Greasewood Creek Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  greasewood creek

  june 1970

  telling

  june 1973

  willow

  june 1970

  home

  september 1984

  august 1970

  january 1980

  november 1970

  may 1982

  august 1970

  hole

  august 1970

  ruby

  flight

  september 1971

  vessels

  birth

  august 1972

  surfacing

  perfect

  lennie explains

  lilacs

  seeds

  rain

  december 1971

  wing

  celilo

  hands

  may 1978

  bodies in motion

  august 1970

  christmas tree

  dishpan

  the orchard

  january 1972

  tumbleweeds

  signs and wonders

  meridian

  the red slip

  july 1983

  artifacts

  spring 1968

  on greasewood creek

  piano

  dirt

  the blue wise man

  river

  memorial day, warm springs reservation

  lennie

  Copyright Page

  greasewood creek

  THE AIR STILL holds the shape of the house. August light pushes through cottonwood limbs—no more than air themselves—shimmers off ghost windows. Weed-shot grass seeps from the empty pasture, scabs over the ground where the house once sat, surrounds a shard of foundation. Beneath this scab, a wound of rust and ash—years of dirt sifted through porch boards, glass, the crumbling razor blades Frank dropped through cracks in the bathroom floor.

  A south wind sizzles through the dry grass, brushes Avery’s bare legs, rises into the limbs of the cottonwoods. It surges through a swath of apple trees to the east, whispers the names of her sister, grandmother, father before it rushes north across the pasture toward the only other house she’s lived in—the place Paul and Mary left to Davis, their only grandchild.

  Across the distance, she makes out the shape of the house, the wind-battered sheds and barn, the blue blur of Davis’s F-150 parked in the yard, and next to it, Lovell’s red International. She guesses the fencing is done—that Lovell has stayed to talk—pictures them sitting on the back porch drinking the last of this morning’s coffee or maybe whiskey from the bottle Lovell keeps behind his truck seat.

  In the orchard, threads of light fall between leaves of sixty-year-old trees, catch on dusty apple skin. Avery reaches into lower limbs, twists glowing planets out of their orbits, drops them into a pillowcase, each apple a reminder of Grandma and Grandpa Coleman, of seedlings carried on Grandma’s lap as they rode the train to Eastern Oregon from West Virginia.

  As Avery raises her arms, muscle memory sparks—makes her a child again—then it is her father Frank who lifts her into the loose nets of spiderwebs and drifting motes, lifts her toward the apples, calls their names: Wolf River, Guinea, Red June.

  When the pillowcase is half full, Avery starts back to the Jeep, steps into horizontal light at the edge of the orchard. Wind stirs rye grass anchored in the far slope of the dry irrigation ditch. The low light shifts, bends itself into water that fills the ditch again, catches on dry stems, makes them her sister’s pale hair floating on the current. Time pulls Avery back across the years to a June day, to the hum of her mother’s washing machine on the porch. She hears the sound of Madeline’s voice across the yard. Words surface from memory. She hears her say, Avery, keep an eye on your sister!

  june 1970

  THE DAY, A blade of yellow light spreading through the wheatfield, carving the edges of

  Table Rock clean from the sky. The backyard is muddy and lush, the vein of the irrigation ditch dark with rain and snowmelt.

  Avery and Jean Ann on the backporch, playing house. Madeline, just inside the door, slamming the washing machine lid, saying through the screen, Avery, keep Jean Ann on that porch!

  Jean Ann lies on the porch swing, pretends to take a nap. We’re having spinach for dinner, Avery says. Jean Ann cracks open an eye, scrunches her face, sticks out her tongue. Avery tiptoes down the porch steps, stuffs a fistful of grass into a canning jar, dips the jar into a puddle. As she does, she hears the screendoor squeak, hears her mother say, Get out of that mud and get up on this porch. If I catch you down there again, I’m going to wear you out!

  Now, Madeline in the yard, jerking the jar from Avery’s hands, dumping the grass and muddy water, squeezing Avery’s arm. Hard. Stay away from that water, she says.

  On the porch, Avery moves near Jean Ann’s face, counts to five. Jean does not move. Avery walks to the edge of the porch, listens, waits for Jean Ann to stop pretending, to call her back, but there is only the sound of the washer.

  At the clothesline, she waits again, this time to hear her mother’s voice, to feel the sting of a palm on her bare leg, but there is nothing. She looks back at the house once, pushes past a damp bedsheet, lets it fall, lets it muffle the sound of the ditch. Lets it make her invisible.

  In the garden, she pulls yellow leaves off peavines, flicks ants off a peony bud, pries open its knot of pink-white petals. She drops them, watches them float to the ground. Now her fingers smell like her mother’s face cream.

  THEN, MADELINE’S VOICE—a shout. Avery freezes, watches a black ant zigzag across her knuckles. Her mother’s voice again. Avery turns toward the clothesline, stretches her arms, pushes through. The thin, blue sheet brushes her head and neck, makes a little breeze down the backs of her legs, as if someone is standing behind her.

  Across the yard, Madeline, like she has dropped a pile of wet clothes on the ditch bank, like she is trying to gather them up into her arms again.

  Now, Avery can see—sees her mother pulling her sister into her lap. A net of hair, gone dark from muddy water, yellow T-shirt, red shorts. Jean Ann’s bare feet, legs the color of ashes. Avery stops walking, she cannot breathe. The air becomes thick, a cushion of heat around her.

  Avery watches her mother’s face, pale, mouth stretched wide like she might scream again, but there is no sound—only the water slipping through the ditch. Madeline rocks on her heels, tears the hair away from Jean Ann’s face, then stops, lays her on the ground. She crouches over Jean Ann, lays the side of her face against the T-shirt, listens, her eyes squeezed shut, then she sits up, puts her fingers against Jean Ann’s neck, rolls her onto her side, slaps her back with the flat of her hand, making a sound like pounding dough on the breadboard. A small ribbon of dark water slips out of Jean Ann’s mouth.

  Madeline stands, her knees grass-stained and muddy, her own feet bare. She picks up Jean Ann again, holds her against her own body, lurches toward the house. Passes Avery, does not look at her. At the porch steps, she stumbles, lurches, stumbles again. She opens the screendoor with her foot and they are gone.

  At the top of the steps, dark outlines of water drops spread into the porch boards. Avery follows them, stands at the screendoor, the slamming sound still in her head, the smell of metal and fly spray strong in her nose. Avery watches through the mesh. Her mother lays Jean Ann on the couch, then pulls an afghan over her, kneels on the floor near Jean Ann’s head. She fusses with the wet hair.

  Avery wants her father. She turns to see if he might be coming home. She looks out over the yard, finds it changed. The light bouncing off the sheets on the clothesline hurts her eyes. The trees have moved closer, the sky farther away. Grandma Coleman’s voice, from a day not long be
fore, comes into her head, You got to help your mama out, Avery. Look after your sister.

  Avery scans the road, the field for her father. She stands on the porch, staring down into the cup of one purple iris, levitating among the green spears by the cement foundation. When the sound from her mother comes like steam rushing out of a teakettle, she wobbles back down the stairs, crawls under the porch, stunned, ashamed.

  She has let her sister drown.

  telling

  LAST NIGHT, A storm. This morning, the barn hunkered in the pasture—flayed animal—rain-soaked, side door flapped open on loose hinges. Before daylight, the clouds moved away, a third-quarter moon sprayed light onto strips of tin hanging from its roof, onto the hood of Davis’s pickup as he drove off to Obsidian Springs to shoe horses.

  All morning, Avery hauled shattered limbs in the wheelbarrow, dumped them on the burn pile. Now, she peels corral poles Davis and Lovell brought down from the hills yesterday.

  The lodgepole is dry this time of year, hard to peel. Over and over, she pulls the drawknife toward her with both hands, works down the length of wood, turns it to expose unpeeled bark, starts again.

  She thinks of Lovell, wonders if there was not thirty-two years’ difference in their ages, whether she might have loved him. She does love him, but it might have been in a different way. She thinks of the first time she met him, just after her mother had given her over to Mary, just after her father vanished into the air of the wheatfield.

  THE MORNING SHE first sees Lovell, he sits on a kitchen chair close to the edge of Paul and Mary’s porch, head down, turning a piece of wood in his hands. The way the denim goes lighter at the knees of his jeans startles her, makes her think of her father, whom she hasn’t seen in weeks. The man sits much higher in the chair than Frank did. She looks at the top of his head, white threads of hair. Not her father.

  She steps on the bottom step and the man looks up. His eyes are blue, near to the color of the bachelor buttons that poke up between the broken trucks in the back pasture. He smiles. The lines rippling out from the sides of his mouth make Avery think of water after a stone has dropped into it.

  Hello, there, he says, not loud, not soft, but the way she heard her father talk to the lady who works in the bank.

  She walks to the top of the steps, stands in front of him, says nothing. He is still looking at her.

  Not much of a talker, are you?

  Avery knows this is not a question, but the way his words come out do not sound mean.

  I’m Lovell. I help Paul out sometimes. I got a little girl about your age. Six, are you?

  This time, it is a question. Rude not to answer, but all she can manage is a nod.

  Thought so.

  He hands her the piece of wood then pulls a small knife out of his shirt pocket. She studies the wood, runs her fingers over it, feels the weight of it like a living thing in her hand.

  I come from West Virginia, same as your folks. Mary, too. You and I aren’t kin, I don’t think.

  Lovell opens the knife, wipes both sides of the blade on the leg of his jeans. He holds his hand out toward her.

  OK, I’ll take that back now.

  His hand is scratched up, missing the tip of the index finger. The rest of the fingers are flat on the ends, look like they have been smashed and never gone back to their right shapes. She gives him the piece of wood, lifts her hand to her nose, recognizes the smell of the trees down by the river.

  Cottonwood, he says. He lays the knife handle across his palm, starts scratching at the wood with it.

  This here is the head, he says, nodding at one end of the chunk of wood. The best end of a horse.

  She can hear the smile in his voice.

  Curls of wood drift onto the floorboards, the rough toes of his boots. You gonna tell me your name?

  Avery, she says.

  Avery, he repeats. My girl is Lennie. She lives with me most of the time, but right now, she’s staying over on the Indian reservation with her mother. Be home before school starts. You start school this year, too?

  Now, the curls of wood are finer, and because of the breeze, they drift off the porch, into the flower bed, lie on the petals like yellow worms.

  How do you make that? Avery asks, pointing at his work.

  Pretty simple, he says. You just take away everything that ain’t the horse. He grins. Bachelor buttons, stone in water.

  AVERY’S JACKET IS pitch-splattered, her arms sore by the time she hears Davis’s pickup in the driveway. He comes around the shed, grins when he sees the peeled posts.

  You smell like Christmas, he tells her.

  After supper, they stand on the back porch, watch a line of blackbirds lift from a telephone wire over the road. Dark shapes scatter like buckshot over the pasture, regroup, settle in the dry stubble of the wheatfield. Birds are gathering up, Davis says, Sign of cold weather.

  In thin afternoon light, Avery holds a ladder while Davis nails the loose tin back onto the barn. I want to say something to you when you get down, she says.

  She waits at the bottom of the ladder, her back to the wind that picks up again. When Davis comes down, she steps away from him, faces him. The cold air has brought up the color in his pale skin. She reaches into his jacket pocket, takes out the elkskin glove he’s stuck in there. She pulls it back onto his right hand, says, I guess you know I’m pregnant.

  Then, a moment of waiting. The wind tears at her scarf, pushes against the back of her jacket. She registers the ache in her own hands from gripping the ladder frame while Davis stood on it.

  She watches his eyebrows rise. He grins. He folds her into him, against his warmth, his breath in her ear. She hears—feels—him inhale, smelling her hair, her neck, like he always does when he holds her like this.

  You sure? he asks. When?

  Yep. The last week of May, probably. Thereabouts.

  Hmmm, he says into her shoulder. He pushes her away, then opens his coat, pulls her inside it. We have, what, eight months or so?

  Yep, a little more, she says. Lennie says I—everything—looks fine.

  His mouth is at her ear again, his breath moist in the wool of her hat. I suppose you’ll want Lennie to see you through this—want her to deliver you at home, he says.

  Over Davis’s shoulder, the sky is nearly dark, but she can see the storm-stripped line of cottonwoods by the irrigation ditch. She remembers what Davis once told her about the trees on the Plateau, pointing out something she should have noticed, but hadn’t. Here, in fall, he’d said, the trees always shed their leaves in this order: locust, cottonwood, then oak. One of the dependable things in this world.

  I don’t want to find out whether it’s a boy or girl until it gets here, she says.

  Good, he says. Me, neither.

  Inside the house, they take off their boots, lay scarves and gloves on the kitchen table, go into the darkened living room to lie down on the couch together.

  Davis pulls his hand through Avery’s hair. She smells the Lava soap on his skin and the scent of her own hair on the couch pillow, left there after this morning’s nap.

  Somewhere above them, attic windows shudder. She feels the roughness of Davis’s wool sock against her ankle, is aware of the exact shape of the place on her back where her shirt has ridden up, where cold air brushes her skin. All of this, all of this, she thinks, because there is someone else in the room with them, and just now, between them.

  june 1973

  THE TOP SHEET is light, cool on Avery’s skin. It gathers heat from her shoulders and arms, gathers the smell of shaving cream—Mary’s sunburn cure.

  Today, she helped Mary pick bugs off tomatoes, pull weeds from rows of onions and cabbage, asked about the plastic owl hanging in the tree at the edge of the garden.

  Paul ordered that thing from the Fingerhut catalog, Mary said. Supposed to scare away birds—keep them from eating the seeds. I guess it works, she laughed.

  Cool air sifts through the window screen. With it, the sound of en
gines out on the main road, disappearing into long twilight. Avery listens for her mother’s muffler—knows she won’t hear it. Madeline stopped coming to get her after sundown a while ago—has almost stopped coming for her at all.

  From the front room, muffled sounds: the tv, clock chime, Paul hacking up hay dust. From the kitchen, the oven door, opening then closing, water running in the sink. Mary’s puttering, getting ready. Tomorrow, her daughter Caroline will drive in from Idaho, leaving her boy Davis to stay through haying season.

  WHAT GRADE YOU in? he asks. He tips his glass, drinks the last of the Kool-Aid.

  Going to fourth, she says. What grade are you in? Sixth, he says.

  Above them, locust leaves twist in the hot breeze. Avery picks hay stems out of her shoelaces, still feels the throb of the tractor in her calves and feet.

  You stay here all the time? he asks.

  A red crescent of Kool-Aid above his top lip. Flecks of dried blood and hay in the fine blond hair on his arms.

  Most of the time, she says. My mom stays gone a lot.

  He picks at a scab on his arm. I heard about your sister, he says.

  Needles of sweat in the hay scratches on her own arms. She says, Where’s your dad?

  Army, he says. Vietnam.

  Oh, she says, thinks about the news on Paul’s tv, the black-and-white picture propped on the front room shelf, the smiling, beautiful Caroline, a man in uniform beside her, the blond, toothless boy anchored to his knee. She asks him, When’s he coming home?

  He shrugs, says, Where’s your grandma and grandpa?

  Dead, she says. My Grandma Coleman just died this winter. My dad’s mom and dad are dead, too. Before I was born.

  willow

  ON THE RIVERBANK, red twigs, pieces of blue baling twine—blood vessels against a thin skin of snow. Lennie hands Avery the knife, says, Hold this a minute. Watch out, it’s pretty sharp. She wiggles her index finger inside the glove, says, It’s how Dad cut the tip of his finger off, cutting willow for Mom.