Stony River (56 page)

Willy, watching her face shrewdly, frowned. “All right, I get the picture.” He dropped his hand. “I can see you have no illusions of me. But I hope in time you’ll come to regard me as highly as I do you.”

She wanted to tell him she already did. Instead, all she could say was, very troubled: “Perhaps you have illusions of me.”

“If I do, I hope to keep them,” he said lightly. “Never mind, Sevana. Keep your heart, but we’ll still be friends, won’t we?”

“Oh yes, Willy!” she cried.

They turned back for her apartment, where Willy bid her goodnight at the door. He seemed to be in a bad humor although he was trying not to show it. He pulled away very fast in his car.

Still surprised at the direction the evening had taken, Sevana watched the headlights swing away from the balcony with a feeling of confusion she couldn’t sort through.

Miles to the west, Joel had also gone to the midweek service. Sunday he’d been out with the sheep, but tonight they were shut in the barn with their hay and grain, and he could go to town. The ice-cold stars flashed above the spartan summits as he hiked down the trail in a few inches of snow. He could name many of the constellations. They were in perfect order, occupying the sky in the same patterns they had for centuries. He was the one who had been out of sync. He had railed against the order of the universe, had wanted to rearrange the scheme of things for his own purposes. And even now, the pain of what he had been honor-bound to give up was real and deep.

And yet order and symmetry were coming back into his life, and he was not such a fool to not know why. It was because of Sevana, who had listened to all his dilemmas and reached out to him in unspoken sympathy. Sevana, with her midnight eyes, staring toward the mountains and into her own dreams. Sevana, with an innocent, intuitive wisdom, off to find the meaning of life, when he suspected deep down she knew it already. All summer he could have been finding out what lay behind those eyes the color of alpine gentian, but he’d been too wrapped up in himself. Yet now that she was gone, it was queer how often he was thinking about her.

Yes, it was queer, but she had done what he had not believed possible—for with her clear, blue-mirrored gaze, she had drawn him until he had begun to know he could get over Chantal after all. It was at the wilderness this radical thought had first occurred to him, and he’d hoped to pursue it when he returned home—but she had left before he had the chance. He’d wanted to sound her out the last unplanned night at his cabin, had debated it in himself; but it seemed selfish to say anything when she was leaving to pursue her dreams. Yes, her precipitate departure had caught him by surprise, while he was still wondering if and what to say.

He wasn’t sure how she felt about him, but he intended to find out. Her letters, he thought, were promising, for she wrote as one pouring out her heart. He would go to Lethbridge—had already written he was coming. And if she was agreeable to the idea, he would take her out on a real date where she was the honored object of his attention, not merely a confidante concerning his other sordid affairs. And if she, too, felt the bond that seemed to exist between them even without acknowledgment—the thought of her up there with him during the long winter evenings with a cedar fire crackling in the stove, almost took his breath away.

Everyone welcomed him with their customary goodwill at church. He stayed longer than his habit, relaxing in the friendliness around him. Never quite himself in groups, tonight he felt a magnamity toward all mankind—reborn, somehow—done fighting, done despairing, done entertaining thoughts he should not entertain. It was in a light mood almost unfamiliar to him that he went to the post office to get his mail, hoping for another letter from Sevana. But the letter he found was so unsought for, he tore it open and read it there in the dimly lit lobby of the cement-block building. It was from his father—who had not written him one letter in his life.

Driving toward home, no longer light of heart but deeply distraught and pressured, he turned away from the river in a last-minute decision and drove down to Lakeshore Lodge. He didn’t feel like negotiating the convoluted turns of the canyon just then. He wanted a place to sit still and regroup his thoughts. He would get a cup of coffee and see if he could think things through.

As he swung into the parking lot, his headlights swept across a lone woman in a long coat that blended with the night, unloading a bag from her car. She turned her head of long, curled tresses, also the color of the night—and he was out of the truck and hurrying toward her. “Chantal!” Already he was holding her protectively, as only came naturally to him. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m on my way to see you,” she said, drawing back to look up at him with pleasure and some other emotion he couldn’t define. “But I didn’t want to hike up in the dark, so I got a room to wait for morning. If you lived in a normal place like everyone else, I could have driven there tonight,” she added reproachfully, her voice so low and smooth it was almost a purr.

“I know,” he said apologetically. “I’m afraid I’ve never been much good at being normal. But Chantal—why are you here when we—when we decided—” He couldn’t continue.

“Joel,” she said seriously. “Take a deep breath and listen.” Her face wore a queer look of agitated expectancy in the caramel glow coming from the dining room windows. “I tried my best, but—I couldn’t do it. I’ve left him. This summer, while you were up in the high country. I moved back to Vancouver—I bought a house on the Bay. I didn’t want to tell you until everything was settled. And now it is. You remember when you said we should get married, and I didn’t know how to answer? I’ve been reliving that moment every day since we said goodbye. And if it’s still what you want…ask me again. This time I know what to say.”

And while he stood silent, too surprised to respond, she wrapped her arms around his coat. “It’s yes, Joel,” she whispered. “Forever, yes.”

CHAPTER 38

In the dreary overcast that held no memory of last night’s open skies, Sevana walked with lagging steps down the outdoor stairway, reluctant to face Willy after their disagreement of the previous evening. But he greeted her on the sidewalk naturally, with no sign of brooding. She was glad he hadn’t taken her rebuff to heart. Still, she made an extra effort to be nice to him that day, and looked for ways to please him.

Inwardly she questioned her reticence to move their relationship to a deeper level. Wasn’t it irrational to keep holding onto an unlikely hope, at the expense of something definite and immediate she could have here with him? They were excellently suited in interests and talents. He was just what she was looking for, wasn’t he? She found her eyes following him as she considered it. But the thought of Joel held her back.

Returning from lunch, she discovered a tiny package for her in the shop mail with no return address. Suspensefully she perched behind the counter and opened the brown wrapping. Out of it fell a wooden lamb, carved and polished—and with it, a piece of notebook paper folded up small. She laughed aloud.

Willy came out of the back room at the sound, and smiled at her dancing eyes. “What’s funny?”

“Look!” She held up the lamb.

“Who sent you that?”

“Joel. He’s the shepherd I told you about. He carved it.”

Willy took it from her and inspected it briefly, but was more interested in her face. “He’s pretty good,” he said casually, handing it back.

She set the statuette on the counter where it stood perfectly balanced. “Look, Willy!” Her eyes reflected a deepfelt delight. “It seems to be frolicking, just like the lambs last summer. They were so funny! They would prance and play, so unaware of the mountains rising above them—which were so grand and solemn, it seemed more fitting to be quiet and reverent in their presence, as in a great cathedral.”

But Willy did not seem to find pleasure in the mental picture she’d painted for him of the noble mountains, nor of the lighthearted lambs, for he only looked at her oddly and went for his coat. “Guess I’ll go to lunch now that you’re back,” he said, and walked out.

Sevana unfolded the precious paper. Joel had written that he was bringing a few sheep over to Lethbridge to sell to the breeder the first week of December. While he was there, he would see her if it was convenient for her. He would call from Cragmont before he came. He was happy to hear she had met David and Krysta and was attending their church. As for Fenn, he wasn’t surprised by her disclosure, nor was there anything he could do—but she should take comfort in the fact that he had lived there alone all these years with no harm come to him yet. He said the snow had come to stay, but it wasn’t so deep the sheep couldn’t find feed on the south slopes, in addition to what he gave them at the barn. It had been cold and the river was freezing over. He had almost finished varnishing his most recent violin, and was assembling another. The lamb, he said, had been whittled out of a whitebark branch from Stormy Pass, so now she could have a piece of the wilderness for her own. He said he looked forward to seeing her soon, and signed it simply, ‘Joel’.

Sevana folded up the paper in a haze of happiness. He would be here in two weeks! Everything else dropped into insignificance, overshadowed by that one all-encompassing event. She would see him in person, instead of the alarmingly distant and nebulous image he had become in her mind. She didn’t know exactly what day he would arrive, or how long he would stay—but oh, just the thought of seeing him again was almost too wonderful to contemplate.

A customer came in, and then another, and for a while Sevana was busy. Willy returned from lunch and disappeared into the classroom to finish his lesson. When the shop grew quiet again, Sevana sat with the account books in front of her, but they were caught up. Outside the big front window the day was dull and rainy, and cars whizzed by constantly in the wet street.

She picked up the lamb fashioned from wood of the high country. A piece of the wilderness! Surely by now the snow promised by the hunters’ warning sign lay heavy on the summits. She tried to picture the snowcovered meadows, smooth and white; Old Stormy, with immense drifts blanketing its monumental form; the alpine firs all but buried—solitary sentinels bearing the bitter weather; and the wind…the wind would be singing its lonely, eternal song.

She was startled to see Willy standing in the classroom doorway. “What were you thinking about?” he asked, coming over to straddle the other stool. “You looked like you were a thousand miles away.”

She put the lamb down. “I was just thinking of the high country.”

“Where you spent the summer?”

“Yes. Oh Willy, you should see it—you would love it; you would find things to paint at every turn.”

“And what would I do when I tired of trees and mountains?” he teased her.

“Don’t be silly,” she protested, as if such a thing wasn’t possible.

His eye went to the rainy street where her eye had been. “While the snow is already deep on your mountains, the plain is still bare,” he said impressively. “There are many places we can go. There are miles of trails down in the riverbreaks for us to explore, and parks and nature preserves, and a bigger lake not far from here that I will take you to.” He looked expectantly for her reaction, so she gave him the smile he wanted, before he found his papers and went back to the classroom.

She picked up the miniature again and studied the tight swirls of woodgrain representing years and years of harsh clinging-to-life on the ridgetops. Joel had said the whitebark pine grew only at the highest altitudes because it couldn’t survive anywhere else. Maybe she was like that. Maybe that was why she was having such a hard time adjusting to life on the plain. She had grown up in the city, but now the city seemed a foreign and unnatural place. Traversing sidewalks, flanked by the rush of traffic, she never failed to recall a time when she had walked untraveled dirt roads with the sound of the river filling the air. Sometimes she looked up from the street in blind hope of witnessing the great ranges above her, only to see buildings and grain elevators and smokestacks—or else the sky stretching to the bare horizon.

She stood the lamb carefully aright. The truth was, she had made a mistake in leaving the mountains. She had waited for the homesickness to subside, and it had not subsided. It was as hard-hitting as when she’d first left, so that the feeling of loss lay continually over her heart like an undiminished shadow. An age ago, arriving at Cragmont for the first time, her worst fear had been being stranded in that isolated place. Now her worst fear was being stranded anywhere else. She knew now, all too well, what the old backwoodsman had meant. Once you had lived in the mountains, you never got out. But despite his well-intentioned warning she had left—and now here she was, trying to find her way back.

What if she moved to Cragmont at end of class? As she had once considered, she could become its local artist—although there was probably little demand for art in that out-of-the-mainstream town. But she could work at a place like Lakeshore Lodge and paint on the side. She could drive up to see Fenn some evenings, cook dinner for him (her daydream conveniently included a car). She could visit the sitting rock whenever she liked. She might even run into Joel sometimes, there at the river—or she could walk up to his cabin to see him. She lived in the reverie while she sorted tubes of paint into their respective bins. She could finish art school and then just walk away—to a life in the mountains.

But after she had floated along on this high new whimsy for a while, the whole thing began to lose altitude. Common sense told her she was trying to force her way back into a life that had no room for her anymore. Oh, it was tempting! and she felt like she was double-crossing herself by deciding against it—cutting herself off from the very thing she had a deep-seated fear something else would cut her off from. But if she did move back to Cragmont, she would be rejecting the chance to make a far more successful life somewhere else—almost
anywhere
else. She needed to make the most of her career, not throw away her opportunities on some quixotic fancy. It was her misfortune that she had found happiness in days that could not last.