Out of the Woods (20 page)

The process was not nearly so decorous as it sounds. In a forest, Hartland said, each tree fights for survival: the trees you see are the survivors of an epic contest, a ruthless struggle for light and air, water and space. It is no wonder, then, if a small current of unease accompanies even the most benign forest walk; around us a battle rages. Hartland pointed to strange twisting branches that veered in sudden verticals or serpentine curves, struggling to reach the light. Some of the trees had even divided against themselves, forming secondary and tertiary trunks, short-term solutions that would betray them in old age when the fissures and fault lines of the past exposed them to wind and weather.

I asked Jon Hartland about wolf trees. After the old tree died, I had gone looking for others. I was drawn to them, to the idea of their ruined fantastic beauty, but another had been hard to find.

Hartland wasn't surprised. Wolf trees are always large, he said, with thick trunks and widely spreading crowns, defined as they grow older as much by what they have lost as by what they retain: the limbs sheared away by wind and ice, the blackened holes gaping like wounds, and the sharpened point of broken branches. The wolf tree's size, its strength, is also its downfall. A wolf tree survives as long as it does because it stands alone: at the top of a hill perhaps, or near the remnants of an old stone wall. But over time, the tree grows old and weakens, and the forest once again encroaches. The huge tree is slowly surrounded by the younger, stronger invaders, whose limbs are supple against the heavy snows and whose root systems are more efficient. The old tree, no longer alone, cannot survive.

A tree dies from the top down. The crown withers, the branches become fragile, the center dries up and hollows out. Still, the tree will stand, to all outward appearances alive, like an ancient warrior brandishing his weapons against all comers. But not forever: eventually it surrenders, to a hard summer rain or a biting nor'easter that knocks it down, and the enormous root system nearly as wide as the tree was tall shuts down.

I wouldn't find wolf trees on the ridge where I had been looking, Hartland said, because the forest itself was still young, although its character had been formed eons ago.

When Hartland drives down U.S. Interstate 91, where it parallels the Connecticut River, New Hampshire on one side, Vermont on the other, he can trace a catastrophic tale of two broken drifting worlds. About 420 million years earlier, he said, New Hampshire and Maine had been a part of the African tectonic plate while Vermont formed a part of its European counterpart. Just east of Vermont 100, the old road that runs roughly down the middle of the state, the African plate crashed into the European, obliterating what was then the coastline, and creating mountains that were eventually worn down by ice and storm and time to the present-day ridges and hills.

Because they had come from different continents, the bedrock and the soil in Vermont were very different from those in New Hampshire a few miles away. New Hampshire had the sandy soil of its African origin and became home to oak, white pine, and hemlock. Vermont, formed at the bottom of an ancient ocean, contained limestone, which was itself the detritus of sea creatures; the higher pH levels of the soil made it home to different species, to beech and birch, sugar maple and ash. Because the soil was fertile in Vermont, things grew and grazed there; because the soil was not in New Hampshire, that state turned to the mills and the canneries.

The mountains and the glaciers that pushed down from the north shaped history, determining the direction of commerce and culture that settled in the valleys and followed the rivers down to the sea. The glaciers sculpted the lakes and carved the mountains, pushing boulders and the remains of exploded volcanoes ahead of them, shaping the topography in an asymmetrical direction, the south side steeper, darker, denser than the north, determining the steeps and flats of the trails I now walked.

 

Y
ou can't think about the forest without thinking about soil, Hartland said. You can't think about soil without thinking about bedrock. And you can't think about bedrock without thinking about time.

 

T
he last morning my mother spent in her own home, I made her French toast. She didn't know it was her last morning—we had told her what Pearlbea had told us to think of as “a loving lie,” that she had to leave the house for a little while until we got the furnace fixed. It was true that the furnace was always going out and my mother was deathly afraid of the cold, so the lie had worked, though I doubt it would have been so successful if I hadn't also slipped a Xanax among her daily vitamins.

“We eat the same way,” she said suddenly. It was startling to hear her make any fresh observation—for over a year her conversation hadn't deviated from an endless loop of a few predictable sentences. In the morning it was an inquiry about how I had slept. In the car, during the day, it was about the vapor trail of a jet going through the sky and how pretty it was, and in the car at night it was about the colored taillights of the other cars and how pretty they were. It reminded me of what being stoned was like, and I sometimes wondered if any of this terrible process was ever pleasant for her.

She was right: we did eat the same way, both of us cutting up our French toast into little pieces and then eating them from the center of the plate outward to the edge. I had spent half my life trying to be anyone but my mother, but by now I was reconciled, at least somewhat, to how much I was like her—the best of me and the worst had come from her. And I thought of how, as she receded into shadow, she was taking a part of me with her, a part of all three of her children. There was no one who would ever see us as capable of such perfection as she did, no matter how religiously we disappointed her.

 

T
he residents were eating lunch when we arrived, and they made room for her at the table. She was always happy in company, at least at first, and we slipped away as they made her welcome, unpacking her clothes in the bedroom that was now hers, scattering photographs of her husband and children and putting in its new place the rosary that was always next to her bed.

Afterward, my brother and sister-in-law and I went back to my mother's house. It was so strange: everything was exactly the same as it had been a few hours before and everything was entirely different. It had been a destination, to run away from, to creep back to, and now, still standing, it was gone.

We spent the next few days throwing out an unspeakable amount of trash. My mother saved everything—empty takeout containers and the old wooden cylinders on which sewing thread used to be wound, bolts of beautiful woolen and silk fabric, now stained and moth-eaten, mimeographed homework assignments from her years as a teacher, every kitchen utensil she had ever owned.

And there were photographs. Boxes and boxes of photographs that we dragged into the room my mother had called the study. No one ever studied there, or so much as entered the room, except for my father, who read the paper there and found a refuge from his wife. It was a pretty little room with intensely uncomfortable tufted furniture and dusty bookshelves holding hardbacks from their years as members of the Book-of-the-Month Club half a century earlier.

Holly and I sat on the floor, going through every photo, tossing duplicates and travel pictures, saving images of my mother's childhood, those of her children and grandchildren. There were thousands of them, every family visit catalogued, every ceremonious occasion. We sat there for hours, watching the past unspool, including our own as young mothers. It had been easy of late to tell myself that Zoë's childhood had gone by in a flash, but here was the warp and weft of it laid out stitch by stitch, the ticking minutes, the endless afternoons of feeding and changing and reading and entertaining, of soothing and humoring and scolding and doing it again and again. Wow, said Holly. Life is long.

We packed up most of the pictures to be stored in her basement—we told ourselves our children would want to look at them someday. But I took one with me. It was a picture of my mother, an eight-by-ten black-and-white in one of those paper frames that can be propped upright by means of a bit of angled cardboard.

I had never seen it before. A school portrait, probably, taken when she was about fifteen or sixteen. She is dressed in a neatly pressed white blouse with a rounded collar and a woolen vest with bright brass buttons, a jauntily folded handkerchief positioned just so in the left breast pocket. A crucifix gleams, caught in the camera's flash. Her hair falls in tight curls just above her shoulders, having been no doubt twisted up in rags all night for the occasion. My mother had told us for so long that she was ugly that I had believed it until I was old enough to judge for myself, but here was the beginning of her unruly irregular beauty—pale skin, delicate arcing eyebrows, the large nose and the full underlip of her mouth for once not compressed into a hard thin line. And here, too, was what might have been, had she been loved, had she been told she was pretty, had anyone believed in her. There was hope and excitement in her eyes, such a willingness to please and to find pleasure, a belief that there was a place for her in the world as she then imagined it, if she only looked hard enough. There had been no love in her harsh young life: she was the daughter of Polish immigrants, a steelworker and a charwoman. Her mother had been the eldest of ten children who had grown up in a brutal and violent poverty and who considered it enough to put a roof over her children's head and food in their mouths. My mother worked hard, put herself through night school, and hoped for happiness, but by the time it came along, in the form of a young New Hampshire soldier, the damage was too deep: it had divided her from herself. But there in the picture was the woman she could have been, on the verge of being eclipsed by the woman she would become. In the photo I could see both of them, looking out from frightened hopeful eyes, her tentative uncertain smile.

My mother worried that there was something deeply wrong with her. That she didn't belong—because of her poverty, her looks, because her mother declared as much. She was and would always remain an outsider. It's a look you see in the firstborn of many immigrant families—sometimes it's erased by success and happy endings, but sometimes it hardens, and moves glacierlike down the slope of a life, and into the lives of the children who come later, transforming the soil in which they will grow up, determining which side of the ridge they will walk.

I took the picture home and put it on the mantelpiece above the woodstove and took it down again and stared at it for hours, this picture of my mother with all her dreams intact, yes, and with all her fears already formed. And when it comes time these days, as it does all too frequently, to think about what I could have done differently, I try to remember to look at that picture, because it reminds me to remember how much of what happens to us now happens because of the vagaries of ancient glaciers, because of the way in which continents collided in generations no longer remembered. You did good, I tell the picture, phrasing it the way my grandmother would have, had she ever said the words my mother longed to hear. You did the best you possibly could.

 

A
t first, after the confusion of her initial few weeks in the new place, my mother seemed happier to us than she had been for a long while. She had always liked people, but her difficult nature—opinionated, oversensitive, intrusive—had driven them away. But at her new home, she was surrounded by women determined to make her feel loved, and by others too out of it to notice her contrariness. And for a time she grew animated and participated in the word games and the music classes. She took under her wing a patient whose own dementia had robbed her of speech, holding her hand and encouraging her. She told the women who cared for her that she loved them and tried their patience with endless stories about her children—when she wasn't excoriating them as they tried to bathe her.

But when her children came to visit her, the light would go out of her eyes, replaced by a look of watchful mistrust. She refused to walk, although she still could, and she seemed to find it difficult to put a sentence together—at least for us. She was better, the staff members said, when we weren't around, though they were too kind to put it that way.

During one visit she did make the effort to tell us something. We have to talk, she began, but she couldn't remember the end of the sentence, or what it was we had to talk about. My brother tried to steer her away from attempts to articulate the agenda she couldn't remember.

So how are you, Mom? he said. How's life?

My life, she said, is blackness and mold.

Oh really? said Chris, thinking that she was remembering some long-ago problem with dampness in the basement. And what are you going to do about that?

She looked at us, stunned. You asking me that is like a slap in the face, she said. And that was when I knew that she wanted back her solitude in all its burned and blackened beauty, and that no matter how dark the sea into which her past was slipping, no matter how little she knew of the present, or thought of the future, my mother would always remember, until she remembered nothing else, that we were the people who had betrayed her.

About a year later, I found another wolf tree. A cellar hole, so overgrown I nearly fell into it, and a tumble of old stones that looked as if design, not accident, had placed them there, made me stop and look around. The tree stood in what must have been a corner of the pasture. It was an ungraceful old survivor, lopsided, the stumps of its bony branches poking at the sky like fingers, like an old preacher in a threadbare frock coat, half mad with the prophecies no one stops to listen to. I took pictures. I walked on.

My mother lives in twilight, no longer the hectoring, insistent, urgent woman she was, storming our lives with the love and the fury that nearly drowned us all; neither bane nor blessing, not arrow, not anchor. I'm not sure she makes any more of my presence than the tree does, though sometimes I think I spot an errant gleam of recognition, which quickly fades. And when I leave the pleasant little house where she now lives, there is always a moment of utter disorientation—I don't know where I have been, I don't know where to go—and for that moment my mother and I are finally in the same place.