Evergreen

by Rebecca Rasmussen

  “Gunther’s going to fall off a cliff one day,” Lulu said. “I think we all know that. He’ll holler the whole way down because he won’t have seen it coming.”

  “I don’t want to fall off a cliff,” Hux said.

  “You’re like your mother,” Lulu said. “She fell down hard once, and she never climbed high enough to do it again.”

  “But she loves you more than anything,” Hux said.

  Lulu smiled her crooked smile. “I love her that way, too.”

  Hux watched Naamah at the gate, thinking of Lulu. Naamah was looking up at the orphanage with an expression Hux could only guess at because her back was to him. She stood that way for a long time. Hux thought he saw someone pass by the front windows on the second floor of the orphanage. He thought he saw Sister Cordelia’s black robe.

  He thought of what Sister Cordelia had told him—I love her still.

  After a while, Naamah let go of the gates. When she came back to the truck, there was rust on her face.

  “I’m ready to go now,” she said.

  Hux tucked the green feather into his pocket. Maybe a little strength would rub off on him, too. Maybe like the feather, they were supposed to float for a while. Land softly. Hux decided to drive the other way out of Green River, through the center of town. He and Naamah could make wishes on a handful of old change that was rolling around on the mats.

  Before he started the truck and steered it away from the orphanage for what he hoped would be the last time, he pointed to the gravel.

  “You dropped your hat. Should I get it for you?”

  Naamah looked at herself in the side mirror. She touched the front of her sunny-yellow dress. “It isn’t mine anymore.”

  29

  Everyone made it through the summer admirably, even the corn. The thick green stalks were as tall as Naamah by August. The ears golden as the sun. Before they harvested it, Hux took a picture of Naamah with her crop. The doctor in Yellow Falls had said the last few months of her pregnancy would be uncomfortable with all that extra weight bearing down on her. Right then, though, between the rows of sweet corn, Naamah looked round but light. She looked proud of herself.

  “Take another one,” Gunther said that day. “I want to remember this forever.”

  Naamah’s feet were bare. Her toes were curled into the damp soil. She was wearing one of Gunther’s white undershirts and a pair of overalls with the seams let out by Phee.

  “You get in there with her,” Hux said to Gunther.

  “Brother and sister first,” Gunther said.

  Hux gave up his camera and walked into the corn, pushing some aside to make a space for himself. He put his arm around Naamah’s waist, and she put hers around his.

  “You guys look like lovebirds,” Gunther said. “My turn now.”

  In one of the pictures, Gunther got on his knees and pressed his lips against Naamah’s stomach. In another, he kissed an ear of corn.

  The whole time the corn rustled, the flies darted, and the heat radiated from all directions. It was the height of summer, the height of everything.

  Even though it tasted wonderful when it was grilled over Gunther and Naamah’s fire pit and dipped in butter, Hux thought it was a little sad to eat that corn. To see the corn silk blow around in the dirt. Gunther said he was too sentimental—corn’s corn—and he was probably right. It was just that Naamah had worked so hard to grow it.

  Naamah was still reading her book about pregnancy, but she wouldn’t look at the chapter about birth no matter how much everyone encouraged her to. She said the doctor had scared her enough when he told her what would happen if the baby wouldn’t come out on his own. She didn’t like the idea of being put to sleep or having an IV stuck in her hand. The idea of a room you had to be wheeled into and out of. Hux didn’t like the sound of it either. When you lived in a place with nature all around you, you were bound to get nervous being stuck between four white walls, weren’t you? Naamah wanted to know how you could give someone a C-section when they were landlocked in Minnesota.

  “It’s not that kind of ‘sea,’ ” Hux explained. Sometimes he couldn’t tell if she was joking or if she really didn’t understand what most people did. “It stands for Cesarean.”

  “I don’t care what it stands for,” Naamah said. “I still don’t like it.”

  Naamah started to have nightmares about it.

  One day in early September, she was taking a nap on the bottom bunk at Hux’s cabin and woke up having wet the bed. She’d grown heavier like the doctor said she would. She hunched more. Slept more. Wanted to be alone more, too, so Hux let her use his cabin and would walk around Evergreen until he couldn’t walk anymore. He pulled bad weeds and picked good flowers and pruned the garden. Eventually, he’d sneak onto the porch and rock in one of the chairs until Naamah woke up. Sometimes he’d read. Mostly he’d just sit.

  “Please don’t be mad,” Naamah said when she realized what had happened to the bed. Her uncertainty in that moment reminded Hux of the first days she was with him in Evergreen. It made him think of her taped-up laundry bag. It made him nervous.

  “The book says something about a loose bladder, doesn’t it?” Hux said. He didn’t want her to be embarrassed and he didn’t want to read too much into her expression either.

  Naamah balled up the sheets and carried them toward the screened door. When she opened it, a few lacy moths flew in. “I’m going to take these down to the river. Don’t tell Gunther, okay? He’ll just worry. He already wants to camp in front of the doctor’s office.”

  “Only if you let me come with you,” Hux said. “If you stop fretting over old sheets.”

  “Okay,” Naamah said, finally returning to the girl he’d stood with in the corn.

  The two of them went to the river, scrubbed the sheets against the warm rocks, and pinned them between birch trees to dry. A little yellow butterfly landed on the white cloth, which made Hux think of his father. His father wouldn’t have pinned one so common to velvet. He was always looking for the most unique butterflies for his collection, which was why all his life Hux had preferred the most common ones. They were the safest to love.

  “You want to come in? It’s already getting colder,” Naamah said, wading into the water fully clothed. She reached down to her feet and pulled a piece of dark green algae out from between her toes. “You can be upriver of me if you want.”

  “You go ahead,” Hux said. “This rock is suiting me just fine.”

  When she was deep enough, Naamah rolled over onto her back and floated. Her stomach rose above the surface of the water like a half-moon. Her hair fanned out around her like seaweed. “I love to swim,” she said. “It feels good to be weightless. Free. It was the best thing I ever bartered for at the logging camp. The lessons, I mean.”

  “Who taught you?” Hux said, even though he didn’t think he wanted to know.

  “Just someone I used to know,” Naamah said. “She was one of the good ones.”

  “She?” Hux said, relieved.

  “You’re one of the good ones, too.”

  “Thank you,” Hux said, feeling the heat come into his cheeks. Gunther would have taken a bow. He’d have stripped down and run into the water after her.

  “Too good maybe,” Naamah said, squinting at him even though the sun was behind her. “You always let everyone go ahead of you.”

  “I’m not in a rush,” Hux said.

  “I’ll say.” Naamah took in a mouthful of sparkling blue water and spit it, like a fountain, in his direction. She went beneath the surface for a minute, but just as Hux started to worry about her she came back up again, sending little waves in all directions.

  30

  Even though there wasn’t a storm in Evergreen or even a cloud visible on the late-October horizon, a few hours before Naamah gave birth the electricity went out. At first Hux thought he didn’t pull the cord hanging from the rafters hard enough, so he pulled it again. Then he tried the switch next to the sink. No luck there eit
her. Remember, it is light we are offering you. Light, my friends! Gunther still had that old government letter. He still got riled up about it, too. He said it was taxation without representation. Clear-as-day bullshit. Most of the time Hux let him rant without joining in. But something bothered him about the bulbs not working today. He didn’t feel like sitting in the dark with Naamah.

  “Tell me about our mother again,” Naamah asked him. It seemed like it was always dark when Naamah asked about her.

  “She was glad she didn’t have to see light come in here,” Hux said. He’d just come in from rocking on the porch. The cabin was full of shadows.

  “Because of my father?” Naamah said.

  Hux was thinking about how much and how little Naamah looked like their mother. How much and how little he remembered what made her her anymore. Sometimes he couldn’t even remember his mother’s voice.

  Naamah was resting on the lower bunk bed. Her belly rose toward the top bunk like an unexpected lift of earth. She was staring at the slats of wood above her, counting the black knots in the wood.

  “What was his name?” Naamah said.

  “I wish our mother never told it to me,” Hux said. He sat on the floor beside the bunk bed. “Trust me. You don’t want to know. You should let this go.”

  Naamah stopped counting the knots in the wood. “Please tell me, Hux. I need to know before the baby comes.”

  “Why?” Hux said.

  Naamah touched her belly. “So I don’t pass on everything that’s bad about me.”

  “You’re nothing like him,” Hux said.

  “Then tell me his name.”

  “Cullen O’Shea,” Hux said.

  They were going to bring us light.

  “He was Irish, then?” Naamah said.

  His hands were scissors for me.

  Naamah touched her face the way Hux had seen a blind person touch a stranger’s face in Yellow Falls. “Did he have dimples?”

  I’ve never forgotten those dimples.

  “Yes,” Hux said.

  Naamah let her hand fall. “That’s why you hate seeing mine so much.”

  “I don’t hate it,” Hux said.

  “I knew a few men like him,” Naamah said. “Girls got hurt sometimes up north when they weren’t careful. Sometimes even when they were.”

  “Why did you stay there for so long?” Hux asked because he was close to asking, Did you get hurt? and he couldn’t know the answer to that. He just couldn’t.

  “Where else was I supposed to go?” Naamah said. “I was fourteen.”

  “But she wasn’t even there,” Hux said, thinking of their mother, the men.

  Naamah looked at him as if she were still a little girl. “She’s everywhere.”

  The two of them stayed silent for a while staring at the knots of black wood, the wood’s history. Hux wondered if he should have lied to her. At least about the dimples. Maybe about everything. He didn’t know what Naamah was thinking about.

  “Thank you for telling me,” she said eventually. “I know that was hard for you.”

  Naamah rolled over onto her side and closed her eyes. It didn’t take long for her to fall asleep or at least to pretend she was. Hux continued to sit on the floor beside her. He counted the rafters, the logs beside the woodstove, anything he could count. After a while he lay back, too.

  Late in the afternoon, Hux woke to the sound of Naamah’s breathing, which had turned from slow and steady to jagged at some point while he slept. Sweat was pooling in the space between her neck and shoulders. Her cheeks were red, her veins swollen. Hux jumped up to find the keys to the truck so he could take Naamah to the hospital.

  “Please don’t take me there,” Naamah said. “They’ll stick me with things.”

  Hux thought about the bag Gunther had packed for her to take to the hospital, the tiny diapers folded up inside of it and God only knew what else. Gunther had tried to put a pocketknife in there. “I don’t know anything about giving birth other than women do it. I don’t want to know anything more about it than that either.”

  “You were born here,” Naamah said.

  Hux put his hand on his sister’s hot forehead. “So were you. That doesn’t mean we know what we’re doing. Gunther either. Where’s that book?”

  All at once, Naamah arched her back. She latched on to Hux’s hand with the strength of a lumberjack. She clutched her stomach with the other.

  “She’s coming,” Naamah said, fighting for her breath.

  “She?” Hux said.

  “I couldn’t tell Gunther—he made a camouflage bib out of a tarp.”

  “We’ve got to get you to the hospital,” Hux said.

  “I see her,” Naamah said, gripping him harder. “She rocks me to sleep at night.”

  “You mean you rock her?” Hux said.

  When the contraction was over, Naamah let go of his hand. “I mean it how I said.”

  Hux and Naamah spent the next hour or so that way—with her holding on to him one minute and letting him go the next. Naamah still wouldn’t agree to go to the hospital in Yellow Falls. She still wouldn’t budge from that bunk bed.

  “This isn’t the right time to be stubborn,” Hux said. He was the only one who seemed to be panicking. Naamah was strangely focused.

  Between contractions, Hux did everything he could think of to get ready for what was coming. He heated the water to sterilize the scissors and the tools he used to sew up animals. He brought a stack of clean towels over to the bunk bed. A clean sheet. He lit the candles he had and kept matches nearby. He wished his father were here. Hux’s mother told him he saved both their lives the day Hux was born.

  Naamah started exhaling knives. She spread her legs apart.

  “I’m going to push now,” she said.

  “No,” Hux said. “No. No.”

  But she started pushing anyway.

  “How could she leave me, Hux? I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “I don’t know,” Hux said, wiping down her forehead with a cool cloth.

  Naamah started breathing so fast and hard Hux thought she was going to pass out. Her face tensed up. The muscles on either side of her jaw bulged.

  “She hated me, Hux.”

  Naamah’s eyes were as fierce and gray as they’d ever been; the green in them was overcome. “She left me on the doorstep like a dog.”

  A few minutes later, the baby was born.

  A girl, just like Naamah said she would be.

  Hux didn’t have to twist and pull his niece’s shoulders to get her out. He didn’t have to make sure the umbilical cord wasn’t wrapped around his niece’s neck, squeezing her life before it could begin. He wasn’t the one who’d had to reach into dark places no one belonged. All he did was pick his niece up and lay her on her mother’s chest.

  Even though her eyes were still closed, Hux’s niece did something incredible. She charted her way beneath Naamah’s shirt until her mouth found Naamah’s breast. She reached for Naamah’s tangled hair with her tiny fingers.

  With her heart.

  “She’s beautiful,” Naamah said, looking at her daughter, who was making little sucking sounds. Her legs were tucked up underneath her.

  “She looks like you,” Hux said. She and her mother shared the same curving arch, the same dark hair, the same lips. Hux thought all babies were born with blue eyes, but when his niece opened hers he saw that they were a gentle shade of brown.

  “I’ll turn on the light,” he said to Naamah. “You’ll see.”

  Hux pulled the cord he’d been pulling all day. This time the lightbulb snapped yellow, a sudden ugly exposure that all of them shrank from. Naamah pulled her hair free from her daughter’s hands and tried to sit up. Though his niece didn’t cry when she was born, she cried now. She wailed. Hux didn’t know a baby could make that much noise.

  “How do I get her to stop crying?” Naamah said with real alarm.

  “I have no idea,” he said, draping a clean towel over Naamah and his niece, s
o the blood wouldn’t spook them. “Feed her? Rock her a little? Let me go get Gunther.”

  “I’m afraid I’m going to hurt her,” Naamah said.

  “You just need your husband,” Hux said, not thinking much about it then. Hux’s hand was at least twice the size of his niece’s foot. Anyone would be afraid of holding her the wrong way, of straining her neck—whatever Naamah was afraid of.

  After Hux cut the umbilical cord, he went to get Gunther, who’d been shooting at bucks all day and finally got one in honor of his son. His future trapper.

  “It’s a girl,” Hux said when he found him and the buck in the forest.

  Gunther looked up from field dressing. Hux could tell he was deciding whether or not to be happy, because, in Gunther’s view, you could decide things like that. Despite the buck and the fishing rod and the camouflage bib, he decided to be happy.

  “I’ll buy her a pink tackle box, then,” he said, more tenderly than he’d ever said anything. “A goddamn pink tackle box.”

  He dropped the knife he was holding and a flap of the buck’s soft white underbelly fur and started running through the woods toward Hux’s cabin, whooping and hollering.

  When Hux reached the cabin, the door wide was open, and Gunther was inside holding his daughter up like a prize trout. He was kissing her cheeks and cooing to her.

  “You’re the greatest little girl who ever lived,” he said. “I’m going to spoil you and then spoil you some more. Who says girls can’t fish? Look at those perfect hands.”

  Naamah was still on the bottom bunk.

  “Can I get you anything?” Hux said to her while Gunther held his daughter up to the light, which in his hands she didn’t shrink from.

  “I’m so thirsty,” Naamah said, so Hux brought her a glass of water, which she drank down without stopping. He brought her another one.

  “She stopped crying the moment he picked her up,” Naamah said.

  “That’s just luck,” Hux said. To Gunther, he said, “Come see your wife.”

  “My wood goddess!” Gunther said and brought the baby over to them. He’d wiped his daughter off with a damp towel and wrapped her up in a dry one. “I had a feeling today was the day. How are you doing? Why didn’t anyone come get me?”