Hux didn’t know what his father would think about Naamah. Or what his mother would think. He didn’t even know what he thought yet. More than anything, he wanted to know why Naamah left that orphanage when she was so young, but she didn’t owe him that.
When they reached the cedar tree Hux had felled a few days before, he opened the thermos and handed it to Naamah.
“I love the smell of coffee,” she said. “The taste not so much.”
“I put a lot of sugar in mine,” Hux said.
Naamah took a sip, made a face, and handed the thermos back.
“You want some bread?” Hux said.
Naamah picked up an ax. “I want to chop wood.”
While he drank coffee, Hux watched the way her black hair slid across her back each time she swung the ax. There were twigs and leaves stuck in it from sleeping on the ground in the logging camp and last night in Evergreen, and now little splinters of wood from the cedar tree were stuck to it, too. Naamah was used to working hard; he could tell that. When she got warm, she took off her sweatshirt, leaving her with only the white undershirt from the day before. He couldn’t tell if it was still wet from the river or wet from her sweat.
Hux joined in after he finished the coffee. He could barely feel the moment of impact between the ax and the wood anymore, his calluses were so thick. Leah used to wear gloves when she went with him, but Naamah worked until she had blood blisters at the base of her fingers, and those blisters broke, and then she worked more.
It was like the two of them had chopped and stacked wood together all their lives. They weren’t competing the way Hux and Gunther did. They weren’t betting anything. The sun was shining through the narrow spaces between the branches overhead. The air smelled of pine and cedar and tamarack sap—their hands and clothes were sticky from it.
Occasionally Hux thought he saw in Naamah the beginnings of a smile. A bird would land on a nearby branch or the wind would blow and the trees would rain needles on them and they’d stop swinging for a minute. Once, Naamah held her finger out and a grosbeak grazed it. Like Hux, she seemed to love being outside all the way to her bones.
She looked sorry when they cut the last of the wood.
“We’ll come back soon,” Hux said. “Wood’s one thing I never have enough of.”
Naamah sat on a log. She wiped her hands on her sweatpants, which stained the gray material with blood. “I know what you’re thinking,” she said.
“I’ve got stuff for that at home,” Hux said, visualizing the package of bandages and the tin of salve he kept in the mudroom. Naamah was beat up pretty good. Her hands were swollen; parts of them looked like raw meat.
“You could have stopped without any hard feelings on my part,” he said. “Out here you’ve got to know when to say mercy.”
Naamah looked down at her hands. Her hair fell around her face like a curtain; a pinecone toppled out of it onto the forest floor.
“I didn’t like it—all those men,” she said.
“It isn’t any of my business,” Hux said, but his mind got caught up in the words all those men anyway. He thought of the girl with the knee sock pushed down around her ankle.
Naamah fumbled at the front of her neck until her fingers found her silver chain and cross. “I went there for her.”
23
Naamah left the orphanage in the middle of an October snowstorm with only the clothes on her back, the boots on her feet, and the same laundry bag she’d brought with her to Evergreen. She didn’t say why she left, and Hux didn’t ask her. Until that day, she said she’d never felt snow on her skin. She didn’t know it could be soft and biting all at once. She didn’t know anything until she was alone in the woods for the first time.
Naamah rocked as she talked. She and Hux were sitting on the porch trying to hold on to the last of the day’s sun. The waxwings were flying through the garden, plucking up what was left of the berries and dropping them on the ground.
A few weeks had passed since he and Naamah had first chopped wood together. Hux was still sleeping in his bunk bed and Naamah in her pine-needle nest beyond the front porch. In the mornings Hux would come out with a mug of coffee for her, which she’d sip from the frosty forest floor. She said all that sugar was growing on her.
Hux kept telling Naamah she didn’t have to sleep outside, but she kept saying she did. He didn’t know what she was going to do when the snow came, but he hoped she’d want to stay the winter and by then he’d find a way to lure her inside.
“I thought leaving Hopewell would make me free,” Naamah said, rocking more and more slowly until she stopped altogether. She looked out into the woods.
“Did it?” Hux said, slowing down, too.
“Not exactly,” Naamah said.
Hux thought she was going to tell him about the logging camp—why she stayed when she found out their mother wasn’t there, that she’d never been there. But she didn’t.
“I stood all night in a stand of evergreen trees a few hundred yards from Hopewell,” she said. “I thought I was going to freeze to death like Sister Cordelia said.”
Hux was listening to Naamah as if what she said were pieces of a puzzle that was going to take time to put together. He was listening for the corner pieces, the foundation.
“When I was bitten up by frost but still alive in the morning, I started walking through the woods,” Naamah said. “There was a fountain in Green River that was supposed to make people’s dreams come true, but when I got there it was empty.”
Naamah lifted herself out of the rocking chair. She put her cigarettes in the pocket of the work shirt Hux had lent her. “I think I’ll go inside now.”
Hux handed her the matches, picturing her standing all by herself in the snow, thinking about how afraid she must have been even though she didn’t say so.
“Are you hungry?” he said. He didn’t want to push her into telling him more, but he didn’t want to let her go either. About all he could think to do right then was feed her. “I could make pancakes. With that syrup you like so much.”
Naamah smiled a little but not enough for her dimple to show, which seemed a kindness even though she didn’t know the story of her face the way Hux did.
“Okay,” she said.
That night, after they finished supper and Naamah was washing the dishes, Gunther came by for the first time since Hux had brought Naamah to Evergreen. Gunther had been out hunting royal bucks the last few weeks, and when he didn’t find any of those he trapped a few foxes. He said he’d told Hux he’d be gone.
“I guess I forgot,” Hux said.
“It’s the Leah fog,” Gunther said. He leaned against the doorframe. He was chewing on a twig, which was his version of a toothbrush. His cheeks were flushed. His hair ragged the way women liked it. He was wet from swimming across the river. He was also drunk.
“Aren’t you going to invite me in?” he said, handing Hux a bottle of whiskey. “I sold a few nice pelts today. I brought the good stuff. Didn’t you even miss me?”
“Not tonight,” Hux said. From where he stood, he saw Naamah rinsing the dishes from supper. He could hear her humming, but he didn’t recognize the tune.
Gunther leaned across the threshold. “You got someone in there?”
“No,” Hux said, trying to close the door. “Good night.”
Gunther hopped over a rocking chair and hurled himself off the porch, somehow managing to land on his feet. He ran to the kitchen window before Hux could pull the curtains shut. Naamah watched as Hux ran back to the door. Her hands were full of soap.
“You old dog,” Gunther said. “Here I was feeling sorry for you. I was about to go out and find you another buck. Who is she? Where did you find her? What are you hiding?”
“She’s my sister,” Hux said because he’d never be able to get Gunther to leave without telling him the truth, and even then he didn’t know if he’d be able to get him to go.
“And I’m your uncle,” Gunther said. “I didn’t take you fo
r a paying customer.”
Hux made a fist, but Gunther caught it before it did any damage to his face.
“You don’t know how to fight,” he said. “You’re going to break your hand.” He forced Hux’s thumb out from beneath his fingers. “Now you can hit me.”
Naamah sidled up to Hux at the door. “What’s going on?”
“I was just telling your friend to hit me right here,” Gunther said, pointing to his jaw.
Naamah put a hand on her hip, which she tilted ever so slightly in his direction.
“Why should he?” she said.
“I said something he didn’t like,” Gunther said.
“Maybe I should hit you, too, then,” Naamah said. “I’m his sister after all.”
After Hux was finished feeling proud Naamah would call herself his sister so soon, he recognized what was going on. She and Gunther were flirting with each other.
Naamah wiped her wet hands on her jeans and held one out to him. “I’m Naamah.”
Gunther took it and kissed the top of it. When he finally let go of it, his lips had soap on them. “I’m in love,” he said, licking them.
“All right. Enough’s enough. You have to go,” Hux said, pushing Gunther away from the door and down the steps. Gunther’s boots were wet and untied, and he kept falling over himself. “I’ll come over tomorrow. I’ll explain everything.”
“She’s the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen,” Gunther said, looking up at the porch. “It’s not just because I’ve been drinking either. That hair. Those eyes! She’s like a wood angel.”
“Go drink some more,” Hux said. “It’ll do you good to pass out. Just don’t do it in the river. I don’t want to pick crayfish out of your mouth.”
“A fairy?” Gunther said, finally turning toward the river. “No, that’s not it.”
Gunther was halfway to the river when he found the word he was looking for.
“Nymph!” he called back, and Hux waved him off and closed the cabin door.
“I’m sorry about that,” he said to Naamah. “Gunther’s a handful.”
“I don’t mind,” Naamah said, returning to the sink.
When the last of the dishes was clean, she dried them and put them away in the cupboard Hux normally used for his skinning tools, but she seemed proud of herself and Hux didn’t want to discourage her. Hux got out the old book about the Arctic Circle. He should have been thinking about preservation—what was going to get them through the winter besides wood—but he kept thinking he had time to settle in. They had time.
Before they went to sleep that night, Naamah did something surprising. She brought the laundry bag inside, along with a blanket made out of old potato sacks she’d stuffed with goose feathers and stitched together with heavy twine. She said she thought she’d give the top bunk bed a try. When she spread her blanket over the existing wool one, a few of the white feathers floated down to the floor.
“Okay,” Hux said, trying not to make a big deal about it, even though he didn’t know why Naamah had changed her mind. Tonight wasn’t any colder than the others. The sky was clear. The ground was dry. He tried to stop thinking; he didn’t want his thoughts to scare her off. Sometimes he had the feeling she could hear them without his saying anything.
Hux changed in the mudroom, and Naamah changed in the closet. Both of them took turns with the flashlight in the outhouse. Before they got into the bunk beds, Naamah kneeled on the floor. At first, Hux thought she’d dropped something and was looking for it, but then he heard her say, “Amen,” and she was on her feet again. He didn’t ask her about it or the cross around her neck. He kept thinking of what he’d read in the file at the orphanage. I intend to restore her through the Word. He wondered if she believed in God or if it was some kind of reflex. Hux believed in the trees and the river and the sky.
When Naamah climbed up into the bunk bed, Hux turned out the light. They lay in silence for a while before Naamah spoke up in the darkness.
“Why did she leave me and not you?” she said.
Hux was grateful Naamah had waited as long as she had, but he still didn’t know the best way to tell her what had happened, since he couldn’t think of it, of him, without feeling sick to his stomach. Sick in his heart.
“Our fathers weren’t the same person,” he said.
“Who was mine?” Naamah said.
Hux shifted in the bunk bed. He didn’t feel himself clenching his teeth until he released them. He heard his sigh, though. His deep exhale.
“He wasn’t a good man, was he?” Naamah said.
“No,” Hux said, trying to spare her his name if she would let him. “He came the year my father was in Germany. Our mother couldn’t keep him out.”
“Do I look like him?” Naamah said.
Hux turned on the light and got out of bed to get the photograph of his mother and father on their wedding day. Even though the photograph was black and white, he knew his mother’s dress was blue with tiny crystals sewn into the fabric and that she’d worked at Harvey Small’s in order to buy it. His father wore a traveling suit made in Germany. Both of them had a certain glint in their expressions, a happiness to have found each other in a lumber town in northern Minnesota.
“You look like her,” Hux said, handing her the picture frame.
Hux got back in the lower bunk to give Naamah some privacy. She didn’t say anything for a long time, and Hux resisted the urge to fill the silence. He wondered if she was studying the photograph for traces of herself, if she was following the lines of their mother’s face with her fingers like he did sometimes. He wondered, but he didn’t ask.
Another feather floated down.
“Sister Cordelia used to say she was tainted by the devil,” Naamah said finally. “She said that’s why he wanted me so much. She said she could have kept me if she’d wanted to.”
“I don’t think it was that simple for her,” Hux said.
Hux thought of Naamah’s footprint on the piece of pink paper—the words my daughter—which he put in the glove compartment of his truck the night he took Naamah away from the logging camp when his name was the only proof she needed in order to believe he was who he said he was, who he said she was. He thought about getting up to get it. He thought about how, when he was little, sometimes his mother would look at him as if she expected to see someone else or at least hoped she would.
“I used to have dreams about her when I was still at Hopewell,” Naamah said, the bunk bed creaking beneath her. “One time she and I were walking through the garden at the end of summer. She was singing a song about all these beautiful blue things. Even though I told her she’d get in trouble with Sister Cordelia, when we passed a grapevine she picked the biggest grape she saw. I watched her eat that grape like it was made of happiness.”
“What happened after that?” Hux said.
“I woke up.”
“Do you still dream about her?” Hux said.
“Yes, but the dreams aren’t as nice. The last one I had I was standing in an alfalfa field and she ran over me with a truck.”
Hux twisted his blanket in his hands. He couldn’t change what his mother had done. In order to understand it, Hux had to let Cullen O’Shea in all over again. He had to picture him at the door. At the table. On the floor. A man with scissors for hands. Stones for a heart. He had to picture his mother with a gun in her hand.
Hux leaned out over the bunk bed and looked up at Naamah, who was hugging the picture frame as if it could hug her back. She asked Hux to turn out the light, which he did.
“Not a single person in this world has loved me,” she said.
Hux reached up for her hand but couldn’t find it in the dark. “I do,” he said, and even though he did, albeit in a way he didn’t understand, it didn’t sound true.
“Guilt and love aren’t the same thing,” Naamah said, but kindly.
The next morning she was gone, and Hux wished he’d told her about how their mother used to linger in front of the pink yarn a
t the general store. He wished he’d told her about how she used to look at him and want her. He was sorry for the piece of paper in the glove compartment. He was sorry about it all.
Hux searched for her on the bed of pine needles at the forest’s edge but didn’t find her there. He walked through the meadow, where they’d sometimes drink their coffee, thinking maybe she’d gone for a walk. She liked to wander through the woods when there were no more chores left for her to do. He walked across the creek, over the springs, in and out of the little ravines. He sat on a stump for a while and then went back to the cabin, hoping she’d be waiting for him on the porch like the night she was waiting for him in the truck. Maybe she was watching to see what he’d do.
When she wasn’t at the cabin, Hux took the rowboat across the river. Gunther could track people as well as he could track animals. According to him, Hux had the footfall of an old sap. Gunther was lighter on his feet, like how pond skaters balanced on the surface of the water but never broke through.
Hux knocked on Gunther’s front door, but Gunther didn’t open it.
Naamah did. She was wearing one of Gunther’s plaid work shirts and looking back over her shoulder in the direction of the kitchen, laughing her logging-camp laugh.
It’ll take more than a hamburger to get me in your truck, Bud.
Her dark hair trailed down the length of her back and was full of twigs and dirt and feathers. A strand of algae was stuck to her neck. Her feet were caked with dried mud. She squinted in the bright morning light.
“I was thirsty,” she said, before Hux could say anything.
Gunther walked out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his waist. Before he saw Hux, he said, “I’ve got the worst goddamn headache in the world. Between your hands and the whiskey, I don’t know which way is up. I think you drank more than me.”
Gunther turned, and Hux saw the claw marks on his back.
“I don’t see how you could have grown up in some orphanage. You belong out here in the trees.” Gunther stopped talking when he saw Hux standing at the screened door.
“I’m going for a walk,” Naamah announced when Hux made a fist.
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