What We Take For Truth Page 2

  “You can file them for me then. They all go in the round file.” Jane’s deep smoker’s voice barked across the pass-through from the kitchen into the café.

  Grace placed Kev’s pie in front of him and he rewarded her with a smile. Two grayhairs, Larry and Al, sat at the corner table solving the problems of the world—at least the world minus Prosperity.

  “Nice to know you keep good track of your paperwork, Jane.” Larry’s voice was strong and deep enough to be heard over the running water in the kitchen. “It’ll make it easier for the bank when they foreclose.” He winked at Grace.

  Larry and Al had been regulars since Grace started working at the Hoot Owl when she turned thirteen. Both men had long ago retired from their jobs as cutters, though they still wore overalls and drank their coffee black at the crack of dawn. Grace picked up the coffeepot and walked over to them.

  “Mornin’, guys. Want anything?”

  “Nothin’ we can afford.” Al sighed. “Listen, you hear about that Green River killer, Parrot? You gotta be careful in the city. I don’t like to think of you all alone there.”

  Grace put her hand on her hip and cocked her head, looking at the old logger. “You think I’m gonna let a little ol’ murderer stop me from leaving when I’ve had to put up with down-and-out loggers and mill workers all my life?”

  Larry nodded. “Parrot’s got a point, Al.”

  “And by the way, my name’s Grace. Annie, my dear departed momma, named me Grace Annable Tillman and if any of you gentlemen should ever call me Annable that will be the last cup of coffee you ever drink in the Hoot Owl. If you need me quick you can still call me Parrot, but I prefer Grace. I’ve decided when I move to Seattle I’m going to be Grace, so I’m starting now.”

  “Maybe, maybe not!” Kev bellowed from his seat. The men hooted.

  “You finish up your pie, Kev. Near time to get back home.” Grace knew how Mary worried about her son even though his solo trip to the Hoot Owl in the morning had been part of Kev’s routine for nearly a year. “Momma’s waiting for you.”

  Kev crammed a large mouthful of chocolate cream into his mouth and pushed his plate away. He scraped his chair back from the table and rose.

  “See you tomorrow, Kev,” Grace said as he made his way out the door.

  “Maybe, maybe not,” the boy repeated and let the door slam behind him.

  “That boy’s going to miss you,” Larry mumbled from behind the sports section.

  “Give me a break, guys.” Grace walked back behind the counter and returned the coffeepot to the heat.

  Jane stuck her head through the opening to the kitchen, “Don’t let those old coots make you feel guilty. They’re just jealous cause they know this town is dead and they don’t have the gumption to move on themselves.”

  Grace sighed. Shaking her head, she walked over to pick up Kev’s empty plate just as the door slammed open, admitting the husky form of Burt Samson, heavy-booted and overall-clad with a greasy baseball cap that declared “I.W. of A.” in faded letters.

  Red-faced, Burt demanded, “What kind of shit is this? I’ll be goddamned if birds are more important than people! You hear the news?” he asked the open space of the café. “That goddamned judge is shutting down timber sales in national forests. All to save a fuckin’ owl.”

  “Yahoo! Point for the good guys!” Jane screamed from the kitchen.

  “Shut up, Jane.” Al had gotten up from his chair; his brow furrowed as he leaned against the table. “Warren’s turning over in his grave; it’s our loyalty to your brother keeps us coming in here. You keep talking like that and you won’t see another customer in this café for a long time.” He looked over at Burt. “What’s Jackson say? You guys still got some contracts on private land, right? Like to see ’em try and stop that!”

  “Let’s take this to the tavern, Al. Don’t feel too logger friendly in here.” Burt looked at Grace as he said this. “And I shouldn’t even be talking’ to you, little lady. All because of you I got a mopey-eyed, do-nothin’ son to deal with now. He’s so screwed up he’s not safe in the woods.” He shook his head. “Can’t understand how a girl bred and raised in Prosperity could turn her back on my Pat. You think you’re gonna find a better man in Seattle? That’s a joke.” He turned on his heel and stormed out of the café with Al and Larry in tow.

  Grace sank into the nearest chair and watched the men cross the street to the Bullhook. If she didn’t get out of here, she’d have to deal with Burt Samson and every other logger in town treating her like a traitor.

  “Hell, Parrot. Patrick is a fool and his daddy is no better. Don’t let those cretins get to you.” Jane had come out of the kitchen to stand beside her niece. Her orange hair stood in short spikes around her head, its color mirrored in her glossy fingernails. The flour-dusted apron she wore over her tie-dyed T-shirt said Hoot Owl Café in orange embroidered letters. “You’ll find better men than Pat in about five minutes in the city.”

  Grace looked up into her aunt’s face. The sharp line of her jaw, the deepening wrinkles around her eyes, the fierce clamp of her lips. Time and stubbornness were skillful carvers.

  “Don’t worry. I’m going. It’s gonna to take more than a few remarks from Burt Samson to stop me.” She sighed and pushed herself up to stand next to her aunt.

  Jane fished in her apron pocket and pulled out a quarter, walked over to the jukebox in the back of the café and dropped it in the slot. “We need a little dancing music, don’t you think?”

  She Drives Me Crazy poured from the speakers and Jane grabbed Grace’s hand and began swaying and bouncing to the music.

  “That boy is crazy. But you didn’t drive him to it.” Jane grinned. “He’s got that deluded logger mentality, just like every man in this town. They just can’t face reality.”

  Grace stood rooted in the center of the empty café. She dropped her aunt’s hand. “I know. It’s just...”

  There’d been a time—hell, most of her childhood—when everyone in Grace’s world spoke about Prosperity and logging with pride. But it was all different now. Ever since the government put the spotted owl on the endangered species list and started to restrict where trees could be cut, there’d been a war brewing in the woods: you were either a crazy tree-hugging radical or a shortsighted, tree-killing redneck. And that war was killing her town.

  In spite of everything, Grace loved Prosperity. She loved it almost as much as she hated it. How many places were there where you could walk one block from your house and be in an old-growth forest? Where you could fall asleep to the sound of owls calling to one another? Where everyone knew everyone—for better or for worse. And beyond all that, Prosperity was home to her mother’s spirit.

  “Damn it, Parrot. If you aren’t going to dance with me, I’ll go back and finish those salads.” As Jane headed toward the kitchen, she put her hand on her niece’s shoulder and whispered in her ear, “Stay here and you’re stuck being an out-of-work logger’s wife. Don’t be a fool. You know this town is dying. Run for it and don’t look back.”

  Years ago, when Jane, who’d always pushed against the grain, began talking about how people couldn’t keep clear-cutting the trees without screwing up the whole balance of life, Grace was curious. She knew how much her daddy loved the woods, just like she did. It confused her to know that he “killed trees,” as Jane put it. But Grace saw how the town, even her daddy, had laughed at Jane. Then three years ago, Warren was killed in a logging accident, and Jane’s passionate environmental spirit twisted her grief into an anti-logging rage.

  Warren’s death had rocked Grace’s world too. The conflict between those who were fighting to keep every tree alive and those whose own lives depended on cutting them down wound itself into Grace’s grief. Much of the time she wouldn’t have been able to say if she were mourning her father or the forest.

  It wasn’t long after Warren’s death that a group of hippies set up camp in a stand of old growth—a bunch of tree-huggers who threatened to put thei
r bodies in the way of any woodsman’s chain saw. The Hoot Owl had always welcomed the short-lived summer “crowd” of hikers but relied on local loggers to pay the bills. Once Jane made it clear she sided with the environmentalists though, the locals began shunning the café.

  At the same time Pat had begun pushing Grace to take him to the spotted owl nest Warren had shown her, so he could destroy it. The Northern Spotted Owl was a shy, finicky bird that could only live in healthy forests; it needed a diverse habitat. The government was convinced it had to save the owls by keeping loggers out of the forests where the birds lived. Pat argued that, without a local nest, the government wouldn’t limit logging in the nearby national forest. His plan was ridiculous, but Grace couldn’t get Pat to see that. Instead he’d made it into a test of her love and loyalty. A test she was failing big-time.

  It might mean abandoning her mother’s memory but getting out of Prosperity felt like the only way Grace was going to survive this crazy battle that was killing the town.

  Grace grabbed a wet rag from behind the counter and began wiping down the tables.

  “You go on home and start packing.” Jane called from the kitchen. “Knowing you, it’ll take you a week just to decide you aren’t going to need your hiking boots in the city.”

  “Don’t you want help with breakfast?”

  “Ummm. There any customers out there waiting to order?”

  “No, not yet.”

  “Right. The crowd could show up any minute, I forgot.” Jane pushed open the door from the kitchen and stood looking at her niece. “I said, go. If I get more customers than I can handle, I’ll climb up on the roof and yell.”

  Grace dropped the dishcloth on the counter and stomped out, letting the door slam behind her. Damn Aunt Jane. Damn Patrick.

  Chapter 2

  The echo of the café door slamming shut still rang in the empty street and Grace stood with her hands balled into tight fists, her nails digging into her palms. She looked across the road and considered the tavern. The Bullhook was going to outlast everything else in Prosperity. There would always be thirsty loggers, and the worse things got, the more there would be. Here it was, not even nine o’clock in the morning, and the sign was lit. She didn’t need to look inside to know who sat at the bar. How much time had her own father spent on one of those stools?

  Without making a conscious choice, Grace found herself wandering up the street toward the mill—the opposite direction from Jane’s house, the house she’d called home since she was four. She walked past Sherman’s General Store, not yet open for the day, and the few houses that stood between the tiny business district and the elementary school. Mrs. G, the postmistress, lived in the first of these and worked hard to keep encroaching desolation at bay. Hers was one of the few homes in town with windowsills painted bright white and pots of purple azaleas blooming boisterously next to the steps. A porch swing with a yellow cushion beckoned by the front door. Grace looked away from this point of cheerful welcome and lifted her eyes to the steep slopes covered with cedar and hemlock. When she got to the corner across from where the ancient, long-empty log cabin stood, she turned up toward the mountains and the sawmill.

  Dyer’s Mill sat on the largest area of flat land in Prosperity. Most places in town were up or down from one another, except for the few establishments that ran along Main Street: the café; the post office; the tiny police station where Kev’s father, Kevin Bigley Sr., drank his coffee and saved his energy for Saturday nights; Jarvis Hardware with its empty windows staring out at the street like shocked victims of some horror; and Marlene’s Do It Again, the thrift shop run by the few church ladies left. It was a steep step up across the street from the café to the Bullhook Tavern and Sherman’s General Store. Prosperity Grade School, with its four narrow classrooms and its empty bell tower, occupied a smaller square of level land downhill from the mill. Those who still believed there was a point to it made a hilly trek to the opposite end of town to reach the old clapboard church on the one Sunday a month when Reverend Foster appeared.

  The tallest structure in town was Dyer’s drying kiln, an inverted metal cone that mimicked the shape of the volcanic peaks from Mount Baker down the spine of the Cascades to Mount Shasta and, like them, it periodically spewed plumes of steam into the air. When the mill was hard at work, the kiln emitted clouds day and night. Lately, the rusty miniature volcano was quiet most of the time and functioned primarily as a landmark for the occasional hiker who needed directions to the old logging trail that led to the ridge.

  Children had never been allowed inside the mill, but when Grace was a toddler Warren had insisted that his daughter would understand the work it took to produce good lumber. One day, in spite of Annie’s objections, he carried his baby girl like a shining bouquet of spring wildflowers tucked in the bend of one massive arm and walked into the metal-walled milling shed. No one had interfered with them. The piercing whine of the saws and the rumble and pound of the sorting machines terrified Grace. The child threw her hands up and clamped them over her ears. She sobbed, “Daddy, the trees are crying.”

  That first impression had never completely left her.

  She walked up to the chain-link fence that outlined the mill yard and stood looking at the small pyramid of branchless tree trunks, each stripped of its green by the buckers who’d used their chain saws to trim them down to these red logs. They lay waiting their turn to be ripped by the hungry blades and tamed into lumber.

  Like all the residents of Prosperity, Grace had seen the slow and steady decline, the shrinking dimensions of the logs. When she was a kid, her daddy had hoisted her onto his shoulders to give her an idea of how big the trees were that he cut—a single giant lying on its side filled the extended bed of a logging truck and towered over the cab. Grace had reached out instinctively to touch it, feeling a mixture of awe and terror as she inhaled its scent. The perfume of red cedar still sent shivers through her.

  Lately, the log trucks that passed through town heading to the mill carried piles of tree trunks, each far thinner and younger than that giant. Those majestic old-growth trees were scarce now, and men were cutting huge swaths of the spindlier second growth to get the wood they needed, keeping the buckers busy.

  Grace knew if she were ever going to get out of this town, she would need to buck herself—strip away the innumerable limbs that extended out from her to intertwine with the community. She would have to stand on her own, stop leaning on those who loved her, on the people who had always been there surrounding her with support. She would have to say goodbye to the Dyers.

  The early morning mist thickened as Grace stood at the mill fence. No one was at work yet, and the machinery was quiet. Rain began falling in earnest, heavy drops landing on her head and sliding down the silky shafts of her black hair. Still she stood, occasionally wiping the water from her face, letting pools form at her feet. Her arms tingled from the accumulating cold, but she couldn’t turn away, her mind flooded with all the stories of how she and her parents were tied to this place.

  Mill owner Jackson Dyer and his wife Rose had been close to Annie and Warren from the early days, when Grace’s parents were love-struck teenagers. They comforted Annie during the months when Warren was away in Vietnam, responding to her fears with stoic calm. Once Annie was gone, Rose Dyer stepped in to help Warren and Jane care for little Grace. The older couple reveled in the role of doting grandparents, filling the void left by Annie’s and Warren’s own deceased parents.

  Since she was a sophomore in high school, Grace had spent at least one evening each week making dinner for Jackson and Rose. And with each of these meals Grace’s branches had knotted themselves more tightly among those stretched out from the Dyers’ sturdy trunks.

  ***

  The whole thing started when Grace was sixteen. She had been waitressing at the café in the afternoons for nearly three years. Jackson came into the Hoot Owl one day, as usual, for his afternoon coffee. The café was empty but for Grace sitting at the coun
ter trying to finish her homework. He made his regular comment about not wanting to take her away from her important work and headed behind the counter to pour a cup for himself. This afternoon, though, something in his voice made her look up.

  He was standing across the counter from her grinning like a kid with a naughty secret. The smile started in his squinted eyes and lit up his whole grizzled face. Jackson was normally a serious man; his thin gray hair and salt-and-pepper mustache revealed what the years of running the mill and bearing the responsibility for the whole town’s welfare was doing to him. Seeing him like this, almost giddy, made Grace jump off her stool.

  “What? What? You look like you’re going to burst. Tell me.”

  “Well,” he tried to pretend a studied calm, but it came out like a giggle, “I have an idea.” He leaned across the counter and lowered his voice, even though there was no one else in the place. “This is a secret, OK? Just between you and me.” He was getting more excited as he talked.

  Grace nodded. All this buildup was ridiculous. Jackson was the most predictable man she knew. He was probably going to tell her he’d decided to have banana cream instead of his regular apple pie or something.

  “Next Saturday is our anniversary—me and Rose. And I want to do something special.”

  Wow. Jackson, a romantic? No wonder he wanted her to keep it a secret—imagine what they’d do with this at the mill.

  “You’re a great cook, Grace. You like to make different things—things not on Jane’s menu, right?” Again she nodded. She’d been experimenting for a while; when it was slow Jane let her use the café kitchen to try new recipes. Sometimes she’d let regulars taste her creations. Jackson had been a guinea pig more than once.

  “Well, how’d you like to make a special anniversary dinner for me and Rose? I could take her over to the river for the day and you could cook in our kitchen. Then when we got home, it’d be all ready and she’d be so surprised!” Then he straightened up and became the serious businessman for a moment, “’Course I’d pay you. You’d be like a caterer.” And he waited, his eyebrows raised in anticipation.