Back to the Garden

by Clara Hume

  So the boys and I took advantage of the jeep one afternoon and figured we'd drive it down to Sandpoint. I had just a quarter of a tank of fuel and didn't want to waste more of what I had stocked up, but we had enough in the line to get to town and back.

  We had to talk to some of the ranchers who lived down the mountain anyway, to see if they'd come up and watch our homes in the coming months. They were willing but said to be careful in town. We asked why, and they said, "Outlaws." One of them said we should stake out Les Carlson's place because Les had died they'd heard last summer.

  "I'll be damned," Jimmy said. He looked sad and lost at that moment.

  We had our rifles, and the four of us—Daniel, Caine, Jimmy, and I—seemed a formidable crew. Once we got down the mountain, Jimmy showed us where old man Les had lived outside of town. Les’s place was at the edge of a wildfire from two years prior, Jimmy explained. The black scar ran across the land, and the Jimmy said you could probably see it from space it had been so bad. It ran across a deep inlet, and the eroded soil from the wildfire caused floods down below, when it rained. The mountains had wildfires every spring, summer, and fall, but none had reached the cabins on Wild Mountain. But that year, Jimmy said, for days on end they had to shut windows and wear scarves around their faces due to so much smoke. Ash, he said, fell from the sky like black feathers. It was closer than any fire yet.

  Les had a garage and used to service farm equipment, so we rode out there first and never even made it into town. His place looked beat up, weed-strewn, and devoid of life. I followed Jimmy out of the jeep and across a small yard, where a few chickens squawked about our feet. Les's house was a rancher, and beyond it was an acre of yard between the house and the barns, where he had kept his tools, equipment, and livestock once upon a time.

  It was an eerie feeling walking up to his house. The day was cool, but the sunshine felt ancient and shadowy. Jimmy pulled open a screen door, and behind it the storm door was already opened. We peeked around to see a dark, lifeless home.

  Looking around, we saw there had been some looting, but not a lot. Les didn't ever have much in his house, Jimmy said, sadly. "He were a penny pincher—wouldn't have bought a glass of water if he could've saved a nickel."

  The barn was the next stop. The four of us walked out back, our boots crunching on the gravel leading to grassland filled with weeds and snakes. We could hear them crawling through the grass, scooting away from us. The weeds were high, to our knees. We got to the barn, which Jimmy said once had been "red as an apple," but now was worn and pinkish brown. We noticed a complicated system of chains on the barn's double door, held together by a chain combo-lock, which was at least three inches thick.

  "Never mind that," Caine said, "Aye, all the windows are broken." So we climbed in through one of the bigger windows and were met on the other side with musty odors and darkness.

  Jimmy knew exactly where to look. All the tools in the immediate barn area had been taken, he said. But he opened a closet door in the back below the hay lofts and said, "Anyone got a flashlight?"

  I had one from the jeep and shined it through to the walk-in. Jimmy found a trap door and opened it to the overwhelming smell of musty chill.

  "Yep," he said, "She's still here."

  Jimmy said he remembered that Les used to store some fuel down here, and when we climbed down the ladder steps to a full cellar, were surprised to see it all here. We let out a whoop, and Jimmy said, "He musta added a lot of it in the past coupla years, that stinker."

  We hauled it all back to the jeep. Les had already mixed the fuel and stored it in safe containers. When we were piling it into the back of the truck, Jimmy said, "I feel bad takin' from a dead man. I mean, I hope he don't care. Maybe I should leave a thank you note about the fuel."

  We chuckled. I had never met Les, but old Jimmy said he would have wanted us to have it. Like everyone else around these parts, he was a buddy to Jimmy and highly respectful of Fran's and Elena's parents.

  Poring over the rest of the place, back in some buildings Jimmy knew of that weren't close to the house, we found an old shed that had some tractor equipment and parts. We pulled out a small engine that would power the wagon, and then Daniel, who was scouring the junk metal outside the shed, said, "Look at that shit."

  Out in the distance was a tanker wagon. It stood glistening under the cold sun, but as we approached it noticed that the metal parts on it had been torn apart and rusted pretty bad. What was left though were four heavy-duty tires that we figured we could use for the wagon. If that thing had been put together, it would have easily transported a ton or more of materials. It could surely hold our traveling gear and us. We ended up never going to town that day, but took two trips from Les's, heaving the goods we found up the mountain. The second trip we had to hitch up a trailer to the jeep. We got fuel, tires, spindles, axles, hubs, bearings. You should have seen Fran and Elena when they saw us pull up with all that and a few chickens.

  It was a pretty damn rugged engine, even though using an engine in place of horses on an old wagon was a creative building process, and it took all winter. We had to hook up disc brakes to the new tires and improvise a way for the bio-fuel to run through to the engine. We built a fan to cool the motor, counting on the rest of the country to be damn hot. We revised the schooner to have a baseboard built up that would hold the engine out front. We built reaches in front of the jockey box that had foot pedals and brake lines leading to the front wheels. Fran and Elena spent weeks taking old canvas pieces from the barn to make the cover, and they made the bows with clips for putting the cover on the wagon.

  Beneath the wagon bed and over the axels we built a two-foot high storage compartment where all the fuel would be stored in containers, along with water and clothes, though some of that would be carried in the wagon.

  Now all we had to do was wait until the weather cleared up enough to start heading down South.

  Part II—The Leaving

  It is not down in any map; true places never are.

  -Herman Melville (Moby-Dick)

  Maisie—Chapter 10

  My father built our home in the fog of the Sierra Nevada Sequoias. He had told me that when he was a child some nights you could see a beautiful chorus of spirits settle over the forest and feel the winds upwelling and chilling your bones. My mother, who was from Georgia, met Dad during a vacation in California and adapted the mysteries of her southern superstitious upbringing to the western forests.

  The nebulous atmosphere of the Redwoods lent itself to her mindset, not the hoodoo of the bayous, but of Appalachia. She twisted old tales into new ones. If one heard the rare marbled murrelet after dark, it was a portent of death. She always buried her hair after cutting it, lest birds grasped it in their talons, giving her headaches for weeks. If someone died in the house, the clock must be stopped in that room. She wouldn't buy wind chimes, because they called the dead to awaken from their gravely slumber.

  When I was born right at midnight, my mama said I'd be able to see and talk with ghosts. It was an old legend, and it never came true in my case. She was convinced though, because as a young child I often stared into the distance, dreaming or thinking, but she thought I was looking at ghosts. I also began to draw and paint at a young age, and my subjects were abstract, for the transition of our world from fog to sunlight was confusing to me. I would paint the sky, the treelines, and all would appear fluid and wild. Mother said there were spirits in my paintings.

  Dad studied the reduction of the frequency of the fog in the great trees. He was often out in the forests wearing his ranger suit, documenting in notebooks, and had an air of sound mind and logic—while Mom drifted about the spacious lodge dressed in bangles, feathers, shawls, flowery skirts, braids, and scarves. If my father was a rock, she was the wind.

  She started a little café at our homestead on the outskirts of Silver City. She would cook only two types of food: Appalachian and Yokuts. Her specialty was shucky beans, and once people learned what it
was, they'd come from miles around—and all the tourists who had tried the beans came back year after year if they didn't live near enough to come by every day.

  We had rangers and ranchers and loggers stop by every afternoon for their fix of cornbread and shucky beans. The beans you had to dry out. I remember the way Mom strung them up in a sunny window for days at a time. Then she would cook them with salt pork. Into her cornbread she added crunchy bits from her famous fried chicken to make "cracklin' bread."

  She became obsessed with native Yokuts food, too, thanks to a local woman named Maggie Morgan who was in her 80s and passed all this stuff down to Mama, who learned how to make acorn bread. To make the bread you had to pound acorns into flour and then put a little water into that mix to absorb the tannic acid. Once this flour dried, it made a crust, which you could mix with water again to make into dough.

  At night we would have visitors hanging out on our big wrap-around porch, drinking and eating various traditional foods. Those nights I remember the heat of the dying day, the big sun lowering itself into the horizon like a phoenix closing its wings.

  We had no air-conditioning. We relied on the shade of the biggest trees in the world, but because of the lack of rain and moisture, most of them were stressed and we were left with a shell of our once rich land: scattered trees and a homestead that had been deserted due to death and travel. And the wildfires. They happened each summer and more than once threatened our home. I remember ash filling the skies like billions of insects as noxious smoke stung my nostrils. Then it happened. During a lightning storm, the fire crept close enough to us to burn down Mama's café.

  After Dad died of the flu, Mom hitched a ride down South to find her mama, who must have been in her 90s by then and I doubted she was still alive, but Mom couldn't stay here, she said. Too many bad memories. If she could only find some kin, she might once again feel some familiarity in the world. I wasn't kin enough, apparently, though she insisted she would return someday.

  It was my job to bury my father—she couldn't do that—and keep up the household. But week after week, the operation became too lonely. I wouldn't see another soul for days. Sometimes Maggie's adopted son Joe would come up to see how I was doing.

  I hadn't seen Joe for a while. I would sit out on the front porch each evening, waiting to see his lithe body coming down the lane of weeds and wild things growing in abundance. I longed for the old fog, the old silvery moon outlined by an aura of mist—but nowadays it was a purple sky sketched with waves of heat, folding into red sunsets, dry breath, and dust.

  I wanted to see if Joe would stay up here at the old house while I went to find Mama. He'd think I was crazy for sure, but I figured I could convince him because he loved our home so, and his mother was buried out back with my father. I had asked him often to stay up there with me, but he couldn't, or wouldn't. It had to do with some unrequited love thing he had going for me. I had never given him any indication of affinity, and while intellectually he realized that, he had had this love for too long and it wasn't going away. I figured if he couldn't live with me as a friend, he might live at my house if I had to leave.

  Even now, with nothing left here but memories, I couldn't foresee leaving the place by itself without someone looking after it. Oh, there were some chickens and a couple goats. An old nag. They'd need some looking after, but if Joe wouldn't do it, I could easily get the animals to a neighboring farm.

  It was on one of these heated early spring evenings, when the last of the mountain snow had melted and the sun played tricks in the low horizon, when I finally saw Joe coming down the lane. I knew it was him because of his black hair and hands in his overalls pockets—but he was not alone. He walked alongside a wagon, with who knows how many people in it, and for the first time in months I became both excited and nervous. I hadn't seen much in the way of visitors in the last few years. Oh, some drifters here and there who were up to no good, who I had to scare off with my rifle. Or some locals who came up to say hello when they felt healthy enough to ride or walk over. I had to assume if Joe was bringing anyone to my home, they'd damn well better be pleasant types of folks.

  Pretty soon they were ascending my porch, all weary and hot and thirsty. They had with them a little green-eyed girl who looked no older than age three or so and an older man who appeared as though he was going to pass out.

  Joe was a shy but genuinely good man, which made me wonder why I couldn't fall for him, but I figured I just couldn't. I'd known him my whole life. Shortly before I was born, Maggie had adopted him, at age five, from an East Indian woman who had settled in the area years before but was dying. Maggie couldn't ever have kids. I grew up with Joe, and he felt like a brother.

  He jumped up on my porch, and his jaw was square and his eyes sad and gray-green. Perpetually, he looked lost and too thin. He introduced the others quickly. "They came down from Idaho, heading a stretch down California before going on to South Carolina. They need a place for a few days. They say they can help out around the house or whatever you want if we can put them up for just a bit."

  I immediately jumped up and said, "Joe, go get some water from the creek. Come on up, you all. It's cooler out on the porch, and I've got the room."

  Heck, the lodge was built with visitors in mind. There were several bedrooms with cots or built-in bunks. Nothing fancy, but it was roomy and would suffice.

  Joe went out back to the creek with a wheelbarrow and some big buckets, and I went inside to get a ladle and some cups. I also cut up some bread and brought out the lard from the cellar. In no time, we had a feast on our front porch, and I invited the visitors to wash up afterward down in the creek.

  It was like night and day when I saw them with clean faces after our meal. With the sun still up in the sky, we opted to stay on the porch where an occasional breeze would rumble by—except the little girl, Kristy was her name, was so sleepy that her mom laid her inside on the sofa.

  They had brought red wine and rum, which they wanted to share with Joe and me. I hadn't drank anything in ages, but brought out mugs, and we had pleasant conversation but an uncomfortable night of mosquitoes and heat. I asked them, "Where you going?"

  The man who answered seemed familiar. But I couldn't place him right then and there. He had a full beard, deep eyes, and a sort of rugged look about him. "Up near Sandpoint, Idaho. Headed down South to visit this one's mother, and that one's father." He pointed to the two women in the group.

  One was a tanned, blond squirt of a girl who was quite beautiful in a tomboyish way. The other was a sad-looking but mysteriously attractive dark woman.

  "Where in the South?"

  "Off the coast, near Beaufort," the shorter girl said. She had a clear voice, like a mountain stream. I kinda got the feeling she and the rugged man were a couple. They didn't touch each other but had some sort of connection. You could tell by their body language and the way they looked at each other.

  "My mom and her dad," she pointed to the other girl, "are supposed to be in Beaufort, South Carolina. They left together last year."

  "That's odd. I was just sitting out here thinking how I would love to go find my own mother. She's in Athens, Georgia last I knew."

  Joe looked at me funnily. I gazed over at him. He sat on the steps of the porch, looking gloomy suddenly. I should have said something to him before laying it on these strangers, but I had often told him I wanted to find my mother. I just couldn't believe my luck in having a group come down the lane that were going where I had dreamed of going. I'd talk to Joe tonight alone, if I could.

  The dark girl spoke up. It would take me a while to know their names, but she was Elena, the mother of the little girl and Daniel's partner. "Well, we've got room in our wagon. It's the least we could do for the lodging while we rest up. The road has been harsh."

  "What's it like out there?" I asked.

  Nobody spoke for a while. You could see it in their faces. Not what they expected. I knew just from riding the mare down the mountain occasionall
y these were wild times. I had seen a dead cow in the middle of a road, dead long enough for buzzards to gather from overhead, and yet not dead long enough for a desperate family to be looking at the fly-covered guts to see if any meat was salvageable. I'd seen dead fish choking rivers, the nearby towns deserted. I had once stopped in on the Anderson's down the mountain only to learn that the parents were gone and the teenage boys who survived were guarding their homestead with rifles aimed at me, not even wanting to say hello to an old neighbor.

  Surely, it could not all be that bad. Weren't humans mostly charitable and warm when others were hurting? Or was that my own bias being amongst country folk all my life?

  "It ain't too damn nice out there, missy," said the old man, who I would come to know as Jimmy. "You gotta toughen up to see the world as it is these days. Though if ya wanna really think upon it, I cain't say that fuckin' Somalia, and places like it, haven't always been this way. Only now you got it in the so-called rich countries."

  I groaned a bit inside. It was getting late now. The night was upon us. I couldn't drink too much; it made me feel dizzy. Joe and I excused ourselves to go make up the beds for our guests.

  He said, "I am sorry for bringing them by, but I didn't think you'd mind. They've been on the road for a couple weeks. Been in that motorized wagon, the weirdest thing. Those tires seem to be pretty sturdy, and they're trying not to cross any streams in it. Said they brought a cookstove, a first-aid kit, food, water, fuel, a bit of bedding and clothing, some guns, and some wine. Not a whole lot else."

  "Of course I don't mind, Joe."

  "Look, are you really thinking of going with them?"

  "Well, it's funny, but I was sitting there on the porch when you all came up and was just wondering if there'd be any way I could ever get to the Athens to see if Mama was okay. I've talked with you about that before, Joe."

  He nodded. We were putting sheets on the bunks in the back bedrooms. I opened the windows since it was night and there'd be a bit of breeze—but the bugs would come in too.