Winter Loon(101)

The planchette rested on my palm. I remembered her body next to mine in the frost of fall. For Jolene, sending me this heart repaired was her fingertips guiding her to a maybe, a perhaps. Could it be? Could we try? With or without the Ouija planchette, for me the answer was yes, always yes. I wrote her back, and waited.

We got caught in a whirlpool of memory and swam down, recalling the ways we’d been battered, storm after storm. Over weeks and months, we shared a decade’s worth of want and wound, of battles won and lost, like lovers separated by war. Then somehow, the waters calmed, became more peaceful. Through words that fell like feathers into my outstretched hand, I was let back into the Hightower house and lives I missed so much. I came to know Jolene as a social worker advocating for Native women, pulling up those who’d fallen, standing with those who stood up, while the ornery roots of her own scars tangled with her independent streak and her ache for company. I shared stories of the Blue women, my Montana family, and the way I’d come to realize that all my life I’d been sheltered and shaped for the better by women who’d had to fight for every last thing and who’d done their best, even my mother, even Ruby, in her way. I wrote about Big Tom Small Concrete, the father-and-son team I work for, how sometimes their easy way with each other made me miss the idea of my father but not the man himself, how understanding that the blame of his leaving was squarely on him had made me stronger, more able to withstand the blows.

Jolene sent me a stack of snapshots—the two of us, me with Bull and Lester, of Mona, Troy, and Mariah, their house, and a recent one of her with her one-eyed rescue pup, Apple Pie. That one cut a hole in me at the same time it filled me up. Jolene. She was always so beautiful to me. When I took a closer look at the photograph, I could see she was wearing the locket I’d given her that first Christmas. On the back of the photograph were the words A time of innocence. In the envelope was a tape with only one Simon & Garfunkel song on it.



NINE MONTHS’ WORTH OF LETTERS live on my kitchen table, the heart-shaped planchette on top of the pile, a flimsy paperweight. I will confess to reading them over and over, decoding, memorizing the layers of stories upon stories, like hands over hands. The cassette tape I keep in my pickup, the photograph in my wallet.



NOT LONG AGO AVELINE GOT a call from the county sheriff for Index, Washington. Local fishermen found a drifter by the name of Moss Ballot dead on the banks of the Skykomish River. There were no signs of struggle, only whiskey in his blood and traces of river in his lungs, likely from having fallen face-first and taken his last breaths underwater. He’d set up camp in the trees under a tarp. It seemed he’d been there for a while, living off fish and canned beans. There wasn’t much worth keeping, according to the sheriff. He did say that inside the wax duffel bag there was a diary, the one I’d given to him, it turns out. Inside it were written the words For my children Wes and Annaclaire in care of Aveline Blue, Burden Falls, Montana. There was one sentence, the start of a story never written but told nonetheless: I lose everything. The rest of the pages were blank.



ANNACLAIRE AND I DROVE OVER to Washington, picked up what was left of our father. We put him and his things in an unmarked cardboard box and rested it on the seat between us. It was her idea to scatter his ashes in Burden Canyon near the falls. She’s sixteen now—tough, feisty, the kind of girl who scares the boys in a good way. I’d had unkind thoughts about dropping him in a dumpster or leaving him by the side of the road or getting drunk enough to completely forget where I’d left him. She said we owed it to ourselves to be rid of him properly. We’ve hiked the canyon trail plenty over the ten years I’ve lived there and knew it well in almost any weather.

“Suppose we ought to say something,” I offered. Insects swarmed us in the heat.

Annaclaire slapped her leg, wiped the dead bug on her shorts. She took the can from me and held it out in front of her like an offering to the gods. She yelled the first words into the canyon, so they banked off the walls. “Moss Ballot was a selfish prick, a burden to all who knew him,” she said. “He got one thing right, though, and that’s you and me. So thanks, old man, for making us family.”

It’s been years since Troy told me the story of Nanabozho. In that time, I learned the rest, how he’d fought his father, how they’d reconciled. How Ae-pungishimook had offered the peace pipe to his son. But there had been no peace between me and Moss. I carried my father around my sagged shoulders like some burdensome hide. How he bore me or Annaclaire in his life I would never know. When it was my turn to scatter the ashes, the hide of him slid off my shoulders, down my back, fell with his weightless body to the granite, the weeds, and wildflowers at my feet.

Coming down out of the canyon, I thought about my father’s songbird mobile, about connection and motion, how a tap on one wing set the other end of the branch in flight. One bird dipped, the other soared.

When I got home, I composed one last letter to Jolene, dropped it in the mailbox. I wouldn’t wait for her reply. I headed east, gliding on faith and a mended heart.



I’VE BEEN TRESPASSING HERE ON the shore of Bright Lake for days, sleeping in the back of my pickup under a sky full of stars, tugging on these memories like taffy, losing myself in heat and sugar. I swam out to the spot where my mother drowned, floated belly up, arms splayed and free. Ruby’s hunting knife is sunk to the bottom of the lake now, along with my father’s slippers. The log cabin is gone, same with Darin and Rhonda, same with the little boy who saw the diving loon, and the version of me who watched his mother drown. What’s left is this man waiting for Jolene, who came back around gently, a bird on filament. I have what we need for now—blankets, pillows, food to last us, time. At dusk, a pair of silent loons will ripple the thick water, bob the lilies, and Bright Lake will blur into its own reflection. Into summertime.