MAHATMA JOE

How many memorable localities in a river walk! Here is the warm wood-side; next, the good fishing bay; and next, where the old settler was drowned when crossing on the ice a hundred years ago. It is all storied.

— THOREAU, January 1860 journal

In February, after the chinook blew through, thawing people’s faces into smiles and making look happy again, and making the men look like men again, rather than pouting little boys — in February, the preacher for the Grass Valley, Mahatma Joe Krag, began a rampage not unlike those of other springs.

It had been a hard winter in northern Montana, so hard that ravens sometimes fell from the sky in midflight, their insides just snapping, it seemed, and like great ragged clumps of black cloth they’d fall into the woods, or into a pasture, landing a few weeks shy of spring.

The stave-ribbed horses — those that the coyotes and wolves had not gotten — would go over and pick the crows up with their teeth and begin eating them, chewing the shiny black feathers.

There was nothing else.

People were so short-tempered that even the saloon closed down. In past winters they’d gone in to gather, socialize, drink, and complain collectively, but now people got into fights, pistol-pulling duels out in the snow, duels which never killed anyone, not at thirty yards with the .22 pistols the saloon kept on the counter for that purpose. The snow was usually swirling and blowing, which further lessened the risk, though often one of the duelists would injure the other, hitting him in the thigh or the shoulder, and even once, in the case of One-Ball Boyd, in the groin.

It was a bad winter, even for Grass Valley. The valley was long and narrow, and ran northwest-southeast along an old mountain range, the Whiteflesh Mountains, the first inland range off the Pacific. Storms came hauling off of the Siberian Peninsula and crossed the Bering Strait, kicking up eighty- and hundred-foot waves; they crashed into Alaska and then Washington, worked their way over the northwest passes, too strong to be stopped, and hurried over three hundred miles of prairie in eastern Washington, building up speed.

The Grass Valley was the first thing they hit. The valley was shaped like a bottleneck, slightly curved in the middle, and the storms slammed into it and rounded the curve, accelerating.

But it worked the other way during chinooks. Winds from the south raced up the same funnel, blowing hot air through the valley even in winter, melting all the snow in a matter of days, and launching new hatches of insects, buds in the fruit trees, and the smiles of women. Once February came around, the chinook could happen at any time. It became a race between south winds and north winds to see what got to the bottleneck valley first. The temperature could change almost a hundred degrees in twenty-four hours, going from twenty below to sixty or seventy above.

The chinook would last only a week at most, but it was a sign that there would be just one more month of hard freezes left. A long time ago, the town had had a celebration called Naked Days, where no one wore clothes at any time, not even when they went in for groceries, not even when they went into the saloon. People fed their horses naked, slept naked for the first time in six months, and checked their mailboxes naked. There was hardly anyone around, and everyone knew everyone else. It was hard to describe the sense of freedom chinooks brought, after the entrapment of winter.

It had been great fun, that one week each year, the week of warm washes of wind against the bare chest and across the back, warm winds passing between bare thighs. The women all shaved their legs for the first time since the fall and lay out in the melting patches of snow down by the thawing river and got suntans. The men sat at picnic tables in the meadow behind the mercantile, also down by the river, and drank beer, wore dark sunglasses, and told stories. And there were no more duels — but that had all gone on in the old days, before Mahatma Joe Krag came into the valley, down from Alaska, angry and ambitious at not having converted anyone up there to Christianity, not even an Indian, in over six weeks. And now he hadn’t scored big in Grass Valley in over twenty years: not since the day he left Alaska. He’d run out of souls up there. Little did he know that those six weeks would be the beginning of a rest-of-his-life drought.

Mahatma Joe put an end to Naked Days almost single-handedly, and it took him only a short time to do it.

He was mortified, during his first chinook, when he went into town and saw naked men and women walking down the streets, naked children playing catch, and was greeted by a naked storekeeper when he went in for his groceries. He was horrified but challenged, and sometimes, at night, delighted: he had found a valley more wicked than any of the mining camps in Alaska, and it was in the continental United States.

Mahatma Joe began to write articles about Naked Days for various evangelical magazines, inviting his fellow preachers to come to the valley the following February, during the next chinook, and witness “an entire valley of naked unsaved savages, and right inside our own country!”

The response was significant. The evangelists would watch the weather fervently in January, sometimes arriving early, anticipating the chinook’s passage, calling it correctly even before the weather forecasters did. The evangelists prayed to the sky for the chinook to arrive, so that their business could begin.

The tradition faded. With all the visiting strangers, people in the Grass Valley began to keep their clothes on — around town, anyway.

Mahatma Joe pressed on to other, lesser matters.

He wanted the town to have rules, ever more rules. He wanted to stop the winter fights. He wanted to have a town church, a town Bible study, and a town vegetable garden in the rich meadowland along the Grass River. In summer he wanted the fruits and vegetables all picked and canned and bottled and sent to distant, savage lands. Joe believed that vegetables could calm angry souls, that meat — flesh! — was a temptation of Satan’s creation.

Moose grazed in the fertile river meadow during the summer, and ducks floated on the slow blue waters. Elk, with their antlers in velvet, slept in people’s yards in the high heat of the afternoon, and tried to get into the hay barns at night. The animals were unafraid of people in the hot windy months, and they would roll in the river’s shallows like dogs, trying to escape the biting flies. Small children would walk out and touch the elk’s antlers and feed them sugar cubes during those warm spells when rules dissolved.

Men and women would gather back in the saloon shortly before dusk to watch the sunset and discuss the day, telling of what they had seen. Ospreys. Nuthatches. Western flickers. Varied grosbeaks. Pine siskins. They knew all the names, though often would argue about which bird it was that had the crossed bill for cracking seeds. They loved seeing the western canaries, which were a bright yellow but had no song, made no noise.

There was hemlock, too, along the river in places, hemlock that would kill a man in half an hour. It looked like watercress, which some people used in salads. Every now and then someone would mistake hemlock for watercress, and it’d be the end. Everyone knew there were dangers still left to living up in Grass Valley. There were mountain lions, wolverines, bears, and wolves; it was one of the only places like that left.

Besides wanting to turn the entire river meadow into a town farm, a working, thriving plantation for the export of sweetness, Mahatma Joe wanted to get rid of the hemlock.

He spent the silent white winters huddled in the little office behind his cabin, writing venomous letters to editors of the many sinful newspapers across the country, and writing and rewriting various tracts on religion, sex, and education. He drafted and redrafted proposed ordinances. Joe had always imagined the little valley, ringed by snow and glaciers even in summer, as a new place to build something, a new place to get it right. But he needed help. He was sixty-eight by the time he had his final vision.

·

Sometimes people would move into the valley: young couples who filled in the places of the old-timers who had not made it through the winter. Occasionally they were young singles, a man or a woman running from some piece of extraordinarily bad luck, or a whole life of such luck; or sometimes they were young men and women who had just looked at a map, had seen that there were no paved roads leading into the valley and no towns within forty miles. They had seen how close it was to Canada, and they had wondered if, finally, this might be a place to rest.

They brought guns, traps, saws, books. They always brought a dog, and sometimes two or three, especially the single ones, and always the single women: hardy young women from Illinois and California, Texas and Arkansas, who had seen the name Grass on a map in some city or town library, on a day late in the fall, with end-of-day September light fading and flickering through the windows, with the library closing in half an hour and nowhere to go, no boyfriends, and life over too soon — everything over too soon, and somehow, too, everything just beginning. These women showed up every year, two or three of them, and asked around, found out who had died — who had fallen through the ice, who had been thrown from a horse, who had just disappeared — and they moved in, learning the old ways of the valley, quickly and hungrily, and staying, changing, learning.

One such woman moved to the valley in the fall of Joe’s sixty-eighth year, his twentieth year in the valley. Her name was Leena. She had no money, and she came unaware, came in from the South, and put an ad on the bulletin board outside the mercantile asking for a place to stay in exchange for labor — clothes washing, gardening, fence building, horse feeding, whatever. There were no vacancies, no empty cabins when Leena came. She lived in a tent down in the field behind the mercantile for three weeks, frying bacon and washing her hair in the nearby river at night, babysitting children in their homes and running the cash register in the mercantile.

Across the road from the mercantile, at the Red Dog saloon, the patrons played a game called Shake-a-Day: you rolled five weighted dice at once, and if you had three of a kind, you won a free drink. If you rolled four of a kind, you got a free six-pack, and if all five were the same number, you won half of the pot, which was all of the quarters that had been paid in since the last pot was won. The pot usually built up to six or seven hundred dollars before someone finally won it.

Leena would walk into the bar with her dog Sam, buy one drink and sip it slowly, enjoying the talk and learning things about the valley: the names of birds, the names of plants. Everyone sat on a stool with their dog beside them, and watched the dogs.

Leena would finish her drink, find a quarter, pay for her roll of the dice — you could roll only once a day — and lose, always. She never won a drink to take with her across the street and down to the river — a free drink that she could sip by herself while sitting on a boulder over the river, where she could watch the spry bats racing across the top of the current snapping at bugs, and the big trout beginning to leap, and night coming in, her new life in this bowl of a valley. She never won.

She bathed in the river at night. The water was frigid, with blocks of ice bobbing downstream like dirty heads of lettuce, floating past her as she scrubbed her body hard with the washcloth, fighting for breath, the cold taking the air from her lungs and turning her numb. The stars above her when she was in the river, gasping, seemed brighter than when she was not in the river. She had left the most selfish man in the world back, in California. Each day of being away from him was a day of happiness, of getting stronger — feelings she never thought she’d have again. Leena would take a deep breath, dunk her head under the water, disappear from the moonlight, like one of the great trout that rose and then splashed back down. She would rinse her hair, scrub under her arms, open her eyes under water, look up at the wavering bright moon, and imagine that she was going to live all her life under the cold river, looking up. The gravel beneath her feet felt good.

She would shake violently then, it was so cold, and burst from the water and run for shore with numb legs, numb arms, sometimes tripping and falling, unable to run properly, with nothing working right at all. But she was clean, cleaner than she had ever been. She’d rub herself dry with a rough towel and crawl into her sleeping bag shivering and pull the bag’s drawstring tight around her. Sam slept at her feet. Leena fell asleep with her face and hands still tingling from the river, her feet still numb, but the warmth inside her beginning to glow once more, like something that could never again be chilled. She was poor and her luck was bad, but she was clean.

Sam had been with Leena through three men, three men in six years. Things had fallen apart, lost their glue, like toys submerged in water, parts drifting away, shy parts, plastic parts that were never meant to last. They always wanted her to be a certain way, never wanted her to be able to change her mind or change anything. Leena fell asleep tingling, sinking, warm and safe, Sam’s breath steady in her ear, with all the stars above her moving, rotating, sliding from view and back down behind the tall mountains as the earth spun. She would never have another man, not ever. They were like fish, they were wet, and they were all the same. There was no connection, no beauty. They just bit at the hook and were pulled in, and then they did nothing but lay there, gasping, their eyes turning slowly blue. Leena tumbled through her dreams, unimperiled by her lack of luck. She had never been so happy. She had never lived in so clean a place. Sometimes she thought she could sleep forever. It was good to be in a wild place where men didn’t try to rule you.

Despite the deep good sleeps, Leena was up each morning at seven, frying bacon as the sun, a late riser, was only beginning to show over the tops of the tall mountains. Leena had a Frisbee, and she would go to the meadow with Sam and play, first thing every morning, right after breakfast.

Sam was daring, acrobatic, even heroic, chasing the Frisbee wherever it went, even diving into the river after it. He would race at full speed, tumbling over the little bluff and down into the water, never looking down to notice where the land ended and the river began. Surfacing immediately, he’d watch the Frisbee as it hovered in the air, just beyond his struggles, always a little too far away.

Leena would cry out whenever he did make a great catch, or even a great effort. She would clap her hands and pretend that she was a football coach, as her father had been, back in California. “Sammy my boy, that’s what I like to see. That’s the way to do it, Sammy boy!” she’d shout, laughing and clapping, delighted at Sam’s excitement, his reaction to the praise.

Her laughter carried all the way up and down the narrow valley, trapped in the thin air, living forever in the thin air. Anyone could hear her. There were no secrets there. Everyone knew who Sammy was by the end of the first week.

A hawk’s summer cry, drifting down over the ragged jumble of mountains, spread into the foothills and the valley’s green, flat river bottom, which was no wider in some places than a freeway. Blue water cut through its middle. At noon, back in the woods, the loggers shut off their saws, sat down and opened their lunchboxes. Five or six miles away, on a still day, you could hear their laughter down in the valley, sometimes even hear their voices from up in the mountains, as if angels were speaking.

The valley was a park, green and forever, in the summer.

·

Leena thought how she wanted a horse with which to explore the mountains. She wanted a parrot, too, to talk to her, to ride around on her shoulder. Her life was a river across which she would build a bridge.

There would be one side, and then the other. Ray, owner of the mercantile, had told her that he had an old hay barn farther down the valley, and that he might sell it to her when winter came, if she still had not found a place to stay. There were holes in the roof, it was caving in, and the barn was full of years-ago, dry, no-good hay, but it would be better than the tent, and Leena began to apply her savings toward that, picturing it. She imagined the snow coming down as she sat at a table next to a lantern, writing letters, perhaps a letter to her parents, with the parrot on her shoulder and the horse in its stall, eating hay. Sam would be asleep at her feet. She would get a cat, too, to catch the mice.

No more men. She saved her wages, twelve dollars a day, for the winter. It was understood that whatever she had saved, no matter how much or how little, would be the actual purchase price of the barn. Leena knew that Ray was counting how much he paid her, counting how much she spent. She knew that he was watching. That was how men were: watchers, rule makers. But it was all right. After she bought the barn, it would be hers. This valley would be different. This valley still had wild promise.

The barn she was saving for was also along the river, farther upstream where the valley narrowed and the snows fell deeper. Whenever she moved in, Leena knew she would have to walk down to the frozen river with an ax and chop ice to get to the water for the horse to drink, and to get water for cooking. She would have to tie a rope around her waist to keep from getting lost in the heavy snows, and with that same rope around her, she would slip down through the hole into the cold water to bathe quickly. And she would fish through a hole in the ice, farther out, over the center of the river: she would build a fire to stay warm, a fire whose light would attract the dull, cold fish, and through the small hole she would catch them all, as many as she wanted, all night, and she would dry them, smoke them, hang them from the rafters to cure in the cold dry air, and her cabin would smell good, like fresh fish and smoke.

Leena thought about this as spring settled in around them, and she saved her money, knowing these things — for once knowing how something was going to be, and for once in control.

She kept bathing in the river at night, her skin dark when there was no moon. When she rolled over on her back and let the cold water carry her downstream, bits of moss and trout minnows brushed against her legs. Breasts, shoulders, everything became shiny, luminous, when the moon was out. Drifting into a fast current, she would look up at the stars, the moon, and remember only then that she might have gone too far. Breaking out of her trance, she would swim hard upstream, moving like a fish back to where she had started from, and clean.

·

What Mahatma Joe thought about in the spring-going-to-summer, sitting alone in his tiny office with its woodstove, listening to the sounds of dripping water and the great cakes of ice sliding off his roof, melting and losing their winter grip, was how he was nearing the end, and how he was soon going to be accountable not for the things he had done, but for the things he had not done.

Not enough. He had done a lot, but not enough. He had failed to change things, really. He had sent some canned goods, jams and jellies mostly, to Africa from his own modest garden each year. He buried people in the valley when they died, and said words over them. He had put down the Naked Days rebellion almost twenty years ago. But he’d wasted time, too, wasted perhaps a whole life, on other things: on long slow walks through the woods, especially in the fall when the light was gold and strange. He’d wasted time on sinful daydreams. Sometimes, moving through that particular fall light, Mahatma Joe pretended that he had already died and was in an afterlife. The light was so still, so different, and the woods so silent, that some days he believed it, that heaven was here and now, and not in need of alteration or correction.

Sinful!

Winters were spent in the office studying, making notes for imaginary sermons or for services to his wife and servant, Lily. Over the years, she’d heard it all, knew the answers better than he did, and corrected him in lilting, broken Eskimo-English when he faltered, or when he lost his thoughts to his age, forgetting even what it was that he was supposed to be studying. Lily had been his housekeeper in Alaska, and gradually over the years he had just stopped paying her. He had performed the wedding ceremony himself, though he wasn’t sure if his license for such things had been current at the time.

“I haven’t done anything,” he’d tell Lily when he came back to the house late each afternoon. Thousands of pages of sermons, stuffed all around his office. The house would be warm, warmer than it had been in his drafty office, and supper would be cooking, vegetables and meat warming on the woodstove. Mahatma Joe shot moose and deer when they invaded his garden; bears and elk, too, anything that came slinking around looking for the Lord’s produce. He hung the animals in the garage for Lily to skin and butcher. There was always meat.

When Joe came in sad and complaining, Lily would think of what she could say to cheer him up. “God loves you” was her favorite. That was usually the best one, the one he could not argue with when he came in sulky and self-abusing. Mahatma Joe had been a hero among some of the Inuit up in Alaska. He’d converted them to Christianity left and right, packing the church every Sunday, curing people in both their minds and their bodies, chasing fever from their blisters and wounds, and fever from their twisted, ecstatic, free souls, unsaved souls that didn’t know the Word from the caw of a raven or the howl of wolves. Joe would shout at the heavens, shaking his fists and looking at his flock with wild eyes that frightened them, and made them want to change. It was as if he had come upon them in the woods and saved them, had fired a shot and killed or wounded some dark beast back in the woods just behind them. The Inuit had treated him like a king, and Lily believed that she’d been lucky enough to go with him when he left: proud to be such a strong man’s wife, though sometimes she missed the pay she’d had when she was just a housekeeper.

That six-week slow stretch, when Joe had become disgruntled, and thought he was being called elsewhere — should they have stayed? Lily wondered. Would it have been evil for him to stay in Alaska and just be a regular man, instead of a saint? She understood the drama and attraction of saving souls — changing and controlling the course of a life, or lives — but Lily wondered often what it would have been like if, after running out of souls, Joe had just stayed there and been a regular preacher, just living a regular life instead of moving on and looking for fresh souls, like new meat, like a hunter.

That had been a long time ago. Things had gotten so different once Joe and Lily were across the border, in the Grass Valley. Despite its wildness, its lack of electricity or phones or a single radio station, the people were frightened of nothing, they were wild like animals, and happy — and Lily felt lost. She was shocked at the way they laughed at her husband — laughed at him openly — though she did as Mahatma Joe had instructed her, and prayed for them anyway.

“I have to do something,” he told her more and more, as the days, and then the seasons, went sliding past, surely moving faster than they had ever moved for anyone else. Joe had been a middle-aged man when he and Lily came to the valley, strong and with a whole new place before him. But now it was no different than how it had ever been. In all of his sixty-eight years he had done nothing.

Joe never received thank-you notes from any of the agencies to whom he sent the jars of tomatoes, the preserved squash, the strawberry jam. He used not to mind it, but as he grew older, it only added to the panic.

Except for Lily, he did not exist. It could already be the afterlife, and it was not that much different from the first life, because nothing was happening: nothing major, nothing dangerous, not that he was aware of.

Lily cooked for him. They read magazines together, talked about the garden, reminisced about Alaska, and then compared their lives with those found in the Bible, how what they had done or thought about during the day reminded them of something someone had done in a parable. Then they would go to bed.

They would undress and get under the covers together, still wearing their socks. Another day would slide past as night drew up over them, while outside, in a hard cold that dropped birds from midair, the stars glittered and flashed through the trees, and all through the valley coyotes howled and screamed.

Mahatma Joe would listen to the coyotes and think that he was a sinner for doing nothing, and would be startled to realize that he was breathing hard, almost panting.

“Ssshh,” Lily would tell him, pulling him closer, patting his back, his shoulders, and his head, lowering it to her breasts. “Sssh, it be all right, ssshh,” she said, believing it was the coyotes that were alarming him, coyotes racing across the frozen snow, laughing and yapping, howling, running. “Sssh, it be all right,” she would keep saying, and finally, falling into sleep, he would believe her, and would be grateful for it, as if she had come upon him in the forest with a gun and had killed a dangerous thing stalking behind him, and saved his life.

And then, after Joe was asleep, down in her breasts and warm like a child, Lily would put a pillow beneath his head. She would get out of bed, go into the kitchen, dress warmly, and put on the ice skates they had hanging on the wall, which they kept for when children sometimes came by, wanting to skate on the little pond below their garden. Lily kept the ice swept and scraped in winter for just that purpose. It was always ready, and on the rare occasions when children did come to the door asking if they could skate, Mahatma Joe was delighted. He would hurry down to the frozen pond with them, sit on a snowbank with his Bible, and read to them as they skated around and around the tiny hard pond, the sound of steel cutting through frozen water, steel scraping and flashing. The children, ignoring the Scripture, would have their fun as Mahatma Joe read on, tears coming into his old eyes, so much pleasure it brought him to be reading to an audience, to be touching young lives, the most important ones, and the tears would fall from his cheeks, freezing, like small bits of glass.

Lily would now take the skates out below that field of stars, the crunch of frozen snow, with the coyotes singing and howling, their cries echoing all around the narrow valley as if going in circles, start to finish and back to start again. She’d walk down to the pond and put the skates on, and with her hands behind her back and her chin tucked down, she would skate the way she and Joe had seen men and women do at a park in Seattle, so many years ago. It was a small pond, but she would skate as fast as she could anyway, using only her legs slicing them back and forth like strong scissors, with the cold air racing past her face, and two moons to give her light: the real one cold as stone in the sky above her, and then the one frozen in the ice, reflected, the one that was just ahead of her and then beneath her, passing under her skates as she raced across it, an illusion, behind her, gone.

Lily would skate for hours, her long black hair flowing from beneath her cap. Her eyes watered with pleasure at the speed, and at the feel of it, and at the chance to be doing something that meant absolutely nothing at all, something other than gardening or cooking or cleaning — and she would skate until her legs were trembling,. until she could no longer even stand.

She would lie down on the ice and rest, spread-eagled in the center of the pond. She would watch the moon, panting, her face bright as bone, and would imagine that it was watching her.

There were things to think about as she rested. It would be close to daylight now, colder than ever. The coyotes would be silent, resting too. There would be no sound at all. Lily would think about the other life, the one she had left.

Lily would remember Alaska, remember her friends, remember certain colors, certain days, like scraps of cloth. She would close her eyes, still spread-eagled on the ice, and think about her life with Mahatma Joe, and try to feel all of the water beneath her, an entire pond of water beneath the ice.

Sometimes she thought that she could feel it, that she could sense there was something beneath all that ice. But she would grow quickly cold, lying still like that, and would have to get up and go back to the house, where she would hang the skates back up, build the fire again, slip out of her clothes and into bed with Mahatma Joe, who slept so soundly and who looked, each night (especially in winter), as if he were never going to wake up again. His brow would be furrowed, and Lily would smooth it with her thumb, and say again, “Sssh, ssshhh, it be all right.”

·

The chinooks came, and people behaved fairly well. Mahatma Joe walked down the roads looking for violators, but he rarely saw anyone, clothed or unclothed; the town had changed, especially in the last five years. There was talk of properly paving the road, which was studded with gravel and blue flecks of galena. The town. was aging; growing softer, less wild.

The soil began to warm. The snow blanket shrank, spotted itself away, new ovals of earth and dry grass appearing larger each day, opening so suddenly that it surprised people, even though they saw it happen every year.

But it was never the same. Each year was a surprise. Each year winter fooled them, and they forgot all over again that earth and grass lay beneath the snow, that the world was not made of snow and ice, that the real world would reappear quickly when the grace of the chinooks arrived.

Mahatma Joe prowled the river bottom, explored the fecundity of the valley along the river near where Leena had her tent. He jabbed his walking cane into the rich mire. The cane made a sucking sound as he pulled it out. Joe wanted the soil badly. He took handfuls of it home in his coat pockets and sprinkled it over his own poor garden. It occurred to him, and not for the first time, that these were his last days, but somehow he felt more free than he had in the past, felt cleaner, stronger.

It was like walking through the mountains for days and days — for years, even, without seeing anything — and then coming over a pass and looking out and seeing a small town below, glittering in the distance.

He knew, suddenly, that he was almost there, that he did not have far to go. He no longer had to conserve himself. His steps quickened.

Joe became extraordinarily protective of his home garden. Before, he had let the Arctic hares — their white pelage falling away, shedding to mottled summer brown — sit and warm themselves in the March light of his garden for a few minutes each day, nibbling on carrot tops like hungry sinners, before he sent Lily out to chase them away. Black bears, thin from the winter, sometimes moved in, digging in the garden for roots, and Joe would shoot them, and the elk and deer too, for the meat, but he knew this time that he would not need the meat, and he felt uneasy for the first time about killing, about taking lives too soon, too early.

Instead, Joe ran the moose and bears out of his garden with his chain saw. He kept it on the porch, and would crank it up and run out with it, revving it wildly whenever he saw anything near his vegetables, even the timid rabbits. Joe shot one black bear, a yearling, and hung it on a pole in the garden like a scarecrow, put a baseball cap on it and let it stand in the sun. Like a dark warm shadow, the black fur glistened at first but then fell away, as the winds carried most of the smell farther down the valley and up the river. Ravens flew in from the woods and rested on the bear’s shoulders, leaning forward and picking at his fur as if leaning in to tell him a secret.

·

In April, Mahatma Joe’s soil was no longer good enough for him. He had already managed to raise some beans and a few hardy tomatoes by covering them with blankets at night and by building small warming fires up and down the garden. And by midsummer, as ever, he’d probably be able to eke out enough produce to make his modest shipments to Africa again; but by the end of April, Joe was discouraged. What had been good enough for him in the past was no longer adequate, not since his visions of the larger, better gardens along the river. Joe cut the bear down from his pole, tilled up his garden in a rage, and burned the remains. There would be other good gardens in that very spot, but they would not be his, he knew.

Joe and Lily ordered more seeds from the catalogue and waited for the full moon. They bought another pair of skates at the thrift store for Mahatma Joe. Lily took him to the pond at night, under a moonless sky with stars glittering above like a throw-net cast over them, and on the thinning shield of ice she taught him to skate, for no other reason than that it was something he had never done before. She also taught him her tribe’s songs, which he had once known but had long forgotten.

A full moon appeared. Joe and Lily prepared as if they were going to war, strapping shovels and spades across their backs like rifles, and though the center of the river had thawed and was running fast and cold down the middle, the shorelines were still frozen and packed hard. They laced up their skates, stepped out on the ice, and pushed off, began to glide.

The racing water beside them drowned out the sound of their blades. Lily skated ahead of Joe, being younger and faster, and she leaped small logs that had fallen into the river and were frozen in the ice, leaping like the skaters they had seen in Seattle. Joe tried hard to keep up with her, to stay close to her, and he felt young, felt as quick as the dark river. He watched the moon on her back. He could not wait to get to the valley and sink the first bite of hoe into the centuries-old soil. He wanted to sprinkle the seeds on the dark upturned earth and let the moon’s light touch them with its magic before he covered them up. He wanted to sing the songs of a sinner, in order to do good work. To do anything — any kind of work. To keep from disappearing.

·

She watched them from her tent. Sam’s whines had awakened her the first night they came. Leena had thought they were bears until she heard their voices, almost like children’s voices, over the strong night rush of the river.

Leena peered at their dark shapes moving along the river, the man and the woman discussing something, then separating, and beginning to swing scythes. The valley bottom was washed in moonlight, a light so bright it seemed brighter than daylight, though the slopes of the mountains and the trees were still in shadow, darker than ever.

But out by the river, in the tall spring grass, everything was silver, and she watched, a little frightened, as they moved through the grass with their scythes, cutting great sweeps of it down.

Renewed with every swing, Joe felt as if he were getting back at something, or as if he were earning something — felling sinners for the Lord, each blade of grass a dirty heathen. He was greedy with the scythe, and went at the grass as if it were an enemy or a threat. He delighted in the smooth ease with which it fell. Perhaps he was even saving souls.

Lily was enthusiastic as well. Forty-five years she had lived, and she’d never been in the midst of such tall, green, growing grass. She’d never used a scythe, never walked through waist-high grass, and the smell it made as it was ripped by the scythe almost brought water to her eyes. Her sweeps were smooth, wide, and rhythmic. Lily wanted to take her clothes off and lie down with old Joe in the deep grass under all that light, but knew they were on a mission, that there was only a certain amount of time left, and so she only thought about it, as she cut the grass, and it made her swings easier, gave them a better motion, until after a while she could almost believe that that was what she was doing, lying under the moon in the sea of grass with old Joe, rolling across the pasture in sweeping motions, and it made Lily’s swings come easier still. She hummed to herself as she mowed the grass down.

Leena was frightened to see them in what she had come to think of as her field, and was frightened by the speed and force with which the moon-washed grass was disappearing. The man and the woman were working their way up the slope from the river, coming toward her tent, so that it almost looked as if they were searching for her, hunting for her in the tall grass — that that was the reason they were cutting it all down, bushwhacking it. But she had Sam with her, for protection, and she wanted to get closer, wanted to hear what they were saying to each other, and wanted to hear more closely the tune the woman was humming.

Leena thought that she might even want to help: it looked like it would feel good to cut that grass.

As she watched them, she was suddenly reminded of all the things she had been trying not to think about — California, and the last man, or the one before that. She had wanted to think only of herself. But in watching the grass fall, she was reminded of something else.

Leena crept out of the tent, one hand on Sam’s collar, and began to crawl down through the grass toward the voices. She stopped when she had gotten close enough to make out their words and she lay flat, whispering to Sam to lie down beside her.

There was the sound of the river and of a breeze moving through the trees and the grass. The woman was sometimes humming, sometimes singing, using words that Leena had never heard before — such a song as might be used to put a child to sleep, or to keep a child from waking up; it was the kind of song that would mix in with the child’s dreams, get tangled up in them. It made Leena want to sleep.

The man was calling out the names of vegetables as he worked. He was swinging hard, swinging the way Leena knew she would swing, though she admired more the grace of the woman’s swings.

“Beans! Tomatoes! Kumquats!” snapped the old man, swinging as if his life were riding on it. “Beans! Tomatoes! Kumquats!” He kept repeating his chant as he moved up the hill, until he’d mown down an area sufficient to plant the crops he’d listed. Then he moved over and started a new section, imagining, Leena thought, what lay before him only a little ways into the future. He called out the crops with a strange sort of doubt, as if trying to force them into existence through sheer bravado.

“Corn! Okra! Taters!” he sang, swinging hard with the big scythe, but Leena could tell that he was getting winded, and that his fury, or fear, was doing him no good.

“Corn! Okra! Taters!” he wheezed in a hoarse voice as he drew closer. Leena had to lie down as flat as she could, clutching Sam to her side. They lay there as the scythe ripped the grass all around them, passing right over their heads, so close that she could have reached out and untied the old man’s shoelaces. And then he was moving farther up the hill. He was silent now, but the sound of softly falling grass, like feathers, was all around them, and Leena shivered, delighted with her luck at not being discovered. She lay there like that until daylight, when Mahatma Joe and Lily stopped working and put their skates over their shoulders and walked out to the road toward home.

Leena watched them go and then stood up to shake the grass from her robe and out of her hair. It was a cold morning. The sun was not yet up over the mountains. No one in town was stirring. Leena walked down to the river, pulled her robe and boots off, left them on a rock, then dived into the center of the current, ripping the cold water with her body.

She floated down the river on her back, as she always did, reveling in the sting of the cold water, the way it assured her she was still alive, very alive, even if no one knew it. She thought about how what Mahatma Joe and Lily were doing seemed right, seemed good in a way that she could not define.

When the sun’s crescent showed over the treetops, a gold corona promising the day to come, Leena pulled out of the current, turned over on her stomach, and swam back upstream to the rock, got out and dressed, her blood chilled to the center, but feeling strong, and she walked up the hill to her tent.

Fresh grass cuttings gathered on her boots and around her ankles as she walked. The morning smelled good. She wondered if men in this valley were different. She wondered if the women were different. She knew that everything else was — the weather, the seasons, the land. Perhaps other things were different as well.

·

The mercantile had a tall, steep roof, with old high windows through which dusty sunlight spilled, thin and dry, sunlight tasting of summer, even though it was only April and the river had still not completely broken up. Some days Leena might sell only an apple, or a tank of gas. There was a bell over the door that tinkled when it opened, but most days were silent. The loggers who lived throughout the valley couldn’t get into the woods because of the frost breakup and the muddy roads; it would be another month before the logging trucks moved in and out of the valley, and with them the stumpy, bearded men with their heavy boots, their dirty hands, the orange suspenders holding up thick wool pants. The men wore hard metal hats. They left flecks of sawdust everywhere they went, so that Leena would have to sweep up after them whenever they came into the store to buy a candy bar, a piece of cheese and crackers, a soda pop.

Leena sat on the bench on the porch and worked at making a crude scythe out of scrap metal she had found, lashing it with wire to a sturdy green branch she’d broken off a tree. After her shift was up, she’d go into the woods looking for antlers. She wanted deer and elk antlers to use as a rake and pitchfork, and moose antlers to use as a shovel. Mahatma Joe and Lily had been coming every night, skating down the river along the rim of ice that grew smaller every day. They were planting now in the rich black river-bottom earth.

Some nights, as the moon grew darker, Leena would approach the edge of where they were working and sit, not afraid if they saw her or not, and half hoping they would, so that perhaps they would invite her to help. She had found some good elk antlers, and had made a strong rake.

But Joe and Lily never saw her in the tall night-waving grass. Mahatma Joe would walk down the furrowed rows, dropping the seeds in, still chanting each time a scatter of seeds fell — “Pumpkin! Pumpkin! Pumpkin!” — until Leena felt nearly crazy with the sameness of all of it. Lily would crawl behind Joe on her hands and knees, smoothing and patting the soil down tightly over the seeds in a careful, promising way that made Leena want to get to know Lily and be her friend.

Leena was delighted at the control that Lily and Joe had over the field: how they had cleared and planted it, and were now going to bring it to life and nurture it, controlling when things happened, when things were harvested. It seemed wonderful and simple, and she sat back in the darkness with her tools and waited to be asked to join them.

·

They were there every night, despite the waning moon. They napped during the day and let their house chores go to pot — dust accumulating, and weeds growing up around the cabin. Mahatma Joe had all but abandoned his Bible studies. He had been annoyed anyway at how he kept forgetting parts of it, parts he used to know well. They would wake up around four in the afternoon, when the shadows were beginning to grow longer, and with the light growing softer, shorter. They would open a can of soup or a tin of potted meat and eat it cold. They’d each drink a can of beer, because they felt it helped them skate better. The lane of ice running alongside the river was getting narrower each day, and they weren’t sure what they were going to do when it all melted. There was only a thin strip left in places. Even in the shade of deep fir forests, bends in the river that never saw sunlight, there were young ovals of dark water beginning to appear in the middle of the ice sheet, dark patches of water that they skated around, ovals that were growing larger every night. The nights were growing darker, too, as the moon waned, and Joe and Lily had begun skating with flashlights, scanning the ice ahead of them for those deep holes, but still skating fast, skating hard.

Mahatma Joe didn’t know what they’d do when all the ice was gone. He didn’t own a horse. He did have an old birch-bark canoe, but he thought that would be too heavy to carry up the road each morning — four miles, and uphill. He considered Christ’s uphill walk with the crucifix, and he wondered if maybe he could heft that canoe, if it was for a good cause — the garden — and was the last chance he had at, if not immortality, then at least salvation. Joe thought that he could, especially with Lily’s help. Christ, after all, had had to carry his load all by himself; but he, Mahatma Joe, was luckier. Mahatma Joe had Lily to help him.

Joe would drink two beers, sometimes three, getting ready for the skating, and as the ice lane grew thinner and smaller, Joe began to believe more and more in the canoe.

After the third beer, Mahatma Joe didn’t feel frail or old; he felt young, strong, the way he had felt twenty years ago, when he had first come into the valley looking for souls. He would let the current carry him and Lily down into Grass Valley where they would do their work in the garden, and then he would shoulder the canoe, balance it over his head and shoulders like a young man, a young man after souls, and start up the road. He had done it in Alaska, and he would do it farther south, in the Grass Valley. Grass Valley was no different. Joe was no different.

·

The garden grew. The bean plants were up first, ankle-high in the good soil. On their way down each night, Mahatma Joe and Lily now spent as much time jumping the black holes of river water as they did skating. They were in the air, it seemed, every fourth leg-stroke — skate, skate, skate, and then leap, up over a log or over a wide patch of water, and then skate, skate, skate, and then it was time to leap again. It was exhausting, but the beer, and the darkness of night, the black holes appearing right in front of them at the last second, made it exciting.

As the garden grew, Joe and Lily could not wait to get to it, and skated toward it eagerly each night, as if toward their children, to see what changes each day had brought. They felt light-headed, invincible, and it was not from the beers but from the thought of the garden, the strength of its growth, and the sureness that it was only going to get larger and larger.

“Beets! Carrots! Spinach!” Mahatma Joe would sing, preparing for each jump, calling out a vegetable for each stroke of the skates. He was becoming quite good at it, and was less afraid to jump than Lily, who was heavier than he was and who sometimes made the ice splinter when she landed.

It didn’t seem right, Lily thought, that she should be carrying so many of the tools when she was heavier than Joe to begin with. It made Lily nervous, so she did not sing anymore, but concentrated, scanning with her flashlight as she tried to skate around the black holes when she could. But sometimes there was no choice, it was too late, and Lily had to leap. She would bite her lips and pretend she was like the people they’d seen in Seattle so long ago, the ones dressed up in glitter and sequins, skating under bright, swirling spotlights, leaping with abandon every time they got the chance. Everyone had applauded, including Joe and Lily.

It had reminded Lily of a dance they had done in her village when she was young, back before the old people had stopped dancing. She didn’t remember much about it, didn’t know why they did it, knew only that like all the dances, it was done to change something — either to force something to go away, or to force another thing into existence.

All the men in the village would put on feather costumes, wearing any kind of feathers they could; and all the women would form a circle around them and beat drums while the men hopped and danced and pretended to fly around.

It had been a long time ago. Lily knew that the men and women had worn beautiful ceremonial dresses, soft caribou hide, and necklaces made of caribou teeth that rattled when they danced. But she had been gone so long that her memory was beginning to erode. She was taking on an imaginary memory, one such as Joe might remember, where none of the women wore anything, and the men wore only their feathers and loincloths. In Lily’s new, confused memory, that was how it was — the dancers had been stripped of all protection, all security, even all humanity, and were returning to the wild and to freedom. Lily remembered that it had been some sort of fertility rite, but whether for crops, or people, or fertility in general, she couldn’t remember.

The dance had been held in a great wide pasture in the spring, she remembered, because the snow was leaving, and the nights were warm. She remembered being in the circle of women, watching the strange half-man, half-bird dance, the firelight flickering over them. She remembered being excited at the sound of the drumbeats and chants carrying off into the night, as if trying to change something, or perhaps trying to preserve something. She had never told Joe about it, because she knew he would disapprove of the dancing; and it was not something her village did anymore, anyway.

Lily thought about the children she’d never had. She thought about the life she had never lived, back in her old village. She thought about how it would have been different — neither better nor worse, but different — had she stayed. For a long time it had been enough just to share Joe’s vision, just to be near it, but now Lily sometimes woke in the night convinced that she could not breathe. She believed what Joe told her about the next life, but there had been so little in this one that she felt almost ashamed of herself. Skating hard, Lily imagined that she could hear drumbeats that echoed her thinking. She imagined that she was wearing feathers; believed that Joe was chasing her, not just following her. For the first time in her life she wanted to get away from him, and she began to skate harder.

Lily turned her flashlight off to confuse him, and began skating all-out, as hard as she could. The river flowed north, into the Fishhead; Lily imagined that the Fishhead might still be frozen too, and that she could skate upriver on it, up through Canada and back into Alaska. She felt as if Joe had taken something of hers, had hidden it, and that she had no power, no manner of getting it back.

Lily could hear Joe’s faint, surprised cries behind her. The slush and snow and sheet of floating ice cracked and splintered as she leaned forward and dug in, her dark eyes growing quickly accustomed to the night. She could hear the terror in old Joe’s voice, the terror of being abandoned that all men and women knew. Smiling suddenly, Lily knew what the dance back in her village had been about: the men wanted to leave, but the women did not want them to. Those who could fly would be allowed to leave. But Lily did not remember seeing any of them take flight. She thought how Joe would look at the dance, how he would think it was mostly pathetic little half hops and jumps. She laughed, then, at what Joe would surely think was a silly backwoods idea, that any of them could control anything, whether it was the weather, or a crop, or even each other.

Almost surely, such a thought was nonsense.

Mahatma Joe was skating hard, gaining on her, and he heard her laughter, but that was all. If there had been a splash, it had not been distinguishable from the sounds of the river as it hurtled past, carrying cakes and rafts of melting ice along with it, tiny icebergs, pieces of winter, the last to change.

Joe coasted to a stop, turned his flashlight off, and sat down on the ice and cried. He cried as he stretched himself out over the ice. He cried with guilt. He felt the ice crack beneath him, felt the water racing just beneath it, water running in the wrong direction, to the north, against the flow of nature.

After he was through crying — and it did not take that long — he crawled carefully to the shore and took his skates off, hiked out to the road, and walked the rest of the way to the garden, listening to sounds in the night: birds, and the wind.

He walked hurriedly, hoping, in a sort of delirium of sadness, that he might find her in the garden when he got there, a kind of a miracle, her hoeing, having started without him. Had her laughter really been so quickly cut off?

Joe stopped on the rise above town and looked at his dark garden, at the still cabins that were spaced along the river, each with smoke rising from its chimney, and at the river itself, running through the little valley. Even from the ridge he could hear the sound of the rapids.

Joe watched the river, the light brighter over the valley than it had been back in the woods, and when he saw the pale, naked body come floating through the rapids, clearly alive, swimming upstream, and climbing out on the rock by the garden, Joe grew so excited that he fainted. But he was soon up and running across the field, arms outstretched, tripping but not quite falling, saved by love.

Joe ran down the hill with such speed that he imagined he could lift off and fly if he wanted to, though he did not make the attempt. Just knowing that he could, if he wanted to, was enough.

·

Sam rushed out barking, hackles raised, when Joe drew near the river. Leena, who was standing on the rock drying herself, did not know who it was at first, but then saw the skates hanging over his shoulder, and recognized the shape of his shoulders, his old head. Leena told Sam to stop barking, then asked the man where the other one was, the one who sang while she worked.

“She is gone,” said Mahatma Joe. “I thought you were her. She is gone, and she took all her tools with her.”

·

They worked until daylight, shoveling with the moose antlers, weeding with the hoe Leena had made out of the jaw of a moose. The elk antlers scratched good, deep furrows in the earth, like fingernails down her lover’s back, Leena remembered, and then she remembered the way Lily had moved through the tall grass with the scythe, sweeping smoothly, sweeping hard, and Leena tried to do the same with her furrowing, her weeding.

The garden was knee-high in places. Joe had not asked her to put her shorts and shirt back on, and Leena had not wanted to; there seemed no need. The plants rubbed against her as she walked through them.

Once the sun’s first rim of blaze came over the tallest line of mountains, she went to the river and bathed, and then got out and dressed.

They walked home quickly, Sam running in front of them. Leena carried her tent and clothes in her backpack. They left the antler tools hidden in the garden.

“We will bring a bucket next time,” Joe said. “We need to water the plants.”

“I don’t know how to skate,” said Leena.

“That’s okay,” said Mahatma Joe.

·

Leena sat in the bow, and Sam in the middle. Mahatma Joe sat in the stern, watching them, and leaned back and trailed his hands in the cold ice-melt river. They had a lantern mounted on the bow, and as they pitched and slid over the little waves, curling up and over, sometimes splashing through the little haystack standing waves, the spray drenched Leena, blew back on Sam, and some of it even misted against old Joe; and the canoe’s crazy slides and bounces pitched the lantern’s light all over the woods, illuminating one side of the river and then the other, but it rarely showed them what lay directly ahead. Sometimes they would bounce into rocks, hitting them square on, throwing Joe and Leena out of their seats and making Leena drop her paddle. The boat would spin around, sliding down the little tongue of rapids backwards, and without a paddle, Leena would panic and begin to shout, clutching the sides of the boat, trying to will it to turn back around and point in the right direction — but they never capsized, they stayed low in the boat, and eventually they slid through the rapids, through the pitching waves and cool spray, and finally came back out into calmer water.

They would catch up with the paddle Leena had dropped; sometimes she would dive overboard and swim out to get it, in the still waters, and Sam, not wanting to be left alone in the boat with Mahatma Joe, would join her.

The ice along the shoreline was only the thinnest, most intricate paper crust; it was like lace, and Leena wondered how they could have stayed up on it. The nights were getting ever warmer, but the river was still as cold as it had been in winter. Leena had never felt water so cold, and swimming in it excited her.

It took her breath away and tried to numb her muscles and pin her arms at her sides; it tried to make her legs stop kicking and sink, unable to respond to her wishes; but Leena would hold her breath and fight against the cold, would keep swimming. The colder it was, the better she liked it. It was more of a challenge. It was more like being alive.

She would climb back into the canoe when she had the paddle, sliding over the gunwales like some river creature shining in the moonlight. Her teeth would be chattering as she sat back up in the bow. Leena would wring water from her hair to dry in the thin mountain air, slip on her dress, and rub her toes with her hands while Joe took the paddle and navigated, using the flat blade of the paddle as a rudder, looking around the shivering Leena and up ahead, trying to judge where the rocks were, trying to see beyond the lantern’s dim glow.

Mayflies followed them down the river; moths swarmed around the lantern. Great brown trout leapt from the water, passing through the air in front of them, gulping moths attracted to the lantern light. The fish followed the canoe downriver, making Sam bark and lunge at them the whole way, almost upsetting the boat.

·

The moon had come back, and was full again. Leena would climb out of the canoe first, and then pull it farther up on shore so that Mahatma Joe could get out. Then she would begin carrying buckets of water up from the river. Each bucket held eight gallons; each full bucket weighed sixty-four pounds. Leena wore leather gloves but still developed red stinging blisters that made her want to cry, want to stop, but she knew that she couldn’t, that Joe was not strong enough to carry the water, a big sloshing plastic bucket in each hand, and that if she did not do it, it would not get done.

Her arms felt strained, elongated even, as she hauled the full buckets up to the garden. By the time she got there, the cords in her neck felt stretched out as well. She had to walk pigeon-toed going up the small hill to get the power she needed, but the sound the soil made, drinking up the good water as she poured it, cold and loud, into the furrows, made the trips worth it, always worth it, no matter how much her neck and shoulders ached, no matter how red and tender the palms of her hands were becoming. Her hands would develop calluses soon enough, she knew.

Sam trotted along behind her on each trip to and from the river. The moon shone down on them. Elk and deer tried to approach during the night and nibble at the fresh growth. Mahatma Joe would move toward them through the waist-high beans like a predator, crouched down with one of the antler rakes. He would stalk the deer, then try to run up and attack them with the rake, though they always saw or smelled him coming, and with snorts and whistles they would bound away, white tails flagging, disappearing into the darkness. Joe would settle back down into the beans and wait for the next ambush as Leena emptied the river bucket by bucket, bringing what the garden needed, bringing the very water that perhaps had helped to drown Lily, that had filled, and then left, her lungs.

“Zucchini,” Mahatma Joe would mutter to himself, crouched down in the garden. “Asparagus.”

He thought of Africa, of dying dust babies, stomachs swollen from malnutrition, reaching their hands out for yams. He would get to heaven yet. He was doing a great thing.

Sometimes Joe would lie down on his side and nap, while all through the night Leena carried water, pouring it into the furrows, not ever having any idea what the garden was for, or why she was doing it — only that it was green and growing. She knew that it was responding to her touch, and she liked that. It made her feel a way that she had forgotten.

Leena vaguely realized that she was working for Joe, and that she was doing his work too, and for free, but she could not help it. She was amazed at the change. What once was meadow was now a cultivated garden, ordered and perfect. She’d quit working in the mercantile, had abandoned her hopes of buying the barn. There was room in Joe’s cabin.

The soil splashed to mud as she poured the water; it splashed up around her ankles and got on her shorts, her shirt. Her hair was damp and scraggly from her exhaustion, and each time she went down to the river she wanted to set the buckets down and dive in, clean off, and float down the rapids. But each time, with the water so close, she could not resist making one more trip with the buckets instead, and one more after that, on into morning, until it was too late to swim, until the townspeople were up and moving around, starting the day. People had seen the garden, of course, but had no idea who the gardeners were; but now Joe and Leena were discovered. It did not matter; it was Joe’s all-or-nothing garden, his gamble, and nothing mattered.

No one would bother his garden. He had created it, he had worked for it, and it was his. They would respect that.

·

Joe lay under the broad shade of a giant sunflower plant in the daytime and dozed. The days were dry and warm, the high mountain air thin. Leena would work on until midmorning, until she could carry no more water, and then, not caring whether anyone was looking, she would go over to her rock, strip, and dive in, feeling the dried mud and dust leave her body almost instantly as she plunged deep, her hair flowing around her, diving deep to the bottom, where there was moss and weeds that leaned downstream in the current and tickled her as she swam through it. At the bottom, she would grasp a handful of the weeds and hold on while the cold river pushed against her, cleaning her. She’d hold the air in her lungs and turn colder and colder until she could barely hold her breath any longer — the sun a bright glow above her, seeming closer than it ever seemed — and she’d release her grip then and swim for the top, up toward the brightness, and would break through the surface, gasping, the warm air a shock on her face, and she’d float on farther down with the current.

The men in the Red Dog saloon, loggers mostly, some of them having coffee, were still waiting for spring breakup. Some of them would be drinking beer already, at nine in the morning. They’d taken to sitting out on the porch to watch Leena, immensely grateful for her performance. Each time she went down, the loggers would make bets on how long she would stay under. She became a valley celebrity as she stood on the rock and toweled off, dry and clean again, and put her clothes back on. April turned into May.

She reminded the men of other times, long-ago times, of Naked Days, and of how their valley used to be clean, unchanged. The men who had been thirty-five and forty back then were almost sixty now, and everything had gone by, nothing would ever be the same, and yet nothing had happened.

There was nothing to do but wait for spring breakup, for the warm south winds to melt all the snow in the woods and to dry the roads. Then the men would go out into those woods and erase them, cut as many trees as they could, going back in time — they’d kill the old trees, and plant seedlings that would take ninety, a hundred, sometimes a hundred and fifty years to mature.

They watched Joe and Leena shoulder the birch-bark canoe and start up the road, carrying it like a crucifix. Once Joe and Leena had carried the canoe up around the bend in the road and were out of sight of the other men, Joe would set his end down, saying that his leg was hurting him, and Leena had to carry it herself the rest of the way.

Her back grew wide like a man’s, and her arms grew large and tight. Leena would do what he told her to. She did not know why, only that she did.

They napped in the daytime in separate rooms: Leena on the couch, curled up with Sam, and Mahatma Joe in his room, clutching the pillow as if it were Lily. When dusk fell, they would take the canoe back to the river and begin their journey all over again. They liked working at night because it was not as hot, and they floated down the river toward their garden, dragging a net in the water behind them, lanterns mounted on both ends of the canoe. The net would be full of trout by the time they got there, and it was Leena’s job to pull the heavy net up onto shore. Sam would bark and rush in, snapping at the net, alarmed by this writhing, gill-flapping pile. Joe had Leena carry the fish in buckets up to the garden — and he made her bury them alive, for fertilizer.

Leena moved as if in a trance. Her shoulders were now larger than a man’s; her legs were thick and sturdy from carrying the canoe up the road every day. Her neck had nearly doubled in size. The night was hers. She no longer felt the need to bathe, and with her added muscle, found it harder to stay afloat anyway. The plants in the garden were chest-high, bearing fruit, and greedily, old Joe went from bush to bush, picking okra, lima beans, snap beans, and tomatoes, filling the plastic buckets with them and taking them to the canoe for Leena to carry home, where he would put them in jars and send them to other countries, remnants of his land, another country, different, but changing — souvenirs from a valley of men.

The loggers went back into the woods in late May. The last of the ice that had trapped Lily melted in June. Passing over that spot one night in the canoe, Joe and Leena looked down and saw her, perfectly preserved in the frigid waters, lying on the bottom, looking the same as she ever had, looking up at them through twelve feet of water as if nothing had ever happened, as if no days had ever gone by.