Wilderness (2 page)

Jane Dao-ming Poole sits at her little table by the window with a cup of coffee cooling near her abbreviate right hand, the fingers lost along with her eyes to frostbite that long-ago winter. Her left hand is fisted around the bullet. Awash in memories deep as the cold, gray sea. For the first time in years she thinks of her first father, but there is little there, little left now, save the image of his sallow complexion and his caved chest by flickering lamplight. The man who was her father for five years and who was killed along with her mother high in the mountains. And Jane Dao-ming sees again her second father, Abel Truman, who found her there and who brought her down and whom she knew for two days and who gave her vision to replace
sight. By the window in her studio, her breath comes hot and catches high in her chest to think of him and of her third and final father, who raised her with her second and final mother. This third father, Glenn Makers, who adopted her and taught her what she’d need to know to survive in a sighted world—arithmetic and how an apple feels when ripe and sweet and how the quality of light differs by season and by temperature—and who was hanged by the neck until dead from the branches of a black cottonwood on the banks of the Little Sugar Creek by a man named Farley for the simple reason that he was a black man with a white wife.

The coffee grows cold. Ice slowly scales the window beside her. After a while, the falling snow comes to tap softly at the window and sugar the Douglas fir outside. It falls and falls and shrouds the grounds and coats the town at the bottom of the long hill. The snow gathers upon the fir slowly, branch by branch, until the entire tree becomes a rounded, soft thing that creaks and shivers softly, then finally looses all that cold weight with a long, dry, heavy thudding sound of snow falling onto snow in a breathy rush. Beside Dao-ming, the window rattles softly with the impact.

All the long afternoon, Jane Dao-ming Poole barely moves. The widow of a fisherman, she is well used to waiting. She sits, her iron-colored hair down about her shoulders and one hand lightly touching now a little crucifix—made of bone or something like bone—hanging from a cord around her neck beside the bullet. Two of her second father’s, of Abel’s, few possessions to survive him, she has kept them close to her all down the long years. Glenn Makers gave her the keepsakes when she was old enough, when she’d asked him for, and he told her, Abel Truman’s story.

She’d been young then, yet old enough to understand a bit about Abel’s war, so it had been hard for Dao-ming to grasp how her new parents could speak fondly of a man who’d been on a side meant to keep men like Glenn in bondage. The cause for which he’d fought
made what she knew of Abel’s life an upsetting mare’s nest she could not untangle, and the sound of Glenn’s voice, when he’d call her from her warm thoughts of the old man who’d saved her from the cold and fed her hunger with a meat that made him weep to cook, made her hot with a shame she could not understand. And when she finally asked about him, her third father sat down on the porch step beside her and was quiet so long that Dao-ming had to reach and touch his face to know the set of it—feeling the lean dip of his cheeks beneath her nimble fingers and his high, knobby cheekbones, the thoughtful cast of his mouth. Then his work-rough hands took hers up and enclosed them completely while, behind them, her second mother, Ellen, stood from her porch rocker and said, “You go on, tell her, Glenn. But you tell her all of it,” then went into the cabin to occupy herself at some small chore. Glenn had sighed then, and Dao-ming felt the soft squeeze of his hands.

“Skin started it,” he finally told her. “That war. You know that. Skin started it, but there was more to it than just skin, and even though Abel fought for what he fought for, you can’t take a man out of his time then expect to understand him. That’s just not something you can do. Like the war, there was more to him than just the side he was on. Why are you crying?”

Beside the window, Jane Dao-ming smiles to remember how he always cupped her face when she cried. She couldn’t weep from ruined eyes, so her face convulsed in a hot, dry copy of grief, and when it did, Glenn used his rude thumbs to softly chase down her cheeks as though to wipe away real tears.

“You can love him,” he told her. “It’s all right, it doesn’t betray me, so you can do that.”

And when it had eased and she’d gotten control of herself again, he took her on a long walk through the woods around Makers’ Acres. There was a fresh and gentle wind that day and they could smell the distant sea and he began to tell her of her second father, Abel Truman.
“One thing about him,” Glenn said, and Jane Dao-ming heard the moist clicking of his smile, “is that I’ve never seen a man who loved his dog like Abel did.”

Now, beside the window, Jane Dao-ming is bathed in soft, blue winterlight that smoothes the lines from her face so that, sitting there just so, she looks just a little like the girl she was when she was young. With black hair, long like her first mother’s. Staring out the window and seeing nothing but remembering everything. She can conjure the old man, the old soldier, from her memory whenever she wants. For her, he never died. An old man rocking slowly, slowly rocking, watching the gray Pacific rise and fall. And rise again.

Chapter One

Call These Men Back

1899

In the fall of that year, an old man walked deeper into the forest and higher into the hills than he had since he was young and his life was still a red thing, filled with violence. He walked longer and farther than he had since he was a soldier, campaigning with the Army of Northern Virginia in the Great War of the Rebellion when the world was not yet changed and his body was not yet shattered.

He began his journey late in the year, when the sky seemed a mirror of the ocean: flat and gray and stretching out to a horizon where darkness presided. The old man did not know he was going until he rose one morning and gathered his things—the old Winchester that had served him so well these long years of exile, his walking stick, his blanket roll and haversack—and set off southward down the dark, wet, cold, and windswept beach.

He lived beside the sea in the far northwest corner of these United States, and in the nights before he left he sat before his tiny shack
watching the ocean under the nightblue sky. Seagrass sawed and rustled in a cool, salty wind. A few drops of rain fell upon his face, wetting his beard and softly sizzling in the fire. This light rain but the after-rain of the last night’s storm, or perhaps the harbinger of harder rains yet to come. The shack creaked softly with the wind while the tide hissed all along the dark and rocky shore. The moon glowed full from amidst the rain clouds, casting a hard light that slid like grease atop the water. The old man watched ivory curlers far to sea rise and subside noiselessly. Within the bounds of his little cove stood sea stacks weirdly canted from the wind and waves. Tide-gnawed remnants of antediluvian islands and eroded coastal headlands, the tall stones stood monolithic and forbidding, hoarding the shadows and softly shining purple, ghostblue in the moon- and ocean-colored gloom. Grass and wind-twisted scrub pine stood from the stacks, and on the smaller, flatter, seaward stones lay seals like earthen daubs of paint upon the night’s darker canvas. From that wet dark across the bay came the occasional slap of a flipper upon the water that echoed into the round bowl of the cove, and the dog, as it always did, raised its scarred and shapeless ears.

Their shack stood at the edge of the dark forest just above the high-tide line and beside a slow, tannic river. The door, only an opening in one wall covered by an old piece of faded blanket, looked out upon the gray ocean. The old man’s tiny house was but one room with a packed earth floor and walls of wind-dried driftwood of various shapes and thickness. It was bone white and silvery in its coloring and ill suited in every way for providing home or shelter. The leaking roof was fashioned partially from scrap board he had scavenged from the mill outside Forks—he’d towed the boards north up the coast behind his boat back when his boat was sound and had painted his roof red with river mud that had long since faded to a general rust color. The door, when there had been a door,
had been nothing more than long pieces of driftwood and chunks of tree bark held together with a craze of baling wire.

Off to one side there had once been a lean-to built from the same lumber, but the old man had fallen through it one night before the dog came, when he was out of his mind with drink and sorrow. He’d knocked the whole shelter over with his weight, chopped it apart in anger, and his carpentry skills were not such that he could later fathom how to set it all right again. The salvaged wood now lay pieced together tilewise on the riverbank, serving as a sort of dock for the old man to clean fish upon and stand free of mud when he washed.

The rocker in which he sat was a found item, having washed ashore one fine spring day five years ago and needing but minor repairs to its caning. The old man sat every evening to face the watery horizon and watch the sun fall, when he could see it for the rain, and to listen to the way the forest behind him hushed as light bled slowly from it.

All along the shore, behind the cabin and down the banks of the river, stood the dark wilderness, tumbling in a jade wave to the shore. Numberless green centuries of storm and tide had stranded massive logs of driftwood against the standing trunks so they lay in long heaps and mounds. Strange quiet citadels of wood, sand, and stone. Natural reliquaries encasing the dried bones of birds and fish, raccoons and seals, and the sad remains of drowned seamen carried by current and tide from as far away as Asia. Seasons of sun over long, weary years had turned the great logs silver, then white. The endless ranks of wood provided the old man’s home with a natural windbreak in storm seasons, and he spent many nights awake, listening to the mournful sound of the wind at play in the tangle.

A fire burned from the little stone-lined pit before the cabin the night before he left. Yellow flames danced up into the dark, and the
burning wood shivered and popped upon bright embers that shone like tiny, pulsing hearts lit bright. As he sat rocking and watching the flames at their work, the old man did not yet know that he was going, and yet, hunched before his fire, he could feel something within him shift. Beside him, the dog sensed his despair and knew what the old man did not and knew that he would soon try a thing and fail at it and that they would soon be traveling. The dog also knew they would not return. It knew these things the same way a dog knows well the heart of the man it loves and understands it in better ways than the man could ever hope. The old man patted the dog’s head absently, and the dog looked up at him a moment before settling its chin upon its forepaws and closing its eyes.

The old man sat and rocked and tried not to remember his younger days when he was a married man and soldiering was the furthest thing from his mind. He tried hard not to see his wife, his infant daughter. After a while, the breath that escaped his bearded lips was hot, and he covered his eyes with his right palm and left it there until it was over.

Far to the west, where the night was fast upon the ocean’s rim, the clouds had blown back and the old man could see stars where they dazzled the water. He breathed and rocked before the fire. His thoughts, beyond his control, went from painful recollections of women and family to worse remembrances of war because it had been his experience that one often led to the other—stoking its fires until there was not a man who could resist and, upon yielding, survive as a man still whole.

The old man began to tremble, though the wind was still mild and the rain still warm. He could not help but see, once again, war’s sights and hear war’s sounds and know, once more, war’s hard gifts that are so difficult to live with after war. And then the old man closed his damp eyes again and thought of the blue door he had found on the northward beach that morning.

He’d risen midmorning, after a late night spent waiting out the storm, and went downstream to wash. Checking his lines at the river mouth where it fanned darkly into the ocean, he found a single butterfish struggling weakly on his handmade hook. He watched it from the sandy, crumbling bank—a bright little teardrop shape hung quivering in bark-colored water. The old man hauled it in and cleaned it, fried and ate it all, without much thought and with no joy whatsoever. He threw the dog the innards and what he could not himself finish and watched it eat, after which it wandered off into the forest to scare up whatever else it could. The old man carefully washed his plate in the river, dried it on an old rag he kept for that purpose, and replaced it neatly on the table near his cot.

His breakfast finished, he set to doing chores about his home. He used a hand axe to split shingles from likely-shaped chunks of driftwood and used these to mend his roof. He worked slowly, carefully, favoring his crippled left arm that would never straighten from the angle in which it had healed while he lay wounded in the Wilderness of Spotsylvania after battle there in May of 1864. The previous night’s storm, though mild, had set the shack to trembling and blown rain sideways through the walls. He patched the walls with mud and handfuls of thick moss, and after finishing the job, the old man took up his rifle and set off north along the beach. The dog appeared out of the forest and ran ahead through the surf where it was shallow and fast and cold, then cut back toward the forest to stand atop a high dune, shaking head-to-tail so water flew from it in sprays of silver. It was part Labrador and part something else, and it stood waiting for the old man—a patch of black and gold and red against the dark forest behind.