Len took a step closer and held his hand out to Silva as if she were a skittish animal in need of his help. “ ‘Lo, children are a heritage of the Lord and the fruit of the womb a reward,’ ” he said, and Silva’s body froze in place, her breath like a solid thing inside her lungs.
“You are alone and with child. You don’t know if you will keep it, or yourself. Don’t know if you’ll keep anything,” he said, quiet and sure—a tone of divine proclamation, of a wilderness prophet, casting Silva’s darkest secrets out to the world as if they were nothing, his knowledge of what she carried as evident as the pistol on his hip.
And as if in direct response to his words, Silva’s uterus cramped so sudden and hard that the pain nearly buckled her to her knees. She grabbed the counter, knocking over the newspapers, snarling wolves sent scattering on the floor under her feet in warning: Predator at Large, Len Dietz next to her, grabbing her arm, guiding her to a nearby plastic chair she crumpled into as her uterus cramped hard enough that she couldn’t help crying out.
Len leaned down and stroked her back as if she were a woman in labor, and perhaps she was—her own body already rejecting itself, trying to expel the new shape forming inside of it.
“You need to take care of yourself—there’s more to consider now,” he said, his words heavy with implied meaning, as if Silva had submitted to his care, as if she were a child he was guiding along the right path. Someone used to being obeyed. Someone used to giving rules meant for others to follow. Someone who knew things about her nobody could possibly know.
He was close enough that she could feel his body heat as he bent over and spoke softly into her ear. “ ‘Come to me and find refuge. Seek and ye shall find.’ ” Then he walked to the counter and gathered his bags, his gun hanging heavy on his hip, his arms full of enough ammo to supply a war. He turned and pushed through the doors, cowbells left ringing behind him.
As soon as she was sure he was gone, Silva slumped forward, the chair tipping. She wanted to throw something, yell, cry, scream, but she was stricken mute. Being handled by this stranger, this man with impossible intimate knowledge of her.
Becky hurried to her side. “You poor thing. Len was right. You look just terrible. We need to get you upstairs to rest”—as if all of it, Len’s impossible knowledge of Silva and her own dramatic bodily reaction, were something she could recover from by taking a quick nap.
Silva wanted to get up and run, escape what she’d so foolishly thought she’d come to find, but her hands and legs were shaking so badly it was all she could do to get herself upright. Being exposed like that—left as crumpled and wilted as a trodden flower.
Outside, the apartment steps swayed and creaked as if they, too, were coming undone, and Silva was afraid she was going to crumple again before she made it up—her body quaking, her ears whooshing as if stopped up with water, her abdomen pulsing and raw with pain.
Becky unlocked the door and helped her into the small, bleak room. Silva sank onto a narrow single bed on the far wall under a dirty window, a tiny bathroom no bigger than a closet to the right and a kitchenette to the left. A prisoner’s dorm. A place she never should have come.
Becky hesitated at Silva’s side, fiddling with her name tag, touching the tattoo again as if to reassure herself. “You can trust Len,” she said, a hard look passing over her face. “He takes care of all the mothers. He’s only trying to take back what’s rightfully ours—give us what we need to survive.”
This town, these people—everything they said disjointed and full of threat.
Silva was too stricken to respond, to say that trusting someone like Len Dietz was like being held underwater, staring at the light above you as you fought your own end.
When Becky finally closed the door, the stairs groaning with her departure, Silva curled into a fetal position and buried herself under the covers, her insides radiating pain, her limbs loose in their sockets, her thoughts crowded and thick. Who spoke to someone that way? Who said those kinds of things? Casting her secrets to the air as if they were nothing more than drifting seeds driven by the vagrancies of the wind.
CHAPTER FOUR
* * *
You who are without blame, you who are pure, you who are we—these our bodies, our flesh, our holiness made into words, our fingers grasping at his hem as he chooses one, as he chooses you and you rise to your feet, your flesh unto his flesh, your body unto his body, your eyes unto his eyes. You, the chosen one, you the promise, you the blessed, you who follow his path in the dark, two made into one, two made into you. And he tells you what he tells the others, whispering into your ear as he takes hold of you, his words fluttering like swarming winged creatures you can’t catch a hold of as his body becomes the flesh of your flesh, flesh cleaved in two, the echoes of his words swirling your head like a swarm of bees intent on driving you away—over the cliff, they say, but you must keep them beaten back so that he might stay, keep yourself still until he pulls away, holding your loose hair in his hands, grasping your chin so as to look into your eyes and remind you of your promises coming like shelter from the rushing swarm of his words, your promises like the walls that surround you, that keep you safe from the outside, from a world made evil, your body seeping in the seeds of his holiness, his flesh made into word.
CHAPTER FIVE
MARCH 2001
Silva awoke gulping for air, the sheets tangled around her legs. A sorrow like suffocation, like drowning. She wasn’t sure which had awakened her—her still-pulsing insides, or her nightmare of a woman, wet and desolate, swimming underwater with a slick gray fish body, mouth gaped open in a cry so full of desperation that Silva had awakened crying, too, awash in the fresh emotion of a child who’d lost her mother to the water. She felt it in her own blood—felt the moment her mother had breathed the river in and let it flow through her veins like an icy current.
Outside, morning activities came through Build It Best’s thin walls: a diesel truck idling somewhere close by, a child squealing in the distance, and conversations drifting up from the lumberyard below—a high-pitched peal of laughter Silva recognized as Becky’s.
Remembering everything from the night before in a sudden rush, Silva sat up quickly, imagining Len Dietz climbing the stairs to her room, Becky close on his heels. She held her breath and waited, but first the diesel truck pulled out of the lumberyard, and then everything else turned quiet, too.
The night before, her brain and body had been too overloaded to fight back, unable to process everything that had happened, but now, in the clear light of morning, the grief she’d awakened with was burned away by a deep, blinding fury. A stranger speaking to her like that. As if he controlled her. As if she were his to command.
She replayed the encounter in her head, a revision in which she yelled at him to get the fuck away from her, yelled at him that everything he said was wrong: god had never been a part of anything, and he certainly wasn’t now. She wished she had been able to deliver the kind of equalizing someone like Len Dietz deserved—threatening instead of being threatened.
She put a hand to her stomach, shuddering to think of what might happen to any woman ill-fated enough to be in his care. A town brimming with its own kind of infection.
She carefully palpitated the soft space under her ribs until she reached the hard rise of her hipbones, the bruised reminder of the night before buried deep. Under her fingers, her guts gurgled, protesting their emptiness. The basic need to survive trumping everything else.
Still dressed in the same clothes she’d driven and slept in, she pulled on her boots, lacing them tight before yanking her hair into a ponytail, twisting a rubber band over it until it stuck out from the base of her skull like an oversize barber brush. She splashed water on her face and then looked out the window to make sure the sidewalk was empty before going out to her truck, its windows fogged over with the trees’ night breathing.
Working as quickly as she could, she hauled the trees and boxes to her room. She kept her ba
ck turned toward Build It Best as she made each trip, hoping Becky was busy inside and wouldn’t notice her carrying the bonsai up. She arranged the trees around the kitchen table, and they overtook the room, each bonsai bearing its own powerful personality, its own timeless sense of being, its own spirituality. Sitka spruce—protection from death and illness. Western red cedar—vivid dreams, warding away evil spirits, and purification from death. Needle juniper—protection, love, cleansing from the spread of poisons or disease. Western larch—protection against evil and to induce visions. Bristlecone pine—longevity and strength, alleviation of guilt.
Eamon had taught her each tree’s spiritual and symbolic significance along with the science of their shaping and care, trees throughout centuries and cultures thought to be the houses of gods, entrances to higher realms. And his bonsai looked it. As if they held all the answers for which she was searching. An embodiment of the divine. Her favorite story had been the hamadryads—female spirits presiding over the forests, born bonded to a certain tree. Should their tree perish, the hamadryad would die, too. Should their tree or forest be threatened by a mortal, the dryads and the gods would punish the mortal. Silva just wondered if there was a tree left to sustain her.
Arranged in a circle on the small round table, the bonsai reminded her of westward settlers who’d circled their wagon trains for the night, turning their strongest side outward in defense against attack and protecting the vulnerable inner circle. She wished she could shrink herself and hide inside, find shelter.
Instead, she misted each tree, checking every branch and nodule, every whorl of root, patting their moss-covered soil back into place, watering them carefully, worried that, like her, they, too, would be misshapen and damaged by their adaptation to failure.
Turning sideways to eye her body’s profile in the bathroom mirror, she tried to see what had tipped off Len Dietz, but her stomach was sunken, her complexion wan. In a young memory, she stood next to her mother, holding her own small, pasty-white arm up to her mother’s darkly tanned arm. Her mother had told her that when she was born, the full moon had claimed her as its own. Silva had loved thinking about it when she was a child—her kinship with the moon—even if it frightened her a bit. The remote coolness. The unreachability. The latent power. Power enough to command the tides, direct the earth’s axis. Reflect and redirect the frenetic energy of the sun. She’d been born outside on the night of the full Sturgeon Moon, everything earth-centered, everything full of meaning and portent. They’d celebrated with a moon dance, named her Silvania August Moonbeam Merigal. She had been wanted, treasured, part of a family.
Six weeks. Enough time for anyone to know what to do with themselves. Nerve cells branching and connecting, forming primitive neural pathways. Forming the makings of memory.
She locked the room and tucked the green key fob in her pocket. Len and Becky were right—she was in Two Rivers for a reason, except that reason had nothing to do with any divine predestination. No matter what Len said he knew, he had no idea what Silva needed to find.
Armed with directions to McGregor’s Healthy Hive-Fresh Honey, she spread out the atlas on the truck seat again. Two Rivers was just a small dot at the junction of topography lines. Outside of town, the Salmon River bent inward, a curve that on the map looked haphazardly drawn, accidental. But her plan was straightforward enough: she would follow the road, find McGregor’s, and then she would find out what happened to Isabelle. It didn’t matter what Len Dietz thought or what kind of twisted history this town held. All that mattered was that she found out what she needed to know—wherever and whatever that meant. It was a measure of her own mortality.
She’d half expected Becky to show up ushering Len Dietz, both of them ready to guide her on god’s chosen path, spouting deific secrets they didn’t know, but everything remained still as she started the Dodge, the town itself seeming to wait to see what direction she would take.
She drove to the outskirts of Two Rivers past the Yellow-Pine Motel—the place full of the “idiot feds” the receptionist had griped about, a grouping of white government vehicles parked outside the motel in an orderly line. She wondered if they called it the Piss-Pine Motel. Yellow, piss, bull—each alternative ponderosa name casting a social meaning beyond itself.
Growing up on Trawler, kids had called Silva Tree Girl. Every school project she completed from first grade on had something to do with trees. How they communicated. How they reproduced—her classmates tittering when they realized she was talking about tree sex. How they could survive everything from floods to fire, thriving under hardship. She’d liked the nickname, even if it wasn’t always meant as a compliment. She’d imagined herself as a dryad superhero whose powers changed according to the type of tree she happened to be most attached to at the time. When she walked to and from school, she imagined the papery discs floating down from the elms following her just like the tumbling leaves, attracted to her with magnetic force. Imagined that she could direct them, raising them into a whirlwind of her own making.
As a teen, she had carried Eamon’s old college dendrology textbook with her wherever they went, matching leaf margins and cones, learning the world through trees, naming their favorites: “Newton,” an ancient heirloom apple tree on the island’s south side; “Montezuma,” a wide-girthed western red cedar Eamon named after the 119-foot-circumference cypress that grew in Oaxaca, Mexico; “Kodama,” a Japanese yew, home to tree spirits; and “Pando,” a giant quaking aspen on the island’s point they named after the Utah Pando Clone—a grove of 47,000 genetically identical trees forming a single organism that covered over a hundred acres and weighed thirteen million pounds. The oldest living organism on earth, tree after tree resprouting and growing anew century after century, functioning as a single whole made up of thousands of individuals. A family of interconnected roots.
Outside the grocery store—a squat cinderblock building painted bright orange, its plate-glass windows boarded up—a sheriff in a mud-spattered SUV pulled out, a news van following closely behind him. Whatever “action” Becky had been referring to had garnered both the government’s and the news’s attention. Something, according to Becky’s intimations, that involved Len Dietz, although it seemed there wasn’t anything in town that didn’t involve him.
Silva pulled in and parked. Her body had made its demands clear even if she didn’t want to stop now any more than she had on the way over. Wandering the aisles, she quickly gathered enough items to pass for a few meals and went to the only checker—a woman who peered at her from behind purple glasses, her fingers agile on the ten-key despite their girding, flesh bubbled up around rings of varying patterns of leaves and rosettes and grape clusters, fingernails clicking in sharp little taps, and there on her wrist, the same circular tattoo Becky had. Silva found herself staring, unable to look away, wondering if everyone in town had matching tattoos.
Mistaking Silva’s interest, the woman proudly held out her hand. “Black Hills gold, every one of them,” she said, leaning toward Silva and pulling her hair back, exposing an earlobe studded with multiple matching earrings. “Them long ones,” she said, shaking her head to show off the dangles that hung against her downy-haired neck, “my Charlie gave me for Christmas.” She gestured. “That’s him there.”
Tacked to the partition wall next to an ad for $3.99/lb. rib roast was a photo of a bearded man in full camouflage crouched behind a prone elk, holding up its head by the antlers, its pink tongue lolling out of its mouth. Another of the town’s proud hunters.
The woman looked around as if making sure not to be overheard. “Won the Paradise elk raffle last fall. Got him a six-point. Good folks, those, standing up for our rights. Calling it an occupation. Nobody cares the government took all the land illegally in the first place. They think they can tell us what to do when we’ve got a God-given right to hunt, mine, log, fish, drill, whatever. It’s called do-min-ion.” She shook her head in disgust and pulled out a brochure from under the counter. “Paradise gives free
jerky to visitors. Coupon’s in the back. Them folks are the real patriots,” she said, hastily tucking in the brochure with Silva’s groceries as a middle-aged man wearing a red store apron approached the check-stand, his name, Charu Cheema, stitched on the front.
The man stopped at the end of the counter, his attention directed at the checker. “Sherry, I believe we have discussed this before,” he said, each word enunciated with musical cadence. His dark hair was parted neatly to the side and combed back, everything about him tidy and tucked and careful. He tipped his head at Silva. “So sorry for the inconvenience, ma’am,” he said, his brow furrowed in genuine apology and concern, as if Silva had been somehow terribly mistreated.
“It’s no problem,” she said, although she could see how much everything was a problem here. She tried not to show her surprise at an Indian man owning a grocery store in the middle-of-nowhere, white-antigovernment Idaho.
“We at C&C Foods wish only to offer the best products at the best prices.” He tried a smile, but it was thin, his eyes wary behind his glasses. “Nothing here but good food. Everybody needs food,” he said, but there was a hesitation to his voice, as if he were trying to convince himself, too.
For the first time, Silva realized the store was empty of customers except her, the windows boarded over as if there had been a looting. She wished she could go back and load her cart heaping with items. She already knew what it meant to be so clearly an outsider in this town.
“Have a good day,” Mr. Cheema said, stepping back courteously as Silva left, waiting to further address the recalcitrant Sherry. One small skirmish of the battle clearly being waged.
Silva stashed the groceries on the Dodge’s passenger floorboards. Sheets of paper fluttered from a bulletin board next to the store’s front doors—trucks and dogs for sale, a misspelled ad for handyman work and housecleaning, and several of the same glossy-fronted brochures Sherry had tucked into Silva’s groceries, Paradise Elk Ranch in bright blue with a picture of a bugling bull elk on the front. Eating quickly, Silva pulled out the brochure, reading descriptions of guided hunts and meat products. The last page featured a fireball sun over a dark, smoking world with the text, Don’t Wait Until The End To Think About Your Fate, accompanied by an address for “Almost Paradise.” An oddly sarcastic name for an empty, dry-baked land that seemed more concerned with self-destruction than paradise. She crumpled the flyer and threw it on the floor. She’d already had plenty of this town talking about her fate.
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