Wild Sorrow (23 page)

Mountain nuzzled into my lap. I began to sing quietly under my breath, a little lullaby I had made up when he first came to me as a tiny pup—a song about how we were family. As I sang, the wolf's breathing slowed and he stopped panting, his head pressed into the crook of my knee, against my thigh. I stroked his face, and he closed his eyes.

 

While I was singing that last verse of the lullaby, a vehicle pulled into the fenced compound behind the BLM and lights swept across us. I felt a wave of panic and moved to get up and out, reaching for my sidearm as soon as I was on my feet. Mountain scrambled upright, too, and sat up in the back looking out.

Kerry pulled right in behind the Blazer and jumped out of the door of his Forest Service truck. He strode two long steps and reached to embrace me, then checked himself and slowly and softly gave me a gentle hug. He looked down at me tenderly and stroked the side of my cheek with one hand. “I'm taking you someplace safe,” he said. “We'll go to a motel or something. I'm not leaving you.”

It was those last four words that tripped the lever on the gate in my mind that had been holding the last vestiges of my composure in place. I snorted. “You're not leaving me? You're not leaving me?” I pulled away and shoved him hard in the chest. “Don't lie to me and tell me you're not leaving me! What about your new job in Washington?”

By the stark light of the security flood on the back wall of the BLM I read the astonishment in Kerry's face. “I was going to tell you about it if . . . when I got the job.”

I started shaking my head up and down as if this all made sense to me. “I see,” I said, my voice too loud for normal conversation. “I see. You were going to tell me—when? While you were packing your things?”

Mountain jumped down out of the Chevy and began pacing in a tight pattern, back and forth, repeatedly putting his body in the charged, narrow gap between Kerry and me, trying to distract us.

Kerry reached down to pet the wolf. “It was only a remote chance that I would even get the job—”

“A remote chance that looks all sewn up, according to Roy.”

“I didn't want to worry you unnecessarily.”

“You didn't want to face me and tell me the truth. You lied to me. You were going to leave and not tell me!” By now, I was shouting, and Mountain was panting hard and panicked, pressing his haunches against my legs. “People who lie about leaving and then sneak off . . . that just . . . hurts!” I sobbed.

Kerry moved to take me by the shoulders but I reached again with both hands and shoved him hard in the chest, a burning pain shooting up my arm from the swollen wrist. I grabbed Mountain's collar and shouted, “Mountain, get in,” as I dragged him in the direction of the Blazer's back end. The wolf jumped up into the cargo area, and I reached up for the hatch.

Kerry grabbed it before I could and lowered it carefully down until the latch snapped. “Let's talk about this,” he said. “I wanted to talk to you about this and—”

“Go on and leave!” I shouted, moving toward the driver's door. “Go on and leave me alone!”

As I drove out of the parking lot, I looked in the rearview mirror through stinging tears. Kerry stood stock-still and watched me drive away, his face as stoic as stone.

What Trees Dream

Driving down my long dirt-and-gravel road, I headed half-aware for the beacon of yellow light from the porch lamp. It wasn't until I had turned the Blazer face out and started to open the car door that I realized that a lit porch lamp meant that the electricity was back on. I was so overjoyed, I could hardly wait to get in the house. I gave Mountain a quick romp on his long lead to make sure he had done his business and then got both of my guns out of the car and went inside. When I flipped the switch inside the door, the hardwood floor and log walls flooded with light from the three high-powered bulbs that hung from the center of the ceiling fan in the one main room. “Oh!” I gasped, as if I had suddenly had a ponderous weight removed from my shoulders. “Oh, light! Electricity! Power!”

I fed Mountain first, then built a fire in the woodstove. It was cold in the cabin, but I got a good blaze going and stacked up some logs to keep it fed. Then, I used a few of the gallon jugs of water I had bought to prime the pump that supplied water to the house from my underground cistern. I wanted to leap for joy when I heard the sound of fluid trickling into the toilet tank.
Indoor plumbing!

I opened the taps in the bathroom and kitchen sinks to bleed air from the pipes, and when they began to flow water, I turned them off to conserve the precious liquid. I lit the pilot light in the bottom of the water heater, and relished the thought of a hot shower—indoors. I hung towels on the back of the rocking chair to warm by the woodstove, which now had a good fire going inside, so I closed its cast-iron doors and dampered the air down for maximum radiant heat. I heard the hum of the refrigerator and vowed to go to town for groceries tomorrow. I had to move the shoe box on my nightstand to get to the digital clock. As I set the box on the outside edge, I made a mental note to get out the leather burning tool and my mother's poem and make the bookmark for Diane in the morning. I checked my watch, set the clock, and I noted the time and planned to allow an hour for the water heater to bring its tank up to temperature.

But I did not make it to the shower. I sat on the side of my bed to remove my boots, reached down to untie one, and felt a volcanic flow of hot pain flood from my lumbar joints outward to my hips and then upward along my spine. I couldn't bear to bend over even a second more. I straightened, sitting up, and then I drifted to one side, falling onto the soft down comforter. I stayed like that a minute or two, then drew my knees into a fetal bend, not even caring that I was still wearing my boots when I lifted my feet up onto my bed.

All That Mattered

I have been hung over and I have been beaten down, and the way I felt when I woke up the next morning was more of both than anyone sober deserves to endure. My tongue felt like a rancid mattress that someone had shoved in my mouth. I had drooled all over my pillow, my hair was matted and stuck to one ear, and one arm and hand had gone numb. My ankles and feet had swollen up in my boots, and I ached all over—especially my head. My breath was foul and my bladder begged to be emptied. I forced myself to a sitting position and started to get up when my boot knocked into the empty shoe box on the floor beside my bed.

I looked down with horror at the litter that covered the lambskin on the floor where Mountain slept. The wolf was rapturously snoring at one end of this, lying on his back with his hind legs spread apart, his front paws curled under on either side of his big, upturned chest, the expression on his sleeping face indicating he had reached wolf-nirvana. But across the rest of the rug sprawled the chewed-up remnants of my most valuable treasures. Multicolored bits of the pages that once had contained my mother's poems were strewn like confetti across the long-haired mat. And beneath my boot was a wisp of shiny, colored paper. I stooped and picked it up. It was a thin strip torn from the center of the photo of my mother, the tip of it punctured with tiny piercings from the wolf's sharp front teeth. The only likeness of my mother I had ever had was now in shreds.

“Oh, no!” I cried, and the wolf rolled onto his side and raised his head to look at me. “Mountain, what is this?” I yelled, picking up a handful of his paperwork spit-wads. “What did you do?”

I grabbed hold of the lambskin and yanked on it hard, bowling the wolf off the edge of it and out onto the hardwood floor. Mountain scrambled to his feet and dove toward the front door, his head down and low, his ears pointing backward and listening as I came right behind him in a fury. As he bolted past the wrought-iron coatrack, he caught the leg of it and tipped it over, the top of it knocking him on the back end and then bouncing onto the toe of my boot. I screamed with pain as the heavy iron bar struck the top of my foot, and Mountain came full about in the corner by the door, his back paws slipping on the hardwood and pedaling hard for a purchase. As he pushed away from the door, the broom that had been propped in the corner came down, too, causing him to volt to one side and make for the table, where he hoped to take shelter beneath. I grabbed the broom handle before it, too, fell on me, and limped the two steps to the table, yelling, “What did you do to my mother's things? They were all I had that mattered!” I raised up the broom and struck Mountain hard across his back end, and he yelped with both pain and alarm. He cowered on the floor, and from beneath his quivering body, a puddle of urine spread across the dark wood planks.

“Oh, no,” I said, realizing what I had done. “Oh, God, no.” I dropped to my knees and Mountain flinched and tried to make himself smaller, in terror of another onslaught of anger. “Oh, Mountain,” I said, reaching out a trembling hand to touch him. “Mountain, I'm so sorry!” I remembered Sica's story of being beaten with a broom, and I felt like evil incarnate. I looked down at my beloved wolf-companion, who was now fearful of my touch and traumatized by my outburst of rage. I stroked Mountain's back and he flinched again, so I held my hand in place for a moment, gently touching his trembling haunch. I eased into a seated position, careful not to alarm him with any sudden moves. I continued to pet him as I shook my head in disbelief, unable to fathom the insanity that had come over me. And unable to forgive myself for what I had done to my best friend, a creature whom I had sworn to protect from harm.

 

 

I took Mountain to Tecolote's house, and the wolf and I climbed the slope against an icy gale. Esperanza opened her door and looked out just as we approached the casita, but she was wise enough not to wait out on the
portal
in the arctic air. Once inside, seated at the plank table near the comforting fire, I asked the old bruja for help. While the wolf lay on the floor at our feet in her warm little dwelling, Esperanza rubbed a thick salve on my sprained wrist and listened to my story of the dream experience with the trees, and then of my striking the wolf with a broom.

When I finished, the old woman was quiet.

“Tell me what to do, Esperanza,” I said.

“What to do? It seems you are doing too much already! Maybe you should try
not
to do.”

I pressed my lips together. “Maybe so,” I muttered.

“You must leave Montaña here with me for a little time, only a few hours, or maybe a day. I will keep him safe for you during that time, and I will give him a
cura
so that he can forgive you.”

“Can you give me a
cura
so that
I
can forgive me?”

She gave a sad, toothless half smile. “That one is beyond my humble powers.”

The salve on my hand had begun to create an intense heat and I wanted desperately to rub it off. “You told me to listen to the trees and watch the sky. I was dreaming with the trees last night. The sky was—”

“
¡Ya chole!
Stop talking, Mirasol!” The bruja held up her finger. “You lose the power that has been given to you when you talk about it all the time.”

“But I don't have any power. I don't know what the dream means.”

“You will not find its meaning outside of you. There is no need to speak of it.”

“But—”

“Wait!” she said. “I know you want to rub it, but you must leave it alone. Even though you do not understand it, the medicine is working. You do not need to understand everything for it to work for you.”