In the dusk of early morning, someone had finally taken her back to the ferry, and she’d stumbled home to the cabin along dense, overgrown trails, branches whipping her face and tearing at her legs, spider webs clinging tenuous and sticky to her face, everything transmuted, as if she’d come to in another land, as though she’d been gone forever, a lifetime spent and over.
Aloneness had enveloped her in an aura she could not evade, an emptiness that swallowed her whole. The bonsai dripped puddles into pocks of dark earth, and she had wanted to lie down, let the rain beat against her and never get up. Become one with the soil.
Buried in the fog of her mourning, it had taken her a long time to understand the scope of her damage—that night an irrevocable growth swelling inside her like a tumor. She pictured the embryo inside her growing monstrous—different pieces of the men that night forming its legs, its arms, its head, until it overgrew her body and she burst open like a flower blooming red.
She had rowed Eamon’s boat out until the island was a shadow in the dark, then shipped the oars and drifted, contemplating the water’s black depths. When she leaned over and saw the strange white halo of her own face reflected back to her, she stopped.
Instead she’d started running—ran with a kind of anguish nothing could assuage. She ran the woods along the shore, paths she followed by the indentations of smell and sound, her feet beating a constant rhythm past the cedars, past the ferry, past the docks, the island traced into the pounding rhythm of her legs. At the docks, she dumped crabs from fishermen’s buckets and threw them back to the sea, watching them shimmy their way back into deeper waters.
The evening she’d finally decided to take herself to the water, let it claim her and the embryo growing inside her, she’d been going through Eamon’s boxes looking for the picture of Isabelle, wanting to compare herself to it again, both of them the same age, equal in their sorrow now. Instead, she found a packet with a short note addressed to Eamon in a woman’s scrawling cursive, written on stationery embossed with McGregor’s Honey Fresh Hives—a honey business with an address from Two Rivers, Idaho. The packet’s postmark from not even a year earlier.
Holding the packet in her hands, she’d had a feeling of suspense, of something profound waiting, something full of a deep meaning she couldn’t name. Sitting under Eamon’s worktable’s yellowed lamplight, she’d pulled out a flat, tissue-paper-wrapped packet addressed to Eamon “for safekeeping.” She stared at the faded, ink-bled letters, mistrusting her eyes, everything suddenly too dark to see, to understand what anything meant.
The tissue paper had torn easily—too flimsy to hide anything, meant for gift-giving: colorful, cheerful. And then into Silva’s lap tumbled all the girls. Paintings of twelve girls with swollen abdomens and barely budded breasts, girls too young to be rendered so, their bodies in finely detailed exposure as they stared out into the unknown, their gazes a marker of their tortured fate, all of them with the same braided coronet and the same somber gaze, dressed in the same high-necked, old-fashioned wedding dress, as though they were playing dress-up for a staged antique-photo session, their rounded stomachs protruding in various degrees, each of their faces reflecting a kind of impending, sepulchral doom. A painted biography of the kind of loss and searching Silva already knew in her own cells. What it felt like to have everything of yourself stripped away until you were forced to leave your own body in surrender, cells dividing inside you until they replicated the reality of your own capture.
Before they’d fallen in her lap, the paintings had been tucked in a dog-eared magazine featuring a traveling art exhibit that had reached its halfway point in Moscow, Idaho—a small college town that proclaimed itself “The Heart of the Arts.” And it hadn’t taken Silva long to find it, a photograph of a small watercolor titled In Eden. The details of the painting were distant and blurred, but Silva had recognized the subject matter with an immediacy that stuttered her heart.
The tree was loosely stroked, softer in watercolor than it was in Eamon’s journal sketches, but it was the honeysuckle bonsai, there was no doubt about it—the same curves of fleshly bodies, the same flowing wildness, the trunk-twisted lovers perfectly captured, leaning both into and away from each other, intrinsically intertwined, as clear and evident as if they were standing in front of Silva naked and in the flesh. Except, in this version, the honeysuckle’s roots were laid out bare, and cradled in each root’s branching reach was the bud of a newly formed infant—twelve of them like unfurled seedpods waiting for the sun’s reach. Eamon’s honeysuckle, uprooted as it had been beside Eamon as he lay dying—the tree so much a part of him, there was no way for one to live without the other.
As a child, Silva had always imagined Isabelle living nomadic and loose blown, existing somewhere lush and tropical and far enough away that nobody would ever find her, living a life without consequences. The same life Silva wanted to live. Instead, she’d been so close it made Silva’s head spin. Sending Eamon her tortured paintings for “safekeeping.”
Silva had always wondered what it would take to harden your heart enough to purposely abandon someone, to hurt them so deliberately. She realized now that Isabelle had never quit loving Eamon. She had just forever doomed him to a broken heart.
Eamon had told Silva that at first, after Isabelle had left, he’d planned on tracking her down, bringing her back home, but he hadn’t been able to bear the thought of finding her in the arms of another lover, looking back at him from a distance he couldn’t span. He’d convinced himself that it was too late to change anything. But over the years, he said he couldn’t help wondering if all Isabelle had needed was for him to search her out, show her proof of how much he cared. That perhaps that’s what she’d been looking for all along. Letting her go might have been the biggest failure of all; he’d just been too dilatory and heartbroken to see it. He said he would never make the same mistake again.
Silva had clutched the envelope in her hands. I found you, she wanted to yell, imagining Isabelle stopping, paintbrush in hand, listening to her voice echoing across the distance. She wasn’t an imagined part of Silva’s own existence—she had an address, a town, a lover, a date and time of being. Less than a year and a state away.
That night Silva had dreamed of a trio of females twirling on a cliff top in dappled light, their hands brushing the seeded tops of grasses above the sea’s surface far below. But when they turned and faced her, the shock had woken her up cold. Three versions of herself staring back at her: her child self, her current self, and her older self. Sankan—triple trunk. Isabelle, Silva, and the baby.
Rain drenching the world gray, fog drifting like shadows, Silva had gotten up and packed her things, loaded the five bonsai, locked the cabin, peeled the ragged honeysuckle stickers off the Dodge’s rusty doors, and driven to the early ferry with desperate finality. A journey into the wilderness, tracking the flight path of a grandmother she’d never met. A woman who had made a practice of leaving behind anything that mattered. A woman who didn’t even know she existed. A woman who had become her only remaining family link, whether she wanted it or not.
* * *
Silva rested her hand on the outside of the Dodge’s door, its red oxidized paint chalking her palm and fingertips. Together, she and Eamon had planned on repainting it again, repairing the rust. A ’70 4x4 half-ton short-bed Power Wagon, the pickup in a previous life had been beaten into the ground by overzealous wildland-fire crews who didn’t care that Kelly humps were meant to keep vehicles off old logging roads, who didn’t care that skid roads were meant for skidders. Over the last few decades the truck had grown rusty on the edges, saggy in the middle, and weak in the U-joints—not unlike Eamon himself, who had begun to seem not exactly slow, but mellow. Content to spend long hours studying the ways his bonsai had matured into grace.
Silva had helped Eamon overhaul the pickup when she was fourteen, wire brushing, block sanding, taping, and masking. They’d painted it fire-engine red, the interior glass black, Eamon remo
unting the silver-scripted Dodge insignia on each fender, replanking the flatbed with smooth-sanded boards, and punctiliously trimming everything in the tight-grained oak he’d hoarded for years—oak the emblem of strength and survival. Of longevity and stubborn endurance. Oak trim on the dash; an oak cover over the radio and temperature controls; an oak knob for the gearshift; and oak for the glove-box door, its honeyed interior stamped with both their initials and the date of completion. Long enough ago that the rust had come back.
The Dodge smelled like home—sawdust, tree fungus, and loam, the five antediluvian bonsai bearing silent witness like a host of wizened judges ready to hand down sentence, each one a direct coniferous communication to Eamon. Each ancient style a language he’d taught her to speak: sokan—the twin-trunk juniper, a parent and child growing from the same roots; ishizuki—the rock-grown Sitka spruce, a sparse and stately oceanic sentinel; moyogi—the curved-trunk western red cedar, a primeval wizard with a long, shaggy beard; shakan—the slanting deadwood larch, a fiercely wild and mysterious shapeshifter; and fukinagashi—the windswept bristlecone pine, a silver-trunked mystic. Five primordial shamans seemingly more dead than alive but with enough strength to outlast every catastrophic event that had come their way.
She could still see Eamon at his bonsai table, clairvoyant with his otherworldly gaze. He had always known what she hadn’t. It was a thing’s roots that determined the shape of its life.
Eamon had taken Silva everywhere with him—every job, every outing. Rowing the Sound, walking the forest, he would point out well-formed saxifrages and madrones, explaining the ways of growth, and even as a five-year-old, Silva had been able to tell with a quick glance if a leaf-edge was dentate, crenate, or serrate. Whether a bonsai was cascade (kengai) or semi-cascade (han-kengai).
As a child, she had peered past her bedroom door, watching at night as Eamon watered and misted one bonsai after another, the damp earthy smell of wetted soil permeating the air. She would slip back to bed and dream of dirt and leaves, of branches twining around her in an embrace until she, too, was transformed.
My little dryad, Eamon had always called her, delighting in this, their shared kinship—trees a language she’d always been able to understand. As Silva had grown, all they’d had to do was gesture, tilt a shoulder, flip a hand, and the other understood. She had spent her first years in Trawler walking the beaches, sorting pea-size pebbles and tide-tumbled rocks, as Eamon explained the leavings of gut piles and empty claws. He’d taught her everything he knew, and she’d soaked it up like island moss, following heron tracks and exploring the foraging of crabs, gathering leaves and driftwood and the dry husks of beetles. They’d explored the woods around the island that held the unspeakable stuff of divinity: white clusters of wood nymph blooms, nests of junco and wren, the bone-sharp castings of owls. They’d rowed around the island, digging plants, collecting shells, scouting for whale spouts and the smooth slip of seals. The sound of the water, the oars creaking and dipping. Those had been her favorite moments—everything family life should be.
In Eamon’s absence, Silva had taken over—misting, trimming, caressing, nurturing each ancient bonsai with the same care he had used. She thought perhaps that’s all she wanted to do now—nurture. Having someone, something, completely dependent on her was very different than always being the dependent one, the one left behind. There was the possibility of something else—something so new that even considering it felt dangerous.
* * *
Outside, the land transformed again, the highway paralleling rolling hills sprouted with spring crops—wheat, barley, canola, lentils, chickpeas. A feast in the making. Silva’s appetite was something new and unexpected. A body forming the shape of new life.
She had been afraid to leave anything behind. Along with the five bonsai, she’d packed the seed collection her mother had helped her start when she was young, Eamon’s antique bonsai tools, the packet of Isabelle’s girl paintings and the art magazine she’d sent Eamon, and Eamon’s mildewed bonsai journals, full of fifty years of notes and sketches.
Each bonsai journal showed a stage of who Eamon had been and who he’d become. Silva had named his earliest work “The Isabelle Influence”—sensuous, full-bodied trees curved into soft draping arrangements, trees that blossomed and berried: jasmine, gardenia, bougainvillea, honeysuckle. Afterward, Eamon’s bonsai had become more and more austere and spare—conifers gnarled into their most essential form.
Silva wanted to study the journals until she found the answers she was sure were hidden there—how to regrow all that had been torn loose and uprooted, how to repair heartrot and root rot, how to splice in severed growth, graft in new DNA—although she was afraid there was no real coming back from a lifetime of suffering that kind of damage.
* * *
Finally, eight hours into the drive, Silva reached Moscow, where Isabelle’s In Eden had hung. Below a backdrop of towering grain silos, tweedy, wool-coated professors and hipster students strolled the sidewalks, intent on their scholarly lives. Silva wanted to stop and ask if they’d seen it, if they’d felt what she had: a sense of almost electrical recognition and connection, the heartbreaking beauty of each branch and leaf and blossom, the striking reality of the lovers’ bodies sculpted into its trunk. An intimacy that had left her stunned, as though she’d stumbled upon a painting of her own naked body, as vibrant and exposed as light, illuminated for the whole world to see. The honeysuckle, Eamon, Isabelle, and Silva reflected back to one another.
She’d planned to stop at the gallery just to be in the same space the painting had been in, but instead she drove through town without stopping. Even though she was chasing a lead that was over a year old, even though she’d hardly eaten, had hardly even stopped for bathroom breaks despite her bladder’s new insistence, she felt as though if she stopped, she would lose Isabelle forever, each minute weighted with the permanency of development: lungs, fingers, toes. A beating heart.
She dropped down into the paper-mill-stink of a river valley town, then climbed back up to high prairie, stilt-legged barns and houses perched on the edge of land too dry to support more than brush and bony-hipped steers. At the driveway of one weather-beaten farmhouse, a woman drove a tractor to a field, the two cow dogs trotting alongside its tall tires giving Silva hard stares over their shoulders. Dust devils and chaff traveled along the ditches, drafts of air dipping and rising with the unexpected coolness of a creek inlet and the recent hatching of insects.
She held on to the drift and swerve of the Dodge, dropping elevation again, passing a historic Native American battleground—the Battle of White Bird Canyon, fought June 17, 1877, between the Nez Perce Indians and the United States government. People who fought to stay together in a place that had always been theirs, the Salmon River carving its path through their canyonland home. The River of No Return.
Eighteen-wheelers blew by, sucking the Dodge into their wake, leaving Silva white-knuckled, holding onto the loose steering wheel as if she were steering an errant boat through the rising chop and curl of the Straights on a storm-threatening day, the water calling for her to join it.
The island’s every feature was imprinted into her being. The madrones and Sitkas lining the shore above the beach like denizens of another place and time. Black-capped chickadees calling their own name, Swainson’s thrushes trilling watery. It was early March—time to cut back dead wood, prune rose cane and privet, the spring wind bringing with it an invisible signal of growth, everything burgeoning under its touch, buds bursting open and suckers surging upward, growing straight and unseemly from the branches of lilac, forsythia, willow, and flowering plum. Eamon’s bonsai, too, had spurted into new growth, and she’d been busy pinching eruptions of green from branches long trained to be bare.
Leaving the island had been a tearing away, a stripping down. Like this steep-walled rough canyon with its spines and striations—its fragility disguised by severity. Its exposure like pain, raw and unencumbered.
Final
ly, she passed a sign announcing Two Rivers—Population 422 and found herself driving through a corridor of sharp-peaked houses sheathed in mismatched siding and corrugated tin, their porches hung with “Don’t Tread on Me” flags, junked cars and walleyed horses mired in mud yards behind sagging barbwire fences. She wondered if Isabelle had been counted, too, along with the beekeeper she’d lived with. McGregor of the healthy hives. Eamon’s replacement.
As a child, Silva had loved nothing more than being on the water with Eamon, imagining herself, like Isabelle, on tropical shores, each wilder and more exotic than the last. Like Isabelle’s namesake island: Isabela of the Galápagos, birthplace to primordial beings. But Isabelle had come to this land, the antithesis of tropical. Although nobody could argue its wildness. A rough sprawl of empty spaces meant to drive you away rather than pull you in. A confluence of wild waters near the place Isabelle had called home, at least for a while.
A group of older ladies planting petunias and marigolds in half barrels on the street corner just past a weedy, overgrown baseball diamond watched as she parked next to Build It Best, the only place in town with a room available. A hardware store whose front windows displayed a grizzly reared in attack, yellowed teeth and claws prominent.
When Silva had called ahead to make a reservation, the town’s only motel was booked full of government tenants. The receptionist hadn’t seemed too happy about it, calling them “idiot feds” before catching herself. She’d given Silva the hardware store’s number, and Silva had just been happy to find a place to stay, though now she questioned her decision.
She stayed in the Dodge for a moment, taking stock of her surroundings. Down the street, a few people chatted outside a drugstore, and on the corner the women were back to planting petunias. Otherwise the town was quiet, studded with billboards advertising wild-game processing and huckleberry desserts. She tried to imagine Isabelle on the sidewalk on a late-spring afternoon, chatting with townspeople, but Silva’s childhood imaginings hadn’t ever consigned Isabelle to such a place—a place with a kind of roughness that brooked no frivolity, although like most of the town’s businesses, Build It Best was squared off in a western facade with an upside-down horseshoe nailed over the doors. A few stores had hitching posts installed outside for added western flair. Even the movie rental place across the street had a western facade, advertisement posters of explosions and scantily clad women framed in rough-sawn lumber and a life-size John Wayne cardboard cutout, six-shooter drawn, in the front window.
Sins of the Bees Page 3