Heart Spring Mountain

by Robin MacArthur

  Danny shakes his head. Smiles at her. “To their fucking and their love.”

  THEY WALK BACK IN THE DARK. AT HAZEL’S PORCH DANNY opens his arms and she falls against him, lets him hold her.

  Danny heads back inside to find Deb, and Vale goes to Hazel’s car. She will drive to Neko’s room. She will climb those stairs and let herself in. She will undress while he is sleeping, and slip under his sheets and down comforter, wrap herself around his thin and war-familiar body. The warmth of another human body: how badly we all need it, she thinks as she drives, headlights rippling across the bare bodies of trees. How essential, that coupling in the dark of winter.

  She reaches for her phone and puts on John Lennon’s “Love.” A song Bonnie loved. Reaching: her mother’s arms reaching on that bridge. She loves Danny. She thinks she might love Neko. No matter, it’s him she will reach for. That warmth, that touching. The way he looks into her eyes and says hello as if surprised every time. She parks her car. Climbs the stairs. Opens the door and lets herself inside. Finds his body in the darkness. Finds herself there, in that touching. In the morning the sun rises. Lights the room. Luz. If she has a daughter, she will name her Luz, Vale thinks, watching it come.

  Lena

  MAY 23, 1957

  Lena whispers, “Adele” in her sleep, dreams of those jars of herbs. Hemlock. White pine. Bloodroot. What would be the remedy for this? The only cure she knows, for sure, is her child, nursing. Her girl-child! Feathered, pink-eared, blue-veined. Easter egg, bird. Bonnie. And Otie—where is he? She smiles thinking of him, hopes that Adele will go find him. Oh my goddamn, “Bring me my child!” she tries to yell, but her voice is weak and the house still, the cooling tin roof ticking, a sliver of moonlight sliding across the whitewashed floor.

  She yells again into the night, but her voice is thin. Not what it should be. Her head spins. She’s on the dance floor, spinning; those streaks of alizarin, streaks of crimson. She is so hot. She throws off the covers, throws off the sheet, rips the gown off her chest. She reaches for the cloth beside her, dips it into the bowl of cool water on the bedside table, rubs it across her chest, across her throbbing breasts, spurting milk into the sour sheets and sour pillow.

  Where is her child? Her legs won’t move. Won’t rise. She can’t get up, and yet she must, and then the door is opening, and she calls out into the darkness, “Baby B?”

  But it is Lex.

  He comes to her, puts his hands onto her shoulders. “Shh, Lena Bird,” he whispers, sitting down on the edge of the bed beside her.

  Lena lies down. Feels the sheets underneath her. Lets his hand touch her brow, her hair, her neck, the burning skin of her chest.

  “Lena,” he says, and she can smell the whiskey on him. “You have to get better. You have to sleep.”

  Sleep. She reaches for Lex’s hands, holds them to her. Puts them on her swollen breasts. “Squeeze, Lex, please,” she says, and so he does. He pinches one nipple, and then the next, releasing the pressure. Milk squirts down her side, pools beneath her ribs. Lex finds the cloth and mops up the pooled milk. Squeezes more. Gently, but firm enough.

  The release. The burning pain. “Suck them, please,” she pleads. He looks into her eyes, meets her there, then leans over and puts his lips onto her nipple, gently sucking the milk out, swallowing. One breast and then the other. And Lena can breathe. Oh, sweet Jesus, she can finally breathe.

  “Sleep, my love,” Lex says when he pulls away, the side of his face lit by the moon’s milk-white glow, his fingers on the cloth cooling the fever from her freckled chest.

  “Where is Otie?” Lena asks.

  “Adele took him.”

  “And Bonnie?”

  “Hazel is caring for her.”

  “Lex.”

  “Yes?”

  “There are letters. In the cabin.”

  “Okay.”

  “Burn them.”

  “Burn them?”

  “Burn them.” Lena smiles.

  Lena sleeps. She sleeps for the first time in days, while Lex sits and wipes her brow with a cool cloth. In her dream Bonnie is in her arms, and they are walking. The side of a mountain, snowcapped, but they are warm in layers of wool, hats stuffed with feathers.

  Her girl-child Bonnie is two, or three—apple-cheeked and strong-limbed. They walk and they sing. They sing and they walk. The trees around them—hemlock and spruce—quiver with their footsteps, join their singing with a feathery hum. “Where are we going?” Bonnie calls out, laughing, and Lena laughs also, calls back, “To the top of the mountain!”

  They are hiking to the top of the mountain, this mother and this daughter. Snowcapped. A dome of white light. Treeless. A flock of gray birds circling its tip.

  “What’s at the top of the mountain?” Bonnie calls out, her voice cherry red, joy-filled, a bell, and Lena responds, “Love, my love! At the top of the mountain is love!” And so they hike together. And when the girl-child tires, Lena picks her up and carries her, singing, and wraps her in her woolen shawl, and when she falls asleep in Lena’s arms she carries her still, humming, until they reach the highest crest of the highest peak. Otie is with them, wing-repaired, flying in circles. Hooting. Fierce. Angry. To the very top of the mountain. Ablaze with white light, snowflakes, frost-flecked moss and granite. At the top Lena lies down in a bed of that frosted moss and snow and holds her daughter close to her, closes her eyes, and sleeps, all the while humming, and her girl-child smiles. She smiles! Otie sitting nearby. Bird-friend. Girl-child. Apple cheeks, smiling. Bonnie, the Bonnie in the month of May, the last light fading on her apple lips, Bonnie.

  Hazel

  DECEMBER 19, 2011

  The light is strange this evening, or nighttime, what is it?—candlelight flickering, firelight from the wood stove, the sounds unfamiliar, here in the front room where she lies on the hospital bed, facing the darkened view. Her father’s view, the one Ezekial Wood, her great-something-grandfather, chose two hundred years ago. The view the Indians saw, back when the trees were native. Those hills! Them stars. That was the song the lady came and sang: Them stars, how often I’ve laid on the prairie and watched them go spinning around. Hazel cannot move her head, but she can hear voices from the kitchen, occasional laughter. The women are here. They are always here. She calls out with what voice she has left: “Mother?”

  And then her mother is by her side. Or not her mother but the girl who looks like her. Vale. Eyelids painted with a splash of silver or blue that somehow looks like moonlight.

  “Hazel? Hello. I’m here.”

  Hazel can’t take her eyes off those blue sparkling eyelids. Flecks of silver in there, and maybe purple, too. It must be the flickering light, making those colors blaze so. The blue of morning hoarfrost on the windows. Blue sky reflecting on ice in winter.

  “Hazel?” the girl says, standing there looking down at her like a tall and unfamiliar bird. “You want something?” She blinks and the blue powder shimmers.

  “Yes,” Hazel says.

  The girl leans closer. Smiles. Touches Hazel’s hand. “Tell me,” she whispers.

  The words are fibrous in her throat. They force their way out, slowly: “I want my eyes done.”

  The girl looks at her for a moment like she hasn’t heard, or understood, and then she smiles. Steps backward. “You want your eyes done, like mine?”

  “Yes.”

  Just do it, Hazel thinks.

  “Okay,” the girl says, going to the corner for her bag, returning with it and sitting down on the chair next to Hazel.

  Hazel feels Vale’s fingers on her cheeks, then on the loose flesh below her eyes.

  “Close your eyes,” the girl says, quiet, and Hazel does.

  Like a baby. When was she ever touched like this? She can suddenly smell her mother: that combination of flour and egg whites and milk that hung on her for years. Her mother must have touched her like this, stroked her forehead, her cheeks, oh God, her temples like this.

  Mother, Hazel thinks. Wh
at will happen to our house when I die? What will happen to the land? Heart Spring Mountain. Eternal water. The girl puts her hands on each of Hazel’s cheeks and rubs a cool cream into them. Ah! It is like fresh air, like breathing the quiet song of snow. Hazel can feel Stephen at her breast, his small fingers holding the heavy skin, his one visible green eye shocking her with its gaze. What did that eye want? Even then she couldn’t be sure. My baby, my one and only baby, she sang to him, in that rocking chair, in that house, that whole long winter.

  She hears the clicking of jars, the unscrewing of a lid, and the girl reappears above her holding a jar of blue.

  “Blue okay?” she whispers, and Hazel nods.

  “It looks beautiful,” the girl says, dabbing the sparkling paint onto Hazel’s eyelids. Blending silver and blue so it looks, Hazel imagines, like moonlight over a snow-covered land. But for the first time in a long time Hazel isn’t thinking about the land. She’s thinking about those fingers, there on her cheeks, her eyelids, stroking the soft skin below her ears. She’s thinking about Stephen up there in the woods. My boy. She’s thinking of that morning she entered Lena’s room so many years ago. A tray of tea and hot oatmeal.

  She entered and the tray fell to the floor by her feet. Her sister’s damp face. An unfamiliar hue.

  “No,” she said. That’s all. That quick word—no.

  Later, that afternoon—after the doctor, and the casket, and Lena’s body being carried away—Hazel walked into the nursery to check on Bonnie and found Lex there. Bonnie in his arms, his finger clenched in her miniature fist.

  “You have to leave,” she said.

  “Please, no,” he answered, his eyes bloodshot, his body stinking of sweat and alcohol. He put his lips on Bonnie’s brow, sang: My Bonnie lies over the ocean.

  “Leave,” Hazel said, her voice cool and strong as granite, and he stared at her for a long minute, then turned and set Bonnie in her cradle. Placed his lips on her forehead, a deep breath, before leaving the room.

  He did not write. He did not call. It was the last time Hazel saw him.

  Hazel looks up into those eyes above her—what a beautiful child. Beautiful child! There are tears in her own eyes, and for a moment she worries that this girl will see them, and then she is not worrying about that at all. They come fast and silent, the tears, stream down her face and pool in the valleys of her cheeks. She is thinking about that translucent blue powdering her eyes, about light filling her veins, about the beauty of sunlight reflecting on snow. Why did she wait so long for this? Was it this easy, all along, simply lying down and letting herself be touched? Hazel thinks for a moment she is dying, that she will never be able to breathe again, that her heart has seized, but then she does breathe, and a sob erupts from her chest. A single one.

  “It’s okay,” the girl whispers, love and terror in her eyes. “It’s okay.”

  Vale

  DECEMBER 19, 2011

  It’s late—ten or eleven. Danny climbs into the passenger seat, and they drive the few short minutes to Neko’s. He is, by some miracle, awake, and Vale takes his hand and leads him to the door. Slips a hat on his head. Says, “Shhh.”

  Neko puts on his coat, grins, follows her to the car.

  Neither of them knows where she’s driving. She puts on Leonard Cohen’s Best Of in honor of Danny’s hayloft serenades. Danny turns to her. “You remember.”

  “Of course,” Vale says, smiling. They drive the back roads, covered in a slim sheet of snow, the moon full or nearly so, the barns and fields near fluorescent in the night light, the landscape lunar.

  Cohen sings about lonesome and quarrelsome heroes, and Danny sings along at the top of his lungs, and Vale and Neko join in. Shouting. Singing out of key. Vale driving too fast. Intoxicated by recklessness and moonlight.

  He sings about turning into gold, and they all do, too, their voices awful, all rage and laughter.

  “This song,” Danny says, slamming his fist on the dashboard. “Too damn good.”

  “Cohen salvation,” Neko says quietly, leaning in from the backseat and kissing Vale’s neck.

  Vale accelerates. Gives the finger to the full moon.

  SHE DOESN’T KNOW EXACTLY WHERE SHE’S HEADED UNTIL she finds herself passing the driveway to Ginny’s Farther Heaven. Of course. She puts the car into reverse. Backs up and turns up the driveway.

  She has to gun it with the snow; at the last hill the tires spin out and the car slides into the ditch.

  “Shit,” Vale whispers. “I guess we walk.”

  They climb out and scramble up the rest of the driveway in the dark. There are no lights on in the farmhouse. Vale hasn’t thought this through entirely, but she has a hunch that if Ginny wakes, she won’t mind.

  She leads them to the backside of the house, to the attached barn converted to living room, slides open a window, and they all climb inside. It’s cold in there—the wood stove unlit—but the purple trapeze silk is still hanging, a streak of dark in the center of the moonlit room.

  Peacock feathers litter the floor. “The promised land,” Danny says, picking one up, smiling.

  Neko is quiet. Eyes the trapeze silk and then Vale.

  Vale throws off her hat and coat. She pulls off her boots and socks and goes to the fabric. She slips her sweater over her head. Steps out of her jeans so that she’s wearing just her black lace bra and her gray long underwear. She lifts herself up—climbing—animal, creature-esque there in that moonlight, to the very top. She ties a knot below her foot and finds her balance—holds her left arm and left leg out, swivels her hips and neck until the fabric begins to spin. Slow. Then faster.

  She doesn’t look down at the faces she knows are there, looking up. This isn’t about being seen. Or is it? She closes her eyes and imagines Shante’s voice floating up from below—the syncopated strum of her ukulele, her voice, thick and beautiful, twining up through the air. There’s a skylight amid the rafters, the moon bright in it, and every time Vale spins, that moonlight flickers across her face. A strobe light in that old barn.

  The radiance falls on all of us, Bonnie, Vale thinks, spinning. Those men she loves below her, looking up. Those men who love her, looking up. Ginny’s wild spirit, asleep in the next room, eyeing her through the walls. The peacocks, asleep in their corners. On every one of us, Vale thinks, spinning, feeling every muscle in her body work. Every fucking one.

  Deb

  DECEMBER 19, 2011

  She is half-asleep on the couch in Hazel’s room. This vigilant tending. Hazel’s breath uneven, ragged. Rising and falling. The dark brown of the catheter bag, its sour, human smell. Her body occasionally arcing in what Deb can only assume is unbearable pain. Deb’s been giving her a dose of morphine twice a day, but it doesn’t seem to be enough. The nurse from hospice brought her into the kitchen yesterday, said quietly, “This is up to you. How much pain you want her to endure. How long this journey lasts.” She looked pointedly toward the jar of morphine on the table. “You know what I’m saying?” she said, her voice tender, and Deb had nodded. She understands.

  And so it is up to Deb and Danny and Vale.

  They slipped out an hour or more ago and have not yet returned. Cousins. Old friends. She is grateful they have each other as the world transforms into something other. Apocalyptic or just plain harder than before.

  And who will she have as the great world spins? Deb pours herself some more wine and thinks of Stephen and the darkness that must have lived inside him. That quiet suffering. She thinks: it is good to approach sixty. The doors open. The birds fly out or in. The light in the painting quivers. The music becomes more expansive, essential, quixotic.

  “Stephen,” she whispers into the dark. This room he grew up in. Its airs his own. “Life gets better. Less pungent. I wish you were here to find that out with me.” One’s suffering takes on hushed tones, Deb thinks. Becomes peppered with light.

  But he is long gone. Twenty-five years she has been alone. Who will she fuck in the last half of her life? Sh
e would like to fuck Bird again. She would like to fuck the man who drives the town plow. She would like to fuck Georges Brassens. Oh how she would like to be found again! She would like to make love to Stephen in their bed, their sleeping child above. For so many years she has been waiting for Danny to come home and make her whole. And now Danny is home. And still she is alone.

  Deb throws her head back against the cushions of the couch. “It’s never too late to want to be fucked,” she says out loud to Hazel, whose eyes flinch for a moment. “Never too late to learn to want something.” How drunk is she? She will go out looking next Tuesday, after work. She’ll go to the bar and sit there, like she did when she was nineteen, freshly washed, looking to get fucked. She’ll ask Ginny to join her. Deb laughs, moonlight streaking across her face and cheekbones. “Never too late to want to be fucked,” she whispers.

  The dying woman takes a breath in, lurches to her side slightly, exhales. Those cheekbones, Deb thinks. Those beautiful unloved and dying cheekbones. Like Sandra Milo’s. Like Lena Olin’s. Like Grace Paley’s, and Georgia O’Keeffe’s and Sandrine Bonnaire’s in Vagabond. “May your journey be peaceful,” Deb says out loud, rising and going to Hazel, taking her hand in her own.

  Danny

  DECEMBER 19, 2011

  Danny stands outside the door of the farmhouse where Hazel, his grandmother, lies dying, and where his mother—aged, beautiful, bent-shouldered—sits drinking her wine alone. He can see her through the glass windows of this house that has sheltered for two hundred years, will shelter still. This house that his great-great-grandmother Marie moved to while her culture went silent, became unknown, disappeared into the trees.

  She looks beautiful, his mother does. Serene. Not yet finished with this life and its living. Her head tipped back. Her eyes closed. A fierceness there he’d forgotten. She would tell him anything. He thinks of the French and Russian and Italian and Scandinavian movies she showed him when he was young. Jean Seberg and Brigitte Bardot and Ingrid Bergman. Her uninhibited weeping. Her laughter and dancing. The sex scenes that made him cringe, turn away, embarrassed, and her laughter and bright voice: “Gah! Ridiculous. Also: deep pleasure, my son. Deep pleasure.”