Before the Eruption
June
That summer Callie and I were looking after the creaking Victorian on the north edge of town. We were given a small stipend for the maintenance we’d, in theory, do: repainting the porch and fixing sticky windows, rescuing the gazebo from the acres of blackberry, pruning the dog rose, and washing the turret windows. It sounded easy enough. The free rent meant that I only had to work my café job a few days a week, so we had plenty of time to run around the yard barefoot and bake bread and eat dandelions. Callie used the pots from the kitchen to dye fabric with black walnut and indigo and shriveled beets she got from her job at the food co-op. One time we let a traveling maringa band camp in the front yard and in the morning they made us pancakes. When you came over, we’d take the croquet set from the garden shed and play sprawling, absurd games, or, on warm nights, set up a cot on the sleeping porch to tangle under the whir of crickets.
Then, one afternoon, Callie fell asleep in a patch of sun and had the bad dream, one where something happened to the house. What kind of thing? I asked. But she couldn’t remember. Just something bad, she said. Under our watch. Cloven hoof. Away. She blew her nose into a cloth napkin, tied up her wild hair. Don’t worry about it, she said. It was just a dream.
But after that she started worrying—that we would spill red wine all over the carpet or accidentally burn the place down with a space heater, maim the floors moving furniture or make the wallpaper go moldy if we left the windows open.
We spent the following morning uprooting blackberries from around the gazebo, or trying: the ground was parched, the roots impossible. We had a square-tipped shovel and a garden trowel, both the wrong tools for the job. By noon we called it quits.
That afternoon I met up with you on the north flank of the mountain. I sat swinging my legs on the locked gate until your truck grumbled up into the gravel lot. I threw myself at you, I wrestled you to the ground, and then we wandered up, into the high meadows where there was nothing in particular we were supposed to do.
Fireweed and lupin frothed above the tree line. A thrush rocketed up from the undergrowth. Soon the huckleberries would be ripe. I’d been reading up on the great photographers: Imogen Cunningham, Walker Evans, and that summer I brought the camera everywhere, and you’d humor me, hold still waist-deep in a freezing lake until the reflection hit just right.
But at the summit something smelled wrong. Like rotten eggs. Under the surface, a shifting.
Two weeks after the mountain started belching sulfur, the volcanologists arrived.
They had French accents, sun-spotted faces, red watch caps, and reflective silver suits. The woman bony and pixie-cut and bird-like, the man thickset and curly-haired with a boxer's cauliflower nose. They learned our names and shook our hands but refused to stay in town. Instead, they set up a pup tent near the summit, where they took seismographic readings and boiled eggs in a saucepan held over the hot cracks in the ground.
How was it looking? we asked.
Very exciting, they said. Very bad.
I raised the camera, framed the volcanologists peeling their boiled eggs.
Around the end of the month, the girl saints arrived. They came in a van from the city and stayed in the decommissioned military housing, right above the tree line. Mother Ida, the Skylark Congregation’s kitchener, said they’d spend all day every day praying, so that the mountain would go back to sleep and we would all be saved.
We didn’t think we needed saving. I mean, sure, we had our problems. It was the hottest summer on record. A toxic algae bloom tendrilled up the lowland river, and the authorities advised us not to swim. The café where I worked had no air conditioning, and the carpenter you worked for listened to doomsday talk radio. The evangelists from the Skylark Congregation came door-to-door every Sunday, and the banana bread at the food co-op was made with stevia and tapioca flour, and the men’s hands at the Friday night ecstatic dance always wandered too low. The utility company diverted half of the Spukani River for agricultural use, while, ten miles to the north, the reservation still didn’t have tap water. Every year the bittersweet nightshade escaped from our gardens and climbed further up the mountain, and every day, the transmission on Callie’s station wagon smelled more like burning rubber. But we didn’t need to be saved.
Mother Ida came down every Friday to buy groceries for the girl saints at Maria Agbayani’s general store, which had a smaller selection than the co-op, but better prices. Callie and I were in the tool aisle, looking for shovels to tackle the blackberries, when we overheard her being rung up. Maria had been raised Catholic and was scandalized by the whole thing. Girl saints? We looked over. Maria shook her head as she bagged Mother Ida’s groceries: rice and milk, okra, sweet corn, cocoa. They’re not canonized. They’re not even dead.
They’re dead to the world, said Mother Ida, as she counted out bills. The Skylark Congregation didn’t believe in credit cards.
We watched from the cash register line, a little disappointed. We had imagined the girl saints ate only lemon seeds, like the ones in the movies. We liked to picture them barefoot and silent, white shift dresses floating over their radiant bodies.
July
The girl saints. What did they do all day? Was it true? Did they chain their lips shut with silver chains after sundown? Did they sleep with rosaries in their mouths, on one long white mattress? Was it true they each had a fawn they bottle-fed until it grew fat and was sold for meat?
Pretending to be lost, you and I wandered up the mountain and knocked on the door of the old barracks.
The girl who answered looked around our age, in her early twenties. She wore a blue housedress, a white handkerchief pulled back over her hair. She invited us inside with an easy smile. The barracks must have been old officer housing, whitewashed walls and creaking hardwood floors, enamel sinks, lines of cots with perfectly folded wool blankets. The girl saints buzzed around, quietly occupied. A light giggling floated from room to room. A breeze lifted the curtains. We were led to the kitchen where they poured us mugs of chicory coffee and shook out a forest service map over the table. The girl saint’s finger hovered over the topo lines like a dowsing rod.
By the way, I said, trying to sound casual, how’s it going? The praying? Does it feel like it’s working?
The girl saint didn’t look up from the map. Her eyes narrowed in concentration. The paint brush can’t step back and see the painting, she said. Only the painter can do that. The air cinched tighter around us for a moment, then she laughed, dispelling it. Here’s where you can cut up to the trail, she said, pointing us to a dotted line. Your feet know the way back. We downed the dregs of our coffee, and the girl saints showed us to the door.”
But we didn’t take their directions down the mountain. Instead we cut up, over the scree field and through the meadow, where we picked up the trail. At that point the trail closure was a half-assed handwritten sign, a piece of paracord strung between two juts of rebar. We dipped under the paracord and continued to the summit, where a plume of vapor drifted up from a patch of jumbled rock. I pressed my thumb into the warm mud and then smudged it against your forehead.
Hey, you said.
When the plume became visible from town, the volcanologists held an informational meeting in the downstairs of the public library. Mother Ida organized a potluck, and everyone came. Callie and I brought a huge Tupperware dish of tabbouleh, and you brought cornbread, and we all sat on folding chairs eating Maria Agbayani’s pork belly and Dirty Joe’s chili. The forest service rangers hung out near the back, in their cleanest uniforms and wild beards, and on the opposite side of the room the fire department balanced paper plates of macaroni and cheese on their knees and wiped their mustaches and complimented people’s babies. The girl saints did not attend, but they had baked a huge loaf of sourdough that Mother Ida brought, and everyone lined up to eat a small slice. Then the fire chief got up and cleared his throat and made everyone sit down so the volcanologists could present.
The volcanologists gestured at their slideshow erratically with a laser pointer.
They showed us diagrams of tectonic plates dominating each other and mountains sliced in half. They told us about trapped magma, viscous and gaseous, about eruptions that take the earth with them, air and rock and gas and magma blended into an indescribable mass of movement. They said our mountain’s summit, twenty miles from town, looked increasingly upset.
Just far enough, said the man.
Almost far enough, said the woman.
The summer deepened. The nights shallow and humid, the days hot. We went to the middle slopes and picked gallons of huckleberries. After eating till our tongues were purple, we Tetrised Tupperware containers of berries into the freezer and baked sheet pans of cobbler. In the basement we muddled the rest with brewer’s yeast and sugar in five-gallon buckets to make wine.
I did not fix the sticking window. I did not pull the dandelions out from around the dog rose. I did not free the gazebo.
Higher up the mountain, pikas skittered across the scree fields. Lichens brushed crusted rainbows across the granite. Whitebark pines twisted up like gnarled fingers. Bluebells and columbines bloomed. A bighorn sheep bleated to her lambs. At the summit, the spout of vapor thickened. A billow of steam formed and reformed continuously, so that you could almost see a figure emerging from it, some massive hand or face, the thrust of a ribcage or crest of a hip. A prayer bell tolled in the distance. We could hear the girl saints singing.
The Feds thought they could stop it. They sent in a crew and bored a hole into the south side of the mountain using a mining rig, penetrating layers of sandstone and basalt, then piped in water from the reservoir. The workers were some kind of contractors, young men who wore bright yellow utility jumpers so it would be harder to get run over by heavy machinery in the fading light. They worked from before dawn to late in the night. Dying trout flopped at the shore of the lowered lake.
Sometimes the contractors came into town to drink. We liked talking to them, asking them How’s it going? But they would shake their heads and mutter punchlines none of us got. In response, they’d ask us about the girl saints. Was it true they could talk in bird calls? That they couldn’t look a man in the eyes? We didn’t know where they’d heard that, we said.
We only ever saw one woman among them. Thickset, she sat silently in their midst, a beer can weeping condensation in her hands. She had the words CASH ONLY tattooed across her knuckles,and a bird bone on a leather cord around her neck.
August
The first week of August, we hiked up to visit the volcanologists, bringing them the last of our huckleberry cobbler. They looked tired and ate it with their hands. We told them we liked their hats, the matching red watch caps they always wore.
It’s so we can find each other, they said.
They had to get back to their instruments. We watched as they made their way across the scree field, two red dots in a vast jumbled landscape. Steam roiled off the ground, like a time-lapse of fog, dissipating. I lifted up my camera and took a picture, suddenly jealous of how close they were to that pulsing core of geothermal heat. They walked together for a half mile and then veered apart. Two red dots. So they could find each other.
It was the last time we saw them.
Before we left we skirted a mile or two north, to the meadow above the barracks. I lay down in the grass. My body felt sore and heavy. Sunburned, mosquito-bitten. A salt pattern of dried sweat had formed on your T-shirt. We were tired and kissing out of habit, and then, in that mysterious way that it always happens, for real. The warmth of your chest on my chest. My hand closing into a fist in your hair.
But we were not alone in the meadow. With a rustling from the tall sedges, a girl saint stood up, then another, then another, until we were surrounded. They looked at us, not smiling, not unsmiling. Or maybe they weren’t looking at us at all. Their mouths were moving and they were silent. Was this what it felt like to be saved?
In line at the general store Dirty Joe heard a rumor that one of the girl saints had run away with one of the contractors. Some young father from Fresno. But Callie heard it was the female contractor, the one with the bird bone hanging from her neck. That they had taken off for Seattle, or further, to Vancouver, or east to Idaho, or up the mountain, to hide in the pines. Maria Agbayani heard that it never happened at all.
We were waiting for the rain to soften the ground before we tackled the blackberries. But it didn’t rain. Callie’s worry shifted from black mold to dry rot. We powerwashed and resealed the deck.
The steam venting from the summit formed a perpetual cloud above town, like something that might hide a Lemurian spacecraft, or an angel.
It got hard to ignore. The Feds declared the mountain closed for real, barricaded all the roads in. The contractors who came into town became increasingly disheveled: yellow jumpsuits dirty, hair greasy, eyes bloodshot, buying Fireball from the general store to puke up in the alley.
From the sleeping porch, I watched Callie wander the yard, the cuffs of her overalls rolled up to her knees. I watched as she made her way through a sun salutation, then yelled Fuck loud enough to startle the birds. The mourning doves rearranged themselves in a further spruce, the wind whipped her long hair free from her braids, her eyes puffy and red. I knew I should go down there. I didn’t have anything to say.
We started tagging along with Callie to ecstatic dance every Friday in the food co-op parking lot. It wasn’t just us, attendance was increasing, even the doomsday carpenter you worked for started showing up, swaying in a corner with his eyes closed while someone went off on a didgeridoo. It felt crucial to turn off the brain and fall into a creature body, to swing hips and swim arms and move towards a dark molten thing that shirked away when we tried to touch it, that left us spent and spinning. That’s it, said Callie. Let it happen. We wanted release, but we had to keep coming back, again and again, because, as I was starting to realize, you can’t let go of something that hasn’t happened yet.
The Skylark Congregation started holding services daily, both morning and night. They brought the girl saints down from the barracks and let them officiate baptisms, leading people into the lake pumped half dry by the mitigation efforts, where a line of dead fish and dried algae circled the shore like a ring on a dirty bathtub. Harp music spun out of a loudspeaker. We all showed up out of curiosity, and then suddenly it was for real, and they were holding us by the shoulders and plunging us into the bitter cold water. Their hands pressed into our scapulas, gentle but firm. When they pulled us up, we felt a rush of something, endorphins at least, that first drug. They opened our mouths and placed cubes of bread on our tongues. We sat on the shore, towels around our shoulders, and watched as the girl saints dunked lines of contractors. In their yellow jumpsuits with their limbs splayed, they looked like construction paper stars underwater.
September
The days got shorter. The nights got colder. Still, no rain fell. In a month the property owners would visit, and we had made almost no progress on the blackberries. One Friday night Callie came home from ecstatic dance and said, Ok here’s the scheme. She’d met a girl who lived on a farm two hours south with a bunch of goats, and she said for a hundred bucks we could borrow one to eat the blackberries as long as we transported it ourselves. So the next day we convinced you to take us in the truck.
I came over to Dirty Joe’s bungalow to wake you up. Either it’s gonna blow or it’s not, he was saying over the phone. It doesn’t give a shit if we’re ready.
We didn’t get on the road till early afternoon, which was overcast. I rode in the middle seat, pinned between you and Callie, and I could feel her fidgeting nervously against me. We stopped at a fruit stand and an antique store, so it was nearly three by the time we got to the farm, cold and cloudy. They’d already confined the goat for us. Huge and black, he bucked against the sides of the crate as we loaded it into the truck bed, his eyes troubled fragments of amber.
What’s his name? I asked.
Cabra, Callie said. It’s Portuguese. He’s a Charnequeira.
On the highway he shuddered against the bars, braying and pacing back and forth.
Does Cabra mean something? I asked.
She rubbed her temples. I think, she said, it means, ‘Goat.’
I tore a fruit stand peach apart into thirds. Callie peeled the skin off her section and flung it out the window. You were trying to change lanes so I fed you, too fast, juice spilling, and you grimaced. I could tell you were annoyed with the whole project, and it made me start thinking about the volcanologists: how they must have lowered each other into craters on the ends of metal cables and canoed across lakes of lava to find each other: two red pinpricks, moving like magnets. I knew there were different kinds of love, but sometimes I found it hard not to compare. I ate my portion of peach and turned up the radio.
An hour south of town we stopped at the Spukani River. Callie fed Cabra the last shriveled peach through the crate. Good boy, she said. She touched his velvet nose, his beard, and he turned his head away. What’s it like to be a goat? she asked.
And what was it like to be Callie? I wondered, as I watched her toss the peach pit into the river. You hopped up the bluff from where you’d been pissing in a bush, whistling, your keys jangling. What was it like to be you? What was it like to be Mother Ida, Dirty Joe? What was it like to be a girl saint, praying to a silent white wall? I could feel this subtle little gulf between us all, and the baby-bird part of me wanted to caulk it shut. At the same time, I somehow got the sense that my life depended on it, on that chilly, throbbing space between.
We wandered down to the willowy edge of the river. The clouds began to pull apart. The mountain emerged, jutting up like a proud, rocky nipple. And then it began to bloom apart.
We could see it all. And here’s the fucked-up thing: I wanted to be closer.
As for the Victorian, there wasn’t much left of it, after a two-hundred-foot Douglas fir, uprooted by the blast, punched diagonally across the roof. But the gazebo survived, freed from the blackberries which died back under the ashfall. In the chaotic arrival, the goat freaked and bolted—we tracked him a mile through the ash but never found him.
The girl saints made it out alive, piling into their van, against their faith, at the first tremors. And the contractors made it out too, almost all of them. We would find our town was still there, quivering, under a dark sky and a foot of ash. The Feds would give us some money to organize as a volunteer corps, and we would spend the coming months excavating our lives with shovels and pressure hoses, digging caked ash out of our nostrils.
Five miles up the road, we would find cars thrown like toys. Houses with their roofs peeled back like sardine can lids. We would pick our way through a wreckage of logging equipment, turned belly-up like dead bugs, and find more goat prints. Ten miles up the road, we would reach the place where the heat of the pyroclastic flow had stripped the bark off trees.
Once, when we were clearing downed logs from the road, we would see two figures crouched by a silt-choked stream, trying to catch water in a plastic bottle. They would scamper away when we called out, and later still we’d swear it was the girl saint and the girl contractor, we’d swear one wore a blue housedress and the other had knuckle tattoos, but how could we know? Both of them, coated in ash.
Fifteen miles up from town, we’d find the place where the shockwave had flattened trees and I would forward the film in my camera. Point it towards the melted asphalt. Towards trees with the leaves and bark and branches scorched off, like fur or grass or toothpicks, combed out in the direction of the blast. Towards the ghost of the barracks, their concrete foundation. Toward the place above that, the place torn to moonscape, the place where the goat prints pointed. Cloven hoof, away. The place where the volcanologists must have been because no one found their bodies. Not a shred of Kevlar, not a bit of red yarn. I wondered sometimes, what it was like. If their hands found each other in the end. What it was like to be so close to something that it consumed you completely.
Elizabeth Wing is an incoming MFA Candidate and teaching associate at UMASS Amherst. Her work has appeared in venues including Mudroom, The Rebis, Washington Square Review, The Shore and 7x7.