Heart Spring Mountain

by Robin MacArthur

  Vale feels remarkably less alone, watching this film. Its refusal to ignore pain or solitude. The screen’s cool light bouncing off the cabin’s dark walls. Mona with the goat herders. Mona with the maid. Mona on the road again, alone.

  The cuts are elliptical—the moments strung together without smooth transitions. You have to do the work yourself—piece together this life of Mona. Smoking fields, goatherds, grapevines. The loose strings of violin threading through the room.

  When the film ends, Vale can hardly move.

  “I’m sorry. That was inappropriate,” Deb says.

  “It was beautiful,” Vale say, her stomach in tangles. Her limbs frozen. Mona as Bonnie. Bonnie as Mona. The cabin suddenly too dark and quiet around them.

  “Too relevant,” Deb says quietly, “for both of us.”

  Vale rarely thinks of Stephen’s death, but she thinks of it now. What it must have been like for Deb, living here, alone, for all these years.

  “Our lives are pitiful,” Vale says.

  Deb laughs. “Yes. Remarkably so.”

  “We need to dance, Deb. Otherwise I think we might die,” Vale says.

  Deb smiles. Goes to the wall, slips a record out of a sleeve. “Georges Brassens—my favorite dead French songwriter,” she calls out, setting the needle down.

  Vale rises off the couch, closes her eyes, moves her arms in slow motion.

  Dancing, she thinks: an occupation of the spirit.

  A refusal to give up joy.

  “Georges Brassens—the sexy father I never had!” Vale says, opening her eyes again, moving her toes and fingers and arms.

  Deb laughs. Closes her eyes. Moves her hips slowly. An old heat there, Vale thinks, watching.

  Hazel

  DECEMBER 15, 1986

  The sound of boots on the front porch, the scraping of snow, and then her front door opening. “Stephen?” she calls out. She’s at the table with coffee, next to the blazing Stanley, and is sure it is him. Her son. Long-limbed. Handsome. Kind. It was well below zero last night, the first real cold night of winter, and the Stanley this morning needed three logs going good before the kitchen warmed. “Stephen?” she calls out again.

  But it isn’t Stephen. It’s Deb, with Danny behind her, their mittened hands wrapped together. Deb is still in her nightgown with jeans and Sorels on underneath, her hair a mess. Always the floozy.

  “Hazel,” Deb says. Her face paler than Hazel has ever seen it, and she isn’t breathing right. The room suddenly smells strange, and then Hazel looks at Danny’s eyes. They are dark and small, two deep holes that seem to disappear too far back into his body. He’s shaking. His lower lip trembling and blue.

  “What is it?” Hazel says, her throat dry.

  “Stephen,” Deb says, not blinking, or moving, or looking away. “It’s Stephen.”

  GODDAMN YOU, HAZEL THINKS LATER THAT DAY, AFTER the body has been carried down the mountain by two neighbors, after the police have come, and Bonnie with her baby. At last it is just Danny and Deb and Hazel and Bonnie (Vale sleeping on the couch), sitting in Hazel’s kitchen at the table, the only spot warmed by the fire, watching the sky give up its light for the grays and blues of dusk.

  They are sitting eating the pea soup Hazel has warmed up on the stove, when Hazel says it out loud.

  “Goddamn you,” she says, looking at the woman who turned her son’s life into who knows what. The woman who never seemed to work a lick in her whole life, who spent money on wine and records and had never wanted Stephen, or Danny, for that matter, to have anything to do with cows or the land. She wanted to take this place and Hazel’s son in her slender fist and turn it into some kind of fantasy, walk the hillsides in a poetic reverie. But what did she really know about any of it? Of who made those beautiful, now crumbling walls, of the blood and sweat and work that went into these now overgrowing fields. She was sure Deb had never loved her son like she should have. Was too demanding—needing him like a child needs a mother. And Danny. Danny sits next to his mother eating the soup, his eyes wide and still full of that too-deep look that made Hazel nearly gasp and turn away. In her mind: a flash of her own boy at that age streaking across a field, laughing. My son was perfect, she thinks, loving him as deeply as she has ever loved anyone.

  Hazel turns toward Deb. “The boy can sleep here,” she says, coolly. Her daughter-in-law’s eyes have dried, and they look at her then with a look so cold it frightens Hazel.

  “No,” Deb says. A cold laugh of disbelief. Standing and reaching for Danny. “Come. Let’s go home.”

  And then they are gone, the door closed quietly behind them, and it is just Hazel and Bonnie and Bonnie’s baby, Vale, and soon they leave, too, and then it is just her there in her kitchen, alone again, alone as she has been, it seems, for years, and it isn’t until all the lights are off, and she is nestled deep under the wool blankets of her four-post bed, that she feels the pain streaking from her legs up into her back and neck and shoulders. An unbearable pain, which will not subside.

  Vale

  NOVEMBER 20, 2011

  Vale buys a Sharpie and writes notes in the places Bonnie might go: in gas station bathrooms, on lampposts, on the stone pilings beneath the railroad bridge: BONNIE COME HOME. THE MOTHER IS THE LOVE FACTORY. MY BONNIE LIES OVER THE OCEAN.

  She pictures Bonnie hitchhiking to California. She pictures Bonnie in a cave somewhere, living off roadkill and scavenged nuts and herbs. She pictures Bonnie, mercurial, nocturnal, good at going unseen, making her way through the backstreets of town.

  There’s another gray hair on the bed at the back of the barn. The rock moved. The note gone. Bodily smells. Cat piss. Swallow shit.

  Vale writes on the wall: MY BONNIE.

  NEKO PICKS HER UP AT THE END OF THE DRIVEWAY IN HIS mother’s car.

  “Do you ever break into houses?” he asks, opening the passenger side door for her.

  “No,” Vale says, eyeing him suspiciously, sliding in.

  Neko pulls out onto the gravel road. Accelerates too quickly.

  “What’s up, Neko?” Vale asks.

  “Nothing. I want to take you dancing,” he says, smiling.

  “Okay then,” Vale says, reaching for his hand. She loves his hand: its heat, its thick fingers.

  It’s a short drive—ten minutes or so.

  A one-story house up a long driveway, made of wood and light—built in the sixties, large panes of glass, no cars in the driveway. “Summer house,” Neko says.

  He checks the windows until he finds one, in the basement, that slides open.

  “Señorita?” he says to Vale, pointing the way through. The strange ways we find solace and joy, Vale thinks, hoisting herself inside.

  They find the stairs to the first floor. Neko turns on a handful of lights. The house is all straight lines, dark wood, bookshelves. New Yorkers, Vale guesses: clean, spare, simple sophistication, dripping money. Though she’s discovering that money is relative—that the people her mother called “rich assholes” her whole childhood—academics and artists—are both rich and not rich, in the strange twist of inequity, at once.

  Neko flips the kitchen track lights on, pours Vale a glass of wine from a bottle on the counter. Catalunya, the bottle says. Garnacha. Vale runs her fingers across the label, breathes in—smells the earth of those mountains in northern Spain. Dry and ancient—she can feel it on her tongue. She closes her eyes and pictures herself in some Spanish city, cobblestones beneath her feet.

  Neko smiles. “Beautiful here, no?” He looks around the room. Then steps toward Vale and touches the rim of his glass to hers. “Dance with me,” he says, holding his arms out to her.

  “Why not,” Vale says, smiling, and they dance, to no music, around that room. They tango. They salsa. They crash into a bookshelf, spill wine on an Oriental rug. “Shit!” Neko says, wiping it with the sleeve of his sweater.

  “Talk to me in Spanish,” Vale says. “It turns me on.” And he does: Te quiero. Bonita. Quitate la ropa. Huir conmigo.
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  Vale laughs. Neko kisses her throat, pulls her to him, spins her in tight circles. Tiny kisses, from the hollow between her breasts to the tip of her chin. Whispers into her ear: Me hace feliz verte reír.

  Vale smiles. “You have to translate.”

  Neko puts his lips against Vale’s ear: “It makes me happy to see you laugh.”

  Vale pulls Neko’s body to hers, collapses onto the couch.

  He finds her there. Puts his face into her stomach. Whispers, “Have me.”

  LATER HIS EYES ARE CLOUDED, ON ANOTHER CONTINENT. He tells her that he will go back. Needs to. That it feels imperative: documenting the true terror that is war.

  Vale rolls away from him. Eyes the dark mahogany of the ceiling.

  There is a grand piano in the corner, books scattered all around. Vale nods toward the piano. “Play for me.”

  “Of course,” Neko says, standing, going to a pile of records. He scans the labels, pulls one out, slips it onto the record player.

  The needle touches down, that high, rotating hiss, and then solo piano rises into the air. “Bach’s Piano Concerto no. 5,” Neko shouts from across the room.

  He sits down at the piano with his back to her, moves his hands back and forth a quarter inch above the keys. Vale smiles. Closes her eyes.

  The music escalates, trembles, stops abruptly and suddenly in places, midair. Then resumes, slowly, bringing her back to solid ground. She’s never listened closely to Bach before. Never listened to it with eyes closed like this—letting it wash over her body. It’s beautiful. The humor of Neko’s motions fades and something else enters. Vale sees mist rising. Smoke. The air punctured with bullets, with stars. An unbearable grief settles in her chest, brought in by that piano: Neko’s bent shoulders. Neko’s Iraq, and Vale’s mother. War, heroin, hurricanes: all symptoms of the same illness, Vale thinks. Corporatization, militarization, greed.

  Neko stops moving his fingers. Bends over the cream-colored body of the piano. Rests his arms and head there. After a few minutes Vale sees he is sleeping, eyes twitching in a dream.

  She pulls on her jeans and sweater, puts Lena’s hat on her head. Unlocks the front door, slips through, and starts walking. She doesn’t want him to leave her. She doesn’t want to have to beg him to stay. She doesn’t want him to look up from that piano and into her eyes and see whatever lies there.

  It takes her an hour to walk, the flashlight of her phone leading the way: back roads, fields, Silver Creek.

  She’s shivering. The night colder than she expected. The walk longer. But she’s grateful for it: the sting of cold, the ache of muscles.

  A branch breaks above her, followed by a whipping sound, and Vale looks up to see the wings of a large bird taking flight overhead. Owl. Lena’s owl, Vale thinks, her breath catching, her eyes following its wings into the ink-blue sky.

  “Hello, Barred,” she says, shivers up and down her spine.

  She read a few days ago that they inhabit dense forests, swamps, and streamsides. Of course they are here, Vale thinks, standing in the cold, the sound of that bird’s wings still ricocheting in her ears. Along this creek bank, tucked amid tree branches, seeing me long before I see them.

  Hazel

  NOVEMBER 20, 2011

  She lies in her bed, the radiator ticking near her feet, and watches the leaves, lit by pale moonlight, fall from the maple outside her window. It’s late evening, a cold draft leaking from the cracks around the single-pane windows. She doesn’t know what year it is. Time, impossibly tangled. The house suddenly feels thin-walled: all bone. Stephen has moved out, she thinks, and it is just Bonnie and Hazel here in the old house at the back of the field.

  “Bonnie,” she calls out. But there is no answer.

  Bonnie: thin dark hair, thin brown limbs. That god-awful music leaking from under the door of her room too many hours of the day. Bonnie asking a day ago, or was it two, where and who her father is, and Hazel saying, “You have no father. Get ready for school.”

  The slam of pine door on pinewood frame.

  A lifetime spent taking care of others, Hazel thinks. And now this moonlight, and this bed, and this house, too cold even with the radiators on. Hazel pulls the sheets off, restless, and looks down at her threadbare nightgown, her pale legs, her wide feet, in this first-floor bedroom she slept in as a child, and as a married wife, and since then, alone. She should draw the covers up. Close her eyes. Sleep. Instead she stands and undoes the buttons of her gown, slips it off her shoulders. She goes to the wall, feels for the light switch and flicks it on.

  There she is. Bathed in light in the mirror above her dresser. Her ninety-year-old face. An apple doll, ravaged and dried, her hair white flames around it. The sagging fruits of her breasts, barely filling the loose polyester of her bra.

  The first time Lex loved her it was August. A dance at the town hall. Not the man her father would have chosen for her: a fiddle player, quiet, aloof, magnetic, from a poor family on the edge of town. Not a farmer. Startling green eyes.

  It was Hazel who asked him to dance, not the other way around.

  He turned, grinned, eyes glinting with curiosity, and said, “Sure.”

  Why him? She has wondered for fifty years now. The dance floor was his place, his river, his whole body shifting in and out of light. And then her own body suddenly spinning, head thrown back, hands gripped tightly to his shoulders, his chest against her chest. Why him? She could have chosen so many others.

  She reaches behind her back and unclasps the bra. Lets it fall to the floor. A few snowflakes falling outside her window. Her small breasts hanging there.

  He loved them in that field. Held them. Kissed them. Treated them like they were some kind of jewel, some unfathomable treasure.

  She closes her eyes. Lex Starkweather. Fields. Frost-burnt grapes. Hazel brings her hands to those breasts of hers.

  Reaches her left hand lower. And there it is. That old sharp burn.

  When was I ever really loved? she thinks. When was I ever really loved.

  Vale

  NOVEMBER 20, 2011

  The owl is still crashing through tree branches in Vale’s mind as she walks the last stretch of woods home; she feels its wings beating at the edge of her skin, feels its presence behind every tree.

  She feels spooked—surprisingly so.

  When she reaches Hazel’s field she stops. There’s a light on in Hazel’s bedroom, unusually late. It’s out of her way, but Vale walks in that direction, up to the old farmhouse, and peers in the window just to be sure everything is fine.

  It takes her a moment to understand what she’s seeing.

  Hazel in front of her bedroom mirror, unclasping her bra, bringing her sun-spotted hands to her breasts.

  Hazel reaching her left hand down her body, down her stomach, to the crease between her legs.

  Jesus, Vale thinks, ducking below the window frame.

  An explosive silent laugh rises from her chest.

  But the laugh ends. Vale crawls away from the window and walks back through the field, feeling the earth’s faint curvature beneath her feet. A living body, the earth: a woman’s spine, those stones she nearly trips over. Shit, she thinks. The unbearable loneliness.

  And also: good for you, Hazel, you old lady. Seeking pleasure. Finding it.

  Deb

  DECEMBER 16, 1986

  We all grieve differently, Deb thinks, walking up that snow-covered path, Danny’s hand in hers, but inside she wants to break something. She wants to scream. She wants to give up—toss herself over the bridge and float downstream. At the cabin she turns on every light and settles Danny on the couch with all the blankets she can find wrapped around him. She starts a fire with newspaper and, because she can’t find any kindling, takes a kitchen chair and slams it onto the living room floor so hard that it shatters, then picks up the pieces, lays them on top of the newspaper, and covers them with hardwood until a fire is blazing. She goes to the gas stove, puts milk into a pan, dumps cocoa and sugar in,
stirs until the milk is dark and thick, then brings two steaming cups to where Danny sits next to the fire. What can she say to him? She’s been trying all day, but the words, for the first time, seem lodged. She hands him the hot cocoa and he takes it. She puts her free arm around him and holds him close to her body.

  There were times when he was a baby (so many) when she felt her body was all she had to offer: her breast, her arms, her lap. Times when she had been too tired or overwhelmed to sing to him or play with trucks on the floor and so she had simply laid herself down on the bed and brought him to her and let him suck on her breasts and find what comfort and warmth he could while she closed her eyes and let her mind drift elsewhere. In those moments she had escaped, thought of the places she had loved before she came here: her childhood bedroom with its white muslin curtains. A lover by the Monongahela River in high school. That bed on the porch at Farther Heaven, waking alone in the mornings to crickets, roosters, crows. She had always felt half-guilty in those breastfeeding escapist moments, but should she have? Isn’t the body sometimes as much a comfort as anything else?

  Finally he turns to her. He doesn’t say anything but reaches around her waist and puts his hand up under her shirt to the soft skin of her belly and holds it there. When he finishes his cocoa he hands her the cup and leans across her body and puts his face into her stomach and Deb strokes his hair and ears and neck and shoulders until she feels his body become heavy with exhaustion, and then she feels the small shudder that lets her know he has slipped into sleep, and she stays that way all night, by that fire, holding her son’s body, until the hillside blushes pink with dawn.

  SHE WONDERS, FOR A WEEK OR TWO, IF THEY WILL GO somewhere else, move back to her mother’s house outside of Pittsburgh, take Danny across the country in her rusted Datsun, find some cheap apartment in the desert somewhere, but she and Danny stay there, in the cabin, on their own. She clears most of Stephen’s things out of the closets and begins wearing the things she keeps; his too-long jeans, which she crops at the ankles, his wool shirts and sweaters. On a Tuesday in January she drives to the library in Nelson and asks if they are hiring, says maybe she can help out for free for a while until a position opens up, and the green-eyed woman at the desk looks at her for a moment, an all-knowing and pitying look, then glances down at the book in front of her and says, “Sure.”