He put his right hand on the little dog stretched beside him. The dog didn’t bark or growl, but he felt the hair on her back rise and stiffen as the visitation began to manifest itself visibly in the room, at first only as a quavering illumination, like that from a guttering candle, and then as the shape of a woman. She shimmered, and her light shook. Around her the shadows trembled. And then it was Gladys — nobody else — flickering and false, like a figure in a motion picture.
Gladys didn’t speak, but she broadcast what she was feeling: She mourned for her daughter, whom she couldn’t find. Without her baby she couldn’t go to sleep in Jesus or rest in Abraham’s bosom. Her daughter hadn’t come across among the spirits, but lingered here in the world of life, a child alone in the burning forest. But the forest isn’t burning, he told her. But Gladys couldn’t hear. Before his sight she was living again her last moments: The forest burned, and she had only a minute to gather a few things and her baby and run from the cabin as the fire smoked down the hill. Of what she’d snatched up, less and less seemed worthy, and she tossed away clothes and valuables as the heat drove her toward the river. At the lip of the bluff she held only her Bible and her red box of chocolates, each pinned against her with an elbow, and the baby clutched against her chest with both her hands. She stooped and dropped the candy and the heavy book at her feet while she tied the child inside her apron, and then she was able to pick them up again. Needing a hand to steady her along the rocky bluff as they descended, she tossed away the Bible rather than the chocolates. This uncovering of her indifference to God, the Father of All — this was her undoing. Twenty feet above the water she kicked loose a stone, and not a heartbeat later she’d broken her back on the rocks below. Her legs lost all feeling and wouldn’t move. She was only able to pluck at the knot across her bodice until the child was free to crawl away and fend for itself, however briefly, along the shore. The water stroked at Gladys until by the very power of its gentleness, it seemed, it lifted her down and claimed her, and she drowned. One by one from eddy pools and from among the rocks, the baby plucked the scattered chocolates. Eighty-foot-long spruce jutting out over the water burned through and fell into the gorge, their clumps of green needles afire and trailing smoke like pyrotechnical snakes, their flaming tops hissing as they hit the river. Gladys floated past it all, no longer in the water but now overhead, seeing everything in the world. The moss on the shingled roof of her home curled and began to smoke faintly. The logs in the walls stressed and popped like large-bore cartridges going off. On the table by the stove a magazine curled, darkened, flamed, spiraled upward, and flew away page by page, burning and circling. The cabin’s one glass window shattered, the curtains began to blacken at the hems, the wax melted off the jars of tomatoes, beans, and Canada cherries on a shelf above the steaming kitchen tub. Suddenly all the lamps in the cabin were lit. On the table a metal-lidded jar of salt exploded, and then the whole structure ignited like a match head.
Gladys had seen all of this, and she made it his to know. She’d lost her future to death, and lost her child to life. Kate had escaped the fire.
Escaped? Grainier didn’t understand this news. Had some family downriver rescued his baby daughter? “But I don’t see how they could have done, not unbeknownst to anybody. Such a strange and lucky turn would have made a big story for the newspapers — like it made for the Bible, when it happened to Moses.”
He was talking out loud. But where was Gladys to hear him? He sensed her presence no more. The cabin was dark. The dog no longer trembled.
7
Thereafter, Grainier lived in the cabin, even through the winters. By most Januaries, when the snow had deepened, the valley seemed stopped with a perpetual silence, but as a matter of fact it was often filled with the rumble of trains and the choirs of distant wolves and the nearer mad jibbering of coyotes. Also his own howling, as he’d taken it up as a kind of sport.
The spirit form of his departed wife never reappeared to him. At times he dreamed of her, and dreamed also of the loud flames that had taken her. Usually he woke in the middle of this roaring dream to find himself surrounded by the thunder of the Spokane International going up the valley in the night.
But he wasn’t just a lone eccentric bachelor who lived in the woods and howled with the wolves. By his own lights, Grainier had amounted to something. He had a business in the hauling.
He was glad he hadn’t married another wife, not that one would have been easy to find, but a Kootenai widow might have been willing. That he’d taken on an acre and a home in the first place he owed to Gladys. He’d felt able to tackle the responsibilities that came with a team and wagon because Gladys had stayed in his heart and in his thoughts.
He boarded the mares in town during winters — two elderly logging horses in about the same shape and situation as himself, but smart with the wagon, and more than strong enough. To pay for the outfit he worked in the Washington woods one last summer, very glad to call it his last. Early that season a wild limb knocked his jaw crooked, and he never quite got the left side hooked back properly on its hinge again. It pained him to chew his food, and that accounted more than anything else for his lifelong skinniness. His joints went to pieces. If he reached the wrong way behind him, his right shoulder locked up as dead as a vault door until somebody freed it by putting a foot against his ribs and pulling on his arm. “It takes a great much of pulling,” he’d explain to anyone helping him, closing his eyes and entering a darkness of bone torment, “more than that — pull harder — a great deal of pulling now, greater, greater, you just have to pull …” until the big joint unlocked with a sound between a pop and a gulp. His right knee began to wobble sideways out from under him more and more often; it grew dangerous to trust him with the other end of a load. “I’m got so I’m joined up too tricky to pay me,” he told his boss one day. He stayed out the job, his only duty tearing down old coolie shacks and salvaging the better lumber, and when that chore was done he went back to Bonners Ferry. He was finished as a woodsman.
He rode the Great Northern to Spokane. With nearly five hundred dollars in his pocket, more than plenty to pay off his team and wagon, he stayed in a room at the Riverside Hotel and visited the county fair, a diversion that lasted only half an hour, because his first decision at the fairgrounds was a wrong one.
In the middle of a field, two men from Alberta had parked an airplane and were offering rides in the sky for four dollars a passenger — quite a hefty asking price, and not many took them up on it. But Grainier had to try. The young pilot — just a kid, twenty or so at the most, a blond boy in a brown oversuit with metal buttons up the front — gave him a pair of goggles to wear and boosted him aboard. “Climb on over. Get something under your butt,” the boy said.
Grainier seated himself on a bench behind the pilot’s. He was now about six feet off the ground, and already that seemed high enough. The two wings on either side of this device seemed constructed of the frailest stuff. How did it fly when its wings stayed still? — by making its own gale, evidently, driving the air with its propeller, which the other Albertan, the boy’s grim father, turned with his hands to get it spinning.