by S. M. Hulse
* * *
The second time in my life I expect to die. It’s more peaceful this time. I was so terrified in the closet, so panicked. Here in the woods I worry about the mountain lion coming back—I can hear the narrators of those nature shows I used to watch before Samuel destroyed the television intoning, The predators seek out prey that is injured or infirm—but I think it’s long gone, and here, at least, there are no guns, no shots, only the steady rhythm of rain on branches and pine needles and stone. I close my eyes and listen to the rain and realize I am not frightened to be alone.
I try to quiet my mind, but it keeps turning to Emily, to Asa’s insistence that there has to be a reason for what happened to his daughter. He seems to have concluded that there’s someone he is meant to heal, that if that person is not, could not be, his daughter, then it must be someone else, because otherwise it’s all for nothing. He wants—needs—something good to come of it all. But suppose God, or the universe, or fate, isn’t so high-minded. Suppose it’s simpler. Emily’s death was unjustified, unjustifiable. It must be balanced. Maybe I’m the balancing weight.
I do not believe in things like that, I remind myself. There is no fate, perhaps no God.
But the thoughts do not leave me.
* * *
The sun disappeared some time earlier, but it’s not yet dark. There’s a break in the rain, though there looks to be more coming. Through a broken patch in the cloud cover I glimpse the bare sky. It’s a deeply fading blue, like water coalescing below a steep waterfall. I pass a few minutes contemplating how I would mix the color on my palette. Cobalt blue, I decide, with a dab of titanium white and maybe a swipe of ultramarine or even violet.
The blue patch passes, the clouds come overhead, the rain returns. It’s heavier now, louder, and at first the hoofsteps blend with the rainfall. Lockjaw, I think, when the sound becomes distinct, and I crane my neck to look down the trail but can’t see her yet. I’m glad the mule hasn’t become lion fodder or tumbled down the side of the mountain and broken a leg or her neck, but I can’t muster relief. I might be able to reach the bottom of a stirrup, but that won’t do anything but put me in a good position to get kicked. I can’t get back into the saddle from the ground. Lockjaw can’t save me.
And then there is another sound. More steps. Footsteps, not hoofsteps. I squint into the darkening evening, convinced I’m beginning to experience auditory hallucinations or some kind of sound-mirage. But then, moments later, he is there, just a few steps away, leading Lockjaw by the reins, rifle slung over his back, bearded and skinnier than when I last saw him, but definitely there, definitely real.
Samuel.
* * *
“I wondered if you’d come,” my brother says, stopping in front of me. The words are soft, almost overcome by the rain. He crouches beside me, takes one of my wrists in his hands, bends it this way and that.
“I’d know if my wrist was broken.” He drops my wrist, moves to my legs. He feels for the bones, moves toward my feet a few inches, feels again. I can’t register the touch, but I see it is firm but gentle, and I think again of how he would have made a good vet. “I checked myself after I fell,” I say. “I don’t think I’m hurt.” He nods a brief acknowledgment, but still squeezes each ankle through my boots before he stands.
“Lockjaw’s okay, too,” he tells me, giving the mule a single pat on the neck. “Scraped up a knee, but she’s sound.”
“There was a mountain lion.”
“I’ve seen him a couple times.”
I wait for Samuel to chastise me for riding so far alone, but he says nothing. Maybe he figures it’s self-evident; maybe he’s waiting for me to volley far more righteous anger at him over the things he’s done. And during the last weeks I’ve thought of so many things to say to my brother, so many questions to ask, but here in the darkening wilderness they all seem too remote to speak aloud. What has already been done is so much worse than anything I can say about it; I understand that. But I also know if I put voice to my thoughts, neither I nor Samuel will ever again be able to pretend that he didn’t do those things, that I didn’t say those words. I know, too, that silence won’t last forever. That this is delay, not avoidance, but for the moment I keep the words in check.
Samuel reaches for me, and I wrap my arms around his neck; he lifts me into the saddle. While I adjust my position and place my feet into the stirrups, he takes off the rifle, then his coat, hands the coat to me. The outer canvas is sodden and heavy, but the interior flannel lining has stayed dry, and when I put it on it’s warm and I’m grateful for it. Samuel has a red plaid shirt on, and I’ve washed it enough to know it’s near-threadbare. “There’s a poncho in the saddlebag,” I tell him.
He pulls it out, puts it on. Opens the water bottle, takes a long swig, passes it to me along with the granola bar. When I give the water bottle back he has my cell phone in his hand. An ordinary enough thing to have on the trail—spotty reception or not, it’s foolish not to carry it; you could get lucky and have your emergency happen in line with a cell tower, after all—but I did not bring it for emergencies, I understand that now, and I see in the tightening of my brother’s features that he understands it, too.
He glances at me—there and gone, a motion too quick for me to read what’s in his eyes—then puts the phone in his pocket. He slings the rifle back over his shoulder, outside the poncho, then loops the reins over Lockjaw’s head and hands them to me. He keeps hold of the near rein below the bit. We start toward home.
* * *
“How did you find me?” I ask.
“Lockjaw turned up at the cabin.” Samuel looks over his shoulder. “You believe that? She ain’t been up there in more than ten years, and I hear something in the clearing and look over and there she is, standing in that same spot where I used to picket her.” He pauses, and then something almost like levity creeps into his voice. “She’s practically Lassie.”
I want to let the small joke hang there, pretend I’m just a sister being kidded by her big brother, nothing more. Out here in the woods, in this place where we found refuge before, it seems a viable fantasy. But the unspoken things are still there between us. “I’m selling her.”
Samuel doesn’t say anything, but there’s a single hesitation in his step. The rain seems louder, but I don’t think it’s falling harder than before.
“What did you think I was going to do, Samuel?” I lift the reins and Lockjaw obediently stops; Samuel stops with her, takes a breath, turns to face me. “They’re taking the house tomorrow. I don’t know if I’m still getting the government’s money for it or not; the deed’s in your name, and I don’t know what happens now that you’ve … done what you did. Even if I managed to find a piece of land to keep her on, I can’t take care of her myself. I work thirty hours a week at a gas station that’s closing down and your paycheck’s gone; I can’t afford to board her. Forget the mule; I don’t even know where I’m going to sleep tomorrow night. Damn it, what did you think was going to happen?” I hear my voice rising until the last line comes out a yell, and I listen for an echo but the rain dampens the sound and nothing comes back. My pulse is going hard in my chest, I don’t know whether to scream or cry, and I haven’t said half of what I want to, mean to.
It would be a good moment for an apology, or at least an explanation, but I know my brother too well to expect either. Samuel puts a hand on my lower leg, but if that’s intended as a comfort, it’s a meaningless one. “Why did you come out here today?” he asks. “Why now?”
A sudden flash of a memory that can’t possibly be my own: I’m sitting on the couch, our mother beside me, and I know bad news is coming; I’m doing everything I can to avoid hearing it: studying the embroidery on the throw pillows, talking over our mother every time she begins to speak, finally clapping my hands over my ears until she pries them away and tells me that my father is trapped in the mine. But I was only a year old. It isn’t my memory. Isn’t me on that couch.
“I told you,”
I say, and the anger has bled from me, only weariness left. “They’re taking the house tomorrow.”
Samuel says, “Josie.” Hasn’t called me that in years.
I close my eyes. See the school picture. The hospital bed. “There was a girl.”
“In the church.” The words a sigh. I look at him. He’s wrapped an arm around Lockjaw’s neck, speaks as though to the mule, his head pressed against her wet coat. “I listened to the radio those first few days.”
He knows. As soon as I mentioned Emily he knew. Still I hesitate.
“Tell me.”
“She’s gone.” I echo Asa’s words. “She died.”
Samuel closes his eyes, tightens his jaw the way he does if he cuts himself, waiting for that first wave of pain to rise, crest, pass. I wonder whether the pain of this will pass. Whether I should wish it to.
When I’ve almost decided to say his name, Samuel straightens. He doesn’t look at me, but turns around and clucks to Lockjaw, leading her into a walk. He stays alongside her head, his back to me. This non-response shouldn’t surprise me. How rarely has Samuel shared his feelings with me. How easily has he become someone who follows a logic I don’t understand, who has been shaped by memories and worries he won’t confide. This is what Samuel does. He keeps things to himself, or at least keeps them from me. He listens, analyzes, accepts, reacts, all in his head. He goes silent. Sure, sometimes he rages, repeats the talking points of whatever crackpot ideology he’s most recently latched on to, but his own thoughts? His emotions? Those he doesn’t share. I know this about him, have known it almost as long as I’ve known him, but I still expected something more from him upon learning that Emily had died. That she died because of him. That he killed her.
Part of me wants to scream it, over and over again, if necessary, louder and louder until he has to listen, has to react: You killed a child, Samuel!
I don’t only because I already know he won’t answer. Doesn’t matter how loud I get, how furious I am, how distraught. He won’t get angry, won’t cry, won’t do anything at all but keep his eyes on the trail ahead. So I gather my anger, my thoughts twisting darkly, sharp and heavy inside my head, rising and building to a new potency now that I’ve released them from the bonds of doubt and denial. So I cry, the tears swift and plentiful and endless, washed away by rain as soon as they fall. I get angry. I cry. Let Samuel worry about the damn trail.
* * *
“We don’t have to go home,” I say, some time later. I hear my voice as though it is someone else’s, the voice of a sleepy child, exhausted and ready to yield to dream.
Samuel keeps walking, his stride no shorter than an hour ago, no less steady. “You want to live in the woods again?”
“We did it before. We could do it again.” I might as well say, We could go to the moon, Samuel. It doesn’t seem so far away.
* * *
True dark now. Still almost an hour back to the house, by my guess. Samuel has let go of Lockjaw’s bridle and I’ve given the mule free rein to choose her path. Samuel walks behind us, out of kicking distance, following in the mule’s tracks. He carries a flashlight but refuses to turn it on. He isn’t so far back, but in the dark I can barely see him, glimpse him only in movement, the edge of a shoulder, a boot sole, a hint of a face. I keep twisting in the saddle to look for him, and every time I turn he knows, and calls, “I’m here, Jo.”
Turn. “I’m here.”
“I’m here.”
* * *
We come to the crest of the ridgeline above the house. Samuel stops just short of the height of it, and Lockjaw stops, too. “There’s probably a car by the gate.” I suppose I shouldn’t warn him, but it’s automatic, instinct.
“There’s probably more than that.” Samuel looks at me. “Can you make it to the barn on your own? Put up Lockjaw?”
“Yes.”
He runs a hand down Lockjaw’s long face, scratches her crest behind her ears. He seems reluctant to leave the mule, and I hear the sibilant sound of him whispering to her but can’t make out the words. At last he steps away, lets his hand slide off her neck like water. “I’ll see you at the house.” He’s down the steep hill and out of sight before I can say anything.
I hear the first thunder just as I come off the mountain, a low growl in the dark over the western slopes. Lockjaw tenses beneath me, breaks into an uncomfortable jig. “Easy.” I look for lightning, but there is nothing but black. The moon would be nearly full, but the clouds block it with remarkable totality; I can’t even distinguish the ridgeline from the sky. Then there’s a flash, distant, a burst that lights a length of cloud from within, and for an instant I see the contours of the valley, the silhouette of the mountains visible for a blink before it vanishes again. I’m prepared for the thunder when it comes, several seconds later than I guess, and Lockjaw dances but does not unseat me.
It feels good to be back in my wheelchair after so long in the saddle—and after being unceremoniously reminded of how limited I can be without it. I hurry in the barn, but still take time to rub liniment into Lockjaw’s legs; it was a long ride for an old mule. I put ointment on her scraped knee, toss some extra hay into the stall, shut the rear door so she can’t tear around the pasture in a repeat of the last thunderstorm, and turn off all but the exterior security lights.
I’m startled to see that the house is dark, and I wheel quickly across the creek and to the porch. The door locked. He could have come in the back, I tell myself, shoving down the panic rising in my chest. But there are no lights in the living room, the kitchen, nothing but darkness through the picture window. I’ll never find him again. I didn’t believe he’d do this. Despite everything else he’s done, I never thought he’d leave me this way. I fumble for the key, find the lock, open the door. Flick on the living room light: empty. But then I hear the rush of water in the pipes, the twinning of the downpour of the upstairs shower with the rain on the roof.
Of course. I’m supposed to be alone. If anyone were watching, they would have seen me in the barn. Light in the house could have aroused suspicion. Samuel is better at this than I could ever be. I wonder if it’s a trait to be proud of.
I’d like to make coffee, but the kitchen is almost empty. A single bottle of cola, warm on the counter, but Samuel doesn’t drink soda. I run the tap until it’s cold, fill two plastic cups, and set them on the counter. No table, either. The water shuts off upstairs. I pull the shades on the kitchen windows. I do most nights, don’t I? Nothing unusual in it.
I glance around the kitchen for my cell phone. No. He’ll have taken it upstairs. Nothing significant in that, necessarily. It was in his pocket. Probably forgot about it.
Creaking floorboards above. He’s in his bedroom. Not a lot left there. The bed, the jeans and sweatshirt I loaned Asa. I found the clothes a few days ago in the laundry room when Hawkins hauled out the washer and dryer. Too late to donate them, so I had him put them upstairs with the other things left behind.
Samuel comes downstairs cautiously, moves quickly past the living room—no curtains there anymore—and enters the kitchen. He carries the rifle with him, sets it in a corner. He looks more like himself. He shaved in the shower; there’s a bead of blood on his jaw. His hair is longer than he likes, but he’s finger-combed it into place. The jeans hang lower on his hips than before he went into the mountains for a month, but otherwise he might have come back from that trip to Wyoming he told me he was taking. The sweatshirt is in his hand, and he wears a ratty T-shirt that has faded to something less than white. The tattoo black on his skin.
Samuel sees me looking. “I’m warm,” he says, “and it ain’t like you don’t know it’s there.”
I hand him one of the cups of water. “I wish you wouldn’t do this.”
“What?”
“Act like you’ve become this irredeemable person. Like you’re not Samuel anymore but ‘Samuel Henry Faber,’ public enemy.” I nod to the tattoo. It’s faded a bit over the years, and the edges have blurred, but it hasn�
�t lost its power. I still recoil from the sight of it. “You believed in that shit for like five minutes and you’ve been embarrassed about it ever since. Don’t try to convince me you’re a neo-Nazi.”
“People would be better off keeping to their own kind.”
“Ben Archer was our own kind.” Familiar words. Reciting lines we long ago memorized. “I guarantee the people involved in taking this house from us are mostly ‘our kind,’ as you define it.” He opens his mouth, but I cut him off before he can speak. “I swear to God, Samuel, if you’re about to say something about ‘the Jews,’ I’m going straight out the front door.” I hate that I have to say those words. What does it matter that he keeps his tattoo covered in public if he still voices the sentiments it represents in private? What does it matter if he’s put a more rational, respectable veneer on the old radicalism? I’ve let him—let myself—believe it does matter, but that bomb has shown me how wrong I was.
Samuel says nothing, which is confirmation enough. But he puts the sweatshirt on.
I thought I would have so much more to say, so much more to ask. These last weeks I’ve wanted answers to so many questions. I wanted to know why. I wanted to know whether he was sorry. But the bomb has exploded. Emily is dead. Nothing can change that, and nothing Samuel might say about the subject can justify it. I don’t want to hear him try.
Thunder, closer.
“You lose the tree in that storm a few weeks back?”
I nod. He doesn’t ask who cut it up for me. Probably assumes it was Hawkins.
“It clobbered me up in the hills. Hail like you’ve never seen.” He takes a sip of the water, sets the cup on the counter. Crosses his arms. “Didn’t trust the roof on that old cabin, so I rode out the storm down the old East Shaft. I’d already been down it twice.” He looks at me. “In the early days I heard helicopters a couple times. Don’t know if they were for me or if they belonged to one of the logging companies or what. Didn’t stick around to find out. They’ve got infrared on those, you know. The government.”