Evergreen

by Rebecca Rasmussen

  Slow down, she thought, picturing herself walking up the back stairs to the apartment in Yellow Falls, to her mother and father, a life that didn’t belong to her anymore.

  Emil clutched his pocket. “The letter’s a month old.”

  Only when Eveline thought of her own father did she give herself over to Emil’s panic, which she’d never seen in him. He looked suddenly older, the lines on his neck and forehead more pronounced, his movements clumsy. In his eyes, Eveline could see what he would look like as an old man, how he would wear his hardships and even hers like a yoke.

  “I don’t have to go,” Emil said, as if he’d heard her thoughts.

  “Of course you do,” Eveline said, as if she’d heard his.

  Thus began the whirlwind of unstitching all they’d stitched together during the winter. It occurred to Eveline that Emil could go to Lulu’s at once, and Eveline could stay back and pack up the cabin properly, so it would be able to defend itself against the weather and the animals, against Evergreen. She and Hux could go to Lulu’s the next day.

  “You can manage a trip across the river?” Emil said.

  “If you left the rowboat, I could,” Eveline said.

  “What about the paddles?”

  “I’ll use a snowshoe.”

  Emil pulled her to him. “Ich liebe dich.”

  “I love you, too,” Eveline said.

  What were a few months away from each other? The boats were faster now, and the German borders were still open even if most people were leaving the country. And they were married, and Emil was a citizen of the United States; it said so on his passport. Eveline’s parents would be happy to get to see their grandson and their daughter. Hux could use her old crib, which was up in the crawl space. Eveline could sleep in her canopy bed.

  When Emil had filled a canvas duffel bag with clothes and a leather messenger bag with his identification papers and the German money left over from his first crossing, he handed Eveline a small stack of American money.

  “It isn’t as much as it should be,” he said.

  “We’ll make do,” Eveline said, though she wondered how they would, since food would have to be bought in Yellow Falls, and rent would have to be contributed to. Maybe she could get her old job back while her mother watched Hux.

  Eveline walked Emil to the front door and onto the porch. The day was sunny but crisp. The air smelled of pines. Hux was sleeping in Eveline’s arms.

  “My son,” Emil said, lifting Hux up. He kissed his cheeks and handed him back to Eveline. “Are you sure you can do this?”

  “Yes,” Eveline said.

  “I’ll be back by the end of the summer at the very latest,” he said to Eveline, kissing her one last time before he laced his mud-caked boots, which he’d wear until he got to Yellow Falls and then switch them for the loafers he’d traveled across the ocean in the first time. He took the first step off the porch toward the woods and the river.

  “I’ll write whenever I can,” he said, touching his pocket.

  Eveline held Hux more closely. “Me, too.”

  Eveline spent the afternoon emptying the cupboards in the pantry of anything perishable and packing those items alongside hers and Hux’s clothes. She put whatever could fit into the tweed suitcase, the earnestness of which made her smile now. To think she’d floated twenty miles with it in the bottom of the rowboat last September!

  Eveline left her green scarf and her black dancing shoes on the shelf in the closet and scattered cedar chips over both to guard against the moths, which Emil said grew to be as big as hummingbirds by August, their wings patterned like old lace. The crib would have to stay. And the mattress made of pine needles and feathers.

  Hux slept most of the afternoon in the reed basket on the kitchen table, aware, it seemed, that Emil was gone but not undone by it. He looked at her curiously, as if to say, Now what? I don’t know, Eveline thought. Evergreen had always been a quiet place, but the absoluteness of it unnerved her now.

  April. May. June. July. August, at the latest.

  Eveline took down the English taxidermy manual from the bookshelf and a few of her sketches from the cabin wall. She wondered what would happen to Tuna, who’d become accustomed to the crumbs Eveline sprinkled on the porch railing for her and to Eveline’s imitation of her song, which had improved over the months and was drawing Tuna closer to her outstretched hand each day. Had Eveline ruined her for the wild?

  Had Evergreen ruined Eveline for Yellow Falls? What would it be like to sleep in her childhood bedroom with her child? To spend the evenings with her mother and father instead of with her husband? Only when Eveline was about to leave Evergreen did she realize how it had changed her. Since September, she’d grown out of being a daughter and was growing into being a mother and a wife. She thought of what Emil said: Would your parents mind looking after you and Hux until I come back? Did she really seem as helpless as a child?

  I mind, Eveline thought now, because Emil had been taking care of her, and she didn’t realize the completeness of his care until he was gone.

  She could stay in Evergreen if she wanted to. Emil would be back by the end of the summer with enough time to cut and stack wood for the winter. She could help, too. She could learn to wield an ax. She could learn to catch fish instead of just frying them. She couldn’t bear another winter of rice and beans, which was what would happen if she spent the summer in Yellow Falls. When Emil returned, they’d have to start from scratch, again.

  Eveline could start the garden she’d planned up in the meadow and put up enough vegetables to last the entire winter. She could harvest the raspberries from the bush beyond the kitchen window and put up jam, too. She could even grow a row of tobacco plants with Lulu’s guidance and surprise Emil with a pouchful for his rosewood pipe. How proud he’d be of her. How resourceful he’d say she was.

  Yes! She’d stay.

  Except that night came, and menacing shadows crept across the cabin walls, and suddenly Eveline wished there were a lock on the door. Though Hux was sleeping soundly in his crib, she brought him into the bed with her. There’s nothing to be afraid of. But the moment the word afraid slipped into her vocabulary, so did the name Annie Mae.

  The history books about Yellow Falls, if there were any, were marred by only one murder, which was still unsolved. A few years back, a mother was trimming flowers in her garden one morning while her nine-year-old daughter played in her bedroom. Neither of them noticed the man with the red beard watching them from across the way. When the mother went into the shed, the man walked through the front door, lifted Annie Mae up, and carried her away. Two days later, she was found in a drainage ditch beside a cornfield.

  Eveline thought of Annie Mae now, in the cabin, while her own child slept peacefully beside her. If Emil were here, she would have curled up to him like a spoon, but because he wasn’t, she turned away from her training. This stops now.

  Eveline got up out of bed, opened the front door, and walked out onto the porch. She forced herself to look at the shadows and listen to the night sounds—the cries of owls, the creak of trees, the last of the ice breaking up on the river—until that was all they were.

  The next day, when Eveline didn’t go to Lulu, Lulu came to her.

  “I thought a black bear got you,” Lulu said, coming up through the woods the same way she had the day before, her coonskin coat flying behind her, Gunther flying in front of her. She’d tied a burlap sack to the end of a branch and was carrying it like a torch.

  “They’re more afraid of me than I am of them,” Eveline said.

  “That’s a bunch of horseshit,” Lulu said.

  Eveline was pinning clothes to the line. She set down the yellow sheet she was holding and picked up the reed basket, Hux.

  “I’m sort of kidding,” Lulu said when she and Gunther got close.

  “Then I’m only sort of mad,” Eveline said.

  Lulu untied the burlap sack from the branch and with the branch tapped Gunther on his backside
. “Go on and play now.”

  “But I don’t have anyone to play with,” Gunther said. He brushed off the seat of his pants and messed up his ragged hair as if Lulu had touched that, too. He leaned over the reed basket. “He won’t play with me, that’s for sure. He can’t even get out of that thing. I bet he doesn’t know how to use the outhouse. He’d probably fall in. I’m four.”

  “You were a baby once, too,” Eveline started, but stopped when Lulu dragged her finger along her neck, and Gunther pretended to throw up.

  “What about Buckley?” Lulu said.

  Gunther poked at the ground with the torch stick. “He’s mad ’cause I shot him.”

  His imaginary friend, Lulu mouthed to Eveline.

  “You should apologize,” she said to her son.

  Gunther perked up a little. “And then he wouldn’t be mad anymore?”

  “Probably,” Lulu said.

  Gunther dragged Buckley to the porch steps. “I’m sorry I shot you, but I told you not to use my toothbrush. You were bad, and now I have gems.”

  “Germs,” Lulu said.

  Eveline pinned one end of the bedsheet to the clothesline, but was struggling to keep the ends off the damp ground while she reached for another wooden pin in the bucket.

  Lulu handed her one. “He’s going to end up in jail, isn’t he?”

  “Maybe a straitjacket,” Eveline said.

  “Careful,” Lulu said. “I’m not above shooting my friends.”

  Together, they finished hanging Eveline’s wet laundry on the line.

  “Are you going to tell me what happened?” Lulu said when their hands were empty. “I made Reddy take Emil to Yellow Falls so I could wait for you.”

  Eveline thought of Emil driving over washed-out roads in a beat-up old truck with a man who’d shot his own toe, on his way to a bus station, then a train station, then a boat, then his father. She wondered what they talked about, if they talked at all.

  “Emil’s father is dying,” she said. “He went back to Germany to see him.”

  “You always think I’m talking about someone else,” Lulu said.

  Eveline looked down at Hux, who was staring up at the green trees, the blue sky, and the white clouds. “I was packing for home when I realized I’m already here.”

  “You know what you’re doing?” Lulu said.

  “No, but I’m sure of it all the same.”

  “I figured you might say something like that.” Lulu reached into the burlap sack and handed her a baby bottle. “I was hoping anyway.”

  “Why?” Eveline said.

  “We’ve got to start you a garden,” Lulu said. “In that meadow where the sun’s strong and the ground absorbs a little runoff from the hill. These are from my personal collection. The chafers and potato bugs don’t like them as much as the kinds at the general store.”

  Lulu reached into her sack and pulled out a handful of tiny white envelopes with different words scrawled messily across the fronts: CARROT. TOMATO. DILL. BASIL. HORSERADISH. LETTUCE. CORN. SQUASH. PUMPKIN. TURNIP. ONION. BEANPOLE BEAN. SWEET PEA. BEET. CELERY. There were so many envelopes, and the name on each of them made Eveline’s mouth water. The envelopes made her nervous, too, since she’d only ever grown a garden in the scraggly lot behind the apartment in Yellow Falls, and though it had seemed impressive, it was only the size of a sandbox, and Eveline had depended on it for beauty, not survival.

  “Don’t worry,” Lulu said. “I’ll help you. I already planted mine.”

  “Can I ask you something else?” Eveline said.

  “Sure,” Lulu said.

  “Will you teach me how to fish?”

  That night, Eveline sat at the table with a pencil and a piece of paper. Dear Emil, she wrote, but each letter she started, she stopped. She didn’t know how to put into words what was in her heart. What if she couldn’t take care of herself? Hux? What if she could?

  A little after midnight, she ended up with this, the pale bones of truth:

  Dear Emil,

  I’m staying in Evergreen with Hux. I love you.

  Eveline

  6

  Lulu came every morning for the next few weeks, until April turned into May and the buds turned into blooms, and thinking about Emil’s departure turned into thinking about his return, since surely he was in Germany by now, saying goodbye to his father with Gitte and his mother before Dr. Hayner administered the syringe of morphine and Emil’s father took his last breath. Though Emil hadn’t translated the letter word for word, repeating the details he did translate made his absence easier for Eveline to bear, because they made it selfish for her to miss him too much or feel sorry for herself. Lulu said that was horseshit, too. Miss the man. Feel sorry for yourself. Downright wallow if you want.

  “He wouldn’t,” Eveline said.

  “Well, you’re not him.”

  “It’s complicated,” Eveline said, thinking of her parents, who’d sent word through Reddy they were disappointed she wasn’t coming home while Emil was in Germany—her mother had used the words positively stupid.

  “No, it’s not,” Lulu said.

  This morning, after Lulu and Eveline finished the thermos of coffee Lulu had brought and smoked a cigarette on the porch, and Gunther complained of Hux’s helplessness and Hux spit up milk as if to annoy him further, they all went up to the meadow to work on the garden. Lulu lent Eveline her spade and hoe, but she turned the soil with her bare hands, which explained her black fingernails and her lack of flinch when she encountered a snake or an earthworm. When Eveline encountered either, she howled.

  “They’re not the biting kind,” Lulu said.

  “No, but they’re the wriggling kind!”

  In the afternoon, after Gunther and Hux napped in the cabin, the four of them—And Buckley! Gunther said—went down to the river so Eveline could practice fishing. She used the lures from Emil’s tackle box because she wasn’t nervy enough to use a worm.

  “You have no problem piercing the flesh of chickens and turkeys and fish—other alive things,” Lulu said. “You married a man who does that for a living, for God’s sake.”

  “Once alive,” Eveline said. “But you’re right. I have to work up to it.”

  So far, with the lures she’d only caught river detritus.

  “You might just be a wait-for-your-husband kind of girl,” Lulu said.

  Emil had never lorded his survival skills over her, but Eveline’s lack of them irritated her now. Emil was the one who cut wood and dragged it through the snow. He was the one who carried Meg and William’s belongings to the roof when the water came through, and he was the one who put them back when he found a way to get the water out.

  I will bait this hook! Eveline thought.

  And she did, though she squirmed the whole time while Lulu laughed and laughed.

  “I’ll shoot the worm if you want me to,” Gunther said to Eveline, just before the hook pierced the worm’s flesh, and Eveline felt both triumphant and a little sorry.

  “Thank you,” she said to Gunther. She was about to kiss the top of his head when she remembered what he did to his hair after Lulu had touched it. Instead, Eveline cast her line the way Lulu taught her and felt a tug on the end of it.

  “I have something!” she said.

  Eveline reeled in the line—You have to think like a fish, Lulu said—and just as she was about to declare triumph, she saw what she’d caught: an old leather shoe covered in algae.

  Lulu unhooked the shoe from the line and cradled it like an infant. “So that’s where you went. I’ve been looking all over for you. You poor baby.”

  Eveline thought of Emil and the day she’d arrived in Evergreen after falling asleep on the river and foolishly losing her paddles. And though neither Emil nor Lulu had meant anything by poor baby, Eveline was mad they’d both said it. Lulu could catch a fish with her bare hands. Probably Emil could, too.

  “You have to think like a fish,” Lulu said again.

  “Fish don’t think,” Ev
eline said.

  “Sure they do.” Lulu thrust herself away from the rocky shore and jumped into the water wild eyed and fully clothed. While she spun around in the river like a crazed, cold fish, Gunther poked at Hux with his index finger, and Hux clamped down on it.

  “Your coat!” Eveline said.

  “He’s got me and Buckley!” Gunther said.

  Eveline freed his finger. “We don’t bite, darling,” she said to Hux.

  “You might try meaning that,” Lulu said, wringing out the ends of her coat, which smelled even more unpleasant and looked more alive than it had when it was dry. She came out of the water, red cheeked and dripping, and plunked down on a large gray rock that was warm from the sun. To Gunther and Buckley she said, “You’re lucky he’s all gums.”

  Eveline sat down next to Lulu. “He’s very sorry.”

  Lulu poured the water from her boots onto Eveline’s leg. “No, he isn’t.”

  While Gunther and Buckley sat beside Hux with a healthy dose of fear in their eyes, and Lulu and Eveline sat beside each other on the rock sunning themselves, Eveline thought of Meg and wondered if she and Lulu had done the same thing together.

  “I wasn’t crossing the river then,” Lulu said when Eveline asked her about it.

  “Why not?” Eveline said.

  Lulu tossed a pebble into the water. “I’m pretty sure we didn’t come to Evergreen for the same reasons. Actually I know in my heart we didn’t. Why did you come here?”

  Eveline thought of Emil and his butterflies. “For love, I guess.”

  When Gunther and Buckley got up to chase after a low-flying bird downriver, Lulu said, “I came because Gunther needed a father and Reddy needed a wife. I used to work at the saloon, and Reddy was one of my regulars. He liked me because I knew just when to take away the whiskey and put down a cup of water and a plate of fried potatoes in its place. He said I was his angel. He’s pretty uncreative when it comes to romance.”