by Diane Thomas
Yeah, you’re going to mess with her world, aren’t you, make it just a little different.
She’ll never notice. What harm can it do? Nothing but make her life some easier, though that’s not your intent. So what does it matter? You’re not fighting a fucking war these days, you’re just watching one dumb whore who came up here to die.
Still, you hadn’t ought to do it for another reason, hadn’t ought to go around touching shit you know she’ll touch. Puts you just one step away from touching her. One step. Every man walks down the road to Hell just one step at a time.
But not Danny. Danny has the power of his will. Danny will obey his almighty first commandment. Never touch again.
Shadows getting long, his favorite time except for pitch-black dark. Time when nowhere you might cast your eye is necessarily what it seems. A hollow stump might be a bear, might be a fender from a rusted-out Ford Fairlane. Might be Danny.
Danny loves the twilight, even though it’s nighttime gives you the best edge to move in close. Tree to tree, silent as a shadow, he sneaks toward the cabin. All the way up to the corner where her sleeping bag lies on the other side. He squats, sits, the stones cold between his thighs, hugs them loosely with both arms, rests his cheek against them. Through the broken mortar is the Dead Lady settling down. Yeah, this is what he came for, the small sighs and whimpers that give way to whispered breaths of sleep. He times his own breaths to them—can’t get much closer to someone than that—stays by her through the night. He’d kill for reefer strong enough to let him see her dreams.
When a stiff breeze stirs itself near morning, he uses it to cover his few sounds as he gets up and makes his way some distance, toward the tree stump where she left the axe. Creeps beyond it in a wide arc, past the thicket where she almost found him. Moves the deadfalls away from his hiding place, out to where she can get them easy. Moves other branches in close from the woods.
Changes things.
It ain’t ’cause you have to. It’s just ’cause she’s there.
Spring
6
Seeds
SOMETHING’S WRONG. SHE HARDLY NAPS ANYMORE, MAYBE TEN OR fifteen minutes and that’s all, finishes her routine tasks in half the time with energy to spare, rarely throws up her food. It’s been a month; she’s been told to expect by now the start of organs shutting down. Every day she checks for signs, but they don’t come. From the looks of things, she’s not dying according to schedule.
To say this is worrisome is not quite accurate but close. Closer is to say it’s a situation that demands strict vigilance. Because it’s producing change, an unfamiliar dilemma: She has time on her hands, time when she wants more than to sleep, or sit and stare, a luxury she can’t remember and hence did not plan for. And time on one’s hands begs to be filled.
When there aren’t other diversions, one’s mind answers the call. And hers has stepped up to the plate to fill her empty hours with craziness. Today, as is increasingly the case, the sunrise moved her to a whole morning of joyous tears at the mere fact of her continued existence. But in the afternoons, when shadows take on a certain length and shape, she cowers, keeps away from windows, certain she is being watched. Nights, she dives into her sleeping bag before it’s dark enough to light a candle; who knows what its bright flame might draw? One joy, one fear, is as foolish as another, she knows this. Nonetheless, they come.
To defend against them, she invents activities, distractions bordering on obsessions. From her tree book she has learned, as best she could in winter, the names of all the trees she can see from the cabin and along the privy path. Excluding the dogwoods, which she came here knowing, the chestnut oaks were easiest: huge Aubrey Beardsley concoctions, gnarled and black, with thick trunks and twisted, horrormovie limbs. The other oaks she mostly told from acorns or their brown leaves rotting on the ground. White, post, red, scarlet, black, pin, chinquapin—amazing how so many can exist in this one place. The poplars are straight and tall, the hickories less so, the branches of young maples angle like calligraphy. Her favorites, the delicate and slender beeches, keep their parchment leaves all winter and stand gathered in low places like clutches of people talking. For several days she had a mystery tree, then pegged it as a serviceberry, known for its “ragged, white, wedding-bouquet blossoms with a languid scent.” She’s sketched in her notebook—on the backs of pages—every tree, its shape, and a leaf when she could find one.
There’s a bright-colored snake lives in the privy. In the warmest part of the day it stretches out where the floor meets the wall, like the piece of decorative molding she at first mistook it for. When she reached out to touch it, the snake convulsed against her hand—its skin smooth, not at all slimy—then streaked away. Back at the cabin she looked it up in her Child’s Book of Forest Animals, the wafer-thin booklet she bought only because she thought it might fill the last space in her sleeping bag. Unlike larger, more thorough guidebooks, it told her in a hurry everything about snakes she was in a hurry to find out, mainly that the privy snake, a corn snake, would not kill her. The Child’s Book of Forest Animals did not tell her why, considering her prognosis, she thought this fact important.
Now she watches for the corn snake in the privy the same way she listens for the deer at night outside her wall. But these wonders aren’t nearly enough to fill her empty hours. In all her advance planning she never allowed for time. Not the time she has left—that’s a black crow perching always on her shoulder and she counts its feathers last thing every day. No, it’s this other time, this time-on-her-hands time, leisure time, she failed to consider. Today, after resting maybe fifteen minutes, she simply gets up and sits on one of the benches. There’s nothing left for her to do. The house is clean, clothes and dishes put away, four days’ worth of firewood stacked by size out on the porch, more under the woodshed overhang. She’s eaten lunch, picked some dry weeds on her privy walk, arranged them in her extra cup and set them on the table. It’s too early to build up the fire for supper, so she sits, hands folded in her lap.
Her little cabin has the simple, functional beauty of a thing created over time with loving care, a life’s work. Even the knobs on the storage cabinets take into account the grain of their wood. The trestle table and its benches, though perhaps crafted more hurriedly, show a similar sensibility and belong here in this place. The same holds true for the “few good things” she brought. Even the seed packets belong, as they gleam from the mantel. She stares at them a long while, then gets up and brings them to the table. A dozen lovely envelopes, each different and all chosen by a random sweep of her hand. Even the backs are pretty, with their pastel diagrams of planting zones. Her cabin is in zone seven.
She fans out the envelopes, arranges them by the colors of their vegetables: parsley, kale, broccoli, green bell pepper, sage, cabbage, lettuce, turnip, yellow summer squash, golden winter squash, carrot, beet.
If their names make a litany, their various planting directions are a poem:
Plant in late winter.
Sow after the last frost.
When the ground is warm to touch.
In full sun.
In partial shade.
In small hills.
Scatter soil one-eighth inch.
Water in.
Thin at two inches.
Harvest at sixty days.
Ninety. One hundred twenty.
Let the ground lie fallow until Spring.
Her work in the meadow starts innocently enough. No more than poking around, tugging up a patch of weeds here, kicking a rock there, examining the rusted fence. Something to do, a distraction. There’s a spading fork in the woodshed with a handle not too rotten. She uses it to poke between tree roots, under slick mats of last fall’s leaves and leaves from other falls before them, down to the dark, loamy soil. We are not here long, any of us.
It’s not a plan, standing inside the rusted fence at various times of day, turning in all directions to determine angles of the sun, amounts of shade from trees at
the forest’s edge, prevailing winds. Nor is dragging limbs and branches from the woods and piling them beside the fenced enclosure any sort of plan. It’s not a plan a few days later hiking to the car, bringing the shovel she bought at the hardware store, digging up each weed and seedling inside the enclosure until her every move is agony and bruises black as orchids bloom on her arms apparently from no more than the strain. It’s still not a plan, laying the collected limbs inside the fence in rectangles narrow enough for her to reach halfway across, or washing out the privy slop jar, using it to bring soil from the woods day after day until she’s filled all the rectangles. Nor is it a plan upending one of the picnic-table benches, dragging it to the sunny side of the front room, filling its box-like underside with small stones and loamy soil for seeds that call for indoor starting.
Not even on a windless noon, when she tears a tiny corner off the turnip envelope, shakes its granules out onto her palm, and sprinkles them into the vastness of her first raised bed, is it a plan. Mere specks that cannot possibly grow turnips. Turnips she may never live to see.
No. It’s not a plan. A plan requires a future.
ANOTHER TWO WEEKS GONE and she’s developed a new symptom: a focused, trance-like state, some variant of a daze. Her vision’s grown quite sharp and she looks only at right now.
It’s in this daze she turns over the other bench to make another indoor bed, and keeps on building outdoor garden beds for all the other seeds she owns and seeds she doesn’t own but can imagine owning. It’s in this daze she stops and listens to a pair of crows quarreling at tree line for a length of time so long it can be measured by the changing angle of the sun. Or lets the wind into her hearing, until it no longer sounds like traffic on some not-so-distant freeway but only like itself. This morning, as with all others now, she stokes her kitchen fire in darkness, rolls up her sleeping bag and sits on it to watch the dawn light filter through the trees; shows up ahead of time as if she’s bought a ticket. Later, she eats slowly. Her foods are few, but every day their tastes intensify. And nearly every day she keeps them down.
This wilderness that so recently was merely nameless trees on nameless ridges has grown infinitely complex and subtle. She writes in her notebook: Spring is felt before you see it; buds swell in the cold. My seeds sprout in a green fringe so frail I’m frightened for them. After dinner she waits for the sun to set just as she waited for its rise. Its afterglow flames up and fades; the birds grow quiet. If she looks away, when she looks back it’s dark.
This night she awakens to the sound of gentle rain that drowns out the deer’s breathing, imagines how her seeds will swell like small, expectant bellies, then drops back into sleep knowing she has prayed a prayer.
THE WEATHER’S WARMER NOW. In the garden a few days ago, she spied on a single ant most of a cloudless morning, as it marched along one of the stacked branches enclosing a just-planted bed. The ant disappeared periodically into patches of shade from the branch above it, only to emerge seconds or minutes later farther on. Mostly now she takes each morning one ant at a time. Works in the garden, dreams of harvesting full-grown vegetables, plans long walks, imagines sitting on her porch in moonlight.
But she does not, in fact, sit on her porch in moonlight. Something that surely has to do with seasonal changes in the slant of light, the length and shape of shadows, how they move, has put a thick, black smear inside her mind that spreads and clings like oil. On the few days she’s lingered in the garden past midday, this inner dark has come on her at what seems the same hour. And always suddenly, like a current of chill air that brushes against one’s skin on a hot afternoon. Or the intensity of something’s sudden gaze, something watching. She makes a point to tend her garden, chop her wood, perform all her outdoor chores now only during mornings, dreads her last hike to the privy in late afternoon. Afternoons, she doubts even the deer—she’s never found its tracks.
Perhaps it really is no more than fear of shadows, the way they move when wind blows through the trees. If this is so, then there will be some time of day that she has not yet noticed, when things become all right again and that black pall inside her thins and disappears. A point where it is safe to go outside, at least a little while. Perhaps some precise moment, just before the sun slides down below the trees. That time when all the shadows merge but it is not yet dark. That’s when she’ll go down to the privy.
Now.
Throw on her coat and run, if she still can. If she knows she can run, perhaps she won’t be so afraid.
It’s probably quite normal, her abnormal fear, a hardwired survival mechanism we all share. In cities you’re supposed to be afraid. It makes you lock your doors, stay out of alleys, keeps you safe. Perhaps the fear that keeps you safe in cities gets kicked into overdrive by isolation.
And yet come summer, she won’t be able to see three feet to either side of her on any of the paths. Even now, with all the trees still bare, if something crouched on the downside of a ridge less than three feet away she wouldn’t see it. In cities, someone is always near enough to hear you scream. Who would hear her in this lonesome place?
And there is something out there. Now. Twenty, thirty feet beyond the path, something she can’t quite see but hears. Or perhaps only senses—its eyes crawling over her skin. It’s moving parallel to her, causing changes in the light. Around the next bend is the privy. She runs toward it, dashes in and bars the door.
Takes comfort in the little bit of light that leaks in from a screened vent near the roof. Takes comfort even in the enclosure’s rank smells—and how someone improved upon the usual hole by inserting a slop jar she can empty. But the sun is almost down; she can’t stay here all night. Even assuming whatever thing that’s out there eventually slinks away and doesn’t bother her, if she stays she will almost surely freeze, catch pneumonia. Die—and not in any way she planned. She unbars the door, steps outside, runs.
To the cabin—the porch, the door, and then inside. She shoots the bolt, stands panting.
But it’s not over. What if the thing got in while you were gone?
Too frightened to move anything except her eyes, she stands with her back against the door, looks all around. The cabin’s full of places she can’t see. She crosses the room—on tiptoes, what good will that do?—lifts the lids on both the storage bins and peers in, cranes her neck to see up the hearth’s chimney, tiptoes to the kitchen, checks even the pie safe. Nothing.
There is one more place something could hide, if that something knew how to climb up there. She’s never once been in the loft, gave it only a quick glance her second or third day. Heights dizzied her when she was in the best of health; they terrify her now. And the loft steps are steep and narrow, more ladder than stairs. She would have to climb five of them to see up there.
Fear makes you weak. Fear also makes you strong. Two steps, three steps, four, one more.
Quick, look. Empty.
Nothing is hiding there. Nothing is hiding anywhere. She is a foolish woman. Her terror is all nonsense. Nothing more than a new symptom, something else to not give in to, to ignore.
7
A Journey
SWATHS OF VIOLETS BLOOM AGAINST THE GROUND AND BUDS HAVE popped out on the dogwoods. She has not only lived into the spring, she has outlasted her provisions. There’s hardly any food left in the house and only half a candle.
This morning she flipped back through her notebook entries, slid her index finger down each page. On the face of it, she’s hardly dying. Certainly seems strong enough to hike out to her car, drive to Elkmont.
Tonight she unrolls her sleeping bag in the same corner by the fireplace, curls deep inside it as the dark rolls in. In her safe shell she rides the night from sound to sound. The owl, whose soft call only deepens silence; sometimes a larger animal—a bear, a boar—crashing among more distant trees. But the sound she waits for, longs for, is that breathing, so in rhythm with her own, that leads her to believe she has an ally.
She has grown to think whatever an
imal is there protects her—from whatever other animal it is that terrifies her. Most nights it comes. Always at first she fears it but then settles down and lets it lull her into sleep. If she wakes in darkness it’s still there, a doe that steps so lightly she makes no sound and leaves no tracks.
On the few nights the doe does not come she sleeps more fitfully. Sometimes in the darkest part, as if in some dream, a wild cry echoes off the mountains with such a human sound it chills her. A bobcat, certainly. Nothing to fear. Nonetheless, she stares up at the cabin’s trusses, makes herself a stowaway on a sturdy ship rocking secure and out of reach on a calm sea.
She sleeps then, and all the night’s mystery seeps into her bones. It’s still there come morning, even sounds she has forgotten.
A DAWN MIST SHIMMERS among the trees and the hike out to her car is easy. She has lived to see the dry text in her guidebooks come alive. Hard, pale humps of edible fiddlehead ferns push up through the soft ground by the stream; tiny peeper frogs, drawn to wetness, sing out one at a time and then in chorus; a huge and beautiful pileated woodpecker, with its sleek red head and jungle cries, sweeps through the trees. Pay attention. You may never see these sights again.
She squeezes her hand around the list she carries folded in her pocket. Post office (rent a box), bank (open an account), supermarket (rice, beans, squash, cabbage, salt), hardware store (nails, screws, screwdriver, a second inside lock for the cabin door, candles, more bullets for the gun), bookshop (small paperback on gardening), dress shop (two cotton shirts—she failed to bring clothes for warm weather). A rocking chair would be so nice, but there’s no way she can bring it in on the trail.
The mist is burning off and she takes strong, sure strides. The ground, with all its textures, moves fast beneath her feet. During her time at the cabin, her sense of smell has grown extraordinarily keen. A strong scent of dampness leads to a cache of delicate boletus mushrooms on a decomposing log. She marks it with a cairn of stones; her guidebook says they’re good to eat. Not much farther on, she glimpses in the valley far below a sudden flash of too-bright yellow through the trees. Her car, neglected, mud spattered, its roof covered with small twigs and dried leaves, a city car that never once put in for this, poor thing.