MAY 20, 1974
The clearing he makes is on the ridge above his mother’s farm, an east-sloping bank at the top of the hill, accessible only by four-wheel drive or on foot. He’s done being close to roads, done being connected by electrical or telephone wires, done being part of a system driven to killing, driven to war. Done being in a house with his mother and seventeen-year-old Bonnie. Their incessant bickering. David Bowie, War, the Bee Gees blasting from the radio in the upstairs bathroom, black nail polish, the toxic fumes of hairspray.
He cuts the hemlocks, the spruce, the birch, and the pines. The hard maples he leaves standing, for sap in spring, shade in summer, company come winter.
How to live one’s life? Stephen’s friends—more than half of them—went to Vietnam. When Stephen’s card was drawn, two years ago, he walked into the woods with a jackknife and cut a half inch off the tip of his right-hand trigger finger. “Goddamnit!” he had screamed into the woods around him, wrapping the bleeding finger in the T-shirt he ripped off his shoulders. He wasn’t planning to do it. But he couldn’t go there. Do that. Kill. Or leave Bonnie, his cousin with the cracked heart, her body that looks like it might lift up from the ground and blow away. He drove himself directly to the draft office. “Sissy,” Fred Cole had whispered. “Goddamn chicken-shit sissy.” Breath like stale coffee. Breath like pennies. “That’s what you are.”
His mother had said more or less the same thing.
No matter how hard Stephen has worked since then, the words don’t leave his mind. They have rooted there, and into his muscles. Seventy-two hundred Vermonters served. One hundred thirty-eight did not return. Stephen works harder.
He works at the sawmill during the day; in the afternoons and evenings he works on his cabin. He has made a small clearing with a chainsaw and an axe, felling the trees, cutting them into logs, and used his grandfather’s adze, unearthed from the back of the barn, to shape the logs into rectangles. It’s the way the barn below was built, and the old house, too—these wooden notches, wooden posts. The braces and beams he used to stare at for hours in his second-story bedroom, admiring the simple miracle of architecture.
Bonnie comes sometimes up the hill in the afternoons. She is failing school, screwing too many people in the backs of pickup trucks. Her eyes are magnetic, her fingers aflutter and on fire.
“Stephen-monkey!” she shouts. “Come smoke a joint with me.”
He stops what he’s doing. Joins her in the clearing next to his favorite maple, overlooking the farm below.
“Hazel’s on a tirade today,” Bonnie says, letting out a smoke ring and tipping her head back to face the clouds. “No way I’m going back there now.”
Stephen nods, takes the joint, eyes his cousin: bell-bottom jeans and a skinny tank top. Motherless and coming of age in the post-Vietnam vacuum; inheriting all of the detritus of the 1960s without any of the hope, Stephen thinks. What is it people her age have to hope for?
And Stephen? What does he have? He passes the joint back to Bonnie, who takes it between her thumb and forefinger. There’s not one of his childhood friends Stephen feels right with anymore. And so there is this house. This foundation: stone rooted up from old stone walls and dragged to this spot by hand.
“Stephen,” Bonnie says, lying back in the grass, a smile across her thin lips. “Tell me about my mother.”
Stephen has told her most everything he remembers—so little. About her barred owl, Otie, one-eyed, hit by a car and rescued from some roadside. When Stephen was young—five, six—he used to go and visit Lena and her owl at the old hunting camp on the hill overlooking the swamp. She’d laugh whenever she saw him. Serve him chunks of cheese with wild apples, say, “How goes your heart, Stevie?” She taught him how to feed Otie live mice from her traps, and how to hold him on his shoulder. He can still remember the feel of those talons digging into the thick denim shoulder of his coat and the lilt of Lena’s voice in his ear saying, Every bird is an omen, whether you know it or not. He can still remember the smell of the bird in that cabin, too—shit and feathers and something entirely other.
He tells all this to Bonnie as he has told her before, his eyes closed, the pot going to his head, and it’s too late before he opens his eyes and sees she’s rolled onto her side in the leaves, tears streaming down her cheeks.
He goes to her. Puts his hand on her shoulder. Holds it there. She squeezes his hand, stands, bows, and walks down the hill in the half dark that has somehow quickly descended, threading her way through the trees.
“Damn,” Stephen whispers, watching.
When she’s gone he remembers something else about Lena. Something he hasn’t ever told Bonnie. One day Lena told him a story—Passamaquoddy, she said—about a woman who married an owl. She was leaning back on a rock, her eyes closed, a piece of grass between her lips.
In the story there was a beautiful girl who was too proud to marry. Her father promised to give her to any man who could make the embers of the fire blaze up by spitting on it. No suitor could, until a great horned owl, disguised as a handsome young man, showed up. He spit into the fire and the flames leapt into the night sky and the girl’s father gave her to the owl-dressed-up-as-a-man, who took her home and slept with her that night. It wasn’t until the morning that she saw his pointed ears and yellow eyes and true figure.
“Is this real?” Stephen had asked, eyes wide.
“Of course!” Lena replied, pinching his shoulder, laughing. She said she had heard the story from her friend Adele, who lived on the far side of the mountain. “But wait. There’s more.” The girl saw his true owl figure and fled. But he returned, again and again, in various disguises, until at last she accepted his devotion and his love, and, most enticing of all, Lena said, her eyes alight, “his alluring and bewitching song.”
“So she married an owl?” Stephen asked.
“Yes,” Lena said. “And they lived ever after in both worlds—human and creature.” She sat up and grinned at him. “That’s me, kiddo. Married to an owl.” She put her lips against his hair and breathed in, then elbowed his ribs until he laughed out loud.
Stephen lies back in the leaves, his head spinning from the pot. He will have to tell Bonnie that story. He will have to tell Bonnie the next time she comes. The woman who married an owl. Is there an equivalent story, he wonders, for a man who does not quite belong in the human world?
He looks at the shadow of his cabin. There are posts into soil. The clearing of darkness, the making of light. There is the plain old toil of it. Dedication of another kind—wood, light, this clearing, the trees he chooses to let branch here. Here, here, and, a better world, with every strike his adze makes, a world not of killing, or abandonment, but of self-reliance, of turning tall trees into the rectangular and sturdy and there-for-generations-to-come bones of a home.
When it grows too dark to see, Stephen sits down on the earth in front of the pile of logs and stones and feeds himself—cold cuts and a can of beans he picked up that day, beer. The world goes dark around him. Fills with the company of creatures—coyotes down by the creek, owls, brown bats flitting from one branch to another.