Evergreen: A novel

PART ONE

Evergreen, Minnesota

1938

1

Eveline LeMay came after the water. She arrived on a cool morning in early September, asleep in a rowboat without paddles as if she knew the river currents would carry her past the tamarack and black-spruce forest, around Bone Island, a fen, and a bog, all the way to Evergreen and her new husband, Emil, who was waiting for her on the rocky shore.

The flood had delayed Eveline’s trip north two months and forced her to travel by boat since the dirt roads had been washed away and no plans were made to restore them. Emil had sent word for her via the forest service to stay with her parents in Yellow Falls, a lumber town twenty miles south of Evergreen, until the water receded because he was living on the roof of their cabin, subsisting on whatever happened to float by. The newspapers blamed the flood on nature, but everyone knew the government had been building a dam to harness the power of the Snake and Owl Rivers in order to, in their words, bring light to all that was dark, but in everyone else’s: to build a paper mill and clear-cut the forests.

Mein Liebe, Emil said, and Eveline opened her gray eyes.

I lost the paddles, she said, sitting up in the rowboat, stiff from floating all night.

On either side of the river, a forest of towering white pines shaded the shore. When the wind blew, long green needles fell onto the water like rain.

Emil lifted her out of the boat as if she were a child and waved away a mosquito from her face. My poor baby, he said, kissing her. But you’re here now. You’re home.

For the first time in two days, Eveline felt warm again despite her thin cotton dress, which she chose because Emil said the daisy pattern reminded him of the meadows in Germany where he played as a boy. She’d pinned up her long wheat-colored hair into a bun and let a few strands fall loosely around her face. Until she fell asleep, she’d pinched her cheeks every few hours to give them the rosy color Emil admired when they first met.

Lob der Jugend, he’d said. In praise of youth.

Emil was ten years her senior, gray at the temples, which made him look both dignified and a little rueful. His shoulders were broad and strong from working outside, which belied the stiffness in his chest he called winter in the heart.

They’re boots, he said now, handing Eveline a pair of black rubber waders that rose to her thighs. The country’s all mud.

And the cabin? Eveline said, struggling with them.

I stopped living on the roof three weeks ago, Emil said. They’re not like stockings. You won’t break them if you pull harder.

Once she secured the waders, Eveline took Emil’s hand, and the two of them walked up the rocky riverbank into the woods, which were alive with the hum of mosquitoes and groaning tree trunks. Emil set down pine boards for her to walk on in the places where the mud gurgled and spit sulfur. Where he didn’t set down boards, the mud came up to her ankles and in one place her calves.

At least the water came before the government did, Emil said. He pointed to a stand of old-growth pine trees the flood had uprooted and tossed like matchsticks onto their sides. It’ll make good firewood.

Do we have a fireplace? Eveline said.

A woodstove, said Emil.

Electricity?

A year or two yet. I’m working on running water.

Eveline had agreed to move to Evergreen because she wanted to be wherever Emil was, and Emil wanted to open a taxidermy shop on the edge of the wilderness like his father and his father’s father back in the Black Forest. Eveline’s mother had yielded similarly when she was nineteen and agreed to marry Eveline’s father and live above the Laundromat despite her allergy to heavy detergents. Every afternoon for as long as Eveline could remember, her mother would sit in a spearmint-oil bath to clear her sinuses, but she’d always be ready to greet her father with a kiss when he came home from the lumberyard, which made Eveline confident about her decision to marry Emil and move to Evergreen.

Before Emil proposed to her, Eveline worked at Harvey Small’s, the only restaurant in Yellow Falls, serving plates of hamburgers to lumberjacks to relieve some of her family’s financial burdens. After her shifts, she’d go across the street to Lenora’s Fine Gowns, the place she’d met Emil, to brush against China silk and French chiffon, party dresses too fine for Northwoods parties. The dress shop was tucked between a live-bait stall and the Hunting Emporium, where camouflage jackets and buck knives hung from strands of twine in the front window. Eveline would circle the shop, reliving the moment when Emil had walked by, saw her twirling before a mirror, and was drawn to her side. After that, she’d go home to wash the scent of bacon fat out of her hair and freshen her skin with lemon juice.

Coming into the country meant Eveline no longer had to work in the restaurant, where children poured milk shakes onto the seats and stray dogs circled out back for bits of gristle, but it also meant she and Emil would have to eke out sustenance from the hard northern landscape and whatever supplies Emil had salvaged from the flood. Eveline was nervous about her instinct for survival, but she trusted Emil’s completely. Emil had survived war as a boy and yet wasn’t hardened. Eveline thought of his butterfly collection—the delicate purple emperor he gave her the day they met—and squeezed his hand. Around them great pines lay like injured soldiers, sap streaming from their bark like blood.

I packed too many dresses, Eveline said, surprised at how the modest silver band on her ring finger had made her lose sight of the place she was packing for. She’d tucked a pair of dancing shoes into her suitcase at the last minute.

You won’t always have to wear waders, Emil said.

There’s something else, Eveline thought, but couldn’t say in the middle of all this death.

Before Emil decided to move them north, they shared her childhood bedroom in the apartment above the Laundromat and had only twice been daring enough to move together as man and wife, but it had been enough for life to begin inside of her.

Her mother didn’t speak of her condition, but each morning she brought Eveline a cup of herbal tea with a spoonful of honey. She let out the seams of Eveline’s clothes and found an oversize winter coat for her at the secondhand shop.

Mom? Eveline had said the morning before she left for Evergreen, when her mother passed by the threshold of her bedroom door. But the question Eveline wanted to ask her mother she couldn’t find the tongue for, because even though her mother seemed cheerful enough and complained little, over the years her face had become weighed down by something Eveline recognized but didn’t yet understand.

Are you happy? Eveline had thought.

Emil let go of Eveline’s hand when they got to a clearing in the forest and the mud gave way to bright green moss, then switchgrass that rose to her thighs.

It’s not much farther, he said, tossing aside a dead weasel so Eveline wouldn’t have to step over it. Everything’s been displaced.

Eveline wondered if Emil meant perished. Sometimes he used words that meant something different than they did to Eveline. When he asked her to marry him, he’d said in case we’re separated, which Eveline took to mean so we won’t ever be separate.

The two walked through the thigh-high grass, over fallen branches that snapped beneath their feet and spongy earth that gave beneath them, Emil with a hand in his trouser pocket and the other wrapped around the handle of Eveline’s tweed suitcase.

Overhead the clouds lumped together until Eveline couldn’t discern their shapes individually anymore. The air smelled of wet earth. Oxeye daisies and milkweed thistle, which grew in the back lot outside her bedroom window in Yellow Falls, gradually took the place of the switchgrass and made Eveline feel more sure of herself. What a good spot for a garden in the spring, she thought. My first real garden. In place of the milk thistle, which scratched at her waders like fingernails, she imagined everything from pumpkins to malva flowers. Maybe even a row of walnut saplings, which would grow up with their child. When Eveline was a baby, her mother planted a forsythia shrub behind the Laundromat so Eveline would be the first one in town to glimpse spring in its bright yellow petals.

Eveline looked up at the clouds. Do you think it’s going to rain today?

Only if you wish it to, my wife, Emil said. I’ve been practicing saying that.

The wife part or the lying part?

Emil smiled. Both.

Emil? Eveline said, but before she could finish her thought the cabin rose out of the tangle of milk thistle in front of them like the prow of a ship on a wave.

For a brief stark moment, Eveline saw her future in the black water stains that licked the brown logs, in the boarded-up window Emil had yet to fix because he’d have to float a pane of glass twenty miles up the river. She saw it in the mud bubbling out from beneath the porch steps and the yellow liquid oozing like pus from the chinking between the logs.

And yet on the porch were two rocking chairs Emil had built and an evergreen wreath decorated with winterberries. A white-throated sparrow, what her father called a fortune bird, sat on the perch of a bright red birdhouse that hung from the eaves.

Emil set down her suitcase. What is it?

Eveline placed a hand on her stomach, a future that nudged her through the sunny material of her dress. I’m pregnant.

2

Emil carried Eveline across the threshold singing, "A Junge! A Mädchen! Let us have one of each!" and everything turned sour. Though Emil had spent weeks cleaning the cabin, a few of the logs still dripped water like leaky faucets. He’d set pots and pans beneath the most eager of the streams and covered the stains on the floor with grass rugs, but the rugs couldn’t contain what was beneath them, what was above them, what was all around: rot.

It will get better, Emil said and set Eveline on her own two feet.

Of course it will, Eveline said because she didn’t want to hurt her husband’s feelings or betray her own. She was certain she’d be sick if she didn’t focus on what was pleasant about the inside of the cabin: the matching nightstands with delicate birdlike feet, the woodstove alight and crackling with blue and orange flames, and the narrow bed Emil had skirted with evergreen boughs and pinecones, which made it look like a nest.

Would it be all right if I lie down? Eveline said, hoping sleep would transform her disappointment, her fears. She told herself she was tired—that was all. Just very tired.

Emil led her to the bed, turned down the dark blue patchwork quilt, and pulled the covers up to her chin. He touched the gentle curve of her stomach.

Sleep, my dear, he said, as if he understood she was overwhelmed, as if he’d felt the very same way when he arrived in Evergreen.

Eveline fell asleep almost as soon as she closed her eyes. In her dreams, she heard the little bird on the front porch skittering across the wood planks, chirping her welcome song. She heard the tamaracks and black spruces bending in the wind beyond the cabin. She heard the drip-drop of water in the cast-iron pots and pans on the floor. All day, Eveline tried to open her eyes to her new life, and all day they remained closed.

Late in the evening, Eveline woke to the smell of rot, a still-sour stomach, and to Emil, who was snoring lightly beside her. His chest rose and fell with the sureness of a grandfather clock, and Eveline placed her hand on his ribs to steady all that was unsteady in her. She looked at the chipped basin Emil had set on the floor for her, but she couldn’t bear the thought of an upheaval so close to him. On her nightstand, an oil lamp was burning. She lifted it with one hand and lifted herself out of bed with the other. Before he brought her into the cabin, Emil had steered her to the outhouse he’d built behind it.

Eveline put on her shoes, opened the heavy front door of the cabin, and stood on the porch a long moment in her daisy dress.

It will get better, she said, clutching the oil lamp like an old friend.

After she found the outhouse, Eveline wiped her mouth with a handkerchief. She adjusted her underclothes and her dress, and in the process tilted the oil lamp too far south. When the flame went out, panic electrified the nerves in her spine and legs until she remembered a trick her father taught her when she was little. Eveline closed her eyes hard and opened them softly, and the dark wasn’t so dark anymore.

On that night pulsing stars needlepointed the sky, and the moonlight, a pale harvest yellow, shone on the trunks of nearby birches, lighting their silver bark like streetlamps. The daytime industry of animals in the forest had slowed to an occasional hoo from an owl and the croak of a tree frog. Even the expanses of mud, which gurgled and spit during the day, eased back into themselves now. Eveline saw then that before the flood the country was beautiful and that it would be again.

During September, Emil worked on beauty’s behalf outside of the cabin, clearing milk thistle and pricker bushes, while Eveline worked on its behalf inside. Emil had altered the frame of their one-room cabin to make it more structurally sound, but the people who lived here before them were the ones who’d built it and therefore decided its layout, which puzzled Eveline. The cupboards, for instance, were hung intermittently through the cabin instead of centrally in the kitchen, and Eveline was forced to put cans of beans in the cupboard above their bed and sacks of flour and rice in the one beside the closet door. The woodstove, where Eveline cooked their meals, sat on a pallet of bricks in the far corner of the room, and that, along with the placement of the cupboards, made Eveline wonder about the previous tenants, who’d left behind everything but their clothes and family photographs.

Did they say where they were going? Eveline asked one morning as she was cooking breakfast and noticed the path of worn wood between the stove and the table.

Back to Canada, I think.

The woman had left behind a rosary and a silver hand mirror engraved with the words FOR MEG, LOVE, WILLIAM.

I wonder why, Eveline said.

They missed home, Emil said.

They weren’t able to make one out here?

Emil touched the rosary. It’ll be different for us.

It was strange to be living among other people’s things, and Eveline did what she could to make them feel more like hers. She pulled apart one of her dresses to make a floral curtain for the little window above the basin in the kitchen and filled the extra water glasses with stems of oxeye daisies and joe-pye weed from the meadow. There wasn’t much to do about the boarded-up window, so that afternoon Eveline sat on the porch and on a page in her journal sketched what the view would have been. When she finished, she tacked her drawing to the rusty nail sticking out of the plywood board.

I should make a wreath instead, she said when Emil came in from working.

Don’t you dare. I love it, Emil said. He handed her a blue porcelain teapot he found in the woods while he was clearing thistle. I can fix the handle.

So far Emil had found a washboard, the teapot, and a worn-out teddy bear, which the flood had brought from someone else’s home to the outskirts of theirs. The bear was missing its left eye, and though it was no longer fit for a child, Eveline sewed on a brown button in its place and set it on the bed. She would have been glad to return the items to their owners, but Emil only knew of one other family living in Evergreen on higher ground on the other side of the river. He’d left a note, but nobody had made the trip across.

It’s lovely, Eveline said about the teapot.

Emil touched the broken handle. It reminds me of Germany.

Emil came to America because he thought it would be a less complicated place than Germany. He grew up during the lean years after World War I, when Germany was paying reparations to the rest of the world and starving as a result. Before the war, Emil’s father was a naturalist and a taxidermist. After the war, instead of his father mounting the specimens he caught in the Black Forest and sending them on to the museums in Berlin, Frankfurt, and Munich, his family ate them. Once, when there were no specimens left, his father went into the forest with a wagon and came back with a wild horse from the pack Emil ran after with his boyhood friends. When Emil and his sister, Gitte, wept bitterly, their father told them to go to America. Perhaps there, he said, they only ride horses.

Even when prewar food appeared on the table again, Emil was intent on going to America because he read about the business opportunities for foreigners in the Dakotas. He only ended up in Minnesota because he ran out of money for train fare and because he walked past the dress shop and saw Eveline twirling in front of the mirror inside. After that he was intent on marrying her and opening a small taxidermy shop to support them.

After he finished the day’s outdoor work, Emil would spread a cloth across the kitchen table and work late into the night, building a collection by which future customers could judge his craftsmanship. Emil preserved specimens the way his father and his father’s father had. He didn’t use the pernicious chemicals—arsenical soap and corrosive sublimate—many taxidermists in America used. Emil used cotton and beeswax.

Watching him work was like watching an artist. Every few minutes, he’d stand up, rub his chin, and sit back down with the magnifying glass to fix whatever displeased him. He’d say, I’m an elephant when I need to be a gazelle.

Eveline knew Emil was a fine taxidermist, but she wondered how he was going to find customers when only one other family lived in Evergreen.

When hunters kill an animal here now, they have to take it all the way to Yellow Falls to get to a taxidermist, Emil said. Instead of doing that, they can bring the animal to me. I’ll preserve it and deliver it to them personally.

By boat? Eveline said.

Next spring I’m going to get the money for a truck from Jeremiah Burr.

What are you going to give him? Eveline said.

What everyone here seems to want, Emil said. A wall full of bucks’ heads.

What do people want in Germany?

Sons who stay put.

When Emil had finally saved enough money for the trip across the ocean, his father wouldn’t come out of his study to say goodbye. That morning, the women in his family were the ones who dropped him at the train station in Hornberg. Just before he boarded, his mother gave him his father’s most cherished butterfly collection and suggested he use the butterflies to tip people along the way, which worked in Europe. But when Emil tried to give a porter a monarch butterfly in Grand Central Station, the porter crushed it in his hand.

Eveline fell in love with Emil precisely because of those butterflies. Other men left buckets of fish on her doorstep or dragged her out to the woods to watch them cut wood. Before they were married, Eveline would daydream about Emil’s smooth fingers brushing hers in the dress shop the day they met and how, despite her parents’ concern, she felt so certain his gentleness was meant for her and her alone.

Eveline looked at Emil’s fingers now, which bullet burs and thorns had scraped raw. A blood blister had taken over the tip of his thumb; the nail was starting to turn black.

I should get back out there, Emil said. We’re going to get snow today.

Eveline looked at the small pile of logs beside the stove. Even in warm weather, wood disappeared faster than Emil could cut it. I can help you, she said.

Emil put his heavy wool coat on. He kissed her forehead. At the door, he smiled as if she’d said something funny. I didn’t marry you so you could wield an ax.

Why did you? Eveline said, but Emil was already gone.

Eveline set the lunch dishes in the basin and gathered Emil’s wool socks, which needed mending. There was supper to think about and laundry to scrub against the washboard. Floors to wash, too. Eveline was amused now by all the nights she’d stayed up before she was married thinking about how freeing it would be when she and Emil finally had a place of their own. She didn’t think about chores then or the silence she’d complete them in. Most days now, she went hours without speaking, when in Yellow Falls she’d scarcely caught a moment to herself, let alone a silent one.

Today was no different. The snow came home before Emil did, clinging to the silvery birch branches, the brown eaves of the cabin, and the red birdhouse. It softened Evergreen’s sharp lines and the sparrow’s hearty trill. Eveline wrapped herself in one of the left-behind quilts and sat on the porch talking to the sparrow, whom she’d named Fortuna.

Tuna.

Why didn’t you fly south like all of the other birds?

Tuna hopped from the birdhouse perch to the porch railing, stretching her white throat toward the falling snow so much like a child that Eveline half expected an eager tongue to spring forth from her beak to gather the flakes and savor them as they melted.

Eveline wondered what had happened to all the Yellow Falls girls who got married and moved south to Minneapolis and sometimes as far as Chicago, places that seemed like they were part of another world now. On a map, hundreds of rural miles separated her from them, but this distinction seemed more pressing than inches on a map: in Eveline’s world girls talked to birds, and in the other one they talked to one another.

Were the girls lonesome for the Northwoods? Its forests? Its meadows? Its star-filled sky? Perhaps they all had closets full of pretty party dresses that kept them from missing the mud and the sand, the angles of the river and the anglers who fished it.

Tuna hopped from the porch railing back to the perch of her birdhouse.

I feel the same way, Eveline said, unwilling to admit she was lonely.

3

Eveline spent the winter of her pregnancy reading Emil’s taxidermy manuals, the only bound pages for mile after boundless mile. Of everything she packed that hurried September morning in Yellow Falls, books weren’t something she’d considered stuffing into her suitcase, which meant she was stuck reading about dead animals now.

Soon you’ll be able to preserve me, Emil said when he came in from chopping wood on the first big snow day—two feet!—in November. He was growing a beard, which collected snow when he was chopping wood and, along with his foggy safety glasses, made him look a little like an owl until the snow melted.

Just birds, Eveline said, even though she’d been secretly drawing pictures of babies when she was certain Emil was deep in the woods.

No woman in Yellow Falls, and probably anywhere, talked about what it felt like to be pregnant other than to say it was the Lord’s miracle, so Eveline didn’t know to expect the cramping and expanding, the tenderness of her breasts and hips. For the tenderness, she draped warm cloths over whatever parts were sore. She didn’t know what to do about the expansion of her hips and breasts, except to take out the seams of her clothes and hope Emil didn’t mind when they undressed beneath the sheets. The cramps were the worst; they caused her such indigestion Eveline didn’t know how she’d survive their indignity. Often, while Emil slept soundly, she’d escape to the outhouse to spare them both.

And then December came, and Eveline and the baby reached sudden equilibrium. As the baby grew, the cramps and tenderness disappeared, and the expansion seemed more purposeful, since it confined itself to her stomach. The queasiness disappeared, too, which could have been because the cabin finally stopped smelling of rot and smelled instead of the applewood Emil cut for her. On the nights he preserved specimens, the cabin smelled of oil of cedar, too, which mixed with the smells of supper.

Cooking was difficult without a proper layout and running water. Eveline had to heat blocks of snow on the woodstove at the beginning of the meal and more at the end to clean the dishes. The pantry contained only a few items anymore—salt, flour, rice, dried beans, and bouillon—which made supper predictable: beef-flavored rice and beans. Occasionally, Emil would get a rabbit or a squirrel between chopping wood and bringing it to the cabin.

One day, he got a wild turkey, and how gloriously rich that meal was!

Where did you find it? she said when Emil brought the turkey inside. He’d already plucked all of the feathers, which made the turkey look like a newborn. Emil set a pot of water on the woodstove while Eveline coddled the turkey in her arms.

The edge of the edge of the forest, Emil said.

How smart you are! Eveline said.

"How lucky, said Emil. He let me take him."

Let? Eveline said.

He leaped right into my arms, Emil said, taking the turkey out of Eveline’s and placing it in the pot of boiling water.

While the turkey cooked, Eveline set the table. Normally, she didn’t like the earthy smell of fat rendering out of animals, but just then the layer of yellow fat that bubbled at the top of the pot smelled like happiness.

The next day, Eveline turned the leftovers into soup. She couldn’t wait to start a garden in the spring, to grow carrots, celery, potatoes, and a patch of herbs. Living in the woods had narrowed her longings; what happiness thyme (and the baby) would bring. Eveline took the most neutral of her cotton dresses and pulled them apart in order to make clothes for the baby, who nudged the project along when in the past she might have set down her needle and thread. In between sewing, she’d drink a cup of broth and read.

All but one of Emil’s manuals were written in German, and though she was learning the language slowly from Emil (and from his German-to-English dictionary), the words on the page rarely came together in any sensible way. The sketches were what brought the words she did know to life. Eveline practiced tracing specimens in her journal