Heart Spring Mountain

by Robin MacArthur

Edith Piaf sings “La Vie en Rose,” and Vale smiles. Feels an odd shiver. Hopeful: that’s what she feels right now, watching Ginny up there at the top of that fabric, this sixty-five-year-old woman living a life of continuous trying. “You want a shot?” Ginny says, lowering herself to the floor, turning toward Vale.

  “Yes,” Vale says.

  She strips off her sweater and grabs onto the fabric. Ginny shows her how to knot it around her foot. How to pull herself up. How to climb. Vale’s dancing muscles put to work.

  “You’re a natural,” Ginny calls out. “Be safe.”

  Vale keeps climbing, all the way up to the top of this barn turned living room—cobwebs amid the rafters, Ginny and Deb grinning below her, the fabric slowly spinning.

  “You’re amazing,” Deb hollers from below.

  “Goddess!” Ginny crows.

  Vale twines in slow motion and wishes Bonnie were here. Bonnie would have liked these women, this night, this house, this music. She throws an arm out into the shape of a star and listens to Edith Piaf sing words she doesn’t understand in a nightclub in Paris. The motherfucking art of good company, Vale thinks, a pain she can’t explain rising in her chest.

  My mother will not see this, Vale thinks. Bonnie will not knock on the door and come in, see her daughter spinning, phenomenally high, head tipped back, a rare and extraordinary bird among the rafters.

  Hazel

  DECEMBER 17, 2011

  There is someone in her driveway. Hazel can see the large blue-and-white van he or she drives, can see the box he or she carries (the shape of a gun case, or a fiddle case), can see the person cross the yard and walk toward Hazel’s front porch.

  Lex?

  But it’s a woman’s voice. “Hello,” she calls out, knocking on the door.

  Goddamn, Hazel thinks, but what is she to do? The woman lifting the latch, opening the door, stepping inside. “Hello,” she calls again.

  Hazel hears the woman talking to the stranger in the kitchen—the nurse who is sometimes here. Then coming toward her. Where is Lex? Where is Lena? She doesn’t walk tentatively, this woman, like Deb or that nurse. Her footsteps are heavy, determined on Hazel’s solid pine floor. She comes closer and Hazel is surprised by the youthfulness of the woman’s face and by the light that emanates from it—an orb, a moon, wrinkled, not young—piercing blue eyes and rosy cheeks. Some kind of china doll. But not flimsy—not at all flimsy—sturdy with long, beautiful hands and—

  “I’ve come to sing you some songs,” the woman says. “Deb thought you might like that.”

  The gall, Hazel thinks, but cannot say. When you are dying you no longer have any choice about who visits you, or what they say to you, or where and what happens with your body, it seems. Right, Mother? Her mother is beside her. Sleeping on the same pillow. Their hands wrapped in each other’s.

  “All right then,” the woman says, opening the black box that looks so much like the box her father used to keep his rifle in, only this glowing, tall china doll of a woman pulls out not a gun but a dulcimer. She slides a chair over next to Hazel’s bed, sets the instrument on her knee, and glances, for a moment, out the window with those blue-gray eyes, and then she begins to play.

  It’s not at all what Hazel expected.

  The woman’s voice isn’t vague or weak or plaintive. She isn’t singing a sad or melancholy song to ease Hazel into death, or a gospel tune full of false joy. It’s a song about coyotes and stars and cowboys, and the woman’s voice is deep and clear and so loud it seems to pierce though the stale air of Hazel’s room. It’s utterly surprising. She didn’t expect this. She didn’t expect to like this, to have the air parted like this. Coyotes and fish and Lex with his fiddle, sixty years ago, at the barn dance, that first night when he took her hand and led her out onto that dance floor and spun her around until blisters formed on her heels. What is this song about? Them stars, how often I’ve laid on the prairie and watched them go spinning around. The woman sits bolt upright, looking out the window, only occasionally glancing down at her fingers; beautiful, young-looking, graceful fingers.

  Some clusters is branded, the Dipper, the Lion

  The Eagle, the Serpent, the Bear

  The Horns o’ the Bull and the Belt o’ Orion

  And Cassia o’ What’s-her-name’s Chair.

  The words of the song seem to go on and on; how can this woman remember them all? And sing them so clearly that a painting appears in Hazel’s mind: swirling stars and deserts she’s never been to and all the creatures up there. Her grandmother Marie used to know the constellations, and when Hazel was a girl she would take Lena and Hazel out into the middle of the field on clear, moonless nights, and tell them their names.

  Hazel is that girl again, standing in that field, her grandmother’s warm and thick hand in hers, under that big swirling, timeless sky that moves only in circles, not in straight lines.

  The northern lights, her grandmother tells them, pointing, are caused by a group of people who play games with balls of light. And then a word rolls off her tongue that Hazel has forgotten until now, a word that sounds like some strange and familiar music, there in that field: Wassan-mon-haneehla-ak. “That was the name of the people,” Hazel’s grandmother Marie says, squeezing Hazel’s hand.

  She moves her other hand to the left. “And that,” she says, “is Big Bear. Kchi-awasos.”

  Kchi-awasos.

  A terrible tangle in Hazel’s chest.

  Those words: Indian.

  She thinks of what her father called them: Indian niggers. Gypsies. Voice copper and silver, tinged with hatred.

  The music stops. “That song is called ‘Them Stars,’” the woman says, looking straight into Hazel’s eyes. “Are you okay?”

  Hazel’s lips won’t move. She looks toward the window.

  The woman nods and looks out the window as well, as if trying to see what Hazel sees. “Would you like another song?”

  “No,” Hazel says, trying to sit up but unable to.

  A knot in her chest, making its way upward. Did she ever show Stephen the stars? Or Bonnie? She can’t remember doing so. Stephen, a boy, standing in that very same field, his hand in hers.

  “Okay, then,” the woman says, rising and putting her instrument back into the black box it came in, clasping it shut.

  Hazel doesn’t want her to go; she doesn’t know why. She is so sturdy, and that voice: deep, clear water. The water at the bottom of the pool in Silver Creek that she used to dive into when she was a girl.

  “That’s what boys do, not girls,” her father had said every time Hazel came home dripping wet from head to toe, wet underwear, wet dress, creek water streaming down her thighs. But she had loved to swim. She had loved that cold, clear black water, the stones glistening at the bottom, the way she would reach her fist down and grab and then drift back toward the surface of the water—gasping, splashing—and open up her fist to find what was there: a quartz, a whetstone, loose gravel.

  The woman turns back toward the room. “It was a pleasure, Hazel,” she says. “Thank you.”

  Hazel lifts her hand. It doesn’t come close to touching what she wants to say. To describe that clear dark water she used to dive into when she was a girl, to describe the stars her grandmother pointed out to her at night, that word—Kchi-awasos—to tell someone how she wishes she could go back in time to when Stephen was a boy, to hold his hand in hers, and keep it there in the cup of her palm, to point up to the sky and say, “Look, Stephen. Aurora borealis. That wash across the sky . . .”

  Hazel can hear the woman going to the front door and letting herself out. She turns and sees the woman through the window, walking along the muddy path toward her van, and climbing in. She will never know the names of all the stars. Or dive into that water. But when she closes her eyes she can hear the woman’s voice singing. It’s in her head. Ringing there—clear and bright and loud.

  Deb

  DECEMBER 18, 2011

  A knock at the door, the creak of it openi
ng, and they all turn. Danny!

  Deb runs to greet him. Danny—her tall boy. The one who did not die in the landslide two months ago. The one who was in a nearby village but did not die. Tender-eyed and reaching his arms out toward her just as she reaches out for him. She holds him, this boy of hers. Hair thinning. Face sunburnt. His arms, his back, his slender chest. Smelling of wool and woodsmoke and sweat and the dust of another land. He holds her, too. She is weeping, foolishly. “Danny,” she says, pulling away and looking at his beautiful face, his bright eyes, his toothy grin. “Come in.”

  They meet Vale in the kitchen. “Vale, valley, vibrant, Vale,” he says, going to her, putting his arms around her. “I am so very sorry,” he says.

  Vale whispers, “Me, too.”

  A long hold, and like that they are all here: Hazel’s chickens miraculously come home to roost.

  Danny goes into the living room, stands next to Hazel’s bed, and watches her sleep. The sky a hushed blue now, first stars visible.

  Deb heats up the soup on the stove; Vale slices bread.

  He comes back into the kitchen and puts his chin on top of Deb’s head. Holds it there.

  “How you be, my boy?” she says, wrapping her arms around him.

  My God. Back to her. She thinks of the devastation in the Philippines, Haiti, Japan, Guatemala. You never know, Deb thinks, squeezing her son’s body tight.

  They set the table, something they haven’t done here in Hazel’s house since the Thanksgivings before Stephen died. Three settings. Bowls. Cups for water. Jars for wine.

  Spoons. The bread and the butter.

  What a communion this feels like, Deb thinks, while lighting the candles in the brass candelabra that’s been in the cupboard for twenty-six years. Brought together by disaster, natural and human, this son and this daughter. How many dinners have been had at this very table by the ancestors of Danny and Bonnie and Vale? At this same oak table. Lit by this same three-tiered candelabra. Zipporah and Ezekial, Henry and Marie. Their spirits feel very much in the room. They bustle around her, watch from the corners, and from behind the plaster walls. This house the colonizers built with their blood, sweat, ignorance, righteousness, and tears. The one Danny and Vale will most likely have to sell—how will any of them be able to afford it? Divide the land and save what they can—the perches on the outskirts, the cabins in the hills. We’re going back in time, Deb thinks, picturing the original homesteader, Zipporah, who bore and raised thirteen children in a one-room cabin uphill of here somewhere while the house was being built. We’re getting poorer, this family, Deb thinks. Our houses smaller.

  Danny goes into the living room with Vale. Deb goes to the sink to wash the dishes. Refills her glass of wine.

  She can hear Danny’s gentle voice talking to Vale and Hazel. Vale’s occasional laughter. How is it she found them, or they found her, this mountainside and its people? She dips her hands into the warm, soapy water.

  How she loves each of them, their flaws and all. That is an essential part of beauty, after all—its pockedness, its darkness and its light. Glory be to God for dappled things . . . all things counter, original, spare. Those words have run in her head for thirty-something years now, ever since Ginny read Gerard Manley Hopkins to them all by candlelight in the kitchen at the commune. That long winter. Ringing in her head all these years when her cabin seemed too dank, too dark, too quiet, too dim.

  Pied beauty. Her own gray hair, stretch-marked stomach and thighs, sunspots on her forehead and hands. Stephen’s dappled love and fallible heart. Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?), Hopkins wrote. Like this family of hers, here in this two-hundred-year-old farmhouse on Heart Spring Mountain. Deb holds her hands still in the soapy water and thinks of Bonnie, her pied beauty. Praise her, Deb thinks, looking out the dark window. And praise her—Hazel. And her—Vale. And him—her son.

  Vale

  DECEMBER 18, 2011

  Danny,” Vale says after dinner. “Shall we go for a walk? It’s too quiet in here.”

  “Yes,” Danny says, grabbing the half-empty bottle of wine from the table. They slip into jackets and scarves, hats and mittens, and head outside, the steam of their breath lit up by the light pooling from the kitchen windows.

  Danny looks up at the sky. “Jesus. The stars in winter in the Northern Hemisphere. I’d forgotten.”

  “A luminous sphere of plasma,” Vale says, quoting the definition she learned in fifth grade, a line that has reverberated there ever since. “Come. I want to show you something.”

  She clicks on her flashlight, starts walking up the hillside, and Danny follows. It’s dark but there’s enough moon to see by, a dusting of new snow beneath their boots.

  She doesn’t want him to know where she’s taking him, that cabin where his father died—near the sickness also lies the cure.

  “You believe in ghosts, Danny?” Vale asks, breathing hard from the climb, the cold air sharp in her lungs.

  He pauses to look out over the farmhouse below, nestled into its valley. “Of course. You?”

  “I’m beginning to. My mother’s, Lena’s.”

  Danny nods and looks up at the tree branches above them.

  “And Hazel is half-ghost, too, at this point,” Vale continues. “Hey, Danny. Are the stars the same in Guatemala?”

  And so he tells her about the stars near the equator. The different constellations. About watching them while smoking a joint on a rooftop in Quetzaltenango belonging to a woman named Luz.

  “Luz, like light,” he says, and Vale does not allow herself to feel jealous of Danny’s lover. She takes that feeling from her chest and sends it out toward the stars now popped above them: Venus, Mars, Orion’s Sword.

  She thinks of Neko, watching the stars from a rooftop in Iraq one month from now.

  Vale starts walking. “Come.”

  AS THEY APPROACH LENA’S CABIN, DANNY STOPS IN THE path behind her. “Why?” he says quietly, his voice a near whisper.

  Vale says, “Trust me. Please.”

  He looks her in the eyes, half-visible in this moonlight, and follows.

  Vale pushes the door open with her shoulder, opens a box of matches, and lights the candles on the table.

  Danny stands in the doorway breathing.

  “Look,” Vale says, shining her flashlight on the two cups hanging from a nail above the sink: pink roses, tea stains.

  “And here,” she says, lifting the flashlight to the feathers and stones and animal bones lined up on the windowsill, and farther up, to the photos tacked to the walls.

  “Lena?” Danny says, moving toward the windowsill, reaching out and touching an animal’s skull with his fingers. “I never knew all this was in here.”

  “Me either,” says Vale. “But she’s here. Her ghost is badass. Very much alive.”

  Danny sits down in a chair in front of the cluster of lit candles. He looks at the floor, the place where his father died one winter night. He nods. “She’s here, your matriarch. Her life written in these things.”

  “Yes,” Vale says, sitting down next to him. “Also: I’m pretty sure we’re part Abenaki.”

  Danny raises his eyes to her. “Really?”

  She tells him about Marie, their great-great-grandmother. About the photo from Lena’s attic. About that note scrawled in the town ledger: Indian.

  “No shit,” Danny says, rubbing the pine of the table with his thumb.

  “Not that it really matters,” Vale says. “But it matters to me. It seems important to know who you are. Bonnie never knew who she was.”

  Danny reaches across the table and puts his hand on top of Vale’s.

  “That’s the tragic part,” Vale says, her voice cracking. A branch breaks outside. “She had to get lost in order for me to—end up here. Get found.” Vale puts both hands on the pine table. She looks at the photos pinned to Lena’s wall.

  “I’m so sorry, Vale,” Danny says quietly.

  Vale puts her fingernail into the soft wax of the candle.
“It happens all the time, to people everywhere, you know? They die. Get lost.”

  “I do,” Danny says.

  Vale takes the two teacups off the wall, cleans them out with the wool of her mittens, and fills each of them from the wine bottle Danny brought. She places one in front of Danny and brings the other to her lips.

  “Maybe that’s why my dad came here, too,” Danny says. “Lena’s ghost here.” He closes his eyes and takes a sip of his wine. “He told me a story once.”

  Vale looks at him. Doesn’t say a word. He’s never spoken about Stephen to her before.

  Danny tells her the story of the woman who married an owl. Of the woman who chose that singing, that half-human world, over all else. Just as Lena did with Otie, Vale thinks. The woman who married an owl.

  “Danny,” she says. She’s been waiting a long time to tell him. Her voice is shaking, a near whisper.

  “Yeah?”

  “Your grandfather came here, too.”

  He eyes her from across the table. “What?”

  Vale’s heart is loud in her chest. She fears it isn’t true, but there is the drawing on the rafters. There are Bonnie’s green eyes.

  Vale moves the flashlight up the wall to her left and shows Danny the inked drawing above the bed. The naked lovers with their exaggerated proportions, the man with a fiddle in his left hand. Their ridiculous and goofy grins. LW + LS.

  Danny looks from the drawing into Vale’s eyes. “Lex and Lena?” Danny says. To Vale the cabin walls suddenly feel too close, too dank, too dark.

  Vale nods. “He disappeared just after my mother was born.”

  Danny downs his teacup of wine and puts his face into his hands. “Jesus. It’s a landscape full of holes and half-truths.”

  “I know,” Vale whispers. The candlelight throws their shadows across the wall.

  Danny looks up from his hands. A dry laugh. “Well, shit, Vale. At least there was love.”

  Vale smiles. Feels a streak of warmth shoot from her chest to her toes. “Yes, there was love.”

  Vale pours Danny more wine. Touches the rim of her rose teacup to his. “To their fucking and their love.”