Heart Spring Mountain

by Robin MacArthur

  Small towns, Deb thinks. They are a bitch this way.

  Other people have died, she reminds herself while splitting and stacking firewood. Other husbands. Other fathers and sons, she tells herself while washing dishes at the kitchen sink, while reshelving books on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Other people have suffered and lived on beyond the window of their loved one’s lives. In small towns, even. She knows a woman whose husband killed a man, shot him in the head in broad daylight, and that woman lives here still. Visits her husband, whom she manages to still love, once a month in the prison north of Rutland. That woman has come to love, she once told Deb, while checking out a book at the library, living alone. She told her that solitude is the only thing that brings any comfort anymore. But that it does—in abundance: geese on lakes; herons on ponds; boots on leaves in cold weather.

  Eventually the library hires her and Deb makes enough money to buy their food and firewood. Her mother sends her money sometimes, and Deb doesn’t turn it down. She empties the stinking water under the sink. Takes her old car to town to get it fixed. Their lives become quieter, hers and Danny’s, more rhythmic, in many ways more peaceful: no longer reaching out for Stephen’s love. No longer trying to touch his sadness or assuage his anger. In the evenings they read books, play board games. Deb drinks wine, too much of it, she is sure, but enough so that she can fall asleep early beside Danny’s body and sleep deeply. She listens to Stephen’s favorite records—John Prine, Townes Van Zandt—and her own—Ruth Brown, the Nina Simone album Bird sent her in the mail, Georges Brassens—and sometimes she and Danny dance around the cabin. Shuffling and laughing by candlelight. Sometimes they laugh so hard, they both end up in tears.

  He is a boy lost at sea, her son, and she his only anchor. “Come,” she says, pulling him toward her, his face the same contours as Stephen’s, his hands the same, his legs the same. She holds him, and sings him the songs she sang to him as a baby, and ten years old or no, he lets her.

  Lena

  OCTOBER 19, 1956

  Plum, bird, sarsaparilla—

  Adele opens the door and goes to the stove to put on water for tea. Herbs from the woods she’s gathered—hemlock, yarrow, burdock—followed by instant coffee. We drink it outside on the porch, no matter the season. Her thick boots, her mangled hands. She says we drink outside so that we don’t forget to hear what the birds have to say on the matter.

  She says, her voice soft this time, “Loving another woman’s husband. Tsk. Dangerous.”

  She says, “You better be careful. Love can be more powerful than herbs.”

  I tell her, “Never!” and laugh, but I stop bleeding; my body grows thicker around the waist. In the morning I leave the cabin where the smell of Otie is everywhere, lean against my favorite oak, and retch into the leaves.

  Adele says, “There’s only one way now, and that is forward.” She gives me hemlock and yellow lady’s slipper.

  I don’t tell Lex when he shows up at my door that night. I grab his hands and pull him to me. His green eyes glint in the western light, shafting through the window. He says, “If only we had music, Lena-belle,” and I say, “Oh we do, Lex-i-con. We do,” whistling the entire tune of “Saint Anne’s Reel.”

  He pulls me to the floor. He lifts my shirt off of my shoulders, puts his lip against my nipple, twines there.

  I am laughing. I am cooing.

  I say, “Lex, you coon you,” and then there is the music we find there—starlight, murk, flicker—and then crawling toward the bed, where he sleeps wrapped around me until dawn.

  WE WAKE EARLY. HE HAS LOST HIS JOY IN THE nighttime—he wakes with his brow furrowed. He is shaking, which always means he is back at that war and its eternal battlefield. I climb out of bed, throw a sweater on, and make us coffee. He joins me at the table. Puts his face into the steam and breathes in. “Lena,” he says, eyes desperate. “What are we doing?”

  I take a sip of my coffee. Look up to face Otie, who is blinking from the corner. I say, “We are animals.” Outside: jay, crow, chipmunk.

  He touches my finger with his thumb. Rubs it there. “Stephen,” he says, his voice a hoarse whisper.

  “Stephen,” I say. I don’t say: I am with child. I look out the window: red leaves falling from the maples, beech leaves rattling.

  “I’ve done so much wrong,” he says, and I don’t deny it. I don’t deny either of us our wrongdoing in our quest to be loved.

  I kiss him on the lips—bristle, moist, coffee-dank—before he walks down the trail to the house below, where his wife is already up, cleaning the stalls, milking.

  Hazel

  NOVEMBER 25, 2011

  Thanksgiving was yesterday: Deb brought a small turkey, green beans, mashed potatoes. Vale came. Not all that different than any other day. Was it once? When they were girls?

  Hazel looks out the window and sees a girl in a gray sweater walking into the mist-filled woods. Lena?

  Once, that summer their mother died, Hazel found Lena knee-deep in the creek, naked, her dress in the leaves beside her.

  Hazel wrapped her own sweater around her sister’s naked shoulders and said, “Come.”

  But Lena just smiled. Her body cold. Shivering. “The leaves, they look like rubies, don’t they?” Face lit up, glowing. Leaves and sticks tangled in her hair.

  “Yes, they do, Lena. Time to come home,” Hazel said, taking her sister’s arm and lifting her up, gathering her dress, walking her home across that field.

  Is this Lena now, headed toward the woods? Hazel puts on her jacket and walks out to the porch. “Lena,” she calls out, but the girl doesn’t turn around.

  Hazel pulls her collar up around her neck. A cold morning. Brutally so. A fierce wind. The girl turns and waves and grins and keeps walking, and so Hazel follows.

  She hasn’t been into the woods for so long. The mess of it surprises her: its many roots, fallen branches, and blackberry canes near impossible to pass over. She’s never liked the woods—has always preferred the clean order of fields. But she continues, following the girl, stumbling over a fallen tree and catching herself, standing upright. When her breath returns, the girl is gone. Hazel braces herself against a pine tree and closes her eyes. She’s dizzy, spinning uncontrollably, her head throbbing.

  It’s five in the morning and she’s young again. She wakes at the crack of dawn to the rooster’s crow and the sky’s slow blueing. She rolls over to wake Lex, to say “milk” into his ear, but the bed is empty.

  It’s not the first time. Those sheets vacant beside her. Hazel rises, pulls her nightgown up and over her head, looks down at her body, caught in this early morning light. She is thirty-five years old and still young. Flat stomach, full breasts, strong legs.

  She gets dressed and turns to look out the window: Lex’s truck in the driveway. No lights from the kitchen windows, no lights on in the barn.

  Outside it’s cool, already the mornings so dark here on the hill, just a pale moon setting over the trees on the west side of the pasture.

  “Lex,” she calls out at the door of the barn, but there’s no answer, just the cows’ restless shuffling, the low storm of their voices rising.

  Hazel goes to the woodshed, but the woodshed is empty. She goes to the edge of the field, but it is empty, too.

  She heads up the old logging road to the camp where Lena lives, not sure why she’s going that way.

  The cabin is quiet, all stillness, woodsmoke rising from its thin tin chimney. There’s something near the door, a familiar shape.

  She steps closer. Takes a deep breath. Her husband’s boots. Cracked leather she’s oiled many times.

  Hazel stands still, twenty feet away, her hands by her sides, breathing in the cold air.

  Goddamn, she whispers to the pines on her way back down the hill. Goddamn to the grass and leaves and ferns underfoot, to the sunshine that touches her brow. To the mountain, to the spring, to the house, to the barn, to the boy, in that second-story bedroom, sleeping: Goddamn.

  Ha
zel turns and a spruce branch whips across her cheek, drawing blood. What on earth is she doing out here in the woods? Her stomach is in knots. There is no girl. You fool, there is no girl. Her arms and limbs and face are cold. Swamp water pools around her feet, soaking through her shoes.

  She turns to make her way back to the clearing, just visible through the trees. Not far, she tells herself, her body shaking, her socks soaked through.

  She’s almost back to the house when she stumbles. Falls, there behind the barn. There’s a cracking sound, and an unbearable pounding in her head. A streak of pain shoots up from her left side, and she feels a pool of wet leak from between her legs. Jesus no, she thinks. Lying still. Trying to breathe. Will I be found? Also: the unbearable indignity.

  Deb

  NOVEMBER 25, 2011

  Deb is at the kitchen sink, a John Prine record spinning, a bottle of wine beside her. What a sad old bird I’ve become, she thinks. She should be drinking with Vale. She should be drinking with Ginny, her old radical pal. They should be at a movie, or out listening to jazz (who cares how long a drive). Put on their old dresses or tightest jeans—show off their sixty-year-old asses, fight this diminished sense of verve.

  She finishes her second glass of wine and glances down the hill at Hazel’s house. It’s an old habit, this referential checking.

  But tonight there’s no light on. Deb looks at the clock next to her sink—8:47. Deb knows, from years of watching, that every night between six and nine Hazel watches TV in the living room, but tonight that first-story window is dark. No blue flicker.

  Deb takes the shortcut through the woods, the early moon bright enough to see by. No snow yet, but cold—fifteen and dropping.

  Deb’s on the porch when she hears the sound: an animal cry from the far side of the barn.

  “Shit,” she whispers, running that way.

  Hazel smells like piss; her whole body is shaking. “It’s okay, Hazel,” Deb says, looking into her mother-in-law’s terrified eyes. “It’s okay. I’m here now. I’ll be right back,” she says, going to the house to call 911, returning with a couch pillow and an armload of blankets. “It’s all right, Hazel, an ambulance will be here soon,” she says, a half-truth—it will take twenty minutes or more. She places the pillow beneath Hazel’s head, covers her body in blankets, takes her hand in her own and then sings any songs she can think of as the stars come out above them.

  There aren’t that many she knows the words to. What an absurd thing to discover in the moments that matter. It’s the lullabies that come out, the ones she sang to Danny when he was young—Woody Guthrie’s “Hobo’s Lullaby” and “Silent Night,” of all things. But the singing seems necessary. Anything to keep Hazel awake. Voice and warmth under that cold sky. And then the sound of a siren, and the strobe of flashing lights, and the paramedics arriving.

  CREUTZFELDT-JAKOB. THAT IS THE DISEASE THE DOCTORS tell them Hazel has. A broken rib, yes, but also this rare and swift dementia. One in a million—the proteins of the brain consuming themselves, causing rapid mental deterioration, the part of the brain that delineates space and time the first to go. Rapid physical deterioration, too—breathing, heart rate, motor skills. Hazel spends four days in the hospital for testing, and Deb is shocked at the change she witnesses in that time alone—Hazel suddenly unable to walk, her appetite gone, her mind growing more and more wily. This is, the palliative doctor comes to tell her, terminal. How long, depends: a few weeks to a few months. He says it’s hospice care at this point. In a center or at home.

  Deb turns to Hazel, eyes closed on the bed next to her, and asks where she wants to be, and Hazel’s eyes flash open, and she says, her voice alarmingly clear: “Home.” And so home it is.

  Vale and Deb set up the bed near the window in Hazel’s living room. A hospice nurse will come two times a day to help them change the bedding, check their supplies of painkillers, empty the catheter.

  “What is happening?” Hazel says, her voice thin, cracked, her blue eyes terrified, and so Deb tells her mother-in-law about the disease she has. That it is terminal. She’s never before had to tell someone they are dying. Hazel looks to the window, nods. It’s hard to know if she understands.

  The hospice nurse brings a vial of oral morphine and teaches Deb how to manage the pain, which seems to be significant since her fall. The nurse has light-blue eyes. Kind ones. “Your job is to make her as comfortable as possible. You understand?”

  Deb nods.

  The synchronicity is not lost on her—Bonnie easing a needle, filled with a related narcotic, into her arm four months ago and walking out into the storm. Deb wonders what storm Hazel is walking out into now, and what she’ll find there.

  Darkness or light? That is the question. Millions of years of queries, and that is still the everlasting one.

  She thinks: how little I knew when I was nineteen on those back roads hitchhiking, as she brings a cup of water and a straw to Hazel’s lips, as she checks the catheter bag.

  Vale

  NOVEMBER 28, 2011

  She is at the big house with Deb, sitting by Hazel’s bedside, when she gets the call. It’s nine in the morning; the police officer says they’ve found some footage a neighbor brought in months ago. Vale takes the phone out onto the porch.

  “I’m sorry,” the officer says. “It somehow got lost in the shuffle here. Do you want to come in to see?”

  “Motherfuckers,” Vale whispers, pulling the phone away from her face. She looks out across the field at her small blue camper, the line of trees above it. Her heart rattles in her chest. How can they be that incompetent?

  “Sure,” Vale says. “I’ll come see.”

  She hangs up and stares out at the bare trees, at the overcast sky, at crows on the horizon.

  Does Vale want to come in to see? Vale hasn’t seen Bonnie for eight years. What kind of a mother does she want to remember? In the last month Bonnie has become something other in Vale’s mind. Has transformed into the mother in the photograph plastered all over town: thick hair, laughter—her cheek on Vale’s cheek. Does Vale want to see the one who put a needle packed with heroin and fentanyl in her arm and walked out into a hurricane?

  Vale stands still for a long time before climbing into Hazel’s fifteen-year-old maroon Ford Taurus, the car Hazel will never drive again. “It’s yours,” Deb said yesterday, waving her hand in the air. “All yours. Take it. Be free.”

  It’s been a long time since Vale has had a car of her own to drive. She could drive it to New Orleans. She could drive it to New York and join the protests. She could start driving west with Neko, lock the doors and not stop until they run out of gas somewhere, start anew in some abandoned farmhouse in North Dakota. Burn his credit cards, passport, camera. She hasn’t called him or seen him since slipping out that night. He hasn’t called her, either.

  Vale pictures cracking open that farmhouse door. Flicker of swallows. And standing in the center of the kitchen in a blue housedress: Bonnie.

  “I don’t want to be here,” Vale says, slamming her fist into the steering wheel as she pulls into the police station parking lot.

  She looks the woman working at the front desk in the eye: “I’ve heard there is some footage.”

  THE VIDEO IS GRAINY, BLOWN UP ON THE COMPUTER screen. The sound: rain and howling wind. The screen covered in droplets that smear and stretch like veins. The woman who held the phone was standing on her rooftop, filming the creek and the rising water, a plastic toy, car tires, crashing by.

  Bonnie appears in the left-hand side of the screen. A drift of white—white sweatshirt, white shoes—stepping off the back stairs of the apartment building, standing still for a moment, looking upward, crossing the street. She’s tiny in the footage—Vale can’t make out the details of her face, just the outline of her body: bent shoulders, too thin. She walks with a spring in her step. The phone shakes and the woman holding it calls out, “Careful! Dangerous!” and the Bonnie in the screen, small as a child, getting soaked by rain, turns
and waves—ghost-face, a blank patch of white—turns again and continues walking toward the bridge. She walks onto the center of it, lifts her arms, holds them out on either side of her, head tipped back—her body shaking—laughter?—and then the screen turns to black.

  Vale can’t breathe.

  “Do you want to keep the footage?” the policeman standing behind her asks.

  Does she want the footage? Her mother, a ghost woman, walking into the rain?

  “No. Thank you,” Vale says, heading for the door.

  VALE DRIVES UNTIL IT’S NEARLY DARK. SHE DRIVES TO the river. At the cornfields, an entrance spot to that deep pool in the river where that photo was taken nearly twenty years ago, Vale hits the brakes and pulls over onto the gravel edge.

  She gets out of the car and walks across the stubbled field, cornstalks ankle high. She stands in the middle of that clearing, facing the river on the far side. She gets down on her knees. She digs her fingers into the damp and cold earth between the frozen stalks. She opens her mouth to scream, but no sound comes out. Headlights from cars on the highway shoot past on the bridge overhead. “Damn you, Bonnie!” Vale says, her voice coming out at last. Choosing that drug over Vale. Choosing Dean over Vale. “Damn you,” Vale whispers, putting her head against the damp earth.

  “Oh, honey,” her mother says in her ear.

  Vale is seven years old. She is in this field with Bonnie, leaping across green corn plants, thigh high. The air crackling with heat—July or August. “Come!” Bonnie yells, in cutoff shorts and blue cotton, running toward the water. Vale races to keep up. When she does, at the river’s bank, she reaches out for her mother’s hand and her mother reaches back. She pulls Bonnie’s hand to her face and holds it there. Squints up into the sun. Her hand smells like cigarettes and lemon. Someone takes a photograph. Someone sends that photograph to Bonnie—she tacks it to the wall. Vale takes that photo with her when she leaves: her mother’s hand, her mother’s laugh: spikes of gold. And then Bonnie pulls away, throws off her clothes, and leaps into the cold water.