The Lowering Days

by Gregory Brown

  “Someone needs to do something for the earth,” one kid said.

  “Or the trees,” said another.

  Molly wished they would all shut up. Youthful zealotry, rage, environmental defense driven by a bunch of hokum teenage angst—she was almost embarrassed at how cliché they all sounded. And she was mad at how historically blind they were.

  “Someone is,” she said quietly.

  “Yeah, yeah,” a tall, disinterested boy spoke up. He was a senior, and Molly had no idea why he was waiting for a bus with a bunch of freshmen and sophomores. “Scientists, conservationists. I know.”

  But you don’t. She couldn’t find the words to tell the boy, who seemed in his cool skepticism to have grabbed all the authority in the world, no matter how false she would later realize his expertise was. You don’t at all, she thought. Whole cultures. Whole tribes. Whole indigenous communities you barely, if at all, even know exist. We’ve always been doing things for the world. Caring for it, supporting it. Seeing it for what it actually is: a living being, a home.

  “It’s Molly, right?” the boy said.

  She narrowed her eyes, imagined slapping him in the face. She knew he knew her name. At the same time she tried not to puke out an enthusiastic, head-nodding little dance of joy at the thrill of being noticed. She took a breath to keep from embarrassing herself. Seskahsen, she thought. It’s Penobscot. I’m a keeper of the world your world is completely ruining. I’m one of the ones who wasn’t supposed to survive. “That’s me,” she quipped.

  The boy nodded into the distance. “The question I have, Molly, is: Is it enough? All these studies and reports and things. All the bullshit no one even hears. Is it enough?”

  She didn’t know how to answer that.

  “Sometimes you have to go after the thing that’s hurting other things. Look at these people out in California who are blowing up bulldozers and sabotaging cut sites.”

  “You’re talking about violent crime.”

  “No,” said the boy. “I’m talking about acts of mercy for things other than us.”

  Mercy. The word coming from a white boy. That angle on things coming from a white boy. The audacity sickened her. What if he was right, though? How far was too far? How little was too little?

  “Sometimes change is violent,” the boy said. “It’s a shitty mess.”

  Molly barely heard him. She was looking over his head to the shadowy outline of the distant mill as she realized she’d been quietly telling herself the same thing her whole life.

  She spent the summer and fall sneaking into the mill, exploring the layout, learning its topography, figuring out what would burn and how, devising a plan. Her goal was not just fire, but rebirth. At night she peppered her father with questions about plants and gardening, and he gleefully went on and on like a man who’d rediscovered an old friend. Pushing deeper inside the abandoned mill site, she planted fire-loving seeds and seedlings wherever she thought the land would support life. She delighted in the small guerrilla act of slipping a living pocket of complex DNA beneath the earth of a hulking paper mill whose days, she was convinced, were numbered. While most of the world watched the news or dozed off, dreading getting up for work tomorrow, here she was digging holes for shagbark hickory trees in green spaces between maintenance sheds and loading docks. Even with all her planning, most days the fire seemed impossibly foolish. But when she thought about stopping, she saw that tall, aloof boy and his white face, theorizing about change. As winter set in, she began picturing the world she was trying to build after the fire. Who knew what seeds would germinate, activated by fire as plants had been for millennia, and what would pass on with the burn? Pitch pine and scrub oak and larch and willow. Blazing star and wild lupine and fireweed. If they came, they would come as a tapestry of new life emerging from the ashes.

  Now, in the aftermath of it all, she could tell none of this to the man beside her, who she loved as much as anyone in her life.

  Moses cleared his throat. “Your dad might have had a job there again, at the mill.”

  “Exactly,” she said. “I’m already down one parent, and working at that place kills people.” She had been convinced the minute the mill reopened its doors, her father would slide directly back in.

  “So does being poor.”

  Molly winced. “My dad left the island and took that job because of me. He wanted to make things, to garden. Not be a mill worker.”

  “Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” Moses said. “Your dad wanted you.”

  Of course that was the real truth. But childhoods run on bitterness and resentment just as much as imagination and love. She rested her head back against Cricket’s neck. “Do you remember what you used to call me, Moses?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Little Fast One. I still smile when I think about that. After my mom left, I used to ride Cricket all around, thinking, ‘I am the Little Fast One. I cannot be sad.’”

  “Some things can’t be outrun.”

  “I’m learning that. When I started the fire, I stopped feeling angry for the first time in forever. Now I just feel sad.”

  “The fire,” Moses said. “You’re not the first person to want to do something like that.”

  Molly thought of Moses’s stories of resistance, stories she’d heard her whole life: the fight for Penobscot voting rights in the state, how he’d traveled to California and been part of the Native occupation of Alcatraz, the seizure of the replica of the Mayflower in Boston, the spiritual walk across the country to support tribal sovereignty, him and a bunch of other tribal members occupying Baxter State Park for a week because they wanted Ktahdin returned to them, and the victory of the Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act, when Jimmy Carter put his pen to a sheet of paper, and the Penobscot Nation was suddenly all over the national news.

  “Was it too much?” she asked.

  “That’s not for me to say,” Moses answered. “You need to go be with your dad now, Little Fast One. Cricket will be okay.”

  Molly slipped a carrot from her pocket. “kkə̀seləməl,” she said, and Cricket’s small, square teeth accepted the gift, which of course was a goodbye with gratitude and, she was certain, love. Across the yard, watching his daughter from the cab of the truck, Adam Greenwind looked away, convinced his heart would shatter.

  Six

  Lyman Creel drifted up the inlet cautiously. The eastern channel of the river opened before him, the golden waters breaking around the bottom of Verona Island. He turned the throttle down and hesitated. The boat softly rocked from side to side on the swells, and the feeling of being on the sea lifted his spirits. It was a world of contradiction. Being on the ground but afloat at the same time. Being rocked and soothed and just as suddenly pushed and tossed if the waves picked up.

  And here was yet another contradiction, a Penobscot Bay lobsterman going up to check on his traps in the river. Not unheard of, no. But not common. Not loved, for sure. It was only a few traps, he’d told himself. Just a test.

  Lyman stretched and rubbed at his eyes. The sun, low and rich on the horizon, had only been up for an hour, and this too was part of what he loved. Being out in the world as the world came back to life. There was a simple pleasure in having the light and the heat and the sounds and smells of the dawn come to him as opposed to going to them. So daybreak found him having coffee with Grace each morning, then feeding the ravens, before heading for the water.

  Grace knew about his experiment. He’d never been one to keep much of anything from her. “It’s not being fished,” he’d told her when he first started thinking of setting a few traps in the channel.

  “Doesn’t mean you should,” she told him.

  These lines were often vague: where river ended and sea began, where sea ended and river started. It was the same water, rushing down from the north to mix with the ocean, and then rising back up the river on the tides. The same water. A weak excuse. Of course Grace was right. This wasn’t where he normally fished, and territory meant
everything. You didn’t go to places that weren’t yours. Yet, here he was.

  That morning Grace had looked at him strangely over her coffee before kissing him goodbye. “Be safe out there,” she said. “Don’t be greedy.”

  He dumped four aspirin into his palm and chewed them slowly between his back molars, gagging at the bitterness. His knees screamed this morning, and lately his right shoulder had started to grind and lock sometimes when he lifted a trap. There was too much tension in the job, but what job wasn’t a battle? Coming out of the winter, he’d started thinking about fishing up near the river as opposed to pushing deeper out to sea. He wondered now if he was just being lazy. Still, a couple weeks ago, he’d run a half dozen traps up the river. He’d been waiting for some backlash from the Eastport fishery, but it had yet to come, and a certain sense of being in the right had slowly supplanted his doubt and his guilt.

  Lyman washed the aspirin down with the bottom of a cup of black, silty coffee. Flinched at the acidity of it, wondered if it was really worth it. Bad body parts, bad medicine, bad coffee, and bad meals, these days at sea that ran together like an unbroken line. But then you’d see the sky in a certain awe-punching light, or a seal pup playfully following your wake, or pull a jackpot trap, and hope would suddenly be there again, not dancing just a few miles out of reach like it loved to do, but right there with you. Lyman shrugged off his feeling of unease and powered the boat forward. The familiar lift of the hull, the stink of gasoline, the aiding push of the rising tides, all soothed him.

  He saw something in the water then, a few dozen yards from his first trap. A homemade circular carved-stick fishing weir had been set up near the mouth of the channel. The sun was bright and directly in front of him, making it hard to see clearly. He slowed at the weir, studying it, and as the boat drifted around the structure, Lyman caught a glint of something else in the distance. Out near his first buoy, a person was leaning out of a canoe and pulling up one of his traps.

  Like an answer to a dark insult, the anger came on instantly. “Hey!” he yelled. Of course the words wouldn’t make it across the water. “You. What the hell are you doing?”

  Then he was throwing the outboard into a full, whining roar and spinning the boat forward into the sun. Fury rising through his body like gasoline.

  He squinted into the glare and winced, the ache in his knees and shoulder splitting up to his skull. The person had noticed him. They were moving faster now. He couldn’t tell if they were emptying the trap into the canoe or just trying to get it loose of the gunwale and back into the water. Closing the distance, he realized the person was young, and a girl. He remembered the weir, noted the canoe, the dark skin, thought of the cooked remains of the mill just up the river. He couldn’t believe the bravado. Setting up a fish weir and poaching his traps just a few miles away from the scene of the fire. He was almost on the canoe now, and he kept waiting for the girl to cut the warp line and just take the trap. It would have been faster. But she didn’t.

  He was just feet away now, and he realized he’d kill the girl if he hit the canoe. He threw the throttle down to nothing and cut the steering wheel hard. The big lobster boat spun sideways and tipped almost ninety degrees to the water, riding up on the crests. Lyman had to hang on with all his strength to keep from sliding overboard. The wake of the breaking boat barreled forward. In an instant the canoe was flipped, girl and trap gone overboard.

  “Shit,” Lyman muttered, working to steady the boat. He grabbed the gaff hook and scrambled to the side. Black waters churned and folded all about. He saw the girl thrashing, bobbing up and down, and wondered if she could swim. He caught hold of her sweatshirt with the hook. She was screaming and swearing at him as he pulled her in.

  Hauling the girl to the edge of the hull, he yelled, “What were you doing to it, the trap?” He tried to grab hold of her, but she pulled away and slashed at his hands with a pocketknife she’d brought up from somewhere in her soaked clothes. “Are you fucking kidding me?” he swore. “I’m trying to save you.”

  She laughed then, coughing water, managed to say something he couldn’t make out. Her eyes were all rage, and blood covered her chin. She slashed again, and Lyman danced back, narrowly avoiding the blade. This time the girl’s momentum carried her under the water, and he grabbed hold of her again with the gaff before she could drown or flee. Tired of the game, he violently hauled her up the side of the boat, flailing and screaming in panic, and knocked the knife out of her hands. Lyman reached out and grabbed the girl by the throat. She stilled instantly. Then he pinned her down against the deck, felt her neck flattening against his palm. It was like crushing a plastic bottle, so easy, just a gentle squeeze. He felt her breath moving under his hand. Saw her nostrils flaring like an animal’s. She arched her throat up against his palm and he could feel her daring him to do it. For years after he would be shocked by how badly he had for the briefest awful moment wanted to crush the windpipe of a child.

  “Not yours,” he managed to say, gasping for breath himself and loosening his grip.

  “Or yours,” she hissed back at him.

  The whine of a second engine suddenly filled the air. Another fishing boat was coming down the other end of the channel. He recognized Moses Jupiter’s boat in the shape of the hull. A blast rang out, deep and full, and it took Lyman a second to realize that it was a shotgun firing. Moses Jupiter had shot at him. The other lobsterman had a shotgun lain over the helm windowsill as he steered with the other hand. A second shot rang out, and Lyman ducked, felt the shot sing through the air above him, thought he heard a crack somewhere but wasn’t sure. “Fuck,” he swore, and got even lower, forgetting the girl for a moment. As he tried to get to the cabin, where he kept the little sawed-off, a third shot caught the water right in front of the boat. This was madness, all of it. Moses Jupiter had him pinned to the deck of his own boat.

  The girl was unfazed. She stood tall and carefree at the bow. When her eyes caught Lyman’s, he swore she was enjoying this. He watched helplessly then as the girl turned and raced across the deck. Without slowing at all, she launched off the side of the boat in a full dive, split the water with astonishing force, and disappeared. Ten seconds passed before she broke the surface, swimming as smoothly and quickly as anyone he had ever seen. She dove again and came up under the drifting canoe, somehow managing to flip the boat over and swing her body into it in one powerful, continuous motion. He’d never seen anything like it. A fourth shot broke his trance. Moses had slowed and pulled his boat around between Lyman and the girl, effectively shielding her. The girl and canoe were gliding to the shore. It was only when Lyman grabbed his radio that he realized that one of Jupiter’s seemingly random warning shots had taken off his antennae. Radio static and the hard racing of his own heart surrounded him as he turned and powered back toward the bay, the hand that had momentarily gripped the girl’s neck shaking with a combination of adrenaline and fear that he thought might never still.

  All spring, rumors trickled in to the newspaper office. Sightings of a man and a girl out among the woods, here and then there. Deer killed out of season. Snare traps and fishing weirs set around brooks and marshes. Poaching itself wasn’t odd. Hunger, survival, want, never having enough food, or money, or time—these were influences many of us understood. It didn’t take long for a connection to be drawn between the fire and the sightings. What was abnormal about the man and the girl was their ghostliness. There was only one credible report of actual contact. A state game biologist studying bat colonies along the lower neck of the river had come out of a cave with a bag of guano samples and seen a girl and a man standing before her. The man’s eyes had widened in surprise, and then the girl had stepped in front of him as if she, just a child, might protect him. The woman set her sample kit down on the ground and raised her hands. Before she could speak, they were gone, faded or vanished back into the woods. The report added a second layer to the story we had all been caught up in: the girl who had started the fire, if this girl was
indeed the same one, was not alone after all.

  What the game wardens, local hunting guides, and newspaper people like our mother couldn’t unearth—the location and nature of the man and the girl—Link and I took it upon ourselves to discover.

  By June I had become convinced that the two were forest creatures who grew hungry, turned human, and stepped out of the woods each night to take food. As far-fetched as that was, it seemed to me the best explanation. Only something made of the earth could ingest the bones and gristle and hide of an animal and return to the earth without leaving more evidence. Part of me knew better—there’s the magical, and there’s the impossible—but it was into summer then, that season of possibility and wonder. I stared out at the woods beyond my bedroom window every morning, imagining a man and a girl stepping out of the trunk of a red oak or a northern white cedar, my two favorite trees.

  Link believed the two had holed up like outlaws in one of the caves notched into Hatchet Mountain, where bear denned and raptors nested. Years earlier we’d discovered a nesting pair of gyrfalcons on Hatchet. Reggie claimed we were full of shit, said gyrs didn’t nest this far south. When we tried to take him up the mountain to prove our claim, he just shook his head. “I’d rather sit right here and beam with pride that my nephews are already starting to spin tall, shit-stuffed tales,” he said. As for the gyrfalcons, I’d never seen an animal so stunning. We went up the mountain every clear afternoon after school to sit with them, to watch them. They were bright white and dappled by hundreds of small, dark-brown teardrop-shaped spots. In flight their wings opened as wide as a car. And when they took off from the cliffs, air blasted down off their wings like the exhaust from a furnace. Somehow they’d wandered down from the northern reaches of the Maritimes, and we watched in amazement as the majestic couple returned to their cliff nest each spring for three years before they suddenly disappeared, and we knew they’d been shot by a fisherman or poisoned by a farmer. Over time the nest had grown massive: five feet deep and nearly ten feet wide. It didn’t seem right to let it be taken over by anything when it had once housed something so rare and stunning, so Link and I climbed all the way up the cliff and dismantled the nest stick by stick. Reggie met us at the bottom of the mountain after all and helped us pile the sticks into the back of his truck. “I won’t tell you I’m sorry,” he said. “Every fool knows a falcon keeps moving, even in death.” Then we drove ten miles up to Prospect, where the river narrows around Verona Island, and we floated the nest, piece by piece, down the Penobscot as an offering to the departed falcons. “Why the narrows?” Link asked. Something I couldn’t quite voice about the spot had made sense to me: the thick, thundering river bending into the narrowed gorge, squeezed on its banks by towering spruce and pines, the massive green and blue glacial boulders that heaved their river-rounded backs up through the cold trickling water, the way fish leapt into being after mayfly hatches, spinning just above the surface in the long orange afternoon light. “Some places are like portals to eternity,” Reggie said after a few moments of silence. “You stand in them and look around, and you feel how long and unending the world is. You become a part of something beyond time. Maybe this is one of those places.”