Free House of Spells by Robert Pepper-Smith Page A

closed up. I cleared ice out of the hole with my bare hands; I ran around in circles to attract fish by underwater vibrations. I laid the flashlight down, set my line, and soon I was hauling in trout after trout, little things with a blue and green speckle on their sides and the smell of archival water on them. Soon I had a heaped pile at my side with the ones on the outside beginning to freeze. Hungry, they just kept taking the bait.
    There was no one else out there to see how lucky I was that night.
    I kept looking around for someone to see what was happening.
    And then, all of a sudden, I saw myself and what I had at my feet: way too many, too quickly and without much effort. Looking at the poor little things, I felt my stomach turn. I cleared away the frozen ones, the light had already gone out of their eyes. Five or six in the middle of the stack were still alive. Heartsick, I let them go.

    Now I heard the car door slide open and Rose was standing beside me. To stay awake, I’d rested my forehead against the metal wall. The wind in the window opening was numbing my ears. The forest ran by and the rock peaks above were just beginning to show. After a while she said, “Give me him, I can’t sleep.”
    When she returned to the sleeping car, I felt the train slow between high, sooty banks. We were climbing into the mountains. I walked through the dining car past linen-covered tables with flower vases bracketed to the wall and on each a peach in a silver bowl. An unripe peach is hard and sounds like an empty wooden box. The skin of a ripe one bunches under your thumb. I was hungry and tucked one under my shirt.
    Then, thinking of Rose, I felt she was in trouble.
    I hurried, almost ran back to our sleeping car.
    I was remembering how in the fall of ’68, Mr. Giacomo had paid us to find his horses that had come down from the alpage. I remembered that in the Slocan Gorge we could smell their grassy breath: his two buckskin horses were on the path. I could hear the clop of iron shoes and the suck of heavy shoes in the mud. They were coming down slowly, unsure, because the Palliser Range was buried in snow. In those days Mr. Giacomo was a trail guide, and he often took them into the mountains. They were coming down to their winter stables in the first snow.
    “Lacey,” Rose said then, “it’s Mr. Giacomo’s horses.”
    To let them approach, we stood by the path under the pines. I felt a warm muzzle brush my shoulder and arm. On their breath I could smell the sweet range grass that crackled when you walked through it. I could hear snow melting in the bearded moss that hung from the pines. The air had turned warm and it smelled of rain. Suddenly the horses tore away.
    The clouds we’d seen south of there had gathered overhead. Hailstones raked through the pines. Shadows rolled over the mountainside and the air, suddenly cold, smelled like breath out of a well. We heard splintering wood in the trees across the ridge, then thunder heaved the forest floor.
    I ran into the forest to press my forehead against a pine trunk. Whimpering, I locked my arms around the tree. Rose unlaced my fingers one by one.
    “Look at me,” she said, backing down the path, gazing into my wild eyes and holding me steady in her gaze. My hands clutched hers like old roots.
    And now on the train I felt the same way, and I went looking for her.
    When I got to the observation car, I heard Rose talking. She was sitting on the carpeted platform under the glass dome at the rear. Until I was beside them, I couldn’t see that it was Mr. Giacomo she was talking with. He was wearing his sheepskin coat and riding boots. He was in one of those tall, cloth-covered observation chairs, his hands clasped between his knees. He must have walked to the station to get on the train before we did.
    “You belong at home,” he told Rose, adding, “Honey, you’re leaving a good place behind.”
    “You really don’t care about us,” Rose said.
    “What will you do