Up in the mountains, Jonah tucked his old truck into the woods off the dirt road and hiked up into the Gore; up through the glacier-scored hollow, where he alone dwelled with the few solemn bears that sought their winter retreat in the lightless reek of the talcum mines, amid the gloom of the few colossal hemlocks that had escaped the saw’s tooth and whose monumental size seemed now less majestic for their survival than sorrowful for their scarcity elsewhere.
In a clearing, he knelt, his heart heaving as it did every time he knelt here.
Every day.
He brushed twigs free of the two flat stones he’d set in the hard earth and chiseled crudely with his own hands years ago:
Sally
March 11, 1980-19—
Rebecca
October 15, 1953-19—
He took his cap off and fell still.
A creek trickled over rocks nearby.
He laid his palms on each of the stones, remembering.
He rose with effort, a quick catch in his bad knee, continued on, pushed deeper into the wilds.
Now and again he stopped. Hacked phlegm. His breath rattled like the wind in dried milkweed. What was once done without effort was now an endeavor of will against a body that was ready to quit.
The cabin lay inked in shadows beneath the hemlocks, unseen from the rutted trail running through the undergrowth like a scar.
His head howled and his blood roared as he stepped inside the cabin. He needed to quell his anger, stanch it before it overtook him. He needed to find the one photo of Rebecca he’d taken here, calm himself with her visage.
He rooted for the photo among his bookshelves, tilted from tectonic shifts and made of stacked bricks and old wood planks.
No credit.
He tore through warped drawers and flung papers and nails and dead batteries from them as if he were a bear tearing apart a log, drunk for honey.
Where was her photograph? He’d not looked at it, not dared the anguish, in ages, but now he needed to see it, see her face. See his wife’s face.
He yanked free a drawer. Tipped its debris on the card table and spilled his hands round in the ruins as a miner fingers a tumble of pebbles in search of that hunk of godforsaken gold.
Where was her photo? Where had he put it? Why was it not here?
There.
There it was: her photo.
Rebecca.
He picked it up and fell to his knees and stared at her image, faded despite his keeping it stored away to prevent her becoming all the more a ghost.
The scream of blood in his head quieted to the flutter of a moth’s wings. He looked at her face and trembled. So long ago, yet he trembled. Yet he could smell her. Yet he could hear and feel her every breath on him. See her. Still. The sweet ache persisted with the sense that if he turned around he’d find her standing there behind him.
His breathing ebbed as her photo calmed him.
He returned the photo to the drawer and stood so calm among the ruins he’d cast about himself it was as though he’d died in taking in her image, and his stupid soulless body had yet to know enough to fall limp to the wood floor where it belonged.
If only he’d the courage.