Page 22

June 28, 1997 · Gone Two Days

BACK OUTSIDE,into the trees along the road. Luce ran her fingers along the sharp redwood needles. They were bigger down here, larger leaves for more surface area to absorb the dappled light that made it through the thick branches. Up top, where they had full sun, the needles were small and fine. It was all adaptive. Everything natural shifts to survive.

It was full dark now, but there was a faint glow coming from down the road—Gramms. Maybe Luce could hide out with her for a little bit while she straightened out her head and decided what to do.

In Gramms’s house, a baseball game was on the TV, the sound turned low, and the radio was on low too, familiar voices hushed and yammering. Gramms was in her tan, plush armchair, her heavy white tennis shoes clomping on the ground as she shifted. She gestured to the other armchair beside her and handed Luce a bowl of peanuts, her eyes never leaving the game.

“I like your mother. She’s a tough cookie, that girl.”

She could see the corner of Gramms’s mouth flick into a smile, fragments of peanut shell caught in her spittle.

“You know she’d kill you if she heard you call her a girl instead of a woman,” Luce said, cracking a peanut.

Gramms laughed, wet and thick. “I know. I’ve been saying it out loud since she’s been gone because I’m hoping it’ll make her mad enough to come on back and slap me.” She winked over at Luce. Not the worst strategy. “Watch this one.” She cupped her hands around her mouth, turned her head to the ceiling, and hollered, “Come on back, you ugly witch!” Luce couldn’t help smiling.

Once, years before, Luce had asked her mother whether they were some kind of witches, which she’d learned from a library book was a thing people hated and feared. Witches is just a word people came up with as an excuse to kill strong women, Gloria had said.

What people? Who kills witches? Luce asked.

Historically, everyone.

Why?

Because they were afraid of female strength.

Does anyone still do it?

Ha, Gloria had laughed. It’s sneakier now. Cops. The government. They arrest strong women who are helping other women. You know our herb patch? Luce nodded. It was a small bed within their larger garden, herbs spilling over the edges and regular collections by Gloria or Una, or sometimes other women who stopped by. Luce knew only a few of the plants in there. Mullein, red clover, peppermint, yarrow.

It’s an abortifacient garden.

I know, Luce said.

But that’s not what we’d ever call it to other people, Gloria said. You know not to use that word, right? Again, Luce nodded. And you know not to say what it’s for—you can’t say the word abortion or birth control. Or anything about it being a place to let women help themselves, decide when to have babies.

I know. So what.

So that’s the whole point. That’s the thing about witches. It scares people to think about women taking control of their own lives.

Gramms hocked a loogie and spit it into a cup beside her, then cracked another nut.

“That man who was threatening my mom,” Luce said. Gramms nodded, tilted her recliner back a little. “I just talked to him. Turns out Una convinced him to leave us alone. Paid him to leave us alone.”

“That was nice of her.”

“No, no, listen. She didn’t tell me. She’s been saying he’s the person we should be worried about.”

Gramms winced, changing position in her chair as her arm unfurled, and she squeezed Luce’s hand. “Now why would knuckleheaded Una do a thing like that?” Gramms asked.

“I was hoping you could tell me.”

Her hand was rough, with salt and flecks of peanut shells stuck to her palm as she continued to squeeze Luce’s hand, considering. The baseball crowd let out a quiet, triumphant roar. “I sure don’t know,” Gramms said quietly. She gathered another handful of nuts, nodding at the TV as she spoke, though to Luce her eyes seemed unfocused. “Una cares deeply about the Red Grove, and all the people in it. She feels responsible for all of us, you know. But I will tell you that sometimes her choices are a goddamned mystery to me.”

Luce threw her head back against the headrest, looked up at the ceiling. Spiderwebs in the corners, water stains from long-ago leaks. There must be a reason Una had chosen not to tell her—some other information about her mother’s whereabouts that was still secret, something Una was working on behind the scenes and would tell Luce about as soon as she could. She had to tamp down the queasiness, it was the only way forward. Living among the trees meant trusting the network, even if it was so deep you couldn’t see it.

“Well, I’m thoroughly bent out of shape,” Gramms said, “and I can’t figure why all this is happening. I want to help you, Goose, and I want to dump a bucket of sheep’s feet on Una’s head so they can kick some sense into her. I wonder how much you know about the history of the Red Grove.”

“I don’t want a history lesson, Gramms.”

“I thought you wanted information about your mother,” she said, snapping a peanut shell in two.

“I know the history,” Luce said, her voice tentative. Newcomers often asked questions while they walked in the dark, and she prided herself on being a thorough repository of Red Grove lore.

Gramms threw nuts into her mouth, worked her jaw, lips parted. “There’s a difference between history and story,” she said.

“I know that.”

“Good. So did your mother. She wasn’t afraid to differentiate the two. And I believe she started to figure out that the history might, uh, differ from some of the stories.”

Luce gnawed her lip, considering, but it didn’t seem right. If there was more to the Tamsen Nightingale story, they’d know about it.

“Now I swear to God I don’t know where she is, but I will tell you this much. She wasn’t all in on the Red Grove. That’s no news. She didn’t like the stories people told here, about what the Red Grove should become, about what it had been in the past, about you.”

“Me?”

“Those big plans everyone has for you, missy,” Gramms said. “It’s no secret you’re probably the one Una will train to take over.” The way Gramms said it didn’t fill Luce with the kind of bashful pride she’d felt the few times someone had mentioned it before. “I do know that your mama has been worried for you—that sometimes being here can make people a little bit, how do I say it, too focused on what’s scary about the world out there.”

“It’s scary because it’s accurate,” Luce said quickly, and she sounded defensive, she knew, but she couldn’t help it. “Did you know that for Native American women, four out of five experience violence? And that they are murdered at ten times the national average?”

“You’re not wrong, Goose.”

“So not talking about it doesn’t make it go away. It makes us part of the problem. There’s honestly no gray area here.”

“Kid, you want to know what I’ll remember best from my whole life? The last thing I’ll think about when I die? It was one night when I was a young woman and thought I was in love, doesn’t matter with who. We were in San Francisco. After dinner, we started walking, and she pulled a bottle of rum from her jacket, and we kept walking all through the city, sipping that bottle and laughing our heads off, talking, and it got later and later, and we kept walking, we went through every neighborhood in the whole goddamned city, drunk and hysterical and kissing—we walked the entire night. It wasn’t very safe, and certainly something could have happened, but it didn’t. That’s the thing. Usually it doesn’t. The world is big and fun. There was risk in it, and the risk was part of what made it feel so good.” She coughed, wet and meaty. “Goose, I think you’re gonna want to understand what about this place is history and what is a story. I think it’ll help you find your mama.” There was worry across her forehead, her thin eyebrows. Tenderness there, too.

“How?” Luce said, twisting a peanut in her fingers until it snapped open, sharp against her skin. “It sounds like you’re not telling me something.”

“I wish to hell I knew where your mother was,” Gramms said. “But I have a bad feeling that it’s gonna have to be you who figures it out.”

“You mean because I’m her daughter?” Luce asked.

Gramms raised her eyebrows at her. “No, no. That’s bullshit. Bloodlines are a story that keeps the powerful people in charge. Screw bloodlines. It’s cronyism. We don’t pick who we’re born to.” A man in a bird costume, standing on top of a dugout, was using a wing to spank himself. Gramms split open another shell. Hoots of laughter drifted out from the radio.

“I thought you were going to tell me I had her gifts.”

“Of course not.”

“So you don’t think I have her gifts?”

“How should I know?”

Luce gnawed on the outside of a peanut, taking in the salt and chewing the stringy tendrils of shells. Of all the people she’d ever met, Gramms seemed the least impressed by her mother. She loved her, teased her, winked at her even, but somehow didn’t seem to fall for the spell she cast on so many others.

“Goose, there are a lot of kinds of inheritance,” she said. “Decide what you want to inherit from your mother and take it. And then leave the rest behind.”

What did she want to inherit from her mother? She’d spent so much of her life trying to figure out what of her came from Gloria and what came from Gem, but mostly the Gloria parts just felt like the bad parts. The parts she’d chosen to leave behind.

Luce was five, her hand tight around her mother’s hand. They were getting off a packed train in the city. It was unusual that she was with her mom. Nearly all her young memories were with Gem, sturdy and safe Gem, slicing her apples, gluing googly eyes onto a toilet paper roll to make a snake.

But in this memory, Luce, hip-high, supposed to have a special day with her mother, had the sudden, choking fear that they were about to get separated. She was sure the train doors would close on their hands and she would be swept away from her in this sea of other huge bodies. She squeezed her mother’s hand as hard as she could, a terror spiking through her body like a fever. Her mother looked down at her sharply, but then started moving them toward the door. Excuse me, she heard her mother say to the world of strangers above, Luce’s fingers clawing into her mother’s hand, squeezing, nearly quivering with force, clenching her teeth together for added strength to channel into the bond, red rover red rover, shaking, kids on the playground unable to run through their clenched hands, send Luce-the-goose rightover, imagining herself unable to break their hands, Luce’s hands squeezing tighter than they ever had, tethered.

When they reached the train’s door, Luce gave one final squeeze to her mother’s hand as hard as she possibly could.

Ow, Gloria said, her mouth twisting around the words. It wasn’t a face Luce had seen before. The expression terrified her, pinging one nerve and then another, an eel of fear through her body that made her grip her mother’s hand even tighter, and just as quickly, her mother, pained, tried to fling off her hand. But Luce was clinging too tightly for it to drop easily. Gloria had to work for it. She stilled their forward momentum and shook her wrist. She flung it.

They were disconnected.

And, separated, Gloria stepped off the train. Luce froze, mashed against ten thousand giants and suffocating beneath their rolls of fat. A person slid into the space where her mother had been. Loud bells chimed. The doors began to shut.

Her mother was leaving her behind.

Warm liquid ran down her leg, a giant’s elbow smashed into her forehead. Nobody saw her there, nobody noticed the little shadow girl, all alone, lost in the woods, locked out on the balcony in the night, the end.

But then, for whatever reason, the train’s sealed doors pulled apart. A bell rang from somewhere high. And there, suddenly, was Gloria lurching in past the doors, her big hands grabbing Luce by the shoulder and pulling her toward the door. Luce bounced between the purses and scratchy coats and got a jolt of elbow in the back of her head, but none of it mattered. Gloria had pulled her off the train.

Luce pressed her face against her mother’s body, that warm animal smell, that softness in the middle of her giantess. She turned her face to the side to smell her mother’s arm, pressed her lips against it, kissed, and then bit down.

Her teeth clamped. Not gently. She braced her neck, readied for her mother to push her forehead and get her off, to hook her fingers in Luce’s mouth and, like a caught fish, toss. But after the initial flinch, her mother didn’t move. Luce bit down harder. Her eyes and nose were leaking. Still, her mother did not move. The train doors closed, and she heard the rumble of the big cars as they began sliding into their future. People jostled around them, a rushing river, but they remained. Luce’s teeth stayed sunk. She ground down with her front teeth, and Gloria started but didn’t move, and finally Luce couldn’t breathe for all the tears and snot blocking her nose. She unclamped. Two deep crescent moons ran along Gloria’s arm.

Okay then, Gloria said, looking down at Luce. Her eyes were wet, too. A mother and daughter can only be connected for so long. It was true of mountain lions. Once the cubs were grown enough, two years old, enough to fend for themselves, the mother started to get annoyed with them. There was conflict. And then one day the mother leaves, and they never see each other again.

The man-bird was dancing with a woman in the front row, rubbing his tail feathers up and down her legs. Gramms clicked the TV off. There were peanut shell flakes all around her mouth, wet on her tongue as she spoke. “I’m going to try to help you figure out what the shit is going on. I’m slow as a turtle but mean as a snake when I need to be. But listen: you need to go to bed.” Luce started to protest—too much to do—but Gramms cut her off. “No ifs, ands, or buts. Go home and go to sleep. Things’ll make more sense in the morning. I’m old, so you have to do what I say. Meanwhile, do you have a cigarette?”

The hill was steep and the moaning sonorous as the women helped Rabbit climb to the cabin, resting against the enormous trunks of redwoods when the labor pains came. Rabbit, red-faced, cheeks burning, and her companion were ushered inside, given water to drink and seats upon which to rest. Her companion hadn’t stopped talking, narrating their journey to this valley, how Hank Monk had whispered to them about this hidden place where women could be safe, how they knew they had no choice.

Wild blackberries that grew in the forest clearings hung heavy with fruit, and the children took Hank Monk’s daughter out to gather the berries while the women rested. Ines brought Rabbit a steaming mug, fragments of herbs floating on the surface, and as she straightened to drink, her enormous belly pressed against the fabric of her cloak. “You undertook a long journey for someone in such delicate condition,” Ines said from beside the fire.

“Didn’t have a choice, did we?” Rabbit’s companion said. “We heardthere are women here with some special powers.” She widened her eyes, nodding.

“We have no midwives here,” Tamsen said.

“I want you to get rid of it,” Rabbit said. It was the first time she’d spoken. There was a directness in her tone so unlike her companion, shadows under her eyes and a waxiness coating her cheeks and forehead. None of the women responded right away, but each of them eyed the belly, much too far to take it back, and imagined what she might want them to do after the baby arrived, an act none of them were willing to undertake. Would they be the ones who would take this unwanted baby, did they have it in them, could these women who’d fled to this place have enough inside them yet to withstand the heft of that new weight?

As afternoon turned into night, the forest rose up, hollering alongside Rabbit’s hollering and moaning. The coyotes cried, one set of yips awakening the next in a chorus that circled the cabin, as if they could smell the precipice of life and death inside and yearned for it. The women had clean blankets on the bed, they boiled water, lit candles. Between contractions, Rabbit, wide-eyed with terror, was walking up and back the length of the room, a woman supporting her on each side.

She stopped when she was right in front of Tamsen, gripping Tamsen’s forearms with a strength Tamsen had felt only in the maw of the mountain lion, and said, “Someone is coming.” A pain caused her to double over again, hands on knees, moaning and shaking. The women helped her to the bed. Tamsen swallowed the strange bile rising in her throat; surely she was talking about the baby, that’s who was coming, that’s what she’d meant.

Rabbit’s labors continued through the night, women coaxing her on with words of love or strength or wisdom, Rabbit’s moans and tears and cries filling the cabin as the moon rose and stars shone, as the night animals prowled and their prey fled, as coyotes howled very close.

Just before the sun rose, Rabbit, exhausted and covered in sweat, sat up, blinking around the room at the gathered women. Something else was in her face, a ferocious clench of her jaw that alarmed Tamsen, butshe looked over to Ines, who was nodding at Rabbit, yes, that was good, she was almost there. Rabbit beckoned Tamsen over again, clutched at her clothes, and pulled her face in close, sour, iron, wild. “He will come back,” Rabbit said, barely audible though their faces were nearly pressed together. “He is looking for you.”

“Who will?” Tamsen asked, matching Rabbit’s hush, that acid rising again. “The man who did this to you? He won’t find you here.”

“He is still searching for you,” Rabbit said, her pupils huge and locked. A wild panic rose in Tamsen’s gut, her throat, but she could not let it show—there was no way Rabbit could know about her husband and his brothers from so long ago. She had not let anyone in on the steady fear that her husband was hunting her; she would not start.

Rabbit yelled out, her fingers digging into Tamsen’s shoulders. And then, bringing her mouth close to Tamsen’s ear again, she whispered that she was hearing things here, things she’d never heard. Whispering from the trees.

“Watch for him,” she said, and then put a hand on her belly. “I didn’t mean it. Don’t get rid of her.” And like tufts of steam rising from a kettle, Tamsen saw her sisters Margaret and Minnie, the outlines of their faces and bodies, as if they were hovering in the room, both curled in on themselves like sleeping cats.

The women said the baby would soon be there. Back on the bed, Rabbit pushed and screamed and pushed and wept and bore down, as taut as a bowstring, sweating, and hours passed, blood, shit, water, and then, finally, she was with them. A baby girl.

Tamsen cut her cord and was wiping the baby off when Ines shouted. Another baby’s head had crowned. Rabbit swore and cried and pleaded, and that baby came fast, a new slippery creature in Ines’s hands. Another girl. Rabbit lay flat on her back, breathing shallow and fast, no longer screaming. There was blood everywhere.

Tamsen and Ines held the slippery bodies, careful not to drop them, and each of them, too, had tears in their eyes, holding this kind of unexpected miracle. It was their doubleness that astonished Tamsen, theiridenticalness, the way they came into the world with a sister already in tow, each whole in and of themselves and also more by their proximity to each other.

They brought the babies to Rabbit, but her eyes were closed. They nudged her to wake, to hold the new babies, but she didn’t budge. They’d wait, give her a moment to rest. The babies were small and pink and squished, and Tamsen couldn’t imagine how creatures so tiny survived in the world.

Rabbit was still bleeding. They tried to wake her so they could clean her, help her, but she would not wake. She would not wake. Though her cheeks had a flush from exertion, the rest of her face was pale. Her companion crouched beside her, squeezing Rabbit’s hand, stroking her forehead. But Rabbit was somewhere else.

Another woman who still had milk took the babies. Tamsen could no longer hear the coyotes outside, but she was sure there were animals close by, animals looking for blood. Hank Monk fell to his knees when he saw his sister, and though he would later deny it, his eye filled with tears.

While the women were busy holding the babies, tending to Rabbit, working to stop the bleeding, mixing roots and plants with shaking hands, Tamsen slipped out the door with a bundle wrapped in her arms. Dawn had broken, and the new day’s light was thin beneath the fog that settled on these trees, tallest she’d ever seen. She climbed farther up the hill, toward the cave where she’d encountered the mountain lion and cubs. Once she was near, she unwrapped the bundle in her arms. Inside was the bloody placenta. She tossed it in the direction of the lions. An offering for the hunger of wild things.

Rabbit did not wake later that morning, or in the afternoon. The blood had soaked many blankets, and the color of her skin became closer to the color of fog. She did not wake in the evening. The babies, squirming grubs, slept and cried and ate from the breasts of the woman who’d taken them.

Through the following night, Hank Monk sat vigil in the corner of the room while the women checked on Rabbit, wet her dry lips with water, placed crushed herbs on her body to wake her organs, to promote circulation. But Ines did not know where to put the herbs to stop a bleeding that came from deep inside. Nobody knew how to help.

Tamsen slipped outside in the deepest part of the night, searching for flashes of eyes, remembering Minnie and Margaret as babies. She could not recall their scent, not exactly, but she remembered the spastic kick of their fat legs, the gummed smiles. She imagined her sisters, their bones out here in the wild, and she imagined them, too, as who they were before they died, bodies whole and strong, flying in the sky with their long dresses whipping behind them. She imagined them, and then it was as if they were right there, above Tamsen; there they were.

That night, Rabbit died. It was no surprise.

When light cracked through the dark sky the next morning, Ines awoke and saw Tamsen sitting in a chair by the door, her dark silhouette against the just-lightening sky. “Hank Monk left,” Tamsen said, and Ines nodded, yawning. “And has left us his daughter to help with the babies.”

“That wasn’t part of the bargain,” Ines said, sitting straight up.

Tamsen handed Ines a note from Hank Monk. “If my girl and these babies have to grow up as women in this world, they should be your kind of women.”

“What will we do with the babies?” Ines asked.

“They are our daughters,” Tamsen said. “Margaret and Minnie.”

“But we don’t know what kind of people they really come from,” Ines said.

“Bloodlines only matter to men because they don’t make life,” Tamsen said. “They do not matter to us. The babies will choose what they want to inherit.”

The rains came that winter, and then the drought arrived with the summer, a fall of great abundance, the winter of toads, spring’s fern, summer, winter, summer. Tamsen could feel the shifting pressure systems in her knuckles and knees, the passing years in her back, but still she had the strength of the forest.

Tamsen Nightingale knew that Hank Monk would keep his promise and threaten or mislead or hurt any herd of men who would encroach upon the women’s refuge. They wrapped the occasional tree along the boundary of the valley with yarn they’d dyed red with their own blood, a signal to Hank Monk that all within the boundary should remain protected. There were a few among them who could fight if the situation arose, but most of the women’s strengths were elsewhere, growing plants or cooking or teaching or understanding animals or hunting or tending to injuries and illness or listening or telling stories or building shelters or mending traps or offering extra love to the brokenhearted or envisioning the longevity of their refuge.

The twins, Margaret and Minnie, slept across each other’s bodies at night, their limbs forming branches that crossed and curved around each other, and as they grew, it did not become easier to distinguish them. They would often shuffle out of bed together very early in the morning and come to stand beside Tamsen, who was the first awake. They would tell her, one at a time, of the dreams they’d had the night before, always identical. The stories rose the hair on Tamsen’s arms as she listened quietly, nodding, building the fire or kneading bread.

“I was in a cave full of rabbits,” one would say.

“Little baby pink rabbits, no hair yet,” the other would say.

“And my head was hurting, and I needed to go find my sissy.”

“I needed to search in the snow for my sissy,” the other would say, and Tamsen would pat their heads, sit them down with bread, and try not to be flooded by fear but instead by wonder. “And then a man came here, and he was looking for you,” one said. Tamsen listened, and the air grew sharp and prickled. She did not tell this story to the other women, wondering if, perhaps, the girls were having a regular dream, the kind most children dreamed, and also knowing that they weren’t.

One of the women had brought with her a fiddle, which she played some evenings, and she was soon joined by another woman who could play theflute. Some nights the women built a fire outside and listened to the music and the children danced themselves tired, then slept against each other or the closest woman. And then one night the musicians played outside without the light of a fire, using the moonlight to help guide their hands, and this time instead of just the children being roused by the sounds, it was the women whose bodies started moving, two at first, and then pulling others out of the cabin or off their seats on the ground to join, the darkness seeming to cover shyness or apprehension, an erasure for the excuse of talent or knowing the steps or rhythm, opening instead into more and more bodies moving together to the strings and wind, and the treetops hundreds of feet overhead swaying too, owls calling and bats swooping, and the glimpse of teeth or a darkened open mouth in a smile as a face whirled by, the women dancing alone or with one another, spinning and dipping, leading, and two of them she’d seen linger when their hands brushed, pressing closer and closer, the children gripping one another and flinging each other into the darkness, a kind of hysteria born of their mothers’ play. Even Tamsen was smiling, clapping along, grabbed eventually by Ines, who twisted and spun, both of them stomping and shuffling, an energy coursing through them. Tamsen, watching the rest of them move through the darkness, thought she’d never seen so much joy in her life, and then, revising that, thought that maybe she’d never felt so much, either.