Nahoonkara Page 4

We each have two pairs of clothes, Uncle Frank and Uncle Robert’s overalls included. So, I go about gathering the clothing worn the previous week, carrying them all in my arms, stopping in the middle of the stairway. I don’t know why I like it there so much, but I stop every time I go up or down. Stop and feel the way in which the darkness in the narrow stairway intensifies the sounds of the house. The scraping and sloshing of Mother’s kitchen rags against the scrub board. The deep sigh Uncle Robert makes after finishing his cup of coffee. Uncle Frank’s spitting into his hand and rubbing down the cowlick in the vain hope it might actually keep. In the stairway, here, at the center of the house, it’s as if I can be in all places at once, and the sound takes me there.

  I make any excuse I can to go outside. Help Uncle Robert roll the beer barrels through the snow into the tavern. Help Uncle Frank in the shed with whatever new idea he has to make things work better. Bring in more water for the wash. As it turns out, I’m chopping wood out back most of the morning, and I’m happy to do it because I lose myself in the cycle of each crack of the axe blade. The snow still falls, but the tinkling sound is gone. Outside, the hush silences the bustling within the house, even muffling Uncle Frank’s tinkering in the shed. Perhaps that’s why I don’t hear Father’s approach, why the whine of the front door, the groan of the floorboards escape me.

  I drop the last pile of logs in the tavern’s woodhouse, and Uncle Robert’s grumbling breaks the silence. If lunch is not ready at noon, he gets a headache that won’t leave him until the next day. So, I enter through the back door and make my way to the kitchen through the living room. I almost don’t hear the barbed voice pulling up memory like a catfish, the dark whisper that slips beneath the cookie room door. I call it the cookie room because Mother stores the cookies in there at Christmas time, but it’s really just a big closet. At first, I don’t recognize the voice. I can’t make out the words, though I feel the weight of its swollen mouth, the curled force of its tongue.

  I step closer until I stand, frozen, before the door. For a moment, the child who is me thinks that it’s Santa, for every year just before Christmas, Mother and Santa have conversations in the locked living room before they let the children in to find the cookies and to see Santa’s boots disappear through the back door. But as soon as the thought enters my mind, it is gone.

  I wonder why she doesn’t say anything. I hear her in the silence smothered by his sour breath. I hear her in the body sinking beneath the earth spilling from his mouth. I reach for the door handle but my hand is stopped by the crooked moan within. My mouth is dry, drier than the tasteless ash of his, the ash that deadens my mother’s own moist lips. Again a moan like laughter, but not. I steel myself for the song of his presence, for the silence of it and the emptiness.

  I open the door.

  At night as Catherine curls herself against me, I kick away the thoughts of Mother’s face pressed against the closet wall, the hollowness of eyes choked by acceptance. I slap at the slanted image of my father drowned in a need I can only guess at. His bare and hairy legs trembling and spent.

  Mother put her finger to her lips, but there’s no need. I won’t say a thing. I wrap my arms about Catherine, hold her tight. I whisper to her as she sleeps. A voice as far from ashes as I can find. I tell her that the snow falling outside is an incantation, a magic that keeps us whole. I tell her that sometimes we step outside that magic, and we don’t even know it. And I vow to her if she ever steps outside of it, I will always guide her home.

  MAD MEG

  Narrator | Colorado

  Kids too short to hold a drill, or men too old to pound one, carried the rock to a pine bucket that traveled up the airshaft connecting the upper and lower drifts. The better driller you were, the lower the drift you got, the better chance to hit a vein and maybe pocket a little for yourself. With only two drifts off the main tunnel, the “Meg” was a young mine, and it needed young miners to make the twenty minute hike up the face of La Nana just to begin work there. Though, soon the miners built themselves cabins to save the trouble of making the hike, leaving the sum total of their energy for the mine.

  The drill-turners were almost always children, boys who came west with their fathers lusting for the ten to forty dollars a day they could make in the mines. Often, the drillers could barely make out the outline of the drill-turner’s tiny hand holding the bit. So they placed candles at chest height along the rock, and the wax dripped onto the black caps on the boys’ heads but that was better than having the wax drip into their eyes. The placement of the candles, the distance of a man’s outstretched hands, was crucial, partly based on the need to best light the driller’s swing area, but mainly because it made it easy for the men to relight their pipes with a simple lean and nod of the head.

  The candle told the driller how much room he had to swing his hammer, to drive it home on the bit. Its light defined his world, his swing area, and that space was all the world he needed. For, if a driller’s hand fell outside of that world, if he hit another man with his hammer, he was moved to clean up duty in the main tunnel. Though the “main” was closest to the sunlight, to the surface, it was the worst punishment he could receive because there most of the ore had been cleared away.

  Will Markey never received that punishment. It was Will who first called the mine “Mad Meg” after the first shaft collapsed. In the morning, Will worked the lower drifts, his goose-bone pipe hanging from his mouth. By afternoon, having had his fill of the lower shafts, he made his way up through the main, picking up the ore that fell from his two mules along the way.

  By evening, Will Markey stayed outside. Each day he told the men it was because he was needed to consult with Henry, which was often the case. But more often it was because the cold damp of the mine, the constant fifty-five degrees, made his bones ache. With the sixth sense miners have when it comes to weakness in rocks or in humans, they joked that Will was older than the mountain, with as many cracks and precipices, and sometimes, by the end of the day, he wondered if they were right.

  Henry knew rocks, but he’d come to realize he didn’t know as much as he’d thought about mining. Everything he learned in that first year, he learned from Will Markey.

  Will Markey was the reason Henry didn’t think of quicksilver poisoning when the horses and mules began to die. It was Will who’d supervised the two tow-haired boys who drove first the mules and then the horses through the ore, forcing them to stir up the mixture with their hooves. Six months after they began taking ore from the mine and extracting it, the mules died. The horses followed two months later, and three more months after that the two boys grew sick and were taken to Denver. What caused Henry even more trouble was that Markey didn’t seem to be physically affected by the extraction process. Will Markey stood alongside those boys every step of the way. In fact, when the boys first showed signs of the sickness, he even took over for them. Yet, somehow, he’d survived. Henry couldn’t figure out the problem because it had no logical reasoning behind its answer. What saved Will Markey was the fact that he never took that goose-bone pipe out of his mouth. With all the tobacco he was inhaling, he hadn’t had the chance to take the quicksilver into his lungs—either that, or the strange alchemy of the mixture nullified the quicksilver’s poisons. Will Markey suggested the latter explanation, but Henry couldn’t understand such things.

  That’s why when the second shaft collapsed at the end of that first year Henry didn’t understand that the best thing to do would be to close it down. Instead, he spent days plumbing its depths, searching for fault lines, for signs of future instability. He even brought specialists in from Leadville, who guaranteed him that the shaft would hold. He didn’t understand that the earth treasured her mysteries, kept her inscrutable parts secreted in darkness; he didn’t understand that the second shaft ran straight into the heart of the mountain, and that the mountain would fight to protect that heart.

  THE FLIGHT OF THE HAWK

  Meg | Wisconsin

  Everyone thought K
illian would die after the roof beam from One-Eared Louie’s farm fell on him, but he didn’t. He stepped to the side at the last moment. So, instead of crushing his skull, the beam just gave it a good whack. Probably not much harder than some I’ve given him. Even still, the doctor didn’t give Killian much of a chance. So, I put Catherine in bed with the other boys. Let Killian sleep alone that week. But it didn’t matter. Each morning I found her back with him.

  I often wondered if it was Catherine’s simple desire to lie next to her oldest brother, as she’d always done, that had made the difference and saved him. Either that or he’d inherited my own stubborn will.

  What I refused to think, no matter how often it worked its way into my mind, was that some compact had been reached between my oldest and youngest, a bargain made in their shared dream, a smaller life offered up to the other; or, perhaps, knowing they could not both survive, their two spirits had joined. For the day after Killian awoke from his coma, Catherine came down with a sore throat, followed by headache and fever. At first I didn’t think anything of it. Having just escaped one tragedy, it was impossible to conceive of another. I assumed she had a cold or, at worst, the flu. Even Doctor Apfelbeck was hesitant to give voice to the growing suspicion inside him.

  Killian first mentioned the nature of her illness to me, and the fact that she would die. Since waking from his coma, he’d taken to rising even earlier than usual and walking along the river before dawn. I could see him out there sometimes beyond the elms, watching the hawks circling, searching for their first meal of the day. I’d call him to come in, but he wouldn’t listen. And I got to wondering if the beam had made him deaf and dumb.

  “Catherine’s got polio,” he’d said. “She’s going to die at the end of the month.”

  I slapped him. For that I can never forgive myself.

  Four days later, she lost movement in her right leg and was beginning to have trouble breathing. We brought the doctor in, but besides giving a name to what we already knew, he could do little. Killian stayed with his sister throughout the day, playing games with her until she grew tired, and I watched over her throughout the night. Some evenings, Frank and Robert stepped in, sitting with Catherine, Robert playing his accordion, making up songs that made her smile, while Frank told his stories.

  “When the whale swallowed me, I thought I was dead for sure,” Frank would say, sitting on the wood stool beside the bed.

  At first I didn’t want him filling her with fancies. Why tell lies to a suffering child? But then I saw the power of those stories, the way Catherine looked at him, as if she’d shut out the rest of the world, even me. It’s hard for a mother to feel that she’s not part of her child’s world, but in this case, I was happy for it.

  He’d sit beside her like that telling his stories for hours as I looked on. Even at three years old, Catherine knew what he was doing. But she didn’t mind; she loved the stories. And no matter how much he mixed them up, they all ended the same. “I learned one thing while trapped in the darkness,” he would lean in close, whispering in her ear. “You’ve got to believe in something. That’s what makes the world magic. I always believed I would escape and sure enough I did.”

  On the eighth day, Frank leaned in close to repeat the words Catherine had learned to recite herself, but this time the little girl turned to him. “I’m going to die tomorrow,” she said in between breaths. “I believe it. Does that make it magic?”

  Only the odd slant of Frank’s smile gave away his surprise. He hadn’t meant for her to take his words that way. At first, he didn’t know how to respond. Neither did I. A mother should never hear those words from her child’s lips.

  I think Frank had seen death as the dark belly from which Catherine had to be delivered, that’s why he’d told her the stories, or maybe that’s what I wanted to believe, the reason I sat in the corner and listened. She’d seen more clearly. She’d understood that it was this world that was the dark one, the shadow, and her belief would carry her from it.

  I didn’t care. I would not lose her from any world. I called for the doctor, hitched the team for the trip to Milwaukee. They had a hospital there. But when everything was ready, when I’d heated the rocks for the sleigh and brought the furs to bundle Catherine in, she stopped me with one look from her wide, brown eyes. I fell to the floor beside the bed, covering my ears.

  “I don’t want to go to the hospital,” she’d said, her words so soft that I prayed I’d imagined them. “I want to die here.”

  I shut the door to the room then. Climbed in bed with her and laid her head in the crook of my arm, wrapping the blankets about us. I heard myself talking to her all the while, knowing even then, the purpose of the talk was to calm me.

  “Why do people assume adults are stronger than children?” I asked her.

  She smiled.

  “Physical strength is nothing, is it?” I asked.

  She said nothing. She didn’t need to.

  I don’t know how long I sat there before Killian opened the door, staring at the both of us in bed, a look of wonder upon his face.

  “What is it?” I asked him.

  “A great bird,” he said. “A hawk, I think. But it’s shimmering.” He held a hand out as if to touch it. “It’s whispering something to you,” he said. Then, he dropped his hand to his side and turned and ran through the door, out into the yard, and down the line of elms.

  I sat up in the bed, willing myself to move further, but found I could not. How often since I’ve wished I could have felt the fragile grace of her bird breath upon my skin. How different things might have been if I’d have heard her words or even the twitter of her voice in my ear. How, perhaps, I could have been there for Killian and the other boys if I’d just felt her downy arms about me once more.

  THE TREE OF LIFE

  Killian | Colorado

  Elizabeth presses her legs together and clenches her teeth, digs her heels into the bed sheets until I think Henry Jr. will have to cut his way out if he wants to see the world.

  “Take a leg and hold it,” Jess Carter says, taking a hold of one of Elizabeth’s legs herself. “And don’t let her close them. This baby’s coming.”

  Jess Carter doesn’t live in Seven Falls. She’s been acting as midwife around the county for several years now, and came all the way from Montezuma to help Elizabeth birth the baby.

  “I want you to start pushing,” Jess says, nodding for me to put a warm cloth on Elizabeth’s forehead. “The baby’s dropped. It’s time.” Elizabeth gazes at her as if from far away, her eyes wild like she’s lost in a snowdrift and doesn’t know which way to dig. Jess gives me a look that asks if she can count on me. And I swear her red hair looks like it bursts into flame.

  Elizabeth props herself up on her hands and pushes. And though the spring snow still covers the ground out back, sweat beads her forehead. “I can’t do it!” She screams even as she pushes harder. “It’s tearing me apart!”

  “I can see the head,” I shout, surprised. “The hair’s black!”

  Elizabeth arches her back, as she lets out a long, low, animal groan.

  “He’s crowning, Elizabeth,” Jess says, taking a clean towel in her hands to receive the baby.

  The head slowly forces its way, blood and a yellowish liquid squirting out alongside it, forced by the pressure. The face is blue, scrunched tight against the light of the new world. As it’s emerging, the head turns as if taking in its surroundings, though the eyes are still closed. Then, like a great stone set in place, the head stops.

  Jess gives me that look again, this time not asking but demanding I be ready, then says to Elizabeth, “You’re going to need to push even harder now.”

  Elizabeth shoots her a puzzled look.

  “Are you listening to me, Elizabeth,” Jess goes on in the same sure tone. “The baby is stuck. Now I want you to push again, and I want you to push as hard as you can, as if everything else was just a warm up.”

  Elizabeth nods her head, takes a deep breath
then pushes, screaming this time so that the whole town must hear her. But the baby’s head remains where it is. Eyes shut. Skin going purple.

  Downstairs, the pine floorboards creak under Henry’s steps. An owl hoots outside the bedroom window, and I wonder if it’s a good omen or a bad one. I take in the room as if I’d never seen it before: the dark oak desk and dresser Henry bought in Denver, the lace curtains that were a wedding gift from Pete Myers, the row of stone jars beneath the window, jars in which Elizabeth says she keeps parts of herself (jars in which I’m afraid to look, not knowing exactly what she means), the Ute blanket hanging on the wall that Henry traded for when a nomad family passed through last fall, and the brass bed with its new satin sheets, sheets Elizabeth now lies upon, sheets she told Henry not to put on before the birth. But Henry, who has very few requirements, insists on fresh satin sheets every day, regardless of what happens to them.

  “Now push!” Jess shouts and Elizabeth responds.

  The baby’s face remains unchanged.

  “Killian,” Jess shouts. “It’s time!” And without a word or even understanding what I’m doing I follow the midwife’s actions, helping her as she turns Elizabeth over onto all fours, the baby’s head now sticking out the back, like some dark and stone-faced twin. And then Jess goes to work, sticking one hand up the swollen opening, in alongside the baby, and the other hand up Elizabeth’s other hole, both hands working in unison, delicately pushing on the baby, rotating it, then putting pressure again, working the baby loose. “Push, Elizabeth!”

  I no longer know what it is that the midwife pulls from her body.

  “Get the moss to stem the bleeding,” Jess shouts to me, and I leap across the room and back, carrying two handfuls. She is already slicing through the cord with a knife I hadn’t seen, and when she is done, she hands me the baby, exchanging it for the moss. “Cover it and take it outside,” she says. “Quickly! The shock of cold air will help it to breathe.” Forgetting that Jess set aside clean blankets, I tear the Ute blanket from the wall and run down the stairs.