The Ash Family, page 3
I was quiet, next to Bay. I was overflowing with questions about the Ash Family but too nervous to ask the wrong thing. Finally, I introduced myself. “No way are you a Beryl,” he said. In his voice it sounded like Burl. “I will never call you that.”
“What will you call me, then?” I said.
He looked over at me and tilted his head. “Dice will decide,” he said. “You’ll have to show yourself to us somehow. For me, Dice said I was a bay, like a harbor.”
“What’s your real name?” I said.
“I forget,” he said.
* * *
At last, Bay pulled up to a mountain cabin, a rich-family one, with red shingles and white-frosting eaves, a redwood deck and large windows facing into the gloomy Smokies.
“What is this?” I said.
“The free store,” he said. “We need coats.”
He parked the car, and we walked to the door. I raised my hand to the doorbell, but he shoved me aside.
He took a plastic card to the lock and opened the door into a dark, glossy foyer, exhaling heat.
“Are we stealing?” I was breathless from the shove. He’s a farmer, I reminded myself, a shepherd.
He said, “No one’s been here in months.”
“I saw lights on.”
“That’s just automatic.”
“To keep people from stealing,” I said.
“Listen,” he said. “If you want to fall down the hole of believing in property, in a sense, you’re stealing from me. Because I’m taking care of you.”
“You wanted company, you said.”
“Did I?” He smiled. “Do you think society is unequal?” He peered down the hallway and shifted his head like a snake. “Would you go to a rally?”
“Yeah.”
“Would you break a big-box window?”
“Yeah.”
“Would you shoot an oilman?”
“No,” I said. I wasn’t violent. I didn’t even eat animals; Isaac had taught me to be a vegetarian. Isaac used to say, It’s easy to be an activist when you’re heartbroken. He was talking about the people who smashed windows, whom he did not respect. It’s easy to imagine that rage against one person and rage against society are in sync. I didn’t know how to explain this to Bay. “Think about the oilman’s family,” I said at last.
“You’ve got to fight violence with violence,” Bay said. “Imagefare.” I thought then that he was speaking metaphorically. He stepped farther into the hall. He looked bizarre next to the foyer table with its arrangement of dried billy buttons.
“You’re going to get caught,” I said.
“No one’s been here in months,” he said. “See that doorknob? No prints, cleared off by the rain. That takes weeks and weeks. And moss won’t grow like that on a front walk that’s been recently stepped on.”
He turned to enter the house, and I stood there for a minute, my tongue pasted in my mouth. Then I went around back. I looked for a stream or a rain barrel. It was almost night. I felt pricks of what I thought was rain, but it was snow, astonishing at this time of year. The flakes landed on my hands and didn’t melt. I found a rusty tap and fell onto my knees in front of it. When I spun the knob, which shrieked and emitted no water, a shard of rusted metal entered my palm, burning hot.
I dug my fingers into my thigh, trying to stay quiet. The splinter had sunk deep, and I was afraid to squeeze it out. It was worth entering the house to clean out the wound, but just then Bay came out, carrying a heavy load, and kicked the door shut behind him. “Let’s head out,” he said, and set off back down the walk.
“I need to get this splinter out,” I said. My voice was raspy. “It’s metal.” My palm already shone with swelling, and I felt faint.
“Another thing wrong with you?” he said. He softened. “I’ll teach you how to fix it later.” He held out a winter coat, a down-filled performance jacket of some kind, expensive.
I grabbed it.
“Give that back to me,” he said, smiling, but I could see he was unhappy with me. My hand burned.
“No,” I said.
“Trust me,” he said.
I handed him the jacket. He admired it while I shivered. He reached into the pockets.
He reminded me of Isaac, taking away something I wanted. The Christmas I was fifteen, my mother had bought me red rubber boots. She already had a pair, except hers were from Walmart and my new ones were from Belk. “We’ll match,” she’d said. The rubber was thick and expensive, carmine red like a quince flower.
I showed the boots to Isaac and he laughed. “Hideous,” he said. “You don’t want those.” He hadn’t yet met her. But Isaac was good at freeing me to feel new disdain or new love; that was why I liked him so much. “Let’s give them to someone who actually needs them.” He drove me to Ninth Street and we deposited the boots next to a sleeping man with a cardboard sign, even though they would not fit him. It hurt me to give them away, to look back and see them standing on the curb, pertly upright.
When my mother asked me why I never wore the boots I said, “I donated them.” I hadn’t known how important they were to her. But she didn’t talk to me for a week after that, and I learned it was better to lie.
I looked out over the Smokies, soft layers of taupe and gray. “Here you go,” Bay said. He was just like Isaac, but better. After all that fuss, Bay’d just wanted to dress me himself. Nothing had ever hurt so badly as pushing my swollen, frozen, hot hand through a coat sleeve. I didn’t let it show. I thought he might turn the car around. I was all his. He zipped me up, pulled the cords. “It’s warmer when someone does it for you,” he said gently.
I closed my eyes in the rush of heat.
He caught my throbbing hand and lifted it to his eyes. He looked at it just like he’d looked at my father’s photograph, tilting it. My left palm was too swollen for me to make a fist, and in the middle of the red, the splinter was rimmed in rigid lemon-white.
“Hey,” he said. “You’ll get a scar, and you’ll always remember this time. Hey, Beryl,” he said, more softly. “I know these things. It’ll be okay.”
I floated, pinned to the earth only by my hand.
* * *
That evening, he parked in a Pisgah National Forest lot. He brought a folded tent from his trunk, and I saw that the trunk was full of gleaming empty bags of gas station chocolate, the same kind he’d offered me.
“Over in Asher land, we eat our own animals,” he said, “but we’re mostly a dairy farm. The worker reaps the best rewards. In the fake world, we only eat vegetables, except roadkill. Bet I can find us a raccoon or opossum for tonight.” We started to hike up a narrow pine-needle-floored trail into the plum-colored twilight. He carried the backpack and I carried the tent and water, taking care not to use my left hand.
“Sure,” I said, though I was a vegetarian. I just wanted to watch him eat it. I liked how Bay kept transforming things: woods into bedroom, raccoon into nourishment, someone else’s jacket into ours. I wanted to live like that, borderless, every object taken on its own terms.
We hiked a mile in and set up a camp. The blue night glittered through the trees like a chandelier. While Bay hunted, I held stream ice in a bandana. My coat and hood wrapped me in happiness—I was happy again—the night with Bay was better, his caretaking, the strangeness of homemaking in the middle of nowhere. I thought about deer beds near the Eno, the tamped-down meadow grass.
Bay didn’t bring back a raccoon. He heated water on the camp stove for ramen.
“Does Dice shoot oilmen?” I said.
Bay smiled at me. He put a floppy rectangle of ramen on a paper plate for me and crumbled the seasoning over it. “The short answer is no. He’s peaceful at heart. The FBI used to watch him because he gave out too much free food. He fed all kinds of people, thousands, the homeless, protesters, everyone.” He paused. “But don’t you know sometimes people bring violence on themselves? Or maybe you’ve never seen police in riot gear.”
“I’ve gone to a lot of marches,” I said. “My friend lived in a squat, actually.”
“A real good girl,” he said.
* * *
I lay down before he did, and watched his flashlight play over the tent’s vibrating blue walls. When he unzipped the door, my heart jumped. He smelled like diesel fuel. The kind of smell near which you shouldn’t strike matches. He took off his shoes and the space filled with the vinegar smell of unsocked feet. I waited for him to undress, but he lay down in his clothes. His pants, formerly chinos, perhaps, were as waterproof and shiny as an oiled canvas. “Washing your clothes takes all the fight out of them,” he’d said.
* * *
In the morning, I paddled my way out of the sticky Pertex and emerged from the tent caped in steam. My left hand was empty of sensation. On the camping stove’s soft blue flame, Bay boiled organic oatmeal with organic dried cranberries. Food from the rich people’s house. He said he was going to town.
“Am I coming?”
This made him smile, and only later I knew why: I was so eager to let him set the terms.
“Go for a walk,” he said. “You need to get better used to your body. You have the distinct look of a person who doesn’t know anything about her body.” He shook my shoulders. “That’s my personal challenge to you,” he said. “You always stop short, don’t you?”
I loved his touching my shoulders.
“How’s that going for you?” he said, and slung on his backpack.
“Don’t leave me here,” I said.
He looked at me and smiled. He said, “Dice always talks about breaking down the door. Break down the door. What’s behind it?” He set off down the trail. The woods became bleaker and my jacket felt warmer.
* * *
The autumn sun was unexpectedly low, and I didn’t know how to use it to track my path. The sun was pale gold. The remainders of snow had mottled the ground, destroying my depth perception—the forested hills rose like a wall of gneiss. I felt myself panting loudly; I developed a stitch in my side. My hand was melon-heavy. I tried to remember what I’d heard about splinters finding their way to the heart. The woods were young, the ground a knit of jug plants with heart-shaped leaves. The narrow trees trembled in the wind, without enough substance for the wind to bend them.
In these woods every tree seemed exactly the same, and the wind ensured that I couldn’t hear myself or smell myself, and it would have been easy to lose faith in myself entirely, except that every pump of blood jostled the metal wedge in my palm. I kept moving forward.
The sun had gone behind a cloud. I trailed spiderwebs like finish-line ribbons as I walked between saplings. I passed a stream overhung with boulders, and twenty minutes later, I passed it again.
I tried to reacquaint myself with my body. But I didn’t feel anything, except for the pounding in my hand. I sat this time, and lifted my hand to my face and examined it, testing the skin, which seemed hot and fragile as the skin of a fermented fruit.
I found a row of trees marked with orange spray paint and followed their jagged path till I came out suddenly on the shoulder of a vast deserted highway. Along the sides, busted tires curled like snakeskins. The woods were so shallow after all. One car drove past but I didn’t rise to flag it.
I tried to remember what Bay had said: You who imagine that all fruits ripen at the same time as strawberries know nothing about grapes. I knew I would never see Bay again, and I was sorry. He was a dream person.
I grounded myself by breathing into my scarf. Memories darted around the brown trees, thousands of them edging up on me. The past for me was 100 percent sad, the way that sometimes weather sites say it’s 100 percent humidity outside, but it’s still not raining.
* * *
I heard a far-off echoing pop, a truck backfiring or a gun, and tried to find my way back to the road again, and failed. The setting sun revealed itself, ducking under the cloud cover, and I walked straight toward it, over streams and logs. Then far away I saw the low blue dome of our tent. I struggled forward, suddenly exhausted.
Bay sat by the tent, smoking and boiling rice. “There you are,” he said, and I wanted to kiss him. “What’s up?”
“I got lost. I thought I’d never see you again,” I said.
“Oh, I envy you,” he said. “That’s the best place to be.”
“I didn’t like it,” I said. In my absence, Bay had gathered branches for a fire. He built a high, airy stack that lit immediately. No snow: no tent. We sat wrapped in our sleeping bags. My face and chest burned. My backside felt icy and vulnerable. I let my gaze crawl over his long ugly scars.
“How’d you get those scars?”
“From a fight with my dad.”
“Did he fight you with a knife?”
“Scissors,” he said. “Before the Ash Family, I told people I’d fought with a bear.” He’d never looked so large as in that moment. He shifted the fire with a branch, compiling the flames into an upward torrent. “What about your folks?”
I saw my mother lifting gems into my hand. “My mom is fine,” I said. It felt childish to tell Bay the details.
He nodded. “Well, little sister, you’ll fit right in,” he said.
“Little sister?” I said.
“You don’t like me calling you that.”
“I think you’re younger than me,” I said, though I was only nineteen and Bay seemed twenty-five, or twenty-eight.
“Get away from the calendar.” He breathed with a lot of movement. “None of that matters,” he said. “We’re going to a place of real love. Dice will show you. The borders between you and me?” he said. “Porous. The definite self? Doesn’t exist.”
I nodded, unsure.
“Dice will understand you like a lightning bolt understands a rod,” Bay said. And again he talked about Dice, whom I pictured as a hippie, professor, or priest. I wondered whether Dice would have anything to teach me, because I was looking for someone who could weave together all that I was with all that I wanted to be—a seeker, maybe, but uncertain about my direction, someone moving peripatetically in the direction of nature, wildness, fear, desire, like the weird crosshatch of scratches on the diffraction glasses my father may have given me—I liked to think he did, I was somewhat certain—glasses that turned all small bright lights into hearts. Isaac had told me that the degree to which you can be moved by aesthetic experience seemed, in studies, to have a genetic component. That was my principal heritage, my main virtue—whatever it was, I had so much of it: I could be moved.
After years of lying low, Bay said, Dice was ready again to take action in the world, to wage war on behalf of nature. Bay stopped talking about Dice and looked at me. The fire had calmed. I felt loose and easy, like I’d just been kissed all over the face and neck.
“It’s been a big day,” Bay said. “But you know what? You’ve let your guard down. This getting lost is just what I hoped for you.” He smiled. He seemed to be taunting me. “Little sister,” he said again.
I pushed back. “I could have fallen and died in the woods. I could have gotten shot by a poacher,” I said. Or I could have chosen to hitchhike away. Since he’d bothered to talk to me at the bus stop, didn’t he want to preserve me? I needed to know that I was not interchangeable, that there was something to me that he liked, something he liked beyond my willingness.
“Beryl,” he said. My name was an insult. “I thought you’d understand the Ash Family needs you to go beyond your comfort. Honestly, I was going to bring you there tomorrow. But, you know.” Firelight animated his silhouette, his rough hair, his dark slimy coat. I searched for the gentleness I’d seen at the bus stop. He’d once had calm eyes and a frightening face; now it was the opposite: his eyes were tracers, the lights that smear your vision with afterimage; his eyes were bright with malice. “We can give up.”
This wasn’t what I wanted. I could already feel the shame of returning to Isaac, to his narrow room in the squat, the train pushing through the woods right past the gardenia bush that suffused all our years of courtship with its heart-wrenching heavy gorgeousness. In the summer, even naked, even with the fan, our bodies got sticky as tape. He didn’t like the people who smashed windows, but when we lay together and he let his hand drift over my neck and touch me so lightly I could barely stand it, I’d picture him throwing a rock into a wall of glass, and how the shatter seemed to happen not radially but all at once. He was studying at UNC, he wanted me to study, too; he didn’t feel the call to a more essential life. I needed to go home changed or not at all.
“For the time being,” Bay said. “Not give up give up. It’s just good sometimes to let yourself go out with the current. Let the tide recede.” He shifted tactics. “How’s your hand?”
“I think I should go to a clinic tomorrow. It’s just getting worse. Though,” I added quickly, “I’d like to believe what you said, that it will be okay, and just scar.”
“A clinic, like a hospital?” The mood had darkened again somehow. He straightened. “Well, if you go to the hospital, you’re going back.”
He was agitated and I didn’t know why, so I pushed it. “Are you making me choose between you and my hand?”
“We don’t deal with institutions like hospitals. We can’t be numbered.”
“My hand is rotting!” I said. “Look!” My hand was puffy and seemed about to split open.
He rose, so tall he seemed to be on stilts. He pulled his Ka-Bar knife out of his pocket and unsheathed it. In his shadowy hand the shining blade was a small pointed length of fire. In one quick motion, he turned and jammed the blade deep into a tree. The tree stayed still, impassive, but someone cried out: it was me.
When my emotions were hot like this I couldn’t tell good from bad, all I could tell was that I was shivering, and I liked that. All elements melt together at a certain heat.
Bay turned around with a smile. “Here, sister. Let me sanitize that hand.”
