Wild Life (35 page)

In Speelyei he was saved from having to walk the last half dozen miles, for I was already there, the impatient ferryman having sent the lost woman down on the back of a postman's mule as soon as getting word her family might be coming. She was sitting on a porch waiting for him, her face skeletal and pale, a webwork of scars and scabs, and her shaven head now a half-inch bristle of silvery white hair, but he knew her at once, and his first feeling almost certainly one of astonishment—he had secretly believed this trip might be all that remained to settle, in his own mind and the minds of the woman's children and friends, that she was lost to them forever.

He went up to her and took her fleshless fingers into his hands. “Do you know me?” he said to her. The woman wore her silence like a coat, but when her eyes flooded with tears, he correctly took this to be an answer, and he was overcome—they both were—by an exquisite sense of deliverance, a surcease of sorrow.

Ours is not a relationship of devotion, but Stuband and I are long acquainted and have old knowledge of each other's losses and successes, burdens and fortunate outcomes. I believe we have a dim understanding: like a tough plant that survives drought and flood and snow and sun, our relation to each other must be deep-rooted and stronger than a relation that is tender and looked after.

It was a bright day, the air warm and the sky moving with thin cloud. We rode back down to Etna in the back of a saw salesman's buggy, over a road that is passable only during the four dry months of the year. In my former life I was perhaps glib and judgmental, and if I had been so now, Stuband might have retreated into quiet himself, which is his own natural condition; but his voice flowed easily into my emptiness, and he talked to me of things as they occurred to him, comments upon the weather and the rough farms and logging camps we were passing by, as well as trivial events recently reported in the newspapers. The breathless speed of the rail cycle had been a revelation, he told me: heart stirring and distracting. He had no experience of traveling in an automobile or on the seat of a bicycle—he was a boatman and a dairy farmer—but he found that the swift steady hum of the spinning axles and the light clack of the wheels on the rails filled his mind with empty sound, freeing him of the need for thinking. He had craned his head forward, peering watery-eyed over the timekeeper's shoulder into the made wind. Perhaps he would learn from me how to ride a two-wheeler, he said.

Where my scabbed hand rested flat on the tailgate between us, Stuband sometimes placed his own hand over it gently and delivered a light stroke. He paid little attention to my silence, not requiring a response to his meaningless flow of talk, and I was aware of this and grateful for it. I have lived a wild life in the woods and consider myself now like a feral dog, needing to be reaccustomed to men's voices and the possibility of peaceful intention in their touch.

“I don't know how I shall get used to wearing shoes,” I said, turning to him suddenly. This was in the midst of something he was saying about hair oil, and startled him so much he laughed, the wordless fluent sound endearing him to me beyond any words he could have said. He pretended to notice my bare feet for the first time—they are horribly deformed from calluses and half-healed scars. (I know that my appearance is appalling. Of course, he may have imagined abjectness and illness—it was on this very account he must have been sent up the river alone, to spare my young sons the shock—but his imagination always has been meager, and I think he half expected to find me in need only of a solid meal and a long nap.)

“You always have done whatever you liked,” he said with a broad smile—this was at least a partial truth—“so go on barefoot if you want to.” I examined his smile for something which I could not have explained. His long mustache had seemingly gone white since I had seen him last—white as my own cropped head—and beneath it, his mouth was generous in its shape.

The road was rough, switchbacking in and out of ravines and around rock promontories and the muscular roots and stumps of trees that were cut down decades before. This country was burnt over in the same terrible summer as the Yacolt fire; there were blackened widowmakers at every hand. All the homes and camps faced the river, not the road. At intervals, greased log chutes hung down the steep riverbank, and wherever the camps were working, logs would shoot down to the river unexpectedly with all the speed and thunder of a rocket. It was necessary to drive under or over the chutes, and the salesman, being well acquainted with the hazards of this road, would hold well back, waiting for the whistle punk's all-clear signal before making his crossing. The horses were skittish going over the greased chutes at ground level; but they went under them, as under the straddling legs of a giant, quite without fear.

While we jolted along the road, Stuband went on talking of insubstantial things; I looked out at the half-tamed countryside and did not ask him anything. He may have believed the woman was drowsing, her head nodding with the jerk of the wagon, but she was listening for certain quiet and soft words which could be heard every little while between the steady flow of his language. The spirit of an animal power had come into her body while she had been lost, and since coming out of the wild woods she has been able to do certain things she hadn't been able to do before: to hear and apprehend the voices of other creatures, especially birds, speaking in their own languages. Of course, very soon she would understand that this was a sign of starvation and madness—perhaps she already knew it. But in the weeks and months ahead she would hold on to the notion that it was also a gift.

 

It has long been a tradition among novel writers that a book must end by everybody getting just what they wanted, or if the conventional happy ending was impossible, then it must be a tragedy in which one or both should die. In real life very few of us get what we want, our tragedies don't kill us, but we go on living them year after year, carrying them with us like a scar on an old wound.

W
ILLA
C
ATHER
(1896)

Stuband tries to spare my feelings and my health by giving over the news in tiny increments, which is agony—there is too much of it, and I would rather be smote by a club than stung to death by ants.

“Well, the center of Yacolt has been burnt out this week,” he said, when I first asked him for news of my missing life, “perhaps by Prohibitionists trying to close up saloons.” He then put his hand into his hair and tugged down the forelock as if he believed this would keep his scalp from flying off in the wind—we were standing at the rail on the foredeck of the boat, where it was too blustery for the tourists. The Lewis and Clark Fair is in full cry in Portland, which must account for the terrible crowding aboard: they have seen the Exposition and are now bound for Astoria to see the ocean. (I suppose it was the more adventurous among them who were debarking the
Chester
at Etna—going off to tour Ole Peterson's Lava Cave and take in the fishing at Trout Lake.)

My brain worked slowly—I had to think of Melba's daughter's name—but after gathering all the words into my mouth I said, “I shouldn't care about the burnt buildings of a town I've been to but once, except I know Florence Coffee has her house there.”

He looked down with intent concentration upon the water breaking before the bow, and shortly admitted, “Hers was somewhat singed.” There followed another long period of thinking, after which he told me quietly, “In the excitement—or maybe without it—not entirely unexpected—she was delivered of a stillborn child.”

No, not entirely unexpected.

We went on standing together in the gusty breeze, looking out at the water and at the clay bluffs sliding past the boat, until I was able to get out the next words: “What is known of Harriet?”

This evidently distressed him, which was its own answer. But when he had pulled his hair down harder and given me a cautious and
sidelong look—I felt he was judging whether I had a good grip on the rail so as not to be swept into the water by the terrible thing he had to say—he said both plainly and gently, “She was found lying in a grave not more than a hundred yards from the place she went lost.”

I felt an old hollowness and stillness, empty of anguish.

On the thirtieth of April, very early in the morning, loggers returning to their work at Camp 8—they had laid flat the trees around Harriet's little creek the day before—saw a great wolfish animal, long legged, gray as ash, standing amid the tangled trunks and piles of brush. Wolves have rarely been seen in the woods of western Washington for the last twenty years or more, and there was something immediately strange about the way the creature stood, its head low and flat, staring over at the loggers. The men were all of them loaded down with their saws and wedges and springboards, and so they merely stood and watched. It slowly dropped its muzzle—“a kiss” as one of them said—to something which lay on the ground amid the broken limbs and shattered bark, and then slipped silently into the woods behind. This was how Harriet's little body was found, dug up by animals, without a tooth mark upon her flesh.

She had a broken nose and a broken bone in her neck as well as bruises upon her legs and chin; one foot was bare and the other shod; she had been laid in the grave in a tender posture, which the wolf had not disturbed—with her little hands folded across her chest and her face covered by the soft crown of her daddy's hat.

There are unthinkable voids and immense wildernesses in the human heart.

I steeled myself to ask where was Homer now, and Stuband, who always has been a religious man, gave me a grim look and said, “He is in Hell, I'm afraid.”

Bill Boyce, the foreman at Camp 8—I remembered him as soon as Stuband said his name—had brought the news to Homer by asking him in a most careful way if he had anything further to report about the last occasion when he had been with his daughter in the woods; and what did he remember of how he had lost his hat? Homer began to swear loudly and turn red in the face; people said he was unsteady on his feet, and that he shook his fist at Boyce, all of which was widely taken as evidence of guilt, though the exact nature of this guilt was a matter for dispute. Boyce sent word down to the constable at Yacolt
that he might wish to make an investigation into the circumstances of Harriet's death; but before the constable had traveled up the flume and over the trail to camp, the men reported that a log had slipped its chain unexpectedly, had caught Homer's sleeve, and then, rolling downhill, had tumbled his body along with it.

Stuband did not offer anything more in this line, and my brain was slow to follow the news backward to the next issue; only when we were eating our supper out of our laps in the crowded and noisy salon, I finally thought to say, “This leaves Florence childless and widowed and her house burnt. How is she living?”

This seemed to mortify poor Stuband, who was trying so hard to preserve me from unnecessary worry. He would have sidestepped—“Folks always look out for their fellow creatures when such trouble befalls,” and so forth—but I pressed him until he gave up the further news: Melba has taken her sorely grieving daughter and moved to Seaview, which town was chosen for the well-known restorative benefits of living within sight of the ocean.

I do not feel myself to be fragile in any way, but the fact is, I put down my sandwich and cried when I heard this, and I cannot account for it. Stuband, having failed, as he thought, to preserve me from agitation, said with a kind of wild overanxiety, “Of course, I have seen as many sad and crazed people living along the edge of the Pacific as anywhere else,” which was unreasonably consoling. And when he'd recovered his thinking processes, he told me that Melba had acted on the false belief I was dead—“departed from life,” as he said. When I heard this, I wiped my eyes on my sleeve. “Cannery work will be the only thing available to her,” I told him, “which doesn't suit a woman in her situation at all. When she's gotten the news I'm alive, she'll expect me to take her back without a whimper, as if she had not deserted me and my children, and I suppose I shall have to find room somewhere in the house for Florence too, who might benefit from being around active boys.” I sat back, relieved to the heart.

“Well, there is also a little news of the boys,” Stuband said, and his eyes went briefly around the salon looking for a place to rest.

I had been supposing my children to be in the safe care of Edith and Otto Eustler, but Stuband has a transparent face which registers every feeling, and when I saw his look I felt a terrible flutter in the region of my breast, which he must have seen—the truth is, I have lost
the will to hide things myself anymore—and he surprised me by becoming suddenly steady, leaning forward to grasp my hands. “Don't worry now, Charlotte, it's all over and the outcome better than expected. There was a siege of diphtheria among the children who live up and down the sloughs, which was evidently caused by the spring flood and sewage getting into the well water. Your boys have all come through it fine”—my heart turning and opening out—he must have seen this also, and yet went on holding my hands, and his face going on serious, which was the worst moment—“but you will learn the truth as soon as stepping off the boat, so I must tell you: Jules has had a very bad case and has suffered a kind of paralysis of his vocal cords, which no one can say if it will be permanent.”

I was speechless myself. Then I said, “Some neighborhood children have died from it? Which ones?” in a matter-of-fact voice, before I began crying again. I could not remember the names or faces of any of the boys who used to play with my sons, had not enough memory of my own children—Jules!—but a clear concentrated awareness of my fault, my guilt, and the remorse all coming out in a flood—not to have been there while he was ill, while all of them were sick, to have been—where?—gallivanting off in search of dime-novel adventure and finding—what?—a dark and tangled wilderness, and the ghosts of the dead.