NOW
I followed Diana to the river, my footsteps sounding like little firecrackers going off against the quiet padding of her feet. She carried a pack, a fishing rod, her bow and a quiver of arrows. She was going to teach me to fish, and while I fished, she would hunt for game as a way to replenish our food stores. I thought of the bridge and then of the Robinson family, who’d been trapped in a cave on the island for three days by a fearsome thirty-foot boa constrictor. I felt the same way.
Mark was trying to repair the footbridge, although, he said, without a winch, doing so would be close to impossible. Angela, meanwhile, had taken on more chores, including winterizing the coop, so the chickens wouldn’t get their usual break from laying, which might have seemed heartless to anyone who wasn’t facing the prospect of running out of food.
According to Mark, the only way to get from the farm to town without the bridge was a five-mile trek to a place where Tenmile River ran wide and shallow, so you could carry supplies across it. Then you’d have to hike four miles back to the vehicles. In the winter, when the river froze, however, there was a spot you could cross that was a mile and a half away with a mile or so trek to the car. Xander seemed to be stronger—maybe it was from all the fresh air or simply from his spending so much time playing with Rudy—but sometimes his breathing got bad or his little heart would flutter like a bird in a cage and he would have to lie down until he felt better. Which meant there was no way he could walk nine miles and I would have to carry him part of the way, which I couldn’t do for very long. Not if you added the supplies and clothes I’d have to bring along. Even if the river froze, a two-and-a-half-mile hike through a thick forest and brush might still be too hard.
Diana’s voice interrupted my thoughts.
“If you’re going to stay here, at least learn to walk without sounding like King Kong. Any game within a half mile is already gone.”
I focused on the word “if.” Had Rudy mentioned my search for the keys?
“I’ll try to be more quiet,” I told her.
We came to the fishing spot, which was about twenty-five yards downriver from the small beach where I’d cut willows for Angela. Diana said that even though it was late season, the river was still good for graylings and possibly rainbow trout. I was to catch as many fish as I could and Angela would can them. We had two dozen quart-sized Mason jars left. Even I could see, however, that that amount wouldn’t be enough and that for all Mark’s talk of being tough and living with what the land gave us, we were in trouble.
“You won’t be a good fly-fisher but I can teach you enough to get you serviceable,” she said, and set about the lesson: the choosing of the fly based on what insects were about, the four-count rhythm, the mending of the line, the light flick to set the hook. Diana caught a twelve-inch grayling, a blue-gray fish with a sail-like fin, within a few minutes. The fish felt slippery and unsettling in my hands and I tried not to let my squeamishness show as she had me knock it over the head with a rock, run a line through its gill and stake it in the stream. Diana said graylings weren’t picky eaters, so that was in my favor.
“You’ve got a nice lay down, a good feel for the drift,” she said after she watched me for a while, and I felt inordinately proud.
She studied the sky.
“Conditions should be OK for a couple of hours. Then head back.” She crouched near her pack. “Tell the others I’ll be back before dark.”
She was hoping to get a moose, although, she said, she hadn’t seen sign of them around—or maybe she’d find a deer if she was lucky. She had what was called a subsistence permit. I didn’t know what that was.
The river rushed over boulders and eddied in calm pools. Diana dug into her pack and retrieved a metal water bottle and set it on a flat rock. “First rule, never go anywhere without water,” she said. “Second rule, always carry one of these.”
She stood and tossed me a small black canister, which I fumbled and dropped. I retrieved it from the ground.
“What’s this?”
“Bear spray. The directions are on the canister. Hook it to your jeans.”
A ripple of worry ran through me. “Is it safe?”
“Unless you spray it into the wind. Then it’ll come back and hit you instead of the bear.”
My neck prickled at the thought of coming face-to-face with the grizzly that roamed the area. I’d glimpsed him early one morning on my way to the outhouse. He had come out of the woods near the spring line; he had a massive head with strips of shaggy fur that hung from his haunches. He looked unkempt and dangerous. I’d held my breath until the bear disappeared into the willows.
Diana hefted her pack and quiver of arrows onto her shoulders, picked up her bow and started to leave.
“Can I ask you a question?” I said.
She stopped and turned her head.
“Why did you want Mark to keep Rudy a secret from me?”
A raven croaked from somewhere high in a tree. Diana looked across the river and then back at me.
“I didn’t,” she said.
I carried her answer with me over the next days as Mark urged us on with hunting and fishing and pit digging. It was like I’d swallowed a dark stone that sat heavily inside. What else was he still lying about? The days grew shorter and I noticed the small reductions in our meals: the tinier portions of meat in the soups, the slightly shrunken loaves of bread, the rabbit stews that were mostly potatoes and carrots. I thought of the Donner Party, who had pushed on despite every sign of bad things to come and eventually destroyed themselves.
At night, Mark pored over his books: Mind, Self, Love and others about survival and the dangers of big government. There was no more poetry. He began to lecture us about how our troubles were nothing against what was happening in the world and that we needed to harden ourselves against the temptation to give up.
“Our society is so afraid of letting people have their own power, of letting us find our passion and reject the chains of capitalism, that they try to take away every pleasure we have. Think of Prohibition; think of the war on drugs. If we’d made drugs legal, the government wouldn’t have done the corporations’ bidding and sent gang members back to El Salvador and guns to Nicaragua and labeled Mexico a dangerous place so we could exploit people with low-wage jobs that allowed companies to get rich. I didn’t understand it before but I see it now. I was a slave to greed. Once we sever ourselves from this sick society, however, and become our own saviors, we will have abundance.”
Xander piped up, “I want to do a bun dance, Daddy,” and Mark laughed.
“We will, Xan. I promise,” he said.
I had a hard time following his lines of thought. They seemed to lead only to the places he wanted them to go. Angela, however, parroted what he said. “Abundance will come to us,” she repeated over and over.
Diana, meanwhile, began to range farther in search of game. We celebrated when she came home with a beaver she’d shot. The meat was full of fat and therefore even better for us than the leaner meat of rabbits, which we’d been relying on. Once, she came home with a porcupine, although we had to throw the meat away because its liver turned out to be spotted with disease. The long days exhausted her, however, and she often fell asleep right after dinner. Her eyes looked sunken and her skin pale. Angela fussed over her and said pregnant women needed more vitamins and minerals; she pressed Diana to eat more kale and drink herbal tea.
Angela, for her part, seemed to grow even more needy. As Mark sat on the couch, she would stretch like a cat in front of him, lifting her arms so the smooth white skin of her belly showed or bending into yoga-like poses so her behind pressed like a peach against the fabric of her skirt. She’d run a hand across his chest and make suggestive remarks. Most of the time, he ignored her.
“Baby, what’s wrong?” she would ask, and Mark would say that he was tired or that it wasn’t her day and, once, that she needed to stop acting like a “cheap stripper.”
She came up to me after that and asked if I knew what was going on with Mark and if I was sleeping with him.
“I thought maybe you guys hooked up and all his energy was going to that.” Her eyes were filled with hurt. “How can I have a baby if he won’t touch me?”
I lied and told her we hadn’t had sex and kept quiet about the fact that Mark had been coming into the container and that I’d been making up excuses to keep him away from me: a headache, a pulled muscle in my back or heavy bleeding, although the truth was that, while I’d had two light periods here, my menses were now MIA.
Each time, I could see irritation flash across Mark’s face, which was then replaced by a kind of forced patience. As if he was trying hard to be the enlightened person Kai Huang urged his followers to be but couldn’t quite do it.
“If you don’t let pleasure in, your body gets out of balance. That’s why you’re sick,” he said after I complained about a scratchy throat.
I mumbled something about needing sleep instead and he left. Angela brought me cups of turmeric-laced tea and put a warm poultice on my throat. Three nights later, he was back.
“Angela says you’re better.”
“I guess I am.”
He sat on the edge of the bed and studied me. “What’s wrong? You don’t seem happy to see me.” His tone was playful. His eyes weren’t.
“Of course I’m glad to see you.” I was sitting cross-legged on the bed. There was a fire in the stove.
He ran a hand up my thigh. I tried not to flinch. “What is it, then?”
Something scraped against the container and I decided it was the wind.
“It’s just that I can’t help thinking about Angela and how much she wants a child.” I’d come up with this idea a few nights ago.
“And?” His hand stopped.
“And Kai Huang says all our needs are supposed to be equal and I feel like, well, maybe she’s being left out.”
Mark’s eyes narrowed.
I hurried on before he could speak. “It’s just that she said you guys missed her fertile day, that you were up here helping me with the stove and then you went back and fell asleep and you’re spending so much time with me and not her. It’s making her unhappy, and you know what Kai Huang says about standing in the way of others’ happiness.”
“Don’t be the dam on other people’s rivers of joy,” Mark mumbled.
“Exactly. I know it’s not the time to have three babies.”
He started to open his mouth and I held up my hand.
“We need to add on to the cabin and fix the bridge so we can get supplies, and with three babies, we’re not going to be able to keep up with the planting and the animals.”
I could tell the same thoughts had already crossed his mind.
“I can’t be happy if Angela’s not, so I think you and I should wait. Let Angela get pregnant first. I know that means abstinence for us, since I don’t have any birth control here, but I can’t feel pleasure at her expense.”
Mark studied me. I laced my fingers together in my lap so I didn’t fidget and give away my nerves.
He swore under his breath. Something about stubborn women. But I think it was because he knew I’d worked him into a philosophical corner: Deny my arguments and he was denying his precious book. He stomped out of the container into the night. The next afternoon, he took the sled, a duffel and the rifle and headed off on the long hike to the car and town. He said that he was the only one who could manage the trek now that Diana was pregnant, and that he’d be careful and get in and out of town as fast as he could.
“We also need grain. If the chickens starve, then so do we,” he said.
That night, when I came into the container for bed, I found a single owl feather laid out on my pillow. In Kai Huang’s stories, the owl was a bad omen.
The feather felt like a threat and I thought maybe that was why Mark had left it there. Quickly, I opened the container door and buried it under a few inches of dirt and leaves.