The Yellow Wood

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

  Pa did not lie, and he always told me seventeen. There is no written proof of this or of much else. Family records are skeletal and so open to interpretation they are apocryphal, more metaphor than history.

  Sometimes as I put one foot in front of the other to get through the day, I indulge myself in imagining legends that might grow up around the facts of what I am doing here and now:

  “Every morning he used to walk to the fork in the path and turn around and around to all four directions.”

  “Half of what we ate when we were kids he harvested from the woods. And remedies, and potions, and dyes. And toys: bendable stems you could braid into rings, leaves that looked like stars, roots that we dressed up like ugly little dolls.”

  “He planted things in the woods. See that big tree over there? These tiny little flowers you can’t find unless you already know where to look, and even then sometimes not? He planted those. That plant with the fuzzy leaves, too, and that purplish one. Be careful. They’re poisonous. Yes, they are. He told me so.”

  In this way, getting through the day is made to mean both more and less than it literally does. Sometimes, contemplation of my legacy lengthens my stride and directs my gaze. Sometimes, distracted, I stumble.

  I do have the copy of Pa’s obituary that my sister clipped. Why we should need such a memento is beyond me. I would not have saved it. I conspicuously did not look for it in the paper at the time of his death, and certainly have never read and re-read it as she did, smoothing its folds, weeping and smiling. But once it came into my possession, throwing it away seemed, though I am not a religious man, sacrilegious. And it is, after all, proof of something—proof that my father lived and now is dead, proof that I am an orphan, a ludicrous concept for a man my age.

  Knowing no one outside his village, Pa—no one’s father yet—came on a boat to America with very little money, very little English, few job skills, and only the most amorphous and idealized intention of finding a better life. He made his way, more or less. I have no way of knowing whether, when all was said and done, he was glad to have come here, worked in the steel mills of the Monongahela Valley, bought the tall thin house on Pearl Street, married the saintly Julia and then the wicked Mary. Had children. Had grandchildren. Had me. I do not know whether it turned out to be a better life.

  He lived to be seventy-eight, an age I meant to note and did not when I passed it myself a few years ago. He dropped dead of a heart attack on the steps of the doctor’s office where he had just been pronounced hale. By then he had long lost all touch with the Old Country except for his habitual reversal of v’s and w’s, an American surname with a Slovak tinge, the fruit-filled Christmas cookies he taught my sister and my wife to make (Emily’s version can best be said to have been loosely inspired by the original), and a set of three minimalist stories:

  1. He told me the river teemed with fish. He never gave details, I never asked for any, but my hungry imagination supplied: thick as cream, silver and iridescent blue, with a gushing odour I could only think to call fishy. He said that in spring the villagers, the boy who would be my father among them, waded out into the swollen river with wide sleeves billowing, netting multitudes of fish. Imagining slimy squirming against bare upper arms, I would shudder and rub my own flesh. As new words entered my vocabulary I applied them to this story: freshet, spawn.

  2. My father’s family—my family, though I have never succeeded in feeling part of the line—lived in a big stone house, one blocky grey-and-white photograph of which is still extant. When Pa was small, he told me, a fire destroyed most of the wooden houses in the village and everyone moved into his house. As I learned them, I ascribed to this story the words community and neighbourliness, invasion and melee, generosity and obligation.

  3. Pa’s mother, my grandmother whom I never knew and therefore have no name for other than the given name Maria, which I cannot help pronouncing with an American accent, gave him a gift to take with him into the New World. My sister told her granddaughter it was his aunt, but Pa told me it was his mother and Pa did not lie. Packaged and discrete as an heirloom, consciously given and received, the gift was the courage to break her heart by leaving the big sheltering stone house when they both knew he would never come back. Every time he recounted this story, which I alone must have heard a hundred times, Pa’s eyes filled. She held him by the shoulders to bestow her blessing on him: “Go, son. I would go with you if I could. God help me, I would go instead of you. But I’m afraid.” She shook him, he said. She kissed him. “Go anyway, son. Be brave for us both.”

  “I’m not brave,” he said he told her. “I’m afraid.”

  “It isn’t bravery if you aren’t afraid.” Like his mother’s name, this adage must have sounded quite different in the language of my father’s youth, which he made a point not to pass down.

  Only three anecdotes. Not nearly enough. Despite the personal cost, I have offered my children far more than that. They have as many stories about my life as I could find for them. It is probably not nearly enough, either. Or perhaps it is far too much.

  “What is that?”

  “That’s Vaughn banging on his goddamn drum.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Vaughn is Vaughn. Maybe he thinks Dad’ll hear it and find his way home. Maybe it has nothing to do with Dad. How the hell should I know why Vaughn does anything?”

  “Does Daddy actually get lost?” It’s hard for me to imagine our father at risk in these familiar woods, except from his own plans and potions, which I have still not mentioned to any of my siblings. But the alarm of my sister and brothers and several of their children is contagious.

  “There’s no telling what he’ll do, either.” Galen has always regarded our family as a bunch of loonies, himself the lone exception. He’s got a point, though getting married at his age was a surprise—from him, downright weird. Right now he seems more irritated than anything else. But then, that’s always been the distinguishing characteristic of my oldest brother. Everything irritates him. Life irritates him. He approves of nothing and nobody. No matter what the situation, it’s never good enough for him. I suppose this chronic dissatisfaction comes in handy for a habitual social activist, but on a personal level it’s a pain in the ass. Rather savagely I wonder how Vivian stands him, what possessed her to marry him.

  He’s been irritated with me all my life. Since he picked me up at the airport a month ago, he’s hardly made an attempt to uncurl his lip. At the moment he’s close to furious, and as I did so many times in our shared distant past, I rise to the bait.

  At his heels as we crash through the yellow underbrush, I demand, “You’ve never much liked me, have you, Galen?”

  He snorts, doesn’t turn or pause. “For Chrissake, Alexandra, this isn’t about you. I know it’s hard to believe, but not everything is about you.”

  I’m out of practice. “Shut up,” is the best I can come up with.

  Behind me, Will snaps, “Will you two knock it off?” And there we are again, all in our places: Galen and I bickering, Will struggling to keep the peace, Emily worrying and directing from home, Vaughn off somewhere doing his own eccentric version of the current family activity, and all of it spun off from and looping back to Daddy, the source and the inspiration, the seed of the pearl or the source of the infection depending on your point of view.

  We trudge. Every once in a while one of us calls one of our various names for him—“Daddy!” “Dad!” “Alexander Kove!”—but from our father there’s no response any of us can hear. Birds screech and there are startled rustlings and thumps, Vaughn’s drum among them, not far away. These woods are inhabited. The space they form is a container with a tight lid out of which I crawled a long time ago, from which I’ve never escaped, which I’ve never fully explored though I spent hours and days and nights of my childhood within it.

  We’re walking fast, listening hard, each of us searching for our father. “Do we have a
plan here or are we just sort of flailing?”

  Galen doesn’t deign to answer. After a moment, Will says, “He has a hideout he goes to sometimes when the family gets to be too much for him.”

  For reasons I don’t pretend to understand, I don’t admit to already knowing this. With careful obfuscation just this side of an outright lie, I express my incredulity, which in itself is sincere. “A hideout? He’s eighty-fucking-one years old.”

  Contemptuously, Galen corrects me. “Eighty-fucking-two.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Yeah, well, you’ve missed a few birthdays.”

  Pointedly I speak to Will, not to Galen. That’ll show him. “Like the hideout he had as a kid to get away from the wicked stepmother.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “His stepmother Mary used to chase him with a butcher knife or a fireplace poker and he’d hide in a hollowed-out place in the hedge that divided their yard from the Petrovskys’. Remember?”

  “Who?”

  “The next-door neighbours. John and what was her name? Ida?”

  “John and Irena Petrovsky. Their sons were Bill and Les. But I never heard that hideout story.” Will seems not so much sceptical as wary.

  Galen is firmer. “That’s not one of Dad’s stories. You’re making that up.”

  Panic skitters in me like Vaughn’s drumbeat. “Oh, come on, you guys. He used to show us the spot in the hedge every time we’d visit Grandpa. He wouldn’t let us play in there. Remember?”

  “Hey, Alexandra, I thought you weren’t into fiction anymore.”

  “Sandi. Her name is Sandi now.”

  Ahead of me and behind me on the narrow path, my brothers chortle and, predictably, I yell at them. “What’s so funny, assholes?”

  “Ooh,” Galen turns to sneer. “She’s getting mad.”

  Will volleys the ridicule back past my head. “Ooh. I’m scared.”

  “Fuck you!”

  They laugh outright, and I am swept by the ancient murderous rage I haven’t felt since I left this place and these people. Though Martin and I occasionally find each other thunderously frustrating, we’ve made it a point to fight fair. Even my children, whose early survival depended on their ability to read people and whose skill at driving me crazy can be impressive, don’t get to me like this.

  “Fuck you!” I shriek again, a trapped and powerless adolescent fighting for my life again and revelling in it. “I don’t need this!”

  Storming off the path into the tangled yellow wood is so intensely gratifying I don’t care how reckless it might be. Shouting for my father is a cover; I’m not really looking for him anymore. My brothers don’t follow or even call me back. They just go on without me.

  Taking the shortcut is like blazing a trail through the wood every time, although I come this way often and I suspect others do as well—Vaughn routinely and some of my grandchildren once in a while. Over- and undergrowth move in with an energy and speed that can seem magical and directed but is nothing more or less than their nature, filling in footprints and healing broken branches or, more likely, forcing them altogether out of existence. I always travel the same route, and these woods are not very deep. Even so, today I have become anxious and contemptibly unsure of myself.

  To entice my children from one place to another through the wood, I used games. Treasure hunts: I would hide pennies, many of which are probably still here, camouflaged now as dirt and leaves; as the children got older, it had to be at least quarters, and once in a while, just to keep things interesting, I would plant a dollar bill or two, which really did look and feel a bit like foliage. Scavenger hunts with lists whose ulterior purpose was to improve vocabulary and encourage abstract thought:

  A variegated leaf.

  Two objects that, taken together, could be said to form a sequence.

  Something secret.

  Something powerful.

  A gift.

  Alexandra once brought home two bits of trash, a broken crayon, and part of a brown paper bag, with and on which she wrote me a little poem about a grasshopper and claimed it met the criteria for the last three items—a secret and powerful gift. Her sister and brothers objected on grounds that she had not found the poem but made it. I had to rule with them, and Alexandra did not win the prize, but I thought she understood my pride in her. More than that, I thought she was signalling that she understood what was happening between us, what I was trying to pass along to her and what she would do with it when it was her own. As it has turned out, I was wrong.

  A red fox has a den somewhere around here. I move carefully. Vaughn’s drum has stopped, or sunk beneath my auditory threshold. This little blue spruce seems to me not to have grown an inch in height or girth in all the years I have been passing by it, though it looks perfectly healthy, round as a snowman, needle tips blue as the pale blue sky.

  My children would have me stay out of the wood. Emily says flat out that I am getting too old for this. It is true that my knees hurt and buckle from the slightest jar. Many days I have barely enough strength in my arms to push low-hanging branches and cottony spider webs out of the way. It is also true that my ability to control myself and the world is less and less reliable. As often as not now, I end up somewhere I had not planned to go. But then, I often end up somewhere I had not planned to go whether I am in the wood or not.

  Vaughn’s drum has stopped. This seems as weird to me as the fact that he was walking through the woods playing it in the first place. His studied eccentricity is already wearing thin. I resent how my attention has swung to him, exactly what he wants, and the shudder of alarm and anticipation that makes me stumble and veer.

  An animal crosses the path up ahead as if there were no path, red-gold in shadow and sunlight, and with something like pain I’m thinking of the Hopkins poem about dappled things. That’s not one Daddy taught me. I wonder if he knows it, or if I might teach it to him.

  I want to be thinking about the family I have chosen and constructed for myself rather than my family of, as they say, origin. But it’s hard to keep my mind on them. I miss them in the same pervasive, tissue-deep way I’d notice having not enough air to breathe.

  The first time we saw Tara, the traumatized six-year-old with a history we didn’t share who would be our miraculous daughter, she was crouched on the floor in the living room of the foster home, fingering puzzle pieces without much apparent attempt to fit them together. Skilfully, she was not acknowledging us—not looking up, not saying “hi,” ignoring our offerings of an elephant puppet and the pictures of what would soon be her house. The foster mother kept apologizing for Tara’s “rudeness,” insisting she’d taught her better than that. I sat on the floor beside the child, took up a piece of sky, found another to fit into it and make a corner. Tara scooted back away from me, but she was interested. Martin came and just sat with her, not trying for a response, just offering himself. Before we left that first day, she was calling us Mommy and Daddy. I remember how green her eyes were, sheened behind those short dark lashes; her eyes are still astonishing, flashing with defiance or insight, yearning for her father’s approval which he seldom openly bestows, curtained against me even when we sit together in the early morning kitchen. I remember the burnt umber of her hand against the beige of mine that first day, how small she was, how thoroughly mine already. She still holds my hand sometimes. If she were here with me now she might be holding my hand. She still calls me Mommy.

  The first time we met Ramon, the hurt and angry ten-year-old stranger who would be our beloved son, he didn’t want to let us go. His whole taut, pudgy little body said, “You won’t come back,” and when we did, when we kept coming back, his own relief infuriated him. If he were here with me now, I’d be hunting for him in the yellow woods, and when I found him I’d yell at him and take him in my arms, nearly a man now, taller than I am, yelling back at me and then bending to rest his head on my shoulder.


  Off to my left a bird calls oddly. When it repeats I realize it’s a musical instrument, some sort of flute—doubtless my peculiar brother Vaughn again. Seriously pissed off now, I crash through prickly undergrowth toward the sound, which is moving. Vaughn may not think he’s signalling me, but I have some say in that, too.

  Vaughn is in my way. He has been circling me all afternoon. His ubiquitous music could hardly be more dissonant; this is a place for natural sounds, birdcalls and the rattle of branches and wind so high as to be perceptible only by the single sense of hearing. Imposed sounds of poorly played flutes and drums and, God help us, didgeridoos do not belong here—although a case could be made that any sounds any of us makes are by definition natural, because we make them. This is an irritating thought.

  Vaughn has been circling me in one way or another since he was fourteen or fifteen years old when first I and then he realized he was homosexual. When I look at him, when I think of him, the nauseating images of my son fellating and sodomizing another man superimpose themselves on everything else. I recognize this as bigotry. I blame Vaughn for asking too much of me and thereby exposing one of my core character traits: hypocrisy arising out of moral turpitude, the spirit being willing but the psyche weak.

  There he is, standing in front of me, just barely far enough away to be a silhouette against a pale blue fissure of sky between trees. With various musical instruments attached to his back, belt, wrists, head, neck, ankles, he cuts a foolish figure, a caricature of a minstrel, a ragtag one-man band. His hair fluffs out around a shimmering bald spot. His elbows jump in a rhythm that escapes me. His dancing feet swish through the layers of leaf duff on which we are both standing. He says cheerily, “Listen to this, Dad,” and launches into a tune of, I presume, his own composition.

  Actually, it is rather good. I cannot stop myself from turning away.

  And I am lost.

  I have never been here before.

  No one knows where I am. Including me.