Backwater

by Joan Bauer

  Then I had to get dressed without the benefit of a full-length mirror. I never felt put together until I could see all of myself, but Aunt Jo didn’t seem to miss these things. I watched her brush her long sandy hair, stick it in a pony tail without looking in a mirror once, and start making breakfast—oatmeal with brown sugar and canned peaches, tea with honey.

  It was the best oatmeal I’d ever tasted, not instant like I was used to. There was more time here to do things right. I still felt the need to rush, though, and raced through my breakfast like I was late for school. Jo ate slowly, peacefully.

  I wanted to be peaceful, too.

  I washed the breakfast bowls in the smallest amount of soapy water possible to conserve the supply. Then Jo and I scraped yesterday’s mud off our clothes and hung our jeans outside to freshen.

  I missed the washer / dryer.

  I missed things that flushed.

  I thought longingly of that word on the bathroom faucet back home that I had always taken for granted: HOT.

  No television, no phone.

  We could die here and no one would know.

  Half of the world could blow up and we’d be the last to get the news.

  “Aunt Jo, could I get you on tape? I have so many things I—”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t feel comfortable with that.”

  Terrific.

  But even in the face of an uncooperative relative, a gifted family historian forges ahead.

  “Do you miss knowing what’s going on in the world, Aunt Jo?”

  “Sometimes I do. I get the paper when I go into town. I try to think about the issues, not just race ahead to the next headline. I can’t keep up with everything. You can sit in front of the TV news and swear the world’s about to end, but you come up here …” She looked out the window and smiled. “And other things become important, like thrushes.”

  I looked at the tall pine out the kitchen window. Sun poured across its boughs that were filled with small birds who were flying in and out like they were playing some kind of warp-speed tag.

  “They love playing chase,” Jo said, smiling easy—everything about her was easy.

  I’d never thought of birds as playing. I’d never thought much about them at all.

  “Birds don’t worry,” Jo said. “That’s one of my favorite things about them. They’re not going crazy trying to figure out what tomorrow will bring. They’re content with simple things.”

  “They don’t have homework,” I said defensively. “They don’t have schedules and teachers breathing down their necks and parents trying to control their lives. Not one of those birds ever had to write the one-hundred-year history of their school and then wonder if it was going to be published. Birds don’t work hard.”

  “They work on these.” Jo handed me a bird’s nest that she kept by the cupboard. It was light, strong and amazingly complex. Twigs and grass were wound in intricate patterns. “They only use their feet and beaks to build their nests. They never waste material, either—just gather what they need.”

  I turned the nest over, felt the sureness of the walls.

  “And when they’re finished,” Jo said, “they don’t need anyone to applaud and give them a grade or a gold star. There are no contests for the fastest bird, the most beautiful, the smartest …”

  “Birds don’t need those things. People do.”

  “Why do you think people need them?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t either,” Jo said, and went to stoke the fire.

  * * *

  We were sitting by the stone fireplace watching the thick flames of the wood fire—Jo in the rocker, me curled in a blanket. I was trying to think of a way to ask her how she came to think of herself as the mayor of a town of birds when she said, “Ivy, did anyone ever tell you about Tutty Breedlove?”

  “I’ve heard her name before.”

  Jo laughed. “Time you heard more.”

  She lifted an old box from under her bed and found a dog-eared photograph of an unsmiling woman staring at the camera wearing a Western hat and a fringed jacket with a sheriff’s star pinned to her lapel. Her hair was done up in braids that were wound around her head. She held a pearl-handled revolver in each hand; she had the Breedlove chin.

  “Ivy Breedlove, I’d like to introduce you to your—let’s see …” Jo thought hard, “I guess this is your Great-Great-Great-Aunt Tutty.”

  I touched Tutty’s pistol. “Pleased to meet you.”

  “For eight years, your Aunt Tutty was the sheriff of Kriner Creek, Kansas, and she was one terrifying presence.”

  “You’re kidding?”

  “I am not.”

  “I didn’t know there were women sheriffs.”

  “Oh, boy, kid, I’ve got some educating to do with you.” And she told me the story of Kriner Creek, Kansas—how eleven sheriffs (all men) had died at the hands of desperados in less than seven years, how no man in town would agree to wear the sheriff’s badge since the town was famous for its easy access after train robberies and had become an outlaw’s paradise.

  “Now Tutty was a widow three times over and had been farming her land real nicely after her third husband died. She was a gentle soul, too, quiet and even-tempered, but she was sick of outlaws coming into town and throwing their weight around. The sheriff’s badge was hanging in the window of the jailhouse for someone to put it on, and one day Tutty grabbed that badge, stuck it on her dress, and said real sweetly that if anyone had a problem with it, they were going to have to shoot her dead to get it. The men, of course, had a fit because they didn’t want a woman defending them, but just then two outlaws rode into town with bags of stolen money and the streets cleared like usual. But Tutty just stood there, aiming her dead husband’s pistol while those robbers laughed. And she’s reported to have said, ‘Boys, it’s nuthin’ personal,’ right before she shot them both in the wrist, which caused them to drop their guns quick. Tutty got the saloonkeeper to help her drag them into jail. Then she went to find the doctor.”

  I was laughing, looking at the photo. “I can’t believe I never heard that story.”

  “When a Breedlove woman’s had enough, the men just better step back,” Jo added.

  A bird flew over, perched on her hand. Her Honor, the Mayor of Backwater, put her face close to its beak and whispered something I couldn’t hear.

  * * *

  “It’s just three miles to the summit.” Jo said, walking quickly on the trail.

  “Round trip?” I asked hopefully.

  “One way.”

  “That’s six miles!”

  “You can’t come to the mountains and not hike.” Jo jumped over a clump of snow-covered branches, very gung-ho.

  I struggled to keep up, sure I was getting a blister. Jo was moving quickly, bounding over rocks and trail like a deer. A forty-three-year-old deer shouldn’t be this fast. She had the wolf with her, too. If the blister started bleeding, the wolf would smell blood and …

  “Come on!” Jo shouted, ducking under a spruce bough heavy with snow.

  I hurried to catch up, my snowboots crunching snow and trail beneath me.

  “It’s harder to walk in the snow,” I said when I caught up.

  Jo smiled at me without sympathy. “But in winter, Ivy, you can see the frames of all the trees, the light and dark shadows of the woods. If you let yourself, that is.”

  I looked down at the rebuke. “I’m getting a blister.”

  “Do you want to go back?”

  “No.” This wasn’t true.

  Jo scooped up two handfuls of snow and dumped them on my head. “Do you want me to carry you?”

  “Hey!” I shook the snow from my face, turned around to do the same thing to her, but she was running up the trail with the carnivore.

  “I’m sorry,” Jo shouted back. “You seemed so miserable.”

  This is how the woman deals with human misery. I picked up my pace, finally getting close enough to dump snow on her head.


  Jo shook the snow off. “For the first two years I lived up here, I made every wrong turn you can think of. I have the Breedlove nonexistent sense of direction.”

  “Me too.” I realized how problematic that could be. Two of us, helpless, lost.

  I looked at the gray-blue sky. The trees stood like soldiers north, south, east, and west, although I didn’t know which way north, south, east or west was.

  “Malachi got me back home a lot.”

  We walked in silence past rows of evergreens and birches that still had their leaves, past tall, arching trunks and deer tracks so clear in the snow. A squirrel scurried from hole to hole, icicles hung from branches.

  I felt my mind beginning to relax with the rhythm of the walking. Jo led straight up now, clinging to rocks, balancing on a narrow precipice.

  We rounded a curve, climbed over a rock formation glistening with frost.

  “We’re here,” Jo said, and extended her hand to the expanse of blue-gray sky and the beauty of the snow-capped summit.

  It was perfect.

  We drank water and ate dates. We didn’t talk. I was getting used to that.

  I watched puffy clouds roll across the sky, watched a droplet of moisture on an evergreen branch glisten in the sunshine. Mostly I just took in the sights—the mountain ranges to my left, the valley of snow-covered trees below, the impossibly big sky. I didn’t think, didn’t move. I just stood there, entirely connected to the mountains.

  Until I realized that I did, indeed, have a blister. I took off my boot, peeled off my sock, examined the little red bump on my heel as my foot froze.

  “Not bad for a first day out,” Jo said.

  Easy for her to say. I dug in my pack, pulled out padded blister foam, stuck some on, sure I was going to be miserable on the trek home.

  “Just take it as it comes,” Jo said. “If you worry about every little thing you’re going to have one thoroughly miserable life.”

  “I worry about everything,” I muttered, lacing my boot up.

  “Do you know the smartest piece of advice I was ever given?”

  “What?”

  “A man who had lived alone in the mountains for twenty years told it to me when I first moved up here.” Jo stood back, closed her eyes and smiled. “Cultivate peace.”

  I’d expected a bit more.

  “You don’t get it, do you?” Jo asked.

  “I get it. Look for peace in all you do. That’s a nice thing.”

  Not a great thing. Not a profound life-changing thing. Twenty years in the woods might strip people of a capacity for deepness.

  “You don’t get it,” Jo said again, looking right at me.

  “I don’t know what you mean, Aunt Jo. I get it. Look for peace in life.”

  “No.”

  “That’s what you said.”

  “No.”

  “I don’t understand. Is there some big secret?”

  “Yes,” said Jo, closing her eyes and leaning back on the rock.

  13

  We were a mile from the cabin. The pine trees gave off a fresh, light scent. It made me think about the fake pine scents in the world—the candles, the car fresheners, the toilet bowl sprays.

  New and improved natural pine scent—like being in a forest even though you are standing next to your toilet bowl.

  Not once, in all my years of going to the bathroom, had I ever felt like I was in a forest when I sprayed.

  Jo picked up a piece of tree bark from the ground and held it to the light. The wood was rotted and the bark peeled off easily. She reached into her pocket, took out a small carved figure. “I made him out of one of these,” she said.

  I held the wooden figure in my hand—nine inches long, perfectly proportioned, a young boy with a fishing rod and an expression of reverie on his face. I turned the figure over and over.

  “Recognize him?” Jo asked.

  Caution rose up in me. I studied the figure again. When I looked at the boy’s eyes, I knew.

  It was my father as a boy.

  “I did that one last year from a picture I had of your dad during one of our vacations, heading down to the lake to fish. He so loved to fish—it was the thing that gave him utmost joy.”

  I felt the smoothness of the wood on the boy’s cheeks; the expression was so real, I felt as though it was alive. “I didn’t know he fished. He’s never talked about it.”

  “He had uncanny instincts about where to find trout. The adult fisherman would follow him to see where he let down his line. He got wise to them, though, and took those poor men on wild goose chases in every trout-free river he could think of.”

  “I can’t picture him with a fishing rod. He plays golf.”

  “He’d sit for hours, just waiting, watching the water for a ripple. Dan had such patience.”

  “Patience!” I almost dropped the carving from laughing. Dad with patience. Now that was funny.

  “His eyes would crackle just like that when he was headed off early in the morning.”

  Now his eyes crackle when he catches criminals, or depending on how rich they are, when he gets them off.

  “Such a shame,” Jo said, “when we lose track of the things that have brought us joy.”

  She seemed so genuinely kind. I thought of all the mean words Dad had said about her.

  Disturbed.

  Strange.

  Emotionally unstable.

  A deserter.

  “There’s another side to your dad. A gentle side.”

  “It’s gone.”

  “Misplaced.”

  Excuse me.

  I knew my father. I’d known him for sixteen years. He was a hard man, an intense, aggressive, type-A man. I could picture him throwing rocks in a lake to stun a few fish and take them home for dinner, but Daniel Webster Breedlove was not the kind of man who would take the time to fish. Dad was not a man of patience.

  A small brown bird swept down from the sky, landed on the icy ground, peered at us, and started chirping like mad.

  “Do you ever wonder,” Jo mused, “what the birds are saying?”

  I used to think about that when I was small, but I didn’t have time to think of those things any more. I shrugged.

  Jo took off her glove, reached into her pocket, and pulled out a few sunflower seeds. She slowly put seeds in her hand, held it out, then stood perfectly still.

  “Come on, baby.”

  After a few moments, the bird flew into her palm. I watched transfixed as it perched gently on her thumb, picked up a seed, and flew off.

  “They understand more than we give them credit for,” Jo said.

  “I didn’t know you could just feed a bird like that.”

  “You can’t,” said Jo, and started back down the trail.

  * * *

  We rounded the sloping trail back past the cabin to a small clearing by the frozen lake.

  “Ever fed a chickadee?” Jo asked me.

  “No.”

  She pointed in the pine tree at two small black, white, and gray birds who were watching us. “One of the friendliest birds around. Hi, kids. Got to provide for the constituents.” She slowly reached into her pocket, her hand came out with seeds in the outstretched palm. “Take some seeds from my hand, Ivy; hold out your arm, and wait.”

  “They’ll eat from my hand?” I took the seed.

  “If you were alone, they wouldn’t. It takes a long time to get wild birds to trust you. If you stand next to me, they might. They know me. All you’ve got to remember is stand as still as you can, don’t swallow, and say something gentle.”

  I stood still, hand out, glove off. It was freezing.

  “Uh …” I gazed up at the birds, feeling stupid. “How’s it going?”

  The chickadees looked at each other.

  “Try again.” Jo whispered. “Reach deeper.”

  “So … birds … do you come here often?”

  Jo laughed.

  I tried hard not to swallow, but when you’re not supposed t
o do something you want to all the more. I swallowed.

  They flew to a higher branch.

  One bird flew with strange choppy movements. He had a shorter, cropped tail. He sat on the branch, peered at me, ruffled his feathers.

  “Look … I have food for you.”

  Too obvious.

  “This seed looks pretty serious, particularly the sunflowers. Yum.”

  Too over the top. My outstretched arm was atrophying.

  Another bird circled. I stood totally still, held out my arm. The bird lighted on the ground, considered me, decided against, flew off.

  “I don’t think they like me,” I said.

  “Maybe they don’t think you like them.”

  “I like them fine.”

  “Find a way to let them know.”

  “I’m hardly breathing. I’m holding out this stupid seed. If anyone at my school ever saw me doing this they’d call the men in white coats.” I instantly wished I hadn’t said that. “I didn’t mean you were crazy, Aunt Jo. This is all kind of … unusual.”

  “Come on, kids,” Jo said quietly. One chickadee flew to her hand, gobbled up a seed, flew off. The difficult one watched.

  I was determined to feed this bird. I held out my hand to him. “Okay, guy, on three—one, two …”

  The bird rose, fluttered his wings, swooped down towards me.

  My heart skipped.

  He hovered above me, considered the seed, and pooped a big one dead-center in my hand.

  “Hey!”

  He landed back up in the tree and looked at me.

  “Same to you, fella!”

  I threw the seed down, wiped my hand on the snow as the bird let out a single, trembling chirp.

  “It takes patience,” Jo said, heading down the trail. I walked after her, turned around and saw the bird flutter down, eat the seed on the ground, fly back to the branch, and study me.

  I made a face at it, which I know was immature, and headed off.

  I didn’t look back, but I heard the trembling chirp.

  14

  We were on our way back to the cabin. My blister was throbbing from the six-mile hike. I felt like every bird in the woods thought of me as Attila the Hun. I was trying to understand how my father could have started out one way and ended up another.