SEPTEMBER 18, 2011
It’s 4 P.M. and there’s an explosive rattle from the icebox below the counter. The lightbulb above the table blinks twice, then stays on.
Electricity.
Vale plugs in her phone, which has been dead for two days. There’s a message from the police department—Vale’s heart freezes for a moment as she listens. The officer who called says someone saw a person matching the description of Bonnie sleeping under the train bridge. That they will check it out, be in touch if they find anything.
Vale climbs out of bed where she’s been for hours and puts on her sweater—she’s suddenly chilled all over. She pours water from the plastic jug on the counter into the teakettle, strikes a match.
When the water’s warm she wets a washcloth and cleans herself—her face and neck, under her arms, between her legs, rinses the washcloth and hangs it over the heater to dry.
She’s been here for way too many days. They slip into one another. Lead nowhere.
But Bonnie under the train bridge: Vale pictures her hiding out there, near the water she’s always loved, the storm her way of getting clean.
Vale checks the rest of the messages on her phone. Freddie at the bar: WORRIED ABOUT YOU. A couple from the club: WHERE THE HELL. One from Shante: LOVE WHERE ARE YOU? And one from Jack: BABE!
Vale makes a cup of instant coffee. Downs it.
She’s been here for nearly three weeks. Too long. Too many days driving back roads and backstreets, hanging up more posters. Too many days of eating the stews and breads Deb brings to Hazel’s house, drinking wine and leaving quietly.
Bonnie by the train bridge: Vale would drive there now, but she can see from here that Deb’s pickup is gone.
Vale looks out her window at Hazel’s house on the hill, the house where Bonnie lived for the first eighteen years of her life, and wonders what, if anything, is left of Bonnie there: bottles of nail polish, cassette tapes, clothes?
Vale puts on her jeans and boots, slips her phone into her pocket, and heads that way.
Passing the barn, Vale remembers a story Hazel once told her. Two slaves, a mother and daughter, uprooted from the barn and turned in. Is that story real? Vale wants to find the photos of those ancestors, look into their eyes and say, “Bastards.” She wants to find a photo of her mother as a girl. Are there any?
“THE POWER’S BACK ON,” VALE SAYS TO HAZEL.
“Oh yes,” Hazel says. “Isn’t that nice.” She’s sitting at the kitchen table, an empty teacup between her hands.
“A relief, huh?”
Hazel nods, turns toward the window.
“I was wondering if there are any family photographs?”
Hazel’s eyes—pale blue, washed out with cataracts—are blank for a moment, then register, as if returning from someone or something far away.
“Photographs? Oh yes. I think there are some in the attic.”
“Thanks,” Vale says, heading toward the stairs.
There are dust bunnies collecting in the corners. It seems unlike the Hazel Vale once knew to let the dust collect like this. Vale can’t remember a moment when Hazel was not cleaning in some way, keeping the wildness at bay with any tools at hand: broom, vacuum, sickle bar, scythe.
“I come from puritanical hard-asses,” Bonnie saying. “They care only about the land and the dead. The land and the dead! As if this land was theirs to begin with! As if it wasn’t stolen from Indians.” Bonnie brushing Vale’s hair. Parting it down the middle. Weaving it into a French braid.
Vale’s pretty sure Bonnie slept in the small, east-facing room at the top of the stairs. She opens the door, steps in. There’s an iron bed in the corner, a wool blanket pulled taut across it, faded yellow curtains. Vale looks in the closet—empty. Pulls open the dresser drawers—bare. She goes to the window and looks out at the view Bonnie had for her first eighteen years: Round Mountain, evergreens, Silver Creek. She puts her fingers on the windowsill and feels something scratched there, looks down: Bonnie, etched into the pine with the tip of a knife. The scraped wood is brown and faded—an old wound. Vale imagines sixteen-year-old Bonnie, that knife in her hand, desperate to get elsewhere. “You got free,” Vale whispers, fingering the grooves.
The attic is a second-story low-gabled room above the kitchen: a single window at the far end, exposed rafters blackened with age. The floor is covered in old furniture, crates, chests, boxes. The detritus of two hundred years piled up, dust-covered, smelling of risen woodsmoke. There doesn’t appear to be anything of Bonnie’s. Just moth-eaten quilts and blankets, cracked dishes. Vale’s ready to leave when she spies, on an upper shelf, a dark blue photo album. She reaches for it, wipes the dust off with her sleeve, flips open the cover. The first photo is of the entire family in front of this house. The wooded hillsides and open fields, a pair of oxen, boys in britches, girls in white cotton with furrowed brows, their lips straight lines and eyes hard as stones. Goddamn, Vale thinks. What stoicism. Where was the joy? At the bottom of the photo, scrawled in pencil, is the year 1901. Their names are scrawled there, too—Henry, Ezekial Jr., Faith and Helen, Willem, and on the far right side, Henry’s young wife, Marie. Vale cannot take her eyes off Marie. She’s pretty sure she’s Hazel’s grandmother—she recognizes the name—though she’s never seen this photo before. Or any photo of her. She has a wide face, dark almond-shaped eyes, two braids—thick and glossy—that fall down both shoulders. She looks Indian—Abenaki—Vale thinks. She touches the photo with her finger. Looks out the dust-hazed window toward the field beyond. Bonnie, years ago, tacking a dream catcher above Vale’s bed: “You and me? We’re Indian. Don’t you think? I can feel it in my bones! Some native blood, somewhere. That’s the wild streak in me. And in my mother. And in you, my darling!” Vale loved that theory for years, and then she learned about colonialism: their white ancestors stealing land from the Abenaki and calling it their own. Plagues. Massacres. And Bonnie’s obsession made Vale cringe.
Vale looks through the rest of the pages, but there are no other pictures of Marie. Just the house becoming more worn down as the years pass.
No pictures of Bonnie either.
But Marie. Vale’s great-great-grandmother.
Vale pulls the photo from the album, sticks it in her jacket pocket, and heads toward the door. At the threshold she pauses, something catching her eye. There’s a hat resting on a pile of cardboard boxes. A dark green fedora, a feather tucked in its brim. Lena’s hat from the photo.
“Hell yes,” Vale whispers, climbing over boxes to reach it. She picks it up, dusts it off, slips it on. The hat, miraculously, has not been eaten by moths. Fits Vale near perfectly.
VALE TACKS THE PHOTO OF MARIE AND THE FARMHOUSE to the camper wall next to the photos of Lena and Bonnie.
She checks her phone: a new message from the police.
Vale listens, her heart—stubborn—racing. They located the woman living below the train bridge, the officer says. It was a thirty-year-old woman. Not Bonnie.
Vale pours herself a tall glass of rum. Turns the light on—a strange novelty. Finds some Odetta on her phone.
She places Lena’s hat on her head and eyes her reflection in the mirror tacked above the sink—she looks like Lena. The feather—Turkey? Owl? Eagle? Grouse?
And like—the almond shape of her eyes, the roundness of her cheeks—Marie, her great-great-grandmother. Those eyes, reluctant, half turning away.
She thinks of Jack, black-Creole, peppering the streets with his bird graffiti. She thinks of Shante playing old French folk songs learned from her grandmother.
“Will you be my dance accompaniment?” Shante asked Vale not long ago. Vale had shrugged, spun around the apartment in purple lace and black leather. She made Shante cocktails, nasturtiums from the garden out back floating on the top. They went to the roof with a blanket and lay there in the hot sun.
“Who were you?” Vale asks Marie. The woman’s eyes are not looking at the photographer but toward the field to her left, as if something is moving there—cat, creature, child. Vale takes a long sip of her rum. “Who are you?” Vale asks her own reflection in the mirror. She pulls some lipstick out of her bag and paints her lips bright red, dances to Odetta singing, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” in small circles around the room.