Beneath the Bonfire

 

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For Kristin Carol (Lang) Guice

1980–2014

Beloved cousin and friend. She of belly laughter and wide, wide Minnesota smiles.

 

And for Carol and George, who took us in when we needed a home.

 

The Good Book says the meek shall inherit the earth and I expect that's probably the truth. I ain't no freethinker, but I'll tell you what. I'm a long way from bein' convinced that it's all that good a thing.

—Cormac McCarthy,
All the Pretty Horses

 

THE CHAINSAW SOIR
É
E

T
HEY SQUATTED IN AN ABANDONED
Pentecostal church high on the bluffs over a river, and when the rain or snow was heavy, the roof leaked and the church was loud with the dripping of water in metal buckets, and when the land was dry beneath the floorboards of the church, hundreds of rattlesnakes shook their maracas at the heat and only at night would the place fall into silence. I had visited sometimes in the spring when the snakes were lethargic and hungry for the sunlight, and we had stood around the church with machetes and rakes and turned the yellow grass red. It was a beautiful spot.

The church was derelict, but their gardens covered acres of land, radiating off in every direction away from the old house of worship. Hitchhikers and wandering hippies knew of Bear and Luna and the church with holes in the roof, and they came to work and camp on the grounds for free meals and camaraderie. But I knew Bear from high school. We always dated the same girls.

They threw parties on the winter solstice every year. They called them
chainsaw parties
. Everyone brought a chainsaw, and that was how they built up enough firewood to heat the drafty church all the way through winter. We all went out into the woods early in the morning with flasks of brandy or whiskey and cut up the deadfall or the widow-makers hung up in other living trees. We used sleds to bring the wood back to the church. There were stations around the church: those who split the deadfall into cordwood, those who transported the split wood to other piles, and those who stacked the wood into cords of tight walls. On the solstice, the sun seemed too heavy an object to rise above the earth, but during those rare hours of light, we worked hard, sweating through our layers of garments, the noise of chainsaws everywhere. And afterward, there was a pig roast and a keg of beer and a bonfire and always a guitar or a harmonica and the sad reedy voice of a skinny stoner girl singing to the stars.

The last chainsaw party I attended was years ago, before Shelly and I were married and before Samuel came. I was dating a nurse then, Nancy. She worked at the hospital in neonatal. She had thick blond hair she kept in a braid behind her head, and she smelled of baby powder and soap and I think that I was in love with her. I liked asking Nancy about her work. She would tell me about the babies that had been born that day. The twins, the triplets, the rare hermaphrodite, the stillborn, the beautiful, the already crippled. She rolled her own cigarettes, and I remember her now, sitting in just a T-shirt at my kitchen table, her legs naked and well muscled and folded beneath her on a chair. Her fingers rolling out dozens of cigarettes and sometimes joints. In the morning before she left for work, her hair not yet braided, and it held the light of the sun like fiber-optic cables.

I drove a pickup truck back then. An old Toyota with a rusting bed. I had jacked up the body during high school and removed the bumpers, replacing them with thick black pipes. We left for the church before dawn, Nancy and I in the dusty cab with a thermos of coffee and my old Husqvarna chainsaw in the back. We smoked cigarettes as we drove, the windows cracked open to the cold while the heater blasted out hot air.

She often went down on me while I drove, and her blond head would bob in my lap as I tried to keep my eyes open and the truck between the yellow lines. I remember that morning, the taste of her kiss and the sun rising over the hills and draws. Nancy liked sex, and my life with her was often an exhibition of love, though I could never keep up with her and somewhere along the line I knew that would end us. We made love in the hospital freight elevators and on the helicopter pad on the top of the tall building and once in the basement morgue, where we had stopped prematurely because I thought I heard a sound in all the dead stillness.

“So what's Luna like?” she asked, moving back across the bench seat of the pickup truck as she unscrewed the silver top of the thermos, steam clouding the passenger-side window.

That hadn't always been her name, Luna. Back when her name was Shelly we had been lovers, but Bear had stolen her from me, though of course I know now that it wasn't like that, a theft. That lovers are not just stolen, but that there was something else, like a yielding or an acquiescence. And I had known then that I wasn't wild enough for her, that we were not a permanent thing but rather something more ephemeral. I decided to tell Nancy the truth.

“Luna and I used to date,” I said, looking straight out at the road disappearing underneath us. “We dated for two years in high school. Back then, her name was Shelly. She and Bear had a renaming ceremony or some such of a thing.” I paused, then, “We were just kid stuff.”

“When were you planning to tell me that?” Nancy asked, crossing her arms.

“I just did,” I said.

“So, why did you break up?” she asked, her voice sharp.

“She started in with Bear,” I said evenly. “I walked in on them one day.”

She was quiet, sipping her coffee, drawing stick figures in the condensation on the window. Nancy had beautiful fingers, and I never tired of holding her hands or watching her fingers cradle a mug or a wineglass. Her perfect nails, the long strong fingers.

“People can be terrible to one another,” she said finally. And then she leaned against me on the bench seat, her head on my shoulder, and she passed me the coffee and we were still many miles from the church and it felt good to drive that way, her body drawn close against mine as the countryside clipped past us—hawks on the telephone poles, frozen rivers moving invisibly beneath cloaks of ice, horses standing somberly in the fields.

*   *   *

I rarely saw Bear after high school. Just those chainsaw parties and sometimes in the spring when the maple sap was running and he needed an extra pair of hands boiling the syrup down. Things went better between us when there was work to be done and afterward over beers, or sharing a joint when we could talk about the labor and not old times, because I had no interest in the past anymore, or thought I didn't, though we were still in each other's lives somehow, and Luna too.

The church was tall and white, and atop the bluffs it seemed like an impossible outpost of God. There were dogs in the yard, barking at our approach, and in the air hung the smell of woodsmoke and I remember that Nancy closed her door and closed her eyes too and said happily, “I feel happy already. I like this place.”

We held hands and approached the great double doors of the church, and just then Bear opened them in tandem and stood before us, his beard long and black, his eyes sparkling blue and the color in his cheeks bright from laboring outdoors. I felt Nancy's grip on my hand slacken.

I introduced Bear and Nancy, and we went into the church. It was warmer than I remembered, with the smell of coffee and of sweat and of dogs, and woodsmoke and tobacco. Luna was at the sink washing a collection of beets, and her hands looked older than her face, her nails broken and short, but she raised her head and said hello and by and by she came over and hugged us gingerly and it wasn't until she walked back to the sink that I could see from her gait that she was pregnant.

Bear was smiling at me and he said, “Five months along! You believe that? Me, a father!” He slapped my shoulder and my back and I shook his hand again, and he said, “How about a morning toast? Something to keep us warm before we start cutting?”

“That sounds great, man,” I said. “Congratulations. Nancy works in the nursery at the hospital, you know, if that's where you guys end up.”

“Wow,” said Bear, turning to her, “that must be beautiful work.” He had a way of bringing people in to him, of making them feel big and important, and he was a good listener. I could see Nancy's eyes soften toward him; she liked talking about babies.

“It's the best job in the whole universe, far as I'm concerned,” she said. “It makes me happy. Some days it's like I get to be a mother ten, twelve times. Yesterday we delivered four babies. Two sets of twins.”

Luna came over from the sink, wiping her hands on a ragged towel. “I want to have the baby right here,” she said, putting an arm around Bear's waist. “No offense, but I hate hospitals. Everyone I've ever lost died in a hospital bed.”

Bear put an arm around her shoulder and pulled her into him tight, his face fixed on the wide floor planks.

“I understand,” Nancy said. “You're right to do it here. Too many women are intimidated by birth. But it's what we were designed to do.” She moved over to Luna and gently applied her hands to the other woman's belly. Luna moved Nancy's hands up, almost to her ribs.

“Feel that?” Luna asked.

“Little feet,” said Nancy, beaming.

“Come here,” Luna said. “I want to talk to you about my preparations.” The two women went toward the kitchen area and I could see that Luna was pouring out two mugs of tea.

“How about those shots?” I said.

“Coming up,” said Bear, and he poured an inch of whiskey in two juice glasses. We touched cups and drained them back quickly.

“Work!” he said loudly.

“Fatherhood!” I sang out.

And then we went out into the cold, where three old pickup trucks were already pulling off the country road and processing toward the church.

*   *   *

Bear and I always worked together each year, a team of two, taking turns with the chainsaws, tying off broken limbs with cable or chain, moving around the forest dissecting fallen trees and organizing the logs into stacks for other teams to take away, back to the splitters. It was a good day to be in the forest, the sun clear and warm despite the date, and we worked hard and silent until Bear wiped his brow and sat heavily on a wide ancient stump of a long-gone oak.