The Lowering Days

by Gregory Brown

  A woman out walking her dog the night of the fire told authorities she had seen a figure pass through a break in the fence around the mill site. Trespass happened fairly often. Shattered glass and cigarette butts littered the ground. New graffiti, phrases ranging from the profound to the imbecilic—“Still Cursed,” “Suck It Eastport,” “What Will Our Sad Fathers Do Now?”—constantly appeared on the buildings, silos, and smokestacks looking down the river. The woman thought something in this intruder’s posture seemed different, though. The figure hid nothing. Standing upright, it boldly walked into the dark collection of industrial buildings. The dog walker stopped and watched. Twenty minutes later, the same short and skinny figure, wearing an oversize green hoodie, came out of the mill, moved through the fence, and turned up the street under the silver light of a clear, full moon. When the woman yelled, the figure turned, just long enough for the woman to determine a few key details. This bold interloper was a girl. And she was young, no more than fourteen, essentially the same age as me and Link and Wren and Galen.

  Then the girl in the green hoodie turned and disappeared down an alley that connected to an ATV trail through the town woods.

  The ringing phone woke us in the middle of the night.

  Moses Jupiter was on the line. “Falon,” he said, “get up here. This is bad.” Not This is going to be bad, or This will be bad, but This is bad.

  Our mother had turned on every light downstairs. From outside, in the woods, deep in the night, our little house must have looked like it was on fire as well. My mother was throwing clothes on and scribbling notes down at the same time.

  Then she was out the door, driving through the dark in her beat-up Volvo station wagon, following the river north, craning her head at every bend for the sight of flames. Back home, my father, Link, Simon, and I sat at the table, catching our breath and wondering why it felt like a death had hit us.

  Though we lived twenty-five miles away, my mother was the first reporter on-site. Truckers and midnight motorists heading upstate had pulled their rigs over on the rickety green bridge spanning the river. They stood along the swaying stretch of asphalt and steel, gawking. Some of them were crying. A pilot coming in to land at Bangor International Airport was so distracted by the intensity of the blaze that he almost missed his descent angle.

  Reggie met my mother in Eastport to help take pictures. What Wren and I saw the next day in the darkroom at The Lowering Days was shocking. Flames towering into the night like a column of fire dropped from the sky. Flames dancing with a hundred shades of crimson heat. I didn’t understand how one girl could cause such a thing. The photos that began to circulate on the news in the days after were just as strange. Heaping piles of charred debris. Warehouses torn down to black studs. Windows melted. And in the background: all the green wonder of the narrows as the river funneled through the chute of high, ancient cliffs and tall pines toward the sea.

  It took twelve hours to put out the fire. Later, when asked why it hadn’t spread or caused a greater environmental impact—the mill, while closed, was still filled with stores of chemicals—the state fire marshal was honest. Instead of the heroics of the firefighters who had responded, he credited the intentionality of whoever set the fire. The arsonist knew the mill—the facilities, the machinery, the layout, the operation—and had managed to start several fires in specific locations that would damage key buildings and machinery without igniting chemical or flash fuels. According to the marshal, the fire starter had used the river on one side as a control line and the machinery as a dozer line, essentially boxing the fire in to various areas. Furthermore, the state police had received an anonymous call about a mill fire in Eastport at 1:35 that morning. His investigation put the fire’s official ignition time between 1:45 and 2:15 a.m. “The warning helped,” he said.

  In the days after the fire, speculation about the girl’s whereabouts began to consume us. We thought she must not be alone. “How does some kid disappear when a whole state is hunting for her?” Link asked one night.

  “Hunting,” my mother repeated the phrase. “That’s exactly what this is. A hunt.”

  I pointed out that, officially, she was “wanted for questioning.” My father shook his head, but then stopped short of saying anything.

  “Don’t be as callous as the rest of them,” my mother snapped. “Look in the mirror some morning and think about how little you actually have to lose in this world.”

  Shame and anger turned about the room with silence, and that silence seemed to go on and on. I vaguely understood that her “them” covered two categories, men in general, and more specifically European men, many of whom were my ancestors, who had overrun places like Indian Point, taking this river valley as their own and turning it into something very different from what it had once been.

  “Those mills have been using the Penobscot as a sewer for a hundred years,” my mother said. “Maybe this is how it starts to stop.”

  A week after the fire, a letter arrived in the mail at the The Lowering Days. It was written on a brown paper bag, instead of dioxin-bleached white paper.

  Dear Readers,

  This paper is run by a white lady, but she’s a white lady who cares. Her heart is in the right place. She gives us the space to be seen and heard. Wə̀liwəni.

  This paper has also shown it cares about truth for everyone, whether human, white, Penobscot, mountain, tree, river, or air. So this paper gets the truth.

  Kənótamən? Wiseləmo sìpo, wiseləmolətəwak ahč nətalənαpemak pαnawαhpskewəyak. Kis αpαčihle αkələpemo. Apčiláwehle. Wekalohke. Nlátəpo pαnawαhpskewəya. Ata sésəmihle, nič kəwičintohətinena, nič kolitəhαsolətinena. Nič ničkin kki. Nič wəničkisolətinα awenohčak nαkα pαnawαhpskewəyak.

  The fire I started was meant for the mill only. Not to hurt anyone else. I acted alone. To the mill: this is for the river who you harmed, my people who you poisoned, and all the men and women who had to make themselves into machines to keep you alive. I think it’s good you’re gone. Some things have to stay dead so others can come back to life.

  To my people: nənotélətamən àhči nəpαlítəhαtamən. The river is us. We are the river. I couldn’t listen to your crying anymore.

  My mother hid the letter in her coat, closed the office, and came home that afternoon. With shaking hands, she set the letter on our kitchen table, where it sat like a bomb. None of us dared touch it.

  I suppose she showed us the letter because she had to show it to someone. I was amazed it had come to The Lowering Days, not the big daily paper in Bangor. But it made sense as well. Over the years my mother had become something of an ally to the Penobscot Nation, the river, and the land. Furthermore, she was tenacious, arguably reckless even, with the truth, believing that it deserved to be heard at all costs. She had often run articles and editorials by tribal leaders and sought to give white issues and indigenous issues equal space.

  So it had been arson in the name of a river under centuries of assault. The weight of that truth began to settle over our household as we all stood in the dimming April light eyeing the letter and listening for cars we knew were not out there and footsteps we irrationally feared might be coming. That night my father locked our door for the first time I could remember.

  And what of the arsonist? If she was indeed a teenager, she was a precocious one, and chillingly direct. Yet she seemed unsure as well. I think it’s good you’re gone. I wanted to know how she had done it. Had the decision been quick and rash? Or had she agonized over the choice? What I was sure of was that the mill was not an innocent victim. The Penobscot Nation had long claimed that the narrows mill knowingly discharged toxic chemicals and wastewater products from the pulp and papermaking process into the river, poisoning its fish and plants. They had data to back their claims. My mother wrote about it all, of course, from all angles, and the environmental debate had filled my childhood. Now, on the eve of its potential reopening, the mill had been burned flat. The girl had directly addres
sed the paper mill, animating it in the process. From then on it would forever be a living, breathing entity in everyone’s eyes. Of course it had always been alive, filled with the lives of those who lived and worked within it, a moving, evolving system, not unlike a body. An ecosystem, Wren had pointed out to me when we looked at Reggie’s photos a week earlier.

  Three

  Our mother had been sitting on the letter for two days, unsure whether to publish it or not, when Grace called. She wanted us to come to her house to talk.

  “Let’s get this over with,” my mother said to Link and me. “I’m not an idiot, Almy,” she added when she saw my face. “Grace is mad because she knows about the letter, and she knows about the letter because of you.”

  I was certain my father hadn’t told anyone about the letter. I was sure my mother hadn’t either. She’d refused to notify the state police or the state fire marshal’s office. She’d refused to even tell Cal Hayes, the Walineyayo County sheriff, and a family friend. I, on the other hand, had immediately told Wren. Suffering too under the weight of the letter, Wren undoubtedly had confided in her mother.

  “You’re using us,” I said.

  “You’re coming.”

  “You think Grace will go easier if we’re there.”

  “I don’t need Grace to go easy,” she said. “I’ve known Grace and how to handle her my whole life. And I gave birth to you, which means I get to use you, especially when you act like an idiot.”

  “Which is often,” my brother added with a grin. Link, in his defense, had done nothing. Still, he went across the room and grabbed his coat. Then he stood watching our mother in the same way he looked at Simon or me or our father when he didn’t think we were paying attention, as if he were memorizing everything about us. Though I thought Link obsessively collected all this information out of boredom, a kind of analytical game to pass the time, as I got older, I realized it was something much deeper. When we were little kids and our parents went somewhere without us, Link would spend hours drawing pictures of where they were and what he thought they were up to. The inside of the grocery store. The inside of the movie theater. The inside of the car as it moved down the highway between Portland or Bangor and home. Whenever Simon asked him why he was drawing these pictures, he would look up and coolly say, “Because I need to be there too. To protect them.”

  We made the long walk through the forest in silence. Eventually we reached a stone wall nearly five feet high. An acre or so of land had been cleared, and the wall formed a perfect circle around the clearing. A driveway ran up to the circle’s edge and then stopped. The most curious thing was that there was no break, opening, or gate anywhere in the wall. There was just a spot where the stones had been tapered into steps so you could climb over and back down the other side. The impracticality of a wall without a door had always puzzled and excited me.

  Stacks of lobster traps and coils of rope and crudely built sawhorses were stacked outside the stone wall. Homemade lean-tos had been raised to protect fishing gear and engine parts. Inside the wall, however, there was only the Creel family’s small house and a neat grid of vegetable gardens, mulched with straw. The effect was one of overpowering refuge: in here, inside this wall, we will not abide grease and grime and disorder. In here, we will be clean and pure. Where the Creels’ space was neat and ordered, ours was often a disaster. Just that morning I’d come downstairs and found Link lying on the floor in front of the TV in the living room, watching an old black-and-white zombie movie. Our father had dragged the TV home after the other one, a big wooden console that had belonged to my grandparents, stopped working. Now the working one was stacked on top of the broken one, and I wondered if we’d put another one on top when this one quit. That’s how things seemed to go at our house on the river. An old rusting car with a hood that wouldn’t fully close, parked beside a new and running car. A spent barbecue grill, a moldy cover still fixed over it with a bungee cord, resting beside a new grill, which was never really new, but bought used off some friend. Sheds were filled with broken rakes waiting for mending leaned up beside whole rakes. Shelves held working lawn mower parts and burned-up ones as well. Things could be fixed, reused. Worst case: even scrap metal was worth a few cents. I thought clean yards were for people with time and money. The Creels had no more of either than us, yet somehow it seemed they’d cheated the system.

  Link stopped at the wall and said, “I’ll stay.”

  “What for?” our mother asked.

  “I’ll just stay,” he said.

  The trees about us were too dark, black almost. They kept shifting as if alive. Then I remembered the ravens that Lyman raised, and slowly, magically, I began to see wings in the branches. “It’s cold,” I said, looking up for the birds.

  Link shrugged, lifted his hand into the air, and extended his fingers.

  “What’s that about?” I asked.

  “Quiet. I’m concentrating. Gotta find the wind.”

  After a moment, Link lowered his hand and licked his finger. “Tastes off,” he muttered.

  I shook my head, embarrassed for my brother, who was full of strange tips and tricks about feeling the world out. Our mother, who somehow seemed secretly proud of his principled stance, turned and climbed the stone steps as I followed.

  Grace, Galen, and Wren were all waiting for us in the kitchen.

  “Let’s start the bullshit, then,” my mother immediately announced.

  “It isn’t like that, Falon,” Grace said. “I know you’re going to print that letter. Fine. I can’t stop you. What I want to talk about is the aftermath.”

  My mother seemed genuinely surprised Grace wasn’t putting up a fight. “When the truth is out there,” she said.

  “Something like that.”

  Notebooks, pens, and vinyl records were stacked on the kitchen table. Dark feathers peeked out from books of poems and cooking magazines. Piles of laundry were neatly folded in chairs. Heavy hemlock beams spanned the house’s ceilings. Bundles of pungent drying herbs hung all around the room, tied and looped over rough nails driven into the timbers. Grace Creel was wearing a red bandanna knotted around her wrist, and a black bandanna tied over her head. I had always loved her voice, which seemed to arrive in a hiss or a whisper, but never with anger. It forced you to really listen for the words, which were often tough like my mother’s, but usually infused with a soft love I often found lacking in our own house. “When everything is out there.” Grace crossed her arms. “You know this place, Falon. Someone is going to find her eventually. It’s going to be ugly.”

  My mother started to respond and then stopped. Her face reddened, and she dropped her gaze to the floor. She didn’t seem to know what to say.

  Wren and Galen were across the room, watching things unfold. Wren flashed a peace sign in the air. She was wearing one of her father’s old green army jackets, the sleeves folded over at the cuffs. A piece of black duct tape was stuck on the chest, underlining her father’s name. It made the name stand out more clearly, and I thought about how other kids might put the tape over their parents’ names to hide or erase them. I had never seen a single photo, garment, memento, or scrap of evidence from my father’s military years. Galen was sitting at the table, thumbing crumbs around the surface. He was tall, at least six feet already, and possessed a stunning wideness. Everything about him was broad, from his shoulders to his chest to his face. He even had unnaturally wide spaces between his teeth, and I remembered Wren telling me how she used to try to slip quarters between them when he was sleeping.

  “This wasn’t some accident,” Grace said. “After that letter comes out, whoever finds that girl might kill her.”

  “Or hug her.” My mother’s voice was as soft as I’d ever heard it. “Or hold her up.”

  “That isn’t this world, Falon.”

  Wren and I looked at each other. We both knew we were at the heart of this exchange in some way. Together we slipped out of the kitchen. Wren led me around the house, displaying various curio
sities: a marble-size knot of shrapnel that had been inside her great grandfather’s thigh for fifty years. Six round blue rocks her father had given her from the sea. A fox skull she found in the woods, which she and Galen had sent back and forth between each other’s rooms when they were younger, the fox living with her in the winter and summer and with him in the spring and fall. A journal about palmistry that had been her grandmother’s. I moved back over to the rocks. They were perfectly round, not a blemish on them. In their color I felt like I could see the ocean moving.