by Dawn Mattox
Curled next to the heater that gave off more smoke than heat, the realization hit me again—today was Christmas Day—and I responded appropriately by crooning “Away in a Manger” as best I could, voice faltering, breaking, my tears seeming to harmonize in a chorus of emotion. It was the perfect song for our plight; a traditional song about the harsh circumstances surrounding the birth of Jesus, who had also been homeless and short on provisions. And like Christ, this little one had no crib.
“At least Jesus had a mom and stepdad,” I said. And then it came to me in my spirit that God was her father and I was her stepmother, and maybe, perhaps, everything would be okay.
When milk began to dribble from the sides of her infant's mouth, I cleaned her up using a kitchen towel dipped in warm water and took a couple more to use later as diapers. Rewrapping her, I did the pat-on-the-back-burp-thing that all women seemed to know, and rocked her in my aching arms until she slept.
My turn. When I was done heating food and eating it, I packed a few necessities: more milk, the baster, a box of matches, and a couple of cans of food. Everything was rolled into the dishtowels and stuffed into a plastic trash bag. After adding some wood to the fire, I lay down, utterly spent. Using the bag for a pillow, I huddled next to Paige’s baby beneath the blessing of Kenny’s coat.
Only then did I laugh in derision at the irony of life as I hugged the sleeping child.
I can’t believe I just breastfed you your first meal.
Who would have thought?
Bump! The building shuddered. Wide awake, I leaped to my feet and snatched the baby in an all-in-one motion.
Thump! The sound of scrabbling and a sharp crack followed. The remains of the broken door went flying.
Baby in one hand, a bag of food in the other, I shoved them both under the desk.
I had not been idle, and I was not unprepared. The kerosene lamp was lit, the bag of food was ready to go, and I had managed to wheel the carts full of furniture in front of the broken door before falling asleep. After all I had been through, I planned on making it through the night.
A snuffling and a whuff.
There was just enough light to make out an enormous bear pushing its way through the door and into the building, casting and splashing massive shadows across the walls as it rocked back and forth.
Don’t panic! I knew what I needed to do. No screaming, no crying, no throwing up, no messing my pants, and definitely no running. Deep breath. Look big. This was always the hard part. It required courage that I didn’t really have. I would have to fake it.
I could do that.
Standing tall, I grabbed the two large pans I had taken from the kitchen and banged them together over my head, percussion instruments on my field of war, followed by a battle cry comprising of a series of four-letter words. The rule is not to make eye contact, but there was no way in hell I was taking my eyes off that bear.
The beast roared, and the heart-stopping sound boomed and echoed throughout the empty room. I had a few words for Ranger Rick—and none of them were kind. I was going to die.
Not without a fight.
I raced to open the heater and fell to my knees, covering my ears at the deafening reverberations and agonizing scream of twisting metal that rent the air. The room rocked with the clamor of cascading tables and flying chairs as the bear gained purchase.
I was ready, if not steady. Two logs the size and shape of baseball bats were waiting near the heater, their ends wrapped in towels and soaked with kerosene. Yanking wide the door to the wood stove, I thrust them into the fire. The bear broke free of the wreckage as the firebrands caught and burst into flames.
Wheeling around, I froze, and not from cold this time. Instinctively letting go of one brand, I gripped the other, drawing back like a batter and hitting a line drive into the bear’s face that made him pull back with a squall. Rearing up, the bear cut loose with a savage growl. I roared. Nothing heroic—purely reactive, repeating swings and jabs that continued to drive the bear back toward the door. Canines popped from his jaws—three-inch daggers whose blades dripped saliva. Shadows on the wall multiplied, looking like a dozen bears gyrating erratically in an insane shadow dance.
A whoosh of claws blew past, pushing me back, the tips slicing as neatly as prongs on a pitchfork down the side of my face. I fell back on a metal chair that folded and snapped like teeth on a steel trap around my leg. The room tipped sideways as I twisted and fell. The remaining burning brand skittered across the hardwood floor. The bear moved in, and I could feel the heat of his breath as he took another swipe, this one to the shoulder, knocking me deeper into the tangled wreckage of furniture.
What a crazy way to die!
The room fairly trembled with the roar that followed. Not rage, not anger, but agony—or a blend of all three—that made me cover my head with my arms and wait for death.
Smells churned in the air; the torrid smell of burning wood, burning fur, and burning flesh. The building shuddered again with another roar as the pain-crazed bear charged out the door.
The world was on fire.
A massive crack shook the building—followed by a thunderous whump as the roof collapsed and a whoosh of air was sucked from the building and hurled into the sky, the oxygen in the air feeding hungry flames that climbed up the walls to feast on the remains of the roof. Sparks filled the air, violently propelling themselves upward like whirling dervishes of flaming dust moats.
Natural instincts screamed, every cell demanding that I save myself, run, follow the bear out the door. We would both die if I tried to cross the room to the baby—the baby that had brought all this on me. In a world where women disposed of unwanted babies like so much trash, it was the ultimate irony that I should risk my life to save this child that I hated. No time to philosophize or rationalize, only the decision to act.
Stooping as I plunged ahead, I fought my way through the carnage to the baby and bag of supplies. Fire dripped down the walls like melted candle wax igniting the skis over the fireplace. Mounted on pegs, the skis were an easy grab—the tip of one burst into flames. Tucking the baby under my arm like a football, clutching the food bag in the same hand, skis, clunky and awkward tucked under the other arm, I scrambled back through the tangle of the wreckage for the door. The baby blanket was burning as we squeezed through, plunging, tripping, falling down the stairs and onto the snow.
Snow. On my knees, I frantically rolled the bundled baby, the blanket hissing, smoking, stinking as I rubbed snow into the smoldering remnant until at last the last ember was extinguished.
I sat in the snow. Sat there, hugging the baby, rocking and crying, as the building continued to burn. Outside was bitter cold. Icy gusts of wind tossed the blanket around us, sending it flapping like a stranded sailor signaling a ship. The stars above looked like crushed ice sailing across a blue galaxy as I searched the heavens, sitting and searching for the constellations that my father had taught me.
The stars always seem brightest in the winter, and Lefty loved the stars, even as he had loved me. Coming down from the hills after a joyous day spent plodding up hills and then sliding down in the sled he had given me for Christmas, my father pulled off the road, wrapped me in a warm blanket, and set me on the hood of our old pickup truck. We shared cold cheese sandwiches and a hot thermos of coffee. My dad never worried about little things, like giving coffee to a kid. He probably figured there were worse addictions, and he was right, although those sweet memories were probably stirred into my lifelong passion for the brew.
Proud of his knowledge, Lefty hugged me and laughed as he pointed out the various constellations. “That one there—the one with five points pointing to the Milky Way? That is called Cannabis Sativa. It looks just like a giant pot leaf, doesn’t it? And those two bright ones over there, off the tip of that tall Ponderosa. Yeah, those. That’s the Harley sign. The two stars are the wheels, and the three in a row just above them—those are the handlebars.” I laughed and shivered, and he gave me a squeeze. �
��Look over there, baby girl. That red star with the three crooked ones at the bottom? That’s the one-eyed Chihuahua constellation called Frito Trublito.” I laughed so hard that I rolled back, deep into my father’s arms, and stared straight up into the heavens above.
“Daddy,” I asked, pointing. “What’s that one?”
Lefty paused for a moment, as he always did when he grew serious. “I call that one the God star.”
I frowned, puzzled. I didn’t think my father believed in God. “What is the God star?” I asked.
Lefty sighed wistfully. “It’s the one that never changes.”
It looked like a blood moon, the way the smoke painted it red as it roiled through the night sky, softly lighting the scene with a morbid kind of beauty, as though it were a campfire for friends to gather around instead of a source of hopeless destruction.
Paige’s child continued to cry, and for a time I joined in. She was alive and okay, except that part of her arm had burned where the blanket had caught fire. Reaching up, I cupped my face that also burned, but mine burned from the slash of the bear’s claw. We were hurting, inside and out.
There was nothing to do but hug the last shivering flames and wait as night slowly crept toward dawn. I shook with anger—anger at the men who might have fathered this child, anger at Paige for forcing her responsibility on me, anger with Kenny for sending me into the mountains.
Angry, angry, angry.
Overwhelmed, I lamented into the night, “Hey, God—where the hell are you?”
But I was like Elijah in the Bible, who looked for God in the storm and in the earthquake and in the fire and did not find him.
God was not in the fire—not even when the propane tank exploded. Not in the freezing snow that numbed my hands and feet. And not in the moon that seemed to bleed for the tragedy playing out below. God was finally found by Elijah, and by me, and would always be found by the seeker in that still small voice within the human heart.
I am here. I will never leave you or forsake you. God seemed to speak to my spirit. Or maybe I had just memorized that verse and was now regurgitating it like so much undigested soul food.
“Yeah, God? Well, then, do something! How about a rescue, huh? How about a roof over our head or a set of bolt cutters to get into the other buildings?” I fingered the ski with the charred tip with hurt and anger. No longer a ski, it was just a burnt board with a clamp. “How about a whole ski, God? Is that too much to ask for?” A new wave of tears rose and fell. The egregious kind of tears born of betrayal that well up and issue from a broken heart. One would think that I should have been used to it by now.
A washboard of pale-pink clouds rippled across the sky. Sunrise found me digging through the smoldering rubble, hoping to find something useful—like a cell phone, or a flare gun, or a snowmobile—but none of those things appeared. Just a tiny flutter of white in an ocean of black that happened to catch my eye. Picking it up and blowing off the ash, I discovered a fragment from a page in a Bible. Only a couple of uncharred inches were readable, but the message was clear. “We went through fire and through water, yet you brought us out into a place of abundance.”
Sure you did. Real freaking abundant. Bitterness was so strong; I could taste it in my mouth. I wadded the page and threw it across the snow, where it bounced and rolled, coming to rest against a piece of blackened stovepipe—a bent section of pipe designed to join two straight pieces when the woodstove and the vent didn’t line up.
And then, I saw it in my mind.
CHAPTER 29
It takes a lot of courage to cross the backside of Pilot Peak when hiking in the summer as the mountain is both high and steep and draped with a blanket of slippery blue shale. Now the mountain and shale were covered in white. While it was possible to cut across the backside of the peak using a modern pair of skis with metal edges that would bite into the hard-packed snow, only an insane person—or an exceedingly desperate one—would plod along on a pair of heavy antique wooden skis. Worse still, only one ski was fully functional. The other was rigged with a makeshift tip from the elbow of an old stovepipe rammed over the ski where the tip had burned off , then pounded flat with a rock. It looked like an elf shoe that had been stepped on by an elephant.
The first snows had given over to a hard freeze that gave good footing, but fresh snow in sunlight is a recipe for an avalanche. Ideally, we should have waited at least two days before attempting to cross, but the situation was anything but ideal. We were midpoint on our journey, and going back was not an option. I inched along one cautious step at a time, shivering and shaking, exposed to icy wind gusts that could easily reach seventy to eighty mph, threatening to snatch us from the slope and hurl us eight hundred feet to the forest floor.
Paige’s baby was anchored to my back, swaddled in strips that I had ripped and knotted from the now-soiled throw and topped off with Kenny’s coat, tied at the bottom with sleeves serving as straps. Trash bags full of provisions dangled from my waist, and I felt like a garbage collector using litter sticks for ski poles.
Looking north from the top of Pilot Peak is the active volcanoes, Mount Lassen and Mount Shasta. Looking east, I could see all the way to Nevada. Today, I only had eyes for the small town of Quincy and the desperate hope of reaching there before dark.
Cutting across the peak was like jogging along a beach that sloped down to the ocean—slow, painful, and out of balance, causing jolts of electric pain to shoot through my injured shoulder and back. The gripping cold magnified the pain of every step. My breath condensed and froze along with the blood that oozed from the claw marks on my face, sticking to the kitchen towel wrapped around my neck and pulled high over my nose. Every step was an ordeal. Step—glide—step—glide—step—glide; the forward motion was agonizingly slow.
Maybe it was instinct that caused me to look back. There on the side of a steep slope, in the midst of freezing, raging wind in the middle of absolutely nowhere, I looked back to study the terrain with prickling fear, searching for the man in black.
What I saw was a lion in gold—and laughed. “It’s . . . just a cat.” I barked out a tight laugh and adjusted my backpack, somehow overwhelmed with relief that it was neither human nor bear. Thousands of big cats now roamed these mountains ever since hunting them became illegal. They were so overpopulated that they had recently been seen hunting in packs. Seeing only one lion gave me an absurd sense of relief.
Probably the same one I chased off before. I can do it again. I hoped.
I was fresh out of weapons, balanced on a dangerous slope, and not about to risk an avalanche or fall by yelling and jumping. I could only return to the task at hand: step—glide—step—glide—step—glide, a little faster.
Made it. Shivering and shaking, exhausted and numb, I sheltered beneath an outcropping of rock and let the baby suck on my finger before moving on. Only the subtle movement of the sun signaled the passing of time before reentering the tree line. There, we stopped again while I drank a can of chicken noodle soup and fed the baby cold milk with the turkey baster. She fought it, and I tried not to drown her. It was only her third meal ever, and I thought she should be more grateful. Regretting the delay, I moved on, the squalling baby signaling our location to every predator in the forest.
“Girl,” I advised her, “we were born in these mountains, and if you don’t shut up, we are going to die in them.” She studied me, her expression serious as her gray eyes searched mine. And then, to my utter amazement, she laughed, and her laughter echoed in the hollow places of my heart, bouncing around until, at last, the sound took wing, flying from my own lips like a new song into the light. Wrapped in Kenny’s jacketed embrace, I hefted my “daughter” back onto my back, and we started our descent to Nelson Creek and Quincy.
The sun had crawled across the sky from behind Pilot Peak to hover above the rim of the western horizon when next I stopped, too shaky to take another step. Everything and everyone have limits, and I had reached and overstepped mine. My gas tank tippe
d to empty somewhere above Nelson Creek Crossing, just a few miles from civilization and the outskirts of Quincy. The first distant lights of the town were winking on in the fading light.
A distinct sound, the sharp snap of a branch breaking beneath living weight, caused me to jump, twisting about in time to see the tail end of a cat. Instinct told me it was lining up for the kill. Crouched low and moving forward.
God, forgive me. The first thought to flash through my tired brain was to put the baby on the road and run for the bridge. The cat would surely go for the easy target. Nevertheless, I bent and pushed off, sailing down the slope until the swish of the skis joined its voice with the steady rumble of the creek below.
It was just a glance—a nanosecond of glancing back—when the stovepipe tip hit a rock with the force of a car driving into a brick wall, snapping the ski and catapulting us down the snowy slope toward Nelson Creek.
Icy waters, cold as death, opened hungry jaws and then constricted, swallowing me whole and cutting me off from the frozen world above.
It wasn’t like I hadn’t been cold before. I knew all about the cold. I sometimes thought that if I were to carve a statue in memory of my mother, I would choose ice as a medium. Starla was a cold-hearted woman, although there were times when she burned with inexplicable fire.
The proof lay in her fiery fingerprints still burning on my cheek.
“I hate you!” I screamed. “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.”
“Yeah, yeah, I got it. You don’t know me!” Starla’s eyes narrowed, panting from the heat of battle. “You think you’re the first person to tell me that? You think I haven’t heard it all my life? Who the hell are you to judge me?”