Evergreen (2 page)

Emil set down her suitcase. “What is it?”

Eveline placed a hand on her stomach, a future that nudged her through the sunny material of her dress. “I’m pregnant.”

2

Emil carried Eveline across the threshold singing, “A
Junge
! A
Mädchen
! Let us have one of each!” and everything turned sour. Though Emil had spent weeks cleaning the cabin, a few of the logs still dripped water like leaky faucets. He’d set pots and pans beneath the most eager of the streams and covered the stains on the floor with grass rugs, but the rugs couldn’t contain what was beneath them, what was above them, what was all around: rot.

“It will get better,” Emil said and set Eveline on her own two feet.

“Of course it will,” Eveline said because she didn’t want to hurt her husband’s feelings or betray her own. She was certain she’d be sick if she didn’t focus on what was pleasant about the inside of the cabin: the matching nightstands with delicate birdlike feet, the woodstove alight and crackling with blue and orange flames, and the narrow bed Emil had skirted with evergreen boughs and pinecones, which made it look like a nest.

“Would it be all right if I lie down?” Eveline said, hoping
sleep would transform her disappointment, her fears. She told herself she was tired—that was all. Just very tired.

Emil led her to the bed, turned down the dark blue patchwork quilt, and pulled the covers up to her chin. He touched the gentle curve of her stomach.

“Sleep, my dear,” he said, as if he understood she was overwhelmed, as if he’d felt the very same way when he arrived in Evergreen.

Eveline fell asleep almost as soon as she closed her eyes. In her dreams, she heard the little bird on the front porch skittering across the wood planks, chirping her welcome song. She heard the tamaracks and black spruces bending in the wind beyond the cabin. She heard the
drip-drop
of water in the cast-iron pots and pans on the floor. All day, Eveline tried to open her eyes to her new life, and all day they remained closed.

Late in the evening, Eveline woke to the smell of rot, a still-sour stomach, and to Emil, who was snoring lightly beside her. His chest rose and fell with the sureness of a grandfather clock, and Eveline placed her hand on his ribs to steady all that was unsteady in her. She looked at the chipped basin Emil had set on the floor for her, but she couldn’t bear the thought of an upheaval so close to him. On her nightstand, an oil lamp was burning. She lifted it with one hand and lifted herself out of bed with the other. Before he brought her into the cabin, Emil had steered her to the outhouse he’d built behind it.

Eveline put on her shoes, opened the heavy front door of the cabin, and stood on the porch a long moment in her daisy dress.

“It will get better,” she said, clutching the oil lamp like an old friend.

After she found the outhouse, Eveline wiped her mouth with a handkerchief. She adjusted her underclothes and her dress, and in the process tilted the oil lamp too far south. When the flame went out, panic electrified the nerves in her spine and legs until she remembered a trick her father taught her when she was little. Eveline closed her eyes hard and opened them softly, and the dark wasn’t so dark anymore.

On that night pulsing stars needlepointed the sky, and the moonlight, a pale harvest yellow, shone on the trunks of nearby birches, lighting their silver bark like streetlamps. The daytime industry of animals in the forest had slowed to an occasional
hoo
from an owl and the croak of a tree frog. Even the expanses of mud, which gurgled and spit during the day, eased back into themselves now. Eveline saw then that before the flood the country was beautiful and that it would be again.

During September, Emil worked on beauty’s behalf outside of the cabin, clearing milk thistle and pricker bushes, while Eveline worked on its behalf inside. Emil had altered the frame of their one-room cabin to make it more structurally sound, but the people who lived here before them were the ones who’d built it and therefore decided its layout, which puzzled Eveline. The cupboards, for instance, were hung intermittently through the cabin instead of centrally in the kitchen, and Eveline was forced to put cans of beans in the cupboard above their bed and sacks of flour and rice in the one beside the closet door. The woodstove, where Eveline cooked their meals, sat on a pallet of bricks in the far corner of the room, and that, along with the placement of the cupboards, made Eveline wonder about the previous tenants, who’d left behind everything but their clothes and family photographs.

“Did they say where they were going?” Eveline asked one morning as she was cooking breakfast and noticed the path of worn wood between the stove and the table.

“Back to Canada, I think.”

The woman had left behind a rosary and a silver hand mirror engraved with the words
FOR MEG, LOVE, WILLIAM
.

“I wonder why,” Eveline said.

“They missed home,” Emil said.

“They weren’t able to make one out here?”

Emil touched the rosary. “It’ll be different for us.”

It was strange to be living among other people’s things, and Eveline did what she could to make them feel more like hers. She pulled apart one of her dresses to make a floral curtain for the little window above the basin in the kitchen and filled the extra water glasses with stems of oxeye daisies and joe-pye weed from the meadow. There wasn’t much to do about the boarded-up window, so that afternoon Eveline sat on the porch and on a page in her journal sketched what the view would have been. When she finished, she tacked her drawing to the rusty nail sticking out of the plywood board.

“I should make a wreath instead,” she said when Emil came in from working.

“Don’t you dare. I love it,” Emil said. He handed her a blue porcelain teapot he found in the woods while he was clearing thistle. “I can fix the handle.”

So far Emil had found a washboard, the teapot, and a worn-out teddy bear, which the flood had brought from someone else’s home to the outskirts of theirs. The bear was missing its left eye, and though it was no longer fit for a child, Eveline sewed on a brown button in its place and set it on the bed. She would have been glad to return the items to their owners, but Emil only knew of one other family living in Evergreen on
higher ground on the other side of the river. He’d left a note, but nobody had made the trip across.

“It’s lovely,” Eveline said about the teapot.

Emil touched the broken handle. “It reminds me of Germany.”

Emil came to America because he thought it would be a less complicated place than Germany. He grew up during the lean years after World War I, when Germany was paying reparations to the rest of the world and starving as a result. Before the war, Emil’s father was a naturalist and a taxidermist. After the war, instead of his father mounting the specimens he caught in the Black Forest and sending them on to the museums in Berlin, Frankfurt, and Munich, his family ate them. Once, when there were no specimens left, his father went into the forest with a wagon and came back with a wild horse from the pack Emil ran after with his boyhood friends. When Emil and his sister, Gitte, wept bitterly, their father told them to go to America. Perhaps there, he said, they only ride horses.

Even when prewar food appeared on the table again, Emil was intent on going to America because he read about the business opportunities for foreigners in the Dakotas. He only ended up in Minnesota because he ran out of money for train fare and because he walked past the dress shop and saw Eveline twirling in front of the mirror inside. After that he was intent on marrying her and opening a small taxidermy shop to support them.

After he finished the day’s outdoor work, Emil would spread a cloth across the kitchen table and work late into the night, building a collection by which future customers could judge his craftsmanship. Emil preserved specimens the way his father and his father’s father had. He didn’t use the pernicious chemicals—arsenical soap and corrosive sublimate—
many taxidermists in America used. Emil used cotton and beeswax.

Watching him work was like watching an artist. Every few minutes, he’d stand up, rub his chin, and sit back down with the magnifying glass to fix whatever displeased him. He’d say, “I’m an elephant when I need to be a gazelle.”

Eveline knew Emil was a fine taxidermist, but she wondered how he was going to find customers when only one other family lived in Evergreen.

“When hunters kill an animal here now, they have to take it all the way to Yellow Falls to get to a taxidermist,” Emil said. “Instead of doing that, they can bring the animal to me. I’ll preserve it and deliver it to them personally.”

“By boat?” Eveline said.

“Next spring I’m going to get the money for a truck from Jeremiah Burr.”

“What are you going to give him?” Eveline said.

“What everyone here seems to want,” Emil said. “A wall full of bucks’ heads.”

“What do people want in Germany?”

“Sons who stay put.”

When Emil had finally saved enough money for the trip across the ocean, his father wouldn’t come out of his study to say goodbye. That morning, the women in his family were the ones who dropped him at the train station in Hornberg. Just before he boarded, his mother gave him his father’s most cherished butterfly collection and suggested he use the butterflies to tip people along the way, which worked in Europe. But when Emil tried to give a porter a monarch butterfly in Grand Central Station, the porter crushed it in his hand.

Eveline fell in love with Emil precisely because of those butterflies. Other men left buckets of fish on her doorstep or dragged her out to the woods to watch them cut wood. Before
they were married, Eveline would daydream about Emil’s smooth fingers brushing hers in the dress shop the day they met and how, despite her parents’ concern, she felt so certain his gentleness was meant for her and her alone.

Eveline looked at Emil’s fingers now, which bullet burs and thorns had scraped raw. A blood blister had taken over the tip of his thumb; the nail was starting to turn black.

“I should get back out there,” Emil said. “We’re going to get snow today.”

Eveline looked at the small pile of logs beside the stove. Even in warm weather, wood disappeared faster than Emil could cut it. “I can help you,” she said.

Emil put his heavy wool coat on. He kissed her forehead. At the door, he smiled as if she’d said something funny. “I didn’t marry you so you could wield an ax.”

“Why did you?” Eveline said, but Emil was already gone.

Eveline set the lunch dishes in the basin and gathered Emil’s wool socks, which needed mending. There was supper to think about and laundry to scrub against the washboard. Floors to wash, too. Eveline was amused now by all the nights she’d stayed up before she was married thinking about how freeing it would be when she and Emil finally had a place of their own. She didn’t think about chores then or the silence she’d complete them in. Most days now, she went hours without speaking, when in Yellow Falls she’d scarcely caught a moment to herself, let alone a silent one.

Today was no different. The snow came home before Emil did, clinging to the silvery birch branches, the brown eaves of the cabin, and the red birdhouse. It softened Evergreen’s sharp lines and the sparrow’s hearty trill. Eveline wrapped herself in one of the left-behind quilts and sat on the porch talking to the sparrow, whom she’d named Fortuna.

Tuna
.

“Why didn’t you fly south like all of the other birds?”

Tuna hopped from the birdhouse perch to the porch railing, stretching her white throat toward the falling snow so much like a child that Eveline half expected an eager tongue to spring forth from her beak to gather the flakes and savor them as they melted.

Eveline wondered what had happened to all the Yellow Falls girls who got married and moved south to Minneapolis and sometimes as far as Chicago, places that seemed like they were part of another world now. On a map, hundreds of rural miles separated her from them, but this distinction seemed more pressing than inches on a map: in Eveline’s world girls talked to birds, and in the other one they talked to one another.

Were the girls lonesome for the Northwoods? Its forests? Its meadows? Its star-filled sky? Perhaps they all had closets full of pretty party dresses that kept them from missing the mud and the sand, the angles of the river and the anglers who fished it.

Tuna hopped from the porch railing back to the perch of her birdhouse.

“I feel the same way,” Eveline said, unwilling to admit she was lonely.

3

Eveline spent the winter of her pregnancy reading Emil’s taxidermy manuals, the only bound pages for mile after boundless mile. Of everything she packed that hurried September morning in Yellow Falls, books weren’t something she’d considered stuffing into her suitcase, which meant she was stuck reading about dead animals now.