Into the Forest

by Jean Hegland

  “No,” I said, and started to giggle.

  “What’s so funny? A minute ago you were determined to save those tomatoes, and now that you’ve ruined them, you’re laughing.”

  “Let’s drink it,” I suggested. I was suddenly elated, suffused with an exquisite upwelling of relief that I hadn’t killed my sister.

  “What?”

  “Isn’t Grand Marnier made with oranges? Let’s drink it. Maybe it’s got some vitamin C in it.”

  “Well, then according to you, we had better save it,” said Eva.

  “For what?” I scoffed, ignoring the sarcasm in her voice. “‘Snakebite, frostbite, or childbirth’? Besides, there’s still the sherry. Come on,” I urged, quoting our father once again. “‘The best occasion is no occasion.’”

  I grabbed Eva’s arm to lead her from the pantry, but she shook free and reached for the broom.

  From the living room I could hear the sound of sweeping and the chatter of broken glass. I was suddenly eleven again, and Eva was too busy practicing to go to the woods with me. I hesitated and then twisted the lid off the bottle. The smells of orange and alcohol filled the air, and I lifted the bottle defiantly to my mouth. The first sip was sweet, like orange syrup with a backfire. I drank again.

  “Eva?” I called.

  “What?”

  “Want some?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m trying to get the glass out of the tomatoes you spilled.”

  “I didn’t spill them—we did.”

  “Like hell.”

  “Come on,” I urged. “Try some of this.”

  “No.”

  I took another drink, and the unbearable weight of my loneliness pressed in on me. I drank again.

  “It tastes like orange suckers,” I called.

  I heard her sigh wearily. She entered the living room a minute later, carrying a bowl of tomatoes. Sitting by the window where the light was best, she began to poke at the fruit with a fork, to rub the shreds of tomato-flesh between her fingers.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Trying to get all the glass out before we eat it—even though you did want to kill me.”

  “Oh.” I drank again. “I’m glad I didn’t,” I added. Already I could feel the familiar warmth in my belly, the loosening in my brain.

  “Eva?”

  “What?” she asked, impatience sharpening the final “t” to a knife’s edge.

  “I do wish you would share this with me. Please. I’ve missed you.”

  She sighed elaborately, and then was silent a long time, bent over her bowl of broken tomatoes. Finally she stood up, carried the bowl back into the kitchen. When she returned, her hands were clean. She sat down at the table across from me and reached for the bottle. She raised it to her mouth as though she were performing another chore and drank.

  “Well?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “Doesn’t it taste like orange suckers?”

  “I guess.” She took another drink and handed me the bottle. So the Grand Marnier passed silently back and forth across the table as the light leached from the sky. When we could no longer see the bottle, Eva rose to feed the fire and left the stove door open. By firelight I studied the curves and hollows of my sister’s face. I thought of all that constrained us, all I needed to ask or say to bridge the distances between us, and the longer I watched her still, sad face the more impossible it seemed that I could ever bring myself to speak.

  Eva handed me the bottle, and I drank. Finally she said, “Hmm.”

  “What?” I asked, pouncing on any possibility of talk.

  “I was just thinking—what would Father say?”

  “About what?”

  “Drinking the Grand Marnier.” “

  ‘Pass the bottle,’” I said.

  “You’ve got it,” she answered.

  “What?”

  “The bottle.”

  “No, that’s what he’d say.” “What?”

  “‘Pass the bottle.’”

  We started giggling, and the giggling felt so good. It was so easy to giggle—so impossible, somehow, to stop—that our laughter grew, took on its own life and momentum until we were laughing in great spasms, until our bellies hurt and our eyes were flooded with tears.

  “You’ve … got … it,” Eva blurted between bursts of hysteria.

  “What?” I gasped.

  “The bottle,” she answered, and we laughed until the muscles at the tops of our cheeks ached.

  “I’m going to pee my pants,” Eva cried, and that was the funniest thing yet.

  “Remember,” I spurted, when I could again breathe enough to speak, “when we got the giggles when Dad’s superintendent came all the way out here for dinner?”

  Eva was rolling on the floor, moaning and clutching her stomach.

  “And you,” I blurted, “you squirted milk out your nose—”

  “All over the salad,” she shrieked.

  “And Mother—”

  “Oh, don’t, don’t,” she begged, as though I were holding her down and tickling her feet.

  “Took it back in the kitchen, and picked the milky pieces out—”

  “And put it in a different bowl—”

  “Because that was all the salad there was—”

  “Oh, don’t. Stop. Please!”

  “—and we were having steak and he’d just said he was a vegetarian.”

  “And she brought it back out again—” “But the only person who ate any—” “Was the superintendent—”

  “And he ate thirds!”

  Finally we, laughed our way to silence. I handed the bottle to Eva, which stirred up a final cloud of giggles. She drank, tilting the bottle lazily above her head.

  “What would Mother say?” I asked meditatively.

  Eva answered immediately. “She’d say,? dancer doesn’t drink.’”

  “Is that why you never drank at the Plaza?”

  She nodded.

  “That’s it? I always thought you were mad at me. I always thought you thought you were better than the rest of us.” “Well, maybe I did, a little. You all got so silly.” “It was fun,” I said defensively.

  “I know.” She sighed, and this time her sigh seemed sad.

  “Can I ask you a question?” I said.

  “What?”

  “Will you answer?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Why didn’t you like Eli?”

  “I did like Eli.”

  “But—”

  “But I didn’t like the way you liked Eli.”

  “What—”

  She shrugged. “That’s the best I can say it. It’s like you’re not your own person when you’re with him.”

  She reached for the bottle, took a long swallow, and said, “My turn.”

  “For what?”

  “To ask you. Why did you come back, if you liked him so much?”

  Why did you come back? It was the question I had scourged myself with a thousand times, the question to which I thought I had no answer.

  Why did you come back? I asked the deep glowing darkness of myself, and the reason came welling up, simple as water. “Because you’re my sister, stupid.”

  She reached across the table to slug me in the shoulder, and then we sat for a long time, listening to the fire.

  At last I reached for the bottle and asked a final question. “Eva, why do you keep dancing?”

  She shrugged. “What else am I supposed to do with all this time?”

  She was quiet then, silent for so long I assumed she was thinking of something else, but suddenly she spoke. “I’ll tell you a secret.” She flopped her head back for another drink. “The bottle’s empty,” she said when she had swallowed.

  “That’s a secret?”

  “No—that’s a shame.”

  We giggled a little more, and then she went on, “This is the secret—I couldn’t keep dancing if it weren’t for the g
as.” “The gas?” I echoed guiltily.

  “That’s what keeps me going. I keep dancing because I know we have that gas. And anytime I really, really had to, I know we could use it for music.”

  There was a hint of questioning in her voice, and I answered it immediately, with a generosity born of love and alcohol. “Of course.”

  She paused for a moment to absorb my gift. Then she went on, “That gas keeps it all close enough to believe in. Do you know that sometimes I sneak it out just to look at it? Sometimes I even open the cap and dab a little on me like perfume, so that later, when I’m dancing, I can smell it.”

  She said, “It’s only the gas that keeps me going.”

  Even though I could hear her sobs, my first thought when I saw her lying on the dirt by the chopping block was, She’s dead, my sister is dead. Now I am truly alone.

  I rushed to her, threw myself over her, held her while she trembled and moaned. “Eva, Eva, Eva, what happened? What’s wrong?” I pleaded, but she wept and would not answer.

  When she finally lifted her face to me, her mouth was swollen and bleeding, and her eyes were the eyes of someone I had never seen.

  “What happened?” I asked again, and at last she was able to say it, to force the words out through her split lips. “A man—he raped me.”

  I eased her to her feet, helped her inside, locked the doors, and built up the fire, using a whole sheet of newspaper in my haste. I gave her a few precious sips of sherry, covered the stovetop with kettles and pots of water. Finally, while the water was heating, the story spewed out of her. She turned her back to me to tell it, and sometimes her voice trembled and cracked, and sometimes she spat the words out in a flat, hard voice that did not seem to be her own.

  She had been in the yard. She was chopping wood, enjoying the easy swing of the ax, proud of the way she could dance the logs apart. The sun was bright, warm. There was a breeze.

  She never heard him coming, never felt his presence until he was almost next to her.

  She gasped, but he held out his hand to steady her as though she were an animal he didn’t want to scare off. “It’s okay,” he said.

  He told her he was headed north to friends in Grantsville, but that he must have taken a wrong turn. He said he heard her ax and smelled our smoke and thought he’d see who was so far out here, thought he’d stop in and introduce himself. He never told her his name.

  “How’re you folks making out?” he asked, his gaze traveling around the yard. “Looks like you’ve got plenty of wood.”

  She was so unused to talking to anyone that she felt a little awkward, but she wasn’t afraid.

  She leaned the ax against the splitting stump and asked him, “Have you heard any news? When will we get our power back?”

  He said, “Who knows.”

  She said, “We heard that things were starting up again back East.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “A friend.”

  “You’ve got friends out here?”

  “Not now. He came to see my sister. But he’s gone.”

  “Yeah. I heard that stuff about Boston, too. Even heard there were some fools who took off, chasing rumors across the country. They won’t last long.”

  Eva said, “That’s what I said, too!”

  They shared a smile. Then he said, “You girls sure have a good-sized woodpile there.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  He studied the wood and his eyes narrowed. “You didn’t cut all this wood by hand, did you?”

  “My father cut it,” she said.

  “Your father?” he said sharply. “Your father’s around here?”

  “Yes,” she answered, surprising herself by the ease with which she said it. “He’s around.”

  “Where is he? I’d like to talk to him, see what he knows.”

  “You’d have to wait awhile,” she said, her voice level, neutral. “He’s out in the woods.”

  “You folks have any spare gas?” he asked, craning his neck to eye the house.

  She wanted him to leave. She answered, “Sorry.”

  “Sorry what?” he asked. “Sorry you don’t have any gas, or sorry you won’t share it?”

  She shrugged, and started to reach for her ax, ready to continue working.

  Just before her hand touched the ax handle, he grabbed her wrist, twisted it so that her arm was yanked behind her back.

  “Listen, bitch,” he said, “if you think you’re saving that gas for an emergency, you’d better consider this one. Where is it?”

  When she didn’t answer, he spun her around to face him. His face grew hard, his eyes narrowed, and the tiny muscles beneath them jerked and trembled. Even so, she glared back at him. Tearing one shoulder free from his grasp, she aimed a knee at his groin.

  She missed—although she hit his thigh with so much force he gasped and tripped. Grappling and struggling, they landed on the ground together. Her dancer’s strength might have saved her if he hadn’t hit her full across the face, a blow that tore open whole rooms of pain inside her skull, blinding her for a crucial moment, and so confusing her that all she could say when he asked, Where is it? was No, No, No.

  When it was over, he rose, stood above her for a cruel moment, buttoning his pants, fastening his heavy, clanking belt buckle, while she lay huddled at his feet. Then he spat on the ground next to her.

  “I sure am sorry I can’t stay until Daddy gets back,” he said. “But you tell him thanks for the hospitality.” He left the clearing, left her lying on the earth with her ax next to her, paralyzed with shock and horror and pain, left her where I found her when I returned from cleaning out the spring.

  When the kettles of water were finally hot, I filled the tub and led her to the bathroom. She stood still as a child as I undressed her, examined her hurts. Bruises were already flowering on her arms. Her face was torn and swollen, and her thighs were streaked with blood.

  She shuddered when she climbed into the steaming water, and I thought she might weep again, but she seemed to relax just slightly into the heat and wet. She spoke for the first time since she had told me of the rape—”Is there any soap?”

  “There’s the Christmas soap,” I said. “I’ll get it.”

  A tiny, cracked lump of unnatural forest green, scented with a fragrance that must have once passed for pine, it was the last soap we owned, the last of a little gift basket of soaps we had found among our mother’s things. We had eked the others along to nothing, rationing them until only this was left—a splinter of soap the size of a dime, the scrap we had agreed to save for our triumphal trip to town.

  When I put it in her hands, she lifted it to her nose, inhaled its fading perfume, and then, looking at me, she asked, “But don’t you want to save it?”

  “No,” I said, cringing at the innocent recrimination in that question. “Use it now.”

  She asked for a washcloth and when I gave it to her, she attacked herself, scrubbing her skin so viciously I thought she would surely bleed, going over and over every inch of her body, first with soap, and then, long after the soap had vanished into the cooling water, with the washcloth. She winced when she first touched herself between her legs, and I saw tears rise in her eyes, but she clenched her teeth, bit back her tears, washed herself clinically, thoroughly, washed thighs and stomach and breasts, washed her shoulders, her elbows, her wrists and fingers, her knees and shins and ankles and between each toe. Gingerly she daubed water on her misshapen face.

  Finally she turned towards me and made a move to climb from the tub. I helped her out, wrapped her in the towels I had laid by the stove to warm. I led her back to her mattress, folded a mug of white tea and sherry in her hands, made her swallow the final aspirin.

  When I handed it to her, she protested. “We should save it.”

  “It’s okay. Take it.”

  “We might need it later. Maybe I should just take half.”

  “Half wouldn’t do any good. You’d waste the whole thing if you cut it
in half,” I answered, wondering what a single aspirin could do against a rape.

  She swallowed the aspirin and watched in silence while I pushed the couch in front of the door, took the rifle from the coat closet and inexpertly fit a bullet into the chamber. I checked the safety half a dozen times, stoked the fire, and then sat on the floor next to her mattress with the gun across my lap.

  Towards morning she slept, while I stayed awake beside her, staring at the fire, cringing at the wind, afraid to breathe.

  There is no place we feel safe. Going outside for wood takes all the courage I can muster, and still I cringe and wince, every moment expecting to be attacked. Inside we feel both exposed and trapped. A dozen times an hour I find myself glancing out the window, scanning the forest, expecting to glimpse the figure I know is waiting for us there.

  It changes the front room to have the rifle in it, leaning like a warning against the door frame. A gun is a mean thing. Rather than comforting me, its cool barrel, heavy stock, and slender trigger scare me as much as everything else, reminding me there’s violence everywhere.

  There is no escaping. Even the fire in the stove seems menacing. Sap boils out of the crackling wood, the flames snap and spit. We’re surrounded by violence, by anger and danger, as surely as we are surrounded by forest. The forest killed our father, and from that forest will come the man—or men—who will kill us.

  Yesterday I forced myself to go outside and search through the junk pile behind the workshop until I found some sheets of corrugated tin. I nailed them over every downstairs window except the one in the front room. While Eva lay unmoving on her mattress, her swollen face turned to the wall, I nailed the door from the kitchen to the utility room shut and barricaded the washing machine in front of the door that leads from the utility room outside.

  So now we have only a single window and one entrance to our house, but all that means is we will be able to hear him breaking in before he reaches us.

  Despite the bright weather and lengthening days, Eva and I stay inside. Hour after hour we sit at the table by the unboarded window that is our only source of light. For breakfast we share a cup of rice, eating not out of hunger but out of habit. Lunch is half a jar of home-canned fruit, dinner a bowl of beans. Those three events shape our lives.