though she knew it was more because he was afraid of getting caught with his hands on her than because he was morally opposed. All that time, those six months, she’d managed to put away enough money from her Burger King job until she had what she thought would be enough to get her clear of Elizabethton, Tennessee, and maybe get a cheap apartment up over the mountains near Asheville, find work there waiting tables or maybe on the Biltmore Estate. That had been the plan, at least, until her momma or Robbie had found the scratched-up flap of carpet where she’d hidden the money. Full withdrawal, close to eight hundred dollars. She didn’t say anything to her mother about it, knew it held no purpose now that the money was gone, likely already spent. That was what surviving by putting her head down had gotten her.
She left that night in her Escort, a vehicle older than her by a decade. It coughed and quit not much longer after she made it over the state line mountain pass, not too far from the town of Mars Hill. She’d sat inside and cried for a couple of hours, slept badly, then got out and began walking, the new mountains coming up around her from behind the complete wall of darkness into something fractured, lovely, and pale. She caught a ride into the city and was walking around its streets at midday.
She spent most of the summer in Asheville, bussed tables at a Japanese steakhouse on the west side of town, roomed with a hippie couple that flew a Che Guevara flag from the front of the disheveled bungalow they rented. But the couple argued and fucked in a relentless cycle that was maddening. Then an apartment on her own fell through at the last minute and then she was fired.
There seemed to be so many And Thens. So many.
When it got bad enough she called her cousin in Boone who worked waiting tables at a downtown pub, told her she could set up something in the kitchen there for her, but after spending her last money on a Greyhound ticket to get there the hiring man said he wanted cooks, not bussers. Her cousin let her stay for free for a while on the couch, but she was married and it didn’t take long to see that her husband had no use for her being there.
To get out of the house she sometimes went to the university library, pretended she was a student there. She walked each of the floors, breathing it in like it was a more exotic kind of air. She talked to the librarians some, asked them questions about what was good to read, what was new. One handed her a book with the picture of a handsome man squinting off into the sunset called The Last American Mountain Man. She sat down at one of the long tables and read the entire book, learning of Eugene Connors and his Falling Sky Preserve just a few miles outside of Boone city limits. Falling Sky was a wilderness school that was entirely self-sufficient, growing its own crops and raising livestock to sustain those who worked and trained there. No one who was accepted had to pay with anything other than their labor and an openness of mind to Connors’ strict tenets. Hard work was expected, as well as unquestioning obedience. But the potential rewards were undeniable. This was a place where you could learn to live truly off the grid, where you could shape your future. Connors believed in the value of the young and their commitment to making the world a better place through discovering their inevitable connection to the land. Rain couldn’t imagine anything more perfect. That night she went home and told her cousin she needed to borrow a few camping things she’d seen in the garage.
She showed up at the front gate of Falling Sky with everything she owned or had borrowed strapped to her back, considered turning around for a half hour before she finally went on to the receiving building. The young man behind the counter took her information with a cold efficiency, asking her next-of-kin, her blood type, her religious affiliation. When she joked that she didn’t realize she was enlisting in the military he told her that no she wasn’t, what she was doing was much harder than that.
She was issued a pair of gray wool blankets and a surplus sleeping roll, assigned to Quonset hut “C” up a ridgeline road flanked tightly by Canadian firs. Above the lintel post hung a hand-painted shingle that read “Mama’s House.” Inside she found a tangle of shouting, laughing women getting ready for the supper bell. Her sisters, she was told.
“Come on, Little Bit, throw your shit over here,” said a woman with pigtails. She showed her an empty cot and helped her put her few things in order. She was not pretty exactly, but there was something in the woman’s face that attracted her. When her hand brushed her hip as she reached past to tidy her ruck at the head of the mattress, she felt a nervous warmth in her neck, coloring.
“Winter,” she introduced herself, told her to come on or she’d miss the best pickings at supper.
After settling in Rain noticed that there were no men aside from those few hanging around the administration building. She asked Winter about this.
“Oh, they’re on working party,” she said. “That happens a lot. They work apart for a couple of weeks at a stretch. I think Connors thinks it makes them work better, anxious to get back home to the honey pot,” she said, laughed. “Don’t worry, though. They’re around. When they get back I’ll get you to meet Wolf.”
“Wolf? Is that your man?”
“I don’t think Wolf is anybody’s man, but we mean something special to one another, if that’s what you mean. We met up here last year. He’s been working on getting things together to move out on his own. It’s beautiful the way he sees what all this is and how we’re supposed to fit in it,” she said, motioned generally at the woods. “Like it’s something prophesized.”
For those first few weeks she continued to use her given name though she’d noted several of the girls had adopted their own. Riverstone. Mockingbird. One odd girl with green hair called Lichen. But it was Winter who steadied her hand, who looked out for her on the long days when they’d be sent out to mend fence or clean stables, earning their rooms and meals through the endless work of the preserve. Sometimes Connors would come and oversee their work.
She grew a new kind of toughness, a physical accompaniment to the inner strength she’d learned as a girl. Her hands changed shape and texture. Pain began to mean something different when the tools of this new life shaped her.
One evening as she was sweeping out the hut she saw the men coming down in single file from the high country, axes scabbarded and slung, timber saws balanced across shoulders, the metal speaking in its soft voice as the blades bounced with each downward step. They were all beautiful to her, these men who seemed to belong to something larger for the first time in their lives.
That night they gathered around the bonfire, their beards and grime showing the wildness of their time in the higher country. They talked of their weeks clearing the dead timber, promised greater achievements when they would bring it down to the building sites, assemble the cabins for the wilderness school before the winter deadline. All the work behind and the work still ahead, a pledge as well as an enticement.
Winter introduced her to the one called Wolf. He was older, more aloof than the others, as if he was amused by the general mass of humanity and paid it only scant notice. Still, he spoke kindly to her, asked her what she expected to gain from the wilderness education program. When she answered his questions his eyes stayed on her as if they were locked there. It confused her, but wasn’t unpleasant.
The next day she volunteered to join one of the working parties that would support the timber detail, hauling up water and medical supplies. They left early and walked out into graying weather. There were only four of them to carry everything and it was slow going because of the weight and narrow trails. She felt her lungs tighten and she began to cramp, falling behind, her voice croaking when she tried to call out for the other women to slow. And then, so quickly, they were gone and she was left alone with no sense of where she was. She fought down panic, breathed it away, resumed the march, paused to hear any signs of the other women, though there were none.
There was a turn somewhere, a choice among the rocks that misled
