Into the Forest

by Jean Hegland

  She smiles, playing along. “Mom said Jesus was a he, but that it was just an accident. She said, ‘He might just as well have been a she.’”

  “And then Dad asked her if the Virgin Mary could just as well have been a he.”

  Each of us nods, smiles. Each of us attempts the complicated business of remembering the pleasure of the past without allowing it any significance in the present.

  One of the candles falters. The flame sputters, leaping up for oxygen and then collapsing into itself. The carousel slows. We watch in silence, mesmerized by the spinning shadows on the ceiling, by the pulse of the five remaining flames, by the slow burn and turn of memory.

  “I think she was wrong,” says Eva after the second flame dims and finally disappears.

  “What?”

  “Jesus couldn’t have been a girl.”

  “Why not?”

  “Things would have turned out differently, a long time ago.”

  “How?” I ask, eager to talk with my sister about an idea.

  She shrugs, a little indifferent, a little impatient, the toss of her shoulders and the movement of her body her only eloquence.

  I give up on analysis. “Jesetta? Jesusphina?” I quip. But it sounds so much like one of our father’s jokes that it falls flat.

  Another candle dies and the carousel stops. In the weakening light of the three remaining flames, the shepherds kneel patiently among their sheep. The wise men hold their gifts stiffly in their wooden arms, as far away as ever from their goal. Mary and Joseph stand rigidly on either side of the wooden infant. The candles dim and glare. The last wick topples. The final flame vanishes. Christmas is over.

  Darkness reclaims us once again.

  Another rainy day. Except for a dash outside this morning to get wood and open the chicken coop so Bathsheba, Lilith, and Pinkie can scratch in the sodden yard, we’ve spent the day indoors. Christmas was only yesterday, but if it weren’t for this notebook and the fact that Eva disappeared into her studio at dawn, no one would ever know it.

  “You’ll wear those shoes out again in a day,” I said to her when she came out at noon.

  “I know.”

  She tugged her sweat-soaked tee shirt away from her chest, took another deep drink of the water that collects, one drop at a time, in the kitchen sink. Then she lunged back into her studio without another word.

  Even now Eva can use things up. I want to save everything, to dribble it out forever. I can make a dozen raisins or half an inch of a stale candy cane last an evening, eking out the pleasure as though it were a geriatric patient going for a ride in her wheelchair in the winter sun. But Eva can still gobble.

  “Might as well enjoy it while we’ve got it,” she says, and she dances her shoes to tatters, swallows her share of the raisins in a single mouthful, lights candles and lets them burn, and never frets about what’s lost. “Why not?” she asks with a toss of her head, a deft flip of her wrist. “Nothing lasts forever. And besides, it’s not like we’ll never see another raisin.”

  Last week I read in the encyclopedia about an indigenous tribe in Baja for whom meat was such a rare delicacy that they would tie a string to a scrap of animal flesh so they could chew it, swallow it, and then haul it back up, to have the pleasure of chewing and swallowing again. I was embarrassed when I read that, because it reminded me of myself, unable to let go of anything more, unable to face even the smallest loss.

  Eva’s not like that. “We have enough food,” she scoffs when she sees me agonizing over a handful of stale peanuts or the last few drops of soy sauce. “We won’t starve.”

  She’s right. The pantry shelves are still crowded with the supplies we bought on our last trip to town and with the quarts of tomatoes, beets, green beans, applesauce, apricots, peaches, plums, and pears we helped our father can last summer. We still have rice, flour, cornmeal, pinto beans, and lentils. We still have macaroni, tuna fish, and canned soup. We have a little sugar, a little salt, a sprinkle of baking powder. We have dried milk and powdered cheese. We still have half a can of shortening, a motley variety of spices, and an odd jumble of other edibles—the unlabeled cans we bought at Fastco, a box of orange Jell-O that must be at least six years old, a jar of stuffed olives.

  We have more than enough to see us through. But even so I have to fight my urge to hang on to everything we have left, as though to lose another drop or scrap could cast us adrift for good. When I think of how we used to live, the casual way we used things, I’m both appalled and filled with longing. I remember emptying wastebaskets that would seem like fortunes now—baskets filled with the cardboard cores of toilet paper rolls, with used tissues, broken pencils, twisted paper clips, sheets of crumpled notebook paper, and empty plastic bags.

  I remember throwing away clothes because they were ripped or stained or no longer in style. I remember tossing out food—scraping heaps of food from our dinner plates into the compost bucket—simply because it had sat untouched on someone’s plate for the duration of a meal. How I long for those brimming wastebaskets, those leftovers. I long to gulp down whole boxes of raisins, to burn a dozen candles at once. I long to indulge, to forget, to ignore. I want to live with abandon, with the careless grace of a consumer, instead of hanging on like an old peasant woman, fretting over bits and scraps.

  In the encyclopedia the other day I read: Amnesia, a condition of memory loss caused by brain injury, shock, fatigue, or illness. When amnesia continues for an extended period of time, the amnesiac occasionally begins a new life entirely unrelated to his previous condition. This response is called a “fugue state.”

  I lifted my head from the page, looked out the window at the chickens scratching in the empty yard, and thought, This is our fugue state—the lost time between the two halves of our real lives.

  Last winter when the electricity first began going off, it was so occasional and brief we didn’t pay much attention. “They’re probably working on the lines,” we’d say, or “The rains must have brought a tree down. They’ll have the power back soon.” And soon enough, the lights would blink on, the washing machine would resume its hum and churn in the utility room, the vacuum cleaner would roar back to life, and a second later we would be taking electricity for granted once again.

  Looking back on it now, I’m sure the three of us were in shock. We were numb, still stunned by Mother’s death less than nine months earlier, so maybe we didn’t realize as soon as we might have that after decades of warnings and predictions things were actually starting to fail. Besides, living as far out as we do, we were used to having the electricity go off occasionally, to having to wait until the power in the more populated areas was restored before we got our power back. Perhaps it took longer than it should have for us to suspect that something different was happening. But even in town, I think the changes began so slowly—or were so much a part of the familiar fabric of trouble and inconvenience—that nobody really recognized them until later that spring.

  For a long time the power quit only for a few minutes every day or so, just enough to be an irritation, a nuisance. The microwave would stop dead, the clothes would flop wetly to the bottom of the dryer, dinner would cool half-cooked in the oven. If one of us was taking a shower, the water would dribble to a gravity-fed trickle without the electric pump to give it pressure. If I was working at my computer, the screen would go blank and the machine would moan as it crashed. If Eva was practicing at home, the CD she had been dancing to would stop, and she would stumble out of her studio, looking as though she had just been slapped awake.

  If it was night and our father was home from work, the sudden lack of light would sometimes propel him out of the grief in which he had lost himself, and he would entertain us by inventing absurd curses while he stomped and fussed in the darkness. “God whack a doughnut,” he’d yell, or “Turds grow roses,” as he bumped into the corners of tables and knocked things off counters, looking for the flashlight, the candles, matches. After ten or fifteen minutes when the lights would fli
ck back on, Eva and I would be almost disappointed because we knew that all too soon his manic energy would drain away and he would once again slump back into despair.

  For a long time it was a rare day when the power didn’t go off at least once. Finally it was a rare day when the power came on. At some point we realized we had lost the habit of groping for the light switch whenever we entered a room. We no longer automatically reached for the knob on the stove when we wanted to cook something or flung the refrigerator door open when we were hungry. We took the electric blankets off our beds, put the electric coffeemaker away, rolled up the carpets we could no longer vacuum. Our father taught us how to trim, fill, and light the kerosene lamps he had once refused to let our mother throw out, and for a time we lit those when darkness fell.

  As winter faded and spring blossomed, we became accustomed to the unreliability of electricity, and we developed a routine to take advantage of it whenever it appeared. We left the kitchen light switched on all the time, and when it blinked into being, Eva would rush out to the utility room to start a load of laundry and then race into her studio, load a CD, and, skipping her barre work, begin to dance, while I flushed the murky toilet and turned on the faucets to fill the tub and the kitchen sink while the electric pump was operating. Then I would run to the computer, where I worked furiously until it all came crashing down again.

  Father had long ago bought a gas generator to power the water pump in case there was a fire and our electricity failed, and sometimes we would turn it on so that Eva could dance and I could attempt to get on the Internet for news, or at least the propaganda—ranting or soothing depending on the site—that passed for news. But even when the phone lines happened to be working, it was all but impossible to connect. Usually I’d chafe so much at having to waste the time the power was on waiting for access, that I would give up, and instead work furiously on my studies while the generator chugged away outside. Eventually, as time passed and gas grew scarcer, Father convinced us to save it for emergencies.

  At first when the power went off while we were fixing a meal, we would get out the Coleman stove and finish cooking over its hissing burners, until one day we didn’t bother putting the Coleman away. When we had used the last of the fuel and the hardware store had no more to sell, we figured out how to bake potatoes among the coals in the woodstove in the living room, learned to fry pancakes and boil beans and steam rice on its top.

  We had long since used up the food in the freezer. Finally we had to give up on the refrigerator, too. Our father dug a hole in the creek, lined it with rocks and black plastic garbage sacks, covered it with a Yield sign he had once scavenged from the dump, and proudly called it a refrigerator. Eva and I complained about having to wrap everything so that the water wouldn’t soak it, about having to hike down to the creek every time we wanted milk or lettuce or margarine, until there was nothing left to keep cool.

  The telephone faded in the same way the electricity did. For a while after the power had ceased to be reliable, we could sometimes make a call if we were persistent enough. It might take all morning, dialing the number until those seven digits jeered in our brains, only to hear the electronically polite voice of the phone company say, “We’re sorry. All lines are busy now. Please hang up and try your call again.” But sooner or later we could get through, could still report to the power company’s answering machine that the electricity was out again.

  One evening in early May, Father came home with a hunting rifle, and a little later a day came when he didn’t go to work at all.

  “Looks like summer vacation’s early this year,” he had said the night before, as he fried eggs on the woodstove for our dinner. “That damn strep is keeping attendance down by half, and nobody can seem to find an antibiotic to touch it. Now there’s a rumor of meningitis. The board seems to think they’ll save everybody a lot of money if they close school a month early.”

  He sighed and added, “Normally I’d fight that, but this year I guess I’m ready for a break. Besides, I’ve got to get the roof reshingled and replace those rotten supports under the utility room before things start up again next fall.”

  During this time the mail delivery was becoming sporadic, and businesses were closed more often. For a few months state employees were paid with promissory notes, until the banks refused to honor the government IOU’s, and then they went unpaid altogether.

  It’s amazing how quickly everyone adapted to those changes. I suppose it’s like the way people beyond our forest had already gotten used to having to drink bottled water, drive on overcrowded freeways, and deal with the automated voices that answered almost every telephone. Then, too, they cursed and complained, and soon adjusted, almost forgetting their lives had ever been any other way.

  Maybe it’s true that the people who live through the times that become history’s pivotal points are those least likely to understand them. I wonder if Abraham Lincoln himself could have answered the inevitable test questions about the causes of the Civil War. Once the daily newspapers ceased to appear every morning and radio broadcasts grew more and more sporadic, what news we did get was so fragmentary and conflicting as to tell us almost nothing about what was really happening.

  Of course, there was a war going on. We had moved our mother’s radio from her workroom into the kitchen, and before the batteries died last spring we used to coax it into muttering its litany of disaster while we were fixing dinner. Sometimes the news of the war would make Father stomp and swear, and sometimes it would send him upstairs to his bedroom long before our meal was cooked.

  The fighting was taking place half a world away, taking place, the politicians promised, to protect our freedoms, to defend our way of life. It was a distant war, but it seemed to cling to our days, to permeate our awareness like a far-off, nasty smoke. It didn’t directly affect what we ate, how we worked and played, yet we couldn’t shake it—it wouldn’t go away. Some people said it was that war that caused the breakdown.

  But I think there were other causes, too. Sometime in January we heard that a paramilitary group had bombed the Golden Gate Bridge, and less than a month later we read that the overseas currency market had failed. In March an earthquake caused one of California’s nuclear reactors to melt down, and the Mississippi River flooded more violently than had ever been imagined possible. All last winter the newspapers—when we could get them—were choked with news of ruin, and I wonder if the convergence of all those disasters brought us to this standstill.

  Then, too, there were all the usual problems. The government’s deficit had been snowballing for over a quarter of a century. We had been in an oil crisis for at least two generations. There were holes in the ozone, our forests were vanishing, our farmlands were demanding more and more fertilizers and pesticides to yield increasingly less—and more poisonous—food. There was an appalling unemployment rate, an overloaded welfare system, and people in the inner cities were seething with frustration, rage, and despair. Schoolchildren were shooting each other at recess. Teenagers were gunning down motorists on the freeways. Grown-ups were opening fire on strangers in fast-food restaurants.

  But all those things had been happening for so long they seemed almost normal, and as things got darker and more uncertain, people began to grasp at new explanations for what was going wrong. All last spring, every time the three of us went to town we were met by more and wilder versions of what was happening in the world beyond Redwood, until finally the ragged bits of gossip and rumor we gleaned seemed as reliable as the garbled nonsense we used to giggle at as children when we passed a whispered message around a circle of friends.

  We heard the United States had a new president, that she was arranging for a loan from the Commonwealth to bail us out. We heard the White House was burning and the National Guard was fighting the Secret Service in the streets of D.C. We heard there was no water left in Los Angeles, that hordes of people were trying to walk north through the drought-ridden Central Valley. We heard that the county to the east
of us still had electricity and that the Third World was rallying to send us support. And then we heard that China and Russia were at war and the U.S. had been forgotten.

  Although the Fundamentalists’ predictions of Armageddon grew more intense, and everyone else complained with increasing bitterness about everything from the lack of chewing gum to the closure of Redwood General Hospital, still, among most people there was an odd sense of buoyancy, a sort of surreptitious relief, the same feeling Eva and I used to have every few years when the river that flows through Redwood flooded, washing out roads and closing businesses for a day or two. We knew a flood was inconvenient and destructive. At the same time we couldn’t help but feel a peculiar sort of delight that something beyond us was large enough to destroy the inexorability of our routines.

  Along with all the worry and confusion there came a feeling of energy, of liberation. The old rules had been temporarily suspended, and it was exciting to imagine the changes that would inevitably grow out of all the upheaval, to contemplate what would have been learned—and corrected—when things began again. Even as everyone’s lives grew more unstable, most people seemed to experience a new optimism, to share the sense that we were weathering the worst of it, and that soon—when things got straightened out—the problems that had caused this mess would have been purged from the system, and America and the future would be in better shape than ever.

  People looked to the past for reassurance and inspiration. At the library, the supermarket, the gas station, and even on the Plaza, we listened to talk about the sacrifices and hardships of the Pilgrims and the pioneers. Echoing the vanished newspaper columnists and talk show hosts, people reminisced about the Depression and World Wars, talked about how those hard times had built character and brought families and communities together, how they had strengthened our country and given it new energy and direction. This time, too, they claimed, a little patience and endurance were all that was required to further the causes of freedom and democracy. We each just needed to do our part and pull together and wait it out.