“Did you?”
“It was a good dream.”
“That’s good,” he said. “I’m glad you did.”
Marion set two places at the table, keeping her back turned to hide the crimped, mournful smile on her face, and Sull remembered the intricate route to the penitentiary, way up in the northern panhandle: Highway 33, Pigeon Run Road, Fallen Timber Road, Route 250, Route 7, Route 2. A three-hour trip, one way. The warden had Eric setting pillars in the penitentiary’s coal mine. Before the trial, the lawyer had said that if Eric pleaded guilty, the judge might send him to the prison farm at Huttonsville, where he could live among the less violent and learn a skill. It was only forty minutes away, no more than a Sunday drive. As they sat on the hard benches of the Cheat County courthouse, Sull bowed his head and listened to Marion chanting her prayer: Oh God, I ask nothing else of You. Please keep him safe. The bailiff touched her shoulder.
After dinner, they sat on the porch. The sun hunkered behind Fenwick Mountain. Marion asked if he’d like a cup of coffee. “Sull. I asked you a question.”
“What now?”
“You want you some coffee?”
“I like that,” he said, watching smoke spiral from the neighbor’s chimney. A wasted Chevy, with FARM USE ONLY sprayed on both doors to avoid the fifteen-dollar tag fee, stood dormant in the drive. Mice nested on the engine block. Everything fallow.
Marion set a steaming mug at his side and squeezed his shoulder. Sull thanked her. She kept standing there, so he looked up into her face, at her weak chin, at the pretty ridge of cheekbone, at the white beginnings of a cataract in her left eye.
“You was a good dad to them,” she said. “Real good. No one could have done better. It weren’t right of me to blame you.”
Marion had never said such a thing, but over the last few years, Sull felt the silent accusation radiate like heat from her skin. His sons hadn’t considered their birthright — this hard land — worth having. They scattered into the world. The failure must be his.
He saw the muscles of her cheek begin to shiver. If Marion started at it, he would, too. She knew this and drifted inside. He set his jaw. He couldn’t again, not today. Lightheaded, he looked around for something solid to touch.
For a long while, he sat on the steps and sharpened the chainsaw blade with a round file, dipping it in bar-and-chain oil and raking it over each tooth with sleek, grating sounds. He lost himself in the rhythm of labor. A victory over tears is a small thing, but it was his. The sky went from indigo to blackness, and he saw nothing ominous in it, nothing but cold stars wheeling in their course, a course determined by the same firm hand he hoped was guiding his own. But satellites, too, crossed the sky in sly, winking arcs. Sull knew that. He could not let himself be confounded. He went inside, to sleep by his wife.
By the first week of December, he couldn’t stand it anymore. He’d held his fire for a month now, and all the hens were gone. When the eagle’s mate flew to an ivory treetop on the hogback ridge, near the graveyard, Sull didn’t take down his.270. He lifted the chainsaw, a good Stihl, and went tramping through ankle-deep snow.
Sull flushed the eagle from her nest, which was large as a raft and took up the entire crown. The size and scope amazed him, deep with dead white branches. Why hadn’t he come here before? He slapped the red oak to test it. His breath, a silver hush.
With a yank of the ripcord, the chainsaw snarled to life, and Sull bit into the bole, giving it a felling notch worthy of timber country. He goosed the saw to a steady, ravenous whine. When the oak finally gave — so fast and so slow, like hot drizzling molasses — it went crashing, loud and brazen, as if it had craved the earth for years and years. He hit the kill switch. Despite the great ripping clots of grapevine and growth, the eagle’s nest had held firm in its rigging, but Sull knew it was worthless here on the ground. He stood on the stump till the light grain oxidized, like the bite out of an apple. It had been a great oak, the father of thousands. Sull couldn’t wrap his arms around it, for he’d tried once. He knelt and with the tip of his Schrade counted the seasons of the tree, marking years of mast and dry, fire and flood. He watched the sky and saw nothing but clouds traveling with black bellyfuls of snow. Sull had expected to feel guilty, for he hated cutting a red oak, his favorite kind for its bounty of acorns, but a smile came and cracked his face. They’d had a nice Thanksgiving with their daughter’s family, Christmas was on its way, and he had deer-meat wrapped in butcher paper. He shot a decent six-point on the third day of buck season, and Reed an even nicer one. He had good health. Marion, too. Perhaps they could take a train to Flint, visit the twins.
Shrieking above.
He glanced up at the sky’s gray vault and saw the eagle’s mate pulling herself upward, flying over the backbone of Fenwick Mountain. Sull watched till she was small as a chickenhawk, small as a period, then small as nothing at all.
Smiling, he began to descend the hillside at a good clip, picking his way through briars on a hoof-beaten trail. One of the deer had been a huge buck that survived rifle season against all odds. The marks of its splayed hooves and dewclaws were tamped into the earth so deeply they dwarfed the tracks of does, fawns, lesser bucks. Maybe Sull would find the shed antlers come February. He settled on his haunches and put bare fingers to one of the icy prints, tracing its dimensions. The cold soothed his ungloved hand. Then he heard a familiar cry.
The smile seeped from his face. Once again, the mate banked against the ridgeline, gliding back in his direction, gliding effortlessly, like she could do it forever.
NATURAL RESOURCES
BEARS HAD BEEN SEEN ON THE road. Black bears, young males thrown out the den, nipped at by their mothers, romping over the green drop cloth of spring. They tore up the last worm fences in that county — those relics of another life, 1860, 1870—and raked the wood for termites. They scared cows and old men picking up trash along the road. Too early, the young males tried mounting sow bears, to make more of their perfect selves. When bitten hard and warned back, they looked joyous even then. So happy to be alive. After two hundred years of decline, they were managing an upswing. A new era had come.
When the population dropped to less than five hundred statewide, the legislature had responded. It closed entire counties to bear hunting, over the protests of farmers and sportsmen; voided the bounty system; banned hounds; tripled the number of game wardens. It established the Cranberry Wilderness — a fifty-thousand-acre swatch of mountains — and made it a sanctuary. This was public land, bought back from timber companies when it was nothing but fire-scarred leavings. No vehicles allowed. No guns.
Two decades passed. Black bears took to this stony land and, to everyone’s surprise, other ruined places. They found the first-generation strip mines, exhausted of coal, the mountains carved down to nubs and benches and abandoned like botched pieces of pottery. The strip mines grew lush with exotic plants the coal companies seeded there to stop the entire county from sloughing downhill in wet plates. By the time the legislature made it law to use native plants for mine reclamation, there was little left to reclaim. Autumn olive and Japanese rose overwhelmed everything, so tough and spry the worst winds couldn’t bend them. Tartar honeysuckle matted the slopes in a rich, unnavigable pelt, an otherworldly green, something out of a movie set.
In hindsight, a good place for shy things to lose themselves. When the strip mines filled up like hotels, the bears spilled into an old quarry, then hillside farms gone to briar, to sapling, to forest. They needed just this much rock.