DECEMBER 18, 2011
A knock at the door, the creak of it opening, and they all turn. Danny!
Deb runs to greet him. Danny—her tall boy. The one who did not die in the landslide two months ago. The one who was in a nearby village but did not die. Tender-eyed and reaching his arms out toward her just as she reaches out for him. She holds him, this boy of hers. Hair thinning. Face sunburnt. His arms, his back, his slender chest. Smelling of wool and woodsmoke and sweat and the dust of another land. He holds her, too. She is weeping, foolishly. “Danny,” she says, pulling away and looking at his beautiful face, his bright eyes, his toothy grin. “Come in.”
They meet Vale in the kitchen. “Vale, valley, vibrant, Vale,” he says, going to her, putting his arms around her. “I am so very sorry,” he says.
Vale whispers, “Me, too.”
A long hold, and like that they are all here: Hazel’s chickens miraculously come home to roost.
Danny goes into the living room, stands next to Hazel’s bed, and watches her sleep. The sky a hushed blue now, first stars visible.
Deb heats up the soup on the stove; Vale slices bread.
He comes back into the kitchen and puts his chin on top of Deb’s head. Holds it there.
“How you be, my boy?” she says, wrapping her arms around him.
My God. Back to her. She thinks of the devastation in the Philippines, Haiti, Japan, Guatemala. You never know, Deb thinks, squeezing her son’s body tight.
They set the table, something they haven’t done here in Hazel’s house since the Thanksgivings before Stephen died. Three settings. Bowls. Cups for water. Jars for wine.
Spoons. The bread and the butter.
What a communion this feels like, Deb thinks, while lighting the candles in the brass candelabra that’s been in the cupboard for twenty-six years. Brought together by disaster, natural and human, this son and this daughter. How many dinners have been had at this very table by the ancestors of Danny and Bonnie and Vale? At this same oak table. Lit by this same three-tiered candelabra. Zipporah and Ezekial, Henry and Marie. Their spirits feel very much in the room. They bustle around her, watch from the corners, and from behind the plaster walls. This house the colonizers built with their blood, sweat, ignorance, righteousness, and tears. The one Danny and Vale will most likely have to sell—how will any of them be able to afford it? Divide the land and save what they can—the perches on the outskirts, the cabins in the hills. We’re going back in time, Deb thinks, picturing the original homesteader, Zipporah, who bore and raised thirteen children in a one-room cabin uphill of here somewhere while the house was being built. We’re getting poorer, this family, Deb thinks. Our houses smaller.
Danny goes into the living room with Vale. Deb goes to the sink to wash the dishes. Refills her glass of wine.
She can hear Danny’s gentle voice talking to Vale and Hazel. Vale’s occasional laughter. How is it she found them, or they found her, this mountainside and its people? She dips her hands into the warm, soapy water.
How she loves each of them, their flaws and all. That is an essential part of beauty, after all—its pockedness, its darkness and its light. Glory be to God for dappled things . . . all things counter, original, spare. Those words have run in her head for thirty-something years now, ever since Ginny read Gerard Manley Hopkins to them all by candlelight in the kitchen at the commune. That long winter. Ringing in her head all these years when her cabin seemed too dank, too dark, too quiet, too dim.
Pied beauty. Her own gray hair, stretch-marked stomach and thighs, sunspots on her forehead and hands. Stephen’s dappled love and fallible heart. Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?), Hopkins wrote. Like this family of hers, here in this two-hundred-year-old farmhouse on Heart Spring Mountain. Deb holds her hands still in the soapy water and thinks of Bonnie, her pied beauty. Praise her, Deb thinks, looking out the dark window. And praise her—Hazel. And her—Vale. And him—her son.