Heart Spring Mountain

by Robin MacArthur

  SHE CATCHES A RIDE WITH AN ELDERLY MAN IN A RED pickup truck.

  “You walking? Those roads are destroyed. No way in or out. I can only get halfway.”

  Vale nods. “Halfway is good.” She looks at her phone. There’s a message from her boss at the bar, Freddie, to whom she told nothing. WHERE YOU AT, SUGAR CAKES?

  “Crazy storm,” the man says. “A woman is missing. You hear that? They still haven’t found her.”

  Vale says nothing, slips her hands under her thighs and holds them still there.

  They pass the fire station, rain-wrecked cornfields where Vale used to lie down between the tall stalks and get stoned, the 7-Eleven where she’s stolen cigarettes, candy, bottles of wine. She was sixteen; she would stick them down the front of her shirt and flash a grin. Every piece of the landscape contains a memory; they attack her chest, claw there. Vale opens the neck of her sweater, seeking air.

  They don’t pass the ruins of that green bridge or the apartment where Bonnie lives above the river, but Vale keeps her eyes peeled.

  The last time Vale saw her mother was in that apartment. Plum-colored bruises up and down her arms. One hundred pounds, barely. Vale told Bonnie she was leaving and not coming back. She had a social worker then who said: Your mother’s life is not your own. Bonnie walked her to the door, handed her a plastic bag. Inside were two oranges and some photographs. She gripped Vale’s arm too long; when Vale finally pulled away, some strands of Bonnie’s hair came out in her hands.

  The pickup passes a mustard-colored trailer tipped on its side fifty feet from the creek. There’s a pink curtain blowing through a broken window, a woman’s bra hanging from a tree branch.

  Vale does a double take. Not Bonnie’s.

  In New Orleans Vale tends bar three nights a week and works as a stripper the other two. Similar acts, in some ways: costume, makeup, performance, verve. Her drink specialties contain hints of sage, lavender, rose. Her dancing: strut, swing, coyness, refrain. She’s never told Bonnie about the strip club. About the way she can make four hundred dollars in a night.

  Nor does Vale tell her friends in New Orleans about Bonnie. About needles or hardened veins or the love factory. Not Shante, not Freddie, not Jack. Not anyone at the club where Vale spins and dances, shakes her hips, reveals the dark orbs of her nipples one at a time.

  Vale raps her knuckles on the glass window and points to the liquor store. “Here is fine,” she says.

  The man pulls the truck over. Eyes her. “You sure?”

  “Yes,” Vale says, hopping out.

  Vale buys pretzels, instant coffee, gin, and wine, stuffs them into her backpack, and starts walking.

  THE BACK ROADS ARE A MESS—DOWNED TREES, TWENTY-FOOT-WIDE gullies where culverts once lay—but by foot, passable. The creek bank that runs alongside her is lined with detritus—boulders, barrels, plastic toys, a washing machine: the things parked behind trailers and barns, all washed downstream. Vale sees a kid’s high chair crumpled against a ledge. A fur coat, snagged on a branch of a still-standing pine tree, six feet up in the air.

  The higher in elevation she gets, the less damage there is, though the culverts are still washed out. Her legs ache. Her throat is parched. She stuffs pretzels into her mouth, keeps walking.

  It’s late afternoon by the time she reaches the roadside spring. Clear water trickling out of a copper pipe by the side of the road three seasons of the year. The brass plaque says HEART SPRING, the name of Vale’s family mountain, the place Ezekial Wood and his wife, Zipporah, settled in 1803, when it was nothing but wild forest inhabited by Abenaki and bears and moose and mountain lions. Heart Spring, they named the mountain and this spring, ever running. How deeply unfitting, Vale thinks, bringing her lips to the copper pipe. But the water is clear and mineral rich and deliciously cold. She splashes it on her face and neck, wipes a wet hand across her chest.

  Bonnie used to bring her here once a week to fill plastic jugs. “Clean water,” Bonnie would say, tipping her head back, putting her lips against that copper, laughing, drinking. “Love me the taste of some hillside spring water! Don’t give me any of that chlorinated town water, honey-cakes.”

  Bonnie hated the hillside where she was born and grew up, but she was drawn to it, too. Deep trees, clean water, the trickling pools of Silver Creek. Vale bends to the water and fills her mouth, again and again.

  For as long as she can remember, Bonnie cut the horoscopes out of the newspaper and taped them to the bathroom walls: The magic is yours, Gemini! You will be loved. Today is the start of something astonishing and new. Little flakes of white paper scattered, eventually, across the black pine floor, spewing good fortunes.

  Vale wipes her mouth, turns, and continues walking, blisters crackling on her heels.

  By the time she arrives at the bridge to Hazel’s house the shadows are long. It’s been forty-six hours since she’s slept; her legs ache, her shoulders ache, her eyes burn as she turns to face the view.

  This high up you can hardly tell there’s been a storm at all. Hazel’s house at the top of the hill: a blaze of tin, traces of white paint lit by late-afternoon sun, ghost-gray clapboards fading into hillside. Behind the house stand the old chicken coop, the empty barn, empty storage sheds. All squares and rectangles, damp earth and shivering pines. Vale closes her eyes and thinks of New Orleans’s heat: of her sometimes-boyfriend, Jack, in his tree house overlooking the city, of the Gypsy fortune-tellers with their dark voodoo, of Shante with her ukulele, of the room in the ramshackle house (once hotel, once whorehouse) where Vale sleeps, camellias outside the open window.

  “I don’t want to be here,” Vale says out loud.

  Uphill of the farmhouse Vale can just barely make out the wooden walls of the cabin where Deb lives. Bonnie: “Beware of hippies, my love,” smiling and bringing a cigarette to her chapped lips. “They are slippery!” Turning David Bowie up on the stereo, closing her eyes and starting to dance, bare feet on cold linoleum.

  Vale doesn’t want to go to Deb’s cabin, or to Hazel’s house. She doesn’t want to face their cold pity. She turns to her right and there is the teal-blue tow-along camper down by the creek where she lived for a summer when she was sixteen, butted up against the trees at the edge of the field.

  She can’t believe it survived the storm, that it’s still here, creek-side. A miniature, pale-blue tin miracle.

  The door pops open with a hard tug, and a pool of brown water runs out onto the ground in front of her feet.

  The smell nearly makes her gag: mildew and mouse and creek water—but she’s slept in worse places before. The camper hasn’t changed much in ten years: a two-burner stove, a table, a bed in the corner. Water-stained yellow paper glued to the walls. Vale pulls open a kitchen drawer and finds mouse shit, a pipe, sugar packets, mildewed condoms. Detritus left over from when she was sixteen. On top of the shelves sit her collection of owls from that summer she lived here, ones she found at thrift stores. Plastic talismans. Purposeless idols.

  She remembers Hazel once telling her back then, in a moment that surprised her: My mother always said owl sightings mean the death of something old and the start of something new.

  Hazel had never said anything like that to her before.

  “Hello, owls,” Vale whispers, pulling the bottle of gin out of her bag and unscrewing the top. She goes to the front step, takes off her boots and rubs her aching feet. Two blisters—bleeding—which she brings to the air.

  The gin is cheap, but she feels it settle into every inch of her bones. She takes another sip. And another. Is grateful for its burn. She is just here for a day or two. Until she finds Bonnie.

  Vale reaches for her backpack and pulls out a thick black journal, slips a photograph out from between its pages. It’s one Bonnie gave her before she left: a photo of Bonnie and Vale at the river. Full summer, July or August, Bonnie standing waist-high in the water, strands of dark hair blowing across her eyes, her arm across Vale’s shoulders, her lips planted on Vale’s seven-yea
r-old plump cheek.

  “Baby, come in the water with me!” Bonnie said, stripping, jumping, hooting, laughing.

  Her love: intoxicating. They lived at the outskirts of town then, a room above the laundromat, and would sneak down the riverbank at night to cool down. Water, baby. Night swimming. Vale has never known who her father is. You don’t need a dad, honey-cakes. You’ve got me. Me! All yours. Laughing and reaching toward Vale. Putting her lips against Vale’s ear and singing the chorus of R.E.M.’s “Night Swimming.”

  “Where are you,” Vale whispers. The night is so quiet: just the sound of the creek and the shuffle of pine needles across the camper’s pocked tin.

  Deb

  JUNE 14, 1974

  Deb hitches north in a beat-up van with a guy she barely knows—a friend of a friend named Ron. She thinks. Or maybe it’s Ran; he says it with some kind of southern drawl though she’s pretty sure he’s from Baltimore. The drawl matches the clothes he’s wearing—weather-beaten overalls and a torn plaid shirt as if he’s straight from the tobacco plot, as if he’s six generations deep in some backwoods holler, except that his blond hair is long and pulled back into a stringy ponytail and he hasn’t shaved for days. She’s pretty sure no tobacco farmers have ponytails.

  The world is a mess and she’s looking for salvation. Nixon’s tapes released. The oil embargo. India building the next nuclear device and naming it, of all appalling things, the Smiling Buddha.

  Deb’s heard about the communes from a handful of old friends. They say all you have to do is drive north until you hit the Vermont border and you’ll find one. Find a town along 91 and ask any ponytailed person around. Ron or Ran is driving his van north to find one, too, and said he’d happily take her along. He said, “It’s a free world, honey,” passing her a joint, and does she have twenty bucks for gas? Deb is twenty-one, has just dropped out of Swarthmore, and is not going back to her parents’ house outside of Pittsburgh, her father working at a factory that makes parts for helicopters, her mother’s dutiful complacency.

  Two of her friends died in Vietnam. The war might be over, but the toxins are everywhere: Patty Hearst’s shoot-out in San Francisco. Nixon’s lies, ongoing. Every time you open a refrigerator door you are complicit, Deb read somewhere.

  It’s Deb’s grandmother, Zina, from a village outside of Vitebsk, she wants to be. Zina died when Deb was ten, but Deb still remembers the way she spoke of the farm where she grew up before the Germans came: cows, ducks, sheep, chickens. Since then Deb has dreamed of getting back there—to fields, farm animals, to doing the good work and using her hands, her arms, her strong legs. To a world apart from wars. She takes the joint from Ran’s thick fingers and puts it to her lips—breathes in. Relax, she tells herself, face into the sunlight. Dresses, fields, farming—self-reliant, purposeful, free. Her grandmother’s warm eyes would grow moist, look out the window: Nothing like waking up on a farm in the morning, she would say to Deb, eyes following a passing crow or swallow or blackbird.

  In her backpack Deb has paperback copies of Thoreau’s Walden and Helen and Scott Nearing’s Living the Good Life. Her bibles. The Nearings: “The value of doing something does not lie in the ease or difficulty, the probability or improbability of its achievement, but in the vision, the plan, the determination and the perseverance, the effort and the struggle . . .”

  The pot makes Deb’s mind lift in a cloud, and she looks out her window at the fields flying by. They’re in Massachusetts now, and already she can breathe easier. Smell the earth through the open windows. Smell the Connecticut River gliding by them like a silver belt, lit by sun. Janis Joplin comes on the radio, and Deb tilts her head back and smiles. Her mother will be arriving home from the club, half-wasted from three martinis. She will see the note on the counter, surrounded by a ring of purple clover gathered from the backyard: Off to live the good life. Love and peace. D.

  Her mother, who has never done anything unexpected or, Deb thinks, brave. Deb wants to be brave. The road north feels like it fits the bill, there in the van listening to Janis’s pitched yearning, feeling the wind in her long hair, feeling the sun on her cheekbones. But Ron/Ran is suddenly putting his fingers on her blue-jeaned thigh and turning to give her a stoned grin, and so she is torn from her reverie. She slaps his hand away and says, “Lay off, asshole. You can let me off here.”

  FREEDOM.

  It feels different when you’re alone, without wheels underneath you.

  Deb finds the back road that runs parallel to the highway and starts walking.

  She passes: farms surrounded by cows and crumbling outbuildings, trailers with dogs out front, some cabins tucked up against the trees. She gets a chill along her spine. Likes the way the landscape feels wild, unfettered, free.

  There’s a creek running alongside the road, its water flickering. Deb climbs down the bank and splashes her neck and face. It tastes sweet on her lips. She wets her hands and rubs the cold water against her armpits. How real, Deb thinks, as she starts walking. Her heart lifts into her upper chest. How serene.

  IT’S NEAR DUSK WHEN SHE SEES THE SIGN ON HER LEFT. White with a rainbow surrounding the letters: FARTHER HEAVEN. Smaller letters in blue: welcome.

  There’s no house or farm in sight, just a long driveway, steep and rutted, weaving up through some fields and, farther up, tall trees.

  At the top of the hill she stops.

  There is a big old house, white paint fading. There are barns, sheds, apple trees. Under the apple trees to the right of the house are two women in blue jeans and loose blouses doing something with their hands. To the left of the house are three men, shirtless, moving hay bales. The late light catches their long hair, their sun-loved chests. The scene is so quiet, liquid in the late light, like a scene from an Ingmar Bergman film. She recalls her film class last spring: Liv Ullmann amid the stone cottages; Tarkovsky’s fields of tawny wildflowers.

  There is a child, too, she sees now, in the grass close to the women. Naked. Rolling. A dog in its arms. No. Something smaller. Pink. The child is laughing. It’s a pig. A little naked pig in a naked child’s arms.

  My God, Deb thinks. She falls down on her knees. Her legs are so tired. She starts to laugh. Though maybe it’s a cry. A pig in that child’s arms. She thinks of Zina in Vitebsk. I have arrived.

  Lena

  MAY 25, 1956

  Honey B—,

  It’s all honey. All honey, Honey Bee! I wake up to the song of Otie, his low caterwauling and clucking, faster each time around. According to my book, descending trill and whinny calls serve as contact song among family members, establish territory.

  “So you love me. Good,” I say, rising and making coffee. Coffee and more coffee: this thing I do. I sit with it at the table, pull out my notebook and pencil, draw a picture of Otie. Brown and white striped plumage. Eyes, umber. Talons looking two hundred years old. Under the drawing I write: golden fury!

  “Golden fury, Otie. Is that you?”

  He doesn’t reply.

  I finish my coffee. Down some crackers. Slip on boots, say, “Come.”

  We walk toward Adele’s cabin. Adele is my only friend barring Otie and the animals that stalk these hills: bear, fisher, deer, moose, fox, owl, coyote. Coyote: the three-legged one I spy most evenings crossing the far edge of the field, the one I hear calling upstream nightly. A night creature, she or he is, like Otie and me—remarkably good at going unseen. Its tracks littering the banks of the swamp come morning.

  There are ghosts, too. In the cellar holes and at the cemetery where my ancestors have been buried for two hundred years. Gray stones rising out of the earth with faintly etched names: Henry, Ezekial, William, Zipporah, Eunice, Philena, Phebe. More recently: my grandmother, Marie, and my mother, Jessie, who died in the upstairs bedroom one morning in June when I was nine years old. Some days I bring her jars of wildflowers: Indian paintbrush, phlox, Queen Anne’s lace. I plant them in the rocky earth, lie down in the grass, and close my eyes. Dream there.

  Bu
t not this morning. “Buck up, Otie. Don’t let the world get you down!” I call out to the bird on my shoulder, smelling woodsmoke, following the path through birch and hemlock and spruce.

  The path ends at Adele’s house: roadside, tucked up against the trees. Two rooms, white paint, a long porch, piles of wood stacked everywhere.

  When I was a girl her uncle, Buck, lived in a house made of tin and tar paper a ways back in the woods. He logged with horses, lived on canned beans, threw the empties out his back window into a pile that reached halfway to the roof. I snuck to his cabin once alone and stood, quiet and unseen, at the edge of the clearing. Smoke rising from the chimney. A pair of rawhide snowshoes nailed to the wall. From within those walls came a soft and beautiful singing—a ballad about a lost lover and roses twining over gray gravestones.

  I sat there in those leaves, listening, until the song came to an end.

  “Indian,” my father always called him. “Gypsy-nigger.” My father’s blue-eyed grimace, his smell of grease and cow and copper.

  “HELLO,” I CALL OUT ON ADELE’S PORCH.

  She comes to the door, grinning. Dark hair pulled back into a ponytail, polyester pants, men’s boots with softened leather. “Otie! Lena,” she says, opening the door wide. “My favorite fools.” Inside there are herbs drying from the ceiling, coffee brewing, a pot of venison stew on the wood stove. In the corner a nephew lies sleeping on a floral couch, the TV on without volume. Above his head: a wind chime made of bone.

  “Here,” Adele says, bringing me a steaming cup of coffee. “And for you, Otie—gohkohkhas—who is better than anything—this,” she says, going to the pantry where she keeps her traps, returning with a live mouse, held by the tail.

  He downs it fast. Blinks at her. Adele cackles, pulls a pack of cigarettes from her pocket. “It’s a good smoky dawn,” she says, lighting one. “You coming fishing with me today, Lena and Otie?”