The World More Full of Weeping

by Robert J. Wiersema

  A light breeze rustled in the branches around the still pond.

  He felt someone’s eyes upon him.

  “Dad?” he called, rising slowly to his feet. The sample spoon dangled limply by his side.

  “Hello?”

  He turned in a slow circle, taking in all of the clearing as he thought of the stories in the books he had read. Stories about bear attacks, and what would happen if a wolf pack got you. Or worse. The stories of crazy people who took little boys like him out to the woods where no one would hear them —

  “Hello?” he called again, his voice cracking. “Is anybody there?”

  “I’m here,” came a soft voice from the tree line behind him. A girl’s voice.

  He turned quickly, almost losing his balance.

  She stepped from the path into the clearing without a sound. “I’m sorry,” she said, raising her hand in a half-wave. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I’m Carly.”

  As she stepped toward him, she smiled.

  You never really get a look at your own life, Jeff Page thought, until you’re showing it to someone else.

  Dean Owens was the first of the Search and Rescue to arrive, parking his truck under the cedar tree at the side of the driveway. As he climbed out of the cab, he straightened his ball cap and grabbed a metal clipboard.

  Jeff nodded as he approached. “Thanks for getting here so fast.”

  “I was on duty. The rest of the crew should be along pretty quick. How you holdin’ up?”

  Jeff glanced over at Diane. His wife — ex-wife, he reminded himself — stared at the edge of the woods like she could will Brian to reappear. Her arms were folded tightly across her chest, her jacket zipped to her throat against a chill that wasn’t coming from outside. “We’re pretty worried. It’s gonna be getting dark soon.”

  “Okay,” Dean said. “Let’s get this out of the way.” He opened the metal folio and clicked a pen to start.

  As they ran through Brian’s distinguishing characteristics, Diane drifted soundlessly, wordlessly toward them.

  “And when did you last see him?”

  “Maybe eleven this morning. I was working.”

  “And you’re sure he went off into the woods?”

  Jeff nodded.

  “And you’ve checked with all of his friends? Maybe he’s over at one of their places.”

  Jeff glanced at Diana. “He doesn’t . . . he’s pretty much a loner. He’s mentioned a girl, Carly, a few times, but I don’t know her last name.”

  “We’ll look into it,” Dean said, making a note. “Did you have a fight or argument recently?”

  Jeff was startled by the question. “Why? What does that — ” He glanced at Diana, who was staring at him.

  “We’re just trying to determine if maybe he ran away. Maybe there was a fight, or some punishment . . .”

  “Brian wouldn’t run away,” Diane said. Her first words in more than half an hour were calm, but there was an edge of fear under them.

  Dean looked at her. “You’d be surprised at the number of kids we end up rescuing from the video store or the arcade in town ’cause they were pissed off at their parents. Husbands and wives, too,” he added, looking between them and trying to lighten the mood.

  “There was a fight,” Jeff said quietly. “This morning. Brian didn’t — he asked if he had to go to his mom’s place in Vancouver this week. He wanted to stay home.” He avoided looking at Diane as he recounted their breakfast conversation, but he could feel the force of her stare.

  “Is that it?” Dean asked. “He just didn’t want to go on vacation in the city?”

  “No,” Diane said flatly. “We . . . He’s going to be moving in with me in the summer. Starting school in Vancouver in the fall. He didn’t want to — doesn’t want to . . .”

  Dean stared at Diane for a moment, then back at Jeff. He pursed his lips as he made another note on the clipboard. Jeff willed himself not to look at his ex-wife.

  “So what can you tell me about the woods?” Dean asked, breaking the awkward silence.

  “You probably remember,” Jeff started, finally daring a glance at Diane. She had turned away, and was staring at the ground. He recognized the biting of her lower lip, the way she tried to keep from crying. “It hasn’t changed much.”

  When they were younger, Jeff and Dean and a bunch of the other kids used to rule the woods behind the house, building forts out of hollow trees, waging war on one another, and building traps for anyone who might come looking for them.

  Dean half-smiled. “I’ve been in a lot of forests since then,” he said. “They really do all start to look the same.”

  Jeff felt fleetingly chastised as he turned toward the forest. The air was dimming, growing heavy and thick as the sun touched the horizon behind them.

  “We’ve got about twenty-five acres.” He gestured. “From fence line to fence line. But the woods keep going, down past John and Claire’s place that way, past young Tom’s over there. There’s an old fence marking the property line on both ends of our share. Brian’s not supposed to cross the fence.”

  Dean looked at him dubiously.

  “Yeah.” Jeff shook his head. “And the fence was in pretty bad shape the last time I checked.”

  In the quiet afternoon distance he heard an engine. Engines.

  “And how far back does it go?”

  “All the way,” Diane answered, almost in a whisper.

  “There’s an old logging road a ways back,” Jeff clarified. “But after that, it meets up with the bush at the foot of the mountain.” His voice trailed off. “Brian’s not supposed to cross the logging road.”

  Diane looked at him.

  “He knows that.”

  She shook her head.

  “He wouldn’t.”

  There was a crunching of gravel under wheels as the trucks turned into the driveway.

  “Here they are,” Dean said, turning away.

  “Hi.” Brian smiled back, a little awkwardly. Not only was he surprised to have someone else in his own private world, he felt a bit shy talking to girls at the best of times. “I’m Brian.”

  He didn’t know if he should try to shake her hand or what. “What are you doing?” she asked, stepping closer to him. “Collecting samples,” he said, as if it should have been obvious. He was a bit confused by how she was dressed: her long, dark dress didn’t seem too suited for tramping around in the woods. “Do you live around here?” he asked, thinking that she reminded him of the Dutch girls from the bigger farms he had seen walking to the Christian school from the bus window, all of them wearing grey dresses, their heads covered with white cloths. She didn’t have anything on her head, but Carly had that same old-fashioned look, the same pale skin.

  “No, I’m just staying here for a while. What do you do with your samples?”

  He remembered the long spoon in his left hand. “Here, I’ll show you.”

  Leaning against the mossy side of a fallen tree, Brian unzipped his backpack and pulled out the wooden case. He set it on the log and flipped open the catches.

  “What’s that?” Carly asked, looking over his shoulder.

  “It’s a microscope,” he said, setting it mostly flat on the log. “My dad gave it to me. It’s pretty old.”

  “What do you do with it?”

  “I’ll show you,” he repeated. He slid a slide from the package and prepared it with a drop of the scummy water. He moved quickly and confidently: he’d been doing this for several months. He’d broken a few slides at first, but he’d gotten the hang of it. “Then you just slip it in here,” he muttered, mostly to himself, as he positioned the slide under the lens. “And you adjust the mirror . . .” Looking through the lens, he adjusted the focus. “There.” He stepped to one side, still holding the microscope. “You look.”

  Holding back her long blonde hair, Carly leaned over the microscope. She looked for a moment, squinting her eyes, then straightened up.

  “What is that?” she asked, her
face wide and open. “What did you do?”

  He had to suppress a laugh. “It’s water,” he said. “Just a drop of water from the pond.” He gestured.

  “But there are things . . . creatures.” She seemed to be drawing away from the microscope.

  He nodded. “They are creatures,” he said. “That’s what . . . They live in there.”

  Her face slowly broke into a smile. “They must be very small,” she said.

  “The microscope magnifies them so we can see them.”

  She looked at the microscope with what he thought was curiosity.

  “Do you want to look again?”

  She stepped forward slowly and bent over the microscope. “How did you find them?” she asked. “How did you know they would be there?”

  “They’re everywhere,” he said, excited to be talking about it. “They’re all around us. Inside us. In the air and the water.”

  “Everywhere?”

  He nodded.

  “Then why haven’t I ever seen them?”

  “There’s a whole world of them, a whole universe, all around us. Just because you can’t see them doesn’t mean they’re not there.”

  When she looked away from the eyepiece, she was smiling. “Is this what you do in the woods?” she asked.

  He nodded, suddenly shy, suddenly unsure of his decision to show the girl his microscope.

  “Do you want to see more hidden things, Brian?” she asked. “I could show you. There’s a whole hidden world in this forest I could show you, if you wanted.”

  The first truck parked behind Dean’s. People spilled from the cab and cargo bed, mostly men, but a couple of women, too.

  Jeff knew everyone, at least in passing. Frank and Jim from the Henderson Press hopped out of the truck’s bed, along with Michelle Coombs and Phil Hardie. They drifted over to form a group around Dean.

  Moving more slowly, Charlie Ellroy slid from the cab of the truck and walked toward Jeff. He extended a hand, a formality Jeff found oddly disconcerting. He shook it anyway.

  “Been a while since we seen you in at the Horseshoe,” Charlie said, shifting his mouth around his false teeth.

  Jeff nodded. “I’ve been pretty busy with Brian since . . .” He trailed off as Diane stepped toward them.

  “Hi, Charlie,” she said.

  “How you holdin’ up?”

  She shrugged, and Jeff could see how much the façade of calm was costing her.

  “So you got a little boy lost,” he said to Jeff.

  “Yeah. Looks that way.”

  “Like father like son.”

  It was the second time that cliché had been used that afternoon, and something about it niggled at the back of Brian’s mind. He was about to ask Charlie what he meant when a second truck pulled into the driveway.

  “That’ll be the cloggers,” Charlie muttered, watching the driveway.

  The truck was driven by Pieter TeBrink, Martin TeBrink’s oldest son, now probably in his late twenties, and was loaded with men who looked like they might have been brothers or cousins. All shared the same straight blond hair, the strong chins and white teeth, the broad smiles. TeBrinks and VanLeeuwens, VanderPols and VanWycks. Scions of the Dutch farmers who owned most of the land surrounding Henderson, all wearing the same battered jeans and boots, well worn from use.

  Dean drifted toward them as they climbed out of the truck, and the men gravitated to him. Some of them glanced toward Jeff, but none returned his raised hand in greeting.

  The Dutch farmers, whose families had been among the first to settle the valley, mostly kept to themselves. They had their own church, their own meeting hall, their own school for their kids. They mostly kept clear of town politics, though Jan VanderWyck was a councilman serving his second term. Most times, people only saw them at the Harvest Festival, where one of their number was usually crowned Harvest King.

  Jeff was grateful to see them.

  “Friendly,” Diane muttered.

  “They’re all just tryin’ to keep their distance.” Charlie turned to face them. “In case . . .” His voice trailed off and he looked to the ground. “In case something goes wrong.”

  The words fell like a hammer on Jeff’s heart. For the first time, he had a sense of the real stakes.

  He realized he had not felt like there was a real problem. He had been expecting Brian to rustle out of the woods looking sheepish, having lost track of the time.

  Like father, like son.

  For the first time, he felt like that might not happen.

  “Okay, everyone muster up,” Dean called. The Search and Rescue team formed a loose knot around him — everyone except Charlie.

  “We don’t have much time before dark, so we’re gonna hustle out before the truck gets here. We’re gonna split into two teams. First team is going to start here. Your search perimeter is due north, between the east and west fence lines. Second team is going to start out on the logging access road and work south between the same two fence lines.”

  Jeff turned away from the briefing, looked toward the woods, starting to blur and darken in the slow-dimming light.

  He felt Diane step up next to him.

  “He’s going to be all right,” he said, without looking at her.

  She didn’t say anything.

  After a moment, he heard the briefing start to break up. He turned away to find Dean writing on his clipboard.

  “What team should I be on?” he asked without waiting for him to finish his writing.

  Dean looked up at him and shook his head. “The home team,” he said slowly, then shook his head more decisively when he saw Jeff start to argue. “No, really. I need you here. I need you close to the phone in case he calls. I need you close to Charlie and the radios in case something comes up. I need you here.”

  “And you don’t want me out there.” Jeff said the words flatly, without emotion.

  Dean pinched his lips into something that could have passed for a smile. “If it were my son out there, Charlie’d have me waiting by the phone.”

  “Right.” Jeff looked at the ground. Helpless.

  Dean touched him on the forearm. “You’ve got a lot of good people out there, Jeff.”

  “Right,” he said again, and Jeff turned away.

  In the distance, he heard boots on gravel, doors opening and closing, hushed voices. Somewhere, an engine started. Somewhere, tires crunched on gravel.

  That was another world, though. In his, Jeff was completely alone, still and powerless, as the evening started down.

  “Where are we going?” Brian asked, clutching his knapsack tightly as he followed the girl he had just met through the tangled underbrush.

  “You’ll see,” she said, always a couple of steps ahead.

  He kept one arm up near his face, sweeping branches away, careful to avoid snapback. The sticks and brambles were thick, and seemed to twist around his feet and legs. “Dammit,” he muttered, liking the way the curse sounded.

  She moved effortlessly through the rough thicket, slipping between the branches and brambles rather than moving them aside. No curses, no snapbacks, no tripping.

  “Are we almost there?” he asked, trying to make it sound like a joke.

  “Hush,” she said in a stern whisper. She stopped and turned back to him, making a show of pressing her fingers to her lips. “You’ll never see anything if you keep making such noise.”

  “Okay,” he whispered, nodding, feeling a little chagrined. “Is it much farther?”

  Her smile was bright, and she shook her head. “No. We’re here.” She beckoned him forward and held her hand out to him.

  He stepped up beside her and took her hand like it was the most natural thing in the world. “What?” he asked.

  “Look.” She cocked her head forward. “Listen.”

  He leaned forward, conscious of her next to him, of the warmth of her hand in his. He gently pulled aside the brambles, listening hard, trying to filter out the sound of his breathing, the beating
of his heart.

  He thought he heard something — something small and quiet. He couldn’t see anything, just a clutter of brown and green, leaves and branches, and rich, loamy-brown cover on the ground and —

  There.

  The coyotes were almost the same sandy brown colour as the ground. If he hadn’t slowed to look, he wouldn’t have seen them. If he hadn’t quieted, he would have woken them and they would have slipped away, unseen and unknown.

  He was suddenly acutely aware of how much poorer his life would have been had he never seen them.

  It was a mother with three, no, four pups, piled in a loose pack of slumbering brown fur. He was close enough that he could have reached out and touched them. He smelled the rich, feral wildness of them, saw the faint patterns in their fur.

  “Wow,” he breathed.

  A few feet away, the mother coyote’s eyes opened, bright yellow against the blurry brown.

  Brian froze.

  “It’s all right,” Carly whispered, squeezing his hand. “Stay still.”

  He felt the coyote’s eyes upon him, tracing him, measuring him. There was a depth to the yellow eyes, to the dark pupils, a caution and an understanding. When their eyes met, it was as if something passed between them.

  I won’t hurt you, he tried to say, without using his voice.

  The coyote languidly licked her chops, sighed and shifted herself within the pile of her brood. She closed her eyes slowly, not looking away from Brian.

  Carly pulled gently at his hand.

  He waited until they were a good distance away before he exploded. “Holy cow, that was amazing! Did you see her? Did you see her looking at me?”

  Carly smiled at his excitement. “I saw her.”

  “At first I was scared. When she opened her eyes, I thought she was — I thought she would protect her cubs. But she just looked at me.”

  “She could tell you weren’t a threat. She knew you wouldn’t hurt her or her children.”

  “That was so cool! How did you know she would be there?”

  For a moment, Carly didn’t say anything. “There are trails and paths that the animals use. You can follow them if you look closely enough.”

  Brian’s eyes were wide, the rush of excitement thrumming in his veins. His hands shook.