The fall Empira Larson came to Idora we remember not solely for her arrival but for the height of the drought. Winter rains the year before never filled the creeks. The following summer the woods were parched and brittle and we worried terribly about fire, though none came. It wasn’t until Christmas that the creeks came up and the river filled.
Empira came to teach fourth grade. She boarded with me her first six months, then moved to a small house that needed repairs and was always damp, but which gave her a depth of privacy people like her seem to crave. It was my own feeling that she had arrived on the heels of some difficulty with a man—not necessarily something he had caused, either; but I didn’t inquire and wouldn’t have. She showed a sharp tongue if provoked but otherwise had a fine bearing and was gracious with the children. She seemed to live the life before her, not one left behind.
To be truthful, I wasn’t much drawn to her at first nor did I welcome her friendship. After my husband died I felt an odd antagonism toward younger women, especially women like Empira who had made independent lives for themselves, who moved about the country freely and might have had many lovers. Empira’s presence made me look poorly on my own life. In conversations with her, meal after meal, I came to know an anger that had not touched me before.
During the weeks she stayed with me I tried to regard Empira as irresponsible and self-important; but nothing in her could long sustain such a view. I held it from self-pity, I later realized. Or envy. When she moved out I missed her company so much it unnerved me. She had dispelled an atmosphere of complacency in my house, as no other boarder ever had. She was fresh as flowers. A boy staying with me briefly began to swagger around the house in such a way you could see he assumed Empira was just smitten. One night he asked her in a smug, condescending way to go to the movies. She said, “Mr. Conway, I love going to the movies, but I’m afraid I wouldn’t enjoy them very much with you.” She could be that blunt, but Eldon Beemis was the single one of my long-term boarders glad to see her go. It gave him the table back, to run the supper conversation as he wished.
A year after she moved out, Empira and I and Albert Garreau, who owned the mercantile, and Deborah Purchase, another widow, were sitting in the school cafeteria after a trip with the students. We’d been out to the Pearson Prehistoric Shelter, a cave above the river east of town. It was warm. We’d gotten cool drinks. With end-of-the-day weariness we were musing about how long ago the shelter had been occupied by humans—eight thousand years, too far back for us to imagine. Albert began recounting the history of Idora, which of course seemed ephemeral by comparison. I recalled a story of my grandfather’s time—he’d come to Idora in 1871 with the railroad—and that one led to another.
My grandfather’s stories of Ohio and the Great Plains, and of his many trips to the Pacific and the Gulf, were ones I’d committed to memory. The language I used when I told them was different from my own. It had my grandfather’s precision and force. I got caught up in his stories that day. I talked until the cafeteria was so dark I couldn’t see the others’ faces clearly. Albert, whom I found appealing partly because he listened to everyone so attentively, had heard many of the stories before, one following on another like a stream of water. Deborah had too. Empira’s attention was rapt.
When I stopped talking I felt slightly chagrined, having gone on so long with such enthusiasm. But telling the stories always had that effect on me. I felt them physically, even—Grandfather’s descriptions of wind-tossed oceans of grass in Nebraska, of huge trees in the valley bottoms of western Oregon, of flocks of cranes flying over. People’s desires: “… when Adrian tasted the wheat flour, the faint trace of nasturtiums was there. He bought every bag Edward Bonner had on the shelves.” When I spoke of these things, it was as if I were guiding a canoe through rapids and stretches of calm water, conveying my passengers on a momentous journey down a marked but unknown path. I rose to this part of my life as I did to no other.
When Albert and then Deborah left, Empira invited me to her home for supper. I said I wasn’t able to come. I wouldn’t like eating in that small, dank, ramshackle house of hers. I was ashamed of myself, thinking so; and when she told me then how wondrous and strange and invigorating my stories were I felt worse. She said they were an homage to my grandfather’s memory; she said that I was their custodian, and that when I told the stories I was beautiful.
My eyes filled with tears right in front of her. I couldn’t help it.
Empira was a physically active woman and early on volunteered to coach girls’ track at the high school, though I don’t believe she knew much about it at the beginning. One Saturday morning when I was leaving for Blue River, I saw her on the cinder track behind the school and pulled over to watch her from the car. Lap after lap she ran, her cheeks red, her head bobbing, her stride too short to be graceful but relentless. I was mesmerized by her belief in herself, at the same time I questioned it.
You couldn’t say what Empira cared about most. She was a good teacher, by all that I heard. Her concern for the children was genuine and tireless. She read voraciously and had a lot of music she listened to. She didn’t visit much, but she carried the irksome burden of a single woman in Idora with no self-consciousness I saw. Several town men, aimless strays, foisted themselves on her. When she didn’t give them what they wanted they moved on. I wondered if Empira cared at all about having a man in her life. I suspected she did, and it irritated me that she pretended it didn’t. Men new to town would hear around that she was “an eccentric, selfish bitch”—that’s what Albert Garreau told me when I asked. It took me a while to understand what they resented was her insistence on privacy and independence.
The third year Empira was among us she discovered she was sick. She never spoke of it directly, but I remember she came by the house one day with a book for me—we often traded mysteries—and she gave me an ebony stick at the same time. She said it was a storyteller’s stick, from Ghana. The storyteller drew in the dirt with it, she said, while he spoke. I think of that as the moment she told me she was dying.
In that last year—a long summer, then the rainiest winter I can remember, a late spring—Empira began a tapestry. I’d gotten over my feelings about her house, knowing by then what lay behind them, and when I went over for supper one night I saw the loom set up on the side porch. On it was the most astonishing piece of handwork I had ever seen. An understanding swept over me then that Empira was gifted in a way I could barely comprehend. Despite her usually good manners, Empira would deliberately annoy people on occasion if she felt they were being self-righteous—and she could be aloof. In my pettiness, I must say I enjoyed the few small barbs and comeuppances she suffered because of this. I thought they showed her her limits. But when I stood in front of that tapestry my stomach dropped. I never felt the same about her again.
When I first looked at it I thought it had to be a painting, so fine was her weave. Only with my glasses on could I distinguish the threads one from another or, more amazing, the boundaries between colors. A hundred spools of thread pegged on a board ran the spectrum from plum through saffron to ruby red, with dozens of shades of blue and green and hues of brown.
The tapestry was but a quarter finished, only the left margin and most of the upper left corner done. It would be about five feet by three, a wilderness scene of bright sunlight over a canyon. A few words had been sewn in over the shadows of trees in the left foreground.
“Empira,” I whispered, raising my hands in astonishment, in a kind of helplessness.
“When I was a little girl,” she told me, “my parents took my brothers and me to the Grand Canyon. You can actually see all that space over the canyon, you know. I never forgot its breadth, how delicate the colors of the rocks and the sky and the trees were that hung in it. I wanted to fill that space up, to be inside it like a bird, graceful, rising, falling, flying long, winding spirals from the rim down to a landing far below.”
“What are the words, here, what are they going to be?”
“What I wrote the first morning after I was married. They are my sentences of greatest desire, the purest hope I think I ever wrote.”
I waited for her to go on.
“I don’t regret the feelings, not a word,” she said, chiding me for my presumption.
“Empira, if you can weave this well, I mean with such skill, which is really so completely—”
“It’s each individual thread, Marlis. Tying off each single thread. Pulling them from the spools, holding them to the light, feeling their tension, like violin strings, before they become part of the pattern.”
“But it’s so beautiful. And, my God, so real. You’ve hidden your lamp under a bushel basket.”
“We suspect so little of what goes on in the world, of what is happening or has happened to us. We don’t gather the threads, Marlis. We let them go and then the wind weaves them. We let go and float. We eddy up along the river somewhere, most of us, and just wait out our time.”
By early that summer, when classes were over, we could see Empira was exhausted and we knew that she was ill. But none of us, the circle of her friends—Albert, Deborah, Ellie Randall, who was the principal, Dick Everson, who taught with her, or Grady and Maureen Sillings, who lived next door to me—none of us felt it right to bring it up. She had a pattern to her life that was deliberate and private, and this was but the last part of it.
That summer she visited each child she’d taught—of those that still lived nearby—giving some of them books and trinkets. When fall came she wasn’t strong enough to teach and Ellie told her not to come in. Empira visited me regularly, sometimes bringing flowers. She encouraged and then listened with such pleasure to my stories. She aged in those weeks, physically, but her temperament became more serene, and as I listened to her speak of her own past I heard no self-pity or recrimination. I knew then that I loved her.
She finished the tapestry but didn’t tell me. I saw it at her house one morning, still on the loom. The completed scene was brilliant, almost luminous. The air filling the canyon was bright and depthless but it had the pale color she’d described. The words were unobtrusive. As I bent down to read them I was struck with an enormous sadness. “My holy and blooded desire … implausible as such a life can be … his hands tracing the bow of my back, his lips on the rim of my ear … bring my own children here, to find what I was given …”
It rained without letup that October, not the mist and unending drizzle we are used to but downpours that flooded the air and streamed over the ground, night and day. One evening, Empira came to my door and said when I opened it, “Will you walk with me this evening, Mrs. Damien?”
I said yes, of course. We walked through the rain, down streets that led from homes on the hills to stores that fronted the highway and the park, then the river. Her stride was short, her steps firm. She spoke as we went, as her strength allowed.
“You have a good memory, Marlis,” she began. “Perhaps you will do me the favor of remembering all I will try to say now.” I feared she would become philosophical, but she was specific, enumerating things in her house, saying to whom each was to go. A set of tattered place mats, a raw amethyst in its mother stone, a Steuben vase, a box of hummingbird feathers. Some of her choices, the beneficiaries, surprised me.
We crossed the highway and walked through the park. The muddy river, visible in the faint glow of street lamps, undulated powerfully. Empira guided us to a place where it rose to the very edge of the bank. I understood her intention in the same moment that she made a gesture with her hand to sever us. I acquiesced, against all my beliefs. She dropped her coat to the ground, pulled a shawl more tightly around her, stepped out of her shoes and moved to the river’s edge. After a moment she sank down and lay over on her side. I couldn’t tell then whether she moved or whether the river surged but the water rose under her and enveloped her and she was gone. Her dress crumpled last in the grip of the current and I saw that the shawl was her tapestry turned side to.
She was gone quickly, as if it hadn’t happened, as if I were still listening to her voice on the hilly streets.
Two days later her body surfaced miles away in a flood eddy. I found an address for her family, a small town in eastern Pennsylvania. Her mother said there was no reason to send her back, not all that way at such expense. Could we please bury her there? she asked. We did, at the best spot Ellie and Albert and I could find at the Idora cemetery. The Reverend Arthur Thorven read an impatient service, annoyed by what he believed was a sinful act of despair, a failure of courage. It was a first funeral for most of the children. They looked on in awe, troubled, disbelieving. Some people standing there may have thought what Eldon Beemis had at breakfast that morning, opening the paper as I cleared the dishes.
“Says here Empira had cancer. Homeliness, I expect, was the root of what got her. Why she killed herself.”
I felt so sharply in that moment the poverty of my friendship.