Evergreen (22 page)

Hux wanted to tell Phee he was sorry, but he didn’t want to embarrass her the way Gunther got embarrassed when they talked too close to their hearts.

“I came here because I was always looking out a window at the kids playing in our neighborhood,” she said. “What a waste those years were. I should have closed the blinds.”

“What happened to your husband?” Hux said.

“He’s still sitting in the chair I left him in,” Phee said.

What if his sister had been waiting for him like that? Hux thought. He thought of his mother, too—of all she’d endured and how that endurance had disfigured her from the inside out. He wanted her to finally be happy, wherever she was.

Phee finished her coffee and called to Liddy, who was sunning
herself on the woodpile, her throne, and then said to Hux, “Can I ask you something now?”

“Sure,” Hux said, bracing himself.

But Phee only smiled. “You think my coffee’s too bitter, don’t you?”

20

Hux didn’t like the idea of going to an orphanage, especially a religious one. He’d never set foot in a church before, and his only knowledge of them came from what Gunther told him about the Catholic church in Yellow Falls, where the priest could supposedly take one look at you and tell you all the ways in which you were eternally damned. Gunther loved the idea of that. He loved the fervor of it all, the gore. Heaven versus hell! God versus the devil! Sometimes he’d sit in the pew with a flask or a girl or both, daring the priest to come over and assess him. Sometimes he’d try to get Hux to go with him for entertainment’s sake (
the sake of your soul!
), but Hux didn’t like the idea of someone being able to look through him. He liked the words
winter
and
woods
and
snow
. He liked a good covering. A thick coat.

Halfway to the orphanage in Green River, Hux pulled over to the side of the road. He didn’t feel like himself when he wasn’t in the woods. The road to Green River was flat and the view open. Brittle alfalfa fields stretched to the horizon
in every direction. Hux was thinking about turning back altogether. He looked at the piece of pink paper on the passenger seat, the imprint of his sister’s slight foot. Even though she was only a year younger than him, Hux kept thinking he’d find a bright-eyed little girl waiting for him at the orphanage. He kept thinking he owed this girl something.

Unless his sister had become a nun, like a few orphans probably did, deep down Hux knew she wouldn’t be there anymore and that she wasn’t little anymore either, and there was some comfort in that. He figured he’d sit with one of the nuns, and she’d hand him an address or some other vital piece of information to move him closer to her.

When he wasn’t thinking about that little girl, Hux liked to imagine his sister was married by now with a child of her own, like the prettiest girls in Yellow Falls who married their high school sweethearts and gave birth to the next generation of them all in the same year. He liked to imagine a group of nuns having reared her as if she were their own, taking turns singing little hymns and bouncing her on their knees. Hux wondered what she’d look like, if seeing her would be like seeing his mother again in her true unburdened form.
My sister
, he thought. He made up names for her when he couldn’t sleep. Maybe she was a Catherine or a May. Or something fancier than that. Lorraine. Victoria. Maybe she’d turn out to be like the priest, and she’d be able to see through him and understand why he was sitting on the side of a road in the middle of nowhere.

Hux wished Gunther were in the passenger seat, pointing a gun at him to make him keep going.
Buck up
, Gunther would have said.
At least your ma didn’t get poached
. But that was the other thing, the dark thing, the thing named Cullen O’Shea. What if he saw her for the first time and, like his mother, wanted to let her go again?

Hux sat while the wind rocked the truck and his breath fogged the windows. He thought of the cabin and the oxeye meadow, the river and the porch. Even though he didn’t want to, he thought of his mother helpless on the cabin floor, the same floor Hux used to crawl across before he could walk, the same floor he used to eat crumbs from like his mother’s bird, Tuna. Hux thought of his father stuffing that cedar box, this pink paper, beneath his wool sweaters in the closet—the only unbrave thing he ever did.

Hux steered the truck back onto the road.

You should have done something, Dad
.

Hopewell was the name of the orphanage, which seemed pleasant enough until Hux drove through the iron gates and sat with the head nun, the only nun as far as he could tell.

Sister Cordelia, she called herself.

Hux had never met a nun before and was intimidated by her black robe, along with the straight way she sat in her chair as if God himself were pulling her shoulders back. Sister Cordelia had a large brown mole on her cheek and one above her lip. When she spoke, the moles and the thick black hairs that grew out of them spoke, too. She wore a heavy silver cross around her neck and seemed strangely powerful for being so old.

The office contained a metal desk, two chairs, and a cross on the wall with a ceramic Jesus affixed to it. The two of them sat on either side of the desk, schoolmarm and schoolboy, the way Hux imagined he would have sat at the school in Yellow Falls if it had been closer and he’d been allowed to go. Sister Cordelia looked at Hux as if she could tell he’d never been to church or read the Bible. Hux could barely meet her dark eyes, and yet there was nothing else to look at in their place unless
he looked at the bloody arms and legs of Jesus on the cross or the moles between the deep wrinkles on her face.

The yellowed window shade was drawn.

Sister Cordelia didn’t speak for a long time. She only stared at Hux, which prompted him to open his mouth. Even though he spent most of his days in silence, this kind made him nervous. He wondered out loud where all the children were. Why didn’t he hear them in the hallways? Since being invited in, Hux hadn’t seen any signs of childhood. No toys. No little shoes by the door. No drawings. Whatever else little girls adored.

His questions went unanswered.

So Hux went on. He told Sister Cordelia he was looking for his sister, his name was Hux, and he lived in Evergreen.

“So you’re Hux,” Sister Cordelia said, quieting him with the rise of her hand. “I’ve been waiting a very long time to know what those three letters meant.”

“You know who I am?” Hux said.

“Now I do,” Sister Cordelia said. “Your name was stitched on her baby blanket.”

Hux leaned forward. “My sister’s?”

Sister Cordelia rested her chin in the palm of her hand. She looked at Hux from different angles, as if she were deciding something important about him.

A full minute passed this way, and then another.

“I let her go when she was fourteen,” she finally said, with what Hux recognized as pity. It was the way Earl talked to him whenever he went to the general store for supplies.
Poor boy
, he would say though Hux was a grown man now.
It’s a great hardship to be all alone in the world
. The man would always put an extra can of soup into his bag.

“Don’t you have to keep kids until they’re eighteen?” Hux said.

“You should stop troubling yourself and go home,” Sister Cordelia said. “You’re a decent young man, I can tell. No religious training, but that can be overlooked in some cases. I suggest you get yourself to a church and find a nice woman to marry. Have the Lord’s children and
keep
them. Then you’ll have lived a more Christian life than your mother.”

“You knew her?” Hux said.

Sister Cordelia opened one of the desk drawers and took out a worn manila folder stuffed full of yellowed paper, debating, it seemed, whether she was going to give it to Hux or not. “I watched your mother leave your sister on our doorstep. For a brief time, I thought she’d change her mind, but she didn’t. She bled onto the walkway, which I scrubbed clean.”

Hux had assumed his father was the only one with a war story; he’d escaped the Nazis and Germany with nothing but the clothes on his back and had worked his way home by stoking the fires in a steamship first and then cleaning the floors in Grand Central Station until he’d earned enough for a ticket to Minnesota. Until Hux’s mother was in his arms once again. His father had said that was the best day of his life, seeing his family again.

His mother said she was disappointed he didn’t bring her a bouquet of edelweiss.

“She was a prostitute, wasn’t she?” Sister Cordelia said. “They all are, coming to us in the middle of the night like they do. They think I can’t see them or their tarnished souls. I wonder why she kept you. Maybe a boy seemed more useful to her.”

“She wasn’t what you say,” Hux said, raising his voice more than was right in front of a woman. “She was my mother. She was wonderful. She died when I was fifteen.”

“If you say so,” Sister Cordelia said, getting up from the desk. She lifted the window shade and stood staring at a group
of girls huddled together outside. The girls were wearing white blouses and gray skirts when they should have been wearing coats and hats.

“Aren’t they cold?” Hux said, wanting to give them his work shirt, his warmth.

“Nobody grows strong by being coddled, young man,” Sister Cordelia said. “That’s my work here: to take the sins these girls are born with and restore them through the Word.”

“But they’re only children,” Hux said when one of the little girls met his eyes. She was just like the sister he’d been picturing all this time. Her hair was swept back into a ponytail. Her cheeks were pink. “Why weren’t any of them adopted? Why wasn’t my sister?”

“Naamah was meant to serve God. I suppose the others weren’t cute enough.”

“That’s her name?” Hux said. He didn’t know what it meant or even how to spell it, but he was happy to finally know it. Naamah. In it, he saw the future. He saw home.

“It was when she belonged to me,” Sister Cordelia said, turning away from the window. She walked over to Hux. “Do you believe in the devil?”

“I don’t know,” Hux said.

Sister Cordelia handed Hux the folder. She rolled up her black sleeve, exposing her forearm, which was purple and scarred, as if, like Jesus, she’d been nailed to the cross. “You should. He’s everywhere. For a long time he had hold of your sister. Maybe he still does.”

Hux opened the folder and read the topmost piece of paper in it.

April 16, 1940. Another infant has been brought to us by her mother, who abandoned her to our care like all the other mothers. Why do they keep opening themselves up in such unholy ways? We’ve decided not to pursue the mother and instead, in accordance with the laws of Minnesota and the greater laws of God, raise the child as a Christian to be adopted by a family who practices our values or raised by us if no one sees fit to take her home. I shall call her Naamah, for she is a fallen angel and I intend to restore her through the Word
.

May 5, 1940. Naamah has been crying for daylong spells. I have taken over her care completely, since the doctor is useless in this matter and thinks she’s simply adjusting to life at Hopewell. I’ve positioned her crib next to the holy-water font and hung a cross directly over it, so that she may know the Lord’s sacrifice and behave accordingly. I don’t care what the other nuns think. We must take swift and grave action now, so the Devil doesn’t steal Naamah’s soul out from underneath us. She’s wooing him with her tears. He’s going to get her. I know it. I’ll do what I can with the help of the Lord
.

October 9, 1940. No matter how hard I have tried to keep her from him, Naamah has let the Devil take hold of her. I see him in her gray eyes now, the way she hoards whatever milk I give her, the way she stuffs her fingers greedily into her mouth. I must strike now with my arsenal. I’ll starve her if I have to. I must drive the Devil out
.

Hux turned over the papers as if he’d find something that made sense of the first ones the farther in he got. What he was reading didn’t seem like it could be real. His mother and father had never laid a cross finger on him, let alone a cross religious
one. They never talked about the devil. Or even God. They were gentle woods people—sad, maybe—who taught him to be kind and treat others the way he wanted to be treated.

September 21, 1945. One war may have ended, but another one goes on here. Naamah has lost a tooth in the holy bread. I know she did it on purpose. God is stronger than the Devil, she will see. Until she repents stale bread is all she’ll get to eat. She has so much potential, but sometimes I have to hurt her just to see it, to get down to the truth of it all. She doesn’t understand what a kindness this is. She’s still selfish enough to sit before me looking heartbroken. She doesn’t understand His sacrifice
.

“But everyone loses teeth,” Hux said, letting a handful of the papers fall to the floor.