SEPTEMBER 19, 1956
Plum—
Two months into this madness, this forest fire we can’t put out. Lex comes every day. I hear his footsteps in leaves, in grass. That particular hesitant, rhythmic breath, then: “Lena? You here?” Beautiful cheek. Beautiful sunburnt neck. Beautiful moss-green eyes. Songster. Trickster. Coyote.
We don’t talk about Hazel. We don’t talk about the future. I make black coffee on the stove, fill the teacups for him and for me. We sit at the table, facing the window, facing the pines, talking, breathing, looking, sipping the black earth of coffee, full of grounds. He tells me about the Battle of Taejon, the Twenty-Fourth Infantry Division, 3,602 dead and wounded. He tells me about stumbling, early one morning, across a ditch full of dead civilians in Yongsan—women and children. Flies in their wounds, flies in their still eyes.
He says, “I’ve never told anyone.”
I put my head against the pine table. Take both his hands in mine. Hold them there a long time.
I tell him about the animals I’ve seen of late: my friend the three-legged coyote. Its night song down by the creek.
Lex sings me his favorite songs: Elvis’s “Love Me Tender.” Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally.” Kitty Wells’s “Making Believe.” He closes his eyes, taps his feet on the cabin floor.
Sometimes I go to him, put my palm on the back of his neck, and he pulls my body to him, holds his face in the shallow hollow between my breasts. Sometimes we do not touch. Sometimes I say, “Here, look at this,” and show him something I have drawn—a mountain lion, a deer’s antler, an owl. Otie watches us, blinks, calls out when we do.
“You’re genuine, Lena-love,” Lex says, with a thin smile and sparking eyes.
Sometimes we walk: stone walls, cellar holes, the swamp at the back of the woods, where the trees part and open into marsh grass and open sky. The bank is covered in coyote trails, paw marks litter the damp mud.
“Treasures,” Lex says, fingering the ribs and hollows and gouges of the bones on my windowsill with his callused fingers and wide thumbs.
And then, a desperate hunger in his eyes, “Lena?”
We make our way to the bed. Undress each other. My sister’s face is at every window. Her eyes in every knothole in every board of pine. But we don’t stop. “Don’t stop,” I say, before he disappears back down the hill, “coming here.”
He kisses my forehead, where the hair meets the skin.
“Lena,” he says, helpless eyes, leaning his body into mine.
STEPHEN COMES, TOO; YOUNG LEGS, POUNDING, THE knock on my door, his voice calling out: “Lena!”
We hike to our favorite spot in the woods—an outcrop of ledge overlooking the house, the fields, the creek below. The rock surrounded by wood ferns, yellow dock, feverfew. “Lay your head back, Lena, and you can move with the clouds!”
I do. And I can! We float to the sky side by side, traveling over treetops. Stephen is laughing, his little body in blue jeans and flannel, his shorn hair and freckled nose and green-flecked eyes, like his dad’s. And then Stephen is quiet. “Lena,” he says. “Are you ever scared?”
I touch his hand. “Of course I am.”
“I don’t want to die.”
“Everybody dies. And then we turn to light.”
He is quiet. We are quiet. We listen to the leaves quiver above our heads; we listen to a far-off tractor, to a bird in the branches above us.
“Common yellowthroat,” I say.
Stephen nods and puts his small, nail-chewed, callused hand in mine.
“But if I do die, Lena, I will turn into a butterfly. And it will be okay because I will fly around you and you will say, ‘Hey, who is this beautiful butterfly?’”
“Yes, I will,” I say. I take his hand and bring it to my chest.
“And I will be a magic butterfly. So I can talk to you.”
“I would love that, Stephen.”
“And I will be the most beautiful butterfly, covered in leaves and kings.”
“Yes, you will, Stephen.”
“And you can keep me with you everywhere you go.”
“Yes. I will. I would love that. I will keep you with me everywhere I go.”
And then he rolls toward me, puts his head and hair on my chest, and I kiss his beautiful boy brow.