Eye of Flame

by Pamela Sargent

  “Mother must have hated this place,” Evie said as she opened the suitcase.

  “I never heard her say so.”

  “Well, think of it, Jennie—sitting around here, away from all her friends, taking care of us and waiting for Dad to come up on the weekends,”

  Maybe she had hated it. I wouldn’t know, because Mother had been the kind of person who kept her thoughts to herself. The camp had been my father’s boyhood summer refuge. Even after all our summers there. Mother had moved around the rooms, occasionally peering into a corner or picking up an object from a table, as if she were a guest exploring unfamiliar surroundings. But maybe Evie was only projecting her own feelings onto our mother. That would be like my sister, imagining that everyone felt exactly the way she did.

  “But I guess you wouldn’t understand that,” Evie continued, “being practically a hermit yourself.”

  I would have to put up with three days of this, Evie asking when I was leaving, how I could possibly get through another winter, when I was going to find a job and get on with my life. She would get to the business about the land, too; I was sure of that now. It didn’t matter. I was ready for her this time.

  We went to the kitchen. “Hungry yet?” Evie asked.

  “Not really.”

  “Let’s have a drink then. Better make mine a ginger ale, or diet soda if you have any.”

  “You sure? I’ve got some of your bourbon left.”

  “Steve and I are trying for a kid,” she said, “so I’m laying off the booze.”

  “You must be kidding,” I said. “You have three already. How can you afford it? What’s going to happen to your job?”

  “Steve wants a kid of his own. Can’t blame a man for that, can you?”

  “Go sit on the porch,” I said. “I’ll get the drinks.” She wandered toward the porch. Evie had always been big, and she had gained more weight since her last visit; maybe she was already pregnant. I poured her a diet cola, along with gin over ice for myself. Once, I had liked martinis, but had come to think of them as a drink for rich white Republicans, so now I didn’t bother with the vermouth. “Your grandmother drank.” Mother had harped on that, on how much trouble it had caused everyone. “Her Indian blood—that’s what it was.” That was Mother’s explanation for any behavior she didn’t want to blame either on environment or her own genes.

  The screened-in porch faced the lake. Evie was sitting in one of the chairs, smoking a cigarette; apparently she hadn’t given that up yet. I sat down near the standing ashtray and took out my own cigarettes. Tobacco was a sacred plant for the Iroquois; I had read that in a book. For my grandmother’s Mohawk ancestors, it was a means by which their prayers could reach the spirits, and rise to their Creator. That was, I supposed, a pretty good reason not to quit. My indecision would travel out along the smoky tendrils, to be dispersed as it rose toward heaven; the spirits would answer my prayers. A stream of smoke from my cigarette drifted through the screen, then broke up into uneven strands.

  Evie said, “I have to talk to you.”

  “I figured.”

  “Curt called me last night. I talked to Sam a couple of days ago, about the land. They think selling it off’s a good idea. People want lakeside property, and this land’s worth more now.”

  Of course my brothers would agree with her about selling. The land Father had left us was his only legacy. We owned everything around this small bay; the closest place, about a mile south, was another cabin overlooking the narrow channel that connected the bay to the rest of the lake. The shallowness of the channel kept large motorboats out of the bay; days could pass without my seeing more than a canoe moving along the shore. It was why the loons came there and blue herons nested in the nearby trees; I thought of the eagle I had seen earlier.

  “Dad didn’t leave us this land,” I said, “so that we could sell it.”

  “He must have known we’d consider it. Why didn’t he put it in the will if he didn’t want us to sell?”

  “Because he was too sick to think about it. Because there wasn’t time. I know what he would have wanted.”

  “You know. You always know, Jennie. You always know all this stuff about everyone in the family that nobody else knows.” Or which might not even be true, her voice suggested.

  I knew things because the rest of them never bothered to listen to anybody. I said, “When I knew Dad was dying, I kept waiting for him to tell me to get on with my life. But he never did, and it wasn’t until a little while ago that I figured out why. He wanted me to stay here, to protect this land.”

  “That’s crazy. He was so doped up toward the end he probably couldn’t think straight. He must have figured you’d have enough sense to get back on your feet by now. This land’s worth nothing to us this way. If we sell it, we can—”

  “It isn’t ours,” I said, “not really. It’s like we’re the caretakers, that it’s a trust. I’ve been feeling that way the whole time I’ve been here. It isn’t our land, it’s our people’s—Grandma’s people.”

  “Are you on that again?” Evie stubbed out her cigarette. “How can that stuff matter to you? Look, I loved Grandma, but she wasn’t all that much use to anybody when she was alive. If Grandpa hadn’t had to waste so much money on her, maybe there would have been something left for us.”

  She took out another cigarette and lit it. “You can afford to be sentimental about these things, but the rest of us have kids. I’d like to be able to do something for them.”

  That was the excuse that explained everything. “I have kids, so that gives me license to be an asshole. I have kids, so I’m entitled to do things I’d shy away from or have doubts about otherwise, because I have to think of them.” At least that’s how it sounded to me. Whatever happened to “I have kids, so maybe I should try to pass on some wisdom and principles?” But my sister didn’t live in that world. Maybe no one did any more.

  “And Curt’s got a son almost ready for college,” Evie went on. “He told me he wants Brian to get somewhere,” That sounded like Curt. My brother would think he was doing the world a big favor if he gave it another lawyer or M.B.A.

  “It isn’t as if the state hasn’t set aside plenty of undeveloped land already,” Evie gestured with her cigarette. “We’re not rich, you know. We can’t keep this our little private bay forever.”

  I tried to think of what to say, but the gin was getting to me. Evie wouldn’t understand if I told her that I still caught glimpses of deer coming to the bay to drink, that we had to keep the land as it was so that the deer could still come here. I couldn’t tell her that having more people around would probably frighten off the turtles that sunned themselves on the logs across from our dock. Evie would be thinking of future college bills and expensive technology for her kids and the new baby with Steve, not deer and turtles.

  “It won’t be the same,” I said. “I saw an eagle in that big tree today. He won’t stick around if builders start tearing things up. We could leave something behind, Evie, a bit of untouched land people might appreciate having someday.”

  “Listen,” She leaned toward me. “We can still keep some of the land around this camp. You’d hardly notice the difference. We could sell the rest off in large parcels, so there wouldn’t be too many places built.” She sounded like a white woman, with her talk of selling the land and carving it up, but that was how Evie thought of herself. It’s that Indian blood that caused most of the family troubles; better forget you have any.

  “I’ll just bet the developers will listen to you,” I said. “They’ll say, ‘Sure, I’ll just put one summer home here and make fifty grand instead of building five and pocketing a hell of a lot more.’”

  “There are limits,” Evie replied, “what with having to put in septic systems and all. If you ask me, this place could use some development,” She squinted as she stared toward the lake. “For instance, that big tree there is completely out of hand. Somebody should have cut it down a long time ago. If you cleared out some of tho
se trees, you’d have a much better view.”

  “That tree stays,” I was on my feet. “It’s Grandma’s tree—she planted it herself when Grandpa built this place,” I don’t know how I knew that. During the year I had been living at the camp, I had looked out at the tree without ever thinking about it. Why had Grandma planted a pine there, when pines already surrounded us on all sides? Yet somehow I knew she had planted it. Maybe she had told me once, and I had simply forgotten until that moment.

  I went into the kitchen, took some ice out of the refrigerator, and poured myself more gin. The evening wind was picking up when I got back to the porch. The pines sang, the wind rising into a muted cheer and then falling into a sigh, but a deeper moan nearly drowned out the song. I heard a rumble that might have been distant thunder, but the sky was still salmon pink, the clouds fingers of navy blue.

  “It was cruel,” I said then, “what Grandpa did to Grandma.”

  “What do you mean?” Evie asked.

  “Buying all this land and saying he did it for her.”

  “You call that cruel? It showed how much he adored her.”

  “No, it didn’t,” I said. “He was saying, ‘Here, I bought this land, this little piece of the mountains that used to belong to your people, because I made a lot of money in lumber. And you can have a little of your land back because a white man got it for you.’”

  “You’re crazy, Jennie. Grandpa loved that woman. Do you think he would have stayed with her all those years if he hadn’t?”

  That was the way the rest of them saw it. Grandpa was the long-suffering saint and Grandma the alcoholic he hadn’t been able to help. He had checked her into every expensive hospital he could find, but that had not kept her from going back to drinking when she got home. He had sold his business to stay with her, and at the end of his life, the money was gone. Grandma had outlived him even with the drinking; she tapered off toward the end, spacing out her drinks, but not enough to save either her liver or my father from her medical bills. No wonder the rest of them blamed her for their lives of tract houses, credit card bills, and tedious jobs.

  Maybe I would have blamed her myself, but I had spent too much time as a child sitting with her when my brothers exiled me from their games. To Evie and my brothers, our grandmother was only an old drunk who sat in the corner and mumbled to herself; that was the Grandma they remembered. They didn’t have the patience to listen to her, to see that her disjointed musings made sense once you put them together. The Grandpa I had heard about in her words wasn’t the loving husband Evie saw, but the man who had forced her to live among people who despised her, who had refused to let her go.

  “The wild Indians’ll get you.” That had been Curt’s favorite taunt at our camp when he was tormenting our younger brother Sam. “When you’re asleep, the wild Indians’ll climb in your window and scalp you.” Indians had nothing to do with them. They had never noticed how Grandma closed her eyes when she heard Curt’s words, how her hand had tightened around her glass.

  “I don’t even know my clan,” I said.

  Evie exhaled a stream of smoke. “What?”

  “I don’t even know my clan. Grandma used to say that. She’d say it in this low voice, so nobody else would hear, but I did,” She had said it as if knowing the name of her clan would have freed her from her prison.

  “Probably said it when she was drunk,” Evie leaned back in her chair. “It doesn’t matter, Jennie. It’s got nothing to do with us.” She was quiet for a while. “Being alone up here all this time—no wonder you sound so funny. Look, if we sell, you’d have enough to make a new start. You can think of where to live, have time to find a job. Hell, maybe we can get enough so you don’t have to work at all,”

  As the gin slowed me down, I wanted to shout that I was going to find work—waitressing, office work, or whatever—in the nearest town, that I could lay in enough wood for the winter and buy enough meat for myself cheaply from a hunter once deer season started. I knew what I had to do; it was time to lay it all out and show Evie she had to go along. I was about to raise my voice when the cabin suddenly shook, and the floor dropped from under my chair.

  The disturbance lasted only a moment. Before I could speak, the floor was once more firmly under my feet, the evening still except for the gentle sound of the wind.

  “Whoa,” Evie muttered. “Did you feel that?”

  “Just a quake,” I said. The mountains had them once in a while, mild ones that barely made three points or so on the Richter scale, but I had never felt one quite like that. Usually, everything would get very quiet, and then there would be a sharp sound like a sonic boom, and after that a small bounce before things settled down. This time, the quake had come from deep underground, as though the earth was giving way.

  “Jesus,” Evie said, “I thought the whole place was going to fall down. I’ll have that bourbon after all.”

  I got her the drink, and then another one when we sat down in the kitchen to eat the sandwiches she had brought, and by then Evie was wandering down memory lane, droning on about our adventures at the camp when we were younger. She seemed to get most nostalgic about the times the boys had ganged up on me, or about how Curt and Sam would always push me off the dock, even when I was dressed, even when the water was freezing cold. I didn’t mind. At least she had forgotten about real estate for the moment.

  She went to bed early, tired from her drive, and I sat on the porch with another gin, trying to think of how to persuade her and my brothers not to sell our land. Brilliant ideas about how to convince them flashed through my mind, only to be forgotten a second or so later. My face was stiff, my body numb. I was really drunk by then, and felt as if I were wrapped in cotton and looking at everything from inside a long tunnel. The big pine tree near the path seemed larger, and then I saw a face in the bark, a carved mask like the ones my ancestors had made.

  That had to be an illusion, a trick of the moonlight shining through the boughs. The face changed as I stared at it, reshaping itself into that of a wolf. Seeing a face in the tree didn’t frighten me, though, because I had noticed other strange things lately—marks and symbols on trees that looked as though they had been made by knives, the throbbing sounds of drums in the night until hooting owls or the snarl of a bobcat drowned them out. I had grown to accept these passing sights and sounds, which seemed to belong to the forest and mountains.

  I must have fallen asleep after that, and woke up on the studio couch in the living room, my head pounding. I lifted my head, then realized I would never make it to my bedroom without collapsing or vomiting—maybe both. My head fell back, and then I was outside, under the big pine.

  Two men in feathered caps and deerskin robes stood near the tree. One lifted his hand, and then I looked up to see the eagle flutter its wings in the branches overhead.

  “Do you know what tree this is?” one man asked.

  “My grandmother’s,” I replied.

  “It is more than that. Your grandmother planted the cone from which it grew, but that cone fell from an ancient pine, the one under which I had my vision of peace, the vision that united the Five Nations of the Iroquois. I am the Peacemaker, child, and this tree—”

  But before he could say anything more, I was back on the couch, covering my eyes with one hand against the light. “Jennie,” my sister said.

  “Jesus Christ,” My jaw ached, and even moving my mouth hurt. “Turn off the light,”

  “You’re drunk,” she said.

  “So what?”

  “Is this what you do when you’re alone, just drink yourself silly?”

  “No. This is what I do when you guys won’t leave me alone.”

  She pulled me up from the couch and helped me toward my bedroom. “You ought to know better, Jennie, what with—”

  “I had a dream. I have to tell you—”

  “You probably had a nightmare, in your condition.” She let me fall to the bed, then took off my shoes.

  “It wasn’t a nightma
re.” Something else my grandmother had said was coming back to me. Dreams were important; in the old days, an Iroquois who had a vivid dream would go to every longhouse in his settlement, recounting his dream until he found someone who could explain it to him. I didn’t think Evie would be able to explain my dream to me, but it clearly had something to do with our land and the tree outside, so I felt it was something I had to tell her. Maybe the dream would persuade her to give up her plans.

  “I was outside,” I continued, “and these two men—I’m positive they were Mohawks, or Iroquois anyway, were standing—”

  “Give it a rest,” Evie burst out. “I’m going back to sleep. Talk to me when you’re sober,” She stomped out of the room.

  I don’t know why I thought telling her about the dream would bring her around. The fact was, I didn’t have to come up with brilliant schemes for keeping the land. All I had to do was tell Evie I wasn’t going to sign any papers, and she and my brothers wouldn’t be able to do a thing. I hadn’t wanted to state the matter quite so bluntly, but she had pushed me to it, so there was nothing else to be done.

  But I didn’t know if I would have the fortitude to hold out against my brothers and sister forever. I could disappear, but the rest of them—Curt especially—wouldn’t give up until they found me, and they might use my disappearance against me. If they got desperate enough, they might even get me declared incompetent, and they would have enough grounds, what with my wanderings, erratic work history, and bouts of manic-depression. I had gotten my mental shit together before coming home, but it could still look bad, so I’d have to make sure they couldn’t find me. If that meant leaving the forest that had finally calmed the storms that often raged inside me, I would still have the comfort of knowing the land was safe.