Chapter 9 - The Thaw
Winter broke in the third week of March.
It didn't happen slowly; it came in three days of warm, southern wind that blew up from the Chesapeake, turning the snow banks on the highway into roaring ditches of brown river water that carried the dead brush down into the basin. The ice on the Monongahela cracked with sounds like distant artillery, the great white plates buckling against the concrete bridge piers before tumbling south toward the Ohio.
Evelyn's house in town was sold at public auction on the steps of the municipal building on a Tuesday morning.
Mark and I didn't go. We stayed on the mountain, helping the local high school track team clear the windfall branches from the public trail that ran along the lower edge of the state forest. But Christian Vance sent us the docket sheet: the house had been bought by a young couple from State College who ran an organic apple orchard—a man who worked with his hands and a woman who taught seventh-grade English at the middle school.
The furniture had been cleared out by a liquidator from Altoona. The antique silver, the hand-knotted lace runners, the mahogany dining table where Evelyn had held court for half a century—all of it had been tagged with yellow price stickers and hauled away in the back of two canvas-sided trucks.
Nothing remained of her in the valley except the three lines of black ink on the Department of Corrections roster in Muncy:
INMATE #44892-A: MILLER, EVELYN V.HOUSING UNIT: MAXIMUM MEDICAL.STATUS: PERMANENT COMMITTAL.
She had suffered a stroke two weeks after the hearing. The prison doctor had sent a brief, formal notice to the probate attorney: she was alive, but the right side of her body was paralyzed, and her speech had deteriorated into a repetitive, garbled string of syllables that the nurses said sounded like land survey coordinates—chains, links, rods, and perches.
She couldn't hold a pen. She couldn't sign a deed. She sat in a high-backed vinyl wheelchair by an aluminum-framed window that looked out over forty acres of razor wire, watching the crows sit on the perimeter fence.
On a Saturday afternoon in late April, Mark and I took Lily up to the surveyor's cabin.
The logging road had dried out, the deep ruts filled with crushed limestone by the state forestry crew. The cabin itself was gone; the state had demolished the creosote logs with an excavator three weeks earlier, hauling the timber to a regional incinerator and grading the site down to the red granite foundation.
The river-stone chimney still stood, rising fifteen feet into the blue spring air like an old monument in an abandoned cemetery.
The clearing was full of wildflowers—wild mustard, mountain laurel, and the pale blue bells of Virginia bluebells that always come up through the leaf mulch after the snow leaves the hemlocks.
Lily was running ahead of us, wearing her pink sneakers and an old pair of denim overalls that had grass stains across both knees. Her glasses were in her pocket; Dr. Aris had cleared her for full activity forty-eight hours earlier, his examination showing that her corneas had healed with less than five percent optical distortion.
"Look, Dad!" she yelled, dropping to her knees beside a flat slab of granite where the cabin porch had been. "There’s a nest!"
Mark and I walked up the rise together, his arm around my waist, our fingers tangled together over the rough canvas of my work jacket.
In a crevice between two of the foundation stones, sheltered from the north wind by the remains of the hearth, a pair of gray juncos had built a tiny, perfect bowl of dry pine needles and sheep's wool. Inside sat four speckled eggs, no larger than acorns, warm beneath the afternoon sun.
Mark knelt down beside our daughter, pointing with a calloused finger. "Don't touch them, bug. Just look. The mother’s up in that white pine watching you."
Lily leaned in until her nose was six inches from the stone, her brown eyes wide, clear, and perfectly steady as she counted the tiny brown flecks on the shells.
"One, two, three, four," she whispered. "When are they going to hatch, Dad?"
"In a couple of weeks," Mark said, his voice soft, rich with the quiet certainty of a man who was finally back on his own ground. "Right about the time the apple trees start to flower down in the hollow."
I looked out past the stone chimney, down the long green slope of the mountain where four thousand acres of hemlock and white pine were stretching their branches toward the spring sky. The valley didn't smell like lye anymore. It didn't smell like burning vellum, or copper pennies, or old secrets kept in rusted lockboxes beneath the floor.
It smelled of damp earth, warming pitch, and the sweet, cold water of the mountain springs running clean over the stones down to the river.
"Mom?" Lily called out, looking over her shoulder with a smile that showed the gap where her left bicuspid was coming in. "Can we come back here for my next birthday? We can bring the cake up in a basket and have a picnic by the chimney."
May you like
I looked at Mark, and then down at my wrists, where the pale pink scars of the burns were already beginning to fade beneath the spring sun.
"Yes, sweetheart," I said, stepping down onto the stone foundation beside her and taking her small, warm hand in mine. "We can come back every year. The mountain’s not going anywhere."
