Stony River (7 page)

Sevana scrambled to her feet, rubbing her hands in a futile attempt to rid them of their charcoal. “Oh Fenn, I was going to have dinner ready for you, but I can’t even get the fire going!” she exclaimed sorrowfully. “I opened the damper as you said, but it won’t burn.”

He went to look in the stove. “You can’t start a fire without kindling.” There was disbelief in his voice that she could be so ignorant.

Outside he shattered a round with a few swift blows, and added the splinters to the firebox. When he straightened from lighting the wood, Sevana saw how tired and dirty he looked, and was sorry again there had been no dinner waiting for him when he got home.

“What were you going to make?” he asked.

“I—hadn’t gotten that far yet,” she had to admit.

Without further deliberation, Fenn began drawing out handfuls of potatoes and carrots from a bucket below the counter. Waiting to see what he had in mind, Sevana found her attention drawn again to the fraying threads of his shortened trousers. She wondered if he had to wade creeks the same way cars did around here. But not wanting to offend him with impertinent questions, she merely found a knife and helped him peel potatoes.

After the vegetables had been set to simmer in a kettle, Fenn added a slab of smoked salmon and half the bottle of beer he’d gotten from the springbox. Then he mixed up biscuit dough and dropped it by spoonfuls onto a baking tin, while Sevana stood back, trying to learn how he did things without getting in the way. She wondered about the source of the white fat he kept in the unlabeled can on the stove and used in almost everything, but had a feeling she was better off not knowing. Once the biscuits were in the oven, Fenn went out on the front porch to finish his beer.

With a little time on her hands, Sevana returned to the woodpile. Chopping wood was a novelty to her, a challenge not yet well-mastered. She decided that for practice she would attempt the formidable round she had passed up the first time.

When Fenn appeared in the doorway to announce that dinner was ready, he found her with jaw clamped tight and wisps of hair coming loose from her braid as she tried to dislodge the blade from the large log round—which had been further scarred by her inaccurate blows and even chipped off a little on one edge, but was otherwise very much intact.

Something like amusement flickered momentarily in his face as he took hold of the handle and twisted it free in a single motion. “Leave the chopping block alone, Sevana,” he said, handing the axe back to her. “It’s not going to do me any good in pieces.”

Sevana’s eyes grew big as she viewed the scarred stump in that new light. Propping the axe against it with a sigh, she trailed him into the house. Before sitting down, she purposely filled her cup with water instead of milk.

Over the fish stew—which she did not particularly relish, even though the thought of salmon was much more reassuring than bear—she announced, “I met the shepherd today.”

“Wilder?” Fenn regarded his delicate, city-bred sister with some surprise. “What possessed you to go that far up the trail?”

“I wanted to find a view,” she said. “And I did, too. Oh Fenn, it was splendid! Wouldn’t that be the way to live—so high in the mountains with the sheep?”

“It’d be a good life, all right. Wouldn’t have to deal with anybody.” There was a hard glint in his eye as he said it.

She offered to do the dishes that night, and Fenn didn’t object. He brought in a bucket of water for her, and then—evidently impressed by what he’d witnessed earlier—chopped enough sticks to fill the woodbox to overflowing.

When Sevana went out on the porch later, Fenn was seated on the front steps with his chainsaw beside him, scraping the teeth with a round file. “What are you doing?” she asked, taking a place on the bench.

“Sharpening my chain.”

She thought the way his hair fell over his forehead while he worked made him look more boyish. “It’s a nice evening, isn’t it?” she said, hoping he would meet her eyes and smile, to let her know he liked having her there. But he didn’t look up or hesitate in the methodical passes of his file.

She began to polish her nails a glossy mulberry, even though she doubted there was much point to the ritual if she was going to keep chopping wood and washing dishes every day. Suddenly Fenn confronted her with a question. “Did you go in my room today?”

She nearly jumped at the direct inquiry. She wanted to deny it, but was afraid he would see through it. “Yes, I did,” she confessed. “But only to see if you had any good books. I didn’t bring very many.” She wondered why he asked. It seemed he knew she had, and was only asking to accuse her.

“Did you take any?”

“No,” she said.
You didn’t have any,
she added to herself.

“If you want books, ask me first,” he said. “Otherwise, stay out of there.” He took a drink from the brown bottle beside him.

In the uneasy pause that fell back between them, Joel’s truck was first heard and then seen rattling at a brisk clip down the mountain. Sevana waved a freshly lacquered hand, but Joel didn’t look their direction on his way past the homestead. She wondered where he was going so fast and intent that he didn’t even have the presence of mind to acknowledge his only neighbors. He hadn’t mentioned going anywhere that evening.

She had just finished the other hand when a bird shrilled into the evening silence—a piercing note that lingered after itself in the stillness. To Sevana it was a melancholy sound, as if all the loneliness of the surrounding mountains had been gathered into that one poignant cry, intensifying it beyond expression. She waited in suspense to hear it again. After a long interval, the bird repeated the single, flutelike note. The evening stood suspended between night and day, listening for another call, but none came. “What was that?” she cried softly.

“What was what?” Fenn tested a metal bit with his fingertip.

“That bird that sang out just now.”

“A thrush.” As he tipped back his head for another drink, his eye lit on her as she sat waiting raptly for a sight or sound of that unfamiliar bird. “Sevana,” he said, annoyed, “haven’t you got anything to do besides sit there and watch me?”

Her eyes flew to his, startled and hurt. He returned the look, cool and unflinching. Without another word, she got up and went inside. Fetching an unfinished painting from her room, she settled with it at the kitchen table—removing easily into an inner world as familiar as the real one, where life even at its most distressing could be shut out and go virtually unnoticed. But before long, the dim aspect of the room forced her to seek out her inhospitable sibling. “Fenn, could you show me how to light the lantern?” she requested reluctantly from the doorway.

Fenn merely grunted in response, but in a short time he came in. “Gad, Sevana, that turpentine could send you into a stupor,” he remarked ungratefully, with a superficial glance at the wild oak tree upon which she was laboriously concentrating. “Just like peyote, but easier to come by. Do visions of the gods ever dance before your eyes?”

“I’m sorry,” said Sevana, who was so used to the pungent smell she hardly ever noticed it. She screwed the cap back on the little bottle.

“So you’re the budding artist,” he observed cynically as he unhooked the lantern from its ceiling wire and set it on the table. “Planning to make a career of it, I hear.”

“Yes,” she said, encouraged by his interest. “It’s all I’ve ever wanted to do.”

“I understand Bryce is not overjoyed with your choice,”—the fact of which seemed to please him immoderately.

“He told you that?”

“Yes. He even had the gall to ask me to talk you out of it while you’re here. He wants you to choose a more useful vocation—as if he knew better than you, what you wanted to do.” The sarcasm present whenever he spoke of anything even remotely concerning his father, edged his words.

“Yes, he thinks I should have art for a hobby but not make it my career,” she confirmed. “And I feel bad about it, because he’s willing to pay for my education either way. But I can’t even consider doing anything else. And rather than taking art at a university, I wanted to try something more specialized first—and my teacher said the private studio in Lethbridge is excellent.” In reality, half a dozen schools had been recommended to her, and she had chosen Lethbridge as the one closest to Fenn—but as she felt he would not appreciate the reason, she didn’t enlighten him of it.

Talking to Fenn that way, finding him a more sympathetic ally when it came down between her or her father, made her feel like they were communicating for once, and she would have gladly continued the conversation. But Fenn had already initiated a series of applications involving the lantern—and Sevana, thoroughly alarmed because it looked far more complicated than anything she’d dealt with there so far, hung onto every word as he explained how to prime the pump and light the mantle, knowing he wouldn’t want to show her twice.

Convinced by then of her general incompetence, he made her repeat the process on her own. When she had succeeded with much prompting, he hung the light again and turned to his bedtime rituals of washing up and locking the doors. “Try not to rattle around down here too much while I’m trying to sleep, will you?” he made request as he headed for the stairs.

She nodded absently, already absorbed again with painting in the field flowers one by one. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

He stopped his climb abruptly. “No need for you to get up so early.” The way he said it, it was more a request that she didn’t.

“I like starting the day with you,” she insisted. “I’d be glad to help make breakfast or your lunch.”

“I can do it myself.” He went on up to his room.

Sevana gave the stairs a dark look and returned to her brushwork. Night settled in for good without her noticing. Only weariness and a tight cramp in her fingers eventually brought her back to the present. Shaking the tension out of her hand, she cleaned her prized Siberian-sable paintbrush in turpentine and pinched the bristles back into an exact point to dry. Then she crept to the counter to wash her face, trying not to make any metallic noises with the teakettle or washpan. As she hung the towel back on its nail, a beam of light out the window caught her eye—the moon, nearly round, tangled in the branches of a cedar tree below the clearing.

Intrigued, she forgot her tiredness and followed the moon outside, both fastidiously unlocking the door and leaving it open a crack to avoid any possibility of another nocturnal lock-out. Out under the onyx-blue sky, the night stretched deep and fathomless and wild. The sheen of the low moon brushed the clearing with frostlike radiance, causing the knobby trunks of the two birches to glow a startling white against the shadows of the forest. The tar-black range leaned overhead, blotting out most of the stars. But in that enchanted midnight, the overreaching mountainside did not seem so much an obstructive wall to trap her in and erase her sky, as a bulwark standing protectively over the homesite, silent and strong.

Sevana’s heart soared with all the other things reaching heavenward—the points of the trees, the ascendant ridgetops, the spirit of the earth itself lifting toward something higher above it. There was something unexplainable in the night, something calling—the same mysterious pull she’d felt in the meadow, but now even stronger. Her eyes swept the dark treetops, touched on the inky ridgeline, searched the narrow slice of crystalline stars—and she wished to know what was making her heart rise so restlessly in pursuit of something far away—or was it near?—something she couldn’t name.

She remained where she stood, lost in the unanswered questions of the night, until she began to shiver in the damp air. Going back in the house, she quietly closed and locked the door, stole across the floorboards—and was halfway up the stairs when she remembered the lantern.

Retracing her way, wincing as one of the steps creaked underfoot, she reached up on tiptoe to the hanging light and twisted the knob as far as it would go. But it continued to burn as brightly as before. Thinking she had turned the knob the wrong direction, she tweaked it the other way, and fire shot out the top, licking the ceiling. With a stifled cry, she turned it back down. But the lantern continued to spew out forked tongues of flame, singeing the ceiling boards.

Panic-stricken, she ran for the water bucket. It was almost empty, but she climbed on a chair and slung what little water was left toward the fire. It sloshed out awkwardly, missing the target and splattering across the table. Jumping down, she glanced back once more wildly at the flames lending a hellish, hazy-yellow illumination to the room, and raced up the stairs three at a time. “Fenn,” she shouted, banging on his door. “Fenn, wake up!”

“What is it?” he responded irritably, after a moment.

“The lantern’s on fire—it’s burning the ceiling!”

She heard him hit the floor. His door flew open as he sprinted past her down the stairs. But the lantern was out. Only an acrid smell in the room lent support to her story.

“It
was
on fire,” she insisted. “I must have turned it the wrong way, because flames went clear to the ceiling.”

Fenn relit the lantern, and as the flame strengthened he stood before her in the smoky light, arms folded across his bare chest. “Sevana, are we going to do this every night?” he demanded.

“I’m sorry, Fenn. The lantern didn’t go out when I turned it down; and when I turned it the other way, it caught on fire.”