Evergreen (11 page)

I didn’t leave Germany quickly enough, I’m afraid, for which all of us will be punished. I will risk everything to get home to you, my darling, but if I don’t make it there—and here, I don’t mean to frighten you—you must marry another and go on raising our little son without me. How foolish I’ve been. I have no money to enclose and little hope that this letter will reach you—yesterday, a man was dragged away from the post office and beaten in an alley, accused of treason for writing a letter to a relative in England. And this was in Hornberg. I can only imagine what’s happening in the cities, in Poland. God help us all. Forgive me if you can. If you get this letter. If you don’t
.

Love, Emil

Emil wouldn’t have to know what happened to her—that was her first thought. She could go to Green River in the spring. She could let go of this ugliness inside of her she couldn’t find a way to want. As each thought rolled off the edge of the cliff in her mind, she tried to gather it up, to hold on to it, before it fell to the ground.

You selfish girl
, she thought when she read the letter again.
You survived what happened to you. Your husband might not
.

What was happening in Germany was worse than what had happened to her. An army of Cullens had come together to brutalize people—entire countries—overnight. And her husband
had been ordered to become one of them against his will, on behalf of which he would run and possibly be shot. What had happened to them: two quiet people who’d only wanted to live a quiet life in northern Minnesota?

Eveline imagined Emil in the Black Forest running between tree trunks and honey brush, looking for a way back to her and not finding one. He thought she was in Yellow Falls. He thought her cheeks were still rosy. He thought her heart was still light.

Meine Liebe
, he was calling.
My darling. All you have to do is wish me home
.

Eveline placed a hand on her stomach. Even though she wanted her husband now more than she’d ever wanted him, she couldn’t. Not yet.

She didn’t know what reaction the news would have caused her to have if she’d read the letter in her mother’s kitchen instead of her own. In Evergreen, Eveline picked up Hux, who was sleeping in the reed basket, tucked Emil’s fishing rod under her free arm, and went down to the river.
If I can’t catch a fish on my own we won’t survive this. If I can, we will
. When she was a girl, she used to play a similar game with the daisies in back of the Laundromat. The yellow petals revealed whether or not she’d find love.

She knew how to win that game—she didn’t know how to win this one.

On the way down to the river, Eveline dug into the soft soil on the forest floor with a trowel, turning the earth until fat brown worms wriggled up. She picked them up and put them into the pocket of her dress. How strange she could go on living after what Cullen had done to her and nearly faint at the thought of a handful of worms wriggling in her pocket.

At the river’s edge, Eveline took the worms out one by one, pushed the hooks into their flesh, and cast out her line. Each
time she felt a tug and reeled in her line, the worms were gone and the hooks bent backward.

You have to think like a fish
, Lulu had said. Eveline imagined a school of them slicing through the dark water like silver knives.
How do you catch something that doesn’t want to be caught? Whose life depends on not being caught? Maybe you don’t. Maybe you give up
.

Eveline sat on the rocks. Hux had woken up and was looking at the blue sky and the birds crossing overhead, soaring on the updrafts. A cricket jumped into the basket and back out again. Eveline felt a tug on her line, but instead of reeling it in she let it out this time.

Another tug, and she stood up. Out in the middle of the river, a fish jumped.

Once she was sure she’d hooked the fish, Eveline began to reel in the line slowly until the fish was closer to her than it was far away. When she walked into the water, she could see it swimming circles in the shallows, panicked but alive. She kept reeling in the line. When all that was left between her and the fish was a few feet, Eveline held up Emil’s rod and carried it and the fish out of the river onto dry land.

The fish, a lovely bluegill, opened and closed its mouth desperately. Eveline was on the verge of throwing it back, of eating beans and rice for the rest of her life. She thought of Emil and Cullen, two men forever part of her life, one she’d said yes to, the other no. She took that bluegill in her hands, slid the hook out of its gill, and with great sadness but a new resolve,
my God, my God
, she watched the life go out of it as it flapped against the rocks.

Eveline caught five fish before she walked back up to the cabin with Hux, tossed them in flour, and fried them in the skillet. Something inside of her was shifting even if she didn’t know in what direction yet.

For the first time in weeks, she was hungry again.

She stood over the woodstove pulling the tiny bones out with her fingers and sucking the white flesh from them. When night came, Eveline placed Hux in his crib and brought a fillet out to Reddy’s pup tent.

“I’m all right,” she said, handing him the plate. “You can go home now.”

Reddy picked up the fillet with his fingers. “I like to camp.”

“Nobody likes to camp for this long.”

“Emil would want me to,” Reddy said. “I’d want him to if Lulu was out here alone.”

“Emil’s not coming home,” Eveline said, thinking about the two of them in the truck all those months ago now. “At least not for a while.”

“I figured as much,” Reddy said. “The paper in Yellow Falls said Germany’s invaded Poland. I didn’t know how to tell you.”

“Emil said that in his letter, too.”

Reddy reached into the pup tent and pulled out a sleeping bag for Eveline to sit on. Stars were appearing overhead. Owls spoke to each other in the trees.

“Lulu thinks I should keep the baby,” Eveline said.

“That’s only because her parents didn’t keep her,” Reddy said.

“I didn’t know that,” Eveline said. “Maybe I did.”

“When she came home from school one day, they were gone,” Reddy said. “People said they went to Canada. Desperate people go north.”

Eveline still had Lulu’s coonskin coat, and though it gave her strength just thinking about it, she thought maybe it was time to give it back.

“This is your first fish, isn’t it?” Reddy said, licking the ends of his fingers.

“How did you know?” Eveline said.

“They always taste the best.” Reddy wiped the corners of his mouth with his sleeve. Scabs crisscrossed his face where he’d cut himself shaving in the garden the other morning.

“I’m not going back to Yellow Falls,” Eveline said. “If you were wondering.”

“I can help you cut wood for the winter,” Reddy said. “Lulu thinks it’ll be worse than last year, which was pretty bad where we were trapping. I’m sure she told you I shot my toe when I was cleaning my gun. She likes to tell that story for some reason.”

Eveline thought of Lulu walking up to the cabin for the first time with a hard-boiled egg in her coat pocket.

“We’re still figuring out how to raise the tax money, but I’m sure we can come up with enough for all of us,” Reddy said. “We’ll sell the truck if we have to. I don’t have to go to Yellow Falls as much as I do either. Poor Gunther, having me for a father.”

Reddy was eyeing the brown liquor bottle in the back of the tent.

“I’d have some,” Eveline said, because he would do the same for her.

He already had.

Reddy got the bottle and a tin mug from inside the tent. He poured a little into the mug and handed it to Eveline, who squeezed his forearm lightly.

“You’re a good husband and father,” she said.

Reddy drew the bottle to his mouth. “You girls could break me in half.”

The two of them drank together in the fading light—friends, family, whatever they were. When she woke in the morning, Eveline knew Reddy and the pup tent would be gone.

11

By October men in orange hats, camouflage coats and pants, took over the woods the way Emil had said they would. They came to Evergreen to shoot what they couldn’t kill in their hometowns, what didn’t exist there anymore. They drank and smoked and crashed around like the land owed them something. During the day, Eveline cut wood and dragged it back to the cabin with Hux strapped to her back on a cradleboard she made out of plywood and the walnut weighing her down in front. Lulu and Reddy kept trying to get her to wear something orange so the men didn’t shoot her. They wanted to give her some of their wood, too, so she didn’t have to go out on her own as much. But that’s what her friends didn’t understand: Eveline wanted to be alone. She needed to be.

At night after she put Hux to bed, Eveline sat in front of the woodstove whittling arrows until their points were sharp enough to pierce the flesh of the buck she knew she had to get to pay the taxes she and Emil owed by the end of November. She knew it couldn’t be just any buck either; he needed to
have a rack that would satisfy Jeremiah Burr and his empty office wall. He needed to be a royal buck. Even though Lulu and Reddy kept offering to sell their truck to pay her taxes, Eveline kept saying no. If she couldn’t pay the taxes now, she’d never be able to. Reddy lent her one of his bows because she refused to hold a gun again, and Eveline made a target out of a bundle of dried river grass and a tarp pulled taut across it. She decided she wouldn’t go hunting until she hit the center of it.

Eveline’s belly was growing rounder and softer, but the rest of her was growing stronger and harder. In September, the brush she cut for kindling would scrape her fingers raw, and even the gentlest application of salve would make her cringe. Now, her hands were full of calluses so thick the tip of a needle wouldn’t penetrate them. Muscles she didn’t even know belonged to her poked out of her arms and legs at strange angles. Ropy blue veins. Eveline looked like a different person than the one who’d arrived in Evergreen a year ago, one full of bruises and gashes and scars that looked exactly the way she felt.

Eveline usually kept her hair a few inches below her shoulder blades, but this year it got all the way down to her waist before she noticed it. One night after Hux fell asleep, she sat with the silver hand mirror and a brush, trying to untangle the leaves and bullet burs and hardened mud it had collected while she was in the woods. When she couldn’t find her way through the knots, she cut it to her shoulders, then to her chin.

She’d worn out the last of her dresses, so she stripped the scarecrow of its trousers and wore those now along with one of Emil’s heavy plaid work shirts. Hux was the only one who seemed to miss what she used to look like; when he was strapped to the cradleboard he’d suck on what was left of her hair.

“Mama,” he said the first day it was gone.

He kicked and wailed until Eveline set him down on the ground.

“Do you want us to freeze to death?” she said sharply.

The walnut stayed quiet.

Cutting wood and dragging it back to the cabin was hard work, harder than Emil had let on last winter. But it was good, clean work, too, which kept her mind from wandering into visions of Cullen and herself forever entwined on the cabin floor. If she didn’t pay attention she could cut off her hand with Emil’s ax, which Lulu taught her to sharpen on the rocks down by the river one morning near the end of October.

“
I
could keep the baby,” Lulu said that day.

Eveline touched the blade of the ax. The day was cool, the metal cold. The trees along the river shook their yellow leaves like fists. Snow was coming.

“How do you know when it’s sharp enough?” Eveline said.

“I just know,” Lulu said.

Of course Lulu couldn’t keep the walnut—they both knew that. Eveline would have to stay on her side of the river for the rest of her life.

“I’m not going to leave her in the middle of nowhere,” Eveline said. “Someone will adopt her. She deserves as much, don’t you think?”

“You’re the one with the coat,” Lulu said, and went back to sharpening the ax.

“I’ll give it back to you if that’s what you want,” Eveline said.

Gunther and Reddy had just come down from their cabin to the river, the opposite shore. Reddy waved to Lulu and Eveline. He began to lay putty down in the hull of the canoe, since the ice would be coming soon, and the canoe would
have to be stored up in the rafters of their cabin. Either that or it would lay overturned in the chicken coop, and the chickens would have to come inside.

Gunther began to skip stones.

“Look at me, Hux!” he yelled. “I bet you can’t throw as far!”

Lulu set the ax down. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s got into me lately. I have a lot more feelings than I want. A lot more memories.”

Eveline touched Lulu’s shoulder. “Why did they leave you?”

“I don’t know,” Lulu said, looking at the cat’s paws on the river. “My mother dropped me at school and told me to mind my teacher and eat my lunch the same way she did every single morning my whole life. She didn’t say a word different.”