A Week in the Woods (6 page)

While his dad slept in on Sunday morning, Mark and his mom feasted on fresh-baked Russian pastries, one of Anya's specialties. After breakfast, Mark said, “You know about the room where they say the runaway slaves hid, right? I found it. C'mon.”

Together they wound their way up the narrow steps, Mark in the lead. The room was tiny, just big enough for a rope-frame bed and a small washstand. The walls were made of rough pine boards, and the only light came filtering up from the cupboard door below. Mark's mom had to duck to keep from bumping into the low-beamed ceiling.

Mark ran his hand along the rail of the bed. He whispered, “Makes you think, doesn't it?”

His mom nodded, and then they tiptoed back down the stairs.

Sunday afternoon Mark had gone along for the ride when Leon drove his parents to the regional airport.

At the gate his mom said, “We'll try to be back for next weekend, sweetheart. We love you very much. And you have a good first week at your new school, all right?”

Mark smiled and nodded, “Sure thing.”

“That's my boy,” and his dad tousled his hair. “See you soon, Mark.”

And that was the end of the first family weekend at the new house.

Monday afternoon Mark got home from his first day at the new school, and finally got to set off into the great outdoors. After bundling up under Anya's watchful eye, he had gone out the back door of the garage and headed toward the woods that covered the steep slope to the south and east of the house. When he'd returned huffing and puffing fifteen minutes later, he was soaked up to his waist, with snow jammed up under his jacket, his face bright red.

Leon was waiting for him in the garage. He pointed at a short stool. “Shake off the snow then sit and catch your breath. Just sit. Now you know that no one can plow through the deep snow. So I will teach you to go on top of it.”

Leon slipped the toes of his boots into a pair of long snowshoes made of bentwood and rawhide strips. He buckled the straps on the bindings, stood up and said, “First, you watch.”

Leon shuffled out the front of the garage. He took a few quick strides beyond the snow banks to the left of the driveway until he was walking where the snow was deep and unpacked. “See? A heavy man, but he only sinks a few inches.” He stopped to make sure
Mark was watching. Mark was on his feet, all eyes.

Moving again, Leon said, “Forward, always forward. Keep your legs apart, so, to keep the shoes from banging. And keep the tips up and the tails dragging, just so.”

Leon came back into the garage. “Now your turn.” Bending down, he laced Mark into the bindings of a smaller pair of snowshoes. “These are Anya's. I think too big for you. Still, you can learn.”

And Mark did.

After losing his balance once, and after letting the toes dig in and trip him a couple of times, Mark had gotten the feel of staying centered on the webbed platforms. With Leon behind him, Mark went back past the tracks he'd left as he had floundered through the four- and five-foot snowdrifts on the east side of the house. “Look!” he shouted. “It's like I'm floating!”

When his mom called that night to ask how his first day of school had been, Mark said, “Fine, but you know what? I learned how to snowshoe today! Leon taught me! Anya's snowshoes are a little too big, but Leon said I did great!”

His mom said, “That's wonderful, dear. And school was all right? Were the teachers nice? And the children?”

“School was fine, Mom. So, can I get my own snowshoes?”

“Of course, sweetheart. If you can't find what you want in Whitson or Atlinboro, you can shop online. I'll
tell Anya it's all right when I speak with her. Get all the gear you need, dear.”

And that's why Mark and Leon had driven to Scottie's Sporting Goods in Atlinboro Tuesday after school. The snowshoes Mark chose weren't made of bent maple and twisted rawhide like Leon's. These were high-tech, state-of-the-art snowshoes made of ballistic nylon stretched over tempered aluminum frames. Both of Mark's snowshoes together weighed less than one of Anya's.

Mark's first seven days were spent in the woods. From after school until dusk, he tramped uphill and down, from one end of the large property to the other. On moonlit nights, looking out his bedroom window across the meadows, it gave him a good feeling to see his own tracks, crisscrossing the bluish snow.

If Mark's first week was about the woods, then his second week was about the barn. He had walked all the way around the barn several times as he'd explored the property on his snowshoes. He had been curious, but there hadn't seemed to be a way to get in. Deep snowdrifts blocked the doors on the lower level and also those on the end facing west. On the south side facing the pastures in front of the house, icicles had formed a glittering curtain, adding a thick glaze to the drifts that blocked that doorway. And on the end of the barn closest to the house, the huge double doors were snowed completely shut.

Then on the Monday of his second week, Mark felt he just had to get inside the barn and look around. He asked Leon for help, and together they'd shoveled the drifts away from a smaller entrance to the right of the main doors. Once the snow was cleared, it was easy to enter because the little door swung inward.

Mark had looked at Leon as the door creaked open. “Want to come see with me?”

Leon smiled and shook his head. “I have work in the house.” Which wasn't completely true. As a boy in Russia, Leon had explored plenty of old barns. This one was Mark's.

The door opened into a room that was about ten feet wide and twelve feet long. Two small windows faced the house, each covered with spider webs, each loaded with last summer's harvest of flies and moths. Below the windows there was a narrow workbench that would have been about waist high on a grown man. Nails driven into the wall around the windows served as hangers for a pair of pliers, a bent screwdriver, a hammer with black tape on its handle, and some small coils of wire. Some nails and screws and a few old hinges were scattered across the bench. Everything was rusty.

On the wall opposite the bench was a row of twelve wooden pegs spaced about six inches apart, almost too high for Mark to reach. From one of them hung some long strips of leather—part of an old harness,
dark and stiff from the sweat of plow horses. And looking at the leather strips, Mark had remembered what a room like this was called: a tack room. Three rusty horseshoes were stacked on another peg. Mark stood on his tiptoes to lift one of them off. It had a nice feel in his gloved hand, heavy and solid, and he slipped it into his coat pocket.

But the best thing Mark had found on that first visit was in the corner of the room, next to the crude plank door that opened into the rest of the barn. At first he thought it was a broom handle or a piece of pipe. He picked it up and took it over to the windows for a better look.

Someone had made a walking stick from a straight young tree. It was about an inch and a half thick at the top, and tapered perfectly to about half that width at the bottom. A narrow metal ring, maybe a thin piece of pipe, had been fitted onto the bottom end of the stick to keep it from splitting or wearing away on rocky ground. The top of the stick had been rounded over and carefully smoothed, and in the light Mark could see the whittled cuts left by a knife. Six inches below the top end, the silver-gray bark had been peeled away—just enough space for a hand to grasp hold—and a series of little ridges had been cut, ringing the stick. Mark had pulled the glove off his right hand to see how the grip felt. Just right.

Opening the inner door, Mark stepped out onto
the main floor of the barn, the end of the walking stick making a satisfying thump on the worn wooden floorboards. A row of small square windowpanes above the wide doors on either end of the barn let in some light, and Mark could see fine.

Looking up, the first thing that caught Mark's eye was a long rope. It hung from the highest beam in the center of the barn, and a loop had been tied in the end that dangled a foot or so above the floor. Mark trotted over, dropped his stick, and jumping up, he grabbed hold of the rope and pulled, testing to make sure it would hold him. He didn't really doubt it, since the rope was almost as thick as the climbing rope in gym class. Running forward with the loop in one hand, he pulled the rope back as far he could and let it go. It swung out, and when it came back, Mark was ready. He grabbed hold and ran with it, then at the very last second, leaped up and clamped his legs around the big knot above the loop. The momentum swept him forward in a long slow arc, and then back and forth like a pendulum. After a few more swings, Mark had picked up his stick and moved on.

The haylofts were about fifteen feet off the floor on either side of the open central area. To Mark they looked like enormous shelves built out from the side walls. Craning his neck to see better, he thought,
Wonder how you get up there?
Immediately he saw the answer. The floor of each loft was supported by a row
of massive wooden posts that were spaced about every twenty feet, and on several of the posts, boards and cross pieces had been nailed to make simple box ladders.

Twenty seconds after this discovery Mark was up one of the ladders and walking cautiously in the north hayloft, tapping ahead with his stick to be sure the boards were safe. When he got to the wall at the west end of the barn, he turned around and looked back. The inside of the barn stretched out in front of him, almost like it was a diagram on a huge piece of paper. The angled support beams marched away from him, the roof sloped gracefully from the peak, the horizontal and vertical supports met at perfect intervals—it all looked so solid, so permanent.

Glancing at the realtor's brochure back in Scarsdale, Mark hadn't known what it meant when he'd read, “Classic one-hundred-foot post-and-beam dairy barn.” This was like no place Mark had ever been before. Pulling in a slow breath of air through his nose, he sifted the smells. There hadn't been a cow or a horse in the barn for over thirty years, and it had been at least that long since a real hay crop had been stored away. Still, even in the thin cold air of February, Mark caught wisps of all that past life and activity. And looking down, leaning on the old walking stick, he had felt a deep, satisfying connection to the place.

Every afternoon of his second week in New
Hampshire, Mark had returned to the barn. In the corner under the south hayloft he found a small sleigh, and next to it a stack of wooden carriage wheels. He'd found the trapdoors that the farmer had used for dropping hay down to the ground level for the cows and horses. He had also explored the maze of stalls and pens on the ground floor, noticing that the smell of the animals was definitely stronger down there.

Each day he found new things and added them to his collection in the tack room. He'd found a rusty shovel with a carved wooden handle, a pitchfork with a missing tine, a small hatchet, a wooden bucket, an assortment of bottles and jars, a short curved sickle, a coffee can full of nails, an old-fashioned grinding wheel with a foot pedal, a length of iron chain, four long wrenches, a kerosene lantern, and a foot-shaped anvil that looked like it had been used to repair shoes or boots.

During those first two weeks Mark had learned a lot. He'd learned to snowshoe, and as he explored the woods, he had learned to read animal tracks in the snow—rabbit, deer, squirrel, and several kinds of birds, mostly chickadees. He had learned to bundle up in layers against the cold and wind, and he'd learned how delicious food can taste after spending a few hours outside.

Besides his discoveries in the barn, Mark found other links with the past during those first two weeks.
In the woods up on the western ridge he'd found a stone fireplace and a heap of boards, the remains of a tumbledown cabin. And on a level place overlooking the meadow he had found six gravestones surrounded by a low iron fence, a small family cemetery. Digging the snow away from one of the stones, he read the name: Sarah Lynn Fawcett. The date on the headstone was 1825.

While Mark was tramping around the property or exploring out in the barn for hours and hours, without even knowing it he made his most important discovery.

All his life Mark's parents had hired people to fill up his days—nannies and tutors, teachers and coaches, trainers and counselors—good people, kind people, the very best available. Every spring, every summer, and especially every fall and winter, almost every minute had been filled with important, progressive activities.

And then in one day, the day they had moved up here, all that had stopped. Just stopped. No lessons, no tutoring, no sports, hardly any homework.

Mark couldn't have explained why he had stopped feeling mad about moving to this place, but after two weeks, he had. He couldn't have explained why he wasn't upset that his parents had gotten so busy that they wouldn't be coming back again until March twentieth. But he didn't mind at all. True, Mark still resented having to go to school five days a week, but he didn't feel neglected or isolated anymore.

That's because Mark had discovered time. It wasn't
just a sense of history, a sense of time past, that he had discovered. Mark had found his own sense of time—time present—and he had discovered how much this time was worth. This time was valuable. This time belonged to him. This time was like a bank account, loaded with days and hours and minutes, all his. After school and all night and all weekend, Mark could spend his time any way he wanted to.

And for the first time in his life, Mark felt rich.

* * *

On the Friday afternoon of his second week in New Hampshire, Mark felt especially rich. Riding home in the car after school, he'd gotten an idea, and the idea had grown to become a plan. Now it was time for action.

Mark hurried out to the barn along the well-packed trail to the tack room door. Walking quickly into the main room of the barn, he looked around and made some decisions. Things looked good, and he still had about two hours of daylight.