Evergreen (8 page)

By the time she swaddled Hux in a blanket and ran up to the meadow, the garden had split its seams. The crows had uprooted Eveline’s dill and broccoli and, just to be mean, a handful of yellow oxeye daises: her favorite flower. Eveline spent the morning restoring order to the garden, shooing the circling crows with Lulu’s hoe, while Hux played with a rattle she’d made for him out of a dried gourd. She replanted what she could and harvested what she couldn’t, thinking about how baby vegetables were prized more than their mature counterparts in the ladies’ magazines now and wondering if the same held true for pumpkins and squash, tiny string beans. She didn’t think of the word
scarecrow
until she got to the rows of violated sweet corn, the golden ears she wouldn’t be dipping in pools of melted butter.

To build one, Eveline sacrificed a blue blouse and her black dancing shoes, but she couldn’t spare any slacks, since she only owned two pairs and one of them was already in sorry shape. In the closet, she glanced at Hux’s rompers. Unless she was going to make a baby scarecrow, she’d have to use a pair of Emil’s slacks. She picked the least flattering of the heavy wool pairs—the ugly brown pair, if she was honest with herself—and laid the outfit out on the bed.
Sorry, dear
, she said, as if the slacks were Emil.

To make the scarecrow’s skeleton, Eveline lashed together Lulu’s hoe and a branch that had come down on the outhouse, along with rope leftover from the clothesline. He wasn’t the world’s handsomest scarecrow, but when she got him to his feet, Hux shook his rattle vigorously and Eveline felt a little surge of pride.

A few hours later, the crows came back.

“Scarecrows only scare people,” Lulu said, after the second ransacking. She brought over one of Reddy’s guns, a .38-caliber Smith and Wesson an old friend of his used to kill soldiers during the First World War.
German soldiers
, she meant but didn’t say. “Even if they’re not attacking your garden, sometimes you have to kill one just to make your point.”

Lulu balanced an empty can of tomato paste on the scarecrow’s arm, stepped back, and judging Gunther and Hux to be far enough away shot it off.

Eveline had never held a gun before and wasn’t eager to hold this one, which was loaded with two-hundred-grain bullets. The worn walnut panels, along with the indentation of the previous owner’s fingers, meant that someone had loved this gun well. The gun was heavier than Eveline thought it would be. The metal, cold and dull.

“This means you can’t kill a crow,” Lulu said, showing her how the safety mechanism, the hammerblock, worked. “This means you can.”

Eveline held the gun as daintily as she could, wondering what Emil would think if he saw her with it. “I’m afraid it’ll go off by itself.”

“It doesn’t have free will,” Lulu said. “Apparently just like us.”

Eveline, Reddy, and reluctantly Lulu had signed and returned the government papers, agreeing to let the field agent do his assessing because none of them wanted to vacate their land, which belonged to them in heart but not by deed. They were squatters. Lulu and Reddy knew this when they moved to Evergreen and took up residency in what was then an abandoned cabin. They said Emil must have known this, too, when he made the agreement with Meg and William, who were probably happy to get whatever they could. Money was what they’d most likely needed, not paperwork, which made her wish Emil was here so she could be mad at him in person instead of worried about him on paper.

Since she’d received Emil’s letter, Eveline had been waiting less and less patiently for another one, hopeful whenever Reddy crossed the river and disappointed when he came with buckets of fish instead of an armful of mail.
He’s not coming home
, she’d think then and would have to go to weed the garden or read the English taxidermy manual or take up some other project to distract herself from that possibility.

After some cleverness on her part, she and Hux now had a real outdoor shower when the rain barrel was full. Instead of fighting the flow of water, Eveline had raised the rain barrel onto the roof and lowered the copper piping, allowing gravity to do its work. She’d built a siphoning system out of cloth and gravel to slow the pressure of water. She and Hux had spent a whole day collecting smooth gray stones at the river and lined the shower floor with them. Eveline was still working on something
that would approximate a showerhead, but she’d already placed a bar of castile soap in a dish and had hammered a nail into the cabin wall to hang her towel on. The temperature of the water depended on the sun, which meant the best time to shower was in the afternoon, when the sun was strong enough to heat the water to something between cold and comfortable.

Lulu and Reddy were impressed with her accomplishment, as was the Lead with Light field agent Cullen O’Shea, who showed up early one morning near the beginning of July to assess the property. He was wearing a crisp white shirt and freshly pressed trousers, which belied the lengthy trip up the river in his government-issued ten-horsepower motorboat. His eyes were an unearthly blue, his hair the color of cinnamon sticks. Despite the way he was dressed, he looked at ease in the wilderness.

Mr. O’Shea said he’d figure Eveline’s ingenuity into his assessment, writing something on his wooden clipboard with a yellow school pencil. The air was humid, which made the pencil catch on the moist paper. Eveline was sweating, but he didn’t appear to be.

“I believe that merits a five-dollar property rental discount, don’t you?”

“I believe you may be right, Mr. O’Shea.”

“Cullen,” he said, a dimple appearing to the right of his mouth. “Friendly Irish surveyor at your service, Mrs. Sturm.”

Eveline switched Hux to her other hip and held out her hand. “Eveline.”

She went in the cabin to make a cup of tea for him. Lulu would have offered him a cup of dirt. He was going to Lulu and Reddy’s cabin next.

“Lulu can be difficult,” Eveline said.

“Are you friendly with her?”

“She’s my
best
friend,” Eveline said, smiling like a schoolgirl because it was true.

“Can I hold him?” Cullen said when she brought the cup of tea out to him.

“Your son,” he added, when Eveline tried to hand him the tea. “I love children.”

“Do you have any?” Eveline said, handing Hux over.

“Women worth marrying are usually already married,” Cullen said, holding out his index finger, which Hux clung to like the rattle.

Eveline set the teacup on a stump. “He likes you.”

“I like him, too,” Cullen said, his dimple appearing again.

Cullen spent the morning walking around the cabin, the outhouse, and the surrounding woods, inspecting what the people at Lead with Light told him to inspect and writing the results on his clipboard. Though he was technically supposed to, he said he wouldn’t come inside the cabin because whatever was in there wasn’t his business and because Eveline’s husband wasn’t there to agree to an invasion of privacy.

“What about the electricity?” Eveline said, though she wasn’t particularly interested in having it, since she’d lived without for so long. The warm glow of the oil lamps made the cabin cozier at night and she’d finally mastered how to bake soda bread on the woodstove.

“An electrician will wire you when the dam gets closer to completion,” he said. “It’ll probably only be for a single bulb at first, which is pretty useless if you ask me.”

Before he moved on to Lulu’s, Eveline took him up to the garden, which was still growing despite the crows’ efforts to destroy it. Lulu had brought Eveline a flat of geraniums to keep the grubs away from her leafy greens and suggested setting out dishes of soapy water for the potato bugs that weren’t supposed to like this strain of seeds in the first place.

“Think of Gunther,” she said. “He wilts in the presence of soap.”

The corn was torn to bits, but the tomatoes were growing plump, some as large as grapefruits, and the squash vines were dropping their sunny petals onto the broccoli below them. Lulu kept urging her to harvest the garden, which Eveline kept delaying because the twist of vines and the spread of leaves, the vibrant rainbow of colors, gave her such pleasure to look at. The scent of her first real garden, too—soil and herbs and sun—was more intoxicating than any perfume she’d ever dabbed on her wrists.

“Maybe I’ll marry her,” Cullen said, shaking hands with the scarecrow.
“Him?”

“The crows keep attacking the corn,” Eveline said.

“See,” Cullen said. “Even the scarecrow’s taken.”

“Only for the summer,” Eveline said. “Then it could be yours.”

“Nothing like marrying an it.”

After Cullen gave her a copy of the report he was taking back to the office with him, in which he’d recommended charging her and Emil a very small monthly residence fee, Eveline gave him directions to Lulu’s house and a last bit of advice.

“Don’t ask her about her coat.”

Cullen shook Hux’s hand and then hers and started down the same path Emil had walked down months ago now.

Eveline spent the rest of the day doing her chores and playing with Hux, who’d begun to crawl. She set down a blanket on the porch and encouraged him with fingers full of honey from the jar Lulu gave her. When Hux grew tired, he rolled on his back and looked up at the cross of beams overhead and the slices of blue sky visible in the spaces between them.

“Your mama and papa love you more than anything else in the world,” Eveline told him. She was worried Hux didn’t
know he had a father. She showed him the photograph of her and Emil taken outside the courthouse on their wedding day, her in the blue dress she was twirling in when they met and Emil in his traveling suit. “That’s your papa.”

After Hux woke from his afternoon nap and Eveline took in the laundry from the line, she started a supper of smoked trout. The last time Reddy went to Yellow Falls, he brought back a lemon for Eveline. Now, instead of rubbing the flesh of the fruit on her skin, she squeezed it over the smoked fish and on top of the dilled rice she made to go along with it. She cut a slice of soda bread for her and for Hux, although Hux mostly gummed whatever she gave him. Since it was just the two of them, she didn’t set down a tablecloth or napkins. If she needed to wipe her mouth, she used a dish towel.

“Here we are then,” she said to Hux when everything was ready.

Just then someone knocked on the front door. Eveline went to it, knowing that whoever it was wasn’t Lulu because day or night Lulu marched right in. Maybe it was Reddy, come to invite them for supper.

“Hello?” she heard someone say. The voice was familiar, soft. She thought it belonged to Emil, which meant he was home again. Home. What a lovely word! She’d gladly put out a tablecloth again. She’d gladly dress for supper.

I’ve missed you so much!

Before Eveline opened the door, she picked an oxeye daisy out of the Mason jar on the bookshelf and tucked it behind her ear. She pinched her cheeks.

“You’re home!” she said, skipping a little as she turned the knob.

Instead of Emil, Cullen O’Shea was standing at the foot of the porch with a bundle of wires in his hand. “I didn’t know you were expecting me.”

What a disappointment not to see her husband standing on the porch in his traveling suit, a duffel bag slung over his shoulder, a bouquet of white edelweiss—Emil’s favorite flower—in his hand. “I thought you were my husband,” Eveline said.

“No, ma’am,” Cullen said. “I’m just a surveyor with a broken boat.”

The sun was balancing low on the horizon, and Eveline shielded her eyes to see him.

“What’s wrong with it?” she said.

He held up the bundle of wires. “One of these shorted out. I’m afraid I’m stuck on the river tonight. Tomorrow, I’ll row myself back to town. I was wondering if I might trouble you for a blanket. I’ll return it in the morning. The mosquitoes are getting to me.”

“Of course,” Eveline said, turning to retrieve one. Halfway up the porch steps, she stopped. “How rude of me. You must be starved.”

“This is turning out to be pretty inconvenient, I admit. I thought I’d be up here half a day at the most, but your coat friend had me surveying in circles.”

“She’s a troublemaker,” Eveline said, smiling.

“She’s only protecting her own,” Cullen said.

“I just put our little supper on the table,” Eveline said, looking down at her apron, which was full of flour from the loaf of bread.
Nothing to be done now
, she thought, wondering what else in the cabin would embarrass her. “It’s a simple one since it’s just Hux and me, but we’re happy to have you if you don’t mind smoked trout.”

“I love trout,” Cullen said. “But I couldn’t come inside, Mrs. Sturm.”

“Eveline.”

Cullen took off his hat. “It wouldn’t be right.”

“Those rules don’t matter out here,” Eveline said, taking his hand, which was softer than Emil’s. She led him up the porch steps. “They probably don’t matter anywhere.”

Eveline sat Cullen down in her seat and made another plate for herself. Hux dropped his bread on the floor and though Eveline usually would have picked it up and given it back to him, with Cullen here she cut another slice for him and set aside the other one for Tuna. The kitchen was warm from cooking the rice, and before she sat down Eveline propped open the little window that overlooked the raspberry bush.

“You sure about this?” Cullen said.

Eveline sat in Emil’s place. “Absolutely.”

The three of them ate supper, Eveline and Cullen asking each other questions to fill the quiet and paying plenty of attention to Hux to ease the fact that they were two strangers sitting at a table together.
You’re such a good little boy, aren’t you? He’s my angel. My love
.

“Have you always been a surveyor?” Eveline asked Cullen, thinking it was nice to have another person at her table again. Whenever she ate with Lulu and Reddy, she ate at their table. Afterward, one or the other of them would row her and Hux back.

“Not officially,” Cullen said, studying her sketches on the far wall. “But I’ve always been somewhat of an observer. Looks like you are, too.”