Heart Spring Mountain

by Robin MacArthur

  A quick slap across her face. Hazel had loved their mother, too. Had wanted to never touch those jars of summer, preserved.

  Lena was nine when their mother died. Hazel was seventeen. Lena refused, after that, to go to school. Lena taking off into the woods. Truancy officers. A threat of her being taken away, and Hazel saying, with all her might: “No.”

  “Don’t you think, Mother,” Hazel says out loud, toward the bed, where her mother lies sleeping, face serene and beautiful, “that we should fill the hot water bottles?”

  Her mother nods.

  She did her best, didn’t she? Their mother, for that year of darkness, breathing quietly in this room. These same yellow curtains. Lena would bring her jars of wildflowers, line them up on the bedside table, bright and faded and rotting in jars—Joe-Pye weed, buttercup, black-eyed Susan. Her father below: too quiet. Quiet footprints on soft pine.

  Stop this. Hazel closes her eyes.

  Hazel turns back to her mother, but she is not there. Empty sheets. The blanket pulled taut.

  The taste of metal in the back of Hazel’s mouth.

  What is wrong with her? Hazel brought her mother soups as she was dying. Cups of tea. Cups of water. Breeze through the open window. Of course her mother is not here. Ninety years old and her mind is parchment, filament. Hazel lurches up from the bed and goes to the window. She looks out at the backside of the field and at the woods, sloping upward behind it.

  “No, we are not Indian,” Hazel says out loud. “Right, Mother?” Her mother’s face moon-colored. Glowing from within. Hazel goes to her and kisses her brow. Her mother puts her hand on Hazel’s shaking shoulder. Holds it there.

  Lena

  JUNE 9, 1956

  Dear Dusk,

  The cabin, this evening, smells like Otie’s box in the corner, filled with moss and lichen and leaves. It smells like the pellets he throws up every day, full of fur and bones. I cover my mouth as I scrape the bottom of the box into a bucket, cleaning the putrid moss and leaves. Otie closes his eye and falls into a deep sleep. When I’m done I wash my hands with soap and collected rainwater. Pour more water into the teacup with a rose painted in its middle. Take a long drink. Look out at the darkening sky.

  I run my palms down my thighs, slip off my pants, pull the blood-soaked rag from between my legs. I wash it out in a pan of water warmed on the stove. The water runs red. More water. Rinse again. Hang it to dry on a nail above the wood stove. My body pining for a child, Otie. The only thing I’ve ever wanted. A child! If I’m lucky, a girl, for reasons I don’t know.

  Otie wakes, hops around, sniffing, prowling, occasionally calling out. To some nearby lover? His one eye, his broken wing. What a match we are: our one-eye and our off-eye, my left one, drifting upward. “Unlovable, always,” I say to Otie, putting a clean rag between my legs. Sitting back down at the table. “You and me.”

  I pull out my notebook, flip through the pages: drawings of beavers, moose, bear, mink, weasel, fisher, coyote.

  I write: Near the sickness also lies the cure—something Adele told me. She knows the names and the purposes of all the roadside weeds.

  For bleeding: bloodroot (strung around the neck), white pine for hemorrhage.

  Colds and fever: balsam, hemlock, aspen, black spruce, white pine, cedar.

  I think of my grandmother, Marie, who died when I was four, braiding my long, thick hair by the fire. Of her cups of fragrant, woods-rich tea.

  Otie watches me draw, eye blinking. Owls mate for life, I read in my book. Does he think I am his partner? “I love you, too, Otie-O,” I say, and he closes his eye, contented. I’ve been told an owl’s memory of place is so keen, it can fly between branches of trees in total darkness.

  “Shall we walk, Otie?”

  At the bottom of the hill we hear music and circle the big house. The living room windows are open, and from them slips the voice of Buck Owens, crooning.

  I slide against the clapboards of the house, stepping behind lilac and over periwinkle, holding my body close to the wall, and peer in.

  Stephen is in the corner playing with a matchbox. His thin boy limbs. Shock of blond hair across his brow. Stephen! Beautiful child. Hazel is at the kitchen sink, blue dress and bent shoulders. I want to take those shoulders in my hands. Pull them back. Say: There now.

  Lex sits in the chair next to the radio, a glass of bourbon in his hand, eyes closed, foot tapping. Long legs. Cheekbones. War-damaged. Song-strewn.

  I turn from the window and put my back against the pine clapboard siding. White chips of paint flake off under my fingernails. I close my eyes. Feel Otie’s ever-present talons on my collarbone. Feel the evening dew settle on my scalp and cheeks. Hold my body there—electric.

  Down by the creek, the yip-yip-yip! of that three-legged coyote friend.

  “Like you and me, Otie,” I whisper, slipping away from the house, and walking back toward home. “Nocturnal. Pining.”

  Vale

  SEPTEMBER 20, 2011

  Vale wakes at dawn. Puts on Lena’s hat. Turns up the gas heater on the wall.

  She is drinking too much. Losing track of reality. Is Bonnie back at the swamp, in some woodland cave somewhere, drinking hemlock tea over an open fire?

  Last night Vale asked Deb if she has any books about Vermont’s native peoples, and Deb returned from her cabin later with two: one about Abenaki history and a small book that fits in Vale’s palm, called No Word for Time.

  This morning Vale makes coffee and opens the books.

  How is it she’s lived here for most of her life, went to school here, and knows nothing of Vermont’s native people? Some petroglyphs near the falls where she and Jimmy used to skinny-dip and get high. The place in the river called Indian Love Call where her mother used to take her. Bonnie would make a hooting sound up toward the rock cliffs and when her echo came back, say, “See? Indian ghosts. Yours and mine!” Slip off her dress and leap—naked—into that cold water. Vale eyeing the woods around them, hoping no one was near.

  Vale sits at the table, the lamp buzzing above her head, and flips through the books’ pages. In the history book she reads about the Years of the Beaver: colonization, disease, genocide, with fewer than one thousand Abenaki remaining after the Revolutionary War. She reads about the early Years of the Fox—the late 1820s to mid-twentieth century—the time of Marie’s photo—when many fled north into exile. Some chose to stay and merge with French Canadian neighbors. Others chose the Path of the Fox: heading for mountains and rivers, and others, to “pass” into English-American culture. The photo of Marie, according to the writing scrawled on its back, was taken in 1901, likely a few years before Lena’s mother, Jessie, was born. Was Marie trying to pass?

  Vale reads about something she’s never known before. In the 1920s, the state’s Commission on Country Life launched the Vermont Eugenics Survey, whose explicit mission was to codify and perpetuate the state’s lily-white reputation. The result: twenty years of institutionalizing Vermont’s poor, uneducated, and people of color. Many of those targeted were the Abenaki. Many had their children taken from them. Many were sterilized. Others went into hiding—the woods, or camps by the river—or denied their native blood.

  Vale closes the book. Pours herself another cup of coffee. Drinks it slowly. She looks at Marie’s photo on the wall and thinks how that eugenics movement was still happening when Lena and Hazel were girls. Vale pictures Marie moving to this white house on the hill, unbraiding her dark hair, cinching an apron around her waist, unlearning her mother tongue. No longer going into the swamps to gather sweetgrass. Not telling her granddaughters much of anything, for their own protection, and hers.

  Vale puts down the book and goes outside. It’s cold. A bitter, balsam-scented wind rising up from the creek. She wraps her sweater around her, pulls Lena’s hat low over her eyes and ears. Woodsmoke rises from Deb’s cabin on the hill above her; sunlight reflects off Hazel’s kitchen windows.

  Vale pisses on the creek side of the camper. The
piss makes eddies through the dirt and grass. She rises. Lifts her arms above her head. Feels the sunlight on her face. “Jesus,” she whispers, feeling the landscape unfolding in new ways.

  Back inside Vale opens the pages of the smaller book, No Word for Time.

  It’s a book about the spirituality of the Algonquin people, of whom, Vale learns, the Abenaki are part.

  The author, Pritchard, writes that for the Algonquin peoples, “to do damage to the earth does spiritual damage as well.”

  Vale feels that line in her chest. She sets the book down. Thinks of the earth’s warming and the resulting storms. Thinks of oil spills, beach-wrecked birds, landfills full of plastic. She thinks of Bonnie’s spiritual damage, those many books on her shelf—each an attempt to get found.

  VALE LACES HER BOOTS, BUTTONS HER SWEATER, AND walks into the woods. They’re ravaged still, the banks of the creek no longer mossy, fern-touched, Japanese-looking in their ancientness, but wrecked—upturned gravel, torn-up trees.

  She walked up this part of the creek once with Danny, years ago. Leaping from stone to stone, balancing her way across fallen logs. “You’re a natural-born ballerina, Vale!” he called out as she crossed the log, and she was—her body, in those moments, pure light. She was in love with him then. Danny, her cousin, nine years older than her, playing Leonard Cohen songs in the hayloft of the barn. Danny putting on the Rolling Stones in Deb’s cabin up there on the hillside—turning the volume up, nodding his head, pouting his lips like Mick Jagger.

  She wanted to be a dancer then: a ballerina in pink and white. Bruised toes and bobby pins. Not exactly how she’d describe her nights at the club, but not entirely different, either. Her body muscle and lightning. Fully capable. The last time she talked to Bonnie on the phone she told her that she was dancing—enough to pay her bills. She didn’t tell her what kind. Bonnie’s voice reeking pride—“Oh honey. That’s so fine! I’m so proud of you! I always knew you were pure grace. Divine!” Then her voice drifting off into distraction, or exhaustion. Saying she had to go.

  Vale continues along the bank, upstream. Farther back, where the creek turns to swamp, the damage lessens. Just fields of flattened bluestem, flattened ferns.

  Eerily quiet. Eerily still.

  Vale bends down and looks into the mud at the edge of the open water: Deer tracks. Dog or coyote tracks.

  No mother tracks.

  This might be where I would come, Vale thinks, if the world were ending.

  Is it ending? How high do the seas have to rise, how many storms, before the world as they know it is no more?

  There are other tracks she doesn’t recognize. Fisher? Weasel? Fox? Animals waking with the dawn and coming to water. I’ll be like them in the apocalyptic near future, Vale thinks—eyes wild, ears pricked, head ever-turning. Living back here near the fertile swamp, relearning all those things that were forgotten.

  Vale puts her palm into the murky, mud- and moss-flecked swamp water, and thinks of herself under bright lights at the strip club, undressing. The heat of the lights, sweat pouring out along her spine and under her arms. She thinks of the muscles in her legs, burning, and how she learned, up there, to make the greatest effort appear effortless—how to make the hardest work full of grace.

  “We’ve got Gypsy souls,” her mother saying, dancing around the living room in the apartment in an old T-shirt. “Gypsy souls! You and me. Screw the unbelievers who say otherwise. Indian souls! I can feel it in my bones, Vale-love.”

  Vale pulls her sweater around her neck, raises her face to the darkening clouds moving in fast from the west, to the drops of rain falling, just now, from those clouds.

  “Are you here, Bonnie?” Vale says out loud.

  Blue jay in the highest pine. Flash of far-off lightning.

  Vale bends and puts her fingers into the print of that dog’s or coyote’s track, lifts her finger and smells it: heady scent of swamp water.

  Lena

  JUNE 18, 1956

  Birds,

  I go to barn dances, because I love to dance. What God doesn’t exist in that boot sole on pine floor, in that spinning? I don’t go to church, despite my sister’s urgent pleas. My mother died when I was nine years old; why would I go to church and pray to that cold God? My God is in the tree roots, in the creek song, in the smell of wild mushrooms and the potent scent of herbs. My God is in the face of Otie—God face—Owl face—Moon face—One-Eyed—and in the way he looks at me, silent, neck turning. His sharp talons. His forever hunger. Name that God to me and I will name my God to you.

  MY GOD IS IN THE MUSIC, TOO—FIDDLE, BASS, GUITAR, drum. My God is in the sweat and sway, the touch and the turning. And so I go to the dances.

  I leave Otie in the cabin in his box against the wall. Two mice a day—that’s what he needs. I have live traps set up all along the foundation and along the stone walls. I pull the mice out by their tails, whisper thank you in their ears, hand them to Otie, who lunges, devouring.

  I ask Adele how to say thank you in her language, and she tells me it’s oliwni. “Oliwni,” I whisper in the mouse’s petrified ear.

  I ask Adele the word for owl and she tells me it’s gohkohkhas. “Gohkohkhas,” I say to Otie, “take care of yourself, my friend. I would take you dancing if I could, but they would call me a loon.” Otie blinks back, long and slow.

  I slip out of my blue jeans and into an old dress of my sister’s. Peach-colored silk, pearl buttons, a stain on the hip and a rip up the side I’ve mended with crude stitches.

  Will you ever learn to sew? My sister has asked me for years. My quick answer, always with a smile: no.

  I put my hair in two braids and don my wool hat.

  I put my boots on and take a sip of whiskey and say, “How do I look?” to Otie, who blinks from his crate, serene and mum.

  I walk down the hill and catch a ride with Hazel and Stephen. My sister brings a chicken pot pie, a Jell-O mold, and a carafe of coffee. She eyes me and my dress sidelong: “You’re wearing that?”

  I smile. Touch the soft tip of my sister’s nose. The cool line of it. She turns away, starts the car, drives.

  I turn around to talk to Stephen. Six years old and moss-colored eyes like his dad’s. He is grinning at me. I am grinning at him. He asks where Otie is, and I tell him I left him at home with the stars for company. That he would be terrified by the dancing—think we’d all gone mad. I touch Stephen’s knee and ask if he will dance with me tonight. He shrugs. Smiles. Shakes his head.

  I tell him that Adele told me, not long ago, a story about a woman who married an owl, and that I want to tell him the story sometime. That I think he will like it.

  “The woman who married an owl?” He beams, showing off his crooked teeth, the new gaps there.

  “Oh yes. And it might be me. It might just be a story about me!” I wink at him and turn back toward the open road. I roll my window down and take off my hat and put my head out and feel the wind in my face and in my eyes and I call out in Otie’s song—hoo, hoo, who-cooks-for-you!—to the dimming night air.

  “Get your head back in here,” my sister says. I reach over and pinch her thigh. Turn back to wink at Stephen, laughing in the backseat.

  LEX IS THE ONE WHO PLAYS THE FIDDLE. THE ONE WITH the fern-colored eyes, faint rims of black. When he plays, it is like his body becomes untied from this earth except for one electric wire that runs from his left toe to the top of his head. He spins around that wire, rocking this way and that, shaking, bending, flowing and flowering. Most of the time his eyes are closed, but sometimes he looks up at the dancers, and when he does he grins, and that grin is like a lightbulb exploding in that wooden room in which we dance, in which the men are so taut and the women so stiff, their faces contained, but in that flashing bulb, for an instant, we all look so beautiful, I think I might break open into something I was not before—a hawk, an ember, the petals of a beach rose, strewing. Then he closes his eyes again, and the music plays on, and I squeeze the arms of the man who is hold
ing me and let my whole body surrender to his rhythm and his strength, and we spin.

  Oh, the way the music draws lines of alizarin, lines of crimson around that square room! The way you can follow those lines with your eyes closed and climb into the heart of another person, the maker of the music, drifting out in spirals amid the pine walls of a pine-floored room.

  I’m nothing like the ladies in this town in my crudely stitched silk dress, my men’s boots, my fedora. I’m nothing like the ladies with their Junior Ladies’ Community Club, the ones who bake pies for good causes and dress in nice, freshly sewn flowered dresses. Lena, I can hear my dead mother say every time I step out the door, her voice echoed in my sister’s. The tone of their voices make me pause: full of burnt molasses and smoke—a peculiar hunger.

  But oh, how I love to dance! This dress I don so it can swing, soft silk that twirls up and over my boots and about my knees. I love to hold men and have them spin me around, their muscles tight around my arms and back, my braids whipping across both our faces. That spinning makes me laugh, and that laughing makes heads turn, but what do I care? I don’t. What would caring be but a tether keeping us from the unhinged future that is free, Otie?

  Stephen

  MAY 20, 1974

  The clearing he makes is on the ridge above his mother’s farm, an east-sloping bank at the top of the hill, accessible only by four-wheel drive or on foot. He’s done being close to roads, done being connected by electrical or telephone wires, done being part of a system driven to killing, driven to war. Done being in a house with his mother and seventeen-year-old Bonnie. Their incessant bickering. David Bowie, War, the Bee Gees blasting from the radio in the upstairs bathroom, black nail polish, the toxic fumes of hairspray.