We Went to the Woods

by Caite Dolan-Leach

  Chapter 12

  Summer arrived suddenly, as it often does. One morning, instead of seeing the glimmers of frost on the grass, you wake up and it’s already warm outside. The lilacs look wilted, browned at the edges. By midday, you’re sweating. The dandelions erupt.

  The sun seemed to loosen the tension that had been burgeoning between Louisa and Beau, and Jack was seemingly walking on air, measuring his delicate buds and saplings what seemed like every other hour, crouching down in the field to see if his bean shoots had emerged. He deliberated every morning when it would be safe to move his tomato seedlings into the ground. Louisa was also particularly invested in this delicate question of timing, as tomatoes were, she claimed, her spirit animal. Chloe sang and trilled on a flute she had borrowed from a friend and was teaching herself to play. At the moment, she favored spritely Celtic airs. Beau took long walks around the edges of the property, his sharp eyes always hunting for something edible, new, or beautiful. He brought us each posies of wildflowers: pink lady’s slippers, mayapples, lupine, ferns. Chloe, not realizing what they were, strung a garland of wild hops around the pillars of her cabin, and Jack decided to experiment with them, mumbling something about wet-hopped ale, jotting down notes in the pad he kept with him. He spent a day constructing trellises in the small clearing behind his cabin, and Louisa looked annoyed until Chloe explained what it was for. Louisa was in favor of anything that could supplement her larder.

  In the midst of our large-scale political concerns (it was the summer of the 2016 primaries), Louisa amplified her efforts to put an end to her neighbor’s farming. She had convinced Rudy to file some petitions, and something that I vaguely understood to be a cease-and-desist order had been issued to the Larsons. Beau pointed out that this rather clearly identified us as hostile, and I mumbled something similar about fences and neighbors, but Louisa was uninterested in our objections.

  “I want them to know that I know what they’re up to! They’re counting on complacency—so much of this world is! They think we’ll just roll over and let them fuck us in the ass with Citizens United. Shop at Target and be good worker bees. Fuck that. And fuck Chuck Larson.”

  I would frequently mouth this inevitable tagline whenever she concluded a rant; once, Beau saw me do it and burst out laughing. I was absurdly pleased.

  “Fuck Chuck Larson” had become her mantra, and she spent a significant percentage of her time fretting about Larson’s comings and goings. She installed herself in an old deer stand at the edge of the field and logged spraying times, fertilizing days, number of people who came and went. She took pictures of the property, tractors, and employees. Whenever a person or equipment encroached on what she believed to be her land, she came barreling out of the tree brandishing some document or other, apoplectically berating whosoever dared to trundle into her world. She had heated conversations on the phone with Rudy and the unfortunate lawyer he had saddled the case with, supposedly on the grounds that he was more experienced in property law and environmental issues. I once even overheard Louisa on the phone with her mother. It was a clipped, uncomfortable conversation, and I could tell that Louisa was trying to elicit her support, if not her legal expertise. But from her taut mouth and the uneasy way she paced around her cabin, I suspected that Ms. Jackson was not especially forthcoming with either, and was also coming up short on maternal indulgence and sympathy.

  “More or less what I expected,” Louisa answered curtly when I asked her what her mother had said. She seemed disinclined to talk any further about it. Personally, I felt it was probably good for Louisa to have a dash of cold water thrown on her machinations, but I certainly didn’t want to volunteer for the job. I’ll confess to some cowardice, even, in that I would sometimes let her pressure me into accompanying her on her “reconnaissance missions.” Though I refused to confront the burly older men who drove the Larsons’ tractors, I did take pictures of Louisa doing so, holding up her legal documents like some sort of medieval sword, prepared to vanquish these environmental desecrators. Yet again, I was complicit in my passivity.

  While Jack joined in with Louisa’s invective quite enthusiastically—citing court cases he had read about on his weekly excursions to both the public and the Cornell libraries, where he would happily prowl the stacks for hours—Chloe and Beau distanced themselves. Chloe because she hated the conflict, and Beau for indeterminate reasons that seemed related to his general desire for secrecy. I got the impression that he felt that Louisa’s blatant, provocative campaign was simply bad warfare. This made me nervous, but I was loath to bring it up to anyone, least of all Louisa. A decision I deeply regret. But perhaps part of me longed for the chaos too.

  * * *

  —

  The morning of the fire, we were drinking an unpleasant mustard tea (yet another Jackian experimentation); it had been concocted from foraged herbs and greens and tasted basically like boiled dandelions. Dandelions, in fact, may have featured prominently in the recipe that day; “Jack’s Tea” was different every morning.

  It was warm outside, so we sat clustered around the picnic table, making a list of what needed to be accomplished that day, as well as during the rest of the week. Jack liked to break everything down into short-term and long-term goals, and he had an elaborate, color-coded key of tasks, partly in his head, partly transcribed in what we now thought of as the Homestead Almanac, our little log of this first year’s successes and failures. Jack, the founder of said publication, was the primary author and custodian, but we all undertook to make the occasional contribution. The sight of this journal invariably made me think guiltily of the notebook and the growing compendium of my own project, hidden in my cabin, hoarded there for my own nighttime subterfuge. I had yet to (and in fact would not, during my tenure at the Homestead) show it to anyone—the pleasure of that little text, and the possibilities it afforded me, was a private one.

  The evening before, I had watched the nocturnal migration of the gaslights, swirling in one of their usual constellations. At one point, I had noted that all three cabins were dark, and, as though fooled by a magician’s three-cup trick, I realized that I had lost track of where the respective marbles had ended up. I considered my inattention a good sign for my mental health, and I was prepared to call it a night when I saw a figure, presumably Beau, slink back to his cabin. The light stayed on for a minute or two before the Homestead again went completely dark. I had set a box near the wall so Argos could leap more easily in and out of the mezzanine bed, and he had long since tucked himself in. After Beau’s return, I slunk up to bed, shoving Argos’s long legs out of the way to clear a nook for myself.

  That morning, we sat sipping “tea,” still in our pajamas (Chloe slinky in her kimono, naturally), arguing over who would have to clear brambles and weeds and shake things up with the composting toilet. We were all eager to harvest some salad greens. Argos was pacing around the table, occasionally plopping his large head in my lap in search of an absent scratch or a forgotten crumb. Normally he sat flopped in the dust at our feet, but I didn’t register his antsiness until I smelled smoke.

  Louisa and Chloe seemed to sense it the same moment I did, and Louisa leapt up from the table to race into the big cabin, where she was cooking porridge with berries on the stovetop.

  “I better not have burned that fucking pan,” I heard her cry as she dashed up the steps. But she appeared only a moment later with a puzzled expression. “Stove’s fine in here,” she said from the steps. In a primal gesture, we all simultaneously lifted our snouts into the air to sniff. Fire.

  “It’s too wet for a forest fire,” Jack said, if somewhat uncertainly. This seemed true, though; we’d had plenty of spring showers, rejoicing each time.

  “Everyone check your cabins,” Louisa snapped, clearing the stairs in a quick jump. We all dashed to make sure our lamps hadn’t fallen over or our mattresses spontaneously combusted. We reappeared at the same time, shaking our heads.


  “Look,” Chloe said, pointing. “Over there. Smoke.” We all turned to follow where her finger gestured, behind the back field.

  “You don’t think—if those fucking Larsons did anything back there, I’ll sue them for this whole damn county!” Louisa cried, rushing back to her cabin for her duck boots. We all set off at a jog, rushing through the woods. Argos outstripped us all, racing ahead only to circle back and collect us periodically. The back field was roughly half a mile away, and we reached it after a few minutes, me and Jack light-footed in the lead.

  “Holy fuck,” I said.

  “Jesus,” Jack said. We stood staring as the others arrived, Louisa panting and red-faced.

  “Fuck me,” she said, staring at the flames. The Larsons’ massive tractor billowed smoke and fire, a sooty plume stretching up from the cab and rising above the tree line. As we watched, the windshield exploded outward from the heat.

  “We need to go,” Beau said evenly. He tugged at Louisa’s elbow, and she allowed herself to be steered away—but only for a few yards. Her head snapped back to stare at the fire; she seemed to be transfixed by the inferno.

  “Should we call the fire department?” Chloe suggested anxiously. “I mean, couldn’t this start a forest fire?”

  “The ground and the wood are wet,” Beau answered, pointing at a muddy footprint in illustration. “It’ll keep for a few minutes. Let’s get back to the cabins.” He seemed to want distance between us and the fire, whereas Louisa clearly wanted to stay and watch the blaze.

  “Serves those assholes right,” she spat, her face splitting into a worrisome grin. “For once they might have a sense of what their industry costs.”

  “Who do you think did it?” Chloe asked, looking around.

  “They probably did it so they could claim it was us,” Louisa insisted, gesticulating wildly at the vehicle. “Frame us and take the insurance.”

  “Frame us, Louisa? Listen to yourself,” Jack said.

  “To make us look unhinged! Then they can undercut us if—when—the lawsuit gets to court. Say we harassed them.”

  “Some people might say that even without the arson,” I muttered.

  “Do you have any idea how much a tractor like that costs?” Jack asked. “That is a hell of a price to pay for one field and a neighborly dispute. Insurance probably won’t settle if it looks intentional.”

  “One tractor means nothing to them! They know what they stand to lose if our lawsuit succeeds. They’ll use our strategy of being persistent against us, claiming that we’re overly invested”—I could see the gears of her mind turning, her legal breeding evident in her quick assessment of the opposing side—“and they’ll say that we’ve gone outside the law. Those fuckers will get away with it, and their insurance will pay for it!”

  There was a desperate, grasping quality in Louisa’s argument, and I could see that she didn’t really believe her accusation at all. Which raised a question: Why was she bothering? If she knew it wasn’t the Larsons, that meant she had some inkling of who had set the fire. I watched her twitchy face and wondered what she might be capable of.

  “Well, whoever did this couldn’t have done it too long ago,” Beau pointed out. “This fire certainly hasn’t been going all night.”

  Beau had remained silent during Louisa’s incoherent rant, but his desire to get away from the field and its wreckage was evident. The fire had probably been lit as we were waking, putting the kettle on to boil. The arsonist was probably not that far away from us. I whirled around, certain that we were being watched from the deer stand, from the woods. The birds were quiet, and I tugged down the sleeves of my suddenly inadequate T-shirt. Surely Beau wouldn’t? But I believed that he was capable of erratic, reckless choices. Would he dare? Would he do it for Louisa? But he’d been with us all morning. Almost conspicuously so.

  “We need to get back home immediately. Someone could show up here any second,” Louisa said curtly. “Come on. We need to call my lawyer.”

  She was on the phone with Rudy before we reached the Homestead, informing him of the basics in clipped tones. I knew she must be anxious, because normally she would be overly informative, would use too many words. But she was being very careful to say only what she knew and was trying not to speculate. Already coaching herself as a witness.

  “He says if we call the cops, it will look less suspicious,” she said immediately upon hanging up. “Especially since we likely left footprints. He also says the insurance company will almost definitely investigate, and we should probably plan on a criminal investigation.” We all flinched.

  “But we didn’t do it,” Chloe said. There was an uneasy silence.

  “Obviously,” Louisa said after a pause. “Unless somebody would like to confess?” She looked us each square in the eye. No one said anything. Unsurprisingly. I gazed around at my friends but could glean nothing from their expressions. Even Jack’s guileless face looked shut down. “Okay, next question,” she went on. “Anyone have any contact with the Larsons that we aren’t aware of? Run-ins on the road? Words that could be taken out of context?” We all shook our heads mutely. “Right. Okay. We’re going to come under the most scrutiny, so everyone has to be totally clear on what’s happened. We were trying to bring a lawsuit against them. We had every reason to think we would get what we wanted by legal means. We would never, under any circumstances, take matters into our own hands.” I half-expected her to ask us to recite these lines back to her, but we all just nodded diligently. I wondered what my parents would say if I added convicted arsonist to my list of disgraces.

  “Okay, if we’re ready, I’m calling the cops.”

  * * *

  I remember giving my statement, clipped and restricted to the facts. I was overly circumspect in my attempts not to incriminate anyone—I didn’t know whether I suspected we had somehow been involved or I was just scared. The cops finished with me quickly; my unassuming looks and quiet voice once again worked in my favor. They spoke to Louisa the longest, predictably. Rudy appeared while the police were still jotting down notes, and I couldn’t help wondering if his presence somehow made us appear guilty. And of course I couldn’t help wondering whether we—or one of us—was. I thought of Beau’s light, flickering on at strange times during the night. I thought of Louisa’s intense psychological fixation on the Larsons’ field. Of Chloe’s willingness to play along with any fantasy, her eagerness to start any fire. Of Jack’s impulsivity, his failure to recognize the permanence of choices, of how silly he could get when he was stoned. I sat on the steps of my cabin and stroked Argos’s grimy head whenever he strolled up to me, pausing in his patrol. Too anxious to continue monitoring the true-crime scene unfurling on my own little piece of paradise, I eventually fetched my gloves and went to go tear up burdock from the edges of the garden, dousing the ragged ground with vinegar when I had finished wrenching them from the ground. Dripping with sweat, I watched the two cops pile into their patrol car and drive off, leaving the Homestead quiet and worried.

  We were all on edge for the rest of the day. Rudy left, making us promise not to give further statements and not to go anywhere near the back field. Chloe disappeared into her cabin, I assumed to lie down, wearing that glassy expression that so worried me. Jack turned over the compost with an intense fervor. Beau disappeared, naturally. I wandered listlessly from the garden to the soggy woodland patch where Jack’s mushroom spores were under cultivation, unable to remember what was on today’s short-term list. I wanted to sequester myself to work on my project, poring over my notes and flipping through the library books I had surreptitiously borrowed. I was getting off on my own secrecy.

  Wandering through the orchard, I found Louisa in a tree, draped over a branch like a languorous monkey. Her elbow was pillowed on a ragged book. With her chin hovering above the curled, chipped pages, she read aloud, without looking at me:

  I am enamour’d of growi
ng out-doors,

  Of men that live among cattle or taste of the ocean or woods,

  Of the builders and steerers of ships and the wielders of axes and mauls, and the drivers of horses,

  I can eat and sleep with them week in and week out.

  What is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest, is Me,

  Me going in for my chances, spending for vast returns,

  Adorning myself to bestow myself on the first that will take me,

  Not asking the sky to come down to my good will,

  Scattering it freely forever.

  “ ‘Song of Myself,’ ” I said, hoisting myself up into the branches of the apple tree to perch in a jagged crook near her. I had to tilt my hips and slot them into the rough Y of the branches, so that I listed towards the trunk.

  “Sometimes I worry that we’re asking the sky to come down to us,” she said, chin now propped on the book, eyes gazing at the Homestead, or something farther off.

  “Well, we’re asking capitalism to shove off and let us re-create our own small-scale agrarian society,” I pointed out. “It’s not the sky, but it might as well be.”

  “I understand that we’re probably destined for failure. That the world and the culture we live in have a vested interest in us failing, because for us to succeed would mean that there’s an alternative. But. But.” Louisa righted herself on the branch to turn her head towards me. “But don’t we have to try? Isn’t it somehow our obligation?”

  “Obviously, we all believe that,” I said. “Why else would we agree to eat quinoa with fiddleheads for a solid month straight? And drink that awful mead of Jack’s?”

  “Ugh, what I wouldn’t give for a real beer!” Louisa laughed. “We all agree on sacrificing something; we all believe we can do something. But what if this isn’t the way to do it? Maybe we should all be politicians. Writing political manifestos. You should maybe start your own publication. I don’t know.”