But there were so many other things besides words. There were the odors of honeysuckle and freshly turned earth, and ancient songs played out on the roof by the rain. Moths tracing spirals in the moonlight. Ghosts.
"Rick," she said, "do you ever see ghosts?"
"You mean real ones?"
"As opposed to imaginary ones?" She laughed. "I guess that means no. Sorry I asked."
"Why? You been seeing ghosts?"
"They're in my house. It's full of them. Some are mine, people from my own family--my dead grandfather, specifically. And some are your family. Some I can't identify."
"Scary."
"No, that's the funny thing, is they're not. They're all really happy. They're good company, to tell you the truth. They make it seem less lonely in the house."
"I don't know, Lusa. Sounds a little bit cuckoo."
"I know it does." He'd used her name--no one else in the family did, ever--and he had not called her Aunt Lusa. Whatever this meant, it stopped the conversation for a minute.
"Well," she said finally. "I just wanted to tell somebody. Sorry."
"No, it's OK. It's kind of interesting. I never seen any ghosts, but I never seen Alaska, either, and it's probably up there."
"That's a sensible philosophy."
"What do they look like?"
She glanced at him. "Are you really interested?"
He shrugged. "Yeah."
"They're not like in the movies. They're like actual people, in my house. Kids, to be exact. Mostly they play on the steps. This morning I heard them whispering. I got up and looked down over the banister and they were sitting there on the second step from the bottom, with their backs to me."
"Who was?" Now he was interested.
"Promise you won't tell anybody this."
"Cross my heart."
"Cole and Jewel. A boy and a girl, and that's who they were. About four and seven years old, maybe."
"Nuh-uh. You sure?"
"Yes."
"You never knew Cole when he was little, though," he pointed out.
She gave him a look. "You're questioning my scientific accuracy? They were ghosts! I don't know how I knew it was him, I just did. I've seen pictures, and you know, or maybe you don't, but when you've been that close to somebody you can learn to know their whole life. It was him, OK? And your aunt Jewel, brother and sister. She had her arm around his shoulders like she meant to protect her kid brother from the whole big world. Like she knew she'd lose him someday. All of the sudden I understood this whole new thing about both of them, how close they'd been. And I felt really sad for Jewel."
"Everybody feels sad for Aunt Jewel. Talk about getting the short end of the stick."
"What, because her husband left her?"
"Yeah, Uncle Shel hitting the road, and then Cole dying, and her kids' being messed up, and now getting sick."
"What sick, how sick?"
"I don't even know. Honest to God, they don't tell me anything. They act like I'm a little kid. But I have eyes, I can see her hair's falling out."
"Oh no," Lusa whispered, looking down. "God. Is it cancer?"
"I think so. Of the..." He touched his chest. "She had that operation last year, on both sides, but it's still got all through her."
"Last year? After I moved here, or before?"
"I'm not really sure. It was all hush-hush, even in the family. Nobody knows down at church. Not even her boss at Kroger's. He'd prolly fire her."
Lusa found no words; she could only shake her head from side to side.
"Aunt Hannie-Mavis's been taking her to Roanoke for these treatments. I only know that because she brings both their kids over for Mom and my sisters to baby-set when they go. They never told me anything, really, I just put two and two together."
"They haven't told me, either," Lusa said. "I knew something serious was wrong. Damn it, I knew that, and they won't even let me help." Her voice cracked. She felt flushed and weak-kneed from this awful news and feared that if she started to cry she might not stop. He put his arm around her. Just from the simple comfort of that gesture, tears flooded her eyes.
"They don't want to put more worries on you," he said. "You've already been through the worst there is."
"Not the worst. I'm still alive."
"I think it'd be worse losing the person you love than dying yourself."
To her embarrassment, this made her cry helplessly. He was so young, how could he know that? She pressed her face against the cotton of his white T-shirt and the warmth of his chest and let herself stay there, sobbing, wishing she could fly away from here. In her mind she could easily picture it: throwing things in a suitcase, books and clothes, practically nothing--she'd leave behind all the heavy family furniture. Just run down the steps and away. But those two children were on the landing with their backs to her, impossible to get around. They stopped her.
Rick had been standing silent for a long while, she realized, holding her patiently, stroking her hair with his other hand. She took a breath.
"I'm sorry," she said, pulling her face away and avoiding his eyes.
"Don't be. It got my arm around you for a minute. I'd like to do more than that: I'd like to fix your whole barn roof." He put his finger under her chin and to Lusa's utter shock leaned down and kissed her very quickly on the lips.
"Rick," she said, feeling some form of hysteria rise through her body, "Little Rickie. I'm your aunt. For God's sakes." This was like a movie, she thought. The woman with no desire left in her, pursued for an evening by every man.
"I'm sorry," he said, really meaning it. He actually took a step back from her. "Oh, Lord, that was dumb. Don't be mad. I don't know what I was thinking, OK?"
She laughed. "I'm not mad. And I'm not laughing at you, I'm laughing at me. You're a very handsome man. Your girlfriend is very lucky to have you."
He didn't comment on that. He was looking at her, trying to guess what damage he'd done. "You won't, like, tell anybody, will you?"
"No, of course not. Who would I tell?" She smiled, shaking her head and wiping her eyes with her palm. "Here's the really funny thing: your dad was considering making the same pass half an hour ago."
"My dad? Him and you?"
"Don't act so shocked. Is that any worse than you and me?"
But now he was angry. "Goddamn, my dad! He didn't get anywhere, did he? I mean, what did he try?"
She regretted her indiscretion; she'd forgotten somehow that this was a child and his father. Lusa had no instincts for such things--she wasn't a mother. "He didn't really try anything," she amended calmly. "He didn't get past the planning stages."
"Man! That old lech," he said, shaking his head sadly. "And now look at him. He's up there jacking off in front of everybody with bottle rockets instead."
"You're very bad."
"I am."
"But you're right. I guess I'd better go supervise the show. So I can write up a good report for the insurance after they burn the place down."
He touched her shoulder, stopping her. "Just don't be mad, OK. I like us being friends, Aunt Lusa. I'm sorry I messed up."
"Rick, I'm not mad." She looked at her hands and clinked her bottles together, hesitating. She still felt startled by the taste of his mouth, the smoke and human pungency that had struck through her numbness into some living place at her core. "You know something? I'm lonely, I'm losing my mind, and it felt so good to have your arms around me, I can't even think about it. I should be thanking you. That's it, end of subject." She gave him a quick hug and left him there in his cloud of smoke.
She mounted the hill slowly, amazed by the vision of lights opening out ahead of her. Hundreds of luminous fireflies were rising out of the grass while red and blue sparks rained down from the sky. All her sisters-in-law were busy feeding children or cleaning up, but the men were glued to their lawn chairs, hooting as the bombs went off. One after another the missiles rocketed crazily out over the pond or into the catalpa tree, setting dozens of small, hissing fi
res among the leaves.
"Aaaw," the male voices cried in unison when one misfired sideways into the grass. Then came a solid, beery cheer when the next one shot straight up with a loud hiss, popping open above their heads, flinging its sparkling seeds to the wind.
Lusa bit her lip against the strange ache in her belly. This night was out of control completely, she thought, but what could you do? We're only what we are: a woman cycling with the moon, and a tribe of men trying to have sex with the sky.
{16}
Predators
Hoof!" she cried aloud, jerking backward as if she'd touched electricity. That right there was a copperhead. Slowly she pulled her weed hook back from the briars she'd been clearing away from the edge of the trail. In one slow, steady motion she brought the tool's handle up to rest on her shoulder while the rest of her body held perfectly still, catching up with its lost breath. Not all snakes did that to her anymore. She'd seen enough of them now to conquer the instinctive recoil; normally, when a slender-headed snake raced underfoot, a dark nose tapering to body in a streamlined profile, her mind instantly recognized a friend. But a triangular head made her go cold. Like a yield sign, she'd thought once before, only here in the woods it means stop. Here every bird and mammal knew that shape advertised a venomous status--the profile common to pit vipers in general and copperheads in particular. This one sunning itself at the trail's edge was especially fat-bodied, marked in a diamond pattern like a long argyle sock in coppery hues of brownish pink and deep rose. They were beautiful colors, but they did not add up to an appealing creature.
Easy, stand your ground, her dad would sing in a low monotone. The first copperhead of her life they'd found in the barn, coiled under a hay bale they were fixing to carry outside for the cattle. She'd yelped and darted for the loft door that once, but never again. You can't run away till you know where "away" is. You could be headed straight for his maw. Now she kept her boots planted as she watched this fellow coil lazily over himself, headed in several directions at once, in no hurry to choose a course. She breathed deeply and tried not to hate this snake. Doing his job, was all. Living out his life like the thousand other copperheads on this mountain that would never be seen by human eyes; they wanted only their one or two rodents a month, the living wage, a contribution to balance. Not one of them wanted to be stepped on or, heaven forbid, to have to sink its fangs into a monstrous, inedible mammal a hundred times its size--a waste of expensive toxin at best. She knew all this. You can stare at a thing and know that you personally have no place in its heart whatsoever, but keeping it out of yours is another matter.
Finally the wide-jawed head nudged out of the sunlight into the tall grass. The body elongated and followed in a sinuous line, flowing downhill. Shortly the head reappeared, tongue flickering, ten feet away, in another patch of sunlight. The fixed line of its mouth ran back from the blunt nose in a little upcurve, like an ironic smile. It was just an illusion created by the deep jowls with the fangs tucked inside, she knew, but it filled her with sudden emotion. The fear and anger and queasiness in her stomach made her feel weak, but there it was. She hated the thing for its smile.
"You stay there," she said to its unblinking stare. "Wipe that grin off your face." She turned and headed uphill toward the cabin with the stout scythe balanced over her shoulder. Her legs felt as heavy as water. There was no reason to feel this tired, except maybe the aftermath of an adrenaline rush, but she was ready to quit for the day. Eat a late lunch, curl up with a book. Rain was coming. She'd heard unexpectedly loud thunder several times already this morning (each boom had made her jump, as the snake had): a storm rolling in from Kentucky. She took a shortcut back to the jeep road through a ten-year-old clear cut that was overgrown now but still sunny, and full of cockleburs. She tried to avoid this route in summer so she wouldn't have to spend an hour afterward picking the burrs off her jeans. But she didn't want to get caught in the storm. She swiped her weed cutter at the dense stands of bristly seedpods, taking her own perverse satisfaction in their presence, here and everywhere. Parakeets' revenge, was how she liked to think of them. They'd coevolved with an expert seed eater, the Carolina parakeet, which had gone extinct so soon after Europeans settled that little was known about it but this one thing, its favorite food. John James Audubon painted the birds' portrait with their mouths full, feasting among cockleburs, and he wrote of how the bright flocks would travel up and down the river valleys searching the burrs out, descending noisily wherever they found the bristly stands and devouring them until hardly any were left. That was hard to imagine, a scarcity of cockleburs. Now they went uneaten and would continue so for the rest of time. Now they grabbed the ankles of travelers and spread into fields and farms, roadside ditches, even woodland clearings, trying to teach a lesson that people had forgotten how to know.
She picked up her step when the first fat raindrops began to spatter through the leaves. An hour ago she'd been sweating, but as the storm moved in she felt the air temperature plummet as if she were swimming deep into a lake. She stopped to untie her windbreaker from around her waist and put it on, pulling the hood forward to her eyebrows before taking off again at a trot. By the time the trail met the Forest Service road that ran up from the valley, she'd picked up her pace to a dead run.
She slowed down on the road because its ruts could turn an ankle, and because the mountain was steep; she needed to catch her wind. Why did people always run in the rain? She still had half a mile to go, so she'd be soaked when she got home, regardless. She smirked at herself, then stopped to listen.
It was a vehicle. She stood waiting for it to round the corner so she could see what manner of human intrusion this was to be. Sad to say, she assumed people meant trouble. She knew the Forest Service wouldn't approve of her inhospitable outlook, but this mountain would be a superior place if people stayed off it altogether. She waited, feeling her shoulders tense up, and was surprised when the flat green flank of the Forest Service jeep appeared through the damp tree trunks. Today? What was it, July already?
She thought about this. Yes, well into the first week of July. Darn it, they'd sent up her supplies, and she'd missed what's-his-name again. Jerry Lind was his name, the guy who usually drove up with her mail and groceries. She needed to give him her requisition. Her heart was pounding, and not just from running uphill. Eddie Bondo was up there. This morning she'd left him sitting on the porch in his bare feet reading her Field Guide to the Eastern Birds. Oh, hell.
"Hey, Deanna! You look like the Grim Reaper." Jerry was driving with his head stuck out the open window.
"Hey, Jerry. You look like Smokey the Bear."
He touched his hat brim. "Keeps the rain off." He cut the engine, slowing to a roll next to Deanna and then pulling the brake on hard, causing the whole vehicle to jerk. The road here was deeply cut with ruts that were starting to run like small chocolate rivers. She cocked her left foot up against the jeep to tie her soggy bootlaces.
"What'd you do with my stuff, just plunk it down on the porch stoop?"
"Nah, I put it inside. With rain coming. Your mail's on the table with the food boxes. I put your bottled gas for your stove on the porch."
She studied him for some sign of what he'd discovered at the cabin. "You run into any trouble?" she asked cautiously.
"What, you mean that door? I'd say so--those hinges are ninety percent rust. You got any WD-40, or should I bring you up some next month?"
That was all he'd run into? Trouble getting the door open? She watched his face. "I got oil," she said slowly. "I do have a list for you, though, for next month. I need some lumber to patch up a bridge, and I've got a list of books I need."
Jerry shifted his hat and scratched his forehead. "Man alive, more books. Don't you ever want, like, a TV?"
"A TV that runs on batteries? Don't tell me they make such a thing. I don't even turn on the radio I've got."
"You don't listen to the radio? Man. The President could get shot or something and you wouldn't kno
w it for a month."
She dropped her left foot and hiked up her right to retie her other bootlace. "Tell me something, Jerry. If the President got shot this afternoon, what would you do tomorrow that'd be any different from what you'd do if he hadn't?"
Jerry considered the question. "Nothing whatsoever, except probably watch a bunch of TV. On CNN, see, they'd tell you every fifteen minutes that he was still dead."
"Why I like my life, Jerry. I watch birds. They do something different every fifteen minutes."
"Get in," he said. "I'll drive up and get your req list. I promise I won't tell you any news from the world."
"All right." She walked around behind the boxy metal truck to climb in on the passenger's side, tossing her weed hook onto the floor behind the seats with a loud clang. "What were you going to do if you didn't run into me, just repeat last month's requisition?"
"Wouldn't be the first time." The jeep lurched forward in pulses as Jerry lifted his foot off the brake. The road was extremely steep.
"That's true, it wouldn't," she agreed. "I'm still eating the rice you doubled up on me in November." What had he seen in the cabin? She felt embarrassed and raw, as if Jerry had seen her naked. She studied him for signs of his thoughts while receiving whiplash in small doses as the jeep pitched downhill. Jerry seemed like his usual self--a kid, in other words. She resisted telling him to gear down and use the transmission instead of the brake. Who was she to backseat-drive? She hadn't driven a car in two years.
He squinted at the single-lane track. The shoulder dropped off steeply to the left, while the mountain rose straight up to the right. "I never had to backtrack on this road before. Is there someplace wide enough to turn around?"
"Not for about a mile and a half. Down at that farm's the first place it widens out." She shifted in her seat. "Who owns that place at the bottom of the hollow? I guess you wouldn't know."