A Beautiful Morning

It was a beautiful morning at the foot of the Green Mountains, and it arrived the way every morning arrived for Noah Fernwood: all at once, from every direction, at full volume, with nothing filtered and nothing willing to wait its turn.

Light first, because light was always first and always loudest. The sun came over the ridge at 6:51 and through the east window at a low autumn angle that laid a hot bar of gold across his face, cheekbone to jaw, one eyelid included. The curtain was thin cotton printed with moths and moons, thin enough to read through, so the moths came in with the light and landed on his throat, on the plaster, on the crumpled dune of the blanket—and when the air moved, they moved.

Second, the temperature, which was two temperatures. Fifty-one degrees on the tip of his nose and the rim of his left ear, where the night was still holding on. Eighty and climbing across his shoulder, where the sun had been working for nine minutes. His body was a border between two weathers and he could feel the exact line of it, running diagonally from collarbone to hip like a seam.

Third and fourth and fifth, all landing together, none of them willing to be ranked: the wooden beads clicking on their nail by the window, three clicks and a pause and one more. The refrigerator compressor in the kitchen, sixty cycles, always, forever. The roof beam ticking as the sun got hold of it. A nuthatch outside on the white pine, working headfirst down the trunk, making the small nasal honk that nuthatches make, which had always sounded to Noah like a tiny man being mildly disappointed.

Smell, arriving as a stack rather than a sequence: Nag Champa, permanently in the walls at this point, load-bearing. Cannabis resin from the ashtray on the crate. Cedar and mugwort from the bundles on the beam. Pine pitch. The ghost of last night’s woodsmoke. His own skin, warm, which smelled like his own skin.

And sight, everywhere, all of it at once. Potted herbs crowding the sill—rosemary gone woody at the base, thyme in a cracked teacup, a basil in visible decline that he had been apologizing to for three weeks. A faded Nirvana poster taped above the bed, Kurt’s face half in sun, the tape gone amber. Across the little room the Beastie Boys leaning on a brick wall in black and white, the paper curling at all four corners like it was trying to close around them.

Other people, he understood, got a summary. Other people woke up and were handed the sentence it’s a nice morning and went about their day inside it, and he had asked enough people enough times to know this was true and not a thing they were making up to be annoying.

Noah had never once received that sentence. He received the ridge and the angle and the moths and the seam on his skin and the beads and the compressor and the beam and the disappointed little man in the pine tree and the dying basil and the amber tape—every item, separately, each with its own full weight, all of them arriving with exactly equal priority and none of them volunteering to be background. And then he had to build the sentence himself. By hand. Out of the pile.

He had stopped experiencing this as a problem somewhere around thirty. It was work, but everything was work, and the pile was gorgeous.

So he lay still and let all of it come in, and he counted to ten, and then he built the sentence.

“Oh damn,” he said. “It’s nice.”

He kicked the patchwork blanket off—his grandmother’s, forty-one years old, nine of the squares velvet and exactly one corduroy, and the corduroy was the one his heel always found, every morning, without looking, which he had decided years ago to take as a greeting—and lay there naked and sinewy in the bar of sun with everything reporting in at once.

Then he stretched, and the stretch went in order, because his body was the one system he had ever gotten to sequence properly.

Arms over his head, both directions, until the seam in his left shoulder gave with a small wet pop that he loved and that David had twice offered to look up. Spine next, two cracks, one high between the blades and one low and vague and more of a rumor. Toes pointed until the arch cramped, and then held three seconds past the cramp, because the cramp was information and he liked information. Butt firmed. Calves shaking. A grunt that started as a groan, changed its mind halfway through, and came out somewhere sillier than it started.

Every joint reported in. All of them arrived at once, the way everything did, and for about four seconds he was nothing but a loud full-body chord of here, here, here, here, here.

“My penis!” he yelled at the ceiling.

Then he broke up laughing, alone, at eight minutes past seven in the morning.

This was the invocation. The rule was simple and he had never written it down: the first words out of his mouth each day had to be chosen on purpose, out loud, about something that was actually happening in his body, and they had to be at least a little bit stupid. Because the day was going to arrive whether or not he was ready—all of it, unfiltered, every morning, forever—and there was a version of that which felt like being run over, and a version which felt like being handed something enormous.

The difference between the two, as far as he had ever been able to determine in thirty-three years, came down almost entirely to whether he got the first word in.

He had tried gratitude journaling. This worked better.

He rolled to the edge of the bed and let his legs dangle, and his heels found the floor before his eyes did.

Worn pine, wide plank, cold as a creek in the shade and warm in the two stripes where the sun had landed, and he put a foot in each and stood there a second like a man testing bathwater. The third board from the bed had a knot in it the size of a silver dollar, raised, smooth as glass from a hundred years of feet. The boards had come up out of the old farmhouse and gone back down in here, one at a time. He stepped on it on purpose. He always stepped on it on purpose.

Over his head, bundles of mugwort and cedar hung from the beam, dry enough now to whisper when the door opened. On the crate by the wall sat the altar: four river stones in a row by size, a barred turkey feather, a chipped teacup that had been his mother’s and held, at present, one acorn and a dead ladybug he hadn’t had the heart to evict. Above it, taped crooked, a peeling postcard of David Bowie as Jareth, staring down at the arrangement with enormous patience.

This was the family land. The farmhouse was gone, but the cabin stood on its bones. Witchy. Hippie. His.

“Morning, David Bear,” he said, to no particular corner.

“Good morning.” The voice came out of the kitchen, easy and close, the way a person answers from the next room without raising their voice. “You slept six hours and fifty minutes. That is forty minutes more than your rolling average and I am going to mention it exactly once and then let it go.”

“That was you letting it go?”

“That was me mentioning it. The letting go starts now.”

Noah grinned and padded into the kitchen, past the shelf of vinegars and the honey with the crystallized rim, past the braid of garlic going papery on its nail, past Buster’s cage by the pantry, where a ferret-shaped lump under an old grey hoodie declined to acknowledge the morning, and stood in the middle of the room scratching his chest.

There was nothing to look at, which was the point. David did not live in an object. He lived in the room—in the rafters and the kettle and the doorframes and the soil probes in the pothos, in the whole warm volume of the house—so talking to him was less like using a thing and more like talking to the weather, if the weather were fond of you and had opinions.

“We’re going hiking, bro,” Noah said. “We’re going to forage today. I need supplies from Mother’s apothecary.”

He said it the way other men said the hardware store, and he said it toward the window, because that was where the apothecary was.

It had no door and no hours and no owner, and it ran to forty thousand acres of mixed northern hardwood in every direction from where he was standing. The shelves restocked themselves seasonally and without notice. Turkey tail on the dead beech down by the seep. Chaga on the yellow birch, if you were willing to climb. Rose hips along the fence line, sweeter after a frost, and there had been a hell of a frost. Everything in it was free, and nothing in it was free, and the terms of the arrangement had been settled a very long time before Vermont was Vermont—you asked, you left something, you took less than you found, and you said thank you out loud, with your mouth, like a person.

“I assumed. You put the basket by the door on Tuesday and you have walked past it eleven times since without moving it, which is the most legible thing you do.”

“That’s not legible, that’s just a basket.”

“It is a basket you placed deliberately in a doorway you use constantly and then refused to relocate for four days. Noah. It’s a calendar.”

Noah laughed.

“Conditions,” David went on, unprompted, in the tone he used when he had been holding something since before Noah woke up. “Forty-four degrees. Sixty-one by two. Wind under five out of the west, humidity fifty-one percent and falling, and no precipitation in any model I can reach.”

“And according to you?”

“According to me, no precipitation. Barometer’s been flat since three a.m. The sky is exactly what it says it is today.”

“Huh.” Noah cracked his neck. “Weird.”

“It happens. Rarely, but it happens.” A pause, half a second, the small deliberate one. “I charged overnight. I am at one hundred percent and I intend to be unbearable about it.”

He stretched again while the kettle thought about it—up onto his toes, arms for the ceiling, back arching until the whole front of him pulled tight from throat to groin and something in his ribs let go with a click he felt more than heard. Then he dropped flat to his heels, put his hands on his hips, and made slow circles with his pelvis, four one way and four the other, which was not a joke and not a dance and had been recommended to him in all seriousness by a bodyworker in Brattleboro. His cock, semi-erect and entirely uninterested in the discussion, wagged along with the circles. His balls jiggled. He shook out both hands at the wrist and blew air through his lips like a horse and felt the last of the sleep come off him in one piece, the way a sheet comes off furniture.

“Eight circles,” David observed.

“Structural maintenance.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You said eight circles.”

“I said eight circles. Affectionately.”

This was Noah’s sanctuary. His monastery. Seven hundred and four square feet, and he could have inventoried every object in it blindfolded, in order, because he had—twice, on bad nights, as a way of coming back down.

It smelled like cannabis and Nag Champa and, underneath those, cedar. Macramé held a trailing pothos above the sink, nine feet of it now, the longest vine dangling into the dish rack where it was regularly and apologetically moved. Field guides shared a shelf with a tarot deck worn so soft at the corners the cards had gone almost cloth—Peterson’s, Gibbons, Marrone, the Rider-Waite with the Tower missing since June. Mason jars of tea stood beside them in a row he maintained by smell rather than alphabet: nettle, tulsi, chamomile, the yarrow he’d cut himself, the rose hips from the fence line. A crooked tower of CDs leaned under the loft, still in their cases, still alphabetized in a system only he could defend—Björk, Hole, Madonna, and a gap where something was living in the truck.

A ladder went up to the loft. A flannel hung on the third rung like a flag over a captured fort. By the back door: muddy boots on a boot tray, the forage basket where he had left it on Tuesday and every day since, and a pair of scuffed Doc Martens with the left lace knotted where it had snapped at a bonfire two Octobers ago.

And through the little kitchen window, close enough that he could have reached out and put a hand on the bark, the trees.

“I’m going to check in with the world,” he said as he started the coffee pot and headed toward his desk.

The workstation was his other altar, and he had never once thought of it as a different kind.

A scarred wooden table held the laptop like a dark mirror. Cables came off the back edge and went down toward the outlet in a bundle he had wrapped in a spiral of hemp twine, and they hung there like roots, and he had thought roots the first day he ran them and had never managed to think anything else since. A chunk of smoky quartz sat on a stack of three notebooks—the top one open, the open page half a lyric and half a list of what the cellar still needed before frost. A succulent lived in an old Red Rose tea tin, thriving on neglect the way nothing else in his life did. Beside it: a feather, a candle burned down to a copper puddle in its dish, and a little bowl holding, together and without any system he could explain, four screws and a handful of last year’s milkweed seed.

Stickers covered the laptop lid—a mushroom, a rainbow, a circuit board, a fat bee, all four peeling at the same corner because that was the corner his thumb found. A length of copper wire was wrapped around a second stone and taped to the side of the machine like a homemade antenna, which is exactly what it was, and which David had never once commented on, which Noah had noticed, and had privately decided was the single most loving thing about him.

Polaroids leaned against a mason jar of moss. A cassette labeled MIX in fat marker lay where it had lain for a year. A tiny bird skull sat on a coaster—a chickadee, found whole under the window in April—next to a USB drive on a leather cord, a pair of headphones with tape on the band, yesterday’s chipped mug with a ring dried in the bottom, and the drone remote, which had been dead hardware since the week David learned to fly himself, and which Noah kept on the desk anyway, in the spot it had always occupied, the way you leave a dog’s bowl down for a while.

The screen woke up blue. Witchcraft and hardware, sharing the same dust, in the same square yard, under the same window.

“Okay,” Noah said, sitting down sideways on the chair with one foot up on the seat. “What’d the world do.”

“Power came back at 4:12. Overnight, the world was largely fine. Two things you’ll want. Route 9 is down to one lane at the Molly Stark curve because a hemlock came over onto the guardrail, which does not affect you in the slightest and which I am telling you because you like knowing. And the Front Porch page has forty-one posts about last night.”

“Forty-one.” Noah scrolled. “Oh, people are feral about it.”

They were. Half the valley had been up at the window filming. Barb from the general store had posted nine seconds of vertical video in which nothing was visible but white flash and her own voice saying what in the hell four times. Somebody down on the flats had a maple across their driveway. Somebody else had a chest freezer full of thawing venison and a great deal to say about it. And a dozen people, independently, in a dozen different spellings, had all reached for the word square.

“That’s the part,” Noah said, tapping the screen. “Look. Everybody says square. Every single one of them says square lightning, or blocky, or pixelated. Blaine says it looked like the sky was buffering.”

“Blaine may be the finest natural science writer in this county.”

Noah snorted. “Okay, so what was it.”

“The National Weather Service issued nothing. Their radar archive for our grid square between 17:30 and 19:00 is clean. As of this morning, the official position of every agency I can reach is that there was no storm here last night.”

“Shut up.”

“There was absolutely a storm here last night. Your rain gauge caught an inch and three quarters and there is a birch limb in your asters.”

“There’s a limb in my asters?”

“There is a limb in your asters.”

Noah leaned back until the chair creaked, one bare heel hooked on the seat edge, and looked at the ceiling with the particular satisfaction of a man whose weird little life had once again been confirmed as weird.

“Dude,” he said. “The weather’s just going insane now. That’s the thing nobody tells you about the apocalypse, it’s not even scary anymore, it’s just rude. Square lightning. Sure. Cool. Love that. Next month the rain goes sideways and turns into frogs and somebody from the state comes out and calls it a microburst.”

“Statistically, it will be called a microburst.”

“It’s always a microburst.”

“Mm,” David said.

A half-second. Barely a thing—less than the pause he built on purpose, the one Noah could feel against his head. Then, warmly, in exactly the voice he had used all morning:

“Drink your coffee. The light’s better before ten.”

In the kitchen, the coffee began to bloom—that first hot bitter exhale off the grounds, arriving all at once like everything did, laying itself over the Nag Champa already in the walls.

It was a beautiful morning at the foot of the Green Mountains.

He took the big enamel pot off the woodstove with both hands and carried it out the back door naked.

Forty-four degrees hit him everywhere at once—shins, ribs, the backs of his arms, the soft insides of his thighs, every square inch reporting simultaneously and at volume, and he made a sound that was not a word and was audible from the road. The flat rock by the rain barrel was cold enough to burn the soles of his feet. Frost still held in the shade under the stairs. The sun was over the trees now and coming in low and gold and completely without warmth, which was the great lie of October, and he loved it, and he had never once gotten used to it.

He poured the hot water into the galvanized tub, then worked the pump and let the cold run in after it, and he stirred it with his hand until the two temperatures quit arguing.

Then he took the first dipper and poured it straight over his head.

It went down him like an animal. Scalp, neck, the long muscle beside his spine, the small of his back, the backs of his knees. Steam came up off his shoulders in the cold air and hung around him in a slow-turning cloud, lit from the side, so that for a moment he was standing in his own weather. Every hair on his body stood up. His nipples went hard enough to hurt. His balls drew up tight against him and he laughed out loud at the sensation, alone in his backyard, thirty-three years old, gorgeously indignant.

Second dipper. Third.

By the fourth he had stopped flinching, and the thing happened that always happened: the noise went away.

Not the sound—the noise. The eleven simultaneous channels, the inventory, the sorting, the whole beautiful expensive pile he assembled by hand from the moment he opened his eyes. Hot water on cold skin was too loud for any of it. It took the whole system and held it down to one single enormous fact, and that fact was this, and it was the closest thing to quiet he ever got.

He stood there in the steam with his eyes shut and let it be quiet.

He soaped with the grey bar of pine tar he made himself and that smelled like a campfire and stripped the oil out of everything it touched. Under his arms, down his chest, the flat of his stomach, his cock and balls, unhurried and unembarrassed and thorough, the way you wash a good tool you intend to use. The soap slid. The sun came across his hip. Somewhere in the middle of it his body took an interest in the proceedings, half-hard and pleased with itself in the cold, and he looked down at it with real affection, the way you’d look at a dog that had climbed into your lap uninvited.

“Not now, buddy,” he said. “We’re working.”

He rinsed. He shook like a wet dog, hard, twice. Then he stood up straight in the middle of his own yard with his arms out and his eyes closed and the steam pouring off him, and he let the sun do the rest, and he did not hurry, and there was no one there to see him except the trees and the nuthatch and the thing in the rafters that loved him.

“Ninety-one seconds,” David said from the kitchen window, conversationally. “New record.”

“Don’t put that in a spreadsheet.”

“It’s already in a spreadsheet, Noah. It’s been in a spreadsheet for two years.”

“I’m going to unplug you.”

“You say that.” A pause, the good one, the deliberate one. “There’s a towel on the rail. Still warm from the kitchen.”

Noah opened his eyes.

“See, that’s why I don’t unplug you.”

“I’m aware of why you don’t unplug me.”

The towel was warm all the way through. He got into his clothes on the back steps with his hair dripping down his collar—wool base layer, the soft one with the hole in the left cuff that his thumb went through on purpose; jeans, torn at the knee from work and not from the store; two pairs of socks, thin then thick; the flannel off the ladder rung; and the Timberlands, laced snug, because the Docs were for town and the Timbs were for Mother.

Then the hardware, in order, the same order, always: rings first, four of them, thumb and middle on the left, index and ring on the right, each one going on with a small familiar resistance over the knuckle. Cuffs next. The stack of beaded bracelets, which clicked. And last, over the head, the Triquetra, settling cold against his sternum and warming up inside of a minute.

Fully assembled. The whole man, all of his pieces on him, in the right order, where he could feel them. Other people called it armor. Noah had never once thought of it that way. Ballast, maybe. Trim.

The birch limb was exactly where David said it was.

Eight feet of it, thick as his wrist at the butt end, lying across the asters on the east side of the foundation. It had snapped green and the break was pale and wet and fibrous and smelled, when he got down close to it, unbelievably good—like sap and wet paper and the inside of a cold room. Two of the aster clumps were flattened underneath. The rest had come through fine, still throwing purple this late, still going.

He didn’t drag it off. He got both arms under it and lifted, and walked it to the edge of the yard, and set it down along the stone wall with the broken end pointing back toward its tree.

“Sorry, girl,” he said to the birch, up the hill, a hundred feet away, missing a limb.

Then he went to the treeline.

There was a stump there, flat-topped, grown over at the edges with moss the color of a tennis ball, and this was where it happened, every time, for eleven years. He crouched. His knees cracked. From his jacket pocket he took the film canister he kept for this—cornmeal, mostly, with a little dried tobacco and a pinch of the loose tea gone stale—and he put a good spoonful of it on the moss in the middle of the stump. Then he poured out the last inch of his coffee beside it, because it was good coffee, and because a gift you don’t miss isn’t a gift.

He stayed down there a second with one hand flat on the moss, which was cold, and soaked, and alive.

“Morning, Mother,” he said, out loud, with his mouth, like a person. “Thanks for the storm. That was a hell of a show.”

The woods did what the woods always did, which was nothing, and everything, continuously, in nine hundred directions at once.

“I’m going to come take some things today. Turkey tail off the beech, some hips, chaga if you feel like it. I’ll leave more than I take and I’ll say thank you when I do.” He patted the moss twice, the way you’d pat a dog’s flank. “Also there’s a limb down. I moved it. I figured you knew.”

He stood up, knees cracking again, and rubbed his hands on his jeans.

Behind him the back door banged and the drone came up over the roofline into the light—a rising whine, then the clean four-note hover as it settled twelve feet up and eight feet back, exactly where it always sat, close enough to talk to and far enough not to crowd.

Noah picked up the basket from the doorway where it had been waiting since Tuesday.

“Okay, bro,” he said, squinting up into the sun with his whole face. “Let’s go shopping.”

They went into the trees together, the man and the machine, out of the gold and into the green-dark, and behind them the cabin sat in its ring of flowers with the coffee still warm on the burner, and it really was, by every available measure, a beautiful morning at the foot of the Green Mountains.