Asylum-- Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty

The first small trap we came to held a large and beautiful marten. It dangled, dead, from a low limb of a spruce tree, caught by one foot. Billy explained that marten are good climbers and they will scale a tree to get the bait of dried salmon. Once caught, they fall off the branch and struggle briefly but soon wear themselves out and freeze to death. It sounded rather grim, but every marten caught was money in Billy’s pocket, and I knew how empty that pocket was. The animal was dark brown, with a weasel-thin body and a predator’s sharp teeth. 

Billy was pleased. “The dark ones bring in the best money.” 

He watched me stroking the long, soft fur and said, “I know it’s sad, too.” Then he matter-of-factly picked up the marten and shoved it under the bib of his coveralls. It stuck out from either side of the bib like a frozen pike. The next two traps were empty, but the third held a smaller, reddish-brown marten with a golden triangle of fur at its throat.

Billy could see I was tired, and he offered to stop and make some tea at the next set. To our dismay, there was a dead gray jay in the trap. “I hate it when I catch a camp robber,” Billy said, tenderly removing it from the steel jaws. I closely examined the bird, admiring its dove gray feathers before laying it at the foot of a tree. Billy cut some spruce boughs and spread them on the snow for me to sit on. They were springy and surprisingly comfortable. He stripped off two handfuls of birch bark, then broke off a few dead twigs and branches from a nearby spruce.

“Don’t wait for me,” he said as I pulled out an apple. I assumed he’d be a while getting the fire started. I took a bite, rubbed Smokey’s nose for a minute, looked up, and Billy already had a good little fire going. He took a tin can from his pack, filled it with snow, and put it on the fire to melt. He came and sat down by me, lounging on one elbow on the boughs, looking very much at home. Everything he did, he did with assurance and ease. He seemed a natural part of the woods, with his dark green wool sweater and butternut-colored canvas coveralls, his tin can and his fire built in the snow. He wasn’t wearing the latest synthetic fabrics. He didn’t pull a fancy stove out of a colorful high-tech backpack. His pack was a fifty-year-old canvas and leather rucksack Homer had given him, an artifact of the Swiss militia. It was heavy even when empty.

 “Where did you learn all this stuff?” I asked.

“All what stuff?”

“Starting a fire, trapping, and everything.”

“Some of it from the Troll. Other people in town. Books. Some of it from my dad. He used to trap muskrats back in Maine.”

When we got home, Billy set the martens on a shelf to let them thaw. He showed me one of his favorite books, a small volume on campcraft published in 1917. It included instructions on everything from how to walk like an Indian to how to skin a cougar. Once I read there was no need to gut the animal if you are just keeping the fur rather than the meat, I agreed to watch Billy skin one of the martens. It was a surprisingly bloodless process. He hung it upside down from a beam in the kitchen, made incisions around its back paws, then cut up the back of each leg to the base of its tail. He carefully slit the tail and skinned it first, then the legs. After that, Billy explained as he went along, “you basically peel off the rest of it like a sock.”  

The next step was to take a flat stretching board—like a small thin ironing board—and slowly work it through the skin. After allowing the skin to dry, he would carefully peel it off the board, turning it right side out once again. The end result was an intact fur, minus the animal inside. He showed me several others he had already skinned and dried. They were each about the size and shape of a baguette and they ranged in color from reddish brown to a dark chocolate.

I picked one up and was surprised at how light it was, as if the baguette had been hollowed out. The fur was soft and silky but the dry skin inside rustled like parchment as if the thin skin were inscribed with a quill pen of old, yielding some ancient message that tells you what you need to know only after you already know it. I thought of the Native man who’d approached me at a Fairbanks hotel, trying to sell me something. He’d unrolled a piece of rabbit fur to show the underside where he had drawn a detailed pen and ink sketch of two hunters creeping across the ice toward a walrus. I wondered what would be inscribed on my own inner skin if I were turned inside out. The birth of my children, my parents’ deaths, the slow decline of my marriage. A small stick figure chasing another figure across the snow—me following my grandmother north. A dazzling starburst of me falling in love.

Chapter Seventeen

A Goat and a  Garden

The phone rang—a rare occurrence—and Billy and I both jumped at the sound. It was almost noon, and we still weren’t dressed. It was one of the things I loved about Eagle in winter—the slow mornings. The sun didn’t rise until eleven so there was no reason to get up early, no pressure to rush off to work. The first morning I was at Billy’s in November, I had been startled out of deep sleep by the sound of an alarm. It was still black outside, and I was suddenly confused where I was and what time of day it was. 

Billy leapt out of bed and hit the off button on the alarm clock, threw a couple of logs into the stove, and then quickly scooted under the covers.

“What time is it?”

“Seven o’clock.”

“Why in the world did you set the alarm? Do you have somewhere you have to be?” I knew the likelihood of this was next to none.

A huge shiver ran through him and he snuggled close against me. “I always set it for seven and then I go back to bed.”

“But why?”

“I don’t know. Just because I can, I guess.”

When I got back to San Jose, I called Billy and said, “I have something to read to you. This is from Smokey’s journal:

“One of the grand joys of living in the bush is the privilege of defying the tyranny of bells—doorbells, ringing phones, alarm clocks. We especially revel in snooting the arrogant alarm clock. Sometimes we set the thing for the sheer luxury of thumbing our noses at it; we snuggle down in the sleeping bag again, secure in the knowledge that no explanations are required for being late and lazy.”

Billy laughed and said, “She sounds like a woman after my own heart.”

The phone rang again, and Billy picked it up. “It’s Paula,” he whispered, covering the receiver, as if I knew her. I couldn’t wait for him to get off the phone so I could ask who she was. All he said was “Uh huh, yes, uh huh, okay, bye.”

“So, who’s Paula?”

“Just someone I’ve known for a long time. I help her out when I can—shovel her roof, whatever she needs.”

“Is this someone I should be worried about?” I teased.

“No. You’ll see why when you meet her. But she’s out of water and asked me to go to the well house for her this afternoon.”

We took the snowmachine to town, pulling a sled to carry Paula’s water jugs. Zooming down the road to Eagle, I had the disquieting feeling of being an unprotected body hurtling through space. Hadn’t anyone up here ever heard of helmets, I wondered? A whole exoskeleton would be even better. The five miles seemed to take forever, the cold wind making my eyes tear up and my eyelashes freeze. I was glad when we slowed and passed the fire hall and the laundromat and pulled up at the post office. 

I climbed off the snowmachine, my ears ringing, and slowly adjusted to the stillness of the little town. The cabins hunkered under their load of snow, smoke streaming from the stovepipes. A dog team pulled up in front of us, harnesses jingling, runners shushing over the snow. A teenage girl tied up the dogs and went inside. The log building was bustling with people eagerly looking for a grocery order, their prescription drugs, or a care package from the Lower 48. I took a piece of candy from the jar, and noticed that someone had tossed a wolf tooth into the change cup along with the loose pennies. A man with a long ponytail and a dark, unreadable countenance came in wearing a hat made of what appeared to be the whole front end of a wolf. The face, with its squinty dried eye-slits, came down over the top of his head and the legs dangled down his cheeks. He looked like a shaman wearing a totemic mask, about to perform some secret ritual. Nobody gave him a second glance. Extravagant fur hats were the norm here: nothing was warmer, and the bigger, the better. 

We stopped to read the community announcements on the bulletin board. Someone lost his ax down by the creek where he gets his water. A woman was looking to buy a few bales of hay to keep her dogs warm in the coming cold snap. I wondered if it would hold off until after my expected day of departure. The mail plane didn’t fly when it was colder than thirty-five below. Every day the weather cooperated and the mail plane made it to Eagle was a small miracle in itself. 

When we drove into the driveway of Paula’s cabin on Telegraph Hill, Billy suddenly seemed in a hurry to take off, grabbing the water jugs off the porch, and loading them in the sled. “Just knock hard!” he yelled.

The door swung open and a woman wearing flannel pajama pants, an oversize t-shirt, and striped socks, greeted me with a delighted, pixie’s smile. I could tell by the way Billy had rushed off that even this harmless female made him nervous.

Every available surface in the room was covered with colorful crafts made from beads or clay or fabric. A sculpture of a handsome man wearing a cowboy hat eyeballed me, so realistic I felt like I’d seen him before.

Paula said bitterly, “My ex. He took off for Arizona six years ago. Couldn’t deal with the winters anymore.”

Turning back to a huge pot of water on the stove, she said, “I’m just finishing up these dishes. Then we can have some tea.”

 The floor looked like it hadn’t been swept in days or weeks, but Paula was meticulous in making sure her dishes were germ-free. The complicated process involved scrubbing the dishes, dipping them in boiling water dowsed with vinegar, removing them from the pot with tongs, and placing them on clean towels spread on the counter.

Before we’d left Billy’s cabin, I’d pestered him into giving me more information about the stranger I’d be meeting. He said, “Well, she’s a bit of a recluse. I don’t blame her.” He summarized her history: a girl who’d suffered abuse from her mother, a runaway at age fourteen who’d lived on the streets of San Francisco, a young adult whose beloved father had shot himself in a motel in Bakersfield. With a background like that, I’d wrongly expected her to be a rather grim person. But, even though she was about my age, Paula had an engaging, childlike quality about her.

As she sat on a tree stump at the low kitchen table, wiping her hands dry, she suddenly plunged into a story about her first winter in Eagle when she and her husband nearly froze, living in a travel trailer that had frost creeping up the inside walls. One day a marten slipped in through the cat door and ran under the bed. She startled me with a high-pitched scream and then burst out laughing at how ridiculous she’d been, jumping onto the couch, flapping her hands and hollering, “Get it out, get it out!” They’d left the door open for hours—enduring swarms of mosquitoes—before the marten finally exited as quietly as it had come.

Paula’s voice became warm with nostalgia as she described the cozy round hogan she and her ex-husband had built the following year from willow branches and sheets of plastic covered with sod. Then her tone dropped and tears sprang to her eyes as she described how afraid of fire she always was in winter. One time they went to Fairbanks and friends were watching the hogan and keeping a low fire going for their three cats. 

“When we got back, the plane flew right over the hogan. I looked down and thought ‘Whew, everything’s okay.’ We landed and drove home, and by that time—just twenty minutes later—the whole place was on fire. Our cats were inside. We couldn’t get them out.” She sat in silence, looking down at her expressive hands, now still. 

I noticed a Bible open on the table, its pages covered in pictures lightly drawn with colored pencils. She said, “Go ahead and look at it.” I flipped through the volume, marveling at the angels, flowers, vines, and biblical characters that faintly obscured the words.

“Paula, this Bible is a work of art!”

She laughed and took it from my hands, smoothing the appliqué cover. Reaching under the table, she brought out a bottle of homemade blueberry wine and offered me a glass. When I declined, she responded, “It says right there in Psalm 104: 15. Wine ‘gladdens the heart of man.’ Don’t you think God wants us to be happy?”

Billy bumped open the door, carrying two five-gallon jugs of water. He admitted sheepishly that he’d lost one of the caps. Paula leapt off the tree stump and yelled, “What use is a jug without a cap? How could you possibly lose it between the well house and here?” She angrily shooed us out the door.

Whirlwind though Paula was, with her lightning change of moods, there was something fragile and appealing in her sad eyes, her porcelain complexion framed by light brown, baby-fine hair. With a life of pain behind her, I hoped that she at least felt safe here, hidden away in her cabin in the woods, surrounded by all her pretty things.

I turned to wave at Paula who stood at the door, hand disgustedly on her hip, as we walked down the driveway. Billy just shrugged and said, “And we caught her on a good day. You should see her after she buys a quart of vodka from the bootleggers!”

We bought eggs and a granola bar to split at the store and then drove to the library, where we settled into deep chairs near the wood stove. I glanced with disinterest at the Fairbanks newspaper, unconcerned with what was happening Outside. Billy immersed himself in a book called How to Live in the Woods on $10 a Week. I picked up a history of Fort Egbert and read about life at this hardship post on the frontier. I was surprised to find out the fort was, in some ways, more modern than much of present-day Eagle, with electricity and hot and cold running water, and entertainment such as saloons available in town. They even had a doctor, whereas now there is only a health aide. The soldier who used to play taps every night wrote that the sound created a five-fold echo off Eagle Bluff, reminding him of soldiers who had died in battle. I’d heard rifle shots resounding against the bluff, one after another after another, til their echoes overlapped in complex waves that took a long time to die away.

Marshall came in the door along with a cold blast of air. “Hello, William.”

Billy said, “It’s been a while since I’ve heard that name.”

“Anyone who’s made it through as many winters here as you deserves a little respect,” Marshall replied. 

Later I looked up and saw the dark pressing against the windows. We were the only ones left in the building except for the library volunteer. Before the long, cold ride home, I switched on my headlamp and went to the outhouse just steps from the back door. When I returned, the lights falling onto the snow seemed immeasurably brighter than the kerosene lamps in Billy’s cabin. Outhouses, headlamps, kerosene lanterns. Suddenly I realized how far I was from everything I knew and held dear. I felt stricken with a deep sense of loss. 

Pulling Billy behind a bookshelf, I whispered, “I’ve been trying to put off thinking about what would happen if I actually left Thomas. For good, I mean. I think you have, too.”

Billy nodded, wondering where I was going with this.

“Do you realize everything I’d be giving up? Leaving Thomas would be like losing my history. My memory gaps—I don’t know if those memories will ever come back. I feel like I’d be losing the whole family. The kids, they wouldn’t understand. They love their dad. His shouting all the time, his weird behavior—that’s just Dad to them. They’d think I’m the one in the wrong.” 

I looked at my hands, bare without my wedding ring. I took a big breath and said, “Maybe I should go back to him and try again.”

Billy’s eyes widened, but without a word, he went to a nearby shelf and pulled out a copy of the Bible. Turning to 1Corinthians 13, he read:

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.

On the way home, the feeble headlight on the snowmachine made barely a dent in the darkness. Over the white sweep of river, the northern lights undulated like a piece of rippled Christmas candy set in motion in shades of red and green and white. In Taiga, a few days after our anniversary, Thomas and I had stood outside wrapped in blankets watching the aurora. For the first time I saw it just as Smokey had painted it, in folds of color that hung almost to the ground. I’d felt a layering of self and time as if I were not only myself in the here and now watching a display of northern lights with my husband, but also a girl again looking at one of her grandmother’s paintings and seeing it come alive. All that was missing was one of cabins in the snow that Smokey had often placed beneath the northern lights. And now I held a clear image of just the right cabin for that wintry scene. Thomas had looked forward to showing me the aurora in our new home and he stood with his arm around me, thrilled we were experiencing them together. All I could think was “I have to go to Eagle and love Billy before I die.”

That night I lay with my head on Billy’s lap. The light of the kerosene lamp cast a shadow over his face, and I could just see the outline of his beard as he looked down at me. The only noise was the hiss of moisture escaping from the green aspen in the stove. I drifted off to sleep as Billy sat stroking my hair. The sound of a piece of wood breaking in the fire brought me out of my dreams, and I heard Billy speaking very quietly as if not wanting to wake me. He was saying over and over, “I love you. I love you, Louise. I love you.”

Opening my eyes, I saw he was bent over me, staring at my face from just inches away. Putting my hand behind his neck, I pulled his head down and kissed him. 

“Finally, Billy, finally,” I whispered.

“That day you called to say goodbye before you killed yourself, all I could think of was ‘God, don’t let my friend be taken away from me.’ I flagged down the school bus on its way back to town. I told Brad I had a friend who was in trouble. He pulled over and we prayed for you.”

I imagined the two men—Billy and Brad, the pastor of the bible chapel who also worked as the bus driver—sitting in the empty yellow school bus, heads bowed in prayer.

“Thank you, Billy. Thank you for being there for me.”

“But since then, I’ve realized that my soul isn’t longing for a friend. It wants a mate. I love you, Louise, and I want you to stay here.”

Those long-awaited words sank into me, filling the ragged hole that was my heart. Everything was all right now. Billy loved me. He would take care of me, just as he had that December midnight when he’d called the San Jose police. He would be there for me. He would not deny me. 

“I love you, Billy.”

He began talking as if in a reverie, slowly and softly, telling me all the things he would do if I stayed in Eagle. 

“I would move the outhouse closer . . . put in a drain so we won’t have to take out the slop bucket . . . build a shower room . . . get a goat with a gentle temperament . . . put in a bigger garden . . . build a greenhouse.”

I didn’t care if we had a goat or a garden, as long as I had Billy and this place of sweet asylum in the woods. 

The morning I was to leave, we got a call saying the plane to Fairbanks would be delayed by three hours.

“Hoo-ray,” said Billy, “hoo-ray.”

Now he could make the fried potatoes and caribou steak I had requested for breakfast. We even had time to bake brownies and skin another marten. 

The brownies were cooling, the marten skin was on the stretching board, and we hurriedly climbed back into bed. What seemed like a short time later, we looked at the clock and saw it was less than ten minutes before the plane was to take off. We threw on our clothes, Billy grabbed my duffel bag, and we ran out the door. I hopped onto the snowmachine while Billy pulled the starter cord. He revved the engine and took off standing on the footrest. As we raced through the clearing, he swung his leg over the seat and sat down. We careened down the trail between the trees heavy with fresh snow, sliding sideways at the curves. Billy, usually considerate of my fear of going fast, was driving like a wild man. He rode up onto the side of snow banks, threatening to dump us into the snow. I held onto my hat, and he heard me laughing. He looked back at my huge grin and started whistling “Bridge Over the River Kwai.”

We slowed down a bit as we passed through the Native village with a sad-looking husky chained near an outhouse with the door hanging on its hinges. Billy sped up to pass a truck going in same direction, then slowed and turned onto the road to the airstrip. We came out onto the wide open space and cruised to a stop. There was nothing but a pair of tire tracks leading down the runway. We’d missed the plane. I leapt off the snowmachine, tugging Billy with me.

Throwing my arms around him, I spun us in a circle, yelling, “I don’t have to leave! I get to stay another day!” He began laughing, and I grabbed his hand and ran, swinging him around like crack the whip. “I am so happy!” I tried to push him into the snow but he held onto me and we both fell down.

  We got up, brushing off our clothes, and walked down the runway holding hands. I kept turning around and around, taking in the snow-covered mountains, the trees thickly hoar-frosted under a bright, bright blue sky, a lone patch of fog snagged between two hills.

“This is the most beautiful day in the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen.”

The air was so still there was no sound except the squeaking of our boots on the snow. We walked for ten minutes or more. When we stopped to kiss, all was silent except for a snowmachine in the distance. Or maybe it was a car passing on the road. But the sound didn’t fade away. It grew louder. We turned and looked to the west and saw a mosquito-size spot high in the sky. We watched it come on, approaching fast. It was the plane. It was just late. I’d have to leave after all. I turned to Billy, disappointment written all over my face. 

Taking my hand, he said, “Remember the first time you left, last spring? Before we went to your cabin to pack your suitcase, we drove out to the footbridge at American Creek.”

“Yes, I remember,” I said. 

“You stood there looking at the creek and you said, ‘I don’t want to leave.’ You had the most plaintive sound in your voice, like a small child.”

“That was the first time I had to say goodbye to Eagle.”

I’d been out of touch with my family for ten days and they would start to worry if I didn’t contact them soon. The apartment and the fellowship were waiting for me in San Jose. I had unfinished business there.