Evergreen (20 page)

Gunther said he was a damn fool, if you asked him.

“Good thing I wasn’t asking,” Hux said.

The two of them were standing in the oxeye meadow on
Hux’s side of the river, getting ready to cut logs from the birch tree Hux took down in the forest that morning and dragged here with his truck. It was the beginning of October, but the afternoon sun was still warm enough they couldn’t see their breath. The ground still gave a little beneath their feet. Hux pulled a carrot up from the soil, brushed it off, and bit into it. When he was a baby his mother started a garden up here, which she stopped tending by the time he could walk. Twenty-odd years later, and stray vegetables still cropped up among the milk thistle.

“I’m going to chop you into the ground,” Gunther said.

Hux was wearing an orange hat because it was hunting season and he didn’t want to get shot. Gunther’s was camouflage.

Hux put on his safety glasses.

“You’re seriously wearing those?” Gunther said. “No wonder Leah got fed up. Or maybe it was because you wouldn’t get rid of those bunk beds. Or maybe it’s the beard.”

“Can we please just cut some wood,” Hux said.

They’d have to cut at least another cord before the first hard frost. Everything about fall in the Northwoods seemed like a race. If you didn’t chop enough wood, you’d freeze come winter. If you didn’t put up enough food, you’d starve. There were stories about fur trappers who went into the woods in the fall and didn’t come out again. When Hux’s father was alive, he never let Hux leave the cabin without promising to pay attention to what was around him. He wanted Hux to understand who he was by where he was.

Hux chopped and stacked birch logs thinking of his father, who’d had the strength of two men but could pin butterflies and insects to velvet with the delicacy of a woman. His father had learned Latin growing up in Germany and garnered a great sense of well-being from knowing more than what was
commonly known. The monarch butterfly was
Danaus plexippus
. The stick bug was
Phasmatodea
. When he was little, Hux resisted learning these complex names because he didn’t like that they always applied to dead things.
Phasmatodea
were pinned to velvet and encased in glass, while his beloved stick bugs clung to trees in the forest and could be cajoled with a light brush into his hand.

“You should come to the tavern with me,” Gunther said, splitting the last log. He cradled his ax like it was a woman. He was smiling his crooked smile just like his mother used to when she was up to no-good good. “I’ll find you a real sweet girl.”

“I have to be at Phee’s first thing in the morning,” Hux said.

“I could have built ten porches in the time it’s taken you to build one.”

“I’m still not going to Yellow Falls with you.”

When all the wood was stacked, they tarped it up and secured it with bungees in case the wind picked up or it rained. They’d come back tomorrow or the next day to load it into the truck. They’d split it evenly, maybe even take some over to Phee’s place, since she was living out in the bush all by herself. She’d protest, but she’d take the wood.

A yellow butterfly landed on the blue tarp as if the tarp were a stretch of water.

“You remember the year all those caterpillars came?” Gunther said.

When Hux was a boy, he and Gunther used to play in the meadow while their fathers discussed animals. One year there was an explosion of caterpillars on account of the heavy summer rains. Hux and Gunther spent hours transferring monarch caterpillars from overcrowded milkweeds to less crowded ones so they didn’t starve.

“I kept thinking you were going to crush them,” Hux said.

That year, Hux’s father let him and Gunther bring a chrysalis into the cabin and they watched it turn into a butterfly. Though he and Gunther rarely agreed about anything at that age, or at any age, for that matter, they agreed not to pin it to velvet.

“I can be gentle,” Gunther said, chewing on a bluestem and then spitting it out again. “You sure you don’t want to come with me to town?”

“Have fun,” Hux said.

Gunther slung his ax over his shoulder and walked toward the river, which he swam across unless it was frozen. It was the only kind of bathing he liked to do.

Hux put his ax in the truck. The afternoon was too nice for driving, even the quarter mile back to his cabin, so he left the truck and walked. Along the way, he stopped to pick up a red oak leaf the size of a plate. Every fall since he was little he collected leaves and pressed them in his father’s heavy taxidermy manuals. His collection was like a farmer’s almanac. You could tell by looking at each season’s worth, some bright and others dull, whether or not the year had been warmer or colder than usual, or more or less snow had fallen. Hux put the oak leaf into his bag, wondering what its unusual brilliance would mean.

Hux followed the footpath into the woods, a path created by the weight of his boots and a steady stream of whitetails that ate blueberries off the bushes. After cutting wood, all he could ever think about was eating something hearty. Leah used to make venison stew that melted in his mouth. She did something special to the meat but would never say what.

“You won’t need me if you can make it yourself,” she said.

When he got home, Hux went to the back of the cabin to check the level of the rain barrel, which wasn’t full enough to
justify taking a shower, albeit a freezing one. He’d been thinking about getting a propane heater so he could rig up a four-season shower, but he’d either have to preserve more animals or charge Phee more than he wanted to. And there was the problem of the water supply; it seemed like there was always too much or too little of it. Maybe he’d just keep going over to Gunther’s when he wanted a warm shower.

“Get a well already!” Gunther would say, but he’d always let him in.

Hux loved Gunther’s cabin—the red and blue swipes of paint on the front of it, the fact that it had actual bedrooms and a bathroom instead of an open space and an outhouse like at Hux’s. When Hux was a kid, he’d spent as many nights over there as he’d spent here.

Hux walked to the front of his cabin, figuring where the squirrels were burrowing into the spaces between the logs so he could chink them before the weather turned. No matter how many precautions he took, the squirrels always found a way in. The last squirrel chewed through the loaves of bread in the kitchen. The container of honey, too.

Hux stepped onto his front porch, took his boots off, and clapped them together before he saw the limp buck sprawled out between the rocking chairs on the porch floor and the note attached to its fur.

Cheer up, Buddy. This one’s all yours. Go get that propane heater
.

Gunther
.

Sometimes Hux couldn’t believe how alike Lulu Gunther turned out to be. He was feisty and loud and downright obnoxious
sometimes, most of the time, but he was also more generous than anyone in the Northwoods. He had more heart.

Before he got to the buck, Hux stepped around it and went inside to heat a can of chicken soup and drink a glass of milk while the refrigerator still worked. During the winter, when the storms cut off the electricity, he’d have to put whatever was perishable in the snow, and unless he tied a rope to it he wouldn’t find it until the spring. Probably he should have stocked up on powdered milk, but it seemed unnatural to him when for years all he’d drunk was milk from Gunther’s goat Willa Girl and then Willa Girl II. It was bad enough drinking gallons of the store-bought stuff while they waited on a Willa Girl III.

After Hux ate, he boiled a pot of water on the woodstove for coffee and sterilized his tools. Before he began to separate the buck’s head from his body on the porch floor, he gave thanks like his father taught him. In his father’s view, respect was the most important part of preserving an animal. When Hux was first learning how to mount, his father would take away his tools for a week if he forgot to say a few kind words. Hux didn’t love the work the way his father did, or the hunters he mostly did it for, but he was good at it, and more often than not that made the difference between failing and prospering in Evergreen.

Once Hux freed the buck’s head from its body, he decided to spread plastic garbage bags over the kitchen table instead of going out to the work shed. The light was better for skinning here, and Leah wasn’t around to protest anymore. He went out to the shed for the shortwave and set it up on the counter.

While he worked, Hux liked to listen to the Canadian program
A Day in the Life Of
. Recently, they’d done a story on polar bears in Churchill. Hux liked the part about the bears knocking
over a tundra buggy and scaring tourists into going home. His father said there were two kinds of men in the world: the kind that respected animals and the kind that got killed by them. Hux had witnessed the rise of a third category: the kind that sprayed themselves with Rusty’s Doe-in-Heat, waited with whiskey in a tree stand, and took a kind of grace that didn’t belong to them.

Hux knew he ought to bring the buck inside, but what he really wanted to do was drink a cup of coffee and reread his favorite childhood book, which his father used to read to him first as a boy and then again as a young man. After Hux’s mother got sick and couldn’t easily join them in conversation anymore, and Hux and his father ran out of conversation themselves, his father would read out loud from the top bunk while Hux listened on the bunk below him like he was a little boy, even though that year he turned fifteen. The book was about an explorer in the Arctic Circle. When his father read to him, the cabin filled up with the midnight sun. When Hux was growing up, there were no schools to go to and only Gunther to play with, so Hux became friends with the stars in the sky, the trees in the forest, and the people in books. Gunther made fun of him for talking about igloos and sled dogs, but he had an imaginary friend he dragged around everywhere, too.

When the kettle whistled, Hux filled a mug and added a spoonful of instant coffee grounds from the tin on the counter. He took his coffee out onto the porch and went back inside for the wool camp blanket on the bottom bunk and the book on the shelf beside it. He sat in the rocking chair closest to the door. The afternoon was beginning its slow slide into evening. The air smelled of Phee’s cedar fire.

Just a few minutes, Hux told himself, and he’d go back inside and work.

He looked out at the garden he’d started between the tangle of raspberry bushes and the south side of the cabin. He was proud of his little plot of earth. The beets and spinach were making way for pumpkins and squash. The last lonely tomato dangled from the vine.

Hux opened the book and closed it again.

An owl hooted in a distant tree. The echo of it took awhile to reach him; the delay reminded him of how alone he was just then.

Maybe he should have gone to town with Gunther after all and made merry with shots of cheap whiskey and flushed girls until he forgot how much he missed Leah. How much he missed his father. His mother. Lulu. Reddy.

Until he forgot that everyone who ever mattered was gone.

Sometimes Hux felt like a child living out here this way. Sometimes he felt like an old man. Sometimes he heard his mother calling to him from the grave, her chest rattling like wet bones.
Do the right thing, Hux. Go get your sister. Bring her home
.

18

Until the day of her death, Hux’s mother kept a grim secret. Whenever she felt the truth bubbling up, she swallowed it down until her insides turned black from its poison.

All the years of her girlhood, Hux’s mother had worn a green ribbon in her long wheat-colored hair. Her cheeks were pink. Her heart light. Her eyes were the only part of her that pointed to something heavier; they were the color of river stones.

According to Hux’s father, his mother looked like the girls who worked in the
Bier
gardens in Berlin, girls who charmed customers with plates of sausages and flashes of milky skin. On the day Hux’s father arrived in Yellow Falls from Germany and saw Hux’s mother spinning in front of a mirror in the dress shop, he wanted to marry her. At the time, he only knew how to say two things in English.
How do I get to the Dakotas?
and
Would you like a butterfly?
He said both of these things to Hux’s mother, who laughed, but not unkindly.

Hux didn’t know the girl who wore a ribbon in her hair;
he’d only known a woman who wore her disappointments like a saddle on her face. A woman who wanted to be happy but couldn’t. Hux still didn’t know what provoked her to tell the truth the last day of her life.

“I can smell my own death,” she’d said when the sun came up and Hux passed by the foot of her bed on his way to his shoes and the door. “It doesn’t smell good.”

“You’re not going to die, Mom,” he’d said. He was afraid of her. Her skin had yellowed and hung from her body like drapes, and in his heart he knew that meant she was right about dying, and he didn’t want her to go. He still needed her. He was only fifteen.