by Alison Stine
But it seemed like the group was making plans, making plans for a future I couldn’t understand. There were sacks of soil and cement, neat bales of straw stacked against tree trucks.
“I’d rather sleep in my own house. Or my truck. I don’t know why we had to leave it parked,” I said as I punched the sleeping bag Mica had produced for me. It was musty and olive green, like a relic from a Boy Scout camp.
The extra supplies the camp had rustled up for us weren’t as nice or new as the equipment they had brought for themselves. My bedroll was patched, thin, and smelled of a basement. When I had unrolled the sleeping bag, dust flew up in the lantern light.
“Their land, their rules,” Dance said.
“It’s not their land. They admitted as much. They’re trespassing.”
“Occupying.”
“Okay, Dirt Boy.”
Grayson snorted.
“Why didn’t you tell us about your past?” I asked.
“What’s there to tell?” Dance said.
“An organizer? That might be useful.”
But Dance shook his head. His sleeping bag was polyester, printed with a cartoon character. It looked even thinner than mine. “I doubt that,” he said. “I didn’t organize much. I was involved with a few groups, went to a few protests. Even before the first lost spring, when things were just starting to get bad, I wanted to do something. I wanted to try, you know? So I chained myself to a bulldozer, showed up to some rallies, smashed a bank window. That sort of thing.”
“You smashed a bank window?” Grayson said.
“It didn’t do much good, did it? I met Mica on a tree-sit. We were trying to stop a pipeline from going through a forest in Virginia. I guess we lost that one.”
Nobody I knew—Lisbeth, Mama, or Lobo—talked about what the cold was, or named it. We were too busy just handling it, surviving day to day. It was like living on the farm. You didn’t question why the aphids came, you just dealt with the invasion: sprayed the bitter neem oil with its garlic scent, washing the leaves like you would bathe a child; dusted the plants with diatomaceous earth, the sharp white powder that would nick your fingers and get into your lungs unless you wore a mask. We were all just focused on making money, staying warm, staying alive—not naming things, not blaming yet.
But Dance and Mica had named it: lost spring. I wondered what the president had said in her speech. I wondered what they were saying in cities.
“Do you think this is our fault?” I asked.
Dance’s breath hung in the tent between us, a thin white bridge. My fingers hurt from the brief, frozen moments I had stripped off my gloves to untie the sleeping bag. I wondered if it was snowing again.
“Isn’t everything?” Dance said.
* * *
He fell asleep first, or pretended to. I lay in my musty sleeping bag and listened to his breathing, soft but deep. I was on the other end of the tent, nearest the side. Grayson had put his bedroll in the middle, between me and Dance: a kid between his folks. Now he leaned over to me and whispered. “Are you awake, Wil?”
“No.”
“Can I ask you a question? Why were you upset about Mica?”
I rolled over and faced him. He had his sleeping bag and whatever moth-holed blankets Mica had unearthed for him pulled up to his chin. I wouldn’t have wanted that stuff to touch my face. “I’m not upset,” I said.
“Yes, you are.”
“She has the keys to my truck.” She had asked for them, in case they had needed to move the truck in the night, she said, to deeper cover. I cursed myself for handing them over. For believing her. I was so tired my guard had slipped. I was making mistakes.
“We’ll get them back in the morning,” Grayson said. “Dance trusts her.”
“I just don’t know Dance very well, either,” I whispered. “I don’t know if I trust him.”
“Dance? He got us out of Skate State, didn’t he?”
“No,” I said. “Jamey got us out. He drove us in there. And we don’t know Mica and these people here at all.”
“I don’t know what choice we have other than to trust them, at least for tonight.”
I peered around Grayson, but Dance was buried beneath blankets and somebody’s old coat, breathing in the darkness in his cartoon bag. “I just want to keep going,” I said. “To California. I don’t want to get stuck here.”
“I promise,” Grayson said. “We are not going to get stuck. We’re going to keep going. No matter what.”
The tent radiated with cold. It was sleeting lightly. Faint trails of moisture beaded the tent, pattering on top. I had to keep myself very still. If I reached out my hand to touch the side of the tent or bumped it by mistake, I would send icy streams cascading into my palm.
“Are you going to be able to sleep?” Grayson asked.
Other than the sleet, the woods were silent. No generators hummed. No animals called out to each other in the night. “Do you think it’s safe here?” I asked.
“Is anywhere safe?”
* * *
Lobo said if she had to try things with anyone, he was the best person. He would sit with her, watch her. He would take her to Billy Crow’s, the medicine man down the holler, if her limbs trembled, if foam came from her mouth, if her breathing slowed too much. He could get anything for her. He was a magician, a peddler who came from the woods, from the stars. I knew why she loved him. He brought magic, like scarves from his pockets, like a coin where there was no coin, like a silk bouquet. Any number of pills, brightly colored, could appear in his hands, or powder wrapped in a paper twist. He coaxed magic from the ground, made the seeds sprout, made the plants grow money. Conjured fire and warmth and attention. She had been so lonely with me in the duplex. With Lobo she would never be lonely.
Like any peddler, people loved him: children, the boys in the banged-up trucks. Someone was always coming over to buy something; to ask for something; to sit around the table, with the gun beneath it like a sleeping dog, and smoke, talk about smoking, talk about the weather. That grew old.
Mama was a searcher, Lobo said. She was on some kind of mission, to experience all sensations, all feelings, to know the world, to see. But that didn’t make sense to me, because dope made you see nothing. It slit your eyes, dulled them like the dead. It made the world a narrow sliver. Molly made you love everyone. Opioids turned you into a doll, a doll who didn’t care about anything. Weed made the world bearable.
I would do none of it. When Lobo said Mama had been asleep before—before when she was married to my daddy, when she had cried in the duplex, when she had carried me...that she was just now waking up and experiencing things in full color, seeking here with him—what did that make me? Someone that didn’t matter, didn’t register. But I had been with her all along. A ghost beside her sleepwalker.
Things would be better in California.
* * *
In the morning, the smell of bacon woke me. For a moment, before my eyes had adjusted fully, I thought I was back before the lost spring, before the farm even. I thought I was waking up in the duplex, into childhood: my daddy standing at the stove in the galley kitchen, cooking while my mama slept. Had he actually ever done this? Been there for us like that? I couldn’t remember it. Maybe I made it up.
I blinked. I saw the plastic top of the tent, partially covered with snow, and the shadow of a hanging branch. I felt the ache in my body from sleeping on the cold, hard ground. Sleet tapped on the roof. I slid up. Grayson’s bedroll was empty. Dance snored on. I crawled out of my sleeping bag.
It was not bacon, of course, I realized when I unzipped the tent and stepped out into the camp. Something soy-based smoked on a grate laid over a fire. I smelled coffee but couldn’t find it. In the hazy, white-sky light, I couldn’t figure out what time it was. I knew I had slept late, later than I had in a long time, but there was no sun to judge by, no gap
in the clouds. It could be any time.
People walked about the camp quietly, focused on work. Hammering and sawing came from the trees. Someone was chopping wood.
I could see the camp laid out more clearly in the day: the wide circle of tents, a cook station in the middle with a fire, a cooler, and a picnic table. Those hodgepodge, half-built structures, deeper in the woods. A dozen people, mostly in black, milled about the camp. They were young and wearing coats that looked expensive, long and down. Their skin sparkled with facial jewelry. Nobody smiled at me, but a lot of people looked at me.
“Wil, over here.” Grayson, down a small hill on the other side of the camp, was waving.
I headed over to him, grateful to get away from the main group. A white man with dreadlocks stopped chopping wood as I passed and regarded me, ax over his shoulder.
Grayson stood on the banks of a stream, his flannel shirt rolled to the elbows. “You can wash up here. It’s really cold, though.”
“That seems to be the theme of the day.”
“Oh, them,” Grayson said.
“I don’t think they like us here.”
Grayson didn’t seem bothered. He crouched and cupped his hands in the stream, splashing water over his face, then shook it off like a dog. Ice had formed on the top and sides of the stream, a crust thin as sugar. Grayson washed from a double fist-size hole. The dark water lapped at the edges. It was too cold to fish. The fish, if they were still alive, would be sluggish and clustered at the bottom of the stream, where the heat lay.
“Everybody’s cautious,” Grayson said. “They just don’t know you. You know how people are, especially these days. Nobody likes strangers.” He wiped his hands on his jeans. “These are a bunch of college kids. I bet if they knew what your family did, they’d warm up to you real quick.”
I looked at a rock on the bank, wondered how far I could kick it.
Grayson was quick to notice. “Did I say the wrong thing?”
“It just didn’t exactly work out for me that way back in school.”
“Well, high school is stupid.”
“So is warming up to someone for what they can get you. Which I can’t even get anymore.”
Grayson fell silent, studying the camp. I waited for him to say: You could grow it.
But he didn’t.
I shouldn’t have been hard on him. I knew he wouldn’t strike back, he wouldn’t have said something to make me feel bad on purpose—he wasn’t like that. I couldn’t really say that about many people. I thought of his flowered sheets, crumpled on the couch at his folks’ house; his ham radio that we couldn’t get to work. He had taken his turn driving, even though it must have hurt him to shove his injured foot into the cramped space between the front seats and drive on his left, but he did it. He did more than his share. He drove slowly and cracked jokes that were so terrible I almost laughed.
I needed coffee. I was about to say that and apologize to him when he said, “I think the world is just going to be like that from now on. It’s going to be about what you can do, how you contribute to the group, or whatever.”
I thought of Skate State: men at the windows of my truck, demanding to know what we could offer them in exchange for our lives. I thought of Jake standing outside the shed, snow filling his flip-flops, his skin chapped and flaking, telling me I hadn’t done shit for him.
“It’s going to be all about the group,” Grayson said. “Your group, whatever it is.”
“Skate State was freakish,” I said. “It was bad even before the weather turned—Jamey told me. That’s not how the world’s going to go.”
“Maybe not. But look at this place. People all have their jobs. Mica and those women guard the fence. Other people repair it. Some people cook. Some people do construction. They’re making something here. Something new. Look.” He pointed above the bank.
The trees were bare, of course. No leaves had come back. No leaves were coming. But some of the trees had boughs. I looked closer. The boughs were affixed to the trees, lashed with ropes: props, like the cover the women had used to disguise the truck when we had first pulled into the camp. Below the fake boughs were wooden platforms. They were tree stands, the kind hunters would use. Lobo had chopped down stands like these from poachers perched in our woods without permission.
“Mica said some of them want to move up there permanently,” Grayson said. “Eventually move into the trees. Make sure those trees never come down.”
“When did you talk to Mica?”
“This morning. I couldn’t sleep. Dance snores.” Grayson dipped his finger in the stream and began to brush his teeth with water. We had left our toothbrushes—along with everything else—in the tiny house. “So do you.”
After we had finished washing up, I helped Grayson up the bank. On the climb, his cast snagged on a root. His jaw tightened and he tried not to wince. “It’s fine,” he said.
“You keep saying that. But it keeps not getting better.”
“The doctor said it would take a long time to heal, remember? We’re on the road. These aren’t ideal conditions for healing.”
Giggling and crackling leaves: Jamey and the women were headed down to the stream. Jamey had her hair different, braided in a mermaid tail, away from her face. It made her look even younger. Her eyes glinted with purple liner, extending across her temples, which I noticed for the first time were freckled. She carried a shower caddy, like she was going to wash up in a college dorm, with a loofah and shampoo bottles. One of the women held Starla. Someone had painted the baby’s face with pink and blue stars.
“Good conditions for her, though,” Grayson said.
I thought I was prepared for anything. I had been raised to expect bad men, men sick with drugs, the unpredictability of the harvest, the sheriff. But nothing could prepare me for gas stations closing, the pharmacy running out of meds, the cold that kept coming, the snow that would not end. The swiftness of this change. College kids, living in the trees to try to save them.
* * *
Grayson found coffee for me in a stoneware mug, and on top of a hill, I found Dance. He was chopping wood, his coat stripped off and tied around his waist.
“Is that for us?” I asked, nodding at the pile of wood he had already split.
“No.”
“You defecting?”
“Just trying to say thank-you to these people.” He swung the ax down onto a log, which wobbled but held. “For the beds they offered us last night, and food, and safety.” He swung again and splintered it. That aching crack as the wood creaked open, revealing an orange heart that was almost red.
“Are we safe?” I asked.
The camp spread out at the foot of the hillside, tents as colorful as flags. There was smoke and work. On the other side was wilderness. The big hill sloped, grassy in warmer days, now patched with snow.
I felt turned around. I no longer remembered which side Skate State was on, which side was California. Other smoke was rising from the trees in the distance. More people, strangers, in camps or families, trying to survive.
“What are their plans for keeping warm here?”
“I don’t know,” Dance said. He knocked the pieces of the log he had split into the pile. “Building more permanent structures, insulated ones.”
“They’re not going home?”
“They say this is their home now. Their ancestors lived like this, built cabins by hand, dug coal scraps out of the ground to keep warm. They made it. They got by on a lot less. Mica says they can do it again.”
These hills could hold anyone, I knew that. Cabins and farms I couldn’t see, even compounds: trailers and sheds spotting the woods under its woven canopy. The most broken, abandoned-looking shack, leaking and thin-walled, could shelter someone temporarily.
Temporarily could last a long time.
The trees were bare, but clustere
d together they still gave cover. Rocks could hide. Cliffs could hide. There were caves in the rocks, mines in the ground. Only smoke betrayed the people who might be surviving there.
“What was Ladd Ridge like?” I asked Dance.
“The tree-sit with Mica? That was a long time ago. Spring into summer.” He took a break, resting his ax against the stump. “A real summer,” he said. “I sat up on a monopod in this tree in the middle of the road they wanted to bulldoze for their fucking pipeline. I guess they did it, after all. I was the tree-sitter. I was the healthiest then, so I was up there, strung up by wires. I had to tie everything down—my phone, my pillow. Mica was part of the support team. She brought me food, took away my buckets. It was pretty lonely up there. I knew I had support, though, down below. I had food, water, people yelling positive things to me from the trees. It helped me keep going.”
“Was it like this?”
Dance scanned the hillside, the hiding trees, the smoke from the fires. “No,” he said. “This is something else.”
I had finished my coffee. Fog might have burned off the mountains by now, but there was no sun, nothing to sear the white mist that seemed to spring from the ground. There was a mine fire near home that had been burning underground for a hundred years, sparked by a coal seam. It might never go out. I wondered if folks had found a way to harness that fire for warmth. I wondered if breathing in the hot, toxic haze of a coal seam fire was worth it to stay warm, if we were killing ourselves to survive.
I hiked down the hill to the main camp. We needed to get back to the truck, back on the road. I needed to rally the others.
Behind me, Dance picked up his ax. I heard the ringing song of the wood being split, the kick and tumble of the logs. This time of year—fall—there still should have been insects, the drowsy riot of hornets, the bees doing their last and best. Mama and I used to joke that the seasons in southeastern Ohio were Winter, Mud, Summer, and Hornet. They were each troublesome, something to dread and deal with on the farm. Now they seemed like children I had named but would never know. Something Lisbeth would have done.