In Wilderness

by Diane Thomas

  And let familiar terrors seize her. Where is she? She doesn’t know this place. Is it a hospital? Did she collapse somewhere and get brought here?

  She can’t remember.

  Is she hemorrhaging? She feels around inside her mouth, inside her clothes, looks at her hands. Nothing. Oh, dear God. What if she’s in some warehouse for the insane? She guards against it and it’s never happened, but there’s always a first time. She remembers she does not remember things too well. Remembers her strategies on these occasions. Stay calm; assess the situation, one piece of verifiable information at a time; try to breathe normally.

  First things first. She can’t have died, she hurts too badly. In all the usual places, also the soles of her feet and the muscles in her upper arms. Unnerving, this hurting in odd places. That’s how new symptoms happen, they just show up and stay.

  There’s a window in the adjacent wall and it does not have bars on it. A good sign. Outside there are trees, a great lot of trees. Maybe more trees than she’s ever seen all at one time. A bird she doesn’t know the name of trills from one of them, a lovely sound—she hardly knows the names of any birds, much less what they sound like. This one is gray, but then they all are, aren’t they? Or brown. Except bluebirds and cardinals and jays. The room she’s in has stone walls, rough wooden ceiling beams, and a hard, austere beauty, like an old church. A poor church with nothing extra, only dignity. Some things are beautiful, no matter what.

  Beauty. Seven out-of-focus Polaroids. They gave them to her at the closing. Somehow she got here, to the pictures, then she slept. With all her clothes on, even her red coat. This is her first morning. All this she is now certain of. Something else: An animal breathed outside her wall last night and frightened her. Of this she is less sure.

  On the floor, beside a trestle table halfway across the room, is a pile that looks like everything she dragged into the forest in her sleeping bag. In it there’s a gun, which when you get right down to it is why she’s here. She can shoot herself today, right now, and get it over with. A quick, clean end to things, not like with the pills. She slides her hand down in her coat pocket, feels the six hard, reassuring lumps of bullets tied inside their bandanna. So simple, easy. Bang. The thought causes her breath to come in strangled gulps.

  Or she can wait—a day, a week, a month or two—until her pain’s too great to bear.

  She slides out of her sleeping bag, stands on wobbly legs. Balancing first with one hand against the wall and then by clinging to the edge of the trestle table, she makes her way to the jumble of her belongings, picks up the gun between two fingers, shoves its hard, cold barrel into her mouth. Being. Nothingness. No thingness and therefore no pain.

  How badly does she want it?

  Not yet badly enough.

  She replaces the gun among her more innocent possessions. By electing not to shoot herself this morning, she can spend the whole day living here. Wriggle into her boots, hike to the privy, bring back firewood and put food on the stove, eat something so she won’t feel so weak. Maybe then heat water for a bath. These options turn the room quite bright, the edges of things crisp and clear. She puts on her warm wool sweater and her boots, goes out onto the porch.

  And beauty truly is there all around her. So much more than in the photographs, or even on the trail. Beauty that slams into her hard. The cold air smells sharp and clean and makes her want to take in greedy gulps of it. Last night’s light snow glistens on the porch railings and lies delicately inside curled dry leaves on the ground. Bare winter trees sway slightly in the light wind, like blades of grass. They’re different among themselves. Their shapes are different, their barks are various colors, not the same, and their limbs bend at different angles. The small twigs at their tips appear to wrap the sky in delicate, dark nettings. She makes a frame out of her thumbs and forefingers, examines sections of the woods before her; each is equally lovely. A large, rustbrown bird perched in a tree not twenty feet away spreads its wings and flies off with a harsh cry ending in a dying fall. Katherine watches the soaring bird until it’s out of sight, a bird so large she might ride on its shoulders.

  Along the privy path she clings to trees. For balance, but also to experience the textures of their barks. Once there, she finds her pain’s no more than she can bear—one can bear a lot more of a lot of things than one imagines; also, if you bite down hard on the soft part of your hand, but not so hard you make it bleed, your simultaneous pain in some unrelated body part will not seem quite so great.

  Or if you distract your thoughts from it. What animal breathed against her wall last night? A deer? There should be tracks. Small, deep holes in the wet ground, like in her Child’s Book of Forest Animals. She looks for examples on her way back to the cabin, finds none and turns to picking up wood—small, damp stove-wood branches to sundry on the porch, a few larger ones for the fireplace later. Wet wood smells beautiful, but it’s heavier than it looks. Collecting it’s something she didn’t plan for, something she must do each day.

  Best shoot yourself as soon as possible.

  That’s not funny.

  Oh, but it is. Here you’re tramping around in the middle of nowhere picking up sticks so you won’t freeze to death, when all you came for in the first place was to die. Small wonder skeletons all grin.

  The trail forks here. Last night she hadn’t noticed. The broader path leads back to the cabin, past a briar thicket she dodged earlier, its thorny, meandering sticks easy to spot. The narrower path she remembers from the plat as a thin, wavering line that leads out to the pond and then the meadow. Magical to see it come alive, that slender blue-ink thread. She can’t help but follow it, no matter how she feels. Drops her wood in such a way it points her to the cabin, moves tentatively onto the narrower path, again clings to trees to save her strength. There’s the walking back to also be considered, mustn’t forget that.

  But already here are cattails. Cattails at the bottom of a tangled bank. A jutting rock she can almost get to. Can get to. And sit on.

  Close up, the water smells reedy and cold. Shadowy fish dart beneath its surface. One leaps, flashes a silvery rainbow, sends concentric circles over the dark water. As if on cue, a pair of mallards explode out of the marsh and squawk themselves into the sky—as if they, and the fish, are part of some perfect nature print she has magically wandered into. How can such beauty exist with no one to observe it? Do people take these sights for granted? Her time’s too short for that.

  Around the next bend, the meadow is a blowing field of wild grass and pine seedlings grown up past her knees. As she walks into it, waves of small, startled birds rise up ahead of her then drift back down a few feet farther on. Surrounding the meadow’s center is a rusted fence. Its fragile gate swings open easily. Inside, the worn-down ridges of old furrows rise beneath her feet like ancient graves.

  Hard to say how large it was, this fenced-off garden, what fraction of an acre. Large enough for whoever lived here. Now it’s the wind that lives here, in the grasses. And it sings, that’s all she knows to call it. Long, low notes, like breath blown across the slender neck of an empty Coke bottle. The grass smells of sunshine, the wind rushes into her open mouth. At the far edge of the meadow, a large tree with a thick trunk and branches reaching to the sky stands with the morning sun behind it, not unlike the tree out of her dream. She closes her eyes, extends her arms, turns once around slowly and smiles.

  “The perfect place to die.”

  What a dreadful thing to make of it. An ad.

  Ad that would win a Clio. Old habits die hard.

  She laughs. It has a different ring when there’s no one to hear it. Fuller and unguarded.

  Hiking back, arms filled with still-damp branches, she rounds a bend and, for a disorienting moment, in the same way one experiences déjà vu, sees the cabin as a place where she lives and belongs. She drops her wood on the porch, goes to the corner where she heard the deer the night before, brushes away the dry leaves and peers at the ground. There’s nothing
there. No tracks of any kind.

  Perhaps she doesn’t yet know what to look for.

  Perhaps her deer’s a spirit deer that floats.

  Hardly. More likely is that fear can prompt hallucinations, aural as well as visual, and there was nothing outside her wall last night at all.

  Inside the cabin, two cabbages, huge and green, lie with everything else on the floor beside the trestle table. They are everything she sees. When she picks one up, it’s cold and alive between her hands. One leaf, two leaves, three leaves, so sweet you chew them slowly. Now, sit here on this bench, breathe quietly. Oh, miracle! She keeps it down.

  Lying on top of her sleeping bag on the sun-warmed floor, she closes her eyes for her midmorning nap, the low point of her day. No one naps mornings except people like her. Damaged, sick, dying. Outside, what has to be a mockingbird sings whole long songs, never repeats itself. They sing because they’re lonely, so the guidebooks say; they sing because they’re looking for a mate. If she lives out her remaining four months of allotted time, she’ll be here when it finds one. She’ll be here when the trees take on that first green haze of spring and then leaf out. Growing up, she used to watch for it out her bedroom window. The year she turned eleven, a small gray bird built a nest in the top branches of the tallest tree, where she could see it. One morning while she was in school the bird hatched three sky-blue eggs. It seemed magical, a miracle, because she hadn’t been there.

  IT WAS THAT SAME time of year, when she began once more keeping watch over the trees, that she met Michael. She was sixteen, like all her friends, the lot of them just starting to go out with boys in cars, living for the musty smells of Packards and Hudsons when their dashboard radios got hot, the scratch of wool upholstery through their thin spring skirts. The air was wet and heavy; their winter coats were not yet packed away in cedar chests. It happened fast. He was three years older, out of school, which made her feel all at the same time very young and very old and very special. He had played football and she knew even back then who he was, the way you know a movie star. Now he was in the Army, saving to pay for college. In April they had their picture taken at her junior prom under a cardboard archway decorated with crepe paper roses. He had his arm around her. They had only just come from frantically tasting each other in the back seat of his car; anyone could see it in the photograph, in their eyes. She can’t remember if she knew then he was leaving.

  Of course she wrote him every day; he wrote her every day he could. In June, after the trees all got their leaves, the phone rang.

  Okinawa. A hideous and unfamiliar word. The details didn’t matter, only that he was dead and all the life in her died with him. Their plans. Because there had been plans, there had not been any question he’d come back and they’d get married. And so they saved themselves for it, that future, even the night before he left. No one so young imagines anyone they know will die.

  They wouldn’t let her see inside his coffin. Wouldn’t remove the flag, pry up the nails. Her mother had to lead her from the church when it was over. Because she could not move for sobbing, no one would take her to his grave. When she got home she tore the dress she’d had on into little pieces, gripped the pieces with her teeth and ripped them once again, threw them in the garbage. Would have burned them had she been alone.

  How she got through her senior year she can’t remember, only that she marched down the aisle with all her classmates in a white cap and gown, hating herself for still being alive. That fall, she rode the bus downtown to night school. Sat at desks struck by shafts of dust-filled late-afternoon light, memorized shorthand squiggles, learned to type. Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country. Banged the keys so hard she bruised her fingertips.

  When you latch on to learning desperately, as a distraction, it’s easy to rise to the head of the class. Easy afterwards to get a good job, then a better one, then a still better one at a place like Clopton Advertising. On Christmas Eve that year, she came home to find her mother lying on the kitchen floor, dead beside their open refrigerator. An enormous turkey sat defrosting in a dishpan on the bottom shelf, below an array of small brown paper grocery sacks filled with green beans, sweet potatoes, cornmeal for stuffing, oranges and flaked coconut for the ambrosia. The way her dead mother’s hands curled under her chin like a small child’s stayed with her. And how she looked so small lying there, as if her whole life had been of no consequence. A husband who left her for no apparent reason, a career selling cosmetics in a second-best department store. Katherine feared her mother’s circumstances were hereditary; she herself had already known great love and tragedy and there seemed nothing left. When Tim Clopton asked to marry her, she let him.

  When she got pregnant, the baby kicked hard early on and she came back to herself in a fierce way, determined to give this child love enough that nothing in the world would ever harm him. Yet somehow she hadn’t, and the harm had been grievous—proof her capacity for a great love was used up.

  If her dead son were here now, alive, he’d be four years old and she would give to him the singing grass, the squawking ducks, the leaping trout, the cabin.

  SHE GETS UP FROM her sleeping bag, sits at the table gazing at her heaped possessions near her feet. Their presence pleases her, suggests she’ll have a life here in this place, a future even if it’s short. But now they must be put away. On pegs near the door, in storage bins by the fireplace, in the kitchen pie safe with its lovely punched-tin doors. Here’s the hatchet, so comfortable in her hand the day she bought it. If the hatchet is a good man with strong arms in a plaid wool shirt, then the gun’s a twitchy hoodlum talking out the side of his mouth: “Yeah, baby, I’ll take care of you.”

  And here’s her brand new notebook, the single thing she is most glad to find. She’s been two days without it, long to go without one’s memory. Because that’s what they’ve become, the notebooks. Of necessity. Until three years ago, she could lie in bed each night and run the whole day she had just lived through her mind like a movie she’d already seen. Then gradually her mind’s projectionist grew sloppy with his splices, prone to walkouts, shutdowns, packing up his reels and leaving town with only a few snippets, single frames, forgotten on the floor. She is still good with far-backs and once-upon-a-times, but yesterday, this morning, even five minutes ago, can fly away from her just like the little birds out in the meadow. The notebooks fill in the blanks. Sometimes even one or two words written in a notebook can bring back an entire reel of film. Sometimes. But not often.

  On the first page of every notebook, she has always written what she fears she will forget in an emergency: name, age, address and phone, place of business, family doctor. At some point she began listing her bizarre array of symptoms, alphabetically to keep up with them: bleeding, confusion, exhaustion, fainting, headaches, inflammation (gastrointestinal, genitourinary, some talk even of her brain swelling), nausea, seizures, and the last one, pain—in expository writing, as in the Rule of Three, the point of greatest emphasis is always last. Thus pain is permitted to defy alphabetizing. There were new symptoms with each notebook; none of the old ones ever went away. She used to list someone’s name to contact in the event of an emergency but quit after she sold her interest in the agency; there was no longer anybody to write down.

  But this notebook is different. She writes her name, Katherine Reid, no longer Clopton, not for a long time. And her age, thirty-eight, then realizes she no longer has a place of business, nor a doctor. Nor even an address, only a narrow trail off a dirt road any postman would ignore. After some thought she writes, I live in the stone cabin past the end of the turnoff by the Wickles Store. If I am alive that’s where I need to be and I can get there. If I am dead, dispose of me as you will; I apologize for any inconvenience this might cause you. Please reimburse any expense from my possessions. At the top of the second page she writes today’s date, February 14, 1967, pauses a moment, then adds, Valentine’s.

  In the notebooks she writes small and with no
margins, keeps her notations spare and to the point. She allows herself a page a day, front only. Each steno book lasts her three months; she has brought only the one. She runs her hands over the page she has just dated, likes the feel of the notebooks, how their cardboard covers make them hard to bend. Arrived last night. Immediately to bed. Something, a deer, breathing outside my wall. Woke midmorning. Tolerable pain.

  She means to write next about gathering wood and the importance of maintaining both the stove and hearth fires, but something in the jumbled pile in front of her distracts her. White-edged rectangles, bright as quilt pieces with vivid spots of color in their centers, are scattered through her drab possessions. Where did she get them? Why? She doesn’t quilt. Frightening she can’t remember.

  As if lifting a dead mouse by its tail, she picks one of the squares up by a corner. It’s made of paper. Stiff, white, coated paper framing a rather well-executed watercolor beet.

  Seeds. A small packet of beet seeds.

  And she’s brought lots of them—three, four, seven, nine, one dozen assorted envelopes of Thompson’s High-Yield Vegetable Seeds. They gleam so insistently her breath quickens. The one day her notebook was packed away out of her reach, she ends up with twelve envelopes of seeds she can’t remember buying.

  And four hours she can’t place.

  Occasionally, when she tries hard to think of something it will come to her, a scrap of film left on the floor. This time there’s nothing for a long while, and then only a mind’s-eye view so odd it makes no sense. An Adam’s apple sliding up and down in a man’s scrawny neck, a man who brings with him the memory of a pervasive smell of oil on metal, and of rubber.