Evergreen

by Rebecca Rasmussen

  Sometimes his mother would make an egg pie the way Reddy did for her when Tuna, his mother’s beloved little bird, died. Hux remembered that bird, her throat white as snow. He remembered her flying around the cabin in the mornings after his mother had given her a handful of sunflower seeds. He remembered how one afternoon she fell from the rafters like a stone. How his mother took Tuna in her arms like a child. How she wept and wept.

  “I hope you don’t hate me for what I’m about to tell you,” Hux’s mother said to him from her bed. “You were always such a good boy. Do you know that? We were doing so well. The garden was growing. Your grandparents were going to come for the first time.”

  Hux didn’t remember their first visit to Evergreen, but he remembered the other ones. They’d bring him candy from the general store, and his grandfather would take him fishing for trout down by the river. Hux only visited their apartment once, and he’d stayed in his mother’s old bedroom, playing with all of her treasures instead of sleeping. On the night table was a book about a woman who went west to pioneer with her family. Hux didn’t like the story much, but he liked how one of the characters shared his father’s name.

  “I should have listened to your grandmother,” Hux’s mother said. “We got a letter from the government that summer. They were going to rebuild that dam they’ve been talking about forever. They were going to bring us light.”

  His mother slumped back down in the bed, a movement that shifted the metal pan beneath the lower half of her body. Urine spilled onto the sheets, which were stained yellow from previous accidents. When Hux moved to get a dry cloth, his mother grabbed his hand.

  “He could tell I didn’t have a survival instinct.”

  “Who?” Hux said.

  “Cullen O’Shea,” his mother said. “He came one morning to survey the property. I’ve never forgotten those dimples. Some people are evil to the core.”

  When Hux didn’t say anything, his mother said, “His hands were scissors for me.”

  “You need to rest if you want to get better, Mom.”

  His mother looked at him sadly. “I didn’t shoot until he was gone. That was the second-biggest mistake of my life.”

  Hux didn’t want to know what the first one was. “You need to stay quiet.”

  “I’m glad I didn’t live long enough to see the light come in,” his mother said, looking up at the ceiling. “I wouldn’t have been able to bear it.”

  “You’re still alive, Mom,” Hux said, thinking, Don’t go, don’t go, don’t go.

  “I had his child,” his mother said, her chest starting to rattle the way the doctor said it would near the end. “Then I gave her away to some nuns in Green River.”

  Before she rolled over, she said, “You have a sister, Hux.”

  Then, after a few strained minutes, “I think I’ll join Lulu now.”

  19

  At first light, Hux headed over to Phee’s place to finish building her porch. He didn’t sleep well again and was hoping pounding nails and sawing boards would wear him out enough to set him straight for the next night. Gunther was right: he’d been lingering on the project longer than was necessary, reinforcing the porch floor and then reinforcing it again. If Phee had noticed, she didn’t say anything. Sometimes she’d bring out mugs of coffee so bitter Hux could barely choke it down. Other times, though, she’d bring out a perfectly sweet apple pie. Maybe she had her own reasons for not wanting him to finish.

  Phee lived on the western edge of the bog, which meant they probably wouldn’t have crossed paths except they were in the general store at the same time, and Earl, the owner, introduced them. That day, Phee’s basket was stacked with tins of sardines. Hux’s was full of sweets. He figured he could grow the healthy stuff, and Gunther could supply the meat, but neither of them knew their way around a pie tin. The one time Hux had tried to make cookies, they got so black even the birds wouldn’t touch them.

  “We make some pair, don’t we?” Phee had said in the checkout line.

  Phee was an older woman, with silver hair twirled up on her head like a nest, but with a brightness of eyes that made her seem younger than she was. That first day, she was wearing a long yellow dress with a pair of muddy waders. Hux liked that about her from the start—how she could be practical and impractical at the same time, tough and dainty.

  “For Liddy. My cat,” she’d said, motioning to the sardines in her basket. “She likes the ones packed in oil. She’s a brat.”

  Hux had looked down at the bags of rainbow-colored candy in his basket with more than a twinge of embarrassment. “I guess I’m doing my part to keep the dentist in business.”

  “I’d rather pull my own tooth out than see him again.”

  Hux had thought of Gunther standing in front of a mirror with pliers and a cotton ball soaked with whiskey, his homespun version of dentistry. “That’s what my friend does.”

  “He sounds smart,” Phee had said.

  Hux had laughed. “Not really.”

  Ever since then, he’d been building a porch for her.

  The fall sun shone brightly as Hux drove around the southern tip of bog to the western side where Phee lived. Woodland caribou used to thrive here until their migration routes were cut off by the northern timber industry. The small bands that were stranded in Evergreen eventually died off or were poached by hunters. You could still see their old bleached bones reflecting in the sun sometimes. You could still hear the clicking of their feet. Hux rarely saw an animal or a bird at work in the bog, but if he paid attention he’d see evidence of their industry. The great gray owl bred here during the summer along with the warblers and thrushes. To Hux the most interesting part of the bog wasn’t the birds or the animals; it was the plant life. The pitcher plants were the most cunning of them all.

  “Sometimes I forget how fortunate we are to be on top of the food chain,” Phee said when Hux showed her how they trapped and dissolved insects.

  Hux worked on her porch all morning with the same preemptive regret he’d felt before Leah left, when he knew he could still stop her but couldn’t make himself block her way. When he was around Phee, he felt like that sunny-yellow dress of hers, and in Evergreen that was a hard thing to give up, especially with winter coming, all those blue hours.

  All night Hux had sat up in his bunk bed thinking about his mother and father, about Lulu and Reddy—everyone that was gone. Gunther’s last bar girl said Evergreen was probably cursed and gave Gunther a small bundle of sage tied with twine, which he was supposed to light on fire and wave around the cabin to clear out old spirits and bad luck. Gunther had laughed at her, but Hux wouldn’t have minded waving the sage around.

  A few weeks before Leah came to Evergreen and a few weeks after his father finally succumbed to pneumonia, Hux found a cedar box with a flower etched on the front beneath a stack of his father’s wool sweaters in the closet. Sometimes Hux doubted his mother had said anything about the light coming in and the man named Cullen O’Shea who was going to bring it to her. Sometimes he thought he’d made the story up, like his stories about the Arctic. But what she told him was the truth, and his father must have known it for years. Inside the box were two pieces of pink paper. Another woman’s letter took up the first piece. A woman named Meg. On the second piece, there was a small red footprint, a thin curve of an arch on paper, and words his mother had written next to it.

  My daughter. Born April 16, 1940.

  “Where’s your mind this morning?” Phee said, handing Hux a mug of coffee.

  “About a million places,” Hux said. “I’m sorry, Phee. I’m taking too long.”

  Hux set down his hammer. The mosquitoes and blackflies had already died off, which made the going easier than when he’d started the project. The last of the season’s frogs were calling to one another in the bog.

  “Do you want to hear the truth?” Phee said, sitting on the step beside him. “I think we both don’t want you to finish this porch. I’m sure you’ve noticed I don’t have a
whole lot of neighbors out here.”

  “I bet Earl would like to move in with you,” Hux said.

  “He doesn’t discount sardines for you, too?” Phee said. She rubbed her hands together as if she were cold. “If I’m old enough to be your grandmother, how old does that make Earl? Wait. Don’t say it. I don’t want to know.”

  “Ancient,” Hux said.

  Phee tapped Hux on the knee with her index finger. “I’ve still got a few years’ worth of vanity left in me. Maybe less if we count my arthritis.”

  “Does it hurt?” Hux said.

  “On the good days I can open a jar. On the bad days I can’t.”

  “What kind of day is it today?”

  Phee looked at her almost-finished porch, which would probably outlast both of them. She leaned against the railing. “A good one.”

  The two of them sat next to each other on the top step with their coffee, looking out at the bog and up at the sky, listening to the birds chirping in the branches of trees, as if they’d been friends for a long time.

  “Can I ask you something?” Hux said after a while.

  “Sure,” Phee said.

  Hux didn’t know why then or why her, but he wanted to tell Phee about that cedar box and his sister’s footprint inside. He wanted to tell her about the light and Cullen O’Shea. About how he didn’t know why his father had kept the box hidden in the closet all those years. Hux hadn’t even told Gunther he had a sister somewhere out there in the world. He’d just sat alone with the truth, figuring if he sat long enough he’d know what to do with it.

  “You want to know why I came out this way, don’t you?” Phee said, granting him a little grace, a little more time, with the touch of her hand. “My husband and I couldn’t have children,” she said. “I’m all twisted up in the places I need to be straight and straight in the places I need to be twisted up.” Phee touched the silver ring on her finger. “Milty wanted children more than anything else.”

  Hux wanted to tell Phee he was sorry, but he didn’t want to embarrass her the way Gunther got embarrassed when they talked too close to their hearts.

  “I came here because I was always looking out a window at the kids playing in our neighborhood,” she said. “What a waste those years were. I should have closed the blinds.”

  “What happened to your husband?” Hux said.

  “He’s still sitting in the chair I left him in,” Phee said.

  What if his sister had been waiting for him like that? Hux thought. He thought of his mother, too—of all she’d endured and how that endurance had disfigured her from the inside out. He wanted her to finally be happy, wherever she was.

  Phee finished her coffee and called to Liddy, who was sunning herself on the woodpile, her throne, and then said to Hux, “Can I ask you something now?”

  “Sure,” Hux said, bracing himself.

  But Phee only smiled. “You think my coffee’s too bitter, don’t you?”

  20

  Hux didn’t like the idea of going to an orphanage, especially a religious one. He’d never set foot in a church before, and his only knowledge of them came from what Gunther told him about the Catholic church in Yellow Falls, where the priest could supposedly take one look at you and tell you all the ways in which you were eternally damned. Gunther loved the idea of that. He loved the fervor of it all, the gore. Heaven versus hell! God versus the devil! Sometimes he’d sit in the pew with a flask or a girl or both, daring the priest to come over and assess him. Sometimes he’d try to get Hux to go with him for entertainment’s sake (the sake of your soul!), but Hux didn’t like the idea of someone being able to look through him. He liked the words winter and woods and snow. He liked a good covering. A thick coat.

  Halfway to the orphanage in Green River, Hux pulled over to the side of the road. He didn’t feel like himself when he wasn’t in the woods. The road to Green River was flat and the view open. Brittle alfalfa fields stretched to the horizon in every direction. Hux was thinking about turning back altogether. He looked at the piece of pink paper on the passenger seat, the imprint of his sister’s slight foot. Even though she was only a year younger than him, Hux kept thinking he’d find a bright-eyed little girl waiting for him at the orphanage. He kept thinking he owed this girl something.

  Unless his sister had become a nun, like a few orphans probably did, deep down Hux knew she wouldn’t be there anymore and that she wasn’t little anymore either, and there was some comfort in that. He figured he’d sit with one of the nuns, and she’d hand him an address or some other vital piece of information to move him closer to her.

  When he wasn’t thinking about that little girl, Hux liked to imagine his sister was married by now with a child of her own, like the prettiest girls in Yellow Falls who married their high school sweethearts and gave birth to the next generation of them all in the same year. He liked to imagine a group of nuns having reared her as if she were their own, taking turns singing little hymns and bouncing her on their knees. Hux wondered what she’d look like, if seeing her would be like seeing his mother again in her true unburdened form. My sister, he thought. He made up names for her when he couldn’t sleep. Maybe she was a Catherine or a May. Or something fancier than that. Lorraine. Victoria. Maybe she’d turn out to be like the priest, and she’d be able to see through him and understand why he was sitting on the side of a road in the middle of nowhere.

  Hux wished Gunther were in the passenger seat, pointing a gun at him to make him keep going. Buck up, Gunther would have said. At least your ma didn’t get poached. But that was the other thing, the dark thing, the thing named Cullen O’Shea. What if he saw her for the first time and, like his mother, wanted to let her go again?

  Hux sat while the wind rocked the truck and his breath fogged the windows. He thought of the cabin and the oxeye meadow, the river and the porch. Even though he didn’t want to, he thought of his mother helpless on the cabin floor, the same floor Hux used to crawl across before he could walk, the same floor he used to eat crumbs from like his mother’s bird, Tuna. Hux thought of his father stuffing that cedar box, this pink paper, beneath his wool sweaters in the closet—the only unbrave thing he ever did.

  Hux steered the truck back onto the road.

  You should have done something, Dad.

  Hopewell was the name of the orphanage, which seemed pleasant enough until Hux drove through the iron gates and sat with the head nun, the only nun as far as he could tell.

  Sister Cordelia, she called herself.

  Hux had never met a nun before and was intimidated by her black robe, along with the straight way she sat in her chair as if God himself were pulling her shoulders back. Sister Cordelia had a large brown mole on her cheek and one above her lip. When she spoke, the moles and the thick black hairs that grew out of them spoke, too. She wore a heavy silver cross around her neck and seemed strangely powerful for being so old.

  The office contained a metal desk, two chairs, and a cross on the wall with a ceramic Jesus affixed to it. The two of them sat on either side of the desk, schoolmarm and schoolboy, the way Hux imagined he would have sat at the school in Yellow Falls if it had been closer and he’d been allowed to go. Sister Cordelia looked at Hux as if she could tell he’d never been to church or read the Bible. Hux could barely meet her dark eyes, and yet there was nothing else to look at in their place unless he looked at the bloody arms and legs of Jesus on the cross or the moles between the deep wrinkles on her face.

  The yellowed window shade was drawn.

  Sister Cordelia didn’t speak for a long time. She only stared at Hux, which prompted him to open his mouth. Even though he spent most of his days in silence, this kind made him nervous. He wondered out loud where all the children were. Why didn’t he hear them in the hallways? Since being invited in, Hux hadn’t seen any signs of childhood. No toys. No little shoes by the door. No drawings. Whatever else little girls adored.

  His questions went unanswered.

  So Hux went on. He told Sister Co
rdelia he was looking for his sister, his name was Hux, and he lived in Evergreen.

  “So you’re Hux,” Sister Cordelia said, quieting him with the rise of her hand. “I’ve been waiting a very long time to know what those three letters meant.”

  “You know who I am?” Hux said.

  “Now I do,” Sister Cordelia said. “Your name was stitched on her baby blanket.”

  Hux leaned forward. “My sister’s?”

  Sister Cordelia rested her chin in the palm of her hand. She looked at Hux from different angles, as if she were deciding something important about him.

  A full minute passed this way, and then another.

  “I let her go when she was fourteen,” she finally said, with what Hux recognized as pity. It was the way Earl talked to him whenever he went to the general store for supplies. Poor boy, he would say though Hux was a grown man now. It’s a great hardship to be all alone in the world. The man would always put an extra can of soup into his bag.

  “Don’t you have to keep kids until they’re eighteen?” Hux said.

  “You should stop troubling yourself and go home,” Sister Cordelia said. “You’re a decent young man, I can tell. No religious training, but that can be overlooked in some cases. I suggest you get yourself to a church and find a nice woman to marry. Have the Lord’s children and keep them. Then you’ll have lived a more Christian life than your mother.”

  “You knew her?” Hux said.

  Sister Cordelia opened one of the desk drawers and took out a worn manila folder stuffed full of yellowed paper, debating, it seemed, whether she was going to give it to Hux or not. “I watched your mother leave your sister on our doorstep. For a brief time, I thought she’d change her mind, but she didn’t. She bled onto the walkway, which I scrubbed clean.”

  Hux had assumed his father was the only one with a war story; he’d escaped the Nazis and Germany with nothing but the clothes on his back and had worked his way home by stoking the fires in a steamship first and then cleaning the floors in Grand Central Station until he’d earned enough for a ticket to Minnesota. Until Hux’s mother was in his arms once again. His father had said that was the best day of his life, seeing his family again.