When Mack called in on the radio, his voice was tinny in the small kitchen, Nick standing at the counter, listening with furrowed brows as he spoke.
“Ted sent word about the elk testing,” Mack said. “Wanted me to let you know, besides other things, it was conclusive of CWD. Just what you were afraid of. Fish and Game will be handling the situation with high priority.”
Perplexed, Silva looked back and forth between Nick and the radio.
“Chronic wasting disease,” Nick explained. “A version of mad cow. Spreads easily to wild herds, has a near one hundred percent mortality rate. His elk are probably full of disease—tuberculosis, pneumonia—just like domestic sheep in the canyon. Transfers to everything and wipes out the native herds. With things already so tense, anything coming from Fish and Game will probably be considered a direct attack. It’s going to cause a shit-storm.…”
“I’ll keep you updated. Don’t want you caught unawares up there,” Mack finished.
It was colony collapse of a different sort. Silva had a sinking feeling in her guts.
“Things can’t keep going on like this much longer,” Nick said, staring out pensively.
“No, they can’t,” Silva said, going to him. “Are you okay?”
He paused before answering. “I just don’t want any more shit falling on us or this place.…” He pulled back for a moment and looked at her with quiet regard, his eyes a clear, potent blue. “We should get out of here—at least for a little while. Take a breather.”
At first, her heart sinking, Silva thought he was talking about going back to Two Rivers, choosing to move even closer to all the drama, where they would only get more drawn into it. Len Dietz and his followers had a way of assuring Nick’s and Silva’s involvement, whether they wanted it or not.
“There’s a hidden spot upcanyon, a hackberry growing out of a rock along the river called the Wishing Tree. Like your bonsai. I’d like to take you there. We could ride up, camp out, and then watch the rafters come through the best rapids,” he said. His eyes were still troubled even as he tried to get back to where they’d been before the news from Mack.
She was worried he felt it, too—this golden time fleeting. The canyon’s reality had come crashing back with resounding force. She glanced outside, imagined the coolness of the river, a root-over-rock hackberry called the Wishing Tree—something Eamon would have loved seeing.
“Only the river and trees this time, I promise,” Nick said, looking deep in her eyes.
The river and the trees. The bonsai and the bees. An incantation she had learned to sing.
* * *
While Nick got the horses ready and packed, Silva went to the house and watered each bonsai thoroughly before placing wet tea bags over their soil for extra moisture. She’d been having to water the bonsai as much as the garden in the new apex of heat. She packed the rucksack, bringing only a small bonsai sketchbook and extra clothes before closing up her workroom, pausing for a moment to look at the evidence of herself left behind: trimming shears, jinning pliers, gravers, root hooks, knob and wire cutters, and coils of different gauged copper wire lined up next to the stack of Eamon’s bonsai journals. Everything reimagined, reshaped.
The horses were lazy in the heat, their neck and withers wet, horse smell mixing with leather and sweat as they rode through rolling plateaus of shale and sage. The drought-shrunken trees were spread like an African plain: sky and sun and bleeding rock veins, pink arterial flows. The heat pushed back against them like an invisible hand as the river slipped by, gleaming like metal, the air still, everything dried to dust, grass breaking underfoot like twigs.
The rucksack hung heavy and hot against Silva’s back. “So, where is this famous Wishing Tree?” she asked. She felt like a child on a road trip, asking how much farther every five minutes, impatiently waiting for the promised destination.
Nick smiled back at her. “You’ll just have to wait and see. Only good secret I have left.”
They climbed a steep hillside of bunch grass and then rode under a cluster of huge bull pines that smelled like vanilla. Silva brushed her hand against their rough, orange-veined bark as they rode by, the sky filtered through the trees’ long needles, this wild country straddled between two rivers twining their age-old ways, carving out new territory with each pulse.
Nick pointed out the sharp peaks of the Seven Devils shearing above the otherwise smoothly contoured landscape, hills shaped like a woman’s body, and told Silva the story of the sky woman who’d run naked and wild, blowing every which way with the wind until finally she’d given into the land’s earthward pull, let it claim her as its own. When he pointed out the mounds that formed her hips and thighs and breasts, Silva felt as though he were tracing her own body.
As they finally dropped back down toward the river, he led them off-trail through a burned hackberry thicket, the ghostly shapes of the silvered trunks standing like sentinels on the barren slope. Scrambling down a steep deer trail, the horses shimmied past a basalt bluff that dropped sharply to the water; then the path leveled on a small flat that turned from grass to sand where it met the river, pines encircling the small beach, providing much-needed shade.
Nick leapt off Sage and helped Silva dismount. “Welcome to camp,” he said. The water stretched smooth and flat, current swirling with pollen, swallows skimming the surface, winging water loose as a canyon wren sang along the weavings of basalt, syringa sweeting the air, hackberry and meadowlark tangled together.
“The Wishing Tree is just over the bluff. You can make all the wishes you want,” he said.
Silva shucked off the sweaty rucksack and leaned it against a pine. “No limit?” she asked.
“Not for the Tree Girl,” he said, grinning.
Juniper paddled around the eddy, his tail extended out behind him like a rudder, as Silva let the horses drink and Nick pitched a tiny, faded green dome tent, frayed at the seams, in a pocket of grass and sand, sweeping out dried bugs from seasons past before unrolling two old Army mummy sleeping bags—more relics from his youth. When he was done, he got the horses hobbled in the shade, contentedly eating the piles of oats he’d poured out for them.
“Come on,” he said, pulling Silva up from the river. “The pièce de résistance awaits.…”
She got the rucksack with her sketchbook and pencils as Nick slung his fishing rod’s battered aluminum pack tube over his shoulder. They clambered up the steep bluff, Juniper ahead of them, surefooted on the narrow footholds. There were tiny clumps of pink and purple flowering plants nestled in the crevices, the clean, lemon scent of sage blunted by the earthiness of baked dust and the mineral smell of heated scree. The line of past water was a ghost cut against the rock walls around them—a white mark, a sluice of stones swept banking. Pools once filled torrent-high, deep enough you could sink out of sight. A dream of water that once was.
They got to the top and went down the other side, and then, protected and out of view from above, was the Wishing Tree, just as Nick had promised—a gnarled yet elegant hackberry anchored root to rock, growing impossibly out of the sheer basalt outcropping that dropped precipitously to the water. The hackberry’s crown was leafed with a streak of deadwood running up its trunk intertwined with the live wood. A bonsai master would work years to achieve that juxtaposition—the living and the dead. The jin, the shari. The grace of life and death.
“It’s perfect,” she said with reverence, wishing she could have shown the Wishing Tree to Eamon. Wrapped in the heavy silence, she could feel the force of this otherworldly place winding somewhere below the things we know. She wanted to sit at the rock-anchored roots and wish for everything she had ever wanted: that Eamon had lived, that her mother had lived, that Isabelle had lived, that all of them might be together, here, somehow, in this moment.
Nick put his arm around her shoulder, pulled her into him. “Stay here, do your tree thing, make a hundred wishes,” he said. “I brought along my own form of worship.”
He pulled out the segmented fishi
ng-rod pieces from the aluminum tube. He fit the pieces together, attached the round reel, and strung the thin, tapered line through the rod eyes before scrabbling up the outcropping and standing where it veered sharply into the water to start his cast—a smooth, sinuous action of line and pole and arm waving in the air until the release, minuscule fly sailing and touching down on the river’s surface with a tiny dimpling, then a slow-spinning drift.
Silva started sketching—first the hackberry leaning from the rock, and then Nick standing out on the rocky point over the water, each a complement to the other, Nick and the canyon’s Wishing Tree somehow versions of the same thing. A maze of roots holding them onto to the rock. An anchoring they both had learned to trust. Faith in an order that reached beyond them. Eamon had taught her to always embrace the mystery of the unknown, said that when the past and the future met they always created some new shape, one often better-formed than the last.
She could have watched Nick forever—the hypnotic movement of his casting, the quiet drift of the fly on the water, his utter concentration as he read the current, finding the hidden swirls, the secret eddies of desire and release.
He caught the first fish fast, the next soon after. He reeled them in, thrashing, netted them, and held them up triumphantly for Silva to see, their silvery bodies flashing bright in the sun.
“Hungry yet?” Nick called out.
“With you, when am I not?” she said, her voice catching.
After Nick cleaned the fish, wrapped them in damp leaves, and put them in the shade, he scraped a fire line in the sand, brushing away everything organic before assembling a small ring of rocks and starting a fire using one of the egg-carton fire starters they’d made together—wax and pitch and paper melting and catching flame, sparks leaping into the air as the sticks he’d piled in caught fire, everything as dry as tinder. When Silva asked him if it was safe—open flame in drought country after all his warnings of fire—he assured her it was: the flames concentrated, burning only where he directed.
He got a good bed of coals going, then diced the garlic and onion and lemon he’d brought, stuffing the fishes’ cavities full before wrapping them in foil and throwing them in the fire along with several large potatoes he’d preseasoned and wrapped in foil as well. She knew by the smell she wouldn’t be able to resist it any more than she had anything else he’d cooked.
By the time dinner was done, fragrant and steaming, the river was wafting cool, the sand damp. Nick used green sticks to pull the fish and potatoes out of the coals, their foil wrapping powdery with ash, bits of aluminum flaking away like pieces of mica. When he presented her with a Fostoria plate artfully arranged with fish and potatoes and wedges of lemon, along with a Fostoria glass full of sparkling wine, Silva laughed out loud and shook her head in wonder.
“How?” she asked, turning the clear, star-edged plate around in her hands, its weight sturdy and thick. Fancy, Depression-era glass on a horse camping trip up Hells Canyon—dishes Nick’s mother had painstakingly collected and then abandoned in the Larkins house when she’d absconded to Almost Paradise.
“I figured it was the right time to use them—our Wishing Tree trip,” Nick said, sitting beside her. The fire crackled as he fed it twigs, building a peak of orange flame that matched the sunset. Across the river, an osprey dove into the water, coming up with a thrashing fish in its talons. “See?” Nick said. “Maybe there’s enough here for everybody.”
She hoped he was right.
When they were finished eating—tidy skeletons of fish bones and lemon rinds like a still-life Isabelle would have painted—Nick stood and pulled off his clothes. He ran and dove in the river, swimming several strokes out toward the current before turning and blowing the water from his mouth, shaking his hair from his eyes.
“Come on,” he said. “What’re you waiting for? There’s no going slowly… but I think you already know that.”
She tilted her head at him, her heart beating hard in her chest. He didn’t know the half of it. At the shore’s edge, Juniper barked and bit at the water, and Silva laughed, picked up a rock, and playfully threw it a few feet from Nick. “Go get it,” she said to Juniper, but he just looked, tattered ears perked, smart enough to know a sinking offer.
She stripped down and dove in, Juniper right behind her, the three of them splashing around like a family of otters. She swam over to the basalt bluff and held onto it, its surface teeming with a miniature world of life, insects and rock-clinging plants joining with the darting shadows of fish below. When Nick followed her, she reached out and touched the line etched into his cheek before kissing him long enough that it felt like coming up for air after being held underwater.
“Tell me what happened,” she finally said.
He looked at her a moment. “I was eighteen, had been out drinking. Saw Len walking down the sidewalk all slicked up, like he was out on the town. He stopped to talk to a young woman, ‘preach the word of god.’ He kept touching her, laying his hands on her shoulders, and suddenly it was like I was fourteen all over again, like my mom was still there.… I broke a bottle over his head. It was a bad fight.”
She reached for his hand and clasped it in her own. “When Eamon died, I had my own version of that same fight,” she said. A dark room, her body cast free of itself. “But we’re here, in this exact moment, right now. That has to count for something, right?”
“I think so,” Nick said, tucking her into his river-wet body, the current swirling pollen, fish muscling into deep water—this their river song, the song of their undoing, the song of their remaking.
The air washed cool, the canyon offering a lovely stretch of black-walled sky view, naked and bragging with stars. Crickets rasped in bunch grass and sage as a breeze sluiced upcanyon like a ghost echo of the river lapping against canyon walls and rushing on into the dark. Silva, too, felt unshackled. Released. She wanted to go back to the Wishing Tree and wish again and again—wishes for the future instead of the past, wishes she wanted to believe could come true.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Date: February 1, 2000
Title: Birth & Death
Subject: Lenite Mother
Setting: Almost Paradise Birthing Room & Cemetery
Medium: Watercolor and graphite on cold-press
Size: 8×10
Dearest Eamon,
There has come a reckoning, as there always eventually is. This isn’t the first time it has happened since I’ve been here—a woman fallen ill in some way and then quickly taken away. Of course it is never the “great leader” who fails. Of course it is the most vulnerable who suffer the dearest consequences of his narcissistic, masochistic rule. Of course it is the women and the children who bear the brunt of all his great wrongs, their lives sacrificed for his self-serving cause over and over again. When has religion ever been anything but a woman’s sure way to subjugation and loss?
The birth was to be celebrated as the first of the new millennium. I was allowed into the Birthing Room, a place kept separate and secret, Faith as its guardian—a midwife who has delivered untold numbers of Len’s and the Lenites’ progeny. It was one of Len’s non-maiden wives, a woman named Shoshanna, a woman who laughed and stroked her stomach at the Childbearing Ceremony as she taught the maidens what to expect after their upcoming wedding-night “implanting.” I was to paint the mother and child’s portrait after the birth—a happy Madonna and babe—but instead, all there was was blood. So much blood. Cord coiled around the tiny neck, slick gray stillborn body, placental separation, maternal hemorrhage. Both mother and child dead within what seemed like moments, then both taken quickly away, buried in a hushed and solemn ceremony under the cemetery tree—a place full of maternal ghosts. Women calling out from the grave as their executioners bend their heads and declare, “The Lord’s will be done.”
The maidens have been kept separate since the wedding, herded together in waiting suspense until they’ve missed their first menses, at which point they will be celebrated and
waited upon by the rest of the Almost Paradise wives, kept strong and healthy for their upcoming womb growth. A month in, and their time draws nigh.
I must escape this compound. I must leave before it is too late—before I can no longer keep my place. A woman unattached. A woman alone. A woman to be conquered. A woman without a child—even if I once had one, skin pink and flushed, tiny yelling mouth. I have asked Faith for her assistance. Told her my work is done. Told her that I must go to find you—my husband. This they can understand. The bonds that tie us together, even all these years apart. What might I see of myself then? Wrapped in your arms, away from all this, away from all I’ve become. What might I transform into? A new version of self, a new version of me, a new version of us? You and me and the family we were always meant to be. Is it possible to re-create history, to retrace those lines, to restitch those tapestries? Will you, dear Eamon, still be there, waiting for me?
All my love,
Isabelle
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
AUGUST 2001
The next morning, they left the horses hobbled in the shade and hiked to the highest part of the bluff, the trail carved into the sheer rock face, its peak banked around the cliff side—a hundred-foot drop overlooking a frothing set of rapids formed by the confluence of a mountain-fed creek still running high, fed from alpine snowmelt.
The vertical exposed cliffs were riddled with blasting holes where men had forced their way through, setting dynamite. Clusters of tenuous plants grew where the wind had deposited ash and dust enough to hold a few hair roots, but otherwise the bluff was devoid of life—nothing but a weaving of gray basalt rising precipitously above the inky river’s depths.
“This isn’t suitable for people—only mountain goats or sheep,” Silva said, sweat running down her back as they made their way along the hot rock face. She looked down, imagining tumbling through the air to the water, thinking of the two shot-up mountain sheep.
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