Touch

by Alexi Zentner

  We almost had to run to stay with Jeannot, catching glimpses of him through the thick trees. The hill flattened and the trees thinned, but when we came out into the broad clearing, there was no sign of my grandfather.

  “Where did he go?” Virginia said. We were both a little out of breath.

  I shook my head. The open field full of wild flowers and thick, matted grasses was still. Jeannot had been in front of us, but not far enough so that he would have been able to scramble across the shallow creek and cover the thousand feet or more into the next section of trees without us seeing him. “He must have turned around somewhere back in the woods,” I said.

  “What was he chasing?”

  “Maybe something was chasing him.”

  “We were chasing him, Stephen. No. He was after something.” Virginia walked forward to the creek and knelt down next to the water, cupping a handful to her mouth. “Cold,” she said.

  “Think it will be long to freeze-up?” I squatted next to her and took a drink myself.

  “A while yet, at least according to my father. He said the other Indians were laughing at the men for the early float. They don’t think much of Pearl’s ability to see the weather coming.”

  As she said this, I saw something glint in the water. I fished my hand down among the rocks, wetting my sleeve. I pulled a chain from the water and held it up for Virginia to see.

  “That’s a pretty chain.” She grinned at me. “You should give it to Jeannot for his birthday. He might like it more than a cake.”

  I splashed some water at her and she scrambled back from the bank. “Here,” I said, holding out the chain. “You should have it.” She lifted her hair so that I could fasten it around her neck, and as she turned to show me the way the gold lay against her throat, we heard Jeannot’s voice.

  “Where did you find that?” Jeannot was breathing hard, sweat on his face and tightness in his voice. He moved toward us and reached out to touch the necklace around Virginia’s neck. “Where did you get this?” He looked at Virginia and then at me.

  “It was in the creek,” I said.

  “Did you see …” Jeannot’s voice trailed off and then he sank to his knees. His head bent to his chest, and then he began to shake. I looked at Virginia.

  We stayed silent, not moving, letting my grandfather cry. Finally, Jeannot rubbed his eyes with his sleeves. Slowly, like it pained him to do so, he rose to his feet. He touched the necklace around Virginia’s neck again, fingering the chain as if somebody else wore it.

  “Don’t let Franklin see you wearing this,” he said.

  “Uncle Jeannot?” Virginia looked scared as she spoke. I was scared as well. The sight of an adult crying, let alone Jeannot, was unsettling.

  He turned to me and said, “It was your grandmother’s. Your grandfather,” he said to Virginia, and then looked back to me. “Martine’s brother, your great-uncle Franklin, gave it to her. It was buried with her.”

  “You should have it,” Virginia said. She reached behind her neck to unclasp the chain.

  “No.” He stopped her fingers with his own. “She would have been your great-aunt. She wants you to have it. That’s why you found it. I don’t know why, and I don’t know why she won’t let me find her, but when it’s time, I suppose she’ll show herself.”

  He did not say anything else. He just turned and walked back toward the village.

  VIRGINIA SENT ME the chain a few years ago. “For one of your daughters,” she wrote. “It’s not something that any of my sons would appreciate.”

  I wrote back and told her that it was not something that either of my daughters—this was before the baby was born—were of age to appreciate, either. Still, I kept the necklace. It’s in a box in the drawer of the desk now; sometimes I’m tempted to pull it out and finger it.

  One thing that has been an unexpected joy in returning to Sawgamet after so many years has been the chance to spend time with Virginia again. My wife and Virginia have taken to each other with alacrity, and for me, spending time with my cousin has been yet another thing that brings me back to my youth.

  Virginia hasn’t changed as much as I would have thought. Or perhaps it is rather that, despite my travels, I haven’t nearly changed so much as I thought, either. Physically, she looks surprisingly the same. If I look closely at her hands I can see that she is as worn and old as I am, but her face is that of a much younger woman, and on the several occasions when we have taken to walking in the woods together, I have found myself winded while she gaily carries on her end of the conversation.

  I wish that I’d returned to find my mother similarly unchanged.

  My stepfather has remarked that it is funny how providence works; all of the details for me to come and assume my stepfather’s station as the minister of the Anglican church in Sawgamet had been settled for some months before we even had wind of my mother’s illness. But in the few weeks between when my mother first started feeling poorly and we arrived in Sawgamet, she had already taken to bed.

  My mother was never a large woman, but she had been cheerfully fed and active, the sort of woman who thrived in a town like Sawgamet. I don’t mean to make her sound like farm stock, but neither was she a delicate china doll. She read and sewed and baked and complemented Father Earl in leading the church, but she also hiked through the woods with him, could handle an ax to cut firewood, and other than the winter that my father and sister died, never seemed to mind the cold.

  When I finally arrived in Sawgamet, it was to a woman I barely recognized. True, it had been two years since the last time we had seen each other—she came to Vancouver to see the new baby, her namesake—but the changes wrought so quickly were a blow to me. Is that always how it works? That we grow old in the space of a few weeks? I feel as if I should still be a young man, but when I look in the mirror I am greeted by a shock of gray hair that is thinning at the part.

  Still, even though I should have been expecting the change in my mother, my first thought was that some imposter had clambered into the bed beside which my aunt Julia sat vigil. Julia—Franklin and Rebecca’s daughter—distracted me with the flicker of her hands and the shadows she threw on the wall. Shadow puppets seem like such children’s games, but as her hands moved I saw the dance of caribou, hunting wolves, sled dogs, and then, as she turned at the sound of my footsteps, a bird taking flight.

  “Stephen,” she said, her voice quiet. “How was your journey?”

  “How is she?”

  “Sleeping,” my aunt said, “which is well enough. She’s uncomfortable and been sleeping poorly.”

  As I stared at my mother, I could see some of the familiar features that had begun to sink away. Between the lights from the bedside lamp and the flame in the fireplace, stark shadows made crevices on her face.

  I don’t know how long I stared at my mother, but I forgot about my aunt Julia until I felt her hand on my shoulder.

  “Why don’t you sit with her?” she said. “Your mother will be happy to see you when she wakes. Just keep the fire stoked so she doesn’t catch chill.”

  The door closed behind Julia, and I sat in the chair and took my mother’s hand. Her skin had turned so thin, paper-like, that I thought I would be able to see the light pass through it if I held it up to the lamp.

  SITTING ALONE IN MY STUDY like this, night fallen hard and the house finally silent, it is no wonder that I might worry about my own mortality. It’s still a few hours yet until midnight, but the girls are asleep, as is my wife, and I know that downstairs, in the parlor, Father Earl is resting in a chair beside my mother’s bed.

  I should be preparing to write my mother’s eulogy rather than thinking of my grandfather and grandmother, of my father diving through the ice and reaching out to my sister, of all of the many things that both drove me away and brought me back to Sawgamet. Easier said than done. To write the eulogy is to accept that very soon my mother will be truly and finally dead, that I will be—even though I am past forty—an orphan. Were I more
like my grandfather, I would simply refuse to believe in my mother’s death. Were I more like my grandfather, I’d believe that even when my mother does die, whether it is tomorrow or tonight, somewhere out there, past the window, past the train yards and the houses, into the cuts and woods, she would still roam.

  SIX

  The Miner’s Angel

  WHEN I THINK ABOUT the first winter after my grandparents married, I am prone—as I often am—to think of it in biblical terms. Or maybe it is simply that I am looking for a reason, for something to explain all that happened. I can explain the rise of Sawgamet easy enough: all it took was a few men—my grandfather among them—with instant wealth to cause other men to flock to Sawgamet. The Yankee who gathered enough gold dust from shaking out his clothes that he bought a horse, the Chinaman who walked into town one morning with a nugget the size of a baseball, and Twelve-Foot Pete, so named because in a mining claim measuring only twelve feet by twelve feet, he unearthed enough gold to buy a thousand acres of farmland in his native Ohio. On this, dreams were made.

  We are experiencing another boom of sorts in Sawgamet now, with the growing war. The need for lumber—the resilient wood that comes from our forests—has increased enough to return some of the flush to this town, but I know it will not last. Sooner or later, every boom has a bust, though at least there is something tangible in these forests; I can see the trees, walk through the cuts. But gold. Gold is something else. A dream that ends soon enough.

  My grandfather would have been familiar with the proverb, “He that tilleth his land shall have plenty of bread: but he that followeth after vain persons shall have poverty enough.” But, of course, he and my grandmother were not thinking of gold when they ignored the way that the summer held longer than it should have. They may have been the only people in Sawgamet who were not thinking of gold: the previous winter had been mild enough for the miners to work through, and the summer had been warm and lasted well into the fall, the town growing by the day. But my grandparents were in love. They weren’t thinking of the way that empires crumble, the way that people can lose faith, the way that nothing lasts forever.

  They expected the summer to last forever, and when they finally woke to frost on their windows near the end of October, it came as a surprise. They had gone to sleep the night before to another unseasonably warm night, but the morning frost was thick on the glass. Sun scattered through the ice crystals and splayed across the room. Flaireur stayed sleeping at the foot of the bed, even as Martine washed and dressed and made her way downstairs to see what Rebecca had prepared for breakfast.

  The same Rebecca, of course, that I knew only as my great-aunt, witty and often warm to me and her granddaughter, Virginia, but a sharp-tongued matron who suffered no fools. It is difficult for me to imagine her as the young woman—she was a year or two older than Martine and Jeannot—that my grandfather hired as soon as the house was complete. Rebecca was one of the few women who had come to Sawgamet unwilling to sell her body.

  While Rebecca made breakfast—pancakes and bacon, syrup and preserved raspberries—my grandmother returned upstairs. She found Jeannot dressed in thin pants and a light shirt, pulling on his pair of boots.

  “Where are you off to?”

  “I’ve been cooped up here long enough,” he said, and then he saw the look that flashed across Martine’s face. “Not with you. With you I could lay forever,” he said, “but I’m used to being outside more. I was thinking of going for a paddle.”

  “Where?”

  Jeannot stood and stepped over to the window. He scratched his thumbnail against the frost on the window. “I think I’m going to go off into the woods a ways.” He rubbed on the glass until there was a small square that they could both see through. He nodded at the view over the river and at the hills rising into peaks on the other side. “I’ve always wanted to know what’s further along. Today seems like a fine day for it. Would you like to join me,” he said, and with a small smile he added, “or do you have too much to do?”

  THEY DID NOT BRING MUCH with them. Rebecca packed Jeannot and Martine some fried chicken wrapped in paper, biscuits, and shortbread, and Jeannot brought his rifle. The sun had already chased away the morning’s frost, and my grandparents wore light summer clothing that belied the date on the calendar. They paddled upstream until their shoulders and arms ached. Because of the current, they moved slowly, no more than half the pace of an easy walk, and several times they pulled the canoe from the water and portaged it, carrying it past whitewater and then launching it again when the river widened. After a few hours, they stopped for lunch, beaching the canoe on a gravel bar. They set aside some shortbread and gave the rest of the chicken scraps to Flaireur. After eating, the dog fell asleep in the sun.

  The river moved slowly and sang quietly. Jeannot sat on the gravel, leaned back against the canoe, and closed his eyes, but Martine stripped off her clothes and swam in the river. She let herself float in the current, her long hair trailing behind her. Three times she drifted down the river, swam to the side, then walked back to Jeannot. He watched her, noting the way that the sun seemed to burnish the gold chain embedded in her skin, and finally, after she called to him, he, too, joined her in the cold water.

  They played, dunking each other under the water, swimming down to touch the bottom, letting themselves be carried along by the gentle pull of the wide, lazy river. Though Jeannot told me they just swam, I’d imagine that after a while the playing led, as many things do for newlyweds, to kissing, and the kissing to making love. Jeannot standing in the river with the water midway up his chest, holding Martine in the slow sway of the current. Even with muscles sore from paddling, she would have seemed weightless, and when they were finished, they remained still, Martine wrapped around him, Jeannot’s head on her shoulder.

  Whether they were just swimming or something more, my grandfather told me that as he held his wife in the river, she started to fall asleep until she heard him let out a small gasp. She started to speak, but my grandfather’s hand darted from the water and touched lightly on her lips. Silently, she turned and looked out on the bank.

  Flaireur lay sleeping, curled near the canoe, even though a caribou stood only a few paces away from the dog. The caribou was enormous. From where my grandparents were entwined in the river, the caribou seemed to stand nearly six feet at shoulder height, easily a foot bigger than any caribou either of them had seen before. He was heavy, as well. Perhaps because of the delay in the cold, the rutting season had not begun, and this bull had not lost his stores of fat. More striking than his size, however, was that he seemed to be made of solid gold. Had he not taken a step forward at that moment, both Jeannot and Martine would have been willing to believe that he was some sort of misplaced statue.

  The caribou hovered over Flaireur, but the dog did not stir. The sun reflected off the caribou’s golden coat, his antlers, his feet.

  “Even his bones must be made of gold,” my grandfather whispered to Martine. His words broke the stillness that had come over the couple. Gingerly, Jeannot lowered Martine to her feet, and then he slowly began to ease his way out of the water, his eyes flickering from the rifle that lay in the canoe to the golden caribou that stood only a few paces away from the boat.

  The caribou looked up at Jeannot, but the animal showed neither surprise nor fear as my grandfather steadily advanced upon him. As Jeannot moved forward, the caribou turned and took a few steps toward the woods before stopping and looking back. Jeannot froze, expecting the animal to bolt, but the golden caribou shook his head and then took only another two steps before pausing again.

  Jeannot reached for his rifle, but Martine, who had crept behind him, touched his wrist lightly, and instead he took her hand in his. Together, carefully and slowly, still naked, the water glistening on their bodies in the midday sun, Jeannot and Martine walked after the caribou. As they headed into the woods, Jeannot glanced back and saw Flaireur still sleeping peacefully.

  My grandparents followed the
caribou through the forest. At first they were tentative and solemn, but soon it became almost a game. By the time they were deep enough into the forest that the light had become diffuse—as if they were walking in the moonlight—they had forgotten any need to be quiet. The path that the caribou followed was wide and twisting, and the fallen leaves and dirt stayed soft underneath their feet. Jeannot noticed that the tree trunks and bushes near the trail glittered with gold dust, and they wondered if the forest grew its own gold, but then they came to realize that the caribou seemed to be shedding gold as it walked. The air was thick with it, and the few beams of light that came cleanly through the forest canopy appeared as spears of gold.

  The caribou walked in front of them, slow enough that they could follow, but fast enough that no matter how much my grandparents called to him, he kept out of reach. They did not try running after him. There was something in the hush of the woods—broken only by the clicking of the caribou’s feet—that made them reverent. After a little while, they began to forget why they had started following the caribou. Hand in hand, they began to speak of children and the future, subjects that neither of them had spoken openly to the other of before, and neither of them noticed the change in the light or the sudden cold stillness in the air until they had already come into the clearing.

  Ahead of them, the caribou waited. The trees formed an almost perfect circle around the glade. The sun, past its height, still shone heatlessly down, and its light bounced brilliantly off the giant boulder that occupied the middle of the clearing. The caribou watched Jeannot and Martine emerge from the trees, and then he turned to the boulder and began grinding his antlers and his shoulders against it.