Eden Mine

by S. M. Hulse

  A breeze picks up, and I cup one hand over the top of the bowl; when it dies down, I add a tiny amount of powdered silver ore our father brought out of Gethsemane for Samuel, mix it all together with a few drops of water from the creek. The result is a thimbleful of smooth color that is nearly—but not quite—black, like the night sky seconds after the darkest point of night, with the barest hint of a shimmer that sparks beneath the eye and dims almost as soon as it’s spotted.

  I’ve thought about including my family in the painting. They are so much of what I want to remember about this place, so much of what makes it hard to leave. But I haven’t been able to imagine how to do it. I don’t remember my father but could never exclude him, so I’d have to paint him as I’ve seen him in photographs. But I would want to paint my mother as she looked when she smiled and called me Josie, and then my parents would not match each other—my father younger than my mother in image when he was in fact two years older—and it seems cruel to separate them that way when the mountain has already stolen enough. And Samuel, how would he appear if I painted him now, with love and fury and disappointment battling in my heart? So they will be represented in my composition not by their forms and faces but by these scraps and bits, these papers and photos, and I alone will know what gives this paint its darkness, and its points of light.

  I dip my brush into the ash paint. Hesitate. Still afraid of the dark. I remind myself that this is the virtue of the mud paint. Even this, the deepest pigment I’ll use, is not as void of light as the bone black from my tubes of acrylic. Though my eye can scarcely discern a difference, this is still a shade of gray.

  I begin with a line of shade beneath the jut of rock on the slope behind the house, a touch along the ridgeline that is last to escape shadow in the morning and first to succumb to it in the evening, move to the curve of creek that remains hidden from sun even at noon. And then the eave of the barn, the edge of the window that was once my mother’s and is now mine, the sill of the big picture window in the living room my mother looked through one afternoon to see the mining officials driving toward the house, the same window Samuel looked through that awful night to find Ben Archer’s truck barreling up the drive.

  And last of all—the thimble’s worth of paint nearly gone—Samuel’s window, tucked beneath the northern gable. Last of all and darkest of all. I dip my brush and paint, thinking of the history of this place. Trying to work out when the boy who looked out of that window with hope became the man who looked out of it with hate. Somehow everything that ever happened on this land—the optimism of a new home, cattle grazing and then dying, a burning light so dark might never come, a promise to never sell, a death beneath the mountains, two killings on a pleasant spring evening, a decision about a road—all of it led to this. To me, painting the house I am thirty hours from losing. To Samuel, a brother I love but do not recognize, hidden but so close—I’m now certain—I could almost include him in the painting. To a grieving father and a child awaiting burial.

  There’s no color to spare, but I lay it down firmly, refusing to fear the darkness. I start in the lower right corner of Samuel’s window and work my way to the upper left, using small, layered strokes. I don’t have enough paint. I know it when I’ve covered only half the window, but try to make it last, adding another drop of creek water, swirling my brush along the edges of the shallow bowl to pull the pigment into the bristles. When I finish, the upper corner of the window is just starting to fade to light, just slightly less dark than the rest. I look at it for a long time. Think about trying to make more of the ash paint so I don’t renege on my resolve to paint darkness where darkness is due. But it is the barest fade, the window still quite black, and in the end I leave it, grateful for that subtle promise of light.

  * * *

  That afternoon, I curry Lockjaw and brush her first with a stiff bristle brush and then with a soft one. The mule rarely shows much love of grooming, but when I reach high to run the brush along her crest, she arches her neck and leans into the touch. She raises each hoof obediently when I tap each leg, and lowers her head to my lap so I can guide the small goat-hair brush over the contours of her face, around each swirl and curve. I try to draw out the routine even as I do my best to pretend it isn’t the last time. Samuel roached Lockjaw’s mane a month ago and it still looks all right, but when I finish the rest of the grooming, I carefully bell her tail. I make three cuts into the hair so the tail appears to have three tiers; it’s an old military tradition I read about in one of my books: mules broke to pack have one bell, those broke to pack and ride have two, and only those broke to pack, ride, and drive get three. When I was a kid I always belled Lockjaw’s tail before the Silver Days show, proud to have such a well-trained mule. I make a note to tell the boy about it when he and his father come to pick up Lockjaw so he can be proud, too.

  I’m sorry I haven’t taken the time to give my tack more than a cursory cleaning recently; dust has collected in the curved petals of the floral tooling on the saddle, and the shanks of the bit are marred by green flecks of chewed, hardened hay. I bat as much of the dust off the saddle as possible, scrape the worst of the hay from the bit with a fingernail.

  At the top of the mounting ramp, I check my saddlebag: water, granola bar, hoof pick, Vetrap, poncho, cell phone. As I mount, I wonder whether I’ll ride again. Probably not anytime soon, not like this. Not so independently. Samuel worked patiently to teach Lockjaw to tolerate my flopping legs, my imprecise seat. He taught her never to move at the ramp, no matter what. He taught her to stop the moment she felt her rider becoming unbalanced. These things could be taught to another mule or horse, but not every animal would be as receptive or reliable. None will be Lockjaw.

  I guide her onto the trail that leads northeast over the ridge. It’s narrow, but not as steep as some we’ll ride later. The trail switchbacks lazily along the face of the slope, and though we aren’t yet far above the valley floor, I imagine that as we ride higher into the hills the sun becomes brighter and warmer. The air seems thinner, each breath not doing the job as well as the one before, but that’s anxiety, not altitude. I try to notice everything: the magpies swooping from the trees closest to the meadow, the sound of the small rocks sent skittering down the hillside by Lockjaw’s hooves, the way the heights of the pines sway degrees at a time while the bases remain still. All things I have seen or heard before, but I focus on them anew to forestall the inevitable forgetting, the coming fade of memory. And because it’s easier to look at what I’m leaving than to consider where I’m going.

  Like most riders, I fear the unseen gopher hole, the den or burrow that might swallow my mount’s limb and snap it. But I long ago extrapolated that rational worry into a torturous fantasy in which the entire mountainside gives way, sending me and Lockjaw plummeting into the depths of the mines. I imagine sudden darkness, still air clotted with dust, and bones. They would be bones, wouldn’t they? Surely after all this time? Or might there still be flesh of some sort clinging to the bodies? Sometimes I worry that I would see my father, sometimes that I would not.

  A child’s nightmare, nothing more. I’m not even over Gethsemane on this hill; Eden sprawls beneath us now.

  I cross the ridgeline, taking one last glance down at the house that seems very small indeed from this vantage point. The trail is steeper on the far side, and I lean slightly backward as Lockjaw descends, gripping the saddle horn with one hand. I resisted this during my first few solo rides after becoming paralyzed—in my mind, only beginners and babies held the horn—until Samuel went through an issue of Western Horseman and circled every picture of a professional barrel racer hanging on to the horn as she rounded the barrels. “And they can feel their legs,” he said.

  He brought me here on Lockjaw’s back. He rode in front, pulled me up behind him so I could put my arms around his midsection. I still had pain then, and the ride sent it jarring through me with each hoofstep. I didn’t tell Samuel, because I was afraid he would take me back to the rehab center
. Might have been the first time I kept a secret from him. I thought he’d catch me at it, but he hadn’t, and it was a power I’d found less intoxicating than frightening.

  The journey seemed to take a long time that day. Hours, certainly, maybe enough to fill an afternoon. I haven’t been back since, and I don’t quite remember the way.

  Still I ride on.

  * * *

  Samuel knew about the cabin, he told me, because our father showed it to him when they took their first and last hunting trip together, when Samuel was seven. Like most of the mines in this part of the country, Eden started as a placer mine, established by men seeking gold. There was only a little gold to be had in these mountains, and then only in the very early days, but plenty of people came looking for it. The cabin dated from that time, our father guessed, which meant it was almost a hundred and fifty years old. One room, a simple rectangle. One window, also a rectangle, no glass. The rusted remnants of what had once been a woodstove, a hole in the roof where the pipe had gone when it still existed.

  I suppose people had stayed in it now and then before Samuel and I briefly made it our home. The occasional hunter or backpacker, maybe, or one of the handful of men who chose to live in the mountains, alone and at least a little crazy, not quite homeless but something like it. But probably not that many people ever bothered. The roof had more than just the one hole in it, the floorboards were warped and in some cases missing, the door had at some point been torn down, most likely by a bear, according to Samuel, and a variety of small animals and insects had taken up residence over the years, leaving copious evidence of their presence behind.

  By the time Samuel brought me to the cabin, it was clear he had already been there many times. A heavy green tarp was fastened over the roof, a sheet of screen stapled over the window. A new campfire ring had been built from stones on a flat patch of dirt, a tripod with a cooking pot positioned above. The interior of the cabin was not only impeccably swept, it bore the scent of what I finally recognized as the oil soap our mother had used to clean the floors at the house. Inside, Samuel had arranged two cots—mine in the back corner of the cabin, bolstered with a heavy pad, his below the window, where it could be easily pulled across the closed door every night—as well as a camp toilet behind a dark shower curtain hanging from the ceiling. He’d brought plenty of food, sealed it all in bear canisters, and piled it beneath a lean-to he’d built fifty yards from the cabin. He’d even bought me a pair of all-terrain tires for my wheelchair, had them waiting when we arrived.

  It was, in retrospect, a ridiculous plan. But Samuel formulated it so carefully, with such attention to detail, that we encountered few problems. He approached the entire endeavor with the earnestness and determination of the Eagle Scout he had recently become. He tried to imagine every possible obstacle we might encounter—from rainstorms to bears to pressure sores—and made plans to avoid or overcome it. I needed very clean hands to use my catheters? He brought bottled water, boiled creek water when it ran out, and packed in a huge container of alcohol-based hand sanitizer, which he insisted I use after washing my hands. Rain might come through the screened-in window? He cut a piece of tarp to cover it, mounted it along the top edge of the window, then rolled the tarp and tied it so it could be pulled down like a shade if it rained.

  Samuel made it seem like an adventure, linked it to the books we both loved, separately, as children, he reading them first, me inheriting them years later: Little House on the Prairie and The Swiss Family Robinson and My Side of the Mountain. It had not been an easy place to learn to cope with my body’s new limitations and demands, but it ensured I learned work-arounds, didn’t dally mastering floor transfers, didn’t fear trying new things with my chair, and when we finally left to go back home, everything there seemed simpler by comparison. My memories of the place, considering the circumstances, are peculiarly fond.

  These last weeks, I’ve wondered when a thought becomes a suspicion, a suspicion a certainty. I still can’t pinpoint when one changed to another, but I know now I’m riding toward my brother. What I still don’t know is why he’s there. It makes so little sense. Why the cabin? There are better places to go, dozens, hundreds of them. So many more places to hide, to disappear. So many places I don’t know about.

  Lockjaw stops and flicks a long ear backward, and I realize I’m gripping the reins in my fist. I take a breath, relax my hand, and cluck to Lockjaw. She walks on toward the cabin.

  * * *

  The shadows of the pines stretch down the side of the mountain, each tree shading those below. In another couple hours the sun will be low enough the mountains will cast their own eastern slopes into darkness. The effect is amplified by the clouds building in the sky overhead. They were thin at first, almost wispy, but have become more substantial as the day wears on. I should turn back. Even now there’s no way I’ll make it home in daylight, and though I trust Lockjaw to carry me out of the mountains safely, the wilderness is often unkind to those who underestimate it.

  I do not turn back.

  I have no plan beyond getting to the cabin. Have not allowed myself to think beyond that point. I don’t know what I will do when I get there. What I will say. I’m not even sure why I’ve come now. Because of Emily, of course, but—harsh as it sounds—what difference does it really make? I can’t bring her back, and neither can my brother.

  There’s something selfish in it, I acknowledge. I miss him.

  * * *

  I don’t see the mountain lion arrive; it is simply in front of me on the trail. Lockjaw halts abruptly, aims her ears sharply forward, and blows a lungful of air hard through her nostrils. I tighten my grip on the reins but am careful not to pull. I saw a mountain lion once before, in the hills west of Kalispell, but I was in my car then, the lion a tawny blur that flashed across the road in front of me and then was gone.

  This cat has frozen mid-step, no more than three yards ahead, its gold eyes fixed unblinkingly on us, intent the way even a housecat’s gaze can be, but with the honest threat of power and ruthlessness behind them. One large forepaw remains lifted. A breeze kicks up, and the mountain lion’s whiskers move with it, and I see the rise of breath beneath the curve of ribs, but the animal is otherwise utterly still. Oddly, what I notice most is its tail, held in a graceful curve behind its body. There’s an undeniable muscular strength even there, in something so inconsequential as its tail, and that is perhaps the most menacing detail of all.

  Make yourself small for a bear, big for a lion. The thought comes automatically. I learned it so long ago I can’t remember who taught me. Probably Samuel. I unzip my jacket with my free hand, catch the hem and raise it above my head with my dressage whip, steel myself with a deep breath, and yell, “Get on, now. Get!” I wave my arm over my head, banging the whip against the nearest tree branch, and at the same time I carefully ask Lockjaw to take a single step backward, then another. “Go on,” I holler again, and suddenly the mountain lion obeys, springing off the trail in a single leap, but I feel only a split second of relief before Lockjaw rears and spins sideways. I still have my hand above my head, and I fall to the left, over Lockjaw’s shoulder as her forefeet touch earth again, and then I’m on the ground and Lockjaw is galloping ahead down the trail, stirrups slapping her ribs, reins over her head, slowing only to flatten her ears and snap her jaws at the place the lion had been. I try to call to her, but the wind has been knocked out of me and all I manage is a whisper, followed by a pained wheeze. In moments the mule is out of sight.

  I lie on my back for several seconds. Panic waits in the wings of my consciousness, but I evaluate the parts of my body I can feel—I’ll have a bruised shoulder, and when I touch my cheek my fingers come away bloody, but not very—and then I slowly sit up and examine the parts I can’t feel for unnoticed fractures or blood. I can’t be sure, but I don’t think I’ve injured anything seriously. I unbuckle my helmet, find a small but sharp dent in its side. So I’ve been lucky, but only to a point. The cell phone wouldn’t
have worked here, but now I can’t even try because it’s still in the saddlebag attached to Lockjaw. The water is gone, too, and the poncho. As I think it, I feel the first raindrop.

  It’s taken me almost three hours to ride to this point. I’m not sure how close I am to the cabin, but guess it’s still at least an hour’s ride away. I wish, for the first time, that the FBI people were watching me more closely, but I’ve gone riding in the hills so many times—and I was trying to normalize it, wasn’t I, whether I fully realized it or not; I was discouraging them from following me in anticipation of this very journey—and I doubt anyone has paid much attention. They might notice I’m missing at some point—certainly after 5:00 p.m. tomorrow, when I’m to be off the property for good—but they won’t know where to look. Hawkins will notice, too, but he won’t know where to look, either. South Dakota, I told him.

  * * *

  The rain is soft but steady. I’ve propped myself against the nearest tree, which makes the drops less frequent but larger. I zip my coat and put my damaged helmet back on my head, but rain seeps below the coat’s collar and through the helmet’s vents. I’m not cold yet, but will be when it gets dark.

  Feels foolish to stay here. Ought to at least try to save myself. A pervasive thought, though I know it’s wrong. I have no hope of making it either to the cabin or back home on my own; I’d exhaust myself in short order and be worse off than I am now. Even the able-bodied are told to stay put, though I imagine that works better if people are actually looking for you. I wonder if I should move to the center of the trail, out from beneath the tree, in case someone does notice I’m missing, in case they send a helicopter. I decide that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon. I stay where I am.