Beneath Ceaseless Skies #124

by Gemma Files

  I knew he would not have loved me. My mother told me he would come to, one day, when he was old and ugly too. But I know that no one loves a troll. No one loves the rot and weather and disintegration of things. They don’t remember that else this, nothing ever grows.

  * * *

  IV. Girl

  When the grizzly came to our door, my sisters and I were sewing up the holes in our clothes. It was the heart of winter. Snow dragged the base of our house deeper into the ground. My father was at his desk across the room, nearest the door. I call him a miner, but he hadn’t stuck a pan in cold stream water or blasted the riverbanks in three years. He wrote articles for a local newspaper, just enough to keep us alive.

  He had a miner’s broken heart, the grief of someone whose boyhood dreams, burnished with gold and hope, had been broken down by those years of frenzy. He couldn’t have known that bringing his young family—wife and three little girls—would have destroyed his chances. You had to be mean, and solitary, to make it. No one to protect or love but yourself. He didn’t realize what streams full of gold, wild country and native tribes who had little avarice and no steel or gunpowder, did to lawless men. What so many men together did to men.

  Our mother died a year after she arrived, of tuberculosis, but now I think it was homesickness that killed her. Not for the flat green land of Muskego, Wisconsin, where we had come from, but Norway, where she was born. Where tradition was rooted like old linden trees and change came slowly, measured and even. In these Sierra Nevada foothills, the mountains themselves so harsh in their beauty, so unpredictable, change and chaos are constant. The world is being built up again from gold-dust and dirt and blood. Nothing is certain, nothing is set. The violent openness of it killed her.

  When the grizzly bear came to our door, I was mending the holes in my father’s shirt. When you have only a few things to wear, there’s a constant battle against holes and weak places. You are always up against the endless friction of life; its weathering.

  My father opened the door from where he sat at his desk. A grizzly bear stood on the tiny porch in the winter night. He looked right at me, straight through. His winter coat was in, gloss and shag, and he was wider than two men. The musk of wilderness came through the door with him, halfway in. His whole body would have taken up all the space we had for standing. None of us started—the stillness of hunger made us slow as trees. But inside I went pale, I went cold, I smelled death and I shook.

  “Good evening,” said the Bear, and his voice was deep and rough like dirt.

  “The same to you, sir,” said my father, but his voice quivered.

  “I am only a bear, old man, and you know what I want.” His eyes were caramel, his fur thick and rippled. I was looking at his paws, as big as my skull. “I can smell how soft and clean she is, through all this reek of threadbare human grief. I’ve come for your youngest daughter. Give her to me, and I will make you as rich as you now are poor.”

  It was not an offer to be easily refused. He stood there in the door with the winter at his back, his thick fur and wide shoulders holding it off. He stood there and filled up our little home with the smell of pine and wind.

  I said “no,” a whisper, but I could see in his face that my father had already sold me. I was afraid, pale and cold and shaking underneath my skin. I was so used to my sisters, the small room and its close walls, the birds right outside that landed on my shoulders, my hard and hungry stomach. I did not want to be alone. I did not want to be somewhere big, and open, and solitary.

  * * *

  The bear came back the next week. The winter snow had deepened. Even my sisters begged me to go—think of how all of our lives would be changed, they said. He seemed a gentle sort of bear anyway, they said, not so bad; surely you won’t be eaten, surely.

  I packed one bag. I put on all of my socks. I left with him into the snow.

  “Are you afraid?” he asked.

  “No,” I lied.

  “Then grab onto my fur and climb onto my back. It is wide and warm, and we have far to go.”

  * * *

  V. Lady of Gold

  I knew her before she ever came running for help, before she lost him, stupid thing. I know the whole story; how he carried her tenderly against his back, like a groom carries his bride, up the granite mountains in the snow, to the great, fallen sequoia that was his home. Inside, he had carved and scrubbed it into a gnarled palace. Outside, it was only a fallen log, a bear’s den.

  I know this because I was there. I am the dust of ancient, imploding stars; that pressure and rift. I am the flakes, nuggets, powders and gems that men came for in the thousands. They reached their hands into the streams of my body and ripped up pieces of me. They took me into their little bags.

  Anywhere they have taken part of me, I know about. I watch the insides of saloons and brothels where small sacks of gold are exchanged for sad, tired women and tumblers of whiskey: the things that men turn to when they begin to wonder if they are wrong. I know the fine restaurants of San Francisco where the rich come to eat oysters and drink champagne, gold as my blood. I know the insides of wooden trunks, the undersides of floorboards, where I am hidden away, for fear of deceit. And oh, I know the cold streams that flip and unfurl over granite. I know the blue quiet of riverbeds, occasionally the spindled feet of some heron or egret churning the silt. I know the earth’s insides, her dark hot chambers of pressure and stone; places humans will never touch me, places so dark and heavy, so full of that planetary force, they would combust your bones and heart in a second.

  So of course, I saw her father pan desperately for pieces of my body, never greedy or cruel enough. Of course, I know the inside of that bear’s home. I watched her in there before she ever tripped out into the wind to look for him, finding me along the way. He had covered the inside of that fallen sequoia with gold leaf so it shone from within like a wild, bark-rough star. Every burl, old owl burrow and crack he smoothed gold.

  He panned it himself, at night, when he had his man’s body back, when he wasn’t in danger of being shot by the other miners camped by the San Joaquin River, that soft arm of water which held me to her bosomed banks for so long. The carcass of a grizzly shot dead always brought them to a frenzy of victory: man over wilderness, man over chaos, man over death. He was very careful, in that heavy gold body, with claws and teeth that tore and killed without effort, because he knew what men were like in their hearts. He had killed a grizzly too, before all this; knew the thrill, and the sorrow, of such mastery. The godliness and the terror to feel ursine blood all over your hands, warm and dark as earth.

  He panned that gold for his den with the patience taught by hibernation. He slipped and coaxed my pieces from the riverbanks with seducing fingers, like a lover. I came to him in flakes and whole chunks, wriggled up through the silt to be near. He felt like a bear, quiet and strong and without malice; not a man. The grizzly had seeped far into him: a gentle love of thimbleberries and acorns, hibernation-dreams, irrevocable strength. He painted his den with my gold body. He painted each piece of furniture carved of wood, the bedposts, the plates. Then he went to look for her.

  I liked him despite myself, and he did make a very handsome bear. I don’t know much of curses, or of the strange beings who make them; all brought here with the gold-seeking men. But I do know that he wanted a human girl to love him. This was necessary. I do know that he wanted that girl to be held in starlight. He wanted her to be so dazzled she’d forget her horror at being married to a bear.

  His part of the tree, where he kept to in the day, was only a tree—dank and piney, with bark-eating worms, loose roots, dirt. I forgot my hatred of men for him and for that girl, who as the months passed would rather curl up in his dirt-den than loll in the light of my body, mute with luxury. They both seemed to find peace when she came and pressed herself beside his bear-body in the humus-dark.

  * * *

  VI. Girl

  He always took me up on his back. I missed this when I lost h
im, more than the nights he would come into my gold room, right into my bed and into me, with the bare body of a man. Those were slick and tender nights, nights of human lust and comfort and skin. But when he let me up on his back and took me to the acorn groves, or to his berry patches—blackberry, thimbleberry, salmonberry, huckle and elder and mora—those afternoons I still long for. He let me lay down on his back as he walked, or sink my hands into his fur. He smelled of bear. It was a little bit like the wool of grass-eating animals, but with a sharp blood and musk-scent, like fresh meat. To be held by a bear—this made me feel as though I might belong.

  At first I stayed in my golden chambers, eating everything rich, hoarding everything shiny or soft. The tree smelled like butterscotch and pitch inside. I fell into a sort of stupor. Winter turned into spring. It was dry and fresh outside. He picked me wildflowers by night. We lived high up in the Sierras, where the air was thin, close to where all the streams started. The lakes were perfect as ice and as cold, bluer than sky. They were full of frogs with lemon-yellow legs who didn’t sing much but watched me with their uncanny round eyes. We lived just below the place where the air got too thin for tall trees to grow, just below that harsh landscape with its desolate purple columbines.

  Maybe it was the thin air, going to my head. Maybe it was the company of a bear throughout all my daylight hours; the gold-coated rooms grew too bright for me. My stomach started to turn at the little cardamom cakes and sapphires set in gold. I began to sleep in his end of the tree, the bear-end, through half the day, curled up in his paws like an unnatural cub. I wanted to be near that wildness; I wanted a coat of my own, and teeth, and claws.

  At night when he was a man I wasn’t allowed any light in the room. He never said why. What is a girl supposed to do but grow obsessed with candles? I knew it was wrong, some kind of betrayal. But I stole a tallow taper from the dining room. I stuck it under my pillow. He didn’t speak much, as a man. It seemed like he was happier as a bear, more comfortable. Without human conversation, I didn’t know him at all, those nights, except by touch. I wanted to see him. I thought this would make a difference. The curiosity of the eyes is insatiable, particularly in a young girl. You think you will know a person’s heart if you can know his face. So I lit the taper one night, after he fell asleep.

  You know this part. Everyone knows this part. The crane-woman knew it and the man with the winds tied into his hair, he knew it too. The candle dripped hot tallow onto his nightshirt. I stared for too long, because he was beautiful, because I was looking and looking and couldn’t find the bear in his face. He woke up into that traitor’s flame.

  “You’ve ruined it,” was all he said. “You’ve ruined it. I’m gone from you forever.”

  * * *

  VII. Long-Nose

  Our curse—that string tied around his ankle—yanked him back. He came to us with his shoes torn open to his skin, having walked the stream and riverways that lead out of the Sierras, all the way down through the prairie and marsh of the Central Valley as it heated up with spring and burst out its orange poppies and checker-blooms. The water took him to the San Francisco Bay. He followed the same routes as the silt sloughed off the riverbanks by miner’s hoses.

  It’s none of my business the reason things decay, what breaks them down and tears them open, only that they do. I should not be partial to wind and bacterial infestation over men’s hands and desires, but I am. They did with their hoses what only centuries of proper disintegration, of the world’s great weathering, should do. We trolls have never liked it when men take it upon themselves to guide the ways of destruction. We have always punished them for it. Lived in burrowed palaces beneath stone footbridges and reached up our strong and clammy arms to pull them under, horse and all, maiden and all; it makes no difference to us. Sometimes we eat them ourselves. Sometimes we feed them to the worms and the black beetles, the small maggot, smaller bacteria, and the molds that are our pets. Now and then, if they are pleasant to look at, more pleasant than usual, we keep them until they are old, and we savor the process of shrivel and age.

  I’m not sure how he made it over the ocean to our granite doorstep, but he made it all right, in the dead of night. The oiled lighthouse up on the Southeast Farallon peak must have helped him. The lighthouse keepers were asleep in their wind-thrashed white cottages. The auklets hunted insects on black wings. They filled the night with fey shrieks. He knew right where to come, how to get to the entrance of our tunnels in a sea cave that fills daily with tide. We put him in with the chickadees, next to the cage of perfect gray foxes with their red tails and kohl-dark eyes, next to the pleading virgins and a stray priest. Our tunnels were lit with sea lion oil.

  “So you don’t try running, before your wedding night,” my mother said to him when she locked him in.

  “I thought I couldn’t.” It was a growl, although he was a man now, at nighttime, a skinny one who almost made me sad. “You’ve got me now, this old carcass. I couldn’t do it, run. No human can really love a bear, not all the way through.”

  We put him in with the chickadees anyway, in locked a room with thick quartz walls, to save us the trouble of chasing him, to keep us from deciding to eat him after all, on a lazy evening. My mother and I began to prepare for the wedding. It hadn’t been done, a troll wedding with a man, not in centuries, not on this barren island where we ended up, forgotten and far from home. But we were bored, no longer necessary in nightmares or dark prayers.

  We’d caught him early in the morning while he panned the San Joaquin River and smoked a cigarette, his hands rough and warm but his face almost too pretty for a man. We like to toy with pretty things. It amuses us. And we were angry that we’d been forgotten.

  We wanted them to remember us and fear us again, to fill up the pantries and parlors of their nightmares with our bodies. So we went through all the accumulated curses of our people in our minds, catalogued there like so many mushrooms.

  Mother came up with this one, and I sniffed him out. A typically blond Norwegian miner with blood still under his fingernails from the sport of killing a grizzly bear. Mostly they killed them and didn’t eat them; mutilated their bodies, like men will do in the heat of their wars to the bodies of enemies. Their own blood gets in their eyes. The taste of bear meat was too strong for them. Sometimes they took the skin. They always took the head, the seat of power.

  When I found him by the river, there was a grizzly head outside his tent. He’d left the body to rot. It wasn’t hard to put them together, grizzly and man. The bear was only just dead. It was a good, wholesome curse—man by night, bear by day. Needing the love of a human girl to break the lock.

  Anyway, I got a little giddy, preparing for that wedding, as bad as any human girl. I took to embroidering the outlines of the most delicate murre wing-bones on my dress made of cobweb and the mycelia of poisonous mushrooms. For a little while, I thought about love, the human kind. I got intoxicated by the idea of it, so fragile and strange and soft to me, like flowers just starting to grow or a smooth red plum, all juice, all sweet and flesh that hasn’t yet fallen and begun to ferment.

  His bear body began to fall away when we brought him to our caves. The curse lifted, because he had failed. A human woman had not fallen in love with him as he was by daylight. She had to go and peek at his human body at night, as all young girls will. He had failed, and that meant he was mine. The bear body died around him and it rotted, so he could know the wasting of flesh. It is an alchemical and nuanced process. It is not to be taken lightly, bodies slaughtered and cast over the ground.

  The man emerged from the rotting bear like the naked stone of a plum. That’s when I could tell. It was in his eyes: if he’d had a choice, he would have chosen the bear instead of the man.

  * * *

  VIII. Lady of Gold

  He left her that morning. He didn’t explain. The gold-leaf fell off all the surfaces in the sequoia like tears. It’s true: I liked them too much. I’ve always liked a good romance. My flakes a
nd shards drift up through silt or pebble at the hint of love, the vibrations of passion. And in this new California of gun-point law, where the blood of everything here before ran across the ground—Maidu, Miwok, Wintun, snowy goose, tule elk, elephant seal, pussytoes, yarrow—in this new California, tenderness was hard to come by. A love story between a broke miner’s daughter and a grizzly bear? I couldn’t resist it. I like a good curse as much as any troll.

  When he left her there in the tree den, I saw her cry. She kicked out at the furniture. She smashed the champagne glasses in the cupboard. She broke all the tallow candlesticks in her fists, like they were carrots. Snapped them, crying. She went and lay in his end of the den for days. I don’t know what she thought about.

  * * *

  IX. Girl

  I wanted to be a bear too. I lay there and tried to grow claws. I tried to creep up and break the necks of birds. I couldn’t. So I packed up my little bag, like I had those three years before. I wore all my socks at once, to save room in my pack. I started to walk down the mountain.

  The air got thicker as I descended. It felt heavy and damp, after the alpine mountain passes and their strange blue lakes. There was a purity there, hitched into the alpenglow of dawn or dusk. There was a purity to our days that I had never known. A purity of spirit, like I had really found God, not just knelt down on my knees and prayed for things: my mother to get better or the cold to stop or a sack of anything, more parsnips, dried pinto beans, to drop on our house, bust through the ceiling and feed us.

  I followed the tracks of bears. I avoided men. They seemed more dangerous now to me than the bears. Maybe that was stupid. Maybe I was almost eaten a hundred times. I don’t know. Their tracks reminded me of the texture of his leathery cracked paws. Sometimes as I walked down the mountain, as I cut my shoes open on the sharpest granite, as I picked red columbine and the purple and yellow blossoms of shooting stars, I wanted to be eaten. Carried in a strong thick body with dense gold-brown fur and an appetite for spawning salmon and dusky huckleberry skins. If I were eaten, I would become a bear.