Evergreen (35 page)

“It’s something your grandmother used to do when this was a piece of plywood.”

“For decoration?” Racina said.

“Yes,” Uncle Hux said.

“Is that why Aunt Leah collects all those tiny teacups?” Racina said, looking at the shelf above her uncle’s bed, which was full of them. The only miniature thing she owned was the white ceramic bird that had appeared on her windowsill one morning when she was six years old and she returned from a two-week stay at the hospital in Green River.

“I have no idea,” Uncle Hux said. “I just try not to break them.”

“When will she be back?” Racina said.

“A few more weeks still. Her sister’s having the kind of wedding that lasts a lot longer than one day. Your aunt’s ready to send her on her honeymoon.”

“I don’t think I want to get married,” Racina said.

“It’s nice being married,” Uncle Hux said. “Especially to your aunt.”

Racina loved the story of how Aunt Leah came to be her aunt. Whenever she stayed over on one of the bunk beds, she asked them to tell it. Her favorite part was about how Uncle Hux realized he’d made a terrible mistake letting her leave Evergreen and in the middle of the night got in his truck and drove hundreds of miles. Racina loved hearing about how he promised to build her a bridge across the river if she didn’t want to get her feet wet.

“Dad probably wouldn’t let me get married anyway,” Racina said, wondering if a boy would ever want to build a bridge for her.

“Your dad loves you so much it makes him crazy sometimes,” Uncle Hux said.

“Sometimes?” Racina said.

Uncle Hux smiled. “That may have been generous.”

“He won’t even let me sweep.”

“I won’t either. I have a much more important job for you. A museum in Wisconsin asked me to bring a badger back to life for an exhibit. I thought you could help.”

“Do you really need my help?” Racina said. Sometimes she had the feeling that people weren’t always telling her the full truth, maybe because she knew she wasn’t always telling them the full truth. “Because I want to earn those boots.”

“I need your little hands,” Uncle Hux said. “Your artistic sense. Right now his fur is so bleached he’s the color of an old bone. He’s missing an eye, too.”

Racina sat at the kitchen table while Uncle Hux put a kettle on the woodstove. He said he needed to sterilize his tools and drink some coffee before he got started. He had to mix some paint, too, which she could help with. The only time he ever worked inside was when Aunt Leah was gone, because the only animals she wanted on the table were the ones that ended up on her plate, and she wasn’t even sure about that anymore.

“You want some of that tea your dad packed you with?” Uncle Hux said when the kettle whistled. He opened the tin of sugar and got out a spoon.

“I’ll have coffee actually,” Racina said.

“Your dad wouldn’t like that.”

“He wouldn’t have to know,” Racina said.

When it was done brewing, Uncle Hux poured a little in
a cup for her and added some cream and a teaspoon of sugar. “One of these days you’re going to get me in trouble.”

“You and Phee are the only ones who let me do things,” Racina said. She puckered her lips when she tasted her coffee. “It’s so sweet.”

“People always say that, but they get used to it,” Uncle Hux said.

He looked out the window above the sink for a minute, as if something more than a raspberry bush stood in front of it. Her dad and Phee did that sometimes, too. Racina wondered if all adults did that or just the ones in Evergreen.

“I’m used to it now,” Racina said, unpuckering.

Uncle Hux went into his closet and came back with a cardboard box of fake glass eyes for Racina to look through. Then he went and got the badger from the shed and set the small museum crate on the table. Racina’s dad said that before she was born, Uncle Hux used to preserve animals for hunters who wanted heads on their walls. When she asked him why he stopped, her dad said Uncle Hux got soft. They all did. Her dad used to be a trapper. Now he mostly made fishing rods and sold them to people who didn’t know how to fish.

“They look like marbles,” Racina said about the eyes.

“Marbles would be a lot cheaper,” Uncle Hux said. “These are custom eyes. A man in Canada makes each one of them by hand. No two are exactly alike, just like in life.”

Racina held up a blue eye that looked just like river ice. “This one’s pretty.”

“The museum will probably want brown ones,” Uncle Hux said.

“Why?” Racina said.

“Because they want the badger to look real.”

“By using fake eyes?” Racina said.

Before he uncrated the badger, Uncle Hux put on a pair of
plastic gloves. He told her not to touch the badger’s fur because a lot of old taxidermists used to preserve with arsenic, which was a poison. A lot of them didn’t know what they were doing either, he said, which was why this guy had seams all over the place. Each person who’d worked on him had tried to cover up the previous person’s mistakes but had ended up making his own.

“How will you fix him?” Racina said.

“I don’t know yet,” Uncle Hux said. “That’s what the coffee’s for.”

The two of them sat together at the table with the box of eyes and the badger between them, drinking their coffee. Hux asked her how her studying was going, which she said was better for her than it was for her dad. Her dad didn’t understand the kind of math that was in her book, and even though he said he’d never once had to divide fractions in his life he stayed up all night until he figured out how to do it.

“He’s one of the most stubborn people I’ve ever met,” Uncle Hux said.

“You should see him around my French book.”

“We never had to learn another language when we were your age. We didn’t have to go in and take those tests you take either. Your dad learned what to do by trying it, and I learned what not to do by watching him. I bet he went up every tree within a mile of here.”

Racina liked to imagine Uncle Hux and her dad playing in Evergreen as kids, climbing trees and jumping in the river and running until they couldn’t run anymore.

She set her coffee cup down. “Uncle Hux?”

“You don’t have to drink it if you don’t like it,” he said.

“If I ask you something, will you tell me the truth?” Racina said.

“I’ll try,” Uncle Hux said.

Racina swept her dark hair away from her face and touched her cheek, her scar, which looked almost exactly like the leaf of a pitcher plant. The edges of the scar formed the shape of a trumpet. Inside, the skin was marbled with tiny veins. More than her sickness, which made the skin underneath her eyes red most of the time and kept her smaller and thinner than other girls her age, her scar was what made people stare at her.

“How did I get this?” she said.

Uncle Hux let go of his coffee. His face didn’t look soft like it usually did. His beard either. He looked worried or sad or both maybe. “What does your dad say?”

“He says it’s a birthmark,” Racina said.

“That seems right,” Uncle Hux said.

“I’m almost eleven,” she said, glaring at him. “I know the difference between a birthmark and a scar.”

Uncle Hux looked at the badger as if the answer were somewhere in that crate. If he didn’t tell her about the scar, she didn’t know who would. Uncle Hux wasn’t built for lying. At least that’s what her dad had said when the three of them were on their way to Yellow Falls and her dad stopped to put up
NO TRESPASSING
signs on public land.

“I know it has something to do with my mother,” Racina said. “I saw it in my medical file once before dad took it out. I know I was in the snow.”

Racina knew other things, too. She knew she was three weeks old the first time she went to the hospital, and she knew her mother never came to visit her.

Uncle Hux looked at her as if he were deciding something important and needed her face to do it. He’d never looked at her scar with anything other than love, and because of that she didn’t know what his expression meant; right then, his eyes looked like they were holding on to all the feelings in the
world. After a while, he took off his gloves and went into the closet, where he stayed so long Racina wondered if he was ever going to come back.

When he finally did, he said, “I don’t think I can tell you what you want to know.”

“Why?” Racina said.

“Because your dad wouldn’t want me to.” Uncle Hux pushed a little cedar box in her direction. “This is the best I can do until you talk to him.”

Racina reached for the box, which had a flower on the front of it.

“It’s yours now,” Uncle Hux said.

Racina lifted the top off the box and looked inside, expecting to find one of Uncle Hux’s wood carvings or a present Aunt Leah had picked out for her in one of the stores in Yellow Falls. What Racina found instead were photographs.

“That’s a picture of your mother with her corn,” Uncle Hux said, moving his chair so he was next to her. “She’s the only one of us who could grow it without the crows getting it.”

Racina looked at her mother, who was wearing overalls and a white T-shirt in the picture. Her feet were bare. Her toes were buried in the dirt. The corn was all around her. Racina had only ever seen one other picture of her mother—the day she and her dad were married—and her mother looked scared in that one.

“That’s you in her belly,” Uncle Hux said.

“It is?” Racina said. She touched the picture before she remembered it was bad for them. Her mother was holding her stomach with one hand and holding the corn back with the other. She looked so pretty. Her dark hair went all the way down to her waist like Racina wanted hers to do. She was smiling the way her dad did when he was in a really good mood.

“She was very happy that day,” Uncle Hux said. “We all were.”

In another picture, Uncle Hux had his arm around her mother—his sister—and in another one her dad was kissing an ear of corn. The last picture was the one she loved the most. In that one, her dad was kneeling in front of her mother with his hands on her waist and his lips on her stomach. Her dad had told Racina he thought she was going to be a boy before she was born. He even said he thought that was what he wanted. But when he saw her for the first time, he said he wouldn’t have traded her for all the boys in the world.

Racina knew her mother left Evergreen when she was a baby, and she knew it wasn’t because of anything she did—at least that’s what her dad used to say when she was little and asked about her mother. Her dad said her mother grew up in the orphanage in Green River. He said she had a very hard life, which made her sick, and she had to go away to get better.

“Why didn’t he ever marry anyone else?” Racina said.

“It takes your dad a long time to figure out how to let go of things,” Uncle Hux said. “It takes me a long time, too.”

Racina looked at the picture again. “I can’t tell what color her eyes were.”

“They’re gray with just a little green in them,” Uncle Hux said. He sifted through the box of glass eyes and put one of them in her hand. “This one’s pretty close.”

Racina held the eye up to the light. The gray in it made her think of the stones by the river, which she liked to sit on when the sun was shining because they made her warm. The streaks of green running through the gray made her think of the river grass and how, when she was little and the wind blew, the grass seemed like it was waving to her.

“Do you think you can love someone you never really knew?” she said.

“Yes,” Uncle Hux said. He put his arm around her the way he put it around her mother all those years ago in the corn. “I think they can love you, too.”

After her dad picked her up and they crossed the river and walked up the bank to their cabin, Racina decided to take a nap. Her dad asked if she wanted him to tuck her in, but she said she was fine. All she wanted to do was sleep a little. Cleaning was hard work.

“How about I make you some of those noodles you like for dinner?” her dad said.

Usually, Racina liked to help with the noodles because her dad let her make a little hill of flour and a well and crack an egg into it. Usually, she savored each noodle she twirled onto her fork. “I don’t like them that much.”

“Since when?” he said.

“Today,” Racina said, thinking of the pictures of her mother in the corn and wishing her dad had been the one to give them to her.

“You sure you’re all right? You don’t sound like you.”

“Who else would I be?” Racina said, but she meant if her mother had stayed in Evergreen. If her eyes were gray with a little green in them, too.

When her dad finally stopped staring at her and began measuring out flour for the noodles, Racina went into her room and closed her door. When she heard the radio go on and the familiar clang of pots and pans start up, she lifted the corner of her mattress and moved her hand around until she felt the folder she was looking for. Even though it was just she and her dad in the cabin and he didn’t go through her belongings, or at least she didn’t think he did, when she first started putting things in the folder she wrote
Property of Racina
on the front and beneath that
Please Keep Out
.

Racina took the cedar box Uncle Hux had given her out
of the bag that held her medicine. Out of that she took the photographs of her mother in the corn and put them into the folder along with the little book about having a baby Phee had given her, the scrap of her baby blanket, which was supposed to have belonged to her mother first, and the tarnished cross she found on the floor at Uncle Hux’s when she was four or five and would make forts under the bottom bunk bed. She pretended the cross belonged to her mother, since the orphanage in Green River used to be a religious one when she lived there. Uncle Hux said that had all changed a few years ago when the head nun died.

Sometimes Racina would rub the cross like a crystal ball and see her mother walking through a meadow like the one on the other side of the river. Other times she’d see her catching a fish with her bare hand like Uncle Hux said she did once.

Today, Racina looked at the picture of her dad and her mother in the corn together. She didn’t want to say so in front of Uncle Hux, but she was worried about her dad, and even though it didn’t make sense to her, she was mad at him at the same time. She’d heard him and Uncle Hux talking outside by the fire pit last week. Uncle Hux had told her dad he’d watch Racina if he wanted to go to town like he used to before she was born. If her dad wanted to spin a woman around a dance floor for a few hours. Eat some dinner.