Evergreen (30 page)

“I’ll help you,” he said.

Hux did what he could the next few weeks. He brought over warm cups of chicken broth, which Naamah gulped down and which came back up just as quickly until she learned how to sip. He sat with her. Phee made tea from ground ginger and raspberry leaves to ease her queasiness. Both she and Hux agreed not to say anything to Gunther until Naamah did.

Gunther may have been a sharpshooter in the forest, but at home his farsightedness didn’t do him any favors. Gunther figured it was a good sign to see Naamah sitting in her blanket nest when he came in from hunting. He thought she was finally relaxing into their life together, finally letting Evergreen nourish her like it nourished him.

He started calling her his little bird.

As predictable as he was, his reaction when he found out Naamah was pregnant surprised Hux. Hux was sitting with Naamah when Gunther came in from hunting that day.

“I think it’s about time for the breakup,” Gunther said, and out of nowhere Naamah threw up. Gunther looked to Hux. “What did I say wrong? It happens every year. The ice melts. The green comes out. The flies start biting.”

“She ate something bad,” Hux said.

“No, I didn’t,” Naamah said when she stopped heaving. “I’m pregnant.”

Gunther stepped forward. “You’re what?”

He seemed like he was doing the same thing Hux had done when he first found out: deciding whether or not this would drown Naamah or bring her up to the surface.

Naamah was standing now, yellow vomit stuck to her shirt. She was looking out the window at the forest as if she might try to walk through the glass to get there.

Before she could move, Gunther blocked her way.

“Do you think it’s a boy? Because I could teach him to hunt and trap and fish. He could run the business with me. Little hands are good for making lures.”

“He won’t come out walking,” Naamah said. “He won’t understand about the forest.”

“I knew it—he’s a he.”

A smile spread across Gunther’s face. A wide, amazingly crooked one.

Gunther set down his rifle. With a great swoop downward he picked Naamah up and spun her around and around the cabin. When he finally set her down, her face was drained of its color, but she looked relieved, which seemed as good as happy.

Each week that spring after the ice on the river broke up, Naamah would sit on either hers or Hux’s porch studying that little booklet about pregnancy, which seemed to help her connect what she couldn’t connect with her hands. She memorized the chronology of what was happening inside her and started to measure everything according to weeks.

When she was at Hux’s, she would read parts of the booklet out loud. Hux knew that at week eight the baby was starting to grow fingers and at week ten tiny fingernails. He knew about the fine dark hair that covered the baby by fourteen weeks and the gooey protective coating that came after that, which the book compared to a layer of cream cheese. He didn’t want to know what the book said about birth.

“It’ll fall out, won’t it?” Hux said to Naamah that day about the hair.

“I don’t know—the book doesn’t say,” Naamah said.

“I guess if it doesn’t fall out you could shave it,” Hux said.

“You can’t shave a baby, can you?” Naamah said, and they both laughed.

By May, the weather had turned so nice Naamah stopped putting a blanket over her belly when she rocked on Hux’s porch. Open windows suited her. Blooming flowers. Toothy weeds. She seemed to be lengthening right along with the days, the greenery.

Naamah helped Hux start his garden again, and she started one for her and Gunther again, too. Even though the crows always attacked whatever corn was planted in Evergreen, Naamah planted a few rows of it anyway. She said corn was an excuse to eat butter. She liked how the kernels left imprints, like little teeth, in the softened sticks. She started tomatoes and onions and carrots, too—anything and everything, so long as she could put her hands in the warm black earth. Always, she had dirt under her fingernails and garden detritus in her hair. Like their mother used to, Naamah would pick bouquets of wildflowers up in the oxeye meadow and put them in Mason jars on both sides of the river.

Whatever had sent Naamah to places like the logging camp and the Mosquito Net seemed like it was finally gone. Gunther
thought so, too. He knew about the cream cheese stuff and the hair. In the evenings, he’d sit with her on their porch even though he hated to sit still. He used to say sitting made his legs so bored he wanted to shoot them just to feel something. Now he said he liked how the book compared the baby to a minnow.

At week twenty, Naamah felt the baby move for the first time.

The next day she paddled across the river and walked up to Hux’s cabin. She was wearing Phee’s long yellow dress and a fancy green hat with feathers all over it. Hux was working at preserving a muskrat for a customer in Yellow Falls, who kept changing his mind about what kind of mount he wanted. He was glad to see her, glad for the break.

“I need you to take me to Hopewell,” she said from the other side of the screened door, which a few moths clung to. Her long hair was twirled up under the hat somehow, and for the first time Hux saw how delicate her neck was.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Hux said.

“Then I’ll walk,” Naamah said. “It’s not that far.”

“Does Gunther know about this?”

“He wouldn’t understand,” Naamah said. “I wouldn’t want him to have to.”

Hux stepped out onto the porch. He wanted to do what was right, but he didn’t know what that was. Naamah was pregnant, and he couldn’t see any good coming from her and Sister Cordelia sitting down together in a room. He could see Sister Cordelia hurting her all over again without even laying a finger on her. On the other hand, maybe it was what she needed to get on with things and have this baby. This life.

“I feel like I shouldn’t take you,” he said. He motioned to her hat. “You don’t have a gun or anything under there?”

“It isn’t that kind of trip,” Naamah said.

“You know what you’re doing?”

Naamah put a hand on his forearm. “No, but I’m sure of it.”

So Hux drove his sister to Green River.

On the way they listened to the radio, which came in more and more clearly the farther away from Evergreen they got. The river and hills gave way to alfalfa and potato fields, blanketing the land beneath them with purple and white flowers. Hux and Naamah rolled down their windows at the same time—he liked when that happened, these little synchronicities. It made him feel close to her. The air smelled sweet and rich and young. Yellow buttercups were growing up alongside the road.

“You think my corn is going to make it to harvest?” Naamah said.

She was leaning toward her open window, looking at herself in the side mirror, but not in the way Leah used to when she was putting on makeup on their way to Yellow Falls or doing something else to doll herself up. Naamah was looking at herself with real wonder.

“The crows are pretty persistent,” Hux said.

“Gunther doesn’t think it will make it either,” Naamah said. “He said he remembers our mother making a scarecrow one year. It’s still strange to say that—our mother. To think of her living somewhere besides in my dreams. He said the crows got the corn anyway.”

“I don’t remember that. Gunther’s a little older than me, though.”

Naamah smiled. “A little wiser, he says.”

“He’s full of it. He’s always been full of it.”

“He says that, too.”

The two of them stopped talking when old farmhouses started to crop up alongside the road instead of just the buttercups, the crops. They were getting close to Green River, to
Hopewell. Naamah started to fidget a little in her seat, which made Hux doubt his decision to bring her here. If she didn’t think it was bad for the baby, he would have offered Naamah some whiskey to calm her down, to calm both of them down. All he had was one of the pieces of bubble gum he’d bought at the general store during the winter.

“You sure you don’t want half?” Naamah said, unwrapping it.

“I got it for you,” Hux said. “I just forgot about it.”

Naamah put the piece of bubble gum in her mouth and chewed it vigorously while Hux drove the rest of the way to Hopewell. He figured she’d want to go inside, and he was preparing himself to insist on going in with her. He was preparing the steel toe of his boot in case Sister Cordelia did anything to hurt Naamah. If she talked about the baby as a sin in the eyes of the Lord. Or the Lord at all, though that seemed inevitable. Even though it was summer now, Hux didn’t want to see those girls huddled together outside. He didn’t want to see Sister Cordelia’s bald head. Her oversize cross. Her moles. And yet he wanted to see her get what she deserved, even if he didn’t know what that was.

Naamah swallowed the gum the moment Hux pulled up to the iron gates, as if chewing it in the presence of the Hopewell sign would have made her guilty somehow. The gates were closed but not locked. Hux asked her if she wanted him to park there or open them and drive up to the front door, which was his way of asking her if she was sure being here was what she really wanted, what she really needed.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do yet,” she said, so Hux parked the truck in front of the gates. “I always imagined coming here and burning this place down. Hurting her for hurting me. For making me ugly.”

“You’re not ugly,” Hux said.

“Sometimes I am,” Naamah said.

When Hux turned off the engine, Naamah slid out of the truck as quickly as she had the night he brought her home and she disappeared into the river. This time, she didn’t disappear. She walked right up to the iron gates and pressed her face against them. The hem of Phee’s yellow sundress blew in the wind. A green feather came free from Naamah’s hat, floated into the cab of the truck, and landed on the passenger seat.

Naamah was standing in front of those gates as though her feet were rooted all the way to the center of the earth. He wondered if that hat was like Lulu’s coonskin coat.

Lulu would have loved Naamah. She’d have made a pair of trousers for her that would have lasted a lifetime. She’d have admired Naamah’s persevering spirit, even though she wouldn’t have said it that way. Her courage. Which Hux never really possessed.

When she was still alive and Hux broke his arm following Gunther up a tree, Lulu carried Hux to her couch as if his legs were injured. “I want to tell you something about yourself,” she’d said. “You got hurt because you’re too careful. I saw you hesitate on that branch. That’s when you fell down. What were you thinking?”

“How I didn’t want to fall down,” Hux had said.

Lulu laughed a little. Hux loved Lulu like a second mother. He loved her man pants and her thick plaid lumberjack shirts. He loved that mysterious bond between her and his mother, how his mother would come in from an afternoon with her saying she suddenly felt like baking a pie or eating ice cream. Something decadent. Sometimes, when she didn’t have the ingredients for a pie and the trip to Yellow Falls was too daunting, she’d dip her fingers into the sugar container. Sometimes she’d let Hux dip his fingers in, too.

“Gunther’s going to fall off a cliff one day,” Lulu said. “I think we all know that. He’ll holler the whole way down because he won’t have seen it coming.”

“I don’t want to fall off a cliff,” Hux said.

“You’re like your mother,” Lulu said. “She fell down hard once, and she never climbed high enough to do it again.”

“But she loves you more than anything,” Hux said.

Lulu smiled her crooked smile. “I love her that way, too.”

Hux watched Naamah at the gate, thinking of Lulu. Naamah was looking up at the orphanage with an expression Hux could only guess at because her back was to him. She stood that way for a long time. Hux thought he saw someone pass by the front windows on the second floor of the orphanage. He thought he saw Sister Cordelia’s black robe.

He thought of what Sister Cordelia had told him—
I love her still
.

After a while, Naamah let go of the gates. When she came back to the truck, there was rust on her face.

“I’m ready to go now,” she said.

Hux tucked the green feather into his pocket. Maybe a little strength would rub off on him, too. Maybe like the feather, they were supposed to float for a while. Land softly. Hux decided to drive the other way out of Green River, through the center of town. He and Naamah could make wishes on a handful of old change that was rolling around on the mats.

Before he started the truck and steered it away from the orphanage for what he hoped would be the last time, he pointed to the gravel.

“You dropped your hat. Should I get it for you?”

Naamah looked at herself in the side mirror. She touched the front of her sunny-yellow dress. “It isn’t mine anymore.”

29

Everyone made it through the summer admirably, even the corn. The thick green stalks were as tall as Naamah by August. The ears golden as the sun. Before they harvested it, Hux took a picture of Naamah with her crop. The doctor in Yellow Falls had said the last few months of her pregnancy would be uncomfortable with all that extra weight bearing down on her. Right then, though, between the rows of sweet corn, Naamah looked round but light. She looked proud of herself.