She lights a fire in the potbellied stove. They sit, huddled in front of it, while the newspaper bursts into flame and the kindling slowly catches.
Neko is quiet. Warms his hands by the fire. Watches Vale, a gleam in his eyes.
“She’s here,” Vale says, after a few moments, holding her hands over the iron of the stove.
“Lena?”
“No. Bonnie.”
Neko raises his eyebrows. “Yeah? Tell me.”
Vale shrugs. “I don’t know. I just feel it. But enough of that,” Vale says, smiling.
She rises and pushes Neko backward onto Lena’s bed. She climbs onto it and stands over him. Takes off her hat. Takes off her jacket and her scarf and stands there, breathing.
It’s then that she sees the drawing. On the underside of a beam above the bed, a spot she’s never seen before. It’s a rough sketch, cartoonish, of a man and a woman. Vale leans closer.
The naked man holds a fiddle. The naked woman has thick long braids, is laughing. Next to them are the initials: LW + LS.
LW and LS. Vale’s mind is spinning. Lena Wood. Her grandmother. A sudden heat in Vale’s chest. Lena was not alone. And who is LS? LS. Lex. Starkweather. Hazel’s husband. Stephen’s father. Lena Wood and Lex Starkweather. The fiddle player. Vale takes a deep breath. She looks down at Neko. “Jesus Christ,” she whispers, stepping off the bed, picking up her sweater and wrapping it around her shoulders.
Vale knows exactly what it’s like to not know who your father is. She’s spent her whole life eyeing the face of every man she passes, looking for one with bone structure and eyes matching her own. Who? Vale asked Bonnie once, screaming, pounding her fists against the coffee table, and Bonnie put her face in her hands. Held them there for a long time. Whispered—and Vale believed her—I don’t know.
Vale thinks now of Danny’s green eyes. Of Bonnie’s green eyes. Of course. Her mother’s father.
“Neko,” she says.
“Yeah?”
“Hold me.”
Deb
DECEMBER 13, 2011
Vale is outside Hazel’s door in a damp rain, midafternoon. “Did you know about Lena and Lex?” she says when Deb opens the door. “I don’t know why I’m shaking. I don’t know why I’m so cold.”
“Come in, honey,” Deb says, closing the door, bringing Vale a blanket.
She brings her niece a cup of coffee, sweetened with cream, and Vale tells her about the drawings on the wall. LW + LS. Those green eyes. The birth of a baby who never knew who her father was. Whose mother died before she could be told.
“Jesus,” Deb whispers, sitting down. “Who else knows? Hazel?” They both turn to look at her, sleeping in the living room.
Vale shrugs. Sips her coffee and closes her eyes.
“The secrets of a hillside. The goddamn damage silence can do,” Deb says, putting her arms around Vale.
She thinks of Bonnie, whom they cannot find to tell.
She wants to ask Hazel, to find out if she knows, but she can’t risk the possibility of breaking the news on her deathbed.
And then Vale rises, dumps the rest of her coffee down the sink, says she has to go, and heads out the door, and it is just Deb and Hazel again. This quiet old shell of a house. Lex and Lena’s ghosts filling the air.
HAZEL MAKES A SOUND FROM THE LIVING ROOM, AND Deb goes that way.
She’s been growing steadily worse. Is only managing to swallow broth and juice and water when they bring a cup to her with a straw, say, “Drink. You must.”
Her eyes are open now. Deb brings a cup of apple juice to her lips. Holds the straw still while Hazel sips. Her eyes glaze over again. She closes them. Turns away.
Deb goes to the couch. She is exhausted. She misses her solitude. Misses her cabin—she’s been spending nights here on the living room couch. She checks her phone and finds there’s an e-mail from Danny in Guatemala: See you in five days, he writes. She stares at the screen for far too long. Can barely breathe.
Five days. Can she stand it? Danny—Stephen’s limbs, Deb’s cheekbones, Stephen’s green eyes. The one she loves more than anything in this world and the one she has not been able to make happy despite it. That is the curse of motherhood, she thinks: they make us happy and yet we cannot make them happy. And so we suffer, doubly so. She laughs out loud. Had she done it wrong? Her quiet rage, her expectations. But enough of that. She is long done with guilt. Those thoughts are thirty years old now, and she is done having them—scraps in the wind she tosses.
IN THE EARLY EVENING A VISITING NURSE COMES TO RELIEVE Deb for a couple hours. She walks back to her cabin and throws logs onto the fire, turns on the light next to the kitchen sink. Lex and Lena. How long? How often? She thinks of Stephen as a boy, and what he knew, or didn’t know.
She goes up the loft stairs, the ones she so rarely climbs, and puts clean sheets onto Danny’s bed. Smooths down the wool blanket. The distance of all of their woods and fields and cities closing—Danny, Hazel, Deb, Vale. How tragic that it takes catastrophes, she thinks—storms and deaths and missing bodies—to do so.
“My birds, coming home to roost,” Hazel had said a few days ago, looking at Vale and Deb by the bed beside her, a glint of recognition in her eyes.
The hole-in-the-heart pattern repeating. The patterns always repeating. And yet Vale—Deb feels spikes of hope there. Vale unraveling these truths from the past, unspooling a revisionist history in which love existed, too. What does that mean for this hillside and this family and the future? she wonders. She thinks of Vale’s bright, fierce, solitary beauty. That poppy tattoo, petals strewing. Those owl wings in flight on her left shoulder.
Deb goes to the canvas—Ginny’s painting—hung from two nails on the wall. A rust-red field, wine-colored trees.
The canvas is almost the height of Deb—ridiculously large. “Really, you want something this grand in your living room?” Ginny had asked, grinning, carrying it to Deb’s truck a week ago. “Yes,” Deb said.
It still smells of Ginny’s turpentine. Deb scans her fingers across the thin lines, the scraped-away thicker chunks of paint. She loves this painting. Vermilion, burnt sienna, umber. A fine line of bright white in the center. Startling if you look at it for long enough. She needs this painting somehow. A writer friend of hers once said that you have to find the story that only you know how to tell.
This is the story Ginny knows how to tell: this painting.
And what is Deb’s story to tell? Deb can’t keep apocalyptic visions out of her head—images of what will happen when New York becomes submerged: bunkers, food scarcity, the hoarding of weapons.
But she turns that part of her mind off. Returns to the visions she chooses to let nest instead: community, resilience, coming together in small circles. Palliative care—maybe that is her thing. In the concrete and the abstract: wood stove, candlelight, straws in water, catheter bags, music, stew. Guiding one another through the dark times.
Deb goes to the record player and puts on Billie Holiday’s Lady Sings the Blues. Bird would tuck a plastic gardenia behind her ear, shimmy across the kitchen floor, the quote from Frantz Fanon she wrote across the wall: “Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity.”
Billie sings “I Must Have That Man,” and Deb closes her eyes. Wool socks on pine floor. A smile across her lips. Deb has faith that they will find their way back toward one another, the women of this mountain. Vale and Vale’s daughters. Danny’s daughters. Find some place—here or elsewhere—to call their own.
When the song ends Deb closes the damper on the stove, slips her coat over her shoulders, and heads back down the hill to relieve the nurse of the bedside burden of a woman dying. That is another asset of middle age, Deb thinks, pulling her scarf around her neck—a bitter wind picking up, tall grass tangling around her boots and knees and thighs—the willingness to care for others. The ego’s willingness to surrender time—much of it—for the sake of another. Even the ones who never loved
you, Deb thinks, walking toward that farmhouse with its woodsmoke, its company, its single lightbulb hanging from the front porch ceiling.
Vale
DECEMBER 17, 2011
Come, let’s go for a ride,” Deb says to Vale, nodding toward the door. “The nurse is here for the evening. We deserve a break, me and you. Plus, the news is unbearable. Too many repetitions of the same thing.”
Vale nods. Two days ago, Tropical Storm Washi hit the Philippines: eight inches of rain in twelve hours. Flash floods and landslides: 1,200 people reported dead, half a million without homes. In Europe they are smothered under Winter Storm Joachim: 400,000 in France without power. Trains derailed. Ships destroyed.
They take back roads along Silver Creek, cross a bridge, pass farms and double-wides and new houses not yet wedded to the ground.
“Where to?” Vale asks.
“Ginny’s place. Farther Heaven.”
“The commune?”
“Yes. The commune! The landscape of my naïve youth.”
She tells Vale that Ginny bought out the others years ago and lives there alone, solitary and stoic and dirt poor, “like the rest of us ex-hippies. Ha—success not our forte. But you’ll like Ginny. She’s fabulous and fierce, an absurd misfit.”
DEB TAKES A RIGHT UP A LONG AND STEEP AND DEEPLY rutted driveway, the shape of a bent arm. At the top of the hill is a large farmhouse, an old school bus sitting on stumps, stone cairns, a snow-covered garden—kale rising from the sea of white. Vale smiles. She thinks about the United Nations Climate Change Conference, finished last week in Durban, looking at that garden of winter kale. They didn’t manage to create a treaty but agreed to establish a legally binding deal comprising all countries by 2015. Vale thinks how maybe the slow arc of progress is untrackable: all of these back roads, good-hearted efforts, twists and turns, gardens full of kale.
They get out of the car and walk up the path.
Along the south side of the house sits a long porch. There’s a couch covered in wool blankets, a collection of mud-caked boots, wind chimes, and a peacock—male—tail feathers spread wide—standing in front of them.
“Peacock?” Vale says, her eyebrows raised.
“Yes.” Deb laughs. “Several.”
Ginny opens the door and steps out. She’s striking—nearly six feet tall in blue jeans and a black T-shirt frayed at the hem. Her silver hair flows halfway down her back. Her face is full of lines, and when she grins Vale’s surprised to see two of her front teeth missing. Long turquoise earrings dangle from her ears.
“Friends,” she calls out. “Welcome. What gorgeous incarnations!” She throws her arms out toward them, smells of lavender and woodsmoke.
She kisses Vale’s cheek, pulls her body close, says into her ear: “I am so sorry. So sorry about your mother.”
Vale whispers thanks. The peacock walks in the open door, and Ginny motions for them to follow.
Vale’s never been to one of the old communes before, but their stories have resonated around these parts her whole life: babies born in school buses, rotgut cider in basements, too much fucking.
But this house has a wonderful light, shimmers as Ginny does. The kitchen counter and table are covered in books, ceramic mugs, jars full of peacock feathers. The walls are covered in art—drawings, a collection of clay sculptures, a large painting of a naked woman holding a pistol, a hushed landscape of trees and mist and sky behind her.
“Excuse my mess,” Ginny says, going to the wood stove where a kettle simmers. “One can take up a lot of space when one lives alone.”
“More majestic by the day,” Deb says.
On the wall behind Ginny’s table are some sketches: a deer, a stingray, a guitar with the words “This machine kills fascists” scrawled across it.
Ginny brings them unmatching stemmed crystal glasses filled to the brim with box wine. “What is one to do! Shit, I’m growing old, losing my teeth. Ah, well. But look at this,” she says, passing Deb a print she’s been working on. It’s a woodcut of a creek, feathery hemlocks, a fox passing under a rising full moon, with a line from a Wendell Berry poem at the bottom: PRACTICE RESURRECTION.
“It’s the age of doing so, no?” Ginny says, looking into both their eyes and taking a sip from her glass. She passes the print to Vale. Vale can still smell the wet ink—nearly smell the feathers of the hemlock tree and that fox, too.
“Practice resurrection,” Ginny says, closing her eyes. “That’s what I’m working on. Jesus, the storm,” she says, her voice suddenly low. “My neighbors lost their double-wide. Everything.” She looks at Vale, her eyes brimming. “I’m sorry, Vale. I read recently that in Cree one does not say, ‘I am sick,’ but rather, ‘The sickness has come to me.’ There’s power in that, no? Our sick world to blame for so much suffering.”
Vale nods, reaches her hand into her pocket and rubs the beads of Bonnie’s blue rosary.
“But let’s not talk about the storm,” Ginny says, going to the wood stove and pulling out a loaf of steaming fresh bread. “Deb,” she says, turning, “we thought we were saving the world, and we were wrong! So very wrong! We hid out in the woods here, growing our tomatoes and our green beans while the apocalypse brewed. Cut this bread, will you?” Ginny sets the hot loaf on the counter, reaches for a knife.
The peacock is wandering around by Vale’s feet. She’s never been this close to one before; she’s mesmerized by its tail: iridescent jade and turquoise eyes and swords.
The bird shits on the floor next to Vale’s boot and Ginny laughs.
“Apologies. My birds are tactless. The world goes back to wildness every day,” she says, downing her wine. “I’ll clean that up later. Oh, but my stew. Beans, leeks, potatoes, kale, rosemary. My stew is practicing resurrection.” She goes to the cupboard and pulls out three white handmade bowls.
Vale takes a sip of her wine and looks around at the books littering the table. Langston Hughes, Leslie Marmon Silko, Monique Wittig, Edna St. Vincent Millay. She wants to crack each and every spine. She imagines what it would be like to live a life surrounded by books like this; to grow old in a house that tells the story of your life—your early idealism, your found eccentricity wedded to pragmatism, a life of too many people, and then too few.
“Our idealism wasn’t entirely for naught, was it?” Deb asks, going to the bread.
Ginny shrugs. “I don’t know. But art,” Ginny says. “Where would we be without art? We have to show other ways of living, right? Write the stories for the future. Do so, blindly, and with love. Offer solace when and where we can.”
Vale thinks of Neko and his photographs—not solace, but truth telling. A necessary act of art, too. She thinks of her body moving, with intention and fluidity under lights. What is her story to tell? What language will she tell it in?
Ginny serves the stew into bowls, brings them to the table. “Here,” she says. “My humble offering.”
Deb brings the steaming bread and a bowl full of soft butter.
Vale lifts a spoonful to her lips. Closes her eyes and breathes in. The woods; the soup smells like tree bark and balsam and woods.
“Délicieux,” she says. “Thank you.”
Ginny looks up from her soup, her eyes sparking, a rosy drunk shimmer in her cheeks. “Dried chanterelles,” she whispers. “Dried chanterelles.”
AFTER DINNER THEY CLEAR THEIR DISHES AND MOVE into the living room, a large space with a vaulted ceiling. “This room used to be an attached barn,” Ginny says. “Before the hippies came.”
The peacock follows them, suddenly greeted by two more: a male and a female in the corner, shuffling around in a pile of leaves.
There is a second wood stove in this room; Ginny goes to it and puts a log on, opens the damper. She puts a record on the turntable in the corner, and Edith Piaf’s voice rises into the rafters.
Vale smiles; Piaf’s voice reminds her of earthy French wine, of cigarette smoke. She thinks of her mother dancing barefoot to Patti Smith in the darkened kitchen.
Of Shante singing in French in her apartment in New Orleans. The voices of these women: strange medicine.
From the ceiling hang clutches of drying mint. Under the table in the far corner sit baskets of apples, potatoes, winter squash. “This room stays cold enough all winter—ideal cold storage,” Ginny says, refilling their glasses with wine. “I’m preparing for the post-oil world. I’ve been doing so for forty years. Who knew my skills would turn so phenomenally useful?”
“The hippies were right,” Deb says, falling into an ancient mustard-colored couch, tipping her head back and closing her eyes.
The hippies were right, Vale thinks. Maybe this is the answer. This honing. Going inward. These root vegetables and wood stoves and drying herbs. She would not mind being like these women as she approaches and enters sixty—their gray-haired ferocity and resilience. Life didn’t go how they’d imagined, and yet they hung on, made lives here, quixotic prisms.
“And look here,” Ginny says, pulling a long piece of purple fabric from the wall that’s attached to the highest point of the ceiling with a bolt and a ring. “I’ve taken up trapeze.”
Deb guffaws from the couch. “Trapeze?”
“Don’t laugh,” Ginny says. “I may be wrinkled and losing my teeth, but I am practicing resurrection.”
She slips out of her shoes and takes off her T-shirt. She wears a loose, silk tank top, no bra. Her shoulders are freckled, aged, brown, strong. She propels herself upward, twenty feet into the air, abreast this purple fabric. The muscles of her arms flex and quiver up there at the highest point. She tips her head back, a cascade of silver hair falling down her shoulders, lets out a long throaty laugh.
“A queen!” Deb calls out. “That’s what you’ve been reborn as, Ginny. A fucking queen!”
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