Evergreen (33 page)

“Would you shut up already?” Hux said, getting up from the couch where he was sitting with Naamah. “I’ll go.”

Naamah was reading the
Yellow Falls Gazette
, which Gunther had brought back from town a few hours before. News
about the annual sale at the Hunting Emporium took up the front page. Camouflage was half off.

Gunther walked over to Naamah. “Aren’t you going to send me off with a kiss?”

“Kiss,” Naamah said, but she didn’t look up from the newspaper.

“I want a real one when I get back,” Gunther said, pretending to be offended. He was in a good mood. He finally thought things were getting back to normal.

“You should get some sleep,” Hux said to Naamah, and he and Gunther left.

The whole time they were out pulling up the traps, Hux felt like something was wrong, but he kept telling himself Racina was asleep in the bedroom and Naamah was awake on the couch; his worries were old ones. But Hux worked hard and fast in the snow anyway, which made Gunther work that way too, and they were back at the cabin in a few hours.

“Where is she?” Gunther said when he went into the bedroom to check on Racina and found an empty bed. He walked all over the cabin, opening and closing doors, overturning things along the way.

“Naamah!” he yelled, as if, despite Naamah’s sugary send-offs, he knew there was something to be worried about deep down.

“Your truck’s still here,” Hux said.

“Where would she have gone? It’s night and it’s snowing,” Gunther said.

Gunther started tossing pots and pans around in the kitchen as if his wife and his daughter were beneath them. After the pots and pans, he moved on to the container of oatmeal on the counter, then the cornmeal, which he emptied on the floor.

“Racina’s too little to be outside on a night like tonight.”
He stopped when he got to the flour. “She’s seven goddamn pounds. She’ll freeze.”

Gunther dumped the flour on the floor and an empty whiskey bottle tumbled out.

“What in hell is wrong with her?” he said, looking at the bottle.

Hux was looking at the
Gazette
, which lay open on the couch.

Ethelina Thompson, former Hopewell orphan, age 28, of Green River, Minnesota, passed away early yesterday morning surrounded by her family. Ethelina,
Ethie
to those who loved her most, is survived by her husband, Gerard Thompson of Green River, and her three children, Mary Sue, Mary Grace, and Mary Beth.

On the opposite page was a news story, a headline:

M
OTHER OF
T
HREE
H
ANGS
H
ERSELF FROM
B
ALCONY OF
R
IVERFRONT
H
OME

Hux read about the wash bucket Ethelina had stood barefoot on. The rope she’d cinched around her neck. He thought about how Naamah must have felt that rope around her neck, too, when she read the article with no one around. She must have felt the cold metal on her feet. She must have panicked when she read about how, before Ethelina turned over the wash bucket to stand on it, she’d been scrubbing herself with steel wool and bleach.

Hux didn’t think any direction could have been worse than the one Naamah chose when she left Sister Cordelia at fourteen, but he was wrong. Ethelina didn’t even choose a direction;
she’d stayed in Green River, a few miles from Hopewell, all this time.

“I think I know where she is,” Hux said.

“Where?” Gunther said.

“The Mosquito Net.”

“How would she know about that place?”

“She’s been there before,” Hux said with so much reluctance, so much sadness, he wasn’t sure he said it at all. “That time you came over to my cabin looking for her.”

Hux thought of the Paul Bunyan trapper, the way he’d ripped open Naamah’s green blouse as if he owned her. He thought of the trapper’s lapping-dog tongue, all the lapping-dog tongues—why Naamah needed them when she was unsure of herself.

Why she could never let herself be all right.

Gunther picked up the whiskey bottle. “Did you know about this, too?”

“No,” Hux said.

“I’m going to find my daughter first and kill you second anyway.”

Gunther put his coat back on. He grabbed the keys to his truck.

“I’m coming with you,” Hux said.

Gunther looked at him the way they did when they were boys. “Of course you are.”

Gunther drove fast but carefully through the snow until they got to the bridge that would take them across the river, and he lost his measure and just plain accelerated. When they passed the boat launch, Hux thought of the night he brought Naamah to Evergreen. He thought of her diving into the water, of the water pooling on the seat beneath her.

He and Gunther never made it inside the Mosquito Net.

When they pulled up, the truck’s headlights landed on a cedar tree and the little yellow bundle tucked into its crook. Both of them jumped out when they saw that the bundle was Racina. She was breathing very slowly when they got her down. Her cheek was frostbitten from being pressed against the snowy bark.

Gunther held her in his arms. “Keep swimming, my little fish.”

Hux drove them to Yellow Falls as fast as he could, but Gunther kept telling him to go faster. “She’s so cold,” he said, weeping just like he did when he found out Lulu had gotten caught up in that bear trap. “I should have kept her safe.”

When Hux pulled up to the hospital, he left the keys in the ignition, and he and Gunther ran with Racina through the snow, yelling for help. A doctor in a white lab coat met them at the sliding doors. His stethoscope swung like a pendulum. After Gunther explained what had happened as best as he could, the doctor took Racina from him.

“Get a security guard,” he said to a nurse.

A moment later, two guards dropped the cups of coffee they were holding and came running out. The doctor pointed to Gunther, who put his hands up in the air.

“Take care of her,” Gunther begged. “Make sure they take care of her, Hux.”

The guards pushed Gunther down to the ground and handcuffed him, while the doctor put a plastic mask over Racina’s face and strapped her little body to a stretcher. He cut the yellow blanket off her, slicing through years of history, and stuck a needle in her tiny arm. Racina cried and cried, and all Gunther could do was watch from the ground.

Hux followed Racina as far as they would let him. He waited by that green door two hours before someone told him
Racina was going to be all right. Before someone said she was a good little fighter. She had a lot of heart.

On his way to tell Gunther, who’d somehow convinced the guards to uncuff him and was already gone, Hux found a scrap of the yellow blanket on the floor. He picked it up and held the ducks against his face. He thought of Naamah’s story about her cedar tree, how, even though he didn’t hear her, she’d tried to tell him she was falling.

Gunther, Hux would soon learn, was already pulling up to the Mosquito Net. He was parking his truck, running toward the bar door, picturing Racina strapped to a stretcher, a needle in her arm, hearing her cry and cry, all the while yelling for Naamah to come out.

He was kicking his way through the plywood, through the heap of melting snow on the floor. He was looking hard at the roughneck men and the woman passed out in a pool of her own vomit they were laughing at.

Before Gunther could think, he was lifting Naamah up by her tangle of black hair, slinging her over his shoulder, and walking out the door. He was thinking about losing Racina as he was throwing her mother down in the snow.

As he was telling her not to come home.

33

Even when Hux offered Naamah his bunk bed, his porch, his side of the river entirely, she wouldn’t go back to Evergreen. She wouldn’t go back inside. She was living deep in the woods, if you could call what she was doing living, waiting for Racina to come home from the hospital, to be all right like Hux said she was.

During the day Hux would leave the hospital while Gunther was in with Racina, drive home on the back roads, and walk out to the woods. The first day he brought Naamah a pair of Phee’s boots, since she’d lost one of hers somewhere between the bar and Gunther throwing her down in the snow. He brought her a pair of his warmest gloves, a sleeping bag, and a plate piled high with chicken and vegetables he roasted on the woodstove for her, but Naamah wouldn’t touch any of it. The second day, Hux brought a thermos of coffee and a little container of cream, but Naamah wouldn’t touch that either. She just stood there in the forest, looking at the canopy of green. A week of this, and her foot didn’t even look like a foot anymore—it was purple and swollen and alien.

“At least put the boot on,” he said, thinking of their mother’s feet right before she died. “Losing your foot isn’t going to make any of this better.”

“I’m not going to put it on,” Naamah said.

Hux set down the trash bag he was holding. He and Naamah were standing close to each other. So close Hux saw the trees reflected in her eyes. He’d been so careful of her for so long, patching her together the best he knew how, and it had gotten them nowhere. Hux wasn’t the one who’d left Racina in the crook of a tree, but he knew the blame belonged to him, too. He didn’t realize how much he’d been using her to patch himself together.

“You’re going to put that boot on,” he said, and with a great thrust forward that surprised him as much as it surprised her, he tackled her to the ground.

Hux grabbed her swollen foot and jammed the boot on it. When it wouldn’t fit all the way, he twisted the boot like a screw. When it still wouldn’t go on right, he took out his pocketknife, cut the leather tongue out, and forced her black-and-blue toes into the heel.

Naamah cried out, and Hux finally let go of the boot. He was breathing hard. Her foot was in his hand. “You made a mistake. People make them, Naamah.”

“Not like this they don’t,” Naamah said.

Hux let go of her foot and lay back in the snow.

Racina was in the hospital with frostbite, pneumonia, and a list of other things he didn’t understand written on her chart. Gunther was worrying over her with everything he had, bullying doctors one minute and begging them to take extraspecial care of Racina the next. Naamah was going to lose her foot if she kept this up. Everything was such a mess, and, even though he wanted to more than anything, Hux didn’t know how to clean it up.

“I’m so sorry,” he said.

“I’m sorry, too,” Naamah said.

After a while, she put the boot on and lay back with him. The two of them lay shoulder to shoulder in the snow, looking up at the trees above them, the branches swaying in the wind. The canopy was so thick they couldn’t see the sky; it made the light look green.

“I’m so far away from who I want to be,” Naamah said.

“Me, too,” Hux said.

He leaned into her gently, as if the wind were blowing him there. He thought of the girl with the knee sock around her ankle. All that had happened to her. All that would.

“Come home with me,” he said, reaching for her hand.

“I can’t,” she said, but she let him have it.

“Why?”

“Do you remember the first day we chopped wood together?” Naamah said. “I had blood blisters all over my hands and you told me I could have stopped?”

“I used all the bandages I had to patch you up,” Hux said.

“That’s the thing,” Naamah said. “They’re all gone now, and I’ve still got sores.”

“What are you saying?” Hux said, even though he knew in his heart what was coming, what had been coming a long time now.

Naamah’s eyes were gray and green and clear.

“I’m saying mercy,” she said, and let go of his hand.

Hux wondered what their mother would have done if she were here. Would she stop Naamah? Would she let her go? Hux got up and walked over to the trash bag he’d brought with him. He riffled through it until he found what he was looking for.

“This was Lulu’s before it belonged to our mother,” he said,
laying the coonskin coat across Naamah’s lap. All these years later, and dust still rose up from it. “The story is whoever wears it wears strength on her shoulders. Whoever wears it will be all right. Both of them would want you to have it.”

Naamah ran her fingers along the back of it where the most fur was missing. “I know this coat.”

“How?” Hux said.

“The day I left Hopewell Sister Cordelia took us to a festival in Green River,” Naamah said. “We sang a song in front of everyone, and when we were done, a woman wearing this coat blocked my way. She was really sick. She knew my life at Hopewell wasn’t a good one, and she asked me to forgive her for that. I figured she gave up a child once and was sorry about it and just wanted someone to hear her say so. It was her, wasn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” Hux said, trying to work through his memory so he could see what she was seeing, feel what she was feeling. How many old coonskin coats could there be?

“All this time I’ve been picturing her walking through grapevines.”

“There was this one day she took the truck in the morning without telling anyone and didn’t return until late that night,” Hux said. “My dad and I borrowed Reddy’s truck and drove everywhere we could think of, but we couldn’t find her. When she finally came home she wouldn’t tell us where she went, but her trip made her more peaceful. She stopped crying out in her sleep. She stopped trying not to die.”