Wild Life Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  Dedication

  Note

  Epigraph

  Map

  Prologue

  Sat’y 25 Mar ’05

  Still Sat’y (midnight)

  Sun’y 26 Mar ’05

  Late, Fri’y 31 Mar

  3 p.m. Sat’y 1 Apr ’05

  On the boat landing (Skamokawa), Sat’y night

  On the Telephone, early a.m., 2 Apr

  Sun’y afternoon 2 Apr ’05 (Yacolt)

  Evening of the 2nd (Yacolt)

  Camp 6 (in the woods) 3 Apr

  Afternoon of 3rd (top of the flume)

  Camp 8 (deepwoods), midnight of the 3rd

  In the log camp (deepwoods), morning of the 4th

  In the lava fields (morning) 5 Apr

  In the lava, night of the 5th

  Morning, 6th

  Alone in the deepwoods, night of the 6th

  Alone, the 7th

  8 Apr

  9 Apr

  10th

  11th

  12 Apr (7 nights lost)

  Morning, 14th?

  ? 16th

  Maybe the 17th

  18th? 19th?

  Night

  Cold, windy (have lost track of the date)

  Sun glimpsed today through white cumulus

  Cool, cloudy

  Evening, cool

  Morning

  Morning clouds breaking through to a fair afternoon

  Sun, glorious sun!

  Evening, under a fair sky

  Drizzling morning, bright afternoon

  Late afternoon, spring weather

  Bright day

  Rainy and gray

  Horrible events

  Grief

  Rain today and yesterday

  Cool, springlike

  A gray day

  Rain

  Clear evening

  Bright day, cool and clear

  Sunday 21 May ’05 (on the Lewis River)

  Monday, 5 June (at Etna, waiting for the Mascot)

  Tuesday, 6 June ’05 (on the Lurline)

  Early a.m., Wedn’y, 7 June (Skamokawa)

  Reader’s Guide

  A Conversation with Molly Gloss

  For Discussion

  About the Author

  First Mariner Books edition 2001

  Copyright © 2000 by Molly Gloss

  All rights reserved

  Reprinted by arrangement with Simon & Schuster

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Gloss, Molly

  Wild life : a novel / Molly Gloss.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-618-13157-4

  1. Frontier and pioneer life—Fiction. 2. Wilderness survival—Fiction. 3. Washington (State)—Fiction. 4. Woman pioneers—Fiction. 5. Wild men—Fiction.

  I. Title.

  PS3557.L65 W5 2001

  813'.54—dc21 2001039528

  eISBN 978-0-547-52640-9

  v1.0714

  Acknowledgments

  The author wishes to thank Literary Arts, Inc., for their financial support during the writing of this work; Cottages at Hedgebrook, for a nurturing residency early in the life of the novel; and the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, for their very generous gift.

  Thanks to Irene Martin, who steered me toward a more accurate description of the terrain around Skamokawa (though, of course, any remaining errors are mine).

  For helping this poor lost book find its way out of the woods, I am deeply grateful to the Truthful Trio, and also to my literary agent, Wendy Weil, and my editor at Simon & Schuster, Roz Siegel.

  For my sister, Pat Zagelow

  Note

  The events in this book are entirely fictional, all its people imaginary. Certain thoughts and attitudes shared by many turn-of-the-century women writers have been shamelessly placed in Charlotte’s mouth or upon the pages of her journal without attribution to the actual women who thought and wrote them.

  Though much diminished from their heyday at the turn of the century, Skamokawa and Yacolt, as well as other named towns of southwest Washington State, are yet living communities, to which, in both history and landscape, I have been largely faithful. Certain bits of gossip and anecdotal stories (dates and details often recast) have been gathered from a variety of local sources, including especially Battleground . . . In and Around, by Louise McKay Allworth, and Skamokawa: Sad Years, Glad Years, by Irene Martin.

  I am indebted to Robert Michael Pyle for his nonfiction exploration of the mystery of wilderness, Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide, and to the poet Pattiann Rogers for “Rolling Naked in the Morning Dew,” and to T. H. White for The Bestiary: A Book of Beasts, Being a Translation from a Latin Bestiary of the Twelfth Century.

  There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that.

  GENESIS 6:4

  April 5, 1999

  Sara,

  You said you wanted to see the whole thing just as I found it, so it’s un-messed with, except I’m the one who rubberbanded it with cardboard. The notebook, when I found it, was tied together with rotting string inside a rotting manila folder and lying in a bottom drawer, along with tax returns and receipts dating back to the sixties, in one of my dad’s five (five!) highboy dressers. (I saved the string and the folder, in case you meant the “as is” literally.)

  It’s mostly (apparently) a diary. Some of the diary pages were torn out and stuck in at other places, so the dates are not entirely consecutive; and there’s a bunch of other stuff interleafed too. Some of this “stuff” I know you’ll recognize as coming from Grandmother’s published writing; some others I think might be pieces of unfinished stories of hers (early drafts or experimental writing), but I could be wrong about that. The smaller scraps of paper shoved in between the pages are mostly quotations from various people, newspaper clippings, that kind of thing.

  I almost started in rearranging the diary by the dates and pulling out the little scraps of paper, so I’m glad I called you first. After we talked, I sat down and read the whole thing through, just as it was, which you’ll find is uphill work, her handwriting always scrawly, of course, but some of this the worst I’ve seen, besides age-faded, water stained, and so forth, and even the diary has a lot of scribbled revisions between the lines and in the margins (which I guess should have tipped me what I had). Anyway, I did start to see a kind of order to the arrangement of it all, which is why I think your first guess was right and this was something Grandmother was working on—whether as memoir or allegory or novel or who knows?—and for whatever reason, it never was finished, and obviously never published. (If the diary isn’t a fictional invention, but her own, her actual diary, and she was thinking of using it as the foundation for a memoir, then I can imagine a couple of good reasons she may not have gone ahead with it, and why Dad kept it in a drawer and didn’t tell me he had it.)

  I know you said any papers I found among Dad’s things should probably go to the university for their archive, but now I’m kind of thinking somebody—a feminist press?—might want to publish this if we could get it into a little better shape. I know Grandmother isn’t as famous as Kate Chopin or “that other Charlotte” (as Dad used to call Perkins Gilman), but I would think people would find this story interesting just on its own merits.

  Of course, we don’t know whether she meant this as a true account of what happened (as in socks knocked off), but why should we have
to answer the question? Unless you think people would think she was crazy, in which case maybe someone (not naming any names, but you know who you are) could write a biographical introduction. We could say Charlotte was apparently planning to use her “great adventure”—searching for little Harriet Coffee—as the basis for a novel, a metaphysical (metaphorical?) adventure-fantasy, maybe, which was certainly popular in those days. (Or something else; I would leave it up to you.) That would bring in the women’s studies angle, the “glimpse of a writer’s creative process,” and so forth. And of course you could point out (again) that it was after Grandmother went up into the woods looking for Harriet—or rather, after she came home—that her writing turned a corner and her reputation as a serious writer was made (though by now she’s not on anybody’s radar screen except yours, and the vaunted few in women’s studies, and don’t get me started on that).

  Anyway, it’s just a thought. If you don’t think it will interest a publisher, you should tell me (I trust your judgment), and we’ll go from there. You’ve already written the Great American Dissertation on Charlotte Bridger Drummond, but at the very least there should be a journal article in this stuff somewhere, which might help you get tenure. (Ha!) Call me when you’ve finished reading it.

  Best,

  J

  To write, I have decided, is to be insane. In ordinary life you look sane, act sane—just as sane as any mother of five children. But once you start to write, you are moonstruck, out of your senses. As you stare hard inward, following behind your eyes the images of invisible places, of people, of events, and listening hard inward to silent voices and unspoken conversations—as you are seeing the story, hearing it, feeling it—your very skin becomes permeable, not a boundary, and you enter the place of your writing and live inside the people who live there. You think and say incredible things. You even love other people—you don’t love your children and your husband at all. And here is the interesting thing to me: when this happens, you often learn something, understand something, that can transcend the words on the paper.

  Sat’y 25 Mar ’05

  The death of Jules Verne was reported in the morning papers—a great loss to France and to the world. When I read this news, I confess I was briefly startled into tears—just had to sit down and cry. Generally I am not much of a one for tears, and so my youngest son, named Jules for that very man, came and climbed on me, pulling at my hair and whining the way children will do, and dogs the same way, they’ll climb on you and lick your eyes because they want things to go on being understandable, they don’t want you to sit down suddenly in a kitchen chair crying.

  I won’t tolerate having my hair pulled, which my children know very well, so I stood up and tumbled my son right out of my lap. “Don’t grab on my hair,” I said, and discovered, upon sitting down again, that I was already finished with crying. There followed a theatrical burst of sobbing from Jules where he lay on the floor at my feet, but as quickly done with—a long wet sigh—when I pulled him onto my knee. He settled his bony little spine against my bosom and began to twist a forelock of his own hair around his pointy finger while I held the newspaper out in front of us and read:

  Death Relieves Jules Verne

  Calmly Foresaw His End and Discussed It with His Family

  He had suffered from cataracts and deafness and diabetes, this was something I knew. And seventy-seven. Well, it shouldn’t have been a surprise; I don’t suppose it was. But something about it was unexpected, a jolt. Indeed, he leaves large work, long years of glorious writing; and now is dead. The world is changing, he told us, and in my strong opinion Verne predicted very nearly every one of the major mechanical developments of this century; his ideas have obtained a kind of technological immortality. The world is changing but people go on dying in the usual ways, is somewhere near what I was thinking, now that the prophet himself had arrived at the limits of personal mortality.

  “Bird of six weeks kills her self with gas,” my son read solemnly. My children all are smart as whips, which I have written in these pages many times, but this last one an uncommon case: not yet five years old, but for more than a year he has been copying his letters from books and reading to me the captions of the daily newspaper.

  I looked where he pointed. “Bride,” I said. “Bride of six weeks.”

  “What’s a bride?”

  “A woman with a romantic inclination which has led her into reckless behavior.”

  This answer might have seemed sensible to him if he hadn’t taken up from his older brothers a mistrust of anything I am likely to say about women. And my children are parlor artists, every one of them: he breathed out in a dramatical fashion and tipped his head backward against my breast, staring upward with the expectation of a revised reply.

  “A woman newly married,” I said.

  “What’s married?”

  “Enslaved to a man,” I told him truthfully. At four years of age he has no appreciation of scrupulous truthfulness nor understanding of irony, and withal has learned from his brothers to question anything I am likely to say about men. “Ma!” he said, in the particular way of all my children, exasperated and demanding.

  I said into his turned-up face, “When a man and a woman decide to live as husband and wife, that’s marriage. Like Otto and Edith.”

  He considered the idea, studying upward with his eyes evidently fixed on the little dark caves of my nose; then he said seriously, “Like Jules and Charlotte.”

  Well, boys are prone to confuse the mother with the wife; in fact, husbands are prone to this same thing. So I only said, “No, not like you and me. We are mother and son.”

  I expected him to follow this line of questioning to its next natural point—to ask me if I had a husband, and who was he, which is related to, but not the same as, Do I have a father, and where is he? (heard and answered many times); but his mind does not work like mine and shortly he had circled round again to another issue. “Why’d the bride kill herself with gas?”

  With a child as young as Jules there is not much point in carrying scrupulous truthfulness to the edge of the abyss. “I don’t know,” I said. “It may just be she was very, very sad.” Both of us considered this poor sad bride for a moment. The world is changing but people go on dying in the usual ways. Then I said, “Get up now, I have work. So do you. I want you to find the dog and a scissors and cut the hair away from his eyes, but not too short, and don’t poke his face nor yours, and put the scissors away after.”

  This was something he had attempted without instruction on two occasions in the recent past, for which reason I had hidden the scissors thoroughly and cautioned the dog against cooperation. But I had lately been wondering if Permission would cut the desirability right out of that particular adventure, and in any case Horace Stuband would be rowing Melba up the slough by this time, and it might be, if Jules went on searching out the scissors for a quarter of an hour, Melba would be standing in my kitchen tying on her apron and I’d be locked away in the shed when the matter came to a climax.

  Jules popped out of my lap with a little shout and went off at a gallop, calling for the dog.

  “Ma!” Frank said from the very air aloft. “Lightning’s hid her kitties up here, Ma, there’s a hidey-hole under the eave. Look!”

  Someone has taught that cat to count, is my belief, for she has never failed to notice when we have sneaked off with the weaklings and the crooked-born of her kittens, and she has become more and more wily with each successive litter, determined to raise them all, runts and mutants all, in a behavior that to my mind must be proof of the basic tenets of Darwin, or disproof; which, I cannot as yet decide. For more than a week my children have been looking for Lightning’s new litter in places as unlikely as sugar bowls, desk drawers, and rooftops.

  “Where?” I called to Frank, and went out in the mud of the yard to see where he was pointing from his slippery toehold on the gable of the kitchen porch. “Oh my Lord, Frank. Can you see them? How many are in there?”

>   “She’s in there with them. I ain’t reaching in. It smells like puke and she’ll bite a hole in me and I’ll bleed to death.”

  I school my children as to the rules of absolute construction, agreement of the participle, and placement of copulative conjunctions, but ignore the colloquial as a matter of principle. Ignore, as well, certain subjects of interest to Frank, whose inclination is to direct people’s attention toward blood, purulence, and excrement. I said, “Just look in there, Frank, for heaven’s sake. Count them.”

  “I don’t want to put my face up there! She’ll tear my eyes out and I’ll be blind.”

  Parlor artists, every one of them—which is something their departed father unjustly blamed on me. “Well, then, come down from the roof and go look for Lewis; he’s left the woodpile in a jumble. Let Lightning keep her mutant, godforsaken children, only I won’t be held responsible for what comes to pass. It’s inevitable, I suppose, that a Cat Monster will someday take over the earth.”

  I shook the newspaper as interjection, but having given up for now any hope of reading the dying words of Jules Verne, I returned the paper to the parlor, to the teetery stack at the end of the davenport bed. If I’m to follow what is happening in the world, and what’s being said about this writer or that book, and the details not only of the book industry but of biology and archaeology, chemistry and medicine, the latest debates over the conceptions of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and arguments to do with socialism, feminism, evolution, eugenics, insanity, disease, not to mention what it was exactly that Jules Verne said to his family before he died, and if I’m to go on living three thousand miles from the centers of science and politics and publishing, it always will be necessary to rely on a barrowload of subscriptions to publications of all sorts, and books through the mails. It’s a very lot of reading, and for four days of each and every month there’s no keeping up, as Melba never can be persuaded away from making a monthly visit to her daughter, Florence, in Yacolt, leaving my children and me to manage the household without her; and since the U.S. Post Office continues to bring my mail to the dock at Skamokawa every day with the flood tide, the stack of unread newspapers and periodicals always will build up during my housekeeper’s monthly absence, until by the fourth and last day it slides off the arm of the davenport bed into a loose mountain on the floor beside it: a direct result of Melba’s stubbornness and the continuing inability of my children to manage their lives without subvention and stewardship.