Shades of Eva Read Online Free Page B

all
impermanent. They held a fleeting burst of happiness, at best, that
fell short of anything resembling the permanence, to me, that true
happiness implied. The happiness I craved implied constancy,
contentment, and an end to the age-old restlessness that had thus
far dominated my life.
    Then I thought of my mother’s hugs. Why? I
don’t know. Hugs can smother a child, and there’s nothing lasting
about a hug. There was nothing permanent about my mother, either,
for that matter. Mom was gone, twenty-five years gone, in fact,
which was about as long as I’d been running.
    That’s when something else came to mind.
    “The trains,” I told Scotty. “The trains
made me happy.”
    The one constant in my life had been the
rails, and more so, that view from the railcar where for so many
days and nights I lay staring out an open door, a doorway through
which I gazed that appeared over time less like the passageway to
unexplored lands and more like a moving picture screen.
    With every season, from the white shades of
winter to the greens of summer, from the dark shades of autumn to
the amber sunrises and crimson hues of spring mornings, the
changing landscapes brought a sort of wandering, yet steady peace
to me. Mountains rolled on in stereoscopic wonder, and the deeper I
traveled into them the more their splendor emerged. Trees grew out
of nothingness, and then passed. Camps and communities displayed
themselves in a moving picture, asking nothing in return but a
glimpse of themselves. Prairies gave way to deserts, and deserts to
deep gullies and vast canyons, and then to rivers, and sometimes
ocean-side vistas. In all there was something about the railcar and
peering through its locomotive lens that called to me, and had,
somehow, made me happy.
    “The trees,” I told Scotty. “It’s always
been the trees.”
    I could look upon the canopies of distant
forests and be at peace. From the blue ridges of Tennessee to the
blackened tips of the Adirondacks in New York the forests called to
me, and they came to life. Even in the desert, where trees seemed
most disparate, they always emerged, offering me relief, it felt,
offering me a renewed glimpse of the life they sang of.
    “The trees never took from me,” I said.
“They never have.”
    Aside from the trees, there was nothing and
no one who hadn’t taken from me. I stopped in Neah Bay because of
them. I stayed a year in that lumbering town for them. The lumber
trade put me right in the middle of the forest, and for once the
picture stopped moving. Trees fell beneath our axes. They
disappeared leaving the ground from whence they stood without sign
or signal they ever existed. To that end, I envied them. Their
stumps were pulled. Even their roots disintegrated, unlike the
shame beneath me, which seemed impervious to insult or even time.
Trees fell around me like faceless, fallen ancestors and unborn
children—and yet they returned. Maybe I saw in them the children I
might never father. Maybe I saw in them the good people of my
ancestry who must, by odds, have existed, though I never knew
them.
    And then again, maybe I was insane.
    So in that nondescript bar on the outskirts
of Neah Bay I slammed my whiskey glass on the Mahogany as Meade
lost yet another hand. An unfelt tear made its way from my
cheekbone to the edge of my chin just as Jake Meade turned that
oaken Poker table over. Chips and glasses went flying. Ogelthorpe
and the boys stood up, and then Meade did something strange: he
stood up, took off his belt, and then pointed it at me.
    Our eyes met, his full of anger and daring
impudence, mine behind a haze of uncontrolled passion and
self-abasement. Meade hadn’t the scars of a fighter of my
experience, but what he did have was the willingness to humiliate,
if not kill me, and the size to do just that.
    He began waving his belt in the air like a
lasso, as if he were going to offer up a public whipping to the
whipping boy. He wrapped the buckle end once around his fist