Gone to the Woods Read online

  Into the boy’s eyes, the stare, into his life and all that he would become and past, way past his eyes, while Orvis gasped and hacked and spit down between his feet, lifting his hand, trembling, to pull the two levers back down to the middle position as he continued hissing and croaking, phlegm gurgling, his eyes boring through the boy’s head:

  “A little too much spark,” he wheezed.

  Finally, in the end, the engine did start, and after much forward and backward maneuvering, Orvis got the vehicle lined out on the road and moving along. But it wasn’t like any car or truck the boy had ever seen. The top speed was about as fast as he could run, judging by how fast the dirt moved underneath them. And the vehicle did not run straight, but seemed to wobble, sliding of its own volition to the left and then back to the right in a gentle S-pattern. The boy felt like they were skimming over water. He would find later that this motion was caused by the wooden spokes being dried out and slightly loose, which required Orvis to pay constant attention to the steering wheel to course-correct.

  That might be why he talked to the car. Sig—Edy’s husband and therefore his uncle—told the boy later that Orvis had worked so long with a horse and wagon and sleigh, talking to the horse all the time, that he was used to urging his ride along in angry Norwegian. The boy thought, based on how he talked to the car, he must have really hated the horse, but Sig said you couldn’t hate a horse. You could always, he said, hate a car. Because it had an engine, and engines would always let you down when you needed them—you hated the engine, and that made you hate the car. Plus they were noisy and smelled bad, and it was easy to hate something that was loud and smelled bad and would let you down.

  The engine was so loud that it didn’t much matter that Orvis was talking and swearing in Norwegian. The engine alone made a deafening buckity-buckity-buckity noise, and everything else on the car seemed to be rattling all the time and when they started up any hill—and there were many—the cacophony grew much louder as a growling came from beneath the seat.

  “Come on, get on up that hill before I—no you don’t, you stupid slab-sided son of a gun—you get over or I’ll come up there and hammer you with a brick so hard cars all over the county will feel it.” And then he’d lapse into Norwegian, just ripping off words, spitting and hacking, clawing at the boy by the jacket to catch him when he started to fall out of the side of the truck, which was often, and then grab a breath, spit a gob, and pitch into it again.

  The boy had no idea how far they had to drive. The road was not even a real road, just twin dirt ruts disappearing into the distance, or over one of the many hills or turns, so narrow the trees on either side nearly touched over the top as if they were driving through a long green tunnel.

  The boy thought it must have been very pretty, but he had no chance to appreciate the view because he was always on the hair edge of falling out of the truck as it weaved, jerking in and out of the ruts. All there was to hold on to was the exposed wire under his rear, which did not help much. When he would start to fall, Orvis would grab the collar of his jacket with the clawed hand and jerk him back so hard he would slam all the way over to Orvis’s side. Whereupon he would swear at the boy, the truck, the world, and then push him back and away so forcefully the boy would nearly fall out again.

  And so Orvis would have to grab and pull the boy back once more.

  Back and forth, back and forth, amid the buckity-buckity roar of the engine, the whining growl of whatever was under the seat, and a storm of swearing. Each time Orvis swore as he was looking at the boy, he would get a spray of spit that was brown and wet. And sticky.

  After a time the boy could not begin to measure, they came to a lone mailbox next to the road where he saw another set of twin ruts going off to the side away from the mailbox, vanishing into what appeared to be thick forest. Orvis stopped the truck.

  “Get out,” he said, spitting in the direction of the side ruts. “This is where you are to be.”

  “Where?” The boy could see nothing but dense trees and brush and even more of a tunnel than they had been through on the road. “How far is it?”

  “Not far,” he sputtered. “Not far from here, but we cannot take the truck down there.”

  “Why not?” If he was afraid to take the truck down there, the boy thought, what would happen to him, five-year-old, short-legged him, carrying a cardboard suitcase?

  “The dog.”

  “The dog?”

  “He runs along the side.”

  “Is he mean?” Does he, the boy thought, eat kids?

  “He hates the wheels and runs along the side and bites the tires to make them lose the air. I can’t get new tires until the war is over.” More spit. Gurgling. “So I don’t drive down there. Get out.”

  The boy obeyed him—not that he had much choice—and went to the back and pulled out his box-suitcase. Orvis reached around to a canvas pouch tied on the driver’s side and handed the boy an envelope. “Here, take their mail with you.”

  “What do I do?” The boy stood there, holding the envelope on top of his box.

  “Walk down there”—he pointed one claw—“or don’t. You can wait here until they come to check mail, but they don’t come every day. You might have to spend the night.”

  Of course, the boy thought. I’ll just spend the night. Here. Alone. Sure.

  With that farewell, Orvis pushed the throttle forward, everything started snorting and rattling, and in moments, he was gone. The boy was surprised and a little alarmed at how fast he disappeared and how the slamming, violent noise so completely fell dead silent in what seemed like a split second.

  For a very short time, the silence was absolute. He heard only the sound of his heart in his ears. But in another breath or two, the sound of the woods rushed back in and took over: frogs and birds singing, a soft breeze rustling the leaves, and things—sounded like something heavy—scurrying in the shadows.

  He tried to be brave or at least choose the lesser of two evils: Didn’t want to wait here so he might as well move down the side road. He felt tempted to run—panic being such a good motivator—but his suitcase made swiftness impossible and he stumbled along for what felt like forever. He’d only covered forty or fifty feet when he heard a new sound: a loud and most definitely life-threatening snake-like hissing. He looked farther down the trail to see a lane-wide, enormous, rolling gray-and-white monster with wings sticking out at odd angles obviously coming to attack him.

  He’d heard the soldiers on the train say there were times when a man didn’t know whether to fight or run. He had no such dilemma; he immediately dropped his box and the envelope and turned to try to run back down the path toward the road.

  Two things stopped him.

  First, the monster shape-shifted from an indistinct pile of doom into a visible flock of geese. The geese were clearly coming to attack and he was still terrified. But at least he didn’t think geese would eat him, which of course an unknown monster would have done, as all unknown monsters always do. It had been in every one of the fairy tales that had been read to him—children were always being eaten by monsters.

  Second, directly to the rear of the geese, he spotted a huge, shaggy-looking dog who, with a large bound, piled into the middle of the flock, snarling and biting left and right so hard he could hear teeth snapping. There was a wild explosion of feathers and goose poop (he could smell it) and while the geese didn’t flee—indeed they turned on the dog—he kept them busy and, as Sig later said, when the boy told him about the attack, they made “a whole life’s effort of beating the tar out of that dog.”

  Rex, as the dog turned out to be named, gave a really good account of himself—judging by the quantity of feathers in the air—and it occupied the geese long enough for the boy to pick up his box and the envelope and make his way around the melee. He hadn’t trotted another twenty yards past the dog-and-goose fight when he saw a figure coming.

  Aunt Edith.

  “Edy.” He thought how like a dream she wa
s. That she was suddenly there. Just like a perfect dream. “Hi.”

  She was wearing patched bib overalls and a sweatshirt and a tattered straw hat, and she smiled so that her blue eyes crinkled at the corners. She held out her arms and said, “Why, Lord, little peanut, where on earth did you come from?”

  “Chicago,” he said, falling into the hug that was, right then, the most wonderful thing he had ever known. “I came all the way from Chicago.”

  “And how,” she said, holding him tight, “was your trip?”

  He looked at her face, thinking, remembering. Sick on the train, the wounded soldiers, the awful smells, changing trains for the run north, seeing the lakes and woods, people coming on the train with food and milk, warm thick milk that still smelled of cows in some way, being alone, no, alone, then the car-truck and the woods and smells again and Orvis, oh God, he thought, Orvis and the crank kicking him into the air with too much spark and being left alone, no, alone in the woods and then the horror of the goose monster coming to eat him and what could he say?

  He took a breath and said:

  “I got stuck in a toilet.”

  HIS OWN ROOM

  Their place, Edy and Sig’s homestead, was a fairy tale kind of farm with a small white house with red trim nestled in towering oak trees. All the other buildings—chicken coop, workshop, storage shed, and a small barn—were painted the same way, looking like make-believe cottages the boy had seen in picture books.

  It must have rained the day before he arrived, because chickens were busily chasing water bugs or finding worms on the edges of puddles. A sleek golden mother cat watched over her three kittens, who spent their time chasing the chickens and flying bugs. Rex, the dog who had attacked the geese, found a patch of sunlight and lay down on fresh grass. No sooner had he done so than two of the kittens saw his tail twitch and attacked it, which Rex didn’t seem to mind. He kept flipping the bushy end of the tail back and forth to give the kittens something to pounce on. As the boy walked past him, he growled—a low, deep, stomach sound of a growl.

  The boy stopped dead in his tracks. “The dog doesn’t like me,” he said to Edy. “Why is that?”

  She had been walking ahead carrying his suitcase-box, but she looked back, put the box down, and shook her head. “It’s not you. Rex is growling at the geese. He doesn’t like them.” She pointed behind the boy and he turned to see that the whole flock had been quietly following him about thirty yards back. When he turned toward them, two of them hissed, lowering their heads and spreading their wings.

  “Are they going to attack me?”

  “Not while I’m with you.” Edy’s voice crackled with a laugh. “We’ve had a couple of discussions about who’s boss, and it turns out it’s me.” She picked up his box and started walking again. “Come on, I’ll show you your room.”

  “I’ve got my own room?” He had never had a room. All he could remember were small, very small one-room apartments and sleeping on the couch. Or on the floor. In his memory, everything always seemed to be dark and gray in the places he had lived, even during the day, and there was never a thought of a room for himself. Mostly only the smell of whiskey and beer puke and tobacco smoke and the faint light through dingy shades with the sounds of traffic and elevated trains nearby.

  “Just for me? A for-real room?”

  She didn’t answer, but gestured for him to follow and moved into the house. There was a narrow screened porch that led into the kitchen and, inside the kitchen door, the boy was assailed by such wonderful odors that he had to stop again. Baking bread, fried bacon, milk still warm from the cow, a stew in a large black cast-iron pot with a meat smell he couldn’t identify but which made his mouth water. He glanced around, taking in the rough wood counters holding two loaves of fresh bread the color of new honey, and a pan of fried strips of smoky bacon above the wood range on a warming shelf.

  The smell and the sight of food made him suddenly realize he was starving, but Edy kept moving through the kitchen, past the stove, and around a corner where a two-foot-wide stairway led to a second floor. She was in front of him still carrying his box, and the stairs were so narrow and steep that he couldn’t see anything until they got to the top of the staircase.

  There wasn’t really a proper room; the space was an open attic with a dormer window on what turned out to be the east end—where the sun would come in every morning at dawn—which looked out on a shallow hill planted in corn about as high as the boy’s shoulder. The hill gently rolled up and away and ended in a green wall of forest outlined in blue sky so that it seemed to be a picture painted on the window.

  Next to the window was a single cot brass bed with a huge pillow and a thick quilt, both of which, he found later, were stuffed with goose down.

  Next to the bed was a nightstand, and on the table stood a little pitcher of water next to a glass. For him.

  For him.

  He sat on the edge of the bed and started to cry. Not crybaby sobs like when he’d been afraid of the goose monster or how Orvis had looked at him when the spark was too much. But soft, happy tears, barely wet tears. Edy saw and sat next to him and held him and he didn’t mind that she was holding him, and she said: “There’s nothing to be sad about here.”

  “Not sad,” he murmured. His face was against her bibs and he could smell what came to be for the rest of his life the Edy-smell, an odor of warm sunshine and fresh baked bread and soap. “I never had my own…” What, he thought, my own what? House? Room? Place? There, that was it. He never had his own place to be except under the kitchen table, where he would go when his mother … when his mother became what she was when she drank and had men from the factory over for a party. Place. That was it. He never had his own place to be.

  “… water. I never had my very own water by my very own bed in my very own room in my very own house to live in.” He took a deep breath. “Not sad, happy, just happy…”

  They sat for a time in silence. Then out of nowhere his stomach rumbled and Edy heard it. “Are you hungry?”

  “I could eat,” he said.

  “How about a thick slice of fresh bread with honey and a glass of milk?”

  But what he ate wasn’t regular bread with honey and milk. It was warm fresh bread cut in a slice as thick … as thick as the side of his hands one on top of another, coated with grit-salty butter and a complete covering layer of honey just gone to sugar crystals from a jar on the shelf next to the stove, and a glass of milk so thick with cream it could almost be chewed. And into the milk, to make it exactly perfectly right, Edy stirred a big spoonful of the same honey.

  He took one huge bite and thought about God. He had never thought much about Him although he had heard swearing in the bars where he sang where they used His name. But the first bite into the honey and butter and warm bread made the boy think of Him and, when he chewed and it tasted so wonderful that it made his jaws ache, he thought that He must have something to do with it: the bread, the honey, the butter, how it tasted, how it all worked.

  It had to be God.

  He was going to say something about it to Edy but couldn’t think of how to make the right words, how they would be, so he turned and smiled and with his mouth full said: “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said, and ruffled his hair with her left hand while she put the bread knife back on the cupboard shelf. “As soon as you finish, we’ve got some chores to get done.” She poured a small bit of coffee from a large gray-metal pot on the stove and sipped it while he chewed. “We might as well get you working right away.” A smile, then she downed the rest of the coffee, and they were heading out the door. She didn’t seem to be hurrying, but he nearly had to sprint to keep up with her.

  “Sig is out running ridges to scout for mushrooms and might not get back until after dark so we’ll have to get it done on our own. I’ve already done the milking, but we have to gather eggs and feed the chickens and pigs.”

  “He goes running in the dark?”

  She l
aughed. “Not really. It’s just a way to say that he’s working ridges. It’s late spring, and the mushrooms come on the north side of hills and ridges, but you have to find them because they’re not always in the same place year to year. And there’s a full moon, so he can see to come home in the dark, which means he will work all the daylight he can, and that puts him getting home after dark.”

  “What do you do with mushrooms?” The boy had mental images of the mushroom pictures he had seen in fairy tale books with the little people living under them.

  “Eat them,” Edy said. “We dry them in sunlight on the porch and they last through the winter and it’s grand what they do to a venison stew in the middle of winter. It’s like bringing summer into the stew when you need it most.”

  “What is venison?”

  “My, you ask a lot of questions.” She laughed again, and he found that one of the fine things about Edy was that she was always ready to laugh. “Sig is going to get a kick out of that—the question business. He doesn’t talk much—might go a whole day now and then without saying a word—and it ought to be a trial for him to keep up with your questions.” She took a breath. “Venison is deer meat.”

  He wondered how they came to get deer meat—he didn’t yet understand hunting—but didn’t want to ask more questions right away, so he let it go and followed her into the chicken coop.

  A new smell—chicken poop and dusty straw—made his eyes water. Edy reached into a cupboard on the side and took out a bag and an old tin bucket. She pointed at the opposite wall that was lined with wooden boxes where he could see some chickens sitting. The chickens didn’t seem to care that they were there. She handed the boy the bucket. “Put a little straw in the bottom of the pail, then look in the nests for eggs and put them gently in the bucket. I’ll be outside throwing scratch for them.”