His mother said she was disappointed he didn’t bring her a bouquet of edelweiss.
“She was a prostitute, wasn’t she?” Sister Cordelia said. “They all are, coming to us in the middle of the night like they do. They think I can’t see them or their tarnished souls. I wonder why she kept you. Maybe a boy seemed more useful to her.”
“She wasn’t what you say,” Hux said, raising his voice more than was right in front of a woman. “She was my mother. She was wonderful. She died when I was fifteen.”
“If you say so,” Sister Cordelia said, getting up from the desk. She lifted the window shade and stood staring at a group of girls huddled together outside. The girls were wearing white blouses and gray skirts when they should have been wearing coats and hats.
“Aren’t they cold?” Hux said, wanting to give them his work shirt, his warmth.
“Nobody grows strong by being coddled, young man,” Sister Cordelia said. “That’s my work here: to take the sins these girls are born with and restore them through the Word.”
“But they’re only children,” Hux said when one of the little girls met his eyes. She was just like the sister he’d been picturing all this time. Her hair was swept back into a ponytail. Her cheeks were pink. “Why weren’t any of them adopted? Why wasn’t my sister?”
“Naamah was meant to serve God. I suppose the others weren’t cute enough.”
“That’s her name?” Hux said. He didn’t know what it meant or even how to spell it, but he was happy to finally know it. Naamah. In it, he saw the future. He saw home.
“It was when she belonged to me,” Sister Cordelia said, turning away from the window. She walked over to Hux. “Do you believe in the devil?”
“I don’t know,” Hux said.
Sister Cordelia handed Hux the folder. She rolled up her black sleeve, exposing her forearm, which was purple and scarred, as if, like Jesus, she’d been nailed to the cross. “You should. He’s everywhere. For a long time he had hold of your sister. Maybe he still does.”
Hux opened the folder and read the topmost piece of paper in it.
April 16, 1940. Another infant has been brought to us by her mother, who abandoned her to our care like all the other mothers. Why do they keep opening themselves up in such unholy ways? We’ve decided not to pursue the mother and instead, in accordance with the laws of Minnesota and the greater laws of God, raise the child as a Christian to be adopted by a family who practices our values or raised by us if no one sees fit to take her home. I shall call her Naamah, for she is a fallen angel and I intend to restore her through the Word.
May 5, 1940. Naamah has been crying for daylong spells. I have taken over her care completely, since the doctor is useless in this matter and thinks she’s simply adjusting to life at Hopewell. I’ve positioned her crib next to the holy-water font and hung a cross directly over it, so that she may know the Lord’s sacrifice and behave accordingly. I don’t care what the other nuns think. We must take swift and grave action now, so the Devil doesn’t steal Naamah’s soul out from underneath us. She’s wooing him with her tears. He’s going to get her. I know it. I’ll do what I can with the help of the Lord.
October 9, 1940. No matter how hard I have tried to keep her from him, Naamah has let the Devil take hold of her. I see him in her gray eyes now, the way she hoards whatever milk I give her, the way she stuffs her fingers greedily into her mouth. I must strike now with my arsenal. I’ll starve her if I have to. I must drive the Devil out.
Hux turned over the papers as if he’d find something that made sense of the first ones the farther in he got. What he was reading didn’t seem like it could be real. His mother and father had never laid a cross finger on him, let alone a cross religious one. They never talked about the devil. Or even God. They were gentle woods people—sad, maybe—who taught him to be kind and treat others the way he wanted to be treated.
September 21, 1945. One war may have ended, but another one goes on here. Naamah has lost a tooth in the holy bread. I know she did it on purpose. God is stronger than the Devil, she will see. Until she repents stale bread is all she’ll get to eat. She has so much potential, but sometimes I have to hurt her just to see it, to get down to the truth of it all. She doesn’t understand what a kindness this is. She’s still selfish enough to sit before me looking heartbroken. She doesn’t understand His sacrifice.
“But everyone loses teeth,” Hux said, letting a handful of the papers fall to the floor.
“They don’t all do it while taking Communion,” Sister Cordelia said.
June 4, 1950. Naamah’s monthly blood has come. I’ve told her how unclean that makes her in God’s eyes and she submitted to me cleansing her private parts with bleach. She’s finally freeing herself from the Devil’s hold. She’s finally becoming mine.
“Why did you give this to me?” Hux said. He couldn’t bear to read a single word more. “What would make you give this to me?”
Sister Cordelia closed the shade again. Gone was the girl with the ponytail, the pink cheeks, and the flicker of light in her eyes. Sister Cordelia kneeled before Hux and gathered the papers he’d dropped on the floor. She took great care to put them back in the folder in their original order. While she was sorting them, the covering she was wearing on her head shifted, exposing her bald and pale scalp, which only a few stray silver hairs crisscrossed anymore. “God punishes me, too,” she said when she realized what he was looking at.
“Where is she?” Hux said.
“I’ve heard stories about her in the logging camps up north.”
When Sister Cordelia stood, the bones in her knees cracked, and she reached for the corner of the desk to steady herself. She was weaker than Hux had originally thought, but he didn’t offer her his hand. Her silver cross swung back and forth. She was breathing heavily.
“Holy Father,” she said. “Give me strength.”
And then Hux saw it. In front of him was a woman who’d lived her life on a leash of her own making and would die on one, and he felt sorry for her the way he felt sorry for wounded animals when there was no one to put them out of their misery. He wondered what had happened to make her this way. Had she ever been a little girl with a tender heart?
Sister Cordelia got herself back in her chair. When her cross stopped swinging and her breath belonged to her again, she touched the manila folder as if she were touching the trees it was made from, the forest, the ancient history.
“I loved her,” she said. “I love her still.”
21
Hux drove away from the orphanage with only one thought: if his mother had spoken up earlier, that manila folder would have been half as thick. Together, his mother and his father could have mustered their courage and brought Naamah back to Evergreen. They could have shown her what it was like to be loved without also being hated.
Hux thought of the girl he’d seen outside the window at Hopewell. He imagined teaching her how to split logs in the forest. How to preserve what was beautiful about an animal. What was everlasting. But with each new mile he drove, his vision of her faded until all he saw was the blurry outline of her face.
Hux drove to the first of the two logging camps he knew were still in operation. The rest of them were positioned closer to towns and had been shut down when the roads were paved and the loggers could travel back and forth easily. Hux went empty-handed, hoping he would find his sister and hoping he wouldn’t all at once. He parked the truck and searched the scattering of cabins, the camp store, and the tavern, repeating her name—Naamah, Naamah, Naamah—to strangers who looked at him with yellow whiskey stares.
“I might’ve had a good time with her,” one of the men said, nuzzling his face into his arm as if it were a woman when Hux walked past him.
“We all might have,” another one said, laughing the way men did sometimes.
“Got any booze?” said a third.
These men were more grizzled than any Hux had seen in Yellow Falls. He walked past them without saying anything
because his father had taught him never to fight a man who wasn’t worthy of his fist.
“You up for some fun, mister?” a girl not much older than the one at Hopewell asked Hux. She was wearing red lipstick, which was badly smeared. One of her plaid knee socks was pulled up, and one was pushed down to her ankle.
“No,” Hux said. She belonged in front of a blackboard at school. Or in her mother’s care. What kind of man would press his lips to hers?
Cullen O’Shea, Hux kept thinking when he looked at those knee socks. Hux wondered if he would have taken that shot. Gunther would have made sure the man was lying under an outhouse for all eternity. Nothing would have made him happier than nature’s call.
“No,” Hux said again to the girl.
He slipped back into the camp store with a tightness in his chest that had been expanding upward and outward ever since he’d left Evergreen. He walked up and down the aisles and bought the first cheerful thing he found: a bag of striped peppermint sticks.
The girl was still standing outside when he came out.
Hux wasn’t fool enough to think he could save all the lost girls. All he could do for this one was give her some candy.
Hux drove farther north, alternating between running the heater when he was able to trick himself into thinking about the weather or the woodpile or the canning he still had to do before winter set in and opening the window when he thought about Sister Cordelia and Hopewell and that knee-sock girl instead. From inside the truck, Hux could smell the crisp pine needles on the forest floor, which was why he kept the window open the rest of the way: the scent of the needles reminded him of home. One year when Hux was little, he boiled a pot of the green ones in water and poured the liquid into a glass bottle, which he gave to his mother for her birthday because she said the scent of pine made her feel clean and feeling clean made her happy. He didn’t understand what she meant, but he remembered how she smiled when she took the top off that bottle. He remembered smiling, too.
The second logging camp was more remote than the first. There were still forests that hadn’t been touched by the blade of a saw up here, a sight almost harder to bear than the forests that had. Hux was part of the destruction, but he didn’t ever use more of anything than he needed. Except for maybe whiskey once in a while. Or salt.
Leah used to make fun of him for that. You’re so moderate, she’d say. Sometimes I want you to eat a whole turkey or throw one or yell.
She probably would have done better with someone like Gunther, only his idea of faithfulness was different than hers. Fat, thin, tall, short, blond, brunette, redhead—Gunther loved every kind of woman. And they loved him, too. He could be with a different girl every night, and none of them would ever throw a drink in his face.
Hux parked the truck next to a few others more beat up than his. Instead of cabins, this camp was scattered with canvas tents. Nothing was paved. Everything was dirt. When the wind blew, so did the dust. Here, as in the first camp, men made their wages by destroying the forest. The few Hux passed wore coarse expressions as if life had chopped them down and they were glad to return the favor.
Men went to logging camps because there were no jobs in the places they came from, at least not for them. Usually they were people who couldn’t live the normal way without getting in trouble. Some of them had lost their families. Some of them never had families. Hux guessed the women came for the same reasons. In this camp, they sat on the ground outside the scattering of tents, waiting for the men’s workday to be done so theirs could begin. None of them was as young as the girl with the knee socks. They didn’t look like they could be saved. They didn’t look like they wanted to be.
When Hux was growing up, his father took him to this logging camp to buy planks for the woodshed because they were cheaper than at the lumberyard in Yellow Falls, where they’d gotten a discount until Hux’s grandfather died. His mother had wanted to come along for the ride and the fresh air, but his father had told her it was better for her to stay in Evergreen. She was just beginning to get sick then. He said he didn’t want her to catch a cold. Hux remembered waiting outside the lumberyard office while his father did business. He remembered thinking the women were pretty, which shocked him now.
When his father came out with a purchase slip and they were on their way back to Evergreen, Hux had asked him why all those women were sitting in the dirt.
“Where else are they going to sit?” his father had said.
Hux stopped to talk to each of the women now, hoping his sister wouldn’t turn out to be one of them. He declined their offers of whiskey and good times and gave them each a peppermint stick, which made him feel bad because it made him feel better.
He walked until there was nowhere left to walk but into the bar, the only building in the camp with walls. He slipped in through the saloon-style doors and sat down at the bar, which was made of plywood no one had bothered to sand smooth. He ordered a glass of beer and a shot of whiskey, a hamburger, and fries. The bartender wrote his order on a slip and went back to the kitchen where a man was peeling a giant pile of potatoes and smoking a cigarette at the same time. When he read the order, he looked over at Hux.
“You mind if it’s venison?” he said. “That’s all we’ve got this time of year.”
Hux said he didn’t mind and went back to his beer and the bowl of peanuts the bartender set in front of him. Though Hux wanted to find his sister, not finding her here would bring some comfort, too. The longer he was away from the orphanage, the more he knew he should have gone to the police about Sister Cordelia. I’ll starve her if I have to. She believed in what she’d done—he could tell that because she’d looked him in the eye while he read the pages in that folder. But he could also tell there was more to the story than she’d been willing to say. I let her go when she was fourteen.
“You up here looking for work?” the bartender said.
“Thinking about it,” Hux said.
The bartender offered him a cigarette, and he took one even though he didn’t normally smoke anything other than his father’s old pipe and the tobacco Earl set aside for him once in a while at the general store.
“They lost one on the blasting crew last week,” the bartender said. “You’ve got to have steel balls for that. It pays double though.”
“I think I have regular ones,” Hux said, exhaling a cloud of smoke.
“Too bad,” said the bartender.
When Hux finished the cigarette the bartender offered him another. “Rough day, huh? They all are, aren’t they?”
Hux thought of all the days he and Gunther had spent by the river fishing and swimming and drying off in the sun during the last year. Sometimes Leah would come down, too. Or one of Gunther’s girls, who’d say silly things that made all of them laugh.
“Some are better than others,” Hux said.
The bartender looked at the door and at the woman who was on her way into the bar. He gathered up the condiments on the shelf behind him, stuffing what he could back into jars and putting them in the kitchen.
“Brace yourself,” he said. “Here comes a tornado.”
Even though he’d never seen a picture of her, Hux knew the woman who came through the door was his sister the way he knew in his heart what she was doing in the logging camp. She walked in wearing a white undershirt and tight jeans that were stuffed into a pair of scuffed cowboy boots. She had long black hair down to her waist, which was full of leaves and sticks and pine needles. Out of all the women he’d seen today, she was the only one who still had a mouth full of teeth. Her body was long and lean and leggy, coltish, but there was steel in her stone-colored eyes. Something old and hard and sad.
They were just like his mother’s.
“I’ll take a shot of rye,” she said to the bartender, plucking an olive from one of the jars he didn’t have time to hide. The bartender glanced at her skeptically until she looked around the room, set her sights on Hux, and said, “You know I’m good for it.”
“J
ust this one,” the bartender said. “After that I need to see some money.”
“You don’t think I’m charming anymore?” she said, swinging her hips as if there were music playing. Unlike the women outside, she wasn’t wearing makeup or cheap perfume. Hux didn’t know what that meant. “You used to like when I came in here. You used to call me darling. Don’t you remember that? We’d go out back in the sweetgrass.”
“You used to pay for what you took,” the bartender said.
“You used to, too.” She looked at him seriously for a minute before deciding the whole thing was funny. She laughed but in an awful way.
Hux put out a few bills on her behalf, which only made her laugh more.
“You’re all the same,” she said. “Every one of you.”
A single dimple appeared at the left corner of her mouth, and it broke Hux’s heart to see. All he could think of was getting her out of here. The smell of grease from the kitchen was making him sick. His thoughts were making him sick. The words out back and sweetgrass.
A bell rang outside, which meant the men would be getting off work soon and would come in here looking for relief. Hux couldn’t let her go with one of them or more than one of them or all of them. He couldn’t watch her sell herself for an olive or a shot of rye or whatever it was she wanted this far north.
The cook brought out his food, but Hux couldn’t touch it.
“You want some?” he said sliding his plate over to her. She was hungry, he could tell. Her expression was the same as the strays that lived in the dirt alleys back in Yellow Falls.
“What do you want for it?” she said. She eyed the hamburger but made no movement toward the plate of food or the empty stool next to Hux.
“Nothing,” Hux said.
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