When she was done, tracks of deep steps behind her, the whole garden turned over, she turned off the tiller and dug her fingers into the soil, cupping a palmful, inhaling its rich humus smell before letting it trickle through her open fingers back to the ground already buzzing with insects interested in the newly exposed territory of earth. As she wheeled the tiller back to the barn, the robin flew down from its locust nest, plucked a fat earthworm out of the garden soil, and took it back to its nest full of wide-open beaks.
Nick grinned when he saw her—dirt-streaked legs, dirt-caked boots, dirt all over her face. “Quite the combination—bonsai, bees, and now a garden,” he said, as if they were indeed together in this, and perhaps they were.
In the mirror, she’d noticed the new curving of her waist, her stomach, her breasts—her body already growing softer, fuller, as if she, too, were a fruit ripening under the sun. But she wasn’t ready yet to face it all aloud, in the light. She would rather focus on the growth outside her instead of the growth inside.
She raked a ridge between the tilled soil and the grass, then worked until she’d smoothed the garden into a flat, brown expanse, like prepping a canvas for paint. Then, sorting through her seed collection until she found what she wanted, she started sowing, trying to account for the canyon’s aridity, this new ecosystem. All the seeds she’d saved over the years, devoted to finding the best blooms and fruits. She’d inherited her mother’s touch as well as Eamon’s.
She planted the perimeter first: poppies and columbine, cosmos and wild geranium, asters and lupine. Then the interior: rows of corn, peppers, tomatoes, carrots, radishes, and chives. She planted the herbs last: cilantro, basil, thyme, lemon balm, peppermint. Hundreds of her heirloom seeds planted in Hells Canyon. An incongruent pairing she hoped would take root and flourish.
She washed up at the river, watched the trout’s shimmering swim upstream, the water-skipper’s surface-skimming dance, the periwinkle’s laborious crawl, tracing its tracks into the sand. Up in the hills behind the house, a family of coyotes began their nightly howling, their wavering calls rising like a mourning song. She imagined them running in a phosphorescent afterworld, surviving—thriving—as Nick predicted they would.
Juniper laid a stick at her side like an offered gift. She threw it out into the river for him, but it sank before he reached it. He swam circles around where it had gone under, refusing to give up. Something lost was always something lost. She’d always hated things left unfinished—houses sheathed in Tyvek, cars painted primer gray, trees full of untrimmed suckers—but she didn’t know quite how to finish what she’d started now. Eamon had taught her that often all you had to do was leave things to sort themselves out on their own, see what new shape emerged. Then you would know what you had to work with. Even a cicatrix scar formed something new—fibrous tissue forming and contracting, filling in the empty wound after a branch was severed. Sealing the damage, protection from outside threats: rot and infection and predation.
Once, working a job on the island, Silva had found an old revolver grown into an oak—a loaded Remington new-model Army as brown as the wood surrounding it, encased in over 150 years of scarred growth rings like a piece of art. There had been others found throughout the years: a black-powder rifle in a Montana hickory packed with bear fat to keep the metal from rusting; an ancient flintlock in a Missouri weeping willow; a Spanish conquistador sword grown into a sprawling Texas walnut. Weapons hidden in trees, relics of the past forming a new thing together, just as Eamon had said.
* * *
Nick cooked dinner again, said it was a small thank-you for all of Silva’s work, getting everything in better shape than it’d been in for decades. After she’d finished planting and had gone inside, she’d noticed Nick looking the garden over and wondered if he, too, had envisioned all it could become, all its promise still hidden, seeds furrowed into dark soil. Sowing. Germinating. Growing. Harvesting. The kind of future she’d thought wouldn’t be hers again.
“Did you get the barn room finished, ready for the extraction equipment?” she asked as she flopped down in a living-room chair. When they’d stood looking around the room together before, Nick had explained to Silva how he would set it up for his coming honey harvest—where the nectar-laden hives and frame hanger and uncapper and extractor would go, where the finish table would sit, full of all the freshly filled honey jars. She had been able to imagine it all—the room permeated with golden light, with all that sticky sweetness.
“As ready as it’ll ever be.” Nick stood at the window, staring outside, everything about him quietly on edge, although Silva didn’t understand why. He’d seemed happy and relaxed before—her working in the garden, him working in the barn, as if they were just another canyon couple bent on shaping their mutual dreams, their destiny, out of the labor of their own hands.
“Will you bring the bees soon?” she asked, trying to gauge the ribbons of tension coming from him, undercurrents of something she couldn’t name. Anger, yes, but something else, too.
“As soon as I can,” he said, his back stiff. He leaned hard enough on the windowsill that she thought it might break under the pressure. Outside, the river was steel-gray, the sky a bruised purple-brown, ominous with cumulonimbus brewing up behind the hills, wind gusting through the trees and along the shore in short, fierce bursts. The horses trotted nervously in the pasture, the evening air hanging heavy and thick. She, too, felt threat coming like a storm.
This wasn’t how she’d expected things to go. In any other circumstance, she could have politely taken leave, left Nick to sort through his bad mood on his own, but she had her own pressing need that she’d left until now, hoping to lay good groundwork ahead of time, prove herself worthy. The outfitting group would arrive in the morning. She’d planned to edge around to the horses, to her using Tiko. Now she realized she might have waited too long.
Finally, Nick sat down, wearing an expression of sorrow and bare longing she recognized from some other place and time. Something intimate and vulnerable—a letting down of the masculine guard, an interior landscape of raw, gripping helplessness. He hesitated a moment as if deciding something, then said, “I found something today I never expected to see again.” His jaw muscles clenched and unclenched as if he were gnawing on boot leather.
“What?” Silva asked, hoping it had nothing to do with her, what she was trying to find herself.
“Proof of my failure,” he said simply, both of them gauging in each other all that had been left unspoken. “I blamed my mother for a long time, but I was the one who convinced her. The first to believe. We went into it together, like the buddy system. Got saved and baptized, took communion, joined Dietz.” He looked down at his hands. “I was so proud to join, so proud when he proclaimed us part of his Divine Family, so proud when he ‘chose’ my mother as one of his women, so proud when she got pregnant with my brother. The Chosen Ones.”
Silva pressed back against the tormenting heartbreak and surprise of it. Nick a child-Lenite, his mother one of Len Dietz’s women, pregnant with his child before she died, forever biologically tying Nick to Dietz. The kind of thing from which you could never escape.
“He gave me a gift at the end of my ‘journey,’ after I was sworn into the covenant,” Nick said, his expression tormented, his hands hanging limp in between his legs, and finally she could see what she hadn’t been able to before. Shame. Anger like a skin covering shame’s raw, fleshy, pulsing vulnerability. She wanted to cry out, I know, I know.
“My Ascension Pendant, buried beneath a pile of junk, engraved with my name and the date of my ascension,” Nick said, holding it up: a circle with a pyramid and an eye in its middle.
The Eye of Providence—the all-seeing eye. The pendant Len had been wearing in the hardware store. She couldn’t tell him what the all-seeing eye had told her, what Len Dietz had known just by looking at her. What he’d whispered to her, laying claim, pinning her in place just as surely as he’d done with Isabelle, with Nick’s
mother, too. Ownership along with god’s will.
“What happened to you and your mom?” she asked quietly, crossing her arms and clutching her own torso, shielding herself against what she feared was coming next.
“We went in just like the rest, looking for family, looking for the relief and security of belonging,” Nick said, his voice flattened, his confession pressing on him as physically as a weight. “I thought everything Len did was god’s will. His ‘Family of God,’ his ‘godly love,’ his ‘righteous anger.’ We all thought we were god’s holy family, serving each other in a life of divinity—no doctors for our illnesses or injuries, no schools for our learning, no government for our laws. No tenets besides Len’s.”
Silva felt faint, nauseated, at the thought of Nick for a time calling Len Dietz Father.
“You were a child. You wanted a family. A father, a mother, a sibling. People to love you and for you to love back. We all have the same needs. We do what we do, for better or worse.”
“Well, a family isn’t what I got,” Nick said.
Nor I, she wanted to say.
“ ‘Birth complications,’ they called it, but I saw what Len did to her.” Nick’s face twisted, the agony and anger coming off him visceral enough that Silva braced herself for the rest. There was only one way things like this ever ended.
“She was his flagellant. All of them were—all the women and girls. Mortification of the flesh and spirit in action. But even though it was right there in front of me, in front of us all, we kept our eyes closed tight, refusing to see it until it was too late.”
Goose bumps prickled Silva’s limbs. The way Len had looked at her. All-knowing. All-seeing. Reaching for her, disguising her vulnerability as his own. Disguising his dark appetite with soft words. She’d known the insatiability of his lust the minute she’d looked at him.
“What happened to the baby?” she asked quietly, afraid of the answer.
“They buried him next to my mother. Said it was SIDS. I can’t forgive myself for leaving him,” Nick said, his voice breaking. He touched the scar on his cheek, and Silva imagined a knife fight, bloodshed. A feud stretched through time. So much left behind. Pie plates. A child’s growth marks. The sins of the father. The sins of the mother. Sins enough to bury them all.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. The most worthless words there were. She put a hand on Nick’s.
His eyes full of sorrow, he met her gaze. “So am I,” he said.
“You still want to be here, after all that?” she asked quietly. She’d seen the power of Len Dietz’s desire. His need for control. The kind of need that would never be satisfied.
“Once I get things cleaned up, pay off the taxes, I’ll get this place put to rights again. Make up for what was lost. Dietz will eventually go the way of all fanatics, of everything else that has flown through this country. The canyon will go on like it always has, this millennium and the next, no matter what kind of end they all think is coming.”
He wiped his face with a handkerchief, stuffed it back in his pocket, and looked away.
People needed to believe in something, no matter what inherent futility there was to it, no matter what destruction came in its wake, no matter what forces were set against the believing.
Unlike Nick, Isabelle hadn’t been too young to know better, hadn’t been broken into that kind of vulnerability; the only things she’d lost, she’d willingly tossed out. Silva considered telling Nick her own story—Isabelle’s story—but darkness was sweeping up the river valley, the sky thick and brown, the wind steadily picking up, filming the river’s surface with dust. Silva remembered storms that had blown in when she was a child—the call of the crows huddled up in trees, the whistling of branches, the lightning that split the sky into fissures, and the thunder that sounded like mountains tearing loose.
The air breathed inward in a gasp, and then let loose with a simultaneous peal of lightning and thunder that percussed overhead like canon shots.
Nick stood in concern as Silva tried to calm Juniper, who cowered into her, his body quaking hard enough against hers that it felt as though she were shaking loose, too.
“This wasn’t supposed to hit us here—was forecasted north of the canyon,” Nick said, scowling out the window as if the weather were another foe he could exact his own revenge on.
“I think it missed its mark,” she said, although perhaps the storm hadn’t missed anything at all. An external reflection of the internal. A sign she couldn’t help worrying about.
“I need to get the horses to shelter.” Nick threw on a coat and rushed outside.
Silva locked Juniper in her bedroom and sprinted outside to help Nick with the stock as more flashes of pitched light strobed the sky, fingers of lightning so bright the jagged lines branded into her retinas, repeating as she blinked—white lines sketched like fire against the dark. In the black-blue storm glow, everything looked like ship wreckage drifting on shadowy swells.
When she was just off the porch, there came the thundering fall of a lightning-struck tree somewhere close by, the shock of its impact translating through the ground into her bones. A smell of torn and seared wood, uprooted bareness. A taste like punk-rot in the back of her throat.
Hail pelted the house’s tin roof, pinging off and bouncing like popcorn kernels bursting open. Such late-spring heat, thermals of hot air rising against cold downdrafts, opposing layers bashing against each other like tectonic plates shifting under the earth’s crust. Natural powers far outside anyone’s control. Hail growing from pellets to marble-size balls that hit with enough force to break windows and injure flesh, the ground white and alive with movement.
She could feel the bruises rising as she ran to the barn, hail pummeling her back and shoulders, hitting her head like rocks. The horses and mules had bunched against the fence in panic, the whites of their eyes showing as they whinnied and jerked, flinching as if they were being beaten. Nick was trying to throw on halters as she ran in to help, both of them dragging one head of stock after another into safety, each of them holding onto a nervously shifting horse as hail blew in through the barn door. Everyone would be sore for the pack-ride in the morning—if the storm subsided enough for the group to even go.
Silva patted Tiko’s neck, trying to soothe him and herself as round, red welts rose on her arms and torso and Tiko’s hide twitched with his own discomfort. The storm’s din was loud enough that it was useless to try to talk, each word hammered away before it was fully formed.
Knowing she couldn’t, with the hail and thunder raining down, she wanted now, more than ever, to tell Nick about Isabelle, about the paintings, about her own pregnancy, about her own woundedness. But where would she start in the botany of grief?
The hail finally receded, leaving a maimed landscape behind: the yard blanketed white, tender spring leaves shredded to tatters, bark and branches scattered everywhere. Still, they waited, the wind howling around the barn as if it were searching for entry, lifting the corners of tin on the roof and then slapping them back into place.
“I lost my grandfather five months ago,” Silva said, finally braving at least a part of it. The least she could do was let Nick know he wasn’t alone. “My mother died in a car accident when I was five, and he raised me. I don’t have anyone else.…”
See? she told herself. It doesn’t take more than a breath to say it all. Almost all.
Nick looked at her with compassion. “I’m sorry to hear that. We’re pretty young to have outlived both our families. Len Dietz has been the longest-lasting person in my life.” His voice was resonant with pain, fury, shame—things he still hadn’t yet fully named. But how could you name such things? Things interwoven inside you so tightly it seemed they could never be unwound without destroying you in the process.
She looked at his scar and wondered what else he hadn’t told her, what else had happened between him and Dietz. What kind of unseen scars his young faith had left him with. She resisted asking him more, asking what he’d see
n, what Len Dietz had done to his mother, what had happened to the others. He’d told her much more than he had to, and she’d shared nothing except the barest facts of her own loss. She wanted to be able to tell him all she’d lost. All she hoped to find, too, even if she didn’t yet know what that meant. She wanted to tell him all Len had said to her, what he’d insinuated, but she was wary of the look she’d seen in Nick’s eyes—what he, too, might be capable of. What he might do with such clear provocation, itching for a first punch to be thrown, everything escalating with the kind of momentum that couldn’t be stopped. She didn’t want to be a reason for any further violence.
CHAPTER TWENTY
* * *
You are one of many, one more of many to come, one more of many before, one of many more, many of one more taking another and another and another’s place, her skin like clay, like the floured Play-Doh you make for the little ones, their dirty hands always grasping at you for more, squeezing fleshy globs through their fingers until, shuddering, you make them stop, but now you want to squeeze it, take her gray clay flesh in your hands and warm it back into being, grasp great handfuls and mold it back into life, something so soft you couldn’t help touch it then just as you touch it now, there, where her sleeve pulls away from her wrist, the hair as soft and downy as the secret reaches of your own flesh. You undress her and wash her and wash her. You try to wash the gray away, but the clay won’t warm, won’t pink into what you remember touching before, won’t respond to your pliant pleading fingers, so instead, you brush her hair smooth, coil it into a thick golden coronet around her still face, her eyes forever now closed to you, her body formed and shaped into this new silent state of truth.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
MAY 2001
Silva awoke with the smell of acrid char in her nose and checked out the window for fresh-burned ground, but it was still damp and green, the burning only in her dreams—flames like a torrent raining down on the tops of their heads. She couldn’t bring herself to look out at the garden plot, her mother’s seeds hail-hammered in Nick’s mother’s old garden.
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