Tsuga's Children

by Thomas Williams

  “I can’t remember,” Jen said.

  “He was all brown, all dressed in brown deerskin and he had brown hair and he was brown all over, that’s all I can remember except what he said about me.”

  “Did he say anything about me?”

  “Not that I remember. You were just a baby anyway.”

  “I don’t know what a baby looks like, except maybe the little Jesus, and he’s just a wooden doll.”

  They were silent for a while.

  “I wonder if Tsuga had a little girl my age,” Jen said.

  3. The Iron Ice

  It was on the first day of February, the coldest month of all, that disaster struck the Hemlocks, and struck twice on the same bitter day. Oka’s milk began to dry up. She gave less than a quart that morning, and soon after milking time a weakening sickness had come over Tim Hemlock, with a high fever. He was suddenly so weak he could barely stagger back through the tunnel from the barn and slump down sweating and shivering before the small fire.

  “Something strange is happening to the air,” he said.

  “There’s a change coming.”

  “What kind of change?” Am asked.

  “I don’t know. Everything seems heavier,” his father said.

  Eugenia, Jen and Arn couldn’t feel anything strange, so they worried about him even more, thinking that it was his illness. They wrapped him up in the great bearskin robe, heated water to put his feet in when he shivered, put cool damp cloths to his forehead when he grew hot. No one paid any attention to the old woman, who sat still as a carved wooden statue, always watching.

  Later, toward noon, they began to notice something strange too. First it was a tiny noise that seemed to surround them, the kind of indistinct noise you think might be in your head, so you shake your head and it seems to go away, but while you’re not thinking about it, it sneaks back into your ears and there it is again. As it grew, each of them began to wonder if the others heard it, a small, watery sort of noise, a trickling noise such as they hadn’t heard since the cold closed in upon them in late fall. Louder and louder it grew, until all at once they asked each other, “What is it? What’s that noise?” It seemed to come from all around them.

  Arn went to the door and opened it. He was met by a wave of heat. Warm, balmy air pushed in upon him from the open doorway, air as warm as a hot summer day. The roof of the snow tunnel had fallen in, and bright blue sky and sunlight flashing on the snow—light he hadn’t seen for weeks—hurt his eyes and made him blink. The trickles of melt water were almost a roar as they cascaded from the cabin eaves and the roofs of the forge house and the barn.

  “It’s like summer!” he said. The warm air came flowing into the cabin, coating the table and chairs with a fine mist when it touched their colder surfaces.

  “It’s the false spring!” Eugenia said. But they had never seen the false spring so warm. Soon they were sweating in their heavy winter clothes.

  “It won’t last long,” Tim Hemlock said. In his father’s low, weak voice Arn thought he heard some dread, and he shivered for a moment in spite of the warmth.

  But the sudden summery air was glorious to the children, who had been cold and even colder because they were a little hungry all the time. Jen hadn’t been to the barn to see Oka for several days, so she put on her waterproof boots—the ones with the spruce pitch on the seams—and waded out between the walls of snow in the mud and slush of the path to the barn. She opened the door upon the barn’s cold air, glad she was bringing in the warmth to the animals.

  “Oka?” she said, her eyes just beginning after a minute to get used to the hay-smelling dimness. She felt her way along a wooden railing until she could see again. “Oka?”

  She was at Oka and Brin’s stall. She heard the heavy movements of the large animals. The floor creaked, the warm smells surrounded her, stronger as the summery air poured into the barn. There was Oka’s broad wet nose, her wide cow face and bent-over ears, her brown eyes that seemed so kind. Oka gave a deep sigh and a low humming sound in her throat to let Jen know that she was welcome in the dim dusty winter home of the animals. Brin, who was always calmer and quieter than Oka, gave a smooth moo that was half breath, half voice, but he remained back in the square stall, lying down in the hay with his thick forelegs bent in front of his great broad brisket.

  Sometimes Jen thought she could talk to Oka, but sometimes she wondered if they ever really understood each other. Maybe she made up Oka’s words in her own mind and Oka hadn’t really said them at all. As for Brin, he never really felt like saying much. She never heard the thoughts of the goats. They seemed so quick and neat and clever, but she never could understand them.

  But Oka did say things to her, answered her questions in ways that seemed too strange for her to have thought up all by herself. They were cow thoughts, ruminant deep slow answers, as heavy in themselves as Oka’s great body and bones. “Oka knows how butter grows,” the butter song went, and those seemed to be Oka’s words too.

  “My father’s sick, Oka,” Jen said. “And you didn’t give much milk this morning. Are you sick too? I hope you aren’t.

  As Oka moved her head slowly, sighing, her jaw sliding slowly from side to side, Jen seemed to hear deep, echoing words. They were about a calf, a brown and white calf with long awkward legs and a handsome bony head, and how her milk was rich with cream then as she turned the warm air and sweet clover grass into richness and sustenance, the giver of life. But now she was sad, sad down through the hollow four-chambered depths of her cow-ness, heavy, heavy with sadness for a place she had once been long ago, a wide meadow and a bony calf, sweet water and the green heat of the grass.

  Jen was filled with sadness to hear of the deep yearning of her friend. She had always been so grateful for the milk and butter and cheese that Oka gave them. Oka was the giver of life, and now her sadness made Jen sorrow for the beautiful rich meadow and the bony long-legged calf, as if she, too, had been happy and calm there once long ago.

  Even before Jen could get back from the barn to the cabin another change in the weather came moving inexorably down from Cascom Mountain. The warm air passed through the small openings of the farm, slid wetly across the cabin and the outbuildings to be followed by a deep cold, not a wind but a change as palpable as a moving wall. On her way back to the cabin Jen’s boot soles wanted to stick frozen to the slush that was turning to clear ice. She almost had to leave one of them on the doorstep. It wanted to stay there, as if it were a tree with roots deep into the sudden ice.

  In the cabin they all felt it too. The wet snow on the roof creaked like a great fist as it turned into ice. Tim Hemlock, shivering by the lire in the bear robe, said, “Now everything will freeze solid. Everything will be as hard as iron.”

  “Iron,” Arn said. He seemed to remember something about iron, ice as hard as iron.

  “We’ll have to chop the wood loose from the piles with axes,” Tim Hemlock said wearily. “And the doors. All the doors will freeze hard shut.”

  Iron ice, Arn thought. When had he heard that?

  As the days passed the cold never let up. It sent its probing chill to find chinks or cracks in the cabin. And each day Tim Hemlock got worse, as if the cold had found a way in and was freezing his throat and chest. He could barely drink the thin hot soup Eugenia made for him, and finally he lay on a straw pallet before the fire, trembling and gasping for breath. Arn, as best he could, wearing all the clothes he could put on and still move, had chiseled open the cabin and barn doors, and with Eugenia’s and Jen’s help, took care of the animals and chopped logs loose from the frozen piles to drag them in over the blue ice. They had to wear iron crampons strapped to their boots, the spikes barely digging into the ice that was harder than any they had ever seen before.

  Each day Oka gave less milk. The nanny goat gave her usual small amount, but of course her udder was so much smaller than Oka’s. The goats didn’t seem to mind the ice and cold, as if they said, “We can climb anywhere, live on anything.�
� Jen, who spent hours in the barn with Oka, thought she heard things like that from the goats, but their thoughts were cold and superior, not directed toward her at all.

  One day when they had nothing for supper but a piece of bread, dried berries and thin milk, Tim Hemlock could no longer hear them or respond. He lay with his eyes closed, breathing short breaths as quick as a mouse’s breath. He grew dryer and colder to the touch. Eugenia tried to keep him warm, to keep herself hopeful, but inside she was in despair. Her whole world seemed to be ending. She could not bear to live if Tim Hemlock weren’t there. And what would happen to her poor dear children? The merciless cold would steal into the cabin, into their bodies and claim them forever for the far world of the dead.

  Arn and Jen knew how bad their father’s illness was, even though Eugenia tried to keep it from them. They found it impossible to believe that Tim Hemlock, who was always so strong, who had always protected them and provided for them, could be so weak and sick. It seemed impossible. But then all of a sudden they would know, as if they had awakened from a dream, that the strong silent man could not speak to them or hear their voices or see their tears.

  That night at supper Arn couldn’t eat his food. His small crust of bread would not soften in his mouth. It was as hard as iron. Iron, he thought. And then he remembered. It was the old woman. They were all so worried and frightened about his father, they hadn’t thought of the old woman at all. She might have been a piece of wood sitting there on the bench all day long. She had said once in her hand language to Tim Hemlock, “The month of the iron ice will be the worst.” And now, certainly, they were in the month of the iron ice. February. With these thoughts he was awakened again to the strangeness of the old woman, what she had brought with her as a gift when she first came to the cabin. Yes, there they were, all the little birch-bark boxes of powders upon the shelf, each with a picture cut into its top. He remembered some of the pictures of plants: goosefoot, arrowhead, roseroot, kinnikinic, glasswort, purslane and dock. Others he didn’t recognize. Suddenly he felt that it was time to open the boxes. For one thing, all of those plants he recognized were good to eat, and they were hungry. He got a stool and climbed up on it so he could reach the shelf.

  “What are you doing?” Eugenia asked.

  “We’ve got to eat,” Arn said. “Here, Jen, take these as I pass them down.”

  “But we don’t know what’s in them!” Eugenia said.

  “I do. Some of them, anyway.” Somehow he knew he was right, that it was almost too late but not quite. Then he happened to see a movement out of the corner of his eye, a brown thing moving. He looked, and was shocked to see that the old woman stared brightly into his eyes.

  She was speaking to him! Her arm was raised, her hand limp at the end of her wrist, limply falling. Her hand reminded him of something, of the picture of a hand. Yes! He remembered that on the cover of one of the boxes was a hand delicately poised like that. He found the box with the hand on it and took it to the old woman.

  She nodded, her polished, cracked old face unmoving but her eyes bright. She raised her arms and her hands began to move quickly, up and down, back and forth, her crippled old fingers moving too. He couldn’t understand anything of what she was trying to say, and he felt hopeless again. But a strange thing happened, little by little. He would never know how it happened, but he began to understand everything; her gestures that a minute before were nothing but the meaningless twitches of an old woman’s arms and hands suddenly began to mean water, box, powder, cup. Other movements suddenly meant open, pour, heat, stir, and finally all the different kinds of words—words for things and words for doing—came together almost as easily as the words he had spoken all his life.

  When the old woman stopped speaking she nodded three times and he nodded three times back, then began his preparations. Jen and Eugenia watched in wonderment as he put just so much of the brown powder from the box with the hand on it into a large cup. He added hot water from the water pot that hung over the fire, added a pinch of kinnikinic and a pinch of glasswort and stirred the mixture with a wooden spoon. He got down from the shelf the two kinds of mushrooms they hadn’t dared to eat before—the yellow ones and the red ones. They were dried out, now, and he put them together in the mortar and with the pestle ground them into a fine powder.

  “But what are you going to do with those things, Arn?” Eugenia asked. “They may be dangerous!”

  “I’m making medicine for Dad,” Arn said, pouring the ground mushrooms into the steaming cup.

  “No!” Eugenia said. “It might be poison! We don’t know what those things are!”

  “Are you sure, Arn?” Jen said.

  “No, I’m not exactly sure,” Arn said, “but I feel this is the right thing to do.” Eugenia, who knew that her husband was getting worse and worse, that he might die, finally saw that though it was a desperate thing to try what was unknown to them, they had to do it.

  When the cup had been prepared according to the old woman’s directions, Arn propped his father’s head up in his arm and held the strange steaming broth to his lips. The steam was orange-yellow, almost as thick as liquid; Arn could see it entering his father’s nose when he took his short breaths. Soon the breaths became longer, as more of the steam entered his father’s body, longer and more easy. He could feel his father’s neck begin to loosen and relax against his arm. Some color came back, little by little, into his father’s face.

  Finally Tim Hemlock’s eyes half opened. Arn held the cup to his lips and he drank the brownish broth. When he had drunk it all his eyes closed again and he slept deeply—far too deeply for their voices to follow him. But it was at least a sleep of longer breaths.

  They turned to thank the old woman as best they could. All winter she had been there in her place on the wooden bench. Every day the brown, silent presence was there.

  But now she was gone.

  They couldn’t believe it. They looked again, blinking their eyes. But she was gone, all except for a pair of neat, short deerskin moccasins that sat side by side where her feet had been.

  “But she couldn’t go out in this cold without her moccasins,” Jen cried. She went to the door, but all she saw was the blue ice, the air so cold it made her nostrils close when she tried to breathe. The ice was lower in the path to the barn, but everywhere it was rolling, slippery, blue-white ice, with not a sign of the old woman.

  It was then Jen noticed that the barn door was ajar. Maybe she had gone to the barn! Quickly Jen put on her fur parka, boots and mittens and went through the deep cold to the barn to see. When she came back she was sobbing. “Oka’s gone too!” she cried. “Poor Oka! She’ll freeze to death! She won’t have anything to eat!”

  Arn and Eugenia went with her to see, and it was true. Brin and the goats were there in the dim light of the barn, but Oka was gone. They couldn’t tell which direction she had taken because no hoofprints would show on the ice. Was it the old lady who had opened the pen and the barn door? Had she taken Oka with her?

  “Arn, when you fed the animals did you leave the barn open?” Eugenia asked.

  “No, of course not,” Arn said.

  It was Jen who was the most upset. She loved Oka and was grateful to her for the milk and butter and cheese she gave them. To Arn, a cow was meant to give milk and that was that, and though he knew they couldn’t afford to lose Oka, he couldn’t understand why Jen was crying so hard.

  “Oka will be hungry!” Jen cried. “Where can she go on the ice with nowhere to sleep and nothing to eat?”

  They tried to comfort Jen, but she wouldn’t be comforted. They dressed in their warmest clothes and with the aid of their crampons made a wide circle across the glare ice of the fields and the forest, but could find no sign of Oka, no tracks, no spoor of any kind. When they came back to the cabin where Tim Hemlock slept on the pallet before the fire, Eugenia made a soup of what they had for food, adding some of the powders that Arn had identified from the pictures carved into the birch-bark boxes.
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  Jen was quiet, and ate little of the soup. That night when she climbed up the ladder to the loft and crawled into her warm quilts, all she could see was Oka, somewhere deep in the strange wilderness, hungry and alone. Oka, who had been so generous to them, all alone in a cruel land so different from the warm green fields she yearned for, with no one to help her. Even now the deadly cold might have her down on her side, awkward on the hard, slippery ice. Jen couldn’t think of anything else. She couldn’t sleep in her warm bed when Oka was in the cold, so when everyone else was asleep she got up, as quietly as she could, dressed herself in her fur parka with the fringed hood, her fur-backed mittens, boots with the fur inside and the sharp ice crampons strapped to the soles—and stepped out into the moonlight where it was so clear she was in the frozen chill of the moon itself.

  She didn’t know where to go to look for Oka, but she had to go. First she would go to the barn and see what she might learn there. Maybe Brin, out of his warm, phlegmatic vastness, might have something to tell her. Or the clever goats, who seemed to know so much. They must have seen it all through the black slots in their yellow eyes.

  She stood in the breathing barn, slits of moonlight and the briny smell of hay and manure around her, saying, “Brin? Brin?”

  He moved a gigantic part of him—brisket or flank, she couldn’t see that well at first—and rumbled deep inside one of his stomach chambers: lam only a beast and do not understand much. Oka was warm and could help to hear the noises. She could smell wolf and bear when they were hungry, but she is gone and I am only an ox, strong but with few opinions.

  “But where did she go, Brin? Where did she go?”

  She will follow the moon because how else could she see?

  “But the moon goes over Cascom Mountain!”

  Why do you ask anything of an ox? If I were a bull I would talk to you with my eyes and horns.

  Behind her the goats tilted their heads at each other and stamped their feet, but their thoughts were beyond her understanding.