Stony River (43 page)

“Not at all? Is it always night here, then?”

“No, of course not.” He kept the greasy brush scrubbing evenly over the bootleather without missing a stroke. “The sky is light, but the land lies in the shadow of the mountain.”

“It’s hard to picture.”

“Why try? When winter comes, you’ll be far away.”

“I’m just interested, since I won’t be here to see it.”

“I can tell you what it’s like in two words,” Fenn said levelly. “Long, and dark. Even a dreamer like you shouldn’t find much wonder in that.” He clapped the lid on the grease can and set his boots by the stove.

After helping himself to a cup of tea, he paused with it before the kitchen window. Sevana glanced at his motionless figure, his blond hair shaggy from a too-long-put-off haircut, his broad back rigid beneath his plaid flannel shirt. She wondered what occupied his thoughts as he stood there so silently. She still dearly wished to know him, but increasingly doubted she would ever have the honor. “Do you want me to cut your hair?” she asked, almost without thinking—anything to make a connection with him.

He turned with a speculatory look. “You know how?”

“Well, just from trimming my own—” She grinned encouragingly. “But I could try.”

He was surprisingly docile regarding the idea. But once she had him in a chair and he had given her permission to ‘snip away’, she hesitated, fingering the fine long ends. “I’m not sure what to do.”

“Just hack some off. It’s getting in my way.”

“I don’t want to ruin you.”

“Just hack some off.”

So Sevana gingerly combed and snipped, became confused by all the layers, decided his hair was beautiful long, and stopped before she could do any great damage. But at least the bottom was an inch shorter than before, and Fenn said if he used his imagination he could almost tell it’d been cut. He didn’t complain about her wasting his time, though, perhaps because he was in shock—it not being every day someone called him beautiful, even if it was only his sister.

He inclined his lightly shorn head in a book of medieval legends, and Sevana put some time into a study of Goldthread based on a sketch from the pasture. The turpentine competed with the smell of boot grease for dominance in the room. Occasionally she looked across at Fenn. After a while, when he still gave no indication of turning in, she gave up waiting for him and went upstairs.

In the heart of the night she woke to the moon shining full in her eyes—free of the weight that had anchored it behind the mountain range all summer. Then she realized it wasn’t the only light in the room. A dim shaft shone under her door. She slipped out of bed and peered out on the landing. The light was coming up the stairs. “Fenn?” she called.

“What?” he answered shortly, from below.

“What are you doing?”

“Going to hell. What business of yours?”

She could tell by his voice he was drinking. She blocked her door and went back to bed, searching for a reason for his trouble. Now that she had dismissed the possibility of illegal trapping, she still had many things to account for in his attitudes and actions. The only conclusion she could reach was that he read too many dark books, entertained too many dark thoughts, drank too much. She wasn’t convinced that was the answer, but she was at loss for a better one.

In the morning Fenn looked so half-asleep that Sevana took over stirring the oatmeal for him, while he sat down to lace up his boots. Usually he laced each boot with lightning speed by holding both strings in one hand and zigzagging them diagonally; but this morning he was slow and inaccurate, missing eyelets so that he had to start over more than once. “You shouldn’t stay up so late,” she observed, although it was really a question why he had. But he double-knotted the laces methodically as if he hadn’t heard.

When Sevana went outside, hoarfrost was coating the grass in the yard. The poppies drooped on their stems; the bean plants lay blackened and dead. In a terror she ran down to the river and found there, too, the freeze had taken its toll, the wildflowers standing pale and ice-dusted in the frozen, matted grass. The early sun—which was trading places with the moon as the one battling to keep its face above the mountain walls—had not yet cleared the ridgetop, and the river lay in black, still pools in the shadow of the canyon. There was such a melancholy to the place, such a lifelessness of sleep or death, it seemed not the same place that had been filled with the noisy vitality of springtime nor the glittering, jeweled splendor of summer. The sun glinted in feebly through the trees on the skyline with hit-or-miss rays. Too cold to wait for it to rise high enough to shine full into the corridor, she started home, chilled by more than the temperature of the air—feeling a regret over her lively golden river.

She spent the morning salvaging the remaining garden vegetables and spading under the plants, while the high ridge overstood her watchfully, its furrowed dull-green sides smoky with purple shadows. Feathery ice clouds were painted on the sky and the sunlight was lackluster. Yes, so quickly had that mountain summer passed.

A verse she’d memorized the previous fall came back to her:

Winter in September—

No gentle autumn breath,

No slowly fading ember

With which we can remember

Summer’s death.

She had been going through a particularly restless phase when she was assigned that poem. She remembered how it’d caught at her for no known reason, except that it had been September at the time…how she’d stared out the window of her English classroom at the maple leaves swirling on the cement sidewalk, and wanted to be somewhere else, living life, a different life. Well, she was living one now.

When she was done in the garden, she picked the first batch of small, hard apples from the tree below the house and cooked up a pot of applesauce to go with dinner, the house filling with the sweet, slippery smell of steaming apple skins and sugar.

Aware of the time fleeting away, and wanting to paint a picture for Fenn, Sevana began frequenting the pasture again—even though it was a long way to go without a horse. But much of the time she should have been painting, she spent dreaming. Sitting amid the green and gold grasses in that sunlit aerie still gloriously unendangered by the shadows encroaching the lower valley, Sevana wanted to call out to the hawk sailing over the mountains, to ask if it had looked down on a shepherd and a flock of sheep in its flight. And she wondered how long it would be before the alpestrine summer would end and Joel would return. Always in her heart lay the hope that she would see him again before she left.

Once or twice while at the pasture, she visited the spring in the shallow crease of the mountain. It had dwindled to a fast drip, but after waiting for the cup to fill, she would drink the results of her patience. But it made her sad and lonely, for Joel was not there to drink it with her—and there was no such thing as a community of one.

With the approach of hunting season, Fenn began readying his guns and gear. There was no lumberjack in the valley not doing the same. He fitted the handle to his hunting knife and polished it. Then he persuaded Sevana to make him a paper target with her sienna paint, and commenced practice-shooting his many guns. Sevana sometimes sat on the steps to watch him. He was an excellent marksman, and she admired his skill—her praise of which he tolerated manfully.

Of all his guns, Sevana was most impressed by the muzzleloader—not only by the deafening explosion and cloud of smoke that hung in the air whenever he fired it, but also by the amount of time it took him to clean it after a round of shooting. It was a common sight to see him with a coffee can full of soapy water in the evenings, ramrodding its long steel barrel.

His behavior continued to puzzle her. Sometimes he would go to bed at the usual hour, but other times he would stay up late, sometimes long into the night. He often looked tired—once she even caught him napping in the leather chair—but he persisted in his eccentric new habits. Sevana had given much effort to an explanation for this in her own mind, to no avail. The longer she stayed, though, and saw his unhappiness, the more she felt he needed help. But that was something she didn’t know how to give.

One night Fenn made bullets. He stoked the stove and set a melting pot of lead to heat, even though it was already late. Sevana cast glances his way while she finished another bark frame, trying to guess what was going on behind his dispassionate countenance as he dipped melted lead into the hand-held caster and dropped out the hot shiny bullets onto the counter.

It seemed to her he was running from something; it almost seemed he was afraid to go to bed. And then all at once it came to her—the logical explanation she had been seeking: perhaps he was avoiding sleep because he was being haunted by bad dreams. It was not hard to believe he could be tormented by fearsome images in his sleep, judging from the ghoulish books that often claimed his attention. Of course a big, strong, independent man like Fenn would not want to admit he was afraid of the dark. Yes, that must be it! Bad dreams were the cause of his bad nights. She felt a relief, even an excitement, to finally understand.

She kept working, but was feeling very tender toward him now that she thought she had discovered his trouble. She wished she could gain his confidence. No fear could be as bad if it was shared.

She slipped the picture into the frame about the same time he pushed the lead pot to the edge of the stove. She stood up, planning to take it upstairs to give to him later as a thank-you for the summer. Instead, impulsively, she held it out to him. “Here, Fenn—take this, and have a view of summer to look at all winter.”

“Don’t mind if I do,” he said, inspecting it before he hooked it over a knot on a log. “Never seen anybody paint as good as you.”

She smiled happily at him. It was the nicest thing he’d ever said to her.

She filled the washbasin, while he lit the fireplace and settled into the armchair with Dante’s
Inferno
. On her way to bed she looked over from the stairs. “Are you going to be up much longer?” she hazarded.

“What’s it to you?”

“Fenn,” she said, determined to pursue the matter, “you know, these books you read—” She began to lose courage when she couldn’t think how to say it.

“What about them?” he demanded, waiting for her to go on.

At least she had his attention. “Well, they’re so—dark. Don’t you think if you stopped reading them, you would—” She stopped again.

“What are you trying to say?” His eyes narrowed in exasperation. “You don’t like my books—I gather that much. Fortunately, it’s nobody’s affair but my own what I read.”

At that, Sevana abandoned the attempt. “Anyway, goodnight,” she said, and climbed the stairs. She was relieved to hear him come up shortly, and secretly wished him a peaceful night. But once again candlelight burned across the hall in the late hours, and even though she stayed where she was, she was longing to comfort him from his nightmares.

So it continued. For the most part, things went along uneventfully. But now and again came a night when Fenn would put off going to bed, or Sevana would wake to a light under her door at some unearthly hour. And then she would wonder what dark apparitions had disturbed him, and if they would ever go away and leave him alone for good.

CHAPTER 28

After that first frost, it froze often at night—and even though the days were still summerlike once they had shaken off their morning chill, some alteration had occurred from which there was no turning back. A new kind of silence was stealing into the land, into its very heart. The forests stood hushed and still, as if listening for something. And between tawny riverbanks, where the grass had succumbed to the killing frosts and the flowers gone to seed, the Stony ran more dreamily, as if it was slowly falling asleep.

Up on the deeply shadowed mountainsides the larch and aspen trees were beginning to turn cadmium-yellow among the evergreens, flecking the green forests with the flames of a thousand candles. Sevana had thought the summer beautiful, but she was finding the fall even more so. It was richer than summer, its colors deeper, its silence more haunting.

On opening day of bear season, Fenn strapped his gun over his shoulder as soon as he got home from work and rode away on Trapper, not returning until after dark to the supper Sevana kept waiting for him. Every night that week he hunted—but he didn’t have enough daylight to go very far, and came back from these short forays with nothing more than a few grouse. Randall had met him on the road and inspected his bag limit each time, but that was to be expected: he was twice as omnipresent during hunting season.

Sunday Fenn hunted the entire day, but when he came home at nightfall, face ruddy from the cold wind, he again hung up his rifle empty-handed. “See anything?” Sevana asked, ladling out two bowls of stew at the table—which no longer boasted a centerpiece of wildflowers, but only seedpods and taffy-colored grass.

“Spooked a bear, but it was too brushy to risk a shot.” He draped his wool shirt over the chair and pushed up the sleeves of his longjohn top as he sat down. He was disgruntled because he had run into a hunting party near Cache Creek. Sevana almost laughed at him. Three hunters, and he was making noises about moving to a place where there weren’t so many people.