Heart Spring Mountain

by Robin MacArthur

  Where had they gone wrong? He thinks of that night, ten years ago, when she told him she was pregnant—barefoot on fresh pine, dancing around the kitchen table. Her warm laugh. The way his heart had stopped just then, stepped backward into the woods—hard maples, twisted beech, soft pine.

  Stephen walks uphill, leaves and ice crackling under his feet. The snow coming down harder now. He thinks of his son, Danny, and what he has, and has not, been able to give him. He thinks of Bonnie, living in town now with her baby, Vale. Of the part-time, low-paying jobs she works. He brings her money occasionally. Groceries. Venison stew. Still—a mother, alone? It’s the exhaustion in her eyes he cannot quell.

  Deb’s unhappiness, either. At what point does a cabin—its aging pine and dim lights, its mineral-rich outhouse and trickling off-colored spring water—no longer suffice? “I’m sick of this hole we’re in, Stephen,” she said to him earlier. “It’s dark, we’re poor, we’re miles from anyone other than your mother; our cars don’t fucking run when we need them to. It’s a hole, Stephen. A hole! And you?” She’d put her hand on his chest, full of the tenderness he’d long denied, and said, eyes brimming, “You’re an asshole.”

  He had remained quiet, watching the shapes rage made out of her face. Watching her tears. Standing and putting on his coat and boots. Before stepping out the door he had turned to her. “I didn’t ask you to come,” he said, finally. Its cruelty bitter on his tongue. Its truth bitter, too.

  A few snowflakes fall, heavy and large, on Stephen’s face. The first snowstorm of the year: it always feels like a blessing. A way to start over. Stephen puts the bottle in his pocket and hikes farther up the hill. He always heads for the higher ridge, the spot where Lena’s cabin sits. The place they have let rot, corrode, fall back into the earth since Lena lived there. Porcupine-eaten holes in the floors, broken windows, a door that won’t close, the rusted potbellied wood stove. Stephen goes there sometimes. Some of Lena’s things remain—some pictures tacked to the wall, feathers, bones. A coffeepot on the old two-burner stove. He likes to feel Lena’s presence there. The woman who married an owl. Every bird is an omen, she used to say. Every one.

  The hike up the hill doesn’t take long, but the night is cold. He should have brought paper, matches, kindling. Stephen takes a long sip from the bottle, stops at the door of the cabin and looks out at the dark hillsides around him. From this height he can see the edges of the barn below lit in moonlight. It looks alive like the coals of a fire or Christmas tree lights or the neon flickering of a TV. He watches the lights go out in his own cabin below. He can imagine Danny asleep in his loft, Deb climbing the ladder, undressing, slipping into the cotton nightgown full of holes she sleeps in. He wants to go to her, lift that nightgown, put his face against the warm, soft skin of her stomach, the skin still softened from when Danny was inside her, put his lips against her ear and say, sorry. She’s still beautiful. The most beautiful woman he may have ever seen, her face now shadowed by sun lines, smile lines, worry lines, like a well-loved world. Everything looks better to Stephen when it’s older—barn siding, floorboards, leather—and Deb is no exception. But he can’t bring himself to go back down there. Can’t bring himself to say those two syllables: sor-ry. He’ll wait until he’s sure she’s sleeping. Until he can climb into bed unnoticed, lie there unseen, studying the contours of her face in moonlight. For now he’ll stay here at this wind-loved cabin at the top of the hill, Lena’s haunt, watching it snow. Snow: such permission for silence! A world where he doesn’t have to speak, where he never had to speak: the strange groaning of the oak and the sweet-wintry scent of the pines and the air so brisk it stings his skin, turns his breath to icicles on his beard.

  He goes inside, sits on the floor with his back against the wall, takes a long swig. His grandfather built this as a hunting shack. A place to go and drink, be alone. A place that stank of animal blood and whiskey. And then Lena made it into something other—light-flecked, feathered, warm. Stephen takes another sip from his bottle, then another, and feels the noise of his thoughts recede, feels his limbs strengthen, feels himself brave and deep and wise, feels himself capable of love and fatherhood and the tenderness required of a husband. The woman who married an owl. The man who married an owl. Is Deb one? He takes another sip. Lies down on the hard floor. He should get up and make a fire, but is there paper? Kindling? Wood?

  Lena. He used to visit her when he was a kid. Loved her laughter, her touch of wild. “Here,” he’d say, handing her some treasure he’d found, and she would get down on her knees and look closely. Put it to her nose and breathe in—that fox skull, that hawk feather, that quartz stone. Rub it in her fingers. Ask him where he’d found it. Imagine the life it had before it found them.

  “Because things find us, not the other way around,” she’d said, touching her forehead to his forehead. “Like you to me, and me to you—we needed each other, and so we both went looking.”

  They found each other, Stephen thinks, his body slipping into sleep. He shouldn’t sleep here, he knows it, but the whiskey has warmed him, the bottle now empty. He just needs a short doze. A quick one. And so we both went looking.

  Vale

  NOVEMBER 10, 2011

  The trees go bare. The earth grays.

  Vale drives to all the places her mother loved—Indian Love Call, the fireworks warehouses in New Hampshire, the ruins of a burnt mansion on the backside of Mount Wantastiquet across the river. Wantastiquet—an Abenaki word, Vale realizes for the first time. She thinks about a news story she heard on the radio a few days ago: an uprising of Bolivian indigenous peoples that led to a 375-mile march demanding compensation for the effects of global warming. It’s all connected, Vale thinks, listening to the description of an eight-year-old girl walking with her mother to La Paz, a city neither of them had ever seen before. The tides are rising. All of them.

  The burnt mansion is named Madame Sherri’s after the eccentric New Yorker who built it in the twenties. Her story has echoed around these parts for years: a convertible, lovers, boas, gay strippers. Legendarily subversive for this town. The mansion burnt to the ground in the thirties, but the ruins are still there, home to generations of high school parties: the stone arches of the windows, some burnt piers, and a grand staircase, also made of stone, curving and reaching thirty feet up toward the sky.

  Vale looks around: broken glass, trash, the rocks peppered with graffiti. TZ + NB. GUNS RULE. SCREW YOU CAPITALISM. Below the latter, in thick black ink: Find me.

  A thin cold rain starts to fall. Vale closes her eyes and pictures Bonnie here, writing those words with her black Sharpie: Find me.

  She is so tired of these clues that go nowhere. By the Bonnie who never appears, despite them all.

  Vale goes to the staircase and starts to climb. It’s a stupid thing to do, reckless—the rocks loose beneath her feet, slick now in the rain that is falling and freezing to the stones. Black ice. She’s amazed they haven’t gated this place off or torn it down. How many beloved teenage haunts actually survive?

  But Vale makes it to the top, a spit of stone barely wide enough for her two feet. She stands upright, looks around. The clearing is surrounded by trees, boulders, the faint reflection of a pond in the distance. The rain falls harder on Vale’s face and limbs. Find me, she thinks, taking off her hat and throwing it to the ground. She takes off her sweater. Lets it fall. Takes off her shirt, flings it over her head. Raises her arms, slowly, into the cold rain. All those eyes that watched her do this at the club, gazes unflinching, did any one of them see her? Vale reaches behind her back, unclasps her bra, pulls it off, lets it drop to the ground below. She closes her eyes. Her nipples raw in that cold air. Her old tricks, with no one to see. A line she read in No Word for Time yesterday: “In this world we are largely defined by the sum total of our relationships, to nature and to each other.” Vale hears Jake brakes on the highway. The shiver of wind in pines. The sum total of our relationships. Vale closes her eyes. Calls out, “Find me!” Guttu
ral. Loud. She has spent her entire adult life learning how to be alone.

  Vale lifts her leg, spinning once: a slow-motion pirouette on a funeral pyre.

  SHE DRIVES TO NEKO’S. “FIND ME,” SHE SAYS, GOING TO HIM.

  Neko takes off her wet coat. Wet sweater. Wet hat. Leads her to the bed. Unties her boots. Brings her a towel. She’s shaking, every inch of her stiff with cold. Neko pulls off her wet pants, covers her with warm blankets. He brings her tea in a fluorescent green mug, lies down beside her. Vale tells him about Lena’s cabin. About the marriage license, that barely legible word: Indian. She tells him about Madame Sherri’s, the words written on that rock. “You’ll tell me if you ever see anyone like that again, yes?” she says, her teeth still chattering. “You’ll go to her, and talk to her, and tell her I’m here, yes?”

  “Of course,” Neko says, putting his warm hands on her cold chest.

  “But you haven’t?” Vale asks. Her body warming. The chills subsiding.

  “No,” Neko says, kissing her left rib. Kissing under her arm. Looking into Vale’s eyes. “But I’m always looking. I swear.”

  Vale nods. Takes off his clothes. Pulls him inside her. She doesn’t want to wait. That streak of heat that runs from her head to her toes. Reverberates everywhere.

  Lena

  AUGUST 6, 1956

  Baby Bird—

  It’s the hour before dawn I love best; rooster, crow, birdsong, the sky ink blue. I step outside and the grass is dew-wet, the world’s waking face foggy with mist. Lex is here sometimes beside me, his body golden amid the tangled sheets, his sleeping face shadowed with dreams. Hawks? Wars? Beloved, what rages in there?

  Sinners we are. Black with night. Black coffee, sweetened beans. I bring the cup to his lips, the meat to his sleeping fingers. I say, “Home, love. ’Tis best you go home.” Oh what pools of guilt, those moss-green eyes! I take my finger and run it down his face, down the edge of his stubbled jaw. I say, shhh, and slip my finger between his lips. Beautiful face. Crow face. The punctured lives of men and women. Otie eyeing us from the corner.

  Once Lex is gone, the morning becomes all mine—mist rising, the field alive with grasshoppers. This cabin is a hamlet, this cabin is a cave. Swing low, sweet chariot. I put bread crumbs out on the wooden table in the yard, and my friends the birds come—robins, chickadees, sparrows, jays. Chirrup, chirrup, cheep cheep. The black coffee cools and tastes even better. A sluice along the tongue. The blood wakens, fully alive to the world.

  And then that sweet child. Stephen! Coming up the hill. Long-legged, towheaded, barefooted.

  To the room that still smells like his father, though he doesn’t know that.

  “Look!” he exclaims, a skull of some kind in his outstretched hands. I throw my arms to the air, throw my arms around him. “Oh, Stephen,” I say, “It’s a bona fide treasure! Muskrat? Otter?” He says he found it near the creek, its hue sun-washed, spotted with green mildew.

  We wash it in cool water. We find a spot on my wooden shelf for it to sit.

  “Come back and visit it anytime, Stevie-o. It’s your animal spirit,” I say. “You muskrat, you otter.” He turns and runs back down the path, singing at the top of his two-pint lungs.

  I go to Adele, tell her I am deathly afraid. That love has come over me like a sickness. She gives me herbs—turtlehead and black ash, dark and bitter. “Make a tea,” she says, “and drink every morning.” It works: a week later my blood comes pouring. I kiss this woman’s dark and wrinkled hands that smell of Dawn soap and herbs and tobacco. I bring her a bottle of whiskey, a six-pack of Coke.

  Adele tells me a story about M-ska-gwe-demoos, a swamp-dwelling woman, dressed in moss with moss for hair, who cries alone in the forest and is considered dangerous.

  “Don’t be M-ska-gwe-demoos,” Adele says, laughing, shaking her head, cracking open one of the bottles. She says, “Love is risky stuff.”

  “Have you ever been in love?” I ask.

  The minute I say it I want to pull the words back in. But they have wings—a flock of red-winged blackbirds—making their way over the roof of the house, over the hoods of the tallest pines. Adele grows still beside me. Drinks her Coke slowly. Tells me that when the roundups happened she was sixteen.

  She grips the counter’s edge, drinks her Coke empty, tells me that she was taken to a hospital and cannot have babies. “Ha,” she says, a near howl in her laugh. “Just like that.”

  She goes to the stove, brings me another cup of dark, steaming tea that smells like trees and dirt and earth.

  I bow my head to her knee. Say, “I am so very sorry.”

  “Mmm,” she says. Her eyes are cold. Dark stones under river water. “Lena.” She touches my wool-coated arm, lays her warm and callused hand there for a long minute. “Don’t mess around.”

  Stephen

  DECEMBER 14, 1986

  How long has he been here, in the cabin? The snow falling in deep drifts around him. The cold, bone deep.

  He can make out, on the moonlit windowsill, an animal skull, the size of his fist, and a blue jar full of feathers.

  One day when he was a kid—six? Seven?—he walked up here, skipping, ready to find Lena, and heard voices. Laughter. He knelt by a tree ten feet away, not breathing. Who could Lena have here?

  And then, from within these walls, these very walls, a familiar whistle. His father’s.

  He’d recognize it anywhere.

  Lena’s laughter again. Then silence. Just squirrel, wind, distant highway.

  Stephen stood up, crept to the window, looked in, and saw the naked body of Lena, rising, her breasts loosened, nipple, waist, long hair, and from below, heard his father’s laughter.

  A beast, Lena looked like. A terrifying half human, her eyes turned inward in a way he had never seen before.

  Stephen tiptoed away and ran down the hill. He ran into the barn, climbed up the ladder to the hayloft and made a bed there, amid the bales. Lay there for hours, filling his fists with hay.

  He’s never told a soul.

  Not Hazel. Not Deb. Not Bonnie. Not Danny. The holding of that secret is part of what makes him, he is sure, a good father, a good partner. The not-burdening of others.

  This cabin—where Lena and his father lay. The woman who married an owl. Christ, he is cold. He should go home, but his legs won’t move. So cold. He should go back to Deb and Danny.

  His family. When he thinks of them, asleep now in the loft of the cabin below, he feels proud, generous, and thinks how tomorrow morning he will wake before Deb and get the fire going early, make her coffee and bring it to her, like he used to do, and when he does he will bend down and kiss the soft skin of her forehead. Maybe, if Danny’s still sleeping, they will even make love. He would like that. He would not be afraid to make love in the daylight. He will not be afraid to let her undress him, like she used to do. And he wants to undress her, too. Slip that nightgown up and over her shoulders. Kiss the soft skin between her breasts. Hold them in his hands. Be still there. Put his breath into her ear. Say something. What would he say? I love your body. I love your arms and your hands and your neck and your hair. I’m so glad you are here. He will do it. In the morning he will say the words, and then, if she wants, they could make love, and he would wait for her to come, wait for that tender and quiet release that he loved to feel, that ripple below his body, and then he would come inside her, too.

  Deb

  DECEMBER 15, 1986

  Deb can’t sleep. She lies in bed with the lights off waiting to hear the click of the door latch, the creak of Stephen’s boots across the kitchen floor, the sound of their bedroom door opening. At four she drifts off, but when she wakes an hour later he still isn’t there. At six, just when it’s starting to get light, she wakes Danny and tells him they are going for a hike. A hike! She adds that touch of false enthusiasm to her voice. The cabin is cold, a mess, last night’s dinner dishes piled up in the sink. Danny’s Tintins and Legos scattered across the floor.

  It remi
nds her of the commune on winter mornings—that frozen water in Bird’s attic room, the frozen pipes in the kitchen, the sea of dirty dishes that arose around them.

  They set out following Stephen’s footsteps through the snow—barely visible shadows.

  “Look, your dad’s footprints!” she says, her body nauseous, her arms and legs shaking. She wants to smell woodsmoke from that shack at the top of the hill, wants to believe that he has made himself a winter camp up in the woods, in the trees, where he is always happiest.

  “What is it you do up there?” she had asked him just last week.

  He had shrugged.

  “Don’t you miss us?”

  “Of course,” he had muttered, but it wasn’t the tone she needed to hear. She wanted him to reach toward her, put his arms around her, cup his palm against the small of her back and hold her.

  Hold me, she says more often than she wants to. Sometimes he does, a loose-limbed, nervous hold, and sometimes he turns away from her and does not.

  Why doesn’t she leave? Deb thinks, pausing to wait for Danny. The snow is deep. Surprisingly so. It’s what her mother has asked her for years. I have no idea why you’re raising that boy in such squalor.

  Squalor. Is that what this is? Is that what her grandmother’s village in Russia was? Outhouse, wood stove, dark pine whose corners never get entirely clean. They have water from a spring but no plumbing—the gray water still collects into a bucket in the sink, which she empties two times a day. Her twenty-year-old Datsun will only turn on when the radio’s playing—will only turn off when she clicks the radio back off. “What the fuck is that about?” she said to Stephen, who grinned, shrugged, walked away.

  “Where are we going?” Danny says, pausing in the snow behind her. “I’m cold.”

  “I know, hon,” Deb says. Hiding the terror in her voice. “It’s an adventure!”

  What she has no way of describing to her mother are all the other gifts of this life she has chosen. The way it feels to wake in the dark, climb down the ladder stairs, and light a fire in the wood stove. The way it feels to make a pot of coffee and sit in the dim light with it cupped between her hands, a thick blanket wrapped around her neck and shoulders, and watch the day come. The way she has come to know the hillside with its cellar holes and springs and creek and wildflowers so that it feels like an extension of her own living body. The way the seasons create a rhythm to her days, and her years. The sensation of having made a world for yourself with your own hands. Of belonging somewhere. Yes, she is frustrated, and sometimes lonely, and poor. But still.