must have been scrawled when they were hungry or irritated. At night, alone in my camper with a headlamp, I hunched in my sleeping bag and read every page. I took notes in the margins. I never returned those books to the library.
By the end of December, I’d eaten my way through the drakes. I’d boiled the bones. I checked my notes and went outside. I took the .22 my boyfriend had left. I aimed. I shot. I missed. I dug roots from the frozen ground, ate bark, set snares. I began to recognize tracks. I began to follow them.
In January, I heard from the mailman that Lily climbed into the tub and gave birth to a boy, which meant that they would have to leave the Women’s Land Trust and start over someplace new. According to the mailman, boy children were only allowed on the Land Trust until the age of five. The mailman told me that Rudy celebrated the birth by inviting someone at the bar to punch him in the teeth. He spent one warm night in jail, the mailman said. But I didn’t see any of them that winter. I didn’t see anyone, really, unless you count the mailman.
In February, after not speaking one word out loud for two weeks, I wrote a letter to my aunt. I wrote that I’d be home soon. I crossed it out. I wrote it again. I meant to mail it, but I didn’t have stamps. Then the ducks began to lay small misshapen eggs. They tasted like wet feathers but still I wanted more. I was hungry. My aim with the .22 improved. Following shadowy diagrams, I took apart and cleaned small animals. Mostly what I could catch were raccoons and possums. One tasted much like the other.
By March, I was so lonely I considered eating snow until it drowned me. One cold day, I was looking a raccoon in the eye. Its eye was dead and I was skinning it, and I knew I should go visit Karen and Lily.
Those women had told me that my boyfriend had not left me, that he’d simply left, and I had stayed. I’d made it through the winter on the strength of it. You could say I was proud of myself. You could say, in fact, that I wasn’t myself, but someone new, someone newly ambitious, and if crazed, if disturbed, if hungry and desperate, then so much the better. I gave up pretending I was going back to Seattle. But I’d had enough of being alone. I looked at the dull raccoon eye and decided to remind Lily and Karen that I had twenty acres. There was a place for them and their boy if they wanted to try it.
2
LILY
Some people take to their life with joy, but not Helen. Instead, she was passionate. That’s how it looked to me. The winter had changed her, either back into what she was before Shane, before I’d known her, or into someone else again. She’d proved she could handle working for Rudy. She’d proved she could slaughter drakes. She’d proved she could make it on that piece of land on her own. Finally, when winter was nearly over, she set her sights on us.
It was very soon after Perley was born. His birth had been easy, no big deal, except for the pain so bad you couldn’t even call it pain, it was just my life, me begging for drugs, and Karen holding my hand, saying, You don’t need drugs, Lily, you can do this, you’re strong, just think about what your grandma would have done, and me screaming, You don’t know shit about me and you don’t know shit about my grandma, I’m praying to her right now and she’s answering my prayer, she’s telling you to shut the fuck up, and then one more long push and then Karen caught the baby. Green shit and blood plumed into the tub. The three of us crawled into bed and laughed and bled a little more and rested, baby Perley coated with white mud from inside me. We left it on him, just rubbed it into his skin, like my grandma would have done. We didn’t want him to catch cold. There was no way you were going to touch our boy with water.
Karen and I spent long days next to the woodstove in our snug cabin at the Land Trust. We passed Perley between us, watching his shit turn from black