He'd made love to her twice under the influence of the tireless copper sun that refused to set on her wedding day, the sun that irradiated the squared-off edges of the shades and painted the foot of the bed as if it existed for them alone, and he was nothing like Fred Stines or Eric Kresten or the straining intent hot-faced college boys whose idea of love was a purely mechanical thing, a kind of exercise, like squat thrusts or push-ups. No. He was patient. Loving. Grateful. He made her feel more than just wanted-he made her feel as if she were the center of the universe. She watched him sleep as the sun dipped behind the hills and the shades went gray with the dusk that wanted to be night, and then she woke him when it came back up and he made love to her again.
But now it was seven A.M. and they straightened up the cabin, made the bed, stowed the leftovers in Richard's icebox and went out hand in hand to the canoe. The sun flooded the trees, the river was a cauldron of light. Birds nattered. A pair of geese shot up off the water and Sess pointed to the black burr of a porcupine caught in the crown of a birch up the shore. And then they were paddling, in concert, the easy rhythmic accommodation of man and wife, paddling as if they'd been a team forever.
Everything looked new to her, every leaf, every turning, the river that resisted her paddle and re-created itself moment by moment. Her brain was flooded with endorphins. She was lighter than air. They talked in a hush, their soft, unhurried voices carrying out over the water, and they talked of practical things, of building a fish wheel, expanding the cabin, putting up a greenhouse for the tomatoes, of scattering seed for zinnias, marigolds, pansies and snapdragons. And the dogs. “The first thing I'm going to do is teach you to mush,” he told her, “so you can run the trapline with me, be my partner. You always wanted to be my partner, didn't you? Right from the start?”
Her answer was a smile, delivered over her right shoulder as the paddle slid back from the stroke. Sure she was his partner-she'd chosen him, hadn't she? Wasn't that what this was all about? She'd feed the dogs, she'd mush them, she'd stretch and tan hides, repair the rags of his clothes, feed him, keep him warm at night, and he'd hold her and take care of her in turn. That was her life, spinning out into the future, and it was as fixed and certain as anything on this earth ever can be.
After a time the churning milk of the Yukon gave way to the pellucid Thirtymile, and the cabin-their home-came into view like the last outpost of civilization in a world gone over to nature. The canoe cut across the current and the cabin loomed larger. Everything was still. Still and lush. She wanted to feel the silence, wanted to relax into it, but suddenly Sess was digging at the paddle in a kind of frenzy, out of sync with her for the first time, fighting it, ramming the canoe forward as if the river had caught fire. “The dogs,” he said.
And then it came to her: the dogs were silent. Two days at their stakes and no one home-they should have had their noses to the sky, expressing their impatience and their joy. But they were silent. Worse: they were lying still in the weeds, the chains like nooses at their throats. And when she and Sess got there, when they'd beached the canoe and sprinted up the bank with no breath left in them, the carcasses were already stiffening round the ragged dark openings where the bullets had gone to shelter.
PART THREE. DRUID DAY
One pill makes you larger,
And one pill makes you small.
And the ones that mother gives you
Don't do anything at all.
11
Star didn't have a mantra on this particular morning, no nonsense syllables or song lyrics ricocheting around her head while the sun sang in the windows over the sink and thirty-two fresh-cracked and beaten eggs fluffed in the pan. Or pans. Four of them, cast-iron, black as char-four pans, four burners, all balky. Posters climbed the walls, four Beatles, three Youngbloods, five Rolling Stones. Basil, rosemary, tarragon and lemongrass. Clay pots. A big spill of green. She was crumbling goat cheese over each of the pans, the fragrance rising, the spatula working, fold and stir, fold and stir. At her elbow, the chopping block, and this morning it had a wet sheen to it, the residue of the tomatoes, peppers and onions she and Merry had diced while Lydia squeezed oranges and Maya pulled biscuits from the oven. On the table, the tin plates were stacked high and the silverware awaited the rush in two big plastic tubs that had once held Blue Bonnet margarine. For napkins, there was a roll of paper towels, just like at Camp Minewa.
Numbers were important this morning, that's what it was-she was into numbers, two dogs stretched out on the floor, four women in the kitchen (and she wasn't going to call them _chicks,__ because that was just stupid, that was demeaning and belittling, no matter what Ronnie said), two goats under the tree, forty-three people lined up for breakfast and one sun, fat and glowing, making a magical thing of the flat black grid of the screen door. She scrambled the eggs, one pan, two pans, three pans, four, the scent of the onions competing with the biscuits until the whole room was dense with it and Jiminy stuck his head in the door. “Ready yet?” he wanted to know. “One more minute,” she said, and she loved this, this place and this moment, more than she'd loved anything in her life, “sixty short tiny little expiring seconds-you can start counting them off on your fingers.”
To Merry, at her shoulder, she said, “Cats and chicks, whoever invented that-I mean, those terms? Isn't it stupid? I mean cats are predatory, they're tough and-”
“Unreliable?” Merry said, leaning in with a smile and the crudely rolled, fat-in-the-middle joint they'd been sharing. She held it to Star's lips while Star plied the spatula and finessed the pans. “Always catting around? Spraying the furniture? Sharpening their claws?”
“Right, that's what I mean. They name sports teams after cats, the Tigers, the Nittany Lions, but what are chicks? Little fluffy helpless things that come out of eggs.”
“But cute, right?”
“I don't want to be cute.”
Merry was cutting bread into inch-thick slices. Her hair was involved with her hands, the cutting board, and she whipped it back with a flick of her neck. “What do you want to be, then-tough?”
The eggs tumbled out of the pans and into a matching pair of big fluted ceramic bowls lovingly fabricated by Harmony and Alice, Drop City's resident potters. Star shifted her face away from the swirl of steam and called out, “It's ready!” then tuned back in. “Yeah, sure-I'll settle for tough. It's a whole lot better than helpless. Or predatory, maybe. Predatory's even better.”
“Like a cat?”
But that was too much, and they were both giggling and rubbing at their eyes and the suddenly itching tips of their noses as they served up eggs, first to Jiminy, and then to all the rest of their brothers and sisters, as Drop City and special guests filed by, tin plates in hand. Jiminy was almost always first in line because he was the hungriest, skinny as a concentration camp survivor but he could out-eat anybody Star had ever seen, including her brother Sam, who played left tackle on the high school football team and wore size fourteen shoes. Two total strangers were next in line, and then it was Reba and Alfredo and the kids, Reba looking hard and _old__ in the morning light, her hair like dried weeds, her eyes blunted and lifeless. When she smiled-and she wasn't smiling now, because her lips were two dead things pressed one atop the other-a whole deep rutted floodplain of lines and gouges swallowed her eyes, as if she'd already used up her quotient of joy and from now on out every laugh was going to cost her. “Che doesn't like eggs,” she announced, “-I think he's allergic to albumin. Maybe just give me some toast and I'll smear it with honey or something.”