Listen! (9780062213358) (8 page)

Listen. Listen
.

Charley reaches a hand toward Coyote, and he backs hurriedly away. Still there is no taking back what has just happened. He has touched her. Dog to human. Spirit to spirit. She can still feel his nose on her neck. She pushes her hair out of her eyes with a muddy hand.
Listen!
It is what her mother used to say when she sat, camera in her hands, Charley on the ground nearby, waiting for the right light, the perfect puff of wind, a bird or squirrel or lizard to venture into view.

Charley listens now, the way she used to when her mother told her to. She can hear the rain on the leaves over her head, on the ground around her. She hears a stir of wind, a bird calling across the lake, Sadie moving in the soggy leaf litter down the hill. She doesn't know now any more than she knew then what it is she is listening for, what her mother wanted her to hear.

She sits up, rubs her hands on her wet jeans, and then, with the help of a hickory sapling, drags herself to her feet. Coyote is ahead of her on the trail, moving slowly, his bedraggled tail waving in the rain. “Coyote!” she calls.

He glances over his shoulder and goes on.

“Thank you,” she says. “Thank you.”

T
he Morgan house, like most of the houses on Eagle Lake, was built into the hillside above the lake. The upper floor was originally all there was, the lower floor having been added on the lake side later by remodeling the garage and building an addition. It is on the lower floor that Sarita lives, in what used to be the garage—a big room with a sink, a tiny refrigerator, and a couch that opens into a bed. Beyond Sarita's room, past the stairs that come down from the lake room above, past a hallway with a bathroom, behind a perpetually closed door, is the addition—Charley's mother's studio.

Charley stands in the shadowy dark hallway, staring at the closed door. It
was
her mother's studio, she thinks. What it is now is something else again. Storeroom. Warehouse. Museum. She has not gone into it, the way she hadn't walked the woods trail, since she was ten years old and her mother's real voice, her real, living, breathing self, filled it with activity and life.

Sadie and Coyote have gone. As soon as Coyote finished eating, they swam the lake in the rain and disappeared beneath the Davises' trees. Still wearing her slicker, she stood on the dock and watched them go. Her father left moments later, and Charley was alone with the rain. The empty day, in the empty house, stretched ahead of her like a trek across the wilderness. If the rain continued, she wouldn't even go to sit on the boulder and play Jane Goodall in Coyote's territory.

She took a shower, scrubbing carefully to get rid of the poison ivy oil, washed and dried her hair, put on clean clothes, and considered fixing herself something to eat. She tried to find a movie she wanted to watch on television. She picked up and put down three books, and then she crept down the stairs, feeling like an intruder as she moved through Sarita's room and into the hall.

Her mother's voice has been in her head since she fell on the trail—
listen, listen
. Since before that. Since the dream. It is what brought her here, as if she is following the sound. Now she watches her hand reach for the knob, the way a camera would focus close in a movie, and opens the door. She stands at the open door, listening to the rain pound on the roof over her head, and then steps inside.

Dust. Silence. She touches the wall switch, and the long room is flooded with light. Too much light. Quickly she turns it off and goes to the desk by the nearest window to turn on a reading lamp. Her mother's photographs, some framed, some only matted, cover almost every inch of wall above the built-in cabinets that line much of the room. Each one is a photo of some bit of Eagle Lake. Her mother believed that all of nature could be found in any part of it. “I don't have to go any farther than our woods,” she used to say.

Until someone who had seen her work lured her away to a rainforest in Brazil. Charley would never know why her mother went, what she found there. Whatever pictures she took vanished from the world as completely as she did when the plane went down.

On the floor, leaning against one leg of the worktable that takes up the center of the room, their brown paper-covered backs facing her, are the framed photos Charley took down from the walls of her room the day of the funeral. She doesn't even remember now what they are. She leans down to turn the first one around. Mistake. Seeing it is like a blow to the stomach. It is the picture her mother took for her of the fairy castle.

It isn't really a fairy castle, of course. It is only the stump of an ancient pine tree, broken off a foot or so above the ground. The black-and-white photo was taken early one morning, when mist was still rising from the moss in the first rays of morning sun. The plates of the pine tree's bark, layer after thin layer, form a jagged ring of concentric circles—the castle's battlements—around the central core, a space like a courtyard, carpeted with moss. In the middle of the courtyard a tower of splintered wood, crusted with lichen, rises another foot. Between two roots a hole leads into darkness beneath—like an entrance to the mysterious interior.

It was Charley who named it the fairy castle, playing there while her mother took photographs or waited to take them. A million times she must have imagined herself going into the hole between the roots, down into darkness and then up again into the candlelit, glittery rooms of the castle. The kitchen, the bedrooms, the dining hall.

The stump must still be out there, just a plain old stump like plenty of others, probably nearly hidden now by leaves that have never been brushed away, as she used to do to keep the courtyard clear, the entrance open. But it was magical when she was little enough to believe—almost believe—in fairies. The photograph used to hang on the wall across from her bed, where she could see it as soon as she opened her eyes. Even now she can almost see a figure standing in the castle courtyard dressed in shades of brown and green, slim and winged like a dragonfly with transparent, iridescent double wings.

Charley turns the photo around again and straightens up. The cheerful, friendly clutter that was her mother's way of working has been tidied away. Her father—or Sarita—has packed most of her mother's belongings into boxes that stand open on the table. By the door at the far end of the room that leads outside, boxes are stacked on the daybed under the window. The bigger equipment has been draped with cloth, standing now like hulking ghosts. The door to the darkroom stands ajar, the sign that used to warn Charley away when the darkroom was in use hanging crooked from its hook. She has been right to stay away from here, she thinks.

She goes to turn off the lamp and notices a stack of books on the desk. They are new and all the same—a coffee table book she has never seen before.
Trees and Stones Will Teach You
by Colleen Morgan. Charley stares at her mother's name. Colleen Morgan. What use is a name when there is no person to attach it to, no person to answer if you say it aloud? The book's cover photo, taken from the water, is of the sweet gum her mother called Tree.

Surrounded by woods, thousands and thousands of trees, her mother loved this one best. Somewhere in these cabinets, in these drawers, Charley thinks, there must be hundreds of photos of Tree. In every season, in every kind of weather, in every kind of light.

“Weed trees,” people call sweet gums. When a pair of beavers started chewing the bark of Eagle Lake trees, the community considered getting someone in to kill the beavers and save the woods, until they found out that beavers have a preference for sweet gums. “They can take all of those they want!” the president of the board said. Charley's mother pointed out later that the beavers never laid a tooth on Tree.

“He's a survivor,” she said. Enormously tall, Tree was growing on the hillside above the creek more than seventy years ago when the dam was built. As the water rose, the lake gradually surrounded Tree so that it was growing almost completely in the water. Other trees along the waterline gradually died, their roots drowned, but Tree stayed on, green, then red, then bare boned, then green again. Charley went with her mother to see Tree by water more times than she could remember. Her mother would pull the canoe against his trunk, touch him, talk to him.

Charley picks up the book on top of the stack, opens it, and leafs through the pages. Like most of the books her mother took photographs for, this one has more pictures than words. Across from each photo is a short poem or a quotation. On the title page is the rest of the title quotation: “‘Trees and stones will teach you that which you can never learn from masters.'—St. Bernard of Clairvaux.”

Charley looks at the cover photo again. Tree stands out against the green shrubs of the hillside, his trunk centered between the deep red of his autumn leaves above and their reflection in the water from which he grows. Survivor. How can a tree live in water more than seventy years and the human who loved and admired him vanish in an instant half a world away from home?

Charley turns out the light and leaves the studio, carefully closing the door behind her. She shouldn't have come, she thinks. But she takes the book with her.

C
harley takes the book to her room and drops it on her bed. Then she stands, listening to the rain, aware of the emptiness around her, thinking about going back to her chair in the lake room, finding a funny movie to watch on television—a movie that will take her away from Eagle Lake, make her laugh. But she doesn't go. The book, its doubled image of Tree in autumn, holds her like a magnet. Colleen Morgan, award-winning nature photographer. Where is she now? How can it be that her mother just
isn't
anymore?

Finally she settles onto the bed, fluffs her pillow behind her, switches on her reading light, and begins to turn the pages slowly, looking at the photographs, reading the quotations. Colleen Morgan might be gone, but her work, the last work she finished, is here.

As often as Charley went into the woods with her mother while she was working, the pictures she took there were always a surprise. It was as though the camera saw a different world than Charley did. Small things got bigger. Or big things got smaller. Edges blurred in the mist, colors sharpened in the slant of late afternoon sun, shadows deepened, the sun sparked individual diamonds and streaks of brilliant light on the surface of the water where there had been only ripple and glitter.

The stillness of the picture caught a moment that would have been different for Charley even if she had been sitting exactly where the camera was at exactly the same moment, looking at exactly the same thing. For her the bird would have moved its head, the leaf would have shifted in the wind, the spider would have walked along the strand of its web. She never understood how her mother could know what the camera would hold in place, how she even saw the image she wanted to catch. One of the photos in the book shows a cedar waxwing on a bare winter branch, leaning to place a dogwood berry into the beak of another cedar waxwing. How had she caught that moment? How had she even known to have her camera ready?

It is a question Charley never thought to ask when her mother was there. She was too young to wonder then, too young to care about the work her mother did. She had expected her mother to be there, in her world, in her life, as long as she needed her.

Now, this minute, Charley wants more than anything to ask her mother this question. How did she do what she did? That isn't all she wants to know. She wants to know why. Why photography? Why nature?

And why did she change her mind and go off to take pictures of the rainforest?

Charley looks at the copyright date in the book. It came out after her mother was gone. This is the book Colleen Morgan was talking about, working on, finding quotations and choosing photos for, just before she left for Brazil. She never saw the finished book. Would she have been satisfied with it? Would she have liked it?

Charley wonders which she chose first, the photos or the words. On the page across from the cedar waxwings Charley reads, “‘Love cannot be forced, love cannot be coaxed and teased. It comes out of Heaven, unasked and unsought.'—Pearl Buck.”

She turns the page. The next photo was taken in the Morgans' yard, easy to recognize because theirs is one of only three houses on the lake that has a lawn. Everyone else has just the woods, shrubs, with a garden here or there in whatever sunlight can be had among the trees. The photo is a tight close-up, the blades of grass huge, like a dense green forest, bright above, shadowy at the base. A ladybug on one blade, shiny in the sunlight, is the size of a dime. Across from that page are the words “‘Every blade of grass has its Angel that bends over it and whispers, “Grow, grow.”'—The Talmud.”

There are no angels. Only grass and ladybug.

Charley remembers her mother mowing the grass. The images are hazy—raggedy blue jeans, green-stained sneakers. No face. Like the way, sometimes, in a dream, she knows who someone is but can't quite see them.

Colleen Morgan hated having a whole yard full of grass that needed cutting, hated cutting it, but it was a job she never let her husband do. She would pull the cord to start the mower, and then shout for all the living things hiding in the grass to get out of the way. She would move very slowly, stopping if she saw a cricket or a katydid that wasn't moving out of the way fast enough. “Head for the
short
grass!” she'd yell. “I won't be coming back over what I've already cut.” If she saw a toad in front of her, she would stop the mower altogether and move the toad out of the way, dropping it among the azalea bushes or in the flower garden at the front of the house.