Lenora

            Lenora lived on the ridge southwest of Paradise, California, 3,000 feet up the west slope of the Sierras with her daughter, Julie, two years old, and her son, Kevin, almost five.

            James met her when he went with Annalee to a meeting of people forming a food co-op, before the drunk driver slammed his pickup into James’s carryall. Annalee introduced him to small, thin Lenora of intense hazel eyes that startled James when he met her, because he couldn’t have told her eyes from the image of his own, brown eyes with yellow and green, with spots of black through the varied colors.

            Lenora kept her children close to her. She emanated controlled energy and calmness. James wondered about the jagged scar from the outside corner of her left eye, like a stylized drawing of a stroke of lightning, down to her chin.

            After Annalee left for Europe, two days before he had to leave his house, James saw a poster announcing a meeting at the co-op. He went because he knew he could manage the distance. He wanted to see people. He had a few dollars he could spend on food, and he had a backpack to carry food in.

            Lenora walked into the room. Her children held her hands. James had stopped near the door and stood looking at the people. He said, “Hello Lenora.”

            He thought he had startled her by speaking to her. He said, “Do you remember me? Annalee introduced me to you here about four months ago, when people were just forming the co-op.”

            “I remember you, James.”

            Earl emerged from grouped people talking together and asked James, “Hey man, what happened to you? Why the crutches?”

            James told him what had happened. Lenora watched the two men and listened to their conversation.

            Earl said, “If I can help, let me know. I have a pickup. If you need to move your stuff, I can help.”

            “Thank you. I’ve unloaded enough stuff, I can fit almost everything I own into my backpack.”

            Earl wrote down his phone number and handed the piece of paper to James. He said, “Give me a call if I can help you with anything.” He touched James arm, turned, and walked away.

            Lenora said, “There’s a shed in my back yard you can stay in, if you want to. It’s better than calling it a shed sounds. We use it for tools. It’s tight. It has a wood stove and two windows and outlets. It has an overhead light. It’s small, but it would give you shelter for the winter.”

            “Thank you. I’ll accept.”

            “When do you want to move?”

            “Now.”

            Everything he owned fit into the trunk of her car. He talked to Kevin and Julie on the way up the mountain. Lenora drove. She watched the road. She watched James and Kevin and Julie getting to know each other.

            Rain poured down in the foothills of the Sierras. Snow drifted down from the cold, grey sky. Snow blew off the ridge into the canyon or melted on a warm day and left the winter ground bare.

            Pete gave him a cane, a natural shape of manzanita, golden red, of twisted grain, that fit his hand and curved a little from straight on its way to the ground, the way his leg did.

            In the grocery store, Pete pushed his cart around the end of the aisle. His wooden leg creaked as he walked, a lopsided walk. He saw James putting food into his cart, and he said, “James, when are you going to get off those crutches?”

            “When I find a decent cane. I don’t like the sterile metal canes I’ve seen so far, and the wooden ones all look thin and weak, like they might break if I put any weight on them.”

            “You come with me. I’ll give you a cane.”

            James found Lenora shopping for her groceries in another aisle and said, “I’m going with Pete, so don’t wait for me. I’ll see you later this afternoon.”

            Pete and James paid for their groceries, put them in the back of Pete’s old, faded blue, rattling pickup, and drove out to his place, beyond the edge of town, down a long, curving driveway, past a tiny cabin in the curve of the gravel drive.

            Pete said, “That’s where Unc lived. He was eightyseven when he died, almost two years ago. Unc wasn’t of this world. He kept a big garden and fruit trees. He grew all his vegetables and fruit and most of ours. He wouldn’t talk to anybody except me, and sometimes not even me.

            “When he wasn’t working in his garden, he walked in the woods. He looked for anything that would make a cane and brought them home for me.”

            Pete showed James nineteen canes, of varied and often fantastic shapes, all of natural shapes, as they grew.

            James chose the thick manzanita cane, perfectly bent for a handle. He knew he would keep it all his life, long after he needed it.

            Pete, small, mostly bald, remaining hair gone white.

            When James went to high school and washed restaurant dishes weekends in the town on the ridge in the foothills of the Sierras, Pete fixed the kitchen exhaust fan. James climbed the ladder onto the roof to help him.

            They sat on the slope of the roof, shaded from intense sunshine by the metal fan housing. Up there above the world, the air smelled of roofing tar and automobile exhaust.

            Pete told James the history of the struggles of workers for fair treatment in this nation. That was the first time James heard the workers’ movement placed in history and the first time he heard an explanation of how and why the workers’ movement came about from a man who had lived some of it and whose interest came because he was a working man, still struggling, passionate for the rights of the people.

            Pete was the father of one of James’s friends. Sometimes James thought Pete should be his father. James didn’t see him often, but when he did, they took up old conversations where they had left off, with intensity that said they knew they had to say a lot in a short time.

            James left crutches behind and leaned heavily on the manzanita cane as he walked the edge of the ridge.

            Six weeks after he moved to the ridge, James walked along the ridge above the earth falling away into the canyon behind Lenora’s place. He wore his long, heavy black coat. He walked half a mile down the ridge and partway back, using his cane.

            His knee felt like fire burned inside the joint. Sharp pains shot down his shin, where bone had crushed to a thousand pieces and only recently healed.

            He sat down on deep, soft pine duff, beneath pine trees. Densely growing trees sheltered him from cold wind. He rested, wrapped in his coat, hands shoved deep into big pockets. He lay down and looked at the winter sky above him.

            He slept and woke under clouds gathering dark again for a new rain. The afternoon had slipped away into grey light of winter dusk. He got up from the ground and walked the rest of the way back to the cabin.

            Some cold mornings, he built up his fire and decided to take a few days off from building strength and endurance and stay inside by the stove. But after the fire warmed the place and he ate, he put on his insulated boots, his coat, hat, scarf, and gloves, and he walked out the door and away from the edge of civilization.

            He visited some of the people he knew on the ridge, but he felt isolated from most people, vulnerable, and alien. The visits reminded him of when he quit drinking, and the people around him seemed alien to him.

            Now, the people he visited were settled and content in their lives, occupied with very different interests from those that occupied James. They lived in a different world. He returned to his solitary walks.

            Pain slowed him down sometimes. He had no desire to attempt to share his pain with anyone.

            He returned to the tool shed after a long walk. The day’s light faded. When he entered the small cabin, he saw a body hanging from the rafters in the dark corner of the room. His heart slammed into his breastbone. He snapped on the light, and nothing was there. He didn’t know what to call that vision, but he knew it was his.

            He tried to refuse it, to cast it away from him. It came back in his dreams, a powerful image that woke him again and again. He kept walking and working toward recovery.

            He wrote a poem about the vision of a body hanging in the shed. “... the suggestion that I should end this time of pain and discouragement/ hangs like a strangled body/ body open, receiving suggestion/ turning slowly to rising darkness...”

            He revised the poem and read it again and again. Then he put it into the stove and watched it burn above the wood already burning. Smoke curved to the back of the stove, swirled up the pipe, and dissipated in the cold winter sky.

            Stan, Lenora’s husband, left her in the summer, a few months before James moved into the tool shed. She told James, “I don’t think he has a girl friend. He said he just doesn’t want to have a family anymore. I think noisy kids and a wife who isn’t as beautiful as she was when she was twenty-one got to him.

            “He dreams. Real life didn’t go the direction he dreamed it would, so he dumped real life.”

            Lenora invited James to dinner several times a week. He accepted some of the invitations. He usually talked to Kevin and Julie more than he talked to Lenora.

            He wondered how Ian and Heather were doing, but he didn’t see them. Frank still didn’t do anything about getting him visitation rights, and he wouldn’t turn loose of records. James didn’t have money for another lawyer, even if he could get Frank to release records.

            He stayed on the ridge. He kept walking. He read books about what people should do with their lives. He read novels to try to understand what people thought about the world. He read more psychology than he had read when he studied psychology in college. He read poetry and tried to understand more about what poetry does. He tried to find more direction for his own poetry.

            He wrote poems. He wrote songs. He played his guitar for hours in the afternoons and evenings. Sometimes, he wrote a poem or a song he liked. He liked his poems and songs about the world around him more than he liked what he wrote about himself.

            He had stored his almost finished wood carvings. Someday, he would get them and work on them again.

            He asked Lenora, “Do you have a rifle?”

            “A twenty-two.”

            “Could I borrow it?”

            “What do you want it for, James?”

            “I’ve been getting close to deer on the edge of the ridge. I’d like to shoot one and have some meat. I’ll share the meat with you.”

            “James, if I loaned you my rifle and you shot yourself, I couldn’t live through that. You can’t do that to anyone. I have hard times enough without having to deal with something like that.”

            “I won’t shoot myself, Lenora. Suicide isn’t a possibility for me. I already decided to live. This is a hard time to live through, but it’s a beautiful time, like being born again so I can be aware of the world around me as I grow into it.”

            Three days, he saw deer but not close enough to kill with the small-caliber rifle.

            The fourth day, cold morning fog gathered thick in the deep canyon. White fog moved with morning restlessness. Five deer walked up out of the deep canyon, dim grey shapes in moving fog. They walked up onto the top of the ridge and took on solid, grey form as they emerged from the last, trailing wisps of insubstantiality.

            A doe stopped, stood with thick, white, moving fog behind her, and looked at James. He walked closer. The grey doe stepped toward him, step after slow step, large, liquid brown eyes fixed on him, grey ears funneled toward him.

            He slowly raised the rifle. When she walked close enough, he shot her in the forehead.

            She dropped to the ground, quivered through her whole body, and died.

            He steadied his breathing and his heart. When he felt calm again, he walked forward. He lay the rifle on the ground, dropped to his knees, and touched her soft fur. He heard no sound.

            Then an owl called from over the edge, down in the canyon, “hoo, hoo-oo, hoo, hoo.” A deeper-voiced owl answered from much closer, “hoo, hoo-hoo-hoo, hoo-oo, hoo-oo.”

            Silence lay on the ridge. James knelt without moving, touching the soft fur on the doe’s neck.

            A raven croaked. James heard its wings against the air above him. A hawk screamed somewhere in the high air.

            James drew his knife, cut the doe’s skin, separated muscles, and cut the large artery in her neck. Blood poured onto the ground and steamed in cold air. Rich blood smell rose around James on his knees in front of the doe, rose into the clouds and small blue sky openings above him.

            He spilled her intestines onto the ground and separated out her heart and liver. Strong smells of partially digested grass and intestines permeated the cold air.

            Once, he would have easily carried the white-tailed deer across his shoulders. He will carry that much weight again, in a few months, in a year, he doesn’t know how long, but now, he can’t carry her.

            He returned to the house and told Lenora, “I’m going to need some help.”

            “Can I get to it with the garden cart?”

            “I think so.”

            “Okay. We’ll take a rope and the garden cart.”

            They lifted the deer into the cart. Lenora tied rope to the cart handles. She lifted the handles. James leaned into the rope, chest high, and walked ahead. They shared the load up the long incline to Lenora’s place.

            He hung the carcass from a rafter in the woodshed. He said, “Meat should hang several days, but we’re going to have to get this into the freezer before someone sees it.”

            He skinned the deer and separated the carcass into quarters and the rib cage and backbone while Lenora settled Julie and Kevin for the night. Then she came back outside.

            She said, “I don’t want them to see anything but meat. Meat, you can buy in a store. It might be impossible to get them to keep quiet about this.”

            They cut and wrapped meat on Lenora’s kitchen table. They put the packages of meat in the freezer.

            James said, “Some cultures believed you took on qualities of the animal you killed and ate.”

            “What do you think of as the qualities of this deer?” She taped a package and added it to the pile growing on the tray.

            “Strength, endurance, grace, gentleness, beauty. She looked at me, and then she walked directly toward me.”

            Lenora looked up at him, across the table laden with bloody meat, bones, bits of fat, and tendons.

            He had never really seen her before.

            In light from the fixture in the ceiling above her, in light from the fixture above the sink, in light flowing through the doorway from the living room, her face formed a series of intricately blended planes, joined in beautiful, geometric patterns, living, rounded flesh that shone forth deep vitality.

            The deep scar on her left cheek met merging planes of her face and joined them together, as if it had been added to emphasize the beauty of her face for this moment of his realization.

            Her green, brown, yellow, and black eyes radiated patterns of colors and light from the deep black pupils out through the irises. He thought he looked into a mirror and saw impossible images penetrating his existence.

            He wondered if she knew a powerful shock of recognition drove from her face, from her eyes, into him.

            He looked at the sharp edge of his knife. He could cut off one of his fingers, or his ear. He could cut off some part of himself and present it to her. “Please accept this small part of myself as a token of the powerful feeling that nearly overwhelms me as I look at you.”

            He drew in a long, even breath and put away the thought of self-injury.

            She had recently told him some of her deeply private history, though she knew she might alienate him to an irreconcilable distance by telling him.

            Instead of backing away from her when she told him, he felt more tightly connected, as if he took another step toward becoming part of this family on the ridge. He began to think he knew Lenora better than he had ever known anyone. He wanted to know her better than he did.

            He wanted to understand the composition of her face, the depths of her eyes, the colors of her existence, the patterns of her history, but cutting himself and offering her a severed part of his own flesh had no part in what he felt.

            He thought about what she told him had happened to her as she grew up. Her existence became a testimony of healing, a testimony about the power and continuity of the life force, not a testimony about further injury.

            She said, “Some hunting cultures believed prey animals volunteered to become food for the hunters. Hunters agreed to honor the animals, and the animals volunteered to die so the people would have food, so they could continue to live.”

            “I don’t know what they did to honor the animals.”

            “I think if we thank her and respect what she was, what she still is, that must be part of it.”

            Tears ran down his face. He made no effort to fight them, but he said, “I don’t think crying would have been part of it.”

            “What was part of it for Indian hunters might not fit you. If tears fit you now, that should be part of your ceremony.”

            He cut meat. They cut up one hindquarter and the back straps, packaged the pieces, and put them in the freezer before either of them spoke again.

            Then Lenora said, “Cannibals believed a person takes on qualities of the person they eat. That’s why they did it. If you eat part of an enemy who was strong and smart, a powerful warrior, you take on some of his best qualities.”

            “I don’t think I’m that hungry yet. I’ll probably stop at venison.”

            “Hunger wasn’t the reason. It was a religious ceremony, a religious ritual.”

            She took the wrapped meat to the freezer, put the packages in, came back, wrapped more meat, and started to fill the tray again. She said, “Do you think we’ll take on qualities of this deer when we eat this meat?”

            “If we work at it. I think we have to be conscious of it and work toward it.”

            “You need to regain strength and endurance. You don’t think you lack grace and beauty because you were injured, do you?”

            He put sliced meat on the paper she had just put down. He looked up at her. He thought of Annalee and the look he had seen in her deep brown eyes after he was injured. Sometimes he missed Annalee with an intensity he couldn’t allow to exist.

            He said, “I don’t know. Yes, I do know. Injury has nothing of beauty about it.”

            “Beauty and grace come from inside. Maybe going through difficult times gives you strength and beauty. I didn’t know you very well before, but I think you’ve gained beauty and inner strength since you were injured.”

            “Thank you, Lenora. That’s kind of you to say.”

            “I didn’t say it from kindness. That’s what I see.”

            At ten o’clock, they finished cutting and wrapping meat.

            James said, “We have to get rid of bones and the hide and the head.”

            “If you’ll stay here with Kevin and Julie, I’ll put it all in the garden cart and take it as far out the ridge as I can go. I think coyotes and ravens would appreciate the chance to scavenge what’s left.”

            When she came back, she said, “We’re both bloody. Let’s wrap up the night with a hot shower.”

            “That’d be good. I’ll finish cleaning up here while you take the first shower.”

            “Why don’t we let the kitchen go until morning? We can take a shower together. That would save water.”

            James had gathered knives to wash them, but he put them back down on the table. “Uh-- umm, that sounds like a good idea. I wonder if it actually saves water.”

            His hands shook. He concentrated until he held them steady again.

            “I’m sure it does.” She reached for his hand and led him toward the bathroom. “Come on. I’ll show you.”

            When they stepped out of the shower and toweled dry, James said, “I don’t think it did.”

            “Did what?”

            “Saved water. It might have used more water than separate showers.”

            “No. When I’m alone, I take long showers, until I run out of hot water.” She turned him around by the shoulders and rubbed his back with the towel. “I wanted to hurry and get clean and get dry, because while we were showering, I thought of something else we could do.”

            She turned him back around. He reached around her and rubbed her back with his towel. They stood tightly against each other.

            In the early hours of the morning, wind blew snow against the window above Lenora’s bed. James said, “I think the tool shed will be cold. I didn’t build a fire this evening, but I’d better head that way.”

            “Stay with me.”

            “What about Julie and Kevin? You worried about them talking if they saw the deer. They might talk if they get up in the morning and find me in your bed.”

            “Killing a deer this time of year is illegal. We could be fined or go to jail for it. Having you in my bed isn’t illegal.”

            “It could be dangerous.”

            “I didn’t stop taking birth control pills when Stan left. For a while, I thought he would come back. Then I didn’t want him to come back. After you moved into the tool shed, I started thinking I might eventually get you into my bed, so I kept taking them. So, no negative consequences. Please relax and stay with me.”

            “They might say something to their dad.”

            “He’ll have to deal with it. He chose to leave. He voluntarily gave up any say he had in my life. He might be startled, but he wouldn’t be dangerous to either one of us.

            “It took me a long time to get enough nerve to invite you. I hope you don’t leave now. With me wrapped around you, I don’t think you can get away. Have you gained that much strength?”

            “I’m not interested in finding out. The shed will be really cold. You’re warm.”

            “Then sleep. Unless you want to start again. This is even better exercise than walking, you know. It really builds strength and endurance. We have hours before daylight.”

            James woke startled and afraid. Lenora murmured against him, “What’s happening, James?”

            “Bad dream. I dreamed cannibals were after me. Modern cannibals, in fast cars and business suits.”

            “I forgot to tell you. I’m a cannibal.” She pulled the covers off him and moved down in bed.

            A long time later, James said, “That clears every bad dream I could ever have. But it isn’t the kind of cannibalism I was thinking of.”

            “Best I could come up with on short notice.” She moved back up and lay full length on him. He held her tightly until he had to say, “I have to move you so I can catch up on breathing.”

            James still used the shed that winter. Sometimes he wanted to be alone and concentrate on nothing but recovering, reading, writing, trying to find new sounds in the strings of his guitar. Lenora told him he was welcome whenever he wanted to stay with her in the house, and she left it at that.

            Kevin and Julie walked out to the shed some days, knocked on the door, and came in and spent part of the day with him. Sometimes they walked together along the ridge. Sometimes he sent one of them into the house to ask Lenora if she wanted to go, and they all walked together.

            James and Lenora exercised together many nights that winter, building strength and endurance. Love was a word neither of them used for the other, only for the children.

            Green grasses sprouted from the warming earth. Deciduous trees opened new, green leaves. Myriad birds returned to the ridge. James walked into the town spread along the center of the top of the ridge and found work mowing lawns, repairing houses, pulling weeds, whatever he could find. He usually could work only two or three hours, sometimes four.

            Lenora grew part of their food in the garden behind the house. Stan, becoming her ex-husband, sent support money, but not enough to take care of all her needs.

            Lenora and James had cast their lots together when James killed the deer. They continued to share their resources and their needs.

            Fall turned the leaves red and yellow, orange and brown, a hundred shades of colors against the colder sky of autumn above the mountain. James realized he hadn’t seen bluebirds for several days. Meadowlarks had flown south. He looked for all the species and found only those who wintered on the ridge.

            Winter stripped the deciduous trees and brought a storm that left a foot of snow. The insurance company sent James a check.

            He showed it to Lenora. “It took a long time. I’m buying into Doug’s metal and manufacturing business. He wants an ambitious partner.

            “I think he’s burned out on having to stay on top of the whole business. We’ve known each other since high school. We both think our partnership will work. It’s an opportunity to do really well, if it’s run right.

            “I’ve had enough poverty to last the rest of my life. I want to make a good living. I haven’t liked the idea of moving east, but that’s where the business is, so it looks like it means moving east.”

            Lenora looked at him for a long time. Then she extended her hand, as if to shake. “It’s been nice, James. I’m going to miss you a lot.”

            He held her hand in both of his hands. “I guess I’m slow to say what I’m thinking. I want you to go with me. I want Kevin and Julie to go with us. I want you to marry me, but if you aren’t ready for that, I’ll take you any way I can get you, as employee in the business, or housekeeper, as mistress, as head gardener, as a friend I support from love, as a librarian who takes care of all my books, whatever works for you.”

            “Are you sure about that James? I’ve wondered what would happen when you could afford to leave here. A long time ago, I realized you might say good bye and leave, and everything would be over. In my bravest moments, I accepted that possibility.”

            “I am sure. If you don’t want to go, I’ll pay off your house so you’re not struggling to make payments, and I’ll leave you enough money so you don’t have to wonder where groceries are coming from.”

            “You’re generous, but I’m also a good shot. The kids and I can live on venison and what we grow in the garden.”

            “You mean you want to stay here?”

            “I don’t want to go with you if you’re inviting me out of a feeling of obligation.”

            “I’ve never said I love you, have I? Those words got knocked out of me by experience that showed me the words mean nothing without a lot of foundation under them. I think we’ve built that foundation piece by piece until it’s more solid than I thought a foundation under love could be.

            “I love you. I love Kevin and Julie. I want you to come with me, but I also want you to do what you want to do.”

            “I love this place. It has a lot of me in it.”

            She stepped forward. They hugged each other and stood tight against each other as the clock on the bookcase ticked and ticked. Its second hand spun around its blind face.

            Lenora said, “I can get what we absolutely need packed by morning if I start now, if you take care of Julie and Kevin while I work at it.”

            It took them much longer than that to find a place to live and to get ready and move. While they looked and got ready, James worked his way deeper and deeper into his new business.

            Lenora planned a small wedding in the garden. She sent for her sister. Doug came from east and stood with James.

            Early in the morning, the day of their wedding, Lenora shoveled a path through snow, cleared a large, round area in the garden, and spread dry, clean straw on the ground so their feet wouldn’t get muddy. The clean, summer smell of straw the color of sunshine spread above winter snow.

            James came out to help, but Lenora stopped him before he entered the path. “I want to do this myself,” she said. “You stay out of the garden until we’re ready to start the ceremony.”

            When they planned their wedding, James said, “Maybe we should get the living room ready, too, in case we have a storm.”

            “That won’t be necessary. The sun will shine for our wedding.”

            From deep in his love for her, where he sometimes thought he had sunk beyond the reach of reason, James wondered if Lenora harbored an edge of insanity, part of her that stayed out of contact with the world of reality. He saw in her eyes the certainty of sunshine and a suggestion of alien existence. He knew misalignment with contemporary reality formed an essential part of her and an essential part of his love for her.

            Sun shone into the garden. Sunshine reflected from snow, brilliant in the sheltered area between the house and pine trees along the edge of the canyon. They wore sunglasses, five adults and Julie and Kevin. Their soft, clear voices spoke of a commitment into eternity and were the only sounds against the brilliant white silence of the mountain.