History of Wolves(62)

“Listen,” she told me. And she went through it all again from the very beginning. The van stolen from her parents’ garage in the middle of the night, the perilous winter drive to her uncle’s abandoned fishing cabin, the big new bunkhouse they’d built the first spring, the relief of summer, and summer again, the commune charter they’d copied in calligraphy on parchment and hung over the door—but then set on fire when everything fell apart six years in. “It was pretty bad at the end, sure. Everybody fighting everyone else, everyone jealous and getting confused about the kids. What to do with you guys. But not all the parts were bad, not most of the time. We had good ideas, good plans. We wanted kinship, not obligations.” She paused. “We believed there should be more than the nuclear family. We really thought we could see something better—”

She glanced at my sleeping dad, his cheek smashed against his shoulder.

She went on: “We really thought we could do more with the world—”

I looked down at her from my stool and waited.

“But then everyone took off, and we started over with just you.”





17


P.S. THE SEQUOIAS ARE MORE IMPRESSIVE THAN THE OTHER REDWOODS, IN CASE YOU EVER GET OUT TO CALIFORNIA. There’s a difference just so you know. The coastal redwoods grow (obviously) on the coast and the sequoias are in the mountains. You can drive straight through a sequoia, right? That’s one of the things people do. Plus the sequoias are older. I thought you’d appreciate knowing the difference. I used to go camping in the Sierra Nevada with my dad, and we’d eat canned soup and sleep in this tiny two-man tent he had from the army. It was great. Those trees really do seem permanent, they’re so big. We stayed for weeks, never washed our hair, drank Tang. The woods look like The Time of Dinosaurs or something. Of course, things always seem more impressive when you’re a little kid. That’s one of the reasons I don’t really want to go back. I mean, who wants to ruin one of the things you like thinking about most? Who gives that up on purpose?

Thank goodness for the back of the card but now I’m really out of room.

Bye again,

Mr. G.





18


THE SUMMER PASSED QUICKLY AFTER THE GARDNERS LEFT. Or, not quickly but in fragments. It was one of the hottest summers in a while. It was so hot some nights in July that I soaked my T-shirt in lake water before going to sleep. I wrung it out in the woods and wore it dripping through the dark house and up my ladder. Mornings, the sun coaxed steam off the lake and it was too humid in the afternoons to do anything at all. I remember waiting out the worst hours in some flickering patch of shade beneath the pines, brushing away flies with a fir branch, searching for ticks on the dogs—all four—who lay collapsed around me in the dust. Working my fingers through Abe’s thick halfhusky fur, I could feel each of his ribs in turn, convulsing as he panted. I could feel the way the bones separated and contracted again, making room for more oxygen. I could feel him scooching away, patiently, from the unfamiliar heaviness of my hand.

I remember bouncing one humid evening on the back of my dad’s ATV to the police station in Whitewood, where they gave me a Coke poured so fast into a Styrofoam cup it overflowed on the table. This was a few days after an officer showed up at the bottom of the sumac trail and spoke with my dad over the hood of his black and white car. At the police station, they handed me a roll of brown paper towels to wipe the spilled Coke. They offered to get me another can, but I shook my head and sucked the froth from the top. Someone turned on a fan that blew warm air into my face, and as it dried out my nose and eyes, I remember wondering if this was where Lily had come. If this was where she’d sat last spring and had a Coke and said her piece against Mr. Grierson.

I never knew for sure.

I spent hours in that one little room that summer, in a green plastic lawn chair, answering questions from different people in uniforms and suits. I no longer remember who asked what, or when, or in what order. I know I drank lots of warm Coke. I chewed lots of lips off the smallish Styrofoam cups meant for coffee. I sprinkled the chewed white bits across the table, like clumpy snow, and eventually I learned to ask for the one cushioned folding chair they had, which was kept behind the front desk. By late July, I’d been prepped by a lady with a pouty face—the DA’s assistant?—to cross my legs at the ankle and fold my hands and, if I remembered, to say “ma’am” to the judge and “sir” to the defense lawyer. “Don’t let him scare you, now,” she told me. “Don’t bite your nails like that, don’t look down, don’t let it get to you. Think of yourself as floating or something? Like a fish? You like to fish, don’t you? But not a dead fish, I don’t mean float like that. I mean swimming? In the water? Get that image in your mind, remember you’re not the one on trial.”


I wasn’t scared, though. I didn’t need to think of myself as a walleye drifting along in a current somewhere, just waiting for my hook. I was yearning for it.


*


August came. The days grew hazier, ash scented. Forest fires were going strong a few lakes north of us, and the air tasted of it, though the worst of the blaze was more than fifty miles away. “Safe by the skin of our teeth,” people were saying. By then, by the end of summer, all the deciduous trees—all the aspens and birch—had gone crinkly and blond in the hot weather. The pink geraniums in the window boxes of the Whitewood County district courthouse lay slung over, and the grass along the front walk was brown in strips. Brown, except for a square of emerald sod laid down against the marble steps, like a tiny pricey carpet. For weeks the heat had been oppressive, but now that summer was ending, now that September was on the horizon and the first geese were in flight, everyone was going on about how perfect the season had been, how lucky we’d been all along, how blessed to live in the north, in the woods, which was God’s own country.