Backwater (11 page)

Josephine grabbed the wolf firmly with both hands on either
side of his head and shouted, “
No!
” He put his tail between his legs and whimpered. Jo held her hand in the “stay” command and turned to me.

“I’ve had him since he was a pup. I’ve trained him to obey, but he’s still a wild animal. Let’s leave the blood-curdling screams for the horror movies, shall we?”

“I’m sorry.” I sat in a lump on the floor with as much authority as a broken person can. “I got bit by a huge dog when I was little.”

“That had to be scary for you.”

I instinctively pulled the blanket around myself, carefully hiding all body parts. I remembered the dog biting my arm, Dad kicking him, pulling him off. The dog’s owner kept saying he was tame, he’d never done that before.

This is why I had a toy poodle. If Genghis flipped out, I’d stick him in my pocket. End of uprising.

Jo held her hand in “stay” command; Malachi obeyed, keeping a watchful eye on me as she went to the kitchen. I watched him, too. Our eyes met. Malachi’s were shining yellow in the dark cabin. I looked away first. Not good to lose the staring contest.

Jo took dog biscuits from a bag and threw one to Malachi, who gobbled it down without chewing.

“He might still be hungry,” I said quietly.

“Do you want to give him—?”

“
No
.”

Jo tossed him a biscuit from under her leg. It looped through the air. Malachi jumped up to catch it.

“A trick wolf,” I said weakly. “This is a permanent relationship?”

“You could say that.” She stroked Malachi’s head between his ears, which put him in a subdued state of wolf reverie. “I found him six years ago. A man was selling wolf pups outside of town, which is illegal. The police came to arrest him and Malachi escaped. I found him shaking in a little wet ball by my jeep. We’ve been best friends ever since.”

I inched further away. This wolf would make pâte out of Genghis.

“He thinks of me as the leader of his pack. Whenever I grab either side of his head, that’s the same motion the alpha wolf uses to keep the others in line. I think you’ll become friends. It takes awhile. Some relationships need a bit more effort, but they’re worth it. Maybe we should try to get some sleep.”

“The wolf sleeps here?” I felt a great deal like Red Riding Hood.

“Usually. He sleeps by my bed. Just don’t move suddenly.”

I moved slowly now, so slowly. I picked up my blanket, crept with nonthreatening movements to the bed. I tripped, unfortunately—a very sudden movement, indeed—and Malachi started toward me, but Jo called him back. I tore under the covers, waved one hand peacefully in the air, wondering if all of my beloved body parts would make it until dawn.

I hadn’t expected morning to be so hard.

First, I had to go to the bathroom in a frigid outhouse, then Jo and I had to walk down to the lake with buckets, dip them through a hole chopped in the lake ice, and carry the water back to the cabin for drinking and washing. We didn’t do this the easy way. I had two buckets attached to a wooden yoke positioned around my neck. I kept crashing into trees because the weight threw me forward. I tried standing straight and listed to the left. Jo said the lake water here was pure as I pitched forward like an overburdened oxen. I thought about my ancestors reaching this forested country, finding their plot of land (arguing about it first because they were Breedloves), felling trees to make their first cabins sure and true. I thought about that so hard that I tripped over a tree root, which sent me and the buckets sailing. Some outdoor skills take longer than others to acquire—like walking. I refilled the buckets. When I finally got back to the cabin, I had to heat the water over the fire to get it decently warm just so I could wash myself
(how I missed showers). I had to dry myself in the presence of a carnivore, who kept sniffing my knees like they were some rare backwoods appetizer.

Then I had to get dressed without the benefit of a full-length mirror. I never felt put together until I could see all of myself, but Aunt Jo didn’t seem to miss these things. I watched her brush her long sandy hair, stick it in a pony tail without looking in a mirror once, and start making breakfast—oatmeal with brown sugar and canned peaches, tea with honey.

It was the best oatmeal I’d ever tasted, not instant like I was used to. There was more time here to do things right. I still felt the need to rush, though, and raced through my breakfast like I was late for school. Jo ate slowly, peacefully.

I wanted to be peaceful, too.

I washed the breakfast bowls in the smallest amount of soapy water possible to conserve the supply. Then Jo and I scraped yesterday’s mud off our clothes and hung our jeans outside to freshen.

I missed the washer / dryer.

I missed things that flushed.

I thought longingly of that word on the bathroom faucet back home that I had always taken for granted: HOT.

No television, no phone.

We could die here and no one would know.

Half of the world could blow up and we’d be the last to get the news.

“Aunt Jo, could I get you on tape? I have so many things I—”

“No,” she said. “I don’t feel comfortable with that.”

Terrific.

But even in the face of an uncooperative relative, a gifted family historian forges ahead.

“Do you miss knowing what’s going on in the world, Aunt Jo?”

“Sometimes I do. I get the paper when I go into town. I try to think about the issues, not just race ahead to the next headline. I can’t keep up with everything. You can sit in front of the TV news and swear the world’s about to end, but you come up here …” She looked out the window and smiled. “And other things become important, like thrushes.”

I looked at the tall pine out the kitchen window. Sun poured across its boughs that were filled with small birds who were flying in and out like they were playing some kind of warp-speed tag.

“They love playing chase,” Jo said, smiling easy—everything about her was easy.

I’d never thought of birds as playing. I’d never thought much about them at all.

“Birds don’t worry,” Jo said. “That’s one of my favorite things about them. They’re not going crazy trying to figure out what tomorrow will bring. They’re content with simple things.”

“They don’t have homework,” I said defensively. “They don’t have schedules and teachers breathing down their necks and parents trying to control their lives. Not one of those birds ever had to write the one-hundred-year history of their school and then wonder if it was going to be published. Birds don’t work hard.”

“They work on these.” Jo handed me a bird’s nest that she kept by the cupboard. It was light, strong and amazingly complex. Twigs and grass were wound in intricate patterns. “They only use their feet and beaks to build their nests. They never waste material, either—just gather what they need.”

I turned the nest over, felt the sureness of the walls.

“And when they’re finished,” Jo said, “they don’t need anyone to applaud and give them a grade or a gold star. There are no contests for the fastest bird, the most beautiful, the smartest …”

“Birds don’t need those things. People do.”

“Why do you think people need them?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t either,” Jo said, and went to stoke the fire.

*    *    *

We were sitting by the stone fireplace watching the thick flames of the wood fire—Jo in the rocker, me curled in a blanket. I was trying to think of a way to ask her how she came to think of herself as the mayor of a town of birds when she said, “Ivy, did anyone ever tell you about Tutty Breedlove?”

“I’ve heard her name before.”

Jo laughed. “Time you heard more.”

She lifted an old box from under her bed and found a dog-eared photograph of an unsmiling woman staring at the camera wearing a Western hat and a fringed jacket with a sheriff’s star pinned to her lapel. Her hair was done up in braids that were wound around her head. She held a pearl-handled revolver in each hand; she had the Breedlove chin.

“Ivy Breedlove, I’d like to introduce you to your—let’s
see …” Jo thought hard, “I guess this is your Great-Great-Great-Aunt Tutty.”

I touched Tutty’s pistol. “Pleased to meet you.”

“For eight years, your Aunt Tutty was the sheriff of Kriner Creek, Kansas, and she was one terrifying presence.”

“You’re kidding?”

“I am not.”

“I didn’t know there were women sheriffs.”

“Oh, boy, kid, I’ve got some educating to do with you.” And she told me the story of Kriner Creek, Kansas—how eleven sheriffs (all men) had died at the hands of desperados in less than seven years, how no man in town would agree to wear the sheriff’s badge since the town was famous for its easy access after train robberies and had become an outlaw’s paradise.

“Now Tutty was a widow three times over and had been farming her land real nicely after her third husband died. She was a gentle soul, too, quiet and even-tempered, but she was sick of outlaws coming into town and throwing their weight around. The sheriff’s badge was hanging in the window of the jailhouse for someone to put it on, and one day Tutty grabbed that badge, stuck it on her dress, and said real sweetly that if anyone had a problem with it, they were going to have to shoot her dead to get it. The men, of course, had a fit because they didn’t want a woman defending them, but just then two outlaws rode into town with bags of stolen money and the streets cleared like usual. But Tutty just stood there, aiming her dead husband’s pistol while those robbers laughed. And she’s reported to have said, ‘Boys, it’s nuthin’ personal,’ right before
she shot them both in the wrist, which caused them to drop their guns quick. Tutty got the saloonkeeper to help her drag them into jail. Then she went to find the doctor.”

I was laughing, looking at the photo. “I can’t believe I never heard that story.”

“When a Breedlove woman’s had enough, the men just better step back,” Jo added.

A bird flew over, perched on her hand. Her Honor, the Mayor of Backwater, put her face close to its beak and whispered something I couldn’t hear.

*    *    *

“It’s just three miles to the summit.” Jo said, walking quickly on the trail.

“Round trip?” I asked hopefully.

“One way.”

“That’s six miles!”

“You can’t come to the mountains and not hike.” Jo jumped over a clump of snow-covered branches, very gung-ho.

I struggled to keep up, sure I was getting a blister. Jo was moving quickly, bounding over rocks and trail like a deer. A forty-three-year-old deer shouldn’t be this fast. She had the wolf with her, too. If the blister started bleeding, the wolf would smell blood and …

“Come on!” Jo shouted, ducking under a spruce bough heavy with snow.

I hurried to catch up, my snowboots crunching snow and trail beneath me.

“It’s harder to walk in the snow,” I said when I caught up.

Jo smiled at me without sympathy. “But in winter, Ivy, you can see the frames of all the trees, the light and dark shadows of the woods. If you let yourself, that is.”

I looked down at the rebuke. “I’m getting a blister.”

“Do you want to go back?”

“No.” This wasn’t true.

Jo scooped up two handfuls of snow and dumped them on my head. “Do you want me to carry you?”

“Hey!” I shook the snow from my face, turned around to do the same thing to her, but she was running up the trail with the carnivore.

“I’m sorry,” Jo shouted back. “You seemed so miserable.”

This is how the woman deals with human misery. I picked up my pace, finally getting close enough to dump snow on
her
head.

Jo shook the snow off. “For the first two years I lived up here, I made every wrong turn you can think of. I have the Breedlove nonexistent sense of direction.”

“Me too.” I realized how problematic that could be. Two of us, helpless, lost.

I looked at the gray-blue sky. The trees stood like soldiers north, south, east, and west, although I didn’t know which way north, south, east or west was.

“Malachi got me back home a lot.”

We walked in silence past rows of evergreens and birches that still had their leaves, past tall, arching trunks and deer tracks so clear in the snow. A squirrel scurried from hole to hole, icicles hung from branches.

I felt my mind beginning to relax with the rhythm of the walking. Jo led straight up now, clinging to rocks, balancing on a narrow precipice.

We rounded a curve, climbed over a rock formation glistening with frost.

“We’re here,” Jo said, and extended her hand to the expanse of blue-gray sky and the beauty of the snow-capped summit.

It was perfect.

We drank water and ate dates. We didn’t talk. I was getting used to that.

I watched puffy clouds roll across the sky, watched a droplet of moisture on an evergreen branch glisten in the sunshine. Mostly I just took in the sights—the mountain ranges to my left, the valley of snow-covered trees below, the impossibly big sky. I didn’t think, didn’t move. I just stood there, entirely connected to the mountains.

Until I realized that I did, indeed, have a blister. I took off my boot, peeled off my sock, examined the little red bump on my heel as my foot froze.

“Not bad for a first day out,” Jo said.

Easy for her to say. I dug in my pack, pulled out padded blister foam, stuck some on, sure I was going to be miserable on the trek home.

“Just take it as it comes,” Jo said. “If you worry about every little thing you’re going to have one thoroughly miserable life.”

“I worry about everything,” I muttered, lacing my boot up.

“Do you know the smartest piece of advice I was ever given?”

“What?”

“A man who had lived alone in the mountains for twenty years told it to me when I first moved up here.” Jo stood back, closed her eyes and smiled. “Cultivate peace.”

I’d expected a bit more.

“You don’t get it, do you?” Jo asked.

“I get it. Look for peace in all you do. That’s a nice thing.”

Not a great thing. Not a profound life-changing thing. Twenty years in the woods might strip people of a capacity for deepness.