Ways to Hide in Winter

by Sarah St. Vincent

  The stranger took the tools from me, looking as if he were trying not to seem confused. I closed the door.

  “You’re right, you know,” he said as we returned to the stump. “About my being a city person. I’m from Tashkent, the capital. We have electric heat. Electric everything. I’ve never done this in my life.” He pulled the scarf down. “I have to admit, it seems very primitive. I never knew people in America still heated buildings this way.”

  “Well, Martin doesn’t really need this. It’s just for the fireplace. But yeah, there are some houses around here that still use woodstoves for their heat. Not so many anymore, although my grandmother’s place still does.” We stood facing the stump, and I took the wedge from his hands. “Here’s what you do. You work this thing into a crack, like this one you’ve already made”—I pointed—“and then you hit it with the maul. That’ll start to split the log, like you’re driving a chisel into it, and then you can use the axe to finish the job. Or you can just keep using the wedge.” I pushed the tip of the wedge into the crack and reached for the maul, gripping it and raising it above my head, swinging it down as hard as I could. The motion was difficult, but it worked. I had learned to make it work.

  The maul hit the wedge with an echoing clang. I gripped the handle and struck again.

  “Oh!” He stepped closer and took the handle from me. “I see. Thank you.”

  “No problem. That should at least make things easier.”

  “Yes, I’m sure.” He paused, looking down at the maul’s heavy, blunt head. I waited.

  “May I ask,” he said finally, “if you would like to accompany me for a walk later?”

  I looked at him. His eyes were still on the maul.

  “It’s nothing…inappropriate,” he added hesitantly, raising his head. “It’s simply that I thought I could stand to stretch my legs a bit. And, you know…” He stopped, glancing away almost shyly. “Life passes by rather quickly, doesn’t it? It seems that while I’m here, I shouldn’t always stay within four walls.”

  “Well,” I said, putting my hands in my pockets and shifting my gaze to the stump. The tree must have been two hundred years old by the time it had been cut down; the stump was enormous, sprawling out irregularly, more than a yard wide, a humbled but still imposing reminder of something great that had once been. It occurred to me to wonder if he were afraid of the woods. I didn’t know why the idea hadn’t crossed my mind before; people who weren’t used to places like this always imagined the trail would dwindle and they would find themselves at the mercy of black bears and bobcats and whatever else was lurking in the unknown. Which, of course, was always possible; but then, a lot of things were possible. Many of us experienced the worst disasters of our lives while doing something perfectly ordinary that everyone did.

  “May I ask you a question?” I said at last, looking up into his face.

  “Of course.” He laughed, sounding faintly relieved. “I believe you just have.”

  I studied him, unsure how to find the words that would do what I had long since learned not to do, that would ask something as direct as, Who are you? It seemed too much like an opening, a crack that could allow someone else’s all-too-curious arm to reach into my own thoughts later.

  “The scarf,” I said instead. “I was just wondering. You always keep it around your face—you look like you’re about to rob a bank.”

  “Oh,” he said. “No, no. Is that why you were so frightened when I first came into the store?”

  “Frightened? I wasn’t frightened.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “You looked frightened.”

  “It takes a bit more than that to scare me, I think.”

  “There’s nothing to be ashamed of in being frightened. In my view.” Before I could reply, he continued, “I wear the scarf like that because my lungs are rather weak. It’s no big secret.”

  “Weak? Have you been sick?” That would explain the almost otherworldly paleness, I thought.

  “No. Well, not recently. It was a long time ago. I was taken in for questioning, in my country, and they made me sleep on the floor with other people. It was cold, and I got sick. After I got out, the doctor told me I should protect my lungs when I’m outside, so I use the scarf. There’s some scarring or something in there, apparently.” He gestured at his chest.

  I looked down, prodding the muddy ground with my toe. “‘They’?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “You said ‘they’ took you in for questioning, or something.”

  “Oh. Yes.”

  “You mean the police?”

  “Something like that. Not the ordinary police, but a kind of special police. The police who do these things. It’s difficult to explain.”

  “Special police? You mean, like, secret police?”

  “In a sense. I forget exactly what it is in English.” He pulled off his hat and scratched his head. “‘Intelligence,’ maybe?”

  A vision of this fragile-looking foreigner shivering on the floor of a cell swam into my mind, and I winced. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.”

  “Don’t be sorry! It’s all right. As I said, it’s no secret.” He gave the maul a short, experimental swing, as if it were a golf club.

  I looked at him.

  “You know, it’s odd,” I said after a moment.

  “What’s odd?”

  “That you would tell the truth about that, but lie about being a student.”

  His face tensed, but his response came in a light tone. “Why would I lie about that?”

  “That’s what I’ve been wondering, I guess. But it’s all right. You don’t need to answer.” I scuffed at the ground again, then looked up at him. “I asked you if I could ask one question, not two.”

  He smiled wanly.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “But listen. Remember what I said about using the maul first. If you just use the axe, it’s going to take forever and you’ll wind up splitting your foot instead. I have to go open the store now.”

  “Okay,” he said, but cleared his throat as I turned to go. “Although you never answered my own question, I think. About the walk.”

  “Oh.”

  As I looked at him, I realized for the first time that a deep sadness seemed to suffuse his entire figure, making him look smaller and frailer than he really was. Even when he stood straight, he looked stooped.

  “Sure,” I replied, suddenly embarrassed. “I guess I don’t see why not. Maybe Sunday, if you’re still here then.”

  “Okay.” He shifted his weight, gripping the maul awkwardly. “Thank you. You’re—you’re a good girl.”

  I must have looked at him strangely, because he turned back to the stump, eyeing the log with the wedge embedded in it as if he had suddenly been put in charge of a military strategy, tasked with figuring out how to crack enemy lines.

  He labored most of the morning, until, I thought, blisters must surely have left his hands bloody and sore, in spite of the gloves he had found somewhere. Watching him through the window, I thought of the prisoners of war, their vanished camp with its vanished guards, an entire village that had left behind only rotting rectangles of timber and cement, deep in the woods. Unlucky German and Japanese officers who, I thought, had probably split wood and carried water from dawn until dark, sweat soaking the shirts on their backs. Laboring alone and unseen, trapped in the forest in a strange land. No one knew for certain what had become of them, afterward. There was no list of their names. Ghostlike they had come, and ghostlike they had disappeared into the strange, winding tunnels of the past.

  They must, I reflected as I watched the stranger, have been very homesick when they were here. Even if they were soldiers.

  Although of course, it wouldn’t be right to pity them. They had been on the side that was responsible for murdering all those people, after all. And if they had toiled and sweated and maybe even died hidden away somewhere in the woods of Pennsylvania, well, there were worse fates.

  By noon, the stranger
was clearly tired. Nevertheless, his thin arms in the padded, musty coat continued to move, up and down, up and down, like a human piston driven by some invisible and pitiless machine.

  5

  Sunday came, and I pulled up in front of the hostel, watching the stranger’s slender figure peel itself from the wall like a shadow.

  When I stayed in the car, he walked toward me, glancing around, hands stuffed into his pockets and scarf tied firmly around his face. It was a bright day, the nicest we’d had in weeks, sharp sunlight glinting on the ice that coated the trees. I rolled the window down. “Go ahead and get in. I’ll take us to Tumbling Run.”

  He looked at the car nervously, twisting a foot into the gravel. “I really shouldn’t go very far, I think. Maybe we could just stay close to here?”

  I paused with my hands on the wheel. “I don’t know. It’s up to you, I guess. I thought a change of scenery could do us both good.”

  “Yes, I suppose,” he replied uncertainly.

  I watched him as he looked down at his feet.

  “It’s kind of a secret trail,” I told him, somehow guessing the cause of his reluctance. “No one’s going to see us. I can’t remember the last time I saw anyone else up there.”

  He peered behind the car at the state road and the steep rise of the mountain beyond. “Are you sure?”

  “Well.” I shifted into park and cracked my knuckles, looking down at a cut on my palm. “I can’t make any promises, I guess. But if anyone does see us, it’ll be some guy out walking his dog who’ll forget us as soon as we’re gone. Nobody really goes there. It’s just too hard to find.”

  It wasn’t hard to find, of course, if you knew to look for it. But nobody did. An unmarked trail on private land, it didn’t appear on any maps, not even old ones. Amos had shown it to me, long ago, maybe six months after we’d met. It had been spring then, the mountain laurels and rhododendrons blooming and the stream running. I had been stunned by it, thought it was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen, although at the time I hadn’t made note of where it was. I was with Amos, my first serious boyfriend, the man with the quiet eyes and work-lined hands who said he loved me. It was hard to pay attention to anything else.

  The truth was that much later I’d had to call Amos’s mother to figure out where it was. Amos was dead. I had just left the hospital with a shattered hip and arm that had each been bolted back together through a month of surgery, two fractured ribs, and a disorienting double vision I hadn’t mentioned to anyone, since it seemed impolite to have something else go wrong when I was the center of so much effort already. The morphine floated me along like a great white balloon. Everyone was very nice. They didn’t talk about Amos, although they knew I knew, and gradually it came to seem as if he had been washed away by this month of stillness, of a small, hushed television in a corner, nurses making notes, pills in cups, meals on trays. When Beth visited, I cried, but I didn’t know why. The rest of the time, I wasn’t really sad. Just floating along, anchored only by the persistent pain of bones held together by metal.

  I had called Cindy when I was home, even though I was still months away from being able to walk properly, let alone drive. “Cindy,” I had said into the phone, sitting in my grandmother’s dining room, and had instantly forgotten why I’d called.

  “Kathleen,” she had breathed on the other end. Then, with difficulty, “How are you? I was glad to hear you were out of the hospital.”

  “I’m fine,” I’d replied dreamily. The two white pills I took every four hours were powerful stuff, making me feel as if I were miles away from my own body. Every so often, they made me giggle unreasonably, which always seemed to unnerve whoever was within earshot. I had no idea, at the time, that they would stay with me for so long. “How are you?”

  “We’re all right,” she said, although she meant, of course, that her world was chaos, a whirlwind of sadness and despair, and that she would never know a moment of happiness ever again.

  “I’m so sorry,” I told her.

  “It’s not your fault,” she replied, as if she had rehearsed saying this. Although she didn’t know it, and never would, she was right. It wasn’t.

  “I was just wondering,” I began, and then paused, struggling to remember what I had intended to ask her.

  “Kathleen?” she’d said after a long moment had passed.

  “Yes. I’m sorry. I was wondering,” I’d said slowly, the thought gradually coming back to me, “if you know where Tumbling Run is. I’d like to go there, when I’m better. But I can’t seem to remember.”

  “Tumbling Run?” she had echoed, surprised and perhaps beginning to grow angry, a combination of confusion and grief.

  “We used to go there,” I’d said, suddenly feeling very tired, as if I were climbing a long spiral staircase whose top I couldn’t see. “A long time ago. Before we were married.”

  “Oh.” She had reflected on this for a moment. I could picture her standing in her neat living room, looking stricken. She was a psychologist, one of the only professionals I had ever known, and everything in her house seemed somehow consoling but impersonal: dried bouquets on the mantel, needlepoint pillows on the couch. Amos, with his drawl and his dusty hands and boots, had always seemed out of place there. I probably had, too; maybe that was one of the reasons she hadn’t wanted him to marry me.

  “It’s on South Mountain,” she had said finally. “Right before the county line. There’s a row of rocks. A semicircle. That’s the entrance.” She drew a deep breath. “We used to take the boys there when they were little.”

  “Yes. Thank you. I’m very sorry,” I had said, and carefully returned the receiver to its cradle. A few minutes later, it had become difficult to remember who I’d been talking to.

  The following day, I’d been surprised to find a card from her in the mailbox, small and white with violets on the front. “Please don’t call again,” it said on the inside in her rounded cursive, although it said other things as well that were meant to sound nicer. I had looked at it and then, for some reason, put it in a drawer. It was probably still hidden in my grandmother’s house somewhere, gathering dust.

  Six months later, when I could drive, I had gone up to the trail in all its solitary beauty, passing the state park and the general store on the way. While driving back, I had stopped at the store and spoken to the owner, my mother’s second cousin’s husband, an older man named Herman. The next day, I had found myself with a job that didn’t require me to talk or move much, and that allowed me to rest for long periods on the porch when my pelvis began to ache, as it often did. The hikers were friendly but had little interest in prying into the life of the woman who was cooking their hamburgers. After a time, I was happy, especially when I had grown strong enough to walk down to one of the lakes in the evening, watching people wade and swim in the last of the fall light.

  I had found a place where I could be at peace.

  The stranger walked around the front of the car and opened the passenger door, bringing me back to the present. His expression was doubtful.

  “Come on,” I said. “It’ll be fine. I think you’ll like it.”

  He climbed in, his limbs bending stiffly, as if he were made of wire. I pulled away from the hostel and drove us west through the long corridor of trees. Sitting there, I had an unsettling sense of his nearness, but shook the feeling off.

  “Where does this road go?” he asked, as I steered us around the bends. Small brooks of melted snow were running across the asphalt, shining in the light.

  “Go?”

  “I mean, if you were to keep driving for a long time.”

  I gave him a sidelong look. So much for the idea that he was some kind of hitchhiker, I thought. “Well, it runs along the mountain for quite a while. Eventually you’d wind up close to Gettysburg.”

  “Gettysburg?” He looked at me quizzically. “I’ve heard of that. There’s something there.”

  “Yeah, that’s where the battlefields are. From the Civil War
. Aside from that, it’s really just a tourist town. It’s pretty small.”

  “Oh.” Watching the trees and empty summer cabins pass by outside the window, he was quiet, knitting his hands together in his lap. A squirrel darted across the road, its tail a gray plume, and I swerved to miss it. Light and shade played on the windshield, passing over our faces.

  “Do you ever think about it? The war?” he asked.

  I looked at him. “My brother’s in it. Of course I think about it.”

  “No, I’m sorry. I mean the Civil War, although of course—” He broke off. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize—”

  “That’s okay. It doesn’t really come up.” The road unspooled before us, through a stand of birches that had been charred in the fire.

  He seemed to be pondering something. Eventually, he said, “What do you think of it?”

  I glanced at him. “Of what?”

  “Well, of—of the war. The one happening now.”

  “There are two of them, technically. Or the same one, but in two different places. So they say, anyway.” I swerved around some black ice. “I’m not sure what there is to think, really. They’re happening, and I follow what’s going on as best I can. But…”

  Hearing and disliking the edge of helplessness in my own voice, I tried to think of something else to discuss. But he persisted.

  “Do you ever ask yourself if your country’s done the right thing?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean…going to war in those places.”

  I was silent for a long moment, considering being offended. But, I realized, that wouldn’t be honest, and I didn’t feel like inventing a feeling I didn’t have. I looked at him, remembering the pauses that had sometimes formed in the gap between my twin bed and Beth’s, between a question and an answer, late at night, when we knew there was something we shouldn’t say but were turning over in our minds anyway.

  He watched the forest pass by. The gray rocks that marked the bottom of the trail came into view, and I pressed the brake.