Backwater

This is how we get up the mountain

Mountain Mama revved the jeep up, up. “Here’s the shortcut to the trailhead.” She made the last steep climb, rammed the jeep into second gear, heard the big wheels spinning in ice, rammed it forward, shouting, “Hold on, Breedlove, and shine her steady!”

I clung to the frame with both hands as the jeep twisted and turned up the narrow trail to something that only a wilderness guide could see.

Mama pulled the jeep between two pine trees and jumped out. I flopped forward, trembling.

She marched over to my side, slapped me hard on the back. “Chapter seven, Breedlove—Celebrate your Victories, No Matter How Small.”

“Whoopee,” I said weakly, and covered my face.

Books by

JOAN BAUER

Backwater

Best Foot Forward

Hope Was Here

Rules of the Road

Squashed

Stand Tall

Sticks

Thwonk

JOAN BAUER

backwater

For my mother,
Marjorie Good,
with love

Special thanks to several people who brought life to this story:

To my daughter,
Jean Bauer
, for her keen historical knowledge; and to
Chris Manteuffel
, for his abundant command of history. Their insight into how teenagers contemplate and respond to history is used liberally throughout this book. Their correspondence to me provided much of the energy for Ivy Breedlove’s character.

To
Jean Brown
, who shared her family stories with humor and grace.

To
Karen Baehler
and
Jon Foley
, who taught me both wolf and wilderness discernment.

To my husband,
Evan
, wilderness guide extraordinaire, who has seen me up and down many Adirondack Mountains, and whose patient review and criticism of this manuscript, as always, enhanced my work immensely.

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I knelt in the snow in front of my great-great-great-great-grandfather’s gravestone, took my bristle brush and cleaned the surface, working the bristles deep into each engraved letter. When you’re making a gravestone rubbing you have to care about every detail or you might as well stay home. People want to rush the process, slap on the paper, whip out a waxed marker, and bam, instant history. But I tell them you can’t rush connecting to the past, you’ve got to respect it.

I attached thin, wide paper over the stone with masking tape, took out my colored waxed cakes, and rubbed them across the paper slowly until the image came out—first the crossed gavels, which meant he was a lawyer, then the eye underneath, which meant that even though Great-Great-Great-Great-Grandpa was dead, he was still
watching.
A few of the papers shifted during rubbing, but I worked carefully, making sure Millard Breedlove’s message was preserved for generations to come.

It was the big guilt number from the grave, and it worked. There have been scores of Breedlove lawyers in my family ever since.

I was not going to be one of them, however.

I was going to be a historian and spend time in quiet research libraries and find new insights into the past to help people in the present.

I lived for historical perspective.

I was diligently practicing my craft, too. I had sixty-three days left to finish writing and researching the Breedlove family history in time for Great Aunt Tib’s eightieth birthday celebration. Sixty-three days sounds like all the time in the world to finish something, but anything can happen when you’re wrestling with antiquity.

Deadline pressure was just one of my problems.

The other one was my father, Daniel Webster Breedlove, a prominent trial attorney, who became positively rankled at the thought that
his
daughter (me) would desert the family cause. He constantly warned that
his
father, William Washington “Iron Will” Breedlove, the great circuit judge of Massachusetts County, would roll over in his grave at such a notion.

We’ll see.

I walked across the old family cemetery to Iron Will’s gray-slate gravestone.
Justice was his chief end
, it proclaimed.

“I’m not going to be a lawyer,” I said to Iron Will’s grave. “Get used to it, Grandpa.”

I waited.

I listened.

Nothing rolled over.

I looked at Winsted Attila Breedlove’s gravestone—only his name was engraved in the cold black marble. He was the most feared professor at Harvard Law School at the turn of the Century, a man so fierce that first year law students were reported to have fainted dead away when he called on them in class.

He was one of Dad’s heroes.

“Nothing personal,” I added, just in case.

People think it’s exciting being part of a family with so many successful lawyers. I tell them it’s like being a goldfish swimming in a tank stocked with snapping turtles—it’s hard to keep a lasting presence.

I sat in the snow, surrounded by the whispers of my dead relatives. It was the day after Christmas and pandemonium reigned at the old family house in Plum Lake, New York, where twenty-three Breedloves had gathered to argue away the holidays. No one lives permanently at the old house since Grandpa died. It’s a rambling three-story white frame with a huge wrap-around porch. I love to stand on the porch and gaze at the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains, the oldest mountains in the United States.

Mountains draw you to a deeper place in yourself.

The suburbs don’t do that. I live five hours due south in
Marion, New York, with my father and my Great Aunt Tib—she moved in with us ten years ago when my mom died from cancer. Tib tucked me under her wing like a mother bird protecting her own. I don’t know what I’d do without her.

Historically speaking, Christmas is a trying time for my family. Dad and his brother Archie start quarreling on the way to the candlelight Christmas Eve service every year, and by the time “Silent Night” is sung and the little white candles are raised in reverence in the darkened cathedral, half the family isn’t talking to each other. As my Great Uncle Clarence says somberly as we drive off to church every year, “‘Silent Night’ is just the beginning.”

As a rare form of Breedlove (non-aggressive), I’ve wondered how I got dumped in this amplified family. If it wasn’t for the fact that I possessed the Breedlove chin (long, square, intractable) and the Breedlove hair (thick, sandy, impossible), I could easily believe that I’d been mistakenly exchanged at birth and, in truth, belonged to a gentle, caring family who hated conflict and noise and didn’t feel the need to turn every occasion into a verbal sparring match.

“You’re doing the death thing again.”

I didn’t have to look up because I knew it was Egan, my cousin once removed. He was breathing hard, which did not mean he was a degenerate. He was a cross-country runner, the star of our high school team. I was on the cross-country team, too, but less for the thrill of victory than for the required phys ed credit.

I put the gravestone rubbing in a plastic seal to keep it safe
and put it in my backpack. “I’m connecting to our ancestors, Egan.”

“Fiona’s got the movie camera out,” Egan said ominously. “It’s going to start after dinner, Ivy, and no one can stop it.”

I sat deeper in the snow. Fiona is my aunt by marriage to my Uncle Archie—she’s one of those adults who doesn’t think teenagers can do anything. Last month she announced that no one had time to “weed through a huge family history of names, stories, and dates” and that
she
was going to have a video family history put together “lickety-split.” That’s one of her stupid sayings. Fiona is a time management consultant and believes everything can be done quicker if you listen to her and watch her cable TV show “It’s About Time.” I watched the show once. Fiona showed how to cut breakfast preparation by mixing pancake batter the night before and keeping it in the refrigerator. The fact that you had to take time to do it the preceding evening didn’t bother the audience. They just yelled, “It’s about time!” and applauded like mad when she raced to the shortcut board and read a helpful hint from some brain-dead viewer.