Evergreen by Rebecca Rasmussen Page A

“People said they went to Canada. Desperate people go north.”
    Eveline still had Lulu’s coonskin coat, and though it gave her strength just thinking about it, she thought maybe it was time to give it back.
    “This is your first fish, isn’t it?” Reddy said, licking the ends of his fingers.
    “How did you know?” Eveline said.
    “They always taste the best.” Reddy wiped the corners of his mouth with his sleeve. Scabs crisscrossed his face where he’d cut himself shaving in the garden the other morning.
    “I’m not going back to Yellow Falls,” Eveline said. “If you were wondering.”
    “I can help you cut wood for the winter,” Reddy said. “Lulu thinks it’ll be worse than last year, which was pretty bad where we were trapping. I’m sure she told you I shot my toe when I was cleaning my gun. She likes to tell that story for some reason.”
    Eveline thought of Lulu walking up to the cabin for the first time with a hard-boiled egg in her coat pocket.
    “We’re still figuring out how to raise the tax money, but I’m sure we can come up with enough for all of us,” Reddy said. “We’ll sell the truck if we have to. I don’t have to go to Yellow Falls as much as I do either. Poor Gunther, having me for a father.”
    Reddy was eyeing the brown liquor bottle in the back of the tent.
    “I’d have some,” Eveline said, because he would do the same for her.
    He already had.
    Reddy got the bottle and a tin mug from inside the tent. He poured a little into the mug and handed it to Eveline, who squeezed his forearm lightly.
    “You’re a good husband and father,” she said.
    Reddy drew the bottle to his mouth. “You girls could break me in half.”
    The two of them drank together in the fading light—friends, family, whatever they were. When she woke in the morning, Eveline knew Reddy and the pup tent would be gone.

11
    By October men in orange hats, camouflage coats and pants, took over the woods the way Emil had said they would. They came to Evergreen to shoot what they couldn’t kill in their hometowns, what didn’t exist there anymore. They drank and smoked and crashed around like the land owed them something. During the day, Eveline cut wood and dragged it back to the cabin with Hux strapped to her back on a cradleboard she made out of plywood and the walnut weighing her down in front. Lulu and Reddy kept trying to get her to wear something orange so the men didn’t shoot her. They wanted to give her some of their wood, too, so she didn’t have to go out on her own as much. But that’s what her friends didn’t understand: Eveline wanted to be alone. She needed to be.
    At night after she put Hux to bed, Eveline sat in front of the woodstove whittling arrows until their points were sharp enough to pierce the flesh of the buck she knew she had to get to pay the taxes she and Emil owed by the end of November. She knew it couldn’t be just any buck either; he needed tohave a rack that would satisfy Jeremiah Burr and his empty office wall. He needed to be a royal buck. Even though Lulu and Reddy kept offering to sell their truck to pay her taxes, Eveline kept saying no. If she couldn’t pay the taxes now, she’d never be able to. Reddy lent her one of his bows because she refused to hold a gun again, and Eveline made a target out of a bundle of dried river grass and a tarp pulled taut across it. She decided she wouldn’t go hunting until she hit the center of it.
    Eveline’s belly was growing rounder and softer, but the rest of her was growing stronger and harder. In September, the brush she cut for kindling would scrape her fingers raw, and even the gentlest application of salve would make her cringe. Now, her hands were full of calluses so thick the tip of a needle wouldn’t penetrate them. Muscles she didn’t even know belonged to her poked out of her arms and legs at strange angles. Ropy blue veins. Eveline looked like a different person than the one who’d arrived in Evergreen a