by Summer Wood
The screen door banged shut behind the boy. “It wasn’t there.” He was breathing hard.
“Where?” Ruthie asked.
His eyes shifted to the side. “Where it was supposed to be.”
She yawned. “Oh,” she said. “You mean out in the middle of the yard where the rain would have soaked it?” She tossed her head toward the wobbly sideboard that stood in the corner of the kitchen. “Check the junk drawer. Next time put it where it belongs.” They watched him yank the drawer open and fit the glove to his hand. Secondhand, broken-in dark leather that reeked of neatsfoot oil—Melody’d found it for him at a yard sale the summer before. Wrecker pulled the hardball from its pocket and started driving the ball back into the webbing. He could do it for hours. Thwap, thwap—it drove them insane.
Still, Willow had to admit, he was a good boy. Noisy, messy, smelly, as eight-year-olds were made to be, but with a goodness that was particular to him. He cried hard when the smallest of Sitka’s pups picked a fight with a wolverine and couldn’t be mended. He was some kind of physical freak, climbing and leaping and lifting like a kid twice his age. And he was smart, although that wasn’t always easy to see. Willow had identified extraordinary strengths in spatial reasoning, in relational thinking, that overshadowed his weaknesses in more traditional fields of study. He could improve in those if he ever got interested. He wasn’t the dunce his teacher thought he was.
Willow liked him, even. It was a terrible feeling. She couldn’t get over the thought that this made her at least in some part responsible for his unexpected childhood. Not that there was anything bad about the life he had happened into. It was odd, but odd was no crime. He was safe, he was loved, he was well cared for. Melody saw to it that he had everything a kid could need and a hefty portion of the things he simply wanted. There was even a way that you could look at his life and think: the perfect childhood. Rousseauian—if Rousseau’s noble savage had a pirate manqué for an aunt, an abandoned Willys Jeep for a rocket ship, and the run of the forest.
And still there seemed to be something unforgivable, something almost reprehensible, about condoning the way things had worked out. He’d been deprived of a past. That was it, wasn’t it? His mother pined for him in a cell six hundred miles away—and it might as well have been the moon. She might as well not have been, Willow thought with a chill, for all he knew of her. Sure, she’d made mistakes. She had failed him, even. But Lisa Fay had conceived him, bore him, raised him as well as she could for as long as she could—and that was worth something, Willow thought. Surely it was.
The boy resembled his mother, and now Willow could not get the face of that woman to leave her mind.
“Willow?” Ruth looked at her funny.
“I said thanks,” Wrecker said, peering at her.
“You’re welcome, buddy. Let’s go shell some beans.” Willow glanced at Ruth. “That crop of Jacob’s Cattle beans Len put in last summer? He hung the plants to dry in his sauna. Hasn’t used it in years, but now he’s got the itch to get it going again and he has to get them down, first.” Len planned to move a wringer-washer into the small room and run the plants through it. “I guess you run them through the rollers and that pops the dry beans from the pods. It’s new to me.”
“That’s the old way.” Ruth nodded. “Bring me a handful when you come back. I’ll plant a row in the garden this spring.” She tugged on the brim of Wrecker’s cap. “You? Come back hungry. There’ll be fresh bread waiting for you.”
He had changed quite a bit since he’d arrived. He could read, write, tie his shoes, choose his clothes, button his shirts. He was too big to pick up (unless it was urgent, and then it took two of them), and too old to send to bed before dark. He showered on his own. He had learned to swim. He could use logic as a tool of argument and he asked more sophisticated questions. Walking to Len’s, passing Willow’s yurt, he gestured to the small wooden shed that housed her power generator. “I get how cars run,” he said offhandedly, and Willow smiled, thinking there might still be some distance to go on that subject. “But how exactly does gas make an engine go?”
Combustion, she told him, and described in detail the interaction between gas and oxygen in the presence of a spark, and the role that process played in driving pistons and, when properly geared, propelling a shaft.
He listened closely. There was a period of silence when she finished. And then he asked how he could get himself some gasoline.
He had changed considerably, Willow thought, but he still harbored that same dangerous mix of curiosity and enthusiasm and utter lack of caution that he’d come with.
“Len,” he said, when they arrived. “I need some gasoline.”
Willow tipped her head toward Len and walked over and crouched beside Meg to greet her.
“Hello, Wrecker,” Len said. He grinned at the boy, but his gaze followed Willow.
“Do you have any?”
“Gasoline? I keep that under lock and key.” He tapped the boy’s head. “Nice hat.”
“Willow got it for me,” Wrecker said. “Come on, Len. Gas?”
“None today,” Len said, and the boy drifted away toward Meg.
Willow looked up at the mention of her name. Len caught her eye and she moved to stand beside him. They watched Wrecker and Meg play together in a small rivulet of mud. That was a change, too. Meg adored the boy, followed him around the yard, batted her eyes at him, brought him little gifts of pine needles or spare buttons or the lemon drops Len carried around in his pockets. Wrecker spoke softly to Meg, and she seemed to understand him. He let her put her arm around him and warble in his ear, and he answered her with sympathetic noises of his own. Even Meg’s goose treated him with deference, honking and flapping its wings when he got too close but never opening its beak to bite.
He was a good boy, Wrecker was. He had a sweetness Willow couldn’t deny, and an innate sympathy for creatures smaller or weaker than himself. It made him furious to see them mistreated. But he was a big boy, extraordinarily strong, and when he took matters into his own hands all hell broke loose. A few months back he’d beaten the bejesus out of another boy, a ten-year-old he had accused of removing the legs of a frog at the banks of the creek behind the schoolyard. A live frog? Serves him right, Len murmured, when Willow told him. Maybe, she said. Only the boy had spent two days in the hospital with a detached retina and another week recovering at home before his parents packed up and moved down to Mendocino. Melody was lucky they didn’t press charges, they said. Willow agreed. If her son had been hurt that badly—no matter what he did to cause it—she would have dragged the other boy’s parents straight to hell by their hair.
Bet that boy won’t be bothering frogs any more, Len had said, and chuckled softly.
He’s a loose cannon, she’d told Len.
He answered, He’s a kid. He’ll outgrow it. Len relied on time to cure everything wrong with Wrecker, Willow thought. He treated the boy with a kind of affectionate bemusement, as if the very fact of his presence was something surprising and delightful and at the same time too thorny to address in any but the most formal way.
They all treated him as though he had descended from the heavens. As though his life had begun, day one, when he arrived at Bow Farm. Only Johnny Appleseed understood the danger of that. Johnny, whose own past was a mystery to her—and who kept his present largely under wraps, as well. He had begun to speak out for the trees, for preserving the forest, in a way that set Len off. It had forced a wedge between them, and Willow could feel Johnny begin to drift away from Bow Farm, leaving for long periods, reappearing unexpectedly, leaving again. There were rumors about what he did while he was gone.
Len’s hand took light hold of her elbow, now. “You hungry yet? I’ve got lunch on.” He steered her to the small fire he had banked in a rock-lined pit. Several foil-wrapped lumps roasted in the coals.
“Potatoes?”
“And onions and carrots and turnips. And lamb chops in the kitchen.” He looked both abashed and se
cretly pleased with himself. “I’ll go get them.” Willow watched him jump the steps to the porch two at a time. Blue jeans and a chambray shirt today. And yesterday, and most likely tomorrow—Len kept a drawer full of them, washed and pressed and identical so he wouldn’t waste time in the morning choosing what to wear. True, he was a rough, chapped, stubbly, angular, dense, and stringy man, but even when he was covered in forest dirt and chain saw oil he was the most tucked-in man she knew. Len returned with a plate full of tiny chops and tenderly arranged them on a grate he placed close to the coals. He glanced up at her. Tucked in physically, Willow corrected herself. Emotionally he still had some loose flags flapping in the breeze.
Willow hadn’t felt hungry, but the smell of seared meat made her suddenly eager to eat. Meg and Wrecker had edged close, and they all waited for Len to declare the chops done. A wood fire for a kitchen, some splintered porch steps to dine on—she’d come a long way from Bellingham, where every night she’d laid real silver for the family dinner and made a serious effort to teach her kids good manners. For one fleet second she wondered how much further she’d be willing to go. She glanced at Len and quickly looked away. No. She’d shut that thought away years ago.
Len filled the plates and passed them out and the four of them sat in a line on the second step and tore into the food with their fingers. Len helped Meg open the foil wraps and used his pocketknife to divide her vegetables. He let Wrecker cut his own. Willow watched with concern, but the boy managed well enough and then handed the knife to her. Len looked on approvingly. Wrecker had turned the knife to offer her the handle, the way Len had passed it to him.
Willow chewed slowly. The chops were tiny—two bites each—and unbearably succulent. “Oh my God,” she said. A dribble of meat juice ran down the side of her mouth, and she stopped its escape with the back of her hand. “You could be arrested for this.”
“Good?” Len grinned.
“Good doesn’t come close.” She felt half drunk with the meat and its savor.
Forget Bellingham. There were moments in this life that more than made up for all of its hardness and rough edges. The clarity of a blue sky in January after weeks of rain. The dense flavor of vegetables grown in local gardens, the smell of young lamb chops fresh off the grill. Every August, Willow waited for the sheer ambrosial sweetness of wild blackberries, sun-warmed and ripe to bursting. It took effort to collect them, to pluck the berries from the brambles while steering clear of the thorns. She’d learned to value patience. It had not come easily to her.
When Willow first arrived, she’d been overcome by the physical bounty of the place. Len was a part of that. He was exotic to her then, a man who made his living from the land, who muscled his way with sweat and skill toward the things he wanted—he was the opposite of Ross, and attractive to her in a way that had nothing to do with ambition or social standing. And she’d taken right away to Meg, who was matter-of-fact and funny and shyly offered friendship. They had made her feel at home when her heart was broken. It was painful to see how Meg had been damaged by the surgery, to see how it had changed things between them. Still, Willow reminded herself. They were married. And she was not the kind of woman to take their marriage lightly.
Willow finished her plate and leaned back to rest against an upper step. Wrecker showed no signs of slowing down. He devoured the two remaining chops and polished off the rest of the vegetables. When Len let him know there was a slice of squash pie waiting for him on the table inside, he got up and went in and returned a few moments later, dragging the sleeve of his shirt across his mouth.
“Sure can eat,” Len murmured.
It was no stretch for Willow to remember back to her own sons at that age. Not just the size of their appetites, but their intensity. When hunger struck she’d had a small window to satisfy it, and if she failed that they fell apart, turned from fairly reasonable human beings to beasts out of control, raging, accusing, carrying on until a critical mass of calories had been processed. Kids that age were as biological as slime molds. Kids only? People just learned to cover it better as they aged. Willow glanced sideways at Meg, tipped over on the step and snoring lightly. Meg was as subject to her body’s demands now as any kid. Len had related the time—it happened a few years back—when he’d brought Meg along to run some errands in Eureka. Nothing unusual about that, he said; not until she grew tired and needed to lie down. Right then. Len’s voice was quietly jocular, but the wrinkles around his eyes had deepened. In the shampoo aisle of the Fred Meyer supermarket Meg fell supine to the floor, and no manner of beseeching would convince her to sit back up until she’d napped for half an hour. A sympathetic checkout girl sent a stock boy with a blanket to cover her and a folding chair for Len to perch on while he waited for her to rise.
“If you can’t beat ’em …,” Len said now, and tipped the brim of his cap to shade his eyes while he napped.
Willow hadn’t meant to sleep, but when she opened her eyes next she found that the sun had moved a noticeable distance in the sky and that Len’s arm had shifted in his sleep to lie pressed against her thigh. She blinked and sat up. She moved away from him, worked a kink out of her neck, and smoothed her hair back into place. “Len,” she said brusquely. “If we’re doing this, let’s do it.”
Len rose quickly and stretched. Meg and Wrecker squatted together a short distance away, building a small city out of twigs. He called to them, and together the four of them walked to the back of the cabin, where Len had dragged the wringer-washer onto the back porch. “Here,” he said, guiding Willow’s hand to the best place to grasp the galvanized frame. “Heavy son of a gun. If we can get it down the stairs, we can use the hand truck to move it toward the sauna. Then we have to haul it up into there.”
“I can do it,” Wrecker insisted.
“You’re strong, but you’re short, my friend.”
Willow edged the disgruntled boy away from the machine and gripped the rolled edge. “Tell me again why we don’t do the beans outside? It would be a lot easier.”
“You’ll see.” Len grinned. “They fly everywhere. We’d lose them all and end up with a bean patch there in the spring.”
Down wasn’t so bad. Len wrestled the machine onto the cart and wheeled the wringer along the short path from the cabin. He stopped before a tiny redwood cube. A stovepipe jutted from its roof and the entrance threshold sat two feet above the ground. “You’ve never been inside?” Len wiped the thin sheen of sweat from his forehead and pulled open the plank door. “Let me give you the tour.”
Wrecker rested his hands on the floor and leaned his torso in. “Dark in here,” he reported. “Dusty.”
Len grabbed him about the waist and swung him in. He handled Meg with greater care, helping her situate her foot on the high step and then getting behind to boost her up. He turned to Willow. “Ma’am?”
She could manage, she said, but she took his hand to support her up the step and felt the palm of his other strong on the small of her back.
It was tightly packed. Hundreds of plants hung by their roots from the rafters and littered the floor with their dry leaves. The beans rattled in the pods when Willow ran a hand through them. She waited for her eyes to adjust to the murky light. Len kept a running commentary. He had milled the redwood, sanded it butter-soft, pegged it so there’d be no hot metal to burn skin. “Every stick of it’s from a single tree, so they’ll all expand the same. Should hold up.” He patted the woodstove. “This one cranks, too. Warm as you want. You should come try it some time.”
“Maybe,” Willow said thinly. It was hard to picture the sauna in action. It was a dark box with perimeter benches, a musty, vegetal smell, and a small, high window that let in a little light—but Willow knew it meant something, something good, that Len had decided to use it again. “How do you want to do this?”
They hauled it inside in one big heave that broke a nail on Willow’s left hand and almost pinned her against a bench. With the wringer inside there was barely room for them to s
tand. Len was delighted by their success. He reached up and unhooked a few of the dried stalks. The leaves crumbled into a dust that floated in the air and tickled their lungs. “Let’s try this. Close the door,” he instructed, and when Willow reluctantly pulled the door shut they were thrust into a dusky silence. Len gave Meg’s shoulders a reassuring squeeze and climbed around her to position himself in front of the machine. Willow maintained her post by the door. She wanted to be able to exit quickly, if it came to that.
Len showed Wrecker how to spin the handle of the wringer. Then he carefully fed the plant into its rollers.
The machine spit dry beans like little pieces of shrapnel in every direction. Meg and Wrecker burst out laughing as the beans ricocheted off their skin. They cackled and hooted and Len joined in, casting a shy glance at Willow. “Victory,” she proclaimed, and laughed because he was laughing, and it happened so rarely. And then the boy started to sneeze. “You all right, sport?” Len asked casually after the third or fourth explosion. But the sneezes continued, and Wrecker abandoned his post to stumble past Willow to the door and out. Meg slipped out with him. He’d had enough, he said, when the sneezes slowed enough to let him speak. He wasn’t going in there again. Meg planted herself by his side in solidarity.
Len agreed. It was a good start. He glanced wistfully at the machine. Willow could take a sauna here any time, he said. He guessed she’d earned it.
“Nobody’s taking a sauna as long as you’ve got these things hanging in here.” Willow rubbed her itchy nose. “We could see what we could get done.” She gestured to the door. “Meg’s fine with Wrecker, isn’t she?”
Len’s eyes widened, and he laughed. He stuck his head out the open door. “Meg, honey. Will you stay with Wrecker?” He had a swimmer’s build from behind, with muscular shoulders and a narrow waist.