Eyes Like Sky And Coal And Moonlight (21 page)

“
Before that, a while before, there was a Shoshone camp,” she said. “They all moved along.”

I studied her. Sunlight was creeping up over the ridge, slowly moving the leaves from haze to clear definition. I tugged more wood into the fire and began to make coffee. She watched me, placid and accepting.

“
Who was the man with the two little girls?” I asked.

“
Reverend Kingsley, Algernon Kingsley. Algie. And his girls, Amalfa and Lulu.”

She sounded wistful.

“
What happened to them?”

“
The Shoshone came through here, hunting for a pair of horses they’d lost,” she said. “They killed them all. Cut their throats in the middle of the night.”

I stared into the heart of the fire. “Seems like it would have been lonely since then,” I said.

“
It has.”

I heard Jonah stirring inside the tent and looked towards it. When I looked back, she was gone already. He came crawling out of the tent, ready for coffee.

“
You’re up early,” he said.

We watched the sunrise come up over the hills in sleepy companionable silence, drinking the coffee laced with the small carton of milk that had been in the car.

“
What are you grinning at?” Jonah asked me.

“
It’s been a weird morning,” I said. “And it’s still pretty early.”

We drove into Brigham City so I could check the courthouse records. I told Jonah about Deirdre along the way.

“
It’s not April Fool’s,” he said. “
so
why are you messing with me?”

“
I swear this is true. Honest.”

“
Are you serious?”

“
Seriously serious.”

“
No shit, cross your heart and die?”

“
Anything you want to name.”

“
Holy shit.” He lapsed into silence, staring at the road. “That’s so rad. You’re pulling my leg, right?”

In Brigham City, in a basement underneath the courthouse that smelled like pine cleaner and tinny fluorescent lights, I looked up Reverend Kingsley and his children. Lulu’s actual name turned out to be Lucille. They’d died in 1890. There were no pictures, just the Reverend’s spidery brown signature on the deed to his land, the Northernmost three fifths of the Southwest Quarter of Section Thirteen.

“
So?” Jonah said.

“
So they existed at least, and she’s probably not a mental patient.” We stopped at the QFC and I picked up several bags of marshmallows. “I want real coffee,” I said. We went into a Denny’s where a surly waitress named served us gritty lattes that tasted of burned grounds. At a nearby table, two men in blue coveralls and another in a business suit were making their way through identical portions of Moons Over My Hammy.

The badges on their coveralls read Morton-Thiokol in poisonous green cursive.

“
Well,” the one in the business suit said, coming up for air from his hash browns. “I want the soil tests started today.”

“
Don’t have all the tracts signed off on,” a coverall man said.

“
Just start testing the soil. No one will chase you off if you happen to get a little too far over. There’s only that one tract left, I think, anyhow.”

I caught Jonah’s eye and tried to make a “Listen to the people at the other table” face but he only stared at me blankly.

“
What?” he said.

I mouthed “listen” at him and rolled my eyes to the right but he just stared.

“
I’d like my biscuits boxed,” he told Jolene. And to me, “Did you want coffee to go?”

At our campsite, I set a bag of marshmallows out and gestured Jonah to a seat on a toppled log.

“
Deirdre,” I called. “Got more marshmallows for you.”

“
Holy shit,” Jonah said as she seemed to materialize, walking out of the heart of the thicket. She ignored him, moving over to tear open the bag of marshmallows and pop three down in quick succession before looking at the two of us.

“
Hi Deirdre,” I said. “This is my husband, Jonah.”

She nodded at him as he managed a feeble wave.

“
We want to talk,” I said. “Do you know why someone would want to buy this land?”

“
They come and look at the plants all the time,” Deirdre said.

I couldn’t tell much difference between the trees here or further off. Perhaps a little healthier, a little greener? I wasn’t really sure.

“
They want to cut it all down and grow new trees,” she said. “I heard them talking about clearing it all and setting out new lines of trees.”

“
What will happen to you if they do that?”

She shrugged fatalistically. “I won’t be able to live here any longer.”

“
Can you move to a new tree?” Jonah said.

She looked at him for the first time, and I felt a flare of jealousy at the warmth in her face. “If I move quickly, within a day or two.” She patted the bole closest to her, a little larger than its fellows. “I have lived here for many years.”

He looked at me. “Plenty of places within a day’s drive. Eagle-haunted Lake Sammamish, for that matter. Marymoor Park is pretty close.”

“
How long have you been here, Deirdre?” I asked.

She shrugged again. “Many years.”

“
How did you come here?”

“
I grew here.”

“
With no parents? Who gave you your name?”

“
I awoke to sunlight and rain; I don’t know how long ago that was. I have never seen another like me. Algernon said I was a dryad, a tree spirit. He named me for one.”

A pair of voices came from the road. It was the two men in blue coveralls.

“
Hey,” one shouted, and waved as they came over to us.

“
Camping, huh?” he said, looking at the marshmallows.

“
Yeah,” Jonah said. “What are you guys up to?”

“
Testing the soil all along here.”

“
Oh, yeah? Some kind of government project?”

They exchanged glances. “Yeah, our company’s testing all the soil, building a research facility along here,” he said. “You folks own this land?”

“
Yeah, just figured we’d come up and say goodbye to it before selling it,” Jonah said easily. “You guys want some marshmallows?”

They shook their heads and moved along.

“
We need to get her out of here,” I said to Jonah. “They’ll find her and dissect her or something.”

“
You always assume the worst,” he said.

“
It’s a corporation. Remember?”

His eyes dropped. “You’ll never forgive them, will you?”

“
Thirty years ago a corporation—a big corporation, just like Morton-Thikol—decided burying chemical waste was fine, and then didn’t say anything when someone decided to build a playground on the site, managing to twist the genes of every child that played there. I can live with that, Jonah. But I won’t let them take someone else’s future away.”

“
I don’t want to get out of here,” Deirdre said. “I’ve lived here all my life.”

“
It’s that or be dead,” I said. “I don’t know what you believe as far as life over death goes, but I find the former preferable.”

“
I know it’s unfair,” he said to her. “Sometimes the world is unfair. But you don’t need to be one of the tragedies. You don’t need to be one of the fairytales with an unhappy ending.”

She wavered, looking between us.

“
It’s your land,” she said. “That’s what those men were saying, weren’t they?”

I gestured around myself. “Even if we don’t sell the land, the machinery will come and be all around you. And it’s a corporation—you never know when they’re going to do something like come chop everything down and then go ‘Whoops, our bad’. Or get the government to use eminent domain to grab something for a project that will bring a lot of money to this area?

“
We can offer you someplace to think about what you want to do next,” I said. “A respite.”

She stared at me, searching my face, before she sighed and nodded. Sunlight slanted across the clearing, and the trees whispered in the breeze. She went across to the clump of trees and laid her hands on the bark, bowing her head to it. Jonah watched her. His eyes were sad. I hadn’t seen that look in his eyes before, even on the day we found out we’d never have a child, and it made my chest hurt, a hopeless, hard ache.

I filled a paper grocery bag with dust and dirt and tree branches and laid it on the floor on the passenger sidee.

Deirdre insisted on sitting on my lap, saying that she did not want to touch the seat. She was surprisingly light, like holding a sack of leaves. Her long toes coiled down to the sack of dust, nestling into it.

She lay in my arms and I cradled her. I laid my cheek atop her head for a moment, and the fierce wild green scent of her filled my lungs, pushing them outward. Jonah touched the radio into a dim and drowsy music. We talked quietly, but her answers grew drowsier and drowsier as the afternoon’s warmth filled the car. I let her sleep, figuring it was the state in which she’d most easily take to transportation.

The day was flat and sunny hot.

“
Do you think she’ll do okay by the lake?” Jonah said.

“
I think so. Plenty of trees around there. Enough people to keep her entertained watching them. And with the park, she won’t have to worry about her tree getting cut down.”

“
What do you think she is?”

“
I dunno. A dyrad maybe. Or something entirely different. Maybe an alien.”

“
What do you think she would have done if no one had come along?”

“
Lived there for centuries more, maybe. Her and her memories of the Reverend Algernon.”

The road dipped and we came into the flatlands. Up ahead lay the desert of wind sculptures and power lines, gleaming in the late afternoon sunlight like knives of incandescence lacing the sky.

As we approached the host of power lines, Deirdre stirred in my arms.

“
She’s waking up,” I said. Her eyes opened, then rolled up in her head. Her mouth opened and closed like a fish’s kissing the air, gasping for life.

“
Deirdre, what?” I said. Then, urgently as we passed under the first interlacing of power lines, their intersection a mathematical bird’s nest above us, “Jonah!”

She spasmed helplessly in my arms.

“
Turn around!”

“
I’m trying!” He spun the wheel, despite the honking of the truck behind us and we bumped across the median still under the web of tangled lines, there at its edge, waiting for an opportunity to get back into traffic.

“
Hang on,” I said to Deirdre, holding her tightly as Jonah gunned us into motion and the wheels ground at the road with a desperate roar. “Hang on. Hang on.”

“
It’s…all right,” she said, smiling as her body twisted. She kept smiling. “Algernon.” Her back arched and the car was full of the smell of wet wood and rot as she fell apart into tangled branches, damp roots, and skeletal leaves in my arms. I held the dead weight as we lurched out from under the power lines’ shadow and swerved over to the side of the road.

“
God, Jonah,” I said. “God, she’s gone.” I couldn’t stop crying, crying as I never had in my life. Bits of root and twig covered my lap, a hopeless scattering that could never be reassembled.