Evergreen (3 page)

“Soon you’ll be able to preserve me,” Emil said when he came in from chopping wood on the first big snow day—two feet!—in November. He was growing a beard, which collected snow when he was chopping wood and, along with his foggy safety glasses, made him look a little like an owl until the snow melted.

“Just birds,” Eveline said, even though she’d been secretly drawing pictures of babies when she was certain Emil was deep in the woods.

No woman in Yellow Falls, and probably anywhere, talked about what it felt like to be pregnant other than to say it was the Lord’s miracle, so Eveline didn’t know to expect the cramping
and expanding, the tenderness of her breasts and hips. For the tenderness, she draped warm cloths over whatever parts were sore. She didn’t know what to do about the expansion of her hips and breasts, except to take out the seams of her clothes and hope Emil didn’t mind when they undressed beneath the sheets. The cramps were the worst; they caused her such indigestion Eveline didn’t know how she’d survive their indignity. Often, while Emil slept soundly, she’d escape to the outhouse to spare them both.

And then December came, and Eveline and the baby reached sudden equilibrium. As the baby grew, the cramps and tenderness disappeared, and the expansion seemed more purposeful, since it confined itself to her stomach. The queasiness disappeared, too, which could have been because the cabin finally stopped smelling of rot and smelled instead of the applewood Emil cut for her. On the nights he preserved specimens, the cabin smelled of oil of cedar, too, which mixed with the smells of supper.

Cooking was difficult without a proper layout and running water. Eveline had to heat blocks of snow on the woodstove at the beginning of the meal and more at the end to clean the dishes. The pantry contained only a few items anymore—salt, flour, rice, dried beans, and bouillon—which made supper predictable: beef-flavored rice and beans. Occasionally, Emil would get a rabbit or a squirrel between chopping wood and bringing it to the cabin.

One day, he got a wild turkey, and how gloriously rich that meal was!

“Where did you find it?” she said when Emil brought the turkey inside. He’d already plucked all of the feathers, which made the turkey look like a newborn. Emil set a pot of water on the woodstove while Eveline coddled the turkey in her arms.

“The edge of the edge of the forest,” Emil said.

“How smart you are!” Eveline said.

“How
lucky
,” said Emil. “He let me take him.”

“Let?” Eveline said.

“He leaped right into my arms,” Emil said, taking the turkey out of Eveline’s and placing it in the pot of boiling water.

While the turkey cooked, Eveline set the table. Normally, she didn’t like the earthy smell of fat rendering out of animals, but just then the layer of yellow fat that bubbled at the top of the pot smelled like happiness.

The next day, Eveline turned the leftovers into soup. She couldn’t wait to start a garden in the spring, to grow carrots, celery, potatoes, and a patch of herbs. Living in the woods had narrowed her longings; what happiness thyme (and the baby) would bring. Eveline took the most neutral of her cotton dresses and pulled them apart in order to make clothes for the baby, who nudged the project along when in the past she might have set down her needle and thread. In between sewing, she’d drink a cup of broth and read.

All but one of Emil’s manuals were written in German, and though she was learning the language slowly from Emil (and from his German-to-English dictionary), the words on the page rarely came together in any sensible way. The sketches were what brought the words she did know to life. Eveline practiced tracing specimens in her journal and if she’d captured a likeness particularly well, Emil encouraged her to hang it on the wall, which was becoming crowded with grouse, foxes, deer, fish, and birds.

“You have a gift for drawing sparrows,” Emil said.

“Only Tuna,” Eveline said.

Each day the weather allowed her to, Eveline sat bundled in the rocking chair watching Tuna. At first, she drew Tuna
in stationary positions, but as she got better, she drew her on updrafts. If she misplaced a shadow or shaded one too heavily, she began again.

Only one manual, the English one, showed sketches of the birds in their natural habitats, without accompanying sketches of horsehair nooses and thumbs on sternums—the means, their authors suggested, to put them to eternal sleep. Emil always asked of himself three questions when deciding whether or not to turn birds into specimens, since they would become part of his personal collection and wouldn’t be for sale.

1. Is it rare or endangered?

2. Is it likely to find a mate?

3. Will it stay put in its chosen habitat if left intact?

If Emil could answer yes to any question, he’d walk away from whatever bird he was interested in preserving because he was a naturalist before he was a taxidermist.

That winter, however, Emil was mostly a woodcutter, and Eveline was mostly alone, which gave her too much time to worry about giving birth. Plenty of women had babies at home, but Eveline only knew of one woman who’d given birth in a cabin in the woods, and that woman, Lulu Runk, who’d been normal by Yellow Falls standards, now wore a coat made of coonskins and talked to people only she could see when she came to town for supplies. “Ain’t no life in trees,” she’d say, dragging her grubby child up and down Main Street by his sleeve. “No, sir, it ain’t no life.”

Emil was worried, too. “I think you should have the baby in Yellow Falls,” he said on a blustery night in January as the wind rattled the windows. “It’s too dangerous here. Besides, I think you’ll need your mother. We can go back in March when the ice breaks up.”

“Him,” Eveline said, greatly relieved. “I see him in my dreams. He looks like you.”

“Poor child,” Emil said.

“
Handsome
child,” Eveline said.

Emil was building a crib and a changing table made out of the maple tree he cut down when he first learned she was pregnant back in September. Emil said maple trees were lucky, according to a myth from the old country.

Though Eveline wasn’t superstitious, she asked Emil to tell her the story. According to him, there once was a beautiful girl who lived with her family in the Black Forest. One late-fall night, while the girl’s family slept in the cabin, the moon awakened the girl in the bed she shared with her little sister, drawing her to his bluish light. The girl went to the front door, dressed in only her nightclothes and slippers, her limbs long and graceful in the doorway, her hair trailing down her back like red silk.

Little girl, late night
, the moon sang in a voice more lovely than any the girl had heard.
You belong with me
. The moon urged her outside, past the chickens and horses and outbuildings, farther and farther into the woods. Falling snow laid siege to her neck and face, but the girl didn’t feel the cold flakes on her skin until she’d been walking a long while and the moon disappeared behind the clouds, and she realized she was alone in the dark.

Mama
, she cried, for sense and fear took hold of her. She was too far away from the cabin now for the wind to carry her voice home. The girl huddled against the trunk of nearby tree for warmth and tried with all her heart to stay awake.

In the end, she couldn’t stay awake or keep herself warm in the cold and fell first into troubled sleep and then sleep eternal. When the moon came down to make her his bride, just before morning banished him out of the sky, he found a
small tree in the place the girl had been huddling. The tree had leaves as red as the dawn and sap as sweet as sugar.

“Why was she lucky?” Eveline asked Emil when he stopped talking.

“Because she became immortal,” Emil said.

Eveline pointed to the frame of the crib. “But you cut her down.”

That story was the only indication their lives wouldn’t keep ticking along with the quiet sureness of a clock through the winter. On a windy afternoon in February, two months before Eveline was due, Emil was out cutting wood, and Eveline was reading the English taxidermy manual again. At first, she attributed the feeling in her stomach, like the tightening of a belt, to the manual’s subject matter.

Here, then, rests the shell of the poor hawk, ready to receive from your judgment the size, the shape, the features, and expression it had ere death and your dissecting brought it to its present still and formless state. The cold hand of death stamps deep its mark upon the prostrate victim.

After the belt loosened, Eveline gathered her mittens, hat, and coat for a trip to the outhouse. Maybe the beans she’d eaten for breakfast were causing the pains, she reasoned, since she’d never been in labor before. When she thought of giving birth, she imagined a quick, grueling pain that ended with her holding her little boy an hour or two later.

Huxley, they’d decided. After Emil’s grandfather who died in the Black Forest during the war but not because of it. Hux.

In her most recent dreams, Hux had beautiful, saucer-shaped brown eyes and red cupid lips. He had Emil’s gentleness, his even heart.

Eveline walked to the outhouse through the snow and wind, the thrust of both at her back, thinking about the pain in her stomach, which had dulled to nothing as quickly as it had surged, and about what kind of parents she and Emil would be. As an only child, she had all the attention she desired from her parents, but not so much as to turn her into a Murray—four sisters from Yellow Falls who shared the same first word:
mine
.

Eveline didn’t worry about spoiling Hux in Evergreen because even the smallest comfort had to be earned here. If you were cold, you cut wood. If you were hungry, you made food. If you were lonely, you drew birds (and babies).

Eveline pried open the outhouse door, which had frozen shut since she was out there last. For light and ventilation, Emil had carved a half-moon and the North Star into the back wall of the outhouse, which he’d fashioned from a white pine killed by blister root. The growth rings were stained black and purple and patterned the wood slats like bruises.

The belt tightened around Eveline’s stomach again. Her legs buckled, and she thrust her hand through the half-moon because it was the only thing that would keep her from falling over. The pain radiated from her stomach to her lower back. When a burst of warm liquid soaked her underclothes, Eveline knew for the first time that what she was feeling wasn’t indigestion or taxidermy disgust.

If her mother had been with her, she would have rubbed peppermint oil on her lower back to numb the pain and lavender oil beneath her nose to calm her nerves. She would have told her about contractions and how to breathe through them and keep her body relaxed so that the contractions and the pain
they produced could pass through her as if through an open door. In the end, when nothing else soothed her, she would have sent Emil and Eveline’s father out to Harvey Small’s and put Eveline in the bathtub and let her scream herself hoarse. But her mother wasn’t with her and Eveline didn’t know the liquid between her legs meant her water had broken; she thought it was blood or part of the baby or both.

“Emil,”
she called, and the pain stopped as suddenly as it had begun.

Eveline ripped opened the outhouse door and stumbled out of it into the blowing wind and snow, latching on to the thick rope Emil had strung from the front porch of the cabin to the doorknob of the outhouse to make navigating easier during the winter. Eveline prayed she’d get back to the cabin before the next episode of pain—
Don’t fall, don’t fall
, she told herself—which was just when her ankle twisted and Tuna flew away from the red birdhouse and the white winter world went black.

Eveline woke to the sound of crying—a sound she assumed was coming from her, since her body hurt more than it ever had before. It took her a long moment to realize she was no longer outside, her cheek pressed against the snow, but that she was unclothed beneath the flannel sheet on the bed in the cabin, a metallic taste in her mouth. The sound was coming from Emil, who held a soiled blanket in his arms.

“He’s dead,” Eveline said, and Emil turned.

What Eveline felt now was worse than the burning between her legs and the unbridled zips of electricity radiating up and down her spine. If only she’d paid more attention to Hux during her pregnancy, recorded each of his stirrings in
her journal instead of drawing one-dimensional babies while Emil was away in the woods. Maybe Hux had been trying to tell her everything wasn’t all right, with his kicks and thrusts and flips.

In her dreams, Eveline had seen his sweet face again and again. When she woke, she’d patted her stomach when she should have said,
You are loved
.

Eveline covered her eyes with her hands, and then she uncovered them because she’d worried about only one of them dying in childbirth—her.

Of course Hux would live. He’d grow up strong and lean. He’d learn to climb trees and swim across rivers. He’d chase after wild horses with his friends like his father.

Except there weren’t any wild horses in northern Minnesota. Any friends.

Emil walked over to Eveline, his thick black eyelashes wet.

“Hux is tiny but fine,” he said, placing the soiled blanket, their boy, in her arms. “You’re the one we were waiting for.”

4

Spring brought forth birch leaves on silver branches and tender green buds up from the softening ground. It brought bloodroot and wood anemones, southwest winds and melting ice, and on an afternoon in late April, the week Hux should have been born according to the medical world, it brought Lulu Runk.