The Den

by Abi Maxwell

  Sometimes she and Thomas would meet in an old misshapen tree with branches long and wide enough to stretch right out on. She would lie back and he would run his hands over the length of her feet, up her legs, and in time under her linen dress. She eventually stopped wearing undergarments for this very purpose. He would touch her softly for a long, long time, and then something else would come over him entirely and he would throw her legs open and thrust his fingers up inside her. He would swear once in a while as he did this, all in exasperation, and she always liked that part, the way it stood out against his tender disposition and made him seem like a grown man. His body would be angled above hers, but her dress seemed to always be flung over her head, blocking her view, which turned out to be all right because frequently as they carried on she pictured some even more elaborate love story in her mind. Sometimes he would pull his hand away and push his mouth in, and then once, finally, after weeks and weeks of this, even though they understood just how a baby was made, they did what they knew they probably shouldn’t do. They were seventeen years old by then. Nothing happened, not that time, so they had kept on. Nothing happened and nothing happened, and then suddenly something did. She told her family right away, and as expected, her father demanded that she get married. And then, after thinking it over for a few days, it was her father who had said she and her future husband had better take up with the group going to America.

  * * *

  —

  Anyway, years ago now. In some ways the leaving wasn’t fast, and by the time she was set to go she had been given plenty of time to understand clearly just why her father had made it so. It was no secret to their neighbors just when her baby had been conceived. Too many whispers in church to even attend by the end, and then their own neighborhood dairy had ceased to deliver their milk, and not long after that their own neighbor would not sell them potatoes. Because of the situation, despite their hasty marriage, she remained at her home and he at his own until he had enough money to cross over and begin a new life. It took only one month. Once he was gone, while she sat at home with that baby inside her, she felt that she must miss her husband, must be anxious to begin life with him. Yet she didn’t particularly feel that way. She felt tired, incomprehensibly so. In the new country she would wonder, always, whether or not it had all been worth it, or even if any of it had been. But how ever to answer such a question? She could just look at her boys—three of them now, ages ten, twelve, and fourteen—she could look at their soft hands, their glowing and singular eyes, and that would be enough of an answer. Or to ask such a question—to even momentarily conceive of an existence that would erase theirs—no, she couldn’t.

  And yet. In truth, at least in the early days of her arrival, she could imagine a life without those afternoons in hiding with the man who would become her husband. She could imagine a life that had waited and, in doing so, had been allowed to remain back home.

  * * *

  —

  A few months before Elspeth left, her mother sent her to the city so that she might get supplies for her journey. She was to ride the new railway there and spend the night, returning the next day. The trip wasn’t necessary; she understood that this was her mother’s treat—her very last—to her. Her mother had used up nearly half their stock of candles and stayed up half the night or more in front of the loom for weeks on end in order to earn the extra money so that her daughter might take this trip and choose a special gift for herself and her future baby in America. The money could have meant something to the family, but her mother was proud and it was no use refusing.

  “Get a new pillow, a bit of sweets, a deck of cards,” her mother had said as she hugged her on the train platform. She would be gone only overnight, yet the goodbye had felt real, and unbearable. A kind of practice. Elspeth had nearly not boarded.

  The railway brought her within a block of the inn where she was to stay the night, and she went in and registered and found her way to her room, and she stayed there for two or three hours, looking down at the city streets, too afraid to venture forth. She had been here before but never on her own, and now it looked larger and busier than she had remembered. There were four single beds in the room but no other visitors. Finally, lonely, Elspeth forced herself to think of the new life she was about to embark on, and this gave her courage. She was a woman of America! She was about to be, anyway. She drew a deep breath and told herself to be bold, and then she went out to the street and walked up and down, alone, free. When she saw a shop she liked she just went right in. It was one of the ones for wealthy city ladies. She looked at the hats and dresses and then drew into her mind that pearl brooch that she now owned. It meant she was rich, she had felt sure of it. Settling in to the thought was like settling into a new skin entirely. In that skin she wove her way through the shop and eventually came upon the only real-life red dress she had ever seen. It occurred to her that it might be illegal. She picked it up and asked the lady if she could try it on, and then, in a moment, there she stood in a gown more scarlet than blood.

  To think of that gown now, of the way she had loved it, it makes her sick, really.

  Thank god she hadn’t wasted her mother’s money on the foolish thing—not that she’d had enough for it, anyway. But how could she possibly have thought for one second that she’d been headed to such a glamorous life in America? Thank god she’d had the sense to just buy some sweets with the money, hard ones that the shopkeeper told her would soothe her stomach on the journey over. She also bought a small framed drawing of the shores of her home, and in her new life that drawing became sacred to her.

  It must have been something about the way she walked after wearing that dress, she still thinks sometimes. After all, she had been imagining, as she walked down the cobblestone street, that she was one of those women. One of the independent women such as she had read existed in America. The kind that lived in a boardinghouse and worked at a mill and earned her own money to do what she liked with, and had her own time at night to go out upon the street. The kind with a secret lover, too.

  “Going in?” she had suddenly heard, and for a moment she thought it was a voice from her own thoughts. Yet there stood a man, holding the door to the pub beneath the inn open for her. How on earth had it all happened? A whiskey. He had asked her to a whiskey and she had acted like such a thing had happened before. What to talk about with a man from the city?

  “Do you take Blackwood’s Magazine? I think it’s to die for and my father agrees. Have you read it?” She used to go red when she thought of herself sitting on that pub stool with a baby in her belly and saying that to him. Now she feels nauseated just thinking of it.

  “A cottage weaver who likes to philosophize,” he had said with a smirk.

  She had flushed. Was it so obvious, her character and her rust?

  In the hallway he touched her hair and she giggled; she had had only a few sips of the whiskey, but all the same it had made her giddy. I have no husband I have no baby inside I am not leaving this country, not ever. So had it all been her fault? He held her shoulders from behind and turned her around and kissed her and the truth of it is that she kissed him right back. Next he led her to her otherwise empty room—how did he know where she slept?—and she let him right in, and it was only then, when she saw her suitcase, that she came back to herself. She said, “I have a husband. I am off to meet him in America in two days’ time.”

  “Of course you are,” he had said, his hands on her hips.

  Well, she had liked it for only one minute. But when he pulled at her skirt she knew she had to put a stop to it. Nearly four months pregnant now, but only showing if you looked closely. “You have to leave,” she’d said. He didn’t let go, so she said it again, soberly this time, slowly. She pulled away from him, and as she did so she happened to see her letter on the table, the one her husband had sent from America. She had brought it along with her on this journey because she had thoug
ht it would give her a strange courage, and just now it actually did. She glanced at it and decided it might get this man to leave. John Smith was his name. She waved it in front of his face. She felt a bit dizzy.

  Why, why did she always behave so badly?

  And yet, miraculously, it worked. He grabbed the envelope, looked it over, and left with it in his hand. She locked the door, and then, feeling unsure of her safety, pushed the nearest bed right over in front of it, just in case.

  * * *

  —

  This new land was beautiful, anyway. Their home was deep in a forest of pine and maple and birch. There was a road a quarter-mile’s walk through the woods, but by the time she’d arrived only one house had been built on that road. When she’d first approached it she’d thought it was to be hers. Such a large house! And that barn! But that was the home of just one man, Mr. Josiah Bartlett, her only neighbor in this new land. In winter, when the trees were bare, she could stand at her door and see his high cupola in the distance.

  Her own house was truly just a box. When she’d arrived some fifteen years ago and seen this she had understood that despite that pearl brooch they were not rich, that they were far, far from it. Her husband had worked hours upon hours splitting wood to earn that brooch. But no matter. The squareness of the house, the dampness of it, and that great big fireplace, it all suited her. Reminded her of her true home. Besides, her husband had assured her, buying this cabin had meant that within a year’s time they would not owe a cent, that because they lived out there in the woods they were—or would soon be—free. She’d understood.

  * * *

  —

  Over the years, nearly every day Elspeth and her boys would walk down to the river. Sometimes they would fish beneath that little bridge that led to town, or they’d cross the bridge, bypass the mill, and continue downstream to the train trestle, where they’d shimmy up the bank and then back down the other side and fish in the shade of those great trusses. Sometimes, while they were down there, a train would rush overhead and the ground would rumble and Elspeth would hold her breath, willing it to be over with, but her boys would delight in that iron giant. Other times the four of them would sit upstream of the mill, alongside the dam, and watch the water gush over the top. So she liked the little town just fine, and every single day she felt something more powerful than luck at the fact that they had landed here, and not in that city to the south. But she was lonely. Sometimes so lonely she collapsed. Even after more than a decade, even after she had the friendship of her neighbor, still when she woke up each morning she would keep her eyes closed to cast out a wish: Let me be back home, let me be back home. Like a child. But she never told anyone of her suffering. Anyway, who was there to tell? If she had said it in her letters, it would break her sister’s heart. And her husband was so busy now. With all that work she would have thought he’d be rich, but he still wasn’t, and she had long ago realized that he never would be.

  She still did love him, of course. No reason not to. But then if it weren’t for that, wouldn’t she have never had to come here?

  * * *

  —

  There was a stretch of time in that very first year, before she had gotten to know her neighbor, when she had practically no books, and what with the newborn baby and all the work that needed to be done on their little house she couldn’t afford to order anything to read.

  “Well, write something, why don’t you,” her husband had said one day. The concept had been a shock to her, and she had told him she would never. But then one morning when she rose to write her letters, she found something else entirely spilling forth. It came out so fast and it felt so glorious, though she never would show it to anyone. In fact she wanted so badly to keep it hidden that she even considered stuffing the pages into the chimney, to the spot of missing bricks that she’d discovered when she had been using a broom to scare the bats out. But then of course she had no safe box to keep them in, and it would have been a terrible place anyhow. Instead she slipped the pages under her mattress—that’s what she called the book in her mind, just my pages—and she found herself thinking about them day in and day out. Maybe that’s something good for my pages. Maybe that’s what happens next in my pages.

  The story was a romance, really. Due to unfortunate circumstances a man and a woman were each lost in the woods at night, and fate had it that they literally stumbled upon each other. The woods were not Elspeth’s woods in the new country and not the woods of her real home, either. They were woods like nothing she had ever seen before. They were at once dark and light. The air was black yet the trees glowed, and they illuminated a constant, creeping fog. The two loved each other at once. They found their independent ways home yet continued to meet. In those woods, they had to always be on the lookout for swift riders of dark, sleek horses. There were cliffs that dropped down to the ocean, and there were wild men—and even one woman—who could scale the cliffs, and there was a castle in the distance.

  “More paper,” she had to say to her husband, over and over again, year after year after year. “More ink.” Thankfully he was a kind, unquestioning man. She assumed that he assumed that she was just writing her letters, though her use of postage had not increased along with the rest of it, and he hadn’t asked why.

  Anyway, by the time her second child was three or four years old, there was another project that took up its fair share of paper and ink, too. Well-Well Mountain Island, they called it. She could never even remember who came up with it, exactly. Sometimes, with that boy in particular, she felt both his mind and her own lift right up out of their respective bodies and meet together above to form an idea. She felt that when he talked in his sleep it was in reference to her very own dreams. “You used to live in my belly,” she would tell this boy, though she had never said such a thing to either of the others. “Right in there. We waited and waited for you, and one day you finally started to kick your way out.”

  The island was a place that on one side was eternally in sunshine and on the other in snow. They drew hundreds of pictures of it. She had saved them all. Aside from the natural changes in Evan’s drawings as he grew, the pictures were not really progressively more detailed, and nothing particularly changed with each one. Just picture after picture of a circular island with a line to split it across the middle, a sun casting its rays on the southern half, and snow falling down on the northern. It was the thing the two of them loved the very best to do together. They called it their club. Over the years neither of the other boys would ever join in, and both thought it was so stupid and strange the way she and Evan carried on with it. But there was something so exquisite about it, the way she set her pen down and nearly arrived in that perfect and magical land. She knew her son felt the same.

  And the experience with her pages, the ones she wrote—it was so similar that Elspeth was astonished she’d never come to it earlier in life. Years into the project, she found that she loved all these people she wrote as she loved that place she and her son drew. In fact, in a way she loved these people more, because with them some real, tangible amount of loneliness could be abated. But at a certain point far into her story Elspeth realized not only that it didn’t all fit under her mattress anymore—at least not inconspicuously—but also that there was a strange but sure pressure within it that something bad must happen. When everyone was out of the house she began to spread her pages under her sons’ mattress, too, and she backed up. She made the woman married, but also from an island far off in the center of the ocean. Her husband had found her on a sailing voyage and married her and taken her to live in his castle in this new land, but she had never loved him, and in no time at all she met the other, poorer man of the woods, whom she loved tirelessly. The affair went on and wonderfully on until one foggy night the riders from the castle found the woman with her lover and flung her onto a horse and carried her naked all the way to her husband to expose her indiscretion. At this point i
n the story, however, Elspeth became utterly stuck. She wanted so badly for it all to end well, for all the people in the story to be good.

  Her sister was good. Oftentimes throughout their childhood, Elspeth and Claire would go with the other neighborhood children to follow the lamplighter on his rounds through town, and when he was done, if it was a clear night, the two of them would go off alone into the fields or down to the water to gaze at the stars. It was as they entered their teen years that they began to have what they jokingly referred to as their philosophy talks out there in the dark. These talks frequently circled back to the fact that on these nights Claire—despite a belief in God—always felt only more insignificant out there under the majestic sweep. It was a feeling Elspeth could not understand. When she looked up at the stars, she didn’t imagine herself as just a speck. Instead she felt called by that firmament, not necessarily singled out but at least seen. By the time she and Thomas had been at it, Elspeth had taken that irrepressible feeling that she mattered as just one more sign that she was not indeed a sinner, and so one night under the stars with her sister she finally told her all about taking her clothes off with him.

  “No. Oh, no,” Claire had said, but Elspeth had assured her that it had all been wonderful, every bit of it.

  “I don’t think it’s right,” her sister had said. And “What if Father finds out?”

  “Well,” Elspeth had said. “God must know, and nothing’s happened to me yet.”

  “Maybe,” her sister had said. And then, to Elspeth’s great shock, “But isn’t it possible that he doesn’t care?” And then, even more shockingly: “Tell me about it again. Tell me how it all happens,” and so Elspeth had tried, but of course the parts couldn’t possibly represent the whole of the thing.