Evergreen (26 page)

“I said something he didn’t like,” Gunther said.

“Maybe I should hit you, too, then,” Naamah said. “I’m his sister after all.”

After Hux was finished feeling proud Naamah would call herself his sister so soon, he recognized what was going on. She and Gunther were flirting with each other.

Naamah wiped her wet hands on her jeans and held one out to him. “I’m Naamah.”

Gunther took it and kissed the top of it. When he finally let go of it, his lips had soap on them. “I’m in love,” he said, licking them.

“All right. Enough’s enough. You have to go,” Hux said, pushing Gunther away from the door and down the steps.
Gunther’s boots were wet and untied, and he kept falling over himself. “I’ll come over tomorrow. I’ll explain everything.”

“She’s the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen,” Gunther said, looking up at the porch. “It’s not just because I’ve been drinking either. That hair. Those eyes! She’s like a wood angel.”

“Go drink some more,” Hux said. “It’ll do you good to pass out. Just don’t do it in the river. I don’t want to pick crayfish out of your mouth.”

“A fairy?” Gunther said, finally turning toward the river. “No, that’s not it.”

Gunther was halfway to the river when he found the word he was looking for.

“Nymph!” he called back, and Hux waved him off and closed the cabin door.

“I’m sorry about that,” he said to Naamah. “Gunther’s a handful.”

“I don’t mind,” Naamah said, returning to the sink.

When the last of the dishes was clean, she dried them and put them away in the cupboard Hux normally used for his skinning tools, but she seemed proud of herself and Hux didn’t want to discourage her. Hux got out the old book about the Arctic Circle. He should have been thinking about preservation—what was going to get them through the winter besides wood—but he kept thinking he had time to settle in. They had time.

Before they went to sleep that night, Naamah did something surprising. She brought the laundry bag inside, along with a blanket made out of old potato sacks she’d stuffed with goose feathers and stitched together with heavy twine. She said she thought she’d give the top bunk bed a try. When she spread her blanket over the existing wool one, a few of the white feathers floated down to the floor.

“Okay,” Hux said, trying not to make a big deal about it, even though he didn’t know why Naamah had changed her mind. Tonight wasn’t any colder than the others. The sky was clear. The ground was dry. He tried to stop thinking; he didn’t want his thoughts to scare her off. Sometimes he had the feeling she could hear them without his saying anything.

Hux changed in the mudroom, and Naamah changed in the closet. Both of them took turns with the flashlight in the outhouse. Before they got into the bunk beds, Naamah kneeled on the floor. At first, Hux thought she’d dropped something and was looking for it, but then he heard her say, “Amen,” and she was on her feet again. He didn’t ask her about it or the cross around her neck. He kept thinking of what he’d read in the file at the orphanage.
I intend to restore her through the Word
. He wondered if she believed in God or if it was some kind of reflex. Hux believed in the trees and the river and the sky.

When Naamah climbed up into the bunk bed, Hux turned out the light. They lay in silence for a while before Naamah spoke up in the darkness.

“Why did she leave me and not you?” she said.

Hux was grateful Naamah had waited as long as she had, but he still didn’t know the best way to tell her what had happened, since he couldn’t think of it, of
him
, without feeling sick to his stomach. Sick in his heart.

“Our fathers weren’t the same person,” he said.

“Who was mine?” Naamah said.

Hux shifted in the bunk bed. He didn’t feel himself clenching his teeth until he released them. He heard his sigh, though. His deep exhale.

“He wasn’t a good man, was he?” Naamah said.

“No,” Hux said, trying to spare her his name if she would
let him. “He came the year my father was in Germany. Our mother couldn’t keep him out.”

“Do I look like him?” Naamah said.

Hux turned on the light and got out of bed to get the photograph of his mother and father on their wedding day. Even though the photograph was black and white, he knew his mother’s dress was blue with tiny crystals sewn into the fabric and that she’d worked at Harvey Small’s in order to buy it. His father wore a traveling suit made in Germany. Both of them had a certain glint in their expressions, a happiness to have found each other in a lumber town in northern Minnesota.

“You look like her,” Hux said, handing her the picture frame.

Hux got back in the lower bunk to give Naamah some privacy. She didn’t say anything for a long time, and Hux resisted the urge to fill the silence. He wondered if she was studying the photograph for traces of herself, if she was following the lines of their mother’s face with her fingers like he did sometimes. He wondered, but he didn’t ask.

Another feather floated down.

“Sister Cordelia used to say she was tainted by the devil,” Naamah said finally. “She said that’s why he wanted me so much. She said she could have kept me if she’d wanted to.”

“I don’t think it was that simple for her,” Hux said.

Hux thought of Naamah’s footprint on the piece of pink paper—the words
my daughter
—which he put in the glove compartment of his truck the night he took Naamah away from the logging camp when his name was the only proof she needed in order to believe he was who he said he was, who he said
she
was. He thought about getting up to get it. He thought about how, when he was little, sometimes his mother would look at him as if she expected to see someone else or at least hoped she would.

“I used to have dreams about her when I was still at Hopewell,” Naamah said, the bunk bed creaking beneath her. “One time she and I were walking through the garden at the end of summer. She was singing a song about all these beautiful blue things. Even though I told her she’d get in trouble with Sister Cordelia, when we passed a grapevine she picked the biggest grape she saw. I watched her eat that grape like it was made of happiness.”

“What happened after that?” Hux said.

“I woke up.”

“Do you still dream about her?” Hux said.

“Yes, but the dreams aren’t as nice. The last one I had I was standing in an alfalfa field and she ran over me with a truck.”

Hux twisted his blanket in his hands. He couldn’t change what his mother had done. In order to understand it, Hux had to let Cullen O’Shea in all over again. He had to picture him at the door. At the table. On the floor. A man with scissors for hands. Stones for a heart. He had to picture his mother with a gun in her hand.

Hux leaned out over the bunk bed and looked up at Naamah, who was hugging the picture frame as if it could hug her back. She asked Hux to turn out the light, which he did.

“Not a single person in this world has loved me,” she said.

Hux reached up for her hand but couldn’t find it in the dark. “I do,” he said, and even though he did, albeit in a way he didn’t understand, it didn’t sound true.

“Guilt and love aren’t the same thing,” Naamah said, but kindly.

The next morning she was gone, and Hux wished he’d told her about how their mother used to linger in front of the pink yarn
at the general store. He wished he’d told her about how she used to look at him and want her. He was sorry for the piece of paper in the glove compartment. He was sorry about it all.

Hux searched for her on the bed of pine needles at the forest’s edge but didn’t find her there. He walked through the meadow, where they’d sometimes drink their coffee, thinking maybe she’d gone for a walk. She liked to wander through the woods when there were no more chores left for her to do. He walked across the creek, over the springs, in and out of the little ravines. He sat on a stump for a while and then went back to the cabin, hoping she’d be waiting for him on the porch like the night she was waiting for him in the truck. Maybe she was watching to see what he’d do.

When she wasn’t at the cabin, Hux took the rowboat across the river. Gunther could track people as well as he could track animals. According to him, Hux had the footfall of an old sap. Gunther was lighter on his feet, like how pond skaters balanced on the surface of the water but never broke through.

Hux knocked on Gunther’s front door, but Gunther didn’t open it.

Naamah did. She was wearing one of Gunther’s plaid work shirts and looking back over her shoulder in the direction of the kitchen, laughing her logging-camp laugh.

It’ll take more than a hamburger to get me in your truck, Bud
.

Her dark hair trailed down the length of her back and was full of twigs and dirt and feathers. A strand of algae was stuck to her neck. Her feet were caked with dried mud. She squinted in the bright morning light.

“I was thirsty,” she said, before Hux could say anything.

Gunther walked out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his waist. Before he saw Hux, he said, “I’ve got the worst goddamn headache in the world. Between your hands
and the whiskey, I don’t know which way is up. I think you drank more than me.”

Gunther turned, and Hux saw the claw marks on his back.

“I don’t see how you could have grown up in some orphanage. You belong out here in the trees.” Gunther stopped talking when he saw Hux standing at the screened door.

“I’m going for a walk,” Naamah announced when Hux made a fist.

“You don’t have shoes on,” Hux said.

“I like the way the forest feels on my feet,” she said.

Hux looked at her bare legs. “What about pants? It’s cold.”

“They’re down by the river,” she said and set off in the opposite direction.

Hux opened the screened door, which was still caked with dead blackflies and mosquitoes from the summer. He was happy to have found Naamah, but not like this.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he said to Gunther.

Gunther secured the towel around his waist and put a kettle on for coffee. The cabin smelled of sweat and dirt. On the floor, Hux saw Naamah’s footprints.

“Living my life,” Gunther said. He took down two mugs and heaped sugar into them. “You want milk or something?

Whiskey?”

“She’s my sister,” Hux said.

“
Half
sister. She told me all about it. Funny you never did.”

“How was I supposed to tell you that?” Hux said.

“You know about how I came into the world,” Gunther said. “You think that’s an easy truth for me to tell?” He put on a pair of pants while the water heated up. “You’ve got to figure out how to stand what you can’t help.”

“I didn’t bring her here for you,” Hux said.

“No, you brought her here for you,” Gunther said.

“You can’t treat her like some bar girl from Yellow Falls.”

“Careful,” Gunther said, making the coffee. “My mother was some bar girl.”

Hux sat at the table. He thought of Lulu and her old coonskin coat. “Your mother wasn’t just some bar girl.”

“Neither is Naamah,” Gunther said.

“I know that,” Hux said.

“Then what’s the problem? Unless you think I’m not good enough for her.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But you’re thinking it,” Gunther said. “I can’t be celibate like you.”

“Women don’t leap at me like they leap at you,” Hux said, thinking of the woman he was with—the only other one—before Leah. Milly McKay, who ended up choosing someone else because Hux couldn’t get his feelings for her together fast enough.

“That’s because you don’t leap at them,” Gunther said. “How long did it take you to ask Milly out? A year? She got married and had a baby faster than that. A girl, I think.”

“I’m not you,” Hux said.

Gunther had always been able to do everything—catch a bucket of fish, chop down a tree, milk a goat—twice as fast as Hux. He’d made a life out of tracking wild things, taming them with the barrel of his shotgun, and mounting them on his walls. Hux had made a life out of preserving what was dead. Of course Naamah would go to someone like him.

Gunther added some whiskey to his coffee. “I’m going to marry her.”

“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. You’ve known her for eight hours,” Hux said. “You have no idea who she is.”

Hux pictured the country road outside the logging camp—Naamah clawing at his face in the truck and then at hers. She’d already clawed at Gunther. He thought of her taped-up laundry bag, how long she’d been carrying it, how damaged it was.

“Besides, I don’t think she’s the marrying kind,” he said.

Gunther smiled the same crooked way his mother did when she was still alive. It was a smile that could turn a black sky blue. “Then why did she say yes?”

24

Gunther and Naamah were married on a Tuesday at the courthouse in Yellow Falls, with Hux and Phee looking on as witnesses. There were no promises to cherish each other, no declarations of everlasting love, no
for better or worse
. One minute they weren’t married, and the next they were, and the civil servant was asking the four of them to exit through door B and sign the papers that would make the whole thing official.