Stony River (46 page)

He turned from the door with a question in his face. “So you’re off to the city tomorrow,” he mused. “I almost didn’t get home in time to see you, after all, did I?”

He paced beyond the desk, where he stood with his hands in the pockets of his baggy over-trousers, looking out the dark windowpanes. “Sevana,” he said, turning to her at last, “when I went up to the wilderness, it was to a land I wait all year to return to. And yet while I was there—”

But without warning he stopped, leaving his thought unspoken. “Forgive me,” he said obscurely, walking back to take his seat again. “You’ve come to tell me that you’re off to your dreams, and I should be wishing you well. And I do.” He summoned a smile which his eyes did not share, and which stabbed her to the core. “Are you looking forward to it?”

Sevana wondered how she could explain all the longings and restlessness that filled her heart. “I am.” She was gripping the tin handle of the cup as if it was her only contact with anything real and solid. “Maybe it sounds funny to say, but I feel I’m meant to go to Lethbridge…as if I won’t find what I’m looking for until I do. But still it’s hard to leave, when the larch and aspen are so bright in the forests, and all the colors are so deep and rich.” The words touched only the surface of the things she was feeling—but she couldn’t speak of the other.

“It wouldn’t be an easy place to leave, no matter what the season,” he observed.

“I suppose that’s true,” she agreed with a touch of sadness. “I’ve only seen the summer and the fall, and each I thought could not be better.”

“In many ways—though you wouldn’t think it—winter is the best of all.”

“I’m still planning to come back to see the frozen river.” It made her feel better to think of being able to return.

It seemed to appeal to him also, as he said with a hint of a smile, “I’ll go walking on it with you.” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and appeared to be contemplating the workmanship of his floor.

Silently Sevana studied him for the separation to come—his deep eyes she had only to look into, to be drawn inescapably into his soul; his face so finely sculpted she had often wanted to ask permission to sketch its strong lines; his dark hair untamed, tousled even now as if by wind. It was harder to think of leaving him than anything else. The voices that called her to other pursuits—she could not hear any of them tonight.

Joel looked up, and his eyes were full of many things. “It’s hard to see you go, Sevana,” he confessed. “I have a selfish wish you would always be as you are now, and I’m afraid you will change. It’s different when you’re on your own, and in the city. There is so much that seems good but is not, and you are so young—like a spring lamb.”

She wasn’t young, she thought indignantly—she was seventeen! It was as if he didn’t think she could take care of herself, and she knew she could. “I’ll be all right, Joel,” she said.

“Will you promise to take care?” he persisted, searching her face for the assurance he wanted.

“Yes, I promise.”

He didn’t look convinced. “Over in Lethbridge, if you need anything, look up David Lindford. He’s the friend I said I had over there.”

Sevana merely nodded, not paying him serious attention—and as if he knew that, and felt the need to convince her more thoroughly, he went on: “He’ll do anything he can to help somebody out. I met him while he was pastoring the church in Cragmont. I liked him from the start, but it was when I did some woodworking in the new church building with him that I really got to know him. I developed a real respect for his intelligence and humor, and counsel in a bad time—it was shortly after I had broken things off with Chantal. He’s someone you can trust without exception. Just tell him you’re a neighbor of mine.”

She noticed he didn’t put it in the past tense, even though this was the last night she would have that special status. “Maybe I will.” She said it for his sake, even though she was quite sure she would never look up a total stranger, uninvited and unannounced. Still, it was somehow reassuring to know there was a person over there Joel knew and trusted.

“He’s got a little church on the outskirts of Lethbridge, which is his wife Krysta’s hometown,” Joel went on. “If you could meet them, I would feel better knowing you had friends already there.” Now that he had brought it up, he seemed to be counting on the fact that she would meet David and Krysta, and they would take her under their wing.

But she could not promise him that. “Oh Joel,” she said earnestly, setting down her half-drunk tea on the arm of the chair, “I don’t know what’s ahead for me, but I do know I will never forget these days in the mountains. They have been so good! All the places you were so kind to show me—Snowshoe Meadow, and Landmark Lookout, and Fairy—I mean
Frog
Lake, and the wilderness—”

“I can’t claim that one,” he said softly, yet teasing a little. “You undertook that one on your own. I won’t forget them either, Sevana. I didn’t know this summer I would find a friend.”

She tried to smile, but the anguish in her heart made it impossible. The house was too close, Joel too near, his eyes too kind and too troubled for her to bear. “I’d better go,” she said. “I still have to pack tonight.”

“I’ll take you down on Flint.” He was on his feet at the same time.

“No,” she objected, “I don’t mind the walk. I even brought the gun.” She patted her coat pocket. “I didn’t come up here to make you go out in the cold again tonight.”

“Sevana, it’s not a question of the cold or anything else,” he said, reaching for his coat. “Not even the fresh cougar tracks I saw on the road below your house. If I can’t see you tomorrow, at least I can see you home.”

He shut down the stove while Sevana stood staring at him without reply, knocked into an unnatural silence by his last remark. Maybe she
had
been followed last night, and some instinct had let her know. More often than not, she forgot how wild the place was. But you couldn’t afford to forget—you had to adapt to the place, because it would never adapt to you.

“You know, Sevana,” Joel remarked irrelevantly as he turned out the light, “your hair is the same golden color as the grass on the ridgetops when I left the pass—” and in the lantern’s dying glow, he held open the door for her.

The three-quarter moon was glaring on the rocks above timberline as they walked to the barn. While Joel got Flint from the stall, Sevana went among the sheep and found Goldthread by the moonlight from the small-paned windows. “Goodbye, little Goldthread,” she whispered as she knelt beside him, stroking his back. “I’m so glad you’re all right. I’ll miss you so much.” She held him a long moment, then reached for Hawthorn. “Goodbye, Hawthorn, you little goofball. You and Gyrfalcon stay out of trouble now. Bye, Blaze—I hope your leg is all better.” She found Thistle. “Bye, Thistle. Keep track of Joel for me, won’t you? See you, Brook—you stay close to home, you hear?”

Hawthorn, awake and liking the attention he’d received, pressed in for more—and she threw her arms around his neck, holding his woolly head against her cheek. But looking up to see Joel at the door watching her with an enigmatic expression, she scrambled to her feet, dashing away an unbidden tear.

As they rode across the yard, Sevana kept her eyes on the peaks until the trees swallowed up their black-and-silver etchings. “Goodbye, Old Stormy—goodbye, Bearclaw and Graystone,” she called to them silently. Year after year, the mountains would not change. Whenever she came back, they would still be there, exactly the same. She found some consolation in that.

Down the moon-glazed trail Flint stepped steadily, having already forgotten his past effort and glad to be going somewhere after he’d thought all was done for the day. Sevana would have liked to keep riding that splendid horse through the wide night under the moon and stars, clinging to the rough wool of Joel’s coat—riding forever over the mountains and valleys, away from everything that was destined to separate them. But the journey had only begun when Joel was giving Flint the command to stop. The house was dark, but a light still shone at the barn.

“You’re right, there’s no wind down here.” Joel walked with her to the bottom of the steps, where he stopped and looked down at her in the moonlight. “Well, Sevana, I hope your days in Lethbridge are happy ones,” he said. “I’ll come see you when I bring the sheep over, see if—” his voice caught ever so slightly before he recovered it, “see if you’ve found what you’re going off to find.”

But Sevana couldn’t find her voice at all. Despite the assurances of seeing him again—which she was counting on with all her heart—she was afraid that once they took separate directions, they would lose the closeness that was theirs right now. But she couldn’t let him see how shaken she was. She sought for something to avert the intensity of the moment—and for the first time thought of his gift. “Wait here a minute,” she spoke up quickly.

She returned from the house with the picture. “This is for you.”

“Goldthread.” Even in the imperfect light he could tell which lamb it was. “It’s been a while since he was that small.” His expression softened at the likeness of the curly-fleeced sheep with dark eyes, black triangle nose, and lips curved around a narrow muzzle as if in a smile. “Thanks, Sevana. It will remind me of when he was a new lamb. And it will remind me of you, because we saved him together.”

There was a pause when neither knew what to say. “Thanks for bringing me home through all the cougars and everything,” she finally came up with.

With a half-smile and a hand laid lightly on her shoulder in parting, he rode back up the mountain, leaving her to go in the dark house alone.

CHAPTER 30

In the hour before daybreak, Sevana watched the mountainsides rising into the sky as the truck descended to the valley floor. The shadowy landscape revealed only shades of gray, but she was taking it all in as if her life depended on seeing everything a last time. When they turned onto the main road, she realized with a pang that she hadn’t had a chance to bid the river farewell. “Goodbye, my Stony,” her heart now called to it longingly, as she turned in a futile attempt to catch a glimpse of her secluded retreat through the trees. And then because of something that was threatening to choke her, she vowed silently, “I’ll come back and see you again, I promise I will.”

She settled against the seat and watched the river being left behind with every turn. Gradually the sky lightened above the canyon walls. A few pale-yellow birch leaves drifted down into the colorless, cold-looking water. She felt cold like that—cold and dull and lifeless. She would have given anything to be riding that road to town and back with Joel, instead of on this one-way trip with Fenn. She didn’t take her eyes from each new view of the river until Fenn turned up a side road near Cragmont, and it was gone.

At the logging unit Mr. Sutter came over from the skidder he was warming up, and exchanged a few words with Fenn as he got out of the truck. Then he went around to Sevana’s window. “I hear you’re leaving us,” he said, friendly as always.

“Yes, I’m going to art school.”

Mr. Sutter was impressed at her ambition. Said he admired anybody who could paint—him now, he didn’t know a paintbrush from the man-in-the-moon. He kept his remarks general at first, but eventually brought the conversation around to what was really on his mind. “How’d your summer go, anyway?” he asked with a glance at Fenn, who was installing the starter in a cranelike piece of rusty red machinery with
Kootenay Queen
crudely spray-painted on its side.

She understood well enough by now what he was asking. “I had a wonderful time, for the most part,” she said wistfully.

Mr. Sutter nodded. “Good to hear. Been wondering how you were doing.” He hesitated, scratched his head before he plunged on. “Fenn—he’s a good worker, the best I’ve got. But he’s—” he scuffed at the ground with the toe of his boot, “well—opinion among the crew is, he’s a little hard to get along with,” he finished, keeping his eyes strictly on the dent he’d kicked in the dirt.

“He
is
hard to get along with.” Sevana was matter-of-fact. “He’d rather be alone—he said so himself.”

“Can’t understand it,” the logging man said then, seeming relieved he hadn’t offended her. He had evidently given the matter a good deal of thought. “It’s like he can’t see good in nobody. You being his sister and all, I thought you might know what’s eating him.”

“No, I don’t,” she said. “I wish I could tell you. But even after a summer with him, I still don’t know him very well.” She looked down at her hands folded in her lap. “Maybe I never will.”

Fenn came back from the
Queen
, ready to go. As they drove away, Mr. Sutter stood smiling, hand upraised. “He’s such a nice man,” Sevana said, to annoy Fenn.

Over the passing miles, the scenery changed before her eyes. The mountains stood farther back, the trees and vegetation grew less abundant—until reaching the Divide, there emerged only a dry grassland with hardly a hill or tree to be seen. Endless stretches of flatland, clean, sweeping—there was a fascination to its starkness; yet it seemed nakedly open to someone so lately come from the verdant rises of the mountains. Looking at the road stretching in a ruler-straight line through browning fields, Sevana suddenly smiled to herself. Trick would like this, she thought. He could get up some speed on
these
roads.

On the outer fringes of Lethbridge Fenn turned off toward a two-story establishment set well back from the highway, hiding from the bleakness of the surrounding prairie behind a windbreak of full-grown maple trees. Over the shady porch hung the engraved sign:
Vandalier’s Roadhouse.