Climbing into the jet boat to leave, he glanced up at the hills behind the house, hesitating a moment before saying, “Watch out for trespassers.”
As the jet boat roared off, Silva scanned the hillsides behind her, but they were an uninhabited barrenness just like everything else she’d seen of the canyon so far, the land offering the kind of distance and isolation that left her at the mercy of only herself.
She watched the jet boat leave. Boats were a part of her passage, the roll and chop of metal on water, engines churning against the spray. She knelt at the river and submerged her hands, sifting her fingers in silt. The water lapped in steady surges, every seventh swell a little stronger. A tidal flow. Heavy and cold. It felt as if it could hold her there forever, anchored against bottom.
She put a cold hand to her stomach, wondering how her body could foster any life at all. Six and a half weeks. Later than she’d planned to wait. Later than she’d planned to live through. A tryptic of women circling one another on the way down the drain.
The afternoon was already turning into early evening—she could feel it in the air, that subtle change in temperature, a soft coolness. In Trawler, the evenings had come in on cat’s feet.
She stood, wiping her hands against her jeans. A lifetime ago. Another age.
She walked up the slope that led to the house, keeping an eye out for snakes as Mack had instructed, but the lawn was short and sparse. No good for hiding.
Inside the house, it was cool and damp and smelled of musty propane. The windowsills were lined with old metal boxes full of arrowheads. On the way up the river, Mack had told her about the canyon’s early history, Nez Perce women gathering wild carrots and camas bulbs while their men fished salmon and hunted deer and mountain sheep grown fat on summer grass.
Silva picked up a couple of arrowheads, marveling at the perfect triangles chipped out of stone, impressed with their weightiness, the dark glint of their facets, wondering at the stories behind them: the hunt and the kill, the filling of hungry stomachs. Family and tribe living as one, supporting one another, nobody left to fend for themselves.
Old photographs hung on the walls: rugged Larkins men standing at a barn surrounded by hundreds of sheep or posed by some piece of heavy farming equipment Silva couldn’t imagine having gotten upriver, no roads other than the water’s treacherous path. The homesteaders looked as if they could survive just about anything this place dished out—drought and heat as well as Almost Paradise—even if she already knew the outcome of that assumption, Len Dietz having taken over the place they thought could sustain them.
One more recent photo, softly colored instead of gray scale, showed a tousle-headed boy on the verge of manhood standing next to a woman who looked too young to be his mother, although there was no denying the genetic evidence—the way they both held their bodies side by side, their solemn expressions as they gazed back at the camera. A boy too young to be old and too old to be young, already carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. Nick.
She walked into the tiny kitchen, the doorway trim marked with horizontal lines and spidery writing: Nick 8 mths, all the way to Nick 12 yrs, each line drawn a year and two inches apart, the tallest ending at Silva’s height of five and a half feet.
She tried to imagine Nick as a boy her size, a boy who was about to lose everything: his father, his mother, his home, his inheritance. Left as drifting and alone as Silva was. She’d wanted to ask what had happened to his family, his mother, why he didn’t caretake the ranch himself, but there hadn’t been time, everything a rush of details and action after they’d made the arrangements: meeting Mack at Pittsburg Landing, loading her things in the boat, and leaving the Dodge parked alone in a gravel parking lot—the last point of road entry into the canyon besides the visitor center just below the dam. She hadn’t looked back at Two Rivers; she’d already seen enough of it to last a lifetime.
Now she looked at the flyer collection Mack had given her, created for canyon tourists: Native American History; Hells Canyon Geology; The History of Sternwheelers: Mining, Sheep, and the Delivery of the US Mail. Seven miles below the Larkins Ranch, they had passed the Kirkwood Museum—a tourist hot spot made up of an old sheep rancher’s log bunkhouse filled with ranching artifacts, along with Chinese miners’ tools and antique bottles, photos of early canyon ranching, and ancient artifacts from the Nez Perce and Shoshone tribes, the remains of their pit houses still dotting the land. A conglomeration depicting the evolution of Hells Canyon.
Gregarious and well-informed about the canyon’s history, Mack had told her of the last Larkins Ranch summer caretaker, Jim Waters, who’d battled a family of skunks. He’d trapped them, built a driftwood raft, and sent them downriver in a flotilla, but some “hippie hikers” had found them drowned in the trap and called in complaints—the reason Jim wasn’t coming back.
As the jet boat roared steadily upriver, its din echoing off the canyon walls, Silva had pumped Mack for more information about the Larkins Ranch, asking what had happened to Nick’s family. He’d told her that Nick’s father, Otto Larkins, had “just up and disappeared one day, left wife and kid behind,” and then Meg, Nick’s mother, had moved with Nick to town.
“So, they never came back?” she’d asked, trying to get beyond what she already knew.
“Dad never came back. Mom got caught up with the Lenites. Pretty one, Meg Larkins. Len Dietz always did like the pretty ones. Signed over all her land to him before she died. Kid just drifted about afterward, doing odd jobs. Sad story, really.”
Mack had frowned then in mock seriousness. “Did you know it’s the End Times? Look out—people ’round here like to grow religious prepper psychosis along with their vegetables and kids.”
“So I’ve been warned,” Silva replied, trying to keep her voice even.
“Those Lenite women sure know how to make some pies, though,” he’d added, grinning. “That’s all it takes, you know. Godliness through sugar. Some good sweets to eat and people’ll overlook just about anything.” He’d turned to her then, his seriousness returned and real. “No offense, but this country ain’t much fit for a woman alone. History repeats itself, you know. Pretty girl like you staying in the canyon by yourself… better keep an eye out. The Lenites get a good look at you, they’ll try and keep you.” He’d smiled as if he were making a joke, but his eyes were troubled.
“I don’t think that’ll be a problem,” she’d replied, more sharply than she’d intended. She was accustomed to people’s discomfort with her solitariness and independence, but this time she understood what was at stake. Enough that she fell silent, tracing the hills as they powered through rapid after rapid, water spray atomizing around them. She took in the dark maws of hillside caves, a prey animal scoping its surroundings for the musky, warning sign of predators.
* * *
Other than a few feminine kitchen items, there weren’t traces of a woman ever having lived at the Larkins house—a mother whose writing had charted her son’s growth. All that existed were a few unexpected touches of domesticity: Fostoria stacked in the cupboards along with fluted pie plates and teacups with matching saucers. Not what Silva had anticipated this far upriver. Not this cabin, with its unlikely Depression-era dishes meant for an unachievable kind of civility—no power, no real running water, an outhouse behind the barn. The winters harsh, the summers even harsher. An emptiness that seemed complete, even if Silva knew it wasn’t. She wondered what kind of future Nick believed he could have, reinstating himself at the ranch, Almost Paradise looming above.
She went down the short, narrow hallway at the back of the kitchen and found two tiny bedrooms across from each other, just like Eamon’s cabin. She picked the west-facing room so she could see the striated bluffs across the river, rumpled and lined as if squeezed together. She carried the bonsai into the small room one by one, situating them on the nightstand and desk, keeping them in for the night as a kind of comfort she didn’t want to admit she needed—alone in this place, so c
lose to everything she’d come to find, all the warnings echoing in her head.
She stored her seed collection, situated Eamon’s bonsai tools, angled a lamp for good lighting, and stacked Eamon’s mildewed journals. On her way out, she paused to study a picture hanging in the hallway, a high-school photo of a young woman with blue eyes and a dimpled smile. A woman who’d tried to feed her family on fancy glassware before she gave over the family inheritance to Len Dietz and died, leaving Nick behind. She, too, had left—left her child, left her things, left the future unmarked. Maybe you had to. Maybe that was just how it worked. Isabelle had. Silva’s mother and Eamon, too.
She walked the Larkins property, wondering where the lines met Almost Paradise’s. She paused at the old sheep shed filled with an assortment of castoffs. An old boot, stiff and curled up at the toe, sole loose and hanging, was perched on a glassless window ledge as if, like everyone and everything else in the canyon, it, too, had tried and failed to escape.
Next to the barn, the rectangular outline of an old garden plot was still visible. The canyon offered plenty of sun and an early growing season. The spring frosts having receded, it would have been time to till and plant, hope for a good season, a good harvest.
Silva wondered if Nick’s mother, Meg, had been the gardener, too, if she’d grown heirloom vegetables she sliced and arranged on her fancy teatime dishes. If, like Silva’s mother at the New Community, Meg Larkins had canned, pickled, dried, and “put up,” until the Larkins house pantry was stacked with colorful jars like presents waiting to be opened.
Inside the barn, the chewed-up stalls were heaped with dried manure, a rusted barrel spilling tangled orange twine like intestines. The back room so full of junk the door wouldn’t open beyond a crack, the acrid stink of mice-habitat wafting out. Silva went out and sat on the corral’s three-rail fence. A deer skull hung on the barn, a bird nest built in the cranium, tailings of grass blowing from eye sockets. A canyon wren flitted in and out, scolding Silva’s presence. Somewhere in the distance a meadowlark trilled—that lonely, solitary call of the grasslands.
Night wafted from the barn’s dark entryway—dry-molded hay and dust—and Silva imagined Eamon’s cabin, boarded up and thick with moss, abandoned just as this place was. She wished she could just forget about the island. Go on with life as if none of it had happened, as if it didn’t exist. These people had. Everyone in her family had. She pressed her fists against her stomach. There were good reasons for leaving things behind.
* * *
She stayed up late that night with the bonsai’s watchful outlines in the dark as she read the canyon history books laid out by the Larkins Ranch visitors’ log with its assortment of names and dates—a reminder she wouldn’t be alone for long. A week until the first group’s arrival. Hopefully time enough to sort through and figure out everything she’d come to do.
First, she would recon the trail behind the Larkins house that led to Almost Paradise, and then, after getting the lay of the land, she would try to hike there. Even if she didn’t know what she would do once she arrived, each step closer—even just in planning—was like releasing a breath she was only now realizing she’d been holding her whole life.
The history books were as dark as Silva’s thoughts, full of drownings, murders, droughts, disease-ridden sheep, and ill-fated riverboats. As North America’s deepest river gorge, Hells Canyon, despite its navigational and logistical difficulties, had been inhabited by some of the first people in North America. Ancient rock shelters, Clovis points, and pictographs found within the canyon dated back at least 13,000 years. For centuries, the Nez Perce, Shoshone-Bannock, Northern Paiute, and Cayuse tribes had all been drawn to the canyon’s depths by mild winters and productive foraging and fishing. And then after them came the white settlers, pushing upriver in the late 1800s and early 1900s, going to great lengths in order to make a go of it, despite what the land could tell them in one look: dreams were frivolous in a place like this.
To get water to parched bunch-grass plateaus, homesteaders had dug miles of ditches, navigating through rock, stringing miles of pipe to creeks along cliffs they scaled and hung from on thin ropes, often falling to their deaths. They tilled the ground one painstaking foot at a time, removing boulders that studded the fields like a crop growing of their own accord. Plying basalt into fences and foundations for their one-room cabins, they’d imagined the land transformed into lush orchards and fields of rich alfalfa and timothy, but after a century of their sweating labor the only thing that remained were the same basalt boulders stacked in new human configurations.
Chinese miners had come to the canyon to mine the rivers and creeks and were brutally murdered over scant bits of gold. In the 1887 Deep Creek Massacre alone, thirty-four people were ambushed and slaughtered by a gang of horse thieves and schoolboys, the crime not discovered until the miners’ tortured bodies, thrown by the killers into the Snake, were spotted near Lewiston, Idaho, sixty-five miles away. The site was named Chinese Massacre Cove and marked with a memorial stone inscribed in Chinese, English, and Nez Perce that overlooked the river.
The canyon took back what it had never consented to give in the first place, its landscape defined by the names given to it: gorge, snake, devil, hell. Rotting shacks, rock piles, rusted implements, and caving-in mine shafts now home to rattlesnakes, packrats, and bats. A place of unsurpassed hardship. A place that demanded everything. A place where failure was a definition, not an exception. The canyon bewitching people, century after century, calling them like a Siren to its slopes, its riverbank, its great austere expanse of sky and mountaintops, its hidden shoals and rocky outcrops. Pulling them toward the very things meant to take them under.
Eldridge Larkins, great-great-grandfather of the Larkins Ranch—the man in the oldest photos hanging on the wall—was in the canyon books, homesteading the original Larkins property, thousands of acres. He was successful for a while. It wasn’t until Nick’s father, Otto Larkins, that the decline began. Otto tried wheat, then rapeseed, then cows, but seed went sky-high and the price of beef through the floor and he, too, like nearly all the others, failed.
Silva tried to find more on the family, but other than a quick mention of Otto marrying Meg Ehrlich in his later years—him fifty and her twenty—and having an only son, Nick, the three of them living for a little over a decade in the canyon as a family of three, there wasn’t much. The more recent the canyon’s human history, the sparser it was, as if along with the homesteaders’ failure to sustain themselves, there was a failure in story, a failure in words.
Silva was left wondering about the Larkinses’ life in the place she now inhabited—if they’d been happy in the beginning, sustained by one another and by the land, or if like everyone else in the canyon, they’d been overcome by loss. Enough to leave behind the things that had once mattered. Enough to stay gone forever. The kind of existence that brooked no self-pity. The kind of existence where survival was a matter of definition nobody could make except for themselves.
She studied the photo of the two of them—Meg and Nick, mother and son, twin expressions of sorrow and hardship on their faces and in their posture—and felt as if she were standing there with them, gazing out at the chilling unknown.
CHAPTER TWELVE
* * *
What does the river say as it speaks its tongues into your listening ear, her paint dripping wet like water entering into the secret recesses of your flesh? Colors upon you like the newness of light shining on your pale skin, anointing your forehead, there and there and there. You hold your head down, listen to the gurgling popping rushing burbling glug-glug-glugging flow into your ears, filling you with liquid like blessings, flowing down your chest, over your stomach, in between your legs. You are birth and born, you are afire, flaming in clear water, your skin streaming colors of pink light—wash ov’r me Holy Holy, wash ov’r me Holiness—a wink into night, into arms that hold you tight, blessed of virgins, blessed are thee, blessed are we.
CHAPT
ER THIRTEEN
APRIL 2001
At the sound of crows cawing, Silva awoke transported back to childhood—a small girl hiding behind damp-pinned clothes hung on the clothesline to dry, the smell of beaten cotton billowing around her as her mother battled the crows that flocked each morning to feast in the New Community garden. Outside, mist rose off the Snake, wreathing and twisting like wraiths set free.
Determined to make quick progress of her work, she transferred the bonsai to a makeshift table on the porch that she’d patched together out of weathered plywood propped on top of rickety sawhorses. She checked each tree over, worried how they would fare in the heat and aridity, the drastic alteration to everything they were acclimated to. The only things to survive the canyon had to foster themselves in a continual environment of elemental abuse.
Looking for fasteners to better secure the table, she found a topo map buried in the back of a kitchen drawer. Grease-stained and tattered, the map looked as if it’d been consulted often, its creases ripped, a man’s tidy block print edging its perimeters in bled ink. She spread out the map on the table and oriented herself at the flat representing the Larkins homestead, a spidery trail winding up the elevation lines behind the house and then splitting off in two directions. The map was old—predating the mark of what was to come, Almost Paradise laying claim to all the surrounding land, all the Larkins land—but it gave her what she needed: a distinct, marked route.
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