Gone to the Woods Read online

  When he was in the pasture, they largely—and “largely” is the word—ignored him. This time when they saw him coming though, they grew more alert—Sig said later it was because they saw he was holding the lead rope—and started toward him. And then the brown one—he found later his name was Jim—broke into a shambling trot.

  Heading straight for the boy.

  And the other one—named Blackie—picked up the trot, too, and they seemed to be moving faster as he watched, covering an amazing amount of ground with each giant foot that came down. Their trot sounded like small thunder. Not so small, though.

  Straight at him.

  He stopped. He had absolutely no idea what he should do. Running seemed out of the question. They would be on him in moments if he ran. Would run right over him. Might even not know they’d done it. Just whump! Kid goop.

  So he stood still, and when they seemed about to come over him, he shut his eyes. Whatever happened next, he was sure he didn’t want to see it.

  Everything suddenly became quiet and still.

  Nobody ran over him. No clopping, thudding hooves making kid goop.

  He opened one eye.

  Then the other.

  They had both stopped right in front of him and were holding their heads down to his level, smelling his hair. He reached out one hand and petted Jim on the nose. Soft, rubbery, and warm. Made him think of the word “gentle.” Hot breath that rumbled and seemed to come out of a living cave. Damp warm air. He petted Blackie, touched his nose, the same thing. Like two enormously giant puppies, he thought. Just really big puppies.

  Two tons of puppies.

  Very slowly he reached up and put the lead rope loop around Blackie’s neck in back of his ears. Then he backed up a step and they both raised their heads and he turned and started to walk and they followed. He was hanging on to the end of the lead rope and they kept pace carefully so they wouldn’t catch up or overrun him and hurt him. Like they’d been doing it all their lives.

  They marched to the barn as perfect, as blue perfect (which was a way Sig had of saying something was going … exactly … right) as it could be. At the barn he stopped, they lowered their heads, he took the lead rope off Blackie’s neck—and was brave enough to rub one of his ears in a kind of pet—and they went into the barn and moved on their own to a double stall at the east end, near the door.

  Sig was waiting for them there and he put sweet feed in each of their licked-out boxes, and while they were eating the feed, he harnessed them both.

  It was one of those things—harnessing them—that was so complicated the boy couldn’t quite follow along. First a big collar around their necks, then from the collar two thick leather straps that came back past their legs on each horse ending in chains about two feet long. Then a lot of smaller straps over their backs to hold the heavy load-pulling straps in place, then bridles with bits in their mouths, coming back with long leather lines—called reins—that the boy found later Sig would hold and use to turn or stop the horses.

  He backed them out of the stall and, walking between their heads, went out the barn door and moved across the barnyard to where the boy had seen some farm machinery sitting. Most of it seemed old and had some rust on it, and he had thought it was mainly junk.

  Wrong again.

  One of the pieces of machinery had two wheels with a cupped seat over the middle and metal extensions hanging down with spade bits on the end of each of them. There was also a long shaft of wood jutting out of the front with a crosspiece near the machine. Sig swung the horses around, one of them—Blackie—stepping over the shaft (the boy found later this was called the “tongue”) so that one horse stood on either side of it.

  All the time he had been talking to the horses, giving them instructions. “Over, Jim, back, Blackie, back, back … hold there. Easy hold.” They worked to his voice and when they were in the right position and holding, he hooked the pulling chains to the crosspiece, then went to the front and pulled the end of the tongue until it was between the horses’ necks and hooked it to both of them with a crosspiece attached at the bottom of the heavy collars.

  With that finished, he turned to the boy. “You ready to go?”

  The boy was standing by the side of the horses and he looked at the rig. “There’s only one seat.”

  Sig shook his head and, with one giant hand, reached down, scooped the boy up, and sat him on Blackie’s shoulders. “Hold on to those two little posts sticking out of the top of the collar. They’re called the hames. You settle in there and hang on.”

  At first, for a moment, he was about half scared. But the horses were so big and seemed so steady that when Sig got in the seat and picked up the reins and made a clucking sound with his tongue and they started to move, he didn’t feel out of place at all.

  They moved through the yard on the way to the cornfield and Edy saw them from the porch and waved and he let go long enough to wave back. Quick wave.

  “Nice up there, isn’t it?” she called. “Like seeing from the top of a hill.”

  At the cornfield, Sig lined the horses up so they each walked between two rows of corn, used a tall lever to lower the spade-shovel heads until they cut an inch or so down, skimming like knives, then he clucked once and never said another word.

  The horses knew where to walk, how fast to walk, how to be careful not to hurt the standing corn—which stood about three feet high—and Sig and the boy were only along for the ride. The horses knew everything, and the cultivator—which the machine was called—just slid along, cutting at the roots, killing weeds.

  The bloody things.

  When the team reached the end of the row, they moved out a bit, turned in precisely the right way and exactly the right amount, and started back weeding two new rows on their own without a word from Sig.

  By the end of that first row, the boy was completely accustomed to riding on Blackie’s back—so wide it was like a living table—and nearly forgot he was on top of a horse.

  Edy had been right. He was eight or nine feet above the ground and the view was noticeably different. He could see farther, could see two deer nibbling corn at the far side of the field, could see fluffy white clouds scudding past the forest far to the south, could even see parts of the stream they had been on in the canvas canoe hunting mushrooms winding through the trees.

  It was, in many ways, like a painting, a picture that would stay with him forever, a memory-picture. And in time, second row, third row, fourth row, the plodding horses, the warm sun, and the fresh smell of the corn combined to take him completely out of himself.

  At first it wasn’t that he slept, but that, with his eyes open and the comfort of the ride, he was there but not there. Finally, though, drifting in and out, he did fall asleep.

  He must have shown he was losing control, or perhaps starting to lean because he heard Sig stop the team in a soft voice and walk over to Blackie. Sig lifted the boy down and carried him back to the cultivator seat, climbing up and cradling the boy in his lap—still asleep—before making another soft sound and the team went back to work.

  He was not sure how long he slept, or that it was really even sleep. He was very, completely, comfortable and felt … safe. Just safe. He thought then that he had never felt quite that way before, that he had always thought, felt, knew, believed, that there was some risk, some impending danger in his short life that kept him from relaxing into true, effortless safety.

  But here—in back of a team of horses, riding on a corn cultivator, sitting in a man’s lap—he knew complete safety. Even the smells felt right, felt safe. Sweat smell coming back from the team, warm work-heat smell from Sig’s overalls, the soft feeling of his breath, chest in and out, up and down, wrapping around the boy, sheltering him.

  He sank into it. Past sleep. Past awareness. Past anything. To safety, complete comfort and shelter, and he would not know for many years, for perhaps the rest of his life, a protection that was deeper than rest, a belonging that was a kind of love.


  And he was out like that, wrapped in the shelter of Sig, until there came a time when he pulled the team to a stop and the boy opened his eyes to see that it was late day, evening, and they were back in the yard and Sig put the boy on the ground. He stood while Sig unharnessed the team and let them go in back of the barn into the pasture.

  The horses moved down the stream and drank while the two of them made their way to the house. Edy had milked and done the late chores, but was still out in the barn so Sig put wood in the stove and started a pan of meat and thin-sliced potatoes to frying.

  The boy was still groggy from sleep, and he sat in a kitchen chair and thought of many things, thought that it was all the same and yet somehow different, that he was past just belonging, that he now fit, was part of how everything worked and would always be part of it.

  And Edy came in from chores while Sig and the boy put dishes on the table and Sig dished the potatoes and meat and sliced thick bread for butter and honey and they ate and did dishes and the boy went up the stairs in back of the stove.

  Into his room, where he crawled into the blankets on his bed and went to sleep and didn’t dream of anything except Rex chasing a butterfly like a big puppy. Which he didn’t catch. But his tail kept wagging just the same.

  And then no thing, nothing.

  DIRT CANDY

  The summer seemed to come in layers, one on another. He would learn one part—like chores or cultivating or the canoe or mushrooms or the bloody weeds—and something else would show up.

  There came a day after chores and after they had breakfast that Edy looked at him across the table and said with a soft smile: “You know what you are?”

  “What?”

  “You’re our newest little potato.”

  The boy had no idea what she meant, but she was smiling so he knew it was good and if she wanted him to be their little potato, he would do that. So he nodded and said, “All right. I’m your little potato, if that’s a good thing.”

  “Newest,” she corrected him. “And not just the newest, but the best.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  She looked at Sig, who smiled and nodded. He reached across the table and tousled the boy’s hair. “It’s like candy from dirt—you’ll see this evening.”

  When yard chores were finished and the barn cleaned, Sig had gone to the house while the boy was finishing up feeding the chickens. Sig and Edy came out of the house, and Sig had the big garden digging fork in his hand.

  “Come on,” Edy said. “To the garden.”

  So he trotted across the yard and caught up with them, and they led him to a humped hill-row on the east side. It was obviously a potato row, but set apart from the other potato rows—he was about half proud there were no bloody weeds to see—and Sig dug under the first plant with the fork.

  “We planted these early and covered them with straw so they wouldn’t freeze.” Edy pointed at the fresh hole. “Dig with your hands.”

  The boy knelt and grabbed down into the soil. It was rich sandy loam and warm to the touch, and he felt something round and firm, and he pulled it up and there it was, a new small red potato.

  “There’s more.” Sig dug in again under the next plant with the fork and turned the dirt up. “Keep digging.”

  The boy did as he said and, in a short time, had found maybe five pounds of new red potatoes. Edy rubbed them clean with her hands and put them in a flour sack she had been carrying.

  “Later this evening,” Sig said. “Boiled and cut in pieces and eaten with salted butter—it’s like God gave us dirt candy.”

  “They’re potatoes,” the boy said. “We’ve eaten potatoes before.”

  “Not like these.” Edy stood and brushed dirt from her knees. “They don’t last the winter like the big white potatoes, so you have to plant and eat them straight from the garden. You’ll see.”

  And she was right. She boiled them on the stove until they were so soft they would cut and mash with just a touch of the fork, and they ate them with butter and some brown gravy she made with a few of the mushrooms they had picked for extra flavor and they were … were like a candy. Right on the edge of sweet—the boy couldn’t believe anything straight from the ground could taste that good.

  He went to bed that night with a tight full belly and the fresh taste of buttery salt and new potatoes on his lips.

  Along with a smile.

  Made him proud to be called the newest best little potato.

  In his bed.

  GOOSE WAR

  Sig had this to say about swearing when the boy was running barefoot in the pasture and stubbed his little toe on a rock and thought it was broken and cut loose with a string of words he’d learned in the bars in Chicago: Swearing doesn’t work if you use it too much, too often, too loud, and too stupid. Maybe a word now and then, if at all, and then it really counts.

  So the boy asked him about the geese. He hadn’t been talking about them regular because the bastards (thought, there, he used a swear, but maybe just this once) never let up and it would have been impossible to feed them into everything. Like he would start for the barn and they would come after him, or he’d go to feed the chickens and they’d whump him and every … single … morning when he started for the outhouse, which was after breakfast to do his business, they would lay for him.

  And whump him.

  And bite and pinch and use their wings to beat at him and every … single … morning Rex climbed into the bloody things (which was all right to say because he’d used it on the bloody weeds) and they would beat the peewadden out of him. (He didn’t know what that word really meant but Edy used it all the time, like when the cats fought—“They beat the peewadden out of each other”—so he thought it was all right.) They had a long talk and the three of them over dinner decided that’s how it should be spelled: peewadden.

  Which they beat out of Rex and pretty soon beat out of the boy and there came a morning, after he made a very close survival run to the outhouse and got clobbered on his way back to the porch, when Rex helped and afterward started walking with a bad limp.

  He found Sig in the barn fixing harness—he had barely made it to the barn with the whole flock after him—and he stood inside the door, panting, on the edge of using all those not-good words from the Chicago bars, Rex standing next to him, panting just as hard, probably wishing he knew some not-good dog words as well.

  “Why,” he said to Sig, gasping, “do you have geese?”

  Sig was sitting in the sunlight where it came in the front door on a three-legged milking stool. He cut off a string of lacing cord he had needled through a harness strap and laid it down across his knees, looked off into space, sighed, and said, “You know, I don’t quite know. Now and again, Edy will stuff a pillow with their feathers or cook with one or two of their eggs, and maybe once a year we’ll have one for a celebration dinner. Like a Christmas goose, you know? So we keep them.”

  “It’s been weeks and weeks and they haven’t backed off for a minute. They’re going to kill me. Or Rex.”

  He nodded and the boy thought, Well great, as long as it doesn’t bother you I’ll just go ahead and die. But Sig was thinking of what to say and when it was right in his brain, he said: “When a thing comes at you to hurt you like that, you’ve got to go right at it and hit first. Make it hurt, and after a time, the thing won’t come at you to hurt you so much.”

  He stood and hung up the harness and beckoned the boy to follow him out the back door and down by the stream into a stand of green willow. He cut a piece about an inch and a half in diameter and maybe four feet long. He used his knife to peel the bark off in long strips, wiped the new wood dry with grass, and handed the boy the stick.

  “What’s this for?”

  “It’s your goose thumper. Next time they come for you, give a good growl, and head right into them. Lay left and right with the stick like you were Samson killing lions with an ass bone.”

  “Really?” He’d never heard of anybody name
d Samson and wasn’t at all sure exactly what an ass bone was or how you could kill lions by laying left and right with it. But still. He’d been attacked by the geese week after week, so often it was nearly automatic for him to run from them. He was fear educated, fear trained. “Really? Attack the geese. For sure really?”

  Back in the barn, Sig stood by the door and pointed into the yard where the geese were permanently on patrol, always looking for something to attack. Usually the boy. “I’ll watch,” Sig said. “If you get in trouble I’ll come help. And you’ve got Rex, too.”

  The boy came to the door and looked at them. The enemy. Then he looked up at Sig, who smiled, nodded again. “Make noise when you go at them. A lot of noise.”

  Well, the boy thought. Just that. Well.

  Brandishing his new goose thumper, he moved into the yard and walked toward the geese. Rex had been standing with him and Sig and, sensing that things were going to get interesting, came out beside the boy.

  As soon as the geese saw him, they started heading toward him. No delay. Wings spread, hissing, full-on attack mode, and for the better part of a second, his heart jumped into his throat and he came close to running. But Rex went for them and he couldn’t let the dog go alone anymore.

  “Aaaaarrggghh!”

  A kind of shriek-growl seemed to come from his stomach, or lower, and Sig said later he thought the boy was screaming. But it didn’t matter. It was a loud noise, just a ripper of a sound, and he went for them.

  Which didn’t scare the birds at all. They kept coming, and in three jumps and a hiss and thumping wings, the air was filled with feathers and goose poop. He picked the first one—a mean gray gander—and hit him as blue perfect hard as he could. Fairly clocked him. And he went down—the boy thought he’d killed the goose and, frankly, didn’t mind the thought at all—but he saw him a few minutes later get up, wobbling, and walk away from the fight.