Back to the Garden

by Clara Hume

  When we finally pulled through Joe's death we decided to have an apple-picking day. We'd already harvested the garden crops that hadn't been picked over the summer. Now it was time for the late maturing apples. It was a big deal, with everyone on the mountain coming over to help. The morning was ripe and cold, and the sky white, but throughout the day the sun began to break through, covering us with golden goodness.

  Floppy wouldn't leave Fran's side. Maybe he sensed the new life growing inside her and felt protective. I knew the minute I first saw Fran at Lake Stardust, seemingly ages ago, that creatures felt at harmony with her. I don't know what it was about her. Or maybe I should know, since I was just another creature loving her. She was getting bigger now and wouldn't sit still or stop helping with chores. Her place was the forest, not the inside of the cabin. She had to be with the trees and rocks and wind and streams. There was still some unfinished business with her mom, too, and she never spoke about it. I could see it in her eyes. Time might heal. But making that summer journey meant everything to her, and Fran seemed forever grateful to all of us for going along.

  This morning she had filled buckets with apples, and when the sun came out from behind clouds she began to make cider. Sometimes I caught myself just admiring her from a distance.

  Maisie was making acorn bread when an old rancher from near Les Carlson's place came up to join us. He had a letter with him, which he said had been left at Sandpoint's post office.

  I read it aloud.

  "Dear youngen's,

  'Ol Jimmy Coombs here. I am writing in hopes you all have by now made it safely back to the mountain. I've missed ya deeply, though my time with my best buddy Ishmael was necessary. We'll be heading back to the mountain come spring-time. Make room for us. I'll be bringing Ishmael along with Kenny, though I am sad to report Eugenia's passing shortly after that of her man. I think it's a simple case of death by heartache.

  Please scout around the mountain and find Kenny here a good woman. He ain't had any pussy since, well, who knows when; as a good man like to say: good pussy is what keeps ya pouncin'.

  Yours truly,

  Jimmy Coombs"

  We all laughed at Jimmy's terminology but were saddened to hear about Eugenia and took some time to let it sink in. How much death could we handle before reaching a breaking point? Best not to think about it too much, I figured. Else we'd never get back to living. But I think we all carried with us a part of Joe and Eugenia, along with others who'd died—children, fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, friends. We carried them around every day just so it felt like they were still here.

  We went back to work, filling buckets with apples.

  Barbara said later as we gathered back at the cabin for lunch. "I can't believe a letter got here. And I'm going to faint if I see old Jimmy again. I just loved that man. Course he's a little rough around the edges."

  "I guess this is really time to celebrate," insisted Daniel. "Apples is one reason, but Jimmy coming home?"

  "I'm just going to have to make my mulled wine," Barbara said whimsically. "Now I don't care if we don't have everything that goes in it, but I remember where the cinnamon and nutmeg are, and as far as I'm concerned, those are the only spices we truly need."

  "Bring me some too for the cider, Mom?" Fran asked.

  "Sure, honey."

  Later that afternoon, as we were winding down the harvest, Buddha told me he wanted to ride one of our horses soon. "When it snows," he added.

  "Sure, man. What's your fascination with that all about? You know, riding across the snow?"

  "I heard it in a song you sang when we were down in Mississippi."

  I remembered. "If you are lucky it could be soon, because I think it may just snow tonight."

  "That's what I figured, dude. Look." Buddha looked up toward the sky.

  Thin uniform clouds were growing in a fickle sky that couldn't decide whether to storm or be clear. I smiled at Buddha. "Casey is a great horse to ride. You'll have a good old time."

  "And I'm not too fat?"

  "No way, man."

  Even though the late afternoon brought a few flurries, we enjoyed the day too much to come inside. We craved the cold. It was as if our reunion today had severely reminded us of the heat we'd endured when traveling together. Today we simply layered on more clothing the colder it got. Between Fran's spiked cider and Barbara's mulled wine, we were all feeling a little numb, except for Fran who was drinking tea. While we sat talking around the bonfire, Floppy circled us as wolves howled.

  It was when Floppy began barking wildly that we all arose and looked outward from the nearby garden. Nobody was for sure what was happening. Floppy paced back and forth near the bonfire, and finally Daniel, Caine, Buddha, and I, along with a few ranchers from down the mountain, grabbed our rifles to go check out what was going on.

  "Fran, babe, why don't you head inside," I suggested.

  "Are you nuts?" Fran marched off and returned with her camera. "If something's out there, I'm going too."

  There was no sense in arguing with her. The best I could do was roll my eyes and watch out for her.

  We broke up into pairs and carried walkies, with the knowledge we would only call out in an emergency. Buddha was an odd man out so came with Fran and me. Each team took off toward the general direction Floppy had been barking, with us three investigating just north of the apple grove. We walked gently and avoided stepping on twigs or branches. Willy and Johnny had stayed back with the rest, and as we walked I could tell they'd put out the fire, for the smoke ceased.

  "What do you think is out here worth taking a picture of?" I whispered to Fran.

  "That's why you take a camera," she replied. "You never know what'll be there."

  Buddha didn't say anything at all. He kept looking up at the sky for more snow. His chubby face was like a scared kid's though. He may have been a rough biker, but since his friends had been murdered so ruthlessly, he'd not been as gutsy as he may have once been.

  Fran was the first to hold out her hand to stop us from walking further.

  "What?" I whispered.

  "Shhh," she demanded softly. She crept back to hide behind the trunk and foliage of a sugar pine, motioning for us to come to her.

  We crept down with her. The light of the day was still good, but I didn't see anything yet. Fran's cold gaze warned us to shut up and quit trying to ask her what she thought was out there.

  We sat for a few moments before we heard a rustle near the pines at the edge of the apple grove. Beyond the trees rushed a healthy stream that ran from the hatchery making its way down to Lake Stardust.

  When a bear strode out from the pines I wondered if it were there for the trout. The animal didn't see us. It was more interested in a bucket of apples someone had left on the ground earlier. Then, my eyes widened as two cubs followed their mother out of the bushes. I could see Fran grin widely. Buddha and I may have been aiming our guns the whole time, because we didn't know who might be out here, but Fran was ready to shoot with her camera.

  The mama bear sat eating a piece of fruit, and her children followed suit. Fran snapped photo after photo. I figured that Fran had also noticed the yellow ear tag on the bear. That was our bear, the one we'd tracked that Daniel had tagged. I did the math in my head. When we last saw this bear it was just about a year ago. She hadn't visibly been pregnant then, but her cubs were only about three months now, which meant she had gotten pregnant around the time we tagged her before. Somewhere in our mountains was the father too then. It was good news to us, and we managed to watch the bears eat apples and play in the golden afternoon weeds before they finally went off into the interior of the forest.

  While walking back, we contacted the others on the walkie. Nobody else had found anything, so we figured Floppy had been barking about the bears. When we got back to the crowd, Willy had gotten another fire going and Barbara was passing around more spiced wine and cider.

  We joined everyone at the fire again to prepare for a night
of celebration. I sat with my arm around Fran, who was wearing her dad's old flannel jacket and had a blanket wrapped around her. She snuggled up close to me, and I felt I was really home.

  Today had been a good day, I thought. We'd been so exhausted from travel until recently. Coming back to our mountain and our gardens had redeemed us. A chill was settling in, though, and our breath grew frosty, while the last of the day's orange sunshine flowed above us, glinting off hay and trees as we sat around the fire. The scent of apples, pines, cedar, and fire smoke accented the dying day, while wind picked up and blew fiercely across the mountain.

  At one point I stopped listening to the chatter around the fire and looked up to the sky. A snowflake touched my cheek, and the sun began its ritual descent into the horizon. Meanwhile, the wind grew so hard that my hair began blowing and stinging my face. Way up there the mountains stood as heartily as always—the tallest of them snow-covered and shrouded in mist. I felt comfortable with the knowledge that some things on Earth took longer to destroy than others, even though in just over forty years on this planet I'd seen entire landscapes, species, and economies collapse. But now I, along with the people I loved, had awoken to another day, and that was something to embrace. For just one moment, as I focused on the sky, I felt that we were ephemeral--but we were also meaningful, at this time, before the end of our kind. I clinched the moment as the sun sank.

  About the Author

  Clara Hume writes fiction under a pen name and lives with her husband and cats in British Columbia. She often imagines new story ideas as she runs or hikes the wild trails of the coastal temperate rainforest in BC. She holds Bachelor of Arts degrees in anthropology and English literature from Purdue University.

  Her short story “The Midnight Moon” appeared in the anthology Winds of Change: Short Stories about our Climate (Moon Willow Press, October 2015). Her short memoir about the Atnarko River appeared under her real name, Mary Woodbury, in Stormbird Press’s anthology Tales from the River (September 2018). Under her non-pen name, she is also a team writer at ClimateCultures.net and SFF.com; she has guest-posted several articles for the Free Word Centre.