JULY 18, 1956
Coyote—
Adele shows me jars full of herbs she’s gathered: juniper, pokeweed, black cohosh. She tells me a little more about them every time I come, teaches me how she dries them, stores them, adds a splash of this and a drop of that depending on the cure.
She leans toward me, winces.
“You smell like your body, Lena.” Smiles. Hands me a cup of steaming tea.
It’s sex I smell like, between my legs, but I don’t tell her that.
I pull my notebook out of my pocket. Write down the names of the herbs she tells me.
“Why you writing this stuff down?” she asks, piercing me with her dark eyes.
“Bad memory,” I say. “Is this okay?”
“Of course,” Adele says, rolling some tobacco.
I think of my grandmother, Marie, who died when I was four, a low and sweet-voiced singing. What were those songs?
I ask Adele if she knew Marie. She shakes her head, says, “No.”
I tell her I miss my grandmother and the sound of those songs. She smiles. Lights a cigarette. Walks out the door.
LATE THAT NIGHT WE WALK DOWN TO THE CREEK, OTIE and I. I slip off my pants, my shirt, my boots. I splash my armpits, my crotch, my nipples, with the ice-cold water. It smells like earth, like decaying animal, like ferns. Otie watches me from the bank, winking.
I call out toward him. “Come in with me, you loon bird you!”
He merely winks and turns away.
Another memory: my grandmother, in a field, me and Hazel by her side, pointing up at the stars above us. Words spilling from her mouth that sounded like they were underwater.
I’m about to climb up onto the bank when I see eyes at the edge of the woods. Umber. Earth-colored. I feel them before I see them. I think: Lex Starkweather, and close my eyes, grin. A musky heat there. But when I open them again it is that coyote. Sly, feral, brute, three-legged. It catches my eyes for a long moment. Our breath like invisible water, traversing between here and there. Otie flaps his one good wing, hops toward that dog, squawking. The coyote wheels, turns, disappears into the hemlocks and pines.
“It’s all right, Otie,” I say, rising from the water and slipping back into layers of thick wool. “It’s all right. Nothing to fear.” My whole body shaking. “Let’s go home.”
I shiver the whole way back.
The kerosene lantern on the table flickers; the night air sends goose bumps up my spine, up my ankles and shins to the top of my knees.
Otie hops from the bed to the chair to the floor. He pecks at the water-stained curtains, hanging from the windows. Torn. Fly-speckled. He begins to shred them. Furiously. I let him. He is building a nest. An ancient instinct—this craving for a mate. My mother used to say owls were a sign of the death of something old and the start of something new. Hear that? The death of something old and the start of something new, Otie, my friend.