Russell was telling the three of us — Melody, Leigh, and me — about the last moments of his mother’s life. The three of us were crying, but Russell wasn’t. His face was pale, not his usual ruddy hue that made him look as if he’d just come in from jogging a few miles. His brown eyes seemed more deeply set in his face. Perhaps that was his grief, I thought, or maybe it was just the way he was aging now, out of boyhood, into his late twenties.
I couldn’t look away from him. I didn’t care about the single tear tediously dredging a path down my cheek. I was struck by Russell’s composure, his concentration on telling the tale in the face of three women’s sorrow. We sat in his mother’s two-room house and dabbed our eyes. In unison. A choreography from a Greek tragedy.
Russell pressed his palms against his knees. “ ‘I’m still here, aren’t I?’ That’s what she said.” He looked up from his hands, at me. “ ‘I’m still right here.’ The nurse had drawn the curtain around us, around her bed. I felt like we were inside a cavern that I’d come out of again, but she wouldn’t. And that’s just what happened.” He shook his head.
“And what did you say, honey?” Melody asked him.
“I just answered her. I said, ‘Yes, Mom, you’re here.’ But I don’t think she heard me.”
“She didn’t know if she was here or gone,” Leigh said, folding her lace hankie, the corners embroidered with blue flowers.
Melody and I had soggy tissues balled up in our fists. Russell’s mother, Lila, had been our friend and neighbor at the Farm, a collective enterprise in eastern Washington, for most of our adult lives. If we’d added up all the hours, we’d probably spent a good year standing ankle-deep in Curtain Creek with Lila, washing onions, leeks, and potatoes.
“She heard you, Russ,” I said, then stood up, walked across the room, and threw my tissue in Lila’s wood stove. For a year, when Russell was a baby, I’d slept near that stove, on a mat on the floor. If Lila was too tired to get up to comfort him, I’d done it. During the day, I’d fed him homemade baby food from our harvests: mashed carrots, green beans, applesauce.
When I turned back from the stove, Leigh and Melody were each putting a hand in their jeans pockets, and Russell’s eyes snapped from them to me, imploring. His mouth opened.
“None of that now, girls,” I said. “Russ is all grown up now.”
Years before, whenever Russell was about to return to college after a visit home to the Farm, Melody and Leigh would empty the change from their pockets into his hands. But this time Melody produced only a fresh tissue, and Leigh held up a roll of breath mints. The false alarm made the three of us smile at him through our tears.
Russell rolled his eyes. He’d be on his way in a few days — not back to his laboratory job across the state in Seattle, but to the swamps of Minnesota, where high-school kids had come upon a dozen translucent frogs. The northern leopard frog, Russell had told me the day before, had disappeared from 95 percent of its habitat, but ozone depletion wasn’t the cause. “It’s not just solar radiation zapping those frog eggs, Geneva,” he’d said. “Other factors are at work. Trust me. Nothing’s that simple.” Although he was a biologist now — a herpetologist, to be exact — in his threadbare jeans and patched flannel shirt he still looked like one of us.
Lila had been under the earth for two days — two days of chilling November rains, biting, stinging. Just getting to a consensus about her burial had been a major feat for the community. No one that young — only fifty — was supposed to be dead. None of us at the Farm had been prepared. For more than thirty years she’d lived among us, struggled with us to safeguard personal freedom in this valley carved out between two snowcapped ridges. Our hands were callused, our nails ragged, dirty. Sometimes we’d go for days without saying a word to another human being, lost in a quiet dailiness: shelling peas, peeling pearl onions.
Lila’s death didn’t just sadden us; it frightened us. The white uniforms, the whiter shoes, chemo, ticking monitors, inscrutable pain — out of nowhere they suddenly loomed before us. Even together, we were lonely. All the organic beans and tomatoes, all the raw rolled barley and tofu curries in the world would not save the rest of us if they had not saved her — our Lila, studious observer of leaf mold and wood rot.
“This question of what to do with Lila’s body is bringing out the worst in us,” I’d said in October at our residents’ meeting of Curtain Creek Farm. My voice was too loud. We knew she didn’t have much longer. The cancer was sending out tendrils, choking off her liver and kidneys. “We’re a community here. We need a cemetery. Kids need a place to mourn their loved ones.”
“That’s not who we are, Geneva. That’s a whole Christian trip,” Reuben said, “the sacred remains and all that.” He was an old-timer who lived in an underground house way out past the end of our dirt road.
Around and around we went. No one wanted part of his or her land parcel relegated to a cemetery. No one wanted such a thing within viewing distance of his or her home, or anywhere near the twelve-acre collective garden, or the creek. A cemetery was a throwback to the society we’d abandoned. Adulation for the afterlife. When it was this life, we believed — it was this life that counted.
“But we can’t just go around burning bodies, either. That sucks,” Roxanne, one of the younger women, said. She’d married in and stayed, though the man she’d married had been in Alaska for three years, and most of us presumed he wasn’t coming back. “Even cave people buried their dead.”
Whenever Lila’s name came up, there’d be a spell of quiet in the room, momentarily interrupting the swirling arguments. I attended these meetings only occasionally. I hadn’t been living on the Farm for a dozen years, but I still kept my shack there, and sometimes on weekends I drove out from town.
At last, Charles, who was nearing seventy, stood up and took off his straw hat. The top of his bald head was stark white above his tanned face. “We’ve looked out for one another,” he said, “many of us here, since 1967. Shared food, firewood.” He turned the hat in his hands; bird feathers — bright orange, iridescent blue, chalk white — stuck up from the hatband. “Please. We have to stand together in death, too. You can put Lila in my back field. Hell, I don’t mind. I loved her.”
Russell reached his hand toward my ear. “These suckers could catch one primo brown trout.” He touched my earring, which dangled a tiny amethyst from the bottom of its silver hoop.
I drew back an inch.
“Does it bother you when I touch you?” He was home for a visit this past summer. (Can it have been only six months ago?) We were sitting in a booth in the Red Rail Tavern and he had his arm lightly around my shoulders. Lila and her new boyfriend, Wayne, were dancing out on the dusty floor.
I shook my head. “Not bother, exactly.”
Russell poked my earring gently so it jingled. “No?”
Then I smiled, which I shouldn’t have done. These tiny gestures seemed to occur too quickly, like slippages, leakages. “It’s dangerous.”
Russell leaned toward me, serious, his eyes such a dark shade of brown they almost matched his black hair. “Tell me to stop, then.”
We’d had this conversation before. On and off. Five years running.
“C’mon, Gen.” He leaned closer. “Tell me to stop.”
“You two — honestly.” Lila had returned to our table. She laughed. Wayne stood behind her, his hand on her back. The hunched buffalo on his brass belt buckle caught the flickering light from the beer sign with the picture of a huge fish leaping into a drunken angler’s net.
Russell let his hand fall slowly from my earring to the table.
“I bet you heard my head crack against that post just now, huh?” Lila asked us.
“I doubt it,” Wayne said. “They seem otherwise engaged.”
I shook my head.
“You didn’t? You didn’t see Wayne spin me right into that wooden post? Conk! Lordy, I thought everyone in here must have heard. It’s a good thing I’m not passed out.”
“Maybe you are, Mom. Maybe you are and you just don’t know it.” Russell slid a finger around the rim of his beer mug.
Lila was six years older than I was, and Russell was sixteen years younger. Just a week before, she’d told me as we sat on her porch stoop that, as far as she was concerned, this age business didn’t mean crap. “Hell, Wayne is nine years younger than me. Frank was eight years older. It’s all a bunch of hooey.” She’d put her hand on my arm. Neither of us had even a hint that we’d soon be sitting there deciding at what point Russell and I should tell her doctors to take the machines away. “The years keep mushing us closer, Gen,” she said that night. “It gets blurrier and blurrier. Russ is stubborn as all get-out. He just won’t get over you.”
“He’ll find someone. Someone who likes toads.”
Lila patted my arm. “We don’t know that. We don’t.” She whistled once and Big Dog came and stood in front of us. We scratched his ears. “Russell’s been out into the wide world, Geneva. Like you have. But he comes home, doesn’t he?”
There, in the tavern, I kept remembering how I’d nodded yes. But what was the question? Lila and Wayne did the twist, squirming lower and lower. Weren’t there limits even to the kind of liberty I’d lived my life upholding? Could a middle-aged woman really put her head back against the red vinyl booth and let the electricity in her body go haywire as a twenty-eight-year-old man’s fingers slipped across her chin, down her neck?
“There are these big scales with huge weights piling up on both sides,” I told Russell, “and I don’t know which side to hop on to tip it one way or another.”
“Then let me,” he said. “I know.”
I pointed to a young girl at the bar. “OK, what about her — that cute redhead? Go up there and order something. Talk to her.”
“Not interested.” He picked up my hand. He pressed my fingers. “Give me some credit, Geneva.”
I’d been right there at his birth, though I’d never told him, and I doubted Lila recalled it. I’d been the one to give him the last gentle tug that pulled him out of her and into the world. Rain falling on her tin roof, and me with both hands around his neck, trying to pull him without choking him at the same time. I had no idea what I was doing. I’d helped Sonny, the sheep lady up the road, pull a lamb out once, but that was it. I was sixteen and had been on the Farm for barely a month then. Scooter and Don had found me at Pike Street Market in Seattle, where they were selling organic vegetables. With their similar sets of bad black teeth, they looked strangely related. (They still do.) Back at the Farm it was the potato harvest, they told me, and I could help out. They were expecting a bumper crop, and they could use every digger they could get. “We work sunup to sundown,” they warned me, and I’d have to leave when the harvest was over; they didn’t have any spare houses or extra rooms. “The girl,” they called me the whole way back across the state: “Let the girl sleep in the back. She looks whacked-out.”
But I did stay at the Farm — for twelve years. My six-by-eight-foot cabin had a window in the roof, a window that filled with moonlight at 2 A.M. My single bed was suspended by ropes from the ceiling. When, at seventeen, I’d moved out of Lila’s to live there, I used to stand in the doorway at dawn, listening to the rooster and watching a red-tailed hawk glide over the potato fields as I drank my strong coffee. In another hour I’d be unearthing Yukon Golds and Mt. Vernon Reds in the three acres by Curtain Creek.
“Holy smokes, it’s like finding treasure,” I’d told Charles when he’d first shown me how to dig with the potato fork. He still had a few wisps of salt-and-pepper hair then, long and slicked back under his straw hat. I dug the fork in slowly, carefully, under the weight of my heel. The earth sucked it down. I loved that feel. And then I’d pull back on the fork and open the dirt vault. I’d kneel and rake my fingers toward the edges, past the big, cold, oval potatoes, searching for what we all loved best: the tiny potato eggs, the babies, nudged to the far perimeters, tethered by thin runners. Those small ones we’d later wrap in foil and set on the coals of our harvest fires. We’d top them with goat cheese or rich, buttery, browned onions. Sometimes there’d be a special tea, brewed with mushrooms Scooter and Don had brought back from their trips to the coast, from the rain forest there, and we’d sip and watch each other’s pupils grow as big as quarters. There’d be howling and hooting, and the Farm’s barefoot children would play around us, their corn-husk dolls lined up by castles of bark and rock.
And everywhere the dogs. For years they’d been the coyotes’ lovers in the hills, so the pups that licked our feet were half wild. But they came if we called sweetly, and they sat with us for a while by the fire. They let us scratch their ears. Late at night, the moon dangling low, the children wrapped in blankets, asleep among the spent day lilies, we’d begin the shedding of clothes. Lila was always first to unveil. Her nipples were bright pink beads circling the fire. We were no longer in our right minds, and glad of it. The triangles of pubic hair — brown, black, yellow — were secret runes beside the red embers. The moonlight made us glisten.
Big Dog had selected Lila. His mother was Charles’s black Lab, and she was sure his father was a wolf; I told her the father was probably just a no-account coyote. Big Dog ate all kinds of scraps, even beet greens. He gnawed on corncobs. On winter nights he came down from the snowy ridge tops and slept on Lila’s porch. The gray spots on his black-and-tan coat had lightened. Up there, prowling in the snow, he no doubt resembled a tree stump.
After Lila was safely settled in the ground, fifty yards from the beehives she loved, her marker of blue telephone-line insulators fused together atop her grave, Big Dog became everyone’s. Some nights he slept at Melody and Leigh’s or down past the lower thirty at Scooter and Don’s. Or he slept outside my cabin, his back pressed up close to the wall nearest my small kerosene heater. I stayed there, too — with Russell up the dirt road at his mother’s place, pacing, I knew, around her cactus plants, sorting through her papers. My heater hissed, and Big Dog’s snores outside were like the snores of a very old man.
Lila was the one who made me go back to high school. I’d lost my whole sophomore year traveling — hitching rides, going wherever someone else, some stranger, was going. At the Farm, Lila arranged everything, improvising documents with a new name for me. “Father unknown,” one paper said. “Good,” I told her. “Good deal.”
I rode the school bus with the happy teenagers, feeling more like an older aunt — watching them whisper and giggle — than like one of them. Back then, the Farm had a tutor for the younger children, and they sang songs in French down by the creek, caught bugs, drew maps of the world in the mud. In a few years, Russell would be one of those kids — barefoot, running after a dog that was chasing a rabbit across the field of pungent leeks.
Even then my own childhood seemed years and miles away, tangled in red mangrove roots, half submerged in the salty marsh waters back in Florida. Sometimes in the dim early light, as I rode the bus down the miles of muddy roads that twisted and rose out of our valley, I could almost smell again the girl I’d been. My hair wet and full of sand. The girl who’d stood alone once under a light bulb and smashed a chair across a kitchen table, watched the legs fly off, the seat and back drop in pieces at her feet. I could see my stepfather’s short red hair, shorter still beneath the white Coast Guard cap, after he’d sailed it across the room. I was a child pressed into his service. His grip on my shoulder and hip made matching blue tattoos. I belonged to him, like a canal dredged out deep for the big white pleasure boats, their black flags flapping in the ocean wind.
Before she put me on the yellow bus, Lila sent me to see Melody and Leigh, who lived in a dome house just past the ice hut. Melody and Leigh pulled out two boxes — low, flat ones — from under their bed, then another from beneath the kitchen table. Inside were dozens of shoes, each pair held together by an old rubber band. Melody handed the shoes to Leigh, who tried them on my feet: red pumps, black loafers, soft brown oxfords with laces. The dome house was sweltering. With such interminable sunlight, it almost always was. (The boxes of shoes, I know, are still there — many of them the same sturdy pairs kids wore years ago, and will wear again.) I put on the brown ones and smiled. Melody and Leigh motioned me to walk around in them, and my footsteps circled the braided rug’s circumference. Though still a teenager, that day I had the sense of some small perpetuity — shoes slipped on and kicked off, going round and round.
After two years at the high school, I managed to make my way, slowly, through the community college, then the state university, where they gave me work-study and let me loose in the art studio. That’s where I learned to make paper. Cooking it. Steaming shredded willow branches. Grasses whirled in a blender with paprika and celery seeds. Bark paper. As Lila used to say, I was all over the map.
Now I’m known to get eight blenders going at once in my studio — which is also my living space — atop the old newsprint-storage building in downtown Spokane. The owner couldn’t believe I wanted to live up here, but he helped me hook up a toilet and sink to the ancient plumbing, shaking his head the whole time. I told him I could grab a shower at the Y after a swim, no problem. To me, after twelve years at the Farm, it seemed the lap of luxury.
With my eight blenders plugged into a power strip, I’m set. The paper I make becomes my lamps, my lampshades — tall triangular ones and cylinders wrapped around a framework of red-dogwood saplings. I embellish the shades with pine needles, varnish leaves onto them. They’re hot items now in Seattle and Santa Fe. I box them up. I ship them out.
Weekends out on the Farm, suspended in my bed under 2 A.M. moonlight, I think of a new wrinkle: wheat cherubs, one leg in and one out of the shade. Big Dog snores outside. If I step out, he comes for me to scratch his ears, which I do, but he soon turns away. He won’t look at me. I’m not her, he seems to realize. I’m not Lila.
The gallery owner in Santa Fe tells me he can’t imagine why I don’t just pack up my blenders and move on down there, where the endless sunshine on the ochre mountains would surely provide a steady source of my kind of light. It’s a nice light, all right, I tell him on the phone. I’ve been there. I’ve seen it. But too much of a good thing makes it no good anymore. I can’t explain this, though, to a man whose eyes are glued all day to a cash register. When I visited there, the high-heeled clerks in the boutiques wouldn’t look at me in my black overalls and red sneakers, although I had, strangely enough, the same-size wad of cash in my pocket as the browsers in their sequined silk cowgirl shirts.
Spokane is a city of no pretenses. No one, thank God, has tried to save its downtown yet. Its ugly heart still beats wildly. Bankers still snub the hobos just off the freight trains from Portland or Great Falls. Green-haired, safety-pin-lipped teenagers skateboard down the center of First Avenue, where old lady shoppers, crossing the street, give them a wide berth. Buses chug and burp foul smoke, and no one cares. It is, as Russell has often said, “a whatever kind of place.”
In a few days he’ll be off to Minnesota, where kids have found see-through frogs. Also several clubfooted frogs. A frog with nine little legs. Russell keeps getting phone calls. “More trouble in the lily pads,” he’ll say when he hangs up.
The other day, he showed me a photograph from his backpack. “See, this frog has an eye in its throat.”
“Its own eye?” I squinted down at it.
“See that bulge in its neck? And look: its two regular eyes are sealed shut.”
I stared at the puffy throat that would never croak, at the bugged-out eyes that didn’t have a clue about sky, water, pond muck. “He’s so white.”
“Their skin’s water-permeable,” Russell said, “and this particular species overwinters, so he stays submerged for a long time, down deep. His immune system’s shot.”
Russell put the photograph back in his pack. “Eleven more just like him up there.” His theory, he explained, had to do with heavy metals in large concentrations on the bottoms of those marshes, pollutants from herbicides and fertilizers the local sorghum farmers used. “It all drifts down.” He shook his head. “Down and down.”
What he saw in his everyday life was ugly, I thought: sad and ugly. I touched his arm.
He turned to me, lifted my fingers to his mouth, and kissed them, one by one.
Back in the old days at the farmers’ market in Spokane, I used to push my table up close to Lila’s — mine with its lamps and hers with its vegetables. This way we could talk when the shoppers thinned out. On her table were baggies of pea pods, red basil, catnip, peppermint. There were tidy rows of turnips, beets, potatoes. “Organically Loved,” the sign behind her read. The farmers’ market was where I’d gotten my start, when a gallery owner from Seattle, a man with a gold-tipped cane, had taken a few of my lamps back with him to “test the waters,” he said.
When things were slow, Lila would tell me about Russell, whom I rarely saw then. I’d been off at college. I’d already burned out the motors in three blenders, and number four wasn’t long for this world. From Curtain Creek’s runoff, Lila told me, Russell had collected all manner of salamanders, tadpoles, and water bugs. He knew how they breathed and ate and even procreated. “Surely,” Lila said, “he doesn’t get that sort of smartness from me.”
“Then who?” I asked, thinking that, after so many years, the secrecy about Russell’s father couldn’t still be an issue.
She stared at me, then shrugged. “Too much moonlight.” She ran her hands across the beets. It was all she’d ever said on the subject.
Now I have gold-embossed cards that say “Geneva Lamps,” as though they aren’t from a person at all, but from a place.
Which maybe is true. The place of the lamps is a stand of red dogwood that grows along Curtain Creek. And it’s silver saplings tied and soaking near my ankles in the creek’s icy water. And it’s the circle of grass where Russell, setting down his bucket of toads one day, that summer after he’d finished college, said my name in a new way. And stepping out of the chill, I was for a few moments the woman he saw before him. Everything radiated out from my cold toes in the damp grass.
He bent and cupped first my left foot, then my right, in his warm hands. “It’s too soon to be wading around in that creek, Geneva. What were you thinking?” Then he blew three warm breaths on my toes, the way someone might blow on frozen fingers.
So many of us digging. We took turns with the shovels. I couldn’t help but remember emptying the potato treasure vaults, the mounds of potatoes piled on carts, in wooden crates. Charles had made the casket that sat like a burned-out sun, pulling us toward it. Our emptied-out Lila inside. As we dug, the rain hammered down between the ridges, deepening our valley, our world that had become incomparably present when the weight of what was gone from us had dropped out of it. Farewell.
Or wasn’t she still here? Still right here? In our fogged breaths. In the rain on our slickers streaked with dirt — dirt everywhere, sweetly pungent, clattering against the pine box. We were all submerged by that weight when it went down. Charles had used ten shiny belt buckles for simple embellishments over the lid’s nails. One was a buffalo buckle, from Wayne, who had loved her last and who now stood with Russell across the cavernous hole from me, their arms crossed over their chests. The dozen young children from the Farm, who’d probably never seen a burial before, stared at the adults as we dabbed our eyes. Melody and Leigh, on either side of me, took my hands.
Goodbye. The good is what was, what’s passed. And the bye moves us along, onward. It’s a whispered word. A raised hand. I saw Russell over the abyss of her, his eyes rain-darkened, cast down. Down and down. Toward Lila. Still her. Still here. She was in love with that ground.
I hear the pulleys creak and groan as Russell takes the service elevator up to the top floor of my building. The elevator, which used to haul up bales of newsprint, makes the floor I stand on shimmy. I wait for Russell’s knock. In the last hour, the rain has turned to sleet, then to snow, and back to sleet.
Russell said he wanted to say goodbye to me before he flies off to his frogs in Minnesota. I know that, coming in my alleyway door, he’s had to step over Ed, the wino who sleeps there. It was Ed’s doorway long before it was mine. Ed says one of two things whenever I come in or out: “Seen any good ciggy butts lately?” or, “It’s all quiet here, Missy, on this side.”
I stand among the sixty-three lamps in my studio, none of which is lit. I’ve been experimenting lately with strings of tiny white Christmas lights inside my shades, rather than a single bright bulb. I wrap the string up and down and side to side inside the lamp’s wire latticework. But the little lights are cheap. One tiny bulb bleeps out, and the whole thing goes. Then I have to unwind it, locate the culprit. All day, one of these has given me grief. I can’t find the short. For a minute I think I have, and the lights come on, the paper shade shimmering with silver threads, but then the lights flicker and quit. I walk around the lamp, curse it, kick it aside.
Because of Lila’s death, because she needed me around these last few months, I’m long overdue for a trip to Santa Fe. Down there the air is clean, bright, and soft, like the interiors of the adobe homes. Like the faces behind the boutique windows. When I arrive at the Albuquerque airport, I’ll load my crates of lamps onto a dolly. I’ll brush aside the gallery van-driver’s help. I like to do it myself. The boxes are huge, but not heavy. I’ll pile them high. Boxes of lamps for well-lit people. More light, they want. Always more light.
Russell stands in my dark studio and says nothing for a long time. We stare down on the city — its lights flung out in unkempt rows. Far off, the airport beacon signals erratically, casting smoldering auras into the black fizz of the sky. Sleet pings off my windows.
After a while I tell him about my day. I mention the problem lamp. “It’s nothing,” I say. “I’m just going to toss it and go on to the next one. I’ve got a million more in the hopper, ready to go.” I touch my temple, smile.
Wind rattles the windows’ old glass. Russell stands behind me. When I shiver, he puts his arms around me, crossing them over my chest. He slides his palms across my biceps. The sides of his hands brush against my breasts. When he puts his lips on the back of my neck, I lay my head against his chest, feel his warm mouth as it presses my throat.
“You’re not telling me to stop,” he whispers, and I shake my head.
When he turns me and kisses me, his kiss is not about goodbye. It has nothing to do with departure. I feel his shirt is damp from the rain, and his chest, when I’ve undone the buttons, is cool.
Only once as we are making love do I think of his infant body slipping out, wet and bloody, into my hands. When I think of this, I bury my face in his shoulder, as if I’m Eve going backward, trying to reenter the ribs of her mate, become no one again. The baby’s chest was between my two hands, the sweet pure heart ticking wildly.
“Gen” is all he says as he holds me. “Gen, Gen, Gen.”
Later, when I get up, I hear him. Just on the other side of the paper screen that’s my bedroom wall. I peek around it and see him squatting, naked, by the broken lamp. He’s pulled out the cord of little lights and is fingering the bulbs, one by one. He peers inside the sockets. Then he plugs the cord in. The lights flicker and go out. He’s got the cord wrapped around his shoulders, up one arm and down the other, to keep it from tangling, I suppose. My paper shade, sprinkled with shredded pine needles, is at his feet. He fiddles with a bulb. Sleepy and still dazed by the force of his passion, I stand there watching. He plugs in the cord again, and this time the lights stay on, so brightly I can’t see Russell. And then the lights laugh. They move toward me. They call my name.
This story originally appeared in Georgia Review.
— Ed.
