In Wilderness (9 page)

She aims her Dead Lady eyes straight at him. Danny braces for her screams. If she kicks him with those stiff, new work shoes, he’ll roll into a ball. If she runs he won’t run after her. Whatever, the whole thing will end. She’ll go back to wherever—she’s nothing but a rich-bitch Lady Brett Ashley anyway. He’ll get back to living in the cabin, eat pond fish, get his world back. Happy, happy.

Why, then, has this sad hole fetched up inside him like a seep?

And why, when the bitch keeps staring at him, looking through him, looking past him, passing by him unseeing on her way to find more firewood, does he get a jolt of joy so pure she might’ve shot it straight into his veins?

Joy so complete it brings back a big thing he has forgotten. The free pass of watching. If they don’t sense your presence, if you’re that good at what you do, they won’t ever see you. That’s a proven fact. People only see the things they’re looking for. You can bang an entire shivaree of pots together, set your fucking hair on fire, and if they aren’t looking for you they won’t find you. The Dead Lady looked straight at you and she never saw.

You’ve still got it, Danny Boy. Everything your Pawpaw taught
you. Everything you brought back home from over there. Nothing in this world’s so bad it doesn’t net you something.

Still, he can’t have what just happened happening again, her coming up on him like that. There’s a sure way he can fix that, but not one he craves to implement. It changes things, and that’s not good. Change something just a little and, by definition, you won’t be watching anymore what you set out to watch. By definition. Change things and you affect the outcome, change their world. And yours.

He finishes out today’s watch scrupulously, by the book, cataloging it all in his head. She’s got on what she always wears. The too-big work pants, leather work shoes not yet broken in, red wool shirt, its sleeves rolled twice, extra shoelace tying back her hair. Keeps hold of the axe like it’s a walking stick. No extra movements; still stiff and coddling all her pains. But not as stiff as a few days ago. Maybe not as stiff as yesterday, except he’s got no way to know—she’d finished all her outside chores before he got there, gets up earlier these days.

She ties the wood up in her jacket, carries it back to the cabin, duck-footed from its weight. Soon there’s smoke coming out the stovepipe. Danny digs in his jacket pocket, pulls up his Little Debbie Snack Cake, eats it so his stomach won’t growl. He misses the Old Man’s fish. Pulling fish out of a pond’s a damn sight more dependable than counting on rabbits and squirrels. But rabbits and squirrels are all he’s got now. Small price to pay for watching the Dead Lady. Still, he might ought to build a few more squirrel traps. Except that’s time away from her.

Tonight, like every night, the sun can’t set too fast. He stares at it till it blinds his eyes, as if to speed it behind Panther Mountain by sheer force of will. This is the hardest part, her inside but with her lamp not yet lit and it not dark enough for him to move in close. Can’t even see her pass before a window, all he can do is wait. And take a quiet piss, maybe his last chance till morning.

Yeah, you’re going to mess with her world, aren’t you, make it just a little different.

She’ll never notice. What harm can it do? Nothing but make her life some easier, though that’s not your intent. So what does it matter?
You’re not fighting a fucking war these days, you’re just watching one dumb whore who came up here to die.

Still, you hadn’t ought to do it for another reason, hadn’t ought to go around touching shit you know she’ll touch. Puts you just one step away from touching her. One step. Every man walks down the road to Hell just one step at a time.

But not Danny. Danny has the power of his will. Danny will obey his almighty first commandment. Never touch again.

Shadows getting long, his favorite time except for pitch-black dark. Time when nowhere you might cast your eye is necessarily what it seems. A hollow stump might be a bear, might be a fender from a rusted-out Ford Fairlane. Might be Danny.

Danny loves the twilight, even though it’s nighttime gives you the best edge to move in close. Tree to tree, silent as a shadow, he sneaks toward the cabin. All the way up to the corner where her sleeping bag lies on the other side. He squats, sits, the stones cold between his thighs, hugs them loosely with both arms, rests his cheek against them. Through the broken mortar is the Dead Lady settling down. Yeah, this is what he came for, the small sighs and whimpers that give way to whispered breaths of sleep. He times his own breaths to them—can’t get much closer to someone than that—stays by her through the night. He’d kill for reefer strong enough to let him see her dreams.

When a stiff breeze stirs itself near morning, he uses it to cover his few sounds as he gets up and makes his way some distance, toward the tree stump where she left the axe. Creeps beyond it in a wide arc, past the thicket where she almost found him. Moves the deadfalls away from his hiding place, out to where she can get them easy. Moves other branches in close from the woods.

Changes things.

It ain’t ’cause you have to. It’s just ’cause she’s there
.

S
OMETHING
’
S WRONG
. S
HE HARDLY NAPS ANYMORE
,
MAYBE TEN OR
fifteen minutes and that’s all, finishes her routine tasks in half the time with energy to spare, rarely throws up her food. It’s been a month; she’s been told to expect by now the start of organs shutting down. Every day she checks for signs, but they don’t come. From the looks of things, she’s not dying according to schedule.

To say this is worrisome is not quite accurate but close. Closer is to say it’s a situation that demands strict vigilance. Because it’s producing change, an unfamiliar dilemma: She has time on her hands, time when she wants more than to sleep, or sit and stare, a luxury she can’t remember and hence did not plan for. And time on one’s hands begs to be filled.

When there aren’t other diversions, one’s mind answers the call. And hers has stepped up to the plate to fill her empty hours with craziness. Today, as is increasingly the case, the sunrise moved her to a
whole morning of joyous tears at the mere fact of her continued existence. But in the afternoons, when shadows take on a certain length and shape, she cowers, keeps away from windows, certain she is being watched. Nights, she dives into her sleeping bag before it’s dark enough to light a candle; who knows what its bright flame might draw? One joy, one fear, is as foolish as another, she knows this. Nonetheless, they come.

To defend against them, she invents activities, distractions bordering on obsessions. From her tree book she has learned, as best she could in winter, the names of all the trees she can see from the cabin and along the privy path. Excluding the dogwoods, which she came here knowing, the chestnut oaks were easiest: huge Aubrey Beardsley concoctions, gnarled and black, with thick trunks and twisted, horrormovie limbs. The other oaks she mostly told from acorns or their brown leaves rotting on the ground. White, post, red, scarlet, black, pin, chinquapin—amazing how so many can exist in this one place. The poplars are straight and tall, the hickories less so, the branches of young maples angle like calligraphy. Her favorites, the delicate and slender beeches, keep their parchment leaves all winter and stand gathered in low places like clutches of people talking. For several days she had a mystery tree, then pegged it as a serviceberry, known for its “ragged, white, wedding-bouquet blossoms with a languid scent.” She’s sketched in her notebook—on the backs of pages—every tree, its shape, and a leaf when she could find one.

There’s a bright-colored snake lives in the privy. In the warmest part of the day it stretches out where the floor meets the wall, like the piece of decorative molding she at first mistook it for. When she reached out to touch it, the snake convulsed against her hand—its skin smooth, not at all slimy—then streaked away. Back at the cabin she looked it up in her
Child’s Book of Forest Animals
, the wafer-thin booklet she bought only because she thought it might fill the last space in her sleeping bag. Unlike larger, more thorough guidebooks, it told her in a hurry everything about snakes she was in a hurry to find out, mainly that the privy snake, a corn snake, would not kill her. The
Child’s Book of Forest Animals
did not tell her why, considering her prognosis, she thought this fact important.

Now she watches for the corn snake in the privy the same way she listens for the deer at night outside her wall. But these wonders aren’t nearly enough to fill her empty hours. In all her advance planning she never allowed for time. Not the time she has left—that’s a black crow perching always on her shoulder and she counts its feathers last thing every day. No, it’s this other time, this time-on-her-hands time, leisure time, she failed to consider. Today, after resting maybe fifteen minutes, she simply gets up and sits on one of the benches. There’s nothing left for her to do. The house is clean, clothes and dishes put away, four days’ worth of firewood stacked by size out on the porch, more under the woodshed overhang. She’s eaten lunch, picked some dry weeds on her privy walk, arranged them in her extra cup and set them on the table. It’s too early to build up the fire for supper, so she sits, hands folded in her lap.

Her little cabin has the simple, functional beauty of a thing created over time with loving care, a life’s work. Even the knobs on the storage cabinets take into account the grain of their wood. The trestle table and its benches, though perhaps crafted more hurriedly, show a similar sensibility and belong here in this place. The same holds true for the “few good things” she brought. Even the seed packets belong, as they gleam from the mantel. She stares at them a long while, then gets up and brings them to the table. A dozen lovely envelopes, each different and all chosen by a random sweep of her hand. Even the backs are pretty, with their pastel diagrams of planting zones. Her cabin is in zone seven.

She fans out the envelopes, arranges them by the colors of their vegetables: parsley, kale, broccoli, green bell pepper, sage, cabbage, lettuce, turnip, yellow summer squash, golden winter squash, carrot, beet.

If their names make a litany, their various planting directions are a poem:

Her work in the meadow starts innocently enough. No more than poking around, tugging up a patch of weeds here, kicking a rock there, examining the rusted fence. Something to do, a distraction. There’s a spading fork in the woodshed with a handle not too rotten. She uses it to poke between tree roots, under slick mats of last fall’s leaves and leaves from other falls before them, down to the dark, loamy soil.
We are not here long, any of us
.

It’s not a plan, standing inside the rusted fence at various times of day, turning in all directions to determine angles of the sun, amounts of shade from trees at the forest’s edge, prevailing winds. Nor is dragging limbs and branches from the woods and piling them beside the fenced enclosure any sort of plan. It’s not a plan a few days later hiking to the car, bringing the shovel she bought at the hardware store, digging up each weed and seedling inside the enclosure until her every move is agony and bruises black as orchids bloom on her arms apparently from no more than the strain. It’s still not a plan, laying the collected limbs inside the fence in rectangles narrow enough for her to reach halfway across, or washing out the privy slop jar, using it to bring soil from the woods day after day until she’s filled all the rectangles. Nor is it a plan upending one of the picnic-table benches, dragging it to the sunny side of the front room, filling its box-like underside with small stones and loamy soil for seeds that call for indoor starting.

Not even on a windless noon, when she tears a tiny corner off the turnip envelope, shakes its granules out onto her palm, and sprinkles them into the vastness of her first raised bed, is it a plan. Mere specks that cannot possibly grow turnips. Turnips she may never live to see.

No. It’s not a plan. A plan requires a future.

A
NOTHER TWO WEEKS GONE
and she’s developed a new symptom: a focused, trance-like state, some variant of a daze. Her vision’s grown quite sharp and she looks only at right now.

It’s in this daze she turns over the other bench to make another indoor bed, and keeps on building outdoor garden beds for all the other seeds she owns and seeds she doesn’t own but can imagine owning. It’s in this daze she stops and listens to a pair of crows quarreling at tree line for a length of time so long it can be measured by the changing angle of the sun. Or lets the wind into her hearing, until it no longer sounds like traffic on some not-so-distant freeway but only like itself. This morning, as with all others now, she stokes her kitchen fire in darkness, rolls up her sleeping bag and sits on it to watch the dawn light filter through the trees; shows up ahead of time as if she’s bought a ticket. Later, she eats slowly. Her foods are few, but every day their tastes intensify. And nearly every day she keeps them down.