Northern Forest, cont.

Mary Beth thought it would be harder to touch her dead grandmother’s hand than it was. She spent most of that evening, back at the Fraser house by the fireplace, stocking feet tucked beneath her on a stiff, high-back loveseat with Jack, tuning out relatives telling stories about Alice and thinking about that journal. While Elizabeth laughed, remembering the first time she’d tried to make Alice’s pot roast for Arthur, after they’d married, and she’d filled the house with smoke and called Alice in tears, only to find out her mother-in-law already had a backup pot roast prepared, just in case, Mary Beth wondered whether or not they’d covered the coffin with dirt yet. She watched relatives shuffle around the large Fraser formal dining table, picking at finger sandwiches and fruit salad on small plastic plates, basket of cloth napkins in the corner, and tried to imagine how cold the hands she’d have to move would be. Once, she and Jack had had a pet rat that died while Jack was out of state, looking at the site for their place in Wyoming and Mary’d had to take it out of the cage to bury it in the backyard by the sycamore tree. She’d jumped when she wrapped her head around its tiny furry body, at how cold it was, just hours after death. Mary Beth didn’t know why she wanted to dig up her grandmother: it seemed to her a horrible thing to want. She couldn’t get away from the desperate, consuming wanting-to-know. She’d never had a problem with getting her hands in the dirt, with digging or heavy physical labor that strained her lower back until sweat beads burst onto the back of her slender neck. She’d helped Jack put up the drywall in their new house and install the porcelain sink in the bathroom and had planted her own expansive vegetable garden and built her own worktable for the art studio out back. But she knew that digging up a grave, however little dirt had already been laid on top of that dark, oak coffin, would be harder than any of that.

There hadn’t been much dirt, yet, not packed in with whatever monstrous piece of equipment they used to pound people back below the surface of the earth, just loose clods of it dumped on, as if by the back legs of a horse. When she smeared the loose soil off the lid of the coffin in the yellow glow of that moon, she felt calmer than she had at the wake, staring at creamy pink walls and folded hands poked out of suit coats too formal for the men of Berlin and trying to avoid looking at those brown, mannequin hands. Mary Beth felt the sweat mingle with the dry dirt into muddy trails running down her cheeks as she bent to creak open the lid of her grandmother’s coffin, heavier than the dirt in the shovel. In the darkness, Alice looked like the woman Mary Beth remembered from childhood, the women who kneaded and punched sourdough loaves and had flour permanently in the creases of her face and neck, who would gather her grandchildren up in her thick arms and whisper the Celtic prayers her mother’d taught her young. She looked asleep, peaceful, praying some Hail Mary from the center of her rosary and silently resting beside her long-dead husband. Mary Beth shook, reaching out toward the softly wrinkled fingers of the left hand. They were cold, colder than she could have imagined, but it didn’t startle her: instead she ran her own fingers tenderly along the soft pillows of the undersides, taking her grandmother’s hand in her own as if they were praying the Our Father, lifting it and slowly removing the bulging black notebook from underneath. She lowered her grandmother’s hand back to her chest with a pang of guilt. Would Grammy notice the absence of the journal? Miss it? Mary Beth shook her head. Catholic or no, she knew that nothing of her grandmother was left in this body, that she wasn’t sleeping but slowly beginning the process of decay. And if she did believe in heaven or any of it, she knew her grandmother would want Mary Beth to understand her own grandfather, would want her to read their shared history and would want to teach Mary Beth, in any way she could, the heart of the father Mary’d long since given up on understanding. If Grampy had been connected, somehow, to the Gorham Pulp Mill, Mary Beth had to know.

"Northern Forest" continued ...

Mary’s mother, Elizabeth, had told her that her grandmother had probably been dead for a few days before anyone had found her. It was the maid who stumbled upon the body, sprawled across the bed, apparent heart attack, four days’ worth of Berlin Daily Suns stacked on the doorstep. But even knowing all that, even hearing the gruesome specifics that Mary’s mother wanted to, needed to talk to someone about but couldn’t mention to her husband, couldn’t bring herself to force him to think of his own mother that way, even those details didn’t prepare Mary Beth for the way her grandmother looked at the wake. Mary Beth hated wakes, an unfortunate Catholic tradition that the Frasers happily upheld, because there was her grandmother: face and hands tan with makeup, looking like a plastic mannequin empty version of herself, long nails painted a pearled pink, clutching a wooden rosary and a creased, black leather notebook. Unrecognizable. Mary Beth and Jack knelt together in front of the casket and Mary Beth stared at her folded hands for what she felt was the appropriate amount of time, trying to avoid looking up at her grandmother’s body cocooned in white satin.

Later, Mary Beth caught her mother’s elbow at the mourning meal—buffet style roast beef, herbed carrots and potatoes, salad, rolls and bottles of Sam Adams at the Country Tavern special events room—to ask about the book she’d seen.

“Mom,” Mary Beth whispered, leaning against an exposed wooden beam near the staircase, where her parents were shaking hands and murmuring thanks to sorry for your losses and we’ll miss hers and she was a great lady’s, “what was that notebook Grammy was holding?”

“Oh, it was your Grampy’s journal,” Elizabeth replied. “Uncle Bill found it in Grammy’s nightstand when they were packing up her jewelry and they thought it would be nice to bury her with it.”

“Did they read any of it?” Mary Beth had been just fifteen when her grandfather died, a quiet funny old man who Arthur had never wanted to spend much time around, always nervous and overly formal, shaking his own father’s hand until the day he was gone. Mary could count on one hand the number of times she’d been alone with either of her grandparents and had never known much about their lives before her, let alone before Arthur.

“Of course not,” Elizabeth replied, mildly horrified, as she turned back to embrace Mrs. Harrendanks from St. Teresa’s knitting circle and coo a thank you back to her I’m so sorry. Mary Beth turned from her mother back toward the room to find Jack. He stood by the buffet, laughing with her Uncle Bill: Bill’s meaty fist clutching a beer, face red from the laughter or the alcohol or the crowd. Jack’s smile still cut across his face like a wide gorge, just like in high school, his tousled brown hair ruffled against his forehead and Mary Beth smiled to see him so comfortable at a Fraser family gathering. Jack had always been closer to Bill and Mary Beth suspected it was construction that did it, men who worked with their hands understanding each other on a physical level. Jack was a framer, worked in the skeletons of future houses, and had a scar on his left hand from the place a nail gun had pierced straight through, pinning his palm to a two-by-four. Mary’d had to squirt the antiseptic fluid into the hollow wound for a week, Jack’s friends holding his shoulders down so he couldn’t thrash, roaring and wild against the pain. And Bill was a contractor, the Fraser family’s version of blue collar, who spent every day at his job site, blueprints balled in his fists and yellow hard hat teetering on his massive, balding forehead. But more and more frequently there was no job site to visit. Plenty of land up here to build on, Bill would say, thanks to the once-booming business of the pulp mill clearing out most of Berlin’s northern pine forest, but not many people left who can afford to build on it. The second half of that sentence went: since Arthur Fraser closed down the pulp mill last year but that was the part nobody said unless Bill’d been drinking.

Mary Beth watched Jack bob his head respectfully, his mouth pursed in that tense way men have when discussing serious business, as Bill’s voice lowered.

“No, it’s been a long time since Fraser Paper was that kind of company,” Bill said gravely, “the kind that cared about their workers, knew their faces and made sure they had food on their tables.” Jack shook his head and studied his feet hard. He didn’t have to ask how long or what happened, because he knew. Mary Beth knew. How long it’d been was since Arthur Fraser bought the Berlin Paper Company, ten years before Mary Beth was born, parlaying an MBA from Harvard Business into the title of youngest CEO and his own name on the sign at the gates.

“Berlin Paper used to own the pulp mill, ‘dya know that?” Bill asked, and Jack nodded politely, glancing around for his wife and Mary Beth made her way over to rescue Jack from the awkward rant he’d heard more than once before. “Yup, owned the pulp mill and paper factory and still they made that kind of effort to know their own people. But not anymore. Now it’s cutbacks and cost-effectiveness research reports and Fraser Paper, like the name mattered more than the place!” Mary Beth slid her arm through Jack’s and leaned in to kiss her uncle on his hot cheek just as he slammed his bottle down on the edge of the buffet table and swore under his breath. Mary’d seen it before. Bill would drink too much, his hometown pride mixed with what must’ve been jealousy at the brother who’d made it in the big city and come home to work his little town into shape and he’d start to bubble over. First the rant, then the bottle-slam, the quiet cursing and then,

“God DAMN it, Arthur!” Several heads snapped over to Bill then away quickly, as if embarrassed to be caught judging one of the grieving sons. Others never looked up, having heard Bill’s tirade before. Arthur’s head snapped over to his younger brother and didn’t look away, his eyes narrowing, his chest moving with the deep inhale that meant you were just another burden on his already laden shoulders, as he moved towards them.

“Show some respect, William,” Arthur hissed, his hand clamped down hard on Bill’s shoulder, “this is your own mother’s funeral.”

“Respect!” Bill replied, swerving around to face his brother. “Like the respect you showed shutting down the pulp mill, putting all those folks out of work, folks just like your own father? The last tie we had to him, Art!” Bill poked his finger into his big brother’s chest, then stalked away, muttering, “the last damn thing we had left,” straight out of the room, straight down the stairs and straight out of his own mother’s mourning meal early. Arthur took another deep breath and looked up at Mary Beth, their matching grey eyes meeting for the first time since she’d set foot back in Berlin last night and gave her a curt nod, same for Jack, and went back to shaking hands with the crowd.

Mary Beth exhaled slowly, rubbing the creases between her eyebrows with one hand, willing away the headache she could feel working its way into the foreground. Jack rubbed her neck gently and leaned in to whisper,
“What was that about your grandfather?”

“I don’t know,” Mary Beth replied, glancing up at her husband, sagging slightly against his chest. And she really didn’t. Mary Beth remembered her grandfather in fragments: she remembered he wore bow ties to mass and his great, shaking laugh, belly full and spreading like syrup. She remembered his pressed blue jeans and his gnarled, scarred hands that she’d love to run her little-girl fingers over, riddled with arthritic bumps like the knots of a tree stripped of its bark. She remember his string art of the sailboat hanging over his drafting table and how he’d always microwave her a can of spaghetti-os and him holding the pencil, feet up in the recliner, filling out the weekly crossword. But she couldn’t remember a single thing he’d said to her and she’d never known he had any connection to the pulp mill or Fraser Paper.

“I don’t know,” Mary Beth repeated, headache throbbing like the dull shine of fork against ceramic sink, but preoccupied now with memory. “Do you know that was his journal Grammy was holding in the coffin? Wish I could get a look in that and find out,” she murmured absent-mindedly.

Jack leaned in and kissed his wife’s forehead, sensing her tension. “Mmm, not unless you dig it up. All that’s down in the dirt, now.”

Teaser from my seminar paper for Environmental Lit (20 page critical literature research paper), aka the bane of my existence for the last three months. Due tomorrow and never looking back... (Seriously, it's pretty boring and pretentious-sounding, but I have to do something with it!)


Word as Weapon: Dismantling Hierarchy Through Boundary-Crossing in Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge and Arundhati Roy’s The Cost of Living

"The establishment has always feared writers, because writers have the power of clarity, and when they choose to use it, it can be deadly."
–Arundhati Roy, DAM/AGE, a film with Arundhati Roy

Contemporary writers across the globe such as Terry Tempest Williams, Rick Bass, Vandana Shiva and Arundhati Roy combine environmental and social activism with literature, employing creative literary devices to reach a wider political audience. The willingness of such authors to blur the lines between nonfiction reporting and creative literature is indicative of a holistic approach to solving the world’s social and environmental ills that is also reflected in modern political movements. In an article on the relationship between postcolonial and ecocritical literature, Graham Huggan recognizes that the similarities between these literary movements are rooted in a shared holistic view of social problems. Criticizing a primarily European American approach to ecocriticism, Huggan suggests that postcolonial literature is characterized by an insistence on the inseparability of current crises of ecological mismanagement from historical legacies of imperialistic exploitation and authoritarian abuse (702). However, western ecocritical female writers are exploring similar links between environmental and human degradation by aligning specific human and ecological communities, often going so far as to link the landscape to the physical human body. Terry Tempest Williams, an ecofeminist author from a developed nation, and Arundhati Roy, an ecocritical writer from a developing nation, both seek to challenge the traditional power structures of their various environments by analyzing the deep connection between their “othered” groups and the specific ecological locations they inhabit. In doing so, these two writers demonstrate the similar techniques and approaches of ecofeminist and postcolonial literary activists, despite their different geographic locations and personal backgrounds.

On the surface, a Mormon naturalist from a wealthy family of developers in Salt Lake City, Utah may not seem to have much in common with a former student of architecture and novelist from New Delhi. But the differences in the backgrounds of Terry Tempest Williams and Arundhati Roy lead them both to a life of activism, devoted to the communities—both human and ecological—from which they came. Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge is a book devoted to two such communities: her immediate family, a Mormon stronghold shaken to the core by the deaths of its women, in this case, Williams’ mother, by cancer; and the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, which, during the same season, suffered a devastating loss of habitat due to the flooding of the Great Salt Lake. Arundhati Roy’s collection of two essays, The Cost of Living, explores the relationship of Indians to their modern environment: in “The Greater Common Good”, addressing the close ties between the Adivasi and the Narmada River; in “The End of Imagination”, analyzing the potential physical and psychological impacts of Indian nuclear proliferation on the country’s people as a whole.

In both works of literature, the authors share a common goal: to bring together the fates of a people and their ecological community in a way that challenges their domination by questioning the traditional structure of power. To this end, Williams and Roy employ similar literary techniques, namely: aligning the identity of a specific group of people to a specific place and linking the physical human body (often female) with the natural landscape, in order to place their texts in a larger political context by refusing to adhere to preconceived boundaries on which the exploitation of resources is based.


If you got this far, bravo. Tell me what you think!

coming soon to a conference near you?