In Wilderness (18 page)

She picks up a fruit wedged against her left foot, bites into it. Can’t remember tasting any peach so thoroughly. Someone besides herself is in this forest. Another person. Someone who brought gifts and disappeared.

She should be frightened, of course. Sucks the rough seed dry and slips it in her pocket, picks up the book, heads down the privy path. She has again begun leaving the door open so she can see the mountain, leaves it open still. Because nothing’s changed; on some level she knows this. Whatever’s here has simply been made manifest. She’s in no more danger than she’s ever been. Who left them? A young girl? An old woman? Who would she like this other one to be? A man
would not announce himself that way. Men are straightforward; he’d just knock on her door.

In the garden, her hands are sure among the plants, pulling peppers and cucumbers, yellow summer squashes, picking beans off their vines with two swift fingers, cradling ripe tomatoes on their stems until they fall into her hands. A book! Something to read in the long summer evenings. She fills the lopsided basket rescued from behind the woodpile, pulls the army of small, tender weeds that every day encroaches. Then she rubs a couple radishes against her jeans to get the dirt off, pops them in her mouth; their heat’s a wake-up call. Next she eats a tomato, then a small green pepper. Breakfast. It’s all so simple and yet not. She is part of everything and everything is part of her; how can she not have known this all along?

Perhaps that’s why, when she looks up and sees him standing there under the chestnut oak, clad all in white and staring at her like some fierce blond angel, she is startled but is not afraid, simply gazes back at him for what her eyes can know. Much as, a few days earlier, she gazed at an exotic luna moth, pale greenish white, large as her open hand, that pressed itself against her window screen.

“Hello,” he says in a voice too deep for a boy so thin and doubtless barely out of high school. “I live over the mountain. I’m the one brought you the peaches. And the book.”

He sounds so serious, perhaps afraid.

“Thank you. I ate a peach, it was delicious.” She smiles. “You’re sure you didn’t bring too many?”

“I got lots,” he says, still staring. He looks like he hasn’t eaten in a year.

“You could sell them in Elkmont, you know. I could pay you what you’d get there.”

Something, fury, flashes in his eyes.

“I didn’t bring you them for pay.”

“Well … thank you again. Thank you so very much.” She gestures awkwardly. “Please. Take some vegetables. I’ve got more than enough.”

“I don’t eat vegetables much.” He shifts his weight, looks around at all the garden beds, turns back with a faint smile as if from some
pleasant memory. “But I might trouble you for one of those bright red tomatoes.”

“Of course. Come in and pick one. Pick all you want.”

Her voice sounds schoolmarmish, patronizing, to her ears. She takes a step toward the gate to undo its wooden bolt.

“No!”

He barks it like a wild thing, startles even himself. Takes a ragged breath, tries to smile.

“You got to pick me one yourself. One you want me to have, and put it by the fence there. Then go back to where you are, smack in the middle. I’ll come get it.”

“Oh. Yes. I can do that.”

He looks so frightened standing there, as if she’d threatened to strike him. She picks the largest, ripest tomato she can see and lays the red fruit gently on the ground outside the fence. Then she returns to the center of the garden, stands there motionless. The young man dashes up, grabs the tomato, scuttles back to the meadow’s edge, a feral dog too watchful to eat. He runs his hands over the red fruit, eyes it like some hard-won prize, then looks back at her with that strange fervor.

“I come by here sometimes on my way out to the highway. Come up along that ridge yonder.”

Was he the shadow that she saw that first day hiking in? Did he see her?

“Sometimes I stop awhile and watch you in the garden.” His words rush from his mouth. “It brings me peace, seeing you working with those growing things. You mind?”

She shakes her head quickly, feels uncomfortably warm. “I don’t mind.”

“I’m glad for that. Can I stop by again sometime? Stand out here and watch you work? I won’t come any closer. I swear I won’t.”

Why not? Why won’t he come close enough to touch her? “Yes. I mean … it’s all right. And you’re welcome to come into the garden if you want.”

He looks at her, nods once, slightly but with significance, as if
some understanding of which she is as yet unaware has passed between them. Then he turns on his heel and strides into the trees.

So young and alone, holding his head so high. She tries to bring her mind back to the plants around her, but her concentration has been shattered. All she can think of are the sharp wings of his shoulder blades inside that soft white shirt, when he turned his back on her and walked away.

S
TUPID
. S
TUPID
. S
TUPID
.

He hadn’t meant to do it, any of it. He’d got out of the creek water, put his clothes back on, started for home so cold he couldn’t feel his own skin. And everywhere he looked was ringed in rainbows.

When he got close to Gatsby’s house, none of the burnt parts showed. From this side it looked whole and perfect. And he, Danny, looked perfect, too, in his loose white clothes. So perfect he imagined Katherine standing on the other side of that enormous lawn, alone and staring at him, a light breeze playing in her hair.

His feet left bloody prints on the slate porch steps from burrs he’d stepped on without knowing. Pinecones. Thorns.

That’s what got to him, her standing there across the lawn, what pulled him through his Long Dream to its rightful end. Later, he woke in darkness, his thin fists jammed under the blanket. Lit a lantern,
headed out, his still-sore feet seeking the soft, damp orchard earth, his hands seeking the ripe peaches that weighed down its trees.

It’s all right
.

Climbing back up the mountain, he can’t get the words out of his head. What she said when he asked her could he stop back by again. “It’s all right.” He turns it around inside his mind. Never dreamed her voice would sound so soft.

“It’s all right.” So much more than “yes.”

It’s. All. Right
. His feet beat time to it. Each word and all that it suggests. Pooling, spreading.

It’s
. Contraction of “it is,” a hurry-up word tumbling out as if she couldn’t wait.
It:
Noun, subject. On the face of it, him coming to her in the garden. But who’s to say? “It” could mean anything. Or everything.
Is:
Verb, to be, exist, exist as. Equal. “It” equals “right,” that’s how she said it. Old Professor Beckham would adore his redneck ass.

Right:
Good, perfect, proper, correct, permitted. Encouraged? Yes. Desired? Yes!

All:
The key word, meat and heart of the matter. Danny says it out loud, slowly pushing the
A
’s long airstream from his chest, curling his tongue around the double
L
s. If “all” is a noun, then “all” equals “it,” and “it” truly does mean fucking “everything.” Whole, entire, complete, be-all and end-all, alpha and omega. Universe. If “all” is an adverb, then “it” is “right” in every way.

Case closed. Any way you look at it, according to the woman in the garden, everything he wants to do with her is right and good all through it.

Danny climbs the mountain tall and strong.
It’s. All. Right
. His sins are washed away.

His whole way home he keeps care of her tomato like it’s made of glass. Then he sets it on the center of the mantel in his sleeping room, well out of Dog’s excited reach, and stares at it. Katherine held it with her own two hands. Not just touched it, or brushed it with her fingers. Carried it, her hands all wrapped around it, set it down outside the
gate. Before that, grew it out of nothing but a seed she’d pressed between her thumb and forefinger, her soft flesh surrounding it before she dropped it in the ground. The red fruit smells of sun, other plants, the earth that grew it. And of Katherine. Who smells also of those things. The thought’s a heat inside him.

He has placed the tomato in a square of sunlight, watches it across the room all afternoon. Watches the light move over it and then away. He takes his knife out of its sheath, same knife he took into the water, held all through his sin-cleansing so now his knife is sin-cleansed, too. Goes to the mantel, slices the tomato lengthwise down its middle with his sin-cleansed knife.

Lord, it’s the prettiest thing inside. He’s never really looked at one that way, how it makes a pattern you might find inside somebody’s heart. He slices a piece off one of the halves, flicks the wet seeds out with the knife point, then pushes them with the blade into a wet little pile. If he spreads them out, dries them, keeps them till next spring and plants them, he’ll have tomatoes that came out of hers. The idea rips through his insides, clears a space for his recollection of her voice to thrum, like a hollow reed you hold straight out to catch the wind. Should maybe have brought her some other book this morning. Maybe
The Secret Garden
. Would have fit better with the peaches. But it’s for children. That Forster book’s got romance in it. And other silly things that women like. People riding in carriages, sitting in drawing rooms. That sort of shit. So maybe it’s okay.

He can’t sit still. Attacks his floor with the block sander so furiously Dog runs out the door still hungry. Sawdust rises in the air, then falls. He brushes it into neat little piles with his index finger. Yeah, he could live out a whole life of days like this one.

Only, it’s not wise to be too happy. Happy is the orange you get at Christmas—you prize it because you only get one once a year. He mustn’t go to her too often. In the broad day. In the garden. Needs to hold it back till he can’t stand it longer, him being away from her like that.

He falls asleep in the late afternoon in a hot square of sunlight, so its darkening will wake him, let him know it’s time to head down to the cabin once again to be a silent witness to her dreams.

T
ONIGHT
,
WHEN HE WRAPS
his arms and legs around the corner where she lies, places his cheek against its still-warm stones and joins his breath with her soft breathing, he feels a quickening inside him—made out of her voice; and the tomato; and the July sun. The last time he had a day so perfect, it was with his mama.

She’d packed cornbread and beans for just the two of them, hiked with him to a laurel slick, led him through it by the hand and out the other side into a meadow. There she spread her shawl for them to sit on and they ate the lunch she’d brought, drank water from the creek out of a mason jar. “You look just like your daddy,” she had told him and he liked that. He went to sleep there, his head pillowed in her lap. The last day before he started school.

That blond hippie girl in San Francisco, she’d looked something like her.

“With arms wide open, He’ll pardon you.”

It’s. All. Right.

A
FTERNOONS BRING FAR
-
OFF THUNDER
,
NEVER ANY RAIN
. N
IGHTS
, she lies awake, breathing with the deer and staring at the moonlight on the floor. Days, she passes at once calm and oddly jangled, wanting to sit still yet far too restless for it. She feels too alive, imagines things too starkly. The tiny Jack standing so proud and erect, not preacherly at all, in each Jack-in-the-pulpit plant along the trail. A hummingbird’s invisible, fast-beating heart. No matter how she tries, she cannot weave the day the boy came to the garden. All she gets is something white, with here and there thin lines. Some straw-colored, a few dark red.

He’d looked not much older than Michael had been. Blond like Michael, thinner, more hawklike in the face. If she and Michael had made love and she had had his baby, he’d be close to this boy’s age. Perhaps resemble him.

Outside, on the cabin porch, peeling and slicing the ripest of the
peaches, tossing the peels to birds gathered in the nearest trees, flies circling the leavings. Inside, standing over the iron pot, cooking the fruit down to a sweet, thick syrup that will keep awhile, sucking it off her fingers, licking it out of the spaces in between. Why does she keep thinking of him? He lives alone, has no one. No wife, father, mother, brother, sister, child. She’s not sure how she knows this, just that it rises off him like an odor.

The next day in the garden she senses his watching as a soft cloak settling around her shoulders, but he does not show himself. His presence, even unseen, relaxes her. In the same way she believes he lives alone, she also believes he will not harm her. She picks the largest of the yellow squashes, runs her fingers over it before laying it gently in her basket; knows exactly where her womb is, traces it outside her clothing.

Of course this is nonsense, the kind that comes of living much too long alone. She doesn’t know a thing about him. Except his being here means she should load her pistol, carry it whenever she sets foot outdoors, point it at him, tell him to keep the hell away. She also knows she will not, cannot, do this. Instead, she stays longer in the garden, invents tasks. Wishes even there was more work needed on the horrid fence. A day goes by, then two. He said he lived over the mountain. Maybe he comes this way infrequently, just every month or so. But he will stop by, he said so. He asked for her permission.