Evergreen (28 page)

Maybe it didn’t matter Naamah hadn’t told him about her. They were together on the ice in Evergreen, and Sister Cordelia was miles away in Green River, sitting behind a yellow window shade with an unworthy heart. Maybe the past
didn’t have an equal hold on everyone. Maybe it was gracious sometimes and let people go without following their tracks.

“I guess we know what we’re having for dinner,” Gunther said, licking his lips. He lifted the satchel off Naamah’s shoulder. “We’ll dip it in cornmeal and fry it up in butter.”

Hux thought he saw something change in Naamah’s expression—a little dark twinge—but before he could figure it out it disappeared.

“That sounds good,” she said, leaning into him. “I love cornmeal.”

26

December slowly turned itself over to January, and January blew around snow and branches and little signs that everything wasn’t all right no matter how much Hux wanted it to be. Instead of the trees and the river and the next horizon, Naamah was living behind doors and walls and closed windows now. Steady heat from the woodstove.

She was trying hard to be a perfect wife for Gunther, who saw the freshly baked bread on the table but not the burn marks on Naamah’s fingers. He didn’t see that no matter what apron she wore it choked her at the neck. Phee tried to teach Naamah how to bake bread without hurting herself. Hux was no cook or seamstress or handyman, but he tried to help her as much as he could, too, when Gunther was off in the woods.

At this time of year, Gunther favored his gun over trapping. While he was out, Hux would bring over dinner fixings for them and whatever else he could think of. Near the end of January he brought over the curtains he ordered for Naamah in a catalog at the general store. Unlike his strawberry and
corn ones, hers had squirrels all over them. He figured maybe if some were already inside, the others would stay out.

“Why don’t you go with him?” Hux said when the curtains failed to stir her one way or another. “I’m sure he’d like you to. You’d probably bring back more than he does.”

“He doesn’t like when that happens,” Naamah said.

Her hair was brushed smooth for the first time; the strands were shiny as lacquer. On anyone else but her it would have been beautiful. Naamah was wearing an apron with flowers all over it. Beneath that a housedress with a prim little collar, something like his mother used to wear and Lulu used to make fun of her for.
Why do you insist on dressing like a housewife? You’re more than that dress. At least you’re more than that to me
.

“Besides, I like being here,” Naamah said. She held her head high, but the gesture didn’t belong to her. “I sleep on a bed now. With pillows and everything.”

“I figured as much,” Hux said, thinking,
Who are you trying to be?

“I take bubble baths sometimes, too. Gunther got me some at the general store. He likes how wrinkled up I get. He said it’s nice knowing what I’ll look like when I’m old.”

Hux sat at her table. He offered Naamah a cigarette, which she said no to at first. Eventually she gave in and smoked one over the sink. Even with bread baking in the oven and meat and onions simmering on the woodstove and cigarette smoke hanging in the air, Hux could smell something else beneath it all, but he couldn’t figure out what it was.

“You don’t have to come over so much,” Naamah said. “I’m fine here.”

“I like seeing you,” Hux said, putting out his cigarette, which he’d been smoking more for her sake than for himself.

“Gunther’s right,” Naamah said, turning away from him and toward the window above the sink, which looked out onto the green and white of the woods. Her voice turned dark like the long shadows the spruces cast over the snow. “You should get yourself a woman. That way you won’t have to cross the river so much.”

Hux put the box of matches in his pocket and stood up. He was suddenly embarrassed. “I’m sorry,” he said to Naamah, and he meant it.

They were newlyweds. They probably needed their space. Maybe that’s why she looked uneasy every time he was there. Maybe she was trying to figure out ways to get him to go home without hurting him.

“I just missed having you on my side of the river,” he said.

Hux put his hat and coat on and laced up his boots, which had been drying beside the woodstove. He balled up his wool socks and put them in his coat pocket. He was halfway through the front door when Naamah rushed over and blocked his way.

“Come back inside,” she said, with the kind of wild-animal panic he saw in her the day he brought her back from the logging camp. “I didn’t mean it.”

Hux was busy thinking about his own hurt feelings until he saw she was crying.

“Please forgive me,” she said, pulling on his arm, his hands, his neck.

“It’s all right,” Hux said, trying to calm her down.

“You have to forgive me. You’re the only one who understands.”

“There’s nothing to forgive,” Hux said. He took her hands in his and drew her to him like she was a child. Her tears wet his heavy wool shirt and soaked all the way through to his skin. She was shaking. “It’s all right,” he said again.

He didn’t know how to help her, only that she needed it. He untied her apron so the only thing around her neck was her cross and she could breathe again. Naamah tucked her head beneath his chin. That’s when Hux realized bleach was what he’d been smelling.

Maybe he should have said something to Gunther about it, but Hux didn’t that day or any day because he wanted to protect Naamah from what he considered an indignity—one that wasn’t his to share. He only went into the bathroom, found the bottle of bleach beneath the sink, and poured it down the drain.

He only held her face in his hands and said, “You’re already good and clean and pure, Naamah. You don’t need this. You don’t need
her
.”

He didn’t know he was failing her so badly at that moment.

He didn’t know it wasn’t enough until Gunther showed up at his door one morning a few weeks later without Naamah or his crooked smile.

“Is she here?” Gunther said when Hux opened the cabin door. The skin beneath Gunther’s left eye was black. His neck was scraped up.

“No,” Hux said, trying to figure out what had happened to him.

“I woke up, and she was gone,” Gunther said. He brushed past Hux and sat down at the table inside, which was full of Hux’s preservation tools. Gunther picked one of them up.

“Maybe she went for one of her walks,” Hux said.

“In the middle of the night?” Gunther said.

“She doesn’t like to sleep inside. At least she didn’t when she lived with me.”

Gunther helped himself to a cup of coffee but didn’t add sugar or whiskey like he usually did. He looked genuinely miserable.
“I can’t figure her out. She’s like a handful of people even though she’s only her.”

Hux knew exactly what Gunther meant.

“Do you know she prays?” Gunther said. “One minute we’ll be drinking whiskey and making snow forts and the next minute she’ll be on her knees.”

Hux knew the things he wasn’t telling Gunther and why he wasn’t telling him, and for the first time he wondered if Gunther was doing the same thing.

“Sometimes I get the feeling I love her more than she loves me,” Gunther said. He touched his eye. “I can live with that, I guess.”

“What do you want me to do?” Hux said.

“Go look for her. She’ll think I’m checking up on her if I do it myself.”

So Hux laced up his boots and layered up for what he knew would be a long cold day out in the woods. “I’m sure she just wanted some air.”

“I should be the one who needs air, don’t you think?” Gunther said.

“I don’t know the rules,” Hux said.

Gunther slumped forward in his chair. “Yeah, me neither.”

Hux put his snowshoes on and headed north through the pines with a backpack full of supplies. Aside from food and water, no matter what time of year it was he brought with him a few yards of nylon cord, a pocketknife, fishing line, fishhooks, a compass, a lighter, an extra-large garbage bag, a water tablet, a small handsaw, a first-aid kit, and a plastic whistle. Gunther said if Hux went down in the woods, he might as well just accept it.

Hux didn’t know where Naamah went in the middle of the night, but she didn’t take Gunther’s truck or his, which
Hux figured she would have done if she wanted to go south to Yellow Falls. If she wanted to run away. So Hux kept walking north, calling her name, uncertain if he should be genuinely worried or if she was fine and had only wanted a little space. If he should be glad she’d found her way back outside.

The day was cold and windy; icy black branches clacked against one another overhead. Frozen blueberries clung to the bushes at his knees. The snow was mostly crusted over, which made the going slippery. Ice crystals clung to Hux’s beard.

After an hour or so of walking in wider and wider circles under a heavy winter sky, listening to the sounds of the forest, the crunching of snow beneath his feet, Hux started to hear music like the kind they played at the tavern in Yellow Falls—the kind meant to get people dancing and sweating in order to keep them thirsty.

Hux had heard of the Mosquito Net: a plywood shack set far back in the woods, taken down each summer and pieced back together by fur trappers each winter. Inside, men supposedly did what they did in Yellow Falls: smoked and drank and hung up pictures of naked women they’d found in magazines you couldn’t get at the general store. Pictures that Hux felt bad for enjoying.

Gunther had been to the Mosquito Net once, but he said the men were too rough there even for him. Plus, he said there weren’t any three-dimensional women there, which defeated the purpose of going out in his mind.

Hux knew Naamah was inside even before he pushed open the door. Even before he saw her spinning around with a trapper that had Paul Bunyan blood. He just knew.

The trapper was twice as wide as Hux. Twice as tall. Black hair sprouted from his thick hands, his thick neck, his thick head. His incisors were long and sharp. He looked like a bear
only without any of a bear’s magnificence. Just big and mean and furry.

“What are you doing here?” Hux said to Naamah.

Naamah had a half-crumpled paper cup in one hand; the other was wrapped around the trapper’s waist. “That’s my brother,” she said to the trapper.

“Gunther’s worried sick,” Hux said. “Why are you here? You should be at home.”

“My brother thinks he’s the pope,” Naamah said to the trapper.

“I’ll be the pope if you want me to be,” the trapper said, scratching his beard against Naamah’s neck. Even though it was freezing outside, lines of sweat trickled down his face and landed on Naamah’s green blouse. “See how salty I am for you?”

Naamah licked the trapper’s neck, and Hux lunged forward.

“She’s married,” Hux said.

A group of men turned from their stools. They looked like the kind of trappers who would snare an animal, skin it for its pelt, and leave the rest behind to rot.

The music was saying something about horses and dirt roads and broken hearts.

Naamah turned to the trapper, whose hands moved down her body and caught on the button of her jeans. She showed him her silver ring, which Hux had given her.

“Isn’t it pretty?” she said. “It was my mother’s. Our fingers were the same size.”

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Hux said to the trapper.

The trapper twisted the button on Naamah’s jeans. “What are you going to do?”

“I’m taking her home,” Hux said.

“Not before she pays up for what she’s drunk.”

“How much?” Hux said.

The trapper put his hand down Naamah’s blouse before Hux could stop him. He ripped off the top buttons, exposing her breasts. “This should do it.”

Hux took a swing at him but was on the floor before his fist had a chance to connect to the trapper’s face. He’d bitten his tongue on the way down. His blood tasted like metal. The men at the bar were laughing at him.

The trapper buried his face in Naamah’s chest, pressing his lapping-dog tongue against her skin. “Run along home with your daddy now,” he said when he came up for air.

Naamah frowned. “You’re just going to let me go?”

Hux got up from the floor. “I’m her brother, not her father.”

“You two are something else,” the trapper said. He looked at Hux. “You’re not even going to thank me? I got her primed up for you. All of us did.”

Hux cocked his arm back, and with all his force he took another swing, and this time his fist connected with the trapper’s hard jaw. In the moment of connection Hux felt his thumb snap, but no pain had ever felt as gratifying.

“Go to hell,” he said.

Hux lifted Naamah up as if she weighed no more than a feather and carried her out of the shack the way Gunther had carried her into Phee’s cabin after they were married.

When they were outside, Naamah bit his forearm, and Hux let go of her.

“Why did you do that?” she said, whacking at a pile of iced-over bullet brush. The thorns scraped her hand, and little drops of blood came together like beads on a necklace. The torn pieces of her blouse flapped in the wind. She looked sober suddenly, clear eyed, so much so that Hux wondered if she’d been drinking at all in there.