“Besides what?”
“Come here.”
She led me out of the house into the cold twilight, led me to where the road entered the forest.
“Look,” she said, pointing to the ground. There beside a puddle I saw the print of a boot-clad foot. It was a large track, a third again as large as my own, and whoever left it had stood watching the clearing from that spot for long enough to press his bootprint deep into the mud.
“He’s come back,” I said, scanning the darkening woods with a fear I hadn’t known in months.
“Yes,” she answered, “or someone like him.”
“Did you see him?” I asked.
“No.”
“Then why—”
“Look,” she said again, pointing up the road.
In the gloaming I made out three more tracks from the same pair of boots, but slurred and far apart and leading out of the clearing.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “What made him run?”
Silently Eva guided me to another print. It was broad and naked and just slightly shorter than my foot. When I bent to study it, I could see in the mud beyond each toe the pockmark of a claw, and I felt the night I had just passed shudder through me again.
Eva watched me as those patterns made their story in my skull.
“He got chased off by a bear?” I asked.
“But that had to be pure luck. It would never happen twice.”
She looked at me intently for another moment and then spoke again. “See what I mean?”
“Okay,” I answered. “Okay. Maybe we do need to leave here for a while. But why do we have to burn the house?”
“Don’t you see? Sooner or later someone will come looking for us again. If we leave the house here, they could move in. But if the house is burnt, and we’re not here, there won’t be much reason for anyone to stick around.”
“What if Eli comes back?” I asked before I could think.
“He knows where the stump is, doesn’t he?”
I nodded. Then I asked, “What if there are things we need?”
“Like what?”
“Well, food. Clothes and things. Dishes. Tools.”
“We’ve got a winter’s worth of food in the stump already.”
She started walking to the house. “I packed some things this afternoon—knives and blankets and the magnifying glass. Some jugs and pans. The seeds. And if the shop doesn’t catch fire, we can still sneak down and get things from it if we need to. But none of that stuff will last forever anyway. It’s already wearing out. If we really need something, we’ll get it from the forest.”
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p; “We don’t know enough about the forest yet,” I argued, following her back into the reeking house.
She shrugged again. “We’ll learn. We need an adventure.”
“That’s what Eli said.”
“This is a real adventure. His was only an escape.”
“Let’s wait awhile, at least till spring.”
“Spring isn’t far off. I know we can make it till spring. Besides, I’ve got a feeling that man will be back soon. If we wait, it’ll be too late.”
“But this,” I swept my glance around the room, “this is all we have. All we’ll ever have.”
“All we have is each other. And the forest. And maybe a little time. This almost killed us. We can’t stay here.”
“Oh, Eva—”
“Nell,” she said, “you know all this stuff.”
“All what stuff?”
“How long have people been around?”
“What?”
“I mean, when did they evolve?”
“Modern Homo sapiens appeared in the late middle of the Pleistocene,” I answered.
“So, what’s that mean?”
“Man has been around for at least 100,000 years,” I said, quoting the encyclopedia. “Maybe even two or three times that long.”
“People have been around for at least 100,000 years. And how long have we had electricity?”
“Well, Edison invented the incandescent lamp in 1879.”
“See? All this,” and she swung her arm to encircle the rooms of the only house I’d ever known, “was only a—what did you call it? A fugue state.”
She pointed to the blackness framed by the opened door. “Our real lives are out there.”
“But what if we run out of food, or get sick? We could die.”
“We could run out of food or get sick right here.” She laughed. “Nellie, people have been dying for at least 100,000 years. Dying doesn’t matter. Of course we’ll die.
“Look,” she added fervently, “you’re the one who’s already living out there. You’ve been hating this house for months.”
She watched as I considered what she had said, and then she smiled, reached out to touch my face. “Oh, sister,” she said, “it will be okay. Whatever happens, this is the right thing to do.
“Think of Burl,” she urged, using the name for the first time. “Even if you can’t do it for yourself, do it for him.”
“Okay,” I said. “Okay. We’ll do it,” and I exhaled so deeply it felt as if I had been holding my breath for years. “But I need a minute. A little time.”
“Of course,” she answered. “There’s hours till dawn.”
Burl woke then, and snuffled at my milkless chest. I kissed him and handed him to Eva. “I’ll be outside,” she said. “I’ve already said good-bye.”
Then she left me in the house our parents made for us, the place where we both had been conceived. Tears streaming down my face, I climbed the stairs and entered my parents’ bedroom. I buried my face in my mother’s dresses, inhaled her fading scent for a final time. I closed the closet, laid the photographs of the children we had once been face down on the dresser, and left.
Downstairs, the gas fumes almost made me stagger, so I tried to make my last tour brief—through the kitchen, the front room, Eva’s studio, Mother’s workroom with its unfinished tapestry and shelves of books.
At the sight of the crowded bookshelves I stopped short. In the half-light of the workroom, I remembered all that books had taught me, how they had comforted me, amused and challenged me, and I was stricken at the thought of leaving them behind. Frantically I began piling on the floor every book I thought we could not live without. The Dialogues of Plato. Pride and Prejudice. Elements of Trigonometry. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. A Field Guide to North American Birds. Antigone. Beloved. The Complete Works of Shakespeare. On Civil Disobedience. The Four-Gated City. The World Atlas. Ethan Frome. Quantum Physics. Howl. Wuthering Heights.
But even before I had worked through the first shelf, I knew the heap was too heavy to lug to the stump. I saw the absurdity of trying to keep a library in the woods, exposed to the mildew of winter, the spine-cracking heat of summer, taking up room we would need for other things.
Desperately I tried to pare the number down, to keep only those books that were absolutely necessary. But spread across the floor, each volume was its own best defense. Every book seemed precious beyond compare. How could I argue that The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson was worth more than Grimm’s Fairy Tales, or that On the Origin of Species should be left behind to make room for The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich?
For a moment it seemed more equitable, perhaps even more merciful, to burn them all. I told myself that the life we were entering was one in which books would not matter. I thought of Eva waiting for me in the front yard, reminded myself that the encyclopedia had abandoned me during her labor, that no book had prepared me to save my father’s life.
Then I remembered how my father had loved books, how much faith he had in them, and it seemed that to leave empty-handed would be as much a desecration as leaving his unburied body for the pigs.
I’ll just take three, I bargained with myself—a hook apiece for Eva, Burl, and me.
They won’t last, I argued. They’ll get wet or torn or sacrificed to some more urgent need.
That’s okay, I thought. Someday we may get more. Or if we don’t, at least I can wean myself from them more slowly.
Eva’s book was easy to choose. I took Native Plants of Northern California for her, since it may have already saved her life, since it is the only grandmother she will ever have.
Burl was harder. Mother Goose Rhymes? Peter Rabbit? Treasure Island? War and Peace? How could I imagine what he would yearn to know, what one book he would most love to read? The Odyssey? Don Quixote? Dune? Finally I decided to take for Burl the book of songs and stories of those humans who had peopled the forest before us, the book that contained Sally Bell’s story, the stories of Coyote and Bear, and songs of mourning and thanksgiving, songs for luck.
Then it was my turn, and I felt like Mother Courage, forced to choose between her children. Sorting through the heap of books on the floor, I loved them all. I loved the smell and heft of each of them, loved the colors of their covers and the feel of their pages. I loved all they meant to me, all they had taught me, all I had been in their presence, and I realized the tragedy of choice, because taking one meant leaving all the others.
I had almost decided to save nothing for myself, when a book still standing on the half-emptied shelf caught my eye. I had never read it, had never done more than glance through its thousand pages, but suddenly I knew it was the third book I would take. I lifted it down, traced its title with my finger: Index: A-Z.
I could not save all the stories, could not hope to preserve all the information—that was too vast, too disparate, perhaps even too dangerous. But I could take the encyclopedia’s index, could try to keep that master list of all that had once been made or told or understood. Perhaps we could create new stories; perhaps we could discover a new knowledge that would sustain us. In the meantime, I would take the Index for memory’s sake, so I could remember—and could show Burl—the map of all we’d had to leave behind.
Books in hand, I closed the door on Mother’s workroom. In the front room I lifted the rifle from its post, took the box of bullets from the closet. Everything else I left. I left my computer and my calculator and my letter from Harvard, left Eva’s toe shoes, the CD player, and the Christmas carousel, left a whole house of things we once thought we needed to survive, and walked outside.
The slenderest possible crescent of a waxing moon had just risen above the trees, and out in the dark yard Eva had built a fire beside the chicken coop and was waiting with Burl in her arms.
“Ready?” she asked.
“What’ll we do about the hens?”
“Bring them with us. We can make a coop easily enough. Besides, they’re half-wild already.”
“All right,” I said.
“You want to be the one to do it?” she asked.
“Okay.”
We stood for a moment, watching the little bonfire, and then Eva held a redwood branch over the flames until it crackled with fire.
“There you go,” she said, and handed it to me. “Be careful.”
I climbed the steps, crossed the deck, hesitated a moment, and then tossed the brand in through the open door.
I barely made it off the deck before the explosion came. Behind me as I ran I heard a sound like a quick intake of breath, and immediately afterwards a blast so awful that it rocked the earth. Windows shattered and I stumbled. But in another moment I was beside Eva. Trembling, I turned to face the rising flames, to watch as fire took the house, roaring outward and upward into every room. Silently Eva took my hand, and together we listened to the crashing and shrieking of collapsing walls, the wild hiss and roar of that much fire.
Finally I said, “I really did want you to use the gas for dancing. I always wanted to see you dance again.”
Eva laughed and turned to me and said, “You can see me dance right now.”
She handed me our Burl, and, lifting her arms high above her head, she began to dance. There, beside the burning house, she danced a dance that sloughed off ballet like an outgrown skin and left the dancer fresh and joyous and courageous. She danced with a body that had sown seeds, gathered acorns, given birth. With new and unnamed movements, she danced the dance of herself, now wild, now tender, now lumbering, now leaping. Over the rough earth she danced to the music of our burning house.
Finally, exhausted and exulted, my sister flung herself to the ground.
“Merry Christmas, Nell,” she gasped. “Merry Christmas, Eva,” I answered.
We were silent for a moment, contemplating the burning house. Then Burl stirred in my arms. “‘That’s the story,’” I said, quoting my father. “‘Could be better, could be worse. But at least there’s a baby at the center of it.’”