Before We Sleep

by Jeffrey Lent

  “And then, silent but side by side, we walked up to the guest dome and she had soup and bread waiting for me and she left me there. It was just me, most of the time they have a bunch of freaks there, working for free and basking at the knees of Jean and Larry. So later I rolled one and walked out and sat up high on a rock where I could look down on the starlight dancing on the water and it all felt good. Ya know? I’d gotten what I needed. And Jean didn’t piss me off anymore. Because she couldn’t.”

  Throughout this Phoebe had been a brisk efficiency, smearing torn pita with tahini and honey and passing them over to Katey and eating while talking while also grubbing through the sacks for almonds and the dried apricots and offering them to Katey while eating also and there was something in this, along with the spill of words that gave Katey comfort; as if the girl beside her was a strange creature never before seen but glimpsed somehow, deeply familiar. So comfortable in who she was and what she was doing, where she’d just come from but also where she was going. And, it seemed, where Katey also was going. A dual stab of curiosity and anxiety about that. She told herself that once she got there she could unload and go on. Or maybe stay for the afternoon. How Phoebe had talked about the college; home. Of a different sort than any Katey had known.

  She said, “These apricots, you gotta chew em. But they taste awful good. I like the rest of it, too.”

  Phoebe looked over and grinned. Then reached a finger and dabbed it against Katey’s cheek and took it away and rubbed the spot of tahini onto her overalls. She said, “It’s almost like they set out to hide the world from us, you know?”

  “Yeah. I think so.”

  Phoebe pulled a pack of rolling papers from the bib of her overalls and then a small paper sack and Katey had a small panic but it was only a sack of Bugler tobacco and Phoebe made a cigarette. She held it between her fingers and made no move to light it. She said, “You know this one?”

  “Which one?”

  Phoebe sang, barely, “There’s something happening here…”

  She waited and then Katey sang, “What it is ain’t exactly clear…”

  And both together sang mostly through the rest, both garbling parts but both also rising up hard and clear on the chorus, louder and stronger and the more they sang the more the song came to them and they sang the final verse and chorus three times around without stopping, whooping it through the cab and out the windows and when they finally trailed off Phoebe lifted a clenched fist and pumped it three times and in the silence ringing turned and said, “Yeah. That’s what it’s all about.”

  Then they were out of North Conway up toward Glen and saw a sign for Santa’s Workshop and one for Story Land and beyond that Jackson but followed the curve in the road, dropping into the eastern end of Crawford Notch. Phoebe lit her cigarette and pushed down in her seat, lifted her arms to cross behind her head. She said, “It’s a couple hours to Bethlehem. I’m gonna crash for a bit. As you mighta guessed, it was a weird weekend and I’m fried. But wake me up in Bethlehem, okay?”

  “So I don’t miss the turn?”

  Phoebe grinned and said, “How’d you get so smart?”

  “Just lucky I guess.”

  “Or local. But yeah, wake me up.”

  “You mind if I play the radio?”

  “Anything good, turn it up loud. You heard Hendrix yet? Joplin?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “You’d know if you had.”

  She’d forgotten. As the truck rolled down into the depths of Notch the memory came back, a flitting but soothing thing. Years and years ago, perhaps ten or twelve she’d ridden over here, coming the other way, with her dad to deliver a fiddle to a man up somewhere beyond Jackson. She’d been six or seven. She recalled it was an early fall day, waking in the morning—it must’ve been a Saturday because neither her mother or she was up early for school, waking in her bedroom that was above the living room just off the kitchen and through the open grate in her floor she could hear her parents and her dad talking in that soft easy and determined voice of his, only determined if you knew him, how soft his voice was, and she stirred from sleep to those voices from below and so woke knowing the day before her was going to be an adventure. Her mother was not protesting but in the way she had was trying to make sure this was what her father really wanted, that it was no whim and Katey was wide awake by then. Hearing her dad say, “Now she’s started school, I don’t see as much of her as I like. It would be nice for both of us.” Her mother had said, “Because she’s started school doesn’t mean you have to spend less time with her,” and after that was a silence and she couldn’t hear it from her bedroom but knew her dad was sighing, which is what he did when he felt he’d explained himself and had no more words, the way he did. She hadn’t heard what he wanted but only it was a thing that involved her, so she scrambled from bed in her pajamas and flew down the stairs into the kitchen and had said, “I want to do it. Whatever it is. I want to go.”

  And her dad had ducked his head toward his coffee and her mother had stood and said, “Well, not before you eat a good breakfast and get washed up and in decent clothes. I’m not sending you off looking like a ragamuffin.”

  Her dad said, “Ruth. It’s a long drive.”

  “Then you should’ve thought earlier about taking her along.”

  And Katey said, “Where are we going? There’s cornflakes. And I can be ready in two flicks of a mare’s tail. You’ll see!” And dashed from the room and up the stairs. Her parents both of a sudden chuckling, her mother saying, “I don’t know where she gets half of what she says.”

  And her dad saying, “She soaks it all up like a sponge. Do we have cornflakes?”

  Then she was out of earshot and pulling on clothes.

  She remembered that. But not the drive over. Maybe climbing into the truck, not this truck but an earlier one, maybe climbing into that and driving out of town. The sense of adventure pounding high. What she remembered was sitting in the cab hours later with the windows rolled up most all the way because there were dogs on chains in a scrubbed-bare dirt yard before a one-story house sided with slab wood over tar paper and watching her dad and a man talking on the tilted porch that ran across the front of the house. She knew these sorts of houses from up on Brocklebank, or Kibbling Hill where some of her schoolmates came from, knew they were poor, knew something of what that meant, and the man there on the porch with her dad had a wild beard like Chaddy the hermit and he was yelling at her dad, holding the fiddle tight but yelling and her dad stood there, with one knee cocked, studying his extended shoe as if to find something there, on his shoe or the boards of the porch, looking down and nodding. The dogs on the chains couldn’t reach the truck and had quit trying, were just lying in the smooth worn troughs of dirt they were used to. She smelled woodsmoke from the house and thought it was awful early to have a fire going, then guessed that like Chaddy all the man had was a wood range to cook on. There was also a smell in the yard, sort of a stronger smell but like when she pooped but before she flushed. And the man was yelling at her dad and he just stood, nodding. She was almost frightened but not—no one ever hurt her dad and she could see he wasn’t frightened but just being patient which she knew was how he accepted the storms other people felt within themselves but he didn’t. Then another dog came around the corner of the house, this one not on a chain. It was an old dog with a sharp-pointed nose and long white and brown and black hair. There were patches almost to bare skin on the dog but its nose was up and it came wandering toward the truck as if it smelled her and as it came closer the dog began a slow tired swish back and forth of its tail and she could see that the dog had clouds over its eyes. But it walked right up and paused beside the truck and she could hear it pulling air through its nose as it moved its head side to side and she knew it was smelling her and then it squatted back on its haunches and with a great effort heaved upward so its front feet landed on the running board and its nose was close to the small gap in her window. And the dog began t
o lick the glass, great broad swipes and Katey knew all the dog wanted was to say hello. So she rolled the window down a couple more inches and reached out and stroked the dog’s head. And the dog made a low sound that was not a growl but a sound of pleasure. And the man on the porch had stopped yelling but was walking back and forth with the fiddle tucked under his chin but without a bow. As if he was listening to sounds only he could hear.

  “I’m sorry you had to hear all that,” her dad said, when he got back in the truck. Driving away from the house. “For some reason he thought I fix these things for free. This time, it was easier to do it for free than not. But he’s the one drank too much beer and tipped over and cracked the back like he did. So, maybe it wasn’t as free as he thought. Anyway, Katey-did. We have the rest of the day and let’s see what we can make of it.”

  But when they passed Story Land and she begged to stop he shook his head and said, “Junk.” A few minutes later though he pulled off and they went in the diner and had hot roast beef on toast with mashed potatoes all slathered with gravy, and root beer floats. And then they drove back through the Notch. The steep sides were in beautiful color and coming below the steep narrow head of the Notch he pulled off again and parked. He led her along a path that went into the woods, crossing a stream on an old wooden bridge with no sides, the bridge made of logs split in two with the flat sides up, dark old wood, and then on through the young growth of maples with their leaves showing splotches of red and paper birches with some few golden leaves and if she asked where they were going she didn’t remember but guessed if she had, he’d only said he wanted to show her something. And knew there was as good a chance that she simply walked along with him silent because she was used to him doing this sort of thing, trusting him always and absolutely. And then, it seemed in memory it was not so far but might’ve been—the day was warm and pleasant but not hot and there were no bugs, no blackflies or deerflies or any of the stinging pestilences of spring or summer in the woods—they came slowly and then all at once into a different place. The trees were almost all evergreens—later she’d think most likely hemlocks and white pines—but they were immense. The biggest trees she’d ever seen. They were so big that the old maples up on the top of Beacon Hill seemed like small things, young trees. Most of them were free of branches a long ways up. She could only see scraps of sky above the thickly woven high tops. And the trail was now only a narrow path that wound between rocks and boulders all covered with moss. The forest floor was free of young trees, brambles, almost everything she thought of growing in the woods. There were no stumps but here and there pieces of huge decaying trees whose butt ends rose above the ground several feet before the tops sank into the earth. And over everything grew mosses and ferns; most all unlike anything she’d seen. The ferns were high up above her waist in patches or low barely rising above her ankles and of all possible sorts, with strange leaves and fronds—some she only knew as ferns because they couldn’t be anything else. Likewise the moss: not only the pale or dark green low furze but also rising six or more inches in patches of passing strangeness, in shapes and forms she’d never before seen. Again, she knew they were moss only because they couldn’t be anything else. Some few pale gray and rising on thin stalks but in clumps, with rolled small perfect balls at the tops of the stalks. Other strange forms resembling pale green antlers, as if some strange deer had passed through and shed their horns. And along the sides of the decaying logs were lichens and mushrooms, spatters of yellow and orange spots, bulbous growths spouting. It was very quiet but far above the faint swish of the high tops of boughs weaving patient and strong in a breeze unfelt there below.

  They settled on a boulder side by side, the rock the right height and with a slabbed top that made for a good seat. Once settled her dad looked down and pointed. She followed his finger and saw slender white forms rising a few inches before curling downward and turning outward as to make a small bell. A flower, surely, but without color. A ghost of a flower. She said, “What’s that?”

  “Those are called Indian Pipes.”

  “Did Indians smoke them?”

  “No. I imagine the Indians had a different name for them. Sometimes names are nothing more than what remind us of something else.”

  He never laughed at her questions.

  She said, “What is this place? It’s almost scary but peaceful too.”

  “It’s a very old piece of woods. Somehow, for good reasons I guess, it was never cut down once us white people came here. So, when the Pilgrims landed, these trees were already old. Or at least pretty good-sized. There’s not many places like this anymore. I wanted to show it to you.”

  She looked about. She said, “It looks like a good place for fairies to live. Don’t you think?”

  He said, “Yes, I do. Fairies and gnomes and who knows what else like that.”

  “Trolls?”

  He paused a moment and then said, “If there’s any trolls they wouldn’t be like the ones you think of. They’d be, might well be, say, under that footbridge we walked in on. But not to terrify us or anything like that. Only maybe to protect the fairies and gnomes from folks intent on doing them harm. Or that don’t understand.”

  “That’s good. I wish I could see one—I’d tell em I wasn’t up to mischief. Or see a fairy for that matter.”

  “Why can’t you?”

  “Because they’re magic.”

  “That’s right. But here, now, you can feel that magic all around. Right? And see it too. Even if you can’t see the fairies or gnomes. Or trolls, thank goodness.”

  She looked all around again. She felt the least shiver but it was split between fear and delight. Mostly delight. And high overhead a few narrow beams of light struck through and hit against the upper levels of the trees and turned them golden and soft and the day fell soft and sweet about her.

  And her dad, the way he did, sang to her. His voice was low and sweet also, as if he held the song in the back of his throat and only just allowed it through. Only enough for her, because it was only for her. Although as she listened she guessed any nearby fairies would like the song and know she and her dad were good visitors.

  Shady grove, my little love

  Shady grove, I’d show you

  Shady grove, I’ll take you there

  And shady grove will know you

  “Hey. You okay?” Phoebe had reached and patted her forearm upon the wheel.

  Katey had been crying. She dipped her chin and snuffed in snot and said, “I’m good. An old memory is all. I’ve been here before.”

  Phoebe dropped her hand from Katey’s arm to her thigh and rubbed there gently, then took her hand away. “Old memories,” she said. “They can damn near kill you.”

  They rode silent through the rest of the Notch where it was still late spring—pale green leaves, pockets of swirling cool air, the smell of brook water. And then climbed up out of that rare and strange place to where the land again leveled and they were back in early summer.

  Katey sat in the field in the dusk, at the outer reach of the fire. She was exhausted, exhilarated, a little sore, and full. Closer to the fire Phoebe sat back to back with the girl Susan who was playing a nylon-stringed guitar, a simple pretty melody that Katey didn’t recognize and if there were words Susan wasn’t singing them but rather crooning a sweet Oo loo la lah, la lah loo, loo oo loo la lah … Sparks drifted upward into the clear green light spilling through the trees surrounding the small field. Across from them, Luna sat cross-legged with Chuck stretched out on his back in the grass, his head in her lap. Beyond them was the burble of the thin brook as it flowed over the dam of the beaver pond and beyond that the half-raised structure of the dome upon its platform, a series of triangular ribs rising to a jagged unfinished top against the sky. Night was coming down. The flare of a white gas lantern moved about within the skeleton of the dome and threw shadows and flares to compete with the fire—Steven up there poking along and studying the results of the afternoon of work, work informed by
the notes and thoughts Phoebe had returned with.

  Katey rested easy. No one had even asked who she was, beyond Phoebe’s brief introduction as they commenced unloading the truck hours before, and no one had asked where she was from or wondered about her willingness to stay. It seemed enough that she showed up with Phoebe.

  She still had little idea of where she was—she’d briefly glimpsed a massive five-story white building when she’d turned off the road to follow this rough track to the site of the dome and had passed a long low workshop and two small cabins, one of logs and one an older small farmhouse. But quickly she’d figured out that this project was part of but also separate from the college—that it was taking place in summer seemed answer enough. At least joined with the easy ebb and flow of the group. Clearly they held a vision undertaken but also she—daughter, granddaughter, great-granddaughter of schoolteachers and administrators—understood this vision had been sanctioned and approved by whatever powers needed to do so here. Beyond that, there was little that corresponded with her vision, already old, perhaps waiting to be old, of college life.

  What they’d done was worked. Katey had helped the others unload the truck and carry the food into the cook tent which was an old canvas fly stretched over a framework of poles to make a lean-to with a long table that held a pair of propane camp stoves, plus stacked milk crates that held pots and pans, iron skillets, an assemblage of chipped and mismatched crockery and jars, tins and sacks of provisions. Meanwhile Phoebe and Steven were up on the platform with the unrolled plans, measuring tapes, a plumb bob and a bubble level. Time to time she and the others would hear one of them raise their voice. The girl Luna had begun to work a mass of bread dough on a board on the table while Chuck got the fire burning again and began raking coals into what Katey figured out was a portable reflecting oven, set outside the tent, to take heat from the sun as well as the coals underneath, to bake the bread when it was ready.