by Sheri Holman
“Tonight is Saturday,” Jasper says, not looking at him. “Who’s doing your show while you’re hiding out up here?”
“They’ll put on a rerun, I won’t even be missed,” Eddie says, more seriously. “Except by you, my loyal henchman. And you’re here.”
It should be funny, Eddie meant it as a joke, but Jasper keeps digging, not looking at him.
“For now,” he says.
Eddie claps his hands, for show, but also, it seems to Wallis, to keep from hitting something. Jasper’s anger has them all on edge. “Come on, kids,” he says. “If we’re to look so funereal, we must at least stage a proper cremation.”
He snatches up a stick and lifts the poison-ivy-contaminated shorts, pitching them onto the grill.
“Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit,” he intones, blasting the coals with another squeeze of lighter fluid by way of eulogy. The shorts go up in a sudden conflagration and a column of white smoke shoots up to the trees. Eddie watches it spiral overhead, fingering out to fog. Wallis worries the sparks will land on the roof and take the house along with it. At least he’s gotten Jasper’s attention.
“The other day, I saw a pattern on my weather radar that looked like thousands of tiny airplane contrails,” Eddie says. “They call it chaff, and my Bible-quoting mother would have said that’s what must be separated from the wheat, like the sheep from the goats. But this chaff was tiny little strips of aluminum-coated paper the military drops from its fighter jets to confuse an enemy’s radar, so they can’t know what to shoot at. They were running a training mission and the station’s Doppler picked it up.”
“The Germans used it during World War Two,” Jasper says.
Wallis watches the fabric burn. The squat blue flames lick into the back pocket of the jean shorts where the studs glow red. The three of them stand over the grill as if they were roasting marshmallows.
“The allies used it first,” says Eddie. “During Operation Gomorrah over Hamburg. And the poor bombed-out Hamburgers wandering through the rubble stared up and wondered at all those nothing little strips falling from the sky. Such an effectively simple distraction. A cardboard box slit open and tossed from the ass of a plane.”
“My dad was ‘Stand or Die’ in Pusan,” Jasper says. “He had stories like that.”
“Mine didn’t make it home from Normandy,” Eddie says. “I’m glad I never had a son. I wouldn’t know how to lie him off to war.”
Jasper’s shorts have burned through and the brass button at the fly drops into the coals, sending up a veil of sparks.
“Make a wish,” Eddie says, passing Jasper the beer to finish.
“May you never have a son,” Jasper says, finishing it.
Wallis has watched their exchange silently. Now she rises.
“I’m not hungry, either,” she announces. “I’m taking my shower and tomorrow we’re going on our ginseng hunt.”
“Yes,” says Eddie, nodding absently. “Tomorrow it’s your turn.”
She leaves them to their fire and their beer and walks across the yard, her body prickly as if the smoke had transferred the itch onto her skin. She heads toward the sound of the spring, needing to wash off this feeling that has resettled over her. Overhead, behind the smoke, clouds move across the moon. One by one the stars are extinguished.
Wallis walks away from them, into deeper darkness, before lifting off the green dress and reaching behind her back to unhook the bra she is still getting used to wearing. Stepping out of her underwear, she strides through the night free and invisible even to herself. Her foolish father, thinking he can make things right by striking a match. As if combustion led to anything but ashes. She reaches her arms in front of her, groping for the wall of rock, touching the water that foams between stones. She spreads the dress in the shape of herself over the rocks and steps under the cascade. The air is warm and the water cold, and she tilts her head back, letting the spring water smooth her hair from her face, which she lifts to catch the rain that has just begun to fall, neither one temperature nor the other, water in and around her. She feels for the bar of soap Jasper took out there earlier for his own shower, and lathers her hair, squeaking the strands between her fingers before the spring washes the suds away.
Without their audience, Jasper and Eddie have drifted apart. A lantern moves across the yard and then the belly of the barn is filled with yellow light. Back at the house, another lamp is lit in the kitchen, then more white steam on the porch, her father dousing the coals with water. Wallis is the absence of light, alone outside, naked where no one can see, and the falling rain divides them all. She washes away the bits of straw that have stuck to her breasts. She stretches her neck and lets the water plant its kiss, then bends over so that it may play along her rounded spine. There is no measure of time here, no hot water to run out. No one waiting a turn. She could stand under this spring all night and into the next day and month and year and this water would not stop running until it had flushed away every atom of her, sending her as a freshet down the mountainside. She could join up with other washed-away girls in the dark, making a larger black stream that fed into an invisible river that fed into an ocean that circumnavigated the world before evaporating and becoming the storm that starts it all, falling now, on the tiny house and her upturned face.
The rain falls harder, replacing the clean feeling with the clammy cold of falling leaves. Coming out here she hadn’t thought how she might get back. She has no towel and so she wraps the wet dress around her body, covering most of herself.
The lantern is back, perched on the porch rail out of the rain; Jasper has brought from the barn a tall iron pipe and the millstone. As she passes, he lifts the rock and brings it down sharply on the flat edge of the pipe. It is sudden and violent and rings back over the hollow.
“What are you doing?” she whispers.
“Driving in the grounding rod,” he says.
“In the rain?”
He answers with another blow and another. “The water softens up the earth.”
There is no thunder, no flash of lightning, just an increasingly heavy downpour. He won’t be electrocuted if that’s what he’s hoping for. She darts around him, leaving her wet footprints on the wood, and ducks inside her grandmother’s bedroom where her father has left another lamp burning for her. She drops the wet dress to the floor, finds her brush on the dresser top, and tugs it through her matted hair. From books, she knows the games girls played on St. Agnes’s Eve and Halloween, how to raise visions of their future husbands by sleeping with wedding cake under their pillows or combing their hair while looking over their shoulders into the mirror. She walks to the door, where a fragment of broken mirror hangs and, standing on tiptoe, she can just see her face as she pulls the brush through her hair, ten, twenty, thirty times. Her hair is drying, softening, her body, too, relaxing in the heat thrown off by the lantern. She draws the brush in time to his hammering outside her window, every blow another sweep from root to end. She watches herself in the flickering oil light until her large gray eyes cease to be her eyes, her lips curl slightly fuller and rounder. She holds her own gaze. Show me the future, she whispers to the face she has pinned there, herself but not herself, some fiction of herself that she can direct and release and let behave as it desires without being a part of her. It’s a trick of the light, this shifting face. She sees herself young, older, very old, cycling in rapid succession. Wrinkled, prime, dewy soft. She blinks and as if he feels her, outside he pauses. Just a rest. As if listening for something. But there is only the sound of rain on the roof, water dripping down his hole, then he’s back to driving his stake into the softened earth. She sets down her brush.
You don’t know where you belong. Come out of the rain and sit with me. She moves to the bed and the box of Cora’s roots next to the medicinal she’s used to identify them. Watch me brush my hair, watch me name these roots. Watch me.
Wallis reaches for the peg with her grandmother’s nightgown but decides to leave
it hanging by its scruff tonight. She stretches long and lean. If Jasper could see her now in all her nakedness, he would be hers to command. She would shower him with seeds and petals and herbs to invite dreaming and she would tap him with her root wand and put him into a deep sleep. Then she could look at him and keep him forever without having to talk to him or fight. She could kiss him when she wanted and his lips would still be awake and warm. She could lie beside him and rest her cheek upon his smooth back and she could touch his torch of hair and not get burned. She could animate the parts that pleased her and keep napping the parts that did not.
Come lie on this bed and I’ll show you a movie. You don’t need Dad, I can show it to you. It can be only us, a boy and girl, with a movie and a bed. To the sound of falling rain. No one will even need to know. Just stop hammering.
She lies down in bed and curls up beside Cora’s box of roots. There are many ways to call a person when words don’t work and desire alone is not enough. Sometimes dreams are the only things to trust. The rain drumming on the old tin roof is deafening, yet even that can’t drown out the methodical, maddening contact of stone on pipe. Lying still, she feels the dust invisibly suspended in this old room settling around her. She reaches for the lantern, brings it to her lips, and blows out the flame. The night breeze from the window instantly hardens a new skin in place. Rising and sleeping here, she thinks, she will begin to live in layers, with each night setting the last day.
He must be nearly finished, the blows fall faster and more furious. Something answers in her chest, a sharp pang that takes her breath away. Awkwardly in the dark, she fumbles for the cool mug of water that earlier she’d left on the bedside table. But the water is tepid from sitting out all day, the same temperature as her tongue, and going down it feels like she is swallowing a piece of herself.
They rise early in the morning to leave before the heat of the afternoon. It will be hard to spot, Eddie has warned her, the leaves will still be green and the berries barely ripe. We’ll hunt the sang but we won’t dig it. We’ll come back in the fall when it’s fully grown.
Her father remembers more than he thought; in the hours they’ve been walking, he has pointed out poisonous pokeweed and jack-in-the-pulpit; he’s slit the throat of bloodroot, and pulled both blue cohosh and black cohosh—take some of that home for your mother, he told her. It’s good for the Change.
“Every cliff and creek had a name and a story when I was growing up,” he says. “I can remember the plants but I’ve forgotten the stories. You’d think it’d be the other way around.”
“Every story I’ve ever heard about a cliff or a creek has an Indian maiden leaping or drowning,” Wallis says.
“Another forest, another brokenhearted girl,” he says.
Eddie lopes up the rudimentary path he refound, scanning the low growth between boulders and at the base of trees. Jasper straggles along behind, and Wallis brings up the rear in Cora’s deep green dress. Eddie had presented her with his mother’s ginseng hoe, a long-handled spade Wallis uses to help her up the slopes. More and more she is seeing the country boy in her father, this easy, barefoot way of walking, even in his penny loafers, as if his toes are digging into rock.
“Come look at this,” Eddie says, kicking over a log spongy with bright orange mushrooms. “This is jack-o’-lantern.”
He plucks a mushroom and makes a dark cavern with his palms, gesturing for Jasper to catch up. The boy sidles over and Eddie holds his hands to Jasper’s eye.
“What am I looking for?” he asks.
“Stare at the gills underneath, let your eyes adjust.”
Wallis pushes in. “Let me see,” she says.
“Get your own,” Jasper says. “There’s no room.”
Wallis bends and tugs off her own pumpkin-colored mushroom. In the shadow of her hands, its underbelly glows an almost imperceptible green.
“This is how my mother was beautiful,” Eddie says, answering her earlier question. “You had to know what to look for.”
Next to her Jasper shrugs and turns away, scouting the landscape, ready to move again. All morning her father has stopped to show them things and Jasper’s impatience has restarted them. Eddie drops his mushroom and walks uphill to where a trickle of a spring bleeds from the rock. “Come wash your hands,” he tells Wallis. “They’re also poisonous.”
It is noon, the day flayed out in either direction. Climbing up to join him at the spring, the heat is on her shoulders, washing down through the dark dress to where her legs might move free and cool beneath the skirt. Wallis never wears dresses at home and finds she loves carrying her own green shade. She pulls herself up the slope behind Eddie. Bald ravines fall away around her; somewhere in a farmer’s field not far from here, Eddie told her, the headwaters of the Potomac River bubble up in a muddy ditch. They’ve come upon no rivers in their walk, only a few deep, girl-drowning creeks. Still, when she’s quiet, she believes she can almost feel water moving beneath the stone.
“When I was about four years old, my mother carried me on her back all the way to Panther Gap,” Eddie says. “The whole mountain was creamy white as if it had snowed. I can still make myself dizzy with the smell of all those chestnuts in bloom.”
“What did they smell like?” Wallis asks, drying her hands on her skirt. Her father looks to Jasper.
“I’ll tell you when you get to college,” he says, scanning the horizon. “Look around. This used to be the chestnut graveyard.”
Wallis stares out over the hemlock and deep basins of purple flowering laurel. She recognizes many of the trees from Cora’s book but she sees nothing she can identify as chestnut.
“Loggers cleared out the carcasses during the war. Now all this has grown up in its place.”
Jasper looks down over the running hollows that crisscross the ridge they climbed. A hawk catches an updraft through the lower branches, its glittering, inhuman eyes even with their own. It catches the current and funnels off, higher and higher, a blink, gone.
“I’m glad you made us get out here, Wallis,” Eddie says. “Get a few houses huddled together and all our problems seem monumental. Come up here and you realize how inconsequential you really are.”
“I feel invincible,” Wallis says. “This high up.”
“How does the eternal vastness strike you, Jasper?” Eddie asks.
“Like I don’t want a tour guide to it,” Jasper says.
Eddie nods and starts out again. “Keep your eyes down,” he says. “This is where I used to find my best sang.”
He steps down hard and breaks off a branch to use to prod the understory. They had been following what might have been a rudimentary path, but now Eddie veers off into denser growth. “Be careful,” he says. “This is rattlesnake territory. They like to sun themselves on the flat rocks.”
Her father walks ahead while they step cautiously behind. Wallis swings her hoe, trying not to look at Jasper. How can he act as if nothing happened? A kiss is supposed to be the beginning of something, but he is treating it like the end. She searches as if the thing that is missing between them could be found here on the ground. Real things, important things, can’t be known by what isn’t there. There is always farther to go and places you’ve yet to be.
“Are we ever going to talk about what’s happening?” she asks.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean at the railroad tracks. The barn. This.”
“What is this? This is you in a weird dress making me follow you into the woods.”
Her father is far enough ahead not to hear them. She turns and touches his arm where a patch of pink rash has risen in the crease of his elbow. There were a few spots the jewelweed missed.
“Please, Jasper,” she begs. “I don’t want to fight anymore. I want us to be—you know. Nice to each other.”
“I know what you want, Wallis,” he says, angry now. “We live in the same house together. Where could anything possibly go between us? If people found out, I’d end up back on the
street. I can’t go back there. I’d die out there.”
Jasper has been clearing his own way through the low trees and saplings, but now he pushes through a holly bush and lets the bough whip back behind him. Before she can react, its sharp leaves catch her just below the right eye in three razor-thin cuts.
“You did that on purpose,” she cries.
“Don’t crowd me,” Jasper says. “I’m not going over the edge again.”
Wallis stops as he walks ahead, catching up to her father. She touches her hand to her cheek, three drops of blood on her three fingers. Ahead is a sharp snagging dip of dead fire azalea choked with blackberry. Wallis plunges in, the brown blossoms rattling around her hips. To hell with them. When she was eight or nine years old, she had a recurring dream that snakes overran her bedroom floor; twining and restless, they trapped her between waking and sleep. Afraid to put foot to carpet, she felt safe only under the covers. Now she knows she will step on one and be bitten and die here alone in the forest without ever seeing her mother again. Wallis pulls and crushes, deadheading the azaleas as she walks, letting the dusty petals sift through her fingers. She half wishes she would find a snake just for the satisfaction of bringing the hoe down hard across its neck and watching its pieces slither away. The blackberry briars catch at her flesh and the hem of her dress but she reaches in anyway to take the warm, ripe fruit the birds missed. That kid paralysis, clutching the covers tight. How did all those snakes get into her bedroom in the first place?
Wallis jumps at the nearby crack of gunfire, feeling percussion inside her skull. Three, four loud retorts, then silence ringing off the rock. A dog bays, sharp as the shots, swallowing his last bark as if someone pulled up on his collar.
“It’s hunting season already?” Jasper shouts. The three are spread out, barely in sight of each other. Her father answers.
“Try not to look like a deer.”
Wallis has been scanning the ground but Jasper has been looking up and now he points to a ledge of green leaves overhead. She watches as Eddie makes up the distance between them, squinting, then nodding—yes, yes, that’s it. She watches them, her throat tight. Jasper, on his side of the outcrop, finds his foothold, while Eddie, on the other side, does the same. He found it first. That boy in her house. She sees his face, lit with pleasure as she’s rarely seen it. She turns away and leaves them up there, kneeling before their discovery, their fingers moving together in the leaf litter—she doesn’t need to look to see it—counting the scars on the ginseng’s neck, a notch for every year it pushed through hostile soil, nothing to show for the years in between. Her father is telling him not to pick it—it would be like shooting Bambi or tossing a fingerling fish into your bucket instead of throwing it back. No, her father is saying, plucking the red center cluster, staining his fingers. Take the berry like this, between your index and your thumb. Strip the pulp until you feel the hard seed inside. Work your finger in the soil, like this, and replant it deep, so you can come back after and have more root to harvest.