E
verywhere David went that week, he noticed little girls.
When he strode out for his morning jog, treading along with the burden of his heavy heart, he happened past a little girl
who was digging her heels in and hanging on to a dog leash for dear life, pulled along by a golden retriever at least twice
her size.
When he spelled one of the tellers in the window at the bank, a little girl rode into the drive-thru with her family, smashed
her nose against the glass, and stared at David with huge dark eyes while her father scribbled out a check. He whisked her
a Dum-Dum lollipop along with her father’s cash.
While traveling on the Village Road, he glanced into a cow pasture and saw three girls in inner tubes bobbing along an irrigation
ditch, their bare toes flinging up bead-strings of water. They grasped hands whenever they came within reach of one another,
shrieking and throwing or ducking clumps of wet weeds.
At last, David could stand it no longer. During a rare lull in his office, he dialed Information on his phone and gave the
mechanical voice on the other end all the information he could remember. A listing in Siletz Bay. On the coast of Oregon,
near Lincoln City.
There could be so many reasons not to find it. A single woman alone could very well be unlisted, or indexed under a different
initial. He wouldn’t put it past Susan to be carefully hiding herself away.
“Please hold for the number,” the dehumanized voice said.
David scuttled his desktop for a pen.
Moments later, he was punching in the Oregon number with great boldness, thinking how pleasant it felt to be the one who chose
to do right, the one taking the upper hand. But the instant he heard the childlike, sun-shiny voice on Susan’s answering machine,
his bravado failed him.
“Hey! You’ve reached the house of Samantha and Susan Roche. Don’t hang up, just leave us a message at the—”
Beep
.
And that was all.
He sat incapable of response, shocked to have heard Samantha’s voice. She sounded so young. So
guiltless
. A hollow opened inside of him that later, when he took time to think, would draw him down and drown him. After hearing the
machine hang up, David dialed the number again. And waited, trying not to listen during the short message he knew would come,
before he stammered, “Susan. Listen. It’s David Treasure calling from Wyoming. I… just hadn’t
heard
anything, and I wanted to check in.” He took precious seconds during the recording, measuring his words in case someone might
be listening. “Please, Susan.” Another long, desperate pause. “I need to know what’s happening. Get me at my office,” he said.
“Don’t call me at home.”
After that, whenever a message or a phone call came in at the bank for him, David leapt at it like a pouncing cat. “Hello?
Yes. Oh, yes.” And every time, when it wasn’t Susan, a pendulum swung in his chest, knocking the air out of him with disappointment
and frustration and fear.
When a knock came on his office door just after noon, David rose to meet it, his arm outstretched, adrenaline stinging his
skin. But it was only Nelson Hull, David’s best friend and pastor of the church, with auburn hair ragged around the edges
and, no matter how he tried to tame it, poking in every direction from his head. Everywhere he went, Nelson always looked
a bit electrified.
“I’m in the mood for mountain climbing,” Nelson said after they’d shaken hands. “How about partnering with me. Let’s have
a go at the Grand this afternoon.”
David opened one drawer, then another, looking for his Palm Pilot. “I’ll have to check my schedule. I don’t know if I can
get away.”
“What are you looking for?”
“My PDA.”
“It’s right there,” Nelson said, pointing. “Lying on your desk in front of you.”
“Oh.” They both stared at it for a moment before David asked, “Isn’t it too late to start up? There’s no way we’d make it
to the top.”
“Come on, buddy. Save me. The copy machine’s gone out and they can’t finish the bulletin for Sunday. There’s the mission’s
conference next week and the elders meeting tomorrow morning and Theresa March can’t find enough toilet paper rolls to build
the walls of Jericho for children’s church. It is nuts over there.”
David was warming to the idea. “I guess we don’t have to go all the way, if we don’t want to.”
“Maybe only to Upper Saddle. Let’s go far enough to use the ropes, if we can.” Nelson grinned. “I snuck into your garage on
the way over. I grabbed your stuff, too.”
During their five years of friendship, David had learned that Nelson didn’t often have time for casual relationships. They
were both forty and busy, and they’d grown accustomed to grabbing time together whenever they could. A chance to make their
old climb together seemed too big an adventure to turn down—a retaliation against a day of waiting for Susan Roche and a phone
call that hadn’t come. “Okay. You’ve convinced me. I’m in.”
And so they were off. They drove into the national park and, after changing into sturdy climbing boots and loading two bags
of climbing gear with cams and rope, abandoned the car at the Lupine Meadow parking lot. They chatted about unimportant things
while Nelson Hull led the way along the distinct footpath, their feet dislodging pebbles and razor-sharp chunks of stone.
“Sarah’s having a garage sale next Saturday and she wants to sell my flannel shirts. She says I never wear them anymore and
they’re taking up room in the closet. How about that? I’ve had those since before we got married. They’re my camp shirts.”
“Garage sales are bad. All that great stuff a guy manages to hoard, gone in a day.”
They entered a fragrant tunnel of pine, stringing out along an eastern slope, breathing hard, taking long switchbacks around
shaded fronds of fern and pale strands of bearberry.
Chickadees flew in scallops from bough to bough. Above them, in shades of gray and shadow, spires of schist, granite, and
Precambrian gneiss jutted into the sky.
For the first time in weeks, the landscape surrounding David loomed larger than the impenetrable self-reproach he carried.
“It’s
extraordinary
here. I had forgotten.”
Nelson stopped to catch his breath. “No one should ever stay away so long that he forgets.”
“I didn’t mean to do that. It’s been years since I’ve done this. Time just… gets away.”
“You ought not to let that happen.”
A prominent rib of granite divided the gully they climbed and the first stone tower loomed above them. The Needle. David returned
his attention to the rocky terrain at their feet. For several hundred feet he climbed in silence again, to where a granite
face rose to the east.
“Abby put my turntable in a garage sale and I had to grab it out of someone’s hands. All those people wandering the front
yard, and I put it back inside the house. Imagine. I wouldn’t have any way to play my old albums from college.”
“Do you play your old albums from college?”
“No. But that doesn’t matter. It matters that I wouldn’t have any
way
to.”
A narrow vertical crack split the tower of rock, suitable for climbing, but Nelson continued plodding uphill. He didn’t stop
until they’d traversed a high ledge onto one large, conspicuous boulder. “Nelson, every other preacher I know goes to The
Pines to relax with a round of golf. You’re the only one I know who has to climb.”
“Sarah sold my clubs at a garage sale.”
Below them the valley sprawled like a gathered skirt, the Snake River rickracking a border beside the straight seam of highway.
To the northeast glistened Jackson Lake, sunk into sage flats and gleaming like a mirror. To the southeast lay the Lockhart
hayfields, already green from a first cutting. David grasped his pack and sprinted on ahead of Nelson. He knelt on all fours
and crawled through a narrow tunnel formed by the angle of one huge boulder.
Nelson scrabbled through behind him. “The Eye Of The Needle,” he said.
“Appropriate name.”
After that, they climbed for a while without talking. David’s thigh muscles began to burn. He welcomed the pounding of his
pulse, the rich aching in his obliques.
If everything goes the right way
…
As each step became harder, he embraced the fierce physical exercise.
…
Abby won’t find out what I’ve done
.
He leaned into the slope, climbed higher, earning both his progress and his pain.
If everything goes the right way
…
With each step, he did penance, made restitution to himself and to the mountain.
…
I can hide this
.
“Hey,” Nelson said between breaths when they finally stopped to rest. “Got…a question…to ask you.”
“What’s that?”
“You like that Husquvarna chainsaw you bought?”
“It’s a good one. Six-point-one horsepower engine. Best chainsaw I’ve ever had.”
“Next time you go out to cut firewood for the church with your chainsaw, can I go with you? I’d love to get my hands on that
piece of equipment.”
“Sure.”
“One of the occupational hazards of being a pastor. Having men serve the church so well that I never get out to do the fun
stuff myself.”
“You’re too important,” David said. “Think what it would do to the congregation if a tree fell on you.”
They started up again. The landscape opened into tundra, continuing north, following a faint track in the loose scree and
crossing hard-frozen patches of snow. Long ago they’d discovered that from here they could see all the way to Gannett Peak
on a clear day. David shaded his eyes and searched for it now, some sixty miles away against the southeast horizon, the crowning
height along the purple line of the Wind Rivers.
“Probably the same thing it would do to them if I fell off a mountain,” Nelson said.
The air was growing thin, making it harder for them to breathe as they climbed.
“It’s hazy, isn’t it?” David said between gasps. “I don’t know what happened to the sun.” For a long time, he stood on the
edge of a precipice, looking out, staring off into the distance. Nelson stood on the outcropping beside him, eyes raised to
the sky and to the heavenly Father beyond the sky. If anyone had been watching them with binoculars from the valley below,
they would have seen two human figures jutting beyond the silhouette of the mountain, their statures confident, their feet
braced wide, as if by gaining height there, they’d gained perspective on the world.
A deep bass-note of thunder rumbled at them, so close they could feel it resonate beneath their feet. Seconds later, the sound
ricocheted off the far side of the valley and a streak of lightning doglegged across the sky.
“All those things the Bible says a man is supposed to be.” When David’s voice came at last, it came gruff and hard. “I don’t
think I can live up to those anymore.”
Nelson searched the sky, his hair lifting in the wind. “What brought this up?”
David gestured wildly toward the lightning. “I don’t know. Life. The mountains.”
What I’ve done to my wife
.
“Don’t get confused. Living the right life in God’s eyes has never been about trying, David.”
“Oh, no?”
“It’s about the things you’re willing to do each time you blow it.”
The bluster bore down upon them from the Upper Saddle, blindsiding them because it came—as all Teton weather does—from the
west. David hadn’t noticed when the warmth left and the wind became changeable and the far reaches of clouds became mottled
by gray streaks of rain.
Nelson paused long enough to survey Mount Owen and Teewinot below them. “Even up here, there’s no getting away from the storms.”
“Storms in your life, Nelson?”
The pastor nodded. “That’s why you’re a good friend. It’s nice, spending time with someone who doesn’t have such a messed-up
life and who doesn’t expect me to know the answers to fix it.”
David said nothing.
“Guess we won’t get high enough to use the ropes.”
“I never called Abby.”
“Well, you aren’t going to do it now.”
Wind sluiced over the mountain, threshing David’s hair and the tops of the trees below them, making it difficult to descend
the trail. He started toward the steep ice gullies and crags rising above the mouth of Cascade Canyon. When the thunderbolt
came, he didn’t have to count before he heard the rumble.
Two seconds, at best. Hardly any time at all.
“Nelson, let’s get out of here.”
Stones came tumbling downhill as Nelson followed. David lost his footing once and slid several yards. A lightning flash underscored
each crevice and outcropping of granite. David felt the roots of his hair begin to stand, negative ions attracting positive
ones.
“Hurry.”
Together they lurched downhill. The rain began in sparse, wet pelts before the sky opened. The wind caught the downpour and
slammed it sideways against them. Rain needled their skin. They squinted against it but that didn’t help.
The hail came all at once, hitting the ground and bouncing like popcorn around their feet, striking and stinging their ears.
Water began to rush in little rivers past them, pursuing the way of least resistance. Rivulets joined in the gaps to become
streams, racing downward, filling furrows and troughs.
“We ought to find a rock to duck under,” Nelson bellowed as he scrabbled past his friend.
“With this much water? I think we ought to keep heading down.”
But then Nelson stopped so abruptly that David slammed into him. “Look over there!” Nelson hollered over the wind. He pointed.
“Can you believe that?”
David’s shirt was plastered against him. He pried it loose so it didn’t cling to his chest and squinted into the cold rain.
“What are you talking about?”
“Over there.”
“I don’t—”
“There.”
Sure enough, as David squinted through the weather, he saw what Nelson had seen: two little girls crouched beneath the brow
of a narrow ledge. Two coats—a pink one and a yellow one—flew like banners from where they’d been hung on the crooks of a
stunted blue spruce. Two little girls, alone.