The CleansingBy Linda Dennard
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Jaybirds complaining in barren trees escape notice as the mute child slips into the protective channels of his mother’s voice. The cobbled floor chilling his bare feet as he watches her, his silence a sacred landscape.
Inez McCarthy, young and weak, whispers from the feather mattress. A heavy dew of sweat on her forehead, her arms. The boy leans to hear her, stepping back when she cautions him. She wonders what her son understands. How will he learn? Even an echo of Grandfather’s words will soften the misery her husband will cause the boy. But what passes among generations is never precise and subject to corruption.
Please. Listen. Human beings are pebbles rolling in a rockslide, starting here and stopping over there. Each time we start along the path we are in a different mind, a different form. Who we meet on the way shapes us. We mold them. What you do makes it easy or hard for someone else. Two people come together—the currents alter their course.
If the boy understands, he does not show it. Alert and motionless, his limbs are rigid. The posture of quick flight. A shadow of the father hovers in his absence. The weight of lightning before it strikes.
Go to the window. See the aspen on the ridge? Before any of us took a virgin breath, those trees were ancient. Can you tell where the tree ends and the sky fading into night begins? Or where the roots and dirt divide? Imagine where they start to something new, where snow becomes water, light becomes dark. The living begin and end together.
Crepe outlines of the aspen grove are visible from where Inez curls in the narrow metal bed. To die in sight of her beloved trees is a comfort. They are ancestors, sentient beings who ease the loneliness of isolation.
In those trees, I forget I am bound to bones—I’m as free as melting ice. Nobody judges me. I am a new born colt with no idea stronger than the taste of her mother’s milk. Son, dying is clouds turned to rain, a sunset married to dawn.
Not understanding the words, the child responds to the images they provoke, felt in the same timbre as her voice. A meadow soft with damp grass. The warm nap of sheep’s wool on a December morning. Unfiltered light after days of cloud cover. Anxiety beating its wings it escapes into air, a nervous bird tamed by letting it go.
In life, twigs and stones thrown in the path create us in their likeness. My husband does not recognize this. Not his fault. He grew into a man not remembering cruelty breeds its own. My people—your people—we remember.
Inez cannot help the tumble of her speech. The boy does not respond to logic. Liam has said it often enough. Still, she hopes in a cascade of ideas, a single thought will take root before she dies.
Listen!
A harsh cough silences her as sallow dew riles scars in her lungs. With forced breath, Inez focuses on an unforgiving memory unfurling like the tattered flag of a lost battle. Responsibility to the stick of a child is the only anchor in a turbulent storm rising in her sixteenth year. When she disobeys, Liam reminds her he paid the high price demanded by her captors—aware of the shame it causes her. The boy watches as she rubs wrists scarred from the rope tying her to the saddle horn for the wordless journey to Liam’s valley. A familiar ritual, he associates with unhappiness.
Do not worry. By dusk, the struggle will end.
No need to instruct the boy. His days will be as hard as her husband’s imagination. Hope will not change the facts. Liam McCarthy knows only struggle, at war with forces he dreads but does not believe exist. No family. A random seed displaced by a bitter squall. He has long brooded in the fog of losses. When spring comes, he will not see the change; her son honed with the uneven edge of a cynical nature.
Grandmother, he is granite, changing by erosion. Make him a cloud.
As if he fears intrusion in his sanctuary, the boy shuffles to the door.
Come here. I am talking to the relatives gathering to help me to the other place. They see you. You please them.
A young cougar forced from its habitat into strange territory, the boy studies her, returning to his post at her side. Inez wonders if the silent child is the creation of her illness but knows anguish does not overrun a heart for mere illusion.
Liam calls you Hunter. But I have a different name. He does not know. It means the boy born to spring. I whispered it when you were fresh on the earth. I want you to remember—new life comes after the dark freezes. Say your name!
The agitation in her tone startles the child. The rhythm of her sentences is familiar. By their cadence the sounds are important. Her voice is closest to the warbling of a meadow lark. Now it has the nervous pitch of yellow-winged blackbirds clinging to the tender branches of a river willow.
Hunter shudders, seeing death rise on powerful legs, ready to grasp the woman in giant paws. When the apparition evaporates into the mists of consciousness, the boy kneels. As she reaches to touch his hair, Inez sighs. He is so quiet, his presence unsure. But silence will protect him more than words.
The drifts are thick, the doctor far way. Too late. Grandfather could save me, but a dream tells me he left this world. His spirit cannot find me.
Grandfather is the sepia photograph of a tall man with dark hair who holds the reins of a spotted stallion—a familiar sensibility the boy accepts as reality. Inez sustains the elder's presence with soft prayers. The tenor of voice the same as when she teaches Hunter to bridle the pony or skim gooseberries from thorns with a comb.
Liam cannot find Grandfather. He does not know the way. Believe in what you feel. Act or don’t only when you recognize what it connects. Easier to find the right thing. You know not to waste food. Liam wore out a belt teaching you. To waste the urges of your heart or the gifts of your senses—a much greater sin.
But Grandfather’s teachings have eroded in the years in the valley and wisdom has no power over Liam’s obsessions. Her breasts and thighs remind him she was in love before she the traders enslaved her—before Liam bought her—her young lover not content to let thieves rob them of the future. Her husband forgets how the man suffered. How she suffered. Now he will make the boy pay, always taking more than needed to bring their lives into balance. Love a burden so heavy it drives out life. Yet events Liam clings to will fade with her full passing. The memory worm-eaten. Her husband’s hatred of Hunter will die with her.
My husband is brave, but he wastes his courage on imagined enemies, turning nightmares over and over in his mind, reseeding the pain like wheat each season. To sleep at night, he must control the course of events flowing from dreams. Once my body decays, he will forget what tortures him and dream of happier things. You will see.
Hunter stands, offers her water. His hand shakes as he presses the cup to her swollen lips.
She wonders if he has eaten. The kitchen is frigid; the fire neglected. Not enough will remains to lift her limbs, to walk. He must learn to fend on his own. To tell him otherwise is wrong even if it makes her passage to death bearable. This cursed child needs more than false hopes. Liam will not bring a doctor. He runs from her, wishing her death and fearing it.
From the panic in Hunter’s eyes, he is imagines Liam’s rage at her lifeless form. But she cannot comfort a lamb whose throat its master will soon slit. Gratitude or reassurances of the purpose of sacrifice will not calm it. Inez laughs in resignation, pulling up the phlegm drowning her. A sodden bridge, hope fails, jarring the delicate mooring of her soul. She reaches for the child, hoping to imprint love in his skin, then pulls away. A half-starved boy will die if he absorbs the sickness. Outside the artic blizzard gathers its allies. Grateful, she smiles. Winter will howl without her. Let the wind decide her son’s fate.
I will curse whoever blames you for my death. Our relations will curse them. Set a fire. Liam will be wet and miserable. Light. Fire.
The boy finds a boiling sun behind closed eyes as he hurries to the front room. He lights two kerosene lamps and sets them near the southern window. The amber glow is dim against the red shadow of sunset. He places the kindling as Inez has instructed since memories first resist the crosswinds of his imagination. Three spiny logs intertwined in the hearth, a yellowed newspaper lit with a wooden match. Acrid smoke billows into the room as a horse whinnies in the distance. Should he open the door? Pull the flue? The father will ridicule either decision. He waits. The sooty clouds change course, following the rocky channel of the chimney, called by voices beyond hearing.
Logs blazing, the boy returns to his mother, slipping past the moth-eaten army blanket covering the doorway. Inez is silent. He seizes her shoulders, sharp and thin as his own, shaking her the way the father does when she recedes into dreams. The substance of her gives the boy hope. Her eyes open. Hunter reels, ashamed, as if he causes the disappointment in the bronzed eyes struggling to see. Spoken words the last debris cluttering her soul, her voice floats on the chilled air.
Open the window. Cover my head. Then leave. Do not return. When Liam comes, he will take care of the corpse. You must not touch it. Remember!
The mother’s spirit waits only until the boy steps outside the doorway, separated from death by a thin cloth and his labored breathing. The rag rug she weaves on the creek bank on a cool April morning covers the narrow stone hallway, little protection from the frozen ground. Hunter shivers, wondering how her spirit will escape, regretting the open window. But she will mix with the wind. He imagines the elements are warmer for it.
But the chemistry of another night when two worlds intermingle captures his thoughts as he ignores Inez’s wishes, covering her with the quilt from where he sleeps on straw near the kitchen stove. He sinks to the floor, forgetting where he is, leaning against the bed as he imagines bear trackers in late autumn. He pictures the hunters crouching in a half-circle by the hearth, the gale outside singing with a chorus of animal sounds. Even now he senses the men’s fear and wonders at it. Not that he is unafraid. He shivers at the thought of the father, the shotgun always within reach. Like the other humans who hate what they kill, he is unmoved by the pain he causes. At his mother’s deathbed, the composite scent of the predators—sage brush, tobacco, leather and hide, Burma Shave, the grease of fried onions—takes a familiar and terrifying shape in the child’s mind. Yet he cannot withdraw from the story the smells recall.
Hunter is seldom welcome in the circle of men. When allowed to stay, he sits in McCarthy’s shadow. In the progression of rituals, the time comes for the tonic brewed in a vat lodged in the stony soil of the stream. Let the Indian kid have a swig! McCarthy chuckles, poking the Mason jar at Hunter. When the boy refuses, the men howl, so he slumps against the father’s spine, the sting of their laughter nettle in his heart.
He fights the urge to run, anticipating the moment drink slows the pump of blood so one heart regulates the beat of the next. When this miracle is complete, love hums in his chest for the person he calls father—for each with whom he rides a shared rhythm—anonymous but no longer alone. He smiles as they boast of heroics in blizzards, belittle cowards and praise brave dogs. In the pale light, the conversation softens and turns to things unexplained. Sheepherders gone mad with tick bites stalking cattle and baying at the moon, snakes that follow the scent of skin. Murdered Indians who haunt the meadow.
Liam watches the flames, telling stories about the boy’s grandfather he learns from Inez, rising and taking the picture from the mantle as if to lay claim to the elder’s life. He never meets him, often resenting the force of his presence in Inez’s actions. But in a solemn tone, the father recounts the deeds of the medicine man for the effect they have on others. An immense sadness for remembrances not their own subdues both the boy and the trackers, their mood bottomless because they listen together.
When the silence is too dense to bear, McCarthy jokes at the grandfather’s expense, stopping the slide across an invisible threshold of intimacy and knowledge. The harsh laughter cuts the boy from the circle, casting him into the darkness, alone. Inez and her crazy-assed father is a shield of sound protecting them from other noises and where they might lead.
In the dream of hunters, the child sees Inez climb the steep slope to the aspen grove where she prays in each of the sacred directions as if she seeks protection. The dangerous scent of the trackers envelopes the vision. The last image of his mother, as small as he is, her eyes moist with concern and disease, inseparable from the threat of the odor.
A hawk high above the river screams. Hunter opens his eyes, leaves to tend the fire as his mother asked. He worries the flames will recede before the father arrives at the gate a mile away. Before the storm set mid-morning, the boy saddled the roan for the father. Embers billow to flame as he again hears the father mumble as he throws a leg over the girth of the mare. The boy holds vigil on the three-legged stool, believing the father has promised to come home.
At dawn, Hunter places a log in the hearth before stumbling to the bedroom door—a child acting without intent, the common habit of visiting his mother at dawn. Inez does not move. Before, she is always awake, wanting a soft smile to permeate his day. If Liam stirs, she sends Hunter to collect eggs or kindling for the woodstove.
do not tickle the chickens.
He feels her touch as her calloused feet come to rest on the braided rug—his signal to hurry out. The father will rise only a shade brighter than a nightmare; disappointment a cord of wood that stoops the shoulders, aligning his frame with a trajectory of despair casting shadows in the most abundant sun. But Inez does not smile.
Still Hunter waits for a sign of release, slowly absorbing the truth. What he sees in time, he will leave. In its place, a different memory lives. Inez in the linen dress she beads with small yellow lilies. Worn once. The father’s smile and her shy response as if the full light of Creation has turned on her.
The complex weave of the boy’s imagination dissipates as if his mother has been the borders shaping his thoughts. He shivers, stamping his feet to compel the blood to flow, unable to force himself to take the five steps to close the pane against the blizzard, against the animals thriving on winter kill making no distinction between fresh meat and a lifeless torso. Scat littering the snow creeping across the fragile threshold of glass and pine.
Hunter pictures the beast he knows as his father, the panic sharp as the sting of frost. Liam will punish him for a lapse of borders, for those delicate features lost to feral creatures before contained in a cedar coffin and preserved in soil. During the months of winter alone, he will think of these animals, sense the purpose in their movements, be calmed by it. Now, the panic eases as he hears Inez’s voice—eddies embracing granite in a swollen stream. Water is the mother’s medium, originating in a distant source, flowing to a point beyond reach. He is safe if he follows the channels she carves.
The father forgotten, the child crawls onto the bed, wanting only to be warm, hiding in the patchwork shelter from the glacial wind sifting through gaps in the plaster chinking. Not since birth has Hunter laid in this bed. McCarthy waits only until the baby gasps for air before wrenching Inez to the floor, tearing the flannel sheets from the mattress and burning them in a bonfire of trees as he clears the land of what lays claim to it.
Moments here and there the boy sleeps, listening for footsteps. Hunger and the faint whisper of Inez’s displeasure force him to leave the bed before dawn. After setting a match to paper and pine shavings in the wood stove, he boils pungent coffee in a tin pan, finding a pancake from the last meal she cooks. Anxiety and death burden his limbs.
Breakfast abandoned, he struggles downhill to the stream. A speckled snake in the white meadow, it slides into the river, unsounded and silent beyond the cottonwoods. Clothes draped on brittle plants, Hunter plunges into the creek where the currents run too fast to freeze. Feelings disappear, the territory beyond fear and guilt opens. With numb legs, he wades to the bank, lying for a moment in the early light. He dresses, pushing against fatigue and a false sense of the invincibility of clean skin.
At the house, he will stoke the kindling, reheat the coffee. But an unfamiliar light stops the strenuous climb up the slope, battling a new blizzard gaining strength. The cabin glows as if the new sky has moved indoors. Kerosene thick in the air. Love and terror suffocating him, he breathes the ghosts of burning cedar, hearing the resigned hiss of melting wax and the tiny screams of field mice wintering in the attic.
Fascination with the inferno immobilizes him. Ice forms on his lashes, the blackened teeth marks of frostbite on his hands—a future recollection bound to the woman lying dead in his mind. But at twelve, the reasons men choose to die—sorrow, pride, resignation, revenge—do not yet corrupt the will to live. The wonder of what remains when snow at last consumes fire, one appetite subduing the other, quickens his pulse. The rabbit thump of the heart reminds him of the urgency of life as shotgun shells explode, popping windows and releasing the blaze, the puma freed at last.
Hunter cannot reach the body. Flames will eat it. To survive, he must find shelter. The layered slush hobbles his feet as he searches for Inez’s root cellar, haunted by the father, skin glistening in the August heat as he digs the cellar, pausing only to wipe the sweat. A single motion in a series of repeated steps. As silent as the mountains. Speechless, as the flat blue sky. Liam surveys his progress, rolling a cigarette, tapping it against the wooden handle of the shovel before he jabs it into the corner of his mouth. The boy observes from a tree stump, careful not to interrupt the rhythm of the father’s movements. McCarthy stops when the cellar is deep enough to bury a tall man and his memories, turning to grin at Hunter.
Damn good hidey-hole, don’t you think, Boy? Maybe you’d like to crawl inside—see for yourself?
Hunter does not run. Instinct warns against it.
Forced from the daydream by a blast of warm air, Hunter turns. Two shapes emerge from black smoke rising towards the mountains, studied with curiosity and yearning. An unbidden rush of wind pitches a spark to the barn in the meadow which sends an ember to the stables—places for secrets Inez says—as secluded as a cave set into the molten outcrops on the far hills.
The horses whinny bolting from the stable, tails high as they follow the path worn by the deer. Before Hunter can walk, Inez pushes him away from smoldering campfires, warning him with exaggerated movements never to linger in their wake. What burns will corrupt him, mixing ash with fluids, making the heart sick and vulnerable to evil. A stench tells him the dead burn with the barn. Something violating the ordered states of his mother. Planting. Harvest. Honesty in the certainty of her movements.
The pine shack groans beneath the weight of the blaze as Hunter fights wind to a rise of earth on the hillside. Crouching to avoid the smoke, fingers stiff, he lays aside the tarp on the pine door to the root cellar. In spring, the mound will carry the fragrance of burdock and wet clay and move in place with field mice and gophers. The crude odor of carrots and potatoes buried beneath a layer of wet earth escapes as he lifts the awkward door with a charred two-by-four. Inside, a small shovel lies poised for digging. Spread over the ground in the farthest corner from the opening is the red wool blanket Inez kneels against as she unearths the artifacts of summer—jars of chokecherries and huckleberries, parsnips and onions.
Listen. Grow strong.
The slate sky promises more flurries. The tongues of the ashes are silent. Head first, Hunter crawls into the slanted pit and pulls the door flat against the hole, sealed from the past. He assumes the shape of darkness, sighs, and dreams of yellow lilies and the spring foretold, drifting among the song bird voices of relations.
***
Caught in the blizzard Hunter escapes, Liam McCarthy takes shelter at Farley Sanders’—losing the will to help Inez with a numbing draw from a bottle of the aging trapper’s whiskey. Each day the snowfall accumulates in proportion to the excuses he makes for abandoning her.
She may not be dead, Farley says as he offers a second drink. Sanders and his decaying cottage are two gnarled trees evolving together, weathered and aged by the seasons. Not much the visitor needs from his host except a listening post. With his cavernous silences, McCarthy protects an inner life from intrusion—those extreme mores of right and wrong and the proper alignment of facts he guards with determined vigilance. Sanders does not mind. For months, theirs is a drunks’ communion, ceremonial and acknowledged. McCarthy broods, a thunder cloud that cannot muster the energy to vent. Sanders punches holes in air encrusted with smoke and tar, regret and seclusion, saying just what keeps them connected to the living.
Besides, Liam, Inez is young and hardened by twelve winters in these mountains. She could be alive and waiting for you with one of her special cups of coffee. The boy, too.
Farley Sanders never married, was never in love as far as anyone knows. An attachment to women and convention is little tested. Still, he wonders if he should put on snow shoes and trudge the eight miles into McCarthy’s valley of shadows to check on Inez and her son. But the familiar inertia of midwinter overtakes Farley and his guest offers no incentive to move.
McCarthy sees no other choice but to sit at Sander’s table and wait for the seasons to change. His defenses softening in a room made too warm by the wood stove, his fears cloistered. He smokes and talks about the inequities of his life, the disappointments. The betrayals. He describes other women before Inez and confesses small crimes—nothing to alarm Farley Sanders. He lays out the tenets of a philosophy of survival in a brutal landscape that sounds righteous.
Other ghosts in other seasons have found sanctuary in Sanders’ kitchen, forgetting him once they emerge into the thin sheen of an April morning the way one forgets an anonymous priest in a confessional. Sanders doubts McCarthy will visit again. Too much said or implied. No man feels comfortable with intimacy when sober. McCarthy’s crimes become one more stain on the blue oilcloth; the quarantined smell of bacon, kerosene and chewing tobacco more complex.
When McCarthy finds the energy to ride to the homestead, the worst of winter is over, and the best of spring gone. Fresh earth dislodged in the run-off, begging him to plow, the maiden breeze playing among tender clouds and the bitter-sweet scent of burdock have faded with the delicate, early blooming wildflowers. The clay road thick with mud, the boundary between river and road dissolved in places as if each has forgotten what separates them.
Anger churns in his gut as he starts the steep incline into the valley. Where is the livestock? He pulls up the mare, absorbing the altered landscape—the fallout of a binge; fences broken, the house razed, the out-buildings in ashes. A moose grazes in the meadow like a damn cow. McCarthy raises the rifle but loses sight of the bull.
He leans into the saddle horn, slowing his pace, adjusting the strain of a rough ride. The solid peaks of the distant mountains come into view, sentinels. The boundaries he accepts as authority. In time, he can restore order.
A hard cough, his spittle red, the sharp air a knife in his lungs. No reason to think what it means. The horse trots as the pasture nears. McCarthy pulls her up, aware of being watched. A trick of evening clouds passing over the Snake. Where the cabin once was, a figure stands, his arm across the mane of the Pinto. The mare McCarthy rides snorts and skitters, the first to recognize the mirage is alive. He pulls the mount to the narrow wagon trail shadowing the river bank. No ghosts. Just the bastard.
McCarthy suppresses a smile. The kid made it. Maybe Inez did too. But if she were in good health, she would have tended to the fences, tilled the garden. Whatever Inez has done, she is not lazy. But if she has not recovered, Hunter is running wild. In drunken clarity, he tells Farley he wants Inez to live, and the kid to die. Sanders scolds him. He knows fate has mocked him.
Now mounted on the Pinto, Hunter observes from a distance. McCarthy shakes the rifle in greeting. Muscle on the kid’s bones shines with sweat. The wagon trail narrows. The gate into the south pasture in sight. McCarthy snarls, startling the mare. The thistles have seeded in the hayfield. He jerks the hard bit in the animal’s mouth. The boy does not have brains to destroy them without spreading seeds.
The mare falters. When McCarthy jabs her in the side with the butt of the gun, she rears; at a full gallop through the dense willows lining the road. To protect face and limbs, he lets loose the reins. The horse knows the angry creature’s cruelty, but it does not deter her. After a winter of drinking, McCarthy’s legs cannot command her gait. The cinch snaps on the saddle, the horn snagged by a cottonwood. Free of the rider, the mare gallops toward the boy on the hill as if called by a stallion. McCarthy lands hard in boulders on the sand bar. Nothing broken, but he will limp the quarter-mile, aware the boy still watches.
McCarthy stumbles, falling into murky sludge. The barrel of the gun a crutch, he rises and takes aim at the boy—taller, ebony hair falling below his shoulders. A bullet wasted to remind the full-blood who is boss. The Pinto paws at the earth, but Hunter seems frozen in the fading light. Movement on the water startles McCarthy. He swings the gun toward the noise. Nothing to see. Weary to the bone, he wonders why the boy does not come with the wagon.
A tremor passes through the willows as blackbirds rise in a frenzy with the crack of a gunshot. McCarthy falls to his knees, uncomprehending as blood sifts through his fingers, remembering only how he beat Inez when she taught the boy to shoot. Yet here she is, smiling in her yellow dress.
Forget.
The Pinto whinnies and dances as Hunter reaches McCarthy, sliding to the ground, on his knees as he binds the wound to stop the bleeding. Moistens the father’s lips. Cradles his head throughout the deep night, praying softly in the generations of voices he hears in his mother’s song. Tending to the scars of his father, cleansing him of bitterness tangled and twisted—a poisonous vine in the geography of his psyche. Borders thaw, dissolve, melting to reveal vulnerable, tender earth. The father dies, the change startling the body. Without boundaries, the authoritarian mountains are women weeping.
Inez McCarthy, young and weak, whispers from the feather mattress. A heavy dew of sweat on her forehead, her arms. The boy leans to hear her, stepping back when she cautions him. She wonders what her son understands. How will he learn? Even an echo of Grandfather’s words will soften the misery her husband will cause the boy. But what passes among generations is never precise and subject to corruption.
Please. Listen. Human beings are pebbles rolling in a rockslide, starting here and stopping over there. Each time we start along the path we are in a different mind, a different form. Who we meet on the way shapes us. We mold them. What you do makes it easy or hard for someone else. Two people come together—the currents alter their course.
If the boy understands, he does not show it. Alert and motionless, his limbs are rigid. The posture of quick flight. A shadow of the father hovers in his absence. The weight of lightning before it strikes.
Go to the window. See the aspen on the ridge? Before any of us took a virgin breath, those trees were ancient. Can you tell where the tree ends and the sky fading into night begins? Or where the roots and dirt divide? Imagine where they start to something new, where snow becomes water, light becomes dark. The living begin and end together.
Crepe outlines of the aspen grove are visible from where Inez curls in the narrow metal bed. To die in sight of her beloved trees is a comfort. They are ancestors, sentient beings who ease the loneliness of isolation.
In those trees, I forget I am bound to bones—I’m as free as melting ice. Nobody judges me. I am a new born colt with no idea stronger than the taste of her mother’s milk. Son, dying is clouds turned to rain, a sunset married to dawn.
Not understanding the words, the child responds to the images they provoke, felt in the same timbre as her voice. A meadow soft with damp grass. The warm nap of sheep’s wool on a December morning. Unfiltered light after days of cloud cover. Anxiety beating its wings it escapes into air, a nervous bird tamed by letting it go.
In life, twigs and stones thrown in the path create us in their likeness. My husband does not recognize this. Not his fault. He grew into a man not remembering cruelty breeds its own. My people—your people—we remember.
Inez cannot help the tumble of her speech. The boy does not respond to logic. Liam has said it often enough. Still, she hopes in a cascade of ideas, a single thought will take root before she dies.
Listen!
A harsh cough silences her as sallow dew riles scars in her lungs. With forced breath, Inez focuses on an unforgiving memory unfurling like the tattered flag of a lost battle. Responsibility to the stick of a child is the only anchor in a turbulent storm rising in her sixteenth year. When she disobeys, Liam reminds her he paid the high price demanded by her captors—aware of the shame it causes her. The boy watches as she rubs wrists scarred from the rope tying her to the saddle horn for the wordless journey to Liam’s valley. A familiar ritual, he associates with unhappiness.
Do not worry. By dusk, the struggle will end.
No need to instruct the boy. His days will be as hard as her husband’s imagination. Hope will not change the facts. Liam McCarthy knows only struggle, at war with forces he dreads but does not believe exist. No family. A random seed displaced by a bitter squall. He has long brooded in the fog of losses. When spring comes, he will not see the change; her son honed with the uneven edge of a cynical nature.
Grandmother, he is granite, changing by erosion. Make him a cloud.
As if he fears intrusion in his sanctuary, the boy shuffles to the door.
Come here. I am talking to the relatives gathering to help me to the other place. They see you. You please them.
A young cougar forced from its habitat into strange territory, the boy studies her, returning to his post at her side. Inez wonders if the silent child is the creation of her illness but knows anguish does not overrun a heart for mere illusion.
Liam calls you Hunter. But I have a different name. He does not know. It means the boy born to spring. I whispered it when you were fresh on the earth. I want you to remember—new life comes after the dark freezes. Say your name!
The agitation in her tone startles the child. The rhythm of her sentences is familiar. By their cadence the sounds are important. Her voice is closest to the warbling of a meadow lark. Now it has the nervous pitch of yellow-winged blackbirds clinging to the tender branches of a river willow.
Hunter shudders, seeing death rise on powerful legs, ready to grasp the woman in giant paws. When the apparition evaporates into the mists of consciousness, the boy kneels. As she reaches to touch his hair, Inez sighs. He is so quiet, his presence unsure. But silence will protect him more than words.
The drifts are thick, the doctor far way. Too late. Grandfather could save me, but a dream tells me he left this world. His spirit cannot find me.
Grandfather is the sepia photograph of a tall man with dark hair who holds the reins of a spotted stallion—a familiar sensibility the boy accepts as reality. Inez sustains the elder's presence with soft prayers. The tenor of voice the same as when she teaches Hunter to bridle the pony or skim gooseberries from thorns with a comb.
Liam cannot find Grandfather. He does not know the way. Believe in what you feel. Act or don’t only when you recognize what it connects. Easier to find the right thing. You know not to waste food. Liam wore out a belt teaching you. To waste the urges of your heart or the gifts of your senses—a much greater sin.
But Grandfather’s teachings have eroded in the years in the valley and wisdom has no power over Liam’s obsessions. Her breasts and thighs remind him she was in love before she the traders enslaved her—before Liam bought her—her young lover not content to let thieves rob them of the future. Her husband forgets how the man suffered. How she suffered. Now he will make the boy pay, always taking more than needed to bring their lives into balance. Love a burden so heavy it drives out life. Yet events Liam clings to will fade with her full passing. The memory worm-eaten. Her husband’s hatred of Hunter will die with her.
My husband is brave, but he wastes his courage on imagined enemies, turning nightmares over and over in his mind, reseeding the pain like wheat each season. To sleep at night, he must control the course of events flowing from dreams. Once my body decays, he will forget what tortures him and dream of happier things. You will see.
Hunter stands, offers her water. His hand shakes as he presses the cup to her swollen lips.
She wonders if he has eaten. The kitchen is frigid; the fire neglected. Not enough will remains to lift her limbs, to walk. He must learn to fend on his own. To tell him otherwise is wrong even if it makes her passage to death bearable. This cursed child needs more than false hopes. Liam will not bring a doctor. He runs from her, wishing her death and fearing it.
From the panic in Hunter’s eyes, he is imagines Liam’s rage at her lifeless form. But she cannot comfort a lamb whose throat its master will soon slit. Gratitude or reassurances of the purpose of sacrifice will not calm it. Inez laughs in resignation, pulling up the phlegm drowning her. A sodden bridge, hope fails, jarring the delicate mooring of her soul. She reaches for the child, hoping to imprint love in his skin, then pulls away. A half-starved boy will die if he absorbs the sickness. Outside the artic blizzard gathers its allies. Grateful, she smiles. Winter will howl without her. Let the wind decide her son’s fate.
I will curse whoever blames you for my death. Our relations will curse them. Set a fire. Liam will be wet and miserable. Light. Fire.
The boy finds a boiling sun behind closed eyes as he hurries to the front room. He lights two kerosene lamps and sets them near the southern window. The amber glow is dim against the red shadow of sunset. He places the kindling as Inez has instructed since memories first resist the crosswinds of his imagination. Three spiny logs intertwined in the hearth, a yellowed newspaper lit with a wooden match. Acrid smoke billows into the room as a horse whinnies in the distance. Should he open the door? Pull the flue? The father will ridicule either decision. He waits. The sooty clouds change course, following the rocky channel of the chimney, called by voices beyond hearing.
Logs blazing, the boy returns to his mother, slipping past the moth-eaten army blanket covering the doorway. Inez is silent. He seizes her shoulders, sharp and thin as his own, shaking her the way the father does when she recedes into dreams. The substance of her gives the boy hope. Her eyes open. Hunter reels, ashamed, as if he causes the disappointment in the bronzed eyes struggling to see. Spoken words the last debris cluttering her soul, her voice floats on the chilled air.
Open the window. Cover my head. Then leave. Do not return. When Liam comes, he will take care of the corpse. You must not touch it. Remember!
The mother’s spirit waits only until the boy steps outside the doorway, separated from death by a thin cloth and his labored breathing. The rag rug she weaves on the creek bank on a cool April morning covers the narrow stone hallway, little protection from the frozen ground. Hunter shivers, wondering how her spirit will escape, regretting the open window. But she will mix with the wind. He imagines the elements are warmer for it.
But the chemistry of another night when two worlds intermingle captures his thoughts as he ignores Inez’s wishes, covering her with the quilt from where he sleeps on straw near the kitchen stove. He sinks to the floor, forgetting where he is, leaning against the bed as he imagines bear trackers in late autumn. He pictures the hunters crouching in a half-circle by the hearth, the gale outside singing with a chorus of animal sounds. Even now he senses the men’s fear and wonders at it. Not that he is unafraid. He shivers at the thought of the father, the shotgun always within reach. Like the other humans who hate what they kill, he is unmoved by the pain he causes. At his mother’s deathbed, the composite scent of the predators—sage brush, tobacco, leather and hide, Burma Shave, the grease of fried onions—takes a familiar and terrifying shape in the child’s mind. Yet he cannot withdraw from the story the smells recall.
Hunter is seldom welcome in the circle of men. When allowed to stay, he sits in McCarthy’s shadow. In the progression of rituals, the time comes for the tonic brewed in a vat lodged in the stony soil of the stream. Let the Indian kid have a swig! McCarthy chuckles, poking the Mason jar at Hunter. When the boy refuses, the men howl, so he slumps against the father’s spine, the sting of their laughter nettle in his heart.
He fights the urge to run, anticipating the moment drink slows the pump of blood so one heart regulates the beat of the next. When this miracle is complete, love hums in his chest for the person he calls father—for each with whom he rides a shared rhythm—anonymous but no longer alone. He smiles as they boast of heroics in blizzards, belittle cowards and praise brave dogs. In the pale light, the conversation softens and turns to things unexplained. Sheepherders gone mad with tick bites stalking cattle and baying at the moon, snakes that follow the scent of skin. Murdered Indians who haunt the meadow.
Liam watches the flames, telling stories about the boy’s grandfather he learns from Inez, rising and taking the picture from the mantle as if to lay claim to the elder’s life. He never meets him, often resenting the force of his presence in Inez’s actions. But in a solemn tone, the father recounts the deeds of the medicine man for the effect they have on others. An immense sadness for remembrances not their own subdues both the boy and the trackers, their mood bottomless because they listen together.
When the silence is too dense to bear, McCarthy jokes at the grandfather’s expense, stopping the slide across an invisible threshold of intimacy and knowledge. The harsh laughter cuts the boy from the circle, casting him into the darkness, alone. Inez and her crazy-assed father is a shield of sound protecting them from other noises and where they might lead.
In the dream of hunters, the child sees Inez climb the steep slope to the aspen grove where she prays in each of the sacred directions as if she seeks protection. The dangerous scent of the trackers envelopes the vision. The last image of his mother, as small as he is, her eyes moist with concern and disease, inseparable from the threat of the odor.
A hawk high above the river screams. Hunter opens his eyes, leaves to tend the fire as his mother asked. He worries the flames will recede before the father arrives at the gate a mile away. Before the storm set mid-morning, the boy saddled the roan for the father. Embers billow to flame as he again hears the father mumble as he throws a leg over the girth of the mare. The boy holds vigil on the three-legged stool, believing the father has promised to come home.
At dawn, Hunter places a log in the hearth before stumbling to the bedroom door—a child acting without intent, the common habit of visiting his mother at dawn. Inez does not move. Before, she is always awake, wanting a soft smile to permeate his day. If Liam stirs, she sends Hunter to collect eggs or kindling for the woodstove.
do not tickle the chickens.
He feels her touch as her calloused feet come to rest on the braided rug—his signal to hurry out. The father will rise only a shade brighter than a nightmare; disappointment a cord of wood that stoops the shoulders, aligning his frame with a trajectory of despair casting shadows in the most abundant sun. But Inez does not smile.
Still Hunter waits for a sign of release, slowly absorbing the truth. What he sees in time, he will leave. In its place, a different memory lives. Inez in the linen dress she beads with small yellow lilies. Worn once. The father’s smile and her shy response as if the full light of Creation has turned on her.
The complex weave of the boy’s imagination dissipates as if his mother has been the borders shaping his thoughts. He shivers, stamping his feet to compel the blood to flow, unable to force himself to take the five steps to close the pane against the blizzard, against the animals thriving on winter kill making no distinction between fresh meat and a lifeless torso. Scat littering the snow creeping across the fragile threshold of glass and pine.
Hunter pictures the beast he knows as his father, the panic sharp as the sting of frost. Liam will punish him for a lapse of borders, for those delicate features lost to feral creatures before contained in a cedar coffin and preserved in soil. During the months of winter alone, he will think of these animals, sense the purpose in their movements, be calmed by it. Now, the panic eases as he hears Inez’s voice—eddies embracing granite in a swollen stream. Water is the mother’s medium, originating in a distant source, flowing to a point beyond reach. He is safe if he follows the channels she carves.
The father forgotten, the child crawls onto the bed, wanting only to be warm, hiding in the patchwork shelter from the glacial wind sifting through gaps in the plaster chinking. Not since birth has Hunter laid in this bed. McCarthy waits only until the baby gasps for air before wrenching Inez to the floor, tearing the flannel sheets from the mattress and burning them in a bonfire of trees as he clears the land of what lays claim to it.
Moments here and there the boy sleeps, listening for footsteps. Hunger and the faint whisper of Inez’s displeasure force him to leave the bed before dawn. After setting a match to paper and pine shavings in the wood stove, he boils pungent coffee in a tin pan, finding a pancake from the last meal she cooks. Anxiety and death burden his limbs.
Breakfast abandoned, he struggles downhill to the stream. A speckled snake in the white meadow, it slides into the river, unsounded and silent beyond the cottonwoods. Clothes draped on brittle plants, Hunter plunges into the creek where the currents run too fast to freeze. Feelings disappear, the territory beyond fear and guilt opens. With numb legs, he wades to the bank, lying for a moment in the early light. He dresses, pushing against fatigue and a false sense of the invincibility of clean skin.
At the house, he will stoke the kindling, reheat the coffee. But an unfamiliar light stops the strenuous climb up the slope, battling a new blizzard gaining strength. The cabin glows as if the new sky has moved indoors. Kerosene thick in the air. Love and terror suffocating him, he breathes the ghosts of burning cedar, hearing the resigned hiss of melting wax and the tiny screams of field mice wintering in the attic.
Fascination with the inferno immobilizes him. Ice forms on his lashes, the blackened teeth marks of frostbite on his hands—a future recollection bound to the woman lying dead in his mind. But at twelve, the reasons men choose to die—sorrow, pride, resignation, revenge—do not yet corrupt the will to live. The wonder of what remains when snow at last consumes fire, one appetite subduing the other, quickens his pulse. The rabbit thump of the heart reminds him of the urgency of life as shotgun shells explode, popping windows and releasing the blaze, the puma freed at last.
Hunter cannot reach the body. Flames will eat it. To survive, he must find shelter. The layered slush hobbles his feet as he searches for Inez’s root cellar, haunted by the father, skin glistening in the August heat as he digs the cellar, pausing only to wipe the sweat. A single motion in a series of repeated steps. As silent as the mountains. Speechless, as the flat blue sky. Liam surveys his progress, rolling a cigarette, tapping it against the wooden handle of the shovel before he jabs it into the corner of his mouth. The boy observes from a tree stump, careful not to interrupt the rhythm of the father’s movements. McCarthy stops when the cellar is deep enough to bury a tall man and his memories, turning to grin at Hunter.
Damn good hidey-hole, don’t you think, Boy? Maybe you’d like to crawl inside—see for yourself?
Hunter does not run. Instinct warns against it.
Forced from the daydream by a blast of warm air, Hunter turns. Two shapes emerge from black smoke rising towards the mountains, studied with curiosity and yearning. An unbidden rush of wind pitches a spark to the barn in the meadow which sends an ember to the stables—places for secrets Inez says—as secluded as a cave set into the molten outcrops on the far hills.
The horses whinny bolting from the stable, tails high as they follow the path worn by the deer. Before Hunter can walk, Inez pushes him away from smoldering campfires, warning him with exaggerated movements never to linger in their wake. What burns will corrupt him, mixing ash with fluids, making the heart sick and vulnerable to evil. A stench tells him the dead burn with the barn. Something violating the ordered states of his mother. Planting. Harvest. Honesty in the certainty of her movements.
The pine shack groans beneath the weight of the blaze as Hunter fights wind to a rise of earth on the hillside. Crouching to avoid the smoke, fingers stiff, he lays aside the tarp on the pine door to the root cellar. In spring, the mound will carry the fragrance of burdock and wet clay and move in place with field mice and gophers. The crude odor of carrots and potatoes buried beneath a layer of wet earth escapes as he lifts the awkward door with a charred two-by-four. Inside, a small shovel lies poised for digging. Spread over the ground in the farthest corner from the opening is the red wool blanket Inez kneels against as she unearths the artifacts of summer—jars of chokecherries and huckleberries, parsnips and onions.
Listen. Grow strong.
The slate sky promises more flurries. The tongues of the ashes are silent. Head first, Hunter crawls into the slanted pit and pulls the door flat against the hole, sealed from the past. He assumes the shape of darkness, sighs, and dreams of yellow lilies and the spring foretold, drifting among the song bird voices of relations.
***
Caught in the blizzard Hunter escapes, Liam McCarthy takes shelter at Farley Sanders’—losing the will to help Inez with a numbing draw from a bottle of the aging trapper’s whiskey. Each day the snowfall accumulates in proportion to the excuses he makes for abandoning her.
She may not be dead, Farley says as he offers a second drink. Sanders and his decaying cottage are two gnarled trees evolving together, weathered and aged by the seasons. Not much the visitor needs from his host except a listening post. With his cavernous silences, McCarthy protects an inner life from intrusion—those extreme mores of right and wrong and the proper alignment of facts he guards with determined vigilance. Sanders does not mind. For months, theirs is a drunks’ communion, ceremonial and acknowledged. McCarthy broods, a thunder cloud that cannot muster the energy to vent. Sanders punches holes in air encrusted with smoke and tar, regret and seclusion, saying just what keeps them connected to the living.
Besides, Liam, Inez is young and hardened by twelve winters in these mountains. She could be alive and waiting for you with one of her special cups of coffee. The boy, too.
Farley Sanders never married, was never in love as far as anyone knows. An attachment to women and convention is little tested. Still, he wonders if he should put on snow shoes and trudge the eight miles into McCarthy’s valley of shadows to check on Inez and her son. But the familiar inertia of midwinter overtakes Farley and his guest offers no incentive to move.
McCarthy sees no other choice but to sit at Sander’s table and wait for the seasons to change. His defenses softening in a room made too warm by the wood stove, his fears cloistered. He smokes and talks about the inequities of his life, the disappointments. The betrayals. He describes other women before Inez and confesses small crimes—nothing to alarm Farley Sanders. He lays out the tenets of a philosophy of survival in a brutal landscape that sounds righteous.
Other ghosts in other seasons have found sanctuary in Sanders’ kitchen, forgetting him once they emerge into the thin sheen of an April morning the way one forgets an anonymous priest in a confessional. Sanders doubts McCarthy will visit again. Too much said or implied. No man feels comfortable with intimacy when sober. McCarthy’s crimes become one more stain on the blue oilcloth; the quarantined smell of bacon, kerosene and chewing tobacco more complex.
When McCarthy finds the energy to ride to the homestead, the worst of winter is over, and the best of spring gone. Fresh earth dislodged in the run-off, begging him to plow, the maiden breeze playing among tender clouds and the bitter-sweet scent of burdock have faded with the delicate, early blooming wildflowers. The clay road thick with mud, the boundary between river and road dissolved in places as if each has forgotten what separates them.
Anger churns in his gut as he starts the steep incline into the valley. Where is the livestock? He pulls up the mare, absorbing the altered landscape—the fallout of a binge; fences broken, the house razed, the out-buildings in ashes. A moose grazes in the meadow like a damn cow. McCarthy raises the rifle but loses sight of the bull.
He leans into the saddle horn, slowing his pace, adjusting the strain of a rough ride. The solid peaks of the distant mountains come into view, sentinels. The boundaries he accepts as authority. In time, he can restore order.
A hard cough, his spittle red, the sharp air a knife in his lungs. No reason to think what it means. The horse trots as the pasture nears. McCarthy pulls her up, aware of being watched. A trick of evening clouds passing over the Snake. Where the cabin once was, a figure stands, his arm across the mane of the Pinto. The mare McCarthy rides snorts and skitters, the first to recognize the mirage is alive. He pulls the mount to the narrow wagon trail shadowing the river bank. No ghosts. Just the bastard.
McCarthy suppresses a smile. The kid made it. Maybe Inez did too. But if she were in good health, she would have tended to the fences, tilled the garden. Whatever Inez has done, she is not lazy. But if she has not recovered, Hunter is running wild. In drunken clarity, he tells Farley he wants Inez to live, and the kid to die. Sanders scolds him. He knows fate has mocked him.
Now mounted on the Pinto, Hunter observes from a distance. McCarthy shakes the rifle in greeting. Muscle on the kid’s bones shines with sweat. The wagon trail narrows. The gate into the south pasture in sight. McCarthy snarls, startling the mare. The thistles have seeded in the hayfield. He jerks the hard bit in the animal’s mouth. The boy does not have brains to destroy them without spreading seeds.
The mare falters. When McCarthy jabs her in the side with the butt of the gun, she rears; at a full gallop through the dense willows lining the road. To protect face and limbs, he lets loose the reins. The horse knows the angry creature’s cruelty, but it does not deter her. After a winter of drinking, McCarthy’s legs cannot command her gait. The cinch snaps on the saddle, the horn snagged by a cottonwood. Free of the rider, the mare gallops toward the boy on the hill as if called by a stallion. McCarthy lands hard in boulders on the sand bar. Nothing broken, but he will limp the quarter-mile, aware the boy still watches.
McCarthy stumbles, falling into murky sludge. The barrel of the gun a crutch, he rises and takes aim at the boy—taller, ebony hair falling below his shoulders. A bullet wasted to remind the full-blood who is boss. The Pinto paws at the earth, but Hunter seems frozen in the fading light. Movement on the water startles McCarthy. He swings the gun toward the noise. Nothing to see. Weary to the bone, he wonders why the boy does not come with the wagon.
A tremor passes through the willows as blackbirds rise in a frenzy with the crack of a gunshot. McCarthy falls to his knees, uncomprehending as blood sifts through his fingers, remembering only how he beat Inez when she taught the boy to shoot. Yet here she is, smiling in her yellow dress.
Forget.
The Pinto whinnies and dances as Hunter reaches McCarthy, sliding to the ground, on his knees as he binds the wound to stop the bleeding. Moistens the father’s lips. Cradles his head throughout the deep night, praying softly in the generations of voices he hears in his mother’s song. Tending to the scars of his father, cleansing him of bitterness tangled and twisted—a poisonous vine in the geography of his psyche. Borders thaw, dissolve, melting to reveal vulnerable, tender earth. The father dies, the change startling the body. Without boundaries, the authoritarian mountains are women weeping.
Linda Dennard, born on a cattle ranch in Idaho, was a short-list nominee for the Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award, studied creative writing at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre and was a frequent contributor to the Babel Magazine of the Arts during her years in Ireland. As an academic she is widely published in complexity studies which inform her work.