Evergreen

by Rebecca Rasmussen

  10

  August 23, 1939

  Dear Eveline,

  We’ve heard from Reddy twice now that you and our beloved grandchild will not be coming home this summer either and that you wish us not to visit you—a wish we will respect even if we don’t understand it. Won’t you at least write a letter, a few simple words of explanation? Even though we’re only twenty or so miles apart, we feel so much further away than that. Try to remember that even though you know our routines by heart, we have no way of imagining yours. You’re breaking our hearts, Evie. You really are. Did I raise you to be so unfeeling? Have we done something so gravely wrong? If we have, please forgive us. Please, my darling child, come home. It’s never too late to come home.

  Love,

  Your Mother

  Eveline folded the letter and put it in the drawer of her nightstand with the others. She wanted nothing more than for her mother and father to take her in their arms and make everything all right as if she were a girl again, but Cullen had taken away their ability to tuck her into her bed, to believe what her father had always told her: You can be anyone you want. You couldn’t. She couldn’t. That kind of freedom belonged to the luckiest people. Everyone else’s paths were decided for them, and nothing could be done about it.

  Eveline was pregnant. Again.

  She couldn’t go back to Yellow Falls and let her parents see her body, the evidence of what had happened to her: what she’d done in its defense, what she didn’t do, what she couldn’t. They would still love her—of course, they would; she knew that much—but they’d feel just as helpless as she had when Cullen had asked for dessert. And even though they wouldn’t want to, even though they’d go to sleep promising each other to picture cows jumping over the moon, they’d end up seeing her on the floor of the cabin.

  This time around, sickness didn’t overtake Eveline. This baby struck one note and one note only: Please let me stay here, to which Eveline said, You can’t. It was as if the child was promising to be faultless, but that didn’t ease the fact of it taking root like a walnut in Eveline’s stomach. What good could come of her union with Cullen? What kind of child could be born from darkness and learn how to walk into the light?

  Eveline had searched the woods for black cohosh root and boiled it for two days in a pot, extracting its life-ending potency. But even when she thought of Cullen on top of her and shivered violently, even when she thought of gnarled roots in the bog, how her body had felt black and twisted like them after he’d released her from the floor’s hold, she couldn’t drink it because she knew it wasn’t the walnut’s fault—hard-shelled as it was.

  The same way Eveline knew Hux would be a boy, she knew the walnut would be a girl. She saw her in her dreams, always at the corner of her vision, a girl with hair as black as roots and eyes as gray as storm clouds, her skin cold to the touch. Sometimes, despite herself, Eveline would call to her, but the girl would never come; she’d only stand there from afar watching Eveline with love or hate or both rooting her to the ground.

  Eveline woke from these dreams with a start. After what had happened to her, she was beginning to understand her limitations and that they were different than Lulu’s, who’d kept Gunther under similar circumstances. Lulu said she never looked at Gunther and saw the men in the alley behind the saloon. She saw her little boy and his imaginary friend. She saw Reddy’s fine heart. In her dreams, Eveline didn’t see Emil. The only thing she recognized was the walnut’s gray eyes and a question seizing them from the start.

  If Emil came home and found Eveline round and full, she would let him decide what to do, since her body wouldn’t be able to hide what had happened to it. He would have to determine if he could picture her on the floor of the cabin and still love her the same as he did before he left, when she belonged only to him. Though she hoped it was, she didn’t know if his love for her was strong enough to withstand such a vision.

  If Emil wasn’t home by the time the walnut was born, which was what she was praying for, since then what had happened would belong to her alone—the shame of it, the press of the belt buckle on her skin—Eveline would go to the orphanage in Green River.

  Eveline had heard of the term shock when it was applied to soldiers or to men who’d been trapped in coal mines, or to people who’d almost drowned. But she was fine. She was alive without water or coal in her lungs, fallen soldiers in her heart. Shock wasn’t what plagued her. Or was it? Tomorrow, she’d sometimes catch herself thinking when the cabin began to whirl. Tomorrow I’ll fall apart.

  Lulu and Reddy were the only ones who knew about the walnut. Reddy didn’t say as much, but Eveline knew he’d claim her as his second wife if it came to that. When he went to Yellow Falls the last time, Reddy saw an article in the Gazette about an ex-convict who’d stolen a government boat and had been posing as a government official. There was a reward out for both the man and the boat’s return, he said, but it was an amount that wouldn’t induce anyone to do any looking. As for the light project, during the second week of August, they all received a letter telling them it was on hold. Apparently someone at the top didn’t think single lightbulbs in the wilderness were as useful as Albert Muldoon did. They still owed money though. An arbitrary property tax of thirteen dollars by November 21.

  Since Cullen’s visit, Reddy had been sleeping in a pup tent between the meadow and the forest, at the edge of Eveline’s line of vision, each night eating cold cans of beans and each morning, before the sun came up, rolling up his pup tent, crossing the river, and going home. No one spoke of his routine or when it would stop.

  “Mama,” Hux said again and again, but he didn’t say anything else. He’d stopped tugging his ears, but if Eveline asked him if he wanted the rattle, he’d reach for his blanket.

  Lulu said Reddy had lost hearing in one ear after shooting his toe, and it had yet to come back. Give it time, she said. You’ll see. He’ll hear.

  What she seemed to be saying was that everything would work out even if it seemed like it wouldn’t. You’ll love that baby despite what’s happened, despite yourself.

  September came, and a finally a letter from Emil—I love you was all she’d said in her last one—and though it made her fearful for him, his words carried with them relief for her.

  Dear Eveline,

  I don’t know if you’ll receive this letter or not. I haven’t received any letters from you, though you’ve no doubt been writing often. The borders have closed and I am stuck within them until I can find a way out. Germany has invaded Poland, which you may or may not know by now. My father is still alive, although he is not what keeps me here. I have been commissioned into the German military despite my dual citizenship or maybe because of it. I am supposed to be in Berlin by the end of the week to report for duty. My poor mother and sister are fretting for the lives of two men now. If I desert my duties, according the new national laws, I can be shot if I am found. If I go, I will have to use force on another human being who has done nothing to me or to Germany. I keep wondering what you would do, gentle heart, if you were in my position.

  You asked me once why I married you. I didn’t know the answer that first day of snow in Evergreen. I simply knew I loved you and so I went to chop wood for you and our unborn son. But I’ll tell you now in case you don’t hear from me again. When I gave you that broken teapot I found in the forest, you displayed it at once, despite its broken handle. You said, “It’s lovely.” You have a certain grace in you, Eveline, which I’ve always admired and which makes me the luckiest man in the world. You deserve more than I’ve given you. You’ve made do with so little.

  I didn’t leave Germany quickly enough, I’m afraid, for which all of us will be punished. I will risk everything to get home to you, my darling, but if I don’t make it there—and here, I don’t mean to frighten you—you must marry another and go on raising our little son without me. How foolish I’ve been. I have no money to enclose and little hope that this letter will reach you—yesterday, a man was dragged
away from the post office and beaten in an alley, accused of treason for writing a letter to a relative in England. And this was in Hornberg. I can only imagine what’s happening in the cities, in Poland. God help us all. Forgive me if you can. If you get this letter. If you don’t.

  Love, Emil

  Emil wouldn’t have to know what happened to her—that was her first thought. She could go to Green River in the spring. She could let go of this ugliness inside of her she couldn’t find a way to want. As each thought rolled off the edge of the cliff in her mind, she tried to gather it up, to hold on to it, before it fell to the ground.

  You selfish girl, she thought when she read the letter again. You survived what happened to you. Your husband might not.

  What was happening in Germany was worse than what had happened to her. An army of Cullens had come together to brutalize people—entire countries—overnight. And her husband had been ordered to become one of them against his will, on behalf of which he would run and possibly be shot. What had happened to them: two quiet people who’d only wanted to live a quiet life in northern Minnesota?

  Eveline imagined Emil in the Black Forest running between tree trunks and honey brush, looking for a way back to her and not finding one. He thought she was in Yellow Falls. He thought her cheeks were still rosy. He thought her heart was still light.

  Meine Liebe, he was calling. My darling. All you have to do is wish me home.

  Eveline placed a hand on her stomach. Even though she wanted her husband now more than she’d ever wanted him, she couldn’t. Not yet.

  She didn’t know what reaction the news would have caused her to have if she’d read the letter in her mother’s kitchen instead of her own. In Evergreen, Eveline picked up Hux, who was sleeping in the reed basket, tucked Emil’s fishing rod under her free arm, and went down to the river. If I can’t catch a fish on my own we won’t survive this. If I can, we will. When she was a girl, she used to play a similar game with the daisies in back of the Laundromat. The yellow petals revealed whether or not she’d find love.

  She knew how to win that game—she didn’t know how to win this one.

  On the way down to the river, Eveline dug into the soft soil on the forest floor with a trowel, turning the earth until fat brown worms wriggled up. She picked them up and put them into the pocket of her dress. How strange she could go on living after what Cullen had done to her and nearly faint at the thought of a handful of worms wriggling in her pocket.

  At the river’s edge, Eveline took the worms out one by one, pushed the hooks into their flesh, and cast out her line. Each time she felt a tug and reeled in her line, the worms were gone and the hooks bent backward.

  You have to think like a fish, Lulu had said. Eveline imagined a school of them slicing through the dark water like silver knives. How do you catch something that doesn’t want to be caught? Whose life depends on not being caught? Maybe you don’t. Maybe you give up.

  Eveline sat on the rocks. Hux had woken up and was looking at the blue sky and the birds crossing overhead, soaring on the updrafts. A cricket jumped into the basket and back out again. Eveline felt a tug on her line, but instead of reeling it in she let it out this time.

  Another tug, and she stood up. Out in the middle of the river, a fish jumped.

  Once she was sure she’d hooked the fish, Eveline began to reel in the line slowly until the fish was closer to her than it was far away. When she walked into the water, she could see it swimming circles in the shallows, panicked but alive. She kept reeling in the line. When all that was left between her and the fish was a few feet, Eveline held up Emil’s rod and carried it and the fish out of the river onto dry land.

  The fish, a lovely bluegill, opened and closed its mouth desperately. Eveline was on the verge of throwing it back, of eating beans and rice for the rest of her life. She thought of Emil and Cullen, two men forever part of her life, one she’d said yes to, the other no. She took that bluegill in her hands, slid the hook out of its gill, and with great sadness but a new resolve, my God, my God, she watched the life go out of it as it flapped against the rocks.

  Eveline caught five fish before she walked back up to the cabin with Hux, tossed them in flour, and fried them in the skillet. Something inside of her was shifting even if she didn’t know in what direction yet.

  For the first time in weeks, she was hungry again.

  She stood over the woodstove pulling the tiny bones out with her fingers and sucking the white flesh from them. When night came, Eveline placed Hux in his crib and brought a fillet out to Reddy’s pup tent.

  “I’m all right,” she said, handing him the plate. “You can go home now.”

  Reddy picked up the fillet with his fingers. “I like to camp.”

  “Nobody likes to camp for this long.”

  “Emil would want me to,” Reddy said. “I’d want him to if Lulu was out here alone.”

  “Emil’s not coming home,” Eveline said, thinking about the two of them in the truck all those months ago now. “At least not for a while.”

  “I figured as much,” Reddy said. “The paper in Yellow Falls said Germany’s invaded Poland. I didn’t know how to tell you.”

  “Emil said that in his letter, too.”

  Reddy reached into the pup tent and pulled out a sleeping bag for Eveline to sit on. Stars were appearing overhead. Owls spoke to each other in the trees.

  “Lulu thinks I should keep the baby,” Eveline said.

  “That’s only because her parents didn’t keep her,” Reddy said.

  “I didn’t know that,” Eveline said. “Maybe I did.”

  “When she came home from school one day, they were gone,” Reddy said. “People said they went to Canada. Desperate people go north.”

  Eveline still had Lulu’s coonskin coat, and though it gave her strength just thinking about it, she thought maybe it was time to give it back.

  “This is your first fish, isn’t it?” Reddy said, licking the ends of his fingers.

  “How did you know?” Eveline said.

  “They always taste the best.” Reddy wiped the corners of his mouth with his sleeve. Scabs crisscrossed his face where he’d cut himself shaving in the garden the other morning.

  “I’m not going back to Yellow Falls,” Eveline said. “If you were wondering.”

  “I can help you cut wood for the winter,” Reddy said. “Lulu thinks it’ll be worse than last year, which was pretty bad where we were trapping. I’m sure she told you I shot my toe when I was cleaning my gun. She likes to tell that story for some reason.”

  Eveline thought of Lulu walking up to the cabin for the first time with a hard-boiled egg in her coat pocket.

  “We’re still figuring out how to raise the tax money, but I’m sure we can come up with enough for all of us,” Reddy said. “We’ll sell the truck if we have to. I don’t have to go to Yellow Falls as much as I do either. Poor Gunther, having me for a father.”

  Reddy was eyeing the brown liquor bottle in the back of the tent.

  “I’d have some,” Eveline said, because he would do the same for her.

  He already had.

  Reddy got the bottle and a tin mug from inside the tent. He poured a little into the mug and handed it to Eveline, who squeezed his forearm lightly.

  “You’re a good husband and father,” she said.

  Reddy drew the bottle to his mouth. “You girls could break me in half.”

  The two of them drank together in the fading light—friends, family, whatever they were. When she woke in the morning, Eveline knew Reddy and the pup tent would be gone.

  11

  By October men in orange hats, camouflage coats and pants, took over the woods the way Emil had said they would. They came to Evergreen to shoot what they couldn’t kill in their hometowns, what didn’t exist there anymore. They drank and smoked and crashed around like the land owed them something. During the day, Eveline cut wood and dragged it back to the cabin with Hux strapped to her back on a cradleboard
she made out of plywood and the walnut weighing her down in front. Lulu and Reddy kept trying to get her to wear something orange so the men didn’t shoot her. They wanted to give her some of their wood, too, so she didn’t have to go out on her own as much. But that’s what her friends didn’t understand: Eveline wanted to be alone. She needed to be.

  At night after she put Hux to bed, Eveline sat in front of the woodstove whittling arrows until their points were sharp enough to pierce the flesh of the buck she knew she had to get to pay the taxes she and Emil owed by the end of November. She knew it couldn’t be just any buck either; he needed to have a rack that would satisfy Jeremiah Burr and his empty office wall. He needed to be a royal buck. Even though Lulu and Reddy kept offering to sell their truck to pay her taxes, Eveline kept saying no. If she couldn’t pay the taxes now, she’d never be able to. Reddy lent her one of his bows because she refused to hold a gun again, and Eveline made a target out of a bundle of dried river grass and a tarp pulled taut across it. She decided she wouldn’t go hunting until she hit the center of it.

  Eveline’s belly was growing rounder and softer, but the rest of her was growing stronger and harder. In September, the brush she cut for kindling would scrape her fingers raw, and even the gentlest application of salve would make her cringe. Now, her hands were full of calluses so thick the tip of a needle wouldn’t penetrate them. Muscles she didn’t even know belonged to her poked out of her arms and legs at strange angles. Ropy blue veins. Eveline looked like a different person than the one who’d arrived in Evergreen a year ago, one full of bruises and gashes and scars that looked exactly the way she felt.

  Eveline usually kept her hair a few inches below her shoulder blades, but this year it got all the way down to her waist before she noticed it. One night after Hux fell asleep, she sat with the silver hand mirror and a brush, trying to untangle the leaves and bullet burs and hardened mud it had collected while she was in the woods. When she couldn’t find her way through the knots, she cut it to her shoulders, then to her chin.