Free The Age of Water Lilies by Theresa Kishkan

lily roots packed in a vasculum with their promise of the familiar.
    â€œI am going to cut some fir boughs. Why don’t you take a bucket to the lake for some water? Then we could have a cup of tea,” suggested Gus. So Flora walked to the lake and dipped the bucket in, filling the kettle when she returned and setting the bucket by the door. By now the fire was burning well, the stove pipe creaking as it adjusted to the heat. The incense of burning pine was lovely in the cooler air of the high valley.
    Gus came into the cabin with an armload of sweet-smelling fir boughs and piled them onto one of the pole beds. He showed Flora the bear skin on an exterior wall of the cabin, the side they hadn’t yet investigated. The animal’s feet were nailed to the logs, its head was supported by a hook, and the skin covered almost the entire surface of the wall. Flora had not expected to touch a bear in her life. She marvelled at the coarse hair, the dry nose. She took the tea things out to the porch, and they drank from tin mugs while the loon swam back and forth as if to inspect them from all possible angles.
    Flora knew from Mary that Agrippa’s parents still spent every winter in the Back Valley, living in the old way, though even cabins as rustic as this one weren’t used until recently. Gus pointed out a depression possibly twenty feet across, on the shore of the lake, and explained that it was the site of a kekuli or pit house. Poles would be erected to hold a roof of sod and boughs, and access would be by ladder through an opening in the centre of the roof where smoke also exited. Flora tried to imagine people coming up through the hole in the roof, out of the darkness and into daylight like this, the sound of grasshoppers and water lapping against the pebbles drawing them forth. Though maybe by the time of year when grasshoppers could be heard, the families would be living in the tule lodges Gus also described, sleeping in airy rooms created by bulrushes.
    There was the time in the mown grass of the farthest orchard, the two of them lying down to the song of meadowlarks, clothing pushed aside, and there was this time, a naked embrace on the sweetness of new fir boughs covered over in homespun. The weight of their bodies, turning and lifting, released balsam from the crushed fir, a rustling of branches as though they lay among trees. Wind came in through the screened openings and cooled their bodies after they had made love in the early evening. They had now a small history of such encounters accumulating in their hands, the way they sought an area that responded eagerly, a particular texture of skin, a rough patch on a heel, the soft hairs of an area unknown to Flora before the time in the orchard. She was drowsy with pleasure.
    They ate a meal on the cabin steps, balancing tin plates on their laps. Gus had taken care of the cooking, heating stew and a few biscuits on the stove, and pouring them each a measure of whisky in the cups they had used for their tea. By now the loon had come to their shore and drifted in and out of the reeds. Goldeneye could be seen out in the middle of the lake; bats were beginning to swoop from the trees. Flora had never felt so far from what she knew. When darkness came and the air cooled considerably, Gus brought out a blanket and wrapped it around her shoulders. She leaned against his legs. She could hear the horses snuffling in the corral and wondered if they, too, experienced displacement or whether it was all the same to them—home pasture or a corral in the Back Valley, river water or lake water in their buckets, human voices or loons.
    She had never known anything as nice as talking after love-making. Face to face on the narrow bed, Flora offered the details of her childhood to her lover like a series of small gifts. The rocking horse saga, riding lessons, walks with George’s tutor over Roman roads with appropriate fragments of poetry being recited, in Latin of