In Wilderness (10 page)

This wilderness that so recently was merely nameless trees on nameless ridges has grown infinitely complex and subtle. She writes in her notebook:
Spring is felt before you see it; buds swell in the cold. My seeds sprout in a green fringe so frail I’m frightened for them
. After dinner she waits for the sun to set just as she waited for its rise. Its afterglow flames up and fades; the birds grow quiet. If she looks away, when she looks back it’s dark.

This night she awakens to the sound of gentle rain that drowns out the deer’s breathing, imagines how her seeds will swell like small, expectant bellies, then drops back into sleep knowing she has prayed a prayer.

T
HE WEATHER
’
S WARMER NOW
. In the garden a few days ago, she spied on a single ant most of a cloudless morning, as it marched along one of the stacked branches enclosing a just-planted bed. The ant disappeared periodically into patches of shade from the branch above it, only to emerge seconds or minutes later farther on. Mostly now she
takes each morning one ant at a time. Works in the garden, dreams of harvesting full-grown vegetables, plans long walks, imagines sitting on her porch in moonlight.

But she does not, in fact, sit on her porch in moonlight. Something that surely has to do with seasonal changes in the slant of light, the length and shape of shadows, how they move, has put a thick, black smear inside her mind that spreads and clings like oil. On the few days she’s lingered in the garden past midday, this inner dark has come on her at what seems the same hour. And always suddenly, like a current of chill air that brushes against one’s skin on a hot afternoon. Or the intensity of something’s sudden gaze, something watching. She makes a point to tend her garden, chop her wood, perform all her outdoor chores now only during mornings, dreads her last hike to the privy in late afternoon. Afternoons, she doubts even the deer—she’s never found its tracks.

Perhaps it really is no more than fear of shadows, the way they move when wind blows through the trees. If this is so, then there will be some time of day that she has not yet noticed, when things become all right again and that black pall inside her thins and disappears. A point where it is safe to go outside, at least a little while. Perhaps some precise moment, just before the sun slides down below the trees. That time when all the shadows merge but it is not yet dark. That’s when she’ll go down to the privy.

Now.

Throw on her coat and run, if she still can. If she knows she can run, perhaps she won’t be so afraid.

It’s probably quite normal, her abnormal fear, a hardwired survival mechanism we all share. In cities you’re supposed to be afraid. It makes you lock your doors, stay out of alleys, keeps you safe. Perhaps the fear that keeps you safe in cities gets kicked into overdrive by isolation.

And yet come summer, she won’t be able to see three feet to either side of her on any of the paths. Even now, with all the trees still bare, if something crouched on the downside of a ridge less than three feet away she wouldn’t see it. In cities, someone is always near enough to hear you scream. Who would hear her in this lonesome place?

And there is something out there. Now. Twenty, thirty feet beyond
the path, something she can’t quite see but hears. Or perhaps only senses—its eyes crawling over her skin. It’s moving parallel to her, causing changes in the light. Around the next bend is the privy. She runs toward it, dashes in and bars the door.

Takes comfort in the little bit of light that leaks in from a screened vent near the roof. Takes comfort even in the enclosure’s rank smells—and how someone improved upon the usual hole by inserting a slop jar she can empty. But the sun is almost down; she can’t stay here all night. Even assuming whatever thing that’s out there eventually slinks away and doesn’t bother her, if she stays she will almost surely freeze, catch pneumonia. Die—and not in any way she planned. She unbars the door, steps outside, runs.

To the cabin—the porch, the door, and then inside. She shoots the bolt, stands panting.

But it’s not over. What if the thing got in while you were gone?

Too frightened to move anything except her eyes, she stands with her back against the door, looks all around. The cabin’s full of places she can’t see. She crosses the room—on tiptoes, what good will that do?—lifts the lids on both the storage bins and peers in, cranes her neck to see up the hearth’s chimney, tiptoes to the kitchen, checks even the pie safe. Nothing.

There is one more place something could hide, if that something knew how to climb up there. She’s never once been in the loft, gave it only a quick glance her second or third day. Heights dizzied her when she was in the best of health; they terrify her now. And the loft steps are steep and narrow, more ladder than stairs. She would have to climb five of them to see up there.

Fear makes you weak. Fear also makes you strong. Two steps, three steps, four, one more.

Quick, look. Empty.

Nothing is hiding there. Nothing is hiding anywhere. She is a foolish woman. Her terror is all nonsense. Nothing more than a new symptom, something else to not give in to, to ignore.

S
WATHS OF VIOLETS BLOOM AGAINST THE GROUND AND BUDS HAVE
popped out on the dogwoods. She has not only lived into the spring, she has outlasted her provisions. There’s hardly any food left in the house and only half a candle.

This morning she flipped back through her notebook entries, slid her index finger down each page. On the face of it, she’s hardly dying. Certainly seems strong enough to hike out to her car, drive to Elkmont.

Tonight she unrolls her sleeping bag in the same corner by the fireplace, curls deep inside it as the dark rolls in. In her safe shell she rides the night from sound to sound. The owl, whose soft call only deepens silence; sometimes a larger animal—a bear, a boar—crashing among more distant trees. But the sound she waits for, longs for, is that breathing, so in rhythm with her own, that leads her to believe she has an ally.

She has grown to think whatever animal is there protects her—from whatever other animal it is that terrifies her. Most nights it comes. Always at first she fears it but then settles down and lets it lull her into sleep. If she wakes in darkness it’s still there, a doe that steps so lightly she makes no sound and leaves no tracks.

On the few nights the doe does not come she sleeps more fitfully. Sometimes in the darkest part, as if in some dream, a wild cry echoes off the mountains with such a human sound it chills her. A bobcat, certainly. Nothing to fear. Nonetheless, she stares up at the cabin’s trusses, makes herself a stowaway on a sturdy ship rocking secure and out of reach on a calm sea.

She sleeps then, and all the night’s mystery seeps into her bones. It’s still there come morning, even sounds she has forgotten.

A
DAWN MIST SHIMMERS
among the trees and the hike out to her car is easy. She has lived to see the dry text in her guidebooks come alive. Hard, pale humps of edible fiddlehead ferns push up through the soft ground by the stream; tiny peeper frogs, drawn to wetness, sing out one at a time and then in chorus; a huge and beautiful pileated woodpecker, with its sleek red head and jungle cries, sweeps through the trees.
Pay attention. You may never see these sights again
.

She squeezes her hand around the list she carries folded in her pocket. Post office (rent a box), bank (open an account), supermarket (rice, beans, squash, cabbage, salt), hardware store (nails, screws, screwdriver, a second inside lock for the cabin door, candles, more bullets for the gun), bookshop (small paperback on gardening), dress shop (two cotton shirts—she failed to bring clothes for warm weather). A rocking chair would be so nice, but there’s no way she can bring it in on the trail.

The mist is burning off and she takes strong, sure strides. The ground, with all its textures, moves fast beneath her feet. During her time at the cabin, her sense of smell has grown extraordinarily keen. A strong scent of dampness leads to a cache of delicate boletus mushrooms on a decomposing log. She marks it with a cairn of stones; her guidebook says they’re good to eat. Not much farther on, she glimpses
in the valley far below a sudden flash of too-bright yellow through the trees. Her car, neglected, mud spattered, its roof covered with small twigs and dried leaves, a city car that never once put in for this, poor thing.

Her reflection in its windows is a shock. Had she glimpsed it unawares, in some downtown building’s plate glass, she might not have recognized herself. She looks like an Indian. Thin, but not emaciated, her face firmer, tanned, the cheekbones more pronounced. Her eyes seem a deeper, blacker brown, their gaze alert, direct. She stares into them as she might into a stranger’s, the stranger that this wilderness has made of her from some race only it remembers.

But when she opens the driver’s-side door, its signature creak floods her with forgotten city memories. Inside, her car smells of all she used to be: a woman who hung lavender sachets in her closets, daubed Arpège on her wrists, flung her expensive briefcase on the seat beside her. A wave of dizziness assails her; this new sharp-eyed woman reflected in the window glass is nobody she knows.

Rolling down the window helps. The engine rumbles and dies the first three times she turns her key in the ignition. Should have hiked out every week, started the car to charge the battery. Stupid to assume she’d not be needing it. On the fourth try the engine catches. On the highway, she steps on the gas; the needle climbs to forty, fifty, sixty on the straightaways. Speed feels good. How can she have forgotten?

If you drive fast you can make it to Atlanta in three hours
.

The thought surprises her, but only for a second. It’s crazy living here alone and frightened, without even a rocking chair.

She can drive back this very day, check into a good hotel, order dinner. Rent a small apartment in one of those new, tall, downtown buildings—with windows that look out on other buildings filled with people, or on the green mist of a park—and live there for however long she has. With lots of chairs.

Die in a hospital, like you’re supposed to.

“We’ll see.” She speaks the words aloud to the farmhouses she speeds past. What her mother often said when Katherine wanted something—a ruffled party dress, a radio all her own. “We’ll see.”
Sometimes she got the thing she asked for right away and sometimes not at all.

And sometimes she had to wait for later. Right now she has a list of things she needs to do.

The clock in the courthouse tower reads eight forty-five. Elkmont sparkles in the morning sun, its streets still deserted. She parks by the square, drops two quarters in the meter. Small, rough acorns litter both the benches under a bare chestnut oak. Brush one off and it’s a good place to eat lunch.

The day’s already warm. Across the street, a dark-haired man in khaki pants and a plaid shirt buttoned to the neck steps out of the feed store, dumps a bucket of soapy water on the sidewalk and jabs at it with a push broom. Katherine watches him with total concentration, fascinated by the way he jerks his broom or moves his shoulders, this first human being she’s laid eyes on in a month. His pavement glistens.

But in spite of the clean sidewalk and the sunny day, the air around her smells peculiar, artificial, as if concocted from the odors of orange marshmallow peanuts, roof tar, and those cake deodorizers that one finds in service station toilet bowls. Small waves of heat rise off the asphalt street. The other day, down near the privy, she caught the scent of a bear, or someplace where a bear had been. The blackberry bushes all were crushed and broken and beside them was a paw print. The ground around smelled like the biggest, wettest, foulest dog imaginable had wallowed there. A rank scent, but she’d trade this one for it in a heartbeat. She takes a deep breath in a futile attempt to clear her head, which has begun to throb. She has errands, needs to finish them before she can move on. She made a list.

H
E CAN
’
T SLEEP
,
TOO GODDAMN COLD
. N
OT COLD IN THE HOUSE
,
NOT
even cold out there with Jimbo’s reefer plants and Gatsby’s fruit trees. It’s cold that’s in him and hadn’t ought to be, and that his moldy blanket can’t do anything about. Cold curling through him, through the whole damn room, like some weird, twisting, dry-ice smoke.

Here, Dog. Don’t stand there and stare at me with those sad-mama eyes. Come lie down beside me, warm me up so I can get some sleep.

Okay, fuck you, don’t then. Get on outside.

He gives the dog a good non-contact kick, then lights a joint, cups both hands around it, draws the ash-end to bright yellow. Even that won’t warm him.

He could read something if he had a lantern; candle won’t give light enough. Start the next book on the shelf. Jimbo was a reader. Taught Danny what it meant to be one. Jimbo lived in town, in a
house full of books. Books he loaned to Danny. Because Danny had taught Jimbo how to beat up anyone that picked on him. One good turn deserved another. Danny and Jimbo—they played Robinson Crusoe, Natty Bumppo, Jason and the Golden Fleece, Tarzan. Later, he was Sal Paradise to Jimbo’s Dean Moriarty—in high school, in college. In the war. But by then they weren’t playing, that was who they were. Danny and Jimbo. Friends for life.

Yeah, well.

Eastern sky’s showing a thin line of morning light. A hair more and he can climb down to the cabin, watch her walk out to the privy, come back and eat her breakfast on the porch, feet tucked under her long red coat, whatever. He’s never been by her this early, doesn’t know her morning ways. Yeah, something different, that’ll do the trick. Watch her stoned out of his mind, let the sun come up and warm his bones.

He pinches out the joint and drops it in his shirt pocket, ties his boot laces together, drapes the boots around his neck and scrambles down the mountain. Barefoot, quiet, grabbing onto saplings, sliding over rocks.
Just like with the she-bear, it’s just ’cause she’s there
.