In Wilderness (15 page)

It’s always early morning when you get there, the sun’s first rays warming the downtown’s squat brick buildings. Everything smells fresh. You’re the only person on the street, no cars. And it’s so unearthly still you can’t hear your own footsteps. The granite office building across from the courthouse has its upstairs windows labeled “Bobby Brownlee, DDS” and “Matthew Hingle, Accounting.” Downstairs, on the tall window with the green shutters, the one that looks out on the square, gold script letters edged in black read “Daniel J. MacLean, Attorney at Law.” Inside, there’s a Chinese rug, brass lamps. Good furniture, like at Jimbo’s dad’s office that time he sewed up your cut foot. All of which is very weird, because you joined the Army after freshman year and never once got near a law school. But that doesn’t matter. Nothing matters in a long dream except holding on.

So you walk on by, because you’re getting close now. Almost to where the houses start. Mimms, Beasleys, Rowans, brick houses set on good granite foundations, shaded by magnificent old oaks. You pass through a strip of woods you don’t remember. Thick woods, on both sides of the road. Then you round a curve and there it is. A big house, two stories, white and frilly as a wedding cake, with a wide porch and a cupola like Janelle always dreamed of. It sits back from the street behind a picket fence. And all the grass inside the fence is green and purple flowers edge the walk and nothing there can ever harm you.

You turn in at the little gate and you can hardly breathe for wanting all of it right then. But you got to slow it down, hold on—this is the best, the most important part. Up the walk, up the steps, across the porch boards painted shiny gray. You’re trembling so hard your rucksack bangs against your legs and you can barely ring the bell.

Don’t move. Whatever you do now, don’t move.

Used to, in your daylong dreams, footsteps echoed down the hall. Then the door opened, and you caught a flash of Janelle’s gold-blond hair inside the hall’s cool darkness. You reached out to take her hand,
so you could lead her down the hall and up the stairs. To the bedroom, your bedroom. Your own brass bed you slept in with your mama when you were a little boy and your daddy was gone off to fight the war.

You never made it. Convulsed there on the porch before you even touched her. Every goddamn time. Bit your lower lip to keep from crying out. And then the sun was going down and you’d got nothing left to give her, but you’d kept yourself alive another day. Because there never once was any death inside a daylong dream.

Till he got Janelle’s fucking Dear John about how she’d got engaged to someone else. After that, nothing worked right anymore. No one opened the door and Danny just stood there on the porch, his dick in his hand and nothing happening, real tears running down his stupid face.

He kept on trying for a couple months, then gave it up. Because there wasn’t any point to it, it was like something inside him had quit paying attention. He got scared then, decided maybe he was nothing but a ghost and didn’t know it. That maybe that’s the way you tell, your dick gets hard and nothing happens. That’s when he knew for sure his number had come up and he was going to die. The men knew, too, wouldn’t go near him, left him to move day and night inside his own cleared space. All except Jimbo.

Then one bright blue-sky October morning Jimbo got blown up not ten feet from him. A smear of pink brain froth on Danny’s forehead pointed him out sure as any finger: That hit was meant for you.

He screamed for seven days, then tried to shoot his trigger finger off. The Army sent him to a hospital. After that they sent him home.

But the long dream didn’t work there either. Not in the desert, not in the Old Man’s cabin, not here on his moldy bed in Gatsby’s house.

It doesn’t work again tonight, but the end is different—the door opens. He doesn’t see Janelle’s blond hair, but the hallway isn’t empty. There’s something in there, he can hear it breathing close enough to touch.

Maybe just another ghost like him.

Or maybe not—his right wrist tingles underneath the covers. From where whatever-it-was brushed against him in the dark.

S
HE IS ALIVE IN A WARM ROOM
,
AMID SOUNDS OF DRIPPING WATER
. The kitchen sparkles with the bright, wet light of sun on melting snow.

She does not remember how she got here, only the heaviness of the wood she carried through the blizzard’s white-walled rooms. And Michael commanding her to get up, go home. And so she must have, and with strength enough to build a fire inside the stove and sense enough to lie beside it. There, though, her resourcefulness seems to have deserted her. She is still in her wet nightgown and her boots, and huddled under her damp coat. But it was enough, what she did. She can save her own life, take care of herself. Alone.

Her starving eyes devour everything in sight. The twined basrelief tulips on the stove’s firebox door, the dull sheen of pewter plates against whitewashed walls, the floor’s earth-colored slate. She is alive in the midst of beauty. How could anything be wrong?

Yet something is. She pokes with stiff, exploratory fingers at her throat, chest, stomach. Nothing. It’s as if she has gone numb. A pure, clean terror seizes her. Has she had a stroke? Have parts of her—organs, appendages—frozen from exposure? Did she die out in the snow? She moves her right arm, right leg, turns her face to the right, repeats it all on her left side. Everything still moves. And she can feel the damp sleeping-bag canvas balled up under her, its zipper tongue gouging her thigh—not a characteristic one associates with afterlives. Yet something is absent. Something that used to fill every empty space inside her—spaces between joints, in and around organs, seemingly even inside cells—as recently as yesterday.

Pain.

For this one minute all her pain has ceased.

Don’t move, don’t breathe. And whatever else you do, don’t weep. It’s just one moment out of your life’s sum total of moments, one vagary in the countless vagaries of your condition. You are not healed, don’t think it; name one thing you wished for from this illness that came true.

She lies motionless until her muscles cramp, yet her familiar hurts do not return. Not when she stands, nor when she walks across the kitchen floor so solid beneath her feet. All the air smells moist and new. She bends down to pull on her boots and when she raises up she is not dizzy; when she hikes out and uses the privy, no hot pain lashes through her; when she stoops to pick up firewood, nothing clenches in her lower back.

Walking as if on eggshells to preserve this wondrous state, she lays a new fire in the stove, takes giddy pleasure in small, silly things. The shape of the iron kettle, the growing weight of a tin cup filling with water. The sound of her warm blood coursing through her veins when she sits still and listens.

In the warming oven is a mix of beans and rice left from before she went to town. It’s hard and dry, and she eats every bite while she heats water for a bath. Afterwards, clean, rubbed dry with a rough towel, every inch of her tingles as if she’s a snake that has just shed its skin.

And she is still hungry.

T
HE SNOW MELTS IN
one day and it is truly spring. Seeds sprout in the garden like an edging of green lace, the soil smells rich, and earthworms wriggle everywhere.

She has gone six days without dizziness or pain, alive with an energy and attentiveness akin to some strange state of grace. She seems to have lost need of irony, of looking askance, standing aside. Spends time instead absorbed in the small things of the moment, contained by them. Her days have narrowed to activities she counts on the fingers of one hand, yet within each is infinite variety. She rises when it is still dark, stokes the stove, makes tea, then sits at her front window watching for the first hint of new day, awaits it leaning forward like an acolyte at prayers. Yesterday she held a small branch in her hand, studied it for what must have been an hour.

In her notebook she still keeps a written record of her days, but for their mystery and beauty, not because she needs its prompting to remember:

Entries spare as haikus. Nights, she sleeps inside the deer’s soft, even breathing, but she never writes of this and she does not know why.

She loves the clear, fresh mornings in the garden, where there’s always a surprise. Lately, among the weeds, a patch of spindly, dry tendrils with a nostalgic fragrance has turned out to be mint. She moved some to a cracked pot she found back of the woodshed and placed it in her south-facing window, so she can drink mint tea. This afternoon she pounded all the long nails from the hardware store into the heart-pine wall that separates the front room from the kitchen. They form the outline of a square, and now she has a loom.

So quickly, so hungrily, she is coming to believe in her new situation,
to accept it. Not as health, not yet, but as a feeling of well-being, something that someday she might take for granted, build upon. A thing even now far beyond what health once had seemed.

And she wonders: What did happen to the ones who went west in the covered wagons, signed on to the ships that sailed around the Horn, or found some other change of scene and were not heard from?

This?

F
OR THE FIRST TIME SINCE SHE GOT HERE
,
SHE FEELS SAFE
,
EVEN IN
the afternoons, a phenomenon she can’t adequately explain. Nonetheless, she hasn’t lost the sense that something watches her, her one symptom that didn’t disappear with all the rest. That’s why, though she can’t bear to load it, she still keeps the gun with her. The gun is hideous; it intrudes on all her thoughts. She stuffs it behind a rock when she works in the garden, so the tender plants won’t sense its threat. Today, to wean herself away from it, she leaves it on her porch. If whoever stripped her car has not shown up by now, he likely isn’t going to. And if she were being watched by something out to do her harm, by now it surely would have harmed her, or have tried.

Perhaps her fear has lessened due to what she tentatively considers her recovery. Or perhaps because her days are full. Lately, after twice seeing a brown rabbit scamper back into the woods, much of her garden time has gone into repairing the old fence. All its cedar posts are
solid in the ground, but much of its barbed wire has rusted through. The pliers she bought are barely adequate to cut and twist new wire from the coil out by the woodpile. And even as she mends one break she spies two new ones someplace else. The work causes her wrists and fingers to both ache and grow strong.

She has already thinned the earliest seedlings. The tiny plants, all of them, tasted of her joy at being alive and eating food she’s grown. She gardens with her sleeves rolled up to feel the soft breeze on her arms. Writes in her notebook:

In the same way her life here is now woven into everything around her, she weaves the fabric of her days onto her loom. A storm cloud boiling over Panther Mountain, a silver fish sliding through the pond’s dark water, the wild green growing things thrusting out of the ground around her, all show up as dark, ragged wools, delicate silk threads, dried weeds and grasses that pull her life together and interpret it. With no shuttle it’s slow work winding each strand through the warp with her fingers, yet it compels her. Some days it seems that every breath she draws gets woven, and that the thing taking shape between the square of nails gives no more than the crudest hint of all it stands for.

Wild animals come near the cabin now. One morning she surprised a raccoon sleeping underneath the porch; several times she’s seen an opossum slink out from the woodpile by the privy; she’s started leaving little bits of beans and rice for a red squirrel who comes begging. And, yes, there are deer. More than once outside her window she has glimpsed a doe standing at tree line, a doe that leaves her tracks. At the pond one afternoon, a buck with antlers so magnificent he seemed unbalanced by them stared at her from across the water for a full minute before stepping away as if he had behind him an entire retinue. And once at dusk a bear lumbered purposefully past her porch on its way to someplace else.

Her first weeks here, she talked out loud a lot and in her arrogance said words to birds, animals, even insects, as if she expected them to understand. Then in those first days following the snow she spoke no sounds at all, an exquisite, encapsulated time in which she listened fiercely to the forest, a time that humbled her and cleared a space for her to notice her surroundings in deeper ways than she had heretofore imagined. She knows now she misses ninety-eight percent of what goes on.

With her new sense of well-being, she dares venture farther from the cabin to forage for wild foods. And for the loom: Her once empty shelves are stocked with a prodigious array of weeds, feathers, vines, and grasses, in addition to the yarns she’s bought; she sees everything in terms of texture, dreams of intense, new, hairy yarns, strong silks, fine white sheep’s wool dyed with summer flowers. And so today, as an experiment, she plans to hike someplace she’s never gone. It’s not a path, not really. No more than a suggestion of a gully cut by spring rains sliding over rocks and around trees. She’s seen it often, this subtle ribbon twining up the side of Panther Mountain. When she thinks of it, excitement rises in her chest as if her heart stands at attention.