“You don’t have shoes on,” Hux said.
“I like the way the forest feels on my feet,” she said.
Hux looked at her bare legs. “What about pants? It’s cold.”
“They’re down by the river,” she said and set off in the opposite direction.
Hux opened the screened door, which was still caked with dead blackflies and mosquitoes from the summer. He was happy to have found Naamah, but not like this.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he said to Gunther.
Gunther secured the towel around his waist and put a kettle on for coffee. The cabin smelled of sweat and dirt. On the floor, Hux saw Naamah’s footprints.
“Living my life,” Gunther said. He took down two mugs and heaped sugar into them. “You want milk or something?
Whiskey?”
“She’s my sister,” Hux said.
“Half sister. She told me all about it. Funny you never did.”
“How was I supposed to tell you that?” Hux said.
“You know about how I came into the world,” Gunther said. “You think that’s an easy truth for me to tell?” He put on a pair of pants while the water heated up. “You’ve got to figure out how to stand what you can’t help.”
“I didn’t bring her here for you,” Hux said.
“No, you brought her here for you,” Gunther said.
“You can’t treat her like some bar girl from Yellow Falls.”
“Careful,” Gunther said, making the coffee. “My mother was some bar girl.”
Hux sat at the table. He thought of Lulu and her old coonskin coat. “Your mother wasn’t just some bar girl.”
“Neither is Naamah,” Gunther said.
“I know that,” Hux said.
“Then what’s the problem? Unless you think I’m not good enough for her.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But you’re thinking it,” Gunther said. “I can’t be celibate like you.”
“Women don’t leap at me like they leap at you,” Hux said, thinking of the woman he was with—the only other one—before Leah. Milly McKay, who ended up choosing someone else because Hux couldn’t get his feelings for her together fast enough.
“That’s because you don’t leap at them,” Gunther said. “How long did it take you to ask Milly out? A year? She got married and had a baby faster than that. A girl, I think.”
“I’m not you,” Hux said.
Gunther had always been able to do everything—catch a bucket of fish, chop down a tree, milk a goat—twice as fast as Hux. He’d made a life out of tracking wild things, taming them with the barrel of his shotgun, and mounting them on his walls. Hux had made a life out of preserving what was dead. Of course Naamah would go to someone like him.
Gunther added some whiskey to his coffee. “I’m going to marry her.”
“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. You’ve known her for eight hours,” Hux said. “You have no idea who she is.”
Hux pictured the country road outside the logging camp—Naamah clawing at his face in the truck and then at hers. She’d already clawed at Gunther. He thought of her taped-up laundry bag, how long she’d been carrying it, how damaged it was.
“Besides, I don’t think she’s the marrying kind,” he said.
Gunther smiled the same crooked way his mother did when she was still alive. It was a smile that could turn a black sky blue. “Then why did she say yes?”
24
Gunther and Naamah were married on a Tuesday at the courthouse in Yellow Falls, with Hux and Phee looking on as witnesses. There were no promises to cherish each other, no declarations of everlasting love, no for better or worse. One minute they weren’t married, and the next they were, and the civil servant was asking the four of them to exit through door B and sign the papers that would make the whole thing official.
Everyone but Hux had signed and was now waiting on him.
Hux stood in the lobby of the courthouse with the pen in his hand. He looked at Naamah, who was wearing the dress Phee had sewn for her; Naamah didn’t care what the dress looked like as long as it wasn’t white or black, like a habit, so Phee chose a pretty silver material from a bolt at the general store that matched Naamah’s eyes almost exactly. Phee had made a hair wreath, too, out of evergreen branches and berries and tiny fall orchids from the bog. Gunther was wearing the corduroy suit Reddy had married Lulu in and a camouflage tie he bought at the Hunting Emporium. He had dirt under his fingernails. He was smiling his crooked smile. Maybe this really was the way love worked.
“Are you sure you want to get married?” Hux had asked Naamah that morning when he was helping her get ready at the cabin, when there was still time to back out.
“That’s what people do when they love each other, isn’t it?” she’d said.
Hux looked down at the piece of paper. Gunther had scribbled his name so quickly Hux could barely make it out. Gunther wanted to kiss his bride, damn it. Twirl her around a little. Take her back to the woods. Naamah’s signature was looping and intricate and measured, surprisingly so for a woman who slept outside and walked barefoot through the forest most of the time; the look of it gave Hux some assurance she knew what she was doing. Phee’s signature was the one that gave him pause. It was bold as newspaper headlines, but Hux couldn’t tell which direction it was leaning.
“Grave Mistake Made by Young Couple Today in Yellow Falls”? “Young Couple with Fine Future Marries Today in Yellow Falls”?
“We’ll all be dead before you sign your name,” Gunther said.
What if I don’t sign it? Hux thought, even though he knew Gunther would grab a stranger off the street if it came to that. Hux thought of his mother and father in the picture back at the cabin, his father’s traveling suit, his mother’s blue dress. They’d started with so much happiness, and in so little time it was whittled down to nothing.
Naamah sidled up to Hux. Her dress rustled like wind in the trees. She put a hand on his forearm. It’s all right, she seemed to be saying with the light press of her fingers.
So Hux signed the piece of paper, and Gunther picked Naamah up and whooped like a cowboy all the way down the steps of the courthouse. At Phee’s urging, Hux took several pictures of them. His thumb was in the way of the lens in every photograph except one. Only the one would turn out and only after the camera was lost and found again, and all it would take then was a glance for Hux to know which headline their coupling implied.
After Gunther finished showing Naamah off to strangers on Main Street, the four of them drove back to Phee’s cabin to eat a pot roast with carrots and potatoes and a loaf of bread, which Gunther and Naamah barely touched. The whole time their legs were tangled up beneath the table like vines. Their hands were anchored on each other’s laps, as though if they let go they might get pulled down into their private underworld altogether.
Hux felt bad Phee had gone to so much trouble and ate twice as much as he normally would have to show his appreciation. After the roast, Phee served pieces of chocolate cake and tiny glasses of red liqueur that was sweet and bitter at the same time. After that, she excused Gunther and Naamah from the table as if they were children, for which they looked grateful and guilty and relieved.
In no time they were outside, chasing each other around the woodpile and the garden, taking turns tackling each other to the ground. Gunther had finally found someone who didn’t mind wrestling with him. Someone who liked it, even. Once, Naamah pretended she was hurt, and when Gunther skidded to her rescue beside a pile of kindling, she bit his arm, and he howled and they laughed and did it all over again.
Phee opened the window above the sink in her kitchen.
“Your dress!” she started, but then she closed the window suddenly as if she were sorry she’d said anything. Phee’s fingers were covered in bandages where she’d pricked them with the needle when she was sewing Naamah’s dress. She said it had been a long time since she’d worked without a pattern, but Hux w
ondered if her arthritis had flared up while she was sewing, if that’s what made her hands clumsy.
“You want me to go get Naamah and tell her to take it off?” he said.
Phee wiped her hands on a dish towel. She opened a can of sardines for Liddy and whistled lightly for her to come. “My wedding dress is sitting in a pile of mothballs somewhere. This one will tell a more interesting story.”
They stood side by side looking out the window like parents. They watched Naamah and Gunther run around and around the fire pit and eventually disappear into the bog. Every so often Hux would hear the echo of their laughter.
After the last dish was washed and put back in the cupboard, he and Phee went out to the porch with bigger glasses of the red stuff, which reminded Hux of cough syrup and chokecherries. “What is this anyway?” he asked her.
Phee put a pair of gloves on and draped a wool blanket over her lap. The snow had held off through October and the beginning of November, but the sky finally looked ready for it even if Hux’s woodpile and his pantry weren’t. The air was heavy with moisture. The clouds were low and pink.
“I thought it would suit you,” Phee said, lifting her glass.
“Because it’s bitter?” Hux said. He missed Naamah. He missed his best friend. He was happy for them, but he couldn’t help feeling like he was being left behind, which was exactly how he felt when his mother died.
Phee smiled. “No, you fool. Because it’s sweet.”
The two of them sat out on the porch talking and rocking and waiting for Gunther and Naamah to return until it became clear they weren’t coming back, at least not tonight. Hux offered to light a fire for Phee, but she said sometimes she liked being a little cold.
After a while, Phee fell asleep in her chair, and Hux went inside for another blanket and placed it around her shoulders as well as he could without waking her. He listened for Naamah and Gunther in the bog but didn’t hear them. He wondered if they’d decided to walk home, and if that was so, he tried not to feel hurt they didn’t come back to say good night.
Late in the evening, the first snowflakes started to fall, and Phee woke with a start. She dabbed at the corners of her mouth with a handkerchief, as if she’d been drooling.
“You never know what’s going to happen when you close your eyes at my age.”
“You’re not that old,” Hux said.
Phee used the railing to pull herself up. “You’re not that young.” She leaned her head out over the porch. “Is that snow?”
“It started a few minutes ago,” Hux said.
Phee walked down the steps and held out her hands to catch the flakes. “This is worth being cold for,” she said, slipping off her gloves.
Hux followed her. There was something special about the first snow of the season. Even though it brought with it months of low-hanging gray skies, below-zero temperatures and wind chills, the first snow temporarily covered everything fall had exposed.
“You think it will stick?” Phee said.
Hux thought of Naamah, of Gunther. “It’s too early to tell.”
25
Almost overnight, late fall turned into early winter, and the first featherlight snowfall turned into daily snowfall heavy as stones. The transition was hard to appreciate, especially when Hux had to strap on snowshoes to go anywhere but the outhouse or the woodpile.
It was Phee’s first winter in Evergreen, which Hux figured would be overwhelming for her. He made a weekly trip over to her place with wood, which he stacked by the door so she didn’t have to walk through the snow. Sometimes they’d play one of her word games.
When the roads were clear enough, Hux would make trips to Yellow Falls to pick up a few luxuries at the general store with the money he got from Gunther’s buck. He’d get butter and cream for Phee. Eggs and cheese for himself. He’d even pick up a few things for Gunther and Naamah, too, but he’d always end up eating them himself because they stayed out trapping longer than he expected. Still, he’d buy little bags of peppermint sticks with the same sense of anticipation every time.
Naamah had moved her few belongings over to Gunther’s cabin, and even though he’d never seen what was inside of the laundry bag, he missed seeing it around. He missed the routine of going outside with a cup of coffee in the morning, and he missed the relief he felt when he saw her snuggled up under her tree. He missed wondering how that flimsy burlap-and-feather blanket kept her from freezing.
Sometimes Hux would sit in the truck with her footprint in his hand, wondering if the reason he didn’t want to sign that piece of paper at the courthouse was selfish all the way to its root. Maybe he wasn’t looking out for her at all. Naamah and Gunther had gone out trapping after the first snow, and by the time they finally came home in December, for the first time in his life Hux understood wanting to tackle someone to the ground.
The three of them were down at the river, drilling holes into the ice with augers so they could fish. Naamah was wearing her cowboy boots and a pair of jeans with holes all over them, clearing snow away with a shovel. Her hair was so badly tangled, so full of the woods, it looked like it belonged to one of the animals in their traps.
“I’ve never met anyone who loves being outside as much as me,” Gunther said about Naamah. “Except my ma, maybe.”
Gunther said he and Naamah would walk for ten or twelve hours at a time, setting lines and checking others, and his fingers would have about fallen off, and she’d want to keep going to the next stand of trees, the next river, the next vague horizon line. He said she was better at figuring out where to set the traps than him. She’d blind-set them without bait even, which he never did, and the animals would still come. The only lure they needed was her.
“At least that’s how it is with me,” he said.
Gunther looked good. His hair was long. His beard thick. He looked happy.
“You still trucking to the tavern every night?” he joked.
“Oh, yeah. I’ve had some real sweet times,” Hux said.
“You still going over to Phee’s place?”
Hux knew what Gunther was doing, but there was no stopping him.
“She’s married still, you know.”
“It isn’t like that,” Hux said, pretending to be irritated but not doing a very good job of it. Without Gunther here, he’d had no reason to cross the river, which he loved to do in the winter. When he was a boy, he used to think that when the river froze it froze all the way through to its rocky bottom, until his father told him there was a whole winter world down there, alive and well and rushing by.
“You’re still hung up on Leah,” Gunther said. “You should go after her.”
“Why don’t you go back into the woods and leave me alone,” Hux said.
Gunther reached for Hux’s arm and at the same time hooked his leg around Hux’s and before Hux knew it he was on his back on the ice, the wind knocked out of him. His head hurt. His tongue was bleeding. His ear was full of snow.
“I missed you, too,” Gunther said and helped Hux to his feet.
Naamah had stopped shoveling the snow. She was leaning over one of the holes they’d drilled, holding a pocketknife and staring intensely at the dark water below. The sky above was clear and deep and blue, and the sun reflected off the snow and the ice with such strength Hux had to close his eyes every few seconds to stop them from burning.
“What is it?” Gunther said.
All at once Naamah plunged her hand into the hole, and when she brought it back out again she was holding a good-sized bluegill, which she’d speared with one of the short blades on her pocketknife. Even though Hux counted himself an accomplished fisherman and had known quite a few of them, too, he’d never seen anything like this. Naamah quieted the bluegill with the pocketknife and filleted it right there on the ice as if she’d been doing it all her life. The scales she scraped off shone like little jewels in the sunlight. Lulu was the only other person Hux could think of who might have been capable of this same feat. He’d always wonde
red how she’d gotten tangled up in that bear trap with a sixth sense like that.
“I told you,” Gunther said. “They jump onto blades for her.”
“How did you know when to put your hand in?” Hux said.
When Naamah was done cleaning her bluegill, she wiped her hands, the entrails and blood, on her jeans. She put the fillet in the little leather satchel she was carrying.
“Sister Cordelia taught me,” she said, standing up.
“They taught you how to fish at that orphanage?” Gunther said.
Even though Hux didn’t know why Naamah had lied like that, the fact that Gunther was still smiling concerned him more. It meant Gunther didn’t know about Sister Cordelia or what she’d done to Naamah. He didn’t know anything.
Naamah tugged on Gunther’s beard. “Don’t be jealous, you old goat. I just have more patience than you do.”
“You could wait out a goddamn glacier,” Gunther said. He grabbed her hand roughly and kissed it tenderly and just like that dissolved Sister Cordelia’s ghost.
Maybe it didn’t matter Naamah hadn’t told him about her. They were together on the ice in Evergreen, and Sister Cordelia was miles away in Green River, sitting behind a yellow window shade with an unworthy heart. Maybe the past didn’t have an equal hold on everyone. Maybe it was gracious sometimes and let people go without following their tracks.
“I guess we know what we’re having for dinner,” Gunther said, licking his lips. He lifted the satchel off Naamah’s shoulder. “We’ll dip it in cornmeal and fry it up in butter.”
Hux thought he saw something change in Naamah’s expression—a little dark twinge—but before he could figure it out it disappeared.
“That sounds good,” she said, leaning into him. “I love cornmeal.”
26
December slowly turned itself over to January, and January blew around snow and branches and little signs that everything wasn’t all right no matter how much Hux wanted it to be. Instead of the trees and the river and the next horizon, Naamah was living behind doors and walls and closed windows now. Steady heat from the woodstove.
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