The man listened for the dawn birds returning to the trees and added more wood to the fire. The logs were small and snapped in the soft gray light. There was an art to keeping a fire low enough to avoid notice but warm enough to survive the night. While a bright, high sun blistered the days now in April, the temperature often struggled to escape the forties still, and heavy snows drifted through their campsite. The man pushed up the coals in the fire, where a flat stone was heating. He laid two gutted and filleted fish on the stones and listened to the fat sizzle.
The campsite was surrounded by thick woods and set in the shadows of Bald Hill. Though they’d put leaves and branches over the tent to better disguise it and packed in bales of straw for insulation, it wasn’t a home or a place for staying. Adam Greenwind was Penobscot and found it insanely strange that he was sitting over an early spring fire in the deep woods, essentially hugging an old migratory route, trying to figure out what to make of his life now.
Two weeks before, he had stepped into the hallway of their little ranch house in the middle of the night and found his fourteen-year-old daughter, Molly, frantically packing a bag. She was terrified when she looked up at him. Out the hallway window he could see the silhouette of the birch-bark wigwam he and Molly had started building that fall for a tribal project about exploring family heritage. They’d raised the sapling frame and sheathed the structure in birch bark, but they’d been unable to finish the wigwam before winter. While he’d spent all February and March talking excitedly at breakfast about getting back out to finish the wigwam, Molly’s enthusiasm waned. Instead, in the mornings, her eyes continually fell on the unopened stack of bills and delinquency notices piling up on the table. When he moved the stack onto his dresser so she wouldn’t have to see it each morning, she’d retrieved the bills and put them right back at the center of the table. That was Molly. Not one to let things be pushed into the dark. He had started getting dressed in his work clothes again as soon as he woke, even though there’d been no work but odd jobs for almost two years, since the mill closed. It just made her more upset. “You can’t fool me into thinking things are okay, Dad,” she said. “I leave you behind and go to school. Every day you’re just here alone. I hate it.”
The old grandfather clock working time over in the living room was the only sound in the house. He thought he heard deer or raccoons scurrying around outside under the moon. He imagined Molly’s horse, Cricket, curled up in her corral shelter, picking out the same night sounds. He thought he caught the whine of sirens in the distance and began to really worry. Dawn was two hours away, and he understood that light would be no help to whatever was happening here. He grabbed his own duffel bag and began stuffing supplies into it, packing light, but packing smart.
Molly stopped. “You can’t come.”
“See if you can stop me.”
He thought she might start crying, but then her face changed, shaking a little, pushing something far down. “I messed up.”
“We all do, sweetie.”
“Stop acting easy, Dad. Stop acting cool. It isn’t you.”
“Okay,” he said. “Then tell me what happened.”
She had been honest with him. Now it seemed nothing would ever be the same.
A fire that practically took an entire mill to the ground in an evening. How had Molly done such a thing on her own? He hadn’t raised his daughter to keep her head down and stay invisible. “Too easy to be an invisible Indian,” he often told her. “Too easy to give ’em exactly what they want.” He’d raised her to have a backbone and act in defense of those who needed defending. But not this: destruction, violence—those were angry ways, easy ways. He wondered now if it was his fault. Most of her life Molly had watched him come home from the mill too tired to hardly think. While he’d tried to be careful, he had a big mouth, and it was just the two of them at home. Molly listening to him complain about how the paper company treated its workers, constantly putting more on them, skimping on safety supplies, slashing overtime, even canning free coffee in the employee lounge near the end. Listening to him rant about the chemicals and the waste and awfulness of a mechanized world. Listening to him talk about how hard it was to know your birthright was to caretake the earth, all while doing work that injured the river and traumatized the land. Of course causal relationships were complex, yet here they were.
In the distance Adam could almost make out the high, sandy hill from which this place took its name. His grandmother used to tell him about Penobscot warriors who would race up the hill’s treacherous shifting sands. It was a hard run, and dangerous—a broken leg or ankle, a stumble and fall down the hill, a landslide coming down behind you, these were all real risks. So the challenge took great strength and endurance, but also intelligence and strategy. His grandmother had told him how Penobscot women made the sand run too, often winning the contest. He had first shown Bald Hill to Molly when she was five or six, and told her the same stories. He remembered how her eyes had focused and hardened at the idea of a female warrior besting the hill climb. There had been no shock, no surprise there, and he thought it interesting that when they left their house for the woods after the fire, they had almost instinctively traveled here, to the shadows of the proving hill.
Now Adam listened to the woods around the camp, heard nothing, and grinned at the lie. Several peeled and cut ash saplings were stacked near the edge of the fire’s light. Molly had spent all yesterday gathering and cutting the sticks to the right length for a fish weir. She was still asleep in the tent, and he knew that when she woke she’d start measuring and fitting the weir together and wrapping the sticks with netting. He almost rose, but stopped himself. He could hardly go twenty minutes without checking to make sure she was safe. It reminded him of their early days together, when she was an infant and he lived for her first year of life in conflicting states of wonder and panic, amazed that such a tiny thing could exist in the world and terrified that those tiny lungs and that tiny heart might at any minute stop doing exactly what they were designed to do and take her away from him.
Somewhere to the west, a twig snapped. “No need to make it easy on me,” Adam said without looking up. “kkʷey, Moses.”
A figure stepped out from the woods. He was tall, with a stone turtle pendant around his neck and his gray hair braided back in a ponytail. He moved softly despite his age and the heavy pack on his shoulders. “The stick was a stumble, not a courtesy.”
“How long have you been out there?”
“Probably just as long as you think.” The other man returned the greeting. “kkʷey, Adam.”
Adam blew into his hands, trying to take the cold from his palms. Then he pointed to the pack. “I didn’t ask for any of that.”
“You’re not the only one who needs to eat.”
Adam didn’t think to question how Moses had found them. He had known someone would come, had known too it would be Moses, who he had known all his life.
“This is a pickle, isn’t it?” Moses finally said.
Adam laughed. Of all the phrases to spill out of his friend, who spoke at least four languages. “I don’t know.” He nodded to the fish cooking on a rock at the center of the fire. “We’ve got food, heat. No holes in the tent.”
“No handcuffs yet, either.”
Adam grinned. “I’d like to keep it that way.”
“Me too,” Moses said. “Molly?”
“Still sleeping.”
The older man moved to the weir sticks and lifted one, turning the tan wood in his hands. “Where’s she going to put it in?”
“Beats me. Somewhere with fish.”
“It’s a good weir.”
“Should be. You taught her.” Adam felt the unexpected edge in his voice, crackling the air. “You pick a lot up hanging out with an old Indian revolutionary while your dad has to make a living.”
“I see,” Moses said.
Adam paused, turned the fish on the warm rock, tried to calm his anger. “Wə̀liwəni,” he finally said, embarrassed at his disrespect. “For the supplies, for coming.”
“It’s nothing.” The man waved his hand through the dim light. “What other things can I do for you?”
The precision of the phrasing was not lost on Adam. Not What do you need? or How can I help? but “What other things can I do for you?” What’s your plan? was the first thing most people would have asked. Adam appreciated that Moses had not.
“This isn’t your mess to get caught up in.”
“When did I ever ask you to be afraid for me, Adam? Mòsa sakeləkéskihkač Pride has no place here. Stop being messy.”
Adam took a deep breath and released it. The directness of the rebuke felt good. He’d grown up on the reservation fixing things on the island and tinkering at every turn: fishing poles, radios, canoes, neighbors’ air conditioners. Back then Moses and the other elders had called Adam “Many Solutions,” partly as a joke and partly out of wonder, for the child seemed able to figure out how almost anything worked. When he wasn’t fixing things, Adam was gardening. Working his hands through the earth, studying how it could take sun and water and make food and medicine for its children, how it could heal and adapt and sustain and persevere—that was his greatest joy. But life takes you elsewhere. He remembered the worst years: he and Nonie and Molly, just a baby then, shivering in a rented room on the island. No heat half the time, no car any of the time. Young and broke and hungry and angry at each other because the world never seemed to have enough for them. And there was that mill, just down the river, with its doors peeled open like a waiting mouth, promising money, promising the balm of the white man’s world: resource, opportunity. Adam looked into his palms now as Moses sat down beside him. He feared this mess was beyond the power of his hands to fix, heal, wrangle, or resurrect.
“Can you meet us at the house near dark?” Adam asked after a while. “One week from now.”
“You’re going back.”
“There is no back.”
Moses put his hand on Adam’s shoulder. “But there’s family still.”
Adam nodded. “Bring your truck, and the hitch that fits Cricket’s horse trailer. I need you to find a place for her.”
“I know someone,” Moses said. “Good people. Discreet people. What else?”
But what was his actual plan? At the mill, he’d been immediately respected because of his ability to figure problems out. So come on, Adam. You were a carpenter and a nut for working on tape recorders, cars, and radios since you could practically walk. A draftsman and a welder. A foreman and a safety supervisor. Sure, you got driven out of a job, but you’ve got a lifetime of practical knowledge in that thick head of yours. So what’s your plan? Stay out of sight as long as possible. Wait for the initial rage to calm down. Protect Molly. Find a way back to a normal life again, no matter how long that might take. If he was honest, he hoped for something he couldn’t quite articulate. For the anger to pass. For the land to protect them. To find forgiveness on the other side of it all.
“It’s not just Cricket,” he said. “We need somewhere to go for a while too.” He didn’t want to take this trouble up the river any closer to the reservation, he explained. So it had to be downriver, toward the bay, where the waters widened, and where their ancestors had for centuries traveled during the warm season, leaving their river villages to harvest fish and shellfish on the coast and get ready for winter.
“We can’t come in, Moses,” Adam said. He would do anything to keep Molly out of jail or the foster system, which to Native people were the same damn thing. “What if we did, and I never got her back?” He felt his face going hot at the idea, and he looked away.
Moses Jupiter reached out and brushed the wetness from his friend’s cheeks, then hugged him. “I know, Adam. It will get better. Ménαkαč peči-kati-sakάmkʷihaso. Don’t forget to light a fire near the water. Don’t forget to dance, to sing. Did you bring a drum?”
Adam nodded at the tent, where his grandmother’s drum was swaddled in a wool and horsehair blanket.
“Hug Molly for me,” Moses said. “Tell her I’ll bring waffles next time. Rock-sizzled fish only goes so far when you’re fourteen. Minač kənamihol.”
It was snowing a week later when Molly and her father came out of the woods and returned to their home. Molly was glad for the awful weather. It kept the roads and trails clear, at least. She’d resisted leaving the woods, yelling about how dangerous it was. Her father didn’t budge, and under different circumstances she would have respected his conviction. Out in the yard the wind was throwing screens of snow up in great howling gusts, and while she could hear the sound of a truck coming up the long dirt road to the ranch house, she couldn’t see Moses until he was out of the vehicle and almost right in front of her.
Her father nodded to the older man and then turned to her. “Do you want to go inside?” he asked, pointing back to the house, which sat in a small clearing on the wooded hill.
“Not anymore,” she said. It wasn’t a lie, either. The night she had come back home through the woods with the smell of smoke trailing her like something she might never escape, she had understood when she pushed open the thin front door and looked around the kitchen, with its brown veneer cabinets and boot-worn blue-and-yellow linoleum floors, its old pea-green refrigerator sputtering in the corner, and its odd assortment of knickknack salt-and-pepper shakers—two highly racist Indians in full headdresses and dance regalia, the king and queen of hearts from Alice and Wonderland, two dancing puffins dressed in colorful clown outfits—that her father kept arranged on the windowsill as a reminder and a way to honor her great-grandmother, who had collected the curiosities, that she might never again get to turn that doorknob and walk inside carefree.
“I’m okay, Dad,” she said.
Adam nodded, tightened his coat, and disappeared back into the whorls of snow to wait. A moment later she heard the truck door slam. When the wind dropped, she saw her father sitting in the cab, rubbing his hands together and looking off through the trees. She was the one who favored the cold.
Moses Jupiter did not love the cold either, but he was happy to see Molly, the closest thing he had to a daughter or granddaughter, standing in the snowy yard. While she didn’t show it, she must have been freezing as she stood rooted to the snowy earth. She had wrapped her sneakers in plastic bags and duct-taped them at the ankles to keep the snow out. Overall she didn’t look much different. Maybe a few pounds lighter. Tall for her age, and rangy. Limbs like braided rope, baggy jeans, and a hooded sweatshirt that hung from her like a sail. It was hard to find a way in to hug her, always had been, as she seemed composed of only edges. Yet her face betrayed a certain kindness, a belief in the good of people, he thought.
“Molly,” he said.
“Seskahsen,” the girl corrected.
“I didn’t forget. I helped choose that name. Do you remember what it means?”
“Light or something.”
“No,” Moses said. “A brilliant, uninterrupted light. The unrelenting light.”
Molly wanted to hide, but the only place to go would have been into the house, or into the truck cab with her dad. “I don’t feel like a brilliant anything anymore,” she said. Then she relented, moved across the snow, and hugged Moses.
Moses didn’t want to let her go. “Don’t be a shit about your name,” he whispered into her ear. “It’s not a gift to question.”
Her eye roll was subtle, but not lost on him as he reluctantly dropped his embrace and raised his hands. “I know. I’m just an old man full of folksy sayings.”
“No,” Molly said. “I’m glad you’re here. I’m just upset and scared.”
“čkəwi. Walk with me.” Moses started toward the paddock. He’d been checking on Cricket for two weeks now, since the fire broke out and Molly and Adam vanished without a word. He’d even called the middle school, pretending to be Molly’s grandfather, and told them that he was ill and his granddaughter was caring for him. It was a small enough place that the lie wasn’t questioned at first, but big lies never last too long in small towns. He knew others would start asking about Molly and Adam soon. The connection between their disappearance and the fire would follow.
Behind him, Molly hadn’t moved. “If you skip this part, you’ll never forgive yourself,” he called back.
In the paddock Molly pressed her face to Cricket’s neck and sank into the smell, hide and hair and a quiet, unflinching love she had never found outside of animals. The horse trailer was parked beside the little pink ranch house. Molly studied the land. Through the snow to the west was the valley and the center of town. Beyond that, the river. And just beyond that, in the shadows of exposed hematite cliffs, rolling green mountains, and a steep, sand-layered hill, a small tent sat covered with ferns and brush. Old home, new home, she thought, and shook her head at the absurdity of their life now. The ranch house was a faded fuchsia color with a sky-blue metal roof. She loved the quirkiness of it, and so had her father. It might have been the ugliest house in the state of Maine. “A pink house was good enough for Bob Dylan and the Band,” her father used to say. “Seems like it should be good enough for us.” She knew the real reason they never repainted the house was because it was the same color now as when her mother first fell in love with it and lived with them there, before she went off to have a different life somewhere else. While Molly had long since stopped asking why her mother left, she still imagined her as skʷéwtəmohs, a swamp woman. Moses had first told her of the swamp woman when she was a little kid. They were legendary female spirits who lived alone in the wilderness and helped hunters and travelers who were in trouble. Molly knew her story was just a child’s tale erected to survive a certain unforgivable pain, but since their hidden life in the woods had begun, she swore she could feel her mother out there watching them, perhaps guiding them.
Her dreams had been strange as well. Each night she was visited by a snowy, cliff-carved world filled with thick pines taller than any she had ever seen. Their canopies split the sky, wild green branches churning with snow. Ravens danced about the trees. They seemed the only inhabitants of the high, deep woods. Each morning she checked her head for a fever, worried about what an illness would mean now for her and her father. There was no hospital. There was no grocery store. There was always medicine, in the earth, in the woods, all around, but would it be enough? Finding her skin cool to the touch, she would spend the rest of the day trying to assemble the collection of strange images into some whole, as if building a puzzle. The frozen pines constantly swayed and cracked in the cold. The sound seemed to call the ravens into more of a frenzy. It was dangerously cold in the dreams, well below zero. And when the heavy snows ebbed for a moment, she was able, far in the distance, up a great mountain, to see a small golden chair sitting on a rocky ledge, backed by blue light. The chair appeared to be made of twisted wood. Sometimes there was a small boy sitting on it, other times a tall, hulking man. His physical presence was so dark that it seemed to swallow all the light about him. He had a bald head and was dressed in black furs, and when he grinned, his teeth were so white that her eyes stung. Other times the chair was gone, and a bright-red apple tree held the summit.
She was starting to see, she thought. It was not a place for people. In the dream world the rivers were undammed and the trees colossal. If it hadn’t been winter, she was sure clouds of insects would have clogged the air. It was the world before every tree had been cut, every tract of earth mined, every river harnessed, everything put to use.
There was also music, a constant quiet melody on the wind. She had been gathering bits of the dream song together now for days, and she wished badly that she could walk out of the woods to the Catholic church to play the piano her fingers had loved since she was a small child. Her father had once read her a passage by a Jewish philosopher about how one’s life, the entire span of it, should be treated like a singular work of art. She saw the fire as a necessary brushstroke. She thought she had understood how much it would cost her. She had been a fool. So many things were gone now. She wondered what her friends were doing. She wondered if she’d ever see them again. She missed the crappy cafeteria food at school, and the awful fluorescent lights. The loud banging of lockers that made her anxious. The musty smell around the nozzles on the water fountains. The look of all the cars speeding out of the parking lot after the bell rang.
Last night the dream had changed. The landscape was the same, remote and snow-ravaged, but she was near the sea. She could make out the familiar rocky coast of her childhood and the Penobscot River, moving through the land to the north. There were two white eagles, one small and one much larger. They were falling from the sky. They seemed to fall forever, and for some reason she screamed to warn them. They made no sound in return, continuing their plummet in silence. When Molly woke, her father was holding her. She thought about how it looked as if he had aged twenty years in the last two weeks. She couldn’t tell him about the dreams. For him, everything had been reduced to staying hidden, staying safe, staying alive, and she hated that all the stress of her action was falling on him, and now on Moses too. Even Cricket looked older as she traced the fresh gray hairs around the horse’s flaring nostrils and stroked her ears.
“Where will you take her?” Molly asked.
“Somewhere safe,” said Moses, “loving.”
“You won’t tell me.”
“Mèhsəma. In time.”
“When I’m less of a danger,” she said, and sighed. “My dad won’t let me turn myself in, but people deserve to know what happened. That’s why I sent the letter.”
Moses glanced across the yard. Adam had not left the cab of the truck, where he was watching them through the windshield and blowing into his hands. “I’m not sad about the letter.” Anger rose in his voice as he slid into Penobscot. “Sákewəso awαpálihle. Ni wəči-ahtα wəlitəhαsiwi.”
The words cut deeper than the biting snow. She was hurt at the insinuation that she had sinned against herself by betraying their values. The truth was, she was still stunned each morning when she woke up at the campsite, so far away from her old bed. She remembered the Abenaki corn hanging all over the house, blue kernels reflecting the light. Jarred dry beans and different-shaped squash arranged on the counters. Pumpkins sitting on each stair like toddling members of the family. Her father lifting the black ash seed box that had been his grandmother’s and smiling as he said, “This is an act of resistance. Growing our own food from our ancestors’ seeds instead of going to McDonald’s.” But as those moments receded further, memories of the day a year ago that had ultimately led them here returned more often. A group of white kids had started talking about the old mill while standing around in the April slush, waiting for the bus after school.
“Someone needs to do something for the earth,” one kid said.
“Or the trees,” said another.
Molly wished they would all shut up. Youthful zealotry, rage, environmental defense driven by a bunch of hokum teenage angst—she was almost embarrassed at how cliché they all sounded. And she was mad at how historically blind they were.
“Someone is,” she said quietly.
“Yeah, yeah,” a tall, disinterested boy spoke up. He was a senior, and Molly had no idea why he was waiting for a bus with a bunch of freshmen and sophomores. “Scientists, conservationists. I know.”
But you don’t. She couldn’t find the words to tell the boy, who seemed in his cool skepticism to have grabbed all the authority in the world, no matter how false she would later realize his expertise was. You don’t at all, she thought. Whole cultures. Whole tribes. Whole indigenous communities you barely, if at all, even know exist. We’ve always been doing things for the world. Caring for it, supporting it. Seeing it for what it actually is: a living being, a home.
“It’s Molly, right?” the boy said.
She narrowed her eyes, imagined slapping him in the face. She knew he knew her name. At the same time she tried not to puke out an enthusiastic, head-nodding little dance of joy at the thrill of being noticed. She took a breath to keep from embarrassing herself. Seskahsen, she thought. It’s Penobscot. I’m a keeper of the world your world is completely ruining. I’m one of the ones who wasn’t supposed to survive. “That’s me,” she quipped.
The boy nodded into the distance. “The question I have, Molly, is: Is it enough? All these studies and reports and things. All the bullshit no one even hears. Is it enough?”
She didn’t know how to answer that.
“Sometimes you have to go after the thing that’s hurting other things. Look at these people out in California who are blowing up bulldozers and sabotaging cut sites.”
“You’re talking about violent crime.”
“No,” said the boy. “I’m talking about acts of mercy for things other than us.”
Mercy. The word coming from a white boy. That angle on things coming from a white boy. The audacity sickened her. What if he was right, though? How far was too far? How little was too little?
“Sometimes change is violent,” the boy said. “It’s a shitty mess.”
Molly barely heard him. She was looking over his head to the shadowy outline of the distant mill as she realized she’d been quietly telling herself the same thing her whole life.
She spent the summer and fall sneaking into the mill, exploring the layout, learning its topography, figuring out what would burn and how, devising a plan. Her goal was not just fire, but rebirth. At night she peppered her father with questions about plants and gardening, and he gleefully went on and on like a man who’d rediscovered an old friend. Pushing deeper inside the abandoned mill site, she planted fire-loving seeds and seedlings wherever she thought the land would support life. She delighted in the small guerrilla act of slipping a living pocket of complex DNA beneath the earth of a hulking paper mill whose days, she was convinced, were numbered. While most of the world watched the news or dozed off, dreading getting up for work tomorrow, here she was digging holes for shagbark hickory trees in green spaces between maintenance sheds and loading docks. Even with all her planning, most days the fire seemed impossibly foolish. But when she thought about stopping, she saw that tall, aloof boy and his white face, theorizing about change. As winter set in, she began picturing the world she was trying to build after the fire. Who knew what seeds would germinate, activated by fire as plants had been for millennia, and what would pass on with the burn? Pitch pine and scrub oak and larch and willow. Blazing star and wild lupine and fireweed. If they came, they would come as a tapestry of new life emerging from the ashes.
Now, in the aftermath of it all, she could tell none of this to the man beside her, who she loved as much as anyone in her life.
Moses cleared his throat. “Your dad might have had a job there again, at the mill.”
“Exactly,” she said. “I’m already down one parent, and working at that place kills people.” She had been convinced the minute the mill reopened its doors, her father would slide directly back in.
“So does being poor.”
Molly winced. “My dad left the island and took that job because of me. He wanted to make things, to garden. Not be a mill worker.”
“Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” Moses said. “Your dad wanted you.”
Of course that was the real truth. But childhoods run on bitterness and resentment just as much as imagination and love. She rested her head back against Cricket’s neck. “Do you remember what you used to call me, Moses?”
“Of course I do.”
“Little Fast One. I still smile when I think about that. After my mom left, I used to ride Cricket all around, thinking, ‘I am the Little Fast One. I cannot be sad.’”
“Some things can’t be outrun.”
“I’m learning that. When I started the fire, I stopped feeling angry for the first time in forever. Now I just feel sad.”
“The fire,” Moses said. “You’re not the first person to want to do something like that.”
Molly thought of Moses’s stories of resistance, stories she’d heard her whole life: the fight for Penobscot voting rights in the state, how he’d traveled to California and been part of the Native occupation of Alcatraz, the seizure of the replica of the Mayflower in Boston, the spiritual walk across the country to support tribal sovereignty, him and a bunch of other tribal members occupying Baxter State Park for a week because they wanted Ktahdin returned to them, and the victory of the Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act, when Jimmy Carter put his pen to a sheet of paper, and the Penobscot Nation was suddenly all over the national news.
“Was it too much?” she asked.
“That’s not for me to say,” Moses answered. “You need to go be with your dad now, Little Fast One. Cricket will be okay.”
Molly slipped a carrot from her pocket. “kkə̀seləməl,” she said, and Cricket’s small, square teeth accepted the gift, which of course was a goodbye with gratitude and, she was certain, love. Across the yard, watching his daughter from the cab of the truck, Adam Greenwind looked away, convinced his heart would shatter.