Solomon's Decision, page 4
"All you have to do is call Steven's mom and she'll let us sleep in her family room again."
"Hold it! Wait just a minute! We can't just go to Boise and stay at a perfect stranger's house." She had agreed--actually, mindlessly agreed--to taking the twins to Boise some summer weekend to go tubing on the river. Although she'd done it herself once, with Jesse, she didn't think it was an activity she wanted to undertake with two adventurous children. Not to mention descending on this Steven's mother like a horde of locusts.
"Steven's mom said she likes having company. And besides, he's my friend," Ginger said, with the heartrending expression that never failed to melt Madeline's resolve.
"We'll see," she told them, taking refuge in every parent's evasion. "It'll be quite a while before the river's low enough to tube in, and we'll talk about it then."
Kyle's lower lip went out. "You'll forget," he accused.
"No she won't, 'cause we won't let her," Ginger promised. Her grin was pure devilment.
Madeline knew she was in for constant reminders, until her good intentions were worn away like rock under a waterfall. She glanced at the clock. "Finish your milk, Ginger. Kyle, did you remember to feed King Alfred?"
Eventually they were on their way to school and she was alone, left with the usual puddles of milk on the table, fragments of breakfast on the floor, and a house still echoing with their childish laughter. Was ever a woman so blessed, she wondered, as she quickly tidied the kitchen.
The decision to have Kyle and Ginger had not been arrived at easily. Madeline had known she would cause more than raised eyebrows in Garnet Falls when she produced a baby out of wedlock, particularly so soon after Jesse's death. But she had been so desperately lost. The Zengers had contributed to her decision, too, with their outspoken regrets that she and Jesse had been too good, too careful.
"I never thought I'd be wishin' one of my boys was careless with his seed," Jethro had said, one of those Sunday afternoons when she had gone to the Z-Bar-Z, because she had been going there with Jesse since they were in high school and had nowhere else to go. "But if he had, and you was pregnant, nothin' would make me happier."
"That way we'd have something of him left," his wife agreed. "And so would you."
She shared their regret. Jesse had been a part of her life since the awful day she arrived in Garnet Falls, newly orphaned and unsure of her welcome in the big house where her father had grown up. Her grandparents hadn't been easy with children, but they'd given Madeline a home, and as much love as they were capable of. They had praised her scholarship and her good behavior. They'd never been particularly affectionate.
Jesse gave her hugs. Jesse always gave her hugs, from the time she was eight and he was eleven until she was sixteen and he showed her that there was more, much more than hugs, to loving a man.
How desperate they'd all been to salvage something from the disaster of losing their son and her lover. She and Jesse had stopped practicing birth control as soon as she returned to Garnet Falls after her graduation from Boise State. They wanted babies. Lots of babies. But he had died, alone and bleeding in the mud, just a week before their wedding. When her period came, a few days later, it had nearly destroyed her.
In retrospect, her decision to be inseminated had been for all the wrong reasons. It was a good thing there hadn't been any kind of psychological evaluation to determine her suitability as a parent. She would have failed spectacularly. Four months after Jesse's death, she was in Portland for her first attempt. She'd specified a sperm donor with Jesse's physical characteristics: sandy hair, brown eyes, long and lanky. On her second try, she'd caught.
Jesse's mother hadn't approved. But Jethro had, saying, "It ain't like having Jesse's own blood children, Linnie, but the babies do make me feel almost like a grandpa." He remembered them on birthdays and at Christmas. His approval made it possible for her to be an unwed mother--by choice--in a small town where the sexual revolution was merely a topic on the evening news.
Now Jethro was selling out and moving to Arizona. "The winters are just too much for these old bones, Linnie. If Jesse had lived...well, never mind. But I'm tired of fightin' the beef market and the weather and the government. I've worked hard all my life and I want to do a little playin' before my time comes."
She couldn't blame him. But oh, lord, she would miss him. He was as dear to her as her own father would have been.
The telephone's ring brought her back to her kitchen. Harry Lindholm's request made her wish she could cancel Monday and go back to bed.
* * * *
Erik looked down onto Main Street as he sipped his instant coffee. The studio apartment above the Wooden Nickel was a far cry from his condo in Vienna, Virginia. According to Lester Wood, who owned the building, the only time noise could be a problem was on Friday and Saturday nights. "If you're like most young bucks," he had said when he was showing Erik the place, "you'll be out whoopin' it up with the rest of 'em, so it won't make no never mind."
Erik had refused the free use of Amelia Warren's mobile home, for taking favors from a County Commissioner would have been a conflict of interest, not to mention putting him all too close to her interested view. But he hadn't been able to resist this apartment, particularly when his own search for semi-permanent lodging had proved futile. Amelia had sent him to Lester, and the furnished apartment had been cleaned and made livable on Saturday.
Home! For the next few weeks, at least. When he wasn't off on another of his active projects. He'd certainly have to get back to Mississippi no later than next Tuesday, to check on the progress of the coastal wetland the Trust was attempting to restore.
Damn, but it had been inconvenient, arriving on a Thursday, in order to meet with all the commissioners. Friday had been wasted, too soon to make arrangements for a helicopter to fly them in to the site. The only good thing about the delay was finding this apartment. He'd spent Saturday exploring as much of Hells Canyon as he could reach by road, Sunday moving in and getting settled. And now, finally, he was going to see the supposedly incomparable wetland that had brought him almost three thousand miles.
He was willing to bet it was a mess. A century of cattle and sheep grazing had left little of the West in its pre-settlement condition.
He rinsed the cup under the tap and set it to drain. It was a good thing he was compulsively neat, for a single thing out of place in this tiny apartment would make it look unkempt. Time to go.
Harry Lindholm wasn't at the airport--a grassy landing strip with a single unattended hanger. Neither was the helicopter, which was flying down from New Meadows. Perhaps he should have insisted on chartering the helicopter himself, since NWT funds were paying for it. But Harry had said using the flying service in New Meadows would be much cheaper than chartering out of Boise, so Erik had let him go ahead and make the arrangements.
Erik leaned against the fender of his rental car, enjoying the quiet, the solitude. Except for a distant mechanical murmur from the sawmill on the other side of town, he could hear nothing but birdcalls, the whisper of wind in the cottonwoods along Garnet Creek, and his own thoughts.
Moments like this were becoming more and more precious to him, the longer he stayed in D.C., and more and more necessary. Perhaps it was time he did what he always said he'd do when he got tired of life in the fast lane--settle down.
There were worse places to settle down than Sunset County, Idaho.
The distant thwump-thwump of a helicopter reminded him that he was only here to do a job. When he settled down, it would be someplace where the hand of man had touched the land but lightly. He wanted no reminders of civilization in the view from his front porch--if he ever had one.
Tires on gravel signaled the arrival of Harry Lindholm, Chairman of the County Commissioners, John Deere and Ford dealer, and his guide for today. He heard a door slam and, without turning, he said, "We couldn't ask for a nicer day, Harry."
"Harry could." There was laughter in the husky, feminine voice.
He spun around. Madeline was pulling a daypack out of the back of a dark blue minivan. Her black curls held glints of red in the morning sun and her pert little bottom filled a pair of jeans quite nicely.
"What are you doing here? Where's Harry?"
"Harry and his hunting dog had a disagreement over which way they'd walk this morning," Madeline said, walking toward him. "Ace won, but in the process he pulled Harry off the porch and broke his leg." She smiled. "So I'm your guide."
Excitement flared in him. All weekend he'd done everything he could to avoid thinking of her, for his thoughts always ended in the same place.
He wanted her, with an ache that was enormous, overwhelming, all-consuming. Erik swallowed. "That's great," he said, wondering if she heard the quaver in his voice. How the hell was he going to spend a day in her company and keep his hands off her?
The helicopter landed, preventing any further conversation. While he loaded the duffel containing his field gear, Madeline returned to the minivan for a roll of maps and a pair of rubber boots.
Soon they were airborne. Erik sat alone in the rear seat, not touching Madeline. It was difficult enough to ignore the vulnerable line of her neck when he shifted his gaze past her from one window to the other. He watched the world revolve under them as the pilot turned the aircraft and soared over the high ridge that rose just west of Garnet Falls. This wasn't the green and lush land he was used to, but it had a bleak beauty of its own.
Sagebrush gave way to scattered timber as they climbed higher. Soon ponderosa pine and Douglas-fir grew tall and straight on steep mountainsides, forming an open forest where deer and elk abounded, where grouse and squirrel, bear and bobcat lived in uneasy proximity. Erik knew that if he were on the ground he would see signs of human disturbance, but from up here, the forest looked as it must have for ten thousand years.
They swooped over another ridge, into a valley where a dirt road pointed to clean white buildings on a knoll. The bottomland was green, spotted with red cows and their gamboling calves. He caught the glint of a meandering stream as they turned to follow the road.
"...cousin Jon...Double J...borrow a horse...." The noise from the rotor, carried inside through the open window, stole Madeline's words.
"I can't hear you," he shouted as she looked back, obviously expecting an answer.
"Never mind," she said, but he read the words on her lips rather than hearing them. Her smile twisted his heart, it was so incredibly sweet.
They were in the air for almost an hour. After the ranch with the white buildings--the Double J, he figured--they went over another ridge, followed another stream up a narrow canyon, and then hovered above a hillside where the stream entered the canyon. Madeline pointed and Erik looked as the helicopter slowly rotated counter-clockwise so that the view was directly outside his window.
He looked. He rubbed his eyes and looked again. "Oh. My. God!"
There weren't any places like this left on Earth. Somehow they'd crossed a dimensional barrier and come out in another time, on another planet.
"Wounded Bear Meadow." Madeline's words came clearly to him, despite the rotor noise and the wind.
Erik knew that nine hundred acres was close to one-and-a-half square miles. He knew that Wounded Bear Meadow was primarily a palustrine wetland comprising several types: forested, shrub/scrub, emergent, and submergent. He'd seen from the map that Wounded Bear Creek meandered through the valley containing the meadow, here dammed by beaver, there running free over its rocky bed. And he'd read in Madeline's letter that the meadow had never been plowed.
Nothing he'd heard or read or known had prepared him for what he was seeing.
A touch on his shoulder broke his enchantment. With raised eyebrows, Madeline gestured at the ground. He read her lips: "Do you want to land?"
Erik nodded vigorously.
As they descended, he wondered if the fizzing excitement in his blood was because of Madeline's light touch, or because he was going home, to a place he'd never been.
She was slipping into her daypack when he slid from the helicopter's door. "The pilot has got another job that'll take him about three hours. I brought lunch, so if it's all right with you, we'll look around until we get hungry."
"Sounds good to me," he agreed. He couldn't wait to explore Wounded Bear Meadow, to see if it was as pristine as it appeared.
* * * *
"I still don't believe there can be a place like this in cattle country," Erik said as they stuffed the remains of lunch back into her daypack. "In a few minutes, I'm going to wake up and start living today all over again."
"Jethro's gotten a lot of ribbing about it. This is some of the finest bottomland pasture on the Z-Bar-Z and he's always kept it fenced off. He always says that what was good enough for his grandpappy is good enough for him." Madeline zipped the pack and slid her arms through the straps. "Actually I think it was his great grandfather who first decided it was too beautiful a place to spoil. Back in the 1870s, if I remember rightly." For a moment she felt a twinge of regret that there would never be another Zenger to preserve Wounded Bear Meadow because it was, in Jethro's words, "the prettiest place this side of heaven."
She stood, waiting for him to finish marking the plastic sleeve of an aerial photo. "Now you see why I called for help. I just couldn't let it become part of a planned community, with jogging paths all around the edge and boardwalks out to the beaver dams."
"That's better than being drained. Twenty years ago, that would have been the first thing they did, right before they paved the whole place." Erik closed his camera and advanced the film. "There. Now, what are our chances of getting to that copse of trees out there? I'd like to look it over."
Madeline looked dubiously at the stand of evergreen trees on a low island surrounded by the many-branched stream and several beaver ponds. "I'm game, I guess. When I was up here before, we didn't really explore too much." Instead she and Jesse had picnicked on the wooded slope overlooking the meadow, then made long, delicious love under a pine tree.
She half-expected an old, familiar pain to catch at her heart with sharp talons. Instead all she felt was a gentle melancholy, a sorrow that Jesse's vitality, his deep capacity for love, was no more a part of her life. She missed him still, but she no longer felt half a person for his absence.
"The worst thing that can happen is that we'll get marooned on an island and have to wait for Bill to hoist us out," Erik said, heading out onto the hummocky area between them and the nearest beaver pond.
She could see the ground give under his feet, and knew he would sink were it not for the thick mat of roots that lay just under the surface of the wet soil. "No, the worst thing is that we'll fall into a beaver pond and get captured and stored for next winter," she countered, willing to join in his joking.
"Even worse than that would be to find a pool of slow mud and gradually sink out of sight." He turned around to grimace at her. "Ugh! Can you imagine feeling the mud climbing higher and higher on your body, slick and slimy and completely remorseless?"
"And pretty soon it reaches your mouth, and you can't say scary things any more." She caught up with him and gave him a gentle shove, barely causing him to break stride. "What in the world is slow mud?"
"It's like quicksand, only mud, and very, very slow. Haven't you ever stepped in a mudhole and started to sink?" He gestured. "Your feet get stuck, and the only way to get loose is to take off your boots. But there's no place to grab hold of for leverage, so you just keep sinking. It takes a lot longer, but it's just as deadly as quicksand."
"I don't believe you."
"You should. I'm the wetlands expert. Besides, it happened to me."
"How did you get out?"
"I didn't. I sank out of sight." The twitch of his mouth and the twinkle in his eye belied his serious tone.
The going got rougher. Little ponds appeared on the surface and the grasses--and sedges, according to Erik--became more sparse. Several times Madeline felt the mud grab her boot and try to hold it. Once it released her with a wet, sucking sound.
Erik grinned. "See, I told you."
It was all she could do to keep up with him. His long legs seemed tireless, his feet never seemed to miss solid roots instead of hungry mud. They crossed the first branch of the creek by wading a free flowing stretch between beaver dams. The water wasn't quite deep enough to overtop her boots, but she felt some slop inside, wetting her tucked-in jeans. Her boots, knee high and easily slipped on and off, were really too large around the top. She could have bought women's boots, but they were a couple of inches shorter, and she had wanted all the protection she could get when she helped irrigate two summers ago, when her cousin Jon was laid up with his smashed foot.
Erik stopped often, taking photographs or just looking around. His comments were mostly technical ones, more talking to himself than to her, she guessed. Madeline didn't have much breath left for speech, so she didn't try. It was humbling to find that her daily walks to and from work--half a mile each way--had inadequately prepared her for this kind of walking. She strode along briskly in town and here she was traveling at a slow stroll, but it was work. She had to watch where her feet landed, had to test the uneven and often yielding surface before setting her weight on each foot. Breathing through her nose was getting more and more difficult, because her lungs demanded oxygen in large gulps. Erik made it all look so easy, darn him.
Eventually they reached the copse. It was a lovely place, shady, with leathery-leaved low shrubs and tall grass under the dark green branches. Madeline sprawled gratefully on a fallen log while Erik pulled his camera from its protective plastic bag and changed memory cards. Watching his long, nimble fingers handle the camera as if it were an extension of themselves, she recalled how practiced they had been another time.
She pushed the thought back, 'way back. She was going to have to work with him for weeks, perhaps months. If she allowed him to affect her the way he had in Seattle--the way he had ever since he came to Garnet Falls--she wouldn't be able to do anything effectively.
