Mary White - The Qualities of Wood

Then the cool-green car left the heated asphalt of the town’s streets. They passed first the road crew, then the countless rows of grain, then the low, grassy hills.

‘I volunteer down at the grammar school three mornings a week,’ Katherine told her. ‘Right now they’re having summer school. I read stories to the kids, help corral them outside. And I work at our store every now and then, but the rest of the time I’m pretty free.’ An upbeat number played on the stereo; she tapped her fingers on the steering wheel. ‘It’ll be nice having you around for a while. Most women in town are older, or tied down with a pack of kids. And I’d be glad to help you out with the house, any time.’

Vivian shook her head. ‘Sounds like you’re pretty busy.’

‘When you’re redoing someone else’s, it’s more fun. Picking out curtains, painting – oh, remind me to give you the number of Max’s friend with the carpet business. He’ll give you a good deal.’

‘That’s probably something we’ll do last, after everything is moved out, including us.’

‘Keep it in mind, anyway.’ Katherine looked over, her eyes shaded by the huge lenses. ‘I never asked, what did you do in the city?’

After a moment, Vivian realized what she meant. Her job. ‘I just worked in an office.’ Down the road a short distance, she recognized the long driveway that led to Grandma Gardiner’s house. She reached down to get her purse.

‘What’s Sheriff Townsend doing out here?’ Katherine said.

Vivian looked up. A police car was parked in the driveway.

Katherine pulled behind the red truck, next to the cruiser. As they walked to the porch, they heard voices in the backyard. They turned and followed the sound. In the high grass behind the house, three men stood in a straight line like the trees behind them. Two wore the ill-fitting beige uniforms of law enforcement. One was taller and broader and wore a hat. He gazed at the tree line as the other one, a shorter and younger man with wispy blonde hair, spoke to Nowell.

The women waded through the tall grass. Nowell noticed them and waved, and the two policemen looked over.

‘Hello,’ Vivian said.

‘Hi, Viv.’ Nowell looked pale, even in the orange late-day sunlight, and he shielded his eyes. Vivian hadn’t seen him outside since the night she arrived.

‘Are you the welcoming committee, Sheriff Townsend?’ Katherine asked.

The taller, older man cleared his throat and said, ‘Mrs Wilton.’

Katherine turned to the younger man. ‘Don’t you two look solemn. What is it, Bud?’

Bud, the shorter and younger man, glanced at the sheriff, who was gazing into the trees again.

Nowell spoke first. ‘They found a dead girl back there.’

Katherine’s hand moved quickly to her mouth, her rings shooting yellow and orange sparks.

‘Back in the trees,’ Nowell added.

Vivian shuddered. ‘Where?’

Sheriff Townsend motioned with his hand. ‘Just ’bout a half-mile, northwest towards Stokes’s land.’

They all stood looking beyond the trees. After a moment, Katherine asked, ‘Who was it, Sheriff?’

‘Chanelle Brodie.’

She gasped loudly and closed her eyes. ‘Her poor mother,’ she said. ‘Her poor mother.’

Vivian glanced from the sheriff, who was staring at Katherine with his hard, gray eyes, to Bud, whose eyes were lowered, to Nowell, who was watching her reaction. All of them were eerily illuminated by the liquid-orange sunlight behind them. ‘What happened to her?’ she asked.

The sheriff’s forehead creased into deep lines.

Bud said, ‘Hard to say. We found her face-down on a rock with her head split open.’

Sheriff Townsend’s eyes shot him a warning and Bud quickly corrected himself. ‘Severe head trauma, looks like.’

Katherine was incredulous. ‘Someone killed her?’

‘Now, Mrs Wilton,’ the sheriff said. ‘We don’t know anything yet. We just found the girl this morning. So far, it looks like an accident.’

‘Oh my God.’ She shook her head.

‘Is that what you were looking for last week?’ Vivian asked.

The sheriff nodded.

‘Mrs Brodie reported Chanelle missing,’ Bud said, ‘so we conducted a preliminary search of the area.’ He glanced at Nowell. ‘The Brodies live on the other side of your land.’ He pointed towards town. ‘After a few days went by, we decided to give it another look-through.’

‘Probably didn’t look too hard the first time,’ Katherine said, ‘since that girl was running off every few weeks. Not the easiest child to keep track of, I would think. That poor woman!’

‘We’re just about finished here,’ Sheriff Townsend said. ‘I was asking your husband whether he’d seen or heard anything, Mrs Gardiner. He told me that you just arrived last Thursday.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you both saw lights back there that evening?’

She nodded. ‘Nowell said it was probably the sheriff, well, you, looking around.’

‘Have you seen or heard anything since then?’

‘No.’

He nodded slowly then turned abruptly to Bud. ‘Let’s get going, Deputy.’

‘Wait.’ Vivian touched Nowell’s arm and he flinched. ‘Is she…?’

‘The coroner’s been and gone,’ Bud said.

The men turned again to leave. Vivian turned to look at the trees, to imagine what was beyond them, when all at once, a lone figure emerged from the woods and advanced slowly but steadily, up the incline and through the high grass, the tall trees at his back like a house he’d just left through the front door. ‘Look,’ she said.

The sheriff’s hand went to his holster; Nowell and Katherine took a collective step backwards.

The grass crunched under the feet of the stranger, closer and closer until Vivian could make out a plaid shirt, blue jeans, black and silver hair. Something about his stride was familiar, the loose-jointed smoothness of his gait, like her father’s. This man was much younger, his face more angular, she thought.

Sheriff Townsend called, ‘Evening, Mr Stokes.’

They sighed, leaned back on their heels, and began to stir again.

Flushed slightly from his walk and his eyes shiny with moisture, the man looked around at each one of them. ‘Evening, all,’ he said.

The summer Vivian was nine, she and her parents spent a month in the east, in a cabin surrounded by trees. Her mother was participating in a seminar for writers, having been invited to give two workshops on non-fiction. Backed by a well-known writing school, the seminar ran for six weeks and drew fledging writers from all over the country. Her mother directed a general course titled Writing about History and another on Finding the Story within the Story. Vivian remembered these details from the brochure that arrived several weeks before the trip. She had been intrigued by the picture of her mother inside, a grainy, indistinct photograph, black print on brownish paper. Held at a distance, it looked like her mother, but held closer, it was only a pattern of tiny dots, uneven splotches of ink.

A genuine log cabin was their home for the month-and-a-half, gratis for her mother’s efforts with the struggling writers-in-residence. Her mother, Dr Shatlee to her students at the university and simply Margery to the workshop participants, dreaded the time with the amateur writers. But she was excited by the prospects of a real vacation for Vivian.

‘You always teach summer courses,’ she said to Vivian’s father, who was also Dr Shatlee to his students but Drew to his fellow teachers, ‘and the past two summers I was busy with the Tiwi book. It’ll be good for us to get away.’

The Tiwis were a group of pygmies in New Zealand. Her mother had written a book about the construction of a hospital in a remote Tiwi village. She spent over a month in New Zealand interviewing people and sifting through records. Overall, she worked on the book for almost three years. By focusing on a small group of villagers, she made it a personal tale but she wove historical information throughout the narrative. This was the general method for each of her five books. Her most successful one, about the sinking of a cruise ship, came later, when Vivian was thirteen. By far the best-selling of her books (most of which appealed only to specialized groups), Down Goes the Ambassador had a title like an action movie and chronicled the sinking of an Alaskan cruise ship. The Tiwi, with their wide-set facial features and caramel-colored skin, were too strange and distant for a popular audience, but the cruise ship seemed to be peopled with one’s family, neighbors and co-workers. The tragedy was imaginable.