The Wood Wife Read online

  Yet for Anna, in her own exile, place has become the crux of her being, the source that now feeds her art in a way that I am still trying to grasp. The Red Springs is just water to me, not the well of inspiration it is for Anna; I see no salmon swimming in its depths, no hazel nuts falling from the trees. I have no muse. I struggle on my own. Every word, every line is chiseled with great effort from the hard white block of language.

  Exile Songs will be published next spring. And then deMontillo better watch his ass.

  Yours as ever,

  Cooper

  Chapter Two ❋

  The hills call in a tongue

  I cannot speak, a constant murmuring,

  calling the rain from my dry bones,

  and syllables from the marrow.

  —The Wood Wife, Davis Cooper

  Maggie woke early, with a wrenching sense of dislocation. She stared at the water-stained ceiling above her and tried to recall just where she was. On a mountainside, in Davis Cooper’s house. The sky outside was a shade of violet that she’d never quite seen before.

  She got up, washed, put her bathrobe on and padded into the kitchen. She’d always been an early riser; she felt cheated if she slept too late and missed the rising sun. She cherished the silver morning light, the stillness, the morning rituals: water in the kettle, bitter coffee grounds, a warm mug held between cold hands, the scent of a day unfolding before her, pungent with possibility.

  As the water heated, Maggie unpacked the bag of provisions she’d brought along: dark Dutch coffee, bread, muesli, vegetables, garlic, a bottle of wine. In the small refrigerator were eggs, cheese, fresh pasta from Los Angeles, green corn tamales from downtown Tucson. The only strange thing about the unfamiliarity of this kitchen was the knowledge that it was hers now, these pans, these plates, this old dented kettle, this mug decorated with petroglyph paintings. For years she’d been travelling light and making herself at home in other people’s houses. Having an entire house of her own was going to take some getting used to.

  She made the coffee, grilled some toast, and sat down at the kitchen table with yesterday’s edition of the Arizona Daily Star, too unsettled to actually read it. Davis’s kitchen was the heart of the house, with a rough wood table in the center that could have easily seated a family of twelve and not just one elderly poet. The kitchen hearth held a woodstove—the winter nights were probably cold up here. Fat wicker rockers were pulled close to it, covered by faded old serapes. The walls were a mottled tea-colored adobe with shades of some brighter tone showing through and wainscotting up to waist-height stained or aged to a woodsy green. The window frames were painted violet, the doors were a rich but weathered shade of blue. Mexican saints in beaten tin frames hung among Davis’s pots and pans; folk art and dusty tin milagros hung among strings of red chili peppers, garlic, and desert herbs. The windowsills were crowded with stones, geodes, fossils, clumps of smoky quartz, and Indian pottery shards.

  The rest of the house was less colorful and cluttered, with plain adobe walls and simple, old Mission furniture made of oak. There was a small living room with a beehive fireplace and an old-style ceiling of saguaro ribs; the side bedroom where Maggie had slept on a lumpy feather bed with a tarnished brass frame; Davis’s study in the front of the house; and one other room at the back of the house that seemed to be firmly locked. The wood plank floors were strewn with Navajo rugs in patterns of brown, black and red. Every straight wall held bookcases packed with books in English, Spanish and French. Indian drums hung over one case, a Rincon trail map over another, but otherwise the walls were bare, studded with nails as though recently pictures had hung there and been removed.

  The electricity, Johnny Foxxe had told her, came from a generator she shared with her neighbors. The water was from her own underground spring and tasted of rust. She wondered if her phone was hooked up yet. As she got up to test it, it began to ring. It was probably Nigel. Who else would phone her before dawn?

  “Hey Puck,” he said, “how’s life in the desert?”

  “Nigel, I’ve been in Tucson for exactly,” she looked at her watch, “twelve hours. It’s a little soon for a progress report.”

  “So what’s it like? Is it hot there? Did you meet any cowboys or Indians yet?”

  “Not unless you count the kid who rescued my car from a ditch. He had a snazzy pair of cowboy boots on, but no chaps or spurs, I’m sorry to disappoint you. It’s early, Nigel. Go away. I’ll call you when you get back next week.”

  “Car? Ditch? Did you have an accident?”

  “No, mother. I’m hanging up now. Have a good time up in Ottawa.”

  “Toronto,” he said as she hung up the receiver.

  She poured herself another cup of coffee and ignored the phone when it rang again.

  It rang and rang and eventually stopped as she stood in the door of Davis’s study. She had peered into the room last night, but had hesitated to enter it. It had been a disturbing room by moonlight: the desk with the poet’s papers still on it, as though he had just stepped away. If the old man’s ghost was haunting the house, this is where it would be.

  The room was now bathed in blue pre-dawn light filtered through the french doors and two small windows set deep in the adobe wall. Through the glass of the doors was a view of the Three Graces (as he had once named the three tall saguaro cactus in a letter to her) and a yard full of ground-hugging prickly pear, scrubby wildflowers and hard-packed earth. In the distance, beyond the long dirt drive, was the wash, a fugitive river that ran only after the heaviest rains. Its banks were edged by cottonwoods with the mountains looming behind them, black against the purple sky. It was a dramatic landscape, harsh and vivid. She did not find the desert beautiful. The air felt parched; her skin felt dry; the color of the sky looked unnatural. Already she missed the deep and abundant green of the Pacific coast.

  She sighed, turned on the lamp by the desk, and sat in Davis’s desk chair. She picked up an ink-stained Monte Blanc pen, covered with a thin layer of dust. In the unfinished letter below it he’d been declining a request for an interview, in the acerbic epistolary prose that Maggie had known so well. The rest of the house was a stranger’s house, but here was the man Maggie knew: in the pictures pinned above his desk; in the calligraphic handwriting; in the books on the shelves—books that he’d discussed in his long, cranky, occasionally drunken and often hilarious letters.

  The desktop was full of letters and envelopes postmarked around the world. This had been his work these last years, this voluminous correspondence. There were no poems on the old man’s desk, except the poems other writers had sent. Davis Cooper had not published a book, or a single poem, in over thirty years. Instead he drank. Legend had it that it was alcohol that had fueled his early brilliance, and alcohol that had destroyed it. An occupational hazard, he had called it; in his day, it was normal, almost expected.

  Maggie picked up a pipe from the corner of the desk and breathed the scent of stale tobacco, trying to catch the lingering essence of a man she would never meet. Goddamn him, he’d kept putting her visits off and off until it was too late. It was absurd to be angry with a dead man, but she was angry with Davis nonetheless—and at the same time overwhelmed by his last unexpected gift: the chance to finally know the man, to understand the life he’d led. The study was crammed full of notes, letters, journals, marked-up manuscripts; an entire life sat in these pages, was filed away in trunks and drawers. He’d been a reclusive, secretive man. But he’d trusted her with all this.

  The task before her was daunting. She wondered how and where she should begin. By living here, she answered herself. By sleeping where he slept, eating where he ate, walking this raw, uncomfortable land and trying to learn what kept him here, away from all his colleagues and friends back in Europe and New York. Were the demons that drove him still in this place, or had he taken them with him to his grave? Had he ever written poetry again? It was Maggie’s belief that he had.

  His letters weren’t the work of a re
tired man, but of an artist still struggling with his craft and his muse. His study confirmed that impression. This was a working writer’s room. The walls were filled with poetry, other poets’ work as well as his own, written in brown ink right on the walls in that distinctive calligraphic hand: Blake, Shakespeare, Yeats, Pound, Stevens, Neruda, Adrienne Rich. Quotes from sources as diverse as popular fiction, science texts and the Bible. He’d written on the walls in other rooms too; she’d come across poems in surprising places (Keats by the john, Borges by the sugar tin, a line from one of her own poems on the back of the bedroom door) but here he’d covered the walls with them, a collage of words, in four languages: his own English, his adopted Spanish and French, and Rilke in German.

  Above his desk was a line from Homer:

  Sing heavenly muse.

  Under that were the last words of Michaelangelo upon his deathbed, to his apprentice:

  Draw, Antonio, draw, Antonio,

  draw and do not waste time.

  The first was written in faded ink; the second quote was fresh and new, written in a slanted, urgent hand. Why would a man who had given up his craft write out those particular words? She was certain that somewhere in this room she would find evidence that he’d been writing still, writing up to the very end. But if so, why had he kept it a secret? And would the work be any good?

  She looked long at the bulletin board hanging above Homer’s exhortation. Old photographs were pinned to it and she recognized her friend from the photos printed in biographies of other poets: the young Davis, fair-haired and clean-featured, in the square-shouldered suits of New York in the forties; a more weathered face in the fifties in the harsher Arizona light. Here was one taken with T. S. Eliot in London, another with Pablo Neruda. A grainy snapshot of Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller had been taken in Paris before the war. There were several photographs of Anna Naverra, the Surrealist painter he’d become involved with when he fled his brief marriage to a New York socialite and ended up in Mexico. All the photographs were black-and-white; there were none more recent than thirty years before. As though his life had then ground to a halt, like the poetry did.

  She examined the other items pinned to the board: A grocery list. A phone list. A list of book titles—all nonfiction. A list of what seemed like place names. A list of the titles of Maggie’s early poems. A list of words with no obvious connection between them at all.

  Three small pictures tacked to the board were the only images of art in the room. One was an old, faded postcard from London’s V & A Museum: “The Moon’s Betrothed,” by the English Pre-Raphaelite painter Charles Endicott Bete. The second postcard, from a Tucson gallery, was a contemporary painting by Holly Roberts: the abstracted figure of a man with stag horns rendered in greys and blues. Below that card was a larger reproduction of a painting by Brian Froud, an English artist the poet admired and with whom, she knew, he had corresponded. Froud lived on Dartmoor, the wild corner of Britain where Davis himself had been born. The painting was of a mysterious woman in a mask of leaves and crowned with horns. The figure could have easily stepped from the pages of Davis’s “Wood Wife” poems. She wondered if it illustrated the poems, or simply grew from the same rocky soil—the landscape she had always assumed inspired the poems. Until she came here.

  Tucked behind the Froud picture was an envelope, a thick one, of heavy starched paper. Maggie pulled it out and looked at it, startled. It was addressed hastily in Davis’s hand to “Black Maggie”—his name for her. The envelope was sealed with wax, and covered with thick, grimy layers of dust. Whoever had cleaned the house since then—Johnny Foxxe or his mother, she supposed—had not discovered the envelope, or had left it there undisturbed.

  As she stood holding it in her hands—half-eager, half-afraid to open it—the phone began to ring again. Nigel, she thought to herself crossly as she pocketed the envelope and headed back to the kitchen.

  It was not Nigel, it was her best friend, Tat, calling her from London and blithely unaware of how early it was on this side of the world.

  “Hey, Tat!” Maggie said, ridiculously glad to hear her voice again. She and Tat had known each other for half their lives, ever since their university days at Exeter, in the west of England—not far from where Cooper had been born, and where she’d discovered his work.

  “I’ve been trying to reach you all week,” Tat said. “What happened with what’s-his-name in Mendocino? When I called, he said you’d left him and he wouldn’t say where you’d gone. I had to track down Nigel to get your number. Where is it I’m calling, anyway?”

  “Tucson.”

  “Tucson?”

  “Why does everybody say it that way? It’s not the end of the earth.”

  “No, but it’s surely next door to it. You must be a: Davis Cooper’s house. How long are you going to be there? When are you coming home?”

  Home to Tat was London, just as to Nigel it was L.A. Neither could imagine anyone actually choosing to remain in any other place. For Maggie, it was the idea of “home” that was hard for her to imagine. Itchy feet, her granddaddy always said. She’d moved between half a dozen countries, trailing friends, lovers, possessions in her wake, and all of those places were home, and none of them. She wasn’t quite sure what “home” meant.

  “I don’t know where I’m going next,” she told Tat, just as she’d told Nigel yesterday. “I expect I’ll be in Tucson for a while. Davis’s house is in the mountains, not the city—rather more isolated than I’d imagined. But I’ll have a nice warm winter here and plenty of work to keep me busy. If I’m going to give this book a go, there’s a hell of a lot of research ahead.”

  “So gather up the papers and bring them to London. You’re going to have to travel anyway, aren’t you? To interview the people who knew him? Most of his old colleagues must be in New York or over here.”

  “Or dead,” Maggie said with a sigh. “But I’m nowhere near the interview stage yet. First I’ve got five decades worth of papers to go through. And there’s something else,” Maggie added, struggling to find the words to express it. “He wrote those poems here, Tat. About this land. These mountains. I haven’t been here a full day yet, and I’ve already realized that everything I thought about his poetry is wrong. That thesis I wrote years ago is nonsense. I thought The Wood Wife was rooted in his memories of rural England. But he wrote it in a landscape that’s like nothing else I’ve ever seen. If I can’t understand this place, or what Cooper found so compelling here, then I’ll never really understand his work. Does that make sense to you?”

  “It does,” Tat conceded. “Which is a pity, because I really wanted to talk you into coming over here. I miss you, girl. Well, maybe I’ll try to get over there instead. It will have to be after my show in November; I’ve still got too many prints to finish. London is horrid in the winter, anyway. It would be good to escape the rain. If I come to visit you in the wild west, do you promise me sunshine, art supply stores, and handsome western lads to go dancing with?”

  “Will you settle for sunshine and art supplies? There’s a handsome western lad next door, but he’s too young, and probably too aware of just how handsome he is.”

  “Ummmm, just my type. The ones that have ‘Trouble’ written all over them. You know I have a weakness for those sexy American accents.”

  “You’re the only Brit I know who does. Everyone else winces when we open our mouths. Will you really come, Tat?”

  “Girl, I’ll book the flight today. What do you want me to bring you?”

  “Single malt from the Highlands and the latest on Di.”

  “You’re on,” Tat said. “Now it’s back to the drawing board for me. Ring me if you get lonely. Cheers.”

  Maggie hung up the phone slowly. She hadn’t felt particularly lonely before, but she suddenly felt so now. The house was too empty. The mountain was quiet but for an astonishing racket of birds. The sun was still just a glow on the hills but the sky had paled to lavender. The wash had dried out during the night, and now was
just a broad expanse of sand.

  She saw something lurking out in the yard, on the far side of the cottonwood tree. She stepped closer to the window. It was a coyote, standing motionless. She’d never seen one close up before. It was the size of a German shepherd, but tawny colored, bushy tailed, with the ears and pointed muzzle of a fox. The coyote was skinny, its ribs sticking out, and an eye was damaged, filmed over. It stared at her through its one good eye, and she stared back, feeling strangely moved. It was beautiful in its wildness. Then it turned silently and trotted away, heading through the trees to the bed of the wash. Maggie let out the breath she’d been holding as she watched it disappear.

  She went outside onto the porch and sat down in a rocking chair. The air still held the nighttime’s chill and she was glad for her bathrobe’s warmth. It was one she had pinched off Nigel long ago, and still held the memories of their best days together. Now the robe’s flannel was faded and threadbare, but its touch was a familiar comfort in this unfamiliar place. In the pocket was Davis’s envelope. Maggie pulled it out, stared at it, then she broke the thick wax seal.

  My dear Marguerita, if you find this note, then I fear that I have failed once more. I pray to God that I will not—but prayers are worth little on a gin-sodden tongue, and my God has long turned a deaf ear.

  Yes, more secrets, even now. I dare not tell you more. Words have power, remember that, woman. Even written on a page. Letters. Runes. Alphabets. The stars, the stones, the very trees reveal the language of the earth.

  I am leaving you my house, and everything that’s in it. My books. Anna’s paintings. My journals, and my notes for poems—do with them as you will. Did you guess that I’ve been writing poems? “The Saguaro Forest” is my last work. I wrote it for the mountain. Someday you’ll understand.