Heart Spring Mountain

by Robin MacArthur

  Yesterday, reading the news on her phone, Vale saw a photo of a child in Somalia, where the droughts have been relentless: a boy sitting in a gray washtub, all bone. The victims will be plenty, Vale thinks. The victims are and will be everywhere.

  Her mother is a fool, not a victim. One hundred pounds of skin and bones walking out into that torrential rain.

  “Goddamn you, Bonnie,” Vale whispers, rising.

  THEY DRIVE THE TWENTY MINUTES HOME MOSTLY IN SILENCE. Vale looks out the window at fields, a gray silo, a red barn, the bright streak of Silver Creek winking at them from between the trees. Every inch familiar, and in every shot something changed, upturned, carved anew. Living in New Orleans you get used to the shadow of storms, the earth’s quiet yet undeniable sinking. You get used to recognizing the impermanence of the ground, the trees, the walls, your own skin.

  But here? She isn’t used to that temporality.

  She thinks of glaciers melting, sea levels rising, widespread famine. Not one place is immune.

  Deb pops a tape into the cassette player, and Etta James comes on singing “At Last.” One of the many songs Bonnie loved—music for all those years her medicine and touchstone. Vale turns her eyes toward the trees flying by the windows and thinks of her mother’s body, laughing and twirling, eyes closed, in peach silk. At last. Her mother will be found—she feels the fact of it in the cornfield passing by, in Etta’s voice spooling: hope. Possibility. Redemption.

  Back at the camper Vale pours herself a glass of gin. She picks up the silk dress, puts her face into it, and breathes in.

  Vale pulls off her jeans and T-shirt and slips the dress over her shoulders. Strings the blue rosary over her neck. She charged her cell phone in Deb’s truck: she turns it on now and blasts Missy’s Under Construction. Looks at herself in the cracked and flyspecked mirror. She looks like her mother. She looks like Lena. She brings her glass to her lips, drinks; a breeze slips under the door, the air cool, damp, licking her ankles and shins.

  Deb

  JUNE 14, 1974

  There are seven of them who live there, sometimes more. There is Ginny (thick auburn hair, long-limbed, a laugh like a seal), there is Tim (skinny, acne, unbearably shy), Feather (quiet, pale) with her daughter, Opal, bearded Randy with a banjo, and a petite black woman named Bird.

  “Bird?”

  “Yes. Just Bird.” She smiles at Deb, eyes gleaming.

  Ginny, in a loose dress and red rain boots—braless breasts and jutting collarbones—gives her the lay of the land. There is the farmhouse, ancient, paint-flaking, on the hill, where they cook and rest and sleep and read. The walls are covered in artwork painted directly onto the plaster: a large, rough portrait of Emma Goldman with her arm around Martin Luther King, a picture of Woody Guthrie’s guitar bearing the words This guitar kills fascists, various poems and sketches of mountains, forests, deer. Where there are not paintings on the walls there are bookshelves—pine boards resting on concrete blocks—filled to the brim and teetering in multiple directions.

  Deb would like to spend all day looking at those bookshelves, but Ginny is leading her out the back door to the vegetable garden downhill of the house, a sea of green, which Deb assumes from where she stands is lettuce and spinach and peas but which, she finds out, once she’s standing closer, is mostly weeds. The seedlings are in there, doing their best to surface and grow, but weeds and rocks, Deb discovers in the weeks to follow, always win.

  There is the rusted school bus, resting on large stumps, where Opal was born, which now houses three ducks, twelve hens, and three roosters. “We couldn’t bring ourselves to cut their heads off—yet,” Ginny says, pointing to the three cocksure roosters, vying for their mothers’ and sisters’ love.

  There is a barn where Ginny tells Deb they plan to someday have goats, sheep, cows, and pigs. “We want to make cheese—goat and cow’s milk—and sell honey, too. Wool from the lambs,” Ginny says. Her grin is radiant: spitfire.

  Ginny takes one last look in the empty barn and lingers for a moment—tired perhaps, at the prospect of it all—and Deb decides she likes her. Her hair is pulled back in a ponytail that rains down her left shoulder. She is a realist, Deb thinks, despite her gazelle bones and cotton frock.

  “And then there is the print shop,” Ginny says, pointing the way.

  The print shop is clearly where Ginny wants to be.

  It’s an old milking shed with a cluster of assorted tables gathered into its center. On one of the tables is a letterpress machine. On another is a printing press like the one in Deb’s college art class.

  “You’re not messing around,” Deb says.

  “No,” Ginny says.

  There are stacks of papers everywhere, clotheslines running from one side of the room to the other, poems, etchings, and woodcuts pinned to them. There’s a stack of flyers with a picture of Guthrie’s guitar on it. “We hand those out in town,” Ginny says, nodding toward them.

  “Groovy,” Deb says.

  “Yes. It is,” Ginny says, not smiling, but her green eyes warming. “We have to try and change the world, you know? Disrupt quiet New England any way we can.”

  “Yes,” Deb says, fingering the flyer and thinking of her cousin Pierce, whose father bought his way out of Vietnam, thinking of her own half-assed activism and resistance. But she’s here now. She has five $100 bills of her father’s in her backpack, which she dreams of burning but doesn’t dare.

  “So,” Ginny says, walking toward the door, and Deb follows. “You want to stay?”

  THEY OFFER HER THE DAYBED ON THE PORCH AND TELL her the deal: you can stay for as long as you like, but you must work. Chip in. Do your part. If you don’t, you will be politely asked to leave. It’s Ginny who’s talking, and Deb understands that Ginny is the wheel and the spoke around here. Both the feather boa and the center that holds. She also understands that if Ginny politely asks you to leave, you say thank you and leave.

  In the farmhouse kitchen Bird flips potato cakes on the big wood stove. A Nina Simone record spins on a table in the living room. Deb offers to help, and Bird hands her a bowl of greens and nods toward the sink. Deb runs them under cool water but wonders what they are. They’re nothing like her mother’s iceberg lettuce.

  “Dandelion. Sorrel. Plantain. Wild and foraged,” Bird says without looking up. Deb nods, pats them dry with an old dish towel, arranges them in the wooden bowl Bird hands her.

  They eat at a big table in the living room, making space for their plates amid the books, canning jars full of flowers, and candles stuffed in the necks of empty wine bottles.

  They laugh and tell stories that weave around one another. They talk about the Revolution, and Deb wonders what that word means for them. What is the revolution here in the woods? Bird quotes Frantz Fanon, whom Deb has never read (but she does, a few weeks later). “Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity,” Bird says with tears in her eyes. She turns to them all: “And you, bitches. What will your mission be?”

  Ginny lifts her glass of wine and toasts them all.

  Randy says, “Fucking well. Fucking well is my mission,” with a grin.

  Ginny rolls her eyes. Bird says, “Asshole.”

  Feather gets up and puts on Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, and Randy and Ginny argue about whether goats are easier to milk than cows—teat size, milk production—and then Bird shouts, “Let’s dance!” and Ginny switches the Dylan to Ruth Brown and everyone gets up and starts dancing to “Lucky Lips.” Drums. Horns. That irresistible Memphis swing.

  Is she dreaming? Deb is bone tired. Unable to talk or keep up. After a second glass of wine she slips out the door to the screen porch. What will her mission be?

  She takes off her pants and climbs under the heavy army-navy wool blankets, surprised by how cool it is already out here in the dark. There are peepers, stars, an occasional cluck or crow from the school bus. In the distance she can hear truck brakes from the highway, but that highway feels far away
now. Moonlight falls on Deb’s face through the battered screen, and at some point in the night she slips out from under the covers, opens the screen door, and steps out into that light. She’s barefoot, bare-legged, an old T-shirt slipping off her shoulders. She thinks: here I am. She thinks: have I ever been alive before now? Her legs and arms are covered in goose bumps. She squats to pee in the grass, and the piss hisses, then steams between her bare feet. The air smells like grass, like woods, like the heat from the chicken’s coop. My life, she thinks. Is just beginning.

  Lena

  JUNE 2, 1956

  Woods,

  Dawn. A blue jay screeches from the pines, a hermit thrush calls from behind a brush pile. My favorite songbird: it lurks in the understory, rarely seen, but sings the most beautiful of songs: spiraling flutelike melodies. Dangerously melancholy.

  “Hermit thrush, Otie,” I say. “Our state bird,” walking downhill to milk the cows.

  Four mornings a week I go to the barn at dawn to milk, clean the stalls, feed the newborn calves. My sister gives me cash at the start of every month. An envelope, thin with it.

  “Thank you, Hazel,” I say, hugging her. Her body retreats, but I hold on anyway. All bone and ropey muscle. Oh that they could become a cup—capable of holding, those bones! But she pulls away, my industrious, capable sister.

  Lex does not work on the days I work; we take turns. But this morning there is a voice, tinged with brass, smoky like leather, from the back of the barn. Singing Elvis’s “That’s All Right.” I gather a clean bucket hanging from the nail on the milk room wall and walk in the opposite direction of that singing.

  I go toward Fran, a too-old Guernsey, pull up my stool, put my hands on her teats, and let the grass-rich milk spurt into the metal bucket. “Good girl,” I whisper, putting my head against her side. I love these cows who keep on birthing, year after year. Every birth a loss. Milk sweetened with that grief.

  I can hear him singing still. The barn plays tricks on sound, sends it in wrong directions.

  The voice grows quiet. I think he’s gone. But when I look up, Lex is standing above me, smiling in the morning light.

  I duck my head, turn back to the bucket.

  “Didn’t realize it was your morning,” he says quietly. “Must have lost track of the day.”

  “Or me,” I say, rising, turning, heading for the milk room door.

  “I don’t mind the company,” he says, following.

  I pour the milk into the tank. Catch his eyes quickly. Leave by the back door and start walking.

  Back at the cabin I pack a bag containing a knife and water, let Otie climb onto my shoulder.

  We go west, over the top of the ridge, through the low-hanging arms of the tallest trees, up and over boulders.

  Bear scat. Three-legged-coyote scat. Scrapings on beech bark from a bull moose, in heat and pining.

  We cross Round Mountain to find Adele. She meets us on the porch, and I tell her I am afraid of my own body. Of what it wants. Adele puts a splash of rum into my smoky hemlock tea. Says, “Drink, Lena.”

  I do. She says, “It’s hard to run away from oneself.”

  She steps off the porch and picks up her maul and starts splitting the ash logs piled up in the backyard.

  I help her. I bring the unsplit logs to her, stack the pieces that shatter out from under the maul in neat piles near the door.

  Otie watches us, clucking and hopping from log to log.

  When the wood is stacked I lie back on the grass and spread my arms. My arms become the arms of a spider. My arms become a web. A yellow warbler calls out from the branches of a hemlock. A song sparrow from the other side of the road. I smile. Feel minuscule, evaporated.

  “You’re all right, Lena,” Adele says, chuckling.

  And then hunger strikes. “Climb on, Otie-O,” I say to the bird, pointing to my shoulder, and he does, and we set off again, waving to Adele, walking over stone wall, over ledge, over stream and log, toward home.

  Deb

  SEPTEMBER 8, 2011

  Eleven days and no sign.

  The main roads still shot. The power still out.

  Deb cracks an egg into a pan, throws in some greens from the garden. It’s the same twenty-four-inch-wide white propane stove—now rusted—Stephen put in thirty-seven years ago. Thirty-seven years. The number sounds like thunder in her head, somehow. Ridiculously heavy. Thirty-seven years of knife marks peppering the chopping block. Thirty-seven years of clutter everywhere she turns. Thirty-seven years of photographs tacked to her wall: Angela Davis, Simone de Beauvoir, Woody Guthrie, Nina Simone. Books of poetry scattered everywhere, too: Paley, Harjo, Neruda. Her wild-hearted late-life lovers, who somehow make joy out of their own suffering. Thoreau is still here, too, that dog-eared paperback she carried with her everywhere from age eighteen to twenty-two: As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty. Solitude will not be solitude? Poverty not poverty?

  Deb laughs out loud thinking of her young idealism. Of Thoreau’s mother doing his laundry.

  Deb still has a bucket under the sink. Her electricity still comes from a two-hundred-foot cord hooked up to Hazel’s barn below—cuts in and out every time the wind blows. Her son, Danny, the one person she truly loves in the world, the one person she pines for—is living in a village in Guatemala. Ever restless. My God, she misses him.

  If thirty-seven is thunder, fifty-nine is a freight train, Deb thinks, sipping her wine, bringing her eggs to the table. She turns on the radio, and there is a story about the number of natural disasters in the past two years. In January of last year: the earthquake in Haiti that killed 150,000. This March: the earthquake in Japan with its thirty-foot-high tsunami, Fukushima’s leaked radiation, and 15,000 people dead. The ongoing droughts in East Africa that have killed an estimated 30,000 children. “Waking the beast,” the reporter says.

  “Shit,” Deb says, turning off the radio. Thirty thousand children. She thinks: one town, hillside, island, coastal city, country, mountain at a time. Points on the map, scattered, until the points meld into one bright flame.

  THE STORM UP HERE ON THE HILL HAD BEEN SO QUIET. Deceptively so. At some point midmorning the power blinked, then went out, but no hurricane after all, Deb thought, slipping on a raincoat and boots and stepping out into the deluge.

  A half mile downstream she discovered the damage—trees downed, power lines down, the roads washed out in all directions. She’s never known a storm anything like this one. All that day: helicopters flying overhead—military and emergency crews—rescuing elders, dropping emergency supplies. And then the news of Bonnie.

  Deb climbing in the rain, to the top of the field to call Vale: Your mother.

  Yesterday Deb looked out her kitchen window and saw Vale walking across the field looking like a twentieth-century Tess of the D’Urbervilles: raven-dark hair in a tangled fray, brown eyes, crimson dress, a tattoo of an owl on her left shoulder. You never know who the victims will be, do you, Deb had thought in that moment, her heart in her knees.

  It all leads to a near-crippling anxiety, which she deflects, most days, with her garden—raspberries, apples, peaches, pears, a quarter acre of vegetables, put up in jars—and her birds, one rooster and four hens. The rest of her time she fills with part-time and poorly paid jobs: housecleaning, gardening, elder care. All of it making her too eccentric, she knows, with her wine and books, her ceaseless solitude.

  Deb pours herself another glass of the cheap but good Malbec from Argentina that smells of dirt and blackberries, the kind Deb combs these hillsides for throughout July and August. She bought a case of it in case they’re stranded here for weeks. Deb is two-thirds through the bottle, her head dizzy, her thoughts soft the way she likes them.

  “Fuckin’-A, Thoreau,” she says out loud, lifting her glass of wine in the air and thinking of that berry of time when she was young and idealistic, how it had felt then like the perfect fruit—her lif
e in the country—and how such a fruit can darken, age, ferment, become unfathomably complex.

  Deb closes her eyes and sees Bonnie in a hard rain, Bonnie on a bridge, thin wrists, bruised bones. Will they find her? Helpless; that’s what Deb is up here on this hillside. Helpless, she thinks, humming Stephen’s favorite Neil Young song.

  Vale

  SEPTEMBER 13, 2011

  Vale borrows Deb’s pickup truck and drives to town. The state highway is being worked on by crews from Virginia, Delaware, and Tennessee. A national disaster—that’s what this one qualified as. FEMA funds to repair bridges, rebuild roads, compensate families for the houses that were washed away. Vale imagines those FEMA workers making their way downstream. Pictures some young kid, come north for the first time to repair roads, stumbling across Bonnie’s body.

  Vale gets her news updates from Deb at dinner. Each night Deb makes a thick stew out of dried beans and vegetables from her garden, brings it to Hazel’s house, ladles it into bowls. Fresh warm bread and wine, too. Deb, wearing, as always, her blue jeans and flannel shirts. Vale thinking, a face grown into this place. Altered by it. Silver fox. Who is she? Vale never says much at dinner. Nods thank-you. Slips out the door.

  This morning she drives slow around backstreets, eyeing the faces on porches, the faces in doorways. A girl, six or seven, sits on a porch in a puffy pink jacket, a cat rubbing up against her knees. There’s a woman talking on the phone in an open doorway, her bare foot resting on her inner thigh. Vale thinks of Bonnie cleaning Motel 6 rooms. Bonnie working at the Sunoco. Bonnie cleaning up shit and vomit from toilets and shower stalls. No sick leave and late nights. When Vale was thirteen Bonnie tripped down the last third of the apartment stairs, broke her arm, was sent home with a never-ending prescription of little white pills for the pain.