Into the Forest

by Jean Hegland

  I try to study, but the words slip senselessly past me, snagging my attention only when they remind me of what I’m missing. Lindos. Liszt. London.

  I dream of picking up rocks, rough chunks of dirt-colored shale on a cold plain beneath a grey sky, and wake to a despair so heavy it is an effort to move.

  After London Stock Exchange comes Londonderry. After Londonderry comes the Lone Ranger. And after Lone Ranger comes Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island:

  In 1853, an Indian woman was discovered living entirely alone on an island seventy miles off the coast of Santa Barbara. According to contemporary accounts, in 1835, while her tribe was being removed from the island on orders from the Mission of Santa Barbara, a strong wind sprang up. In the confusion, a child was left behind. When its mother discovered its absence, she swam back to the island to look for it, but while she was gone, the gale grew more threatening, and the captain gave the order to set sail without her.

  Eighteen years elapsed before the Lone Woman was discovered by a crew of sea otter hunters. Although no one could speak her language, she used signs quite eloquently. She indicated she had never found her child, and feared the wild dogs had eaten it.

  She returned to the mainland with the hunters, and was greatly disappointed to learn that none of her tribe could be found. She died seven weeks later.

  And so the inexorable order of the encyclopedia speaks to my life yet again, this time making me face the worst truth of all: There will be no rescue.

  Ever since this began we have been waiting to be saved, waiting like stupid princesses for our rightful lives to be restored to us. But we have only been fooling ourselves, only playing out another fairy tale. Our story can no more have a happy ending than the Lone Woman’s did. The lights will never again come on out here. The phone will never ring for us. Eva and I will live like this until we die, hoarding and cringing and finally starving—if we aren’t lucky enough to get our throats slit first.

  However we die, we’ll die here. Alone. There will be no matriculation at Harvard, no debut with the San Francisco Ballet. There will be no travels, no diplomas, no curtain calls. There will be no more lovers, no husbands, no children. No one will ever read this journal unless the damn chickens learn to read.

  Of course this sort of thing happens all the time. I’ve studied enough history to understand that. Cultures topple, societies collapse, and little pockets of people are left, remnants and refugees, struggling to find food, to defend themselves from famine or disease or marauders while the grass grows up through the palace floors and the temples crumble. Look at Rome, Babylon, Crete, Egypt, look at the Incas or the American Indians.

  And even if this isn’t another two-thousand-year-old civilization coming to an end, look at all the minor devastations—the wars and revolutions, the hurricanes and volcanoes and droughts and floods and famines and plagues that filled the slick pages of the news magazines we used to read. Think of the photographs of the survivors huddled among the rubble. Think of South America, South Africa, Central Asia, Eastern Europe, and ask how we could possibly have felt so smug. Think about the Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island and ask why we ever assumed we would be saved.

  The tulips are blooming, a brilliant, worthless wall, separating us from the forest, dividing nothing from nothing. If I could feel, I think they would make me angry. They are a gesture so futile that now I think I was right not to help my mother plant them, for what are they but a hoax, a fraud, another lie?

  Here I sit in the cave of a room where once, in another lifetime, I ate popcorn, played Scrabble, and watched videos with my family. Now I look out at my mother’s tulips and contemplate suicide.

  It’s a physical urge, stronger than thirst or sex. Halfway back on the left side of my head there is a spot that longs for the jolt of a bullet, that yearns for that fire, that final empty rip. I want to be let out of this cavern, to open myself up to the ease of not-living. I am tired of sorrow and struggle and worry. I am tired of my sad sister. I want to turn out the last light.

  I could do it.

  I could rise from this chair, say, I’m going out for wood. Eva would give her mute little nod, but she wouldn’t look up, not even to see me lift the gun from its post by the door.

  I could open the door. I could step outside, could close the door forever behind me. Break through the ring of my mother’s tulips. Enter the twilit woods, the gun stiff at my side. Push a new path through the forest. In some dim circle of trees, I could sit down on the earth. Take off my shoe. Work my toes into the cold ring of the trigger guard. Fumble the trigger until it gave.

  I am my own person, after all.

  I stood up. I took the gun and opened the door. I was standing at the threshold, looking out at the fading sunset beyond the black trees, when I heard her voice, cracked with fright.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Just out. For wood.” I didn’t face her. The forest air was cold on my cheeks and hands.

  “Why do you have the gun?”

  “It’s almost dark.”

  “But why take the gun?”

  “Because I want to, all right?” I growled, turning on her with a ferocity so intense it startled us both. She met my eyes, held them, her face still bruised like the darkening sky.

  “All right,” she said finally.

  I stepped outside, closed the door, went trembling into the yard. The gun was cold and heavy. I circled the clearing, walking just inside the ring of tulips, their petals like dark flames, like cups of velvet. But beyond them the forest seemed solid, impenetrable. I could find no way to enter it. I stood in the clearing beneath the lurid sky, watched the purple and yellow fade, watched until the first mute stars appeared.

  In that darkness I gathered an armload of wood. In that darkness I reentered the house.

  Once again my sister kept me from going where I wanted to

  The days creep by. I think we’re somewhere in the middle of April, but I have lost track of time. Weeks have passed since I’ve written anything in here, and when I try to match the blank squares of my calendar against the days we have just endured, I can figure no way to sort them out.

  We breathe and another night arrives, so I suppose time continues. But my calendar is obsolete.

  Last night I dreamed that someone was standing at the edge of the woods, threatening and taunting us while Eva and I cowered in the workroom beneath Mother’s loom. I was holding a pair of shears and whispering to Eva that if he came too close we could cut off his hair. Suddenly the walls dissolved and I was aiming a rifle across the clearing.

  I’ll shoot! I screamed at him. I felt a surge of ecstatic power. I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you! I cried. Triumphantly I squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. In desperation I pulled it again, and saw that instead of a bullet, maggots were oozing from the barrel. I woke tangled in panic, but even before I calmed enough to convince myself it was only a dream, I knew I had to learn to shoot the rifle.

  This morning I took it out on the deck and tried to remember what little my father had shown me about guns. I was afraid to waste bullets, so over and over I practiced loading, releasing the safety, and aiming at the forest. Finally, after more than an hour of pretend, I stuck a man-tall stick by the side of the road at the edge of the clearing and set an old pickle jar upside down over it. Then I went back to the deck and, bracing myself against the railing, lined up the sights and pulled the trigger.

  There was a blast so loud and hard I thought I had shot myself. My shoulder stung, my ears rang, and tears ran unbidden down my face. When I recovered, I was standing three feet back from the railing, the pickle jar was intact, and Eva was cringing at the doorway.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ve got to do this.”

  “I know,” she whispered, and vanished into the house.

  I forced myself to try again. But this time I was anticipating the punch of the stock against my shoulder, and I aimed too hastily, shying from the jolt of the gun before
I even pulled the trigger. The barrel swung up wildly and the shot tore into the air.

  I resolved to make myself do it right. I decided to try to trick myself into not flinching by easing the trigger back so slowly I would never know the moment at which it fired. The brunt of the recoil slapped my shoulder and the barrel remained level, but the shot vanished into the forest, and the jar stayed on the stick.

  It seemed to me that somewhere I had heard you should always sight a little high, so for the next shot I aimed in the air above the jar. Once again I avoided flinching, but once again the shot sped harmlessly through the trees.

  I felt as though I had been beaten. My shoulder was weak and aching. My head was ringing, my hands were wet, and I thought I couldn’t endure having to pull the trigger another time. But the pickle jar taunted me from the edge of the clearing, as menacing as a man.

  Desperately, I reviewed my knowledge of trajectories and parabolic curves and reasoned that before a bullet could fall, it must first rise. I sighted a little low, and pulled the trigger as gently as I could. In a blink the pickle jar exploded, leaving me trembling with elation and terror.

  Her face is mending, but day after day my sister remains silent, not sullen, but with a helpless sweetness that reminds me of our father’s dying smile. She seems almost apologetic, as though she would gladly leave her shock and fear behind, shed them like a worn skin, if only she knew how. She’s begun tending the fire again, but I do the few other things that get done. I give her food, and what she doesn’t eat, I eat myself, or save for the next meal.

  “Want to play Backgammon?” I asked once, but she shrugged so listlessly I knew it was useless to set up the game.

  She hasn’t entered her studio since the rape.

  “Why don’t you dance?” I urged yesterday.

  Startled, she looked up from her lap. It was as though I had asked her why she didn’t play the bagpipes, or why she didn’t fly.

  “I can’t,” she said.

  “Let’s use the gas,” I said, “so you can hear some music again.”

  But her body remained passive and no desire brightened her face. “No,” she answered. “No. We’d better save it.”

  This morning I woke with the sun full on my face and the headache I’ve been battling for days finally gone. I felt light as an angel, suffused with the sort of shaky energy that follows an illness. My lungs felt flat, my muscles limp, but my body was eager to be used. Taking the gun with me I went outside to sweep the deck. Then I rinsed out a pile of clothes and hung them on the line in the sun-scented wind, feeling—between my furtive glances at the forest—full half-seconds of pleasure in the sweep of the broom and the warm tug of the breeze.

  On my way back from the clothes line I passed the garden. It was a mess, and I felt a stab of failure and guilt. We didn’t even finish harvesting last fall. We never pulled plants or saved seeds or mulched. We hadn’t pruned the orchard. We should have started seedlings indoors by the stove back in February. We should have planted the cold weather crops last month. We should be setting out tomato, pepper, cucumber, and melon starts now. But the last time either of us held a shovel was to dig our father’s grave.

  I opened the gate and entered the garden. Slowly I walked the perimeter of the plot, just inside the chicken wire deer fence, trying to remember everything I had ever resisted learning about gardening. Underneath the snarl of weeds, I thought I could see the leaves of a volunteer potato plant. I dropped to my knees, set the rifle down beside me, grabbed a clump of weeds in one tentative hand, and pulled. They resisted, and I thought of hair—handfuls of hair rooted in a scalp. I shuddered, gritted my teeth, and tugged harder. Finally the roots gave, and I almost tumbled backwards as they tore free. The little circle of bare soil they revealed was dark and moist. I worked my hands into it, felt it press under my fingernails, crumble through my fingers. Suddenly I was pulling weeds, plunging my hands into their lush midst, tearing them out by the fistful, until my palms were stained and reeking with their green musk.

  The sun felt like a hand on my shoulders, birds called at the edge of the clearing, and once a butterfly landed on the naked soil next to me. It sat still for a moment, and then closed and opened its flat wings and flew on. I forgot to scan the forest for intruders.

  I remembered the seeds. Springing up from the earth, I jogged to the workshop, found on a top shelf an airtight plastic box crammed with a jumble of paper envelopes. Some were commercial packets, but most were envelopes salvaged from old bills, labeled in our father’s handwriting, and filled with the lumps and beads of homegrown seeds. Back inside the deer fence, I spread the packets on the ground and shuffled through them, intent and absorbed, plotting a garden.

  When I quit at noon, a strip of soil the length of the garden was weeded and turned and ready to be sown.

  The encyclopedia reminds me that a flower’s whole reason for being is to produce seeds. All that color and scent and nectar exist solely for the purpose of transporting pollen, solely to attract the attentions of insects or to take advantage of the wind. The reason for flowers is these inert, unremarkable little specks and knobs, these palms full of chromosomes that may one day feed us.

  I planted pumpkin seeds this morning—three to a mound in a row across the west side of the garden. Scrawled in my father’s handwriting on the envelope in which I found them was a single word—Pumpkin. For a wild moment when I first read it, I thought he had addressed the envelope to me. But when I tore it open and saw only seeds like those we used to scoop from jack-o’-lanterns, tears I didn’t want to own bullied their way into my eyes.

  Still, there’s a lucidity that sometimes comes in that moment when you find yourself looking at the world through your tears, as if those tears served as a lens to clarify what it is you’re looking at. As I stared at the word my father had penciled there, I saw that perhaps it was a message to me, after all.

  I hurt so much it’s hard to hold this pen. My hands are throbbing with blisters and scratches, stiff with the soil it seems that no amount of scrubbing can wash completely clean. My arms and legs and back ache as though I had the flu. I never realized what hard work gardening is.

  So far I’ve planted over half the seeds, and tomorrow I’m going to take down the deer fence so I can expand the garden all the way to the shed. We’ve got to have that much space at least, if it’s to keep us alive.

  “I need help,” I said this morning as I blew the steam off the surface of my white tea and took a sip. “In the garden.”

  Eva looked down at her untouched rice.

  “I can’t set the new fence posts by myself. And it’s almost impossible for one person to stretch out chicken wire. It keeps rolling back on itself.”

  Eva said, “Maybe tomorrow.”

  “It’s as safe as staying in here,” I reasoned. “Safer—because I’ve got the gun and there’s more ways to run.”

  “I just—I don’t feel like going out there today.”

  “But Eva, the garden won’t wait until you feel like it. We’ve got to get the rest of it planted as soon as possible. Besides, if we don’t have it fenced again before the seeds I’ve already planted come up, the deer will eat the sprouts.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “What?”

  “It doesn’t matter what we do. It doesn’t matter if the deer eat the sprouts.”

  I felt as though I had been hit. Her words stung in the blisters on my hands, punched my aching back and thighs, made me want to lash out against that pain. I took a drink of the scalding water in my mug as though I could use its heat as inspiration for my fight. But before I could begin to argue, her words had reached my heart.

  “You’re right,” I answered quietly.

  She looked up in surprise. “What?”

  “You’re right. It doesn’t matter. We’ll probably get killed before these seeds even sprout.”

  She bowed her head. In that silence I finished my rice and water, and tried to plan how I could set the red
wood posts I had cut for the fence by myself, how I could unroll the chicken wire and tack it tight without my sister’s help.

  But when I stood up from the table, Eva stood, too, and followed me out to the yard she had not entered since the rape.

  I had already limbed and topped half a dozen small trees, and dug the holes for them with Father’s rickety posthole digger. Eva followed me to the shed, watched as I heaved the half-full bag of cement mix into my arms, and then trailed after me as I staggered back to the garden. While I tried to empty the bag into a bucket, she stood meekly by, her hands hanging heavily by her sides.

  “See,” I said, “the bottom half of this bag must have gotten wet, but hopefully there’s still enough for six holes, especially if I break some of the hard stuff up. Can you hold the bucket for me?”

  She darted a glance at the forest before she bent and steadied the bucket. As soon as I had dumped in enough cement mix for the first batch, she straightened up as though her job were done.

  “Good,” I said, “now we’ve got to mix it. Why don’t you find something to stir with while I get the water?”

  She returned with a stick, and I continued talking. “I’ll pour while you stir. That’s it—all the way to the bottom of the bucket. Let me add a little more water. Okay, I’ll lift this first post into the hole, and hold it straight. You wedge some of these rocks down around it. Good—that’s good. We need to pack the cement over them now. Can you get me some more rock?”

  Step by step we set the posts, me explaining and encouraging and Eva woodenly responding to my requests. By noon three new fence posts stood along the west side of the garden.

  At lunchtime I had to open a second jar of peaches, and by the end of the day, when all but one post on the east side was set, she was anticipating the work’s needs, and even offering a little advice.