Evergreen (21 page)

“Everything’s been spoiled,” his mother said.

Hux didn’t know his mother had a blockage in her heart, which was why purple rosettes made veiny bouquets of her legs and brown mucus gathered in the corners of her eyes. He didn’t know her liver had stopped working.

“Can you keep a secret?” she said.

“Yes,” Hux said, although no one had asked him to keep one before.

“Because I don’t feel like dying without telling someone,” his mother said. “I suppose I don’t feel like dying at all, and yet here I am.”

That day Hux sat on the edge of the bed next to his mother’s feet, which were blue and scaly and swollen to nearly twice their normal size. His father had gone to Yellow Falls to get the doctor, since his mother couldn’t travel over the rough roads to see him anymore. Hux was supposed to spoon-feed her warm broth while he was gone, but when he’d brought out a mug of it, his mother said, “It’s no use feeding me now,” and Hux took it back to the kitchen. She wouldn’t let him put a cool washcloth on her forehead either, which he was
glad for; he didn’t want to touch the skin that wasn’t hers anymore.

“Do you remember the year your father was in Germany?” his mother said.

Hux shook his head.

“I suppose you don’t,” his mother said. “You were just a baby. A lovely baby.”

Both his mother and father had referred to the year they were separated by an ocean before, but Hux didn’t remember living alone with his mother in the cabin. He didn’t remember how his mother had waited each time Reddy went to Yellow Falls, hoping for a letter from Hux’s father and being disappointed when Reddy didn’t return with one.

“I wanted to prove I could take care of us,” his mother said. “You and me.”

Hux’s mother hoisted herself up in the bed, groaning like an animal. If his father had been at home, Hux would have run out to the work shed to hide. Ever since his mother had gotten sick, he’d put a blanket over the window and pretended he was in the Arctic.

“Lulu came with seeds to start a garden that first day,” his mother said. “She was good to me from the start. The coonskin coat—where is it?—belonged first to her.”

Hux went to the closet to get the coat, which he draped over his mother’s legs. Over the years, most of the fur had fallen away, and the coat had lost its warmth. Still, his mother wouldn’t get rid of it. She said whoever wore it wore strength on her shoulders.

“Lulu saved my life,” his mother said. “Where is she?”

“She died last year, Mom,” Hux said.

“Oh,” his mother said. “I remember now.”

Lulu had been walking in the forest a few miles north, surveying
whether it was a good year for trapping or not, when she stepped on an old iron bear trap and it closed around her ankle, its teeth all but severing her foot from her leg. She bled to death before Reddy found her and the scrap of paper in her hand.

Goddamn poachers!
the paper said.
They got me
.

Gunther took a gun out to the forest after they buried her and came back with a buck even though it wasn’t hunting season. Reddy took to drinking in the open. Once a week until she got sick, Hux’s mother would go over there to straighten up. She’d make a pot of chicken broth and wouldn’t leave until Reddy had eaten a bowl.

Once Hux saw her put a splash of whiskey into the broth.

“He’s a great man,” she said when Hux asked her why she did that.

Sometimes his mother would make an egg pie the way Reddy did for her when Tuna, his mother’s beloved little bird, died. Hux remembered that bird, her throat white as snow. He remembered her flying around the cabin in the mornings after his mother had given her a handful of sunflower seeds. He remembered how one afternoon she fell from the rafters like a stone. How his mother took Tuna in her arms like a child. How she wept and wept.

“I hope you don’t hate me for what I’m about to tell you,” Hux’s mother said to him from her bed. “You were always such a good boy. Do you know that? We were doing so well. The garden was growing. Your grandparents were going to come for the first time.”

Hux didn’t remember their first visit to Evergreen, but he remembered the other ones. They’d bring him candy from the general store, and his grandfather would take him fishing for trout down by the river. Hux only visited their apartment
once, and he’d stayed in his mother’s old bedroom, playing with all of her treasures instead of sleeping. On the night table was a book about a woman who went west to pioneer with her family. Hux didn’t like the story much, but he liked how one of the characters shared his father’s name.

“I should have listened to your grandmother,” Hux’s mother said. “We got a letter from the government that summer. They were going to rebuild that dam they’ve been talking about forever. They were going to bring us light.”

His mother slumped back down in the bed, a movement that shifted the metal pan beneath the lower half of her body. Urine spilled onto the sheets, which were stained yellow from previous accidents. When Hux moved to get a dry cloth, his mother grabbed his hand.

“He could tell I didn’t have a survival instinct.”

“Who?” Hux said.

“Cullen O’Shea,” his mother said. “He came one morning to survey the property. I’ve never forgotten those dimples. Some people are evil to the core.”

When Hux didn’t say anything, his mother said, “His hands were scissors for me.”

“You need to rest if you want to get better, Mom.”

His mother looked at him sadly. “I didn’t shoot until he was gone. That was the second-biggest mistake of my life.”

Hux didn’t want to know what the first one was. “You need to stay quiet.”

“I’m glad I didn’t live long enough to see the light come in,” his mother said, looking up at the ceiling. “I wouldn’t have been able to bear it.”

“You’re still alive, Mom,” Hux said, thinking,
Don’t go, don’t go, don’t go
.

“I had his child,” his mother said, her chest starting to rattle
the way the doctor said it would near the end. “Then I gave her away to some nuns in Green River.”

Before she rolled over, she said, “You have a sister, Hux.”

Then, after a few strained minutes, “I think I’ll join Lulu now.”

19

At first light, Hux headed over to Phee’s place to finish building her porch. He didn’t sleep well again and was hoping pounding nails and sawing boards would wear him out enough to set him straight for the next night. Gunther was right: he’d been lingering on the project longer than was necessary, reinforcing the porch floor and then reinforcing it again. If Phee had noticed, she didn’t say anything. Sometimes she’d bring out mugs of coffee so bitter Hux could barely choke it down. Other times, though, she’d bring out a perfectly sweet apple pie. Maybe she had her own reasons for not wanting him to finish.

Phee lived on the western edge of the bog, which meant they probably wouldn’t have crossed paths except they were in the general store at the same time, and Earl, the owner, introduced them. That day, Phee’s basket was stacked with tins of sardines. Hux’s was full of sweets. He figured he could grow the healthy stuff, and Gunther could supply the meat, but neither of them knew their way around a pie tin. The one time
Hux had tried to make cookies, they got so black even the birds wouldn’t touch them.

“We make some pair, don’t we?” Phee had said in the checkout line.

Phee was an older woman, with silver hair twirled up on her head like a nest, but with a brightness of eyes that made her seem younger than she was. That first day, she was wearing a long yellow dress with a pair of muddy waders. Hux liked that about her from the start—how she could be practical and impractical at the same time, tough and dainty.

“For Liddy. My cat,” she’d said, motioning to the sardines in her basket. “She likes the ones packed in oil. She’s a brat.”

Hux had looked down at the bags of rainbow-colored candy in his basket with more than a twinge of embarrassment. “I guess I’m doing my part to keep the dentist in business.”

“I’d rather pull my own tooth out than see him again.”

Hux had thought of Gunther standing in front of a mirror with pliers and a cotton ball soaked with whiskey, his homespun version of dentistry. “That’s what my friend does.”

“He sounds smart,” Phee had said.

Hux had laughed. “Not really.”

Ever since then, he’d been building a porch for her.

The fall sun shone brightly as Hux drove around the southern tip of bog to the western side where Phee lived. Woodland caribou used to thrive here until their migration routes were cut off by the northern timber industry. The small bands that were stranded in Evergreen eventually died off or were poached by hunters. You could still see their old bleached bones reflecting in the sun sometimes. You could still hear the clicking of their feet. Hux rarely saw an animal or a bird at work in the bog, but if he paid attention he’d see evidence of their industry. The great gray owl bred here during the summer along with
the warblers and thrushes. To Hux the most interesting part of the bog wasn’t the birds or the animals; it was the plant life. The pitcher plants were the most cunning of them all.

“Sometimes I forget how fortunate we are to be on top of the food chain,” Phee said when Hux showed her how they trapped and dissolved insects.

Hux worked on her porch all morning with the same preemptive regret he’d felt before Leah left, when he knew he could still stop her but couldn’t make himself block her way. When he was around Phee, he felt like that sunny-yellow dress of hers, and in Evergreen that was a hard thing to give up, especially with winter coming, all those blue hours.

All night Hux had sat up in his bunk bed thinking about his mother and father, about Lulu and Reddy—everyone that was gone. Gunther’s last bar girl said Evergreen was probably cursed and gave Gunther a small bundle of sage tied with twine, which he was supposed to light on fire and wave around the cabin to clear out old spirits and bad luck. Gunther had laughed at her, but Hux wouldn’t have minded waving the sage around.

A few weeks before Leah came to Evergreen and a few weeks after his father finally succumbed to pneumonia, Hux found a cedar box with a flower etched on the front beneath a stack of his father’s wool sweaters in the closet. Sometimes Hux doubted his mother had said anything about the light coming in and the man named Cullen O’Shea who was going to bring it to her. Sometimes he thought he’d made the story up, like his stories about the Arctic. But what she told him was the truth, and his father must have known it for years. Inside the box were two pieces of pink paper. Another woman’s letter took up the first piece. A woman named Meg. On the second piece, there was a small red footprint, a thin
curve of an arch on paper, and words his mother had written next to it.

My daughter. Born April 16, 1940
.

“Where’s your mind this morning?” Phee said, handing Hux a mug of coffee.

“About a million places,” Hux said. “I’m sorry, Phee. I’m taking too long.”

Hux set down his hammer. The mosquitoes and blackflies had already died off, which made the going easier than when he’d started the project. The last of the season’s frogs were calling to one another in the bog.

“Do you want to hear the truth?” Phee said, sitting on the step beside him. “I think we both don’t want you to finish this porch. I’m sure you’ve noticed I don’t have a whole lot of neighbors out here.”

“I bet Earl would like to move in with you,” Hux said.

“He doesn’t discount sardines for you, too?” Phee said. She rubbed her hands together as if she were cold. “If I’m old enough to be your grandmother, how old does that make Earl? Wait. Don’t say it. I don’t want to know.”

“Ancient,” Hux said.

Phee tapped Hux on the knee with her index finger. “I’ve still got a few years’ worth of vanity left in me. Maybe less if we count my arthritis.”

“Does it hurt?” Hux said.

“On the good days I can open a jar. On the bad days I can’t.”

“What kind of day is it today?”

Phee looked at her almost-finished porch, which would probably outlast both of them. She leaned against the railing. “A good one.”

The two of them sat next to each other on the top step with
their coffee, looking out at the bog and up at the sky, listening to the birds chirping in the branches of trees, as if they’d been friends for a long time.

“Can I ask you something?” Hux said after a while.

“Sure,” Phee said.

Hux didn’t know why then or why her, but he wanted to tell Phee about that cedar box and his sister’s footprint inside. He wanted to tell her about the light and Cullen O’Shea. About how he didn’t know why his father had kept the box hidden in the closet all those years. Hux hadn’t even told Gunther he had a sister somewhere out there in the world. He’d just sat alone with the truth, figuring if he sat long enough he’d know what to do with it.

“You want to know why I came out this way, don’t you?” Phee said, granting him a little grace, a little more time, with the touch of her hand. “My husband and I couldn’t have children,” she said. “I’m all twisted up in the places I need to be straight and straight in the places I need to be twisted up.” Phee touched the silver ring on her finger. “Milty wanted children more than anything else.”