Half Wild Read online

  DEDICATION

  FOR

  THE WOMEN WHERE I’M FROM—

  AVAH MARGARET,

  GAIL MARIE,

  AND MARGARET JEAN

  EPIGRAPH

  Listen: you are not yourself, you are crowds of others, you are

  as leaky a vessel as was ever made.

  —REBECCA SOLNIT, THE FARAWAY NEARBY

  Then grow wild in the thin grass, over fossil

  And nowhere to lie without some animal

  To find me.

  —SOPHIE CABOT BLACK, “HOME”

  CONTENTS

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  1 • CREEK DIPPERS

  2 • THE HEART OF THE WOODS

  3 • WINGS, 1989

  4 • MAGGIE IN THE TREES

  5 • KARMANN

  6 • GOD’S COUNTRY

  7 • BARRED OWL

  8 • WHERE FIELDS TRY TO LIE

  9 • THE LONG ROAD TURNS TO JOY

  10 • LOVE BIRDS

  11 • THE WOMEN WHERE I’M FROM

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CREDITS

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Oh, gratitude. To my grandparents, the scientist and the song-catcher, who wed us all to this landscape. To my dad, who took me into the woods when I was young and then took my babies into them thirty years later (for hours at a time) so that I could write this book. To my farming mom, for her intrepid ways and for growing the food I feed my children. To the big-hearted community at Vermont College of Fine Arts, especially my teachers—David Jauss, Laurie Alberts, Jess Row, Larry Sutin, Diane Lefer, Clint McCown, Xu Xi, David Treuer, and Ellen Lesser—who believed in and refined this work. To the editors at the literary journals where these stories first appeared: R. T. Smith at Shenandoah, Ronald Spatz at Alaska Quarterly, and Barry Wightman and Samantha Kolber at Hunger Mountain. To the brilliant friends who have encouraged me to go deeper, and deeper yet: Lauren Markham, Sara Reish Desmond, Miciah Bay Gault, Mika Perrine, and Jennifer Bowen Hicks. To my dear agent, Julia Kenny, without whom this book would be sitting in a box somewhere, housing mice. To the fabulous people at Ecco, who welcomed me onto their ship and gave this work their hours, especially Eleanor Kriseman and my astonishingly whip-smart and generous editor, Megan Lynch. To all my friends and loved ones, here and gone, whose smoke winds through these pages. To Ty, my partner in a love supreme, for making the music, for plot-doctoring at all the right times, and for believing in and supporting me, always. And to my children, Avah Margaret and Owen Cricket, loud and luminous, who every day reach for my hand and take to the woods, bounding.

  1

  CREEK DIPPERS

  “You want to jump in the creek?” my mother asks. It’s a Tuesday night in late July and we’re on the porch drinking Myers’s rum doused with lemonade. She’s wearing cut-off cargo pants and a Grateful Dead T-shirt full of holes; her cracked toenails are the chartreuse of limes.

  “No,” I say, to which she snorts and throws her cigarette butt into the wet grass, where it hisses before losing its flame. Mist rises from the field. Baby grasshoppers pop. Clouds drift.

  I don’t want to go down to the creek with my mom. Nor do I want to be living here at sixteen in this deciduous/coniferous northeastern no-man’s-land of Vicksburg where we were both born, forty square miles of intersecting roads, intersecting streams, failing farms, and rocky ledge. Populated by ghosts and animals and lonely women. Frickin’ heaven, my mom calls these woods.

  Heaven: like she’d know. She’s thirty-three years old and pocked with life’s failures: her sun-lined face and cheaply tattooed arms and soot-lined lungs. My mother has cleaned houses, waitressed, logged, gardened, trained horses, hammered nails, groomed dogs, hung Sheetrock, and killed other people’s livestock for a living. It’s made her body crooked, wrinkled, callused, bent. But she’s a tiger, too. She has a tattoo of a mountain lion on her left thigh that reminds me, every time I see it, of the love-warrior inside her. The one who wanted something other than what she was born with, who nursed me until I was three (little titty-monkey), the one who lays her hand on my shoulder when I come home from class and says, “Angel, you be good. You be real good, baby-o.”

  Angel? Your mother named you Angel?

  What is it with us and our mothers? The way we both love and hate them. The way they define ugly and yet we catch their face in our mirror and surprise ourselves with—gladness.

  The last mountain lion they saw in our state was in 1883. They shot it in the hills above our town, and now it’s stuffed in a museum in Boston, tawny eyes aglow. My mom tells me she’d like to steal that motherfucker someday. Free it from its goddamn stillness. She’s only one-sixteenth Abenaki but claims that cat as her spirit animal all the same. And so that tiger tattoo, inked across her bony thigh.

  But tonight she’s talking about dogs. About how she thinks we should raise them to sell. For money. Always dreaming of money. Always in need of more. She gets up and pours us each another glass; coyotes yip down by the creek: a fresh kill. Her words drift to wolves. “Did I tell you about Alaska,” she says, taking a sip, handing me mine.

  Yes. She has told me about Alaska. She’s been telling me about Alaska my whole life. Roy and a trailer surrounded by wolves, surrounded by pines. The only place she’ll ever go other than here.

  My mother and I have lived in this house, this hunting cabin on concrete blocks she stuffed with insulation, since before I was born. There’s a creek below, a field out front, a gravel road that runs straight for a while, and this porch. This porch. What is it about houses? The way their simplest elements contain who we are, say things for us. I was born on the living room couch, a mattress over a couple of crates. There was blood and my mom’s great-aunt Sugar with bundles of herbs and warm, thick hands.

  “I think we could make good money raising dogs,” my mom says, nodding her head, as if I’ve agreed. “Half-wolf breeds. Half wild. Big buckeroos. Big stinkin’ buckeroos. Don’tcha think, Angel-o?”

  She doesn’t wait for me to answer.

  “Wolves,” she says, balancing her wide, bony foot in the air, touching the moon with its silhouette, laughing. “There were goddamn wolves in Alaska.”

  She’s getting drunk, I can tell. I close my eyes and she disappears. I don’t want to be a pioneer. I am silently naming the places I might go: Chicago. New Orleans. Amarillo.

  We’re waiting for the storm, which we can smell coming through the trees. We’re waiting for Robbie, her boyfriend with the bad teeth. We are, in some regards, waiting for dawn, or tomorrow, or next year. Leaves shuffle. Milky clouds stream past. The creek calls the water in the clouds home. My mom says it smells like desire and tips her head back, sniffing.

  Desire. For a moment I know we both feel it: our shared loneliness. A deer steps into the far edge of the field—stick legs, dark pools of eyes—then turns away into the gray trees.

  Objective correlative. I learned about it in my course on twentieth-century American literature. The way we anthropomorphize the world around us. I read Faulkner and Hemingway and Eudora Welty, books by frickin’ dead white folks, my mother said at the time, reaching for her Pall Malls.

  Yes, I didn’t say, eyeing the bitter streak of her cancer stick, but those books are beautiful. They make me think of nights like this, on the porch, clouds and crickets and this blue hunger, only they turned it into something other. Took it off the porch and into the air. They got the fuck out of Dodge, those men and those women. An aunt of mine lives alone in West Texas. Another on a mountain north of here. Is this hereditary? Some kind of messed-up, errant gene?

  But back to the here, the now.

  “Fuck, it’s hot.
Just a quick dip, Angel-love?” my mother whispers hoarsely, opening her eyes for an instant before closing them again.

  I don’t respond.

  Someday I’ll talk about this porch. I’ll tell a story about Sue, my mom, weeping or yelling amidst the blackberry canes and fireflies, the wild roses. About the way she drags the TV out here sometimes late at night to watch scenes from the Iraq War: the explosion of far-off bombs, the sad companionship of the box’s blue flicker. About how she throws shit at the screen every time George W. Bush’s face appears, whispering Motherfucker. Or maybe I’ll just say “porch.” Porch. My mother had a porch, resting on telephone-pole piers, on which she lived.

  “Let’s go,” she says, stubbing her cigarette and downing her rum. Robbie, we both know, will show up soon in his rusted-out plumber’s van, shuffle up the steps with a six-pack of beer. There is nothing wrong with Robbie. Absolutely nothing wrong with or extraordinary about Robbie.

  We head toward the creek—Silver—its banks lined with rocks and moss and roots and tangled ferns. We’ve dammed a spot with logs and sticks and concrete blocks so that there’s a three-foot-deep pool of clear running water, a patch of sandy bottom. Not much, but enough on nights like this. We strip. Wade in. Feel the cool climb our shins. The aunt in West Texas lives in a trailer at the edge of town with a view of the Big Bend Mountains, a dog named Peco, and a truck named Rose. What the fuck, I want to say to the blood-dipped moon.

  My mother goes first. Butt, chest, shoulders, then flips onto her belly and dips her whole head under. I go next. Underwater you can see the glisten of stones, the toss of ferns (ostrich, lady, wood). My mother’s white, magnified body resembles a whale, beached in far-too-shallow water. My own? Downed birch trees? Coiled wire? A deer?

  The water is ice-cold, mountain melt from higher ground and deeper springs. I raise my face and look up at the dark sky, peppered with holes.

  “Goddamn fucking lovely!” my mother shouts, grinning, stepping out of the water. She rubs herself down with her Grateful Dead T-shirt, slips into her underwear, heads toward the light. “Robbie’ll be here soon. You coming, Angel?”

  “Nah,” I say. “I’ll stay.” I’m freezing underwater, my body a cube, but diaphanous with stillness. My mother disappears up the footpath, and I dip my face back under, head tipped back like a dolphin, like a bracken fern, like an old wheel, spinning.

  I think of those people I will someday give my body to. I think of the girls I go to school with, their normal mothers. I think of these roads, fields, creeks, ephemeral mountain lions.

  I stand up in that shallow lit by moonlight and stay there for a moment—naked amidst the eyeless trees—then step out of the water, dry off, and slip into my clothes.

  There are voices on the porch. Candlelight, Robbie’s van, smoke rising. I’m freezing out in the field, but I’m made of bronze, too. Cast iron in T-shirt and jeans, barefoot and far from pregnant amidst the grasshoppers and trees lit by moon.

  What is it about fields? The way they make all directions viable. The way they give houses, porches, voices perspective. The way the word itself—field—makes you feel both domesticated and wild, both wolf and human, capable of heading toward that porch with its smoke and laughter, or toward the woods, where you could quietly and, without a sound, start walking.

  2

  THE HEART OF THE WOODS

  My father’s a logger, my brother a builder of houses, my husband a real estate man. Our lives are tied to the fate of trees the way some people’s are tied to money, others religion. But my father believes there is an insurmountable distinction between logging and real estate. Logging, he says, can be done tastefully, with heart, so that a year later no one knew you were there, so that the trees left standing have a chance to thrive. Real estate, he says, can never be done well. He has called my husband a carpetbagger, a rich bastard, and a flatlander all in the course of an evening, which means he doesn’t come to our house anymore. It means when I want to see his glistening angry blue eyes and catch the familiar earthy whiff of hemlock sap and cigarette smoke and clean sweat, I get in my car and come here to the Stonewall on Route 100, where I know he’ll be sitting in the afternoon light across from Rita at the far end of the bar, drinking the finest Scotch they carry, the kind they keep in stock just for him.

  And I can tell you the name of every other person here as well—Joe Maise, Terry Miner, Rich Miller, Jay Cole Jr. They nod to me as I walk in, these people from my past, but they don’t offer to buy me drinks. They all know my husband is the one with the shiny slew of white pickup trucks that all say his name—RON BATES—trucks that drive around these towns buying up cheap and undeveloped acreage, parceling them off into four-acre lots, selling them at a profit. Or if he doesn’t sell them, Ron hires my father to clear the land (he still shows up for the cash), my grandfather and cousins and uncles to mill the wood, and my brother to build spec houses on the land: houses that invariably sell. They are good-looking houses for the young professionals who work ten miles downhill in Nelson at the hospital or the nuclear power plant or the car dealerships. We’ve done well for ourselves—better than the Maises or Miners or Coles—which is why when I enter the bar they simply nod at me, the girl they went to school with, the one with the red hair, the one some of them made out with in the front seats of cars back when we were young.

  My father offers to buy me a drink, though, and I accept, even though I live in a six-bedroom house with marble tiles in the front entryway and he lives in the same Tyvek-covered two-room cabin where I was born.

  “Sure, Dad,” I say, while Rita pours me a glass of Glenlivet and I sit down on a stool next to him, our elbows almost touching. “How are you?”

  “Upright and breathing,” he mumbles into his glass. His lips turn up in a sly grin. “You, Sally?”

  “Good,” I lie. “Things are good,” scraping the toe of my boot against the barstool rung.

  When I was young I was his favorite. “Sally Mae, Sally Mae, prettier than the green of May,” he would half shout, half sing when he came home in the evenings in his green Dodge truck. In the summer he would put me on his shoulders and take me out into the woods, teach me the names of trees, how to strip sassafras bark for chewing; in spring, how to tap a maple. “The woods are something to be grateful for, not shit on,” my father would say. “So be good to them.”

  I tried to be.

  “You eating well?” I shout into his right ear.

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Keeping good company?”

  “Not good enough till Rita here will come home with me,” he says, setting his glass down on the counter with a little click to get Rita’s attention, winking at her when he does.

  She shakes her head lovingly, an old friend. “Oh, Calvin, go find a woman half your age.”

  I don’t like to admit it, but I’m jealous of Rita each time I come here. Rita, fifty-eight years old, five foot three, 160 pounds, with undyed hair, is beloved in my father’s eyes, while I am nothing but an embarrassment, a sore.

  Like my mother. Who hated our house—its outhouse and small rooms and drafty windows and lack of electricity or neighbors. “Woods,” my father said, nodding toward them, as if that made us rich. She used to ride in the truck when he delivered wood for the Scandinavian wood stoves of summer people and doctors in Nelson just so she could look at and admire their big, clean houses, their bright lights shining.

  But enough of the past. I sip my drink, breathe, pull my shoulders down, look around the dim room: pine walls, wooden booths, neon Miller signs. Behind the bar a tenpoint buck stares quietly. To my left a stuffed bobcat leaps out from the wall, amber eyes aflame.

  Terry Miner stands up from his end of the bar, goes to the jukebox, and slips two quarters into the slot. Alan Jackson starts to sing. For a moment I watch Terry’s skinny jeans, the cracked leather of his boots, and the sun-bleached and thinning waves of his hair—then turn back toward the bar and stare into that buck’s still eyes.

 
; The clock says five thirty; Ron will be getting home any moment, which means I should go, heat up last night’s dinner in the microwave, open a bottle of Bordeaux, but instead I linger. He will lean in to smell the heat of liquor on my breath and ask where I’ve been. But so what if I’ve come to slip momentarily into the old ways of my life, to get a little tipsy and sit by my aging father listening to country tunes. What harm is there in that?

  My father orders another drink and pulls another Marlboro out of his pack. I let the secondhand smoke fill my clean lungs; he leans toward me and nods at my glass. “Another?”

  I think for a moment of Ron, then catch the glint of that bobcat’s eyes on the wall and Terry Miner’s body in the corner. “Why not.”

  “Oh good,” he says, facing Rita and grinning. “She is a McLean after all.”

  “I’ve always been one,” I say, my voice caught in my throat. “Just changed my name. You know that.”

  “Changed more than that.”

  “Don’t pick a fight with me,” I say quietly, sliding my glass toward the edge of the counter so that Rita can see.

  How many years will I have to walk this line—trying to prove myself in both worlds I belong to?

  “Not the kind of man to pick fights, right, Rita?” My father winks at Rita and nudges me with his elbow. She refills both our glasses, and I wonder how many my father has had already.

  “Thank you,” I say as she slides my glass across the counter.

  Rita nods at me but doesn’t smile.

  I’ve disassociated myself from this town in most ways: the car I drive, the clothes I wear, the places my husband and I go for dinner.

  You can’t get rich in this place without accumulating spite. Ron buys land from old ladies and broke farmers and single women. I work for the business two days a week; it’s my job to find out who’s having hard times, who’s likely to sell. It’s my job to go to their houses, knock on their doors, ask sweetly how they are doing. The Coras and Violets and Hazels and Annes.