MAY 25, 1956
Honey B—,
It’s all honey. All honey, Honey Bee! I wake up to the song of Otie, his low caterwauling and clucking, faster each time around. According to my book, descending trill and whinny calls serve as contact song among family members, establish territory.
“So you love me. Good,” I say, rising and making coffee. Coffee and more coffee: this thing I do. I sit with it at the table, pull out my notebook and pencil, draw a picture of Otie. Brown and white striped plumage. Eyes, umber. Talons looking two hundred years old. Under the drawing I write: golden fury!
“Golden fury, Otie. Is that you?”
He doesn’t reply.
I finish my coffee. Down some crackers. Slip on boots, say, “Come.”
We walk toward Adele’s cabin. Adele is my only friend barring Otie and the animals that stalk these hills: bear, fisher, deer, moose, fox, owl, coyote. Coyote: the three-legged one I spy most evenings crossing the far edge of the field, the one I hear calling upstream nightly. A night creature, she or he is, like Otie and me—remarkably good at going unseen. Its tracks littering the banks of the swamp come morning.
There are ghosts, too. In the cellar holes and at the cemetery where my ancestors have been buried for two hundred years. Gray stones rising out of the earth with faintly etched names: Henry, Ezekial, William, Zipporah, Eunice, Philena, Phebe. More recently: my grandmother, Marie, and my mother, Jessie, who died in the upstairs bedroom one morning in June when I was nine years old. Some days I bring her jars of wildflowers: Indian paintbrush, phlox, Queen Anne’s lace. I plant them in the rocky earth, lie down in the grass, and close my eyes. Dream there.
But not this morning. “Buck up, Otie. Don’t let the world get you down!” I call out to the bird on my shoulder, smelling woodsmoke, following the path through birch and hemlock and spruce.
The path ends at Adele’s house: roadside, tucked up against the trees. Two rooms, white paint, a long porch, piles of wood stacked everywhere.
When I was a girl her uncle, Buck, lived in a house made of tin and tar paper a ways back in the woods. He logged with horses, lived on canned beans, threw the empties out his back window into a pile that reached halfway to the roof. I snuck to his cabin once alone and stood, quiet and unseen, at the edge of the clearing. Smoke rising from the chimney. A pair of rawhide snowshoes nailed to the wall. From within those walls came a soft and beautiful singing—a ballad about a lost lover and roses twining over gray gravestones.
I sat there in those leaves, listening, until the song came to an end.
“Indian,” my father always called him. “Gypsy-nigger.” My father’s blue-eyed grimace, his smell of grease and cow and copper.
“HELLO,” I CALL OUT ON ADELE’S PORCH.
She comes to the door, grinning. Dark hair pulled back into a ponytail, polyester pants, men’s boots with softened leather. “Otie! Lena,” she says, opening the door wide. “My favorite fools.” Inside there are herbs drying from the ceiling, coffee brewing, a pot of venison stew on the wood stove. In the corner a nephew lies sleeping on a floral couch, the TV on without volume. Above his head: a wind chime made of bone.
“Here,” Adele says, bringing me a steaming cup of coffee. “And for you, Otie—gohkohkhas—who is better than anything—this,” she says, going to the pantry where she keeps her traps, returning with a live mouse, held by the tail.
He downs it fast. Blinks at her. Adele cackles, pulls a pack of cigarettes from her pocket. “It’s a good smoky dawn,” she says, lighting one. “You coming fishing with me today, Lena and Otie?”
“Too shy,” I say, looking out the window, downing my coffee. Suddenly itching to be elsewhere: field, woods, hill, creek.
Adele shakes her head. Whispers, “Squirrel,” with a smile on her lips, as Otie and I nod our thank-yous, slip out the door.
We take the long way home, around the backside of Heart Spring Mountain. How deep the woods must have been in 1803, when my ancestors moved here! Old-growth forests, Indian foot trails. I try to imagine clearing this forest with an axe and a two-handled bucksaw. I smell the log cabin where Ezekial and Zipporah slept with thirteen children while building themselves their house on the hill. Parting the trees for light. Parting the trees for air. How grave their God must have been back then, Otie! How severe.