The gully grew dark. Lying there alone, I thought of the grizzlies that tore young girls from their sleeping bags and dragged them deep into the forest. I saw the sky dark with eagles, saw them dive toward the water to pluck the dying salmon from the river. Bobcats sharpened their claws on our woodpile, left two-inch gashes in the wood, as if a stump of pine was soft as flesh. I had always known these woods were alive with danger.
10
GWEN HOLLER punished me with a passion more ardent than any affection she’d ever shown. Hardly a week passed before she latched onto Jill Silverlake. Jill was short and too blond; her face and hair blurred to a single shade, like a doll left unpainted. Her popularity depended on the fact that her father owned the Strand, the only movie theater within twenty miles of Willis.
I wasn’t easy to ignore. The junior high and high school kids shared one building. Still we numbered less than two hundred in all. I made sure Gwen Holler couldn’t avoid walking in front of me a dozen times a day. I spoke to her every chance I got. “I saw a badger in the gully,” I said one day. I was sure this would interest her. But she had a way of lifting her chin that made me invisible. Later I tried to pass her a note in class, and she let it drop to the floor. Jill snatched it up, giggling as she read the message: Meet me at the tree house tonight and I’ll show you where he was.
School was more tedious than usual without Gwen to break the boredom, imitating Mr. Lippman’s twitchy excitement as he explained the digestive system of a cow or the reproductive habits of silver salmon. “The cow has four stomachs and often regurgitates its food to chew it a second time.” Mr. Lippman offered up his knowledge as if each fact were a small treasure. “Female salmon die soon after they spawn. Their nervous systems accelerate, and they literally swim themselves to death.”
I kept hoping Gwen would wait for me someday, that she’d hide at the corner of the building and jump me as I passed. I’d yelp and she’d squeal, delighted that she’d scared me. “They literally swim themselves to death,” she’d say, her voice high and shaky. We’d laugh till our stomachs hurt and walk home arm in arm. But nothing like this ever happened.
On an evening in early December the snow began to fall in soft clusters. I thought of the glaciers, how they’d carved the mountains from each side, leaving a narrow, deadly ridge of stone. At the summit the temperature dropped to 70 below. On the snow fields, the pack was twenty feet deep or more. I prayed for a chill north wind to whip down the canyon of the Rockies so that I could miss one day of school.
Sometime in the middle of the night, without anyone awake to witness, the snow began to swirl, rising off the ground in narrow funnels. By dawn slivers of ice flew sideways and drifted into sharp peaks across the lawns. Trees bent, shrouded in snow, like the stooped ghosts of great men. I thought that God might be listening to me again after all.
I knew my desire was selfish. Blizzards killed stranded travelers and lost cows. I’d heard of an elderly couple whose fire burned out one night. Three days later a neighbor found them frozen in each other’s arms. The truth didn’t matter: it could have happened; it might still happen. But I was not sorry I’d prayed for the storm.
When I woke at eight, I knew school was canceled. I didn’t bother to get dressed. I imagined Daddy getting up for work two hours earlier. I could almost hear him say: It’s not too bad. If he couldn’t back the truck over the drifts in our driveway, he would have walked to the mill.
I scurried down the hallway to crawl in bed with my mother. I’d tell her I was cold and she’d lift up the blankets for me, too sleepy to protest. But she wasn’t in the wide bed. I found her in the other room, my grandmother’s room. Mother slept there more and more — whenever Daddy kicked or snored, whenever his breath held the faintest whiff of whiskey.
I opened the door slowly. I could never sleep in a dead woman’s bed alone, but Mother was unafraid, curled beneath so many blankets I could hardly be sure she was there at all.
This was a woman’s room, not like my parents’ jumbled bedroom, where the dresser top was always cluttered and half a dozen pairs of shoes lined the wall, where the bed went unmade day after day, and the smell was always Father’s smell. Grandmother’s room had white curtains with pale pink roses. The bedspread was white too, and on the dresser the silver-handled mirror and brush lay on the blue runner, ready to be used.
From the wall, the grandmother I had never known gazed at me, amused, as if she guessed I would one day stand here and wonder. The artist who tinted the photograph had made her eyes a brilliant blue and her hair a deep chestnut, but I knew these were small lies: her eyes were as pale and colorless as mine, like clouds, Mother said. Her hair should have been lighter too, my color, unruly, fine, an unremarkable brown. The artist thought that darker hair would make her brows look less severe, but Grandmother’s confidence defied his efforts.
So she peered out at me through the years, with all the brashness of her youth. She was sixteen and fearless. Her marriage was two years away, so she didn’t know that her preacher husband would take her from Chicago to a godforsaken town in Montana. She didn’t know that he’d leave her and the church and their baby daughter, my mother, to answer another call, that he’d move to California to care for an invalid sister, and die there without ever seeing his wife or child again.
This was what was left of him: in her jewelry box a small packet of letters on blue paper, signed: Your loving husband; on her finger a wedding ring she could not remove, first because of hope, and later because her knuckles twisted with arthritis; in her heart a bouquet of baby’s breath, so dry and fragile it would crumble at the slightest touch.
Often Mother sat alone in this room, taking the letters out of the envelopes, reading them again and again, as if she were looking for some truth, some explanation she’d missed. But she never found an answer she liked. Once I caught her by surprise. “I don’t know why my mother kept these letters,” she said. And I wondered: Why do you keep them? She showed me the ring and told me about Grandmother’s twisted hands, though I had heard the story many times. “She made me promise to take the ring off her finger after she died,” Mother said, “no matter what it took. I had a devil of a time, but I kept my word.” She rubbed her own knuckles. “Poor woman,” she whispered.
I closed the door and left my mother drowned in dreams.
Shivering, I ran back to my own bed and hid beneath the covers. I fell into a fitful sleep. I imagined Grandmother’s swollen knuckles. I saw her tug at the ring. But the woman in the dream looked like my mother.
Later, I smelled something baking, something sweet and delicious. Mom had hot cornbread waiting for me when I got down to the kitchen. “Thought I’d warm up the house,” she said. We each took a steaming golden square big enough for four people. I slathered mine with butter and honey, but we hadn’t chewed the first bite before someone rapped on the back door and pressed a pale face against the glass. Mom jumped up to slide the bolt free and let Aunt Arlen inside.