Heart Spring Mountain

by Robin MacArthur

  VALE GOES TO THE COPY STORE AND SLIPS THE PHOTO OF Bonnie at the river into the photocopier. She blocks her own face from the image, blows Bonnie’s up to triple size. Writes: MISSING. PLEASE CALL IF SEEN, in thick letters, makes forty copies and posts them everywhere: grocery stores, gas stations, laundromats. Bonnie’s face at the women’s crisis center. Bonnie’s face at the drop-in center. Bonnie’s face tacked on the doors of various churches in town. Which one was Bonnie’s?

  Most of the churches are locked, but the door of the Evangelical Baptist—a one-story concrete building at the edge of town—opens. Vale enters, sits in the back pew, and looks around. She can see why Bonnie might have come here: this large quiet room with so little inside. The church is mostly barren: blue carpet, wooden pews, a simple wooden cross affixed to the wall. The emptiness itself merciful. The heat must come from the people who show up here, Vale thinks.

  She rises and steps closer to the nave. “Hello?” she calls out, her voice echoing.

  “Welcome,” a voice comes from a side room.

  A tall man in his sixties approaches her. Kind eyes. Blue jeans.

  “Do you know her?” Vale asks, handing him the photograph of Bonnie.

  This man steps closer. He looks at the photo for a long moment. “Yeah,” he says slowly. “I recognize her. She would come in occasionally.”

  Bonnie’s church. This is the one. Vale feels a tingle at the back of her neck.

  “Have you seen her lately?”

  He looks Vale up and down slowly. “I don’t think so,” he says softly. “No. Not since the storm.”

  “Come back anytime,” he calls out, as Vale turns. “You are welcome here! Jesus welcomes all through this door!” His voice rising.

  VALE DRIVES HERSELF TO A TATTOO PARLOR, THE ONE next to the 7-Eleven. It doesn’t matter what kind of tattoo parlor; she isn’t particular. She knows what she wants: to feel the burn of the needle, the slow release of red ink into skin.

  It’s an image of poppies, strewing, that she’s had in her mind for years.

  Poppies—that glorious flower. Wild in the deserts of Arizona and California. Cultivated in the gardens of New England. Propagated in Afghanistan, Turkey, Pakistan, and Colombia in farmers’ dry and arid fields, so that those farmers can make a living, feed their children, send their sons to school. The opium sap cultivated, refined into morphine, further refined into heroin, shipped, on the black market, to New York, then driven upriver, through Springfield and north, under the seats of cars, and sold, in Nelson, for five or ten dollars a bag.

  Cheap enough for Bonnie, addicted to her OxyContin. Cheap enough for half of Vale’s old high-school friends.

  Vale pulls up a photo on her phone and shows it to the woman inking: two red poppy flowers, the petals unloosing in the wind, on the arm opposite Vale’s owl. One stalk. One set of roots. Two heads: Bonnie and Vale.

  “Cool,” the woman says, ink threading up and down both of her arms: snakes, vines, a pistol, a bear.

  She smacks her gum loudly. Has a bright smile.

  “What’s it signify?”

  “Nothing,” Vale says, closing her eyes. Ten years of Bonnie injecting that poppy’s serum, relief in ultrarefined form, into any vein she can find.

  Vale picks up her phone and glances at the news headlines: a photo of a Somali refugee, a woman, carrying jerry cans of water from a tap at the Dagahaley camp in Dadaab.

  The woman is beautiful: a gray headscarf and dark, resilient eyes. In the background—dead trees, a cow on its side, eddies of trash swirling around its gutted body.

  THE TATTOO TAKES THREE HOURS AND MOST OF THE cash Vale has left. The parking lot is dark by the time it’s done. Vale drives through the streets of Nelson one last time before going home—past the Indian grocery, up and down backstreets, past the lit windows of apartments and houses where couples watch TV, babies sleep, kids do homework.

  She drives slow, stares into every window.

  How easy it would be to head back to that apartment in New Orleans where the magnolias and camellias bloom. To that city, braided in beautiful ways. Jack: slipping her shirt up over her head, taking a pen and drawing birds and vines across her breast, neck, shoulders.

  But she can’t, yet.

  Dean: She comes back. She always does.

  Bonnie, neck tipped back, laughing. Bonnie in a field of corn stubble, walking this way.

  Deb

  JULY 20, 1974

  It’s Tim she thinks she loves at first—despite the field of acne—but it’s Bird who finds her. They are in the garden weeding the tomatoes. The weeds are voracious, a forest unto themselves, and they are there for hours, pulling, plucking, under Amish straw hats Tim brought back from a shop in western Pennsylvania. They take off their jeans and dresses, wear just their underwear and cotton T-shirts, sleeves and necks cut off to let in the air. Deb’s back and shoulders are pink, raw, but the pain will come later, will be soothed by creek water. For now there are the weeds amid the tomatoes, the rows upon rows ahead of them, brought on by June rain. And there is Bird, before her.

  She doesn’t know much about Bird. She’s from Atlanta, met Ginny at Yale. They came north together in Bird’s blue Saab 96, which her father, a banker, bought for her. Bird has all the best records: Ruth Brown, Nina Simone, Billie Holiday. When she dances in the living room, all eyes are on her.

  She tells them stories about a grandmother from Mexico City—aristocratic—and another grandmother—a goat farmer from the mountains of Greece. Tips her head back. Laughs. “I didn’t inherit her love of the land.”

  Now, in the garden, Bird throws herself back onto the dirt and closes her eyes. “Goddamn manual labor,” she whispers. “I’m parched. Why did we all come here again?”

  Deb rubs the sweat out of her eyes, smearing dirt across her face. It’s true. It’s not at all how she thought, the day-in-and-day-out relentlessness of physical labor. Her back aches. Her legs ache. Her neck screams from sunburn. Bird rolls over and turns toward Deb. She puts her thin, dirt-caked hand on Deb’s thigh. “Perhaps we should retire,” she says, smiling.

  Deb looks back, surprised. Her leg is cool where Bird’s hand touches it.

  “Perhaps,” she says.

  They go back to the house—its rooms refreshingly cool—and up the stairs to Bird’s room. Deb feels Ginny’s eyes on them where she stands at the kitchen sink—suspect, or wounded, Deb can’t tell. Deb follows Bird up the back stairway.

  Her room is above the kitchen, an attic room with low ceilings and a bed on the floor. “Part of the Underground Railroad, I think, this room,” Bird says. There are candles everywhere, a tapestry hanging as a curtain. She undresses Deb and Deb undresses her. Deb has never kissed a woman, never touched a nipple other than her own, never slipped a finger inside another woman’s body. Never had a woman’s hand draw constellations of the freckles on her sunburnt chest. She spends the evening and the night there, wrapped in Bird’s arms, watching moonlight make its way across the rafters.

  When she wakes, Bird is sitting in bed with a cigarette, listening to Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.”

  Bird grins at Deb; Deb flings her head back on the pillow, laughs. Lies there in the cotton sheets listening to the song and to the rooster below and to the crickets beyond them. She puts her hand on Bird’s arm. Closes her eyes. The revolution will be no re-run, brothers, Gil Scott-Heron sings. The revolution will be live.

  Vale

  SEPTEMBER 18, 2011

  It’s 4 P.M. and there’s an explosive rattle from the icebox below the counter. The lightbulb above the table blinks twice, then stays on.

  Electricity.

  Vale plugs in her phone, which has been dead for two days. There’s a message from the police department—Vale’s heart freezes for a moment as she listens. The officer who called says someone saw a person matching the description of Bonnie sleeping under the train bridge. That they will check it out, be in touch if they find anything.
>
  Vale climbs out of bed where she’s been for hours and puts on her sweater—she’s suddenly chilled all over. She pours water from the plastic jug on the counter into the teakettle, strikes a match.

  When the water’s warm she wets a washcloth and cleans herself—her face and neck, under her arms, between her legs, rinses the washcloth and hangs it over the heater to dry.

  She’s been here for way too many days. They slip into one another. Lead nowhere.

  But Bonnie under the train bridge: Vale pictures her hiding out there, near the water she’s always loved, the storm her way of getting clean.

  Vale checks the rest of the messages on her phone. Freddie at the bar: WORRIED ABOUT YOU. A couple from the club: WHERE THE HELL. One from Shante: LOVE WHERE ARE YOU? And one from Jack: BABE!

  Vale makes a cup of instant coffee. Downs it.

  She’s been here for nearly three weeks. Too long. Too many days driving back roads and backstreets, hanging up more posters. Too many days of eating the stews and breads Deb brings to Hazel’s house, drinking wine and leaving quietly.

  Bonnie by the train bridge: Vale would drive there now, but she can see from here that Deb’s pickup is gone.

  Vale looks out her window at Hazel’s house on the hill, the house where Bonnie lived for the first eighteen years of her life, and wonders what, if anything, is left of Bonnie there: bottles of nail polish, cassette tapes, clothes?

  Vale puts on her jeans and boots, slips her phone into her pocket, and heads that way.

  Passing the barn, Vale remembers a story Hazel once told her. Two slaves, a mother and daughter, uprooted from the barn and turned in. Is that story real? Vale wants to find the photos of those ancestors, look into their eyes and say, “Bastards.” She wants to find a photo of her mother as a girl. Are there any?

  “THE POWER’S BACK ON,” VALE SAYS TO HAZEL.

  “Oh yes,” Hazel says. “Isn’t that nice.” She’s sitting at the kitchen table, an empty teacup between her hands.

  “A relief, huh?”

  Hazel nods, turns toward the window.

  “I was wondering if there are any family photographs?”

  Hazel’s eyes—pale blue, washed out with cataracts—are blank for a moment, then register, as if returning from someone or something far away.

  “Photographs? Oh yes. I think there are some in the attic.”

  “Thanks,” Vale says, heading toward the stairs.

  There are dust bunnies collecting in the corners. It seems unlike the Hazel Vale once knew to let the dust collect like this. Vale can’t remember a moment when Hazel was not cleaning in some way, keeping the wildness at bay with any tools at hand: broom, vacuum, sickle bar, scythe.

  “I come from puritanical hard-asses,” Bonnie saying. “They care only about the land and the dead. The land and the dead! As if this land was theirs to begin with! As if it wasn’t stolen from Indians.” Bonnie brushing Vale’s hair. Parting it down the middle. Weaving it into a French braid.

  Vale’s pretty sure Bonnie slept in the small, east-facing room at the top of the stairs. She opens the door, steps in. There’s an iron bed in the corner, a wool blanket pulled taut across it, faded yellow curtains. Vale looks in the closet—empty. Pulls open the dresser drawers—bare. She goes to the window and looks out at the view Bonnie had for her first eighteen years: Round Mountain, evergreens, Silver Creek. She puts her fingers on the windowsill and feels something scratched there, looks down: Bonnie, etched into the pine with the tip of a knife. The scraped wood is brown and faded—an old wound. Vale imagines sixteen-year-old Bonnie, that knife in her hand, desperate to get elsewhere. “You got free,” Vale whispers, fingering the grooves.

  The attic is a second-story low-gabled room above the kitchen: a single window at the far end, exposed rafters blackened with age. The floor is covered in old furniture, crates, chests, boxes. The detritus of two hundred years piled up, dust-covered, smelling of risen woodsmoke. There doesn’t appear to be anything of Bonnie’s. Just moth-eaten quilts and blankets, cracked dishes. Vale’s ready to leave when she spies, on an upper shelf, a dark blue photo album. She reaches for it, wipes the dust off with her sleeve, flips open the cover. The first photo is of the entire family in front of this house. The wooded hillsides and open fields, a pair of oxen, boys in britches, girls in white cotton with furrowed brows, their lips straight lines and eyes hard as stones. Goddamn, Vale thinks. What stoicism. Where was the joy? At the bottom of the photo, scrawled in pencil, is the year 1901. Their names are scrawled there, too—Henry, Ezekial Jr., Faith and Helen, Willem, and on the far right side, Henry’s young wife, Marie. Vale cannot take her eyes off Marie. She’s pretty sure she’s Hazel’s grandmother—she recognizes the name—though she’s never seen this photo before. Or any photo of her. She has a wide face, dark almond-shaped eyes, two braids—thick and glossy—that fall down both shoulders. She looks Indian—Abenaki—Vale thinks. She touches the photo with her finger. Looks out the dust-hazed window toward the field beyond. Bonnie, years ago, tacking a dream catcher above Vale’s bed: “You and me? We’re Indian. Don’t you think? I can feel it in my bones! Some native blood, somewhere. That’s the wild streak in me. And in my mother. And in you, my darling!” Vale loved that theory for years, and then she learned about colonialism: their white ancestors stealing land from the Abenaki and calling it their own. Plagues. Massacres. And Bonnie’s obsession made Vale cringe.

  Vale looks through the rest of the pages, but there are no other pictures of Marie. Just the house becoming more worn down as the years pass.

  No pictures of Bonnie either.

  But Marie. Vale’s great-great-grandmother.

  Vale pulls the photo from the album, sticks it in her jacket pocket, and heads toward the door. At the threshold she pauses, something catching her eye. There’s a hat resting on a pile of cardboard boxes. A dark green fedora, a feather tucked in its brim. Lena’s hat from the photo.

  “Hell yes,” Vale whispers, climbing over boxes to reach it. She picks it up, dusts it off, slips it on. The hat, miraculously, has not been eaten by moths. Fits Vale near perfectly.

  VALE TACKS THE PHOTO OF MARIE AND THE FARMHOUSE to the camper wall next to the photos of Lena and Bonnie.

  She checks her phone: a new message from the police.

  Vale listens, her heart—stubborn—racing. They located the woman living below the train bridge, the officer says. It was a thirty-year-old woman. Not Bonnie.

  Vale pours herself a tall glass of rum. Turns the light on—a strange novelty. Finds some Odetta on her phone.

  She places Lena’s hat on her head and eyes her reflection in the mirror tacked above the sink—she looks like Lena. The feather—Turkey? Owl? Eagle? Grouse?

  And like—the almond shape of her eyes, the roundness of her cheeks—Marie, her great-great-grandmother. Those eyes, reluctant, half turning away.

  She thinks of Jack, black-Creole, peppering the streets with his bird graffiti. She thinks of Shante playing old French folk songs learned from her grandmother.

  “Will you be my dance accompaniment?” Shante asked Vale not long ago. Vale had shrugged, spun around the apartment in purple lace and black leather. She made Shante cocktails, nasturtiums from the garden out back floating on the top. They went to the roof with a blanket and lay there in the hot sun.

  “Who were you?” Vale asks Marie. The woman’s eyes are not looking at the photographer but toward the field to her left, as if something is moving there—cat, creature, child. Vale takes a long sip of her rum. “Who are you?” Vale asks her own reflection in the mirror. She pulls some lipstick out of her bag and paints her lips bright red, dances to Odetta singing, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” in small circles around the room.

  Hazel

  SEPTEMBER 19, 2011

  A voice upstairs, calling. Bonnie? She goes that way. To the room at the top of the stairs, under the eaves, the room where her mother, Jessie, lay dying, and where, later, Bonnie slept.


  She pushes the door open: drawn faded yellow curtains, a wool blanket the color of cream pulled tight across the bed. Hazel sits down on that blanket. She cleared out all of Bonnie’s things—threw them into plastic bags and took them to the dump—years ago. Hazel smooths down the creases below her. She looks around. Smell of dust and mothballs. Smell of old lath and plaster. Didn’t she hear a voice calling?

  What was it Vale asked her yesterday afternoon?

  “Hazel. What do you know about this photo?” she had said, coming down the stairs.

  Hazel was at the kitchen sink, staring out the window. She turned and looked at Vale for a long moment. She was wearing a green fedora, a turkey feather tucked into its brim. “Lena,” Hazel said.

  “What? No. I’m Vale. I’m Vale, wearing Lena’s hat. I found it in the attic. See? Me. Vale,” taking the hat off.

  “Oh,” Hazel said, blinking.

  And then Vale showed Hazel the photo. This house with fresh white paint, the family in dark suits, pale wool and cotton, standing before it.

  “Oh yes,” Hazel said, a streak of warmth through her chest. “Look at that. Our people.”

  “And this? Who’s this?”

  “That’s my grandmother. Marie. She died when I was eleven or twelve.”

  “Was she Abenaki?”

  “What?” Hazel’s eyes flicked upward at Vale. “Of course not. We’re not Indian.”

  “Okay. I see.”

  And then Vale had left, taking the photo with her, and Hazel had returned her eyes to the field and its sunstruck view. Gypsy-nigger, her father called Buck, the man who lived back in the woods.

  Hazel hasn’t thought of him in years.

  “Mother?” Hazel says quietly, turning back toward the bed. “Are you here?”

  But of course there is no one.

  The house used to be so quiet without electricity. Lena in the corner with her barn kittens. Lena: eight years younger than Hazel. Deathly shy. She wouldn’t speak at school. Wouldn’t speak to strangers. Made a fuss every time their mother, or later, Hazel, tried to brush her hair or scrub the dirt behind her ears. She refused to wear dresses, wanted to go naked, or wear blue jeans. It was animals she loved: barn cats in boxes in the kitchen. A pet baby squirrel, tucked into the front of her shirt. Once, after their mother died, Hazel found Lena in the cellar. She had cracked open every last jar of canned peaches. Those peaches: their mother’s light—sweet and perfect—put up in jars, the top on every single one opened.