In Wilderness

by Diane Thomas

  When she goes back inside the house, he thinks about her being there, the things she does that he can’t see. Sometimes he’ll pick just one, imagine himself with her while it’s happening. Her stirring dinner in that big iron stew pot. Rabbit, deer meat, something he’s killed and brought her. Her standing at the stove just like his mama did. Him watching there beside her like his mama’s little Danny Boy. Her, his mama, asking if he wants to lick the spoon.

  Later, them sitting opposite each other at the table sopping gravy off their plates with soft white bread. Him trapping her narrow foot between both of his. She’s not his mama now.

  13

  On Foot

  WHOEVER STRIPPED YOUR CAR WON’T COME BACK. NO, THEY KNOW coming back’s a very foolish thing to do. And anyway, they’re not the sorts of people who go tramping through the woods. They’re people who hang out in bars in seedy neighborhoods. Or at stock car races.

  How, then, did they know where to find your car?

  They didn’t. They came upon it by accident. It was a crime of opportunity.

  But why were they driving down a road that leads nowhere in the first place?

  They took a wrong turn. They were lost.

  Then why did they go to the trouble to buy a cart and unload all your stuff into it?

  Because they have some sort of moral code, after all. It just doesn’t include not stripping cars.

  Maybe they thought the car was stolen and that someone had abandoned it, so whatever they chose to do to it was perfectly okay.

  Maybe. Maybe so.

  It all churns in her head night and day, causes her to startle at familiar sounds, makes her more tired than she has been in weeks. She hates carrying the gun and still won’t load it. If it were loaded she might well be afraid to pick it up, terrified of holding something in her hand that could end someone’s life through one small, inadvertent movement on her part.

  Banking on hard work to clear her mind, she builds three more raised beds inside the garden. In this way pass several sunny days she barely notices.

  THEN SHE’S RUNNING HER hand over all the shelves in the dark recesses of the pie safe, looking for beans that might have spilled out of their sacks. There aren’t any. Well, three. And not a thimbleful of rice. And there aren’t dandelion greens along the privy path, garden path, or pond’s edge either, as her irresponsible guidebooks more or less had promised. Too early. And too late to thin the fringy little garden plants and eat the excess, she’s already done that. Hard not to eat the larger ones as well.

  She must learn to keep up better with the rice, the beans. Should have bought more, more of everything, before somebody stripped her car. Should know by now to plan for change, loss, the unexpected. Fill the back seat, trunk, passenger seat with beans, rice, nails, seeds, candles, winter squash, cabbages, anything she might remotely need. You never know what’s going to happen. Best plan for the worst right from the start.

  She sits on a bench, her shoulders hunched, and stares at the cart parked by the door. She’s pulled it, full, uphill over the trail, the roughest ground she’ll need to cover. Good to know, but she has never walked to town. How far is it? How long will it take? Does she have strength enough to get there? More importantly, does she have strength enough to get both there and back?

  Maybe it doesn’t matter. As she sees it, she’s got two choices. She can set out tomorrow before the sun rises and try to make it back before it sets, or she can stay here and starve. Six weeks ago she might simply have stayed and snuggled up next to the gun. Now, however, that does not look like a particularly useful option. In fact, it’s an option she can scarcely comprehend.

  She goes over to the cart, shakes it, bounces it lightly on the floor, bends down and checks its wheels, spins each, kicks one. Tomorrow’s Saturday, country folk come to town and day-trippers from Atlanta. Strangers will see her pulling the cart along the highway. Strangers who might be the ones who stripped her car.

  Enough. They took everything they could pry loose. Not likely they’ll be coming back for more.

  This evening she reads by candlelight in her Weeds and Wildflowers book until her eyes sting in the dimness. An oil lamp would be nice; she could buy one in town, wrap it in something so it can’t get broken on the trail. She blows out her candle, listens to the tree frogs. Deafening as they are, after a while you cease to hear them. They’re still singing, you’re just used to them; a person can get used to lots of things after a while, no longer notice them. Maybe someday she’ll get used to living so alone, used to feeling like she’s being watched. In the small patch of sky visible out her front window, she can see Orion’s Belt. Tomorrow ought to be fine weather.

  IT’S BARELY LIGHT WHEN she starts out. Last thing, she slips the gun into the empty rice sack, lays it in the bottom of the cart. It’ll frighten anyone she points it at, no matter that it isn’t loaded. On the trail she is alert to danger, looks and listens to make sure she isn’t being followed. Sniffs the air. Detects a flowering redbud, a grove of blossoming dogwoods, long before either one comes into view, lifts her chin with pride at this new skill.

  Yet a different and troubling odor has begun to seep in underneath the wild, familiar scents, like an unpleasant thought that will not be repressed. It’s oily and acrid, as if from a fire, except she can’t see any smoke. As she nears the highway, the smell grows more pervasive, adds to itself a sickening sweetness that’s a mockery of flowers; then something else, a fool’s idea of cake. Up ahead’s the little clapboard grocery, she can see it through the trees. What she smells is exhaust from cars, trucks out on the highway, perfumes and lotions worn by customers in the little store, cellophane-wrapped snack cakes. People.

  The highway’s asphalt surface sparkles, hurts her eyes and dizzies her. When a huge silver Oldsmobile streaks past blaring “I wanna hold your haaand,” she springs aside in panic, nearly toppling the cart into a ditch. Soon as she can, she runs across the road and walks facing the traffic, a safety rule she knew until this moment just from books. Nonetheless, long before she gets to Elkmont her muscles ache from tensing every time a car speeds past.

  The town coalesces gradually out of surrounding farms and woods, until suddenly there’s the square, with its columned courthouse and its granite monument “To Our Confederate Dead.” As she crosses the street the courthouse tower clock strikes nine. She’s made good time.

  Hardware store, post office, grocery, she rushes through her errands; she is not self-sufficient, never will be, a disappointment she’d rather not dwell on. She does not visit the bookstore or the clothing store and does not stop to eat the lunch she’s brought. She is tired; her body has begun to hurt. She wants only to get back to the cabin, forgets once again even to glance down that part of the highway that leads out of Elkmont and into the wider world.

  The hike back home is longer, hotter, dustier than the same distance had been in the early morning with an empty cart. She tries not to look at the shimmering road and does not stop to rest. When she turns off at the little clapboard store, the smell of cheap cake swells her throat. She jerks the cart behind a large red oak and retches on the ground, hikes the rest of the way panting and drenched in a cold sweat. At the cabin she heats a pan of water, strips off her clothes. With a new bar of Ivory soap she scrubs the residue of Elkmont from her skin, then washes her fake-flower-smelling garments.

  When it’s done she still feels disoriented, as if her true self has wandered far away.

  14

  In the Snow

  THE NEXT MORNING THERE’S NO SUN. AT THE PRIVY SHE POKES AT her belly; the old hurts are back. She has expected this. When she stands the air is ice against her skin. Yet she doesn’t move, stays still a long time inside the small enclosure as if in a frozen trance. Throughout her illness there have always been strange, isolated days, peaceful as the eyes of hurricanes, when she felt almost as good as anybody else. The only difference this time, there were more of them.

  Back at the cabin, she stays in b
ed and shivers until the pewter sky begins to darken, gets up only to light a hearth fire. Moves her sleeping bag in front of it, then burrows deep inside, pretends her own breathing is that of something else, until at last she sleeps.

  But it’s a ragged sleep, filled with shreds of dreams and memories. Her father closing the apartment door behind him that last time so carefully it didn’t make a sound; her mother’s fingers digging into both her shoulders like claws, “Don’t run after him.” Later, in that same too-hot afternoon, her mother’s foot furiously rocking the sewing machine treadle, Katherine’s new blue sundress taking shape too fast from pattern pieces on the floor.

  Toward morning Katherine dreams the deer has come and she can see it lying in the snow outside her cabin wall, then wakes so cold even the sleeping bag can’t warm her. The fire has died to embers, the moonlight turned to dawn light, but with that same eerie, blue-white glow. The wind that moaned last night shrieks now, bending the skinny trees like grass. It’s snowing. Hard. In the third week of March. She slides out of her sleeping bag, steadies herself against a dizzying wash of nausea, stokes the fire. Crawls back inside her sleeping bag. She can pass this one day without going outside.

  The rest of the day she shakes with chills and throws up periodically into a pot brought from the kitchen. Memories of Elkmont’s odors rise into her throat. Outside, the wind screams like a live thing being torn in two. Finally, a thick, viscous sleep draws her into its red-edged darkness and she curls up like a baby.

  She dreams she holds her baby as he turns to ice—Where had she been? Why was she not paying attention?—and wakes to find the hearth fire gone to ashes and the walls slicked with grease-colored light from the late afternoon. The room stinks and the gray-green cold is everywhere. She shivers violently, tries to sit up. A wavering darkness beats behind her eyes.

  Yet she sees all she needs to. She is out of wood. Even the fire inside the kitchen stove has died.

  You’ll die, too, if you can’t make it to the shed and bring back more.

  Does it matter? Dying’s what you came for; here’s your grand chance. You don’t need to raise a finger, death without culpability. Who knows what slender shred of time you might gain otherwise? Perhaps only hours. Perhaps only pain.

  So, does it matter?

  There’s only one way to know.

  Her clothes are near the door—her flannel shirt, jeans, boots, gardening gloves, her long red coat with its ridiculous fur trim. When she gets up to go to them, it sets the room to whirling. When she tries to put them on, their coldness steals her air. She throws her coat over her nightgown, steps into her boots, takes her backpack from its wall hook. The human body can perform amazing feats when summoned. A lone mother lifts a Volkswagen to rescue her trapped child—you read about these things. And she, Katherine, can open a door, make her way across a porch and out into the wind and snow so she won’t freeze and die.

  If you plunge your hand in boiling water, for that first split second it feels cold. Snow’s the opposite: It burns. This snow drives at her mixed with hard sleet pellets that hiss and sting and stick to her gloves. The woodshed path is white, hidden, but it runs right of the chestnut oak.

  Or does it?

  Her feet sink into drifts that force her to step high to keep from falling. Inside her coat, her body is thin, hot metal. A sharp pain in her chest reverberates with every heartbeat. She is so small, to a bird high in the sky no more than a red berry. She is not healed; why should it matter if she gets where she is going? The bird always flies on.

  But now, ahead of her, a faint patch of pale gray inside the swirling white. Please let it be the woodshed. It does matter if she gets there. It matters a great deal. One step, another, straight ahead.

  Inside the lean-to’s shelter, her stillness hurts her much more than the walking. How pleasant it would be to sit here on the ground and rest, but there’s no time. Time only to pile the driest stovewood into her backpack, all it will hold. When she shoulders the pack, its weight slams her to her knees. To rise again takes all her strength—for such a little bit of wood, hardly a day’s worth for the stove and nothing for the hearth. To stay warm she’ll need to sleep in the kitchen, far from the deer’s reassuring breath.

  And if she sleeps somewhere distant from its breathing, she herself might cease to breathe. Who’s to say that can’t be true?

  If she turns her coat into a sling, she can bring logs large enough for the fireplace. Her not wearing it won’t make much difference—going back will take less time than getting here, she’s left a trail. And anyway, the effort of carrying the wood will keep her warm; people don’t freeze to death in five minutes. She strips off her coat, throws three heavy fireplace logs into it, draws its edges up around them. After the first few shocking seconds she no longer feels the cold.

  Except in her feet, which hurt more than she could ever have imagined.

  But the snow is falling harder, already filling in her footprints. She shoulders her backpack, drags her improvised tote with both hands and starts for the cabin, pushing hard against the wind. The wind pushes back. Peering ahead into the swirling snow is like staring into an endless maze of rooms, the forest rooms that beckoned her that first day. But unlike those woodsy rooms that let her walk on past, these snowy rooms are irresistible. She enters one and gauzy curtains close behind her, thicken into walls. The spaces these snowy walls enclose are small—alcoves, anterooms—but open into larger rooms beyond.

  She’s less conscious of her pain now; her whole body’s growing numb. Everything’s gone calm and dreamlike as she leans into the wind. When she topples into a drift, she sees no reason for alarm, lets go of her coat, watches its wood scatter, black against the snow, the unconscious artistry of it something to remember.

  Smart to quit walking when she did. No point to it. She can rest in this small room until the weather clears. That’s what it’s for: a waiting room. Granules of snow collecting now inside the folds of her nightgown, as is their nature. She closes her eyes, at peace in her four walls, waits in this white room, this waiting room.

  For what? Not for the snow to stop, she likes it here, her feet have even ceased to hurt. No, she waits for something that’s supposed to happen, the reason why she’s here. She waits for Michael to come bringing her child, carrying it in his arms. Hers and Tim’s child, which should have been hers and Michael’s. Let the dead carry the dead, isn’t that the way it goes? She has vomited up everything inside her that is sickness. Now she is pure enough to go to Michael, pure enough to hold her son. In this white waiting room, snow swirling all around them.

  “Get up.”

  Her numb heart lurches. “Michael?” Spoken so soft he’ll never hear.

  “Get up, lady. Get up.”

  Snow sifts into her hair.

  “Ka-ther-ine, get up. Go home.”

  He’s said her name. Michael is in the adjoining room, she sees his shadow. Yet he makes no move to come to her. And he has not brought their son.

  Clumsily, slowly, she gathers the spilled wood back into her coat, ties up its corners, pushes her hands deep in the drifted snow and tries to rise. Stands at last with a cry of pain that shatters all the snow-white rooms. Cries out again with every step, until she drops the coat and all its hearth wood, closes her hand around the porch rail of the cabin.

  Later, this will be the last thing she remembers.

  15

  Danny’s Long Dream

  TOUCHING HER, EVEN A LITTLE, IS THE MOST DANGEROUS THING HE can do. If he does it, even just to pick her up out here and carry her inside so she won’t freeze, he breaks his number one commandment. If he breaks his own commandment, he will go to his own hell. A whole goddamn hell just for him.

  Well, shit, what’s he supposed to do? Leave her here to die not ten feet from her door? If she dies that’s the end of watching her. And all he’s done to keep her here won’t go for shit.

  There’s just one answer: He will operate under new rules. Special rules jus
t for today. Because today is an extenuating circumstance. By these rules he still can’t touch her. Not really, not her bare skin. And that includes her face and hands. Even her hair that falls by accident over his wrist when he carries her inside and lays her down. He shrinks from it, shakes his hand free.

  He probably should touch her. Take off her wet clothes so she won’t catch pneumonia. Zip her in her sleeping bag so she’ll stay warm. As it is, all he can do is go out for more wood and build a huge and everlasting kitchen-stove fire, drag her sleeping bag beside it, pick her up off the front-room floor and dump her in there on her side so her wet clothes’ll dry.

  The cotton of her gown feels soft and velvety, like the outside parts of his own ear.

  She’s shivering from the cold, passed out and frowning. He spreads the damp coat over her, the only cover he can find. Empties out the pot she puked in.

  Get out, Danny, before the dumb bitch comes awake.

  And yet he stands a long time in the kitchen doorway, looking at her and at everything around her. Thinking how nights she’ll cook herself a meal in that big cast-iron stove pot, eat it off that pewter plate there on the shelf. Eat sitting at his picnic table. He backs out into the front room, sits on the only bench he comes to. Stares across the room at the other bench, turned upside down under a window, full of dirt with green shoots coming out of it. Wonders what it means and why she did it—the Dead Lady’s full of mysteries. On the table there’s a burned-down stub of candle in a little metal holder, that book about weeds. His mind’s eye sees her sitting on that other bench, across from him, her head bent over the weed book, reading by the candle’s light. Her dark hair parts at the back of her neck, falls forward past her shoulders.