And after a long winter cooped up inside, spring was mesmerizing. If she were able to walk on water, she would do it in the spring, when water and earth were flush. But of course, they had to be. The water couldn’t rise higher than the land, not here, not yet. It could only fill and flatten it, inches of plate glass. One spring the suckers had come up from the lake to spawn, and swum across her lawn, arcing up out of the water, jumping and jumping. There had been so many of them, their arced backs and jumps a series of semi-circles, until she’d had to blink, wondering whether she was looking at a sea serpent. But the strangers who lived beyond the big bend upstream only sent peeled and carved tree trunks, and never animals.
If they sent things at all. Maybe they laughed at the folks downriver so foolish they caught pneumonia standing knee high in the current, trying to reach out and grab the poles that swam past. You couldn’t stand in the middle of the river to catch them. The current was too strong; it would pull your legs out from under you. Even Harker couldn’t do it easily.
Harker had come from away and told people he was the new head man. People of weak minds believed him for a day or two, until they noticed no one paid much attention. Serena’s doctor husband had been the real mayor.
Sometimes Serena had sex with Harker. She missed her husband, who had gone away at first light the morning after she’d noticed the inscriptions on the first pole. He’d taken all their daughters, not yet grown. She never found out where they had gone. He’d never sent word. No one had ever brought her news of him. No wonder, she thought, she’d started sleeping with Harker.
Harker had hair on the backs of his hands and on his big toes, but he also sprouted vegetation. He was bald as a billiard ball, so what grew on his head never came into the equation. No one knew. But when they were in bed together, Serena was able to run her hands though the lichen on his chest. It was a beautiful off-white colour, which was fine with her. Harker grew a few actual leaves too. Just little ones, sprinkled amongst his eyebrow hairs.
“They change colour in the autumn,” he told her, when she plucked one out. They were a dark green leaning towards brown, so mostly they stayed hidden beneath the bushy brown hairs. “When they turn red I pluck them so no one will notice.”
“If I pluck one in the spring when it’s warm and the light is long, it might grow roots. And then, over time, I could grow a new you,” Serena said.
“Just hope it never comes to that,” Harker said. They lay companionably on her embroidered pillows together.
“What a strange thing to say!”
“Why do you really think the doctor left?” Harker asked, stroking her arm. “You’re good looking and you were crazy fertile. Three girls, two boys. Some people wondered if the doctor might have wanted more children and left you for someone younger because of that?”
“That really would be crazy,” she said. “But now that he’s gone I can’t remember my anatomy. What does a kidney do? A liver?”
“They both clean things, I think, but what?” Harker asked. “The blood, the urine…”
“Why does urine need cleaning, if it’s leaving the body anyhow?” Serena asked.
“I can’t remember either. But I know why the doctor left you.”
“Why then, Harker?”
“Because of the poles. Once you had that much magic, you didn’t need him anymore.”
With the doctor, all Serena’s knowledge of medicine had fled. She used to help him clean wounds and set sprains and fractures and sew people up after surgery or knife fights. But, her mind newly blank, she couldn’t charge for her nursing, because she couldn’t nurse. She grew lots of food for herself and her sons, and worked part-time as a landscaper, but nothing paid like a paycheque. There weren’t many to be had since the call centre had closed. Even the feeder high school was only open half days now.
Serena hadn’t yet figured out that she could sell the magic poles if only she and her sons were willing to stand in the icy river from late April to early June, grabbing them as they flew past, in water both too cold and strong and deep to stand for long. It was giving her arthritis, she was sure of it. And Jake and Blake regularly came down with bronchitis and pneumonia.
In the morning she brought him fresh coffee. “Maybe head man doesn’t mean reeve or mayor but the man who sleeps with Serena. First the doctor, and now you.” Serena smiled to show it was a joke and pulled Harker out the door and to the river. She wanted him working.
He stood on the shore looking out as if he wasn’t sure why he was there. Serena pushed him, gently, from behind. He moved into the torrent and grabbed the first passing log. It fought him, like a big fish wanting to escape.
“I like it,” he said after he’d wrestled it to shore.
There were hardly any carvings, just what appeared to be a few leaves at one end. The carvings, Serena was starting to understand, didn’t create the magic, they only described it. In the upland village, where more things were magic, folks could probably differentiate in ways she couldn’t, or couldn’t yet. In addition to being carved, the poles were often warm to the touch, and attracted lint and crumbled leaves and other fine debris. They smelled of hot metal, even when they were made of wood, as this heavy, waterlogged log indeed was. She followed Harker out onto the little gravelly beach and slapped his hands away from the pole.
He paused, gazing at her owlishly. “I want to keep it in my room.”
She slapped his hands again, harder than before. “It isn’t yours.” She didn’t regret it at all this time.
“But I got it,” he said.
“You got it because I told you to. This is my corner of the river. Everything that comes out of the river here is mine.”
Which was a load of rot. Finders keepers, or I was here first, she knew, were specious school yard arguments. She began to drag the log home.
“I wanted to keep it,” Harker mewled, following. “The leaves are like my leaves.”
She was glad he didn’t know how much the poles were worth, or she’d have to fight him, and she didn’t know how to fight, at least not someone so much bigger than she was. Fighting was more dangerous than just being mean, she guessed.
She’d started selling the poles to out-of-towners over the winter. The buyers had appeared out of nowhere, usually late at night. Sombre men in cowls and cloaks, they had offered her staggering sums.
Setting the pole down, Serena massaged her abdomen where a dull chronic pain had turned into a searing one. “What does a kidney do exactly, do you know?” she asked Harker again. The doctor had taken away not just his encyclopedic knowledge, but his encyclopedias. She was fucked, standing in the freezing river day after day. How had her life come to this?
Harker looked at her pleadingly, his leafy eyebrows and big hands still dripping.
“You can keep the next one,” she said. “But we have to go back in the river to get it. I hope we didn’t miss one, standing here arguing.”
She’d seen Harker ring the necks of geese. A full-grown goose can break a man’s arm just by flapping her wings, they always said, but Serena wondered whether it was true. Maybe a smaller man than Harker. He gave the geese to poor families. Serena declined them. She wouldn’t have, before she began selling the poles.
“You should have the meat tested. The geese might be full of lead from the shot,” she said. “Or creosote.”
“From eating railroad ties.” Harker nodded helpfully.
She thought of how he looked vacant when he snapped the geese’s necks. There was no cruelty in it. It was just something he did.