The Den

by Abi Maxwell

  “All alive in this town will remember that on the nightfall of January 18, 1852, the temperature of Middlewood remained in its typical place, but that by sunup on Friday, January 19, the mercury had begun to plunge until it hit a shocking 31 degrees below and then froze in its gauge. As time goes forward we will hear of others in our fine state dying from the cold, but this tale in our own town will remain the saddest and surely the most mysterious. You will know that scarcely one hundred rods from Mr. Josiah Bartlett’s, across his upper field and into the woods, is the squat home of the Scottish family Ross, the parents, Thomas and Elspeth, immigrants, the children Colin (fourteen), Evan (twelve), and Jeremiah (age ten) born here.”

  He stopped, looked at Claire, then continued:

  “One half-hour before sunrise, that house gave way to the violence of the day, the windows being blown in, exposing the whole building to destruction. Mrs. Ross huddled with her boys on the bed while Mr. Ross started for his nearest neighbor’s house, Mr. Josiah Bartlett’s, reaching there at sunrise, feet and face badly frozen and barely able to stand. Seeing the man could venture no more, Mr. Josiah Bartlett suited up his horses and drove his sleigh back through the snow to rescue the family, leaving Mr. Ross to warm himself. Mr. Bartlett pushed through the violent, piercing wind. When he entered the woods he had a mysterious, some would say religious, sense of something amiss, and his senses proved correct. He descended quickly from his sleigh and rushed to the door but did not enter, for the family had vanished, and in their place sat five wild, hungry dogs, their backs hunched, their mouths dripping, their eyes at once cold and bloodshot. Mr. Bartlett ran his sleigh home.”

  “This is what the Kepper boy wrote me about?” Claire asked. “This is what I was to believe happened to my sister?” Her voice was loud now, her entire body shaking with fury.

  “There is more,” he said gently, and when she nodded he went on:

  “All of our town will remember the scare we have had with wolves. Mr. Bartlett, being both a farmer and a scholar, is surely a man capable of identifying wolves, and that these animals were not. No, these animals are coyotes, the scavengers of the western prairies. How did they arrive here? And what exactly have they done to this innocent family? No trace of the Ross family remains, nor any trace of this vicious new predator from the West.”

  “That’s it?” she asked. “This is rubbish. This is why no one has found my sister?” She grabbed the manuscript from him and shook it in his direction. “How did people hear this rubbish, anyway? Your book has yet to be published, no?”

  “Yes, I am not yet through. I have printed this section in the newspaper, Claire. I have claimed this as the truth.”

  “But this is nonsense,” she said.

  “Your sister wrote this. She believed this would work and she was correct. There was a great hunt for wolves here, you see. They killed them all, but they wanted to kill more. So far as they can see, your sister and her family were mauled to death. Coyote is sport now, the whole of Middlewood is wild for it, though of course they haven’t found one, the damn things don’t exist here, they’d know that if they ever read.” He breathed deeply and held his hands out for the manuscript. She passed it to him and he tucked it back into its folder and said, “If only she could know her story worked so well.”

  * * *

  —

  Claire had been given a room on the second floor, where the bed was positioned right up against the chimney, so as she lay there she was warmed in the most wonderful of ways. She closed her eyes. Silence, and then wind, and then silence, but a new kind here. A new land. She drifted off into it, and when she woke again it was to the dim darkness of morning. She heard Mr. Bartlett moving around beneath her, so she dressed and tiptoed downstairs. She thought of her parents. This is the trip of your life, they had said. Mr. Bartlett had told her to be afraid of the town, of causing them to call her sister’s story into mind, and then perhaps into question, but she would not waste such an opportunity. She said, “Please, I want to see where my sister lived.”

  He gave her a pair of boots that were much too big, but with extra twine they cinched down enough. It was just dawn when they set out.

  “You understand it is ruined,” he said.

  “It is no matter,” she said, and they were mostly silent for the rest of the walk. He led her across the field, where the sheep had already been set out to graze. At the edge, he held out his hand to help her over the stone wall, but she refused. The woods were wet with snowmelt and the trees had just begun to bud and in spite of herself she felt happy for her sister, to have at least lived in such beauty. As they walked, he kept looking back to be sure she still followed, and when he did that she had the strange sense that she herself was her sister, accompanying this new, adopted father on a little walk. After some time he stopped at a stream and then turned sharply uphill.

  “A detour,” he said, and led her to a little well house. A bucket sat at the side, attached to a rope. He lowered it down and pulled it back up and offered it to her.

  “Sir,” she said. They had scarcely been walking five minutes. She had no need of water. She said, “I would like you to take me straight to her house, please.”

  He clapped his hands and continued on. It wasn’t but a minute more, up a little knoll. Before it came into sight she said, “There is no road?” And then, “Do others in your town live like this? In the woods?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  She might have asked why, but just then they arrived, and she comforted herself with the thought that when he had first come to this new town, Elspeth’s husband might have had the choice of any number of houses, in any number of places, but had chosen this one because it would remind Elspeth of home. Not that the setting was anything like home. This house was so deep in the woods that it would never be bathed in the kind of light that Elspeth would have wanted. But the smallness of it, the squareness. That at least was like home. She knew that Mr. Bartlett had expected her to stand there in shock. The door had fallen loose off its hinges and the windows were blown in and no one had picked up the glass. Oddly, though, Claire wasn’t upset. The sun was parallel to them now, and braiding its light through the trees, and she could see well enough to make out the details of the place. A little garden here, its greenery poking up through the spring cover. A tree with notches in it. She counted them and knew immediately it was for the years her sister had been here. Had there been a particular day, the anniversary of her arrival, that she’d notched the wood? Had she done it the first day she arrived, or had she waited an entire year, marking the completion rather than the start?

  “I didn’t want to,” he began, but she shook her head, meaning to say that it was all all right. She pushed the door a bit, and then she decided that it ought to come off, so she enlisted his help and together they pulled it loose. He led her across the way to a dip in the woods and they threw it down in.

  “Your sister’s and mine,” he said, meaning the dumping pit.

  She went back to the house. One room inside, and freezing. One large bed in the middle and two more smaller ones against the walls. He said, “I’ve cleared some of it out. You understand that I don’t want people to wonder.”

  One table. Six chairs. On the wall, one faded picture. She took it down and held it against her heart as though the childish drawing were her very sister. For the most part, though, the place was empty.

  “What did she do?” she asked. Her voice seemed so loud in here.

  “I have gathered all the books,” he said. “Your sister read a great deal. I have also gathered the kitchenware piece by piece.”

  She walked across the floor to the fireplace and held her hands out in front of it as though there was a fire within. She squatted down. The structure was so big, and must have kept her sister warm enough. She kept squatting there, imagining that warmth. He said, “We ought to be going,” though there wa
sn’t any real need to.

  She stood up and turned to follow him out. But then she turned back. She went to the bed, patted one of the mattresses, almost flipped it up but changed her mind.

  He said, “Claire?” and she turned back to him, followed him out of the house. When they had reached the edge of the woods his massive barn came into view. The sun was as high as the tops of the trees now, and it shot straight to that barn, casting it in a blazing light.

  * * *

  —

  “I want to see his house,” she said before she left.

  “Whose?”

  “The man who did this to her. The mill owner. I want to see his house.”

  “Claire,” he said.

  “Then I will go on my own.”

  He insisted she could not, and he led her there the following morning, before dawn, when once again no one would see them.

  “Sir,” she said. “Is going at this hour not more suspicious?” Yet he did not answer. Though they could have walked just a few minutes up the road, he led her across the field and over the stone wall and through the woods again, past Elspeth’s fallen house, past the dumping pit, over another stone wall at the far edge of the woods, and across the carriage road. When they finally arrived at the mill owner’s they just stood there silently in front of it. After some time she said, “Did it happen there?”

  “In the top floor. The attic.”

  “And the murder?” she asked.

  “At the mill dam. It is lucky. His body was found within the week and the town believes he fell in.”

  “Will anyone move in now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Shall we go in?”

  “No,” he said. “I should think we should not go in,” and then he turned and led her directly back down the hill, this time on the road rather than through the woods.

  * * *

  —

  The two weeks passed quickly. She told him, during that time, of the feeling she had, that despite the sure fact that her sister was missing, at least on this side of the ocean they now shared the same piece of earth. Now, rather than needing a boat, Claire could just put her shoes on and set out walking to find her sister.

  “You can’t,” he said. “It is such a large country. There is nothing to be done.”

  Alone in his guest room, she thought of all the ways he might be wrong until finally she admitted he was right.

  * * *

  —

  Her parents, when she arrived home, were not disappointed. Not in her, anyway. They were proud of their brave daughter and they seemed to love her all the more for the fact that she had made it back. Or for the fact that they had worried she would not. They showered her with attention, so much so that she had to remind them that she was not an infant.

  “I just want to understand,” her mother said only once. Claire had returned home with the awful story of what had happened—she could not bear to keep it to herself. Other than that, she had returned with nothing but that one strange pen-and-ink drawing that she’d taken from the small house, drawn, they presumed, by Elspeth and her children. It was of an uninhabited island that on the one side looked tropical and the other soaked in rain or snow, they couldn’t tell which. They framed it and hung it in their kitchen, but really it was nothing. It meant nothing, and given the tragedy she had learned of in America, her parents struggled to understand the change that had come over her. But Claire couldn’t explain it, the feeling that had finally encompassed her on her last night there, as she’d lain awake in the warm bed against the chimney in Josiah Bartlett’s house. The feeling of peace when she had waved goodbye to him. The odd vision that as she left Elspeth tumbled toward her in her wake. How ever to explain such a thing?

  Yet not some two months later, a package arrived.

  June 6, 1853

  Dear Claire,

  I pray this arrives safely. Soon after you left I did what I should have done long ago. I do not know why I was afraid in your sister’s house. What a fool! I told myself. It was as though the story your sister had written had become real to me, too. I went back to your sister’s house and I cleaned every nook and cranny, as they say. It was freezing but that only made me work all the harder. I took my broom and stuck it in the chimney to scare the bats and swallows out, and then I flipped the mattresses up to carry them out. I have enclosed all that I found beneath. You will see. The mattresses themselves were ruined by rodents and it is a wonder these pages were relatively untouched. Were it not for your trip and the thoughts of you that lingered I may have been such a fool as to never clear out the house. There is no title, but thankfully she numbered the pages. I know you will be astonished as I am. I packaged it up to you the moment I finished reading. The drawings were also found beneath the mattresses, and as you can see, they all appear to be of a sort.

  Sincerely yours,

  Josiah Bartlett

  “Mother!” Claire called. Her mother rushed to her, but Claire didn’t speak, just handed the letter over, and as soon as she was done she handed the first page over, too. Her mother sat down across from her at the table. Neither said a word, they just read as quickly as they possibly could. When her father came in and saw them there he asked what had happened, but they could not stop long enough to explain. Claire simply found the letter and the first page again and handed it to him and he sat down in the third chair. All three of them sat in this way until the early hours of morning, reading. It was as though Elspeth had sent it straight to them—or, better, that Elspeth herself had entered the room. They took turns refilling the candles. For dinner they ate leftover rolls, raw carrots, and an entire batch of biscuits. They could not stop. Claire was the first to finish. When she was done she set the last page down and then picked up the bundle of pictures, more than thirty of them, all of varying detail but depicting that same island, the one they had framed in the kitchen. Claire flipped through all of them and then set them back in the order that Mr. Bartlett had sent them in and then she just stared forward, waiting. Finally her mother picked up that last page and read it. Only then did Claire look at her. Immediately she knew that her mother did not understand it as she did.

  Claire said, “She has escaped, she will come home.”

  “Claire,” her mother said, so suddenly so full of sadness. As though she had thought that in those pages there would be an explanation. That if only she reached the end she would know where her daughter had gone. But it was only fiction. She said it aloud. “It is only fiction.”

  “No,” Claire said. “No, she will come home.”

  “There is nothing about home in this book. This book is about doomed lovers.”

  “No,” Claire said. “No. Did you not read it? Read it again. She gives it all up, her lover, the husband she doesn’t love, her castle, all of it. She gives it all up to return to her home. There.” She took the last page up again and shook it in her mother’s face. “See?” she demanded. “Elspeth will return.”

  Her father reached across the table then. He grabbed the page out of her hand. She was afraid she would be reprimanded. Elspeth home, it was not a thing to speak lightly of. She and her mother sat silently as he read it. When he was done, he put it back down on the table and he stood up, went to the fireplace.

  “George,” her mother finally said. It was so serious, but oddly it felt like a game, too. They were all so excited. “George. George! Tell us your opinion.”

  “It is a story,” he said plainly. He returned to the table and leafed through the pictures that had been sent. “Fantasy,” he said, and put them back down. He pointed to a tiny detail in the corner of one of the drawings; only this one had it. A title: Well-Well Mountain Island. “She was always full of fantasy,” he said.

  “Yes,” Claire said, all excitement suddenly gone from her. She stacked the pages neatly and returned them to their envelop
e. It was a story. She set it on the shelf by her bed, where she also kept a copy of that other story her sister had written, the coyote story. Mr. Bartlett had transcribed it for her before she left. One day soon, she would save her money to have all of Elspeth’s writing, plus those strange pictures, bound together into a book, as she imagined her sister would have wanted. For now, the shelf it sat upon needed to be repainted. This home looked so much smaller and damper to her after she had seen America, but so much more like home, too. That word, after that trip, had taken on a new meaning, one that Elspeth had certainly understood once she’d left.

  It was only a story. And yet. After that story arrived, Claire began to imagine just where, exactly, Elspeth was in her journey homeward. Whose house did she sleep in, or what barn? What forest, what ship? How far, exactly, from the ocean, and on which side of it? She would go down to the waterfront and look out across and she would will herself to see a ship appear on the horizon, her sister and her family waving from deck. Yet she never did see that. Instead, sometimes, especially in the rain, if the light was just dim enough and the water just dark enough, Claire would see that other story her sister had written. Not the romance but the disappearance. She would look out to the sure vision of a pack of five wild, doglike animals rushing across the ocean, staying afloat at every crest of wave, their heads low and their legs fast, headed definitively home.

  PART FIVE

  Jane and Henrietta

  Henrietta

  THEY LIE on their backs in The Den, her shirt lifted, his warm hand on her flat torso.

  “I’m so sorry,” he says. She had been looking overhead, at the August leaves that glowed even in the dusk, and had been able to see a blur of his profile in her peripheral vision. But now she turns her head away, looks only at the stone of the foundation. Granite, she knows that, has known that practically her entire life. She imagines the people who came before her digging up these rocks, rolling them over to their place. But is that how it would have worked? Or would there have been a quarry in town, and a rock cutter? She would like to ask her father, but it is late summer of 1991 and soon she will vanish, having never bothered to ask.