Harlan at Home

Jimmy shuffled away; Harlan paid careful attention as first his back, then the sound of cracking twigs, were swallowed by the trees. She stood, and pine needles rained from her straightened legs.

“You were cryin’ ’cause the mountains bein’ killed?”

Thin lipped, zie nodded before standing on shaky fawn legs.

“Why?” she asked in a voice like an ancient tree’s bark, grown-thick and rough, sticky sap leaking in droplets from the ages old protective shell. She began to walk away and Oscar had no choice but to follow, and answer.

Zir eyes deepened, brown swirling into a muddy black swimming hole. “I dunno how to explain it-don’t know why-I can feel the pain, the earth’s pain, feel it in my bones, stretching my skin and wringing my guts. Sounds stupid, but… I swan.”

Harlan nodded, gravely, her hands quiet and calm at the end of understanding arms.

Zie stumbled on, voice uncertain and gaining speed. “This here ground’s more a part a me than anything else. When I was just a, just a kid, I could feel my veins down into the earth, suckin’ groundwater up in me, pumpin’ it all through my heart. It’s like I got muscles fulla dirt, branches insteada bones.”

They seemed to be walking along a threading trail, half the size of a deer path. Abruptly, Harlan said, “I want to show you where I live.” Her voice could have walked up to a scared coyote without worry, grandmotherly and exposed and reassuring, all rolled into one.

“Well, I ain’t walked off to a stranger’s house in a long while, but… I can feel you in my marrow. Think we’re mixed all up in this together.”

“Everybody’s mixed up in it now. Even iff’n they don’t wanna be.”

Harlan was clearly leading now, following the barely marked trail zie could no longer see in the growing dusk. Together, they walked through the scrubby undergrowth in silence. Shadows dripped from the leaves like the morning rain as bats streaked after the night’s first insects. The occasional moonbeam, pure as milk, crossed their feet in soft, momentary flurries.

In the dark, Oscar wasn’t sure where they were headed-downhill, certainly, not on the town side of the mountain, but zie couldn’t even tell if zie had walked this forest before. I didn’t think this mountain had any secrets from me, Oscar thought, half grumpy and half in awe, as a giant tree appeared in the path.

A second look, and zie realized it was two-two trunks grown so close they were almost one, maple and sumac with barely a gap between. Massive roots rippled through the mountainside like snakes, popping up in knotted sections fifty feet from the base. The sumac had caught and held eroding soil behind it, piled up to the maple’s lower branches where periwinkle grew, blinking between palm-sized leaves.

“Is this…” Oscar questioned hesitantly, glancing up to where Harlan balanced on one of the buckling roots.

She nodded, smiling, reached between the trunks to pull back a tanned deer hide covering the opening. “Guests first.”

Oscar stepped through with the solemn intrepidity of someone going beyond the veil. And realized that whatever it is, it was pitch black and he couldn’t see any of it.

Harlan chuckled. “Lemme get a fire goin’, give ya some light.”

Zie side-stepped to let her through, and bumped into a wall, earthen but not crumbling beneath zir fingertips. Zie heard the scrape of flint and suddenly, tinder-flame cast its flickering flame around the dugout. As Harlan busied herself building a fire in the tiny riverstone fireplace, Oscar stared, open mouthed.

With the exception of the fireplace and narrow door, the entire place was self-enclosed, like being inside an egg, an egg inside a planet. At the far back, maybe eight of Harlan’s paces from the giant tree, thick branches half-buried in the packed floor marked off a bed, just wide enough, filled with leaves and covered in animal blankets. Two sections of log stood by the fire, chairs or maybe a table, Oscar thought. Turtle shells, a hewn mug, several bone knives and lengths of rope hung from the broken-off spokes of a branch that set firmly into north wall..

Turning in a half-circle, Oscar saw the cubbies and shelves carved into the maple, honeycombing old bark and new wood. Animal miniatures, stone and bone and wood, glowed warm in the firelight. Skeins of yarn and half-knitted socks waterfalled out of hollows, but small earthenware jars marched in neat rows across the shelves. The fireplace, dead center in the south wall, crackled and jumped with light now, illuminating a few butt-shaped dips ringing the hearth. Harlan curled up, comfortable as any sleepy dog.

“Wow… this take long?”

“You know. It happened over time. Pull up some floor and have some bread,” she offered cheerily, indicating a rough-looking loaf warming on the stone.

In struggle,

Bargain Puppy

But I’m A Logger

Jimmy’s jaw dropped. His mouth, if not the rest of him, was clearly awestruck. “But… but… she didn’t tell me been talkin’ to anybody else.”

Harlan barked a laugh. “What, ‘fraid she been a-cheatin’?” Jimmy looked embarrassed, but she continued, “Say, you one a-them Harris boys, ain’t you?”

He nodded, deciding being mute was the best way to deal with this strange woman–this newcomer, his mind firmly insisted on calling her.

“I knew your brother back when. Now there was a sumbitch. Don’t expect to be seein’ him for a damn long while.”

Jimmy grunted, probably in agreement, but Harlan’s focus had already moved on. The skin around her eyes crinkled like a child’s paper fortune teller, smashed flat between grubby hands, as she asked Oscar, “Why was a-screamin’ like that anyhow? Sounded like somebody done died.”

“She was, well, I was cryin’ and she was tryin’ to make me feel better,” Oscar stammered, pulling Chinook tight to zir chest.

“Somebody did die,” Jimmy stated flatly. “Osc’s too nice to say, but zie was cryin’–you see where there’s supposed to be mountains but there ain’t?”

She didn’t follow his pointing finger, only nodded with downcast eyes.

“And you see over yonder, where there’s still a mountain, but there ain’t no trees?”

She squeezed her eyes tight and nodded again, just once.

“Next week, there won’t be a mountain there, neither. And I helped–I cut down them trees!” His voice cracked, but he continued in a whisper, “I’m a logger. Everyone in my family always been a logger. It’s my job.”

Oscar murmured something in Chinook’s ear, something that was caught and carried by the wind.

Harlan’s eyes flashed in recognition. “I know, child, but the evil’s still been done.”

Jimmy sat heavily next to his friend–on the other side from Harlan–and heaved a giant breath. “What did you say?”

“I said, it’s not your fault. You didn’t know… you never thought about it. And I told ‘Nook not to be mad.”

Chinook, perhaps to prove she had understood Oscar, trotted the few feet over to Jimmy and licked his face. “Oh, ‘Nook, you couldn’t be mad at me, huh? I didn’t mean to… you know I’d never…” The group lapsed into a stillness equally uncomfortable to all four as Jimmy buried his nose in Chinook’s shoulder and Oscar, once again, began to sniffle. “I am… I am gonna go back down home. Get some food. Feed ‘Nook.” He stood and looked around uncertainly, looking almost hopeful that someone would stop him.

“I’ll be there, later,” Oscar murmured, dark eyes fixed inscrutably on Jimmy’s uneasy face.

Enter Harlan

Jimmy looked on helplessly as Oscar’s face stretched and buckled under the force of so much hurt, as the very last of the sun died behind the clouds, as Chinook ran towards them from down ridge, barking urgently. She curled up around Oscar’s crouched feet and bayed.

Zombie-like, Oscar buried zir hands in Chinook’s ruff and twined zir fingers through the thick fur, scrabbling at it hysterically with trembling fingertips. She licked the tears crinkling zir face and nuzzled zir wet cheeks, her hot, comforting breath gusting into zir ears and nose. Eventually, Oscar’s breath calmed and zir tears fell more quietly, until zie only rocked slowly back and forth, hiccuping softly.

“Hey… hey,” Jimmy whispered, tracing the line of his friend’s spine with nervous fingertips. “What can I-is there anything I-I want to help but I ain’t-what I mean is-I, I-what should I do?”

“You done brought ‘Nook up here and I think that’s about all there is right now.”

“But I didn’t-” Jimmy splurted out in confusion, before new (and distinctly human) footsteps cut him off, quiet though they were.

Jimmy focused his hunter’s eyes on the nearly inaudible sounds crackling through the redbuds. A slight figure emerged fluidly from the shadows under the treeline, brushing back scrubby undergrowth with long, knobbled fingers. Her bare feet made very little noise as they shuffled through generations thick layers of spicy-smelling dead leaves and pine needles. Fresh acorn eyes shone unerringly from underneath the tattered brim of a gray forager’s cap. An old pokestock strapped to her pack glinted not at all in the dusky blue light.

“Oh, the little one’s jes’ fine. Heard her a-bayin’ and carryin’ on like that; thought she done got herself caught in a trap or sommit.” Above the tree line, the mountain breeze started taking back some of the leaves caught in her rusted gray hair, contained loosely in a braid to her waist.

“There ain’t no traps up here,” Jimmy contradicted.

“There most surely are. I’m all the time stickin’ ‘em or puttin’ ‘em to rust in a stream or some such.”

“I ain’t settin’ ‘em, that’s for dang sure. Trappin’s for cheaters and no goods.” His eyes narrowed in an unusual display of suspicion. “Who are you? And how you know my dog?”

“Chinook? She comes up here all the time. I know all the animals from down yonder there,” she trailed off, indicating from far-off route 119, up the mountain and over the ridge. “All the way over to Virginia.”

Jimmy’s mouth hardened to a paper thin line, but Oscar’s wavering voice interrupted before any more questions, bubbling steadily in Jimmy’s brain, had the chance to overflow. “But who are you? I lived here eighteen years and never seen you yet.”

The small woman’s face softened considerably as she looked towards Oscar, still tear-streaked and huddled around Chinook’s tightly coiled body, though didn’t (entirely) let down her defensive stance. “I don’t get down into town too much. And, well… I guess you can call me Harlan. Seems the simplest.” Her voice, previously like work boots hiking through piles of leaves, lowered to the level of moccasins on moss.

Oscar nodded once to voice zir agreement, and resumed staring off at the flattened mountains in the night-shrouded distance.

Harlan folded her legs beneath her, settling in next to Oscar and Chinook as quietly as snow falling off a fir tree. Her fingers-tanned bone-deep-fluttered to her gray-swathed knees. Oscar examined her closely, shyly, from the corners of zir eyes. Her clothes were so battered they were no color at all. Or rather, the color hovered somewhere between brown and gray, like last year’s abandoned firewood turning slowly to dirt. Oscar didn’t doubt she’d blend in well with the side of a mountain, or a compost heap, especially with all them grass stains. Over a long sleeved tunic so plain zie couldn’t see the seams, she wore a long leather vest, spotted by water and time, that fastened just above a bulging green pouch at her hip.

The first stars twinkled in a purpling sky before Jimmy, who had resumed his usual taciturnity, broke the now-comfortable silence. “You knew her name.” He didn’t bother with the question mark; his voice demanded an answer regardless.

Harlan looked at him, slightly surprised, but stated simply, “She told me, jes’ same’s she told you.”

In struggle,

Bargain Puppy