In Wilderness (19 page)

A week passes. She has read the book he gave her. Twice, even though she also read it years before. Is losing hope that he will come again. She leaves the garden early, as before, finishes her half-done weaving, no longer thinks to trace her womb. Distracts herself by paying close attention to a small brown bird that’s started visiting the garden, each day lighting on something closer to her—a strand of the wire fence, a tomato stake. Until one day it perches on her shoulder, lets her walk with it, its tiny claws pick-picking at her shirt, her skin. Its soft warbling, so close to her ear, sounds like creek water over stones. Companionship’s what she had wanted from the boy, that’s all.

How many days now since she’s seen him? Enough that she has
eaten all the peaches, even the last of the syrup. Enough that there are wide gaps now between the times she thinks of him. One morning the bird flies too soon away, and she looks up to see the boy there at the meadow’s edge, wearing the same white clothes he wore before.

“Hi there,” she says, as casually as she can.

“Hello. Am I bothering you?”

She shakes her head. “No, it’s all right.”

“Yeah, I know.”

He looks so earnest, so intense, and also looks like he’s about to smile. Someone should comb his hair, it’s full of knots and tangles. Someone.

He settles himself cross-legged on the ground, leans his back against the chestnut oak, his hands folded in his lap. Follows her with gray eyes darkened from the shade and doesn’t speak for a long time. She tries not to do anything differently than if he weren’t there, tries not to look at him, tries not to pick only the vegetables on his side of the garden. Tries not to think how much he looks like Michael. The cicadas’ buzzing intensifies the heat as the sun climbs.

“It’s pretty there inside that fence. All orderly and green.”

She starts, had grown used to his silence.

“Yes, isn’t it? Thank you.”

He nods. Again that almost smile.

Harder now to concentrate on garden chores, on her fingers picking off the bush beans, dropping them into the basket, cradling the ripe tomatoes. Harder not to look at him, not to imagine how he looks looking at her. He’s her nearest neighbor, that’s all it is. Another human being like herself, like the man in town that day wielding his push broom.

No, this is different.

“Stand up sometimes where I can see you. When I don’t see you for a while it’s spooky. Like you’re a ghost that disappears.”

This time he does smile. At himself, the corners of his mouth turned down.

She straightens, steps out from between the squashes and the cucumbers. “I’m here.”

“Yeah, I can see that now.”

What is she doing? Why does she just stand there smiling back at him?

“Unbraid your hair.”

“What?”

That startling grown-man voice. “Unbraid your hair.”

She is afraid to move, to breathe, afraid he’ll run away like a wild animal. As if tranced, she lifts her hands to the back of her neck, then slides them down along her single plait to loose its band.

“Look. There’s a breeze yonder inside the fence. You see it in one spot, then in another. Memaw used to say a breeze like that’s come looking for a present.”

Memaw. Used to.

He stares at her and doesn’t smile.

“Unbraid your hair and let the breeze play in it.”

She looks back at him, runs her fingers through the plaited strands, shakes her head to free them. Her hair lifts gently off her neck.

“Look at that old breeze. That’s what he came for.”

“My name is Katherine. Katherine Reid.” Her mouth is dry. The words come out with difficulty.

“My name’s Danny MacLean. I’m pleased to know you.”

The first of this afternoon’s dry thunder rolls itself around his voice, curls into it. The boy untangles his legs, jumps to his feet as if he means to run to her.

Instead, he jerks his head up, scans the sky.

“I got to go.”

He turns away and disappears, his white shirt a brief flash among the trees. And she is once again alone.

I
NSIDE THE CABIN
,
GARDEN
bounty buries her table. She shoves aside tomatoes to make a place for the small bowl of vegetables and rice that is her dinner, the rice kernels dry and slightly burnt from when her attention wandered.

Unbraid your hair
.

She shakes her loose hair vigorously, fretfully, combs her fingers through it. He should have come into the garden.

And then what?

When she rinses her bowl, the water runs slowly from the copper faucet. It’s not the first time and it’s getting worse. A rusted pipe, a leak, something she should see to.

Unbraid your hair
.

That deep voice, its strange, grown-up authority—she burned the rice.

Everything looks all right under the sink. That likely means the problem’s in the pipe outside that brings the water from the stream. She needs to go to town, ask at the hardware store what she should do. Needs to see people on the street, hear voices in the shops. Needs to buy a canner and as many canning jars as she can manage, buy more yarn, keeps forgetting to buy bullets for the gun.

Unbraid your hair
.

She drops onto a bench and clamps her hands over her ears. Rocks there, squeezing her arms across her belly. Squeezing her thighs together. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

To think of him that way.

To think of him at all.

Gets up, goes to the loom, warps it quick in anger. Yanks the weft strands through its middle.

There.

And there.

Brings to life a wild, uneven thing, hairy and terrifying. Dark and bristly hunks of rough wool yarns and stiff dried swamp grass cradling a soft, lush center—purples, corals, reds—yarns like pillows in her hands. She weaves past sundown into lamplight, through the darkness. Binds off her work only when the sky grows light, then drops onto the floor. Sleeps curled around the finished weaving, far from the deer’s sweet, rhythmic breath.

W
HEN SHE WAKES
,
STIFF
, to a sun high in the sky, she knows what she must do. Roll up last night’s work without looking at it, slam it in her cart, then climb into the loft and get the other one, with its spare, straw-colored lines, roll that one up, too. Take them both in to that gallery. Get him out of her house, out of her mind.

On the trail she does not hear the birds, nor recognize the serviceberry tree that dropped such sweet blooms back in April. Does not see the dead log where the edible boletus mushrooms grow, nor even note the outcropping where she can look down at her mangled car. She looks and listens for only one thing. Where is the boy? Is he on some far ridge looking down at her? Or is he close, behind this chestnut oak, that hickory, so near she can reach out and touch him? She sees him in every shadow, hears him in every rustling leaf.

Unbraid your hair
.

E
LKMONT
’
S SHIMMERING SIDEWALKS DIZZY
her in the silver heat. She pulls her cart into the courthouse park to drink at the fountain. He was the boy on the bench that day, the boy with the stringy hair and the hole in his boot, who held up two fingers in a peace sign. It’s been going on that long. The realization creates an upheaval deep inside her, a shuddering she has to stand quite still to bear.

When she is able once again to move, walk, drink the hot stream from the outdoor fountain, she makes her way out of the green shade toward the sidewalk. A little boy in a blue sailor suit toddles past on chubby, dimpled legs, heads for the street. Katherine rushes after him, scoops him up just after he steps off the sidewalk. The child’s small, frightened heart beats hard against her own.

“You mustn’t run into the street like that.”

She brushes his fine blond hair out of his eyes. Won’t, can’t, put him down.

A sour-faced young woman in an orange maternity smock rushes toward her, wheeling a baby in a stroller.

“That’s my boy. I’ll take him now.”

Katherine glares at her with fierce eyes. “He ran into the street.”

The woman turns, watches a single car creep past.

“Give him to me. Clyde Junior, let go of the lady’s sleeve!”

Katherine relinquishes the boy into his mother’s sturdy arms. “No harm done,” she reassures the woman, wheels her cart around, heads in the opposite direction so no one can see her anger, or the yearning in her eyes. Because there had been harm. The boy’s mother turned away, was not paying attention. She, Katherine, would never turn away.

Unbraid your hair
.

In the hardware store she finds a canner and the proper jars. But there’s no such thing as “plumbers’ tape,” and the goop they sell her, “pipe dope,” makes her so dizzy when she sniffs it that she asks the clerk to wrap it in three sacks. The thin man with the Adam’s apple, who still doesn’t recognize her from that long-gone February day, looks at her like she’s crazy but not like she’s “summer people.” Her shoes are much too sensible, her clothes too worn.

In the little gallery by the bookshop, she remembers the young couple who looked in the window, how they stood locked together, pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. Something she has never known. Not with Tim, whose truest love had always been the agency; not even with Michael. Something she will never know. Regret’s as real as a taste on your tongue. She unrolls last night’s weaving, its wild wools and grasses discordant, shocking against the counter’s smooth and quiet maple. A plump woman in a denim skirt emerges from the studio. Her eyes widen as she sinks her fingertips into the weaving’s red and swollen center.

She takes both pieces. They will hang now in the little gallery for strangers to look at and buy, and she, Katherine, will get seventy percent. But that’s not what she thinks of. Only that the boy, Danny MacLean, is now out of her life as if he never had come into it. Never had stared at her from a courthouse bench, nor watched her from a ridgetop or behind a chestnut oak, had never sat cross-legged in the shade outside her garden.

She is dizzy on the walk home, starts at every vehicle that speeds past, retches as soon as she gets beyond the little grocery, the price she pays for venturing outside the wilderness. On the turnoff road she hears all the birds and names them from their calls, listens to the distant thunder, the light wind ruffling the trees, sees tones and textures
all around her, in the dirt beneath her feet. Her life, even alone, is rich and good. She is herself once more.

Until she leaves the road and rounds the trail’s first bend. He is not here. He is not anywhere.

The sun, the birds, the trees’ bright dancing leaves are only desolation, as she drags her cart behind her up the trail.

Unbraid your hair
.

D
ANNY SPRAWLS ON THE LAST WOODEN PEW OF THE EMPTY CHURCH
, before an open window. He likes it here, likes churches in general. They’re almost always open, empty, ready when you need them. He used to sleep in them sometimes. After he set up in the desert. Before he set up here.

This one calls to mind the church his Memaw used to take him to, where people fell down in the aisles jerking and wailing when the Lord came into them. Danny sat there every Sunday, waiting to see it happen, terrified it might happen to him. Sat very still beside his Memaw, watching for the Lord to come and wondering how He got inside the church. Especially in winter with it all shut up.

Wondering if it was all some grown-up bullshit to make boys like him do what they said.

He stares out the two-inch window opening he’s made, thinks some about Memaw’s church, and how churches in books can seem
some like it in the way they look. Even faraway churches in Spain or England. Danny also thinks about the Old Man’s house, which looked like Memaw’s church inside, a thing that hadn’t come to him till now. Mostly he thinks about Katherine. From where he sits he can see nearly all Elkmont’s stores and such and her pulling the little cart he gave her in and out of them. Post office, grocery, hardware store, some prissy “gallery.” He could sit here out of the hot sun all day long just watching her, knowing she won’t see him through the colored glass. Her so determined, jerking that cart over doorsills, potholes, broken places in the sidewalk. The sun gains brightness every time she’s in his sight. He will never hurt her. Never.

It’s Saturday, street’s full of people. Sometimes some man turns and stares at her, she’s a good-looking woman. But that man can’t have her. Danny’ll kill him first. Danny’s the one watches over her. Yesterday she took her hair down all for him, for no more reason than he asked her to. Memaw never took her hair out of its knot for anyone save Pawpaw. Danny’s mama, too. Never took the pins out once after his daddy died, except to sleep.

Ka-ther-ine. He mouths it silently, craves how the “th” makes his teeth clamp on his tongue like it’s a little live thing caught between them. Keeps his tongue there. Clamps his teeth down till it hurts, before he lets it loose.

Ka-ther-ine.

Sometimes he thinks she knows everything there is to know about him, reads his mind or some such. Maybe read it long before she ever saw him. That shit happens. You can know people that way without ever seeing them. From the pure fact they’ve spent a long time near you. Same as knowing some gook’s out there in the jungle without seeing him or hearing him. Smelling him even. You know it just because he’s near.