Wilderness Read online

  WILDERNESS

  A Novel

  Lance Weller

  For Kathryn

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  A Note on the Author

  Prologue

  Rise Again

  1965

  She comes awake with an urgency she does not at first understand, surrendering the overbright tidelands of dream to the sightless dark of her waking day. She’d dreamt a campfire upon a shadow-polished beach. A heap of burning driftwood orange with flame. And, out upon the rim of the world, a paring of sun to redden the westward ocean. Burnt swell tips flashing beneath a dark sky touched with a pale light that lit the low bellies of rain clouds. Wet black sand and a jagged chain of yellowy foam to mark the snarl of tide across wavecut stone. Sparks from the fire rose in a spray to fall and lie like bright little jewels upon the shore. They flared and died and flared again in the wild yellow eyes of the wolf that watched her from the forest rising dark and quiet from the low cliffs behind.

  This the landscape of dream that she had fled to wake.

  Jane Dao-ming Poole stirs early, while it is still cool, while she can still yet feel the night’s last darkness sweep slowly over her sleep-becalmed face. Dawn-colored shadows fill soft declivities where once her eyes looked upon the world and took delight in it. She lies all atremble, for it was the howl of a wolf from the forests spilling off Hurricane Ridge far above the rest home that woke her. Gone now, if it ever was at all. She lies quiet a moment more, then sighs and pushes back the covers to let her body’s fierce heat seek the upper corners. As though to lend the cool, nondescript room something of her own character. Breathing, she tastes from the cracked-open window the fecund odor of the wilderness beyond the grounds, tastes sunlight and beyond the sunlight bitter cold. And so she wakes completely.

  Old now, she has become gray and frail beyond all her childhood reckonings of age. Of necessity she rises slowly, moves carefully into the kitchen space of the little studio apartment. By rote, by touch, by measured pacing from counter to refrigerator to drawer to counter again, Dao-ming moves thoughtlessly through her daily ritual of morning coffee.

  Sitting at the Formica table by the window, she waits for the day’s light, imagining in the way she was taught to imagine the sun gilding crusts of cloud—high, bright shelves of airy wonder—touching the forest below and sparking like strange fire on the peaks of the mountains east and west. She sees there suncups pressed into high snowfields that never melt, that are laced with watermelon fungus that never moves and feeds on sunlight and is always full. The night retreats beyond the sea, and the landscape’s darkness is slowly conquered by degrees of light.

  Uncoiling her stiff fingers from around the warm coffee mug, she splays them on the tabletop in a pane of sun. Gradually, warmth sinks through to her palms, eases up around her finger joints to dull the old, cold aches at palmheel and knuckle. Her soft, aubergine eye sockets are uncovered so that she might sense the quality of light and realize the day. And all the while, she shuttles a piece of splayed bullet—long imprinted by shattered bone, crazed by muscle fibers pressed against it where it had burrowed hotly into his living body, dry and light and old as the American Civil War—along one of two cords that hang about her neck.

  At seven o’clock every morning, the nurse taps lightly at her door with his foreknuckles, and every morning when he sees Dao-ming at her table with her coffee he lightly scolds her for it. By then she has remembered to put on her dark glasses because she knows how it bothers him to see her naked face, that the old ruins of her mad apple eyes, testimony to the outrageous violence of her youth, offend him. She can still remember the time she forgot and the high, startled pitch of his voice when he saw her. He’d stuttered and stammered, stumbling over himself until he’d found the glasses for her and she covered the soft, wrinkled folds of her wasted lids. Bruised-looking cavities sightless since the winter of 1899, when the world changed. Never to be changed back. The nurse’s name is Michael, and she does not know his face or age or race but reckons him a young man and can feel herself blush when he flirts with her.

  Beyond the rest-home staff—the daily nurse, one doctor or another once a month, the other occupants restlessly walking the halls—there are not many who come to visit her these days. Her husband, Edward Poole, lost at sea fifty years ago now while whaling in the old Makah way, has begun to fade from her dreams. She knows exactly where his picture is upon the bureau near her bed, and every night before sleep her fingers stray to touch the cool silver frame that sits tilted in the place her imagination puts the moonlight. Dao-Ming was blinded before she ever met him, yet there was a time, later, when she could find him in a crowded room by the certain soft shivering of the air he displaced, a time she could remember with astonishing clarity his voice, his smell, his blunt, tough fingertips tracing patterns of delight upon her upper arms. All that fades and fades away now like the diminishing ripples of a single raindrop fallen into a wide lake, like the silvery cavitation of bubbles flung through seawater by the blade of an oar. Though she speaks of it to no one, it is the great tragedy of her ending days that she is losing him all over again.

  There are, of course, children and the children of children. Even great-grandchildren whose names she can never quite manage to remember properly and whom, for the most part, she knows she’ll never meet. Most send cards at Christmas and, when they remember, her birthday and wedding anniversary. Perhaps they visit once or twice a year, but they never stay long because no matter what the staff does to decorate, to cheer the place, the home remains a sanitary facility where old folks go to die as cool, dry, and comfortable as possible.

  So sometimes, for want of husband or family or friend, Dao-ming will open her mouth as though to speak of things that lie restless upon her mind to the walls themselves, to the hollow void of her own dark world, or even to Michael the nurse when he comes tapping at her door every morning. But on this morning, in this gradual, cool light, she senses a change in things beyond the wolf howl that woke her—a taste in the air, something subtle yet with a metal-hard edge. The coffee smells richer and stronger. The sunlight does not stay long, yet neither is there rain.

  When Michael knocks, then lets himself into her kitchen, Dao-ming’s dark glasses are in place and the three remaining fingers of her right hand are touching lightly the sweating windowpane. Tilting her face toward him, she asks, “It snowed, didn’t it?”

  She can hear the soft, moist sound of his lips unsticking with a smile and hears him flip on the overhead light. “Yes,” he answers. “Last night. Must’ve started just before midnight sometime, and now we’ve got … oh, three–four inches of the stuff.”

  Dao-ming can tell by the creak of his shoes and the rustle of the clothes upon his body that he is leaning over her counter, watching her. “You’re pretty damn good, aren’t you?”

  “You bet,” she says, grinning. Then, “I pay attention, is all.” She takes her right hand down from the window and covers it with the good, strong fingers of her left.

  “Well,” says Michael, moving to the refrigerator and opening the door. A pneumatic sigh as the rubber seals part, and she can feel the sudden chill from where she sits. “Let’s get you set up. Corn or peas with your dinner?”

  “Steak. Whale.”

  He sighs, and she turns her face toward him. “Venison,” she says. “Just slap it on a fire front and back and get it on a plate. I like it good and bloody, always have.”
/>   “Jane Dao-ming!” he cries in mock alarm. “You’d be killed! Why, you’d die from the shock of it.”

  Dao-ming exhales sharply through her nose and crosses her arms. “Jane Dao-ming, Jane Dao-ming,” she says mincingly. “Well, aren’t you fresh? Using my name like you were courting me.”

  He takes a moment to breathe and collect himself.

  “All right. Fine. Is it creamed corn?”

  “Now, now.”

  “Won’t eat it. Baby food.”

  She hears him sigh again.

  “Are you going to stand there and tell me it’s not?”

  “Yes, I am,” he says. “Just like yesterday.” He pauses a beat. “And the day before.”

  “Peas, then.”

  “Peas,” he repeats. She can hear plastic containers being moved about from shelf to shelf, and when the doors sigh shut again, she asks, “Did you say it was a Douglas fir? Outside my window?”

  “I don’t think I remember saying, but I think so.”

  “You don’t know?” she asks sharply.

  “Well, sure. I mean, I think it’s a fir—”

  “What kind of man can’t tell what kind of tree he’s looking at?”

  “Well …”

  “It could be a lodgepole pine out there for all you know, couldn’t it? My great good God, there could be a weeping willow right out there and you wouldn’t know, would you?”

  “Mrs. Poole …”

  “Mrs. Poole now? What happened to ‘Jane Dao-ming?’”

  He sighs, and Dao-ming follows his example, then says, “You need to find out. For yourself, if not for me. The details. They’re important. The smallest things,” she says, casting her voice breathless and desperate as a sideshow mystic and wangling her fingers through the air. “They loom.”

  “All right, I’ll find out,” he says, then pauses. “How do I …”

  She sighs again. “First look at the bark,” she tells him. “Look for pitch blisters. A Douglas will have them if it’s young. They’ll be sticky. Hard. Maybe a little warm. Then look at its cones. If it’s a Douglas, the needles around it will be pitchfork-shaped. You can feel those too.”

  “Okay,” says Michael. “I’ll try and figure it out this afternoon.”

  “My second father taught me that.” Jane Dao-ming’s voice softens suddenly, becomes distant and hushed and steeped in memory, and she folds her hands upon her lap as though holding there something precious that is passing or has passed. “He was carrying me through the snow. I remember white. I remember cold. He’d wrapped me in his coat because we were caught out in a storm. In the mountains far from shelter. I was five or six then, and I didn’t have two names, let alone three. Just the one. My mother spoke to me in English and called me Dao-ming.” She turned her face as though to address the cold, flat winter light cooling the air above the table. “He was trying to find a place to rest. My second father. He had a bad arm, and he was so sick. He was so tired. He told me the branches of the firs were too weak, too slanted and high to keep the snow off us. That it would come down in big clumps and he didn’t think he could dig us out if we were buried. He was stumbling along, going down the hill, and I uncovered my face to try and see him in the dark—I wasn’t blind then, but my eyes had begun to freeze—and I could just see his silhouette against the falling snow. It was very cold and very white and when the snow touched my face I began to cry because I didn’t have the strength to brush it off. Nor the wit to call for him. It was so cold on my eyes and there was already something wrong. They’d been hurting since the night the wolf came to the door. Coming like it was the wind. I remember its eyes and the wet sound of its growl. I remember the dark of its fur like it was a piece of shadow, like it was made all of night. It stood there, watching me through the open door. And then it opened its mouth and its tongue fell out and for just a moment it looked happy, and I saw then that it wore a collar, just a crude, handmade thing of metal, and wondered was it part dog. And then it was gone, and all that was left was the night like the coldest thing there ever was and—”

  The nurse gently interrupts to ask if she is all right, then tells her he has to finish his rounds. Tells her that if she wants, he’ll come back later and they can talk a while. She turns her old, blind face to him, shuts her mouth, and does not answer. After a few moments she hears the door open and close again, and she is alone once more.

  Jane Dao-ming Poole sits at her little table by the window with a cup of coffee cooling near her abbreviate right hand, the fingers lost along with her eyes to frostbite that long-ago winter. Her left hand is fisted around the bullet. Awash in memories deep as the cold, gray sea. For the first time in years she thinks of her first father, but there is little there, little left now, save the image of his sallow complexion and his caved chest by flickering lamplight. The man who was her father for five years and who was killed along with her mother high in the mountains. And Jane Dao-ming sees again her second father, Abel Truman, who found her there and who brought her down and whom she knew for two days and who gave her vision to replace sight. By the window in her studio, her breath comes hot and catches high in her chest to think of him and of her third and final father, who raised her with her second and final mother. This third father, Glenn Makers, who adopted her and taught her what she’d need to know to survive in a sighted world—arithmetic and how an apple feels when ripe and sweet and how the quality of light differs by season and by temperature—and who was hanged by the neck until dead from the branches of a black cottonwood on the banks of the Little Sugar Creek by a man named Farley for the simple reason that he was a black man with a white wife.

  The coffee grows cold. Ice slowly scales the window beside her. After a while, the falling snow comes to tap softly at the window and sugar the Douglas fir outside. It falls and falls and shrouds the grounds and coats the town at the bottom of the long hill. The snow gathers upon the fir slowly, branch by branch, until the entire tree becomes a rounded, soft thing that creaks and shivers softly, then finally looses all that cold weight with a long, dry, heavy thudding sound of snow falling onto snow in a breathy rush. Beside Dao-ming, the window rattles softly with the impact.

  All the long afternoon, Jane Dao-ming Poole barely moves. The widow of a fisherman, she is well used to waiting. She sits, her iron-colored hair down about her shoulders and one hand lightly touching now a little crucifix—made of bone or something like bone—hanging from a cord around her neck beside the bullet. Two of her second father’s, of Abel’s, few possessions to survive him, she has kept them close to her all down the long years. Glenn Makers gave her the keepsakes when she was old enough, when she’d asked him for, and he told her, Abel Truman’s story.

  She’d been young then, yet old enough to understand a bit about Abel’s war, so it had been hard for Dao-ming to grasp how her new parents could speak fondly of a man who’d been on a side meant to keep men like Glenn in bondage. The cause for which he’d fought made what she knew of Abel’s life an upsetting mare’s nest she could not untangle, and the sound of Glenn’s voice, when he’d call her from her warm thoughts of the old man who’d saved her from the cold and fed her hunger with a meat that made him weep to cook, made her hot with a shame she could not understand. And when she finally asked about him, her third father sat down on the porch step beside her and was quiet so long that Dao-ming had to reach and touch his face to know the set of it—feeling the lean dip of his cheeks beneath her nimble fingers and his high, knobby cheekbones, the thoughtful cast of his mouth. Then his work-rough hands took hers up and enclosed them completely while, behind them, her second mother, Ellen, stood from her porch rocker and said, “You go on, tell her, Glenn. But you tell her all of it,” then went into the cabin to occupy herself at some small chore. Glenn had sighed then, and Dao-ming felt the soft squeeze of his hands.

  “Skin started it,” he finally told her. “That war. You know that. Skin started it, but there was more to it than just skin, and even though Abel fought for what he
fought for, you can’t take a man out of his time then expect to understand him. That’s just not something you can do. Like the war, there was more to him than just the side he was on. Why are you crying?”

  Beside the window, Jane Dao-ming smiles to remember how he always cupped her face when she cried. She couldn’t weep from ruined eyes, so her face convulsed in a hot, dry copy of grief, and when it did, Glenn used his rude thumbs to softly chase down her cheeks as though to wipe away real tears.

  “You can love him,” he told her. “It’s all right, it doesn’t betray me, so you can do that.”

  And when it had eased and she’d gotten control of herself again, he took her on a long walk through the woods around Makers’ Acres. There was a fresh and gentle wind that day and they could smell the distant sea and he began to tell her of her second father, Abel Truman. “One thing about him,” Glenn said, and Jane Dao-ming heard the moist clicking of his smile, “is that I’ve never seen a man who loved his dog like Abel did.”

  Now, beside the window, Jane Dao-ming is bathed in soft, blue winterlight that smoothes the lines from her face so that, sitting there just so, she looks just a little like the girl she was when she was young. With black hair, long like her first mother’s. Staring out the window and seeing nothing but remembering everything. She can conjure the old man, the old soldier, from her memory whenever she wants. For her, he never died. An old man rocking slowly, slowly rocking, watching the gray Pacific rise and fall. And rise again.

  Chapter One

  Call These Men Back

  1899

  In the fall of that year, an old man walked deeper into the forest and higher into the hills than he had since he was young and his life was still a red thing, filled with violence. He walked longer and farther than he had since he was a soldier, campaigning with the Army of Northern Virginia in the Great War of the Rebellion when the world was not yet changed and his body was not yet shattered.