A Clearing in the forest (12 page)

She settled down in front of the television set with a cup of coffee. The dog lay beside her, gnawing idly on the leg of the chair. The farm program today was on beekeeping. Unsettling closeups of the insects turned them into huge furry animals.

She refilled her coffee cup and listened to the morning news, read by newscasters natty in red blazers with the station's crest in gold on their pockets. Plans were announced for a cross-country ski-athon later in the winter. The first snowstorm of the season had resulted in a delay of several school buses. The announcer shuffled his papers. “An accident occurred early this morning at a Ffossco well site, located in Pine County. A young man working at the site was seriously hurt in a fall. It is not known at this time what caused the accident. The name of the injured man is Wilson Catchner, believed to be a resident of Pine County.”

Frances threw on her coat. Her boots were buried somewhere in the pile of winter clothing on the floor of the closet. She left without them, and as she hurried to the truck, the wet snow crept into her shoes and chilled her feet. The accident was her fault! She remembered how Wilson had wanted to quit and she had encouraged him to stay. She prayed that he would be all right, falling back for some reason on a childhood prayer that she hadn't thought of for seventy years.

The truck moved hesitantly through the drifts, resisting her efforts to gun it over the slippery rises. The wiper didn't seem to be working; in order to see the road, she had to stop every few minutes to clear off the windshield.

At seven-thirty the sky was still dark, the shapes of the snow-covered houses along the road a ghostly white. A snowplow loomed up in front of her. It was impossible to see beyond it in order to pass. The snow from its blade was thrown against the truck, encrusting the windshield with snow. The ride seemed endless. Nearly an hour later when she reached the hospital, its rows of lighted rooms in the darkened city suggested a terrible urgency. The parking lot was familiar. In the last years of Tom's illness she had often driven him there so that he could see his patients.

She hurried inside. A nurse was walking in and out of the patients rooms, dispensing medication from tiny paper cups arranged neatly on a metal tray. An aide rattled a cart of breakfast trays past her. Frances looked for a familiar face, but everyone was a stranger.

When she reached the large swinging door that led into the emergency room, she stopped, afraid to go farther. Only her need to see Wilson finally gave her the courage to push open the door.

Mr. and Mrs. Catchner were standing beside the nurse's desk. They looked defenseless and out of place, like civilians caught by an invading army. She started toward them, relieved to see that the nurse at the desk was Lou Walsh, whom she had known for years. Before she could say a word, the Catchners saw her and moved close to each another, forming a wall between her and Lou's desk.

Mrs. Catchner's voice was sharp: “I don't think you have any business to be here, Mrs. Crawford.”

Frances tried to answer, but it was like groping about in a dark bag to try to find the right words. “I just wanted to see Wilson—to find out how he is.” Then, acknowledging their prior claim as his parents, she hastily added: “If it's all right with you.”

Mr. Catchner's face was red, his voice loud in the hushed hospital room: “Don't you think you've caused enough trouble? If it weren't for you giving Wilson grand ideas about going to college, none of this would have happened!”

Frances was not hurt. Hadn't she had already accused herself of the same thing? The phone on Lou Walsh's desk rang. Then she motioned the Catchners to follow her. She glanced back apologetically at Frances.

Frances watched them disappear. She considered running after them, but knew she would be turned back. She thought of remaining until they returned, but could not bear to face them again. She fled.

All day long she sat in front of the television set, hoping for news of Wilson. One daytime serial followed another. Their artificial tales of woe seemed to Frances a mockery of her anguish. A game show came on. The master of ceremonies was a fatherly man proudly showing off the contestants as if they were his bright children. A young couple stood at the microphone. The woman was jumping up and down, squealing with excitement; her husband continually slapped his forehead. Every few minutes the couple threw themselves into each other's arms with obviously feigned excitement.

Frances got up from her chair and carried her cup of cold coffee into the kitchen. The snowstorm had stopped. It was dark now, but a full moon cast a pale glow on the snow-covered ground. From the window she could make out the carcass of the hare. She thought of the owl returning in the night, circling the cabin, nervous in the bright light of the full moon. It would settle on the hare and try to tear off some meat, but the hare's body would be frozen into a solid lump. The owl would hunch patiently over the hare, waiting for the warmth of its body to thaw the carcass. Then it would begin to rip off pink ribbons of the hare's flesh.

She searched through the cupboard. On a shelf next to a box of old cookie cutters and a bag of dead light bulbs she found some rat poison. She would make slits in the frozen body of the hare and insert the poison. The owl would do no more killing. But before she could carry out her plan, a dark shape appeared against the moon.

It was a great gray owl, rare in that part of the country:
Scoliaptex nebulosa
, the Greek eagle-owl of darkness. The owl was the white-gray color of a winter morning, its breast soft and thick with down. The great gray owl had been sighted flying across Lapland and Russia and Mongolia. It was the largest of the owls. For revenge she had nearly murdered a king. For the first time that day she began to cry.

A pair of headlights appeared on the trail and the owl flew off. It was the Catchners' truck. For a minute Frances expected to see Wilson climb out and make his way up the walk, but it was his father who knocked at her door. She urged him to come into the cabin, but he refused her invitation with a quick shake of his head.

“I guess he's going to make it,” was all he said, and then he turned on his heel and headed for the truck. The headlights swung in an arc and disappeared.

Frances went out into the yard, forgetting to put on a coat. She hacked at the frozen earth with a shovel until she had a hole large enough to bury the hare. She laid it gently into the ground and covered it over. As she finished, a shadow winged silently across the snow. The great gray owl circled the yard, once, twice, and flew off carrying its shadow with it.

19

In the third week of December an unseasonable rain fell. Drops of water clung to the bottoms of the tree branches. By early afternoon the temperature suddenly fell, and the drops stretched into icicles. The trunks of the trees were glazed, their ice-encrusted branches bent nearly to the ground. Frances shouted to the wet birds gathered on the feeder to go home, but some primal knowledge of how hard it would be to find food with all the vegetation iced over kept them there eating compusively, stopping only long enough to fluff up bedraggled feathers.

At five minutes past five, the electric clock stopped. The furnace died, and the lights went off. She wondered if a tree limb, heavy with ice, had fallen on the power line. She could still hear the whining roar of the oil drill. Nothing seemed to stop the drilling. She looked through windows glazed with ice. The lights on the rig were on. They must have their own generator, she decided.

When she opened the door to go out for firewood, she heard a sharp crack as the ice sealing the door split. One look at the slick sidewalk made her think better of going outside. What if she fell and broke a leg? Who would find her? The dog ran past her, spreading his paws to give him more traction on the ice, but when all four legs slid out from under him, he turned around and came back in, avoiding her gaze.

She closed off the rest of the house, drained the pipes in the bathroom and kitchen so they wouldn't freeze when the cold began to fill the house, and started a small fire in the fireplace. Sometimes the power stayed out for a couple of days. In a way it was pleasant, this containment within a small center of warmth by the fireplace, with nothing to do. These last weeks since Wilson's accident, the simplest thing had been an effort.

After the confrontation with his parents, she had been afraid to return to the hospital. Instead, she had gone into town nearly every day so that she could use the phone to call Lou Walsh and find out how Wilson was. He had been badly shaken up, but mercifully, Lou had told her, no bones had been broken. Their greatest concern had been the possibility of a head injury. There had been headaches and for a few days a memory loss, but gradually these symptoms had cleared up. The day before yesterday Lou had told her that Wilson had been doing so well he had been allowed to go home.

Driving by the Catchners' house on her way home from town, Frances had peered through the lighted windows, hoping against hope for a glimpse of Wilson, but the living room, which faced the road, had been empty. She would probably never see Wilson at her cabin again, but that was a small price to pay for his recovery.

She slept for a while, waking to a cold dark room. The fire was out. She fed a little of the wood that remained into the dwindling blue flames and lighted a kerosene lamp. Her world had shrunk to a circle of pale yellow light. Familiar objects looked strange. She might be in someone else's room. It was the shadows, she decided, the way they concealed certain things that had been visible.

She knew she ought to eat some dinner, but she couldn't bring herself to leave the warmth of the fire for the cold kitchen. She ate less and less these days. As soon as she thought of food, she thought perversely past the point of its edibility, imagining bread green with mold, butter rancid, meats tinged with putrescent green; even a fresh red apple tasted of soft brown spots and wormholes. She blew out the lamp to conserve kerosene, crept deeper into a coat she had put on that had once belonged to Tom and was long enough to reach down to her feet, and fell asleep. She dreamed she was picking berries in the middle of winter, reaching up high into bare black branches for fruit red as blood. As she bent the branches, she could hear the sheath of ice that coated the twigs breaking into shards. The juice from the fruit covered her thick wool gloves and formed a frozen sugary crust along the edges of her pail.

She awakened to a bright sky. At first she thought the lights had gone on, then she realized she had slept through the night and into the morning. Each ice-glazed tree glowed red, blue, and yellow in the sunlight, a feast of primary colors. Light glanced off the crust of ice that covered the snow. The view from the windows was dazzling.

The fire had died during the night and every joint in her chilled body was stiff, the least movement painful. She was weak and lightheaded from not eating and had to hang onto the backs of chairs to get across the room. Years ago in the state mental hospital they had “untidy wards,” and she thought how well she would fit into one, with her wispy uncombed hair, twisted stockings and crumbled clothes. She understood the senile old women rocking madly in their chairs and shouting out obscenities. A time came when you were sick and tired of your body's needs—shoveling in food, clipping nails, combing hair. Once you interrupted the routine, it was difficult to think of a reason to resume it.

She settled into an armchair, legs tucked under her, and warmed by the sun she floated in and out of consciousness. The dog had resigned himself to staying inside. She had managed a trip into the kitchen to open a bag of dog kibble for him, but it had slipped out of her hands, spilling over the floor, and she had left it. Whatever happened to her, he would have enough food.

Late in the day the sun disappeared and snow fell in thick silent flakes. Watching it made her dizzy. With the sun's warmth gone from the room, an icy numbness touched her hands and feet. She clenched her teeth to keep them from chattering. Her whole body was shivering uncontrollably. She padded across the chilly floor to the fireplace and reached out shaky hands to pick up a log. Its weight surprised her, tipping her off balance. She fell against a chair, sinking into a darkness beyond the darkness of the room. Once, she awoke to feel an animal warmth against her, a rise and fall of heavy breathing. She tried to remember where she was, but there seemed to be no clues—only darkness. A moment later she drifted off again into the warmth of sleep.

20

Wilson had been home from the hospital for two days when the lawyer arrived. It was Wilson's first day out of bed, and after the confinement of the hospital and his bedroom, just walking through the house to the kitchen was a trip to a new country. His mother had wanted to keep him in bed longer, but by managing the enormous task of eating everything she cooked for him, Wilson had convinced her he was much improved.

T. K. had visited him nearly every day in the hospital, almost unrecognizable in a blue suit, pink shirt, and red tie. Only the old high-heeled, mud-splotched boots were familiar. Once he had come bearing a potted plant, holding it gingerly as if he suspected it might climb out of its pot and do something erratic. On the accompanying card were the signatures of all the men who had worked with Wilson on the rig.

It was T. K. who had told him that Ffossco meant to “do something” for him. Wilson had not understood what that meant, thinking that perhaps they were going to send him a plant, too. T. K. also told him that Lyle Barch had been fired. Someone had seen him heading downstate on his motorcycle, a suitcase strapped to the carrier.

The lawyer was Ralston Clifter, a member of their church. When he arrived at the door, the Catchners thought he was making a churchly visit. But Ralston Clifter carried a briefcase, and by the way he refused a cup of coffee and sat stiffly in his chair, they guessed the visit was official.

“I'm certainly glad to see how well you're looking, Wilson,” Clifter said. “That was a most unfortunate accident.” He emphasized the word “accident.”