by Jean Hegland
“Eva and I used to play up here,” I said when we had finally stopped and were standing close together, trying to catch our breath.
“You came here when you were kids?”
“All the time. We practically lived up here.”
“Why’d you quit?”
I felt the smile leach off my face. I shrugged. “Eva started dancing. And then my mother got sick. We grew up, I guess.”
Eli raised his head, looked at me for a minute, but changed his mind and didn’t speak. Instead, he took my hand in his and we walked on through the dripping woods.
It isn’t easy to hold hands and walk through a forest. There are branches to duck, logs to climb, trees to skirt. But we managed. In the distance I could still hear the roar of the stream, as insistent as ever, but muted now by a million leaves. I thought of my sister, working in her studio in the silent house, her face blank, her back straight, her hand resting on the barre as though it were floating on water, her leg soaring over and over again into the quiet air, while far above her in the chill fresh forest, I was happy with someone else.
Several times I got confused, whether because of Eli or because the forest had grown and changed, I don’t know, but none of the trees looked familiar, and I was almost ready to give up. I was planning the joke I would make of heading back downhill when suddenly I heard the tune of nearby water. Veering towards it, I recognized the little rill that ran near the stump.
I led Eli upstream for a hundred yards or so, and there it was, appearing as unexpectedly as it always had, so that one minute we were surrounded by a tangle of trees, and the next minute we were twenty feet from a hollow redwood stump the size of a small room.
We stopped, hand in hand.
I had forgotten how massive it was, how solid. It looked more like stone than wood, and yet it seemed alive. Its outer walls were covered with miniature forests of mosses and lichens. On the north side there was an opening wide enough to let two children enter hand in hand, and I led Eli through it. The walls inside were charred from some ancient fire, blackened and lichened and weathered hard, smelling faintly of a smoke so old there may be no one still alive who could possibly remember the flame.
I watched as Eli stood in the litter of last year’s leaves, spread his arms, and slowly turned around. The walls were always at least two feet beyond his reach.
“Is this what you brought me up here for?” he asked.
“What do you think?”
“It looks like the kind of thing you’d want me to see,” he said, and before I could sort out what he meant by that, he reached for me, pulled me to him. Then I was too busy being shocked by the unexpected softness of his lips to fret about any other meanings.
We could have grown roots, we stood there so long. We could have grown wings and risen like angels up through the tunnel of the stump and out into the sky, still talking in that mute language we suddenly discovered we shared, the fluent and precise language of tongues. At times it seemed the forest went about its own business, and at times it seemed it drew closer, hovering over us.
We made love, though fumbled is probably a better word for what happened between us. There was a confusion of buttons and a tangle of shirt sleeves and pants legs, exposing selves shy, greedy, and riddled with goosebumps. We spread our clothes over the leaves, and there, on the chill floor of the forest, where a redwood tree had grown for a thousand years, we did what we could with each other.
For me, the biggest revelation of sex was not Eli’s penis, which seemed almost girlish somehow, it was so smooth and eager, springing from its tangle of auburn hair and bouncing between us like a puppet on a string. Instead it was the surprise of his whole, full skin against mine, with its exquisite gradations of texture and temperature and pressure. The biggest shock was not our differences but our sameness.
We worked for a long time trying to get him inside me, and whether it was his inexperience, too, that added to our dilemma, I don’t know, but it seemed that both of us were unsure of not only the mechanics, but also the etiquette, of what the encyclopedia calls penetration. For a long time he stuffed himself against me, until even I realized he needed help, and finally, flushed more with embarrassment than lust, I tried to assist him. But then there were two hands fumbling between our four legs.
I was trying to think of a polite way to call the whole thing off when suddenly I felt something give, felt a new, slick dimension to myself. There was a blur of pain, another level of resistance, and he was moving inside me. I have to admit it felt more odd than good, though at the end there was a moment when he cried out with such a pure sound I felt I had just heard the voice of his soul.
When it was over, we lay together for a moment, and then Eli slugged out of me, and there was a messy wetness between my legs. We sprawled on the tangle of jeans legs and shirt sleeves, sharp oak leaves sticking to our backs and elbows and knees, redwood fronds love-knotted in our hair. I opened my eyes, looked up through the stump to the sky beyond the braid of branches, and it seemed I could hear the sap rising through the ghostly wood.
It was strange coming down the hill, my clothes rumpled, my hair prickly with leaves, my crotch tender and sticky, Eli holding my hand.
Eva was in the kitchen when we got home, rinsing our breakfast dishes. She looked up from the sink and asked, “Did you have a good walk?”
“Nell showed me the stump,” Eli said, in another effort to be friendly. For a moment Eva looked stricken. Then her face grew closed, and turning to me she asked, “What stump?”
The next afternoon Eli and I were again lying together inside the stump. We had just finished making love and were lolling in that languorous afterwards, dozing and teasing, and smiling vaguely past the charred walls to the breeze-blown sky. I had my head on his chest and was listening to the sure, firm pumping of his heart.
But at some point my lethargy vanished like mist in the morning sun, and I sat up to face him, to watch him tell me that all our waiting was finally over. Because back East, he said—around Boston—things have started up again. He said they have electricity back there. The phones work. People have jobs. There’s food in the stores.
“How do you know?” I asked, teetering between delight and disbelief.
“A friend of my uncle’s told us.” “He’s been back there?”
“He’s been to Sacramento. He just came back last week.”
“But how—”
“When he was on his way home, he met a man, and they walked most of the way together. This guy had family up by Grantsville somewhere. Anyway, he must have liked Charlie because just before they got to Redwood, he told him all about it, said he was on his way home to get his family and take them back to Boston before next winter.”
The man from Grantsville had said that for a while things were awful back East, even worse than they ever got here. The rioting was horrible, and it seemed that gangs were providing the only order there was. Many, many people died from starvation or exposure or disease. But Eli said that has all run its course by now. He said the people who are left are living like kings.
They’re rebuilding Boston. They’ve established a temporary government and set up a system to allow people to file claims on the deserted buildings if they will agree to repair and occupy them. Boston is a boomtown. But those who are already there are trying to keep it all quiet. Eli said, “If the whole country heard about it, Boston would be mobbed. That’s why Charlie walked a hundred miles with this guy before he said a word because everyone who hears is bound to pack up and head east.”
“It’s the Gold Rush in reverse!” I said, leaping up. “Why didn’t you tell us sooner?”
He grinned, elbowed himself to his feet. “I had to find out who you were first.”
“What do you mean? Who am I?”
“The woman I want to go with me.”
Even standing naked in front of him, with the leavings of our love beginning to drip from me onto the forest humus, it came as a shock to hear him call me
a woman.
“What do you mean?” I repeated.
“I want you to come with me.”
At those words some flat, empty thing inside me inflated like a new lung. I wanted him to stop, to luxuriate in that, to celebrate—with me—what he had just said. But he raced on.
“We’ve got to start soon,” he said, “so we don’t end up spending the winter someplace in South Dakota. Every day we waste means that someone else is getting a head start on us.”
“What about Eva?” I asked.
“She can come, too”.
His brothers are going. And their cousin. With Eva, there will be six of us. “Six is a good number,” said Eli. “Not so many we have a hard time keeping track of everybody, but enough so that we can take care of ourselves.
“But we have to leave soon,” he repeated, “now that spring is coming. It’s already mid-March, and it’ll take us another day and a half just to walk back to town. Mike and Adam said they could only wait two weeks for me, and I’ve already been here one.”
It was odd to hear someone talking in weeks again, to think that somewhere they still existed, five workdays pivoting around a weekend. I remembered how significant Monday morning or Saturday night used to seem. And I realized with a spike of something like lust that those words have regained their meanings, back in Boston.
Just the thought of all of that made me feel expansive, generous, alive. I imagined Boston, ablaze with lights. I imagined grocery stores and gas stations, museums and malls, restaurants and arcades and theaters. I thought of what it would feel like to quit hoarding and cowering and grieving, and for the first time in my life I wept for joy.
“You’re crazy,” said Eva when we told her that night as the three of us sat around the open stove. “You’ll never make it.”
“Of course we will,” said Eli, poking at the coals in the firebox while we stared at the flames with the same mesmerized intensity with which we used to watch TV.
“You’ll walk to Boston?” she said, and I winced at the scorn in her voice.
“Yes,” said Eli.
“Before next winter?”
“Yes.”
“What if you don’t get that far?” “Then we’ll hole up somewhere.”
“Where? Who would take an extra half dozen people in for the winter?”
“We’d earn our keep. Joe’s got a rifle. And a reloader. And if you guys come, there’ll be your gun, too. We can hunt and cut wood. We’ll be fine.”
“Do you know how to hunt?”
“Sure,” he grinned. “Why not? I’m a fast learner.”
“And Boston’s got something we don’t have?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“Power. Food. Jobs.”
“How do you know?”
“I told you. My uncle’s friend—”
“What if he’s wrong? What if it’s just another rumor?”
“If it were a rumor, do you think this guy would have kept it a secret for so long? He and Charlie’d walked a hundred miles together before he even mentioned it. Does that sound like a rumor? Besides, Charlie’s smart. He’d know if this guy was a fake.”
“How?”
“He’d know. But look. Even if he is wrong—which he isn’t—still, we won’t be any worse off than we are now. At least we’ll be there when things do start up again.”
“If you’re so sure Charlie knows what he’s talking about, then where are the planes?”
“The planes?”
“That’s right. Why hasn’t someone flown out West—or driven, for that matter? If things are back up back East, why don’t we know about it?”
“Look, Eva,” he said with an elaborate patience, “those lights aren’t running on gas. The gas is long gone. It’s alternatives—everything’s solar or wind. Of course there aren’t any planes. Besides, no one wants the secret to get out. There isn’t enough for everyone.”
“So why are you going?”
“To seek my fortune. To get on with my life.” He was silent for a moment, and sadder than I had ever seen him. “It’s been a hard time in Redwood.”
“Oh, Eva,” I blurted, “you can dance. There’ll be music. And teachers. You can join a dance company—and I can go to Harvard.”
She met my eyes straight on then with a look that seemed like a warning, but her message was too dense, and I was too enraptured to try to decipher her meaning.
“Eli’s brothers are making a handcart, and they’re trying to find a horse,” I said.
“That’s crazy,” Eva answered.
Eli said, “No crazier than staying here and waiting for the lights to turn back on. No crazier than hiding up here in the hills, counting nails and rubber bands, and watching the pantry empty. What’s going to happen to the two of you if you stay here?”
“Nothing. We’ll be fine.”
“Nothing. That’s right. Nothing will happen—if you’re lucky. If you’re lucky, the lights will come back on before your food runs out, or before one of you gets hurt or sick, or before the house catches fire. If you’re lucky.
“And suppose you are that lucky. Suppose you do manage to survive out here until the power comes back—then what? You’re still thirty miles from town. Thirty miles from a goddamn ghost town. Even before all this happened, Redwood was a place to leave. I thought you’d understand that, Eva.”
She bristled. “Of course I do. But when I leave it’s going to be for something real. Not just craziness.”
“Leaving’s less crazy than staying here.”
“At least if we stay here we’ll stay alive,” said Eva dryly, “which is more than I can say for you, if you try to walk three thousand miles before next winter.”
“You two run more risk out here by yourselves than you do coming with me.” Eli’s voice softened. “Eva, please. It’s an adventure. Come with us. And it’s not fair to Nell.”
“She’s her own person.” Eva rose to add wood to the fire. “Nell will go if she wants.”
I did want. More than I had ever wanted anything I wanted to walk to Boston with Eli. But Eli is gone. Eli is crossing the country without me, headed towards the lights of a living world, and I’m back here as though I never left, writing about traveling while Eva dances and another rain falls.
My socks were darned, my jeans double-patched. The mildewed Army surplus backpack we found in Father’s workshop had been cleaned and mended and filled, the load arranged and rearranged. I had my letter from Harvard, a copy of my SAT scores, my dead calculator, this journal. I had considered and reconsidered each sweater, each match, each pencil stub and spool of thread and grain of rice, balancing its value on the trip against its weight and bulk, and adding into that equation how much Eva might need it here.
We split the money, but I left her the magnifying glass and the last two teabags. And the gas.
“I’m sorry I wouldn’t let you use it before,” I said, and added wistfully, “maybe we should stay another day so we can have that party and watch you dance.”
She shook her head. “No, if you’re going to go, you’d better get on your way.”
She gave me the hiking boots we had found at the back of Mother’s closet. And she insisted I take the rifle.
“You’ll need it,” she said, “more than I will—”
I interrupted her to thank her, able at that moment to feel nothing but my own delight. I was seventeen years old, strong, free, and suddenly beautiful. I was a woman venturing out into the world with her lover. Despite everything, I was finally going to Harvard, and no sour sister could possibly curdle my joy.
I have to admit there were even times when it seemed it would be a relief if Eva stayed behind. Besides, I was still half-convinced that at the last moment she would change her mind and come with us, that the trip would make us allies again. As I sorted and organized and planned, I kept waiting for the moment when she would finally give in and start to pack.
But in the chill light of that final morning, w
hile Eli was out gathering a last load of firewood and Eva and I were sitting at the table with our cups of tasteless tea, she was still adamant. “No, Nell. I’m staying. It’s a crazy trip.”
“But what about your dancing? All this time you’ve managed to keep dancing when no one else ever could, and now you’re going to let it all go?”
“I’m not going to let it go. I’ll keep dancing.”
“But Eva, this could be your only chance.”
She flinched, and then answered so quickly I could tell she had been thinking the same thing herself. “Maybe that’s not the most important thing.”
Trying to keep the fear out of my voice, I asked, “Then what is?”
“I don’t know.”
I reeled for a moment, but then I saw the packs waiting like promises beside the door, and I tried again. “We’re all the family either of us has got left. We’ve got to stick together.”
“No, we don’t.” She shook her head at me, to keep me from softening that blow. She said, “It’s okay, Nell. We’ve both made our choices.”
“You can’t stay here alone.”
“Why not?”
Eli came back in then, his arms burdened with wood, and Eva and I fell silent. We pretended to eat. We talked about the chickens and the weather, made frail jokes. Finally Eli broke our inertia, stood up in a way that was both reluctant and businesslike. “Well. Sure you won’t change your mind, Eva?”
“Yep,” she said, lightly. “I’m sure.”
“Stubborn, aren’t you?”
“Yep,” she said. “I’m stubborn.”
They smiled at each other with an understanding so strong and amused and certain that I felt a little jealous of them both, as though each of them had, without even trying, usurped the place to which I aspired. Eva turned to face me, took my hands in hers, and looked at me so lovingly that even then I expected she was going to change her mind. But she said, “Good-bye, Nellie. I’ll always be your sister.” To lessen the sorrow she added, “Don’t take any wooden nickels. And write when you get work.”
I nodded stupidly, hugging her for the first time since we had discovered the gas. I watched as Eli shrugged his pack across his shoulders, picked up the rifle, and opened the door. Finally, when there was nothing else I could do, I hefted my pack off the floor, slung it around to my back, and followed him out of the house, out into the blaze of early morning light.