The Yellow Wood

by The Yellow Wood (v5. 0) (epub)

  Who knew my sister would turn out to be this complicated, contradictory, exasperating, fascinating woman? Neither her vapidity nor her insightfulness ever ceases to amaze me. Over the years she’s been my main source of information about the family: Will’s gardening misadventures and Galen’s latest rally at the courthouse and Vaughn’s increasing weirdness and her endless attempts to find the right colour bedspread and our father’s declining health and the weather no more or less predictable than when we were kids—all receiving the same emphasis. I used to tune out her chatter, but I’ve come to realize I miss important things that way, details and patterns nobody but Emily has noticed, clichés that have their roots in truth.

  She’s never mentioned that our father has a detailed plan for killing himself, and to all appearances, the means to do it. It doesn’t seem the sort of thing Emily, of all people, would keep quiet about. Most likely she doesn’t know. I ought to tell her, of course.

  But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m jumping to conclusions. That would be embarrassing. Maybe it’s not my place to tell any of these people—my “family”—anything about each other, since I don’t have a context and the history I share with them is ancient. In most ways I’m not one of them. Or, maybe, I just want to have a secret with Daddy. I wouldn’t like to think that, but it could be true.

  For whatever reason, I have said nothing about what I found a week ago today in Daddy’s hideout, and I say nothing about it now, choosing to pursue a safer subject. “I don’t think he ever molested me, Em. I have thought about it, but I don’t have any symptoms of an incest survivor.” I stop short of saying that I do think there’s some other deep dark family secret.

  Today we’re on Emily’s patio. The family has gathered for yet another barbecue. These people love barbecues. Personally, I’ve never understood the appeal. Next week there’ll be a barbecue in honour of the Fourth of July, and I’ll miss my kids and fireworks over City Park lakes at home. The woods here have been chopped back to clear a neat rectangular yard for the kids’ swing set and sandbox and bikes; Earl maintains a strict edge on three sides, a six-foot privacy fence across the back between their house and Galen and Vivian’s. I have to admit, it’s pleasant here.

  Emily and Earl’s youngest child, five-year-old Evan, is playing with his five-year-old nephew in the sandbox in the back corner of the yard, their “vrooms” and giggles providing a sweet distraction. When I got Emily’s bemused email six years ago telling me she and Earl were expecting their seventh child in the same month their first grandchild was due, I dared to hope we might be spared another E name, but no such luck. Oh, there are plenty more, she wrote breezily, and now she’s pregnant with their eighth. I shudder to think what we’re in store for this time. Eurydice. Epiphany. Elvis—could I love a nephew named Elvis? Or maybe, with simple elegance, Eight.

  “But if the memories are repressed, or if it happened when you were pre-verbal—”

  “Emily. Give it up. That’s not what this is about.”

  The little boys’ chatter suddenly turns hostile. By the time I’m aware of the change, Emily is on her way to the sandbox, hands on hipbones to balance the weight of her belly.

  Observing her expert mediation, I miss my own family acutely. Today is Tuesday. Tara has a swimming lesson this afternoon. Martin will get her there. He’s an attentive, reliable father. It’s just a swimming lesson, but I feel left out, sorrowful.

  “That story you sent me,” Emily says when she’s settled in the wicker rocker again. For some reason, she doesn’t look at me.

  I hardly remember sending her a story, can’t imagine now why I would have done so, and fervently wish I hadn’t. “That was a long time ago. God, Em, it must have been in college. These days my writing is all for work.” I’ve lied to my family all my life, so there’s no good reason for me to feel guilty about it now. “Which story was it?”

  “It was about incest.”

  “It was fiction, not autobiography.” In a sense, everything a writer writes is autobiographical, of course, but Emily’s not likely to know that.

  Coyly, she asks, “In a sense, everything’s autobiographical, isn’t it?”

  “Not in that sense.”

  “I still have that story.”

  “Really?” That pleases me inordinately, and gives me pause. I would like to ask if our father read it, too.

  “How come you’ve never sent me any more?”

  “All I write these days are reports and memos.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “Highly creative reports and memos, mind you.”

  She giggles. I chuckle. Our laughter doesn’t take off this time and I’m disappointed.

  What are my daughters conversing about? I have never bothered to disabuse Alexandra of the suspicion, useful to a single father raising an oppositional child, that I could read her mind; at some level she still half-believes this misinterpretation. Emily, on the other hand, most likely does not regard me as having any particular power at all, a perspective that also misses the point.

  Standing in thin shade just beyond the edge of the space Emily and Earl have claimed for their unadorned yard, I keep myself hidden from them without much effort. I doubt either of them can feel me watching, or has any inkling of what I intend to do. Maybe not today, but someday soon.

  Maybe today.

  “Hey, Will.”

  Tall and stocky, golden hair lightened and sheened by grey streaks and by the diffuse sunlight through all those trees, our brother Will comes bearing gifts: a little blue bowl two-thirds full of lettuce in various shades of green, orange carrots, pale green cucumber slices with dark green rims, early red tomatoes. I’m swept by regret that we’ve drifted apart—rushed apart, been catapulted apart; once I left home, we both decided to have absolutely nothing in common anymore. But he’s my brother, and I’m so glad to see him.

  Will brings a salad made from his home-grown vegetables. Later in the season it will be beans, squash, pumpkins, none of them good enough for Will. Behind him, affecting a stringent indifference, Carol has roses for the table. She does not do any gardening. Neither do their children, beyond occasional mowing under duress. They defend themselves from Will’s anxiety about gardening by having nothing to do with it, and I am surprised she deigns even to carry the vase. The roses are pretty, though by no means beautiful.

  Alone among my children, Will used to help me in the garden. It was always a struggle. He never had the knack. Then as now, he sensed my intention for him to learn gardening from me, but misinterpreted it, believed he would be carrying on generation after generation some sort of vital family tradition, like taking over the family Christmas when I could not do it anymore or adding himself onto the family business: “Kove and Son.” I am supposed to be pleased. I am supposed to praise him. I am supposed to be proud.

  Never mind that I gave up labouring in the garden a long time ago, once I learned how to accept what the grocery stores and the wood had to offer. Never mind that I do not even like lettuce. Will’s fundamental limitation is that he does not pay attention. I see what gardening means to him, and I find it vastly annoying; he has concocted the significance of it and then proceeded to torture himself and everybody else with his own neurotic fantasy. What I wanted was for him to have a passion whose products would make the world a better place, and gardening seemed for Will the best possibility. In his hands, gardening has added more to the sum of the world’s unease than to its bounty.

  “All you’d have to do,” instructs Emily, whose own burden and raison d’être is that of procreator and family manager, “is walk around his garden with him once in a while and tell him how nice it looks. Comment on his flowers and vegetables. Come on, Dad, how hard is that?”

  Impossible, is what it is. Too much and too little is at stake. I know very well what he needs from me; I gave him that need, inserted it in him as deliberately as if I had removed the top of his skul
l, dumped it in, stirred things around, and replaced the lid. At times, when I despise myself in general, this seems to have been a particularly egregious cruelty, and I suspect I may have had no motive more honourable than the impulse to populate my world with familiars.

  I know precisely what he needs. Better than he does, better than Emily does, I know what Will needs. And I cannot spare it. He demands it in a more and more concentrated form. For years now, the best this son and I can do is avoid each other’s gaze.

  From off in the woods, well outside the parameters of Emily’s yard, a four-note song makes itself known. I have the sense that it’s been going on for some time and I’ve only now become aware of it. My skin crawls in appreciation of its eerie beauty. It isn’t a birdcall. “What is that?”

  “What is what?”

  “That—music.” She looks at me blankly. The four notes come again. “There! Hear it?”

  “Oh, that’s Vaughn playing his didgeridoo.”

  “Every time I hear him, it sounds different and I don’t know what it is.”

  “That’s Vaughn in a nutshell.”

  Will and Carol have pulled up chairs beside us now. “How ya doing, Sis?” Will greets me. “Emily filling you in on what’s been happening in the family?”

  “Maybe you can fill me in, too.” For some reason, it seems a daring thing to say. Will snorts.

  “So, William, how does your garden grow?” Smiling sweetly and resting her chin on her hand, Emily makes no attempt to disguise the fact that this is meant as a barb—though, given their childhood patterns, if called on it I bet she’d claim she was sincerely inquiring or, at worst, only teasing. I don’t know what’s going on here. I’m wary. But I’m also sister to both of them, and it’s age-old fun to see them fight.

  Carol, however, has no such interest; she rolls her eyes and gets up to go talk to Galen’s new wife Vivian. I wonder what it’s like to be an in-law in this family.

  True to form, Will rises to the bait, sounding about twelve years old. “Shut up, Emily.”

  Merrily she sings out, “Did you ever think that maybe gardening just isn’t your thing? Some people have a green thumb and some don’t, you know?”

  This makes him downright truculent. “When’s the last time you grew anything?” Instantly realizing his gaffe, he flushes. Emily doesn’t let him off the hook. She pats her belly with both hands and gives him a beatific smile. He mutters, “Shit.”

  She doesn’t give it up. “I almost called you the other day. On public television this guy said you can make a fertilizer and pesticide all in one out of stuff like chewing tobacco and beer and mouthwash. Maybe you ought to try that.”

  Will glowers at her, and I see he’s seriously upset. “Johnny Arentzen, Master Gardener. I used to watch him all the time. I tried all that stuff.”

  “And it didn’t work?” She knows it didn’t work. What’s she doing? “So is he a charlatan? The Jim Bakker of gardening?”

  When Will glances at me and away again, I realize Emily’s performing, and provoking him to perform, for my benefit. Will gets up and growls over his shoulder as he stomps into the house, “Nothing works.”

  Sitting back in the fat wicker chair as much as her belly will allow, Emily chortles. “Amazing. Absolutely amazing.”

  “What was that all about?”

  “Will’s got some sort of weird neurosis about gardening.”

  I say as mildly as I can, “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a gardening neurosis.”

  “You know how people use horticulture as therapy? Well, big brother Will needs therapy because of horticulture.” She laughs.

  “Probably doesn’t help to tease him about it, then.”

  “Oh, I know. I’m bad. But it’s so much fun! He’s always been such an easy mark.”

  I have nearly filled my pouch with poisonous plants of a remarkable variety, some of which alter the consciousness, some only kill. This is enough for today. I start to re-enter the family gathering in Emily’s neat yard, then stop short. With so many people around, so many small children, the contents of the pouch must not be here. Glad for an excuse to escape, I set off through the yellow wood toward my house.

  The four notes repeat, and then segue into a long, complicated musical phrase, which repeats and then segues into another. Discovering I’m holding my breath, I try to exhale without being obvious about it. “Does he do this often?”

  “More and more.” She smiles and shakes her head. “More and more.”

  Vaughn is filling the woods with exquisite, heart-breaking music. Music separates man from lesser beasts, one of the few things I would call “holy.” I have no musical talent. I found and developed it in him. The Kove family will bring good into this world.

  Emily asks me out of the blue, “Remember how Mom used to play the harmonica?”

  “The harmonica? Mom?” I can’t imagine why I’m so outraged. “That was Dad.”

  “Mom used to go out into the woods at dusk and not come back until we were all in bed. Sometimes I could hear her harmonica. She only knew a few songs. ‘Old Black Joe.’ ‘Red River Valley.’”

  “You’re wrong, Em. How could you remember something like that anyway? You were only three years old when she left. Do you really remember anything about her?”

  Hands on belly, my little sister glances at me and then away, and I think how much time and effort our family puts into not looking at each other. I think of Martin’s direct brown gaze and am faint with homesickness. Emily says grimly, “I used to think I could remember how she smelled, but I don’t think so anymore.”

  “Oh,” I breathe, “Em,” and I reach for her hand, but she’s heaved herself up out of the chair to join one of her young-adult daughters—the tall one; Erin, I think—who is pushing little kids on the swings.

  There’s a story in this. Music from the woods. Primal memories that may or may not be factual but are certainly true. Gardening as a metaphor and concentrate for despair. Far from diminishing the importance and immediacy of an experience, writing gives me a way in. I’m sipping my lemonade and considering various opening images when several people suddenly and simultaneously demand, “Where’s Dad? Where’s Grandpa? Has anybody seen Daddy?” A Kove family Greek chorus, commenting on the action and sounding an alarm.

  The instant I set foot in the woods, I’d be lost, or might as well be. And, of course, as long as I’m here, I’m always in the woods. The whole point of Emily’s careful yard is that it’s cut out of the woods. Will’s garden is defined by being not-woods; he bitches about the volunteer trees he has to keep digging out because, since he doesn’t want them there, they’re weeds. Around Galen’s house is a ludicrous six-foot privacy fence, reportedly Vivian’s idea. I can’t say that I blame her. Around Vaughn’s cabin is a patch of cleared and trampled ground that makes me imagine him pacing and dancing. There’s virtually no boundary between my father’s house, the yellow house I grew up in, and the yellow woods.

  “I’d get lost myself.”

  Will and Galen look at me with contempt. It’s all I can do not to stick my tongue out at them. Emily pats my hand. “You just stay here with me, Sandi. It’s not the first time he’s wandered off.”

  But alarm pervades the family gathering now, and Emily’s alarmed, too. At least I think she is; my sister is enough of a stranger to me that I don’t have a baseline against which to judge her reactions. Her eyes keep darting to the woods all around us; I couldn’t swear that she doesn’t always do this, but I haven’t noticed it before, and I can’t stop my gaze from following hers, over the fence to the woods on the north, on the south, on the east, back toward the house on the other side of which we both know the woods spreads yellow and familiar and mysterious. Our father is somewhere out there.

  The crowd has thinned considerably. Earl stays at the grill, and Emily doesn’t go beyond the edge of the yard, even that much movement causing
her to pant visibly and brace her lower back with her hands. The youngest kids haven’t left, though they seem distracted in their play; Evan goes to his mother and insists she hold him, which in order to do she has to make her ponderous way back toward me to a vacated lawn chair. Most of the older kids and all the other adults have gone looking for the missing patriarch, a search party that doesn’t seem entirely impromptu. I imagine them fanning out through the woods, each in an assigned, practised position.

  “Where does he usually go?”

  “He always comes back on his own. Everybody goes out searching and when they give up he’s at his house as if nothing ever happened.”

  “Another bit of Kove family performance art.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  At times since I’ve been here she’d have known what I meant. We’d have shared a supercilious chuckle at the eccentricities of our family. I don’t know why she’s pissed off now, and I don’t much care. The kids have gotten a Frisbee stuck in a tree and I hurry to help retrieve it, then offhandedly tell the kids I’m going for a walk. They may or may not relay the message to anybody who cares.

  By the time I get to the gate, irritation with my crazy family is close to revulsion, and I intend to put as much distance as possible between them and me without actually leaving and going home. The fact that I can’t go home quite yet infuriates me, and as I plunge into the woods I break branches, crush flowers, disturb tiny lairs, look for webs to destroy, and make no attempt to avoid the snake that flows alongside me for a few steps. The snake, however, avoids me, proving how much better it fits into this world than I ever will.

  Chapter 5

  Pa left the Old Country when he was seventeen. This is my tale of origin, scanty as it is and begging for embellishment.

  Once I overheard my sister telling her granddaughter he was twenty-two. When I confronted her she insisted he had told her that. She had it confused, or she had some arcane reason for lying. This was between my sister and me until the day she died; indeed, I still hold it against her.