far

Fiction

The Smell of Rust

Desiree Remick

issue three

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I went to the mountains intending to die. Not by my own hand—I never had the guts for that—but by fate or circumstance or the inscrutable will of God. I asked my brother to look after my children, placed a letter in my glove compartment, and drove to the family property, which my grandparents had once fostered and which had since been remanded to nature.

The sun shone differently there. Filtered through the green-black needles of ancient firs, the light came out softer, thicker, like sap or syrup. I could almost run my hands through it. In its duplicitous pools, knots in the trunk of a tree became faces; faces became bones.

Walking through the old woods, I paused to place my hand on the wounded pine. As a child I saw it struck during a storm, a white bolt streaking fire from crown to root.

My mother used to say, “You always identified with that tree.”

When I forced open the cabin door, the stench of rat poured out. The floor was carpeted with droppings. A large grey-brown rodent watched me from the kitchen counter, unafraid.

I found a broom in the back and began to sweep away dry turds. There was no vigor to my cleaning. I brushed the planks tenderly, as if stroking my daughter’s hair.

Suppose I contracted some deadly, incurable ill.

Growing lightheaded, I opened a window. The morning breeze rushed in strong and clean and scoured the impurities from my lungs.

“I deserve to be here,” I said aloud. “I deserve happiness. I deserve life.”

My therapist had suggested such verbal affirmations. I told her it was strange, speaking words I didn’t mean.

“You’re an actor,” she said, “playing a woman who loves herself. The longer you stay in character, the better it will feel.”

It fixed nothing. I still did it, just to say I tried.

No earnest effort is in vain. My therapist told me that, too, after my mother passed away, when the guilt and sadness settled like a landslide and wouldn’t lift. She showed me infographics about something called “complex grief,” and I thought, isn’t all grief complex? Who is allowed to mourn simply? Life demands movement, but grief throws spike strips onto the road. It is itself a kind of death.

When the sun began to set, I climbed the ladder to the loft, though the work of cleaning was only half done. The rats had not ventured up there; the bedding in its plastic sheath was untouched. I lay on it, picturing my children. They would be done with dinner, my daughter devouring her homework, the boys fighting over control of a game. They would not be thinking of me.

I once read a book of true stories in which a man found a bird that had struck a window and damaged her wing. He made a nest out of rags and fed her seeds from his fingers. Slowly she recovered. One spring day, the man carried the bird outside and opened his hands to set her free, but she’d grown fearful of flying and would only sit in his palm, blinking at nothing.

I woke to a bruised and blushing sky. Something in the air felt different. I rose and descended the ladder that my mother had once missed in the dark, before there was any kind of barrier at the edge.

“I’m alright,” she’d said, as I stood looking down at her. “Go back to sleep, honey.”

To mother means we must never show our pain to our children. We must swallow it all, hold it in our bellies like a hot stone. Mother is a gender that blots out other genders, a fire that leaves no oxygen in the room.

Downstairs, all signs of rodent had been wiped away as if they never existed.

For decades, my grandparents allowed a man to occupy the second cabin further up the mountain. We knew him only as Malachai. He was an oddity who wandered the woods conversing with himself, and my brother and I had little to do with him other than the occasional sighting as we played Lewis and Clark (my brother took both roles and alternated between them, while I was Sacagawea, leading him to the shores of the Pacific).

Mother always warned us away from Malachai, and thus he was a source of fascination. We came to believe he was an axe murderer who buried victims under his cabin. I dared my brother to look once. He was halfway under, legs and rear end sticking out, when he suddenly reversed direction and emerged wide-eyed and bloodless.

“There were bones,” he said, when we’d gotten to safety. “Lots of bones.”

I had nightmares of Malachai chasing me into the crawlspace like a dog herding sheep to the slaughter. By the time I was a young mother, bringing my own children to the property, he was already gone. I never learned what happened to him.

As I followed traces of dirt road through aspen groves and thickets of young firs, I lost myself in the mountain birdsong. The chickadee sang chicka-dee-dee-dee; the red-winged blackbird called, pumpkin eeeeeater! I whistled back.

Mother used to call me her echo.

Sunlight stunned me as I stepped into a field of daffodils. Hundreds in full bloom, their yellow mouths asking a silent question. They swayed among the wildflowers like transplanted organs.

I’d forgotten how beautiful it was, this piece of land.

Malachai’s cabin was ruined. The windows smiled with broken teeth. Part of the roof had fallen in, probably under heavy snow. The bedframe was rusted, the sofa cushions nibbled, the dresser shedding paint in big scales. Before I left, I got down on my hands and knees in the grass, peering into the dark gap in the foundation. I could see nothing so I shimmied closer, scraping my arms on the splintery wood. The smell of rust was everywhere.

In a medical art class in college, I saw a painting of a soldier dying of tetanus. He was nude, his back so arched that only his shoulders and heels touched the bed. His face was a rictus, teeth bared, eye fixed and staring. But what obsessed me about the painting was that its artist, in the face of human agony, had drawn out beauty. The body was reverently detailed—perfect skin, dark effeminate hair. Genitals a soft blur. The image was weirdly erotic and might, with a different title, have depicted the ultimate pleasure.

My eyes adjusted to the shadows under the cabin, and I saw what my brother had seen. Bones in the wild are not museum-white, but grey or brown or yellow. These were too small and delicate to be human. I backed out, bloodying my skin again, and stood for a while among the daffodils.

“I deserve to be here,” I said. “I deserve happiness. I deserve life.”

Soon the nod-and-wink of rain morphed into muscular thunderheads with dark bellies. I was soaked by the time I reached shelter. I stripped down, wrapped myself in a blanket, and sat by the window. Through the water-warped glass, I could see the garden, a square plot braced by boards. In that soil, I taught my children to plant and water, weed and harvest. First my oldest, who laid each seed in the ground tenderly, her braids torn apart by the wind. Then, five years later, my inseparable boys. They never took to horticulture, preferring to dig for worms and roly-polies.

We can’t save everything we love.

In the early hours of the night, my daughter visited me in a dream, flickering between child and nascent adult. She snapped petals from a flower until only one remained.

“You always cared about yourself the most,” she said.

I wanted to shake her. “How can you say that? I worked so hard to raise you and the boys, no help from your father. No help from anyone. I gave my mother baths and changed her diapers for years, alone.”

My daughter shook her head. “You’re like a book with only a cover and no pages inside,” she said. “You did all those things but never let us know you. And now you’re trying to disappear.”

I woke with wet cheeks and a terrible ache in my throat and stumbled out into the quiet brutality of dawn, feeling raw, flayed open, my viscera spilled. I found myself once more among the daffodils hanging their dew-heavy heads, and the silence pressed into my ears like fingers, and I knelt in the presence of something far older than my human pain. It came to me as a trio of black bear cubs tumbling over each other in the tall grass while the mother stood stiff and alert nearby.

This, now, was the moment in which all my future moments were suspended, like a drop of water clinging to the tip of a pine needle, about to fall. The sun was just rising over the mountains.