Evergreen by Rebecca Rasmussen Page B

year ago, one full of bruises and gashes and scars that looked exactly the way she felt.
    Eveline usually kept her hair a few inches below her shoulder blades, but this year it got all the way down to her waist before she noticed it. One night after Hux fell asleep, she sat with the silver hand mirror and a brush, trying to untangle the leaves and bullet burs and hardened mud it had collected while she was in the woods. When she couldn’t find her way through the knots, she cut it to her shoulders, then to her chin.
    She’d worn out the last of her dresses, so she stripped the scarecrow of its trousers and wore those now along with one of Emil’s heavy plaid work shirts. Hux was the only one who seemed to miss what she used to look like; when he was strapped to the cradleboard he’d suck on what was left of her hair.
    “Mama,” he said the first day it was gone.
    He kicked and wailed until Eveline set him down on the ground.
    “Do you want us to freeze to death?” she said sharply.
    The walnut stayed quiet.
    Cutting wood and dragging it back to the cabin was hard work, harder than Emil had let on last winter. But it was good, clean work, too, which kept her mind from wandering into visions of Cullen and herself forever entwined on the cabin floor. If she didn’t pay attention she could cut off her hand with Emil’s ax, which Lulu taught her to sharpen on the rocks down by the river one morning near the end of October.
    “ I could keep the baby,” Lulu said that day.
    Eveline touched the blade of the ax. The day was cool, the metal cold. The trees along the river shook their yellow leaves like fists. Snow was coming.
    “How do you know when it’s sharp enough?” Eveline said.
    “I just know,” Lulu said.
    Of course Lulu couldn’t keep the walnut—they both knew that. Eveline would have to stay on her side of the river for the rest of her life.
    “I’m not going to leave her in the middle of nowhere,” Eveline said. “Someone will adopt her. She deserves as much, don’t you think?”
    “You’re the one with the coat,” Lulu said, and went back to sharpening the ax.
    “I’ll give it back to you if that’s what you want,” Eveline said.
    Gunther and Reddy had just come down from their cabin to the river, the opposite shore. Reddy waved to Lulu and Eveline. He began to lay putty down in the hull of the canoe, since the ice would be coming soon, and the canoe wouldhave to be stored up in the rafters of their cabin. Either that or it would lay overturned in the chicken coop, and the chickens would have to come inside.
    Gunther began to skip stones.
    “Look at me, Hux!” he yelled. “I bet you can’t throw as far!”
    Lulu set the ax down. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s got into me lately. I have a lot more feelings than I want. A lot more memories.”
    Eveline touched Lulu’s shoulder. “Why did they leave you?”
    “I don’t know,” Lulu said, looking at the cat’s paws on the river. “My mother dropped me at school and told me to mind my teacher and eat my lunch the same way she did every single morning my whole life. She didn’t say a word different.”
    “This is different,” Eveline said gently.
    Lulu handed her the ax. “I know.”
    That afternoon, as the first snowflakes of the season fell, Eveline finally hit her target at its center. She strapped Hux to her back and went off into the forest, looking for the buck of all bucks, tracking disappearing footprints in the quickly falling snow. She heard the shots of other hunters in the forest, but she didn’t see their orange hats between the low-hanging tamarack branches, the dark green boughs. She walked for hours in the forest, turning in circles until she didn’t know quite where she was in relation to the cabin, until dusk came and she came upon a group of deer rubbing their antlers against tree trunks.
    Hux was sucking on the end of her hair, gripping it with his fingers. Eveline kept him on her back. The walnut kept