With the Hundred-Year-Old Road people lived a young man named Tommy Grove. He was a graceful young man with large, beautiful hands. There was no noise about him. He hunted and fished to provide the old people with food. Tommy was a year younger than I was, but in many ways, he was more like one of the elders. He spoke three languages, and because he lived with old people in death’s territory, he did not fear it, which gave him a powerful strength.
The houses along the damp Hundred-Year-Old Road were even more decrepit and shabby than the others. These houses had not been built by missionaries. The old people would live in no construction of the Christians, neither physical nor spiritual.
All the rest of the people were women, mighty women, and it was to them that I returned when summer was walking away into the arms of autumn. It was 1972 and I was traveling toward myself, coming home to a place where I’d lived as an infant, returning to people I’d never met. I didn’t know my own ways or what they’d think of me, but I was something back in place. I was one of the absences filled that autumn when the trees gave off a golden haze and smell, something back in place at Agnes’ little dark, small-windowed house that had been designed by a missionary who did not want to see what surrounded him.
AGNES’ HOUSE was cluttered and already crowded. It seemed there wasn’t much room for one more. The kitchen was stained by leaks and had not been repainted. The table wobbled. Boots, waiting for winter, were lined up neatly against the wall, as if cold feet had just stepped out of them right into summer.
Agnes was a woman who stoked the fire and wore her coat even on warm summer days. Chilblains, she called it, complaining that her hands were like ice. But the day I came back, she removed her coat. “I’m warm,” she said. I watched her as she absentmindedly ran her fingers through the blue-gray fur, touching it in the ancient, animal act of grooming that women’s hands remember from long ago. She picked a piece of tree bark from it, a few wet grasses, then hung the worn-out coat on a hook beside other coats near the door, and suddenly she was as small as everything else in the brown house, a woman shrunk under the weight of a life the way a stone is made smaller by a river. Except that stones grow smooth, and you couldn’t say that of Agnes.
Dora-Rouge, the mother of Agnes, lived in a small room off the side of the kitchen with its peeling linoleum, old and worn yellow. She was my great-great-grandmother by blood. She had a thin, old voice. She was the beloved old woman, the old and luminous elder of the house. All along, she had been the one who’d said I would return, and no one had believed her, but when she saw me on that first day, she called me by my mother’s name. “Hannah?” she said. She spoke it as a question. It was only later, when I saw my mother, that I understood the mistake. I was the image of her, the woman I’d never seen, the woman who had scarred me. I had the same walnut skin and red hair as Hannah.
Dora-Rouge looked confused. It was this way with her. Some days her memory lived in a distant past, a time more alive and clear than the worn-out, fading present.
Agnes spoke loudly, “No, Mother. It’s Angel, Hannah’s girl.”
Dora-Rouge fixed Agnes with her gaze. “I’m not deaf, you know.” It wasn’t that Dora-Rouge was hard-of-hearing. Her ears were fine. It was just that she had already begun to step over the boundaries of this world into the next. It was an intelligent world, she said, the next one. It was full of the makings of life, and it was where she conversed with her gone husband, Luther. From time to time it was difficult to bring her back the long distance from that world to ours. There was no map of the territory between the worlds, but I could tell something wonderful lived there, in that span we call “between.” At times I could see it in her eyes. But Agnes was afraid. She feared her mother would get caught in a snare along the way and never return. That’s why she yelled. She didn’t want to lose her mother. She wanted to call her back to the world at Adam’s Rib.
Dora-Rouge was the oldest person I’d ever seen, a white-haired creation thin as a key, who sat as if she had become bone already, with sunken cheeks and a confusion of snowy hair. Her eyes were joyous, dark and radiantly clear. When she turned her face toward me, I felt her light. When she laughed, both the house and I opened up a little. It frightened me to feel that way, as if now that I found her I’d have something to lose. She reached out for me. “Angel, is it? Come over here.”
I hesitated, then took her thin, bony hand.
Dora-Rouge had no teeth and her toothless grin lent her an infant sweetness, in spite of the fact that her skin was old copper, her hands knotted with veins and human tributaries, intricacies a young woman like myself could not imagine. A red blanket stretched across her lap and her bony knees were sharp enough to cut their way through the wool.
And that first day as I sat on the edge of the springy bed, I studied her face, searched for traces of my own features, feeling like a small child. Dora-Rouge had an owl beak of a nose like mine. The same eyebrows, white and longer, though hers turned up a little at the edges, winglike. Her mouth might once have been full like mine, except that hers had eaten other foods, spoken another language, and kissed people who’d lived and died long before I was born.
“I always called you the girl who would return.” Her eyes rested on me. “And here you are.”
I tried to smile at her. I felt like a small child.
Antlers lay on a table in Dora-Rouge’s room, and a grass rope, burned at one end. While the rest of the house was dusty and cluttered, her room was in order. She could not tolerate disorder.
“Open the window,” she said to Agnes. “It’s dark.”
“It’s open, Mother,” Agnes said. “They are all open.”
“Then you’d better close the door. The darkness must be getting in.”
“I’m going to get her up,” Agnes said. She lifted the red blanket from Dora-Rouge’s lap.
“We’re going to take her outside. She likes the morning sun. You take hold of her legs. I’ll get the rest.”
“I hate it, Agnes, when you talk about me as if I’m not here,” Dora-Rouge said in a dry voice. She wore small, beaded moccasins, and her knees were drawn up and stiff. There was a yeasty smell to her skin, an odor of fermenting. She was tiny. She’d looked larger than she was, but her body seemed too light to contain a living soul. I think it was because her radiance was bigger than her body. Like the light of fox fire, it was the fire of life burning itself beautifully away. She was not a bit embarrassed at being carried. She smiled into my eyes as we picked her up. She said, with triumph, “I am gloriously old. I am ripening.”
Agnes said nothing, as was her long-standing habit with her mother. Over the years, the two women had learned to tune out what they didn’t want to hear from each other. In that way, they kept peace in the household, though not in their hearts.
Dora-Rouge leaned toward me. “Don’t you know I remember when people lived below ground and were buried above?”
“Mother. You’re not that old.”
We carried her through the kitchen where the bear coat hung on its hook. She said, “That bear clutches at my heart every time I see it. I still don’t know how you can wear it.” This, too, had been said many times, I could tell.
With a movement of her hip, Agnes pushed the screen door open and backed out, her face red with exertion. Even her dress seemed strained. She was getting too old to lift and carry her mother, I could see that. And in that, too, I saw my opportunity. I was a strapping large girl. This is what I can do here, I thought, if I stay. If I stay, I can care for the old woman to earn my keep. I was sturdy. I could carry the delicate old woman by myself. In that moment I began to figure out my place in the house of old women with its worn-out linoleum and leaking roof. I wasn’t sure they could afford me, but I plotted out the chores I could do even though up to that time I’d avoided work as much as possible. I thought I might even repair the torn screen. Me, the girl who would return. But I didn’t know if I could hold myself there, tie myself to that place of dogs and fish and old peo
ple.
Outside, the sunlight rested on Dora-Rouge’s hair like flame on a candle. She settled herself down in the chair and raised her face to the sky. “It is so good to sit in front of the fire this way.” The insects were noisy around us. With her bony hand she took hold of my wrist and leaned toward me. “Don’t you know I remember when we had to break the bones of the dead to let the souls take their leave.”
“She’s not that old,” Agnes said. “You’re not that old,” she said to her mom, louder than she spoke to me.
Agnes straightened back Dora-Rouge’s hair. “She’s a character all right. And she’s the source of both of us. We came from the Fat-Eaters of the north. Before cholesterol.” She said this with a hearty laugh I wouldn’t have suspected of her until that moment as she adjusted the cover about her mother’s lap. When we went back inside, I felt a little more of the stuffy air in the house open up. It was cool inside. I swear that something almost happy walked toward me. In spite of myself, I smiled. It wasn’t a wide smile; my happiness opened only a bit at a time, the way my story did.
THE BATHROOM SINK was stained red with the iron-rich water that made everything on Adam’s Rib look and smell like blood. As I ran water, I looked at my face in the mirror. Half of it, from below the eye to the jawline, looked something like the cratered moon. I hated that half. The other side was perfect and I could have been beautiful in the light of earth and sun. I’d tried desperately all my life to keep the scars in shadows. Even then, before the mirror, I tried not to see them, and I wondered what Agnes saw, or Dora-Rouge, when they looked at my angular cheekbones and large eyes, the red hair so unusual above dark skin, and when they saw the scars. Maybe they felt the same surprise and fear I did when I looked at my face. Of what, I didn’t know. My scars had no memory, were from unknown origin. There were others, as well, on my body.
The scars, I knew, were from my mother. They were all I had of her. For me, she was like air. I breathed her. I had to breathe whether I wanted to or not, and like air, she was invisible, although sometimes I thought I recalled her heartbeat from when I was inside her body. At those times, a distant memory tugged at me in a yearning way, and I felt something deeper than sorrow.
I looked like her, they said, that girl who’d washed up from stormy waters in 1949, washed in from a storm so fierce it blew fish onto the land. At that time she was ten years old and icy cold, the only thing blown in that had a spark of life remaining inside of it.
IT WAS STILL LIGHT when John Husk came in the back door that evening and placed two large fish on the counter and smiled broadly. I liked him from the first. Husk removed his hat. He had a fine face, skinny legs, no hips to speak of. The years of weather had eroded and etched stories on his face, all except for his forehead, which remained baby-smooth and pale from the constant wearing of a cap. He wasn’t much over five feet five, and he smelled of soap.
Dora-Rouge was seated at the table, propped up by several pillows. “It’s sweltering in here,” she said, wiping her forehead. She complained about the heat from the woodstove. But I could see that she was concerned for Agnes.
Agnes was cold and tired. She not only tended to Dora-Rouge, whose skin had become thin as the parchment of birch trees and bruised easily, but there was also this man, John Husk, the man she cooked for. He was older than Agnes. He was closer to seventy, I believe, though I never knew for sure, and he was devoted to Agnes. The neighbors called him “her old man,” but never to her face, because after many years, they were still curious about the relationship between the two. John Husk and Agnes hadn’t married and they were seldom seen together in public, two things that cast doubt on their neighbors’ speculations. Physically, Husk was young for his age and he was still sharp enough to fish and hunt, to play cards on cold nights and to tell people that “hell is cold, not hot.” He knew this firsthand from the many long, fierce winters he’d endured, including two he’d survived in the near-arctic north when he’d once been forced to give up his values and trap for money. All these years later, he still felt guilt for having done this. There had once been a covenant between animals and men, he told me. They would care for one another. It was an agreement much like the one between land and water. This pact, too, had been broken, forced by need and hunger.
Husk fished and delivered groceries to people who lived out on islands, and he loved science. He kept stacks of magazines and books that divulged the secret worlds of atoms and galaxies, of particles and quarks. He’d read about the way bees communicate by dancing. His main desire in life was to prove that the world was alive and that animals felt pain, as if he could make up for being part of the broken contract with animals.
Agnes stirred the kettle with a wooden spoon. Without looking at Husk, she said, “What are you so happy about?”
He didn’t answer, but there was a spark between them, I could tell. I was sensitive to sparks. But Husk said only, “Say, where’s the iron? I need to press my shirt.”
Agnes didn’t remember where she’d last seen it. “They have permanent-press clothes now,” was all she said. “Maybe you should get some.”
Agnes, at the stove, wore thick hose and the heavy black shoes of an old woman. The kitchen smelled of stew. Dora-Rouge, propped up, was birdlike sitting there, but still she reigned over the table like a matriarch. Husk touched her hand. “How are you tonight, Miss Iron?” he asked.
“I want to go home to die,” she said.
Agnes waved flies away as she cooked.
Husk nodded at Dora-Rouge as if he understood. She’d said it often enough. It was her hope, her one desire, to go back to the Fat-Eaters.
Husk rubbed his hand over his shaved chin, smiling broadly. His eyes followed Agnes as she placed dishes on the table. He was politely interested in me, kind to Dora-Rouge, but it was Agnes he watched with lively eyes, and in spite of his own careful grooming, he never seemed to notice her messiness, the safety pin she wore in her glasses, the slip that hung out from beneath her dress. He was that taken with her. It was clear that he adored her. Enough so that every day he showered at the docks before he came home, washed away the smell of fish that accompanied the other men up Poison Road. Husk’s shoes were always clean and dry, without a sign that he had spent any part of the day walking in the skins, scales, blood, and innards of fish.
He was what they might have once called dashing, handsome, with a pencil-thin mustache, a full head of brushed-back gray hair, an ironed jeans jacket. He took pride in his appearance and was immaculate in his grooming. He was one for whom cleanliness was next to godliness. He did this for Agnes, who never noticed.
Husk and I made small talk, the where-do-you-live kind. I told him, Tulsa, mostly, and when I spoke, the trees and red dirt of Oklahoma entered the little kitchen at Adam’s Rib. For a moment, I smelled the richness of nut trees and the thick-aired Oklahoma evenings. I felt a pang of loneliness for that land.
“Have you seen the salt?” Agnes asked. Then to me, she said, “See how he squints?” Meaning Husk. “It’s because he had snow blindness once. In 1929.” I could hear in her voice that she cared for him.
Husk was a light eater. He ate only a little bread and stew and a piece of the fried fish. Once, during dinner, while I savored the hot bread, Agnes looked at Husk, took off her glasses and cleaned them on her sleeve, then looked at him more closely. It wasn’t until later, when I went to bed and tried, without success, to sleep, that I realized I had taken Husk’s cot. It smelled of his soap.
That night, I lay down on the place his body had formed, and it came to me that maybe this was the first night they’d shared a bed in the old thin-walled house, and then from behind the wall I heard her tell him, “So, old man, you’ve got your way at last.” He laughed out loud and so did she. Like they were kids. Already my presence there was doing some good, I thought.
Sleepless as always, I went outside and sat in Dora-Rouge’s chair, listening to the insects and the wail of a loon.
The next morning, Dora-Rouge sai
d, “You look much better, Agnes. It agrees with you to sleep with Mr. Husk.”
BEGINNINGS WERE IMPORTANT to my people, as I would one day call them. It was why Agnes, on a warm, damp night a few days after my return, said, “Nobody knows where it began, your story.” Behind her, white-winged moths and June bugs clung to the screens. “I’ve thought of it for years, where the beginning was.” She turned toward the window, as if answers lived in the wings of moths and the snapping sound of bugs. “What happened to you started long ago. It began around the time of the killing of the wolves. When people were starving.” In spite of the warmth, she pulled the coat tight around her and shivered. “I think and I think and still I don’t know.”
Dora-Rouge pointed her crooked finger at the cloud-colored coat. “It might have been that bear’s revenge on humans.”
“No. It was long before then.”
She searched for words. As in Genesis, the first word shaped what would follow. It was of utmost importance. It determined the kind of world that would be created.
“There wasn’t a single beaver that year. They’d killed them all. And they’d just logged the last of the pine forests.”
I tried to make sense of what she said, but it was hard at first to put it all together. Harold, her son—my grandfather—was married to the woman named Bush, the woman of the island, the one I’d seen drifting in the canoe. But Harold left Bush, a slip of a girl, to go off with a woman named Loretta Wing, my blood grandmother, the mother of Hannah. Harold later vanished off the face of earth, Agnes said.