Molly hugged Rain too, pulling away to kiss her cheek. Jack stared at two women he loved with all his heart. It was unfair. Love put you in such an assailable place, a worm in the path of a gardener with a spade.
"Hi, Sweetie," Molly said.
Gerard said hello to Rain and gave her a hug, then excused himself, letting the screen door bang behind him as he strode to his truck.
"Oh my gosh, you guys," Rain said. "I had the craziest drive. There were these little frogs in the forest, just down from here, tons of them, all hopping across the road. I couldn't drive, I would have squished them all, so I got out of the car and watched them hop and they kept coming and kept coming, and then I couldn't wait anymore, so I got back in the car and drove super slowly, to let them get out of the way."
"Did it work?" Jack asked.
Rain's eyes were huge when she talked. She had some funny new haircut where the back was longer than the front. She was taller than her sister, as tall as Todd. And she was really thin, too thin, he thought, but she insisted that she ate so much food, all the time, she just had a high metabolism, that's all. There was nothing she could do about being skinny, and shut up, she was tired of hearing about it. Molly was back at the stove with the pepper grinder in her hand, frowning into the pot.
"I don't know," Rain said. "I couldn't look back, and I sang really loud so I wouldn't hear any, you know, popping, if I ran over any."
She took her backpack off and swung it onto a kitchen chair, pulling her T-shirt down where it had rucked up.
"Mom! You won't believe it. I know who I'm going to marry."
"Really?" said Molly. She tasted the soup again, frowning into the distance the way she always did when she was tasting things, as though the answer was somewhere in the air in front of her. She offered the spoon to Jack and he obediently opened his mouth and tasted it.
"Perfect," he said.
"Well, I haven't met him," Rain went on. "But I've seen a picture of him. I'm pretty sure he'll be the one."
Jack looked at her.
"I'm kidding, Dad, but you should see the picture, you would totally get it. He has this way of standing, you know? That makes you think that he's sensitive. My friend knows his brother, and she said he's really a genius." She sat, chewing on her thumbnail just like Molly always did.
Molly handed Rain the bowls. "Will you set the table?" she asked. "We're about to eat."
Rain stood up again, cradling the bowls.
"Where are Todd and Amber?" she asked.
Jack shrugged, he'd just been wondering the same thing.
"And the fire? What's happening with the fire?"
You had to admire her confidence, that she could come flopping into the kitchen like she'd never left, telling them the usual stories about crazy things that happened to her, and the pretend romances she got involved in because she was really too shy for real ones. She acted like everything was the same, like it was her birthday they were gathered for, instead of an emergency.
Molly handed Rain a cluster of spoons and Rain took them and finally turned to the table. She set the bowls and spoons down and then held her hand like a cup beneath the edge of the table, brushing a few raisins and some wheat germ into it. Leftovers from breakfast. She walked over to the compost pail.
"Has it been put out yet?"
She was so trusting, Jack thought. He and Molly exchanged another glance.
Around their children they shifted closer to each other, became alike again. The kids themselves were closely linked, sharing blood and memories and a scorn of Jack's old jokes. Molly and he were old and brittle around them, that's what it was.
"No," he said. "It hasn't been put out."
"It was a migration," Molly said suddenly. "What you saw, with the frogs? It's what happens before a fire, if the animals are lucky."
Their moment was gone, Jack saw. Any respite they'd had, finished.
Much later, he woke up in the dark. He was parched and the still air was stifling. He turned and put his hand on empty bedclothes, feeling a swift panic before he could push it down. He sat up. Where was Molly? He shook his head to clear it. When he'd headed for the porch to turn in, she'd been on the sofa, reading. The kids were watching a movie on Todd's computer in the girls' room. Catherine had turned in for the night, stating that she was exhausted.
"I'll be there in a minute," Molly had said to Jack, but he hadn't believed her. She stayed up so late these days, reading feverishly. The space between them was full and pronounced. He lay in the large space of their bed, slowly drifting to sleep, longing for the delicate curve of his wife's spine against his stomach.
Now he sat, shirtless, in his boxer shorts, listening. It was dark and quiet beyond the porch. What he'd been able to see of the moon through the smoke had already set. It was good that the black night air was so still. Wind spread fire. His head was so full of fire these days that there was room for almost nothing else.
He registered sounds coming from the house behind him. Noises like pots clanging. He glanced at the clock. It was after three in the morning.
She was in the kitchen. The air was humid and fragrant around her. Rivulets of condensation ran down the window, which was wide open. She was wearing a camisole, a pair of shorts, and an apron, with her hair piled up on her head. She'd wound an old blue cotton scarf around it, something she'd had since they met in college. She was adorable, her back to him, busy at the stove. He stood stupidly for several minutes before he could figure out what she was doing.
There were about thirty glass jars on the kitchen table, filled with red sauce. Around fifty more sat empty on the counter. He could see chopping boards with the sloppy remnants of hacking, and bowls of whole tomatoes on the sink, on the counter, on top of the fridge. Canning. She was canning tomatoes.
"Molly," he said, but she didn't turn around. "Molly," he said, a little louder, and this time she jumped and looked up. "What are you doing?" he asked. She took her earbuds out of her ears.
"What?"
"What are you doing?" She turned to look at the pot full of glass jars that were clinking together in the water.
"I'm canning salsa," she said.
He walked to stand beside her, pouring himself a glass of water from the sink and drinking it quickly. His throat felt like sandpaper.
He swallowed. "Why are you canning salsa in the middle of the night?"
She expertly pulled one of the jars out of the boiling water with the canning tongs. She was rosy and shiny from the heat and condensation. She pulled another out, carefully setting it beside the first on the stove.
"It's way too hot, during the day," she said, pulling out a third jar. "I don't want to lose the tomatoes." She looked at him. "You have no idea how hard it is to tell the difference between a red and a green tomato with a flashlight."
Jack had a sudden vision of his wife creeping around in the garden at midnight with a flashlight. He couldn't help smiling.
"Ever hear of a freezer?" he inquired.
"Yuck," his wife replied, shaking her head as she pulled more jars out of the pot. "Freezing changes the taste. And we'd have to do it later, so why put it off?"
The last jar was out, and she turned back to the cutting board, looking at the other bowls of tomatoes with a sigh.
"Okay! Salsa's done!" Her shoulders slumped.
Jack moved toward her and drew her into his arms. The air around her smelled of tomato vines. On the counter the seals pulled in on the jars, making small popping sounds.
"Oh honey," she said, pulling away roughly. "It's too hot for that."
He'd felt the heat on her skin, before she pulled away, and he could almost touch her nerves pinging underneath. He made a small noise, involuntary and sad. She turned to him, anxious.
"I'm sorry, Jack. I'm all messed up, right now."
"Me too," said Jack quietly.
He didn't reach for her again.
SIX
Catherine woke to strange colored light coming through the win
dow and the sound of a solitary bird. She couldn't think where she was. The lilac curtains came into focus and slowly it drifted back to her. Molly's room. The ranch. She was home, back where it all started.
She lay on her side and stared at the curtains. The bird whooped and trilled. The air smelled of smoke.
Her father would have taken a CAT himself, she thought. He would never have waited for the State to get themselves together. Of course, people just did things for themselves, in his day. And he'd died too young to ever see a bulldozer out here, of course.
Her parents, Dan and Bertha, came out to these hills in 1924, soon after they were married. They were from a small town on the coast, about seventy miles south as the crow flies, where all the trees lean eastward because of the mighty ocean winds. There was some money. Dan's parents had died young from sickness and exhaustion and what small inheritance they'd had to give had been passed along. Dan wanted land. He took his wife and left the town and the crotchety, tiring people who muttered and whined about Dan's marriage to "that Indian girl." They arrived in Humboldt County, out of reach of all the voices. They took deep, stinging breaths. They were worlds away.
The land was heavily forested; acres and acres of woods on slopes that didn't seem to end. Catherine's parents parked their team and wagon and got to work. They cleared trees and built a house on the southern side of a hill right away, since Bertha was pregnant with Catherine. The land was cold and damp in winter, the house was barely walls, floor, and roof, but all the stories Catherine heard as she grew up told of how blissfully happy the land made her father, right from the start. Wherever he looked, he saw land that was his, that belonged to him. Oh, this great swathe of forest and pasture would sustain them. They would bend their backs into it now, plough their own sweat into the ground, and their reward would be a new life in a place that was open to the breeze, where even the sky felt like their own.
By the time Catherine was three, there were four cows and three steers. There were chickens, and there was a garden. Bertha's mother and sisters, Pomo Indians, sometimes came to visit for a week or more, traveling by horseback all the way north from their home in the south. They brought baskets as gifts when they came, and cooked in their way; Indian meals with acorns and fish they pulled out of the river that ran through the land. Catherine's mother sighed into the language of her birth. She laughed and chattered with her sisters. The ranch was a lonely place. The women and their songs came welcome and made things glad.
Then, when Catherine was four years old, Bertha almost died giving birth to a son who wasn't alive. She was in bed for a long while after, her mother and sisters coming to the bedside to knit or weave baskets or lay soft hands on her face. Catherine was already tall for her age, like her white father, with brown freckled skin and black hair that she had sawn off with a kitchen knife one day when she was left alone for too long. Catherine's aunts and grandmother shooed her away from the bed when she wanted to visit. So Catherine learned gardening early with her father, who showed her how to bury a piece of a potato in a small hill of dirt. The dirt smelled like the rich heart of the earth, and the pennyroyal around them was warm and fragrant in the sun. Catherine, who longed for her happy and strong mother to return, lay back in the dirt and watched the clouds racing along the sky.
Bertha never did come back the same. She got well, but was silent for days at a time, putting food in front of Catherine and her dad with halting, broken movements. Catherine thought she seemed wilted, like she hadn't been watered. When they all sat down to eat at the black oak table that Catherine's dad had made, Bertha sat with her head on her hand and gazed out of the window.
And they never did have another baby. Catherine was an only child on a ranch miles away from the nearest neighbor. All of her songs were frog songs and bird songs, sung at the base of a thousand trees. She began naming the trees as friends. She was alone for great long parts of the day, sitting in the dirt, humming to herself, or tagging along after her father to look after the cows.
One day her grandmother and the aunts came, bringing food and baskets with them. Catherine was sitting down to eat some roasted fish on the front porch when she heard her grandmother speaking loudly and sharply, in a way that Catherine had never heard her speak before. She crawled towards the front door, quietly, so they wouldn't hear her, and peeked through the screen into the room.
It was dark inside. Bertha had covered the windows with blankets. She was sitting on the one rocking chair with her head in her hands again. Catherine's grandmother was standing in front of her, hands on her hips, speaking Pomo quickly and sharply. Soon Catherine's mother began to moan, and then she began to shake, and then she began to cry. And still the words from Catherine's grandmother did not stop coming, they propelled themselves out of her mouth, one after the other, on and on like a swarm of bees that filled the room and just kept coming. Catherine's mother was sobbing now, and Catherine was terrified. She couldn't move. She heard her grandmother telling her mother that she needed to stop being so sad, needed to get up, to work, to be happy. And more things that Catherine couldn't understand.
She heard her father behind her and he stepped over her to go through the door. Flakes of paint fell to the ground beside Catherine's hand as he roughly pushed the door open. He walked over to Bertha and picked her up out of the rocking chair, holding her to his chest while she shook.
"Enough," he said to Catherine's grandmother. "Enough."
And to Catherine's relief, the words stopped coming.
When Grandmother and the aunts left, Catherine's mother curled up on her bed and wouldn't speak, her red, empty eyes gazing out and beyond the hills, beyond the sky even, it seemed. Catherine's dad tinkered around the house for a while, then finally curled up behind his wife, resting his hand on her hip. Maybe an hour later, Catherine peeked in and saw that her mother had pulled Dan's hand up to rest against her face. Catherine tiptoed away. There was no dinner that night. She found the heel of a loaf of bread and took it to bed with her.
The next day when Catherine woke up, the smell of coffee filled the house. Catherine's mother came to her door as soon as Catherine stirred, wearing her old beautiful wine-colored dress and standing with her hair falling to her waist. She pulled it into sections to braid it.
"We're going to church," she said, softly. "We're far too lonely way out here. Come and eat, after you're ready."
They went into town in the horse and wagon, driving out along the curving, bumping roads, with the golden light running alongside them like a friend. Catherine's parents talked over which church they should visit, finally settling on the Presbyterian church, though Catherine's father had grown up Catholic. Bertha liked the way it looked, simple whitewashed wood almost glowing in the morning light. The horse was dusty from the road when Catherine whispered goodbye to him, before they went inside. Her parents were holding hands. She trailed after them, legs much too long under her skirt.
She didn't remember much about that first Sunday at church except for being awestruck by two things. One was the colored glass in the windows. She sat open-mouthed and just stared. The other was her mother laughing quietly with another woman at the back of the church. She looked at that for just as long, but from under her hair, so her mother wouldn't see. Her father saw her looking and he put his hand on top of her head. When he pulled his hand away she felt his kiss land in the place it had rested.
Things did get better after that, though never like they were before the small blue baby boy was put into the earth. Catherine's mother wasn't a girl anymore, singing at any chance like she used to. She was old with a young face, walking slowly and watching the trees when she could stop and lean on her broom. Catherine thought that her brother was always with her ma, never quite letting her go, and it made her ma tired to carry him, too.
Soon after the day when they went to church, Catherine's mother came to her with a book. Catherine was busy building a nest out of small pieces of straw, trying to get it balanced like the swallows'
nests she saw in the eaves of the house, though she didn't know how to get it all chewed up looking like they were. She looked at the straw. Should she chew it? Bertha's footsteps were soft and Catherine jumped when she heard her mother's voice behind her shoulder.
"I'm going to teach you to read," her ma said. "We're too far out to take you to school everyday. This'll do, at least for now."
Catherine was glad. She didn't want to miss anything at the ranch, and the cow they called Poppy was about to give birth. She wasn't sure how you went about talking to people like the town kids anyway, white and smelling of inside.
Bertha told Catherine that she mainly went to church for the people.
"It's no good, getting too isolated," she said. "Does strange things to your head."
But, she told Catherine, church was everywhere. Among the pea vines in the garden, across the pond, in the sky that you could almost fall into, if you were standing on your head with your feet in the air. Painted like the tips of the firs across the sky.
"God is with us now," Bertha would tell Catherine as they sat together poking the corn kernels into the ground. Catherine's hair stuck up like raven's feathers after a storm. She watched her mother closely.
"Make sure you remember that. He is always here."
In Molly's bedroom, Catherine watched as the curtains belled out and then flattened. There were sounds of a truck arriving. The crunch of gravel, the sharp halt, the sudden hush when the driver turned the engine off. Catherine sighed and sat up, swinging her legs over the edge of the bed. She rolled her ankles a few times, wincing. She pulled the gaping front of her nightgown together, then slowly unbraided her hair and ran her fingers through it. Most often, these days, she didn't recognize her hands. Once in a while one would come into her line of sight and startle her with its resemblance to a bird's foot, talons for nails, fingers seized. She bent her fingers now, slowly, back and forth, trying to work the ache out of them.
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