Seasonal Roads

By L. E. Kimball

"Inscrutable, inaccessible, indefinable. Even at the end. That’s what her mother had always been to her." In Seasonal Roads, L. E. Kimball introduces Norna, Aissa, and Jane—mother, daughter, and granddaughter—who are as fierce and complex as the northern terrain they inhabit. Following a nonlinear timeline, Kimball’s stories unravel the beautiful mess of layers that is their lives and allow the narratives to roam freely in time, thus granting the reader keen insights into the past, present, and future.

Spiraling through time and perspective, the stories converge at Norna’s two-room cabin in the woods, accessible only by "seasonal roads" that disappear under deep snow in the winter. The cabin is witness to Norna’s years of solitude spent hunting, foraging, fishing, and defending herself from intruders, Aissa’s escape from her divorce, and Jane’s stubborn vigil as a forest fire rages dangerously nearby. Through raw and ephemeral memories, we learn the darkest kept secrets of these women and the ties that bind them to each other and to the land.

Kimball’s sensual descriptions of the Upper Peninsula, combined with her hauntingly vivid characters, paint an unforgettable picture in Seasonal Roads. Readers of fiction will enjoy the surprising turns of this collection.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Release date: Apr 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9780814341469

L. E. Kimball

L.E. Kimball has her MFA in creative writing from Northern Michigan University. She is an associate editor for Passages North literary journal. She is also the author of A Good High Place and has been published in journals such as Alaska Quarterly Review and Gray’s Sporting Journal. Most of the year she lives off the grid on a trout stream with her son, Josh, and her English shepherd, Maggie.

Book preview

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AISSA

SEASONAL ROADS

Aissa watches as Idgy snatches a fly midair, rolls it between her tongue and the mottled-gray roof of her mouth. She drops it, lifeless and saliva soaked, onto Norna’s dirty wide-planked flooring. The dog, a beagle-Lab mix, sits between the wood stove and a turn-of-the-century dry sink. Aissa sits on a short stool off in the corner, an elbow propped on a pine work table, trying to keep slivers out of her backside. She examines an index finger the dog has just grazed with her teeth.

Soft mouth, my ass, Aissa thinks.

The dog pants, slopping tiny beads of saliva onto the floor.

You’ll run out of that hot wetness, Aissa thinks. We’ll all run out eventually, and the cold dusty dryness will spread until there’s not enough heat or spit left to wet even the tiniest whistle. It’ll be over. Finis.

It’s hot here in her mother’s kitchen, mid-July. There is a Kelvinator propane-operated refrigerator and a working hand-pump in the cabin, added sometime before Norna moved here, August of 1970—the year Aissa started high school and a year after Norna left Aissa’s father because, as Norna said, they could think clearer each to their own.

The room smells of Norna and of things rotting. Moldy produce—eggs or cheese maybe? On top of the rot is the smell of sex. Sex dripping from the ceilings, seeping up from the floorboards, but when Aissa looks she sees nothing but dried rosemary and thyme hanging from an overhead beam.

It has been two days now and all Aissa has accomplished is to shove a bowl of dry kibbles across the floor to the dog who hasn’t touched them. Aissa considers driving off, leaving the dog here alone for all eternity.

Damn it, Idgy, I don’t need this shit … come get in the damn car. You won’t feel a thing.

Aissa pulls on the shredded yellow clothesline hanging from the dog’s neck, but she feels the dog’s teeth rake against her knuckles. Not enough to break the skin, but enough to let her know. Aissa puts her knuckles to her mouth, and tastes something sweet and slightly salty on her tongue, chews for a minute, then fishes it out on her index finger. A tiny ant.

She hears the door slam on the Volvo, then sees the blonde head appear in the doorway. Jane, her ten-year-old daughter. Only it’s Aissa’s mother Norna’s face looking back at her. Short-cropped sandy colored hair. Eyes, elliptical, opaque, color-blind. They remind Aissa of an Indian word she’d learned as a child—giwideonanin: detour.

Though she hates it, another word comes to mind when she sees the child’s face: canine.

Well? Jane asks. They’d spent the night in Newberry, at the Zellar’s Inn where they’d eaten canned bean dip and tortilla chips for dinner, drank warm Pepsi. Jane had requested sirloin. Sirloin is the word she had used. Why not a filet? Aissa had wondered. Or maybe a huge hunk of prime rib. Strip steak? But no, it was sirloin.

After Jane had fallen asleep, Aissa dusted an entire bottle of J. Lohr Cabernet she’d offered the owner of Tom’s Mini-Mart and Bait Shop twenty-five bucks for. He’d planned to take it home himself, so she’d offered the big bucks in desperation. He’d agreed, but she’d felt his eyes drop to her breasts and then farther still. She had tilted her head and followed his gaze until he finally looked up at her and at last shoved a pudgy, hairy paw out for her money, ten dollars more than the sticker price. She’d awakened at ten this morning, with the empty bottle pressed between her face and the too-hard pillow. Stomach, head; the effects of the wine alternate now in sick relay waves.

Jane heads for Idgy and before Aissa can move to stop her, the dog rushes to the girl. Jane crouches next to the dog, the girl’s head drops over the animal’s flanks, their bodies parallel, and it looks for all the world as if they are sniffing each other.

Jane, Aissa says. Get away from her.

What for? Jane asks. Aissa remembers a time they’d stayed with Norna years ago. Aissa had walked out one morning to find Norna and Jane who was maybe five at the time feeding a mangy-looking stray. Male, small, tawny, it appeared part coyote. Jane was holding a piece of leftover stew in an outstretched hand. Her face held a rapt expression, the same atavistic expression it holds now.

Because I said so … just stay away from her.

Jane parks herself on a stool and Idgy resumes her place by the wood stove, head cocked. One black ear points upward, the other flops forward, an effect that gives Idgy a quizzical expression very like Norna’s.

Aissa, what do you think of taxidermy?

Her mother would ask a question of young Aissa, then study Aissa’s face, clearly fascinated with the flashes of thought she saw scattered there, the panic she’d see rising. The questions went on and on.

But eventually they’d stop.

Aissa’s face would turn blue, her blood would dam up, pressure would build in her ears until she thought her head would explode.

Breathe, for God’s sakes, Norna would shout then. There are no wrong answers.

Now, despite a few light sprinkles on the tin roof, the sun filters through the window to the west, illuminating Idgy’s head like those pictures you see of Christ, and Aissa has her first panic thought for the day: that Norna has taken over Idgy’s body for some karmic purpose known only to herself, and that Aissa’s purpose in life is soon to be revealed to her in some weird combination of Kantian logic and beagle-ese. Jane turns her fair head sideways to watch Aissa and both sets of eyes bore into her face. Norna’s eyes.

Why write, Aissa? Why not be a bricklayer?

Seventeen then, she knew better than to debate with her mother the merits of bricklaying vs. journalism as a career choice. So Aissa had posed a question of her own instead. What do you think of Ted? Ted, who bounced when he walked, and had half-open eyes, as if he found a full view of life more than he could take. He and his buddies did hash and quaaludes down by the trout pond, though Aissa didn’t. What did you think when you first met him? Norna had replied. The usual: answer a question with a question. Oh, I didn’t think, Mother. He made me feel sort of unbalanced, I think. What do you talk about? she’d asked. Well, mostly we discuss the size of my nipples. Then Norna’s frank humor: Kind of an inadequate discussion, eh?

Back then Aissa had had only the remotest feelings for Ted, certainly nothing you could describe as love, but she’d felt grateful to him. Grateful in part, she thinks now, because he was the first and seemed good at sex for someone so egotistical, and in part because they had done it in the dirt at the side of the pond. It was less impulsive than one would suppose, less out of character since Ted was not a risk at all. And the sand had ground into her hair and she could feel the good, solid earth pulsing below her, him pulsing above. Despite her ambiguous feelings for him, it felt solid. She felt connected.

Now, Aissa sees four dusty brown bottles of Guinness sitting on a primitive sideboard. As she grabs one she notices part of a five-cent postage stamp adhered to the battered surface of the pine cupboard. She scrapes at it for a moment with her thumb nail, gives up, and wipes the bottle on the front of her faded I’m-a-Montessori-Parent T-shirt, then uses it to twist off the top. But it doesn’t twist. So she bangs it off on the edge of the work table. She sits down in the middle of the kitchen floor, leaning against the Kelvinator, where she can look more carefully into the dog’s yellow eyes. Jane kicks off her tennis shoes, leans back in the chair, eyes closed, head resting against the wall.

Well, Mother, Aissa thinks, this particular question, this dilemma has an answer. And you and I both know what it is, don’t we?

Do it then, she hears Norna’s voice in her head. I don’t blame you, go ahead and do it. You have good reason … only don’t be a chickenshit about it. Don’t leave it to some insipid veterinarian with the inevitable needle—so neat, isn’t it, so sterile? Lose the distance, the voice says, don’t be a chickenshit.

That’s when she sees Norna’s .410 shotgun leaning against the corner of the living room, the shells in a silver box sitting on a window ledge above it.

Aissa pulls her eyes from the gun, looks at dog and child. She realizes she’s been like this for nearly two days, mostly catatonic, and Jane has been, characteristically, watching her. Aren’t you sick of waiting here? Aissa wants to scream at her. You’re ten years old … aren’t you bored as hell?

Two in the afternoon now, Aissa opens the refrigerator, and is surprised to see everything looks fairly fresh—eggs, cheese, milk, broccoli, bacon. She sees a loaf of bread and several tomatoes on top of the fridge. No mold yet. Just a silty gray beauty mark on the top of one of the tomatoes. What, then, is causing that horrible smell? And then she sees it behind the refrigerator. Idgy has killed a chipmunk, no, pardon moi, Aissa thinks, not a chipmunk but a baby squirrel. No doubt she’s been rolling in it. She grabs a hunk of newspaper and flings the animal through the open door into a tall patch of weeds.

Jane seems not to notice.

Peanut butter, Aissa says, seeing it behind the loaf of bread. Make yourself a peanut butter sandwich.

Daddy wouldn’t like that, Jane says, but the words are not a reprimand. No, Aissa thinks. Ben wouldn’t like that. He didn’t like peanut butter, basements, the outdoors, bookshelves, sweating for any reason, and Aissa’s reporter job at the Lansing State Journal.

Jane makes and eats the sandwich while Aissa looks around. The cabin consists of two rooms and little in the way of possessions, but Norna is omnipresent in the sparseness, despite—or perhaps because of—the fact that she had always seemed fleeting.

A fleetingness with the terrible power of an idea.

There is a chest of drawers in the living/kitchen area and black-and-white Native American rugs on the floor. A similar rug hangs over an open pantry door where a few brown dishes are partially visible in two neat rows. The kitchen wood stove had been Norna’s only source of heat. And in the bedroom, next to the bed, is a pile of books. Aissa knows without looking who the authors will be: John Stuart Mill, Henry James, Freud, Darwin, Plato, Sartre, Heidegger. Heisenberg. Fiction or poetry is a possibility: Goethe, Chekhov. Rilke. No political books per se. Norna was political only when it overlapped with other areas of thought. She believed in capitalism only because it provided opportunity for the most rope. Upon which people can hang themselves, she’d say. It was all about the questions.

Other people had questions as well.

Why in the world would your father marry your mother after she lived for over a year in a wigwam on the edge of town? With that Indian?

Aissa had no idea why. He was impressed with Norna’s ass, she’d overheard her father joke once. Not many women could live for a year in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in a wigwam without freezing it off.

Is it true your grandparents found your mother at the county dump beneath a pile of old newspapers?

Yes. Summer of 1915, John and Rona Ansgar, childless, found Aissa’s mother at the Luce County dump beneath the classified section of the Newberry Gazette. At dawn. The bears had not even finished foraging. They named the child Norna, Norse for fate, and took her home. They never reported an abandoned child to authorities and Norna became famous for saying one might as well be in one dump as another.

Through the years Aissa posed questions of her own. Why ever would you live in this godforsaken cabin when Daddy had money—offered you the inn and a perfectly good house on Drummond Island?

Keep the inn, Norna had told Aissa’s father at the time of the divorce.

And Aissa, he’d asked, Who keeps Aissa?

A man named Bert had once owned the fifty acres upon which Norna’s cabin stands. Norna had lived here since ’72 in return for some barn work. She milked cows, cut grass, hauled shit (and some said Bert’s ashes) in return for the use of the cabin. One spring when Aissa had made the pilgrimage to check on her mother after the long winter, she’d caught Norna with someone she’d assumed to be Bert, though she had only gotten a glimpse of the man’s bare buttocks through the partially opened cabin doorway. She’d left, and, years later when she accused Norna of it, her mother had said matter-of-factly, Actually, Bert was homosexual.

Aissa could do nothing more than look at her dumbfounded.

There were so many different guys coming and going up there, Norna had said, I used to tell him they reminded me of aggregate fruit. He found me very amusing.

A gay bush pilot? Isn’t that what Norna said Bert had done once for a living?

At any rate, Bert died and left the cabin to Norna.

From the bedroom Aissa can see the white Volvo in the clearing. She’d left the driver’s door open, and along with the open cabin door, it seems to Aissa a particular omen. She walks through the kitchen, calls Idgy to come. Grabs her by the collar and gets the usual reaction.

You call her, she says to Jane. But Jane only smiles. She’s a good dog, Mom, Jane says.

She doesn’t look sick to me.

When Aissa picks up the shotgun, she’s surprised at how much lighter it feels than she remembers. She pushes the safety, breaks open the chamber to find the gun unloaded but—as all guns are—ready.

It’s nine p.m. and Aissa is again sitting in the middle of Norna’s kitchen floor, the loaded gun propped between her legs. She drinks her third Guinness, which only makes her feel heavy. Her husband Ben, a dentist, would not approve, because he said carbonated beverages rotted your teeth. Even sparkling water does, he’d say, and especially if you are a sipper. So Aissa has been deliberately sipping, holding the warm yeasty brew in her mouth ten seconds before she swallows. But it’s tough to get drunk at this rate, so she has developed a pattern of gulping two huge swallows in rapid succession, sipping every third, swishing the beer around inside her mouth as if she is about to gargle. This accomplishes all her goals, and she feels the beer form a nice head on each tooth like foaming peroxide. She imagines Ben having to pull the rotting things out of her head, dropping them one at a time into the clear rinsing glass he saves for his more distinguished patients.

But Aissa had married Ben for his hands, warmed by the competence she could see in them. An if/then kind of guy, Ben provided the order she’d needed. But lately, Aissa began watching not Ben’s hands, but his legs, skinny, with fine silky black hairs that embraced ankles too delicate, narrow feet upon which he wore the inevitable tan medical shoes or if not them, the brown loafers with the tassels. Yes, Aissa thinks, each of her teeth will make clear tinkling sounds like musical notes as they drop into the glass. Like the crystal wind chimes Ben had hung outside their kitchen window despite Aissa’s protestation that she hated them.

Aissa knew there had been women. Receptionists, nurses. She’s not sure how many.

There’s no such thing as a mistake, Norna had said to her a year or so after her wedding.

Aissa can see the Volvo from her spot on the floor and imagines the battery is probably dead, since the door is still standing open, the light dim like a candlelit vigil. Idgy is still watching her, but the dog’s head seems to turn every so often to Norna’s gun. Go ahead, she seems to be saying, you don’t have the nerve.

Jane, who has been outside sitting by the river, returns now, her short blonde hair curling in crimps around her perspiring face. She sees it in the child’s face as well:

You don’t have the nerve.

The blue-winged olives are coming off, Jane says. How does Jane know about insect hatches? Aissa wonders. Norna must have taught her.

Jane moves over next to Idgy in front of the stove. Aissa remembers Norna standing at the stove many years ago, smells the wood smoke and the corn stew like it was yesterday. Remembers Sam Gabow sitting at the kitchen work table in silence. Why are Indians so silent? Aissa wonders. Who the hell was he, Mother? Was he that Indian? The one in the wigwam? And the reply now in her head, How many Indians do you think I have, dear? Norna had offered Aissa chilled Popov on the rocks this particular day, with a twist of lime. Sam, however, had rolled a joint, which made the air in the room sweet and thick and hazy. While the big Indian had moved about the kitchen that day, Aissa imagined Sam’s body on top of Norna’s frail one. When had it become so frail? Then Aissa remembers black nights, white flesh, Sam’s voice floating through the darkness. The morning smell of Norna’s coffee boiling in the enamel pot, the eggshells dropped in to settle the grounds, that wonderful smell that makes Aissa ache now. All of it mixed with images of her father’s manicured hands, which she somehow can never picture running over Norna’s white flesh in the way Sam’s must have. (Your father visited often before he died, stayed here with me, Norna told her, toward the end. He had? Aissa had never known that … was there something familiar about those buttocks she’d seen?) Sam anointing himself with oil that smelled like cedar. A large sea shell filled with burning sage and herbs, another smell very like pot. Sam blowing tobacco smoke from his enormous lungs all over Norna’s body. Sam dancing, banging a tambourine and Aissa expecting him to chant. Why didn’t he chant? And then he did. A soft, intermittent sound that vibrates even now inside her head. He had turned Norna’s wrists upward, had blown smoke onto them. You’ll need to take tobacco and food from your own portion and make an offering, he had told her.

Jane leans forward now to hug the dog, and Aissa can see down her shirt, the flatness of her chest, only it isn’t Jane’s chest but Norna’s flatness. It was early days in medicine in 1968, and Aissa remembers the wreckage, the angry ragged streaks of scar tissue, as if someone had tried to scoop a pebble off Norna’s rib cage with a machete.

And Aissa remembers again that stray dog Jane and Norna had fed when Jane was small. How Aissa had protested to Norna with the expected concern that the dog might be rabid. She had felt uneasy for reasons more than the menace of the dog, but nothing like how she’d felt two days later when a bigger, black male stray had shown up in the clearing and the dog fight had started in earnest. Norna and Jane had watched from the porch, Aissa from the doorway, as the bigger, blacker dog, obviously part shepherd, ripped at the bowels of the smaller mongrel, whose dying yelps echoed through the ravine. It happened in a surprisingly short time. The blood and saliva mixed in the black dirt and stuck to the sides of the smaller dog so that it appeared coated in chocolate, and the sweet, cloying smell of death assaulted her nostrils. Aissa didn’t see much more of the fight, didn’t watch or even hear the smaller dog’s last raspy breaths because she was watching Jane’s face. And Norna’s. She watched them watch the battle, the two of them, with nearly no expression on their faces. This had terrified Aissa, but more than that, it had excluded her.

And then she remembers the day Jane was born:

Aissa had watched as her mother had bent her head over the child’s naked form in what looked at first to be that lip/belly thing, where adults blow loud air farts in order to make a child laugh. Watched the child’s foot move in reaction to the tickling. Aissa, high on morphine had gotten the impression Norna was cleaning the child with her tongue, rough cleansing motions removing afterbirth and bringing pink life to the child’s pale skin. An image that has never left her. She might have dismissed the thought as a dream or drug induced memory, but as time went on, she could see how alike they were. She’d watched as Jane slept, feet churning, like a dog running in its sleep.

Aissa looks at the acceptance on her daughter’s face now.

Don’t you miss her, Jane? Aissa asks now. She was your grandmother.

Maybe we can live here, Jane says in answer. You know, when you leave Daddy.

Aissa feels her heart stop. Whatever makes you say that, Jane? I’m not leaving your father … Jane’s face holds the same lack of judgment Aissa saw there during the dog fight, the same maddening acceptance of all things natural, with no need to change life the way Aissa always wants to. Aissa is heartsick with the thought of her failure and not willing—at least not yet—to acknowledge it. Where is Jane’s pain? Where is the confusion and pain most children experience? She has a moment of thinking it doesn’t exist, then feels even more resentment when the notion strikes her that it’s being hidden from her like someone keeping a secret, hoarding a prize.

Like Norna used to do.

It’s stopped raining. Steam rises around the Volvo, making it look like it’s sitting on a swirling cloud mass. It’s nearly dark, and since Aissa can’t find a candle anywhere, she digs a large red flashlight out of the back of the Volvo, props it angrily on one of the empty Guinness bottles in the doorway. The beam illuminates Idgy’s head sporadically, the dog weaving side to side to avoid it, the effect like bad spotlighting in a child’s play.

This dog is holding me hostage. Just like Norna did, Aissa thinks. She has the wild notion that there is only one thing that will free her of them both.

Aissa touches the stock of the gun, knows there will be no time to aim, to sight down the barrel. Idgy is too smart for that. The moment she raises the weapon, the dog will certainly