“Yes sir,” Tad whispered. Hot tears had sprung to his eyes halfway through this speech, and he was bitterly ashamed of them, yet he stood up without hesitation and walked ahead of his father to the door, stepping out onto the porch as a wall of cool fragrant air slammed into him, while somewhere in the room behind the telephone began to ring.
High Tea
The next morning, bright and early, Tad set off into the woods again. Breakfast had been a grim affair. He’d been nearly too sore to sit down, and had wolfed his cereal while being careful to avoid looking at either one of his parents. No one spoke of the night before. A pervasive silence reigned. Daisy, as had been the case in years past, seemed unaware of her nocturnal foray, having slept doggedly through the entire business. Perhaps she too was aware of the hanging cloud over the table, if not the cause, or then again she might have retained every detail of the previous evening; with Daisy it was impossible to tell, and Tad hadn’t been able to bring himself to speak of it with her yet. Walt had been his usual taciturn self, while Marta had busied herself with trips to and from the kitchen, making every effort to keep up the appearance that nothing was the matter. But Tad had noticed that she continually stole anxious looks at himself, Walt, and especially Daisy. It was Casey whose lack of deviation from the daily routine had not seemed forced. He had slept soundly throughout the whole of the night’s adventures. When breakfast adjourned, he had left the house carrying his football as usual, seeking out his friends the jocks, the other members of the Feral High varsity squad. They spent the majority of their summer afternoons on the athletic fields by the school, running plays, roughhousing, and smoking cigarettes purloined from their parents. Daisy had slipped back upstairs to spend the day among her books and creations in progress; Walt had driven off to work, his pickup belching sooty clouds into the clear sky like smoke signals all the way to the Willow Road. When Tad left, he had still been able to hear his mother puttering around in the kitchen, where she would likely be camped out for most of the day, basting and sautéing her worries away amid the healing smells of tarragon and rosemary.
It promised to be another scorcher. Tad stopped in the yard to look up at the sky, which was a brilliant, cloudless blue, the sun stuck firmly in his field of vision like a glowing postage stamp. I’m hot. Anyone else hot? He made his way around the first bend of the drive before entering the woods on his right hand side. He felt good, despite the pain with every step that was a continual reminder of the previous night’s follies. And why do I feel so good, he thought, as he made his way over the first of a series of gentle hills. Because things always look better in daylight, and you can’t be upset on a day like today. Because I’m out where I like to be, better than anywhere else in the world, with the sun warming my shoulders and the solid ground underfoot, and the trees all around. And why else, he thought with a grin, why else indeed. Because I’m going to see him, that’s why. Because I’m going to see him. And although there was no feeling to guide him today, no warming glow to bask in as it buffeted him about like a fleck of debris in an updraft, he somehow knew, did not think, but knew, that if he only went where his feet led him, he would have no trouble finding the person he was looking for, his strange new friend, the man who called himself Daddy.
He traveled at a steady pace, today wearing again the battered pair of sneakers, the ones that fit his feet so well that they hardly irritated the blisters he’d suffered from the long hike in his fishing boots the day before. In accordance with his mood a certain gaiety among the wildlife he spotted as he went- the squirrels that scolded him from the lower branches of the elders and poplars, the thrushes, larks, and wrens that shot from branch to branch like feathered bullets. Chasing each other only to stop and burst into spontaneous harmony. The woods that continual blanket of green, quilt of light and dark patches, always shifting. He had come to understand something, the previous night, and he had begun to operate with knowledge of it without taking the time to spell it out to himself in words. But now it sprung to mind again, as the memory of a dream sometimes does during the course of the day. The woods have different moods. I could feel it last night like a presence everywhere. At that point they felt… playful. In a malevolent way. Yes. That was it. And now…well, just look around. And he did look around, and he tried to listen, but not with his ears, and he tried to see, but not with his eyes alone. He tried to impute what he felt in the currents in the air and beneath his feet, the thoughts of the forest around him. It came to his mind that sometimes at just the right moments of his life, maybe he’d connected without ever actually meaning to, being at the proper wavelength when he was walking back from school, perhaps, so tucked away in his own world that he’d never really acknowledged the living entity around him that was playing right along with him even when he thought himself alone. It begs the question, are the woods a comrade or an enemy? Both? Neither? What are their intentions? But he felt he knew the answer to this one too. I’m too small and unimportant for them to bother with much. Like any of the other animals. They don’t take a special interest in me. And this held an amount of comfort for him, and as he walked he continued to exercise this newest one of the senses, trying to keep all of himself a receptor for the very landscape itself and all its myriad of moving tides.
He met with the fence, approaching it cautiously, the three strands of wire that fed their way through the trees like some three bodied metallic snake. He was almost disappointed not to feel himself slammed with some extrasensory tingle to indicate impending danger. All was calm, but still he waited, hesitating with his hand resting on the top strand. It was stretched taught, supported by two trees, one to either side of him. Where the wire wrapped around the trunks bitten into the wood leaving rusty teeth marks as it traveled in either direction, north to south. And he thought it arrogant that people think they can own the land and chain it, as through it were not going to be there long after its supposed master had returned to it, fading back into the net of time like so much dust. Walt Surrey’s land. This isn’t his land. But his father knew it and lay claim to it anyway. And perhaps that was the reason that it felt good to him, on this day, when he’d stepped between the wires and walked away with that boundary growing further behind him with each step, that he was away from the ground that his father professed to control and drawing away from his influence. It was a momentary sensation of independence, to be savored, leaving the familiar behind. Because as much of a comfort as it had always been throughout his life, to be able to return home to that same building that would always be there, at the end of the drive, right now the mere thought of it was oppressive. Though he was not strictly conscious of it in this way, Tad was truly feeling, for perhaps the first time, the strong desire for self autonomy that is a part of growing up and separating from parents and family. It felt good to him that after the events of the previous night he should turn around the very next morning and disobey his father again, fearlessly going where Walt Surrey had forbade him to go.
He walked for a good long while, moving steadily due west, parallel to the Willow Road and moving away from town, staying well clear of The Bottoms. He supposed that even if Daddy’s claim at their first meeting was true, and he did own some patch of land of undetermined size between the Surrey’s and Roy McKenton’s, sooner or later he would end up on Roy’s property. He didn’t want that, not only because of the blood hounds and their notorious sense of smell, but also because if he were spotted, Roy would not hesitate to report the trespass to Tad’s father. So after moving more or less in the same direction for a little more than half an hour, Tad turned and began making his way north, moving away from the KcKenton’s fields and toward the deeper part of the woods, away from the Willow Road. And after a short distance he felt, with an unfailing certainty, that this was the right thing to do. If he’s out here, he’d be in this direction, far enough away from everyone to ensure his privacy. But what is it I’m looking for, exactly? Is it a house, like ours? The image that came to his mind was more like a
mud thatched hut among the trees, or a one room log cabin, or maybe just a cave with a patchwork quilt hung over the entrance to provide shelter from the wind. I don’t imagine there’s a road or a driveway leading up to it, not out here in the middle of the woods. Maybe there’s a path of some kind? Will I know it when I see it? And as he went he scoured the ground for sign, though he had precious little knowledge of woodcraft, and he looked for anything that might be a signal of habitation close by.
Now in a part of the forest a long way from that which he knew from his childhood. Before, he had thought of the thin patches of trees that surrounded the middle and high school as woods. But these, now, these were woods. It had a different feel out here. It felt older. The trees were thicker, taller. Now they were all the size of the giant oak in his backyard. An epic stillness out here. As if he could feel the richness of the earth, and the dry hearts of the timber beating around him, the space between each beat a score of years. He wondered vaguely how far he was from home. Two miles, perhaps? More? He felt the heat of the day still, rising, but it was somewhere out of reach, above and beyond the thick swaying crowns that towered on high, a hundred feet and more above his head. He felt as insignificant as a mouse, creeping along in a hushed silence that existed only in his head, a latter day explorer separated from his party, fallen off the map. At any moment he would stumble upon a lost tribe, or the ruins of some ancient city, or some fabled beast, last member of a species that had once walked here en masse, proud and unafraid. Birds sang whose voices and songs he did not recognize. A silver sheen to the tips of the leaves that faded into a deep, pure, elemental green. No fallen leaves or branches on the ground, but instead a fine moss like the hair on the arms of an elderly man. It was light and springy. When he stopped and looked behind him he could see his footprints in it, the depressions slowly filling in again, fading from sight. These were the woods he’d imagined, reading as a child from the tome of Aesop’s Fables he’d received when he was six, so large he could barely lift it. He realized that he’d begun to walk on tiptoe, holding his breath. I’m close now. And there was no need of one of the games. Life held all the adventure he needed, at this moment. That inclination to embellish and to enhance his reality that he loved, that came on him when he was alone, wasn’t needed now. Moment by moment things stirred within him, welling up, and just as quickly falling back. Now a deep seated sense of peace, and now a shadow of the tingle that he’d begun to recognize. This time it felt to him like a series of pinpricks traveling along his arms and legs. A nervous weight in his stomach like he’d swallowed a warm stone. But still there was no sign of habitation, and he felt too a loneliness, an isolation that made him shudder, and he wondered how it could be that anyone would choose to live so far apart from other humans, self-imposed exile.
He went on, feeling inevitability to each step, as though each movement, each breath was predetermined. Almost there. Almost there. And that is how it was that he first caught sight of Daddy’s house in the clearing, the first glimpses like flashes of summer lightning through the branches, as the trees thinned with a certain reluctance, admitting to him the legitimacy of his mission. It was more than a clearing, really. Tad had come to the nether end of what seemed like a long gash in the trees, reaching back away from him to the north, how far back he could not say. As he stepped out from the trees and into the grass he could see from one side to the other the cleared space, which he thought might be the length of three football fields. But cleared by whom? Did it occur naturally? He didn’t think so. The bottom of the basin was too perfectly shaped. Here the sun beat down unhindered again, and as he turned his face toward it, shading his eyes with his hand, he thought he could see, nearly out of sight in the stratosphere, a hawk or some other bird of prey winging its way to the east.
No trees grew on the land around the house itself; it was like a buffer zone separating the building from the woods. The grass was very high, nearly to his waist. It didn’t look as though it had ever been cut. But he was only dimly aware of these details. Now that he had spotted Daddy’s house, he was wholly powerless to look away. Should a full brass band have suddenly appeared behind him, it is doubtful he would have noticed. Daddy’s house was not a cabin, or a cave, or a shack, or a lean to, or a bunker. Mansion, was the word that came to Tad’s mind. It’s a God damned mansion out in the middle of nowhere. It’s the biggest house I’ve ever seen. And indeed this structure would have hardly been less conspicuous had it been surrounded by other houses, even houses of the same size. Tad began to push his way through the grass, which gave way reluctantly, but he didn’t notice that either. His mouth hung open slightly, his eyes wide, still trying to find a way to take in this monolithic construct looming in front of him. He felt more than ever that the games had come alive and somehow through pure force of will he had plucked this thing from the deepest and most irrational part of his brain. Blink and it’s gone. But blinking did not dismiss Daddy’s house, nor did shaking his head, or rubbing his eyes, and gradually, the closer he came, the more he was forced to admit to himself that this sleeping giant, crouched on the hillside as it was, existed independent of Tad Surrey, and it did not need the benefit of his imagination to continue being.
From the neat fringe of the trees, it was actually a much further distance to the house itself than it had first appeared, and he soon understood that this problem of depth perception was a result of the buildings’ very size. Getting to it took some doing, the tall grass serving as a formidable obstacle itself, and this gave him an opportunity to study the house as he grew closer to it. He was coming out of the trees almost directly in line with the front door. Like his own family’s house, there was a porch running the whole length of the outside, and he could see that further up its massive flanks there were two balconies that also ran as far around in either direction as he could see. The house seemed to be defying several architectural conventions, though Tad found it difficult to say what these might have been. It could have been that it was just a very unappealing shape. It seemed to bulge in places, particularly in the upper stories, as though many additions had been made to it by multiple artisans, each with a different idea of what the end result should look like. To Tad it appeared as though it had swelled and warped as a result of many years of irreparable weather damage. There were many sections of roofing, some tiled, slanting steeply, gables protruding from inconvenient places, towers, spires. On a line, directly above the front door far below, an enormous round window, like a portal or a single giant eye. There were many windows, dozens, in fact, scattered about, seemingly indiscriminately, from the lower sections to the upper ones. He wondered vaguely how many rooms. The house was no single recognizable color, nor could it have been said to be constructed from a single predominant material. The lower sections, including the foundation, were unquestionably brick, though not a normal healthy red, but rather a pale orange, like that of an out of season squash. There were a multitude of cracks, some of them rather large and ominous looking, all around the base beneath the porch, some of them reaching higher, climbing spider-like toward the lower windows, some of which were cracked; actually, some were smashed out altogether. In fact, the closer Tad came, the more it seemed to him that the building was in an advanced state of disrepair. He could see a large pile of assorted trash on the porch as he approached, including what looked like an overturned rocking chair and several empty aquariums, stacked on top of one another. A little further down he spotted a baby carriage, lying on its side. Thousands of bits of broken glass glittered like green gemstones strewn across the lawn and porch. Empty beer cans, the same cheap brand his father preferred. He stopped while still a few yards from the porch and bent down to pick up a jagged green shard of glass. Between his thumb and index finger he felt the smooth planed surface of what had been the bottle’s interior. Let it fall to the earth again.
From this distance he could see that the porch had been painted, once. He thought that originally it might have been white or cream, but now the
few faded sections that remained along the railing were a swatch of dirty beiges and taupes. The front door was literally off the hinges. It stood propped up against the back wall of the porch, next to the frame. The screen door was flung wide, and he could see part of the first room through the opening. He pushed his way forward, through the grass, and stood at last at the bottom of the stairs, four broad steps leading up to the porch. From inside he heard a voice, muffled, but he knew whose it was. It’s not too late to turn back. But of course he did not. He centered himself and walked up the stairs and across the porch, feeling the boards give slightly under his feet. Through the open door, inside.
The first room was not large, the ceiling no more than ten feet high. There were two windows, on the right hand side, both looking out toward the porch, and two doors, one in the left hand side of the far wall, opposite where Tad had come in, the other to his immediate left. This one was closed; the one in front of him, set in the far wall, was open. He could hear the voice more clearly now, speaking, as it seemed, from the next room. Well, here I am. In the lion’s den. On the far wall to the right of the open door was a full-size reproduction of a Monet watercolor in a gilt frame. It was hung crookedly. Without stopping to think it over he stepped quickly across and straightened it. The instant he removed his hand it tilted back down again to its previous position. The walls and ceiling were stained yellow with smoke. A smell of tobacco and vanilla, and beneath it the hint of a more unpleasant odor, a sweetness like old vomit. There didn’t seem to be a light source in the room other than that provided naturally by the sun, which at this time of the day admitted two narrow splinters that cut through the dust motes with a fierce intensity, burning on the floor. The only piece of furniture to be seen was an overstuffed gold colored ottoman sitting beneath one of the windows. The floor covered in ancient dust, with many footprints crossing it. There were more empty beer cans and wine bottles scattered around. Assorted loose change, some of it American currency, most of it not. Rodent droppings and strings of glass beads. Strange symbols on the walls and ceiling in red spray paint, a kind of pseudo-hieroglyphics, intertwining circles, the heads of cats and birds. It’s like a combination frat house and cult headquarters. “You out there,” a voice called from the other room. “Skulking around. Come inside and join us.” Although Tad didn’t recognize the voice, which was deep and throaty, he had little doubt who was speaking. He stepped hesitantly around the corner. No telling what to expect here. Just stay cool.
Woods Page 10