Evergreen (32 page)

“How do I get her to stop crying?” Naamah said with real alarm.

“I have no idea,” he said, draping a clean towel over Naamah and his niece, so the blood wouldn’t spook them. “Feed her? Rock her a little? Let me go get Gunther.”

“I’m afraid I’m going to hurt her,” Naamah said.

“You just need your husband,” Hux said, not thinking much about it then. Hux’s hand was at least twice the size of his niece’s foot. Anyone would be afraid of holding her the wrong way, of straining her neck—whatever Naamah was afraid of.

After Hux cut the umbilical cord, he went to get Gunther, who’d been shooting at bucks all day and finally got one in honor of his son. His future trapper.

“It’s a girl,” Hux said when he found him and the buck in the forest.

Gunther looked up from field dressing. Hux could tell he was deciding whether or not to be happy, because, in Gunther’s
view, you could decide things like that. Despite the buck and the fishing rod and the camouflage bib, he decided to be happy.

“I’ll buy her a pink tackle box, then,” he said, more tenderly than he’d ever said anything. “A goddamn pink tackle box.”

He dropped the knife he was holding and a flap of the buck’s soft white underbelly fur and started running through the woods toward Hux’s cabin, whooping and hollering.

When Hux reached the cabin, the door wide was open, and Gunther was inside holding his daughter up like a prize trout. He was kissing her cheeks and cooing to her.

“You’re the greatest little girl who ever lived,” he said. “I’m going to spoil you and then spoil you some more. Who says girls can’t fish? Look at those perfect hands.”

Naamah was still on the bottom bunk.

“Can I get you anything?” Hux said to her while Gunther held his daughter up to the light, which in his hands she didn’t shrink from.

“I’m so thirsty,” Naamah said, so Hux brought her a glass of water, which she drank down without stopping. He brought her another one.

“She stopped crying the moment he picked her up,” Naamah said.

“That’s just luck,” Hux said. To Gunther, he said, “Come see your wife.”

“My wood goddess!” Gunther said and brought the baby over to them. He’d wiped his daughter off with a damp towel and wrapped her up in a dry one. “I had a feeling today was the day. How are you doing? Why didn’t anyone come get me?”

“I’m all right,” Naamah said, cheering a little.

“That’s all that matters, then,” Gunther said. He tucked his daughter into the crook of his arm, where she fit perfectly. He gave her his pinkie finger to suck on.

Hux saw tears in his eyes, but unlike when they were kids Gunther didn’t wipe them away. A few drops landed on his daughter’s cheeks. He didn’t wipe those away either. “What do we call a girl as precious as you?” he said. “What name could ever do you justice?”

Naamah looked up at Gunther and their daughter as if she didn’t see how she fit with them. Hux wondered if her hesitance had something to do with their conversation earlier. Even though she’d asked him, he couldn’t help but feel like he’d poisoned her.

Naamah reached for the silver cross at the front of her neck, but instead of stroking it like she usually did, or cupping it for comfort, she pulled it until the chain broke.

“Racina,” she said.

31

When they’d recovered enough to make the trip, Gunther took Naamah and Racina to Yellow Falls to have them checked out by the doctor, who said they were banged up a little more than was usual but were fine. Naamah didn’t act like she was fine, though. If Gunther tried to go hunting, Naamah would beg him to stay. If he went to get another log from the woodpile, she’d run outside barefoot in the cold after him. If he had to go to the bathroom, she’d follow him in before he could shut the door.

“You’ve got to help me,” Gunther said to Hux when Racina was three weeks old. He’d slipped out of the cabin and crossed the river in a canoe while Phee sat with Naamah and Racina. The canoe told Hux something was wrong before Gunther did.

They were sitting at Hux’s kitchen table, waiting for the water to boil for coffee. Gunther looked as bad as he used to after a hard night at the tavern.

“I can’t rock both of them,” he said. “I’ve slept a total of two hours in the last two days. Three if you count when I fell asleep standing up.”

“Give it a little time,” Hux said, even though he’d been worried about Naamah ever since she broke that chain. “She’s still finding her footing.”

Gunther traced the letters he carved into the wood the last time Naamah wasn’t fine. He said something about getting formula in Yellow Falls, even though they’d planned on breastfeeding. Naamah had planned on it anyway.

“I hold that baby more than she does,” he said, which Hux could tell hurt him to say out loud. “You’d think it’d be the opposite. Her clamoring for Racina and me shrugging her off. Men aren’t even supposed to like babies. But women … all the women I’ve met know how to hold them right. Naamah holds Racina like she’s holding a porcupine.”

“I’ll go see her,” Hux said.

He went over to Gunther’s place that afternoon while Gunther drove Phee home and continued on to the general store. Hux had been so preoccupied with the birth of his niece he didn’t notice that fall was starting to let go of Evergreen. All along the river, the trees were turning red and brown and gold. Frost was settling on the rocks. On the river grass. On the outermost boughs of the evergreens. The air smelled like fire again, winter in the Northwoods. It seemed like such a long time ago now that Naamah was harvesting her corn and swimming in the river beneath a warm sun, her belly poking up like a half-moon.

Hux let himself into Gunther’s cabin. Phee had knit a tiny pair of red mittens for Racina and a hat the same color, which she’d left on the table.

“How’s my little niece?” Hux said. “My sister?”

Naamah was sitting on the couch with her feet tucked under her. She was staring at the window. The room smelled like spoiled milk. Spit up.

“Gunther sent you over here, didn’t he?” Naamah said.
Her eyes didn’t look right; even though she was sitting on the couch right in front of him, they were very far away. “Will you open the window? I can’t breathe.”

“Maybe just a crack,” Hux said, looking around for his niece. “It’s cold out.”

“She’s in the bedroom,” Naamah said. “Phee got her to sleep for me.”

“Can I see her?”

“Yes,” Naamah said. “Don’t wake her, though.”

Racina was asleep in the middle of the bed, swaddled in a worn yellow blanket with ducks all over it. It was his blanket, Naamah’s. He saw his name stitched into the corner of it, and though the blanket alone might have drawn him backward to Hopewell or Sister Cordelia or his mother making a hard choice on an April night, seeing that blanket wrapped around Racina made him feel like everything was going to be all right despite what Gunther had said. The blanket was Naamah’s dearest possession, and she’d given it to her daughter.

Hux bent over Racina, who was breathing quickly but easily. He kissed her warm cheek. He didn’t see how skin could be that soft, that perfect. His skin was somewhere between sandpaper and pine bark. Hux watched Racina sleep awhile. He loved that he got to see her take her first breath. Come into her life with so much grace. In a way, it made up for having to watch his mother and father go out of theirs without it.

Before Hux went back to the living room, Racina opened her eyes. The baby book said it was too early for her to smile, but she did it anyway.

“You were awake this whole time, weren’t you?” Hux said to her. “Already tricking your poor old uncle. Winning me over with those big brown eyes.”

Racina kicked her foot a little. She made a gurgling noise.

Hux put his finger to his lips. “Don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone.”

Hux waited until Racina closed her eyes before he went back out to sit with Naamah on the couch. He offered to get her something to eat, but Naamah said she wasn’t hungry.

She put her head in her hands. “Something’s wrong with me, Hux.”

Naamah was shaking, so Hux put a wool blanket around her shoulders. “You and Gunther are new parents. That’s a lot to take in.”

“I’m afraid I’m going to do something terrible,” Naamah said. “When babies cried at the orphanage, Sister Cordelia would pinch them until they learned how to be silent.”

“You’re not going to hurt her,” Hux said.

“How do you know that?”

“Because you love her,” Hux said.

Naamah picked up a pillow and hugged it close. “Sister Cordelia loved me.”

Even though Hux wanted to tell Naamah that wasn’t real love, his instinct was to stay quiet. Maybe she counted on Sister Cordelia for that. At least that.

“You want to know the last thing I said to her?” Naamah said.
“You’ll never have my love.”

Hux stayed very still, as if Naamah were an animal in the forest and a sudden movement might scare her away. “It was true, wasn’t it?” he said gently.

“I knew it would hurt her,” Naamah said. “That’s why I did it.”

Naamah tucked her feet deeper into the couch.

“I thought when I ran into the woods, she was going to follow me. That’s why I stayed there all night. That’s why I did a lot of things, I guess.”

Hux thought about the logging camp, the men.

“There was only one other girl at Hopewell who had a name as different as mine,” Naamah said. “Ethelina. She left like I did, a few years before me. I wonder if she stood all night in the trees, too. I wonder which direction she went in the morning.”

“Maybe you could find her,” Hux said.

Naamah looked toward the window, the trees. “Sometimes I wish I didn’t know how to fish and trap. Those other things in my blood now. Sometimes I wish I went south.”

Hux thought about the girl with the sock pushed down around her ankle.

“You’re here now,” he said. “That’s what’s important.”

“Gunther’s sick of me, that’s for sure,” Naamah said.

“You just need to ease up on him a little. Let him go to the bathroom by himself.”

“I’m sick of me, too.”

“Racina’s not going to be a baby forever,” Hux said. “Before you know it, she’ll be running around the woods. You, too.”

“Gunther wants to get her a pair of snowshoes,” Naamah said.

“You have to do that, too,” Hux said. “Think about the future.”

“Sometimes I think about what her first word will be.
Dad
, probably.
Daddy
. I was hoping it would be something like
forest
or
cedar
or
green
.”

“Why
cedar
?” Hux said.

“When I was at the logging camp, there was this old-growth cedar tree I used to sleep up in,” Naamah said. “It had great big branches in all the right places. When the wind blew at night, it felt like the tree was rocking me. It felt like the safest place in the world.”

Hux heard Gunther’s truck coming up the drive.

Naamah heard it, too. She got up to close the window.

“One day when I was up there, I woke up to a group of men yelling for me to come down so they could cut up my tree,” she said. “They said I couldn’t do anything about it. The sun had come up. The work orders were in.”

Naamah put a log in the woodstove.

Gunther was rattling his keys.

“They didn’t even look sorry,” Naamah said. She sat back down on the couch and hugged the pillow again. “They just started up their chain saws and cut down all that beauty.”

32

Naamah not only started to let Gunther out of her sight, she encouraged him to go. She said she was being foolish before and was done with it now. On the days Gunther went out hunting, she’d pack a lunch for him and kiss him like she did before Racina was born. She’d stand at the door with Racina in her arms, waving until he disappeared into the trees.

Neither Hux nor Gunther knew what she was doing to get her courage back until the first snow of the season came. That night, Gunther said he’d better go out and pull up the new traps he’d been trying out downriver and asked Hux to go with him.

“It’ll take half as much time that way,” he said. “Unless you have a date with Phee.”