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Callie McKenzie drives the truck into the yard and parks behind the small farmhouse, still sitting foursquare on its log foundation. It looks neglected and shrunken, windows bare, white paint faded. It’s been empty for a long time, the voices that once filled the rooms gone forever.

She can still hear Lewis’s croaking legacy to her six years ago, only hours before he died. “The farm’s yours when your mother goes. If you want it.” She’d wanted it at twelve. Does she want it now? Can she bear to give up this link to the valley she’d loved with such fierce passion?

Callie brushes away the tears on her cheeks. The early morning air had been cool when she left town but now the sun beats down on the cab roof and fresh sweat bleeds into the plaid wool shirt and jeans she’d worn to fly down from Barrow in northern Alaska two days ago. She climbs out of the pickup and breathes in the scent of earth and green growth, the spice of spruce and jack pine in the remains of the wood pile. Grasshoppers chirr in the lush grass, swallows soar and dive through the blue air.

Yesterday she’d sat through her mother’s memorial service, nails biting into her palms. Father Penrose, black hair streaked with silver, had blathered on and on about Lillian being a wonderful woman and how much her children would miss her. Russell and Peter may but she won’t. The war between them left too much bitterness on both sides.

Young wheat shimmers green in the field across the creek. Behind her, the grass on the pasture hills is long, no cattle now to keep it shorn. To her right, barn and chicken house stand empty and desolate. To her left, across the spring, the garden is overgrown with foxtail and pigweed. She imagines Lewis in the barn, milking Rosie, hens gossiping in the yard, rows of potatoes in the garden. The tears start again.

Should she come back and live here, take care of the land as she’d once longed to do? It seems unfair to Russell, who’s worked the land these last six years. And surely Peter should have his share.

Callie unlocks the back door, then turns the shiny key over in her hand. The lock is something new. So is the paved road running past the house, then west across the valley and over the jack pine ridge to the Alaska Highway. So are the farms and gas wells littering the valley, alien presences.

When she was growing up, no one lived here except the McKenzies, the nearest neighbor seven miles away. No phone, no power, no school, no way of getting out in the winter. No running water, no friends, no movies. Too much work and too little money. But the isolated, silent valley had been companion, teacher and sweet solace.

Her hiking boots thud on the worn linoleum floor.

“Callie, don’t wear those filthy boots in here!” Lillian’s voice echoes in her head.

Callie climbs into the attic’s stale heat and looks out the south window. She knows every inch of the half section and the creek that runs through it. She could walk here again, listen to the birds and the creek sing, look for buttercups. Do wolves still howl on the jack pine ridge in winter? Probably not. Too many people, too much traffic.

She’d have to work hard. But it would be a simple life: earth, air, sunlight and water nourishing the plants and her soul. She’d have her own land under her feet.

A fly bounces and buzzes against the glass. She opens the window and he zooms out, down toward the spring, free, going about his business.

She has to fly back to the Arctic tomorrow. There’s only this one day to think about the valley, about the farm. To make her decision. Not nearly long enough, the way her days fly by. Time seemed to move much more slowly the year she turned twelve, the year everything changed.

~~~~~

Herron Valley – Late Winter 1947

~~~~~

Chapter One

Callie struggles up the hill, thin body bulky in snow pants and parka, deep snow dragging at her legs. She flings herself on a windswept rock ledge above the creek mouth and squints against sunlight striking cold, brilliant sparks on the crusted snow. Behind her, chickadees sing in a grove of skeletal poplars and below, to the left, the glittering, frozen lake curves away to the southeast.

She takes off her mitts and holds between warm hands the icy silver trunk of a young cottonwood beside the ledge. The poor tree is frozen, yet lives; it will make leaves and grow taller when warm weather comes. Amazing how plants seem able to endure almost anything. The hard, ripe wheat kernels in her father’s granary survive the cold yet green wheat dies if it freezes. Perhaps because green wheat is full of moisture, though water under the creek ice doesn’t freeze. But it’s always on the move.

Soon be time for her to move, too; the chill of frigid rock is penetrating through the wool pants to her flesh. Not that it matters. Being cold is nothing.

Yesterday Lillian screamed her into a corner, so angry her tongue seemed to spit flame. Callie had cowered, shaking, her own tongue frozen. Her mother is calmer today but there’s no knowing when she’ll erupt again.

Callie tucks her blonde braids inside the parka hood and breathes in the silence of Herron Valley. A week ago, a late February chinook had melted six inches of snow, raising restless urges in seed, root and sap. Next day fresh Arctic winds crisped the melt to a thin crust, leaving the sun-seeking life nothing but mere shadowy dreams of spring.

A mile west, the valley slopes up to a ridge crowned with jack pine, spruce and poplar, where timber wolves sing in deep winter. Beyond are the Rockies, too far away to see, and she has to imagine snowbound granite peaks, barren and ferocious. Above the valley floor a hawk coasts, scanning the snow for mice.

The snow-drowned creek, marked by bare willows, snakes north through the half-buried barbed wire fences of her father’s farm. The buildings are hidden behind a hill jutting out from the valley’s eastern wall and it’s easy to pretend the buildings and people aren’t there, that the empty land is all hers.

Movement catches her eye. “Jake! What are you doing?”

The collie is digging beside the creek, ears forward, fur spattered with snow, tail wagging. She slips and slides down the slope to see what he’s found.

It’s the tip of an antler. She tugs, freeing it from tangled dead grass beneath the snow. It seems too big for a deer, so it might be elk.

Kneeling beside Jake, she uses her hands to dig up leg bones. If they’re elk, Lewis will want all of them.

The snow dims to dull mica flashes and she looks up to see thin white clouds covering the blue sky in ripples that Lewis calls a mackerel sky. The ripples are all the same, like furrows in a plowed field, not nearly as good for sky dreams as the heaped meringue of cumulus clouds.

With a start, she realizes the sun has moved some distance across the sky. She’d promised to take Jake for a quick walk and come right home. Now Lillian will blow up again. Her flesh shrinks inside the parka.

She picks up the antler. “Come on, Jake.”

The collie trots ahead along their trail, then stops to mark a willow with his scent, his pee turning to pale yellow ice crystals. Crystal is a beautiful word. It sounds exactly like the shattering of thin milk-white ice that forms over a puddle in the first frosts of fall.

The sky is clearing again. If the wind doesn’t blow all the clouds away, sunset could bring cloud fire; peach, mauve and burning gold above the dull, dusky green of the firs, giving the snow a glow that seems almost warm.

She makes several side trips up the hill to look for leaf buds on the poplars. On the last one, she snaps off a branch to take home and put in water. The warmth of the house should make the buds appear, make them grow faster.

When she tops the rise at the south end of the half-acre vegetable garden, another hour has passed. She leans on the corner fence post and tries to armor herself against Lillian’s anger.

The house, a small, white, frame box with a red roof, crouches beside the dirt road a few yards beyond the north end of the garden, separated from it by a shallow gully that carries water from the spring down to the creek. When they homesteaded here in 1943, Lewis laid a twenty-four by twenty-four foot floor which looked too small for a kitchen, front room and two bedrooms. It’s far too small when Lillian’s on a rampage. Is she on one now? Two bedroom windows, and the attic window above, form an upside down blank face, which gives no answer.

The yard lies in a saucer of land backed on three sides by hills, the western lip broken off where the land slopes down to the creek. At the far side of the saucer is the mansard-roofed barn and a chicken shed, their unpainted wood weathered to the color of faded brown grass. There’s no sign of her father but he might be in the workshop, which sits beside the head of the spring just below the eastern pasture hills. Or in the house, if he’s finished his chores.

Boots crunching frozen snow, she tramps past the garden, across the gully and through the small wooden gate. Inside the shed attached to the north side of the house, she drops antler and poplar branch on the work bench, takes off her parka and tries to visualize Lillian in a summer mood.

It’s not easy. Her mother has a smooth round face, short, graying brown hair, and pale blue eyes that twinkle when she laughs. But she rarely laughs. She’s mad most of the time, her mouth turned down in an ugly curve.

Lillian appears in the kitchen doorway. “I told you to come right home. Get in here and peel some potatoes.”

Callie flinches. Lillian’s voice is high, her English accent sharp, so she’s really on the warpath. Her hair is wound on metal rollers and her short, plump figure strains at the seams of a wartime striped cotton house dress that barely reaches her knees. Beige lisle stockings end in two small wrinkles above tie oxfords.

As Lillian moves away, her glance grazes the antler and fastens on Callie. “Don’t bring that filthy old thing into my house! Take it away or I’ll throw it in the fire.”

“I brought it for Dad. It’s not hurting anything.”

“Don’t you dare talk back to me!” Lillian’s face is flushed, her eyes blue-shadowed snow. “Get rid of it.”

Callie, head bent, puts her parka back on and takes the antler to Lewis’s sanctuary, a small lean-to on the side of his workshop. He’s in there looking at a partly assembled skeleton in the light from one tiny window. “Dad, here’s an antler. Is it elk?”

He turns toward her, a tall, spare figure in faded denim overalls, red plaid shirt and jacket, a battered felt hat pulled low over his eyes. She hands him the antler, then looks at an old calendar picture tacked to the rough wall. A majestic bull elk with massive antlers, his head held high, stands on a ridge, snow-capped mountains behind him. He looks strong and free, as though he could go anywhere and do anything he likes.

“It’s from an elk all right,” Lewis says. He has a deep voice, calm and soothing, though Lillian complains that he talks flat Canadian. He bends and places the antler in position beside the skull.

“Jake and I dug up a whole pile of bones.” When she asked him why he was building a skeleton, all he’d say was, ‘to prove I can.’ There must be more to it than that, or Lillian wouldn’t get so mad.

“We’ll go get them in a day or two.” He’s frowning now, his eyes dark under the shadow of his hat. “Your mother’s pretty upset. She says you told a lie.”

“I didn’t!” The accusation is a swift knife thrust, jarring her whole body, bringing tears to her eyes.

Lewis never lies. He has a poker face when he plays blackjack with her, and sometimes a poker tongue when she asks questions. But when he does say something, it’s the truth, and he expects other people to do the same.

He stands, head canted, silent, waiting.

She rubs her arm across her eyes. “In my head I call you and Mom by your first names. Yesterday I slipped and said ‘Lillian’ out loud. She said I was disrespectful. But I didn’t mean it that way.” They’re people in their own right, just like she is. They don’t call her Daughter, so why should she call them Father and Mother?

“She’s strong on people doing the proper thing,” he says. “So you didn’t tell a lie?”

“No, I didn’t.” She’ll die right on the spot if Lewis doesn’t believe her.

Lewis’s face clears. “That’s all right then.” He turns back to the bones and Callie goes outside to stare down at the house, her stomach muscles clenched.

Lillian lied to Lewis. Why?

Because she’s mean, just out and out mean, that’s why. She knows Lewis hates lying and she knows Callie cares what he thinks.

The shock becomes anger, burns away her tears.

***

During a silent supper Lewis looks at Lillian a couple of times but says nothing. Afterward, Callie goes to the barn with him to do chores, her anger unappeased by sausages and mashed potatoes. The sunset is a washed-out yellow, the sky graying as dusk creeps over the valley.

The three horses whicker greetings and Buck, the bull calf, prances in his pen. Rosie, a red Hereford with a white face and dainty white ankles that don’t seem big enough to carry her weight, tries to kick the pail as Lewis milks. He curses her in soothing tones. The barn is full of animal warmth, the rich smells of straw and manure.

While milk hisses into the pail, Callie cuddles Martha, pressing her cheek to the cat’s thick silky fur. She’s like a mobile patchwork quilt; splashes of gray, orange and black supported by little white feet. Lillian says Martha is a tortoise-shell, but is that true? If Lillian lied to Lewis, she must tell other lies, too.

When Lewis is done, she pours milk for Martha and takes some to Buck. He’s so rambunctious, even at three weeks, that he almost knocks her over when he butts against the pail. He puts his nose in the milk, blowing bubbles, while she tugs gently at the curly brown hair between his ears.

“Hurry up with the sheaves,” Lewis says. “I want to get the chores done before it’s too dark to see.”

The ladder to the loft, narrow wooden bars nailed to the studs and extending four feet above the square opening in the loft floor, is beside the door. She tosses down oat sheaves and hears Dolly snorting as Lewis takes one into her stall. The cat scoots up the ladder and sits down to wash her face. It’s a good thing Martha’s body is lean under all that fur. When she gets fat, she has kittens and Lewis kills them. It must be awful to have babies and then lose them.

Climbing up the ladder is easy. Climbing down isn’t. She stands at the edge of the opening, dizzy, knees like limp spaghetti. She keeps her gaze on the ladder, grips the top rung with both hands, feels with her feet for a rung and forces the rest of her body out into emptiness.

She could leave home to get away from Lillian. But she’s probably too young to get a job.

In the chicken house, Lewis heaps chopped wheat in the feed trough while she fills the water dish. The chicken house is tiny, with a low roof, so the birds’ body heat will keep them from freezing in winter. It’s thick with the sour, stinging smell of their manure. She takes a big breath before going inside, but can’t hold it long enough, and the sharp odor plunges up her nostrils.

She snorts to get rid of the smell but that doesn’t work. Just like it won’t work to fight with her mother. Lillian’s anger always explodes into frightening flames around her face.

But she can question everything Lillian says and does. See what other lies she tells. Catch her out when she’s wrong. It’s knowing what’s really true that matters; she’ll just have to endure the meanness. For a while.

Back in the house, chores done, she checks the schedule tacked to the wall beside the floor model radio. The Shadow comes on at eight. His eerie laugh echoing in her head will make the dark even scarier than usual; she’d better go to the outhouse now. She puts on parka and boots again and is lighting the kerosene lantern when she remembers the poplar branch. It’s gone.

She tramps to the front room doorway. “What happened to the poplar branch I brought home?”

“Don’t wear boots in here!” Lillian’s voice is sharp.

“I wanted to see the leaf buds open.”

“Don’t be silly. You should be doing your schoolwork and learning how to cook and sew, not fooling with useless tree branches. I threw it in the fire.”

The room darkens. Lightening crackles in her head. She clamps her mouth shut. Hurries outside. Becomes aware that beyond the small yellow circle of kerosene light swinging in her hand, dark shadows flicker and move as if alive. The lightening fades.

“Jake! Jake, come and walk with me!”

Jake comes bouncing out of the night. She hurries along the hard-packed icy path, Jake beside her, and babbles a stream of meaningless words to hold the monsters at bay. Slimy tentacles brush her face, black mouths yawn and fangs reach out to tear at her.

It’s safe inside the outhouse, the door latched, the lantern giving off a little heat and an Eaton’s catalog to read. She can’t stay forever, though.

It’s always worse going back to the house. The monsters behind the outhouse might get her the minute she steps onto the path. She pulls up her snow pants.

“Jake?” Where is the damn dog, anyway? Probably gone exploring and he’ll come tearing back when she’s halfway to the house and scare her out of a year’s growth.

Years ago, Lillian said monsters lived in the clothes closet and they’d eat her up if she didn’t do as she was told. She knew right away they had fangs and long arms to grab her with. She could think of nothing else the time Lillian locked her in the closet.

Her first day in grade one, when they lived at Poplar Ridge, and she’s already learned a new word. She hurries from the one-room log schoolhouse and up a mile of dirt road edged with wild rose bushes, the word dancing in her head.

“Mom, what does ‘fuck’ mean?”

Lillian looms over her, face red, mouth a thin, pinched line, fury a flaming aura around her head. Clawed hands shake her till her bones hurt.

“That’s a filthy, horrible word. Don’t you ever say it again or I’ll wash your mouth out with soap! Do you hear?”

The air shrouds her in cold mist and her tongue freezes to the roof of her mouth.

“I’ll lock you in the closet. That’s the only place for bad girls who say dirty words.” She pinches Callie’s ear between rough fingers and marches her to the bedroom.

The door clicks shut. She’s alone in the dark, cold slimy tentacles reaching for her. She screams and pounds at the door, gasping for air, but no one comes. She pulls Lillian’s clothes off the hangers and crawls in among them.

Beneath a heavy coat, she sucks her thumb and whimpers. Moisture leaks out from between her legs, soaking into Lillian’s dresses. Shame raises her voice to a howl. The door slams open.

Lewis’s voice, angry. “Hell and damnation, woman, what did you lock her in here for?”

“She used a bad word,” Lillian says.

Lewis pulls Callie out and holds her against his shoulder while she sobs into his plaid wool shirt.

“Look at the mess she’s made of my clothes!” Lillian begins picking them up, then shrieks with rage. “You filthy little animal! You’ve dirtied my dresses! I’ll teach you a lesson you’ll never forget.”

Lewis slaps down Lillian’s hand. “Like hell you will!”

“You have no right to tell me how to raise a child. Not after what you did!”

Lewis’s body tenses. Finally, he takes a breath. ”Leave her alone or I’ll lock you in the goddam closet and see how you like it.” He carries Callie to the front room and holds her on his lap until she stops crying.

She remembers a metal button on his denim overall bib pressing into her cheek and his heart thudding beneath her ear, remembers the smell of freshly washed denim and feeling safe in his arms. Why did Lillian say that to him? What terrible thing did he do?

Jake scratches at the outhouse door and whines. Callie joins him on the path. “Stay by me, Jake, don’t run away.” But after a moment, he trots away into the darkness.

Maybe Lillian wasn’t lying when she said there was nothing to be afraid of, but the monsters feel true. Callie hurries toward the house, fighting an overpowering urge to look over her shoulder. The crunch of snow and her breathing are so loud she’d never hear the monsters’ scaly feet, even if they were right at her heels.

She’s running by the time she reaches the shed. She stumbles inside, shuts the door and slams the bar into its slot. Lies are horrible. She needs to know the truth, to know what is real.

~~~~~

Chapter Two

Callie centers the Bible in a pool of sunshine on her ink-stained study table. Scraping the chair back, she bangs it against her knee and swears under her breath. She’s grown three inches since fall, when Lewis marked her height on the door jamb as five foot three, and her body hasn’t yet learned to fit its new shape to the furniture.

Months ago she’d set out to read the whole Bible and now it’s done, but she has to admit to skimming some of it. All that begetting and begatting was dull and a lot of the language made no sense.

She has much better books: Call of The Wild and The Yearling and Edith Hamilton’s Mythology that Peter gave her last year. Peter had put a note in with the Mythology.

When I’ve finished it, I’ll give you a book about the ancient Greek philosophers. They thought there were just four basic elements: earth, air, fire and water. All of them powerful and all necessary for life. I know you’ll like it.

She wishes he’d hurry up with the book. It sounds like truth. Plants need dirt for their roots; air and water for growth. And sunlight, of course. That’s probably what the Greek philosophers meant by fire.

Lewis’s sister down east, Aunt Etta, has been sending books since Callie started taking school by correspondence. Some, like Ulysses, she sneaked into the cardboard box library in George’s store in Millburn to trade for mysteries and westerns. She’s using The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which is worse than the Bible, to press flowers.

The best book is Wild Flowers Every Child Should Know. Last summer she’d tried to match valley flowers to those in the book, but that didn’t often work. Too bad Mr. Stack didn’t write about every flower in the world.

This Christmas Aunt Etta sent her The Mushroom Handbook, which is fascinating but hard work; there are so many long words to look up. She’d read a few more pages last night, trying to absorb all the facts about meadow mushrooms before Lillian made her go to bed.

She’d stayed awake a long time, mulling over things Lillian might have lied about. Like religion. It’s scary, but she’s going to write Lillian a letter saying what she thinks about it. It’s the only way to find out whether Lillian really believes in God or is using religion to frighten her into behaving.

Callie reaches for her fountain pen, but sunlight flashing on the frost-etched panes draws her gaze outside. The first day of spring is only two weeks away, but all she can see are fence posts sticking out of the drifted snow. The trees will bud out soon, though, and green things will grow just as they did in the myth of Persephone and the Underworld. She imagines Persephone rising from Hades and Demeter making sweet new grass shoot up. The horses will frisk on the pasture hill as they shed their shaggy winter coats and the April sun will be warm on her face, the bare earth awakening beneath her feet as she hikes the valley.

The frost on one window pane looks like a cave with grass around it. Who would live there? Ice fairies, perhaps, with silvery transparent wings and silver hair, clothes woven of ice grass. What would they eat? That’s easy; rainbow beads of water through glass straws.

No, she doesn’t want twinkle-toed fairies with gauzy wings. These will be Amazon fairies, wearing knee-high leather boots, fur caps, and carrying knives on their belts. Their job is to protect plants and animals and they’ll have many adventures, but she can think about those later.

Before she starts the letter, there’s something else she’s been meaning to do. She flips the Bible open to the front flyleaf and writes her name and address.

Cathleen McKenzie

Herron’s Nest

She hasn’t yet been able to talk Lewis into making a sign for the front gate. Not that many would see it. Since the first heavy snowfall in October, only three people have passed along the road allowance between the two quarter sections that make up Herron’s Nest. The men on horseback were out hunting. The man with a team and open sled was lost and stopped at the house to find out where he was.

Millburn

Which is nothing but a general store and a post office.

Peace River Block

The address doesn’t need that but she likes the words.

British Columbia

Canada

The World

Under the address she writes her birth date, May 8, 1935. Books say that people write birth, marriage and death dates in their Bibles. Lillian didn’t write down Callie’s birth date but that’s not surprising.

In Poplar Ridge, where Lewis had homesteaded first and where she was born, the ladies held quilting bees. Callie had just turned five when it was Lillian’s turn to be hostess. The ladies sat stitching and talking and didn’t notice her slip into the house from her exile in the yard. She hid behind her bedroom door to listen.

One lady says, “Callie’s a well-behaved little girl.”

“I insist on obedience and I don’t let her get away with thinking she’s anything special,” Lillian says. “It’s silly to be soft with children. My mother raised me by the book and I turned out all right. Callie thinks she’s hard done by, but it’s for her own good.”

“What book is that?”

“An old one,” Lillian says, “but it still holds good. Babies are just little animals. It takes a great deal of work to make them into civilized human beings.”

“It takes a lot of work just to feed and clothe them, especially when you have seven, as I do.” Mrs. Ford’s voice. “Which is three more than I wanted.”

“Oh, I know how you feel,” Lillian says. “It was a terrible shock when I found out I was expecting Callie. I already had my family, two great, growing boys of 14 and 15. Lewis wanted more children but that’s a man for you; they don’t have to change diapers and clean up messes or lose sleep when a baby cries all night.”

One of the women laughs. “What men like best is doing what gets the babies.”

“I suppose the Lord created them that way,” Lillian says, “but it’s a great pity we have to put up with it for the sake of having children.”

“Some women like it.” Mrs. Goode’s voice.

“Not decent women,” Lillian snaps.

The others are silent. What do men do to get babies? Lillian says a stork brings them.

“Well, there’s nothing to be done about it,” Mrs. Ford says. “The babies come and you have to look after them.”

“I do my duty,” Lillian says, “but the last thing I wanted was another baby.”

Callie pulls the sharp edge of the door hard against her forehead until pain blocks out the words. A few minutes later she sneaks out the bedroom window, the hot July day cold on her skin, the air full of tears.

It doesn’t matter; she can write her own name in the Bible. And put in a photograph of the whole family. Lillian won’t know; she never looks at the book.

In the kitchen a stove lid rattles as Lillian shoves wood on the fire. Callie tenses. Then a door squeaks and Lillian’s rings clash against metal. That’s all right. Her mother’s taking out the big aluminum bowl — a thump as it hits the table — to make bread. She’ll be too busy to check on what Callie’s doing.

She pulls aside the curtain over her closet doorway and takes her shoebox of treasures from the top shelf. Inside is a photograph of Rory Calhoun, cut from a movie magazine her sister-in-law, Rita, left in the attic. He’s handsome: dark brown wavy hair and gray eyes, perfect white teeth. His smile is a bit devilish, as if he likes to tease. She’d give anything to see him in a movie.

Beneath Rory’s picture are souvenirs and a dozen dried out pine cones, seeds scattered everywhere. A dull green pebble from the Pine River, her father’s medals, pearl earrings from Aunt Etta that Lillian won’t let her wear and a photograph of the family taken last summer.

They’re lined up beside the house. She looks the same except for being taller: long blonde braids, long skinny body, blue eyes. Lillian says Lewis’s white hair used to be black and looked very fetching with his blue eyes. Peter is tall and black-haired, Russell short and brown-haired, his wife Rita even shorter. Russell and Peter joined the navy when she was four, and didn’t live at home after they were discharged. Sometimes they seem almost like strangers.

She glues the photo on the inside of the Bible’s front cover. Underneath, she writes her parents’ names, Lewis Lansford Duncan McKenzie and Lillian Graves McKenzie. She puts her brothers’ names in, and everyone’s birth date.

After Lillian reads the letter, maybe she’ll allow Callie to quit the Sunday-school-by-mail course. But that was Lillian’s idea, so it isn’t likely.

“It’s time you got a proper religious education,” her mother had said in her no-nonsense voice. “I will not have you growing up an uncivilized little savage.”

She’s not little — she’s already four inches taller than Lillian — and Rita says she looks more like sixteen than twelve.

Lillian decided correspondence lessons would do. Lewis is too busy to drive the truck to Fort St. John in summer, when the roads are open. Anyway, Lillian doesn’t like the truck; it’s noisy and stinks of grease and gasoline. It’s a lot better than the wagon, though. The wagon has a plank seat but even with a folded blanket it’s hard as hell.

Why is hell a swear word? It’s only the name of a place and Lewis uses it all the time. Lillian says it’s the devil’s fire pit deep in the earth where you go if you’re bad. That’s as unbelievable as having a place called heaven up in the sky.

The trouble with the Sunday School course is that it wants her to believe a lot of unbelievable stuff. The Bible says God made the world in seven days, but that’s not long enough to make the earth and millions of plants. He couldn’t have made even the Herron Valley plants in seven days. And what about snow flakes? Her science book says every one is different and there must be trillions of them.

Callie pulls a pad of blue-lined foolscap toward her and writes a paragraph before she notices her middle finger is stained with ink again. If the crop is good this year, maybe she’ll get a new pen for Christmas.

The Bible has some interesting stories but I don’t think they're true. I believe they were written by men who wanted everyone to be good. The ten commandments are all right because if everyone obeyed them, we wouldn’t have any trouble in the world.

During the war there were stories on the radio about horrible things the Japanese and Germans did to people. She woke night after night from nightmares about babies being bayoneted and cities being bombed until she learned to cover her ears when the news was on.

I think everyone should obey the ten commandments and I’m willing to do that.

In fact, she only agrees with the three that say not to kill, steal or lie. The rest don’t seem important.

But I don’t believe in heaven, hell, God or the devil.

Before the Sunday School lessons, she’d thought being educated meant knowing the entire truth about the world, which is what she wants. Some people must believe the Bible is true, but she can’t; it simply doesn’t make sense. So, is religious education a special kind meant just for those who do believe? A special kind of truth?

She folds the letter and presses her thumb along the folds. Her course instructions say ‘Student must think for himself’ and she’s done that, written down the truth as she sees it and promised to obey the commandments. Lillian can’t argue with that. Can she?

***

Lillian’s worn, blunt-fingered hands thump and fold bread on the kitchen table, the air thick with the sweet sour smell of yeast, jack pine crackling in the wood stove. The dough yields, becomes round and smooth, allows itself to be smeared with lard and covered with a damp cloth. She washes her hands and polishes the gold wedding band with a tea towel.

Callie brushes by the dark green curtain on her doorway and steps past the cellar door into the kitchen.

Lillian gives her a dark look. “If you have nothing better to do, go bring in more wood.”

The grouchy tone is not a good sign. Usually Lillian’s voice is kind of middling, not too high and not too low, but when she sounds like an angry wasp it’s time to back off.

“I wrote you a letter.” Maybe the idea of a letter will put her mother in a better mood.

Lillian’s laugh is scornful. “Why write a letter when you can talk to me? You are a silly child.”

That’s not fair. Lillian never listens to more than three sentences before she says in her most proper English voice, ‘Children should be seen and not heard.’

“Put it on the front room table and I’ll read it later.” Lillian begins scrubbing bits of sticky bread dough off the oilcloth.

Callie walks into the front room. Her heart is banging against her ribs and her throat is tight. Maybe she’ll just toss the letter in the airtight heater and let it burn. Is telling the truth about her ideas worth the risk of Lillian screaming at her?

Yes.

But not today.

She takes the letter back to her room and opens her small scrapbook of dried flowers and leaves. The bright yellow poplar leaf she put in last fall is brittle and cracking away from the glue, the edges sharp against her fingers. She can get another when the leaves turn in the fall, but there must be a better way of preserving them so they don’t fall apart.

~~~~~

Chapter Three

Four days before the equinox, a warm chinook wind streams out of the southwest, singing a spring song. Water drips from tree limbs, snow banks and icicles, gathering on the hillsides and running, bubbling with glee, to the creek. In the farmhouse, Monday is laundry day and the kitchen is filled with steam, sunlight and the lingering fragrance of coffee and crisp-fried bacon. The fire in the wood stove crackles and spits under a copper boiler of water for the washing machine.

The open kitchen door spills light and heat into the back shed where Callie fights with the washer, a copper tub with a hand-operated agitator. Pushing the wooden handle back and forth is so boring it hurts. But today she has a question to ask and worrying about how Lillian will react takes the edge off the boredom.

Lillian comes to the door. “Those sheets should be ready to come out.”

She feeds one into the hand wringer and tries to control the sudden trembling in her hands. “Mom, can I go to Fort St. John for grade eight in September?”

“No.” Lillian shoves a pail underneath the drain and turns the tap. Soap-scummed water pours into the pail.

“Why not? That’s almost high school.”

“Twelve is too young to be away from home.”

“You said kids in England go to boarding school at eight or nine.”

“Only boys go to boarding school.” Lillian’s voice is sharp. “Young ladies stay home and help their mothers when they’re not attending to their lessons.”

She should have known that argument wouldn’t work. It rarely pays to repeat one of Lillian’s statements back to her. At least she just said no; she didn’t explode into one of her unexplainable rages.

Lillian fills the second bucket. “Here, take these out and dump them.”

Callie shoves her moccasin-clad feet into overshoes. Should she keep pushing for school in town? Teachers might tell the truth about how the world works, or at least tell her what books to read.

She walks past the house and flings the dirty water over the gully bank onto a mound of ice built up since fall. The top layer of ice crackles and steams.

“Fee-bee! Fee-bee!” The chickadees are singing their spring song in the bare brown willows. In winter they sing ‘chick-a-dee-dee-dee’ They have such perky black heads and bright eyes. It’s wonderful how trees and birds survive the cold. In January the temperature was fifty degrees below zero Fahrenheit for a week and Lillian hung suet in the willows for the birds. If Callie stood very still, the chickadees would take crumbs from her hand. It was hard not to jump when those tiny cold feet landed on her skin.

“Are you going to moon out there all day?” Lillian’s irritable voice from the back door. “We have work to do.”

Lillian hands her two clean buckets for fresh water. She trudges back along the path. The chinook has turned the snow to slippery mush and she edges sideways down the slope to the barrel in the gully.

If this year’s wheat crop is good maybe Lewis will pipe water into the house. Still, this is better than Poplar Ridge where Lillian melted snow in the boiler. Rain water, collected off the roof, was never enough and they had to drive to the Pine River and fill barrels. In winter Lewis dug scoop-outs in the pasture and packed them with snow so the animals would have drinking water in summer.

Lewis homesteaded here because of the spring, because water is so important. At the foot of the steep pasture hill, the spring bubbles out from beneath a sandstone ledge all year round. He says pressure from the water table keeps it from freezing, even in the coldest weather.

He and Russell bored a hole into the hillside under the sandstone ledge, shoved pipe a few feet into the hill, then sank a barrel in the ground beneath the end of the pipe. Now the water comes through the pipe into the barrel, then flows over the edge and down the gully to a second barrel behind the house. From there it flows on another two hundred yards to the creek.

With water piped in, she wouldn’t have to lug it from the spring but she’d miss hearing the water sing every day. She scoops icy water into the buckets and listens to the stream ripple around the willows. The little bumps that will become catkins are beginning to swell now. She’ll check them every day, watch how they grow. She’d still like to bring a poplar branch into the house and see how fast the buds open but Lillian would only throw it out.

Lillian fills the tub with hot water to do the shirts, overalls and socks. As Callie swings the handle, she looks around the shed, trying to think of more arguments for school in town. A waist-high workbench runs beneath a small window on the north wall. Stacked beneath it is firewood, fresh-split spruce sweet with resin. The bench is cluttered with tools, containers of milk and butter and other odds and ends, a way station for things on their way in or out of the house.

Nothing there but a reminder that when the washing is done, she’ll have to bring in more firewood.

The shed is small and cramped, like the kitchen. The other walls are used for hanging the copper boiler, a galvanized tin bath tub and coats. The washing machine lives in one corner, a stool and some boots in another. The smell of harness oil from the bits of harness her father mends in the winter blends with that of soap flakes.

When she asked Lewis why he hadn’t built a bigger house he said, “The more space, the more you have to heat.” She’d felt stupid not to have thought of that. As it is, the wood stove and airtight heater barely keep the house comfortable during the deep cold. The baseboard nail heads bear miniature mushroom caps of frost all winter and the attic door is kept shut to prevent heat from escaping upstairs.

“Callie! You’re dreaming again.” Lillian turns the wringer while Callie feeds clothes into it. “Careful! Make sure the buttons go through flat, otherwise they’ll break.”

She’ll never remember all this trivial stuff.

“The school would have lots of books and a microscope I could use to look at cross sections of plants.”

“If you’re so interested in plants, you can give me more help weeding the garden. Young ladies don’t need an education. When you grow up, you’ll be looking after a husband and children and keeping house.”

“They teach Home Economics in high school.”

“You can learn that here.” Lillian loads the washer again. “If we didn’t live in this godforsaken backwoods, you could take piano and singing lessons as I did when I was a girl. A course in elocution wouldn’t do you any harm either. You mumble like an old man in his beard.”

She can’t help it if her voice is low like Lewis’s. “You wouldn’t have to cook for me or do my laundry.”

Lillian flashes her an exasperated look. “It’s just as easy to cook and wash for three as it is for two.”

She’d better ease up or Lillian will be mad instead of just irritated. She pushes the handle and sings.

Oh, my darling, oh, my darling,

Oh, my darling Clementine,

You are lost and gone for ever,

Dreadful sorry, Clementine.

The song has exactly the right rhythm for pushing the agitator handle. She wonders how many times it will fit into fifteen minutes.

Too many times. Callie drains the wash water and takes it outside, glancing up the slope to the workshop. She knows Lewis is in there because Jake is lying close to the door, ears cocked, looking across the valley.

What do dogs think about? If she were a dog, she’d think about biting Lillian.

She helps carry the boiler out to the shed and pour water for the first rinse. Another agonizing eternity on the agitator. Slosh, slosh, slosh.

When Lillian complains about hearing Clementine too often, Callie switches to Don’t Fence Me In. The beat isn’t as good, but the words make a lot more sense.

Finally, it’s time for the second rinse. She dunks the bag of bluing into the water and squeezes it. Sky color squirts between her fingers and moves in long, smooth streams to circle the side of the tub. She stirs them until the water is a cloudless pool of blue sky.

By noon, when she goes to call Lewis in for dinner, the chinook wind is snapping at the sheets and clothes pegged on the line. She can hardly wait for them to dry so she can bury her face in their fresh sun-smell.

“In a minute,” Lewis says. The old felt hat shades his eyes from sunshine struggling through the grimy window. Lillian says the hat is a disgrace but he wears it to keep his head warm. Lewis’s white hair is thin, hinting at the skull beneath.

Callie leans her elbows on the work bench. “Dad, will you teach me how to use the rifle this summer?”

He raises his eyes from cleaning the truck carburetor. “You’re too skinny; the recoil would knock you flat.”

“I know to hold the stock tight against my shoulder. I’ve been using the .410 shotgun for two years.”

“You need a clear eye and a steady hand with the rifle. It’s harder to hit the target with a bullet than a wide pattern of shot.” He wipes the carburetor.

A clear eye and a steady hand. That’s another way of saying you have to see what’s true.

In the lean-to, she inspects the elk bones. Last week, she and Lewis had found enough vertebrae at the lake for the whole spine. They’re wired together, resting on sawhorses, and he’s begun attaching ribs. On the walk, Lewis told her about tapping sugar maples for syrup when he was a boy. He can name the trees in the valley, but she wants a book that lists every tree in the world and tells how they grow and multiply.

Jake trots ahead to the house, plumed tail waving, and lies down by the shed door, waiting for Lillian to bring him a dish of scraps. Callie sets the table while Lillian fries potatoes and empties a jar of deer meat into a pan to heat.

“Dad, what do you think about me going to school in town next fall?”

“I’ve already told you no.” Lillian frowns. “I don’t see why you have to keep harping at it.”

“You’d better stick to correspondence for a while yet.” At the wash bench Lewis washes his hands and splashes water on his lined, stubbled face. “I need you on the farm, what with Peter stargazing and Russell being a big shot in town.”

“If that wife of Russell’s hadn’t wanted to live in town,” Lillian says, “he’d have got land here under the VLA and you could have helped each other.” She slices bread like it was Rita’s neck under the knife. “I don’t know what he sees in that girl. And she dresses like a tramp; I’ve never seen her in anything but those awful pants. I’d be surprised if she even owns a pair of stockings.”

Callie has heard these comments a hundred times but she can’t see anything wrong with Rita. She’s pretty, with that curly red hair, and full of fun. Anyway, Russell has a steel plate in his knee; farming would be too hard for him.

Lewis turns on the radio in the front room. The familiar marching song fills the air, followed by a somber male voice, “And now the Winnipeg grain report.” When it’s over and the newscaster starts talking about President Truman, Lewis comes back to the kitchen.

After dinner, when Lillian is pouring tea, Callie says, “Does it cost a lot to stay in the school dormitory?”

“Whatever it costs, we don’t have the money.” Lillian slams the teapot back on the stove. “And I’ve been wearing the same winter coat for fifteen years, so just forget it.”

She’d better not give her mother the religion letter today. Lillian’s too riled up.

Lewis lights his pipe, the acrid sweet scent of tobacco smoke filling the room. “Might get a good crop this year.”

“Or next year.” Lillian sighs. “Whoever called the Peace Block ‘next year country’ certainly got it right.”

“We’re better off than a lot of people.” Lewis sharpens the end of a wooden match with his pocket knife and picks his teeth. “If I hadn’t quit the railroad in ’29 to go homesteading, we might have starved.”

“The depression was just an excuse. You grew up with dirt under your fingernails and you couldn’t wait to get back to the farm.”

“It’s better than putting up with political bullshit from the CPR.”

“Mind your language! It was obvious to me from the beginning that you couldn’t abide authority. I don’t know how you managed in the army.”

The silence stretches like a rubber band and Lillian pours more tea.

Lewis says, “The dormitory can’t cost much. It’s just a couple of army huts the U.S. Corps of Engineers left when they finished building the highway.”

“Whatever they charge, it’s too much,” Lillian says.

Living in an army hut could be fun. It might have running water and an inside toilet, too, like the house Russell and Rita live in.

***

After dinner Lewis goes outside and Lillian decides she has time for a nap. Callie tiptoes up to the attic with her grammar book, looking forward to the space and silence and pretending she has the house to herself.

There’s not much room to walk around in the attic but the windows at each end let in so much light that it seems big. Cardboard boxes cram the sides and clothes hang on nails in the rafters. When Peter comes home, he’ll sleep up here and they’ll have long talks, Peter on one cot, her on the other, and he’ll play the guitar for her. He’s taking astronomy and his last letter described the university library, huge rooms filled with books floor to ceiling. It would be wonderful to have that many books.

She’d write and tell him about wanting to go to school in town, but Lillian might ask what she’s written. Lillian says she’d never read anyone else’s private letters, but that doesn’t stop her asking nosy questions. And if her questions don’t get answered, watch out!

Callie goes to a box of Rita’s old magazines and takes one. She riffles pages until an ad for a fireplace catches her eye. The white marble reflects color from the flames: peach, red, mauve and gold, like cloud fire. A mother and father and two kids sit in front of the fire, smiling, looking happy. The mother has her arms around the kids.

She tries to imagine what it would feel like to have Lillian or Lewis put an arm around her, but somehow she can’t. Under her shirt, her skin feels cold.

She tosses the magazine on the floor. Her mind stills, absorbs the silence, becomes open to the words in her book. She’s almost finished the chapter on verbs when she hears Lewis come in for his afternoon tea.

Should she go down? She doesn’t feel like listening to them, though the house is so small she mostly can’t help hearing what people say unless they whisper. She picks up her book and shuts out the voices until she hears her name.

She creeps to the metal chimney rising from the cookstove below. There’s a gap around the pipe and every word is clear.

“She’s too young to go away to school,” Lillian says. Boiling water hisses into the teapot. “I wish we’d never left Poplar Ridge. At least she could have kept going to the school and we’d have had some social life.”

“The soil is better here and there’s plenty of water. That’s what farming is all about,” Lewis says.

That’s what life is all about, too. Earth, water, air and fire to make plants grow, so they can be used for food and clothes and houses.

“I know.” Lillian sounds irritable. “I just wish you hadn’t picked a place in the middle of nowhere.” Tea gurgles into cups. “The only neighbor closer than Millburn is old Sutherland. No Women’s Institute, no school. No nothing. I loved those school dances in Poplar Ridge.”

Lillian had taught her the schottische when she was six and too old to be put to bed with the babies on a pile of coats near the pot-bellied heater. The man who played accordion rested his head on the blackboard and left a grease spot that never washed off.

“They were all right, I guess,” Lewis says. “If the government plowed the roads, we could get out to Fort St. John with the truck in winter.”

“The government won’t plow the roads until we have more people here. I don’t know what we’ll do if we ever need a dentist or a doctor in the wintertime.” Lillian’s using her tired voice but it has a bite. “Oh, I know it suits you. You’re a lone wolf. And maybe you have reason to be.”

“Damn it, leave my past sins out of this,” Lewis says. His voice is quiet but has a hard edge, too. “What happened happened. I can’t go back and change it.”

She wishes he hadn’t said that because Lillian might have started talking about his sin, whatever it was.

There is silence for a moment, then Lillian says, her voice milder. “Another thing about the town school, you never know what kind of people she’d be associating with. They might let Indians into the school.”

That would be neat. Indians could teach her which roots and berries are edible. Then she could go live on a peaceful island all by herself, like Robinson Crusoe.

“Well, she’s company for you.” The smell of Lewis’s pipe wafts up through the gap.

“No better than a cat or dog. She always has her nose in a book. I’ve told her time and again she’s not to read until her work is done, but she never listens. Even when she’s doing chores, her mind is off somewhere else.”

Lillian is still mad at her because she was reading A Girl of the Limberlost yesterday and forgot to feed the chickens.

“Hard to imagine the place without her,” Lewis says. “She’s a big help, too.”

“She’s more help to you than me and that’s a mistake. She should be learning to run a house, not a farm.”

“She likes farming, which is more than I can say for those two sons of yours. No reason she can’t run this place when she grows up; she’s a good worker. I don’t want everything I’ve built up going to a stranger some day.”

“Nonsense. It’s a man’s job to run a farm.” Loud clink of teacup against saucer. “The only suitable jobs for women are nursing and teaching, before they find husbands.”

Why can’t a woman be a farmer? Doubt creeps into the recesses of her mind like the tendrils of a wild strawberry plant forming new roots. Is there something else Lillian hasn’t told her about what will happen when she grows up?

“She can go to town for the last year or two of high school and then work for a little while,” Lillian continues. “It would be a way for her to meet an eligible man, perhaps a banker or a doctor, and live in town.”

“She might want to marry a farmer.”

“God forbid!”

Lewis’s boots thud on the kitchen linoleum and the back door slams.

Why does Lewis walk away when Lillian says something mean? He could say something mean back, but he hardly ever does. When it happens, though, Lillian looks scared and it’s days before she snipes at him again.

Callie tiptoes back to the cot and tries to read but her mind keeps straying. Lillian wants to live in town but Lewis wouldn’t be happy. Too many people and too many rules and restrictions when you work for somebody else. That’s what he says, anyway.

If they’d let her go away for school she wouldn’t have to endure Lillian’s rages. On the other hand, schools have rules and she hates those as much as Lewis does.

Even worse, she’d have to leave the valley. She looks out at the hills and the willows marking the creek bed. Under the soft blue sky, snow is melting fast, exposing black earth here and there. Soon tiny seedlings will poke their green heads through the soil.

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