by Noah Gordon
“And?”
“It is made by Woodfield Pottery, I detected the latent mark very plainly. And I analyzed a bit of the substance that formed the letters on the top surface. It’s casein paint.”
“All I remember about casein is that it’s a milk component,” R.J. said.
“Right. Casein is the chief protein in milk, the part that curdles when the milk sours. Most of the dairy farmers around here made their own paint in the early days. They had plenty of skimmed milk, and they let the curds dry and ground them between stones. They used the casein as a binder, mixing it with pigment and milk and egg white and a little water. In this case, the pigment used was red lead. The letters are printed in red barn paint. A very bright red, actually. Turned into rust by time and the chemical action of the soil.”
All she’d had to do was place the plate under ultraviolet radiation, Lucy said. The porous clay had absorbed paint, which fluoresced under the ultraviolet, absorbing energy and remitting it right back.
“So … were you able to detect the other letters?”
“Yes, certainly. Got a pencil handy? I’ll read them back to you.”
She spelled them out slowly, and R.J. wrote them on her prescription pad, and when Lucy had finished talking she sat and looked without blinking, almost without breathing, at what she had written:
ISAIAH NORMAN GOODHUE
GO IN INNOCENCE TO GOD
Nov 12, 1915
So Harry Crawford’s family had had nothing to do with the skeletal discovery. R.J. had been barking up the wrong family tree.
She checked the town history to make certain Isaiah Norman Goodhue was indeed the brother Norm with whom Eva had lived alone for most of her life. When she saw that he was, instead of solutions she was left with questions and assumptions, each more disturbing than the last.
Eva would have been a fourteen-year-old girl in 1915, of childbearing age but in important ways still a child. She and her older brother had lived alone in the remote farmhouse on Laurel Hill Road.
If the child had been Eva’s, had Eva been impregnated by some unknown male, or by her brother?
The answer seemed to be implicit in the crude name marker.
Isaiah Norman Goodhue had been thirteen years older than the girl. He never married; he spent his life in isolation, working the farm alone. He would have depended on his sister to cook, to tend the house, to help with the animals and the fields.
And his other needs?
If the brother and sister had been the parents, had Eva been forced? Or had there been an incestuous love affair?
The terror and bewilderment the girl must have felt over the pregnancy!
And afterward. R.J. could imagine Eva—frightened, guiltridden because her infant was buried in unconsecrated earth, pained by the birthing and what must have been crude or nonexistent aftercare.
Clearly, their neighbor’s marshy pasture would have been chosen as burial site because it was wet and worthless and never would be turned over by a plow. Had the brother and sister done the burying together? The clay plate had been buried shallower than the baby. R.J. thought it likely that Eva had marked it to record her dead son’s name and birth date—the only memorial available to her—and then had stolen down to bury it above her infant.
Eva had spent most of her life looking down the hill at that marsh; what must she have felt, seeing Harry Crawford’s cows wading there, adding their piss and manure to the muck?
Dear God, had the child been born alive?
Only Eva would have been able to answer the dark questions, so R.J. would never really know, which was just as well. She no longer wished to display the plate. It spoke to her too loudly of tragedy, too plainly of the unhappiness of a rural girl caught in deep despair, and when she got it back from Lucy, she wrapped it in brown paper and placed it away in the bottom drawer of her breakfront.
36
ON THE TRAIL
Thoughts of the youthful Eva cast a ghostly shadow over R.J. that not even purposeful music making could dispel. Now each day she left her house for the office eagerly, needing the contact with human beings that her practice provided, but even the office was a difficult place, because Toby’s inability to conceive was affecting her ability to deal with the daily tensions. Toby was snappish and short-tempered, and what was worse, R.J. saw that she was aware of her own unsteadiness.
R.J. knew that eventually they would have to discuss it, but Toby had become more than an employee and a patient. They had grown to be close and caring friends, and R.J. was putting off confrontation as long as possible. Despite the added stress, she spent long hours at the office, returning only reluctantly to the quiet house, the lonely silence.
She took consolation from the fact that winter was dying. The mounds of snow at the sides of the road shrank. The warming earth drank the melt, and the maple syrup folks began their yearly labor of tapping the trees to collect sap. Back in December, Frank Sotheby had stuffed a pair of old tennis shoes and some moth-eaten ski pants with rags. Outside his general store, he had stuck what looked like the bottom half of a human being into a snow pile waist-first, along with one ski and a ski pole, as though a skier had taken a header. Now his sight gag melted with the snow. When he removed the sodden garments, R.J. told him it was the surest sign that spring had come.
One evening she opened the door to a now-familiar scratching, and the cat entered the house and made her usual ambling inspection.
“Oh, Agunah, stay with me this time,” she said, reduced to begging for an animal’s company, but Agunah soon returned to the front door and demanded her freedom, and slipped out and left R.J. alone.
She began to welcome and respond to evening ambulance calls, although the rule was that the crews would call on her only if they had a situation they couldn’t handle. The last night in March also offered up the last snowstorm of the season. On the highway leading out of Main Street, a drunken driver skidded across to the wrong side of the road in his Buick and met a small Toyota head-on. The man who was driving the Toyota slammed into the steering wheel, fracturing his ribs and making an island of his sternum, a condition known as flail chest. Whenever he breathed he experienced great pain. Worse, the loose chest wall segment didn’t move in and out with the rest of his chest when he respirated; in effect, the bellows was broken.
All the EMTs could do for the injured man in the field was to tape a small, flat sandbag over the loose sternum, and then give him oxygen and get him into the medical center. The ambulance people were already doing that when R.J. reached the scene. For a change, too many EMTs had responded, among them Toby. The two of them watched the ambulance crew preparing the man for transport, and then R.J. motioned Toby away from the volunteer firemen who were cleaning glass and pieces of metal from the road.
They walked down the highway to a place where they could look back at the accident.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about you,” R.J. said.
The night air was chill, and Toby was shivering slightly in her red ambulance jacket. The urgent yellow ambulance light, turning like a beacon viewed from sea, illuminated her features every few seconds. She wrapped her arms about her body and looked at R.J.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. There’s a procedure I’d like you to have.”
“What kind of procedure?”
“Exploratory. I want somebody to take a good look at what’s happening inside your pelvis.”
“Surgery? Forget it. Look, R.J., I’m not going to be opened up. Some women … it just isn’t in the cards for them to be mothers.”
R.J. grinned mirthlessly. “Tell me about it.” She shook her head. “They don’t have to open you up anymore. Nowadays they make three tiny little incisions in your abdomen. One through your navel and the other two below, roughly over each ovary. They use a very narrow fiber optics instrument with an incredibly sensitive lens that lets them see everything in sharp detail. If necessary, other special instruments allow them to do corrective procedures, rig
ht through those three tiny incisions.”
“Would they have to put me out?”
“Yes. You’d have general anesthesia.”
“Would you do the … what do you call it?”
“Laparoscopy. No. I don’t do that. I’d send you to Danny Noyes. He’s very good.”
“No way.”
R.J. allowed herself to lose patience. “But why? You so desperately want to have a child.”
“Look, R.J. You’re so fucking pious when you preach about women needing to have the right to choose what happens to their own bodies. Well, this is my body. And I choose not to have surgery unless my life or health is threatened, which it doesn’t seem to be. So leave me the hell alone, understand? And thank you for your concern.”
R.J. nodded. “You’re welcome,” she said sadly.
In March she tried to enter the woods behind the house without skis or snowshoes, and she failed, going thigh-deep into snow that had refused to melt on the shaded trail. When she tried again in April, some snow remained but she was able to walk, if somewhat clumsily. Winter had made the wild place wilder, leaving the trail the worse for wear, with downed branches that had to be cleared. She seemed to feel the djinn of the forest staring down at her. In a patch of snow she saw what looked like the tracks of a barefoot man with fat feet and ten sharp claws. But the big toes were the outer ones, and R.J. knew the marks had been left by a large bear. She puckered up and whistled as loud as she could blow, for some reason choosing as her bear-frightening song “My Old Kentucky Home,” although she thought it might put the bear to sleep instead of sending it galloping away.
In three places, trees had fallen across the path. R.J. went back to the barn and got a Swedish bow saw and tried to use it on the blowndown trees, but the saw was inadequate and the work too slow.
There were some things for which she needed a man, she told herself with bitter resignation.
For a few days she pondered whom she might hire to clear the path of debris and perhaps extend the trail along the river. But a few afternoons later, she found herself in her favorite farm supply store, attempting to learn all about chain saws.
They looked lethal, and she knew they could be as deadly as they looked. “They scare the bejeezus out of me,” she admitted to the salesman.
“Well, they should. They’ll cut off your limb as easily as they’ll cut off a tree’s,” he said cheerfully. “But so long as you stay scared, they’re perfectly safe. The people who get hurt are the ones who get comfortable enough to handle them carelessly.”
The saws came in several brands and a number of different weights and lengths. The salesman showed her the smallest, lightest model. “A lot of women favor this one.” But when she told him she wanted to clear a trail through woods, he shook his head and offered her another saw. “This one is medium-heavy. Your arms will tire quicker, and you’ll have to rest more frequently than with the small saw, but you’ll get a lot more accomplished.”
She made him show her half a dozen times how to start it, how to stop it, how the automatic brake should be set so the whirling chain wouldn’t cut her head open if the saw caught on something and kicked back.
By the time she brought it home, along with a supply of oil and a filled gasoline can, she had second thoughts. After supper she read the instruction manual carefully and knew the purchase had been a folly. The saw was too complicated, too wickedly capable of destruction, and she would never have the courage to go into the woods alone and use the dangerous tool. She set everything in a corner of the barn and did her best to forget all about it.
Two afternoons later, she came home from work and, as usual, she took the mail out of the mailbox by the road and carried it down the long driveway to the house. Seated at the kitchen table, she separated it into several piles: Things to be dealt with later, consisting of bills, catalogs she wanted to read, and magazines; letters; and junk mail to be thrown away.
The envelope was square, medium-sized, light blue. The moment she saw the handwriting the air in the room became heavy and warm and harder to breathe.
She didn’t rush to tear it open. Instead, she treated it as if it were a letter bomb, examining it carefully on both sides. There was no return address. It was postmarked three days before, and it had been mailed from Akron, Ohio.
She picked up her letter opener and slit the envelope neatly across the top.
It was a greeting card: “Wishing You a Happy Easter.”
Inside, there was David’s cramped, slanted handwriting.
My Dear R.J.,
I scarcely know what to say, how to start.
I suppose I must begin by saying that I am mortally sorry if I have caused you unnecessary anxiety.
I want you to know I’m alive and healthy. I’ve been sober for some time, and I’m working hard to stay that way.
I’m in a safe place, surrounded by good people. I am coming to terms with life.
I hope you may find it in your heart to think kindly of me, as I think of you.
Yours sincerely,
David
Think kindly of me?
Wishing You a Happy Easter?
She threw the card and the envelope onto the mantel. Gripped by an icy, disgusted fury, she wandered through the house and finally went outside and into the barn. She picked up the new chain saw and strode down the wood road until she came to the first fallen tree.
She did as she had been instructed by the salesman and the manual: knelt; placed her right foot on the bottom of the rear handle, pinning the saw to the ground; set the hand guard; fixed the choke and turned on the ignition switch; held the front handle bar down firmly with her left hand and pulled the starter handle with her right hand. Nothing happened after several pulls, and she was preparing to give up when she pulled again, and the saw started with a cough and a sputter.
She pulled the trigger, and gave it gas, and it roared. She turned to the fallen tree, pulled the trigger again, and placed the blade against the trunk. The chain whipped around, its teeth biting into the wood, and went down through the trunk easily, quickly. The noise was music.
The power! she thought. The power!
In a very short time, the tree was in pieces small enough for her to move them off the trail. She stood with the roaring saw in her hand as dusk fell, reluctant to shut it off, drunk with success, ready to cut away all of her problems. She no longer was trembling. She didn’t fear the bear. She knew the bear would flee from the sound of her vibrating, ripping teeth. She could do this, she thought exultantly. The spirits of the woods were witnesses to the fact that a woman could do anything.
37
ONE MORE BRIDGE TO CROSS
Two afternoons in a row, she took her chain saw into the forest and vanquished the other pair of fallen trees. Then on Thursday, her day off, she entered the woods early, while the silent, druidlike trees were still wet and cold, and commenced to extend the trail. There was only a short distance to go before the lane reached the Catamount, and she attained the river just before breaking for lunch. It was a thrill to turn the corner and begin to work downstream, along the bank.
The saw was heavy. She had to stop from time to time, and she used the intervals to gather the branches and small trees she had severed and drag them off the path, piling them so they would be nesting places for rabbits and other small creatures. There was snow here and there along the banks but the water ran like liquid crystal, fast and full. Just beyond where skunk cabbages pushed through the snow, she saw a blue cordiform stone in the shallow current. When she pushed up the sleeve of her sweater and plunged her hand into the water, her arm seemed to crystallize too, the shock of the cold telegraphing all the way to her toes. The stone was well shaped, and she wiped it dry tenderly with her handkerchief and dropped it into her pocket. All afternoon as she pushed the trail forward, she felt the magic of the heartrock giving her strength and power.
At night she was serenaded by the soprano yipping of coyotes and the baritone roar of the
swollen river. Mornings, eating breakfast in the kitchen, making the bed, straightening up the living room, she saw from her windows a porcupine, hawks, an owl, buzzards, the great Northern ravens that had taken over her land as if on a long-term lease. There were lots of rabbits and several deer, but there was no sign of the two turkeys she had fed in the winter, and she feared for them.
Now every day she rushed home from the office, changed her clothes, and took the chain saw from the barn. She worked hard, with satisfaction that was almost a quiet glee, pushing the great circuit of trail back in the direction of her house.
There was a new softness in the air. Each day darkness fell later, and suddenly the back roads had become goo. She had learned about her environment and knew now when to park the Explorer and slog in on foot to make a house call, and she didn’t use the come-along or need to have her car towed out of the mud.
The muscles of her arms and back and thighs tightened from the work in the woods and were so sore that she grunted when she walked, and then her body hardened and adjusted to the steady labor. Pushing the saw into branches to get the blade close to the tree trunks, she sustained numerous scratches and shallow gouges in her hands and arms. She tried wearing long sleeves and gloves, but the sleeves snagged and the gloves didn’t allow her to grip the saw tightly enough, so she disinfected the wounds carefully each night after her bath and wore the scabs like service stripes.
Sometimes an emergency kept her from working on the trail, a house call or the need to drive to the hospital to see a patient. She became miserly about her spare time, spending every moment in the woods. It was a long hike to the end of the trail, growing longer every time she found a few hours to work. She learned to leave her cans of gasoline and oil in the woods, in well-secured plastic bags. Sometimes she saw signs in the woods that disturbed her. In a place where she had worked only the previous afternoon, she found the scattered long feathers and soft inner down of a turkey that had been taken by something during the night, and she hoped foolishly that it hadn’t been one of “her” birds. And one morning when she walked out, she found an enormous pile of bear droppings like a special delivery letter. She knew that the black bears slept off and on all winter without eating or defecating; in the spring they gorged until they had an enormous bowel movement that expelled a hard, thick fecal plug. She had read of the plug and now examined it, and she noted the wide caliber of the droppings, indicating a very large animal, probably the bear whose paw marks she had seen in the snow. It was as if the bear had shat on her trail to serve notice that it was his territory and not hers, and she grew anxious again about working in the woods.