Death in the Pines (10 page)

The radio told me that many people experienced this ebb into self as depression, and they even had a name for it—SAD, seasonal affective disorder. But the folks who came down with that tended to be those who spent their working days in the fluorescent rabbit-warren mazes of offices. When they retreated into themselves, they found an echoing emptiness, a vacated house.

Not so with me. John and I had always kept busy, winter and summer alike, so I'd had few opportunities to contemplate and speculate on the Meaning of It All. Still, the past months had slowed me down, accustomed me to the natural flow of time, eased me out of the tyranny of a clock that bit another small chunk out of my life each minute. I had flowed into winter, had flowed with it, had learned to greet and celebrate early darkness with a glass of wine and a good book. I had accepted winter as a season to go to sleep early and wake up late and lazy, a papa bear welcoming hibernation.

Now I'd begun to look forward to summer, expecting it would bring a contrasting energy. They'd told me stories of how the entire green state of Vermont erupts in early summer, festivals, parties, and fairs popping up as if sprung from the deep stony soil, a hectic, hilarious time as the residents release the stored-up energy of the cold months.

I finished my ablutions and combed my hair, amid the lingering scent of Dr. Bronner's Peppermint Soap. I grinned at what the old doc might have made of my philosophizing. He could have squeezed it down into a snaking passage of agate type and wrapped it around one of his bars of soap. I thought fleetingly of shaving, fingering my short beard, the product of a month away from the razor, then decided the hell with it. When in Rome.

So I poured a shot-glass of Listerine, dipped my toothbrush into it, and then dipped it into an open box of baking soda and scrubbed away the tooth-scum and hangover sourness. I rinsed with the rest of the mouthwash, then got dressed in local costume: blue flannel shirt, jeans, brown work boots.

I pulled a lemon out of the grocery bag under the table, sliced it in half, and squeezed the juice into a glass. I topped it up with water from the Brita pitcher and drank it down. My headache had mostly dissipated and my vision had cleared. I took the half-full washbasin outside and poured the dirty water into a little gully, then I scrubbed the basin clean with a couple of handfuls of snow.

Then as I turned to go back, I saw Sylvia standing motionless beneath a leafless maple right at the edge of the small clearing around the cabin. The air had become frigid, almost crystalline, the sky a deep blue dome overhead. Sylvia stood watching me, her breath condensing and drifting away over her shoulder.

I stopped, facing her, and said, “Good morning.”

She simply stared for a long, silent moment, and I didn't know if she was trying to reach some big decision or was simply carefully considering her next move. She reminded me of the way the deer had deliberately stood in the roadway the evening before. At last she smiled and stepped toward me. “Good morning.” She passed me and went into the cabin.

I followed, pulling the door shut behind me.

“Good to see you again.” I put the bowl back into its place in the wooden washstand, realizing that I hadn't thought through what I wanted to tell her and ask her. Or maybe that wasn't so, maybe I had thought it through too much.

“Thank you.”

“Where'd you go last night?”

“I have a place to sleep nearby.”

“House? Trailer?”

“I have a home.” She sat in the straight-backed rocker. “What did you dream about last night?”

“Don't know. Danger. Jeremiah's grandson was involved, but that's all I remember.” I pulled a loaf of bread and a jar of raspberry preserves from the pantry. “Want breakfast?”

“I have eaten.” She was staring at the rug again, not making eye contact. “I dreamed of times past and times to come, about my people and yours. It was sad. You really don't remember when you dream?”

I shrugged. “Sometimes I remember bits and pieces, images. My dreams are surreal and usually make no sense.”

She raised an eyebrow but did not look up. “What if this is the dream? What if where you go at night when this ceases to exist for you is the reality?”

I had opened the preserves and spread a portion on a slice of seven-grain bread. “I've heard that kind of question before.
But it's pretty well established that this is what is real. Dreams are processed junk from our waking lives. How do I know this is real? It's a hell of a lot more consistent than my dreams, for one thing.” I took a bite of the bread. “Sure you don't want some?”

She glanced toward my breakfast with a look of covert and lustful hunger but she said, “No, thank you.”

She sat in a kind of absorbed, natural silence as I ate the bread, crunching the raspberry seeds between my molars. When I finished, I took my cast-iron snow-melting pan, went outside and filled it, and brought it back to the stove. A few drops of water hissed and sputtered as they dripped from the pan's sides onto the stovetop.

Sylvia did not look at me, but just sat and rocked. I put some gunpowder green tea in John Lincoln's old mug, the one I'd given him years earlier with the CIA logo, and carried it back to my chair, waiting for the snow to melt and the water to heat. “Anything happen last night that I should know about?”

She shrugged in an odd way, not a gesture of resignation or defiance, but more as though she was saying,
Yes, but nothing urgent,
as though it was more natural for her to shrug than to nod.

When she didn't say anything, I said, “So are you going to introduce me to your people today?”

She stiffened for a second before slipping into a more relaxed posture. “You must promise me something first.” She looked me in the face, and the force of her attention struck me as something almost palpable.

“What?”

“First tell me: do you think your people are in danger? Do you think the whole human race could be—what is the thing you call it—an endangered species?”

I didn't know how to field that. For a few moments I rocked slowly, hearing the chair runners against the wood floor, the crack and pop of the logs burning in the stove. “Nuclear war could do it,” I said. “Pollution, killer germs developed by the labs of three dozen nations, chemicals from genetically engineered foods. I'd say there's some element of danger. Is that what you mean?”

“There is a larger danger,” she said. “A more immediate one, though it could come from any of those things. But even without any of those happening, there is a graver threat.”

“What?”

“The Spirit of the world is ill. The Mother who gives us all life is weakening. If she becomes ill enough, you will all die.” She leaned forward, her intense brown gaze locked on mine. “Since this time yesterday, one hundred species have become extinct forever. Millions of plants and animals have died, ending a hundred million lineages. Each came from billions of years of trial and error, birth and death, growth and change. Each species had ancestors going all the way back to the beginning of life. Each should have had descendants to carry the line to the infinite future. Every one of those hundred species that were living yesterday morning has now vanished beyond recall. No one on Earth will ever see them again. And by this time tomorrow another hundred, or maybe more, will vanish.”

“I've heard that life on Earth goes through periods of great extinctions,” I said. “We're seeing another one begin.”

She shook her head. “Over the last seventy million years, perhaps one species went extinct every four or five years, but other species would replace them. The last time so many unique species were lost was when the great dinosaurs died. The world came close to losing all its life then.”

“How do you know all this?” I asked. “You say you don't use a telephone. Have you been educated? Did you go to college?”

She looked at me in silence. Outside I heard a crow's harsh complaint and the answering chatter of a chipmunk. A log shifted in the stove and I could hear Sylvia's slow breathing, the same rhythm as her rocking chair. Dust motes floated in the slanting rays of sun coming through the east-facing window. She said slowly and with a faint tremor in her voice, “My people hear the screams and feel the pain of those who die.”

I didn't know what to say.

She looked at the rug again. “Your scientists say that there have been five great extinctions on this planet since life began. We have entered the sixth.” She glanced back at me. “I have not been to college. I learned this from Jeremiah Smith.” She took a deep breath. “When these great deaths occur, those at the top of the pyramid of life, those who have stolen, exploited, and hoarded, will die too.”

“Us?”

She nodded. “And that is why you must promise me. Will you promise to do all you can to revive and awaken the Mother?”

“I don't understand—”

“Mother Earth.”

“I'm not sure what I can do.” The pan on the stove made a little clatter as the water began to boil. A faint haze of steam floated above it, causing a rainbow sheen as the prismatic droplets split the sun into its component colors. “I'd be willing to promise, but one man can't—”

“That will come later,” she said. “But now you must promise.”

“OK, I promise to do what I can. Although I'm still not sure what that means.” I frowned. “Are you—are you trying
to hire me? You want me to take on a job as bodyguard to the Earth?”

I'm not sure, but I believe she smiled. “Something like that.”

I had to smile too. “There are hundreds, thousands of people dedicated to saving the world, and some have millions of dollars. What can I do that they can't?”

She stood up and walked to the door, pushed it open, just a few inches, but far enough to spill in the cold air. I felt it on my cheeks and hands. She stared through the crack as if seeing something in the remote distance. “This is not about saving. Those people will fail because they are trying to save something. There is nothing to save.”

“Then I don't understand.”

“No.” Her glance had that almost physical impact. I felt it in my chest and stomach. “You are trapped because you think the same way they do and view the world as they do. You must change first. You are, are—deaf, blind, lame. You must cure yourself first, and then you can help.”

“Now I'm really confused.”

She pushed the door wide open, went across the porch and down the three steps onto the snow. “Get a blanket. Put on your coat. Follow me.”

WWHDTD? I suspected that Henry David would have serenely followed such a guide, perhaps to the surprise of his stodgier friend Ralph Waldo Emerson. Well, hell, I'd been patting myself on the back not so long before, seeing myself as a Thoreau for the twenty-first century. So I pulled my jacket from its peg and reached for the top blanket on the bed. Before my hand closed on it, the cell phone chimed in its charger and I picked it up to answer.

“Oakley Tyler,” I said, not recognizing the number.

“Jerry Smith,” he said. His voice sounded unsteady. “I'm at the office, at my paper. Look, I need to talk with you about your investigating my grandfather's death.”

“When?”

I heard him sigh. “I can meet you in Montpelier. The diner at the corner of State and Main. I need some time to clear my desk. Noon?”

“If I'm not there at the stroke, wait for me.”

“No problem. You'll find me there.”

I grabbed the green wool army blanket and draped it over my shoulder. Then something made me leave the phone connected to its charger, though the battery should have already been full. Somehow I did not think that Sylvia, or Henry David, would approve of it. I stepped out into the freezing morning air.

S
ylvia was walking away from me, into the forest. The sky arched a deep clear blue overhead. Above the treetops I made out the distant shape of Burnt Mountain, twenty miles east of us, looking as if it were no more than a mile away: the air was so cold that the moisture had frozen out of it, leaving it as deceptively transparent as the air of the high desert.

I floundered a little when we hit a series of drifts, but ahead of me Sylvia didn't even seem to notice the change in snow depth. She walked on, surefooted, not even sinking into the snow, not even crunching the crust as I did. Her walk had that lithe fluidity of a Native American, taking all the weight on the whole foot, not coming down heel-first and punching through as I did. And I doubted that she weighed more than a hundred pounds, a lot less than my one-eighty.

Though the air felt well below zero, the sun was warm on my face. She led me through hardwood growth and around a stand of pines until we came to the same outcrop of rocks where I'd first met her. She stopped and said, “Spread out the blanket. We'll sit on it.”

I did as she asked and she sat, facing the river, somewhere down there below us. I knocked snow from my boots and sat beside her, cross-legged. I could smell the deer hide she wore, the odor bringing me images of a night forest, animals panting from having run a long way, a fawn nuzzling her mother's teats, eager for the warm milk.

Sylvia sat quiet and immobile, her breath slow, spine straight, gazing ahead at the treetops down the slope, where the forest floor slanted down to the river. I wanted to talk, but I didn't think she'd welcome that. I began to shiver. Here the trees shaded us, and I missed the warm touch of the sun.

After what might have been two or three minutes, though it seemed longer, she said softly, “Do you see what is around you?”

I kept my voice as low as hers: “I see the forest. I see some places where the snow has drifted or melted and the ground shows through. I see where the snowmelt froze over there, making a little rivulet of ice. I can't see the river, though I think I can hear it under the ice.”