Into the Forest

by Jean Hegland

  Life these mid-January days is a tired round of the same small business—studying, eating, trying to sleep. The roof has started leaking over Eva’s old bedroom, but other than that there’s nothing current to chronicle but meals and dreams and more wet weather. Eva dances and I read, and the only news comes from the encyclopedia. Even so, it’s uncanny how frequently the alphabet’s strict order haunts my life.

  Today I read: Bulb, a structure of fleshy leaves that constitutes the resting stage of some plants. The bulb’s food reserves allow it to lie dormant during inclement weather and to resume growing when conducive conditions return.

  Our mother died before the telephones quit working. She died when electricity still seemed as natural as breathing, when there were still new songs on the radio. She died in a hospital—that’s how long ago it was—died slowly of some complicated cancer, instead of the quick viruses or accidents or flus that kill people now.

  The final winter she was alive, she drove to town one Sunday when the sky was sodden and the earth inert, and she came back with shopping bags bulging with tulip bulbs.

  “I bought every red one in town,” she announced triumphantly.

  “They look brown to me,” said our father, peering into one of the bags and then taking out a bulb, holding it up to the light as though he were checking its color. “What are they, deer food?”

  “The gardening book says deer won’t eat tulips,” she said.

  “Hope the deer read the same book,” he answered. To his delight, she sighed with elaborate patience, rolled her eyes, and asked him how deep he thought she should plant them. Then she carried her bags outside and spent the next week setting out bulbs. She was already bone-thin from the cancer, but I remember how she seemed to draw a vitality from the fresh dirt, the still bulbs, and the keen air. I remember her hands red and chapped from the cold, and the clean and earthy smell of her when she came indoors to warm herself at the stove where I sat with my book and cup of cocoa.

  “Don’t you girls want to help?” she would ask playfully, enlivened by dirt and work and the promise contained in each homely knob, teasing me by sneaking her icy fingers down my back or pressing her cheeks against my neck, pausing by the open door to Eva’s studio to ask again, “Don’t you want to help me?”

  We would mumble later, after this chapter—in a little while, when I finish these plies, and I would go back to the private, chocolate warmth of my cocoa mug and the closed world of my book, and Eva would finish her plies and begin work on her frappés.

  I wonder now if she asked us to help her so she could talk to us about her dying. She, who had always been so candid with our questions about injured birds and sick grandmothers, never spoke with us about what was happening to her, and I wonder if she weren’t trying to create a way for us to talk about her impending death. Perhaps outside, kneeling on the earth, while we worked together to bury the bulbs that would outlive her, she would have been able to ask us how we felt, would have been able to tell us what she thought her dying meant, what it was she wanted us to remember when she was gone.

  But all I knew back then was that I didn’t want to leave the house. It was too cold outside, and I was comfortable by the fire, doing what I knew how to do. I didn’t want to risk having to meet her eyes, having to hear those words—cancer and dying—from my mother, who had cancer, who might be dying.

  I think unconsciously I was afraid that if she asked me how I felt, my unleashed grief and rage would kill us all. In some unadmitted corner of myself I was already weeping and screaming and begging her not to leave me, not to go. If I started crying for real, only her comfort could make me stop, and if she died before she had finished comforting me, then I would be left to cry forever. Besides, I had read somewhere that cancer patients’ attitudes could cause or cure their disease, and I think I was afraid that if we admitted she might be dying, then that alone would kill her.

  So she planted her tulips alone, buried every one herself, and when they were all underground, she returned to the flowers on her loom and never worked outdoors again. By the time the rains had stopped and the first tulip leaves speared up through the damp earth, there was no escaping the fact that she was dying, but by then she was too feeble and we were too frightened to mention it.

  That spring the clearing was ringed with fire, a circle of red tulips broken only where the road intersected it. The resident deer must have nibbled at an early shoot or two and then decided that tulips weren’t to their taste, because soon through every window we saw a line of scarlet tulips, their bright color and elementary shape making them seem like the flowers in a child’s drawing or the thousand flowers of all her tapestries.

  They made a band of red that separated the tame green of our lawn from the wild green of the forest. Every afternoon Mother would sit on the bed our father had arranged on the deck for her, wrapped in blankets, propped on pillows, her bald head shrouded in a turban, her eyes hidden behind dark glasses, watching her tulips until the warm insistence of the sun sent her back into the doze that seemed more and more to be the place where she resided.

  “They’ll come up every year,” she whispered once. She died a month later, just as the wisteria at the south end of the house had begun to bloom. By then her tulips were withered stalks, the green grown out of them as they sagged at the edge of the clearing.

  They buried her in the cemetery in town, on an April day of bright light and hard breezes, a day when our eyes smarted not only from grief, but also from unfiltered sunlight and wind-blown grit. Some part of her is there still, I suppose, rotting into the satin and plywood of the coffin the mortician sold our father. But I think she buried herself in that ring of bulbs, and now I wish I had helped her with her work.

  We never even liked tea before all this happened. I used to drink cocoa and Eva avoided caffeine, but now our mother’s stale teabags are one of the few treats we have to ease us through these days. Even Eva is willing to ration tea. Out of a Fastco box that once held four hundred bags, there are only nine left. But if you take the staple from the top of the bag and sift the tea into a bowl, you’ll see that it really only takes a pinch of tea, just a few dusty crumbs, to transform boiled water to a liquid with a hint of bulk and flavor, a kind of alchemy that civilizes water, that brings to life the ghost—at least—of tea.

  We can make a single teabag last for a week that way, and maybe counting teabags tells us more than any calendar about how this time is passing.

  I’m racing through the encyclopedia. I finished D last week, and this afternoon I read from Eden to Electricity. While I was reading about charges and currents and conductors and fields by the light of the rain-drenched sun, the odd thought came to me that perhaps our electricity was already back. It was entirely possible the bulb in the kitchen we left on six months ago could have burnt out without our ever knowing it.

  The more I sat at the table and looked out at the wet yard, the more I was convinced that all I had to do was get up and switch on the living room light for our fugue state to be over. I felt a surge of thrill, and the caution I felt after it was not so much a warning that I might be wrong as a way of prolonging the delicious instant of discovery—in a moment I was going to rise from my chair, cross the dim room, and turn on a light. I could already feel the tiny resistance as the switch snapped into place. I could already see the light filling the room and hear the joy in my voice when I cried, “Eva, Eva, come see!”

  I waited as long as I could, and then slowly I crossed the room, put my finger on the switch, took a deep breath, and pushed it up. There was a barely audible click.

  And that was all.

  I felt a brutal disappointment, and then I thought, Maybe it’s just that this bulb’s burnt out, too.

  I rushed into the bathroom and tried that light. It seemed that if only I wanted it enough, if only I could focus my whole self on making electricity flow through those miles of wires to this little switch, then there would be light. It seemed it was up to me, as though
I could do it, if only I tried hard enough. I closed my eyes, held my breath, and flipped the switch.

  For a moment I was certain I could see light through my shut lids, but when I opened them, the bathroom was dark. My hand dropped from the switch. I felt my whole self slump into a defeat so vast there seemed no escape.

  Then an even stupider hope buoyed me. If the electricity wasn’t back yet, the phone might be, but until someone thought to call us, we would never know it. I leapt to the kitchen to pick up the phone the way I used to race for it when it rang. I snatched the receiver off the cradle, slammed it to my ear. But instead of the hum that had once made it seem like a living thing, there was silence. Flat blank silence.

  Beyond that silence I heard the relentless tick of Eva’s metronome, the rhythmless noise of the rain.

  Though the rain that falls so steadily on the ragged yard and stoic trees might well be the same rain that fell a week ago, the calendar claims today’s the first of February. We’re down to eight and one-fourth teabags, and I’m more than halfway through the F’s.

  Today I reached Forest, an extensive and complex ecological community dominated by trees and having the potential for self-perpetuation. But before I could memorize the five major types of forest, along with their typical tree densities, climates, and soils, I was interrupted by yet another memory, and I raised my gaze from the page to look out the window at the forest.

  As soon as Eva and I were able to toddle, our father took us on long, slow rambles down the dirt road that led from our clearing through the woods. We looked at wildflowers, listened to birds, and splashed in the clear trickle of the creek. We picked up leaves and poked at centipedes and waterstriders while he towered above us, patient and benevolent as a tree.

  When we got a little older, Mother occasionally gave us permission to journey by ourselves down the quarter-mile of road to the bridge so we could meet Father on his way home from work. Don’t cross the bridge, Mother would warn, until the bridge seemed such a natural boundary it never occurred to us to cross it.

  What we really wanted to do was play in the forest. Every flower and bird and mysterious crashing beckoned for us to clamber up through the trees and ferns, but our mother insisted that we keep to the road.

  “You’re too young,” she said when, at six and seven, we begged to go exploring. “You’ll get lost. It’s not safe.”

  “Please,” we sang.

  “What do you want to do there, anyway?”

  “We just want to explore,” we pleaded, “go for walks, maybe build a fort. We’ll be careful.”

  “You can build a fort in the clearing,” she offered.

  “It’s not the same if it’s not in the forest.”

  “But there’re ticks and rattlesnakes and poison oak in the forest.”

  That stopped us for a moment, until Eva reasoned, “There’s ticks and rattlesnakes and poison oak in the clearing, too. Remember when Daddy found a rattlesnake in the woodpile?”

  “Well, what about pigs?” our mother asked.

  Mother hated wild pigs. They lived in the forest like ghostly rototillers, seldom seen, but leaving deep gashes in the earth where they rooted for grubs and bulbs, and dirty muck holes where they wallowed in the streams. No one we knew had ever been hurt by one, but somehow they seemed to embody all our mother’s fears about the forest.

  “They can weigh two hundred pounds. Their tusks are sharp as razors. Even rattlesnakes can’t bite through their hides. They eat dirt and carrion,” she said. “They could kill you. What are you girls going to do when you meet one of them in the woods?”

  I was ready to stay forever in the safety of the clearing when suddenly our father broke in. “It’s okay, Gloria. It’ll be all right. Like it or not, these two are bound to play in the forest sooner or later. Besides, pigs are shy. Eva and Nell’ll make enough racket to scare off every wild pig in Northern California. Hell, if there were any bears left, they’d run them off, too. I say let the girls go.”

  Mother glared at him, but in the end she backed down. She gave us each police whistles to blow if we got into trouble, and she bundled us in rules: we couldn’t wander out of whistle-range of home, we had to stay together, we couldn’t put our hands or feet anywhere we hadn’t first checked for rattlesnakes, we had to submit to a tick search before we came back inside, and we couldn’t eat anything but the snacks she packed for us.

  “Don’t you girls ever eat anything wild,” she reminded us each time we left the clearing. “Do you understand? Wild plants can kill you.”

  Okay, Mother. Yes, Mother, we promise, we said as, thrilled and scared, we edged towards the woods.

  Ours is a mixed forest, predominantly fir and second-growth redwood but with a smattering of oak and madrone and maple. Father said that before it was logged our land had been covered with redwoods a thousand years old, but all that remained of that mythic place were a few fallen trunks the length and girth of beached whales and several charred stumps the size of small sheds.

  When we were nine and ten, Eva and I discovered one of those stumps about a mile above our house and made it our own. It was hollow, and the space inside was large enough to serve as fort, castle, teepee, and cottage. A tributary of the creek that borders our clearing ran near it and provided us with water for wading, washing, and mudpie making. We kept a chipped tea set up there along with blankets, dress-up clothes, and broken pans, and there we spent every minute we could steal or wheedle, playing Pretend.

  “Pretend,” one of us would say, as soon as we reached the stump, while we were still panting from the exertion of our climb, “we’re Indians.” Or goddesses. Or orphans. Or witches. “And pretend,” the other of us would answer with the hushed intensity the game required, “that we’re lost.” That we’re stalking deer. That we’re going to dance with the fairies. That a bear’s coming to get us and we have to hide.

  Back then, it seemed the forest had everything we needed. Every mushroom or flower or fern or stone was a gift. Every noise was an adventure to be investigated. Frequently we saw deer or rabbits or heard the call of wild turkeys. Occasionally we glimpsed a grey fox or a skunk. Once we caught sight of a bobcat when we were hurrying home to supper much later than we should have been. Twice we found rattlesnakes basking in the summer sun, but each time we were able to back away without disturbing them.

  We never told our mother about the bobcat or the snakes, and she began to call us “wood nymphs,” laugh at our tangled hair and scratched arms, and forget to check us for ticks before she let us come inside. It was all idyllic, and at the end of a day in the forest we would abandon our imaginary lives and hurry back to the clearing and our parents and the cozy realities of hot food and steaming baths and goodnight kisses.

  But then Eva started dancing and all that changed. In the beginning I tried to beg or bribe her to come with me into the forest. “Not now,” she would say. “I’ve got to work on my fouettés. Maybe later.” On those few occasions when I was able to convince her to pack a lunch and venture into the woods, our games felt forced and childish and we always seemed to return to the house sunburnt, tick-bitten, and bad-tempered. I tried going up to the stump alone, but my time there always seemed to drag; the distant crashings of pigs or deer made me jump, fallen branches began to startle me with their resemblance to dozing snakes, and finally the forest came to mean nothing more than the interminable distance between home and town.

  It rains and rains and rains and rains and rains and rains. The rain falls and falls, great silver needles stitching the dull sky to the sodden earth. Downstairs, the house is dark and warm, though all our mother’s dye pots have been put into service upstairs, catching the rainwater that leaks through the roof our father never had a chance to repair.

  When I open the front door to let in a little more light to read by, I can hear the stream hissing with rain. Eva stays in her studio, and above the drumming of the rain I can hear the ticking of her metronome, her hummed snatches of Water Music, and the
brush and thud of her feet on the Mylar floor.

  For the last few days I’ve been craving hot dogs. Hot dogs—a bland sausage on a white bun, a ribbon of yellow mustard scribbled down it. When you bite, there’s the pillowy give of the bun, the mild sting of the mustard, the tiny resistance as your teeth break through the hot dog’s skin, sink through the grainless meat, and then the lovely gooey chew of bread and mustard and pork.

  I can’t remember the last hot dog I’ve eaten, though it must have been at the Uptown Café, with Eva and Eli and the rest of the Plaza-folk. Usually we all claimed those hot dogs were disgusting, made of things you wouldn’t want to think about, pig’s lips, we used to scoff, and who knows what other organs and parts. But occasionally one of us would order one, and then someone else would, and then everyone but Eva would be sharing ravenous, bloated bites. Now I want one so urgently I think I would give even this notebook to be back at the Uptown with a hot dog in my fist.

  Even when Mother finally had to move to the hospital we all kept acting as though she would soon be coming home. Looking back, I truly cannot say whether we were driven by fear or hope, whether we were too cowardly to admit she was dying, or whether we were heroically clinging to the final crumbs of faith in her recovery. I don’t know if we were being complicit or ignorant or innocent when we promised each other that she would be back home before her wisteria faded.

  She seemed to be at her best late at night, so after work Father would pick up Eva at Miss Markova’s studio, and together they would drive home for me in the old Dodge pickup that had become the only vehicle Father had time to keep running. The three of us would drive back into Redwood as the sun was setting. There, he would drop Eva and me off at the Uptown Café, where Eva sipped a diet soda and I devoured a basket of fries while he went on ahead to the hospital, helped his wife through whatever procedures she had to endure, urged her to swallow a little broth or Jell-O, another sip of water.