6. Holland
Chapter six
Holland
The Foundation occupied two rooms above the hardware store.
I was studying the wrong wall when Cleo Halvorsen came around the desk to shake my hand.
Beside a framed award hung a crayon drawing of four stick figures in yellow shirts under an orange sun.
Junie ran along the bottom in an adult’s careful handwriting.
“She did the sun,” Cleo said. “I did the letters. She was furious about my help.”
“The drawing is the best work on this wall.”
“Don’t tell her.” Cleo adjusted the frame beside the drawing. “She’ll want the award moved.”
She returned to her chair, planting both forearms on the desk. Her auburn hair was clipped off her neck. Grief had drawn her face tight around the mouth, though she looked younger than I’d expected. The fluorescent tube gave her skin the bluish cast of office paper.
I took the vinyl chair opposite her. The seat squeaked under me. My bag rested against one leg, recorder inside, notebook open on my knee.
She had read my preview piece yet agreed to meet with me anyway. That told me plenty.
“You read the preview,” I said.
“Twice.” She pressed her thumb against the desk blotter. “The second time, I wrote you a letter. I never sent the letter.”
“Was the letter bad?”
“The letter was accurate.” She nudged the blotter until the edges sat square with the desk. “You called the gulch a lesson. Nobody here got a lesson. We got a funeral in the rain.”
There was no useful defense, so I let the remark stand. The fluorescent tube ticked overhead. I ran my thumb down the notebook’s spiral.
I had come for Eamon. The board, scholarship fund, office—all were scaffolding around a dead man.
“Two conditions,” she said. “Junie stays out of print. If I say stop, we stop. You don’t ask why.”
That eliminated a third of the material I had driven four hours to collect.
“Agreed.” I wrote both conditions where she could see them. “How did the Foundation start?”
She gave me the public version. The Foundation had a board. A scholarship bore Eamon’s name. An August fundraiser took place at the Stonebreaker. Tickets cost forty dollars. The silent auction drew bids on fishing gear, hotel packages. I recorded every detail before asking about the plaques.
“Eamon would’ve hated the Foundation. The plaques especially.” She opened one hand on the desk. “He’d say we should spend the money on better radios.”
My pen stopped.
A coffee ring marked the blotter near her left hand.
I fixed on the ring while her sentence rearranged the man I knew from court filings.
In those documents, he was Eamon Halvorsen, deceased, Rattlesnake Gulch.
I had typed the phrase hundreds of times.
Cleo spoke as if he might walk in, inspect the equipment, complain about the budget.
She watched my pen. People always watched the pen after saying a dead person’s name.
A truck labored up the hill outside, missed a gear, then recovered. I set the pen beside my notebook.
“Better radios,” I said. “He sounds difficult to argue with.”
“He was impossible. He’d agree with you, then follow whatever plan he’d made in the first place.” Her nostrils flared as she drew in a breath. “You didn’t write that down.”
“That story can stay yours.”
“You’ll want that later.”
“I’ll ask later.”
Her gaze remained on the notebook. I rested my hands beside the open pages while she waited for the sales pitch journalists are supposed to deny having.
The door struck the rubber stop with a bang. I lifted halfway out of my chair. One hand pinned the notebook in place.
The intruder was two years old, certain of her jurisdiction. Curly auburn hair sprouted from a half-ponytail that must have required negotiations at breakfast. She spotted me, spotted the bag by my foot, seized the strap.
“Mine,” Junie said.
I drew the bag back with my heel.
“Junie.” Cleo said the name with the polished fatigue of someone who had already used the name forty times that day.
She reached to redirect her daughter. The maneuver brought Junie’s hand within range of the claw clip in my hair.
Junie removed the clip before I understood her plan. Half my hair dropped across my cheek. Heat climbed into my face as she held the clip toward the window for a pawnbroker’s inspection.
My hand rose to repair the damage, then stopped. Junie had already sat on the floor. Both thumbs worked the clip’s hinge.
“Sorry,” Cleo said. “We’re having a problem with property rights.”
I knew the problem. Most of my career depended on persuading people to surrender what they had meant to keep.
The carpet was the color of old oatmeal, thin enough to show every seam in the floorboards. I imagined the rough fibers scraping through my stockings. Then I lowered myself beside Junie.
“That belongs to me,” I told her.
She flexed the clip.
“Mine now.”
“You don’t have to sit down there,” Cleo said.
“I know.” I showed Junie where to press so the spring moved. “She’s chosen a safer subject than my notes.”
Cleo gave one short laugh.
Junie tried the clip in her own hair. The clip slid free, striking the floor. She tried again. After frowning at the clip, she clamped the teeth around my wrist. The teeth pinched.
“Down,” she ordered, patting the loose side of my hair.
I obeyed.
During the hinge lesson, I put the notebook in my bag. The notebook stayed there while Cleo talked about the radios. As the hour passed, the Foundation office grew stuffy; the carpet scored a crosshatch into my knees.
“He couldn’t carry a tune as far as the truck,” Cleo said. “So he sang louder. If anyone complained, he’d start over from the first verse.”
“What did he sing?”
“Mostly ‘King of the Road.’ He knew maybe six words.”
“Six correct words?”
“I’m being generous.”
She laughed again. This time the sound snagged halfway out. She rubbed the heel of her hand across her mouth, continuing before I could decide whether to reach for the recorder.
Junie held my arm straight to admire the clip around my wrist. Her thumbnail was rimmed with blue crayon.
A cracker crumb had lodged in one curl above her ear.
I watched Cleo describe a man ruining the same song during a dozen rescue drives while her daughter conducted a serious inventory of my freckles.
By then, taking notes would have changed the room. I let the details settle into my memory, mixed with the ache in my knees, alongside the occasional thump of customers moving through the hardware store below.
When I stood, one foot had gone numb. I caught the desk to keep from stumbling.
Cleo pretended not to notice. “Come back for a second coffee sometime. Off the clock.”
The article would keep me on the clock until publication. Afterward, she might regret offering me the first cup. I rubbed the marks the clip had left around my wrist.
“I’d like that.”
The answer was true, which made the invitation harder to accept cleanly.
“I’ll hold you to that.” Cleo lifted Junie onto her hip. “Junie will too.”
“I’ll bring a spare clip.”
We found my clip in the bed of a yellow toy dump truck. Junie watched me retrieve the clip. Her face tightened in preparation for an objection. Cleo distracted her by asking where her left shoe had gone.
The shoe was under the desk, full of crayons.
While Cleo dealt with the shoe, I twisted my hair up without a mirror, then shoved the clip into place.
In the hardware store window downstairs, I caught my reflection.
The clip sat crooked. A strip of auburn crayon marked one knee of my stockings.
I left the clip crooked. The crayon streak remained.
* * *
The larch stand smelled unlike any room she had entered.
Sap rose from the fresh cuts, green, sweet. Within ten minutes, the scent had worked into her collar, then her sleeves. Her jacket would carry the fragrance for days. She had no intention of airing out the coat.
This was her third trip to the work face that week.
She followed the same rutted track uphill, where the mud had frozen into ridges sharp enough to turn an ankle.
Each visit had a legitimate purpose. Geography mattered.
Watching a source work made for better reporting.
Those reasons did not account for a third morning among the larches.
Cal stood beside the skid trail, filing a saw chain. He had beaten her to every appointment so far, yet he had never once checked his watch while she packed up.
In the woods, he bore little resemblance to the man who sat across from her in diners.
His yellow Nomex shirt hung open over a henley.
A long-bar saw rested against his thigh, the casing scrubbed clean except near the clutch cover.
Tendons shifted in his forearms as he worked.
Bar oil had stained the creases of his hands.
She had noticed those hands at the Breaker, then again at the Pine Needle. Here, watching seemed harder to excuse.
She looked at the saw instead. “How do you decide which trees to take?”
Blue slashes marked some trunks at chest height. The others stood untouched.
Cal drew the file through a cutter. He held the tool with three fingers, his thumb completing the same grip she used on a pen.
“Start with the crown,” he said. “See which trees are getting light, which ones are crowding the rest.”
He nodded toward a broad larch marked in blue.
“That one’s healthy. Take her out, three smaller trees have room. She leans toward the draw, so she should lay down clean.”
“She?”
He looked up at the trunk. “Work around them long enough, they earn pronouns.”
She tucked her smile into her collar. “A healthy tree can still be wrong for the slope.”
“Health is one question. Spacing, lean, fuel load—all matter. You have to consider how fire will move through here ten years from now.”
He scanned the canopy, then the trunks, reading the stand at two scales. She did something similar with interview notes, hunting for the fact that changed the meaning of all the others.
“You’re not just taking one tree,” he said. “You’re choosing how this slope will look forty years from now.”