DECEMBER 12, 2011
Hazel is sleeping. So often sleeping these days.
Vale sits in the chair on the far side of the room under a lamp, No Word for Time in her hands. She reads: “The essential poetics of the Algonquin might be called ‘poetry in motion,’ or becoming one’s own medium of expression.” Poetry in motion: Vale looks at her leather boots, her red dress from the thrift store, the poppies on her right arm. All these material things: clothes, Lena’s green hat, the green mottled chair on which she sits now, the texture of the plaster walls—they speak to her, affect the way she breathes, affect her ability to feel at peace in the world. “Everything that really matters is enacted,” Pritchard writes, and Vale thinks of Lena’s life up there on the hill—the simplicity of it, the bottles stuffed with feathers, the skulls on her windowsill, the philosophical statement of her living. A physical turning away from power lines and the machinery of want. A turning toward: trees, woods, animals, stars.
What are Vale’s poetics saying? And Bonnie’s? Crystals. Patti Smith. Bowl full of rosaries. Vale reaches into her sweater pocket and pulls out the blue rosary that’s lived there since her trip to her mother’s apartment. She slips it over her neck. Fingers the beads, one by one.
She looks out the window and sees it has started to rain. A December rain, bringing down the last of the oak leaves, streaming down the fields and ditches where there should be snow.
THERE ARE FOOTSTEPS ON THE PORCH, THE FRONT DOOR opening, and Deb’s freckled, sun-weathered face entering. “Hey there,” she says, grinning and peeling off her raincoat, pulling a bottle of tequila out from under her sweater.
Vale nods toward the bottle. “You’re not messing around.”
“No, I’m not,” Deb says, glancing at Hazel in the living room. “Are you?”
“No,” Vale says, rising from her chair, going to the cupboard for cups.
There are no shot glasses in this house—they pour the Patrón into half-pint canning jars. For how many years did Hazel fill them with raspberry, blackberry, blueberry jam? And how many years now since she has? The garden moved, at some invisible point, from the farmhouse to the hippie cabin on the hill. What a strange cultural transformation, Vale thinks, bringing the cups to the table.
“To winter,” Deb says, raising her glass.
“To would-be winter,” Vale says, raising hers.
Deb sits down at the table. “Tell me about the book you’re reading.”
And so Vale tells Deb about No Word for Time and embodiment. About the slippery nature of time—past and present. About how, according to Pritchard, the past is in the present and the future, too. Vale tells Deb she can’t stop thinking about Marie, her great-great-grandmother. Of what was not passed down—how to braid sweetgrass, the medicine that exists outside our back door, a way of belonging to the world.
“Shadow stories, these ancestors of ours,” Deb says. “Blueprints for how to be in the world.”
Vale nods, taking a sip of her tequila. “Yes. But what happens when we lose those stories? When the story lines are severed?” She pictures Bonnie’s face at that river, holding Vale’s chubby body against hers, laughing. Bonnie—who never held Lena’s notebooks. Never saw Marie’s photo. How might her life have been different if she knew what Vale knows? How might it not have been any different at all?
Deb reaches across the table and puts her hand on Vale’s. “Vale, you are one tough motherfucker.”
Vale smiles. “Thank you. Hey, Deb.” A warm heat in her chest from the tequila.
“Yeah?”
“Tell me stories from the commune.”
Deb tips her head back and moans. “Farther Heaven! How long ago that life seems!” She tells Vale about Ginny hanging artwork from the rafters of the barn, about the girl Opal, hungry all winter, her thin bones, about Bird and her radicalism, the rafters in her attic room, its candles and frozen jars of water. She tells her of the time Randy, drunk on home brew, dragged a keg and a chainsaw up into a pine tree, then cut off the branches below him. Of the time Ginny leapt over a bonfire, catching her dress on fire. Of the snow-pissing contests they held in the dead of winter. “Easy for men to write their names in the snow. Harder for us women.”
Vale smiles. Pours some more tequila for them both, looks up at the rough-hewn rafters. “Sounds like the punk anarchists of Pittsburgh and New Orleans, only more hopeful. Not a bad way to come of age.”
“Hopeful, yes,” Deb says. “But we were also on the tail end of a god-awful war. No radical change comes during good times.”
Vale nods. “To change,” she says, lifting her glass for a second time. Downing it. That fabulous sting. She closes her eyes and wonders if her generation has it in them to try and shift the world, here at this new crossroads. Not just war but honeybees, and drinking water, and oceans, and superstorms, and widespread famine. When will the hearts of her generation rise up in one communal scream? She thinks of Occupy, 350’s Keystone XL, the indigenous protestors trying to protect forests and rivers in Bolivia. Dots connecting across the globe.
Deb takes a sip from her jar. “All of that earnest hard work and love we put into that land, but we failed terribly. My God, we stank.” Deb guffaws. “Everyone left but Ginny. But you know”—she nods toward the window, the fields Hazel’s tended so fiercely—“sometimes not upping and leaving is the hardest thing to do, but it’s the real work, too.”
Vale nods and looks down at her hands, twirls the blue rosary.
“Oh, what an ass I am,” Deb says. “I’m sorry. Everyone is free. To stay. Or go. To own your past or shed it. You can do anything you want, you know, Vale. You don’t have to stay here.”
Vale looks into the living room where Hazel lies, her limbs curled inward. She imagines upping and leaving tomorrow—joining the protestors in New Orleans, New York, San Francisco. How easy it would be. She thinks of Neko’s wrists. Neko’s lips. Neko’s collarbones. She raises her empty glass to Deb’s. Thinks: We are the sum total of our relationships. Thinks: Near the sickness also lies the cure.
SHE ENTERS NEKO’S ROOM IN THE EARLY MORNING. Climbs into his bed. Wraps her cold arms around his warm body.
“Hello,” he says, turning, rising onto his elbows. “You’re here.”
“I’m here.”
“I’m glad,” he says, putting his arms around her.
Vale puts her face against his chest. “Hey, Neko.”
“Yeah?”
“Can I bring you to my place?”
He climbs into the passenger seat, and Vale takes a circuitous route, not talking, sunshine beaming in through the windshield, the car passing River Road and Hogback Mountain, the boarded-up general store, Silver Creek and Sunset Lake, ice glistening across its surface. She winds her way back to the farm, crosses the bridge, and parks halfway up the driveway. She nods toward her camper sitting at the edge of the field.
“Home sweet home,” Neko says, squinting at it across the field. Vale nods.
She hasn’t brought anyone but Deb to this camper since she was sixteen. She feels strangely naked having him here: Lena’s hat perched on a hook by the door, her mother’s silk dress hanging from a nail on the wall, the owls she collected when she was sixteen, the pictures of Bonnie and Lena and Marie.
Neko takes his time looking around. He stares for a long time at the photographs.
“Coffee?” Vale asks, putting water on.
“Please,” Neko says, fingering the silk dress, the crude stitches running up its side.
Neko sits down in one of the two chairs and looks up at Vale. “You’re in here,” he says, smiling. “In this camper. In all these thing. You.”
Vale nods, pours the boiling water into their mugs, bring them to the table. “Sorry. No cream. No sugar.”
Neko holds the cup to his lips. “Perfect.”
He opens No Word for Time, skims through the pages.
“What a cultural vacuum we live in, eh?” he says after a few minutes. “We each have to go looking. Make sense of the world on our own. What a lot of work it turns out to be.”
Vale nods, thinks of her mother’s crystals, tarot cards, Native American mythology, newfound love of Jesus. All those years of looking in order to fill the hole of Eve’s banishment from the garden, she thinks. A culture based on division rather than interconnection. Isolation rather than belonging.
“How badly I want Marie to be Abenaki because of the ways in which that would make me feel I belong here,” Vale says. “That I have a right to these woods. You know?”
Neko nods. “Yes. But no need to be so hard on yourself. Or them. The ones who came and carved homes out of this hillside? They were poor, desperate, hungry, too. Survivors. Most of us do our best with what we have, no?”
His eyes are distant. Vale thinks: Iraq. The girl he pulled from the wreckage—Vale pictures her slender arms, her still, dark eyes.
Vale brings her head to Neko’s head. Rests it there. “Can I show you someplace else?”
THEY WALK UPHILL, ACROSS THE FIELD AND ALONG THE old logging road to Lena’s cabin. She doesn’t know why she’s bringing him here exactly. She wants to show him the way the cabin has grown into the hillside and land around it, burrowed, half-swallowed, yet still containing light. She’s been coming here often—near daily, before or after work. She has stocked the cabin with armloads of kindling, newspaper, matches, candles.
She lights a fire in the potbellied stove. They sit, huddled in front of it, while the newspaper bursts into flame and the kindling slowly catches.
Neko is quiet. Warms his hands by the fire. Watches Vale, a gleam in his eyes.
“She’s here,” Vale says, after a few moments, holding her hands over the iron of the stove.
“Lena?”
“No. Bonnie.”
Neko raises his eyebrows. “Yeah? Tell me.”
Vale shrugs. “I don’t know. I just feel it. But enough of that,” Vale says, smiling.
She rises and pushes Neko backward onto Lena’s bed. She climbs onto it and stands over him. Takes off her hat. Takes off her jacket and her scarf and stands there, breathing.
It’s then that she sees the drawing. On the underside of a beam above the bed, a spot she’s never seen before. It’s a rough sketch, cartoonish, of a man and a woman. Vale leans closer.
The naked man holds a fiddle. The naked woman has thick long braids, is laughing. Next to them are the initials: LW + LS.
LW and LS. Vale’s mind is spinning. Lena Wood. Her grandmother. A sudden heat in Vale’s chest. Lena was not alone. And who is LS? LS. Lex. Starkweather. Hazel’s husband. Stephen’s father. Lena Wood and Lex Starkweather. The fiddle player. Vale takes a deep breath. She looks down at Neko. “Jesus Christ,” she whispers, stepping off the bed, picking up her sweater and wrapping it around her shoulders.
Vale knows exactly what it’s like to not know who your father is. She’s spent her whole life eyeing the face of every man she passes, looking for one with bone structure and eyes matching her own. Who? Vale asked Bonnie once, screaming, pounding her fists against the coffee table, and Bonnie put her face in her hands. Held them there for a long time. Whispered—and Vale believed her—I don’t know.
Vale thinks now of Danny’s green eyes. Of Bonnie’s green eyes. Of course. Her mother’s father.
“Neko,” she says.
“Yeah?”
“Hold me.”