The Lowering Days

by Gregory Brown

  “They’d be bluebird eggs and hatch for us if the world were a better place,” Wren said, and rested her chin on my shoulder. I could feel her breath against my neck.

  I sighed. “But all we have are blue rocks.”

  “And the curse of living goes on.” She moved away from my body, finishing our pointless comedy act as all the weight of what was brewing in the bay pushed back in from the next room, where we could still hear our mothers’ voices.

  I looked around. Though the house was a little dank around its corners, overpowering signs of love filled it as well. Every shelf and windowsill held a sepia photo of either a person or a homestead or a pasture, and to read the stories stitched together by the frames was to see a stunning act of preservation, to understand the lives and landscapes of at least three generations. Boots and slippers were neatly lined up along one wall. Names and dates marking people’s heights over the years were penciled on a doorjamb in a vertical totem.

  Outside I heard the crunch of tires on gravel and then saw a truck bending through the woods. Lyman Creel was coming home from his day at sea. The sky had turned dark and green, the air taking on the heavy electricity of a storm. I could see my brother still holding his position along the wall.

  “He can’t make up his mind,” Wren said.

  “About what?”

  “Which is more dangerous. Us or the storm coming in.”

  In the kitchen, the voices had paused, and I imagined them watching Lyman’s homecoming as well. I jerked my head toward the kitchen. “We should go back to them, shouldn’t we?”

  Wren shrugged. “Probably. The thing about parents is, they need you more than they let on.”

  My mother and Grace Creel were still standing across from each other, neither willing to sit. Galen, with all his stunning wideness, was nonchalantly reading a comic book. Link had come inside and was standing beside our mother.

  “I’m interested in the truth, too,” Grace was saying. “But not at the expense of people’s lives. So we need to figure out what we can do to help her, not just use her.”

  “Use her? She sent in a letter. She asked to be heard. I’m not going to swallow it and censor another marginalized kid.”

  “She’s a child, Falon. You’re not.”

  I glanced up at the window. Lyman was sitting on the rock wall with his legs dangling over, as carefree as a child, pulling off his yellow hip waders, which he set in a pile with the rest of his gear. No one else seemed to notice him out there. I, however, could not stop looking. Just then the wind ceased. Rain started falling in thick sheets, kissing the trees, sizzling against the roof. The pine canopies swelled and thrashed, and five ravens filled the sky. Within seconds the birds had surrounded Lyman, turning him into a pocket of rippling darkness, and I thought it strange and a bit lonely, to see a man greeted by his birds before his family.

  Grace turned to watch the ravens joyously dance about her husband as well. She smiled for a moment, and then her face darkened. “There’s too much history stacked on this for it to go softly.”

  “That’s the social worker in you talking,” my mother said. “Maybe not everything is supposed to be soft, Grace.” My mother was looking out at the rain as well. She seemed for the first time to register Lyman’s presence. “I should go,” she whispered.

  “Don’t be like that,” Grace started, though I could see in her face that she was hurt.

  Our mother was already across the room, pulling the door open on the storm. “Stay,” she called back to us as we hesitated. “Wait for the rain to break. What Grace has to say is important. But I’m not the one to hear it.” She seemed so small, framed in the open doorway with the rain cutting down around her as she turned to her friend. “What I do isn’t easy. And it’s even harder to do as a woman. So the truth is, I’m the thing that can’t be soft, Grace.”

  Grace was looking down at the floor. “I know, Falon.”

  In the yard my mother and Lyman didn’t acknowledge each other. I’d never seen two adults trying so hard to act like the other didn’t exist. Lyman reached into a little canvas sack and drew out chunks of fish and began tearing them into pieces for the ravens. He stroked their heads as they snapped up the bits of meat. I couldn’t make sense of this man. Here was a father who had built a wall around his family. Here was a man who loved his family. Here was a man who loved those magical black birds. And here was a man who had once loved our mother. He didn’t seem at all capable of the ugly things I’d been told he had done. The largest of the birds spread its wings and rose high into the air then. I had to duck to follow its flight through the window. When I’d almost lost it in the storm clouds, the bird paused, pinned its wings to its side, rolled over, and fell in a free dive. I gasped, and Wren, who was watching as well, shrugged like the performance was normal. When the plummeting raven was only feet from the earth, it suddenly shot its wings back out, loosed a playful series of croaks, and rose powerfully into the air. Lyman was smiling at the aerial display, and I felt something passing between us. The back of my neck began to sizzle. I felt a sudden urge to flee. Lyman raised his head just a bit and cocked his ear, as if he too had felt the bizarre exchange.

  “Why does he hate us?” I said to Grace, relieved to get away from the grip of the window.

  “He doesn’t hate you. He’s bitter. Thinks something was taken from him.”

  “I’ll bite,” Link said. “What?”

  Grace took her time with the question. “I don’t know exactly.” She seemed genuinely perplexed. “The idea of a life, I guess. Lyman saw a life with your mom when he was a kid. Losing something like that can haunt you for a long time. I love Lyman, but I also know he never really got over that night with your mother and Billy.”

  I watched Grace smile at the shock on all our faces. That night was not something anyone ever talked about. “Hide the truth,” she said, “and watch the same mistakes get made.”

  Link nodded. I did as well. It sounded like something our mother would have said.

  “Like rotten mills getting reopened,” said Wren.

  “Maybe,” Grace said. “But people need rotten mills too. Rotten mills pay for houses and food. Rotten mills make hard lives a little less hard.” Grace crossed the room and hugged Wren. Then she went to the table and kissed Galen on the forehead before turning to us. “Lyman isn’t what you think. You see him and see just one thing. But you can’t be human and be just one thing.”

  Between our house and the Creels’ house a network of deer trails wound up to a bluff overlooking the spot where the river emptied into the sea. Here the outrushing waters gathered in a black whirlpool. My brothers and I would often stand atop the bluff and toss driftwood and cans and firecrackers down into the dark water. Sometimes the debris emerged back up the river; other times, we imagined it surfacing far out at sea. Oftentimes, though, the water never released its grip, and we wondered where the disappeared things went. A single apple tree that seemed impervious to time sat atop the bluff. Its trunk was a soft pink all year long, and crisp red fruit hung from its branches even in February, when ice encased the apples.

  Ghost apples, my father called them. Fruit that will not die. That stays eternally lit like a beacon all year long. That tree became a talisman to us. Passing each other in the halls at school we whispered, “Meet me at the ghost apples.” We told our friends. We told our teenage lovers. But never our enemies. No mention of that tree was ever made to any who carried threat. Though we made regular pilgrimages to the bluff, we never touched the tree or its apples.

  Link and I waited out the rain and then began the walk home. When we didn’t find our mother at the house, we backtracked through the woods, out to the bluff overlooking the ocean. We found her there beside the ghost apples, staring at the sea. She was soaking wet and shaking with cold as dark came swiftly on.

  “Let’s go home, Mom,” Link said. “It’s been a weird afternoon.”

  “Speak for yourselves,” she said, all toughness still. “I’v
e had a fine day.” Then she sighed. “But, yes, home. I think I’m ready.”

  My father and Simon were working down at the harbor still, and the house was empty. My mother sat at the table and folded her hands, twisted with cold, in her lap. Link put a kettle of water on to boil, and we all turned to watch the pines become black notches against the graying sky.

  “I think that all went quite well,” our mother tried to joke, “with Grace.” When we said nothing, she shrugged.

  I took my mother’s hands and began slowly rubbing them between my own. At first she pulled away, and then she relented. “Why were you out on the bluff, Mom?”

  “I needed advice,” she said.

  When the kettle began to hiss, Link rose and poured the steaming water into a large clay mug. He set the warm crock before our mother. “From the apples?” he asked.

  “From her,” she corrected.

  The her was Nigawes, and while her story, a creation tale of sorts that I was never really sure whether my parents invented or stole, had been a constant of our youths, it was years since our mother had talked about Nigawes or Sanoba or their story.

  “You’re going to print the letter,” I said.

  “I have to,” she said.

  Suddenly I remembered being seven or eight years old, and my mother coming home from working as a volunteer escort for Planned Parenthood in Bangor. She would walk into the house and drop the bulletproof vest they made her wear under her coat on the kitchen table. It sounded like hate, and fear, that Kevlar striking our table. I remembered my mother sitting on the living room floor and holding the swollen face of a woman who one summer lived with us after escaping her abusive husband, a man who would have killed her had she stayed. I must have been ten or eleven. I remembered my mother holding that woman’s hand and quietly singing to her for what seemed like days. Trouble in mind, I’m blue, but I won’t be blue always, cause the sun’s gonna shine in my backdoor someday. When I asked my father why my mother volunteered at a place where she had to wear a bulletproof vest, he said, “Because other people won’t.” When I asked my uncle why my mother wore the vest, he said, in typical grand Reggie style, “Because your mother is a hero, because your mother is a lioness.”

  All the anger had faded from Link’s eyes. He smiled at her and shrugged a little. “We know, Mom,” he said. “We’ll stand with you.”

  “My noble, foolish boys,” she said and reached out to touch both of our faces as we sat down with her at the table.

  I tried to push from my mind all that had happened that day. I was tired and simply wanted the day to be done. “Sanoba and Nigawes,” I said. “It’s been a long time since you told us about them.”

  “Too long,” our mother said. As we drew near to her in the wood heat of the kitchen and darkness fell over the river woods, she began.

  The two humans were strange figures. Their bodies seemed made of clay and stone. They were rigid and cold and full of icy reflected light during the winters. Then slowly they filled up with warmth and color in the spring. Over time, they found they could move. Then they found they could think and feel. Still they didn’t know what they were. Years earlier they had risen from the earth at two separate spots along the granite banks of the great river that rose in the northern mountains and emptied into the sea. For a time each was happy, living alone, moving through the world, becoming less like stone and river water and sea wind and more like a man and a woman. They lived along the mouth of a great river. There they had searched the coastline and found many plants and animals to care for and admire, but never anything quite like themselves. Over time, they grew lonely.

  The man was called Sanoba. The woman, Nigawes. One winter, both Sanoba and Nigawes became possessed by the same belief: if they traveled to the river’s heart in the mountains to the north and told the waters their troubles, the waters might soothe them. So, traveling separately, unaware still of each other’s existence, the man and the woman left the coast and went up the river in search of something they could only vaguely define: relief, purpose, joy.

  In the mountains, each stood atop a separate snow-capped peak and sang to the river of their sadness at being alone. Slowly, the river answered. The waters intensified and grew, rushing through the land more forcefully. Over time the river carved a valley between the two mountains. It was then that the two figures saw each other.

  Together Sanoba and Nigawes traveled back down the river to the sea, where they made a life. What began was a great love that filled the land with children. Eventually Sanoba grew tired. He couldn’t keep all his people straight. He couldn’t provide for all their needs. He longed for that old freedom of standing atop a mountain and being angry or sad or relieved to be alone. What bothered him most was that he felt deceived. He had wanted love, not servitude. Had he known it would fall to them alone to fill the entire earth, he might have chosen a different life.

  “If you don’t stop making these children,” he told Nigawes. “I will go.”

  “Stop making them?” she said. “You can’t put a life on one person, Sanoba.”

  The two lovers were standing on a bluff high above the sea. Sanoba walked to the edge and hung his feet out into the wind.

  “I will do it,” he growled.

  Years had passed since they first saw each other across the sky. Nigawes knew her husband, knew his contradictions, too. She knew he was full of bitterness and fear and courage but that he was a cowardly man as well, and there, standing at the edge of the sea, she called his bluff. “You may leave us,” she said. “But you will never fully go away from us.”

  Sanoba was furious at her stubbornness. He had unleashed an actual threat, and what did she have to say in return? Some self-righteous warning that meant nothing. He believed it had finally come to this: she no longer respected him enough to even say anything of actual substance.

  Of course it was not that at all. Nigawes was scared of the change she had observed in her husband. She alone seemed able to see it—their children approached Sanoba just as they always had—and that frightened her even more. Sanoba sounded the same. When he went through the woods, he left the same footprints. Walking the hills, he reached out to touch the same birches. The change had to do with color. She noticed it first in his eyes, where every so often a scarlet tendril would flicker for a moment. Then, slowly, he began to redden. His fingertips turned hot and crimson. At night she uncovered her husband and watched his chest. When it rose, a faint scarlet blush lifted to the surface of his skin. To her Sanoba had always seemed blue and green, built from the sky and grasses. Now it was as if he had swallowed the sun and it was battling to get free. What madness could steal a man’s color, fill a body with fire? The scarlet glow beneath his skin grew so fierce that when he turned to look at her or reached to hold her, she had to look away. No one else seemed to see it as he went about putting a pot of water on the fire to boil or returned from the river with a carved stone toy for the children, and that scared her even more. Listening now to Sanoba’s rage, Nigawes understood that her husband had been infected by something truly cunning that would go to great efforts to keep itself hidden: resentment.

  One morning Sanoba was gone. For a year after that, Nigawes lived alone with her children. Sanoba returned the next spring, after the last snows had melted and the trees were beginning to bud green. He believed he had made a point. He imagined that his family would not be able to survive another winter without him. He wanted to know that he was needed. More than that, he was lonely and ashamed of his abandonment.

  But what he returned to was a land that had been neatly harvested in the fall, maintained through the winter, and replanted in the spring. Sanoba watched his wife and children continue to live the way they had in his absence. They harvested and replanted the earth and filled the valleys with trees and swept the meadows with grasses and wildflowers. They called down rain. They brought ravens to the skies. Deer and bear to the woods. During the day Nigawes ignored him. At night their lovemaking was feroci
ous, desperate. They crashed against the land, rage-filled and weeping. When Nigawes didn’t take with another child, Sanoba grew suspicious. When she didn’t let him help clear and turn and tend and grow the world with her and their children, he grew despondent. His punishment was not unjustified, nor was her lack of trust in his dependability. He had vanished, but he had come back, and he thought that should mean something. Although she kept using his body for her pleasure, howling and clawing against his chest and back deep into the night, she never looked into his eyes or touched his face. Sanoba understood he was on the outside of something now—that perhaps he was no longer needed at all. Of course this rejection was his fault. Unable to face that truth, he took to the easy responses of blame and fury.

  For one thousand days Sanoba tried to kill his wife. Every night Nigawes evaded, outsmarted, and thwarted her husband’s murderous impulses. When he went to the mountains to confess his guilt, he found they had grown so tall with old secrets and slights that they could hold no more.

  Nigawes grew tired. Trying to survive would eventually kill you, she knew. The red that had overtaken her husband years ago had turned black. This, as much as her sadness over his abandonment, was why she couldn’t look at him at night. It wasn’t even blackness, so much as a void of light. When he passed in front of a tree or a boulder, an absence of color overtook the world, and Nigawes gasped, gripping her hands so her children wouldn’t see them shaking. Satisfied that what she had once loved no longer existed, she acted.

  When Nigawes had cracked the trunk that was her husband’s spine and torn out the rocks that were his eyes and shaved the grasses that were his hair and let run the rivers that were his blood, when she had carved his body into a hundred pieces, hoping that whatever small bits of blue and green he still held might slip free and live on in the world, she stood atop the bluff where he had made his threat and she had taken her stand and cast her husband, piece by piece, into the whirlpool at the mouth of the river. Fate would decide whether to take his bones out to sea or up the river. She blamed the waters for his death. An accident while he was fishing. Her children did not challenge her story. They pretended to forget the thousand days prior, to forget the great, quarrelsome love that had brought them into the world. It was easy to accept the danger of the sea. But Nigawes understood that her lie was an awful one. Whether justified or not, she had killed her husband, killed the father of her children, killed her lover. And she had blamed her deed on the world.