Into the Forest

by Jean Hegland

  “These will come in handy,” said Father, tossing the baking powder and garlic salt into his cart.

  “What else do we need?” he asked, and we looked at each other, unsure of how much of the irony in that question was intended.

  “Flour,” said Eva, and we pushed past shelves empty except for a sprinkling of cocoa and a broken box of cornstarch.

  Sprawled in the shadows at the very back of a bottom shelf, we found half a dozen fifty-pound sacks of flour, but when we stooped to heave them onto Eva’s cart, we saw they were all half-empty, and when we tried to lift them, we only succeeded in spilling great puffs of flour.

  “Thought we might need this,” said our father, pulling the duct tape from his pocket. “Nothing’s junk, as long as duct tape will fix it,” he said, quoting himself in an epigram that used to make our mother cringe.

  We helped him patch the sacks with great X’s of tape, helped him lift them onto the cart. “This’ll last us six months, easy,” he said, dusting off his hands and his pants legs, “unless Eva decides to quit being a ballerina and take up sumo wrestling.”

  “Shouldn’t we leave some for someone else?” Eva asked as we loaded the last unwieldy sack onto her cart. She pointed to the eye-level signs that said Remember the Other Guy and Limit Yourself—Avoid Government-Imposed Rationing!

  For a moment our father looked stricken. Then he said, “We’re not going to be back here for a while, so I think this is a fair share. Anyway, no one else seems to be rushing to take it.”

  At the end of the aisle we found a ten-pound bag of sugar, though it had obviously gotten damp at some point because the sugar inside was as hard as concrete.

  “It’s no good,” I said when I felt it.

  “Why not?” asked Father.

  “It’s hard.”

  “It would have been snatched up long ago if there weren’t something wrong with it, but it’s still sweet.” We added the sugar to my cart.

  The shelves on the next aisle held a few giant-sized bottles of toilet cleaner, some smashed cartons of dishwasher detergent, several mop handles, a torn package of sponges, and some green puddles from which the scent of ammonia arose. We took a plastic bag containing a few splintered bars of hand soap, and Father taped up an almost empty box of laundry detergent and added it to our load.

  “We need candles,” Eva said. But all we could find was a single broken utility candle.

  On we went, foraging through the dim reaches of the warehouse, past the aisle-length refrigerators empty except for puddles of dark water, past stacks of boxes containing blank videotapes, telephone answering machines, compact disk players, computer programs, and fax machines, as we searched for usable supplies and edible food.

  Farther back in the warehouse, where the shadows grew even denser, we discovered overlooked cans of soup, tuna fish, fruit cocktail, and sauerkraut. All of them were rusted or dented and most had lost their labels, but we added them to our cart anyway, along with two ten-pound boxes of crushed spaghetti and one of broken macaroni. We found some half-empty bags of pinto beans. We found a five-pound box of pulverized crackers and three large plastic buckets of peanut butter with tarry black stuff covering their lids.

  Finally Father said we had enough. “I wish we could have found some more canning lids, but even so, we’re more than set till the power comes back on, especially with the garden and what we’ll get from the orchard this fall.”

  As we wheeled our carts to the row of checkout stands that waited like sentries at the front of the store, we could see that a man sat at one of the middle ones, reading a paperback by the dim light that filtered through the skylight above him. He looked up as we approached, and I realized I had seen him there before. He was wearing a jacket with the Fastco logo, and the name Stan and the words Assistant Manager were embroidered over his heart.

  “Ready?” he asked, smiling and jumping up from his seat.

  “Yes,” we mumbled, taken aback by his energy, by the odd normalcy of his being there at all, and by something else, a tiny splinter of craziness in his brown eyes.

  “May I see your card, please?”

  Our father looked blank a moment, and then pulled his billfold from his back pocket, fumbled through his collection of bank and credit and ID and library cards until he found the bright orange card that proved he was a Fastco member.

  “Thank you, sir,” said Stan after he had compared Father’s face to the photograph on the card.

  Then we watched in amazement as he lifted the mended bags and dented cans from our carts and stacked them neatly in cardboard boxes, adding everything up in his head as he went. “3.49 and 4.95, that’s 8.44, and 1.95, that’s 10.39, and 7.39 is 17.78, and 6.49 is 24.27 and 3 at 1.89 is 29.94.”

  He seemed to be pulling the prices out of thin air, though I noticed he charged ninety-nine cents for every unlabeled can. It crossed none of our minds to question either his pricing or his addition.

  Finally the last broken box was packed away with the rest of our goods, and he turned to our father to say, “And 11.89 is 404.54. Will that be all, sir?”

  Our father cleared his throat. “That’s all.”

  “Then your grand total is 404.54. No tax these days,” Stan added with a wink.

  Father counted out his bills and handed them to the clerk, who rubbed them between his fingers, studied them under a magnifying glass, and finally dabbed at a corner of each with a cotton ball he had soaking in a bowl of clear fluid.

  “You seeing a lot of counterfeits these days?” asked our father.

  “Not seeing much of anything. But you can’t be too careful. That’s why I have Sheila here to keep me company.” He gave us another smile and reached down to pat the rifle we suddenly noticed leaning against the defunct product scanner.

  “Sheila’s been a real pal. ’Specially back when the looters tried coming around.”

  He shook his head in a sudden fierce disgust. “People wanting somethin’ for nothin’—that’s what got us into this mess. But Sheila don’t go for that any more than I do, and they all soon learned that only paying customers are welcome here.” His fingers lingered on the gun’s barrel for a moment before he tucked the money Father had given him into the slot of the locked cash box that sat beneath his chair.

  “We live out of town a ways,” said our father, trying to keep the conversation casual, but lowering his voice as he spoke. “So we don’t hear much news.”

  “Not much to hear,” answered Stan, counting change from his pocket into our father’s open hand.

  “Where is everybody? The town looks pretty empty.”

  “Well, lots of people left, of course, following rumors. Some went over to Sacramento. Others headed south. Heard there was work—and utilities—down there. The good life, don’tcha know?” He shrugged. “All those rumors. Seemed too chancy to me, but then what do I know? No one’s come back yet. But that could be good or bad, if you see what I mean.”

  “It happened so fast,” I said.

  “Yep.” He looked pleased. “That’s what most folks said. But they always used to tell us at the grocers’ conventions how it’d only take three days of interrupted service for the shelves to start emptying. If you think about that, it’s amazing we lasted as long as we did.”

  We nodded.

  “Mostly the town looks empty ’cause people’ve left. But there’s been some sickness cleaned it out, too. The measles swept through, a month or so ago, took quite a few folks off. Lost my littlest like that.

  “Then something else came—some stomach thing—and there went some more. And some around here’s died other ways—ptomaine, a couple of cases of appendicitis. Even a cut’ll do you, if it bleeds too much or gets infected.”

  “Where are the doctors?” I asked.

  He looked at me blankly for a minute and then said, “Well, they’re still around, I guess, some of them. Not that it does much good, now that all their medicine is gone and their fancy equipment is shut down. There’s a woman
in town does stuff with plants—and some’ll go to her when they need help. I don’t know, I’d rather take a pill, myself. But I guess that’ll have to wait awhile. Knock on wood we won’t need any more doctoring till things get going again.”

  “The people who are still left around here—where are they?”

  “At home. Mostly people just keep close to home. You know—doing some gardening, keeping chickens, that sort of thing. Waiting.”

  We nodded our agreement.

  “Me, I’m different, I guess,” he went on. “I like to get out a little, come here, you know, and keep busy.” He shook his head apologetically. “Not much going on, until the government gets back on its feet.”

  “What news of that?”

  “Heard a rumor they may be taxing again by fall. But rumors—ha! Heard a rumor that some folks in Grantsville had built a spaceship and were selling tickets to the moon.”

  He gave a short, hard laugh, a sound of contempt that made his shoulders rise abruptly and then slump back down, and in that moment his face lost its practiced pleasantness and he looked desperate. “What they’re gonna tax then, I don’t know. Yours are the first real bills I’ve seen in a coon’s age. Nobody’s buying anything. Money’s all gone.”

  “Any gas in town?” asked Father, folding what was left of our money back into his worn wallet.

  Stan laughed again, that same caustic snort. “Old Mick Mitter over at Exxon claims he’s expecting a shipment any day now. But you know Mick. Or maybe you don’t. He likes to talk. Been looking for that delivery ever since June.” Stan smiled his Assistant Manager of Fastco smile, though his eyes still held something that seemed both wild and vacant. He set the final box of groceries back onto Eva’s cart and asked, “You folks like some help out?”

  Today is a day worse than Christmas. Today is a day worth abandoning the calendar to avoid. It’s a day that can never again mean anything but regret and loss and a sorrow like steel—so hard, so sharp, so cold the very air seems brutal. Breathing hurts. My heart aches to pump blood. Like Midas’ Touch in reverse, everything I touch or look at, read or remember turns to dust. Because today is my father’s birthday, and every thought I have of him is tainted by my memory of his death.

  It was early last September. The mornings were chill with coastal fog, the afternoons heavily hot, and the evenings that followed were wide and mellow, with an air that felt like silk against our bare arms, and pink clouds high in the deepening blue of the sky. The garden was past its prime. The lettuces and spinach and mustard had bolted months ago; we had long since eaten all the radishes and peas, and we were getting to the end of the corn and beets and carrots. The beans and summer squashes and tomatoes were slowing down, and in the orchard the apples were almost ready to harvest.

  Father said we were weathering the storm. We would have our power back soon, he promised. The phone would ring again, and he would hike to town for gas. After that, Redwood Elementary would reopen, Eva could resume her ballet classes and take her audition, and I could start preparing in earnest for my Achievement Tests in November.

  It felt as though the tourniquet that grief had put on our lives was finally loosening. Father still frequently disappeared upstairs long before the sun went down, but the hours he spent cutting wood and gardening seemed to lend him a new vigor. He was no longer as remote as he had been, and sometimes he even broke his mourning with a joke.

  In the meantime, I found myself reading—or rather rereading—every novel in the house. I had long since worked my way through the final load of books from the library, my language tapes were silent, the computer was a dusty box, the calculator batteries were dead, and so I returned to novels to supply me with thoughts and emotions and sensations, to give me a life other than my own suspended one.

  Siddhartha.? Is for Murder. The Hobbit. The Golden Notebook. Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Catch-22. The Martian Chronicles. Adam Bede. While I was reading a novel, I was immersed, awash in the story it told, and everything else was an interruption. I could read for hours at a stretch, and any distraction—a question, a meal, the coming of darkness—made me bristle with impatience.

  I occasionally found myself daydreaming about Eli, but most of the urgency had drained from those fantasies. His memory was like a worn teddy bear, something I had once depended on but had finally outgrown. I clutched it now and then out of old habit, but I had come to think that Eva was right, that Eli wasn’t for me, and I had even begun to imagine his replacement—the boy I would meet at Harvard.

  Mornings we canned.

  Mother had inherited canning jars from elderly female relatives on both sides of the family, and occasionally she used to put up a few jars of treats—herbed carrots or spiced peaches or tomato chutney. After she died, we found almost a full case of Fastco canning lids in the pantry, and one summer evening, when the tomato plants were burdened with fruit, the beets were bulging out of the earth, and the beans hung like long fingers from their sagging vines, Father sat out on the deck, The Complete Book of Home Canning spread open on his lap while he read from table of contents to index. Finally, as the last pink cloud faded to blue-black in the sky above us, he closed the book, looked up, and said, “That does it, girls—this summer we’ll eat what we can, and what we can’t, we’ll can.”

  After that he woke Eva and me at dawn each day, and all morning we picked and washed and skinned and sliced and packed and processed, until the creases and whorls in our fingers were permanently stained by the juices of tomatoes, beets, and plums, and our faces and arms were reddened and swollen from the kettles of boiling water it seemed we were constantly bending over.

  The woodstove had to roar in order to keep the water in the canning kettle at the rapid boil The Complete Book of Home Canning required. By midmorning, the house was so hot that breathing seemed a chore. Slowly, the heaps of fruit shrank and the piles of pits and slipped skins grew. Slowly the table was filled with jars of seething fruit, and above the roar of the fire, we could begin to hear the little ping of canning lids sealing as they cooled. And slowly Eva and I would become less and less helpful and more and more sullen, until finally my father would say, “You girls run on, and I’ll finish up this last batch. Hey—twenty-one quarts! That’s a good morning’s work.”

  Once I snapped, “What the hell are we doing all this for? I thought you said things would be back to normal soon.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he answered a little too evenly. “I suppose a jar of fruit could always come in handy—for trade, if nothing else. Besides, it seems a shame to let anything go to waste these days.”

  I scowled, and Eva and I burst from the house into the lesser heat of the day, leaving the worry and cleanup to him. Now I wonder if he didn’t know more than he would admit when he insisted that we work every morning until all the jars we owned were filled, less than a hundred lids remained in the case our mother had bought, and even the windfall apples and bee-stung peaches were canned and added to the crowded pantry shelves.

  When, at the hottest hour of the day, he finally emerged from the house, it was to work in the garden or to cut wood in the forest.

  “I’d planned to reshingle the roof and shore up the utility room this summer,” he said, “but right now it looks like firewood and food’re more important.” He said he wanted us to have at least three years’ worth of firewood curing by the time the rains came that winter. And he wanted extra wood to sell, too.

  “We’ll need to be a little ahead of the game this fall,” he said once. “Public schools are guaranteed to be the last solvent institution on the block. And I’ve got two daughters who’ll be asking for dowries sometime soon. Or at least toe shoes, tuition, and lipstick. Let’s see, wasn’t that Kiss Me Quick Crimson or Move Over Mauve? Either way—gotta have us a little lipstick money put aside.”

  I knew he was trying to make right all that had soured between us, but even as I longed to joke with him, my throat thickened with resentment. Part of me yearned to hear him tease me
, laugh, and call me Pumpkin, but another part still bristled, furious he could now be happy, and equally furious that he had ever been otherwise. I clung to the power of my anger, the safety of having the upper hand, and when he saw that his peace offering had once again been refused, he gathered his chain saw and his bow saw and left the clearing, calling over his shoulder as he strode away, “Once upon a time there was a poor woodcutter who had nothing to his name but a little cottage in the woods and two strapping daughters who needed lipstick….”

  So he roamed the woods, felling trees that he left to dry in the summer’s heat, or limbing the trees he had already felled, cutting them into stove lengths, and stacking them beside the old logging roads, ready to load onto the truck as soon as he had the gas to drive it with.

  He had saved a little gas for the chain saw. “It’s fuel well spent,” he explained when I complained that he had gas for his saw but we couldn’t use any gas to drive to town. “A chain saw’s one of the most efficient little internal combustion engines there is. And right now I’m afraid we need firewood a whole lot more than we need a trip to town.”

  As the summer progressed, he used his bow saw and ax more often, but it made for tedious work, and occasionally we still heard his chain saw whining in the distance like a vaguely annoying mosquito.

  While he spent his afternoons in the forest, Eva and I stayed in the clearing, halfheartedly weeding the garden, puttering in the increasingly spartan kitchen, or trying to pursue what had once been our passions. But more and more frequently we would abandon all pretense of work, would leave the stifling house for the stunning heat of the day. Side by side we would stretch out on the shade-dappled fir needles up by the water tank. There we would pant and doze, hoping for a wisp of breeze.

  We were up at the water tank that afternoon. It was late in the day, almost time for Father to return to the clearing, for us to think about getting supper. Out of sheer boredom I was painting my fingernails from my little stock of hoarded polish, and I can still feel the cool tickle of the brush, still smell the chemical tang rising from that squat bottle, still see the wet crimson ovals of my nails against my fruit-stained fingers, still hear the chain saw droning away somewhere just inside my awareness. In my memory of that moment I am too innocent to be anything but happy.