“At least put the boot on,” he said, thinking of their mother’s feet right before she died. “Losing your foot isn’t going to make any of this better.”
“I’m not going to put it on,” Naamah said.
Hux set down the trash bag he was holding. He and Naamah were standing close to each other. So close Hux saw the trees reflected in her eyes. He’d been so careful of her for so long, patching her together the best he knew how, and it had gotten them nowhere. Hux wasn’t the one who’d left Racina in the crook of a tree, but he knew the blame belonged to him, too. He didn’t realize how much he’d been using her to patch himself together.
“You’re going to put that boot on,” he said, and with a great thrust forward that surprised him as much as it surprised her, he tackled her to the ground.
Hux grabbed her swollen foot and jammed the boot on it. When it wouldn’t fit all the way, he twisted the boot like a screw. When it still wouldn’t go on right, he took out his pocketknife, cut the leather tongue out, and forced her black-and-blue toes into the heel.
Naamah cried out, and Hux finally let go of the boot. He was breathing hard. Her foot was in his hand. “You made a mistake. People make them, Naamah.”
“Not like this they don’t,” Naamah said.
Hux let go of her foot and lay back in the snow.
Racina was in the hospital with frostbite, pneumonia, and a list of other things he didn’t understand written on her chart. Gunther was worrying over her with everything he had, bullying doctors one minute and begging them to take extraspecial care of Racina the next. Naamah was going to lose her foot if she kept this up. Everything was such a mess, and, even though he wanted to more than anything, Hux didn’t know how to clean it up.
“I’m so sorry,” he said.
“I’m sorry, too,” Naamah said.
After a while, she put the boot on and lay back with him. The two of them lay shoulder to shoulder in the snow, looking up at the trees above them, the branches swaying in the wind. The canopy was so thick they couldn’t see the sky; it made the light look green.
“I’m so far away from who I want to be,” Naamah said.
“Me, too,” Hux said.
He leaned into her gently, as if the wind were blowing him there. He thought of the girl with the knee sock around her ankle. All that had happened to her. All that would.
“Come home with me,” he said, reaching for her hand.
“I can’t,” she said, but she let him have it.
“Why?”
“Do you remember the first day we chopped wood together?” Naamah said. “I had blood blisters all over my hands and you told me I could have stopped?”
“I used all the bandages I had to patch you up,” Hux said.
“That’s the thing,” Naamah said. “They’re all gone now, and I’ve still got sores.”
“What are you saying?” Hux said, even though he knew in his heart what was coming, what had been coming a long time now.
Naamah’s eyes were gray and green and clear.
“I’m saying mercy,” she said, and let go of his hand.
Hux wondered what their mother would have done if she were here. Would she stop Naamah? Would she let her go? Hux got up and walked over to the trash bag he’d brought with him. He riffled through it until he found what he was looking for.
“This was Lulu’s before it belonged to our mother,” he said, laying the coonskin coat across Naamah’s lap. All these years later, and dust still rose up from it. “The story is whoever wears it wears strength on her shoulders. Whoever wears it will be all right. Both of them would want you to have it.”
Naamah ran her fingers along the back of it where the most fur was missing. “I know this coat.”
“How?” Hux said.
“The day I left Hopewell Sister Cordelia took us to a festival in Green River,” Naamah said. “We sang a song in front of everyone, and when we were done, a woman wearing this coat blocked my way. She was really sick. She knew my life at Hopewell wasn’t a good one, and she asked me to forgive her for that. I figured she gave up a child once and was sorry about it and just wanted someone to hear her say so. It was her, wasn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” Hux said, trying to work through his memory so he could see what she was seeing, feel what she was feeling. How many old coonskin coats could there be?
“All this time I’ve been picturing her walking through grapevines.”
“There was this one day she took the truck in the morning without telling anyone and didn’t return until late that night,” Hux said. “My dad and I borrowed Reddy’s truck and drove everywhere we could think of, but we couldn’t find her. When she finally came home she wouldn’t tell us where she went, but her trip made her more peaceful. She stopped crying out in her sleep. She stopped trying not to die.”
“She was the first person who ever kissed me,” Naamah said. “I remember the way her lips felt on my skin.”
Naamah nuzzled into the coat as if their mother were still in there somewhere.
Maybe she was. Maybe she always had been.
Naamah touched every part of the coat she could get to, letting her hands linger over the missing patches of fur, the white buttons made of bone, the hide Lulu had pieced together from animals she’d trapped so long ago now.
“Thank you for this,” she said when her hands had nowhere else to explore.
“I should have given it to you sooner,” Hux said, thinking of his mother and Lulu rocking on the front porch of the cabin season after season, year after year, talking and laughing and smoking the way only they knew how.
If you want to catch a fish, you’ve got to think like one.
I’ve caught plenty of fish, thank you very much.
Naamah put the coat on, as if she knew Hux needed her to in order for him to leave her alone in the forest like she wanted. “You gave it to me at exactly the right time.”
That day, Hux walked back to the cabin the longest way he could think of. He circled trees and dipped down into ravines and dragged his feet in the snow, which would melt tomorrow or the day after, like it always did at this time of year. It would take a few more snows yet before it started to stick for good. When there was nothing left to circle, Hux started following the path the whitetails took, which would take him home.
He could see himself opening some beans and eating them out of the can, hearing the fork scrape against the tin: the sound of being alone. He could see himself turning on the radio and sterilizing his tools and preserving something he didn’t really want to preserve.
In the middle of the oxeye meadow, Hux stopped walking. He watched the birds flying low over the snow. He thought of how much his mother would have loved to draw them, how she used to tack her sketches up on the plywood board, which was supposed to have been a window for so long now. The sun dropped low in the sky. Hux’s heart dropped low, too. Naamah was alone in the forest, which was full of shadows now. He didn’t see how that could be merciful, but he let her go because she asked him to. Because with that old coonskin coat on her shoulders now, he believed she would be all right.
When the sun was completely gone, he walked the rest of the way back to the cabin in the dark. All the lights were on inside, casting a warm glow against the old log walls, which he’d patched about a million times now. Hux walked up onto the porch. Before he could get in the door, Gunther came out of it holding Racina in the crook of his arm.
“We’ve been waiting for you,” he said, as though they hadn’t been fighting the last week straight, blaming each other for everything. “They set her free today. I was so happy I bought a whole goddamn turkey from Harvey Small’s. Gravy. Potatoes. Cranberry sauce. Phee’s going to come over in a while, too.”
A large piece of gauze was taped to Racina’s cheek. Hux wondered what kind of scar was forming under there. What kind of scars they’d all end up with.
“We started some coffee,” Gunther said.
Hux knew he had to
find a way to tell Gunther about Naamah, and he knew it would break Gunther’s heart, but he wasn’t going to tell him tonight. Tonight Hux was going to do the opposite of what he felt like doing: He was going to celebrate his niece’s homecoming with his oldest friend in the world. He was going to eat turkey and cranberry sauce and whatever else made it onto his table. He was going to give thanks. Tomorrow he’d order that pane of glass for the window. Before he went to town, he’d walk back to the woods, and even though Naamah wouldn’t be there, he’d see the imprint they’d made together in the snow, and it would look to him like two angels, the grace both of them had been looking for.
Hux leaned over Racina, who was making little gurgling noises with her tongue while Gunther bounced her lightly in his arms. When she noticed Hux watching her, she stopped making noises. She looked up at him curiously with her pretty brown eyes.
“What’s she doing?” Hux said.
“Still deciding if she likes you,” Gunther said, nudging him.
“How do you know she likes you?” Hux said. When he nudged Gunther back, Racina smiled like she did that day in the bedroom. As far as Hux could tell, hers wasn’t going to be a crooked smile or one that set off dimples either.
It was going to be a smile all her own.
“Uncle Hux is funny, isn’t he?” Gunther said to her, but he was smiling, too.
Hux didn’t know how a little girl was supposed to prosper with two craggy men and an old woman looking after her in a place like Evergreen, but he had a feeling she would.
“Don’t listen to him,” he whispered in his niece’s ear just before they went inside.
PART FOUR
Evergreen, Minnesota
1972
34
For her eleventh birthday, Racina wanted a pair of purple cowboy boots more than anything else in the Northwoods. Ever since she saw them in the general store in Yellow Falls, she couldn’t stop thinking about how perfectly they matched the color of the butterfly Uncle Hux showed her last week after one of their walks. A purple emperor, he called it. He said it came all the way from Germany before the war and was the reason, or at least one of them, Racina’s grandmother decided to marry her grandfather. Racina liked to think of the cowboy boots that way. She liked to make up stories for them. There in the leather patch the purple boots were born. Here in the forest they met their first friend.
The day her dad saw her sketching them in her notebook, he offered to take her to the general store and buy them right then, since her birthday was still months away. As long as it didn’t jeopardize her health, her dad couldn’t stand for her not to have what she wanted.
“I want to earn them,” Racina said, and her dad stopped jingling the keys to the truck in front of her, trying to lure her out of the cabin with them. She didn’t want to hurt his feelings, but she thought the boots would be more special if she worked for them. Like how finding a four-leaf clover yourself was luckier than someone giving one to you.
“You’re too young to get a job,” her dad said. “You can’t even drive yet.”
“I was thinking I could do the things you and Uncle Hux don’t like to do. You guys are pretty messy. I could help Phee, too. She’s been wanting to alphabetize her books, but her hands are hurting her. It could be like an allowance.”
“How do you know about allowances?” her dad said, fake squinting like he always did when he was about to say yes but didn’t want her to know it yet.
“Evergreen’s not as far away from the rest of the world as you think, Dad.”
“As I’d like,” he said and kissed her cheek in the same place he always kissed it.
Her dad hated that more people had moved out to the woods in the last few years. He said it was only a matter of time before Evergreen turned into something it was never meant to be. He used to make fun of Uncle Hux about not having running water, but now he told him to hold out because wells attracted the wrong kind of people. People at all. He said if it weren’t for Racina’s sickness, he’d have filled theirs in a long time ago and turned back to the river, the rain. Thank God, he said, no one had ever built that paper mill or dam.
If it weren’t for her sickness.
Racina had heard those words all her life. They were the six most powerful words in the English language. Strung together like that they meant no matter how warm the river was, her dad wouldn’t let her swim in it. They meant overdressing all year long to keep the chill off and the infections away. They meant not running even when the crickets in the meadow clung to her socks and made her want to lift up her legs more than anything. They meant never standing in the rain. Never playing in the snow. Once, Racina made a list of everything she wasn’t allowed to do because of her sickness, and it filled most of a notebook. When she showed it to her dad, all he said was that it took a lot to keep her safe.
The doctors agreed Racina had a rare immune disorder, but over the years they’d disagreed about how to treat it. Some wanted to stick her and her bones with needles. Some wanted to send her to faraway places to be studied. Some wanted to take her away from her dad because sometimes he’d get so mad he’d grab her file out of their hands and tear it in two. Dr. Beller, their new doctor, was the only one whom her dad didn’t do that to. She was the only one who said Evergreen was exactly where Racina was supposed to be.
Racina wondered what Dr. Beller would think about the purple cowboy boots. The last time she saw her in Green River, Dr. Beller was wearing a bright orange dress underneath her white doctor’s coat. She said she guessed she was ready for hunting season, all those poor deer. Racina said she didn’t like to hunt either—not that she was allowed to.
“Stop making me look bad,” her dad had said.
Now he put his keys back on the hook by the door. He said he didn’t want her sweeping anything and stirring up her cough, but she could get wild with the sponge as long as she wore rubber gloves. He said that ought to be worth a pair of purple cowboy boots.
“Dad,” Racina said. “I want to really earn them. Not fake earn them.”
“Fine,” her dad said. “I’ll give you five dollars.”
“One dollar,” Racina said, wishing everyone would stop being so careful of her lungs and her cough and everything and treat her like a normal girl for once.
“Not a penny less,” her dad said and held out his hand for her to shake.
Theirs was the first cabin she cleaned from top to bottom (as high as she could reach on her tiptoes, anyway). She wiped down the cabinets, then the counters, and then the floor. After that, she hoisted herself up on the counter to open the curtains above the sink. When she was little and didn’t want to eat whatever weird food her dad put in front of her because someone told him it worked miracles, she’d sit at the table and count the squirrels on the curtain fabric. She remembered once getting as high as two hundred and four before her dad made her move to a different chair and count what was left on her plate instead. They both knew a lot about things like wheat germ and brewer’s yeast and tea that tasted like dirt.
When Racina was done with the main part of the cabin, she cleaned her room. She made her bed more carefully than she would have if she weren’t getting paid for it. She picked her clothes up off the floor and put them back into her dresser. She tried peeling the pink stickers off her mirror again, but they still wouldn’t budge. She didn’t like how everything for girls was pink and everything for boys was blue anymore. She wanted to be like her history book said Switzerland was during the First World War.
Racina loved studying history. Studying in general. Since she wasn’t allowed to go to the school in Yellow Falls and make real ones, sometimes she’d pretend people like Watson and Crick and Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt were her friends. She liked learning about the world. Unlike her dad, she didn’t mind seeing a few more cabins on the drive to Yellow Falls.
Uncle Hux didn’t mind either, as long as the people in those cabins were good to the land. He said as much when her dad dropped her at Uncle Hux’
s cabin a few days later when the rain cleared and the river calmed down and the sky turned blue again.
“Did you see that barn the new people put up by Phee’s place?” her dad said. “Someone should burn that down. They cut an acre of trees.”
“Dad,” Racina said.
“What else am I supposed to say?”
“Not that you’re going to burn a barn down,” Racina said. Her dad tapped the top of her head. “I only said someone should.”
Uncle Hux held the screened door open for Racina to come inside. “You’re dad’s right this time. It would take a hundred years to get those trees back to what they were.”
Racina’s dad put his hand on her shoulder. “Hold up a minute. You’re not going to get rid of me that quickly.”
He handed Uncle Hux the usual list of instructions he’d put strips of clear tape all over to strengthen, the first-aid kit, and the bag of remedies in case she got sick.
“If she starts coughing, give her a spearmint leaf to chew on. If she sounds gravelly, make her a cup of this tea. If she does anything else, go to the hospital. You know the rules. Don’t give her caffeine. Don’t ply her with candy either. I know you give her those licorice ropes. You might as well give her a spoon and a goddamn bowl of sugar.”
“I’m not a baby,” Racina said. “I know what to do when I cough.”
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