Martin Marten (9781466843691) (15 page)

You tell your dad?

He knows. He
says
things to her, but he can’t make her change.

Maria?

Maria could. We are sort of keeping her in reserve for when we really need her, my dad says. She’s like a secret flashlight you pull out when everything looks dark.

How’s she doing?

Loves
school. What a shock. Although her thing now is that first grade is for little kids and she wants to apply to fourth grade. She says school should be like colleges where you apply wherever you want and they say yes or no, rather than have to march up the grades like a ladder. Dad says she has a point, but he says the school district is antediluvian and dinosophomoric. You know how he talks. When’s your dad coming home?

He says he will be home for the first game of the year, no matter what, even if I don’t make the team. He says he’s so proud that I gave it my all that he will be there either watching me or sitting with me.

That true?

You want another sandwich?

Moon? That true?

Because
I
am having another sandwich. I could eat ten sandwiches right about now. I’m starving. You want another one?

*   *   *

I’ll
prove
I deserve to be in fourth grade, thought Maria. I’ll prove it beyond the shadow of a cloud. I’ll walk home from school by
myself
. Like the big kids do.
I
don’t have to take the baby bus. I am not a baby. The baby bus is for little kids who are afraid to walk home by themselves. I know how to cut through the woods like Dave does. I am demure for my age.

And, her plans laid, she quietly collected what she would need for a jaunt through the woods and did her level best to forget the ironclad rules about frontiers and limitations on her urge for ramblage, as her dad said, although she found that every time she set her mind to forget the rules, they came back clear as if they were written in the air before her eyes—the four boundary points of her compass, the corners of her world, the edges of the allowable universe other than school … the big rock that looks like a hawk near the highway, the huge red cedar tree in the forest, the beech tree near the river, and Miss Moss’s cabin below the store. I promised, she thought. I signed a contract. I gave my word. But that was all before first grade. Things have changed. Circumstances are different. Therefore promises are different. Plus those rules are for little kids in kindergarten. But I should be in fourth grade and not even first grade. I’ll prove that the rules shouldn’t apply. Once I show Mom and Dad that there’s no reason anymore for the rule, then there doesn’t have to be the rule, and I can walk home every day by myself and not have to take the baby bus.

Still, she felt uncomfortable. She put a compass and an orange and a spoon and a thin jacket and a cap and two candy bars in her backpack. At the last second before she zipped it up tight and went to bed, she put in the owl feather that Dave had given her, just because. You never know when an owl feather will come in handy, she thought. What if she met an owl who was one feather short? Wouldn’t that be good, to hand an owl an owl feather? And what if the owl was very grateful then, and decided to be her friend? Wouldn’t that be good? And maybe that owl talked to the other owls, and all the owls on the mountain would keep an eye out for Maria’s family. That would be a good thing, to have all the owls keeping an eye out for you, because they see everything. Probably no animal in the woods sees as much as an owl. That would be a good thing, she thought, and she fell asleep.

31

USUALLY WINTER ON WY’EAST
begins slowly, with plenty of small practice snowstorms dusting the meadows and clearings and frosting the forest and replenishing the brilliant gleam of the glaciers and snowpack on the peak. Usually there is no snow to speak of in September and about five inches falls in October and thirty in November and fifty in December and sixty in January, and then the snows taper back down through the forties in February and March down finally to zero inches by July, although you never know; plenty of climbers and skiers have seen sudden snow in the highest reaches of the mountain in summer, usually late in the afternoon, when the wind shifts course and fogs roll in and climbers lose their bearings. On average, September’s snow was a tenth of an inch, according to all the charts. But averages skew.

It started on a Friday morning. Dave’s dad was fixing a bus at the school. Dave was in geometry class. Maria’s first-grade class was discussing how arithmetic was a language as well as a tool. Dave’s mom was at the lodge working with Emma Jackson Beaton, who had a
terrible
cold and should
not
have been working but was stacking up vacation days so she could, she said, surf with Mr. Billy Beaton on the west coast of Africa. Miss Moss was in the store, feeding an entire busload of Swiss Presbyterians. Mr. Douglas the trapper was in his cabin reviewing his finances, filling out his Oregon Furtaker License Application (
fifty
dollars this year!), reviewing season opening dates and special regulations (no beaver trapping on the mountain at all now, for example, and no bobcat trapping west and north of the peak), and pondering whether to even bother with trapping weasel and coyote this year at all; while there was open season on both all year long, the pelts sold for relatively little, and it would be better resource management, he decided, to focus on bobcat, marten, mink, and fox. He was tempted to try for otters, but of all the animals he knew, otters were the most entertaining and interesting, and not even penury could persuade him to set for them. He rationalized this by explaining to himself that he would spend enough time in and around creeks after mink that the extra wet time for otter would just inevitably lead to pneumonia, which he could absolutely not afford, given the state of his rickety and wheezing finances.

But he laid his plans for red fox (opening day October 15), marten (November 1), gray fox and mink (November 15), and bobcat (December 1), and he checked his traps and gear and winter clothing for the fiftieth time and then decided to split more wood; it looked awfully foreboding outside, and it was always an excellent idea to lay down more wood to dry. You just could not have too much dry wood for the fire, in his experience, and more than once, he had built stacks as tall as his cabin—although, to give him credit, he then often gave a lot of it away, sometimes as barter for food or gasoline but often as friendly gestures or as the sort of thing people do when they bring casseroles or pies to those who have been hammered by illness or death. Easily a dozen people around Zigzag had found half a cord of good dry cedar in their sheds or porches or under tarp and immediately knew whence it came and thanked him for it when next they met. Mr. Robinson, in fact, claimed that he could tell just from the look of the cut who had split the wood; that man wields an
amused
axe, he said, a remark which Mrs. Robinson found entertaining every time she heard it, which was often.

*   *   *

Dave’s dad knew that it was going to snow. He could tell. The clouds were pregnant, it was too cold for rain, and there was a sort of
glower
in the air; that is the best way to say it. A sort of chilled expectation or premonition—like the air was grimacing, and soon it would begin to cough relentlessly.

He checked in the school’s shed for sand, salt, shovels, and the snowplow attachment for the tractor. He checked to see that there were not only tire chains but backup tire chains. He dug out the spare generator and tested it. He dug out the sump pumps on general principle. He contemplated the layout of the school and prevailing wind directions and access points and road grades and laid his plans for bus egress and parent ingress. He wandered by the cafeteria and asked about food supplies on general principle. He found snowshoes and cross-country skis and ski poles in the shed and cleaned and oiled them just in case. He filled the gas tanks of the school’s two trucks and one all-purpose tractor.

But the morning passed without snow, although the chill deepened; and the lunch hour passed without snow, although the air grew grayer and denser; and not until the first buses were driving off and the sports teams started practice did the first hesitant pellets and then flakes fall. For more than an hour the snow was merely flurries swirled this way and that by eddies in the wind, and Dave’s dad began to think that it was a brief fluke in the seasonal cycle. He stood by the shed for a moment to watch the cross-country team return from its daily run and start interval training on the track. Dave was fifth in the straggled line of returnees, running easily, neither trying for a dramatic finish nor easing up, but finishing just behind the lead pack of three seniors and the tall thin sophomore. Dave’s dad watched with a complex mix of feelings—unutterable pride in his son (that kid was two years old two minutes ago, and look at him now those scything legs!), a sigh that he was so damned skinny (how can he possibly compete against those kids—they are twice as thick as he is … he looks like a heron running with deer), worry about him not being dressed properly (aw, a sleeveless shirt and shorts in
snow
for heavens’ sake), and deepest of all, beyond any words he could have summoned to drape on the feeling, a sense of impending loss and the cruelty of time and the yaw of mortality. Very soon, all too soon, Dave would go away—college, work, the navy, traveling, who knew? And while his dad, from layers one through fifteen of his soul, was delighted and thrilled and proud and happy that this would happen, pleased that things looked good for Dave to grow into a cool and responsible young man over the next four years, enough that he could launch into a stimulating life of his own, which every good dad wants for his kid, he also felt, silently, at level sixteen, in the innermost chamber of his heart, a terrible sadness that there would come a day when, look for him as he might, there would be no Dave in the cabin, in the school, on the mountain, and good and right and healthy as that would be, it would also be a hole that could never be filled by anything or anyone else. He loved Maria with a deep and powerful love, but he had two children, and one is not two.

These were his thoughts as the last of the runners staggered through the fence around the track just as the snow picked up its pace. The wind had died, and the snow fell thicker and thicker; even the cross-country coach, who usually ignored the weather, noticed the shift from scatter to storm and finally called everyone in and sent them home. The runners, gleeful at their early escape, sprinted toward the gym and hot showers, laughing. Dave didn’t notice his dad by the shed, and his dad didn’t say anything as the boys ran past; he just watched his son float up the hill to the gym, snow in his hair, laughing.

32

JUST AS DAVE
reached the gym door and his dad turned to lock the shed and Dave’s mom settled into Emma Jackson Beaton’s car, calculating that she would be home a full twenty minutes before Maria’s bus dropped her and the other three kids from their neighborhood at the bus stop, from which they walked twenty yards (Alicia), forty yards (Aidan), seventy (Honora), and ninety (Maria) to their cabins, Maria stepped into the woods behind the grade school, fishing for the compass in her backpack. She noticed the quiet increase in the snow but didn’t worry about it; most of the trees along the trail home were firs and cedars with arms as wide as the world, practiced at catching snowfall and shucking the weight as necessary. Plus this was September, and it never snows in September.

She’s mapped out the trail in her head and on her lunch bag: through the woods for two hundred yards to Snag Creek, then up the creek four hundred yards until it met the river, then up the river four hundred yards to home, quick and easy as pie. On the last leg she would go right past Alicia’s and Aidan’s and Honora’s cabins, and maybe she would wave at them if they were in their windows, and they would be amazed and jealous that she had walked home
All by Herself
. Honora, she knew for a fact, was not allowed to walk even to or from the
bus stop
by herself, and that was only seventy yards, or two hundred and ten feet. Poor Honora.

Through waist-deep ferns and arches of vine maple, around massive firs and bigger cedars, through a secret little ravine filled with dwarf yew trees with their bright red berries; past rotting stumps with their ladders of fungi and immense slugs, around boulders with bright-green and bronze blankets of lichen and moss, past a stump exactly as tall as Maria with a new tree exactly as tall as Maria growing out of it; past skittering thrushes and towhees and wrens underfoot, past a tree with a massive rusted wire cable locked to its base so tightly that the bark had shrunk above and below from the pain, around two little sudden tiny black pools of muddy water in the path as dark as ermine eyes; and there was the creek trilling gently in its bed of rocks and pebbles. Part one of the journey successfully accomplished!

Here and there, alders overhung the creek as it descended gently in a series of small pools, but for the most part it was open to the sky, and now Maria noticed uneasily that actually it was snowing heavily; any relatively flat surface already had several inches of new snow, and the path along the creek could be discerned only as a white line between the edge of the woods and the creek. She had worn her high-top sneakers today, thinking that they would be better in the woods than her other shoes, but she had not even conceived the possibility of snow. Snow in
September
? No way. But it sure was snowing. It couldn’t possibly stick. Yesterday was sixty degrees, and tomorrow would probably be seventy—that’s how September had been her whole life. It was always the last lovely month of summer, and then rain in October, and snow in November, and this was most certainly
not
November.

But it was inarguably snowing. You can
object
to reality, her dad liked to say, but you cannot successfully
argue
with it, so she formally registered a protest but reached into her backpack for her blue cap and red jacket and set forth up the trail along the creek. Within minutes her feet were wet and cold, and she began to hurry.