A Gift Upon the Shore

by Wren, M. K.

  The shopping mall at the junction of North Front and the highway surprised her. It had been built since she was last in Shiloh. Rachel said, “This is really Shiloh’s downtown these days.” Yet half the mall’s shops were vacant. Mary ignored that, too.

  And on the highway, which served as Shiloh’s main street, she ignored the empty buildings and boarded-up windows. There were still shops open for business here. The bakery—yes, she remembered that and its rich crumpet bread—a barber shop, a laundromat.

  After three blocks, Rachel turned left into a parking lot. On the south was an aged building with scarred, brick walls. That, Rachel informed her, was Connie Acres’s clinic. Mary only glanced at it. North of the parking lot stood a new building, flat-roofed, olive drab cement block, metal letters above the entry: U.S. AUXILIARY POLICE STATION, CENTRAL OREGON COAST DIVISION. A communication tower loomed over the building, its dish antennas bizarre blossoms on the latticed steel stem. Six black Apie patrol cars were lined up in front of the station.

  Mary still didn’t understand why Jim Acres insisted on going with them to her aunt’s house, why he further insisted that they meet him here. And when he came out of the station, it was in the company of an Apie captain who looked like a model for a recruiting poster.

  When Rachel and Mary got out of the van, Jim made the introductions. Captain Harry Berden, tall and hard and handsome. He spoke with a Western drawl and hailed from Boise, Idaho. Mary found herself pleased with his assessing gaze as he courteously expressed regret that she’d been caught in the Rover ambush.

  But she was less than pleased when Jim put in casually, “Harry’s going to drive us down to your aunt’s house in his patrol.”

  Mary looked at Jim sharply, but he seemed incapable of meeting her eye. She smiled at Harry Berden and said, “Well, we’d enjoy your company, Captain, but I don’t really think we need a police escort.”

  “You do, ma’am,” he answered soberly. “Take my word for it.”

  Then he explained in his easy drawl that after the oil crunch hit Shiloh so hard, the few people who stayed—no more than five hundred, he estimated—had moved into the north end of town. There was safety in banding together. The south end, well, it had been left to the squatters. And he explained that 101 was a hobo’s highway, a migration route for the homeless and hopeless. And he explained that the Apie garrison here was understaffed, under-equipped, and they had more pressing problems than what he called the wild geese. The highway was turf to road gangs; the Rovers that attacked her bus were still holed up somewhere around Shiloh. And he explained that he knew from the address that her aunt’s house was within the area occupied by the nomads. Forfeited to them.

  Squatters’ land, he called it.

  Mary listened, feeling unexpectedly dizzy, and she wanted to deny it all with a laugh, but she read something in Captain Berden’s eyes that made any denial a delusion. Those young eyes—he was no more than thirty—were suddenly old. There was no despair in them; only a bleak acceptance that was as much a witness to old wounds as a scar.

  Yet she couldn’t surrender her dream. She had nothing else to hold on to. She had to see the house for herself.

  And she did.

  Squatters’ land. It had been a pleasant neighborhood, most of the houses weekenders, but well kept. Now it was as desolate as a war zone, half the dwellings burned ruins engulfed in blackberry vines. Mary sat in the backseat of the black car and stared out through bullet-proof glass, her mind denying the reality her eyes presented her. She caught glimpses of the squatters, ragged wraiths peering through broken windows, running across yards inundated by brittle, gray weeds. One of them—an old man with a prophet’s beard—paused to give the police car a defiant finger before he disappeared behind a burned cottage.

  She wondered numbly why the captain finally stopped the car. She didn’t recognize the house. This was only a shack giving way to weather and weeds, shingles blown off the roof, a climbing rose gone wild festooning the porch, growing through the broken windows.

  It was Aunt Jan’s prized climbing Peace rose. This was Aunt Jan’s house. Mary felt that realization reverberating within her at the same moment she saw three shadowy figures burst out of the front door and vanish within seconds.

  She knew she should surrender then. But she couldn’t. Not yet.

  At the captain’s suggestion, Jim stayed in the car. He knew how to use the radio. Berden and Rachel went into the house with Mary.

  The musty emptiness, the sour smell of filth and mildew, made her skin crawl. All the furniture was gone—except for the charred fragments of carved table legs and chair backs in the fireplace. The sound of the surf echoed hollowly against the smoke-grimed walls; the west windows were empty rectangles. She made her way to the kitchen in the northeast corner. No stove or refrigerator, no cabinets, not even a sink. Pipes thrust out of scarred walls, and in one corner three rats foraged on a mound of garbage. Mary stumbled back, caught her foot on a loose floorboard, and gasped with a spasm of pain.

  The bathroom door was missing and so were the fixtures, except for the toilet that overflowed with foul, brown liquid. She went to the bedroom door. Where the door had been. A mattress, strewn with tangles of dirty blankets, lay on the floor. Tom organdy curtains writhed in the wind that blew cold through the empty window frames.

  A shadow of movement drew her to the north window. Behind the house next door, three people were standing, waiting. Two bearded men. A woman. No, a girl. Maybe seventeen. She stared at Mary with dark, unblinking eyes, and Mary read there fear, anger, resentment, and a hunger that transcended the simple need for food, a hunger Mary knew to be beyond appeasement, and perhaps the girl knew it, too.

  They stared at each other through the empty window, each looking into another plane of existence, and all that stood between Mary and that hungry-eyed, feral creature was a distance of a few yards.

  Then abruptly the squatters turned, ragged clothes flapping, and they disappeared.

  And at that moment the dream died beyond hope of resurrection.

  The wreck of the house might be repaired—if she had the tens of thousands of dollars to spend on it—but the squatters, the wild geese, would still be here, waiting. The deed that had been the lucent focus of all her hope was only a scrap of paper. This house was theirs now.

  Rachel and Captain Berden were waiting for her when she returned to the living room. They didn’t speak, nor did she. She was looking for something, although she didn’t understand what, not until she found it. A memento of the dream.

  It was on the mantel. She wondered how she’d missed it before, how—and why—it had survived.

  The old Seth Thomas clock.

  It was made of quarter-sawed oak, its design stringently simple, the face set in an arch from which the sides fell straight to a curved base. The wood and glass were coated with grime. Mary opened the small door on the front panel. The hinges were stiff, but nothing inside seemed to be broken. She pushed the pendulum. It swung, ticking at a stately pace.

  Aunt Jan’s great-grandmother brought this clock with her when she came west as a bride, from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon, by ship around the Horn. Aunt Jan had told Mary that long ago in the summer of her childhood, when she let Mary wind the clock.

  Now Mary picked it up, held it against her body, saw her tears fall onto the begrimed wood, and she knew it would have been simpler if the Rovers had killed her, too. Like Laura and her baby. That had seemed so cruelly meaningless, but death has no meaning if life is meaningless. And her tears were equally meaningless, but she couldn’t stop them. She knew the feel of these tears. Grief. She grieved again for her father, even for her mother. Grieved for Aunt Jan. Grieved for that feral-eyed girl.

  Grieved for a dream.

  She felt Rachel’s hand on her shoulder. “Mary, let’s go home.”

  Earth k
nows no desolation.

  She smells regeneration

  In the moist breath of decay.

  —GEORGE MEREDITH, THE SPIRIT OF

  EARTH IN AUTUMN (1862)

  Stephen latches the east gate, then, with Shadow sniffing out the way, he walks ahead of me north up the alder-shaded quarry road. It’s little more than a footpath now and wouldn’t exist at all except for our continued use of it. In dry summers we grow corn in the shielded bowl that was once a gravel quarry. Stephen stops about a hundred feet up the road, then turns east through a break in the foliage. He looks back, patiently waiting for me to catch up. Then again he leads the way, following a trail I first walked with Rachel forty years ago.

  The trail winds up the valley of the Styx. The sound of water rushing over its stony, brown bed is constantly at my left, yet I seldom see the creek; it’s too densely curtained with foliage. We’ve entered a world that seems far removed—although it’s only half a mile away—from the world of the sea and the littoral. This is the forest primeval. The rain forest.

  This is, Rachel told me, climax forest, the kind of forest common in the Coast Range before European immigrants razed them for houses and toilet paper. Sitka spruce and hemlock dominate here, thrusting thick boles over a hundred feet skyward. I can’t see the top of them, only the fretted pattern of twigs and needles that makes up the canopy, a pattern of exquisite complexity that’s only a blur in my old eyes.

  At the feet of the giants grow thickets of thimbleberry, salmonberry, elderberry, and salal, all leggy and sparse here, not the dense growth typical of the same plants in sunnier sites. And red huckleberry. It seems to be a native son of the rain forest. Its slender trunks are brown and smooth, its branches warm green, bearing myriads of tiny, oval leaves that arrange themselves in artful clusters. I know the only art in those compositions of leaf and limb is a strategy to catch the sunlight so precious here, yet I always see a self-conscious aesthetic in red huckleberry.

  At the feet of the shrubs, ferns grow extravagantly, and in miniature marshes by the creek, the gigantic, ovate leaves of skunk cabbage spring incredibly out of the mud. The ground everywhere is blazoned with the torn umbrellas of coltsfoot, miner’s lettuce starred with blossoms, oxalis like fields of shamrocks, and sweet-scented wild lily of the valley. And at every level is the moss. It furs the trunks of the trees, sleeves their branches in velvet, hangs in gossamer festoons.

  The earth is rusty brown—burnt sienna, Rachel called it, verging into umber. Duff is its proper name, and if I step off the path, my feet sink into its spongy substance, and I wonder, as I always do: how many centuries of fallen needles, leaves, bark, and rotting wood, how many layers of moss, fungi, and lichen, has it taken to make the resilient texture of this ground? How many moles, worms, ants, and termites? How many billion generations of bacteria. That’s the ultimate layer of life here. I can’t see it, but I smell it in the moist, fecund air. In this context there is nothing horrific about decay. It’s the source of the richness of life here. Nurse logs. They are peculiar to the rain forest: fallen trees dissolving slowly into green mounds, supporting colonnades of young trees. Nurse logs represent an essential of life: nothing wasted, nothing lost, however profligate death might seem.

  Stephen is still ahead of me, expertly wielding a machete. He wears only short, buckskin breeches on this warm day, and as he strides down the trail, slashing at encroaching salal and fern, he is as graceful and beautiful as any young creature in its true habitat.

  And I, neither graceful nor young, carry no tool to keep this trail clear, but I’ve put in my share of hours tending it; Rachel and I always kept it passable. Before the End this area was part of a national forest, and the trail was built by the Job Corps. There, around the next curve, is a cement slab inscribed with the names of the six youths who were plucked from the ghettos of Brooklyn or Chicago or Los Angeles to hack a path through this temperate jungle. I wonder if any of them survived, if any lived to teach their children what they learned here.

  Stephen’s machete whistles and chunks in the rich silence, while Shadow rustles through ferns, following her nose. The path angles up to its highest point, and my pace slows, my cane digs deep with every step. The light, tinted green in its passage through hemlock lace and garlands of spruce, through huckleberry spangles and veils of moss, all moving in the gentle breeze, shimmers, and it’s much like being underwater. I seem to feel the drag of it. At last, the trail slopes downward, then, finally, rounds a curve, and suddenly we are there.

  It always seems sudden, the arrival here at the end and destination of the trail. Even Stephen, who has been here many times, has stopped still, staring upward.

  This forest is full of giants, yet this magnificent Sitka dwarfs them all. It is two hundred feet tall, ten feet in diameter at the bole, and over five centuries old. The Forest Service provided those statistics.

  But statistics don’t convey the majesty of this towering column of living wood, thick sheathed in bark as impervious as weathered granite. Its roots flare from the bole, buttressing the massive trunk, then sink into the ground in brown hills and valleys. I must tilt my head far back to see the first branches a hundred feet above me. Beyond is the crown, its immense, mossy limbs spreading masses of needles to the sun. The light is trapped there, and little escapes to warm the foothills of the roots where Stephen and I stand in silence and constant shadow.

  Running entirely through the base of the tree is a tunnel at most a yard high. When I was young, I crawled through that space. The earth within was lifeless and fine as powder. I lay surrounded by stony bark, and I felt an inexplicable uneasiness, not because of the impending tons of wood above me—the collapse of that tunnel didn’t occur to me as a physical possibility—but because I sensed that I was in a place I shouldn’t be: a womb to which I shouldn’t be allowed to return.

  That tunnel speaks of the beginnings of this giant among giants that seems immutable, something that has no end and no beginning.

  It had a beginning. It was born on the mossy corpse of a nurse log. Its roots year by year grew down and around its source of sustenance until they sank into the earth. And in time the nurse log rotted away, leaving this tunnel, a negative space to witness its existence.

  And this tree will have an end. It will fall, and what a sundering of sky and earth that will be, and it will in turn become a nurse log to nurture other giants.

  Jerry has made a simple slab bench and placed it a few yards from the base of the tree. It replaced the one the Forest Service installed here, which has long ago rotted into duff. I ease down on the bench, smiling at Stephen, who sits down beside me, but doesn’t speak, waiting for me to break the silence.

  And finally, I do. “Rachel first brought me here the morning after I saw my aunt’s house.”

  He nods. “It’s a place of healing, I think. Bernadette says some places are like that. They heal the mind, so it can heal the body.”

  I’m surprised at that. Bernadette, our herbalist, healer, and nurse, seldom reveals her capacity for profound understanding.

  “Yes, Stephen, it’s a place of healing, but for me, Rachel was the healer.” I pause, considering what to tell him. There is so much he must understand about Rachel, yet there is one aspect of her I know he isn’t capable of understanding. I doubt he can imagine a philosophy so inimical to the religious traditions he grew up with. The day will come when he must come to terms with that, but he’s not ready now.

  For now, I’ll tell him only what he must know.

  I look up into the sun-gloried crown of the tree, then down through all its green stories, down the stone gray trunk to the heart of emptiness at its base, and I remember; the images are haloed with my tears.

  If this tree were capable of sound, it would resonate in harmonies of a minor key in the deep ranges beyond the edges of my perception.

  Perhaps it does sing: centuries-s
low songs that I will never hear.

  Not one man in a thousand has the strength of mind or the goodness of heart to be an atheist.

  —SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, LETTER TO THOMAS ALLSOP (ca. 1820)

  She could taste the green air. Mary Hope stared up at the tree, her mind stretching to encompass its dimensions, its stunning presence. She turned finally, found Rachel sitting on the bench, watching her with a shadow smile that manifested itself primarily in her dark eyes. She had been waiting, Mary realized. Waiting for her reaction. She seemed satisfied.

  Mary walked to the bench, leaning into the cane to keep her balance among the sinews of roots, and sat down next to Rachel. Neither of them spoke. Mary could find no words to express what she felt, and Rachel didn’t seem to need or expect any.

  This was the second gift Rachel had offered her today.

  Mary had wakened this morning to be ambushed by memories of the ruins of Aunt Jan’s house, the ruins of her dream. But no new tears came with the memories. It was as if the night and sleep had dropped the curtain on that act of her life. She wasn’t yet capable of raising the curtain on the next act, or even imagining it. She lay in the narrow bed listening to the murmur of the sea. I am here . . . I am always here. . . . She thought about dreams. Dreams were hope specified. Fragile fallacies.