Before Familiar Woods

by Ian Pisarcik

  MILK RAYMOND

  Milk slowed as he crossed the lot toward the truck. He pulled his boy close to his chest.

  A voice cut through the wind. “You ought not run from me.”

  Milk’s foot had gone numb, and it dragged through the snow as though fastened to a track. He felt his boy’s thin body against his chest and his chin on his shoulder. He hoped the boy’s eyes were closed.

  “Stop,” the man said. “I won’t ask you again.”

  He stopped thirty yards from the truck, knowing from the sound of the man’s voice that he was close enough to shoot and not miss. Milk’s only chance was to draw the man even closer where Milk might lunge at him.

  He heard the man’s boots crunching the snow. Two steps and then three.

  “Goddamn,” the man said. He coughed, and Milk heard him spit. “I ain’t fit to run. You ain’t either by the looks of it.”

  Milk cradled the boy with his right arm and held the top of his damp head with his left. He looked again at the truck.

  “I am fit to shoot you, though,” the man said. “And I don’t like shooting more than I have to. Because so much as I don’t like running, I don’t like to clean up neither. Hell, there isn’t a lot I do like, which is why I prefer to be left alone. Why I prefer children don’t come knocking on my door and seeing things they ain’t supposed to be seeing.”

  Milk tried to clear his mind the way he had learned to do in Iraq and focus only on the moment. He heard the wind whip around his coat and heard the man behind him spit again and wipe his mouth. He studied the snow-covered road beyond the truck and the homes on the other side of the road. His eyes focused on a small yellow home with a dim orange light visible through the curtains and faint gray smoke rising from the chimney and mixing with the snow.

  “I won’t kill your boy,” the man said. “I’ll take good care of him. But you and me got a bit of a problem. It’s my experience that some men don’t really give a shit about their wives getting involved with me. Those are the ones looking for someone to blame and not really giving a shit who it is. Others, they take issue. And you running through the snow with your leg half detached from the rest of your body makes me think you’re the kind of guy that might take issue. That might not let a sleeping dog lie.”

  Milk thought to put the boy down and turn and run at the man. He figured if he moved quick enough, the man might get spooked and miss with the first shot, and even if he didn’t miss he might not land the shot clean and Milk might not go down.

  “Let me put the boy down,” Milk said.

  “Fine. I ain’t no monster.”

  Milk set his boy in the snow. Daniel’s eyes were wet. The snow swirled around him. Milk studied him for a long moment and then lipped the words Run to the yellow house, and when the boy turned and started to run, Milk spun around.

  The man wore gray sweat pants tucked into his boots and a long-sleeved shirt. Flakes of snow were caught in his red muttonchops and in his thinning hair. He smiled a toothy smile and raised the gun, and before Milk could take his first step he heard a shot and saw blood bubble out of the right side of the man’s neck.

  The man reached for the opposite side of his neck as though his ability to tell his right from his left had been ruined. He took a small step forward and a second bullet went through his ear.

  RUTH FENN

  The sky was blue and the sun shone bright over the white hills. Ruth stood behind the shed gripping a broad aluminum shovel. The dogs wrestled in the snow and she watched them for a while, and then she turned back to the shed and continued to dig.

  She understood that some of the pots were broken beyond repair. But she believed there were others that were merely cracked and could be fixed with steel wire, and she believed there were still others that weren’t broken at all. Elam had asked her why she didn’t wait until the snow melted to retrieve the pots and she couldn’t explain why any more than she could explain why she had started dumping them outside the shed in the first place. The best she could do was tell him that it felt like something close to a compulsion.

  The sun reflected off the snow. It was the sort of day that seemed like it might be warm from inside but proved cold when confronted. Ruth wondered how it could be so cold when the sun shone so bright, and she heard Mathew as though he were standing right behind her say that it was because the sun was farther away from the earth.

  She lifted a shovelful of snow and tossed it in the direction of the dogs. Woodstock dove on the pile and then spun in a tight circle and trampled the area where Ruth was shoveling. Ruth jabbed the shovel and shouted until he retreated. She stuck the shovel in the snow again and pulled it back when she felt the end strike something solid. She tossed the shovel aside and bent down and pushed away the snow and pulled three brown speckled pots from the ground. She wiped them clean and started toward the house.

  Inside Ruth set the pots on the table. The sun painted a square across the kitchen floor.

  “They aren’t so bad.”

  Ruth turned and saw Elam standing in the doorway. He wore a knitted sweater and blue jeans, and his face was still scratched and the hair on his face was coarse. He had his hands in his pockets.

  “No,” Ruth said, turning back to the pots. “They’re not so bad. Of course, these were at the top. I can’t say how the rest of ’em will look.”

  She studied one of the wares. The small handless jar with bands of blue at the shoulder and base.

  “I can help,” Elam said.

  “That’s okay. I won’t be much longer.”

  Ruth left Elam standing in the doorway. She was between the house and the shed when Della’s truck turned off the road and pulled into the drive. Ruth stood still with the snow up to her knees and watched Della get out of the truck and put her keys in her coat pocket.

  “Deeper than a tall Swede,” Della said.

  “Just about.”

  Della stopped several feet from Ruth. “I brought bourbon. I couldn’t stand being inside any longer. It seems so quiet.”

  Ruth nodded.

  “You’re in the middle of something, though.”

  Ruth scratched at her forehead with her gloved hand. “I got a couple years’ worth of pottery buried under the snow behind the shed. Sometime this morning I got the smart idea to unbury it.”

  “How’s it look?”

  “So far as I can see, it’s held up pretty well.”

  Waxwings buzzed somewhere in the distance. Ruth removed her glasses from her face. “I could use a break, though. Something to warm my bones sounds nice, too.”

  * * *

  THE WORLD LOOKED bleached from the porch. The wind stirred, snow speckled. Della uncapped the bourbon and hesitated a moment and then handed it to Ruth.

  “Old Wives’ Tale,” Ruth said, holding up the bottle.

  “I got it a while back from a place just over the New York line. I liked the label.”

  Ruth studied it. A long shadow of women standing together on top of a hill like a copse of misshapen trees. She took a sip. The bourbon had some kick and it warmed her stomach.

  “It’s finally let up a little,” Della said. “For a while I thought this storm would be like ’89.”

  “It was getting there.”

  “Eleven days we were without power.”

  Ruth shook her head. “Part of me hoped I’d give birth early just so I could lay in a warm hospital bed and watch the television. Of course Mathew had other ideas.” Ruth took another sip from the bottle and studied the falling snow. Watched it collect on the roof of the shed.

  “I drove him to a private school in Burlington just before he died. One of those places where you pick your own grades and grow your lunch in the community garden. I could see he was hurting.” Ruth wiped a watery drip from her nose. “I could see he was different. But we had no money to pay for a private school and I had no idea how we would make a move work. I guess I thought it would come to me. I guess I thought I had to try.”

  She hesitat
ed a moment. “He was quiet the whole way out there. All two and a half hours and then all through the tour with the vice principal. On the way back we pulled into a roadside hamburger stand, and I finally got him to look at me long enough to see how sad his eyes were. He told me he couldn’t go to school in Burlington. I asked him how come, and he told me he couldn’t leave William. I know they didn’t talk none at school. But he felt like he couldn’t leave him. Like he needed to be there. I’m guessing they both felt that way.”

  Ruth handed Della the bottle. Della took a sip and wiped her mouth and sat there a long moment.

  “I gave all the group meeting duties to Ethel. Gave her my Sunday reading slot as well.”

  Ruth was quiet.

  “I understand there were things I lost sight of.” Della stared straight ahead, her hand tight around the bottle. “It seems an insult to apologize.”

  The two women were quiet for several minutes. The dogs continued to wrestle in the snow by the shed. Every now and then Woodstock would start to get the best of Emmylou and then back off like he didn’t want Emmylou to quit, and he’d spin around excitedly and then go right back at her.

  “It’s not that I don’t believe,” Della said finally. “It’s that maybe God gave us a brain and an able body for a reason. It’s that maybe I been looking for a savior when I should have been the one doing the saving.”

  Ruth readjusted her hands in her lap. “Sometimes I think we don’t give ourselves enough credit. It freezes us. Keeps us from doing things we’re capable of doing. Saying things we should be saying. I suppose a lot of people feel that way. I suspect it’s worse for women.”

  Della turned the bottle in her hands. “I guess we got to stick together some.”

  Ruth nodded. “It’s not a bad thing to recognize.”

  MILK RAYMOND

  Spring had come to North Falls. The air was cold but without the bitterness of winter. Milk squinted at the dappled light that hung above the trees that crowned the hills in the far distance. He turned to his boy, who sat in the passenger seat beside the clay sculpture wrapped in thick plastic.

  He thought about Daniel sculpting the face with Ruth over the last six weeks. Pushing his thumbs into the wet clay to form Milk’s sunken eyes and lifting the thin ridges of his ears till they stood like hollow bird bones. He thought about his boy removing the face carefully from the kiln and checking it for cracks.

  “What’s wrong?” Daniel asked.

  “Nothing’s wrong.”

  Milk passed a barn and a hillside grave and an old yellow house that slumped like it had given up. He thought about Jessica and the void she had left for her son. The state had paid for the funeral from the indigent burial fund, but Milk had managed a couple hundred dollars for the headstone. An ash-colored slab with a name and a date.

  Daniel hadn’t said much. He watched the casket being lowered into the damp earth through still and narrow eyes that reminded Milk of his own. It made Milk proud, but it worried him, too. The unexpected toughness of his boy.

  The forest swelled on both sides of the road and then broke completely. Homes appeared and the light reddened the sides of them.

  “We might drive out to see your great-grandmother tomorrow,” Milk said. “Show her your sculpture.” He looked over at his boy, who nodded.

  Milk had been surprised by how much his boy had wanted to see Marcy since they moved her into the assisted-care facility. She didn’t recognize either one of them, and she was often so fatigued she couldn’t do much more than lie there in the bed. But Daniel liked to sit on the chair next to her and watch television, and it seemed important that Milk do what he could to make sure his boy was able to see her as much as he might want.

  He turned onto Pine Street, where an old wheelbarrow with wooden handles lay tipped over in the grass on the side of the road. He glanced at the clock and checked the rearview mirror and then made a quick turn east on Holcomb Hill. “I want to show you something,” he said.

  He followed the road past canted trees with new leaves and around a bend flanked by a rusted guardrail. He climbed the road until it leveled out, and then he drove for another quarter mile until he reached an old brick building with two ruined chimneys and three white pillars chalky with flaked paint. He pulled the truck in front of the building and cut the engine. “Come on,” he said.

  Milk got out of the truck and closed the door. He crossed the sidewalk and ascended the concrete steps scarred by decades of rock salt. When he reached the door, he pressed his hands against the split-pane window and peered into the hallway.

  “What is it?” Daniel asked.

  “Nothing. You can’t see much through here. It’s too dark.”

  Milk descended the steps and walked through the overgrown grass alongside the building. “This used to be the library,” he said. “It hasn’t been nothing for a long time.” He approached a large window positioned behind an oak tree in full bloom and looked in through the glass. The old wood floors were dusty. There were holes in the walls. He could see where the radiators had been. Their footprints pressed into the wood like tobacco stains. “I spent just about every day in this place during the summer when I was your age.”

  Daniel got up on his toes and peered in through the window.

  “My father drove trucks. He’d be gone weeks at a time in the summer. My mother worked for the church as a secretary, and so she’d take me to the playground behind the church in the morning, and then when the library opened she’d drive me here and leave me for the day.” Milk removed his cap and tightened the brim. “I sat in the room next to this one. In a leather chair with big brass nailheads along the arms and a stack of books on my lap. I doubt that chair’s still here. You can’t see it from where you’re standing anyway.”

  Daniel continued to peer through the window. The light faltered.

  “I met your mother here,” Milk said. “This would’ve been in the first grade. She was here every day same as me. It was just the two of us most times.” He put his cap back on and watched his boy. A small boy still not seeming to grow into his shiny spring jacket and faded blue jeans.

  A bird sang in the distance.

  “It’s okay to miss her,” Milk said. “It’s okay to be mad at her too.”

  Daniel pulled away from the window. “Are you mad at her?”

  “I suppose I am, a little. I’m sad too.”

  “I didn’t like it when she was sick.”

  “No,” Milk said. “I don’t suppose she liked it either. She wanted to be better.”

  “She left me.”

  “I know it. That was part of it. That was part of her being sick.”

  Daniel squinted at something past Milk. “Look,” he said. He stepped around Milk and started toward the back of the library. Milk turned and followed. The sun reappeared at the tops of the trees, and the light flickered in front of Milk like something he could reach out and touch.

  “They’re like ours,” Daniel said. He stood behind the library in front of two storm doors nearly hidden in the tall grass.

  The doors were painted red. A branch no bigger than a grown man’s finger had been wedged between them. Daniel bent down and pulled the handle on one of the doors, and the branch slipped free. He continued to pull until the door fell open against the ground with a loud metallic clang. The boy peered into the cellar. He looked back at Milk and then started down the steps. Milk thought to stop him but followed instead.

  The only light came from the sun, but it was enough that Milk could make out the wooden stairs on the other side of the cellar along with a cardboard box and a stack of masonry bricks. Daniel crossed the cellar and started up the wooden steps, making use of the crude handrail. At the top of the stairs he turned the doorknob and pushed.

  A thick layer of dust had turned the library floors the color of wood smoke. The built-in shelves that lined the walls were cobwebbed but still in good shape. A metal cage held an old fire extinguisher. There was some graffiti on the bare walls, symb
ols that Milk didn’t recognize. Daniel walked to the center of the room and stopped and turned to Milk. “Where was the chair?” he asked.

  The question caught Milk off guard. He looked around the library. “Come on,” he said.

  He crossed the large room where the checkout counter had once been, his boots leaving tracks in the dust. He tried to recall the last time he had been in the library. His mother had taken him through elementary school, and then when he was old enough to stay home alone, he stopped coming.

  In the library now, he imagined himself as a child watching his future projected on one of the library walls. His older self moving through the abandoned building, trailed by his own boy who would have been his age. He saw himself leaving for Iraq and tried to imagine seeing Jessica beaten nearly to death on the floor of the motel.

  He wondered what he could have done if he had seen it all. Even now it was so much to take on. And he thought of his boy and how the images were real for him, how hard it must have been—how hard it still was.

  He moved down the dark hall and stepped into a carpeted room that smelled of damp wood and cigarette smoke and something unfamiliar. “It was right here,” he said.

  The chair was no longer in the corner. It was just an empty space. An orange sleeping bag lay in the middle of the room. In the corner opposite where the chair had been were three plastic crates surrounding a stack of cardboard boxes like a firepit. There was a dusty shadow on the wall where a bookshelf had once leaned. Milk’s eyes returned to the empty space where his boy now stood in place of the chair, looking out across the room.

  “I can see it,” Daniel said. “I can see you here.”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “I know. But you were right here.”

  The light reached in through the north-facing window. It spread flawlessly across the ruined library. Milk studied his boy. Seemed to recognize him as though he were a thought that had been dammed up inside of him for all these years and had only now come loose.