“I was in the woods gathering mushrooms,” I tell him. “Look at these lovely chanterelles.” I turn, show him my basket with a thin smile. “And look, wild onions as well. From down by the river. I’m going to make a soup.”
He grunts, dismissing my explanation. He studies my face, trying to catch me in a lie.
I turn up my smile but can’t tell if he’s buying it.
He’s difficult to read. A hard knot of a boy. He’s like his father this way.
He’s got his father’s build, too—tall and lanky, square shoulders and jaw. I watch as he shrugs his way out of his father’s old plaid wool hunting coat, hangs it on a peg by the door.
I tell myself, for what must be the thousandth time, that I will stop going to the woods. I will stop this thing between her and me. It’s too dangerous. Levi is suspicious. Suspicious as his father was once suspicious.
Levi goes to the refrigerator, takes out the milk, drinks right from the carton.
I’ve asked him not to do this, but he does it anyway, right in front of me. It’s a test, I know. He’s pushing, hoping I’ll say something. He’s always ready for a fight. Quiet fury ripples like a muscle under his skin.
But not tonight. I’m in no mood for arguing tonight. I want to hold onto the glow of my afternoon in the woods for just a little bit longer.
The last time, I promise myself.
It was the last time.
No more.
Milk dribbles down Levi’s chin. He wipes it away with the back of his hand, gives me a smirk as he shoves the carton back into the fridge.
* * *
Levi blames me for what happened to his father.
We go round and round sometimes, each of us trying to make sense of it in our way.
“Your father made a terrible decision when he got in his truck to drive that night,” I’ve told him.
The last time we had this discussion, Levi scowled at me, his face so like his father’s. “The only reason Dad ever drank was because you made him,” he said. “Because nothing was ever easy or normal with you two and it was how he coped.”
Levi is young and full of anger, but sometimes his insight stuns me, actually takes my breath away.
“I loved your father very much,” I said. This is no lie—I did love Neil. But it wasn’t enough. It was never enough. The man always wanted more; wanted things I never knew how to give him. And he would get so angry. Levi never saw that side of his father (thank god); only saw that things weren’t working between us, and like his father, he blamed me. I was a walking disappointment to them both.
Neil and I were eighteen when we met, both of us just out of high school, working our first shit jobs at the mill. We were married at nineteen, him in a borrowed coat, me in my mama’s old dress that I had to take in because I was just a waif of a thing. Neil and I were both so young, both still living at home, eager to move out, to start our own lives, get our own little place; thinking something magic might happen when we did.
How can you possibly truly know a person, or even yourself, when you’re so young? How can you help but imagine bright, impossible things for the future?
Levi turned nineteen this past summer. I look at him and see he’s just a little boy in a man’s body. Like his father was on our wedding day.
“How was your day?” I ask him now.
He gives another non-committal grunt, as hard to read as ever.
Then he goes into the living room, reaches for his wooden box full of knives and wood and sharpening stones. He sits in his father’s old chair, takes up a knife and resumes work on the barred owl he’s been carving from a piece of maple for a week now. The wood has a burl in it, making it difficult to carve, but giving it a beautiful swirling pattern that looks like the eye of a storm. Levi works carefully, layering in the delicate feathers, his body calm, relaxed. He works with total focus.
Most boys his age, boys he grew up with, are off in college, or out drinking pilfered beer, playing video games, watching funny videos and porn on the internet maybe. But Levi, he goes to work each day at the mill, just as his father did, and when he comes home, he carves. Our house is full of his creations: rabbits, muskrats, beavers, a fox, two ducks, a loon, but mostly what he loves to carve are birds of prey: eagles, hawks, falcons, and owls.
Sometimes his girlfriend, Sophie, comes over and watches him work. They talk quietly by the fire, whispering, smiling. It’s always so good to see him smile. Sophie loves our house, his carved animals. Last year for Christmas, Levi made her a carving of her dog, Stewy, who’d died the month before. Levi had gotten every detail perfect. Sophie cried when he gave it to her, said it was the best gift she’d ever received.
“Sophie coming tonight?” I ask him as I start in on slicing the mushrooms. “She’s welcome to join us for dinner.”
“Nah,” he says. “She’s got a thing with a friend.”
* * *
After dinner, Levi puts on his father’s coat, grabs a flashlight and the old Winchester. “I’m gonna go check the traps,” he says. Sometimes he brings back a rabbit and skins it, prepares the meat and I’ll make a stew with it the next day. Sometimes, he’ll get a fox, a weasel, a marten. Often, it’s raccoons he traps. Once, he got a bobcat. He skins each animal, processes the pelts. Some, he saves. Some, he sells.
I hear a gunshot ten minutes later. I’m waiting in the dooryard when he comes back, dragging something across the dried brown grass.
“What is it?” I call out.
“A coyote,” he says, coming into the light now. I see gray-brown fur, the fluffy tail as he drags it by its hind legs.
And I turn away, not wanting to see its face, to think of how it suffered, its leg caught in that steel trap until my son put the creature out of its misery.
* * *
I wake up in the middle of the night and know she was just here in my room. I can smell her, taste her in the air. She does this sometimes; sneaks in and watches me while I sleep. Each night, Levi latches the door and windows before bed, just as his father did, but somehow, she finds a way inside. Locks mean nothing to her.
I get up, creep quietly down the stairs, open the front door and step out into the dark yard, hoping I might be quick enough to catch her. My bare feet are cold on the frost-covered grass. The skin under my thin nightgown is covered in goosebumps. The autumn wind whispers through the bare tree branches, seems to call my name. I see only the faint reflective glow of eyeshine from the treeline. “Hello?” I call. “Is that you?” I take a step toward the trees, hear a rustling sound. The hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
“Who are you talking to, Mom?” Levi has come up behind me. He’s standing in the open doorway in his rumpled pajamas.
“No one,” I say.
“Come back inside,” he tells me. “It’s freezing. You’ll catch your death out here.”
* * *
I wish I could say I met her after Neil died. That things started between us then. But that would be a lie.
The truth is, I met her a full year before Neil’s accident.
She says our meeting in the woods that first day wasn’t chance. She says I called her to me. I can’t help thinking it was the other way around.
“Why have you wandered so far into these woods?” she’d asked. She’d come from nowhere, made no sound as she moved through the trees. But there she was: a woman about my age with long brown hair, a worn leather coat and boots, a necklace made from a piece of deer antler and rawhide, a large hunting knife strapped to her belt. Her hands and wrists had faded black tattoos—lines and symbols I didn’t recognize.
I took a staggering step backward, suddenly off balance, startled by her presence. I held up my basket stupidly. “I was looking for blueberries,” I said as if I needed an excuse, an explanation for being in the woods I had every right to be in.
She gave a mischievous smile; her eyes narrowed, seemed to turn to slits. Surely it was my imagination. “Weren’t you warned?” she asked. “Didn’t you hea
r in town that you should be careful? Shouldn’t roam far on your own, shouldn’t venture off the path?”
“Why is that?” I asked, as if I did not know.
She laughed a wicked little laugh. “Aren’t you afraid of the Witch of the Woods?”
“No,” I told her. But it was a lie.
She took a step closer. “Maybe you should be. Maybe you should just turn yourself around and go back where you came from.”
I shook my head, held my ground. “Not without my blueberries. It’s my son’s birthday and I’ve promised him a pie.”
She looked at me a long time. “So you’ll take your chances with me?”
I nodded. “Yes,” I said.
“Come on then,” she said, walking away. “Follow me. I’ll take you to the sweetest blueberries you’ve ever tasted.”
I left the woods that day with a basket not only full of blueberries, but mushrooms and blackberries. More than that, I left with a desire—no, not a desire, but a need, a strong yearning, to return. To see her again.
Maybe, I told myself, she’d cast a spell on me.
Or maybe it was all me. Maybe it was just that there was something missing, something I’d been longing for without even realizing it until I met her that day.
And so I went back. Again and again. Sometimes she showed herself to me. Sometimes she didn’t. But I always felt her there, watching. And always, some part of me was a little afraid.
* * *
Neil noticed a change in me.
“You’re spending a lot of time in the woods,” he said.
“Foraging,” I told him. And I’d show him my basket full of treasures: wild lowbush blueberries, crab apples, sorrel, hickory nuts. She had shown me where to find them. She had taught me the names of the mushrooms, told me which were poison and which were safe to eat.
I would come home with my basket full and name each mushroom for Neil: chanterelle, morel, oyster, Dryad’s saddle, chicken of the woods, lion’s mane. Each one beautiful and delicate and full of strange earthy pleasure.
“Have you ever seen anyone out in the woods when you’re off foraging?” Neil asked once.
I took in a breath. “No,” I said. “Who would I see way back there?”
His jaw tensed and in that split second, I was sure he knew. He knew who I was meeting. What we were doing. He knew I was devoted to her, addicted to her, had given myself to her in a way I never would to him. “Just be careful, Jules,” he said, his eyes dark and brooding.
* * *
There were skid marks in the road, at the bend on old Route 4, where Neil had his accident. He’d locked up the brakes and left a burned-rubber trail all the way across the road, hitting the guard rail on the other side and going over it.
Maybe he swerved and was trying to correct himself.
Or maybe he saw something.
Something in the road.
An animal maybe.
That’s what the police have hypothesized. And all the alcohol in his system, it didn’t exactly give him the sharpest reflexes. His blood alcohol concentration was .16—twice the legal limit.
* * *
I didn’t tell the police about what made Neil get in his truck that night.
How I’d come home and found him there, already drunk in the kitchen.
“Where’s Levi?” I asked.
“I sent him to Ben’s for the night.”
“Why?” I asked.
“We need to talk,” he said. The veins on his neck stood out, pulsating. His whole body thrummed with bourbon-fueled anger.
“I went into the woods,” he said. “I went into the woods and saw you.”
I swallowed.
“What is it you saw?”
He shook his head, took a staggering step toward me. “I’m not going to say it out loud. I can’t. Because it disgusts me. You disgust me. How could you, Jules?” He reached for me; at first, I thought it was to caress me, to touch my face and beg me to stop, to stay out of the woods, to love only him.
And would I? Would I have tried? Would I have done that for him? For us?
But he didn’t beg me to stop or ask if I still loved him. Instead, his fingers found their way to my neck, tightened their grip.
And the thing is, I let him.
I didn’t fight. Didn’t try to get away.
Part of me wanted the whole thing to be over. Done with once and for all.
Then, I looked out the kitchen window and saw her. She was in the yard, watching, not ten feet away from the house.
“What the hell is that?” Neil said, releasing his grip, moving to the window.
I don’t know what he saw. I’ll never know what she showed him; what form she took, what vision she gave him. His face turned ashen, his body rigid. He made a small sound, a sort of breathless silent scream, then turned and ran out of the house and straight to his truck. He flew out of the driveway, truck tires spitting gravel, not even slowing when he ran over the mailbox.
I should have stopped him. Or at least tried.
But I didn’t. Instead, I went into the yard to look for her. To call to her.
But she was gone.
* * *
“I’m wondering something,” I asked her once, not long after his accident. “About Neil.”
We were down by the river gathering willow bark.
“About what happened to Neil that night,” I added, not looking her in the eye.
She straightened, touched the sharp edge of the knife she’d been using. “What happened to Neil was an accident. You said so yourself.”
I shook my head. “How many times have you told me that there are no accidents? No coincidences?”
She was quiet a minute, running her fingers over the blade.
“What is it, exactly, that you’re asking me?” she said, eyes locked on mine. “What is it you really want to know?”
And in that moment I knew (hadn’t I always known?) but suddenly didn’t want either of us to say it out loud. Not ever.
“Nothing,” I told her.
* * *
Levi leaves for work. I straighten the house. Do the dishes. Clean out the garden and put it to bed for the coming winter, pulling up the spent tomato plants, the dead vines that were once loaded with beans and sugar snap peas. I try to busy myself. To push her out of my mind. I tell myself I won’t see her.
Then, somehow, like a sleepwalker, I’m on my way back into the woods. Even as I’m walking, I do my best to convince myself I should turn back. Go home. Read a book. Clean the chimney. Bake a spice cake to surprise Levi with.
But I can’t. I just can’t stay away.
When I get to the clearing, she’s there, but not in her human form.
She’s watching, studying me from the trees. Her white tail flicking, her moist black nostrils twitching slightly, the rest of her body holding statue-still. She’s so perfect—the sun hitting her brown coat, making it sparkle and glisten. I have never seen anything so beautiful, so wild.
She comes to me, her hoofed feet gently touching down on the pine-needle carpet.
She puts her head against me and I wrap my arms around her neck, nuzzling her, rubbing my whole face against her warm fur, breathing her in.
I can almost hear her say the words: I wasn’t sure you’d come.
“There is nowhere else I’d rather be,” I say.
* * *
It’s hours later when I wake. I am naked beside her, my arm draped over her shoulder, the fur soft and warm. Her body is tensed, alert. She’s lifted her head and is watching something there, at the edge of the clearing. I follow her gaze, heart dropping down like a lead weight into my stomach.
“Levi?” I call.
My boy, my angry boy, is standing there, fists clenched, eyes as blank and glassy as a doll’s.
I cover myself, sit up, but he’s gone, running off through the woods, back toward home.
I dress quickly, turn to say something to her, to explain the gravity of us having been seen. But s
he is gone.
I run home, tearing through the trees, my body knowing the way by heart because I’ve traveled it so many times, always careful not to leave any evidence, not to break twigs, leave footprints in soft earth, or make any sign of a path.
He’s not home when I get there. His truck is in the driveway but there’s no sign of him in the house.
“Levi?” I call, standing in the open door, looking out at the yard, listening carefully, but hearing only silence.
I go back into the woods, calling, begging him to come talk to me. I walk for hours, searching the woods until it’s starting to get dark, which happens earlier and earlier this time of year, sunset always catching me off guard.
My wool sweater isn’t enough to ward off the chill of the evening. The wind picks up. My hands are raw and red with cold. The trees take on terrible shapes around me; the branches turn to claws. A group of crows chatters from a nearby maple, seeming to ask How could you, How could you, How could you?
I am far into the woods, almost down by the lake, when I hear distant gunfire. One shot, then two more in rapid succession, coming from the north, toward home. I run all the way, not sticking to the path, but taking shortcuts through thick brush that rips at my face and hands. I trip on tree roots and rocks, turn my ankle stumbling into a hole. On I go, as fast as my body can take me, half limping now as I see the house come into view, the front lights blazing, so bright they hurt my eyes.
Sophie’s car is in the driveway and she’s there on the front steps to greet me as I stumble into the yard. She’s got my apron on and looks so at home there, like it’s her house she’s just stepped out of.
I feel like a ghost; a figure lost between two worlds, belonging to neither.
“Oh my god, Julie, are you alright?” she asks, rushing to me. I am limping, my face scratched and bleeding. I must look a sight.
“I heard gunshots,” I say.
I look down and see great smears of blood in the grass. I can smell the rich metallic scent of it.
She nods. “Levi got a deer,” she says. “A beautiful doe.”
“No,” I say, staggering forward, following the trail of blood, the path he left when dragging the body.
“I know it’s not legal, not in season, and that you’re only supposed to take bucks with two points, but he says the deer are such a menace.”
Hex Life Page 13