True Places

by Sonja Yoerg

  ALSO BY SONJA YOERG

  All the Best People

  The Middle of Somewhere

  House Broken

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2019 by Sonja Yoerg

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com , Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503904781 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1503904784 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781503904552 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1503904555 (paperback)

  Cover design by Caroline Teagle Johnson

  First edition

  To the memory of my mother

  and her garden

  CONTENTS

  START READING

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

  —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

  CHAPTER 1

  The girl knew before she opened her eyes that Mama was gone. She always knew. The air inside the cabin cradled a hollow space, a missing shadow of warmth, an exhaled hum, the absent heartbeat. Early mornings were best for hunting, she accepted that, but loneliness was a heavy cloud to wake up in all the same.

  She turned onto her back and listened to a squirrel hightail it across the roof. One beat of quiet; it had leaped. Her own limbs sensed the animal’s limbs extending, forepaws reaching defiantly, no hint of hesitation, tail along for the ride. Gravity was a prop, a toy. Leaves rustled as the squirrel landed. The girl clenched her teeth, pulled in one side of her mouth, and sucked hard, letting loose a chatter. The squirrel answered.

  The girl swung her feet to the floor, keeping the blanket around her shoulders. Pale, streaky sunlight filtered through chinks in the log walls. She tested the air with a breath. Not that cold. April was here, but winter crouched nearby, haunches twitching, ready to dump more snow, make sure they got down to the last of the deer jerky. Maybe they’d get lucky and outrun winter this time. Maybe today Mama would get a turkey.

  She threw off the blanket, pulled on pants, and tucked in the shirt that fell to midthigh. Her father’s leather belt was so long that after she cinched it she slid the dangling end nearly all the way around again. She crammed her feet into rubber boots, pushing her toes against the rags she’d stuffed into the ends to make them fit, and slipped her knife through a belt loop at her hip.

  “Come on, Ash.” She beckoned impatiently to the empty room, unlatched the door, and stepped outside onto the narrow porch.

  Fog hung in the trees, a hush of silvery damp, but the girl could tell the sun would burn through before long and dry the grasses hunched under the weight of dew. The cabin stood in a small clearing, and the trees surrounding it had strained toward the heavens for a long time, long enough for the trunks to have become too thick for the girl to enclose them in the circle of her arms, long enough for anyone with decency to fall silent in reverence. The clearing was so circumscribed that if a bordering tree fell—and this she had imagined several times—the ones opposite would catch it in outstretched limbs before it crashed onto the cabin roof. Indeed, she had wished for this, to have a massive trunk leaning over them like the shaft of a giant arrow driven into the ground from above. It was unlikely. For all their mutability, trees stayed pretty much where they were.

  A dove mourned from a stand of hickory to the east, and the rounded mauve notes soaked into her, mixing with the sleepiness hanging inside her like hundreds of cobwebs. She yawned and felt her stomach churn. She had to fight the urge to go inside and grab a piece of jerky. The longer she waited to eat, the less she needed. Besides, there might be a rabbit. Mama didn’t mind if she cooked a rabbit for herself as long as she kept the fire small and well tended. And the girl always saved a piece to share later.

  The clearing and the cabin it held were wedged in a crease between two steep ridges, hidden from sun, wind, eyes. She set off on a narrow track parallel to the east ridge and crossed the creek in two giant steps. The water music trailed after her as she wound south, stepping among knee-high arcs of Solomon’s seal cast in uncertain light from the canopy above, sparse with new leaf and clouded in mist. As she walked, the slopes peeled away from each other, and soon the trees thinned. Umbrellas of mayapples clustered at the bases of the trunks, tip to tip, then ceded to red trillium and foamflower, whose sprays of tiny blossoms reminded her not of foam but of stars.

  Using a large black oak as a landmark, the girl found the first runway into the underbrush and checked the snare, adjusting the dangling wire loop. She inspected the other five she had set nearby, all empty. Tomorrow, maybe. Her stomach growled.

  She continued through the woods, casting her eyes across the forest floor. Spotting a patch of wood sorrel, she plucked the stems near the ground and chewed the tender, sour leaves as she went. A group of tall, two-tiered plants caught her eye. Indian cucumber. She dug into the dirt at the base of a narrow stem and extracted a rhizome the shape and length of her finger. She wiped it on her shirt and ate it, relishing the crisp, cool taste.

  A rifle shot rang out.

  The girl paused, then smiled. Mama didn’t waste bullets, as there were none to waste. Tonight they would have fresh meat. She knew she should wish for a deer, for its size.

  “Let’s hope it was a turkey, Ash. Turkey’s our favorite.”

  The girl waited by the stream Mama would cross on her way home. Idle and hungry, she ate all the watercress she’d collected to have with the turkey; all that remained were a few ramps. Ash told her the story about the time he climbed a tree and came nose to nose with a porcupine. When he finished, she was restless. She drank from the stream and headed for the ridge in the direction of the rifle shot.

  The fog had disappeared as surreptitiously as it had come. The sun was high and all the green in the world was rising toward it. She listened as she climbed, her skin and each of her senses bound together into solid awareness. Everythi
ng surrounding her, impinging on her, she felt and knew.

  She did not call out. Mama was here in these woods, and the girl would find her, or Mama would find the girl, by and by.

  Sunlight sliced through at an angle now, drawing a sharp breeze from below. The girl returned to the stream and to the cabin, but Mama was not there. She climbed the ridge again by a different route, always a different route so as not to leave a trail, and called out this time, her voice too high and bright. Worry tunneled like a mole through her belly.

  She crossed to the north into a hemlock grove. The breeze swirled behind her—more wind than usual, a change in weather—and sent the tang of blood to the back of her throat. There, in the middle distance, a dark shape on the ground broke the pattern of the ferns. She approached and saw it was a turkey, one wing splayed across its body as if to cover itself in the shame of death.

  The girl scanned around her, skin prickling, eyes narrowed, nostrils flared. “Mama!”

  She listened through the wind sighing in the branches overhead, through the creaking of old wood, through the stirrings in the underbrush.

  “Mama!”

  A sound. An echo of something she hadn’t heard. She moved toward it, around an outcropping, into denser wood for a short distance, then out into a glittering stand of saplings, tulip poplars, not what she would have expected here.

  “Mama! Mama!”

  She heard the muffled reply and stared at her feet, for the sound seemed to come from beneath her. She strode in a careful circle, ducking among the saplings, eyes upon the ground. She stepped over a deadfall and stopped short. A hole gaped directly before her, a void where the cloth of the earth had been ripped open. If she had not been scouting the ground, she might have fallen in. It was big enough to swallow her.

  Her heart beat in her ears. She shook her head roughly and climbed back over the downed tree to the far side of the hole, giving it a wide berth. There, caught in a tangle of twigs, was the rifle with its familiar burnished walnut stock. She picked it up, checked the safety, and stood the rifle against a tree. Her stomach knotted. Mama would never abandon the rifle like that.

  The girl approached the hole. Boulders big as children hunkered over the other side, with solid stone below lining the shaft as far down as she could see. On her side, freshly uprooted plants dangled into the void.

  “Mama?”

  A low moan rose from below.

  “Mama!”

  “I’m here.” Mama’s voice was a faint, wet echo. “Be careful.”

  The girl took a step back.

  A gravelly scraping. Mama said, “My leg’s broken.”

  Dropping onto her stomach, the girl crept to the edge, unsure of its stability. She grabbed a sturdy branch with one arm and shouted into the blackness. “How far is it? How far down are you?”

  She thought she could hear Mama’s ragged breathing, but it might have been the blood roaring in her ears, or the wind.

  “Twenty feet.” A long pause. A crow cawed high above. Another answered. “My ribs are broken.”

  The girl imagined her mother on cold wet stone, a hand on her rib cage, staring up at a brilliant, ragged circle. Twenty feet. Her mouth went dry. She pursed her lips. Study the problem. That’s what Daddy always told her. Use all your resources.

  “I’m going to get a rope, Mama. And some water and food.” She waited, but there was no answer. “I’ll be quick.” She sprang to her feet and pushed her way through the brush at the end of the deadfall. She stopped abruptly and wagged her finger. “You stay here, Ash. You stay with Mama, okay? Do what I tell you for once.”

  She retrieved the turkey, not thinking of her hunger but only of what she was certain Mama would want her to do. The turkey had cost a bullet, and meat could never be wasted. At first she held the bird by the feet, but its head bounced on the ground, which seemed disrespectful, so she arranged its wings and tucked it under one arm, cradling its small, naked head, loose on its neck, in the palm of her hand.

  By the time she returned, daylight was slipping away. She threw the backpack to the ground and knelt to unpack it. A blanket, a jacket, a nylon rope, a plastic jug of water, and two cloth bundles of jerky and the last of the hickory nuts. She fastened the rope to the handle of the water jug. Lying prone, she pushed the jug out in front of her and lowered it slowly.

  “Water’s coming!” She played out the rope until it went slack in her hands. “You got that now, Mama?”

  “Yes.” Her voice was throaty and seemed farther away than before.

  The girl sat up and waited a few moments for Mama to untie the slipknot, then gathered the rope. “I’m throwing the food down.” She tossed a bundle into the hole.

  She moved a short distance away to where she’d left the pack and spoke in a low voice. “I don’t think she can hold herself on a rope, Ash. Not with broken ribs.” The girl coiled the rope in a loop, tied a bowline, and did the same with the next length. She worked for several minutes more, fingers deft and sure. Holding it aloft, she turned it from side to side and pulled on the knots to set them. “You know what it is. It’s a harness. That’s what I’ve figured out. Mama needs a harness so I can help her climb out. If she could slip her legs into it, that would be best, but if she can’t manage that, then her arms will have to do.”

  She secured the end of the rope to the trunk of a maple and returned to the edge of the hole.

  “Mama? Did you drink some water?”

  Mama grunted.

  “I’m gonna throw down the rope. I made a harness for your legs.”

  The silence from the hole was thick. The girl felt a shiver race down her arms. Since Daddy left, Mama hardly ever spoke, but this was a different species of silence.

  “I can’t climb,” Mama said.

  “I know you’re hurt, and I can’t just pull you out, but if you try climbing, I can take some of your weight. I can help you.”

  A breeze licked through the woods, and the sweat on her neck and back chilled. She was strung rigid and thin, like the wire of a snare, and exhaustion threatened to snap her, but her mind flew, sorting through possibilities, pushing aside the fear and hope battling for attention.

  “Room,” Mama said finally.

  The girl’s mind fell still, paralyzed. Her mother’s voice was a frayed thread and yet full of the import and finality of her message. “It’s a room.” Her voice gave out.

  The girl stared at the harness in her fists, her knuckles white beneath the dirt stains, then at the slick, gaping mouth of the cave. The meaning of her mother’s words rose over her like a pall. She had assumed the hole was a shaft; the first few feet of the sides—what she could see—were vertical. But below that, she knew now, the walls spread wide, curved out, perhaps, to form a room. What shape and what size she did not know. It didn’t matter. Mama could not have scaled the canted walls even if she had not been injured, and the girl was too slight to haul her out on her own. The girl knew the basics of mechanical advantage, levers and pulleys, but there was no horizontal branch of sufficient size to loop her rope over, and if there had been, she concluded in an instant, that, too, would not have been enough.

  She tossed the rope to the side and retrieved the blanket.

  “I’m throwing down a blanket.”

  “No!” It was a high bark, not like Mama at all. There was pain on all sides of it.

  A feeling of dread entered the girl through every pore. She sat cross-legged beside the mouth of the cave, hugging the blanket that was too valuable to be sacrificed for brief comfort.

  “I’m sorry, Mama. I’m really sorry.”

  Mama replied, “I know,” or maybe it was only a muffled moan.

  She imagined her mother’s terror and pain expanding across the darkening floor of the cave, completely filling the stone-walled chamber. If only it had the power to lift Mama, carry her to the surface, harmed but close. But the girl believed in no magic and had been death’s witness countless times so she could eat and live. Her mother was an anim
al, the same as she was, subject to the relentlessness of physical reality, and could not wheedle her way into some other realm of existence—the supernatural, the spiritual, or the transcendent—simply because she was in danger. Reality offered unvarnished truths, especially now, the two of them separated by an insurmountable yet perfectly ordinary arrangement of rock, and yet bound together still by a column of air and, for a short while longer, refracted sunlight. Her desire to be close to her mother kept her near the hole, and more than once she considered reattaching the rope to the tree and lowering herself into the shaft, for both their comfort. She might, not allowing for the unforeseen, shimmy up the rope again and rejoin the surface of the world. But those were only her thoughts, not her will. Mama was dying and there was no remedy for it.

  Violet shadows hastened into the spaces between the trees. The air chilled. The girl put on her jacket and placed the rifle inside the backpack to protect it from the night’s moisture. Wrapping the blanket around her legs, she assumed her vigil by the hole and, out of necessity, ate the jerky she had saved for herself. The food was dust in her mouth.

  The light melted away, as the fog had that morning, leaving the sky pale and thin and touched with mallow pink, then retreated succinctly behind distant mountains. As the stars emerged at last, the girl sighed and spoke.

  “I’m gonna sleep here tonight, and you should, too, Ash. She might not know we’re here, but I don’t want to leave yet.”

  She refolded the blanket and lay down, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. The ache that had been accumulating in her bones was fierce now, and she gasped. She wanted her mama. A finger traced along her cheek would do, or the warm steady weight of Mama’s body next to hers, by the stream or at the table. The girl tried, but it was impossible for her to imagine the magnitude of the loss of such things, having had them so recently and so often. It was like counting stars.

  She lay still, the never-ending vault shimmering overhead, and gathered herself. “I’m gonna miss her,” she whispered. She paused, nodded, rose on her elbow. “I know, Ash. I know you will, too. Come lie next to me. Try to sleep now.”