In Wilderness (16 page)

She ties her shirt at her waist, knots her hair at the nape of her neck, wriggles into her boots. It would have been easier, more useful, wiser, to have walked the perimeter of the pond. There’s good eating on the other side—no end of cattails, maybe fennel or wild asparagus where the pond-marsh peters out among the trees. And all kinds of reeds and grasses. Nonetheless this climb is what she wants. Maybe she’ll find a patch of fiddleheads and fill her backpack, but that’s not the point. The point is the climb itself, that it’s an adventure, not just a mosey on flat ground.

And that she wants it; she has not wanted an adventure for so long.

She runs at the start of it, up the first mild slope. But too soon the path grows slicker, steeper than it seemed. At the first turn she slips, slides backwards, clutches a maple sapling to break her fall, and thinks dark thoughts about the possibilities for injuries. This is a path to scratch and scrabble up on all fours, not a path for walking. Yet once she gets the hang of it, she has no trouble finding workable handholds
and footholds among the rocks and roots. Invariably they are right where she needs them, as if some animal has come this way time and again.

The sun’s grown warmer, almost hot. She stops under an overhanging rock, checks for snakes with a long stick, then crawls inside its shallow cave to catch her breath, cool off. Below stretches a panorama of the clearing: her stone cabin, the privy, the garden, the pond, the paths connecting them. Through the trees’ new leaves, she can make out a small, shimmering sliver of the pond’s surface and the jutting rock at shoreline. In winter she would see more. She imagines she can see a tiny Katherine moving through her outdoor chores, a Katherine she can hold in her warm palm.

A Katherine something might watch.

Dry leaves blown in by autumn winds carpet the ground beneath the overhang. Something has crushed them. Perhaps some animal sleeps here, perhaps her deer. From what she’s read, there’s not sufficient privacy for bears. If a bear had hibernated here, the place would reek of it, that overpowering wet-dog scent. Instead, it smells only of the earth, moldering leaves, and some faint, smoky sweetness she’s unable to identify. Nonetheless, she feels herself a stranger here, uneasy.

She should turn around, go home, but it’s too early. She planned this walk to fill a morning. So she continues up over the rocks, where it’s impossible to look at anything except the next niche where her foot will fit, the next root or rock she must grab hold of. A breeze rustles the slender trees that grow above her. When she reaches them she’ll feel it, catch it, let it cool her. But always by the time she gets there the breeze already has moved on. She climbs higher, but the breeze stays always just ahead.

She’s panting now, arms and legs heavy from exertion; she really should turn back. Something clatters toward her from above. She looks up too quickly, causing the trees to slant at crazy angles in the too-bright sun. A stone nearly as big as her balled fist hurtles past her.

Something has dislodged it, some animal climbing ahead of her, hidden by trees. What sort of animal? She pulls herself upright with the aid of a skinny poplar growing between two boulders.

“Hello? Who’s there? Is anybody there?”

She claps her hands—once, twice, three times—high in front of her to ward off bears. “Shoo, shoo. Go away now!”

Scrambles down the way she came, fast as she can, following the narrow gully past the overhang and down into the clearing. She stands on her porch, panting, gripping the gun and looking toward the path. Whatever thing was up there in the rocks above her has not followed.

She should have taken the gun, stupid not to. But not doing so was somehow part of the adventure. Anyway, her waving an empty revolver would have meant nothing to a bear. So it makes no difference, if she never loads it, whether the gun goes with her or goes back inside the cabin. She knows this now, but keeps the gun close for a few more days whenever she’s outside. Eventually she leaves it in the cabin, and finally puts it back on the high shelf, where it belongs.

S
HE GOES EARLIER OUTDOORS
as the days lengthen, stays longer, wants to know this place as thoroughly as the wild animals that live here, to know what things mean. To this end, she pores over guidebooks; makes intricate notebook sketches of leaves, pods, fungi; glues on feathers, strips of bark. She no longer starts at every shadow. Many afternoons she sits an hour or more on her rock that juts over the pond, stares into the water, listens to her thoughts, which are now mostly of the cabin and the land around it. The porch and kitchen rafters are festooned with small, fragrant bundles of herbs hung up to dry. Last night she ate steamed cattail blossoms with brown rice and a chickweed salad, gourmet fare. The rare evenings she doesn’t weave, she stays long at the table, maps where she has found things. In this way passes the gentlest month she has ever known.

And the most disturbing. New life sprouts everywhere. In the garden, in the woods, beside her porch rail. New leaves curl out of dead, fallen trees. Pods burst, filling the air with downy seeds, and the pond teems with tadpoles, water striders, and silvery fish. Birdsong fills the daytime air; wild animals cry out at night, wake her to lie there with the deer outside her wall.

On a spring day years ago she sat in her high school biology class, waves of heat flushing her face, while the teacher drew on a blackboard
the reproductive cycle of the mosses. Primitive plants as sexual as people; even their parts looked embarrassingly the same. That wondrous thing she so often had imagined for herself with Michael was no different from what happened with the mosses—just as blind, just as imperative. These days she feels again that rush of heat.

Even before her baby came into the world so cold and still all her desire had fled. Now it’s as if once again she has a seed inside her, a seed that’s grown a tiny curled-up shoot that’s pressing to get out as if her body were the dry and crusted earth. Its presence rules her thoughts, causes her to pick a fuzzy leaf from off a lamb’s ear plant, rub it lightly against her cheek, the insides of her wrists.

Her whole body quiets around that insistent shoot. She stares into flowers, pulls off petals and caresses them between her thumb and forefinger. Nothing, not even silk, has so soft a texture. Some distance off the privy path a princess tree languidly drops its lavender trumpet blossoms. She picks one off the ground, thrusts her index finger into its long throat to taste the pollen, sticks a pair of them into her nostrils. Tusks.

Late one afternoon she lights a lantern in anticipation of the evening, hangs it from a brass hook on the porch, then makes her way down to the pond. She keeps a bar of soap there now, wedged under a rock. It’s easier and more relaxing on warm afternoons to bathe there in the cool stillness than from a pan of water in the cabin. She parts the dense branches of the budding alders—and stands motionless, stunned. The air above the pond has turned into a swirl of iridescent spangles. Mayflies. So many they have dimmed the copper sun.

She’s read how they survive for years as larvae in a pond and, as adults, live only a few hours, long enough to mate and die. They will die without once having eaten; the implication of it steals her breath.

Seated on her rock, she gazes at the hordes of tiny insects that swarm frantically, far as her eyes can see. Their ecstatic music is a high-pitched whine that fills the air. She turns her face up to them, whorls of mayflies spinning in the sky like Van Gogh’s stars.

She cannot look away from them, can think of nothing else. What if one loops down to touch her? Will she feel it? Will it make a sound? She shucks off her clothes, balls them into a pillow, lies back on the
sun-warmed stone. A light breeze plays over her body and she brushes her fingertips across her breasts in imitation of it. If a mayfly touched her there, what would she feel?

She stares upward, through the swirling insects, until the rock she’s lying on appears to move, to slowly turn and rise into the sky. Her abdomen’s soft as the underside of a new leaf. Her hand moves down and she was wrong to think no skin could be as delicate as flowers.

That new, green shoot inside her swells and pushes to escape, for it has grown so large. Overhead, the mayflies fling themselves into the air. What is in her shimmers, taut and exquisite, then bursts. She has pressed her fingers deep into the throats of flowers, and the sounds she makes are hideous and beautiful against the whirling sky.

Afterwards, she weeps from the newness of it. For it is not something come back as it once was, but something she has never known.

The mayflies circle black against the sunset’s afterglow and the pond’s water washes her skin cool. An owl hoots from the tall pines as she gathers up her clothes. The lantern on the cabin porch glows like a beacon in the twilight. Everything is a gift.

H
E SAW
.

It’s all he can think about. Can’t for one second put it from his thoughts.

Like right now. He’s sanding the age-rough floor in his library-bedroom, running the block over it time and again. Take him months to finish, but if he can get just one room decent so people can live in it, maybe two, then he’ll have something. And working on it makes him feel good, like he’s the Old Man building his hickory cabinets or some such in his cabin. But even then she’s in the forepart of his mind.

He’s quit the reefer. Doesn’t need it anymore, she gives him that much peace. And fire, a steady glow that’s warmth he can depend on. Except sometimes when it feels like the whole forest blazes up inside him. Only, like Moses’s burning bush, it never gets consumed. Just burns and burns and he lays on his bed and lets it.

Yeah. He lets it burn.

He picks up his hammer, pounds a finish nail into a loose board, on the diagonal, where the next board’s groove will hide it. Feels the Old Man smiling down on him, carpenter to carpenter. Maybe Jack London built his “Wolf House” for his “mate woman.” Yeah, Danny’s burnt-out old house nobody wants to live in but the possums and the coons needs him to fix it up. His fruit trees need him if they’re going to thrive. And her, she needs him most of all. In ways she doesn’t even know about, ways no one’s ever needed him before. Day after day he has to choose. He always chooses her.

He only goes to town when she does now. Won’t leave off watching over her to go in stores. Sometimes he wishes he was like the Old Man, needing nothing but a cast-iron sink, wood stove, little bit of roof tin. No, he doesn’t really wish that. Needing her’s become too sweet a part of him.

He drives another nail into another floorboard, but it’s one nail too many. The noise, vibration, mess with his head. After Jimbo died, Danny made a point to never plan for any kind of future. Homage to the dead, or maybe only superstition. Keeps his mind’s door shut against it at all times. Never thinks about tomorrow, does what wants doing at the moment and that’s it. Right now his floor needs fixing, that’s all he needs to know. The why of it will come to him in time, if it’s supposed to.

So will the why of her. And what he needs to do.

S
OME GIFTS ARE WASTED IF THEY CAN
’
T BE SHARED
.

Her food is running out, so she hikes to Elkmont once again, walks with perfect posture, as if pulled by her own heart, through a forest filled with beauty, signs, and wonders. But when the gravel road turns to blacktop and she sees the dingy clapboard of the Wickles Store, everything changes. The odors from the store and highway are so strong she ties her red bandanna, outlaw-style, over her nose and mouth to block them, removes it only when she gets to town. There she rushes through her errands, wanting only to be gone. On her way home she retches once again behind the oak tree past the little grocery, by now an unwanted ritual, then straightens up, her mind seized by the Rule of Three:

“Three strikes, you’re out.”

She’s been to Elkmont three times now, and every time she’s become ill. It’s always the same. She feels well in the forest, sick when
she ventures out among people. She grew ill in a city filled with people, got better once she left.

It can’t be true. It’s coincidence, and nothing else. How can anyone be made ill by proximity to people? It’s perverse. As if she’s been somehow singled out to serve as an example. Or is being punished for some grievous sin she’s either unaware of or has yet to commit. Or perhaps there is only chaos and her number just came up for this one, could as easily come up again for something worse or better.

Back at the cabin she wanders aimlessly inside its rooms. If it’s true, her conclusion, then that evening by the pond was only cruel. She had come to love the forest because she thought that someday she would leave it, but it’s the forest and its isolation that sustain her. No longer merely what she chose, it’s become a necessity. And that makes all the difference.

The trees, dense now with summer foliage, have so quickly turned into impenetrable rows of sentinels, separating her from every being but herself. Lest she miss the point, the animals no longer come around. The raccoon, the squirrel, the possum all have better things to do. Sometimes she hears them in the distance, their grunts, cries, groans. They so gloriously have each other. She has no one.

N
ONE OF US
—
NOT THEM
, not she herself—is meant for solitude. We crave attachments. When we can’t make them among live things we attach unnaturally to something else. And so she stands watch this night over a last burning nub of candle as if she were waiting by a sick friend’s bedside for the end. The little flame wavers in the still air, winks out, and she cries inconsolably. Lately, it saddens her to see even wildflowers die; she no longer picks them for her table.

The next time she goes to town she behaves erratically. Although she knows now she must hurry before sickness overtakes her, she talks too long to shop clerks, stares too intently at everyone she passes on the street—at their amazing faces, hands, fingers, opposable thumbs. A swarthy man in a sweat-stained shirt and overalls stares back boldly and she doesn’t look away, imagines he might follow her, reach out and
touch her, so she might experience it for a moment, then remember: the touch of a man’s hand.