December's Thorn Page 10

  I took several steps in her direction, sidled up to her, and kissed her temple. “Truer words were never spoken: there isn’t anybody else like you.”

  She smiled, and I was momentarily filled with appreciation for everything in the universe.

  Which sensation was instantly shattered by the sound of snoring.

  Dr. Nelson had fallen asleep on my sofa.

  13

  Lucinda managed to get a few hours sleep before midnight. I woke up when she got out of bed, but only for a second. Moonlight slanted in through the window and seemed to be reflected from her spirit, out to the moon, and back to my bed, covering me like a sheet. I thought of John Donne: “Here lies a she sun, and a he moon there; She gives the best light to his sphere.” I tried to wake up enough to tell her that, to quote the poetry to her, but Nepenthe overtook me, and I forgot how to speak, and she was gone.

  When I woke up again, the unruly sun had invaded, invoking, this time, Emily Dickinson: “There’s a certain slant of light, on winter afternoons, that oppresses, like the weight of cathedral tunes.” I was very unhappy to be in bed alone.

  I sat up, rubbed my eyes, and was suddenly, delightfully, accosted by the smell of bacon. I had heard or read that the smell of bacon was one of the few universally appealing sensations to the male of the species. Loath as I might have been to participate in a stereotype, I actually jumped out of bed, pulled on my pants and boots, and charged downstairs in my T-shirt, expecting to find Lucinda in the kitchen.

  Instead, there was Dr. Nelson, chirping some unrecognizable tune and turning bacon in the cast-iron skillet with a pair of silver tongs.

  “Good morning!” she sang out, not turning to look at me.

  “Bacon,” I said.

  “No,” she corrected, “this is Benton’s bacon, best in the world. I couldn’t believe it when I saw it in your refrigerator.”

  “I don’t drive to Tennessee just to get it,” I said, coming to the stove, “but it would be worth it if I did.”

  “Yes.”

  She removed the finished delight from the skillet and laid the pieces gently on a paper towel, then blotted them with another paper towel.

  “I also made eggs Florentine,” she told me.

  She stooped to open the oven door. Sure enough, there were two ramekins bubbling at the top. She used the tongs to pull them out and set them on the tiles beside the stove.

  “Eggs Florentine?” I whispered, as if something holy might be happening.

  “Well”—she shrugged—“it’s closer to lunchtime than breakfast, really—you slept late again. And you had spinach and cheese, and eggs, so I thought. You know. If we had some kind of fresh baguette or something, this would be the perfect morning meal. Late morning. Do you see what time it is?”

  I didn’t look at the kitchen clock. I couldn’t take my eyes off the eggs Florentine. But I did manage to recall something essential.

  “You’re not going to believe this,” I told her, “but two days ago a loaf of Poilâne sourdough came in the mail, from Paris.”

  She didn’t bother to hide her disbelief. “How is that possible?”

  “I have odd friends,” I told her, “and two of them live in Paris. They overnight the bread to me about once every other month or so.”

  “Why?” she asked, still clearly not believing that I had the bread.

  “Because I like the bread, and they like me,” I answered, squinting.

  I went to the refrigerator, pulled out a plain brown bag, and took out what was left of the loaf. It was golden and the crust was hard and it smelled like a wheat field in summer—in the south of France.

  “Pop it into the oven, just like this, not on a baking sheet, not wrapped, for about ten minutes while the eggs cool, and bread of the gods is yours.”

  She stood immobile for an instant, in awe of the world’s greatest bread.

  “This may turn out to be the best breakfast on the planet,” she said.

  “Certainly the best in Blue Mountain,” I amended.

  She opened the oven, tossed in the half-loaf, and beamed. “You know, I wait in line at this bakery whenever I’m in Paris.”

  “Because you don’t have two friends who live there and send it to you in the comfort of your own home,” I told her.

  “Exactly,” she agreed.

  “Now, a bit of espresso, I would think,” I said absently.

  “Make mine a double,” she said. “I really passed out last night. Sorry.”

  “You hit the sofa,” I said, smiling, “and you were gone.”

  “Somebody covered me with a very nice quilt.”

  “That was me,” I told her, tending to the espresso machine. “And that quilt was made by a woman named June Cotage, a kind of second mother to me. She’s gone now, but the quilt is here, and it reminds me of her. And now you’ve been touched by her, too.”

  “Thank you, June,” she said sweetly. “I slept unusually well.”

  “I did too.” I pulled down two espresso cups from the cupboard. “Unusually well, I mean. I could barely wake up when Lucinda left.”

  “She went to the hospital?”

  I nodded and pushed the button on the machine. It growled and whirred and then gave me espresso, two cups.

  We sat at the kitchen table in silence for a moment, then, drinking espresso and blinking.

  “Look, I— I do have to say,” I stammered, “that something you said last night. I mean— I actually am having some kind of— some sort of very real transition, or something. And as I reflect on that process, those personal realizations, I wonder if it’s possible that you might, somehow— well, be helping me.”

  “Sweetly, if a bit hesitantly, put,” she responded. “That was obviously a little difficult for you to say. But just to be clear: you’re the one making those things happen, whatever they are—not me. I open a door, or, really, just point out that there is a door. You do the rest; you walk through the door; you make the discoveries.”

  I sighed. “Every time I speak with you like this,” I said, shaking my head, “you revert—deliberately, it seems—to the clichés of your profession.”

  “Ah,” she said, sipping her espresso, “now you’re getting to something useful. Let me see if I can put this correctly: in folklore studies, one particular, elementary focus is on folk motifs, is that correct?”

  “Well, yes, a study of archetypes is essential to the basic understanding of folklore in general. Frazer’s The Golden Bough, the Aarne-Thompson classification system, certainly Joseph Campbell’s work—all depend, to a certain extent, on a knowledge of universal motifs for— wait. I see what you’re getting at. You think you’re so clever.”

  “I do?” She took another sip. “And what am I getting at?”

  “You think you’re explaining to me, in terms I can really understand, the value of the stereotype.”

  “And did it work?”

  I sat back. I exhaled. “Yes,” I admitted.

  “Then I guess I really am so clever.”

  I smiled. “I guess you are.”

  Moments later the bread was perfect—hard crust, warm crumb. We ate in silence, as if we were in church, at Eucharist, accepting, taking into our bodies and our spirits, the essence of all life.

  And when it was done, I gave thanks.

  “What did you do to the eggs, exactly?” I asked. “I can’t believe how fantastic they were.”

  “It’s the paprika and nutmeg in the béchamel,” she answered. “Plus, where did you get those eggs? They were amazing.”

  “Lucinda keeps chickens,” I told her. “Aren’t they good?”

  “Who could have imagined that a visit to Blue Mountain would include a side trip to culinary heaven?”

  I sighed. “Well, you’re a few years too late for a truly spectacular, unique gastronomic experience. There used to be a place in town.”

  “Let me stop you,” she interrupted. “I just had a very nice peak experience. I want to savor.”

  �
��Fair enough,” I agreed.

  And, anyway, how could I possibly have communicated the splendor of Miss Etta’s cooking, the sweet creamed corn, the stewed-all-night beef, “white cloud” turnip-potato-butter mash, the golden chicken wings, the pickled beets, the carrots with handmade butter and homegrown tarragon? Miss Etta, like June Cotage, was gone, but never forgotten.

  “Okay,” Dr. Nelson said, “what do you say we bundle up and head down to the creepy cave where your demon lover lives?”

  That made me laugh. “Right, my demon lover. I’m surprised to say this, but I really like the way you think. None of my other friends would ever suggest that kind of thing. I always have to be the one to offer the inappropriate and inadvisable course of action.”

  “I’ll just skip the fact that you just said ‘my other friends,’” she beamed, “and move right along to the ‘let’s get going’ portion of the program.”

  “All right.” I grinned. “Skidmore would hate this.”

  “Wait,” she said, her usual smile gone. “Skidmore.”

  I knew what she meant. “Melissa. We should call to see if Melissa’s all right.”

  I went immediately to the phone and dialed. Skid answered on the first ring.

  “Sheriff,” he said expectantly.

  “Skid,” I said back.

  “Oh, I thought it was the— are you all right?”

  “Yes,” I answered quickly, “I was just checking to see if Melissa was all right.”

  “She’s fine. The car’s a little banged up, but we got it out of the ditch. Look, I was expecting another call. If you’re all right and I’m all right, can I call you back in a while?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  He hung up without another word.

  “And?” Dr. Nelson wanted to know.

  “Melissa’s fine,” I said, hanging up my phone, “but Skidmore seems preoccupied.”

  “Good,” she said, getting up. “Let him be preoccupied, so we can go explore the cave.”

  14

  The mountain sloped downward in back of my house. At a certain point, there was an astonishing panoramic view of the valley below, where the little town of Blue Mountain is nestled. That morning the images were stark: black tree limbs against the new-fallen snow; cold white sun against a colder blue sky. Dr. Nelson and I stepped and fell and waded and slipped our way downward for nearly a half an hour.

  She was still in her rust-colored jacket. She’d pulled her hair back in some sort of ill-constructed braid, with no hat. I had donned a gray wool coat and a scarf. I had a wool hat in my pocket, but when I’d seen that she wasn’t wearing one, I’d decided not to wear mine either, for some reason.

  Neither of us spoke as we made our way down the mountain. It was hard going and we were both breathing heavily.

  At last we came to a more level spot and stopped to rest for a moment.

  “I’m suddenly worried that we won’t find the damned thing,” she whispered, “the cave.”

  “That’s not an inconsequential concern, even though Skidmore marked it with tape,” I agreed. “I think I’ve already said that I’ve explored every inch of this mountain, and I’ve never seen this cave.”

  “Skid said that it was overgrown,” she ventured.

  “I don’t think you understand what I mean by ‘every inch of this mountain,’” I told her.

  “Well,” she said, a little louder, “it didn’t just appear overnight.”

  “No,” I agreed.

  “How will we know if we’ve gone too far down?” she asked.

  “If we get to the bottom of the mountain,” I said, “we’ve gone too far.”

  “Fine.” And without another word, she was off, downward.

  I followed. “Maybe we should fan out.”

  “I don’t know,” she objected. “The last time we did that, you had a strange interlude.”

  “I did not have a strange interlude,” I protested. “But I see your point. We’ll stay close enough to see each other at all times, right?”

  “Right.”

  Another half an hour passed before I had to admit that we had probably passed the place where the cave was hidden.

  “Hey?” I called out.

  “Yes?” she answered.

  “It didn’t take Skid this long to get to the cave, do you think?” I said, walking toward her. “I’m pretty sure we should make our way back up. There was another place where the ground leveled off enough to handle a cave entrance back up about, I don’t know, maybe eight hundred yards.”

  “We didn’t see police tape,” she objected. “Skidmore said he put up police tape. That’s pretty noticeable, in all this snow.”

  “Right,” I said, mostly to myself. “We should have seen that.”

  “Still”—she sighed—“I have to agree with you that we’ve probably passed it, somehow. Did it snow more last night? Could the entrance and the tape be covered with snow?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  She shrugged and headed, slowly, back up the mountain.

  I stood for a little longer. I wanted to take in the upward slant of the mountain in a sort of panoramic sweep. Everything looked different from that angle, and I thought perhaps I might see something new.

  As Dr. Nelson trudged up the hill, I forced my eyes to move very slowly over every inch of the terrain. All the bare trees, the rock outcroppings, the dips, the level places—I tried to see them as if I had never looked at them before. Sometimes familiarity, I thought, can make things invisible. If you see something every day for years and years, you eventually take it for granted; you don’t really notice it at all. Whereas new eyes might see it right away. Like the fabled purloined letter, I was looking for the obvious cave, hidden in plain sight.

  Dr. Nelson was at least fifty feet away from me before I saw the granite boulders.

  “Wait,” I called out. “I think I might have something.”

  I began to make my way upward, toward her.

  “What is it? Do you see the— did you find the cave?” She was gasping. The way down had been exhausting, the way up was excruciating.

  “Not exactly,” I said very softly, “but I did see something new, or new to me.”

  I pointed toward three giant boulders that we’d avoided on our way downward.

  “Those rocks?” she asked. “They’re new? They’re not new.”

  “Sh,” I told her, whispering. “The rocks aren’t new. I’ve sat on those rocks, eaten and slept on them, stood on them to see farther—probably even jumped off them when I was very young. But I saw something new about them, just now.”

  I headed in the direction of the outcropping.

  “What was it?” she asked, her voice lowered. “What did you see?”

  “There’s a space between the two biggest rocks that hasn’t always been there,” I said, grabbing on to a small tree to help me along, lungs bursting.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean there used to be something, a bush or a rock or a tree, in between these two boulders. I think it might have, until recently, covered up the cave.”

  “But,” she began, barely audibly, “there’s no police tape.”

  “Someone’s taken it down, and covered up the opening,” I said.

  “What? What makes you think that?”

  “Because the only reason I noticed the fissure between the rocks now,” I told her, my voice at its lowest, “is because of the smoke.”

  “Smoke?” She craned her neck.

  I stopped to join her in searching out the air. It was difficult to see, set against the snow and the gray of the rocks, but there was clearly a wisp of white smoke escaping between the two boulders. And once the eye defined that smoke, it was easier to see that there must be an opening that was somehow covered up, with only a tiny hole left through which the smoke could escape.

  “What’s covering the entrance?” she asked, barely making a sound.

  “Can’t tell,” I answered. “Want
to find out?”

  She hesitated for only a second. “Okay.”

  Now that we both could see where we were headed, we moved slowly, trying very hard not to make a sound. Of course, it was a good bet that our voices had carried into the cave already, but I hoped that our current silence might afford us a modicum of surprise when we eventually entered there.

  As we got closer, we slowed.

  “You know,” I said, my lips next to her ear, “this might be a bit foolhardy if, in fact, the boy with the gun is in there.”

  She nodded.

  We stood for a second, uncertain what to do.

  Then she put her face close to mine. “On the other hand, if your imaginary wife is in there, I’d really like to see her.”

  “Good,” I said. “Right.”

  We were close enough now to see that someone had rigged a large square of canvas over the fissure. It was covered, or had been covered, with snow and twigs. Space had been left at the top, and it was through that space that small trails of smoke escaped.

  We made it to the edge of the biggest boulder. There was a smaller rock by my left foot that held down a corner of the canvas. I leaned over, picked up the rock, and set it aside.

  Hand on the canvas, I turned to look at Dr. Nelson. She was right behind me.

  “Ready?” I asked.

  She gave her head a single nod.

  I took in a breath, held it, and tossed the canvas upward.

  Instantly from inside the cave there were noises of surprise and scrambling.

  “Issie?” I called, praying I would hear her voice answer me. “It’s Fever. Fever Devilin. And Dr. Nelson, the doctor I was telling you about. The person who’s helping me. Can we come in?”

  Silence followed.

  “Well?” Dr. Nelson whispered into my ear.

  The canvas edge had folded back on itself and made an opening large enough to crawl through, but left little room for dignity or decorum. I peered in. The cave was dark, and now there wasn’t a sound coming from its depths.