Abandon

SIXTY-SIX

I

n the evening, Stephen went for water, blessed with convenience in this regard, since the hillside behind his home boasted a spring. The cabin’s previous occupant had raised a simple structure over the rock where the water surfaced, so it could be easily accessed in the winter months.

A lantern in one hand, an empty pail in the other, he webbed fifty feet up the trail, past the privy and toward the shed, the moon so bright that he could’ve left the lamp behind.

He stepped under the tin roof and traded the lantern for an ax that hung from a nail in the clapboard.

Ice had amassed around the lip of the flat rock where the water spilled over, and when he’d chipped it clear, he set the pail under the trickle and sat contentedly on a dry rock, blanketed, like all the others in this old tailings pile, with an orange flocculent mass.

He’d always assumed it was algae.

A solitary cabin glowed on the east slope above Abandon, though you couldn’t see inside, since the windows weren’t made of glass, but white cotton cloth soaked in tallow. It was a cramped, one-room, saddle-notched affair with a mud and stone chimney, a little porch out front, and a corrugated metal roof that stayed warm enough with a fire blazing underneath it to keep the snow from sticking. Inside and out, it was a spartan dwelling, severely lacking the touch of a woman.

Stephen pulled two enameled graniteware pots off the fire and hustled them over to the rustic table where Harriet sat waiting for supper. He eased down onto the deacon seat and lifted the top from the larger of the two pots.

Steam bellowed out. The slumgullion simmered.

He spooned a serving of stew into Harriet’s bowl, then sliced her a piece of sourdough bread and lathered on several spoonfuls of wild raspberry preserves. One of his parishioners had left the bread and jar of jam on his doorstep Christmas morning. He dipped Harriet’s tin cup into an earthen vessel he’d bought off a Navajo trader, filled her cup with water, then poured himself some Arbuckle’s from a spouted pot, allowing himself a sip of coffee before ladling the stew into his own bowl.

He blessed the meal. It needed prayer.

The stew was horrendous—so wanting of salt and spice that it held all the complexity of dirty water with chunks of gristly elk meat and potatoes and cabbage bobbing on the oily surface.

But his new guest slurped it down without prejudice and even asked for more.

After supper, Stephen prepared Harriet’s bed on the mattress he’d taken from the McCabes’ shack earlier in the afternoon.

For pajamas, Harriet wore her underclothes, Bessie’s peignoir—too long and bunched up around her feet—and a pair of drafty socks sewn from flour sacks. Stephen made Harriet turn away while he slipped a flannel nightshirt over his union suit.

“Would you like a story before we go to sleep?” he asked.

Harriet stood at the foot of his aspen bedstead, looking at the old newspaper that served as wallpaper, tacked to the logs.

“What would that be like?”

“You’ve never had a bedtime story read to you?”

She shook her head, and Stephen realized it owed to her parents’ illiteracy. He got up from his mattress—just a bunch of burlap stitched together and stuffed with pine boughs—and walked over to the railroad tie mounted to the stone above the fireplace, the shelf serving as mantel and bookshelf.

He chose a scuffed, well-used volume, called Harriet over to her bed before the hearth, and tucked her in under the quilts. She lay between Stephen’s legs with her head in his lap, and he read for ten minutes by firelight from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

He closed the book when he thought she’d fallen asleep, but as he tried to extricate himself without waking her, Harriet’s eyes fluttered open and she said, “What happened to Miss Madsen?”

Stephen touched the back of his hand to the young girl’s face. It was soft and cool. He gently wound one of her pitch-black ringlets around his finger. “Molly was very sick,” he said.

“Like scarlet fever?”

“No, in her head. God told me to end her suffering, so I did.”

“How did you?”

“Do you know how a gun works?”

“They hurt you.”

“They can. I shot a bullet into the back of Molly’s head so she wouldn’t be sick or sad anymore.”

“Did it hurt her?”

“It killed her body, but her soul never felt a thing.”

“You gonna shoot me in my head so I go to Jesus?”

“No, Harriet. You’ve got a long and happy life ahead of you.”

She closed her eyes.

Stephen ran his fingers through her hair until she fell asleep.

Harriet awoke. The fire was dying, and though her feet were cold, she could still feel the warmth of the flames on her face. The sound that had roused her from the dream came again. She sat up on the lumpy mattress, looked over her shoulder at Mr. Cole’s bed in the corner against the wall. The preacher had buried his face into his pillow, and he made strange, sad sounds.

Harriet took her doll and got up from the mattress and walked over to his bedside. “Hey,” she said.

Mr. Cole lifted his head off the pillow. Even in the low light of the cabin, she could see the wetness on his face, knew what it was.

“What are you doing up?”

“I heard you bein sad. Is the wet because everyone’s gone?”

Stephen wiped his eyes and sat up against the wall, his long legs hanging off the bed, feet touching the freezing dirt floor.

Harriet climbed onto the mattress with him.

“I’m sad for a lot of reasons.”

“Like what reasons?”

“Well, mainly because God told me to do a very hard thing, something I didn’t think He was capable of. Or me, for that matter. But I did it, because we have to obey God. Always. And now, I um . . .” He wept again. “I feel like I don’t know Him anymore. Like He isn’t who I thought He was. And that’s fine. He’s perfect, whatever He is. That’s my failure, to make naïve assumptions about His nature.

“Then the dev il constantly tells me these lies, whispers in my ear that maybe it wasn’t God who spoke to me. That it was actually him, the evil one. Or that this horrible winter, this town, the thin air, the greed—all that took my mind from me.”

Harriet pried open the fingers of his right hand. “What’s that?”

In Stephen’s sweaty palm lay an ornate sterling silver hairpin. He let Harriet hold it. “It’s a hairpin,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“A piece of jewelry a woman uses to hold up her hair.”

“Why you got one?”

He smiled. “Fair question. It belonged to a woman named Eleanor.”

“Was she your wife?”

“No.”

“Is she dead?”

“No, Eleanor isn’t dead. You know, you kind of favor her. She had black curls like yours. Dark eyes.”

“Did she give you this?”

“We were picnicking on the beach late one afternoon. This was ten years ago, second-worst day of my life. I had taken her there to tell her I couldn’t marry her.”

“Why?”

“Because God told me to go to divinity school instead. To spend my life serving Him. It was a windy day and the wind kept blowing her hair loose, so she pulled out her two hairpins and stuck them in the sand. I swiped one when she wasn’t looking. I suppose I shouldn’t have. You know how you hold Samantha at night, and she makes you feel better? Safer?”

The child nodded.

“That hairpin is my Samantha. When I hold it, on hard nights, lonely nights like this, it makes me remember things about Eleanor—her eyes, the way she smelled, the sound of her laugh. And it makes me sad, makes me miss her, but it also reminds me that I was a very happy man once.”

“You wish you stayed on the beach with Eleanor?”

Stephen gathered his hair and tied it up in a ponytail.

“No, Harriet, I don’t wish that, because that would be wanting something in conflict with God’s will. But I’ll tell you what I do wish. Wish we could live twice, take a different path each time. That at the end of all this, when I finished serving God in the West, I could go back to that day on the beach, put a ring on Eleanor’s finger instead.”

“Maybe you can still go back.”

“Eleanor’s married to a lawyer named Benjamin. They live in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, with four children, last I heard.”

Stephen lay back on his side, his head on the pillow, watching fire shadows move like black ghosts along the walls of his wretched cabin. He managed to cry softly this time, Harriet patting his back, telling him with the simplistic, heartfelt wisdom of a six-year-old that he would wake up in the morning feeling brand-new and happy again, how sometimes her daddy made her very sad and lonely and afraid, but that the feeling always passed, and that it would be the same way for him.

They slept in Stephen’s bed and neither woke until just before dawn, and only because the fire had gone out, turned the cabin cold.