Evergreen

by Rebecca Rasmussen

  “Will you take him?” Eveline said.

  Jeremiah Burr looked over her work, which he said was good, better even than Emil’s. “You have a gift for preservation. Fidelity to the animal.”

  Eveline didn’t tell him that this buck was not at all like the buck she’d killed in the forest. Nor did she tell him she’d cried when the arrow pierced his flesh.

  “When is your husband coming home?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” said Eveline, looking up at the dark clouds tumbling by.

  “I’ll give you the money,” Jeremiah Burr said, and she could tell then in his eyes that he wasn’t the man he pretended to be in front of his customers, that a woman wouldn’t have smiled like that if he were. “I want you to promise me you’ll stop all this nonsense. You’re in trouble, I can tell that. Or you’re about to be. Where are your people? Wait a minute. Doesn’t your father work at the lumberyard?”

  “I’ll be all right,” Eveline said, huddling against the wind in the coonskin coat, thinking of her mother and father sitting in the kitchen, wondering what kind of daughter they raised, recalling all the things they’d done well as parents and all the things they didn’t—There was that time I yelled, that time she cried in the night and I didn’t go to her—wondering if any alteration would have made the difference.

  Wait for me, Eveline thought. I’ll come home soon.

  Eveline thought of Lulu and Reddy, their fine hearts.

  “I have good friends,” she said.

  Jeremiah Burr stood a long moment, deciding whether or not to push further into her life, trying, it seemed, with a wrinkle of his forehead, to foresee what would happen if he did, before he pulled out his wallet and handed her the money for the buck and a little extra.

  “It’s cold,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “Buy yourself a new coat.”

  12

  Winter came, and on its heels spring, another breakup of ice, another tightening of muscles and heart, another long-awaited birth. This one was different than the last; it hurt plenty, but Eveline wasn’t afraid the way she was with Hux when she fell in the snow between the outhouse and the cabin. Nine months she’d been waiting for the moment her body released the walnut and she was free from Cullen and all that had happened on that warm day in July. Nine months until she could banish what remained of him—those dimples, the taste of smoked trout, what she saw when she looked into his blue eyes—from her memory. Nine months until she could come out of the fog and reclaim her life.

  “Push,” Lulu said, wiping sweat from Eveline’s face and neck. Hux was over at Lulu’s cabin, playing cowboys and Indians with Reddy and Gunther, touching his ears, no doubt. Eveline still had to raise her voice for him to understand her.

  The labor had lasted all day, the tightening and loosening, the pain in her lower back. Lulu rubbed menthol oil on Eveline to cool her hot skin.

  “You’re almost there,” she said, opening Eveline’s legs.

  Eveline was unclothed on the bed. Her toenails were dirty. Her feet swollen. For the last week, she hadn’t been able to fit anything on them but Emil’s slippers, which lay on the floor. Lulu was wearing one of Emil’s undershirts, since she, too, had grown hot. There was a fire in the woodstove. The wood crackled and spit as if it were alive.

  “I can see the head,” Lulu said, rinsing her hands in the basin of water.

  Eveline felt a burning in her lower body, that familiar zip of electricity. She thought she’d break apart or faint or both. But she didn’t—not this time.

  “You need to push now,” Lulu said, her arms strong, waiting to catch a child, to keep her from falling to the ground, to her death.

  “I’m not ready,” Eveline said. She thought of Emil in the forest, the broken teapot on the kitchen table, the grace he saw in her but that she didn’t see in herself.

  “Push,” Lulu said, and Eveline did.

  She used every one of her muscles to do what Lulu asked. Her heart beat as if it would break away from the rest of her body. Even her eyes throbbed as they tried to follow the line of pain, which twisted all the way down to her toes like gnarled branches.

  All of this was nothing compared with that last push toward freedom and the walnut’s first cry, a howl, which Eveline would remember for the rest of her life.

  “She’s beautiful,” Lulu said, cutting the umbilical cord and holding her up in the yellow lamplight. The walnut’s hair was black as raven feathers, Lulu said, just like Eveline had dreamed. Her eyes were gray. Her fingers were long and thin, too—royal.

  “Do you want to hold her?” Lulu said, wrapping her in a blanket and trying to hand her to Eveline.

  “No,” Eveline said inhaling for the first real time in months, thinking now only of the orphanage in Green River, the return to ordinary life. She didn’t want to hold the child or even look at her. She loved Hux, babies; she just couldn’t let herself love this one.

  “She’s your daughter, Eveline.”

  Eveline thought of Cullen’s unbuckled belt.

  Lulu bounced the walnut lightly, the same way Emil had when he and Hux were waiting for her to return to consciousness, to their life together in a cabin between a clearing and the forest. “Won’t you at least give her a name? It’s seven years’ bad luck.”

  “That’s when you break a mirror,” Eveline said. She got out of bed, gripping the log walls for support. Tuna was in the rafters, watchful but quiet.

  “You need to rest,” Lulu said.

  “Resting won’t change my mind.”

  “You’re still bleeding,” Lulu said when Eveline slipped her nightgown over her head and picked up the reed basket. “Use the witch-hazel cloths I made for you.”

  Lulu looked for the cloths in the kitchen. When she didn’t find them there, she looked on the porch.

  Eveline looked for the little stack of pink paper she’d come upon earlier in the closet.

  “Gravity is your enemy,” Lulu said.

  “Give her to me,” Eveline said, after she found what she was looking for.

  Lulu handed the walnut to her, and Eveline set her in the reed basket.

  “How are you going to get across the river?” Lulu said.

  “My best friend’s going to help me.”

  Eveline put on Lulu’s coonskin coat and draped one of Hux’s blankets over the walnut. With Lulu straggling behind her, she walked to the river’s edge and Lulu’s patched-up but still-leaky canoe. An owl hooed from the branches of a white pine. A fish splashed.

  “Don’t you even want to think about it?” Lulu said as she pushed the canoe away from the shore. She hopped in it at the last possible moment.

  “I’ve thought about it every single day since last July,” Eveline said.

  Eveline dipped her paddle into the dark water, thinking about how many times she’d crossed this river—sometimes with joy, sometimes with sorrow. She looked at the reed basket and at the needlepoint of stars overhead.

  You’ll be all right, she thought.

  A dry brown leaf blew into the reed basket, and the walnut reached for it with her tiny hand as if it were Eveline’s breast.

  When they’d crossed the river, they walked up to Lulu’s cabin. Reddy had left the keys in the truck in case of an emergency, and Eveline set the reed basket on the passenger’s side. The oil lamps were ablaze in the cabin; Reddy was feeding Hux in Gunther’s old high chair, and Gunther was rooting him on with his toy gun.

  “Eat your peas!” he said. “You’re no sissy, are you?”

  For the first time in their friendship, Lulu walked away from Eveline without saying goodbye. Without saying anything. She was halfway to her door and the slick of colors on either side of it when Eveline reluctantly started the truck, which groaned like an old man.

  “Wait!” Lulu said, turning abruptly. “I’m coming with you.”

  She ran back to the truck with tears in her eyes, slid the reed basket over to the middle of the seat, and sat facing the passenger window, the darkness
beyond.

  They drove like that for miles and miles, over still-frosty alfalfa fields, until they reached the outskirts of Green River and the street the orphanage was located on, which was founded by a French Canadian nun in the early part of the century. The only French word Eveline knew was au revoir, which was what one of her teachers had said to their class when she finally got an offer of marriage: her ticket out of the elementary school. Eveline thought of Emil, of the letters they’d written to each other, of the letters they didn’t. She thought, too, of the letter she found right before she went into labor and rang the bell on her side of the river and Lulu came running down the bank with a bag of supplies.

  Eveline had been looking in the closet for clothes that could be spared for the birth, when she noticed a loose plank of cedar beneath her sweaters and the wolf spiders on the floor. She’d lifted the plank up, wondering if that was how the squirrels were getting in, thinking she’d go get the hammer and nail it back down. The little stack of pink paper beneath the plank she mistook for insulation. But when she pulled it out, she saw that the topmost piece was folded like a letter and words were scrawled across its front.

  For you.

  Eveline had thought it was from Emil—some last pink thought before he left Evergreen for Germany—so she opened it and read it.

  To you, whoever you are,

  We’re leaving in the morning. Going back to our town in Canada after trying to make a life here and failing. Last winter, my husband fell from a tree he was trying to cut down and broke his legs and we almost starved to death. We ate old newspapers when there was nothing left. This is a hard place. But you must know that by now. What I want to tell you is this, what the woman who lived here before us, whose foundation we built our lives on, told me: when the time comes to let go, let go.

  Good luck to you.

  Love, Meg

  Eveline parked the truck behind the tall iron gates in front of the orphanage. It was late now, and the street was emptied of everything but stray leaves tumbling by; the metal swing set beside the orphanage creaked. The building was made of red bricks, warm and solid. Inside, through one of the lighted windows, Eveline saw a few nuns sitting around a table eating supper. They were wearing black habits. One of them was reading from a Bible.

  Eveline got out of the truck with the reed basket, the walnut. Lulu stayed inside, her hand pressed against the window as if she were trying to reach something.

  Eveline walked through the gates to the front door of the orphanage, knowing she wouldn’t go inside, she couldn’t fill out paperwork, she couldn’t say the reasons she was leaving the walnut on their doorstep either to them or to herself.

  The air was cool, the sky lighter above Green River than it was in Evergreen.

  They would take this child and raise her to be mindful of the Lord. They’d watch her take root like a tree in the world. Or maybe a family would adopt her, since she was just born and people wanted babies more than they wanted older children. She’d survive this hour, the walnut. She’d survive being left behind, just as Eveline had. Lulu, too.

  Eveline looked back at the truck, at her best friend, who was still pressing her hand against the glass, which her warmth was fogging.

  “You’ll be all right,” Eveline said to the walnut, who started to cry.

  Eveline’s instincts took over, and she picked up the child to comfort her. It was then that Eveline saw her daughter’s lovely gray eyes, the specks of spring green in them, the earth in all its forms.

  Eveline could take her back to Evergreen. She could keep her. Summer would come. Another garden. Another season of rain and growth. She could sit on the porch with her like she did with Hux. She could give her what she’d given him.

  Eveline buried her face in her child’s neck, inhaling her sugary smell.

  All at once her child latched on to Eveline’s cheek and pulled at it hard the way Cullen had pulled on her wrist. I’d like some dessert.

  Eveline unlatched her tiny hand from her face. She was afraid again.

  There isn’t any.

  One of the nuns walked by the window, and Eveline got down on her knees. She could see the moles on the nun’s face—black hairs growing out of the brown lumps—and the heavy silver cross she wore around her neck swinging back and forth.

  When the nun sat down, Eveline stood up. She wrapped Hux’s blanket—the one with little ducks on it and his name embroidered at the corner—around her child and set her in the reed basket. “I have to let you go,” she said, drops of blood falling from between her legs onto the front walkway like tears. Her child stopped crying.

  Eveline leaned over her daughter one last time.

  “I love you,” she said.

  Eveline rang the orphanage’s doorbell and ran, because unlike with Cullen, this time her legs would carry her wherever she wanted to go. She thought of broken legs and dreams, of a woman named Meg who’d left behind her silver hand mirror, perhaps because the vision of her life in Evergreen would only haunt her. When Eveline reached the truck, she saw that Lulu had moved over to the driver’s seat, and Eveline sat where Lulu had been sitting; the passenger window was still foggy from the warmth of her hand, her heart.

  “Drive,” she told Lulu, who said, “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” Eveline said, although as they drove away from the orphanage, from her sugary daughter, she wondered if this was the biggest mistake of her life, leaving a child on a doorstep at half past ten o’clock. She thought of the day last spring when she saw the doe and her two fawns in the garden. Her two fawns. She felt herself letting go of the bowstring.

  Go back, she thought as they turned the corner, which would lead them to the county road and eventually to the alfalfa fields and home, but she couldn’t say it out loud no matter how much she wanted to. Back there was stillness. In front of her was life. Eveline kept thinking of Emil in the Black Forest, shivering around a dying fire for months and months, waiting for her to do what must have seemed so simple to him: to wish him home.

  And that’s what she did finally on this cold spring night halfway between Green River and Evergreen, on a dark country road illuminated by the truck’s yellow headlights. She could see a light go on in the Black Forest, and her husband running toward a clearing, a road much like this one that would steer him home. She could see him crossing the ocean, boarding a train in Grand Central Station without his butterflies but with no need for them after all he’d survived. She could see him paddling upriver in a leaky old boat.

  Lulu reached for Eveline’s hand, and there they were, the dwarf and the giant.

  In the dark, Eveline kept hearing a voice, a howl, which would pull her back to this moment the rest of her life. She thought of the wolf woman in a cage somewhere in Canada, and a powerful longing sprung up in her. She dug her fingernails into the door handle, hoping it would give beneath the pressure, praying she’d fall out of the truck onto the cold hard road.

  The moon appeared between the clouds, and though Eveline was miles from the orphanage, she was bound to it now, to the woman with the moles and the cross, to the moment she laid her child down in the reed basket beneath a blanket full of cheery ducks, to the moment she turned her back on the past, believing she could for an instant—you couldn’t, she knew now—and steered toward the future.

  As they turned onto the first of many alfalfa fields, Eveline saw a girl with black hair and long thin limbs in the headlights. She saw the crackling fall leaves in her hands, the sticks in her hair, the question, always the same question, in her startling gray eyes.

  Why did you leave me?

  PART TWO

  Hopewell Orphanage Green River, Minnesota

  1954

  13

  That girl with the black hair and the long thin limbs was Naamah, and Sister Cordelia took up her cause from the start. She said the devil had hold of Naamah’s soul, and for the last fourteen years she’d been trying to drive him out. That was why Naamah had spent the first week of he
r life in a crib positioned beneath the holy-water font and this last one banished to her cot, which Sister Cordelia had moved out of the dormitory Naamah shared with the other girls and into the broom closet. This time Naamah’s crime was being hungry and plucking a beautifully purple grape from the vine in the garden without asking for permission.

  Each morning Sister Cordelia made the girls walk past the broom closet before they went down to breakfast to deter them from falling into temptation’s arms like Naamah had.

  “Don’t be fooled into feeling sorry for her,” Sister Cordelia said as she hurried into the closet this morning. The hem of her habit stirred up the fine layer of dust on the floor and sent it whirling in the air. Her moles and the wiry hairs that grew out of them started to quiver, and her upper lip curled back, exposing a rotting tooth among a row of twisted yellow ones. “This is about more than a grape,” she said to the girls. “This is about giving in to your desires the moment you have them. It’s about lust. Think about what would have happened if I didn’t knock the grape out of her hand in time. If she’d actually eaten it.”

  “Yes, Mother,” the girls said, and each of them made the sign of the cross.

  If the other nuns had still been at Hopewell, they might have tried to convince Sister Cordelia to let Naamah go back to the dormitory, or at least let her move an inch or two on her cot, but they might not have. Most were as fearful of Sister Cordelia and her very particular interpretation of the Bible as the girls were. The other nuns usually stayed only as long as it took to be transferred to other, more pleasant orphanages down south. After the last nun left and no one came to take her place, Sister Cordelia walked the halls with her cane held high once again. That she’d had a mother and father once, a history outside of Hopewell, seemed impossible to Naamah. Sister Cordelia belonged to Hopewell, and Hopewell belonged to her.

  The only nun who’d ever tried to stop Sister Cordelia was Sister Lydie, who’d grown up milking cows and making cheese on a dairy farm in a place called Racine, Wisconsin. During her first week at Hopewell, Sister Lydie intervened when she saw Sister Cordelia striking Naamah’s hand with a ruler in the hallway because her locker wasn’t up to scratch.