In Wilderness

by Diane Thomas

  His feet left bloody prints on the slate porch steps from burrs he’d stepped on without knowing. Pinecones. Thorns.

  That’s what got to him, her standing there across the lawn, what pulled him through his Long Dream to its rightful end. Later, he woke in darkness, his thin fists jammed under the blanket. Lit a lantern, headed out, his still-sore feet seeking the soft, damp orchard earth, his hands seeking the ripe peaches that weighed down its trees.

  It’s all right.

  Climbing back up the mountain, he can’t get the words out of his head. What she said when he asked her could he stop back by again. “It’s all right.” He turns it around inside his mind. Never dreamed her voice would sound so soft.

  “It’s all right.” So much more than “yes.”

  It’s. All. Right. His feet beat time to it. Each word and all that it suggests. Pooling, spreading.

  It’s. Contraction of “it is,” a hurry-up word tumbling out as if she couldn’t wait. It: Noun, subject. On the face of it, him coming to her in the garden. But who’s to say? “It” could mean anything. Or everything. Is: Verb, to be, exist, exist as. Equal. “It” equals “right,” that’s how she said it. Old Professor Beckham would adore his redneck ass.

  Right: Good, perfect, proper, correct, permitted. Encouraged? Yes. Desired? Yes!

  All: The key word, meat and heart of the matter. Danny says it out loud, slowly pushing the A’s long airstream from his chest, curling his tongue around the double Ls. If “all” is a noun, then “all” equals “it,” and “it” truly does mean fucking “everything.” Whole, entire, complete, be-all and end-all, alpha and omega. Universe. If “all” is an adverb, then “it” is “right” in every way.

  Case closed. Any way you look at it, according to the woman in the garden, everything he wants to do with her is right and good all through it.

  Danny climbs the mountain tall and strong. It’s. All. Right. His sins are washed away.

  His whole way home he keeps care of her tomato like it’s made of glass. Then he sets it on the center of the mantel in his sleeping room, well out of Dog’s excited reach, and stares at it. Katherine held it with her own two hands. Not just touched it, or brushed it with her fingers. Carried it, her hands all wrapped around it, set it down outside the gate. Before that, grew it out of nothing but a seed she’d pressed between her thumb and forefinger, her soft flesh surrounding it before she dropped it in the ground. The red fruit smells of sun, other plants, the earth that grew it. And of Katherine. Who smells also of those things. The thought’s a heat inside him.

  He has placed the tomato in a square of sunlight, watches it across the room all afternoon. Watches the light move over it and then away. He takes his knife out of its sheath, same knife he took into the water, held all through his sin-cleansing so now his knife is sin-cleansed, too. Goes to the mantel, slices the tomato lengthwise down its middle with his sin-cleansed knife.

  Lord, it’s the prettiest thing inside. He’s never really looked at one that way, how it makes a pattern you might find inside somebody’s heart. He slices a piece off one of the halves, flicks the wet seeds out with the knife point, then pushes them with the blade into a wet little pile. If he spreads them out, dries them, keeps them till next spring and plants them, he’ll have tomatoes that came out of hers. The idea rips through his insides, clears a space for his recollection of her voice to thrum, like a hollow reed you hold straight out to catch the wind. Should maybe have brought her some other book this morning. Maybe The Secret Garden. Would have fit better with the peaches. But it’s for children. That Forster book’s got romance in it. And other silly things that women like. People riding in carriages, sitting in drawing rooms. That sort of shit. So maybe it’s okay.

  He can’t sit still. Attacks his floor with the block sander so furiously Dog runs out the door still hungry. Sawdust rises in the air, then falls. He brushes it into neat little piles with his index finger. Yeah, he could live out a whole life of days like this one.

  Only, it’s not wise to be too happy. Happy is the orange you get at Christmas—you prize it because you only get one once a year. He mustn’t go to her too often. In the broad day. In the garden. Needs to hold it back till he can’t stand it longer, him being away from her like that.

  He falls asleep in the late afternoon in a hot square of sunlight, so its darkening will wake him, let him know it’s time to head down to the cabin once again to be a silent witness to her dreams.

  TONIGHT, WHEN HE WRAPS his arms and legs around the corner where she lies, places his cheek against its still-warm stones and joins his breath with her soft breathing, he feels a quickening inside him—made out of her voice; and the tomato; and the July sun. The last time he had a day so perfect, it was with his mama.

  She’d packed cornbread and beans for just the two of them, hiked with him to a laurel slick, led him through it by the hand and out the other side into a meadow. There she spread her shawl for them to sit on and they ate the lunch she’d brought, drank water from the creek out of a mason jar. “You look just like your daddy,” she had told him and he liked that. He went to sleep there, his head pillowed in her lap. The last day before he started school.

  That blond hippie girl in San Francisco, she’d looked something like her.

  “With arms wide open, He’ll pardon you.”

  It’s. All. Right.

  23

  “Unbraid Your Hair”

  AFTERNOONS BRING FAR-OFF THUNDER, NEVER ANY RAIN. NIGHTS, she lies awake, breathing with the deer and staring at the moonlight on the floor. Days, she passes at once calm and oddly jangled, wanting to sit still yet far too restless for it. She feels too alive, imagines things too starkly. The tiny Jack standing so proud and erect, not preacherly at all, in each Jack-in-the-pulpit plant along the trail. A hummingbird’s invisible, fast-beating heart. No matter how she tries, she cannot weave the day the boy came to the garden. All she gets is something white, with here and there thin lines. Some straw-colored, a few dark red.

  He’d looked not much older than Michael had been. Blond like Michael, thinner, more hawklike in the face. If she and Michael had made love and she had had his baby, he’d be close to this boy’s age. Perhaps resemble him.

  Outside, on the cabin porch, peeling and slicing the ripest of the peaches, tossing the peels to birds gathered in the nearest trees, flies circling the leavings. Inside, standing over the iron pot, cooking the fruit down to a sweet, thick syrup that will keep awhile, sucking it off her fingers, licking it out of the spaces in between. Why does she keep thinking of him? He lives alone, has no one. No wife, father, mother, brother, sister, child. She’s not sure how she knows this, just that it rises off him like an odor.

  The next day in the garden she senses his watching as a soft cloak settling around her shoulders, but he does not show himself. His presence, even unseen, relaxes her. In the same way she believes he lives alone, she also believes he will not harm her. She picks the largest of the yellow squashes, runs her fingers over it before laying it gently in her basket; knows exactly where her womb is, traces it outside her clothing.

  Of course this is nonsense, the kind that comes of living much too long alone. She doesn’t know a thing about him. Except his being here means she should load her pistol, carry it whenever she sets foot outdoors, point it at him, tell him to keep the hell away. She also knows she will not, cannot, do this. Instead, she stays longer in the garden, invents tasks. Wishes even there was more work needed on the horrid fence. A day goes by, then two. He said he lived over the mountain. Maybe he comes this way infrequently, just every month or so. But he will stop by, he said so. He asked for her permission.

  A week passes. She has read the book he gave her. Twice, even though she also read it years before. Is losing hope that he will come again. She leaves the garden early, as before, finishes her half-done weaving, no longer thinks to trace her womb. Distracts herself by paying close attention to a small brown bird that’s started visiting the garde
n, each day lighting on something closer to her—a strand of the wire fence, a tomato stake. Until one day it perches on her shoulder, lets her walk with it, its tiny claws pick-picking at her shirt, her skin. Its soft warbling, so close to her ear, sounds like creek water over stones. Companionship’s what she had wanted from the boy, that’s all.

  How many days now since she’s seen him? Enough that she has eaten all the peaches, even the last of the syrup. Enough that there are wide gaps now between the times she thinks of him. One morning the bird flies too soon away, and she looks up to see the boy there at the meadow’s edge, wearing the same white clothes he wore before.

  “Hi there,” she says, as casually as she can.

  “Hello. Am I bothering you?”

  She shakes her head. “No, it’s all right.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  He looks so earnest, so intense, and also looks like he’s about to smile. Someone should comb his hair, it’s full of knots and tangles. Someone.

  He settles himself cross-legged on the ground, leans his back against the chestnut oak, his hands folded in his lap. Follows her with gray eyes darkened from the shade and doesn’t speak for a long time. She tries not to do anything differently than if he weren’t there, tries not to look at him, tries not to pick only the vegetables on his side of the garden. Tries not to think how much he looks like Michael. The cicadas’ buzzing intensifies the heat as the sun climbs.

  “It’s pretty there inside that fence. All orderly and green.”

  She starts, had grown used to his silence.

  “Yes, isn’t it? Thank you.”

  He nods. Again that almost smile.

  Harder now to concentrate on garden chores, on her fingers picking off the bush beans, dropping them into the basket, cradling the ripe tomatoes. Harder not to look at him, not to imagine how he looks looking at her. He’s her nearest neighbor, that’s all it is. Another human being like herself, like the man in town that day wielding his push broom.

  No, this is different.

  “Stand up sometimes where I can see you. When I don’t see you for a while it’s spooky. Like you’re a ghost that disappears.”

  This time he does smile. At himself, the corners of his mouth turned down.

  She straightens, steps out from between the squashes and the cucumbers. “I’m here.”

  “Yeah, I can see that now.”

  What is she doing? Why does she just stand there smiling back at him?

  “Unbraid your hair.”

  “What?”

  That startling grown-man voice. “Unbraid your hair.”

  She is afraid to move, to breathe, afraid he’ll run away like a wild animal. As if tranced, she lifts her hands to the back of her neck, then slides them down along her single plait to loose its band.

  “Look. There’s a breeze yonder inside the fence. You see it in one spot, then in another. Memaw used to say a breeze like that’s come looking for a present.”

  Memaw. Used to.

  He stares at her and doesn’t smile.

  “Unbraid your hair and let the breeze play in it.”

  She looks back at him, runs her fingers through the plaited strands, shakes her head to free them. Her hair lifts gently off her neck.

  “Look at that old breeze. That’s what he came for.”

  “My name is Katherine. Katherine Reid.” Her mouth is dry. The words come out with difficulty.

  “My name’s Danny MacLean. I’m pleased to know you.”

  The first of this afternoon’s dry thunder rolls itself around his voice, curls into it. The boy untangles his legs, jumps to his feet as if he means to run to her.

  Instead, he jerks his head up, scans the sky.

  “I got to go.”

  He turns away and disappears, his white shirt a brief flash among the trees. And she is once again alone.

  INSIDE THE CABIN, GARDEN bounty buries her table. She shoves aside tomatoes to make a place for the small bowl of vegetables and rice that is her dinner, the rice kernels dry and slightly burnt from when her attention wandered.

  Unbraid your hair.

  She shakes her loose hair vigorously, fretfully, combs her fingers through it. He should have come into the garden.

  And then what?

  When she rinses her bowl, the water runs slowly from the copper faucet. It’s not the first time and it’s getting worse. A rusted pipe, a leak, something she should see to.

  Unbraid your hair.

  That deep voice, its strange, grown-up authority—she burned the rice.

  Everything looks all right under the sink. That likely means the problem’s in the pipe outside that brings the water from the stream. She needs to go to town, ask at the hardware store what she should do. Needs to see people on the street, hear voices in the shops. Needs to buy a canner and as many canning jars as she can manage, buy more yarn, keeps forgetting to buy bullets for the gun.

  Unbraid your hair.

  She drops onto a bench and clamps her hands over her ears. Rocks there, squeezing her arms across her belly. Squeezing her thighs together. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

  To think of him that way.

  To think of him at all.

  Gets up, goes to the loom, warps it quick in anger. Yanks the weft strands through its middle.

  There.

  And there.

  Brings to life a wild, uneven thing, hairy and terrifying. Dark and bristly hunks of rough wool yarns and stiff dried swamp grass cradling a soft, lush center—purples, corals, reds—yarns like pillows in her hands. She weaves past sundown into lamplight, through the darkness. Binds off her work only when the sky grows light, then drops onto the floor. Sleeps curled around the finished weaving, far from the deer’s sweet, rhythmic breath.

  WHEN SHE WAKES, STIFF, to a sun high in the sky, she knows what she must do. Roll up last night’s work without looking at it, slam it in her cart, then climb into the loft and get the other one, with its spare, straw-colored lines, roll that one up, too. Take them both in to that gallery. Get him out of her house, out of her mind.

  On the trail she does not hear the birds, nor recognize the serviceberry tree that dropped such sweet blooms back in April. Does not see the dead log where the edible boletus mushrooms grow, nor even note the outcropping where she can look down at her mangled car. She looks and listens for only one thing. Where is the boy? Is he on some far ridge looking down at her? Or is he close, behind this chestnut oak, that hickory, so near she can reach out and touch him? She sees him in every shadow, hears him in every rustling leaf.

  Unbraid your hair.

  ELKMONT’S SHIMMERING SIDEWALKS DIZZY her in the silver heat. She pulls her cart into the courthouse park to drink at the fountain. He was the boy on the bench that day, the boy with the stringy hair and the hole in his boot, who held up two fingers in a peace sign. It’s been going on that long. The realization creates an upheaval deep inside her, a shuddering she has to stand quite still to bear.

  When she is able once again to move, walk, drink the hot stream from the outdoor fountain, she makes her way out of the green shade toward the sidewalk. A little boy in a blue sailor suit toddles past on chubby, dimpled legs, heads for the street. Katherine rushes after him, scoops him up just after he steps off the sidewalk. The child’s small, frightened heart beats hard against her own.

  “You mustn’t run into the street like that.”

  She brushes his fine blond hair out of his eyes. Won’t, can’t, put him down.

  A sour-faced young woman in an orange maternity smock rushes toward her, wheeling a baby in a stroller.

  “That’s my boy. I’ll take him now.”

  Katherine glares at her with fierce eyes. “He ran into the street.”

  The woman turns, watches a single car creep past.

  “Give him to me. Clyde Junior, let go of the lady’s sleeve!”

  Katherine relinquishes the boy into his mother’s sturdy arms. “No harm done,” she reassures the woman, wheels her
cart around, heads in the opposite direction so no one can see her anger, or the yearning in her eyes. Because there had been harm. The boy’s mother turned away, was not paying attention. She, Katherine, would never turn away.

  Unbraid your hair.

  In the hardware store she finds a canner and the proper jars. But there’s no such thing as “plumbers’ tape,” and the goop they sell her, “pipe dope,” makes her so dizzy when she sniffs it that she asks the clerk to wrap it in three sacks. The thin man with the Adam’s apple, who still doesn’t recognize her from that long-gone February day, looks at her like she’s crazy but not like she’s “summer people.” Her shoes are much too sensible, her clothes too worn.

  In the little gallery by the bookshop, she remembers the young couple who looked in the window, how they stood locked together, pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. Something she has never known. Not with Tim, whose truest love had always been the agency; not even with Michael. Something she will never know. Regret’s as real as a taste on your tongue. She unrolls last night’s weaving, its wild wools and grasses discordant, shocking against the counter’s smooth and quiet maple. A plump woman in a denim skirt emerges from the studio. Her eyes widen as she sinks her fingertips into the weaving’s red and swollen center.

  She takes both pieces. They will hang now in the little gallery for strangers to look at and buy, and she, Katherine, will get seventy percent. But that’s not what she thinks of. Only that the boy, Danny MacLean, is now out of her life as if he never had come into it. Never had stared at her from a courthouse bench, nor watched her from a ridgetop or behind a chestnut oak, had never sat cross-legged in the shade outside her garden.

  She is dizzy on the walk home, starts at every vehicle that speeds past, retches as soon as she gets beyond the little grocery, the price she pays for venturing outside the wilderness. On the turnoff road she hears all the birds and names them from their calls, listens to the distant thunder, the light wind ruffling the trees, sees tones and textures all around her, in the dirt beneath her feet. Her life, even alone, is rich and good. She is herself once more.