Evergreen

by Rebecca Rasmussen

  “I’m all right,” Naamah said, cheering a little.

  “That’s all that matters, then,” Gunther said. He tucked his daughter into the crook of his arm, where she fit perfectly. He gave her his pinkie finger to suck on.

  Hux saw tears in his eyes, but unlike when they were kids Gunther didn’t wipe them away. A few drops landed on his daughter’s cheeks. He didn’t wipe those away either. “What do we call a girl as precious as you?” he said. “What name could ever do you justice?”

  Naamah looked up at Gunther and their daughter as if she didn’t see how she fit with them. Hux wondered if her hesitance had something to do with their conversation earlier. Even though she’d asked him, he couldn’t help but feel like he’d poisoned her.

  Naamah reached for the silver cross at the front of her neck, but instead of stroking it like she usually did, or cupping it for comfort, she pulled it until the chain broke.

  “Racina,” she said.

  31

  When they’d recovered enough to make the trip, Gunther took Naamah and Racina to Yellow Falls to have them checked out by the doctor, who said they were banged up a little more than was usual but were fine. Naamah didn’t act like she was fine, though. If Gunther tried to go hunting, Naamah would beg him to stay. If he went to get another log from the woodpile, she’d run outside barefoot in the cold after him. If he had to go to the bathroom, she’d follow him in before he could shut the door.

  “You’ve got to help me,” Gunther said to Hux when Racina was three weeks old. He’d slipped out of the cabin and crossed the river in a canoe while Phee sat with Naamah and Racina. The canoe told Hux something was wrong before Gunther did.

  They were sitting at Hux’s kitchen table, waiting for the water to boil for coffee. Gunther looked as bad as he used to after a hard night at the tavern.

  “I can’t rock both of them,” he said. “I’ve slept a total of two hours in the last two days. Three if you count when I fell asleep standing up.”

  “Give it a little time,” Hux said, even though he’d been worried about Naamah ever since she broke that chain. “She’s still finding her footing.”

  Gunther traced the letters he carved into the wood the last time Naamah wasn’t fine. He said something about getting formula in Yellow Falls, even though they’d planned on breastfeeding. Naamah had planned on it anyway.

  “I hold that baby more than she does,” he said, which Hux could tell hurt him to say out loud. “You’d think it’d be the opposite. Her clamoring for Racina and me shrugging her off. Men aren’t even supposed to like babies. But women … all the women I’ve met know how to hold them right. Naamah holds Racina like she’s holding a porcupine.”

  “I’ll go see her,” Hux said.

  He went over to Gunther’s place that afternoon while Gunther drove Phee home and continued on to the general store. Hux had been so preoccupied with the birth of his niece he didn’t notice that fall was starting to let go of Evergreen. All along the river, the trees were turning red and brown and gold. Frost was settling on the rocks. On the river grass. On the outermost boughs of the evergreens. The air smelled like fire again, winter in the Northwoods. It seemed like such a long time ago now that Naamah was harvesting her corn and swimming in the river beneath a warm sun, her belly poking up like a half-moon.

  Hux let himself into Gunther’s cabin. Phee had knit a tiny pair of red mittens for Racina and a hat the same color, which she’d left on the table.

  “How’s my little niece?” Hux said. “My sister?”

  Naamah was sitting on the couch with her feet tucked under her. She was staring at the window. The room smelled like spoiled milk. Spit up.

  “Gunther sent you over here, didn’t he?” Naamah said. Her eyes didn’t look right; even though she was sitting on the couch right in front of him, they were very far away. “Will you open the window? I can’t breathe.”

  “Maybe just a crack,” Hux said, looking around for his niece. “It’s cold out.”

  “She’s in the bedroom,” Naamah said. “Phee got her to sleep for me.”

  “Can I see her?”

  “Yes,” Naamah said. “Don’t wake her, though.”

  Racina was asleep in the middle of the bed, swaddled in a worn yellow blanket with ducks all over it. It was his blanket, Naamah’s. He saw his name stitched into the corner of it, and though the blanket alone might have drawn him backward to Hopewell or Sister Cordelia or his mother making a hard choice on an April night, seeing that blanket wrapped around Racina made him feel like everything was going to be all right despite what Gunther had said. The blanket was Naamah’s dearest possession, and she’d given it to her daughter.

  Hux bent over Racina, who was breathing quickly but easily. He kissed her warm cheek. He didn’t see how skin could be that soft, that perfect. His skin was somewhere between sandpaper and pine bark. Hux watched Racina sleep awhile. He loved that he got to see her take her first breath. Come into her life with so much grace. In a way, it made up for having to watch his mother and father go out of theirs without it.

  Before Hux went back to the living room, Racina opened her eyes. The baby book said it was too early for her to smile, but she did it anyway.

  “You were awake this whole time, weren’t you?” Hux said to her. “Already tricking your poor old uncle. Winning me over with those big brown eyes.”

  Racina kicked her foot a little. She made a gurgling noise.

  Hux put his finger to his lips. “Don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone.”

  Hux waited until Racina closed her eyes before he went back out to sit with Naamah on the couch. He offered to get her something to eat, but Naamah said she wasn’t hungry.

  She put her head in her hands. “Something’s wrong with me, Hux.”

  Naamah was shaking, so Hux put a wool blanket around her shoulders. “You and Gunther are new parents. That’s a lot to take in.”

  “I’m afraid I’m going to do something terrible,” Naamah said. “When babies cried at the orphanage, Sister Cordelia would pinch them until they learned how to be silent.”

  “You’re not going to hurt her,” Hux said.

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because you love her,” Hux said.

  Naamah picked up a pillow and hugged it close. “Sister Cordelia loved me.”

  Even though Hux wanted to tell Naamah that wasn’t real love, his instinct was to stay quiet. Maybe she counted on Sister Cordelia for that. At least that.

  “You want to know the last thing I said to her?” Naamah said. “You’ll never have my love.”

  Hux stayed very still, as if Naamah were an animal in the forest and a sudden movement might scare her away. “It was true, wasn’t it?” he said gently.

  “I knew it would hurt her,” Naamah said. “That’s why I did it.”

  Naamah tucked her feet deeper into the couch.

  “I thought when I ran into the woods, she was going to follow me. That’s why I stayed there all night. That’s why I did a lot of things, I guess.”

  Hux thought about the logging camp, the men.

  “There was only one other girl at Hopewell who had a name as different as mine,” Naamah said. “Ethelina. She left like I did, a few years before me. I wonder if she stood all night in the trees, too. I wonder which direction she went in the morning.”

  “Maybe you could find her,” Hux said.

  Naamah looked toward the window, the trees. “Sometimes I wish I didn’t know how to fish and trap. Those other things in my blood now. Sometimes I wish I went south.”

  Hux thought about the girl with the sock pushed down around her ankle.

  “You’re here now,” he said. “That’s what’s important.”

  “Gunther’s sick of me, that’s for sure,” Naamah said.

  “You just need to ease up on him a little. Let him go to the bathroom by himself.”

  “I’m sick of me, too.”

  “Racina’s not going to be a baby forever,�
� Hux said. “Before you know it, she’ll be running around the woods. You, too.”

  “Gunther wants to get her a pair of snowshoes,” Naamah said.

  “You have to do that, too,” Hux said. “Think about the future.”

  “Sometimes I think about what her first word will be. Dad, probably. Daddy. I was hoping it would be something like forest or cedar or green.”

  “Why cedar?” Hux said.

  “When I was at the logging camp, there was this old-growth cedar tree I used to sleep up in,” Naamah said. “It had great big branches in all the right places. When the wind blew at night, it felt like the tree was rocking me. It felt like the safest place in the world.”

  Hux heard Gunther’s truck coming up the drive.

  Naamah heard it, too. She got up to close the window.

  “One day when I was up there, I woke up to a group of men yelling for me to come down so they could cut up my tree,” she said. “They said I couldn’t do anything about it. The sun had come up. The work orders were in.”

  Naamah put a log in the woodstove.

  Gunther was rattling his keys.

  “They didn’t even look sorry,” Naamah said. She sat back down on the couch and hugged the pillow again. “They just started up their chain saws and cut down all that beauty.”

  32

  Naamah not only started to let Gunther out of her sight, she encouraged him to go. She said she was being foolish before and was done with it now. On the days Gunther went out hunting, she’d pack a lunch for him and kiss him like she did before Racina was born. She’d stand at the door with Racina in her arms, waving until he disappeared into the trees.

  Neither Hux nor Gunther knew what she was doing to get her courage back until the first snow of the season came. That night, Gunther said he’d better go out and pull up the new traps he’d been trying out downriver and asked Hux to go with him.

  “It’ll take half as much time that way,” he said. “Unless you have a date with Phee.”

  “Would you shut up already?” Hux said, getting up from the couch where he was sitting with Naamah. “I’ll go.”

  Naamah was reading the Yellow Falls Gazette, which Gunther had brought back from town a few hours before. News about the annual sale at the Hunting Emporium took up the front page. Camouflage was half off.

  Gunther walked over to Naamah. “Aren’t you going to send me off with a kiss?”

  “Kiss,” Naamah said, but she didn’t look up from the newspaper.

  “I want a real one when I get back,” Gunther said, pretending to be offended. He was in a good mood. He finally thought things were getting back to normal.

  “You should get some sleep,” Hux said to Naamah, and he and Gunther left.

  The whole time they were out pulling up the traps, Hux felt like something was wrong, but he kept telling himself Racina was asleep in the bedroom and Naamah was awake on the couch; his worries were old ones. But Hux worked hard and fast in the snow anyway, which made Gunther work that way too, and they were back at the cabin in a few hours.

  “Where is she?” Gunther said when he went into the bedroom to check on Racina and found an empty bed. He walked all over the cabin, opening and closing doors, overturning things along the way.

  “Naamah!” he yelled, as if, despite Naamah’s sugary send-offs, he knew there was something to be worried about deep down.

  “Your truck’s still here,” Hux said.

  “Where would she have gone? It’s night and it’s snowing,” Gunther said.

  Gunther started tossing pots and pans around in the kitchen as if his wife and his daughter were beneath them. After the pots and pans, he moved on to the container of oatmeal on the counter, then the cornmeal, which he emptied on the floor.

  “Racina’s too little to be outside on a night like tonight.” He stopped when he got to the flour. “She’s seven goddamn pounds. She’ll freeze.”

  Gunther dumped the flour on the floor and an empty whiskey bottle tumbled out.

  “What in hell is wrong with her?” he said, looking at the bottle.

  Hux was looking at the Gazette, which lay open on the couch.

  Ethelina Thompson, former Hopewell orphan, age 28, of Green River, Minnesota, passed away early yesterday morning surrounded by her family. Ethelina, Ethie to those who loved her most, is survived by her husband, Gerard Thompson of Green River, and her three children, Mary Sue, Mary Grace, and Mary Beth.

  On the opposite page was a news story, a headline:

  MOTHER OF THREE HANGS HERSELF FROM BALCONY OF RIVERFRONT HOME

  Hux read about the wash bucket Ethelina had stood barefoot on. The rope she’d cinched around her neck. He thought about how Naamah must have felt that rope around her neck, too, when she read the article with no one around. She must have felt the cold metal on her feet. She must have panicked when she read about how, before Ethelina turned over the wash bucket to stand on it, she’d been scrubbing herself with steel wool and bleach.

  Hux didn’t think any direction could have been worse than the one Naamah chose when she left Sister Cordelia at fourteen, but he was wrong. Ethelina didn’t even choose a direction; she’d stayed in Green River, a few miles from Hopewell, all this time.

  “I think I know where she is,” Hux said.

  “Where?” Gunther said.

  “The Mosquito Net.”

  “How would she know about that place?”

  “She’s been there before,” Hux said with so much reluctance, so much sadness, he wasn’t sure he said it at all. “That time you came over to my cabin looking for her.”

  Hux thought of the Paul Bunyan trapper, the way he’d ripped open Naamah’s green blouse as if he owned her. He thought of the trapper’s lapping-dog tongue, all the lapping-dog tongues—why Naamah needed them when she was unsure of herself.

  Why she could never let herself be all right.

  Gunther picked up the whiskey bottle. “Did you know about this, too?”

  “No,” Hux said.

  “I’m going to find my daughter first and kill you second anyway.”

  Gunther put his coat back on. He grabbed the keys to his truck.

  “I’m coming with you,” Hux said.

  Gunther looked at him the way they did when they were boys. “Of course you are.”

  Gunther drove fast but carefully through the snow until they got to the bridge that would take them across the river, and he lost his measure and just plain accelerated. When they passed the boat launch, Hux thought of the night he brought Naamah to Evergreen. He thought of her diving into the water, of the water pooling on the seat beneath her.

  He and Gunther never made it inside the Mosquito Net.

  When they pulled up, the truck’s headlights landed on a cedar tree and the little yellow bundle tucked into its crook. Both of them jumped out when they saw that the bundle was Racina. She was breathing very slowly when they got her down. Her cheek was frostbitten from being pressed against the snowy bark.

  Gunther held her in his arms. “Keep swimming, my little fish.”

  Hux drove them to Yellow Falls as fast as he could, but Gunther kept telling him to go faster. “She’s so cold,” he said, weeping just like he did when he found out Lulu had gotten caught up in that bear trap. “I should have kept her safe.”

  When Hux pulled up to the hospital, he left the keys in the ignition, and he and Gunther ran with Racina through the snow, yelling for help. A doctor in a white lab coat met them at the sliding doors. His stethoscope swung like a pendulum. After Gunther explained what had happened as best as he could, the doctor took Racina from him.

  “Get a security guard,” he said to a nurse.

  A moment later, two guards dropped the cups of coffee they were holding and came running out. The doctor pointed to Gunther, who put his hands up in the air.

  “Take care of her,” Gunther begged. “Make sure they take care of her, Hux.”

  The guards pushed Gunther down to the ground and handcuffed h
im, while the doctor put a plastic mask over Racina’s face and strapped her little body to a stretcher. He cut the yellow blanket off her, slicing through years of history, and stuck a needle in her tiny arm. Racina cried and cried, and all Gunther could do was watch from the ground.

  Hux followed Racina as far as they would let him. He waited by that green door two hours before someone told him Racina was going to be all right. Before someone said she was a good little fighter. She had a lot of heart.

  On his way to tell Gunther, who’d somehow convinced the guards to uncuff him and was already gone, Hux found a scrap of the yellow blanket on the floor. He picked it up and held the ducks against his face. He thought of Naamah’s story about her cedar tree, how, even though he didn’t hear her, she’d tried to tell him she was falling.

  Gunther, Hux would soon learn, was already pulling up to the Mosquito Net. He was parking his truck, running toward the bar door, picturing Racina strapped to a stretcher, a needle in her arm, hearing her cry and cry, all the while yelling for Naamah to come out.

  He was kicking his way through the plywood, through the heap of melting snow on the floor. He was looking hard at the roughneck men and the woman passed out in a pool of her own vomit they were laughing at.

  Before Gunther could think, he was lifting Naamah up by her tangle of black hair, slinging her over his shoulder, and walking out the door. He was thinking about losing Racina as he was throwing her mother down in the snow.

  As he was telling her not to come home.

  33

  Even when Hux offered Naamah his bunk bed, his porch, his side of the river entirely, she wouldn’t go back to Evergreen. She wouldn’t go back inside. She was living deep in the woods, if you could call what she was doing living, waiting for Racina to come home from the hospital, to be all right like Hux said she was.

  During the day Hux would leave the hospital while Gunther was in with Racina, drive home on the back roads, and walk out to the woods. The first day he brought Naamah a pair of Phee’s boots, since she’d lost one of hers somewhere between the bar and Gunther throwing her down in the snow. He brought her a pair of his warmest gloves, a sleeping bag, and a plate piled high with chicken and vegetables he roasted on the woodstove for her, but Naamah wouldn’t touch any of it. The second day, Hux brought a thermos of coffee and a little container of cream, but Naamah wouldn’t touch that either. She just stood there in the forest, looking at the canopy of green. A week of this, and her foot didn’t even look like a foot anymore—it was purple and swollen and alien.