A contagion of yawns overcame the assembly. Then a cry was heard from a corner, where a door opened down into a half-cellar in the stone foundation. It hadn’t been used or even opened in years. “Hey, you guys!” came Randy’s voice out of the dark. “Come see! There’s a tunnel down here!”
41
Soon the clutter of the BFC became the snores and heavy breathing of youthful bodies spent for the day, for the season. By ones and twos (for the merger had well begun on one level and another) members of the two peaceful camps took to various corners and levels. No one felt like trading the fireside and the assembly it had brought together for a cold and solitary monk’s cell upstairs. George Winchester accepted the big sofa at Oberon’s request, while Oberon and Annie bedded down near Mary to keep watch over her. James and Noni took the other inglenook, and Michael, his brother Howard, Dr. Ziegler, and Nurse Iris found a quiet corner not entirely out of the fire’s influence. Outside, the rain had subsided altogether. The storm drifted out over the plains and dissipated, having wrung itself out over Boulder County. Stars came out and the fire gurgled in its red and blue throat.
By midnight, peace and sleep overtook the mountain hall.
Now it is that she who has done nothing but sleep all day awakens. Mary feels her dressed head and says nothing. She arises, waking no one. Stepping softly if shakily to the door, she creeps outside, squats, and beholds the sky. From the soaked ground all around, the scents of broken vegetation, and her newly injured head and bruises, she surmises a storm and drastic events, but recalls nothing of them. Or anything else. And when she comes back to the warm hearth and gazes upon the faces of the man and woman she has been lying beside, lit by the last embers’ glow, she does not know them.
Mary sleeps again. Again she wakens, and this time she has knowledge—fearful, vague knowledge of murder and persecution, and a warm, nebulous knowledge of love and safety surrounding her. Her head spins, and she sleeps once more.
The third time Mary awakens, hours later, still more is clear to her. The fire is dead, and all those around her are dead to the world. Could her face be seen, a kind of serenity might show on it such as she has never known before, crossed by flickers of uncertain intensity. No longer clad in her blue and saffron, but in soft green plush, her skin a palette of rising pinks and russet shadows, she rises. Mary stands in front of the middle window where the faintest eastern light is leaking in, faces the sleepers with deepest composure, and begins to speak:
“Think of having no roof above us tonight: think, and shiver in your sleep. Instead, we are all warm and secure together. Last night I slept beneath cold stone, warmed by the bodies of gray beasts that crept about me, wrapping me in the mercy of their rich pelage. Tonight I slept beneath this roof, warmed by all of you.
“But for the safety of the stones, it could be me up there rotting on the rocks, soon to be part of pink campion and black butterfly, shrill marmot and warm pika, instead of my tormentor.
“Again, my rescuer was a teacher—but no ascetic this time! More like Dionysus with his band of fauns and dryads. Thank you, gentle friends. You are right to revel, to laugh. The world cries out for laughter in the dark.
“My oppressor had no laughter in his heart. His world was a place of stone and crust, unsoftened by human love. That his blood flowed at all was a wonder of nature. To him, all was black and white, good and evil, male and female counterposed. Oh, there is evil—but it is not black, as the butterfly whose name I have lately borrowed shows—and it is certainly not female. He, whose body rots on the rocks—forgive him. He had no idea.
“Seek your shelter in nature. Breast the perpetual storm outside the walls. Sway in the tree in the gale, Muir-like. Walk the flooded gutter barefoot, face the rain with no umbrella, gather the bolts to your breast with no lightning rod and no promise of salvation. Be ready to ride the river down to the sea as selfless stuff, to join the jellies and the plankton, the meconium and the mud and the mold, and to call that heaven.”
Mary pauses, her face placid in the wan mix of starlight and dawn. She rests for a little while, drinks some water, looks out the tall window behind her to the Twin Sisters becoming visible in the gathering pallor. A woodrat, happening upon the scene unawares, runs across her feet. She jerks her tickled toes, startling the rodent, who thought he was alone here. He stamps his hind feet in cadence, gives a cherk! of alarm, then gallops across a dozen slumbering bodies to the attic ladder and up to safety. No one awakens or even moves, and Mary continues:
“I might have died . . . I have died . . . or someone died. I feel that someone is dying within me now. Oh, no, don’t leave . . . we’re not finished!” She stands, face against folded hands, grieving the loss of something that has been part of her for as long as she can remember. Which is not very long at all, or else forever. And then she says, “All right, go then. Like the black butterfly, off on the wind. I’ll catch up with you someday.”
Mary faces out into the silent hall, and her sweet, sonorous voice echoes off its opposite walls like feathers. “You, who follow Pan, Jesus, or Jehovah, Allah or Darwin: you might as well worship the warm-furred pika, or the marmot who whistles warning of maniacs on the loose among the sacred stones. Worship the black butterfly, if you must. Or a cabbage white butterfly. Or a cabbage root maggot. Or a cabbage. For God is all of these equally, or nothing at all: take your pick. A messiah would be better off coming to us as a butterfly or as a flower, able to turn water into nectar—look there for your miracles! For your holiness, if holiness is what you need.
“Worship what you will, if you must . . . but the world needs love more than worship. In love lies the only real shelter there is, as you shall discover in the morning. And so, I wish you good night.”
Mary has awakened no one, though everyone has heard every word. The cricket on the hearth stridulates, hears a muffled exclamation from the bodymound of the BFC, and then all is silence. And in the morning, everyone seems to have dreamed the same dream and remember it with unusual clarity. One member of the women’s camp finds that her clothes, left beside her sleeping bag last night, are missing.
Mary too recalls a dream—or was it?—of a sweet incubus, a visitation from a great pika who enveloped her with soft black wings and softer gray pelage and made warm and tender love to her. This is what she dreams again in the warm cab of the truck that carries her south on the Peak to Peak Highway.
42
In the aftermath of the storm, rivulets of red sand ran down the road. Oberon worked the restored telephone and radio while others searched the premises. Mead and Noni, dodging downed limbs and wires, walked the highway to Magdalena Park Lodge to inquire whether anyone had seen Mary.
“James!” Mead was greeted by Marion Dever. “We’ve wondered how you all weathered the storm up there. We’ve lost some shingles on cabins and a shutter or two, but otherwise we came through okay. Your things are still upstairs. And who is this?”
“Thanks, Marion. Yes, it was quite the fireworks on the mountain. But we’re all fine, considering. This is Noni Blue. She has to leave today, but she’ll be back here soon for a visit. But, Marion, have you seen a lone woman on foot?”
“No, James, we haven’t seen anyone like that at all. Is someone missing?”
As soon as the road opened, Mead caught a ride down to Loveland with Bonnie, the eldest of the Dever sisters, for a quick physical exam, which turned up no damage from the ground flash. Then he hired his old Rent-a-Wreck Merc and made a quick trip to Albuquerque for the promised visit, while Noni returned to Gothic with Winchester to wrap up her summer project. In New Mexico, nothing was resolved, but at least no more storms broke. He got in an afternoon’s fishing with his father. They exchanged little talk, yet their bright flies in the slanting sun seemed, somehow, like shared wishes. He left feeling flickers of hope.
When he rejoined Noni at Magdalena Park, it was in the time of gentians. The two of them spent the next days among gentians in the yellowing, redde
ning meadows. They found the big bluebottle ones, like those the Austrians distill for their Enzian schnapps, and the four-in-hand fringed ones too. They peered at minute deep indigo gentians and delft vases that don’t even open. One afternoon, high up on Meadow Mountain, they discovered the last blooming arctic gentians, their deep ivory corollas speckled with navy blue. They knelt to sniff them and their four long, fuzzy petals. James wrote to his mother about them, and about Noni.
On one of the last days possible, as the lodge closed down each year after Labor Day, they accepted an offer from Patty Dever, the lodge’s wrangler, to take them on a ride. They’d both grown up near horses and were fairly comfortable with them. For two hours, ponytailed Patty led them up trails to Deer Ridge behind the lodge. The close-cropped pastures beside the willow thickets were lined with blue bands of gentians, like some herbaceous border groomed by the mountain gnomes. As the riders rose into the lodgepole forest, pale mauve asters, scarlet amanitas, and maroon-velour boletes took over the trailside.
Mead’s big Appaloosa, Hercules, took the rocky path easily and compliantly. Noni rode a roan mare called Jubilee, as spirited as her name and her rider. She skittered now and then at sliding rocks loosened by the rain’s pickax, but Noni managed the reins well, barely touching toe to rib now and then. All the way up, Roxy the retriever ran crazy through the fragrant damp sand and downwood, back and forth across the trail ahead. From below the summit of Deer Ridge, the three gained a view of the lodge from on high, along with the entire, unobscured face of the mountain—that mountain. No one felt the need to say a thing, except a blue grouse that thrummed from the Engelmann spruces, or to remark on a freshly emerged pine white butterfly spreading its new, soft wings across a spray of bristlecone pine needles to dry them in the sun. If either James or Noni thought a thing about a crisp white butterfly taking wing even as the tatty brown ones retired from the rockslides, they felt no need to share it.
Patty had an appointment for another ride, a family from Kansas eager for a gentle walk along the highway and back below Horsetooth Park before they packed the station wagon and headed for Estes. She felt confident that James and Noni could get their mounts back safely by themselves. They’d had a good canter atop the ridge and had handled the horses well, so she left them to return on their own, in their own good time. The horses would soon be driven down to lower pastures for the winter, so they were getting in their last ride, too. Seeming to sense this, they didn’t lurch toward the barn as usual when they neared the homestretch. After Patty and Roxy had trotted off, James and Noni dismounted and shared the picnic they’d packed. Then, confident that no one was near, they lay back beneath a yellowing aspen on the amber-spattered ground and crushed their own Enzian from the gentians with the press of their young bodies.
At first just playful, their urgency rose like a summer storm, and soon it was invincible. Shirts came off and jeans came down like leaves in a stripping wind. James’s hands found the places they had missed and knew they would miss again. He licked her teeth and crushed her lips. Noni did all those things back, and a few of her own. Their abdomens found their way back together, his aedeagus found her bursa copulatrix, and they remembered why they’d thought last spring that they fit together so damned well. James rode a smooth, slow trot as long as he could, and then broke free, threw the reins to the wind, and galloped bareback to his foregone conclusion. Changing places in midstream, Noni took her own sweet time in the saddle, holding on to James’s beard like a stallion’s mane. And it wasn’t long until she cantered on home herself.
Then Roxy found them, his cold nose on her rump making Noni jump and cry “Oh!” Patty’s party had balked at the highway walk, so she decided to bring them this way after all. Always sharp-eyed for hazards, she managed to distract the kids and the dad by pointing out some coyote poop. But the sunny-haired mom saw something she wasn’t meant to see between the aspens. She smiled, and remembered another time, another summer, not so very far from there.
On their last evening at the lodge before heading east, Noni and Mead brought back a mess of mushrooms from a final hike into the Indian Peaks Wilderness. They had a bucket of small, succulent golden chanterelles, a peck of firm and strangely aromatic matsutakes, and two big, otter-brown king boletes, almost free of worms, as well as a couple of meadow mushrooms from the pasture out back. They asked Marion if they might cook them up in the lodge’s kitchen. Patty, a wild mushroom lover, was repaid for her kindness on the ride, and Keith, Marion, Bonnie, and Laura consented to try the native but none too familiar sweetmeats. Surprised by their savor, after her third helping Laura asked, “So if we all die from these, how will you ever know?”
“I guess we wouldn’t,” said James, “since we’d croak too. And you all’d go to heaven for sure, but I think our chances are shot.”
“Don’t worry,” said Noni. “All these are tried-and-true kinds, much sought after.”
“That’s good to know! But seriously, will you stay in touch?” Laura asked. “We’d love to know if you learn more about all those butterflies.”
Mead promised they would. Still, he was surprised a week later to receive a packet postmarked Allenspark, and he seriously hoped it had nothing to do with mushroom poisoning.
He’d wanted to introduce Noni to the joys of long-distance bus travel, but she had argued for spending those days in the mountains instead, and in the end, Mead accepted her offer of airfare east.
Now she had a week with him in New Haven before taking the train north to Boston to begin her studies at Harvard. She leaned over his shoulder at his lab desk as he slit open the thick envelope from Colorado. There were three letters inside and a short note from Laura Dever. “Dear James,” it read. “These all came for you soon after you left. I hope they find you OK, and that we’ll see you both back here next summer. All say hi. XOX, LD P.S. We’re all still alive.”
The first letter came from Albuquerque. It was a short one from his mother.
I don’t know if this will still reach you in Colorado, James, but if not it will follow you. Thank you for writing about the gentians. That caused me to have a look for myself. I didn’t find any in the Sandias when I went up with your dad, but I did get into a bunch of asters. They’re pretty, but damnably difficult to identify, not to mention the Erigerons and Townsendias.
You know that brochure you left for your brother, about RMBL? Well, I took a look at it, and I’m thinking about signing up for Harriet Barclay’s non-credit wildflower class next summer. I think they let old ladies in. By the by, don’t wildflowers and butterflies have quite a lot to do with each other?
“That sounds promising!” said Noni. James hadn’t tried to conceal the letter.
“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe.”
Helga concluded, “And since you told me about those women at Rocky Flats, I’ve been looking into Los Alamos. It sounds as if something similar is fomenting there. I may drive down there next week and have a look-see. Who knows? I don’t think it’s my style, but you’d better be ready to go my bail, just in case. Oh, and it’s a good thing your father is retired. Love, Mom.”
The second letter was marked “By Hand—for James Mead, please forward.” After he wiped his eyes, Mead could see that it bore a familiar script. Then he remembered where he’d seen it before: the journals of October Carson. “Dear James and Noni,” it read.
We’re sorry we missed your departure, but we’ve been gone ourselves a lot since the storm. I wanted to sincerely apologize for putting you at mortal risk, James. And to thank you again for helping me look for Mary. Also for your interest in my former life, and for curating the journals, for what they’re worth. I’ll look forward to sharing questions about our mutual love interest, both by letter and in person when you return to Colorado next summer. Oh, and please tell George that yes, I’ll be both happy and humbled to serve as external reader for your thesis, when the time comes.
Meanwhile, you might be interested in developments here. Of M
ary, we’ve heard little, and perhaps we never will. However, a single postcard arrived, postmarked from Silver Plume, a little place off I-70 on the way to Loveland Pass. All it said was, “I am well, and I love you all. MG.” I have an abiding feeling she’ll be all right, come what may. Dr. Ziegler has expressed a similar conviction, though he couldn’t say why he thought so. And speaking of the good doctor, he and Michael Heap are exploring options for a better situation for Michael’s brother, Howard.
Our merger with the camp is moving along well, although come spring, most of the women will move down to a house that has been donated to them in Golden. The Grove will continue in one form or another, ever-evolving, I am sure. As for the monastery, Annie has decided to launch a long-held dream of hers here, at our invitation. It is to be called the Enos Mills Outdoor School. Through close contact with the mountains, she hopes to raise a generation of—in Mills’s phrase—“nature-guides,” for our species and our time: citizens who won’t freak out when they have a bat in the cabin—we remember your story! We all agree that this fits the Pan-Pacific ideal to a T.
Please do plan to come back next summer. Bring George and Noni if they are free, and see what we have wrought. Perhaps we can go afield together again, this time with nets in hand—on a clear day. You have that penance to satisfy for George, and I’d be happy to help.
I’ll be here at least until then. After that, who knows? The road does have its claim.
With all the best, O. Carson
“Sweet,” said Noni. “I’m so relieved to hear about Mary. I hope he’s right about her. Let’s go back in gentian time.”
“Right,” said James. “Sounds like October might hit the road again, so let’s not miss him. But first in Maggie season, okay? Maybe the Fourth of July—catch the fireworks in Estes?”
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