by Jon Cohen
“Aspen. Birch. Black locust,” said Harry, taking in the deepening forest. “Fire cherry. Pignut hickory. Shagbark hickory.” Fire, pignut, shagbark, the old, familiar names summoning the woodland sanctuary of his childhood, when he climbed high up in the branches of the giant beech in his front yard and imagined the trees going on forever in all directions, and he safely in the center. His shaded escape, the forest he had spent a lifetime trying to reach.
North of Scranton, the low-fuel warning flashed at him and he took the next exit, a two-lane state road. He stopped at a ramshackle country hardware store and bought fifteen feet of blue nylon rope, paid and walked away. The clerk ran after him with his change. When the clerk went back into the store, Harry let the meaningless coins slide from his hand onto the blacktop.
He continued along the rural road, driving up and down the rolling hills, his car like an unmoored boat bobbing on the waves. At the top of a high hill he came to a gravel crossroad marked by a faded street sign perched atop a rusty pole poking out of the undergrowth. A single ray of afternoon sun touched the sign, setting it aglow. Harry hit the brakes. Maple Road. They were everywhere, a crowded forest of saplings and towering mature trees, rooted fast to the rolling topography, the leafless early spring limbs majestic against the April sky. Sugar maples. Acer saccharum.
“Acer saccharum,” Harry said, the botanical Latin uttered aloud sounding like an incantation. A requiem. Saccharum, saccharum, Acer saccharum.
He pulled onto the gravel road. There was a two-story log frame house set deep in the trees, but after that no other houses. It was all trees now, crowded so thickly along the road they formed a tunnel, the lower branches scratching like fingernails across the roof of his car. On the left side of the road—he almost drove right by it—a sudden opening in the foliage. The overgrown entrance to an abandoned quarry? An old lumber road? Compelled, Harry cut the steering wheel hard and squeezed onto the worn wheel ruts, bouncing along until the wild rhododendron and thick mountain laurel stopped him a half mile in.
He got out of the car, slung the coil of rope over his shoulder and walked into the forest. Cold dry leaves crunched beneath his feet. He didn’t feel the cold, didn’t feel anything but the presence of the sugar maples. As he trudged forward, brushing his fingers against the wide, furrowed trunks, he raised his eyes to the tangle of overhead branches. Transfixed by the tree canopy and the infinite beckoning blue of the afternoon sky, he smacked into a waist-high stone wall, folding over it with a surprised grunt.
He straightened and stepped back. The wall was about three feet high and ten feet long, the last remains of an old homestead. The rest of the wall had fallen long ago, now just a tumble of moss-covered rocks that snaked through the tree trunks into the distance. An immense sugar maple had pushed its heavy roots in among the rocks at the base of the wall. It would not be long before the roots toppled it.
The forest, thought Harry, takes everything.
He placed his hand on the wall and looked up into the maple tree. And there it was, thick and strong—the branch he’d been searching for. That this one section of stone wall was still standing. That it was exactly the right height to reach the branch. The perfect and terrible inevitability of it.
He climbed onto the wall and set to work with the rope, amazed to see himself tying such a complicated knot. He had forgotten he knew how. Who had taught him? His brother, of course, Harry remembering the long ago moment behind the garage when they were kids, Wolf showing him how to tie a hangman’s noose. Wolf knowing such things, privy to the darker arts. With a grin telling Harry, “It might come in handy someday. You never know, right?” His big brother looking out for him.
Harry completed the noose and reached up and tied the other end of the rope to the tree branch. The noose dangled and swayed in the mountain wind. He reached out and took hold of it again and slipped it over his head. A hangman’s noose, a sugar maple, a stone wall: Harry Crane on his forest gallows. He took the lottery ticket out of his wallet. Let the wallet drop from his hand. It bounced off the wall and fell to the ground.
Harry gripped the lottery ticket. In his mind, he heard his sentence pronounced: Condemned bureaucrat. Cowardly husband. Buyer of lottery tickets. From this limb will you hang; and the flesh will fall from your bones, and your bones will molder and turn to dust, and thus will you be scattered and lost forever.
Wolf’s voice suddenly cutting in. “Scattered? You tossed Beth’s ashes like fucking confetti!”
Harry tightened the noose, his body shaking, the self-damning chatter in his head crazy and nonstop. All you had to do was take her hand. But you didn’t. You didn’t take her hand, Harry. Wait here, you said, and crossed the street. Abandoned her. And the crane crashed down. So do it, Harry. Turn out your lights, Harry. Hurry Harry, hurry, do it! Now!
Harry opened his hand and let the ticket flutter away. He extended his right foot out over the abyss. Froze.
Hey, asshole in the tree. Jump! Again Wolf’s voice broke in, like he was right out there among the trees somewhere. Harry twisted his head in the noose, the rough rope digging into his skin as he looked around for his brother. He saw Wolf dart between the tree trunks. But that was impossible, Wolf wasn’t really there. Go away, Wolf, you are not there. No one is there.
Harry tensed his body for the jump and lifted his eyes skyward, the final gesture of all who find themselves with a noose around their necks. Craning their doomed necks for that one last look. And in that very last second, Harry saw something—a glint of gold in a knothole just above the branch where he had tied the rope. He squinted. It was a small, rectangular golden object with writing on it.
Wait a minute, he thought. No, that’s impossible. A mini Snickers?
And Harry knew the candy bar wasn’t real, that it was only one last torture of the mind. A mini Snickers like the one Beth tried to hand him that day on Market Street. It wasn’t there, but he reached for it, as if Beth was giving him another chance, handing it to him one more time so that he might repeat the moment, but alter the fatal outcome, stop the catastrophe of that day by taking hold of the candy, and her.
Redemption tucked into the knothole of a tree. It was not really there, but he reached, and in the reaching two things happened. For a split second, he touched an actual mini Snickers with the tips of his fingers. He heard the plastic crinkle of the golden wrapper, felt the cold hard little piece of chocolate within. It was real! But it didn’t matter. Reaching, he slipped on the mossy stones.
Harry windmilled his arms, fought to regain his balance. But off the wall he went. He whipped both hands over his head and grabbed the rope just before it snapped taut, the pain in his shoulders instant and searing as he swung out from the wall. Flailing legs, slipping hands, the door to Eternity opening—and one final vision—a pair of great angel wings unfolding inches from his face, followed by one final physical sensation—feathers brushing his cheeks, his eyes closing at the touch.
Then crack! His neck snapped.
No.
No!
No, not his neck—but the branch snapping off the tree. The rope went slack as Harry dropped kicking and thrashing to the ground. He landed on his ass, the force of the fall throwing his head backward against the base of the stone wall, hard enough to fracture his skull. A second chance at death.
He saw a flash of golden stars that turned into a galaxy of mini Snickers twinkling and fading into darkness.
His eyes fluttered open.
Closed.
Opened again.
He lay against the base of the wall staring up at the sky, the noose still around his neck, the rope tangled in the tree branch that lay beside him in pieces. His eyes focused, and he saw a large hawk rising through the treetops. Not angel-winged Death—a red-tailed hawk. Harry felt the otherworldly pull of the great bird in flight, and in the next instant he felt the equal pull of gravity and the earthly fact of himself.
His back ached and his head was killing him. He groaned and touched the back of his skull. Lump, no blood.
Exploring further, his fingers brushed against something flat and smooth that was not stone. He went up on an elbow and turned. It was an old book, and it had saved his head from splitting open on the wall like a dropped watermelon. He held the book, leaned back against the wall and stared into the forest.
He saw something.
Then he saw a lot of somethings.
“Holy shit,” he said.
In his dazed march through the forest, searching for the perfect tree from which to hang himself, he had not noticed. It was not just the one mini Snickers in a knothole. There was candy everywhere. On top of tree stumps. Balanced on branches. Dangling from bushes. Three Musketeers, Hershey Bars, Skittles. And juice pouches, too. And Ziploc snack bags filled with cookies. Much of it was weathered and gnawed on by animals. He squinted at several colorful dots pressed into the craggy bark of a nearby white pine—Peanut M&M’s.
But before he could process any of it—book, hawk, candy—another element entered his consciousness: people. On the other side of the wall, voices and footsteps, approaching fast. He scrunched against the wall, yanked the noose from around his neck, and stuffed it in among the rocks and leaves.
The hawk circled directly overhead, around and around the treetops, as if it had laid claim to Harry.
* * *
While Harry had been atop the wall busy failing to hang himself, Amanda and Oriana were nearby, making their way through the forest in fits and starts, arguing heatedly. They were not walking. They were stomping. It was a good thing there were a lot of thick tree trunks separating them as they stomped along.
“I didn’t know I was gone so long, okay?” shouted Oriana as she passed a white oak. She whapped the trunk with her hand. Glared at her mother.
“You knew,” Amanda shouted back at her. Amanda bumped a slender quaking aspen. It dropped a shower of dry yellow leaves in surrender to her anger.
They came to a clearing and faced each other. Circled like sumo wrestlers, eyes narrowing darkly, opponents taking measure.
“We need to get some things straight, young lady,” said Amanda.
“I know what you’re going to say,” said Oriana. “You’re going to say I shouldn’t steal food and hide it in the woods.”
“That’s not what I was going to say. But that’s correct, you should not steal food.”
“It’s not stealing. It’s giving my portion away.”
“You’re not giving it away. You’re wasting it. You’re throwing away my money.”
They circled.
“And that’s not what I’m angry about,” said Amanda.
“That I lost the library book? I told you I’d find it.”
“Did you find it?”
“Not yet.”
“Well, that’s not what I’m angry about,” said Amanda, in a very careful tone.
“So being late for my homework? It’s just some math problems. They’re easy.”
Amanda shook her head. “That’s not it. That’s not what I’m angry about, Oriana.”
Uh-oh. Oriana looked at her mother’s face. Amanda’s cheeks were flushed. Mom was always under control. But at the moment, she looked dangerous. Oriana held her ground. “Then what terrible, horrible thing did I do exactly?”
The world around them seemed to go suddenly still. The trees held their breath.
Amanda erupted. “It’s not one thing, it’s everything! It’s all of it, Oriana! I’m sick of this forest. That you think something big is going to happen out here. Some big, huge magical Daddy event. I’m sick of it!”
“I didn’t say what size it was.”
“Don’t you mess with me! It’s not the size. It’s the magic. It’s your brain twenty-four hours a day on a nonstop diet of hidden candy and fairy tale crap and forests.”
Oriana said nothing. They continued to circle—two warriors fighting an ancient battle—but Amanda was slowly narrowing the circle. She was poised to strike.
“Look around you,” she said. “Okay? Look, Oriana. With your two eyes, look. You know what’s in these woods? In this enchanted forest of yours? Trees. That’s it. Ordinary animals, ordinary bushes and ordinary damn trees!”
Oriana muttered something under her breath. Not muttered. Incanted.
The rising red in Amanda’s cheeks matched the red of Oriana’s jacket. “What did you just say?” But she knew. They both knew. Exactly the words Oriana had said.
Oriana repeated them. “Persevere. See. Believe.”
Words to piss off her mother. The little chant, as if Oriana was casting a spell. Words that were a magical defiance.
And, unbelievably, Oriana suddenly said one more word. The one that was absolutely guaranteed to explode her mother’s brain. The one with two syllables.
“Wingèd,” whispered Oriana. But not to Amanda. To the sky. Because Oriana was looking up.
Amanda was about to pounce, to sweep up her child and carry her forcibly out of the forest and back to the house, where there would be a time-out to end all time-outs. But before she could move a muscle, a large red-tailed hawk swooped low over their heads. Wing shadow, a thumping feathery whoosh of air. Amanda ducked.
But Oriana took off after it. The hawk disappeared into the woods.
Amanda stood and turned as Oriana crossed the clearing—and stopped suddenly at the edge of the woods.
Somebody in the woods cried out. A tree limb snapped.
Amanda ran up behind Oriana, drew her close and peered into a dense stand of sugar maples. She took in details...
...a section of old stone wall with a broken tree branch draped over it.
...an old sugar maple beginning to drip clear sap from a large scar.
...from the other side of the wall—a heavy rustling in the dry leaves.
Amanda stepped protectively in front of her daughter. “Hello?” she called out. Her eyes went to an object lying on the ground. A wallet. She picked it up.
Oriana saw something, too, fluttering in the leaves. She reached down and picked up a small, white rectangle of paper. A lottery ticket. She glanced at her mother who was busy with the wallet.
Amanda examined a photo ID card. Stamped in big black letters across the top were the words: US DEPT OF AGRICULTURE. And below that: Forest Service.
A groan from the other side of the wall. The man on the ID card rose into view.
6
Banged up and woozy, Harry stood before them, holding the book.
Oriana stared at him. Harry stared back. Her eyes flicked to the book. His eyes flicked to the lottery ticket. She closed her fingers over it, looked up at the red-tailed hawk circling overhead, then at Harry again. He could feel her connecting the strange dots—hawk, lottery ticket, book—arranging all of it into something very important. He had never seen such focus, such intensity in a child’s face.
Now Harry’s eyes went to the young girl’s...mother? Yes, they had the same blond hair, the same determined faces. The mother was tall, and she looked powerful. And for that matter, the girl looked powerful, too. No, wild. There was a wildness in these two. Speak to them, thought Harry. Say something. In case they are about to pounce. They looked like pouncers.
He cleared his throat—understandably quite sore—and said, “Snickers.” He raised his arm and pointed at the knothole just above the dripping scar on the sugar maple. Glittering in the sun, the gold wrapper beckoned. “I climbed up on the wall. Slipped. Grabbed the branch...” He shrugged, chagrined. “Got a weakness for Snickers.”
“Oh my God,” Amanda said under her breath, processing. This man—she glanced at the ID again: Harold F. Crane—worked for the Forest Service and this land, this forest, was under his protection. These ten thousand acres behind their house, which Oriana spent so ma
ny hours in, was a national wilderness tract owned by the federal government. In all her years, Amanda had never seen an employee—agent?—of the government out here. And that the very first one she did meet got hurt by one of Oriana’s Snickers...
She shot a look at Oriana. “You are in such trouble,” Amanda growled.
Harry was swaying on his feet. Amanda vaulted over the broken wall and took hold of him. He looked at her, a little dreamily. Blinked.
“My name’s Amanda Jeffers, I’m a nurse,” she said. “When you fell, did you hit your head?”
Harry reached past Amanda and plucked a Peanut M&M from the bark of the white pine. “Have I landed in Candy Land?”
“I have that game!” Oriana said. She joined them on Harry’s side of the wall.
Amanda said to Harry, “I’m sorry, my daughter—it’s hard to explain—she kind of feeds the animals.”
“Not animals,” Oriana said. “It’s for—”
“Oriana!” Amanda cut in.
Harry looked from frowning mother to frowning daughter. Time to change the subject. He raised the book. “I found this.” He had not really looked at it before. It was an old account ledger from a business or a bank. But someone had altered it. The word Ledger was embossed in the soft, faded cover, but the words The Grum’s had been hand-painted above it in gold. The Grum’s Ledger.
“Odd book,” he said.
“All she reads are odd books,” Amanda said.
Oriana nodded. “I’m a reader.”
Again, Harry looked at the strange handmade book, looked at the candy all around him in the trees. Looked at the little girl. “Odd forest,” he said.
Oriana nodded even harder.
Amanda stepped between them. “No, no, this is a very normal forest. You’ve bumped your head.”
Harry suddenly noticed several inches of the bright blue nylon noose sticking out of the leaves about a foot from where Amanda was standing. The girl, absolutely attuned to him, read the alarm on his face and looked down and saw the rope, too. With the tip of her sneaker, she nudged it deeper into the leaves.