In Wilderness

by Diane Thomas

  They three sit like that for what seems a long time. Then the dog gets up, goes to the door and stands there, as though she wants to be let out. Katherine opens the door, follows the dog outside. The animal circles the garden, stops beneath the oak that shaded Danny that first day, lies on the ground and peers into the wilderness beyond. Katherine follows the dog’s gaze, stares long. Stares until, as if in a trompe l’oeil painting, the jumbled mass of trees and undergrowth that’s the beginning of the forest arranges itself into those beckoning green chambers she has yearned toward for so long. Rooms opening one into another, endlessly. Rooms that must reach to the forest’s heart.

  Katherine circles the garden and moves toward them, as if pulled by some invisible cord. Looks once over her shoulder, but the dog has not followed. She wades alone through a thick tangle of fleabane daisies at the meadow’s edge, their feathery blooms filled with soft-spoken bees that do not make a move to sting her; then she walks into the wilderness, that dark, high-ceilinged green, where sun sifts in aslant, as through cathedral clerestories. That she might lose her way, should perhaps turn back, does not deter her. She walks on, creating her own path, as if she has a destination.

  The air, fragrant with moss and damp bark, grows cooler. Katherine turns slowly in a full circle. She’s not gone far, she’s certain of it, but can no longer see the garden, surely a trick of the peculiar light. A small wet-weather stream gurgles noisily near her feet. She continues alongside it, follows it deeper into the wilderness, whispers names of trees she passes, trees whose shapes, leaves, bark textures she memorized her first days in the cabin: red oak, white oak, chestnut oak, chinquapin, red maple, sweet gum, locust, beech, poplar, white pine, cedar, dogwood, serviceberry, a single princess tree.

  There’s little light now, though the sun’s still high. Her whole world’s turned a deep, watery green. The stream has widened between banks of laurel and rhododendron through which she must make her way. Her hand, when she places it against one of the chestnut oaks, comes away with the bark’s haunting fragrance. She cups it over her mouth and nose, breathes in, as she has done so many times before. And then walks on, deeper into the forest maze, until there’s hardly any light at all. The birds she hears in this place sing liquid, complex, unfamiliar songs. They flit high in the trees, do not descend, do not reveal themselves. Threads of mist glide past and dark leaves glisten with condensation that slides in soundless drops onto the mossy ground.

  For some time now her heart has felt less burdened. She skirts a thick expanse of ferns, enters another of the trees’ green chambers. She is not lost: The clearing, her cabin, and the garden are behind her to the west, as is Panther Mountain. Or are they to the south—or north, or east? She can see nothing now but trees, smell nothing but leaf mold, its odor old as the red earth she walks on: “Take me in.”

  A light breeze fluffs the small hairs on her arms as it might ruffle a bird’s downy breast feathers, then moves away. But the sound it made remains. Grows. Into long, low notes that call to mind the meadow’s singing grass. Yet unlike the grass’s one low note, these notes are held in harmony, as if by many voices.

  She advances with slow, measured steps toward the sound, which is beautiful. Then she stops. For it now comes from all around her, from rocks, leaves, trees, from fallen branches, jagged boulders, whitened bones, small flowers beneath her feet. From other living and dead things she cannot see, their individual notes distinct, each one, in tone and pitch. Yet joined, an exaltation.

  She lays her hands on the thick trunk of a sweet gum—to feel its vibrations, to know the sounds are real. The same way as that first night she pressed her palm flat against her cabin’s stones to feel the deer’s moist breathing that was Danny’s.

  When she takes her hand away the tree’s soothing hum lingers inside her. No, not the tree’s; when she tries to move away, the sound stays with her, in her. It is her sound, she knows this now, a sound that kins her to the rocks and trees: low, resonant, distinct. Katherine stands motionless and listens. Until her sound seems all there is, as if it has absorbed her, her corporeal self, and made her one with air. And with a second harmony—high, insistent, sweet, and like her own song emanating from inside her. The vibration of her unborn child.

  Katherine stands listening for a long time and with her full attention, then walks on inside these harmonies, inside the knowledge that she and her child are the same substance, and that their substance is the same substance as water, wind, the wild grass in the meadow, the boulders that jut out over the trail into the forest; the same substance as the bear, the owl, the mockingbird, the vole, and Danny.

  Her baby squirms inside her, its movements like the rainbow trout’s concentric circles on the quiet pond. Minutes, hours, there is no difference as she journeys deeper into wilderness—so wilderness can take her and her child, that singing air they have become, into itself, enfold them. She walks on, prepared for darkness, magnificence, and terror at the forest’s heart, prepared for sacrifice. But when the trees thin, accepts light instead. Accepts even that the music fades and she has come out where she started.

  At the garden.

  Epilogue

  A Brief History of Bartram’s

  Mountains, from an Interview

  on a Late Summer Afternoon

  THE WOMAN, VIRGINIA “PUG” WINSHIP, HOLDS THE CELL PHONE awkwardly against her left ear. It’s an upgrade, smaller than the one she’s used to. Stancil got it for her so she could take Facebook pictures of their grandchildren.

  The phone is ringing on the other end of the line. She leans back in her easy chair, so she can see both the lake and the mountains out the sliding glass deck doors, a view that generally calms her. She never would have volunteered for this position if she’d known it involved interviews.

  “Hello? Hello? Who’s calling?”

  She snaps to attention, sits upright in her chair. “This is Virginia Winship calling for Mr. Frank Carlisle, Sr.” Her actual name sounds strange to her, she has been Pug for so long.

  “You got him. What can I do for you?”

  Already, she’s caught off her guard, had counted on having to go through at least one, maybe several functionaries before getting him, rather like warm-up exercises before the main event. But here he is, right out the gate. His voice is gruff, a trifle phlegmy. An old man’s voice. An old man she may well have caused to get up from a comfortable lounger like hers and walk across a room with perhaps every step a goad to his arthritis pain, all to answer her unwanted call.

  “I chair the History Committee in Bartram’s Mountains, a community Carlisle-Colorado developed in north Georgia in the early 1970s.” She hurries her words, afraid he will hang up on her.

  “We’re doing a series of reports on what was here before. The first three covered prehistoric times and how our mountains formed; the Cherokees, who lived here until the Trail of Tears; and the farmers who came after and eked out their meager living on our rocky soil”—she has loved this phrase, perhaps too well, from the instant she wrote it—“until Carlisle-Colorado bought their farms and they could move to town or buy land somewhere else. Now I’m working on the fourth report, about the valley that became Lake Whippoorwill. Courthouse records show you purchased it several years after you assembled all the rest of what’s now Bartram’s Mountains.”

  She pauses, should not have said so much at once, wanted to get it over with.

  “I was curious why it took so long.” She takes a breath, had expected he would jump in by now with an answer. “My husband and I live on the lake, and so I guess I have a special interest.”

  “Ah, yes, Lake Whippoorwill.”

  She hopes this long-delayed response means that he’s ready for his turn now. Perhaps it will all go okay. Amazing how tense one’s shoulders get before one even notices.

  “You know that Carlisle-Colorado built a dozen or so places pretty much like Bartram’s Mountains,” Frank Carlisle continues. “Golf course, clubhouse, tennis center, riding stab
les, lake with a sand beach, the whole shebang. Can’t do it now. Land’s too dear and too hard to find. I’m eighty-eight years old, and I’d still do it if I could.”

  “Oh, my.” He’s eleven years older than even she herself, who for some years has felt so very ancient.

  “Bartram’s Mountains was the first, the good old days. Those mountains were so pretty I thought people ought to live on them, enjoy them. But there had to be a lake, you know. So we could sell enough high-priced lots to turn a good profit. No lake, no Bartram’s Mountains. Simple economics.”

  Virginia nods, forgetting for a moment that he cannot see her. Simple economics. A cold truth she has never thought about in relation to her beloved Bartram’s Mountains but that she can understand.

  “Getting the valley, so we could reroute the two creeks and fill it, was crucial. That valley was owned back then by a weaver woman name of Katherine Reid. Just her, no husband. I saw some of her weavings once. Looked downright peculiar. Wild. Like they might come to life and swallow you.”

  Virginia knows about the weavings. She copied the name off the deed and searched for her in Google, felt like a sneak doing it. One more new thing she can’t get used to, like the phone. Katherine—Virginia has come to think of her by her first name—had a show once at some important New York City gallery, she tells Frank Carlisle. “I tried to contact them but they’d gone out of business. A dead end.”

  He chuckles deep down in his throat. “Yeah, you won’t find her. She never did want to be found. We sent letter after letter saying we wanted to buy her land. That we’d pay top dollar for it, too. Never heard a peep.”

  A series of creaks on his end of the line calls to mind somebody settling back in an old wooden office chair.

  “Not one peep. Finally figured there was nothing for it but to go back there myself, see if she might be living on that land. I did, and sure enough she was.”

  “Katherine Reid lived here?”

  Virginia can’t say why this is a shock. Perhaps because she always thought of Bartram’s Mountains as carved out of virgin wilderness, even though deep down she knew better. Even before writing the report about the farms.

  “Sure did. Her little cottage is the rock pile at the bottom of Lake Whippoorwill. Lived back there like some hillbilly. Her, her little girl, and their scruffy old dog. No plumbing, no electricity. No nothing but a fenced-in garden, all a-tangle with green growing things like that was how they fed themselves. Hard to imagine in this day and age why anyone would choose to live that way.”

  Outside, the slant of the sun has changed, turning the blue-green mountains to late-afternoon tobacco gold.

  “What happened when you saw her?”

  “Well, she wouldn’t sell to us. Held us off for sixteen months. Knew she had us over a barrel.” His voice has climbed into an upper register.

  “But you got the lake land in the end.”

  “I reckon we just wore her down. She finally said she’d think about a land swap. Like for like. A piece of land she’d have to hike to get to and that never would be built around, far as the eye could see. For a while things just went back and forth, until it finally came down to two parcels, one in Colorado, one in North Carolina. Even then she kept on stalling. I came to think she meant to hold us off till she was dead and buried.”

  Virginia scribbles furiously in her notebook. This will be by far the most interesting History Committee report she’s ever delivered.

  “I’d never seen the like of it,” Frank Carlisle continues. “She wanted in her contract that Carlisle-Colorado had to build her an identical stone cabin to replace the one she would be vacating. Same with all the outbuildings, even the privy. Same materials and everything. We tried to work with her as best we could, but she wouldn’t budge. Finally, Wilt Bradberry started framing in the Holstons’ house, halfway down Panther Mountain where she saw it every day. That’s when it hit her things were never going to be the same.”

  “Which land parcel did she choose?” Virginia’s excitement rises. If Katherine’s in North Carolina, maybe she can track her down and talk with her. Meet her in Asheville for a good, long lunch.

  “Where is she? Oh, I can’t tell you that,” Frank Carlisle answers gravely. “She had it put right in her purchase contract the location of her residence can never be disclosed.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “Just wanted to be left alone, I guess. Although she probably sent the little girl to school, at least when she got older. Wouldn’t consider any place more than a two-mile hike out to a highway on a school bus route.”

  Virginia strives to hide her disappointment. “What was she like, the time you met her?” His answer will be all she ever knows of her.

  Frank Carlisle goes a long time without speaking, as if he’s gotten lost inside his thoughts.

  “To this day I can still see them standing on their porch,” he says at last. “Perfectly still, like they had some Indian, Native American, in them. Like they’d maybe come back from some distant time. Even the dog. I have to say Katherine Reid was a handsome woman. Something almost otherworldly happened when she turned her gaze on you. You felt you’d never been looked at or listened to so thoroughly in all your life, as if she was staring straight into your soul. Her little daughter—couldn’t have been much older than four—seemed already some the same. Brought me a dish of blueberries and a glass of spring water, without my asking.”

  Mr. Carlisle pauses, then adds, in a voice that sounds quite far away, “Even now I see them in my mind’s eye: her, her toddler, and their dog, standing there together on that porch, like in a photograph.”

  After a second or two, he breaks his own spell. “Tell me,” he says, his words clipped and crisp. “Has the snakeroot started running down the mountains yet?”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Snakeroot. White flowers. Bloom all over the mountains after the first cool late summer nights. They’re poison, you know. They’d kill a horse or cow that eats them; deer never will come near them. But they’re still one of the prettiest sights I’ve ever seen. Blossoms flow down the mountainsides like water.”

  “Oh, yes. They’ll cover the ridge behind our house about a month from now. I’d never heard their name.”

  “Most things about most mountains never change,” Frank Carlisle says then. “Year after year they hold on to what’s theirs and keep their mysteries.”

  Virginia feels something mildly unsettling starting up inside her. Like a thought that’s slow to form, only more so. She had meant to ask about that other thing, the thing that she found yesterday going through back issues of the Dunne County Advocate. How the men who cleared away the ruined mansion atop Panther Mountain had turned up the remains of two skeletons. One was a surveyor who went missing three years earlier; the other could not be identified.

  Now, however, she can see no point in bringing up this grisly incident, thanks Frank Carlisle for his time and they say their good-byes. Outside, the mountains are turning to deep purple. Soon the sun will set.

  She lays her annoying little phone down on the chair arm and realizes she is crying, soundlessly, tears sliding down her cheeks. She’s not quite sure why. Something to do with that poor woman, Katherine, having to leave her land so she, Virginia, and all the rest of Bartram’s Mountains could live on it, play golf and tennis on it, swim, hike, ride horses on it, all of which they all could just as easily do someplace else.

  But why cry over that? What’s done is done. Perhaps she’s only crying because of how Frank Carlisle remembered the white flowers after all those years, how he recalled their rightful name. Snakeroot. A name she herself had never thought to learn.

  She gets up, crosses the room, and puts her hand flat on one of the glass doors just over where she can see Panther Mountain, now nearly black beneath the sunset’s afterglow. She wishes she could touch the real mountain this way, cover it with her whole hand. This mountain that has been here since eons before even the Cherokee Indians.
The trees on Panther Mountain will die one by one and be replaced by other trees that may still be growing after Bartram’s Mountains—its clubhouse, golf course, tennis courts, roads, all its houses—have turned to mold and dust. When even the lake has filled with silt and disappeared. But Panther Mountain will not die. Nor will the other mountains. They will be here for her grandchildren and her grandchildren’s grandchildren, and their grandchildren’s grandchildren in turn. It makes her dizzy just to think about it.

  For an instant, her hand covering the mountain, warming the cold glass, Virginia knows what Katherine Reid knew, in the way one might experience a brief electric shock: That a mountain, or a wilderness, is very like a child, your child, whom you must cherish throughout all your life. Not because it’s right and good to do so, but because you are compelled to, in some unspoken partnership with life on earth.

  But that’s silly. It’s just her hand pressing a pane of glass.

  Or is it?

  Author’s Note

  In Wilderness, set in 1966, 1967, and 1968, presents two illnesses unrecognized at the time—post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and environmental illness (EI), also known as multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS)—and, in story, posits possible effects of this lack of recognition in two instances.

  The late 1960s were the years when developers throughout the mountain and coastal South began assembling huge tracts of land for “resort/​retirement communities.” Before that time, vast marsh and mountain acreage throughout the southern states remained wild and virtually untouched.

  I placed Katherine and Danny in such a mountain wilderness. Both are unique fictional characters who seek extreme solutions to their disabilities. They are not meant to stand for any specific individuals or for any group or category of persons.

  —DIANE THOMAS,

  Santa Fe, New Mexico, April 2013