Every Last Cuckoo (19 page)

The one thing Lottie and Sarah had not yet resolved was the matter of Lottie's friends, the ones who wanted a place to stay until their home lives settled down or they had paved a way to more independence. Sarah had told Lottie she would think about this and make a decision by the end of the weekend, which was tomorrow evening.

Sarah still didn't know what her answer would be. Today in the garden she would let her mind work the problem while her hands worked the soil. She knew from a lifetime in gardens that physical labor could strangely untangle knots and dilemmas.

Now Sarah paused in her raking and pruning for a late lunch at the picnic table under the beech. She admired her progress. The fragrant, friable earth was nearly clear of leaves and dead prunings, which lay mounded on an old tarp. Lottie would later drag the tarp to the compost, down near the vegetable garden. Eventually Sarah would put in some tomatoes, bush beans, cucumbers, and squash. She would not try to match Charles's striking variety. No striped eggplants or fingerling potatoes, no melons, no artichokes, no exotic peppers, which in any case needed too much babying in the north country. It was never hot enough for them.

Charles had loved the gardens, both ornamental and edible. Sarah could feel him everywhere today. She could see his hands in the soil he'd worked, setting the seedlings he'd started, or painstakingly constructing the miniature stone walls that kept small, unstable banks from sliding or crumbling. She missed him frightfully, but today her longing felt oddly companionable. Lighter.

Sarah went back to work, fully in the grip of the energy that the flower garden spawned in her. The only blot on her day—many tiny blots—came in the form of the blackflies that arrived in Vermont each May to torment anyone who stepped outdoors. They weren't as bad in Sarah's garden as they could be near streams and rivers, but she cursed and swatted at them all the same, inadequately protected by an herbal repellent. Some year she would decide she was old enough for the hard stuff, with DEET, figuring something else would get her before its carcinogens could. But not yet.

By three, Sarah had dug several holes and sprinkled bonemeal inside before plopping a green inhabitant into each and backfilling carefully, leaving no air around the roots she had gently spread. Bonemeal. A meal of bones. The powdery stuff felt like Charles's ashes. She would like her own ashes planted someday around the roots of irises, lilies, campanulas, delphiniums. With this, she rose stiffly, pulling herself up by the handle of her rake. She brushed off her knees. She watered everything deeply, hoping for generous rain throughout the summer, and went inside for a bath.

As she eased herself into the tub, Sarah felt every muscle exact revenge for overuse. “Oh, quit!” she muttered and slid down until her chin rested on the rippling surface of the bathwater. Then
she dropped her head back against the rolled rim of the clawfoot tub and exhaled, pleased with her day's work, picturing the garden filling in. Suddenly she thought of her house filling in, too, and realized she had decided to let Lottie's friends come. There were many kinds of gardens, after all, many growing things, and a meal of bones nourished them all.

Sarah's earlier life had died with Charles, and in this new one she would—the word came readily—husband life in the forms that it offered. Charles had always done this, in both his practice and his life. Sarah remembered his defense of those teenaged car thieves. Maybe they'd have been less desperate if someone had given them more room. This was what her own parents had done, sheltered people who had no place else to go. In doing so, they had given Sarah a richer life as well. Perhaps she was not too old to recapture that atmosphere she'd loved as a child.

S
ARAH STILL WALKED IN
the mornings, after Lottie left for school, and she took photographs almost every day with Charles's Nikon. She liked to think of its lens as his eye; she liked seeing through it the world he had shown her from time to time, as he had that day in the woods above the deer run. Recently Sarah had started venturing into the woods instead of staying on the roads. Everything looked different now, with the leaves unfurled, the undergrowth thick, the light filtered and green. Everything was crowded together, enfolding Sarah wherever she walked. Her field of vision ended at the dense growth around and above her. Now and then she felt something similar in her mind—burgeoning new life filling her up.

On this June morning, the dogs darted in and out of the trees as Sarah picked her way along the trails, avoiding the mud that remained in the lowest, shadiest places. In her hurry to leave the house, she'd forgotten, once again, to bring a walking stick. She chided herself. Imagine if she fell, just like Charles. Imagine if Sylvie had to rush home and lie in wait for Lottie. For some
reason Sarah was amused by the image of her own body lying just where Charles had come to rest.
Whither thou goest.

Something caught her eye then, and she stopped and peered ahead where the trail bent around a stand of white pines. A tuft of color on the ground, something reddish and soft-looking. Sarah walked slowly closer, not quite sure what she was seeing until she stood right there, looking down at a scrap of bloodstained rusty fur and skin. Nothing else, no carcass, scarcely any flesh, just a three-inch ragged tear from the hide of a red fox, or maybe a red squirrel. Leaning over, Sarah saw scuffed tracks near the brush at the side of the trail. Only one print was relatively clear, and it was canine. The pad marks were barely visible, but symmetrical, and there were toenail impressions. The track was small, an imprint of a heavily furred paw, so a fox, surely.

Nearby she saw spatters of blood on some low leaves and a place where the brush had been flattened and small branches broken. Something had jumped the fox right here, muscled it to the ground, torn it, and made off with its body. The hair on Sarah's neck stood up, and she straightened, looking nervously about. The camera on its strap bumped her breastbone, and soon she was snapping away at the scene of battle. At the very edge of the trail, she found a single track of a much larger creature—bobcat, lynx? It was clearly a feline track this time. There were no claw marks, the heel pad looked large in relation to the toe pads, and the whole pattern was asymmetrical. Sarah remembered all that from outings with Charles.

Suddenly she remembered something else, rumors of cougar sightings, which sent fear slicing through her. Did catamounts eat foxes?

Sarah snapped the cap back onto the lens and called the dogs.
She walked rapidly toward home, wondering whether she should make as much or as little noise as possible. Would a catamount fear and avoid her? Or would it regard her as a feast, stringy as she was? She half ran now, feeling hungry yellow eyes upon her at every step.

When at last she arrived home, intact and ridiculously relieved, she went straight to Charles's office in search of his field guides. The fourth box she opened was the right one. A book on North American mammals informed her that the red fox had few enemies other than humans and that reports of cougars roaming northern New England had not been documented. It also said cougars were solitary beasts. They hunted both by day and by night but attacked humans only if threatened or exceedingly hungry. However, a tracker's guide said that two cougar sightings had indeed been confirmed in New England—it didn't say which state—and asserted that cougars did eat foxes. Sarah found no mention, in any other volume, of any other animal doing so. She knew from Charles that fishers could prey on foxes, but fishers were mustelids—weasels—and didn't leave feline tracks, let alone such large ones.

Sarah shuddered. If that piece of bloody fur indeed came from a red fox, then the only thing that could have eaten it, according to her limited research and the evidence at the scene, was a catamount. She would give anything to ask Charles about this. She knew nothing. She had let him go with his mind full of lore and his heart full of the woods and its secrets, and she had hardly ever asked him about any of it.

A
S
S
ARAH'S PHOTOGRAPHS ACCUMULATED
, she kept them in a drawer, not bothering to show them to anyone. Most
were of pleasing scenes and the progress of spring. One morning she caught a bobolink on a high branch, zooming in on him just as his mate hopped up to his side. Another day she photographed a fawn lying stone still in the deep grass of the meadow, waiting for its mother. More recently she'd started looking for interesting close-ups in the textures of bark, the zippered, herring-bone fronds of feathers, or the random cubism of fractured rock ledges. When she succeeded in making a familiar thing abstract and unrecognizable, reducing it to pure color and pattern, she was pleased. She enjoyed making visual mysteries, images that reversed expectation, as in the photo she called
Terra Firmament,
which might be sky or earth, air or water. Such elemental reversals suited her mood when she was out walking. Somehow they offered her a view of herself as a universal being, one of billions here and gone, no more or less lost and sorrowing than others. It was how she had seen Charles on that long-ago day of her secret reconciliation with him, the day he had appeared both dear and anonymous against the looming hills. Outside, she, too, was small within the vast world, but alive and strong despite the grip of grief. Inside, she still felt reduced and faded.

Sitting on the steps of the backyard deck, Sarah examined five photographs taken hurriedly amid her catamount fears. She had never before focused on ugliness in the natural world. She had never examined things broken or decayed—birds' eggs, featherless nestlings, gnawed bodies, downed trees. These new pictures, though unusual for Sarah, were otherwise nothing much. The splash of blood, the tuft of fur, and the snapped branches were all swallowed by the overall complexity of light, shadow, stones, bark, undergrowth, and mud. But in one shot something stood out, a large feline pawprint, sharply visible in the glistening wet
earth. Sarah didn't even remember taking that picture, and she certainly hadn't thought to place something next to the track to show its size—a wristwatch or film canister.

Catamount, mountain lion, cougar—whatever its name, it could reach eight feet long and three hundred pounds. Black bears did not compare. They were unaggressive and shy unless a cub was in danger, whereas a cougar, so the books said, would now and then devour a human. Sarah gave silent thanks that Charles had not died that way, torn by scimitar claws.

A clatter interrupted Sarah's grisly thoughts, and she was glad to see Mordechai come through the backyard gate, carefully closing it behind him. Everything Mordechai did was careful, but nothing about him was studied. Sarah had seen him little since he moved in more than a month ago, but when she had checked on how he was settling in, she'd liked the spare simplicity of his space. He'd added many books and a computer, arranging on his own for an Internet line. He'd taken down all the curtains that Sarah had laboriously laundered and rehung, letting the light in unimpeded. Two framed pieces of Hebrew calligraphy, some candles, and a small, padded stool were the only personal items Sarah could see. Everything was orderly.

He said, “Good morning, Sarah,” in his lightly accented English. “Are you busy? May I interrupt for a moment?”

“Terribly busy, Mordechai, as you can see,” she answered, stretching her arms lazily toward the sun. “What can I do for you? Is everything all right at the cabin?”

“The cabin is perfect, beautiful. I worry that you can hear me clicking away on the keyboard, even up here. It sounds so loud in the quiet.”

“I don't hear a thing. Not even music. Don't you ever play music?”

“No,” he answered. “I have a single focus to my mind. I read and write nearly all day, and I cannot listen to music at the same time. Because, well, then I listen to the music instead of reading and writing.” He smiled broadly. “I am not what they call a multitasker.”

“Good for you. I'm sure multitasking is just a way to get more work out of everyone. Eyes here, hands there, feet on the treadmill, everything in motion.” Sarah fluttered her hands like startled birds.

“But not you,” Mordechai ventured. “You seem to have a calm life.” He gestured toward the garden and then the woods. “You make this garden. You walk. I see you with your camera every day, heading toward the woods or the road.” Sarah's pile of photographs caught his eye. “May I look?” he asked.

“Oh, Mordechai, I'm no kind of photographer,” she said, embarrassed. “I just take snapshots of things I happen to notice.” She scooped the photos up, though, and handed them to him, not wanting to be rude or coy.

He sat next to her on the step and shuffled curiously through the pile, sometimes rotating an image in an effort to make sense of it. “This one is . . . ?” He stopped at a starkly simple photo of a flat rock face, cracked down the middle. Its colors ranged from rust to blue-gray to silver, and the jagged line that divided the whole gave it the look of a lithograph—something deliberate instead of accidental.

“It's just a pattern I liked in a rock ledge.” Sarah pointed out what had pleased her in each shot. Then they came to the
scene-of-attack photographs, and she told him about her fears of a catamount in their woods. “You should be careful if you go walking,” she said to him. “You could always take the dogs. They love to ramble.”

Mordechai put his hands up in front of his chest, palms out. His flecked eyes caught the light, and he squinted in the glare. “I'm not a woodsman,” he said. “There are not so many trees in Israel as here, at least not where I've lived. I am shy of the woods; it's a dark world. I hear creatures at night. An owl, I think, and something that sings and yips—many voices, all together.”

“Coyotes,” Sarah told him. “They started appearing in Vermont about twenty-five years ago. You had left the country by then, of course. It was very exciting. They migrated slowly eastward. Some people say they bred with timberwolves along the way. Eastern coyotes are bigger than the ones out west.”