The Ten Thousand Doors of January - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,37
intentions in the forward tilt of her shoulders, the slant of her smile. “Well,” she sighed finally, “we’ll be here when you come back.” Ade barely heard her at the time, already flitting out the kitchen door like a loosed bird, but later she would return to those words and rub them for comfort until they were worn smooth as creek stones.
She went first to the sagging barn and unearthed a hammer, a pocketful of square-topped nails, a horsehair paintbrush, and a rusted paint can labeled Prussian Blue.
She took her supplies west toward the old hayfield. Time had stepped very lightly across the field. It had been briefly mowed and hayed by a wealthy neighbor, then abandoned again; a few crews of surveyors had scurried about with intentions of building a shipping house along the riverbank but found the ground too low-lying. Now there was only a rusted line of barbed wire with a tin sign indicating that it was private property and suggesting that trespassers should be wary. Ade ducked beneath it without breaking stride.
The cabin timbers had never been fully cleared away but were left to rot in a weedy tangle of honeysuckle and pokeberry. Ade knelt before the old lumber with her thoughts running deep and silent, like subterranean rivers, and scrounged through the pile for unrotted wood, brackets, old hinges. Farm life without uncles or brothers had left her with more-than-passable carpentry skills, and it took only an hour or so before she’d assembled a frame and rough door. She hammered the frame into the earth and hung her scrapped-together door in it. It creaked in the river breeze.
It was only when she was entirely finished, and the door was painted a deep, velvet-ocean blue, that she fully understood what she was doing: she was leaving, perhaps for a very long time, and she wanted to leave something behind. Some kind of monument or memorial, like Mama Larson’s headstone, that marked her memory of the ghost boy and the cabin. She also couldn’t help hoping, at least a little, that one day the door might open again, and lead elsewhere. This, in my considerable experience, was a misplaced hope. Doors, once closed, do not reopen.
Ade abandoned her aunts’ tools and walked the scant miles into town. Then she tucked her hair up beneath a leather hat so shapeless and worn it lay like a sleeping animal against her skull and strode out on the docks to wait for a likely steamer. This, too, felt less like crafting a plan and more like swimming downriver, swept along by some force grander and madder than herself toward unknown seas. She did not fight it but let the invisible waters close over her head.
It took two days of loitering and begging before she found a steamer desperate enough to take her on as a deckhand. It wasn’t her sex that barred her; her paint-striped trousers and baggy cotton shirt offered sufficient disguise, and her face had a freckled squareness that sidestepped beauty and landed somewhere nearer to handsome.
(This, at least, is what a daguerreotype would have recorded, if Ade had ever posed for one. But photographs, like mirrors, are notorious liars. The truth is: Adelaide was the most beautiful being I have seen in this world or any other, if we understand beauty to be a kind of vital, ferocious burning at a soul’s center that ignites everything it touches.)
But still, something in her eyes made wise boatmen hesitate—something that spoke of abandon and fearlessness, a person dangerously unmoored from her own future. It was pure chance that the Southern Queen was piloted by an inexperienced captain who had hired three drunks and a thief upriver and was so eager to replace them that he hired Ade without asking anything beyond her name and destination. The Queen’s logs record these as Larson and Elsewhere.
It is at this moment, just as Ade’s feet danced their way onto the whitewashed deck boards of a Mississippi steamer, that we must pause. Miss Larson’s life heretofore has been an unusual story but not a mysterious or unknowable one. It has been possible to act as a historian, sifting through interviews and evidences to create a tolerable narrative of a girl’s growing up. But from this moment forward Ade’s story grows grander, stranger, and wilder. She steps into fable and folktale, sideways and unseen, slipping through the fissures of recorded history the way smoke rises through dense canopy. No scholar, no matter how clever