Beneath the Bonfire

by Nickolas Butler

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  For Kristin Carol (Lang) Guice

  1980–2014

  Beloved cousin and friend. She of belly laughter and wide, wide Minnesota smiles.

  And for Carol and George, who took us in when we needed a home.

  The Good Book says the meek shall inherit the earth and I expect that’s probably the truth. I ain’t no freethinker, but I’ll tell you what. I’m a long way from bein’ convinced that it’s all that good a thing.

  —Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

  THE CHAINSAW SOIRÉE

  THEY SQUATTED IN AN ABANDONED Pentecostal church high on the bluffs over a river, and when the rain or snow was heavy, the roof leaked and the church was loud with the dripping of water in metal buckets, and when the land was dry beneath the floorboards of the church, hundreds of rattlesnakes shook their maracas at the heat and only at night would the place fall into silence. I had visited sometimes in the spring when the snakes were lethargic and hungry for the sunlight, and we had stood around the church with machetes and rakes and turned the yellow grass red. It was a beautiful spot.

  The church was derelict, but their gardens covered acres of land, radiating off in every direction away from the old house of worship. Hitchhikers and wandering hippies knew of Bear and Luna and the church with holes in the roof, and they came to work and camp on the grounds for free meals and camaraderie. But I knew Bear from high school. We always dated the same girls.

  They threw parties on the winter solstice every year. They called them chainsaw parties. Everyone brought a chainsaw, and that was how they built up enough firewood to heat the drafty church all the way through winter. We all went out into the woods early in the morning with flasks of brandy or whiskey and cut up the deadfall or the widow-makers hung up in other living trees. We used sleds to bring the wood back to the church. There were stations around the church: those who split the deadfall into cordwood, those who transported the split wood to other piles, and those who stacked the wood into cords of tight walls. On the solstice, the sun seemed too heavy an object to rise above the earth, but during those rare hours of light, we worked hard, sweating through our layers of garments, the noise of chainsaws everywhere. And afterward, there was a pig roast and a keg of beer and a bonfire and always a guitar or a harmonica and the sad reedy voice of a skinny stoner girl singing to the stars.

  The last chainsaw party I attended was years ago, before Shelly and I were married and before Samuel came. I was dating a nurse then, Nancy. She worked at the hospital in neonatal. She had thick blond hair she kept in a braid behind her head, and she smelled of baby powder and soap and I think that I was in love with her. I liked asking Nancy about her work. She would tell me about the babies that had been born that day. The twins, the triplets, the rare hermaphrodite, the stillborn, the beautiful, the already crippled. She rolled her own cigarettes, and I remember her now, sitting in just a T-shirt at my kitchen table, her legs naked and well muscled and folded beneath her on a chair. Her fingers rolling out dozens of cigarettes and sometimes joints. In the morning before she left for work, her hair not yet braided, and it held the light of the sun like fiber-optic cables.

  I drove a pickup truck back then. An old Toyota with a rusting bed. I had jacked up the body during high school and removed the bumpers, replacing them with thick black pipes. We left for the church before dawn, Nancy and I in the dusty cab with a thermos of coffee and my old Husqvarna chainsaw in the back. We smoked cigarettes as we drove, the windows cracked open to the cold while the heater blasted out hot air.

  She often went down on me while I drove, and her blond head would bob in my lap as I tried to keep my eyes open and the truck between the yellow lines. I remember that morning, the taste of her kiss and the sun rising over the hills and draws. Nancy liked sex, and my life with her was often an exhibition of love, though I could never keep up with her and somewhere along the line I knew that would end us. We made love in the hospital freight elevators and on the helicopter pad on the top of the tall building and once in the basement morgue, where we had stopped prematurely because I thought I heard a sound in all the dead stillness.

  “So what’s Luna like?” she asked, moving back across the bench seat of the pickup truck as she unscrewed the silver top of the thermos, steam clouding the passenger-side window.

  That hadn’t always been her name, Luna. Back when her name was Shelly we had been lovers, but Bear had stolen her from me, though of course I know now that it wasn’t like that, a theft. That lovers are not just stolen, but that there was something else, like a yielding or an acquiescence. And I had known then that I wasn’t wild enough for her, that we were not a permanent thing but rather something more ephemeral. I decided to tell Nancy the truth.

  “Luna and I used to date,” I said, looking straight out at the road disappearing underneath us. “We dated for two years in high school. Back then, her name was Shelly. She and Bear had a renaming ceremony or some such of a thing.” I paused, then, “We were just kid stuff.”

  “When were you planning to tell me that?” Nancy asked, crossing her arms.

  “I just did,” I said.

  “So, why did you break up?” she asked, her voice sharp.

  “She started in with Bear,” I said evenly. “I walked in on them one day.”

  She was quiet, sipping her coffee, drawing stick figures in the condensation on the window. Nancy had beautiful fingers, and I never tired of holding her hands or watching her fingers cradle a mug or a wineglass. Her perfect nails, the long strong fingers.

  “People can be terrible to one another,” she said finally. And then she leaned against me on the bench seat, her head on my shoulder, and she passed me the coffee and we were still many miles from the church and it felt good to drive that way, her body drawn close against mine as the countryside clipped past us—hawks on the telephone poles, frozen rivers moving invisibly beneath cloaks of ice, horses standing somberly in the fields.

  * * *

  I rarely saw Bear after high school. Just those chainsaw parties and sometimes in the spring when the maple sap was running and he needed an extra pair of hands boiling the syrup down. Things went better between us when there was work to be done and afterward over beers, or sharing a joint when we could talk about the labor and not old times, because I had no interest in the past anymore, or thought I didn’t, though we were still in each other’s lives somehow, and Luna too.

  The church was tall and white, and atop the bluffs it seemed like an impossible outpost of God. There were dogs in the yard, barking at our approach, and in the air hung the smell of woodsmoke and I remember that Nancy closed her door and closed her eyes too and said happily, “I feel happy already. I like this place.”

  We held hands and approached the great double doors of the church, and just then Bear opened them in tandem and stood before us, his beard long and black, his eyes sparkling blue and the color in his cheeks bright
from laboring outdoors. I felt Nancy’s grip on my hand slacken.

  I introduced Bear and Nancy, and we went into the church. It was warmer than I remembered, with the smell of coffee and of sweat and of dogs, and woodsmoke and tobacco. Luna was at the sink washing a collection of beets, and her hands looked older than her face, her nails broken and short, but she raised her head and said hello and by and by she came over and hugged us gingerly and it wasn’t until she walked back to the sink that I could see from her gait that she was pregnant.

  Bear was smiling at me and he said, “Five months along! You believe that? Me, a father!” He slapped my shoulder and my back and I shook his hand again, and he said, “How about a morning toast? Something to keep us warm before we start cutting?”

  “That sounds great, man,” I said. “Congratulations. Nancy works in the nursery at the hospital, you know, if that’s where you guys end up.”

  “Wow,” said Bear, turning to her, “that must be beautiful work.” He had a way of bringing people in to him, of making them feel big and important, and he was a good listener. I could see Nancy’s eyes soften toward him; she liked talking about babies.

  “It’s the best job in the whole universe, far as I’m concerned,” she said. “It makes me happy. Some days it’s like I get to be a mother ten, twelve times. Yesterday we delivered four babies. Two sets of twins.”

  Luna came over from the sink, wiping her hands on a ragged towel. “I want to have the baby right here,” she said, putting an arm around Bear’s waist. “No offense, but I hate hospitals. Everyone I’ve ever lost died in a hospital bed.”

  Bear put an arm around her shoulder and pulled her into him tight, his face fixed on the wide floor planks.

  “I understand,” Nancy said. “You’re right to do it here. Too many women are intimidated by birth. But it’s what we were designed to do.” She moved over to Luna and gently applied her hands to the other woman’s belly. Luna moved Nancy’s hands up, almost to her ribs.

  “Feel that?” Luna asked.

  “Little feet,” said Nancy, beaming.

  “Come here,” Luna said. “I want to talk to you about my preparations.” The two women went toward the kitchen area and I could see that Luna was pouring out two mugs of tea.

  “How about those shots?” I said.

  “Coming up,” said Bear, and he poured an inch of whiskey in two juice glasses. We touched cups and drained them back quickly.

  “Work!” he said loudly.

  “Fatherhood!” I sang out.

  And then we went out into the cold, where three old pickup trucks were already pulling off the country road and processing toward the church.

  * * *

  Bear and I always worked together each year, a team of two, taking turns with the chainsaws, tying off broken limbs with cable or chain, moving around the forest dissecting fallen trees and organizing the logs into stacks for other teams to take away, back to the splitters. It was a good day to be in the forest, the sun clear and warm despite the date, and we worked hard and silent until Bear wiped his brow and sat heavily on a wide ancient stump of a long-gone oak.

  “I didn’t want to be a father,” he said. “Truth is, I’m scared shitless.”

  I shut the chainsaw off and for a moment we were engulfed in its blue smoke, the memory of its whine and roar still in our ears. I sat down beside him, and there was something inside me that hummed of satisfaction too, because in all things Bear’s life had been his own without the slightest of concessions. He lived beautifully and effortlessly, and he was one of those people in life that people shake their heads at in wonder and envy. He was the kind of man who could get any woman at a party. Who could sit down at a piano and play so truthfully that his audience might quietly weep. Once I had seen him hit a baseball four hundred feet. The coach had stopped practice so that the team could measure his blast, all of us pacing off the distance past the outfield wall, the almost unfathomable numbers adding up in our heads. And then he quit baseball because he claimed it bored him.

  “I think everyone must be,” I said to him banally.

  “I don’t want it, though,” he said. “That’s the thing. I don’t want it at all. She puts my hand on her stomach and I feel it move, but it just scares me. Like something is coming to get me.”

  I stayed quiet.

  “She said it had to happen. That I hadn’t married her right or something. That she’d had to sacrifice her life to live the way we do, and she said she deserved the baby and I owed it to her. She was talking about leaving,” he said. “She convinced me that I would like it, but I know I won’t because I don’t want to. Maybe you could talk to her?”

  I looked at him. “What am I supposed to say?”

  “Never mind,” he said, shaking his head. “No, look—Christ, you’re right. I don’t know what the hell is wrong with me.”

  We stayed that way a while, until the cold was in our sweaty garments, and then we stood slowly and went back to work, with much less vigor than when we had started. The sun looked silver in the sky, and overhead there was the sound of a crow flying through cold air, its wings like paper. Here and there throughout the woods I could see other pairs of workers laboring, their chainsaws buzzing, yellow dust going into the snow and air from the guts of the downed trees.

  “I’ve never been trapped before,” Bear said as he stacked pieces of cordwood, “not by anything. The other night her belly was against me in bed and I could feel the baby kicking my back. You imagine?”

  “You’ll be a great father,” I lied.

  He looked up at me then, squinting against the reflected sunlight on the snow, and he said, “I got a surprise for you.”

  He began moving off deeper into the forest and I followed him, as I always did, the chainsaw heavy in my hand, and I watched as he moved quickly, with the ease and surefootedness of an animal, ducking low under branches or with long strides over fallen logs. We trudged past bur oaks and maples and aspens, through cedars and white pines, to the lip of the bluff where the world fell off into space, and below us was the blue line of a river whose name I did not know.

  The tree was gargantuan, a behemoth cottonwood, and its roots seemed to hold the very cliff together, the subterranean fingers of the giant tree holding boulders in order like so many marbles. Bear began to climb the tree, leaving his chainsaw on the yellow rock below. I put my fingers in the gnarled bark of the tree and began working my way up too, racing him, in fact, the two of us winding separate paths up the tree, following different networks of branches into the heights, where a few dead leaves yet hung like strange laundry. We laughed out loud as we climbed, panting. The world beneath us white and forever unfurled. My lungs felt cold and huge.

  “Nancy is beautiful,” Bear said from his roost, though he was looking at the river below.

  You have everything, I thought, nodding. “It’ll be okay,” I said to him, our comments like two planes passing in the heavens, miles apart.

  “I don’t think I’m meant to be with just one person,” he said to me, and in his voice was a kind of mock sadness.

  “Don’t you love her?” I asked.

  I had loved her many years ago, Shelly. But then, love was always my easiest emotion.

  “Yes,” he said slowly, then, “I don’t know. I don’t think I can share people. I want them to be all mine.”

  The sun was falling already, and the wind in the treetop made us shudder. I waited for Bear to begin his descent before doing the same. The climb down was terrifying, and I hung close to the cottonwood, unable to discern now the path I’d taken up the tree. Still midway up, I could see Bear already on the ground, chainsaw in his hand, already walking away.

  “Bear!” I yelled.

  He turned to me, “Get down already! Let’s find some beer!”

  My face was hot, windblown and sunburned despite the cold. “I can’t!” I stammered.

  He set the chainsaw down and came back to the trunk of the tree, “Move your left foot down into th
at little hollow there,” he said with a patronizing kind of patience.

  “I can’t do it, Ben,” I said, using the name he had abandoned long ago.

  “Christ, man,” he said, “I can’t come up there and pull you down! I got to get back there and help Luna with dinner. You’ll figure it out.”

  He picked up the chainsaw and moved off into the forest, leaving me up in the air, pressed against the rough trunk of the tree, whose limbs danced with the rising wind swirling up from the river bottom. The sun hovered over the western horizon and the bark of the tree was losing its warmth. I was thirty-odd feet off the ground.

  * * *

  Just before the fall of night, in the last of the gloaming, I slid down the tree in a fit of desperation, falling between branches in places, afraid of losing all my light and finding myself stranded over the cliff. I could hear the chainsaw party already kicking into gear as I moved through the forest, angry, cuts burning on my face and hands from the climb down. The chainsaw felt oddly light in my hands as I approached the light of the bonfire and the sound of thick lubricious laughter.

  A small group of men were blowing gasoline out of their mouths into the fire, and the flames were booming up into the soft new night, sparks breaking up into the black and blue evening. A bearded man was sawing against his fiddle, and the music sounded like something carnal and antique. In the shadows I saw the pit where the pig had been roasted, its carcass now a mess of flesh laid bare and people were picking at the rags of meat with their fingers, their faces greasy with work and hunger. I went to the barrel of beer, which sat heavily in a snowbank like a very fat man, and I drank from the spigot until I felt warm with something other than anger. I wanted very badly to leave the chainsaw party, but I could see that my truck was blocked in by other vehicles, and besides, I could not leave without Nancy, wherever she was. I began searching the shadowy faces of the party. In the air hung thick tendrils of marijuana smoke, and I could see that two women were lying in the snow, forming the imprints of angels with their outstretched legs and arms.