Evergreen (10 page)

It was hard to believe the same thing that had happened to her had happened to Lulu, that a body could recover from that kind of disparaging, that kind of shame. Lulu walked around the fire, embraced Eveline, and backed away with Hux.

“Now put it in the fire,” she said.

Eveline stood with the dress in her hand, thinking of the morning Emil had lifted her out of the rowboat. He loved
this dress—the daisies marching up and down the length of the fabric—of all that it stood for. What would he think of her now?

Eveline tossed the dress and her underclothes into the fire and watched them turn to ash. Her neck throbbed.

“You have to let this go,” Lulu said.

Together, they walked to the cabin, where Reddy had been waiting for them, pacing. He took both women in his arms, and though he probably wanted a drink, his breath smelled of buttery piecrust, which he’d pinched into a metal plate, filled with beaten eggs, and cooked over their woodstove.

“I thought something happened,” he said.

Lulu looked at Eveline as if she were asking for her permission, which Eveline granted with a slight nod of her head. “It did.”

Lulu handed Hux to Reddy. “Put him in with Gunther tonight.”

“Of course,” Reddy said, kissing Hux’s forehead.

Lulu led Eveline to their bedroom. She tucked her into their bed, pulling the green cotton sheet to her chin. This was the first night Eveline would spend without Hux.

“Gunther will take care of him,” Lulu said. “I’ll be right outside if you need me.”

“He said I’ll forget all about him,” Eveline said, the sheet over her mouth.

“That’s goddamn rich,” Lulu said, stomping her foot on the wood floor.

“Maybe if I hadn’t been so friendly—”

Lulu swatted Eveline’s cheek, but gently. “Don’t ever say that again, you understand? This isn’t your fault. Some people aren’t good at the root.”

“I feel so tired,” Eveline said.

“It’s all right to close your eyes,” Lulu said, backing up.

“Will you leave the door open a little?”

“Of course.”

Eveline looked around Lulu and Reddy’s bedroom. On the nightstand was a photograph of Gunther when he was a baby, the last still days of his life. Beside the photograph were a half-drunk cup of tea and a scrap of paper, which said,
Reddy’s snoring again. I can’t sleep
. Being in that room made Eveline feel safe; the shadows beyond the window were comforting on this side of the river. Before she turned out the oil lamp, Eveline looked around once more. For a moment she forgot why she was here, until she heard the murmurs of her friends talking in the kitchen. After a while, Reddy sat down in the chair Lulu had positioned beside the bedroom door. Eveline watched him threading his fingers and unthreading them, picking up his rifle as if something could be done about the situation and then setting it down again when he realized it couldn’t. She watched Lulu eat the entire egg pie as if long ago she’d learned how to stand what couldn’t be changed.

Eveline woke to the sound of birds chirping beyond the window in Lulu and Reddy’s bedroom and the sound of butter sizzling in a cast-iron skillet in the kitchen.

“Sit,” Lulu said when Eveline came out of the bedroom in Reddy’s trousers, which were nearly a foot too long for her.

Eveline lifted Hux out of the high chair he was sitting in; he was holding his body up as if overnight he’d grown stronger. She kissed him, wondering what kind of mother she could be after last night. Gunther was pushing eggs around his plate, complaining they were too runny.
There’s a chicken in my eggs
, he said. And then,
Hux tried to kiss me with his mouth in the night
. Eveline looked around the cabin, knowing Lulu and Reddy would let her stay there forever. There were oxeye daisies in a mug on the table that weren’t there the night before.

“If I don’t go back now,” Eveline said, “I’ll never go back.”

“I’ll take you,” Lulu and Reddy said at the same time.

“No,” Eveline said gently. “Hux and I have to go alone.”

Eveline kept waiting for the moment she would fall apart and wanted to be at home when it happened, to have the brown log walls around her, to see strength in their ugliness, that which even a flood couldn’t take down.

Lulu and Reddy let her go.

Thank you
, Eveline thought, but didn’t say because it wasn’t enough. What bothered her, what would always bother her, was that she hadn’t done more, said more, that day by the river when Lulu had told her about the saloon men.

Before she left, Lulu took her into her arms one last time.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she whispered. “Don’t.”

“I’m not,” Eveline said. “I won’t.”

She and Hux crossed the river in Reddy’s canoe, rays of yellow morning light following her from the river’s edge, disappearing in the forest, and appearing again when she reached the garden, which the crows had left intact, and finally the cabin.

Eveline saw the imprint of Cullen’s shoes in the sandy soil beyond the front porch. She set Hux down in the reed basket between the rocking chairs, knowing she should go inside, get a broom, and sweep them away. The cabin needed to be fixed up, too, the plates cleaned and stacked, the floor washed of whatever was on it.

Eveline put on Lulu’s coonskin coat and sat in one of the rocking chairs, drawing strength from the fur, the woman who’d worn it up until now.

Tuna came out of the birdhouse, chirping lightly, waiting for her morning sunflower seed fix. Hux, too, gurgled now and then, hungry for whatever Eveline’s body could offer.

It seemed to Eveline that she had two choices: to keep living or to die, and like Lulu those years ago, she couldn’t choose both.

Before the rain came that afternoon, falling in wide, windswept sheets, washing away what it could, Eveline lifted Hux out of his reed basket. As she guided his mouth to her breast, she thought of Emil coming home with a bouquet of edelweiss in his hands, of summer turning to fall: the life she’d said yes to at the courthouse in Yellow Falls.

10

August 23, 1939

Dear Eveline
,

We’ve heard from Reddy twice now that you and our beloved grandchild will not be coming home this summer either and that you wish us not to visit you—a wish we will respect even if we don’t understand it. Won’t you at least write a letter, a few simple words of explanation? Even though we’re only twenty or so miles apart, we feel so much further away than that. Try to remember that even though you know our routines by heart, we have no way of imagining yours. You’re breaking our hearts, Evie. You really are. Did I raise you to be so unfeeling? Have we done something so gravely wrong? If we have, please forgive us. Please, my darling child, come home. It’s never too late to come home
.

Love
,

     Your Mother

Eveline folded the letter and put it in the drawer of her nightstand with the others. She wanted nothing more than for her mother and father to take her in their arms and make everything all right as if she were a girl again, but Cullen had taken away their ability to tuck her into her bed, to believe what her father had always told her:
You can be anyone you want
. You couldn’t. She couldn’t. That kind of freedom belonged to the luckiest people. Everyone else’s paths were decided for them, and nothing could be done about it.

Eveline was pregnant. Again.

She couldn’t go back to Yellow Falls and let her parents see her body, the evidence of what had happened to her: what she’d done in its defense, what she didn’t do, what she couldn’t. They would still love her—of course, they would; she knew that much—but they’d feel just as helpless as she had when Cullen had asked for dessert. And even though they wouldn’t want to, even though they’d go to sleep promising each other to picture cows jumping over the moon, they’d end up seeing her on the floor of the cabin.

This time around, sickness didn’t overtake Eveline. This baby struck one note and one note only:
Please let me stay here
, to which Eveline said,
You can’t
. It was as if the child was promising to be faultless, but that didn’t ease the fact of it taking root like a walnut in Eveline’s stomach. What good could come of her union with Cullen? What kind of child could be born from darkness and learn how to walk into the light?

Eveline had searched the woods for black cohosh root and boiled it for two days in a pot, extracting its life-ending potency. But even when she thought of Cullen on top of her and shivered violently, even when she thought of gnarled roots in the bog, how her body had felt black and twisted like them after he’d released her from the floor’s hold, she couldn’t drink
it because she knew it wasn’t the walnut’s fault—hard-shelled as it was.

The same way Eveline knew Hux would be a boy, she knew the walnut would be a girl. She saw her in her dreams, always at the corner of her vision, a girl with hair as black as roots and eyes as gray as storm clouds, her skin cold to the touch. Sometimes, despite herself, Eveline would call to her, but the girl would never come; she’d only stand there from afar watching Eveline with love or hate or both rooting her to the ground.

Eveline woke from these dreams with a start. After what had happened to her, she was beginning to understand her limitations and that they were different than Lulu’s, who’d kept Gunther under similar circumstances. Lulu said she never looked at Gunther and saw the men in the alley behind the saloon. She saw her little boy and his imaginary friend. She saw Reddy’s fine heart. In her dreams, Eveline didn’t see Emil. The only thing she recognized was the walnut’s gray eyes and a question seizing them from the start.

If Emil came home and found Eveline round and full, she would let him decide what to do, since her body wouldn’t be able to hide what had happened to it. He would have to determine if he could picture her on the floor of the cabin and still love her the same as he did before he left, when she belonged only to him. Though she hoped it was, she didn’t know if his love for her was strong enough to withstand such a vision.

If Emil wasn’t home by the time the walnut was born, which was what she was praying for, since then what had happened would belong to her alone—the shame of it, the press of the belt buckle on her skin—Eveline would go to the orphanage in Green River.

Eveline had heard of the term
shock
when it was applied to soldiers or to men who’d been trapped in coal mines, or
to people who’d almost drowned. But she was fine. She was alive without water or coal in her lungs, fallen soldiers in her heart. Shock wasn’t what plagued her. Or was it?
Tomorrow
, she’d sometimes catch herself thinking when the cabin began to whirl.
Tomorrow I’ll fall apart
.

Lulu and Reddy were the only ones who knew about the walnut. Reddy didn’t say as much, but Eveline knew he’d claim her as his second wife if it came to that. When he went to Yellow Falls the last time, Reddy saw an article in the
Gazette
about an ex-convict who’d stolen a government boat and had been posing as a government official. There was a reward out for both the man and the boat’s return, he said, but it was an amount that wouldn’t induce anyone to do any looking. As for the light project, during the second week of August, they all received a letter telling them it was on hold. Apparently someone at the top didn’t think single lightbulbs in the wilderness were as useful as Albert Muldoon did. They still owed money though. An arbitrary property tax of thirteen dollars by November 21.

Since Cullen’s visit, Reddy had been sleeping in a pup tent between the meadow and the forest, at the edge of Eveline’s line of vision, each night eating cold cans of beans and each morning, before the sun came up, rolling up his pup tent, crossing the river, and going home. No one spoke of his routine or when it would stop.

“Mama,”
Hux said again and again, but he didn’t say anything else. He’d stopped tugging his ears, but if Eveline asked him if he wanted the rattle, he’d reach for his blanket.

Lulu said Reddy had lost hearing in one ear after shooting his toe, and it had yet to come back. Give it time, she said. You’ll see. He’ll hear.

What she seemed to be saying was that everything would
work out even if it seemed like it wouldn’t.
You’ll love that baby despite what’s happened, despite yourself
.

September came, and a finally a letter from Emil—
I love you
was all she’d said in her last one—and though it made her fearful for him, his words carried with them relief for her.

Dear Eveline
,

I don’t know if you’ll receive this letter or not. I haven’t received any letters from you, though you’ve no doubt been writing often. The borders have closed and I am stuck within them until I can find a way out. Germany has invaded Poland, which you may or may not know by now. My father is still alive, although he is not what keeps me here. I have been commissioned into the German military despite my dual citizenship or maybe because of it. I am supposed to be in Berlin by the end of the week to report for duty. My poor mother and sister are fretting for the lives of two men now. If I desert my duties, according the new national laws, I can be shot if I am found. If I go, I will have to use force on another human being who has done nothing to me or to Germany. I keep wondering what you would do, gentle heart, if you were in my position
.

You asked me once why I married you. I didn’t know the answer that first day of snow in Evergreen. I simply knew I loved you and so I went to chop wood for you and our unborn son. But I’ll tell you now in case you don’t hear from me again. When I gave you that broken teapot I found in the forest, you displayed it at once, despite its broken handle. You said, “It’s lovely.” You have a certain grace in you, Eveline, which I’ve always admired and which makes me the luckiest man in the world. You deserve more than I’ve given you. You’ve made do with so little
.