1
He’s come to clean me out.
It’s as simple as that.
He’s come to scrape me clean, like a strand of meat clinging to a mussel’s shell.
He wants to put me down in Evergreen, in the tangled graveyard set aside for lost souls. This hunter, he hopes to put me down there with the poorest of the poor, the forgotten, the graves no one tends to, their crooked stones leaning aft, as if taken aback by how far injustice can go, even after death. In that cemetery, hard by St. Clements Church, the animals pile insult on injury. They burrow down toward the collapsing coffins, our boxes softened underground, and bring up bits of bone and tats of lace. And the dead can do nothing about it, their hands and feet tied.
But what ghost has ever asked to be gnawed and stripped? Who wants to lie down in a cold bed she didn’t choose or make? Who wants their bones rolled into a hole, like dice weighted to land on only one number, and always the worst?
Now, let’s say you want to change the odds. Let’s say you refuse to be put down in a pauper’s grave. What do you do?
You fight.
It helps to be trouble. Troublesome. Irish stubborn. A mighty will—that’s the ticket. It takes will not to be what everyone expects you to be. It takes heart not to go where they tell you to go. Especially here, along the rugged north coast, in this place where the tides would as soon see you dragged under as drawing breath.
In the seaweed that washes up on my village’s cove, you’ll find all sorts of things the tide has dragged along with it: bobbing globes of buoys, ruined fishing line, plastic grocery bags choked with sand. Things that can’t fight back. Look up from the beach, craning your neck toward the top of our crumbling cliffs, and you’ll see the village of Benito itself, ignoring the flotsam below, dressed in its Sunday best, even on the blackest days. For we do have black days here, even in this most beautiful part of California.
In winter, our sky grows so heavy it’s like a box lined with padded silk closing down on you. The fog stifles. The foghorns moan. The waves turn to claws on the black rocks, and the air smells of cold, wet lead.
In summertime, it’s better. That’s when the tourists come up in their bright, sparkling cars and their smart summer clothes, and they marvel at the view from our peninsula, and lick at expensive toffees and taffies, and don’t even guess that what they might be tasting, on their tongues, in the air, isn’t only summer’s seasoning but the ashes of all the brave women and men who once lived here, as I did, before each life turned to salt.
It’s funny, isn’t it, how the people who eat up the most in this world often don’t taste what it is they’ve dined on? How those who have the means to eat whatever they like are always hungry for more, always more, while the truly famished among us sweep the floors and scrub the dishes and leave the village at night to sleep in places where the rooms are smaller, away from the water and the views, in the woods, in simple beds behind doors as thin as paper, the best wood having been cut for somebody else—for Augustus Lambry, and his like.
When the loggers first came here, a hundred and fifty years ago and more, they were poor—but their will was mighty. They might have worked for men like Lambry who slept in clean, white sheets, but the trees those lumbermen felled were their own business, their own life and death at the edge of the void, and they cut only the biggest, loftiest trunks and shoved and dynamited them downriver, toward the mills and the sea. In those days, Benito’s cove was a half-moon’s sweep of deep water, deeper than it is now, with cypress trees perched thick as crows on the cliffs, except for where a track was cleared to make way for the Lambry logging chutes. Even after the boardinghouses and saloons started going up—once there were so many loggers, a town had to be built to manage them—those trees, and the mounds of salt grass covering the headlands, stayed free and wild. Then, in time, the Main Street Hotel sprang to life, where maids who washed and ironed and cooked could hope to stay clear of grabby sailors; and the peak-roofed storefronts all along Albion Street; and St. Clements Church, its white steeple driving away the last of the Indians; and finally the temple the Chinamen built, with its roofs curled like red shoes left out in the sun. And closer in, on the first hill after the fine houses of the merchants, Evergreen Cemetery was laid out. Evergreen, where even now my poor family rests, broken footstones all in a row.
Above the marble monuments of the wealthy, the gulls rooked and called, and the white-waisted clouds floated, while down in the cove the doghole schooners bobbed at anchor, creaking, and over at the Point, the lighthouse swung its jeweled lamp in a wide circle, warning of hidden dangers.
Just because you can’t see a thing doesn’t mean she isn’t there.
The hunter has parked his bright car at the foot of Evergreen Hill and is coming, now, from the direction of the cemetery toward me. I know what he is. I’ve seen and heard a hunter’s boots before. They make a sound like a sawblade scraping on sand. This one, he’s tall and bulky and box-jawed. He squints at the house, his cheeks taking up the slack skin under his beard. I’m standing in the rose garden in my white dress with my red ribbon twining though my hair, and a little shiver runs through me, a piece of my own will. I hold steady, the way you do when you know a wave is coming, and you lock your knees to meet it. The sandy street leads him to the wrought iron gate at the edge of the garden. He opens it, then turns around to make sure he’s latched the groaning lock securely behind him, but maybe also to be certain he’s alone. So this is a hunter, I think, who watches his back. He looks up and sees the black-railed tower of the house, the steeple meant to rival the church’s with its white shingles layered like gulls’ feathers, though here the paint is starting to flake off and show the older white underneath, the ghost of its old self. He narrows his eyes again, and I see that his skin is rough—a working man’s face—and that his clothes are black and simple—a working man’s clothes—and that although he is, to be sure, one of the living, he’s one of the dying, too, because there is gray at his temples and gray blurring his whiskers, his own flake showing.
He turns his peppered cheek to his left, then to his right, and sees, not me, but the great bundle of life beside him: one of our famed Lambry rose bushes. He reaches his hand out, entranced, cupping one perfect, yellow bud. A breeze coming from far out at sea stirs its petals and my dress. And it’s this flutter of wind, he might decide, and be wrong, that pushes the black thorn deep into his skin, under his sleeve, at the wrist.
The name the living give to such blows is “accident.”
I watch him lick the blood from the root of his palm. I see the flash of silver inside his sleeve. It’s that metal band these hunters all wear. The thing that marks them.
Then, with a motion as calm as when he opened the gate, he takes the yellow Lambry bud and lifts it gently back into its place in the overgrown, latticed arbor, as though putting a child back in its high chair, and he turns away to move farther along the garden. As though I hadn’t just warned him not to.
I’ll need to adjust my thinking, then. His is the strut of a man who takes the first cut lightly. Or maybe he’s like me. Emma Rose Finnis. Irish born. Irish stubborn. Raised to be staunch in the face of wounds. The bells of St. Clements are ringing, and the sun can’t make up its mind about where it wants to burn, dancing in and out of the mists over the cove. But I’ve made up my mind already. I’ll keep this man close.