Northward to the Moon (5 page)

“Where’s the village?” asks my mother in confusion.

“Down a path. We have kind of a long walk. I’m sorry. I can carry Max. Do you think you can take Hershel that far? It’s about a mile or so in.”

“I think so,” says my mother but she doesn’t sound happy. Long gone are the days when she could carry either of them easily. They are both asleep in the back. “Jane, can you take the red suitcase? It’s got everyone’s pajamas.”

“Where are we sleeping?” asks Maya.

“No one knows, it’s an adventure, Mayie,” says Ned.

I grab the red suitcase and get out. I yawn. The earth is wet and there is a rich damp mossy smell. Jim comes back to us from where he parked his pickup. He takes the suitcase out of my hands and I’m glad. I’m really tired now and don’t feel like carrying it through the woods in the dark. To be honest, as much as I want adventures, tonight is not the night for them. I think of my bed back in Massachusetts with its old Pendleton blanket, the dotted swiss curtains, my favorite star.

Jim has a flashlight and walks ahead of us shining a path, which is actually kind of useless as it illuminates the earth for him but not for us in the back. I trip on tree roots from time to time. I am surprised that Maya doesn’t whine but perhaps she is inhibited by Jim.

Finally we get to a clearing. There are a lot of cabins with smoke coming out of their chimneys. The woodsmoke has a thick pleasant smell.

Jim goes to check on Mary but reports that she is asleep.

“I can wake her,” he says uncertainly.

“Don’t think of it,” says my mother, and then there is an awkward pause.

“Why don’t you sit down.” He motions us to a fallen tree. “I just have to tell some people you are here.”

We sit under the stars. It is much warmer than Saskatchewan. Maya clings to my mother’s side. There are noises in the woods. Then we see a cabin door open and a family with startled and curious faces races out carrying bedding. It is obvious that Jim is clearing a cabin for us. This is uncomfortable but what can we do? We do not want to sleep in the car.

Jim stays awhile longer in the cabin and then another woman comes out, also throwing a curious squinty-eyed look at us although she can hardly make us out in the dark. I think we are the most exciting thing to happen here for a while.
There is no Walmart or roller rink or even movie theater for miles and miles. I bet they all get sick of each other’s faces. This consoles me somewhat when Jim emerges and motions us over and says, “You can stay here.”

“I hate to inconvenience those people,” says my mother uncertainly.

“Oh no, they got plenty of room at her sister’s place. They don’t mind. They’re glad you came to see Mary. People’d do just about anything for Mary.” He shows us the cabin and says he will see us in the morning.

The cabin is warm. The beds look freshly made. I am hoping someone changed all the sheets. It is one thing to be outlaws. It is one thing to have adventures and recklessly take what comes. I am all for that but at the end of the day I want fresh linens.

My mother is looking at the beds. I bet she is thinking the same.

She heaves a sigh, unpacks and gets the boys into their pajamas. Maya and I change in the bathroom and I am glad to see that my mother has already put Hershel and Max in a small bed together. I will have a bed to myself.

In the close warm dark, with the sound of the fire, the crackling logs, the wind that whooshes through the pines and down the chimney, the spray of rain and ice against the roof in gusts, the sounds of movement outside, human or animal, impossible to tell, we lie content. Occasionally there is the soft sound of someone moving in his bed or a log shifting position. Quiet pockets of life in the still room. I think of the huge overarching starlit sky of the woods and wonder how it is to be up there in that great silence looking down at Earth. Maybe our explosions and tidal waves and wars are just quiet pockets of life in a larger still room.

I hear the howl of a wolf again. Thank goodness Maya is already gently snoring. Something primitive in me knows that it is safer to sleep huddled this way in one room at night with a fire. I wonder if my mother and Ned are asleep yet or if their thoughts fill this room with images the way mine do. I am at home here in a cabin. I would not know this if adventure had not led me here. It is not a place I would ever have thought to come on my own. Sometimes it is good to have things happen to you outside of your control. There are parts of yourself you would never discover otherwise. But
sometimes it feels that in these new places, as much as I discover new parts of myself, I lose parts of the old Jane. The one who was safe and secure and happy on the beach.

Do my mother’s thoughts and mine tangle in the night? Because I hear her gentle voice say, “Ned, sometimes at night I hear the sound of the ocean.”

“That’s the wind in the pines,” he says practically, and I hear him roll over and start to snore.

In the morning Jim takes us to see Mary. My mother wants Ned to go alone first but he wants to bring us all and introduce us. When we get inside her cabin it is dark and a little smoky and close. Perhaps they are keeping it extra warm because she is ill. She is a mass of gray hair on the bed looking exactly the color of one of the white charred logs in the fireplace. I wonder if when you live under these trees for so long you become partly tree. She turns a wrinkled tree bark face to us and then grins. She is missing quite a few key teeth. “NED!” she croaks.

“Hi, Mary,” says Ned. He looks, all at once, shy. “I wasn’t sure you would recognize me.”

“I didn’t recognize you. I knew you were coming. You’re changed now. You’re old. Felicity, Hershel, Max, Maya and Jane.” She says our names while looking down the line at us.

I realize that Jim kept all our names straight when he told her, which impresses me because he only heard them once. I am thinking he is not only brawny but very smart. It startles me that she calls Ned old when she is so ancient herself. But maybe when she saw him he was such a young man. Or maybe she was trying to say old
er
. She talks in a halting way, needing large breaths to complete sentences, straining as if afraid that any second she will lose the ends of words.

“Whatcha doing here, Ned?” she asks. Then she closes her eyes. As if she needs to rest after sentences too.

“They said when you were sick you kept calling for me,” says Ned.

“I don’t remember. I don’t remember the hospital much, Ned. Except the food. Bad food.”

“Nobody likes hospital food,” says my mother. You can tell she is trying to find consoling things
to say. I think she would like to say consoling things to Ned too, this is so obviously hard for him. She rests her hand lightly on his upper arm.

“Are you in pain?” asks Ned. Somehow this seems kind of personal to me. He hasn’t seen her in twenty years.

Mary shakes her head and then she lies back with her eyes closed and we all glance at each other. Now what?

“So you don’t remember calling me?” Ned tries again.

Mary shakes her head.

“Oh.”

It is hard to know where to go with this. I look at Maya anxiously. I am afraid she is going to burst out with some explosion about how we came all this way to see a dying person who doesn’t know what we’re doing here. But Maya is just looking cowed by circumstances. The boys are getting fidgety, though.

“Well, maybe I will take the boys outside,” says my mother, but doesn’t.

“Uh, I don’t know what to say,” says Ned. “I mean, I came because they said you called me.”

“How many years has it been, Ned? Since you lived here.”

“Oh, about twenty, I guess,” says Ned. You can see everyone deflating. It is very hard to know how to feel when you’ve been feeling noble and now it turns out you’ve done a completely unnecessary thing and wasted a lot of gas to do it, not to mention tossed a family out of their nice warm cabin so you could sleep there.

“Twenty years,” says Mary. “Goes by fast. But Jim told you …” She stops and breathes again loudly with a whispery sound as if her lungs are full of old paper.

Ned waits. We all wait. It seems the polite thing to do but she doesn’t say anything and we get twitchy. You have no idea how long a few minutes can last until you have stood next to a dying woman politely waiting for her to finish her sentence.

Finally Ned says, “Jim told me what, Mary?”

“Jim told you … who … came to us,” she gasps.

“Someone I know?” prompts Ned.

Mary nods and then there is another long wait
while she breathes her rattling breath. I am sorry but at this point I want to shout, What is this? Twenty questions?

We wait some more. Nobody even moves in case it distracts her.

“Who came to the camp?” asks Ned when it is clear Mary needs another prompt.

There is another long wait while she slowly opens her eyes. She shifts herself slightly upward on her pillows and looks into Ned’s eyes for a long time before she says, “Your brother.”

W
ell, that’s a conversation stopper, as you can imagine. Finally Ned says, “My
brother?”

Then Mary croaks, “Your
brother.”

Then Ned looks astounded again and says, “My
brother?”

Then Mary says, “Your
brother
!”

They go around a few times this way with long pauses between question and answer as Mary gathers her strength to speak again. I am worried she will use up all her energy on this one answer and we’ll never find out anything else. My mother must be worried about this too because she suddenly leaps in and asks,
“Which
brother, Mary?”

“Yeah!” says Ned. “Which brother?”

“Says his name is John,” says Mary. She is paling with the effort of the interview and my mother, Ned and I all have our hands clasped, hoping we will get the end of the story before she expires into sleep … or
worse
.

“John?”
asks Ned.

“John,” says Mary, but it is unclear if she is confirming or just repeating.

“John?”
says Ned.

“Can we go out and play with our trucks?” asks Hershel.

This draws Mary’s attention to him for the first time and she turns her head and looks straight at him as she says, “The
Amazing
John!”

This freaks out the usually unflappable Hershel, who takes two steps back.

“What’s amazing about him?” asks Ned.

“No, no, his name …,” says Mary. Her voice becomes thinner and reedier. She is definitely losing lung power now.

“Yes,” says Ned, encouragingly, “John is his name.”

“No …,” says Mary, her hands clenching with the effort, “Amazing …”

“John is amazing?” asks Ned.

“No, Ned,” says my mother. “I think she is saying ‘Amazing’ is part of his name.”

Mary nods emphatically or clearly means to although actually it’s just a limp neck bend.

“The Amazing John?” asks Ned.

Mary nods again but this time the movement is barely discernible. “John the Amazing,” she croaks.

“What kind of a crackpot name is that?” asks Ned in normal tones and not the hushed reverential ones we use for the sick and dying.

“Well, a stage name, maybe, Ned,” says my mother helpfully.

Mary nods again. She opens her eyes. You can tell she is gathering strength for the home stretch. “Vegas,” she whispers.

“John has an
act in Vegas?”
asks Ned.

“Magician,” says Mary.

“John is a
magician?”
says Ned. “But he was never any good with his hands!”

Mary just stares at Ned. And really, I think, weak or not, there is no other appropriate reaction. After all, what is she supposed to do—John is Ned’s silly family, it’s got nothing to do with her.

“Well!” says Ned when it is apparent he is getting
no help with this. He sits down in a chair next to her bed.

My mother takes the boys outside. How can she stand to leave at this most interesting moment? But I guess that is what it is to be a mother. Max has had to have a dreamcatcher taken from him and Hershel, it turns out, has been busy shredding a corner of the blanket where a thread is loose. Duty calls.

“Did he say what he was doing here?” asks Ned.

“Looking for you. Under bed.” Mary’s eyes are closed again.

“He was looking for me under the bed?” asks Ned. Talk about amazing!

But Mary just jabs downward with one birdclaw hand. I look down. There’s a small duffel bag poking out from underneath. I pick it up. Mary nods at me.

“Left for you,” she says, and closes her eyes again as if mission accomplished.

“John came? He left this
bag
for me?” Ned looks astounded but Mary doesn’t bother answering. Ned takes the bag, stupefied.

“Open it,” I urge.

“Yeah,” he says, shaking himself like a dog. “Right.”

He opens the duffel bag. It is full of money.