The Wood Wife

by Terri Windling

  Maggie watched with a bit of envy as the coyote rubbed against the big man with obvious affection. But when Maggie tried to step closer, Cody jumped back again, breathing hard.

  Suddenly Cody spied Fox returning from the stable, and bounded over toward him. For all John’s words about wild creatures, she looked exactly like an excited dog, wagging her bobbed tail and grinning broadly as Fox came near her run.

  “She’s always had a soft spot for Fox,” John commented. “Animals love him, it’s the damnedest thing. But Cody’s smart. I reckon she knows that he’s the one who saved her life.”

  Maggie watched the coyote greet Fox, raining kisses on his extended hand. “How did he do that?”

  “Well now, some fool cowboy shot her in that leg there. Fox is the one who found her, and he got her to the doc in time.”

  “I watched her get shot,” Fox said bitterly, coming over to stand beside them, the coyote trailing behind him on the other side of the fence. “I was watching two coyotes trotting down the wash, a pair that we’ve known around here for years. It was just after the heat had broke and they were all frisky, enjoying themselves. Then I saw a stranger pointing a gun. I yelled, and the other coyote got away but Cody here wasn’t fast enough. She went down and I thought he’d killed her.

  “I ran over, and found that she had taken the bullet in the leg. I was thinking I needed to find John, get some help, when I realized the stranger was coming over too. A young guy—brand new shotgun in his hand, laughing, a big smile on his face. He says ‘Guess I showed that sonuvabitch, huh?’ and slaps my back like he’s some kind of hero. And before I can get a word out he’s grabbed her tail and he’s cut it off. She’s not even dead and he’s claiming his trophy.” Fox’s voice was clipped with anger. “When I yelled at him to get off our goddamn land, he backed off like I was the dangerous lunatic when he was the one carrying the gun. He left all right, but we’ve seen him around here several times since then.”

  “He’s either PRC,” John said, “or he’s a poacher after the deer and the coyotes are target practice. Either way, he’s got no business here.”

  “What’s PRC?” Maggie asked him.

  “Predator and Rodent Control. Your tax dollars at work. It’s a federally funded agency—millions of bucks poured into it each year. Not into educating or feeding hungry youngsters, mind you,” the old man growled, “but into wiping out whole species of animals because you can’t make a profit on ’em like ranch stock or hunters’ game.”

  John took off his Stetson, wiping the sweat from his brow. The morning sun was already growing strong, burning the haze from the mountaintop. When he put the hat back on again the coyote startled at the movement. She jumped back, eyed the three of them, then slowly edged back to the fence, her head held low as if embarrassed.

  John squatted down to stroke the nervous animal. “I used to be a PRC man myself years ago,” he said, looking up at Maggie. “I grew up on a cattle ranch in Wyoming and I should have known better than that. Coyotes never bothered healthy stock and they kept the rodent population in check. My daddy, and his daddy, raised us kids to treat ’em with respect. But there was good money working for PRC, so I chose to believe all the guff they spread: that coyotes kill off whole sheep herds, or will bring down healthy cows and deer. It was all a scam. No one ever cared about coyotes when PRC was after wolves. But the wolves were all killed off, so we needed another predator to holler about, otherwise the agency would have been shut down.” He stood again. “When PRC killed coyotes and pups in a given area, we were always careful to leave at least one good breeding couple alone. Because if sheep ranchers stopped spotting coyotes, we would all be out of a job.”

  Maggie looked at the rancher curiously. “You used to make a living killing coyotes?”

  “Yes ma’am. And bobcats, and hawks, and eagles, and little kit foxes no bigger than a pussycat. American sheepmen pay a bounty for those things rather than hire shepherds to look after their stock like they goddamn ought to, ’scuse my French. Shoot, there’s people who’ll kill the critters in one state and drive them over to the next where fool ranchers pay good bounty money.”

  “And now you’re doing wildlife rehabilitation? That’s quite a transition, John. Seems to me there must be an interesting story there.”

  John stood and gave her a terse little smile. “Well maybe I’ll tell you that story someday. But I warn you, it’s not a pretty one. Or one that I’m very proud of.”

  The old man turned back to the house. Cody trailed him as far as she could on her side of the wire fence. Maggie looked thoughtfully at the mutilated coyote, dragging one lame leg in the dust. Then she followed after the rancher, Fox walking silent behind.

  “They’re an interesting couple,” she said to Fox later, as he maneuvered his truck down the Alders’ drive. On the seat between were several books about the desert and coyotes that she’d borrowed from John.

  He shot her a look. “Do you always think like a journalist, then? Is everyone a potential story?”

  She looked at him closely, trying to determine if this was criticism or no. “I’ve always been interested in people,” she said a bit defensively. “In who they are and how they got that way. It didn’t come from being a journalist, but it’s a trait that helped when I was.”

  “You say that in the past tense.”

  “Well, it’s been some years since I’ve worked for magazines. The books I’ve published since are nonfiction, but they’re personal essays rather than journalism. Mind you, I’m not sure where exactly you draw the line between the two. Davis never did. As long as it wasn’t poetry, it didn’t count.”

  “Dora said you wrote poetry.” Fox shot her another unreadable look.

  “Wrote. Past tense. She’s quite correct.” Maggie said the words lightly, but felt tension in her shoulders nonetheless.

  This time the look he gave her was thoughtful. “Do you prefer writing prose, then?”

  “I’d prefer to be writing poetry, or both,” Maggie answered him frankly. “But it’s been twenty years since I was a ‘rising young poet’—and that’s an awful long time. I turned to magazines to make a living, and then I stopped thinking like a poet, I guess. As you said, I think like a journalist now. I’m still trying to determine if the condition is reversible.”

  Fox frowned. “Then do you share Cooper’s view that being a poet is the only valid thing to be?”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head, “I’m proud of my books, no matter what he thought.” She looked across at Fox, eyes narrowed. “What’s your opinion? For someone who’s not a journalist, you’re good at asking personal questions.”

  “Me? I’m continuing an old argument,” he told her with a self-mocking smile. “I’m still arguing with Cooper’s ghost. But it’s as stubborn as he always was. Nothing mattered but poetry to Cooper. Maybe painting, because that was Anna’s art. Not people. He lived in his poems, not in the world, for the last forty years of his life.”

  Fox shifted gears, lurching over the ruts. His eyes were shadowed, his face serious.

  “You know all those poems and quotes he wrote all over his office walls?” he asked her. “The day I left the mountain the last time, I came in when Cooper wasn’t there and wrote another quote on his door. From Katherine Paterson. You’ve heard of her? She said: ‘If we marvel at the artist who has written a great book, we must marvel more at those people whose lives are works of art and who don’t even know it, who wouldn’t believe it if they were told. However hard work good writing may be, it is easier than good living.’ ”

  Maggie said, “I saw that written on the door. I noticed it was a different handwriting.”

  “And did you notice what he’d written beneath it? No? Just one small word: Touché. The last word I ever had from Cooper. When I came back he was dead.”

  Maggie turned to look at him again and Fox gave her an unconvincing smile. He pulled the truck beside Maggie’s car, parking in the shade of the cottonwood. He turned off
the engine, and climbed from the truck, slamming the door behind him.

  • • •

  Fox took out his tools and began to remove the lock from the door of the back room. As he did so, Maggie and Dora set to work scrubbing the mud from the kitchen floor. Lillian turned up just a few minutes later, announcing she was there to help.

  Fox paused for a moment in his work to listen to the women at theirs, laughter ringing through the dusty old house. He enjoyed the sound of women’s voices, the effortless talk that bound them together. He’d grown up silent on the mountain; talk was a thing that had come hard to him. Words in his world had been scarce and precious, reserved for the poetry page.

  His mother had been a reserved little woman, and his two sisters equally quiet and shy. He searched his memory and couldn’t remember them gossiping together or laughing out loud. Theirs had been a hushed household. His sisters were like wild deer, like poems in motion on the mountainside. Fox was the one who had clattered and clumped and broke things and made all the noise.

  The Alders had lived down in Tucson then, but they came up every weekend, filling the Big House with seven loud children and the tumult of normal family life. The six Alder daughters had frightened Fox; he’d hide from them, as shy as his sisters. Now he preferred strong, talkative women. If Lillian had been a generation younger he’d have fallen in love, John or no John; yet none of her daughters were quite her match. Emma, the youngest, had been his lover, but it was friendship between them now, nothing more.

  The lock mechanism came apart at last. Fox looked thoughtfully at the scarred wood door, resisting the strong impulse to push it open. He went to help the women finish up, and only when the rest of the kitchen was put to rights did they gather around the back-room door.

  “You go in,” Maggie said, nudging Fox’s shoulder. “Go on. Go in first. I haven’t been waiting thirty years for this.”

  Fox took a deep breath. He pushed the door. It moved stiffly on the hinges, groaning. Inside, the air was stale, filled with dust. The room was dark, the windows heavily curtained. He found a light switch and turned it on. The bulbs were old, but they still worked, filling the room with an amber glow.

  The room had been an art studio. Anna Naverra’s, Fox realized. It looked like Cooper hadn’t moved a thing in all the years since Anna had died. The long tables still held scattered sketchbooks and dusty tubes of dried-out paint. Brushes stood in jars with their stiff bristles down, adhered to the rust-colored residue caked at the bottom. Old postcards from art museums were curling away from their tacks on the walls. The small room was crowded with canvases, watercolor studies and smudged chalk sketches. Piled in one corner were the pictures that had hung for years on the walls of Cooper’s house. But why had he moved them all right before he died, when his death was so sudden?

  Lillian came into the room behind Maggie. “I thought that’s what you’d find in here. I thought he would have kept her things. Cooper was a romantic at heart, and he fell apart when Anna died.”

  “Did you know her?” Maggie asked Lillian.

  “Not very well. None of us did. Anna and Cooper kept to themselves. And I wasn’t here much in those years. I was nineteen when they came to the mountain, and I’d just moved north to marry John. But what I remember is the change that had come over Cooper when I moved back here. This was after Anna was gone. Cooper was a different man then. Lost without her. But driven somehow. He was writing the ‘Wood Wife’ poems like there were devils hanging on his tail.”

  “After she died?” Maggie said. “I thought he wrote them when they lived together.”

  “Oh no,” said the older woman firmly. “I remember when Cooper started working on them. I’d inherited the Big House by then, and John had come with me back down to Tucson. Why? Does it matter when he wrote them?”

  “In terms of literary scholarship, yes. The assumption has always been that her pictures with the same imagery were illustrations of his poems.”

  “And not that the paintings may have come first. I see,” said Lillian.

  Dora said, “I can think of a lot of feminist scholars who would love to hear about that.” She was bent down by a shelf of books. She pulled one out and opened it, biting her lip as she turned the pages. She looked up at Maggie. “There are journals here. Full of sketches, mostly, and notes for compositions. But there are also long handwritten blocks of text. Do you read Spanish, Maggie? Maybe when you’ve finished your book on Cooper you might do one on Anna Naverra.”

  Fox said to Dora, “Do you remember when that woman from the Tucson Art Museum was trying to get some of Anna’s paintings to exhibit?”

  “Yeah, and Cooper all but ran her off the mountain with a shotgun. There was something he was protecting in here.”

  “His reputation,” Lillian muttered. “He won the Pulitzer for The Wood Wife and I don’t recall Anna’s name ever being mentioned.”

  “It was Exile Songs he won the Pulitzer for,” Maggie corrected her. “His collection of poems about the war. People think it was for The Wood Wife because that’s the book he became famous for. But it came out after Exile Songs and the critics didn’t like it one bit. It was too full of fairy-tale allusions—and the popularity of it with the general public didn’t help his credibility in poetry circles. In fact it was the kiss of death.”

  Fox said, “So whatever he was hiding here wasn’t his reputation. Because by that time he didn’t have as much of a critical reputation left to lose.”

  Dora stood, still holding the journal and looking flushed, excited. “It’s going to be fascinating, don’t you think, to pore through all of this and piece the truth of their lives back together? If you want help, Maggie, just say so. My Spanish isn’t as fluent as Juan’s, but I’d give it a go.”

  “Thanks. I may take you up on that,” she said, “since I don’t speak Spanish myself.” She was looking through the piled canvases, an expression of wonder on her face.

  Dora came over to stand beside her. “Are you going to put the paintings back up in the house? It looks strange here without them.”

  “Which ones did he have up?” she asked.

  Lillian said, “Never mind Cooper. This is your house now. You should hang the ones that you like best. Assuming you like Anna’s work?”

  “Heavens, yes,” said Maggie. “I’m just a little stunned, that’s all. I knew Cooper had left me his own work—I didn’t realize till I got here that he’d also left me hers.”

  Fox crossed his arms and looked at the paintings, relieved to find that they were indeed here. It had frightened him to think they might be missing. They belonged on this mountain. Cooper had been right about that, although he couldn’t say why. And there were more of them in storage here than Fox had ever expected. Anna had died young, and he’d never imagined that she’d been so prolific.

  Fox moved to help Maggie pull more paintings down from a wooden storage loft. The paintings were beautiful, full of rich color, dreamlike images and juxtapositions rendered in the vivid detail that was typical of the Mexican Surrealist style. Owls, moths, clocks, towers, trees with leaves the color of silver coins, floors made of spiral-patterned tiles that dissolved into desert sand: these were common Naverra images that appeared again and again in her work. Maggie looked them over with evident pleasure. And then Fox heard her catch her breath.

  The oil painting she held showed the figure of a man standing in the desert, surrounded by the faintly pencilled lines of a circle of slit-eyed coyotes, each holding the tail of the one before it in a mouth full of sharp canine teeth. The man was striking, with long black hair and eyes of an unusual shade of green. His cheeks were etched with pale blue lines. Spirals circled one outstretched wrist. He was pouring water onto the sand; where it hit the ground it burst into flame.

  “What is it, Maggie?” Lillian asked. She came over to look at the painting. “Well I’ll be,” she said, looking startled herself. “I didn’t know Anna had painted him. But no, she couldn’t have. No, that doesn’t mak
e sense.”

  “Couldn’t have painted who?” Fox said.

  Lillian looked at him and hesitated. “It’s just that he looks like a man I met here once. Years after Anna had died. Cooper introduced him as Mr. Foxxe. I believe he was your father.”

  “Your father?” said Maggie, and the confusion in her voice matched the feeling in Johnny Foxxe’s heart.

  He’d never really believed in Mr. Foxxe. He had come to believe that they were really Cooper’s illegitimate children, and that Mr. Foxxe was just a story. Now suddenly he didn’t know what to think. He could see his sisters in this man, maybe even his own bony face. But how had his father known Anna Naverra? His mother hadn’t come up to the mountain until nine years after Naverra’s death. Unless that had been the story, and Mr. Foxxe had been the truth.

  Fox stared at the oil painting before him, trying to make sense of this image, this man. He looked into that half-familiar face, and was not comforted by what he saw.

  • • •

  They sat together by Redwater Creek, their white toes dangled in the water. A hiker passing by never noticed them. Their limbs were as white as a desert sycamore, their hair the silver-green of its leaves. The hiker looked in their direction, but all he saw were two young saplings clinging to the rocky bank.

  Below, the water began to smoke. Flames licked the surface of the creek. They quickly pulled up their feet, and laughed. “You don’t scare us,” the eldest called. Then they put their feet back down again and the flames died out around them.

  A woman’s face was barely visible beneath the water’s surface. Cold black eyes stared up at them. Then the eyes began to close. The water cleared. Now there was just the sandy bottom of Redwater Creek, and the slim, white feet of the two young women. Each had a spiral pattern drawn around the bones of the left ankle.