I’m here.
Behind her, the house squeezed itself shut like a fist.
Her feet found the path uphill without trying. Frost crystals grew up like mushrooms, and frozen puddles crunched beneath her feet, loud on account of the metal landscape. It was the same ice and water that had carved the mountains, the ancient seep and trickle of it under and into rock, its freezing and unfreezing, the cracking of granite, the insistent chiseling, water that found out the crevices and always moved downhill.
As soon as she cleared the level of the house she felt her lungs expand and relax and expand again. There in the blued clearing before her was the bowed outline of a fox, his back curled against the whitened earth, his nose intent and pointed at something in front of him.
I see you.
The animal arched up, hopped forward, and slapped his front paws against the frost-tight ground. Then he gave a vigorous shake of his head and was gone.
It’d been two years since she’d found the skeleton of that other fox, the bones bleached clean and so beautiful and sorrowful that she couldn’t bear to leave them. But when she’d brought them home for Matthew to reassemble on the porch, Brodis had stood apart and watched the two of them puzzling out the pieces, and not more than a minute had passed when he’d asked about the stew, and was supper on its way or not. And she’d heaved herself up from the floorboards and said it was true that she’d left off starting the cornbread too long.
The fox had been the first thing she’d taken for herself. But the way Brodis looked at it made it silly. That night she’d woke wide-eyed in the dark. It’d been easy to creep from the bed and pack up the fox and take it up the mountain. It’d been instinct that had taken her to the crevice in the side of the rock, the same overhang she and her cousins had played in as children. Except that this time she was alone, and grown, and it was dark. And there was no one looking to find her. There she’d set the lantern, and there she’d unwrapped the bones and puzzled them out, the skull an empty box, the ribcage a shell, the backbones precise and stacked like threaded bobbins. In the months that followed she’d brought other things too: river stones, and snail fossils, Matthew’s first teeth rattling around the bottom of a jelly jar, a Cherokee pot, programs from school plays and camp revivals, locks of hair and baby clothes, and whatever was unlikely and surprising that she could call her own. Other women she knew hosted weddings and infares or designed quilts and baskets and flowerbeds. Other women she knew planned. She didn’t. In place of planning, she preserved, with mason jars and jelly jars and the battery casing that kept her daughter’s baby blanket from the moths. And she held those glass moments close. That way you knew that whatever happened, you could always go back to that Christmas play program spread on your lap, that moment whenever they’d just darkened the theater and the audience had hushed of a sudden single accord, and your son stepped onto the stage. Whatever happened, you would always have that. You pulled those moments from the garbage and they were yours to own. They were proof you had lived. And they were enough, mostly.
Leastways for her. Where her son stashed his moments she hadn’t figured out.
On the mountain she knew her way without trying. There in front of her was the silhouette of the grandfather oak, its giant arms cradling the sky, there the rhododendron branch blocking the path, there the granite outcroppings where she’d hid as a child, there the grayback boulder spattered with lichen and festooned with laurel. She and Matthew had found arrowheads in its overhang. Now a movement caught her eye—the fox ribboning against the base of the boulder. Then he was gone. She stopped and smelled. Underneath the clean smell of ice was something hot and alive: the musky-coffee smell of pups, curled under the boulder maybe, blind in the dark, a secret sealed from the world.
She stored this information among her private collectings. Sometimes she kept these for herself, and sometimes, like the arrowheads, she gave them to Matthew as gifts.
Around her the pillars of the tulip trees vaulted up the sky, the moon throwing their columned shadows before them. The new-built classrooms seemed close, the dining hall and the dormitories all electrified, the books issued to each student for him alone.
There are scholarships. The lady agent had said it. She had a way of opening her eyes up wide when she meant to make a point.
It was certain Brodis wouldn’t like the idea coming from the outside. Not after the trains and the tobacco and the teams of city boys in shirtsleeves building national parks and kicking people out of their homes and damming up rivers. Not after the big game hunter who moved to Tennessee and imported magic Russian boar with tusks like elephants that could gore a man to death. Or the Baptist missionaries that poured in from Atlanta because the church in that city was affiliated and turns out there wasn’t any call for a mountain church to call itself Baptist unless they were affiliated too, and a whole group of them telling Brodis and Haver Brooks they couldn’t just call their church whatever they wanted unless they got it in with the national organization, and the national organization had its own preachers thank you very much, and when Haver and Brodis ignored them, here they came knocking on doors, their hands stacked with pamphlets.
And now this. It would need finagling. You had to take care for the timing. Tomorrow before bedtime might make.
On the ridge the hemlock crowded out the tulip trees. Old chestnuts twisted like the red carcasses of tortured ancient kings, their massive spiraled torsos lifeless and naked, their ghosts sifting among the castled evergreens. They had their secrets they weren’t telling either, and they remembered the ones that had left, the peregrines and the otters and the wolves and the beaver. And then the woods turned laurely, and the tree line dropped away, and the top of the mountain opened like a fairytale ballroom big as the horizon.
Across the clearing a pair of slanted yellow eyes stared at her, and even in that first moment she marked that they were narrow-set, intelligent eyes, bigger than a bobcat’s or a dog’s. But not a bear’s either. Then another pair and another. Rustling followed, but not the kind that signaled a charge. More like she’d invaded a jealous private party, and the participants now made ready to hide their illicit activities. She couldn’t see them, but she sensed that they studied her. There was a snort, and a single big-chested outline commenced to show itself: a wedge-shaped head with an absurd snout, small pointed ears and great tusks that curved toward the moon, tusks that spoke of jungles and exotic forests, of Mowgli and fairy-tale dragons that burned your house to the ground in a single breath. Behind the beast’s head bristled a silver-tipped collar, as if it was wearing a cape. Below that, its body and hindquarters dwindled to an absurd smallness.
It couldn’t be a pig. The legs were too long, the ears too pointed, the hooves too small. And yet there wasn’t any other thing in the world it could be.
It was them.
The beasts began a great shuffling, and within a second, the caped one turned and followed the crowd toward the west and the Tennessee ridge.
Irenie hadn’t known pigs could move that fast.
The bald was quiet then, but changed. Rooted-up turf lined the earth around her, and the air breathed sharp. Her foot landed in something soft. She lit the lantern to find a segmented mound of scat. It was still warm. But it didn’t smell like the shit of the hogs they put up before slaughter to harden the fat. It smelled like sulfur and decomposing flesh.
How had they come to be here?
The look of the yellow eyes in the night, the intention of them, meant something. They had judged her and found her meaningless, as if they’d been the ones to discover her instead of the other way round, as if whatever change they brought was already here, already bigger than her or Brodis.
She wrapped the pig dropping in a leaf and carried it that way between her thumb and finger. For now. Later she’d find a jar and store it in the cave with her other moments, the ones she’d saved for good. She didn’t tell Brodis about the pigs. It was only a matter of time before he’d know. Besides,