The Den

by Abi Maxwell

  “I saved their teeth,” I remember him saying that very night. He said it had been on his first job, taking care of pups that would be tagged and reintroduced into the wild. They would lose their teeth, and if he was lucky enough to find them he would save them like a parent would a child’s. “Now my collection could fill a whole mouth,” he said.

  So it was that anecdote, I suppose, that first drew me to him. I thought of those X-rays of Henrietta’s teeth and instantly I felt I had encountered someone who understood.

  That night, he talked about how the coyote we see in the East is different from that of the West, of how our eastern animal is the unlikely product of the gray wolves to our north and the coyotes formerly of our land. He shone as he spoke of how, unlike any other predator, coyotes alone have flourished in the face of our efforts to eradicate them. Opportunistic scavenger, he said. The phrase startled me. For a moment, I thought of Henrietta. Was she the opportunistic scavenger, or was it I?

  When the talk was done I waited for everyone to trickle out, and then I went to the front of the room. Without even introducing myself I said, “What is it that coyotes do that wolves don’t?” How was it possible, I meant, that coyotes could flourish in the face of wolves’ near extinction? He understood my question right away. As he answered—diet, adaptability, genetics—he asked me if I would walk him to his car, help him carry his things out. He had a box with some footprints and fur and of course the tooth collection, which was now half wolves’ teeth and half coyotes’. In the parking lot, he told me the story of a couple who had walked all the way home from a movie—two whole miles, on neighborhood streets in a small eastern city—and the entire time they’d been tracked by a coyote without even knowing it. His colleague had been studying the animals of that particular territory—that’s how he knew. This colleague had videotaped the entire episode.

  In response, I told him my coyote story. The house in our woods, the disappearance. And then, at the end of it, without meaning to at all, I said, “And then the same thing happened to my sister.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know,” I said quickly. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I just said that.”

  “What happened to your sister?” he asked.

  “She didn’t turn into a coyote,” I said lightly. “I mean, I guess I used to think she did.”

  “And now?”

  “Now I think she turned into nothing?” I said as a question, knowing as I spoke that I sounded like a fool. But he just kept looking at me, no laughter, no pity, just a little bit of a smile. Waiting.

  I shrugged and finally said, “She vanished.”

  After that he held out his hand. “Clarence Shute,” he said. I told him my name. When I turned to walk home, he asked if I didn’t want a ride. I got in, and a few minutes later, seeing my house, he said, “You farm?”

  “I pretend,” I said. “Just chickens.” And then, once again by mistake, “I burned the barn down years ago.”

  He asked me how.

  “Cigarette,” I said, shocked by how simple it could be to lay a secret bare.

  Again he just looked at me, waited, and then he said, “That’s how they all start, isn’t it.”

  The next day, he was back in the driveway, wanting to take me out. I shepherded the chickens into their coop and left.

  * * *

  —

  We drove an hour to the north, mostly silent together. He didn’t tell me where we were going—just said he had something he thought I would like to see. We stayed off the highway, and instead stuck to bumpy back roads lined with stone walls. I watched them as I rode along, and imagined some ghostlike version of myself running along the top of the walls, leaping from the last stone of one to land gracefully at the start of the next. I kept up the entire time.

  We parked on a dead-end dirt road that had one truck off to the side and no buildings in sight. I wouldn’t have seen the trail had Clarence not led me to it. It was spring and green and wet. I followed him through the mud and unfurled ferns, and it wasn’t five minutes before the trail opened up to a tucked-away field with a small, rough cabin at its edge. Clarence knocked, and as if in response to the knock I suddenly heard the yips and howls. An older woman opened the door, came right out, and said, “I’ll lead you straight down.”

  The woman’s name was Penny and she was the owner of all the land in sight—some one-hundred-plus acres. She had spent the bulk of her life on it, rehabilitating animals and then sending them on their ways, back into the wild or sometimes to some kind of animal-preserve facility. Usually, she said, she had at least a few barred owls and a couple animals that people thought were cuddly, like skunks or raccoons. Just now she had only the two coyote pups, found orphaned and weak thirty miles to the north.

  I had told Clarence, the night before, that I had spent a lifetime thinking of coyotes yet had never seen one. On the drive up he had said, “It couldn’t have been coyotes, you know.”

  “I know,” I’d said, a bit regretfully. I had expected him to say as much the first night we spoke, but he hadn’t. He had waited until the drive.

  “Really,” he’d said as we rode along, “1852. There is absolutely no way. Not in New Hampshire.”

  I hadn’t responded. Now, as I stood in the woods, fingers wrapped into the chain-link fence that separated those injured coyotes from me, it seemed that the fact that I had never actually seen the animal before was just as impossible as the fact that it couldn’t have been them on our land all those years ago.

  “Take your time,” Penny told me, and then continued deeper into the woods. Clarence stayed with me for a moment, but then he, too, walked on, and I was left alone, staring at those animals. They had quieted by the time we’d arrived, and now they were huddled together, eyes closed, from what I could tell. I stood there staring at them, beckoning them to wake up and come look me in the eyes, to howl.

  * * *

  —

  By that point in my life, I had been with only two men. I hadn’t really known either one of them at all, and none of it had been as I had expected it would be. No merging of bodies, of consciousness. Nothing miraculous, as in the books I read or the time I’d spent spying on Henrietta. Instead, it had felt clumsy and prescribed, some kind of shared duty that we knew we were supposed to undertake. With Clarence, though, at first I thought the difference was that I wanted something, my body wanted something. But after some time I realized that wasn’t it at all. I realized that with him, I could just float right up outside of my body and, at least for a time, enter some elemental existence, the kind I had so dreamed for my sister.

  After he took me to see the coyotes, I woke in the middle of the night and walked across the hall to Henrietta’s room. Before they left, my parents had cleared it out. Though they’d never said as much, I had understood that they were finally doing what they knew I could not. They had waited so long, and I was never sure if that wait had made it easier or harder or if throwing the cut-off flannel shirts and jean shorts that Henrietta had worn for what was, from our perspective, her last summer into a garbage bag was always as hard as it would ever be, on any day. I also never understood how they chose to save what they saved. Her jewelry box with a ballerina that stood up and spun in circles when the lid was lifted, for example. She had never cared about that except for the fact that it provided a good hiding place for things like that list about all the ways we could destroy Kaus. They kept the porcelain doll that sat on her dresser, which I’m sure she would have given away. They kept her diaries, which was an obvious choice, but they emptied everything else out. Walking through her space when they were finished, I had been shocked by the sparseness of it, by the bare walls and empty closet, but then what would I have suggested they save? What, if anything, had meant something to Henrietta?

  The dream that had woken me was of those captive coyotes, barking and baring their tee
th at me. In the dream, I put my hand up to the gate that surely I could unfasten, and then I looked at the wild dogs once again. They were not there. Instead, Kaus. I turned and ran, leaving him locked up.

  In Henrietta’s room, I took out everything that my parents had left. The box of diaries, the one sweater our mother had knit for her, scratchy blue yarn that Henrietta had hardly ever worn. Her Christmas stocking. I laid it all out on the bed. Clarence was across the hall, sleeping soundly in what would soon become his home. I could show him all these things, but it would never be enough. Kaus, I wanted to say. Kaus, I wanted to tell that man who lay in my bed, and see what it felt like to unearth my final secret.

  * * *

  —

  Clarence moved in quickly. At first, I worried now and then over the thought that he loved me just for my house and land.

  “But you don’t even have a barn,” he reminded me. “If I chose a woman for her farm, I could have at least chosen one with a barn.”

  But within a year we had made plans to rebuild the barn, to fill it with animals. And within three years we had actually done this, and gotten married in the courthouse.

  * * *

  —

  Clarence keeps a flock of sheep. It’s for his research. When I met him, he had been working for years on a book about the development of the eastern coyote. I learned in his first talk that a part of a coyote’s survival has to do with their reaction to threat. Under normal conditions, a coyote will give birth to a litter of five, maybe six. But if the pack is threatened, the size of the litter will suddenly double. Clarence wants to prove, then, that farmers can live peacefully with the animal—that in fact it is to their benefit. He has fenced our field and filled it with sheep that each night we dutifully bring in. Throughout the day, we collect our urine in a bucket, and after we bring the sheep in he spreads the scent along the perimeter. And his theory works—we have never lost one animal, though he has arranged things specifically so that their blood might be smelled.

  Clarence travels often, though, giving talks, crawling headlong into dens, researching and taking notes for the book he dreams of completing. During these times I do the season’s chores. If there are lambs, I tend to them. Each year I call a professional shearer from the north, and together we shear the sheep, a job I have worked for years to learn. It suits me, such tasks. A busy life is better than the one I lived before.

  * * *

  —

  In this town, in any town like this, I suppose that encountering people from your past must be the natural course of things. It must be inevitable. Yet perhaps because Henrietta left so cleanly, so completely, or because my parents left with virtually the same amount of swiftness, my encounters, to my mind, always seem fated. Why, for example, after years of surely circling around Les Hennessey, did my space finally clank up against hers just weeks after I was left to myself? It seemed like some kind of test. To interact with her was to interact, on some level, with the self that I had been at that time. Could I do that? Could I do that and not curl up?

  I do not mean that I believe in a plan. Yet I have read a little about time, about the theory of relativity and about black holes. I think about it often. I understand how a scientist would explain it, but still I cannot rid myself of the thought that if it is conceivable, according to relativity, to somehow burst forward into the future, then that means the future might already exist. And what then for the past? Sometimes I imagine all of time—everything that has existed and could potentially exist—as a series of innumerable floating planes that we are all just hopping along on.

  Take this one particular day. A Friday. Throughout the week I was generally unaware of how any one day differentiated from any other, but Friday was the day that family had disappeared, and Friday was the day Henrietta disappeared; I always knew Fridays.

  I went to the mailbox, found a slip for a package. I took Clarence’s truck down the hill, to the post office. For my entire upbringing, the woman who works the counter and I were in the same grade, but we do not really speak to each other. I wonder, though, when she sees me—when anyone from my childhood sees me—just what she remembers. Does she see my sister’s face in my own? And what feeling, exactly, does this fill her with? Pity, surely, but it has always seemed to me that there’s some amount of righteousness, too. Slut got what she deserved, I always imagine people saying.

  But I have no grounds for such a hateful thought. In fact, I said exactly that to myself, and then I said hello, and I handed her my slip. She brought my package—a new pair of rain boots for Clarence—and I bought a book of stamps. For some reason, just as I took the stamps into my hand, I had the strange thought that I would use each and every one on a letter to Henrietta. It was as if for a moment I believed I had some address to send such letters to. I gave my head a little shake and I turned around.

  There. All this time and all this anguish and he was just there, sharing the same moment and space as me. Just pushing a P.O. Box closed. My first thought, shamefully, was that he still looked good. He wore a cowboy hat, which no one out here wears. He dropped his hand from the box, turned, tipped his hat to me, and sauntered out.

  I said his name under my breath. “Kaus,” I said. I should have had the wherewithal to run out after him, but I had nothing.

  Clarence was reading in the kitchen when I returned. I gave him his package and told him I felt oddly exhausted. I went upstairs, lay down atop our quilt, closed my eyes, and then got right back up again. I packed my swim bag and returned downstairs, but at the door I decided to leave the bag, to abandon swimming altogether and to just walk.

  I went into town first. I pretended I didn’t know where I was going, pretended I didn’t know why I had gone out to the streets and not to the pool. Yet who was I hiding my purpose from? I walked over the bridge, past the mill, and toward Church Street. I was thirty years old now. Henrietta had been gone for nearly seventeen years, my parents for nine. I had been with Clarence for eight. I had avoided this road for my entire teenage and adult life, and though I had always known exactly why, now I felt the reason in my body. Every car that went by, every voice, forced me to turn and search. By the time I made it to that little house my body ached with tension and my brain was a constant series of misfires that I could not quiet. I stood there and looked up at the house and into the time so many years ago. There was no car in the drive, no sign of movement within. The house’s red paint had chipped considerably. I took in one deep breath and then I turned on my heels, just as Henrietta had done in just that spot, and I headed for the trestle. I climbed right up the bank and walked out onto the tracks, unafraid. I stood in the place where I had first watched my sister be touched. I looked downward, imagined jumping.

  I must have walked for more than two hours that day, retracing my sister’s teenage paths. Clarence had already made dinner by the time I returned. But my stomach was anxious and uneasy, so I told him I could not eat. I left him in the kitchen, and I went upstairs, lay down, and passed into a heavy, dreamless sleep. Yet when I opened my eyes to the shock that morning had already arrived, I felt entirely unrefreshed. I scarcely had the energy to bathe, to dress, to go downstairs and put the coffee on. I was weak as I helped Clarence herd the sheep out, weak as I cuddled the lambs. Clarence recommended I lie down again, but I felt I could not; despite my exhaustion, I felt that all I could do was walk.

  It occurs to me, when I look back on this time period, that I was having an affair, though it was not a physical one, and the object of my obsession was not so much a person as a time and existence. Yet that spring I quit swimming and I quit reading and I basically quit talking to Clarence, and instead I walked and walked and walked, continually placing myself in a path that he—Kaus—might cross. Was this what Henrietta had done at fifteen? Like her, I could scarcely eat. Pounds dropped off seemingly by the day, and on the occasions when I was able to swallow a reasonable amount of food, I immed
iately felt sick to my stomach. Still, I walked to town, to the trestle, to the woods. I walked to The Den, where I lay on the bare ground and gazed above, imagining my body as hers, and his next to mine. In this way my world tunneled and the man that I saw at the post office ceased to be the man I had wronged and became, simply, my sister’s lover. Or my own, for I was doing my best to sink into her. On those walks I felt her, I heard him, I smelled the oncoming fire. Every action, every word, every sound, it all came back. It was like I had finally succeeded; I had jumped off my plane of time and effectively landed on another. It came with a certain amount of darkness, though, for I had, more or less, ceased to live.

  * * *

  —

  One afternoon in early fall I came in to find Clarence on the couch with my book open on his lap. The History of Middlewood.

  “This is so strange,” he said. “This makes no sense.”

  I had just been in The Den, digging my fingers into the soil and clearing the leaves out from around the few sad plants that still showed themselves each year. I had just been thinking of that very story. I had never seen that book in anyone else’s hands, save for my father’s, and seeing it in Clarence’s lap like that, in his possession, made me defensive. I told him I of all people knew that the story made no sense.

  “That’s not what I mean,” he said. “Josiah Bartlett. He lived in this house? He’s the neighbor of this story, the one who goes to rescue the family and finds the coyotes instead?”

  I nodded.

  “But he wrote it in the third person. Why would he do that? I’ve read almost the entire book. He uses the first person all the time. Why wouldn’t he here?”