Evergreen (25 page)

Hux walked into the kitchen and set his keys on the counter. He’d done his best to clean up the mess from Gunther’s buck, but he saw now he’d missed a few thin streaks of blood on the tabletop. He should have made the cabin nice for her. Picked whatever wildflowers were left and stuck them in a vase. Bought her something at the dress shop in Yellow Falls. Perfume. Jewelry. A scarf. Something just for her.

“What do we do now?” Naamah said. She reached out to touch the sugar bowl on the table but pulled her hand away suddenly as if she were afraid she was going to break it.

“We sleep,” Hux said, because he didn’t know what else to do or to say and because his father used to say a good night of sleep gave a man’s nerve back to him. Hux knew Naamah would want to know more about their mother, about the reasons she was dropped off at the orphanage and he wasn’t, but he was hoping she wouldn’t ask tonight. He didn’t know how he was going to tell her what had happened.

“All right,” she said.

Before they settled in for the night, Hux cleared out a shelf in the closet for her, but she wouldn’t let go of the laundry bag.

“Whatever’s in there is yours,” Hux said. “I won’t touch it. I promise.”

He got out a hammer and a few nails and tacked a yellow
sheet up over the opening to the closet. “I’ll change in the mudroom when I need to. You can change in here.”

After Naamah put on a pair of old gray sweatpants and an equally old sweatshirt, Hux showed her to the top bunk bed, but she refused it. He even offered to switch with her and sleep up there instead, but Naamah wanted to sleep on the floor. She said the last time she slept in a bed was on a cot at the orphanage.

“At least take a pillow,” Hux said.

She patted the laundry bag. “I already have one.”

“What about a blanket?”

“I have one of those, too.”

“Okay then,” Hux said and turned off the light. A moment later he turned it back on. “I forgot to show you the outhouse.”

“I’ll find it if I need it,” she said.

“It’s out back.”

“They usually are.”

“Okay then,” Hux said again, realizing how stupid he sounded after he turned out the light. He was relieved he couldn’t see her and she couldn’t see him, and wondered if she was, too. He didn’t regret bringing her back here; he just hadn’t thought far enough ahead about what they were supposed to do after they walked through the door. Maybe she hadn’t either. Tomorrow Hux needed to cut wood and haul it back to the cabin. He needed to catch some fish—bluegills, bass, pike, trout, walleyes—and smoke it, so he wouldn’t be stuck with potatoes all winter. He needed to work on Gunther’s buck so he could sell it to someone and get more supplies at the general store. Maybe he’d smoke some of that meat, too. Thinking about work calmed Hux a little, except he didn’t know what his sister normally did during the day up at the logging camp, what she’d do here. He didn’t take her for a
woman who liked to bake pies, but she didn’t seem exactly like a lumberjack either.

Normally Hux fell asleep easily. Leah used to say he was like a bear hibernating on the bunk bed. Tonight, though, he didn’t fall asleep until Naamah finally stopped thrashing around on the floor, clawing the air in her sleep.

In the logging camp, she said she’d slept outside on the forest floor, and that’s where Hux found her when he woke after the first rays of golden light came through the kitchen window and swept across his face.

“I’m sorry. I tried. I just couldn’t breathe in there,” she said when he asked her why she was curled up on a bed of brown pine needles just beyond the cabin. Her long black hair was twisted around her. She looked like a bird in a nest.

“Okay,” Hux said, which wasn’t ever sentiment enough for Leah.

“Okay,” Naamah said.

Hux asked her if she wanted to chop some wood. He didn’t want to subject her to Gunther yet or share her with Phee. In a few days he’d take her across the river. “You don’t have to chop it, I mean. You could just come.”

“I know how to use an ax,” she said, rising.

So Hux took her, the axes, a few thick slices of bread, and a thermos of coffee into the woods. As they walked along the footpath, he pointed out different types of plants and mosses, showing her which were edible and which weren’t—
This one I rubbed on my face as a boy, and I looked like a tomato for three days
—but she already knew about them. He didn’t want to ask her how because he thought the story might involve the logging camp and the men there. He wanted to erase that part of her life by filling it with his.

“This is a stinging nettle,” he said. “This is milk thistle.”

Where else are they going to sit?
he could hear his father saying.

Hux didn’t know what his father would think about Naamah. Or what his mother would think. He didn’t even know what he thought yet. More than anything, he wanted to know why Naamah left that orphanage when she was so young, but she didn’t owe him that.

When they reached the cedar tree Hux had felled a few days before, he opened the thermos and handed it to Naamah.

“I love the smell of coffee,” she said. “The taste not so much.”

“I put a lot of sugar in mine,” Hux said.

Naamah took a sip, made a face, and handed the thermos back.

“You want some bread?” Hux said.

Naamah picked up an ax. “I want to chop wood.”

While he drank coffee, Hux watched the way her black hair slid across her back each time she swung the ax. There were twigs and leaves stuck in it from sleeping on the ground in the logging camp and last night in Evergreen, and now little splinters of wood from the cedar tree were stuck to it, too. Naamah was used to working hard; he could tell that. When she got warm, she took off her sweatshirt, leaving her with only the white undershirt from the day before. He couldn’t tell if it was still wet from the river or wet from her sweat.

Hux joined in after he finished the coffee. He could barely feel the moment of impact between the ax and the wood anymore, his calluses were so thick. Leah used to wear gloves when she went with him, but Naamah worked until she had blood blisters at the base of her fingers, and those blisters broke, and then she worked more.

It was like the two of them had chopped and stacked wood
together all their lives. They weren’t competing the way Hux and Gunther did. They weren’t betting anything. The sun was shining through the narrow spaces between the branches overhead. The air smelled of pine and cedar and tamarack sap—their hands and clothes were sticky from it.

Occasionally Hux thought he saw in Naamah the beginnings of a smile. A bird would land on a nearby branch or the wind would blow and the trees would rain needles on them and they’d stop swinging for a minute. Once, Naamah held her finger out and a grosbeak grazed it. Like Hux, she seemed to love being outside all the way to her bones.

She looked sorry when they cut the last of the wood.

“We’ll come back soon,” Hux said. “Wood’s one thing I never have enough of.”

Naamah sat on a log. She wiped her hands on her sweatpants, which stained the gray material with blood. “I know what you’re thinking,” she said.

“I’ve got stuff for that at home,” Hux said, visualizing the package of bandages and the tin of salve he kept in the mudroom. Naamah was beat up pretty good. Her hands were swollen; parts of them looked like raw meat.

“You could have stopped without any hard feelings on my part,” he said. “Out here you’ve got to know when to say mercy.”

Naamah looked down at her hands. Her hair fell around her face like a curtain; a pinecone toppled out of it onto the forest floor.

“I didn’t like it—all those men,” she said.

“It isn’t any of my business,” Hux said, but his mind got caught up in the words
all those men
anyway. He thought of the girl with the knee sock pushed down around her ankle.

Naamah fumbled at the front of her neck until her fingers found her silver chain and cross. “I went there for her.”

23

Naamah left the orphanage in the middle of an October snowstorm with only the clothes on her back, the boots on her feet, and the same laundry bag she’d brought with her to Evergreen. She didn’t say why she left, and Hux didn’t ask her. Until that day, she said she’d never felt snow on her skin. She didn’t know it could be soft and biting all at once. She didn’t know anything until she was alone in the woods for the first time.

Naamah rocked as she talked. She and Hux were sitting on the porch trying to hold on to the last of the day’s sun. The waxwings were flying through the garden, plucking up what was left of the berries and dropping them on the ground.

A few weeks had passed since he and Naamah had first chopped wood together. Hux was still sleeping in his bunk bed and Naamah in her pine-needle nest beyond the front porch. In the mornings Hux would come out with a mug of coffee for her, which she’d sip from the frosty forest floor. She said all that sugar was growing on her.

Hux kept telling Naamah she didn’t have to sleep outside, but she kept saying she did. He didn’t know what she was going to do when the snow came, but he hoped she’d want to stay the winter and by then he’d find a way to lure her inside.

“I thought leaving Hopewell would make me free,” Naamah said, rocking more and more slowly until she stopped altogether. She looked out into the woods.

“Did it?” Hux said, slowing down, too.

“Not exactly,” Naamah said.

Hux thought she was going to tell him about the logging camp—why she stayed when she found out their mother wasn’t there, that she’d never been there. But she didn’t.

“I stood all night in a stand of evergreen trees a few hundred yards from Hopewell,” she said. “I thought I was going to freeze to death like Sister Cordelia said.”

Hux was listening to Naamah as if what she said were pieces of a puzzle that was going to take time to put together. He was listening for the corner pieces, the foundation.

“When I was bitten up by frost but still alive in the morning, I started walking through the woods,” Naamah said. “There was a fountain in Green River that was supposed to make people’s dreams come true, but when I got there it was empty.”

Naamah lifted herself out of the rocking chair. She put her cigarettes in the pocket of the work shirt Hux had lent her. “I think I’ll go inside now.”

Hux handed her the matches, picturing her standing all by herself in the snow, thinking about how afraid she must have been even though she didn’t say so.

“Are you hungry?” he said. He didn’t want to push her into telling him more, but he didn’t want to let her go either. About all he could think to do right then was feed her. “I could make pancakes. With that syrup you like so much.”

Naamah smiled a little but not enough for her dimple to show, which seemed a kindness even though she didn’t know the story of her face the way Hux did.

“Okay,” she said.

That night, after they finished supper and Naamah was washing the dishes, Gunther came by for the first time since Hux had brought Naamah to Evergreen. Gunther had been out hunting royal bucks the last few weeks, and when he didn’t find any of those he trapped a few foxes. He said he’d told Hux he’d be gone.

“I guess I forgot,” Hux said.

“It’s the Leah fog,” Gunther said. He leaned against the doorframe. He was chewing on a twig, which was his version of a toothbrush. His cheeks were flushed. His hair ragged the way women liked it. He was wet from swimming across the river. He was also drunk.

“Aren’t you going to invite me in?” he said, handing Hux a bottle of whiskey. “I sold a few nice pelts today. I brought the good stuff. Didn’t you even miss me?”

“Not tonight,” Hux said. From where he stood, he saw Naamah rinsing the dishes from supper. He could hear her humming, but he didn’t recognize the tune.

Gunther leaned across the threshold. “You got someone in there?”

“No,” Hux said, trying to close the door. “Good night.”

Gunther hopped over a rocking chair and hurled himself off the porch, somehow managing to land on his feet. He ran to the kitchen window before Hux could pull the curtains shut. Naamah watched as Hux ran back to the door. Her hands were full of soap.

“You old dog,” Gunther said. “Here I was feeling sorry for you. I was about to go out and find you another buck. Who is she? Where did you find her? What are you hiding?”

“She’s my sister,” Hux said because he’d never be able to get Gunther to leave without telling him the truth, and even then he didn’t know if he’d be able to get him to go.

“And I’m your uncle,” Gunther said. “I didn’t take you for a paying customer.”

Hux made a fist, but Gunther caught it before it did any damage to his face.

“You don’t know how to fight,” he said. “You’re going to break your hand.” He forced Hux’s thumb out from beneath his fingers. “Now you can hit me.”

Naamah sidled up to Hux at the door. “What’s going on?”

“I was just telling your friend to hit me right here,” Gunther said, pointing to his jaw.

Naamah put a hand on her hip, which she tilted ever so slightly in his direction.

“Why should he?” she said.