Arcadia

by Lauren Groff

There was a protest, something about money, but Abe held up a hand. Give me a minute. It’s pretty clear we’re working too hard, too inefficiently, doing redundant stuff just to live. It’s all about division of labor. If we had centralized child care and cooking and didn’t have to worry about carting our own water up from the Pond or getting the stuff from the Free Store for our suppers or making sure we chopped plenty of wood to be warm this week, we could actually get enough work done to support ourselves and make money. I’ve done the math, he said and held up a paper covered in his tiny script. If we fix up Arcadia House and all live there together, we can do this. We can make it work. Maybe even make a profit this year.

  Abe’s beard split, his smile so big Bit feared for his father’s cheeks.

  There was a silence, the sound of someone in the Octagonal Barn above dragging something heavy across the floor. The straw bosses all began talking over one another, pacing up and down the tunnel as they dreamed aloud, building their vision detail by detail.

  The deeper Bit pushes into Arcadia House, now, the more he is bitten by a wretched clammy cold. The men haven’t touched these rooms yet: they are moldy and dark. He pushes at a latch, and a door swings open with a foul exhalation. Between the darkness of the hall he is in and the light above the stairwell, he takes the light and goes up, though the dust is to his ankles. He finds himself on a catwalk that skirts a deep room, an intact couch, a grand brick fireplace, a sea of filth that moves ten feet below from the air he displaces. From this spot in the house, he can no longer hear the men on the roof, their music, or the women far away in the Children’s Wing as they sing and talk.

  There is a black spill beneath the first door, an evil that spreads from the crack. He skips it, creeps on. From behind the second he hears a sound, a sigh, a whisper, and feels a cold in the metal of the knob, so he skips it, too. The third opens when he pushes hard, and he enters.

  The room is furred with dust, inches deep. It grows off the walls, over the floor, spreads itself across lumps that are furniture, Bit discovers, when he inserts his hand and feels wood beneath. He touches a filminess under one, cloth, and finds it a bed.

  In the middle of the floor, a delicious lump, and Bit plunges in both hands. There are hard things deep down. He brings out his fist and peers at a series of tiny bones, a mouse’s skull and skeleton. Then, a handful of buttons in a strange, dense material, creamy white and shimmering. At last, an object, hard and soft at the same time. He blows on it until the book reveals itself.

  On the leather cover, there are embossed flowers, a boy who peers from behind a tree, and letters in gold. Bit traces four—G-R-I-M—then grows impatient and opens the pages.

  At first he sees an illustration. It is the most vivid thing in all of Arcadia House; it sucks the daylight into it. A girl with a squinched face seems to be using her cut-off finger for a key. On another page, there is a tiny man who splits himself in two while blood spills in gouts from his wounds. On another, a girl in a long dress walks beside lions, her mouth open, her hair up in a furry acorn hat.

  He finds the smallest story. His finger runs under each word as he puzzles it out. It is about a mother with many children in a time of famine, something Bit knows: the terror in the belly, winterberry and soybeans all they have left in the mason jars. The mother wants to eat her children. They are angelic and choose to die for her. But she is so ashamed with their sacrifice that she doesn’t eat them. Instead, she runs away.

  Horror is heaped within horror: the mother eating her children, the children dying, the mother disappearing forever into the dark behind the story.

  He drops the book back in its heap of dust, clamps his hands over his eyes. The world moves in tight and squeezes him. He holds his face until the terror scuttles off and he can breathe again.

  From afar, Hannah’s voice, high, frantic: Bit! Come here, right now! Before he leaves, he snatches the book, shoves it down his pants, and runs down over his own treadmarks in the dust, runs and runs, turns the wrong way, loses Hannah’s voice, bursts into a familiar hall, hears her voice closer now, goes down the stairs, leaping the gaps in the treads, stumbles into the Entryway, goes down a corridor, loses her voice, goes another way and at last finds himself in a glassy room with half-collapsed long tables, where Hannah’s back is turned to him, where she is shouting for him. She is so happy to see Bit she snatches him up under the arms and hugs him to her so tightly he can’t breathe, and puts him down, and wipes her wet face on her shoulder and says, Don’t ever wander off here, Bit. You can get hurt. This place is very, very dangerous.

  She holds him away by the arms. God, she says. You’re black with filth.

  Then her mouth shifts as she feels the book in his pants. She looks at him, and Bit watches her, and is almost disappointed when she lets the book go. She has been letting everything go, these days.

  Midge comes from a back room. Since her father turned to ice during the February Morning Meeting, Midge’s face has gone sour, as if she is constantly sucking a gooseberry. She snaps, This is no place for a kid, Hannah. Take him home.

  Midge has no neck, Bit notices. Her head swivels on her shoulders like a ratchet.

  Away they go again, rattling down over the hill in the Red Wagon. Bit leaves the book under his shoes and pants when he and his mother go into the cement-block Showerhouse together, though their day to bathe isn’t until Sunday. Most days, they do what Hannah calls a KACA Bath: dip a washcloth in hot water, soap it up, hit the Kisser-Armpit-Crotch-Ass. Today the Showerhouse echoes, empty. Everyone else is working. There’s a dangerous luxury to the steam, the rosy softnesses of his mother under the hot water, the faces of sleeping babies that live in Hannah’s knees, in his own layers of darkness that fall as she rubs at him with her chapped hands until she has scrubbed him raw and red as an infant again.

  Clean in the quiet of the middle of day, Hannah makes herself a cup of tea. She sits at the window, Edith Piaf on the record player. Non, the invisible singer warbles, je ne regrette rien. Bit hears: No, Gina rug-wet again. He thinks, Poor Gina, heartstruck for her shame.

  Hannah’s so deep in her thoughts that Bit is invisible. He waves his hands before her eyes, but she doesn’t blink. He takes the book he stole from Arcadia House from his pants and sidles down the steps from the main Bread Truck into the chilly lean-to, and puts it into his Stash tin, where it just barely fits if he takes everything else out: the snakeskin and glass eye with a green iris and arrowhead and sparrow with working wings that Abe had once carved for him.

  Daring, he goes out into the afternoon and carries his treasures to the Free Store, where he puts them on the shelf where all of the other unused things live. He touches the hemp necklaces that Sylvia braids, the single rollerskate, the musty paperbacks, the neat stacks of patched and folded jeans, the flannel shirts. Cheryl is weighing dried cranberries in the corner and putting them into paper bags for the cook of each homestead to pick up, and when her back is turned, he plunges his hands into the flour barrel and squeezes the powder deliciously through his fingers. Muffin looks up from where she’s funneling cooking oil into mason jars, and the spatters of oil on her glasses refract her eyes into many tiny blinking eyes. But she doesn’t tell on him. He takes a piece of dried apple from the snack bin and runs home through the cold. When he comes in, his mother cocks her head and says, Where’d you go, Little Man?, but doesn’t even listen for his answer.

  He makes a plan. Tomorrow, he will sneak home from the Kid Herd and spend hours in his new book happily, piecing together the terrible, sharp stories until the world is stuffed full of them and nothing else can get in.

  The snow melts under a freezing rain and the sky is the color of lint. Jincy comes over. Her face is red with tears. She is eight and her head is a wild screw of white curls. She is much older, but Bit’s best friend. They zip themselves into his sleeping bag, and in the closeness there, she whispers: My parents are fighting.

  There is so much for Bit to say that he doesn’t say anything.
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  They play Babysitter and Baby, they play Boycott, they play Handy and Lila. They play Nixon, Jincy making her face loose, veeing her fingers, saying I am not a crook. They play Midwife, in which Jincy is Astrid, and Bit pushes a porcelain babydoll out of his pretend yoni, until Hannah sees and blanches and says, Hey, kids! Let’s make cookies! Then they stir and mix and bake, oatmeal cookies with almonds and raisins and molasses, while Hannah gives them directions from the kitchen table.

  A good bubble rises in Bit, and he moves lightly to keep it whole.

  Abe comes home while it is still bright out, and cooks dinner for them all: crepes with tempeh and preserved mushrooms and soy cheese. At nine, the parents have to go to a Creative Critique of Tarzan up in the Octagonal Barn because he has been making unwanted sexual advances on a number of chicks, even the Pregnant Ladies, which is really spreading some bad vibes. Hannah huddles in her overlarge sweater, looking like a snake about to shed.

  Abe says, frowning, I don’t know if the kids should stay here alone . . .

  Jincy says, We’ll be good! We won’t touch the woodstove or go outside! If we’re scared, we’ll run to the Pink Piper! Reluctantly, Hannah and Abe go into the dusk.

  In the sleeping bag again, Jincy hugs Bit too tight. When he complains, she lets go and starts to whisper stories.

  Under the footbridge over the river, she says, there’s a troll who needs a sacrifice before you can go across. A nice leaf is fine, or a bolt taken from the Motor Pool, or a piece of fruit, but only a little one, so as not to waste.

  What about a booger? Bit says.

  A booger will do, Jincy says, and they laugh.

  Her voice goes lower. Jeannise had sex with both Hank and Horse, and now the twins aren’t talking to one another. Which is bad because they’re the Sanitation Crew and pump out the loos.

  Wes and Haven are going to have a baby, and Wes and Flannery are, too, she says, and Haven and Flannery got into a chick-fight and their faces are all scratched up.

  Jincy heard a mouse conversation last week. They were squeaking that they were so so so so so so hungry in their little tiny voices.

  When Peanut and Clay light one cigarette off an already lit one, it’s called a Dutch fuck, though they don’t do the regular fuck, because they dig chicks.

  A witch lives in the woods. Last summer, at the Cockaigne Fest, when all the adults were drunk on Slap-Apple, Jincy went to the Sugarbush because her parents were yelling, and she saw a huge old hunched lady in black just stop and look at her and go away. She had long white hair and a terrible bad face. She floated in the air.

  Bit drifts to sleep with Jincy’s voice still murmuring on. He sees the shadows full of creatures, trolls like so many green and stunted Handys. He sees the Sugarbush, sinister with gloom. He sees the Pond glistening with moonlight. There, a witch with Astrid’s bad teeth and Hannah’s winter-stringy hair and Midge’s sour yellow face looms up, again and again, out of the shadows, until the witch is so familiar that he begins to wait for her, then long for her to arrive, until he tells himself within the dream that he is no longer afraid. And he is not.

  An uproar in the middle of the night; men come for Abe, talking over each other. When Hannah rises and makes coffee, Hiero says, Oh, hey there, Hannah-baby. Fred Major claps his great hand upon her shoulder. But none of the men are there to drink the coffee by the time it has finished percolating. Hannah sits at the table. Her eyes glint in the shadows.

  Bit’s pajamas are too small for him; the hems ride his calves, his forearms, his belly is cold in the air. He goes over to Hannah and climbs up into her lap, and lays his head upon her chest to hear the slow slosh of her heart.

  She says, In the morning, my friend, someone you love will be gone.

  Bit says nothing, but he thinks Abe? and something begins to collapse in him. Hannah must know what he’s thinking because she says, No, no, no, no. Wonder Bill. He had a different name before he came here. He’s done some bad things that we didn’t know about until yesterday and has to go.

  Monkey Wonder Bill? Wonder Bill who can go hand to hand from branch to branch in the Sugarbush? Wonder Bill who makes animal sounds better than the animals, his turkey gobble in the fall (oh, so long ago, the jewel-bright leaves, the golden silver smell of autumn), the noise that made a turkey as tall as Bit sprint lusty from the bush toward them?

  In the morning, the Pigs come to look for Wonder Bill. Arcadia gathers on the Quad as the Pigs rustle through the dwellings, searching for him. Nobody speaks. Bit sits on Hannah’s feet to insulate his bum from the frozen ground.

  He is confused. He was imagining pinkness, snouts, curly tails, the pictures in the Kid Herd storybooks. These are black-suited men with reflective sunglasses. They are pink: that, at least, is true. Perhaps their tails are hidden under the creased pants they wear. They trail strange smells behind them: Cologne, Hannah whispers, making a face.

  The Pigs go into the first Family Quonset, then into the second. The ones who ring the woods hold guns, and with a startle, Bit sees green under their feet. Garlic mustard, hummock sedge, Dorotka tells him when he asks. Spring is coming. He is tired of the men who murmur into radios. He wants them to go home.

  Bit hears Leif ask Astrid, Are they gonna shoot us? Astrid shakes her head no although her eyes are hard, and she presses her son’s face against her belly.

  Crashes from the Singleton Tent. The Pigs go into the Pink Piper, they go out, they go into the Bread Truck, they go out, they go into Franz and Hans’s lean-to, with the half-made puppet head hanging from the rafter like an oversize piñata though the Circenses Singers are all out on the road. They go out, they go into the Henhouse, and stay in there for a while. The Pregnant Ladies run out, huge and indignant, in their men’s boots and sweaters, squawking.

  Up on the hill, Arcadia House crawls with Pigs. Bit peers at the roof, but Abe is not working up there today. There are no Arcadia men there at all. They must be waiting to start work until the Pigs in black leave.

  At last, a Pig comes over with an angry, fat face. The sheriff from Ilium is beside him, a man in a khaki shirt whom Bit has seen drinking coffee up at the Gatehouse with Titus: his sandy hair lifts and falls like a mudflap over his bald spot. He winks briefly at Titus then looks away.

  The three talk together. The angry head Pig begins to shout. The sheriff makes soothing sounds. Titus says very little.

  At last, the men troop over the snow back up to Arcadia House. The Free People move behind them. From the top of the Hill on the slate porch they watch as the Pigs get into cars and trucks that flash with red and blue lights when they drive away.

  When the last pulls out, a cheer goes up around Bit, so loud and unexpected that he startles and turns his face into the closest legs, Eden’s swollen thighs, to hide. Her forehead is a moon over her pregnant belly when she laughs down at him.

  Abe returns in the afternoon in a Volkswagen with a case of maple spouts and pails for their first sugar season this year; the Sugarbush is huge and ancient, the syrup one more thing they can sell. They had lived near it for three years without suspecting what the copse of trees really was until Dorotka stood up one Sunday Morning Meeting in the Octagonal Barn and nervously suggested making sugar this year. With what? said Handy, our cane didn’t do so hot. She looked confused, then said, Oh. The Sugarbush? It’s a mature old stand, we can get gallons and gallons out of it. And Handy said, What Sugarbush? And Dorotka threw back her head in astonishment and led them down to the Sugarbush, the miraculous woods on the other side of the Pond, and they all couldn’t believe the new bounty; they threw the snow that was too soft that day to make snowballs, the entire community dusted in sunbright powder.

  Handy had wanted to call the product Free People Sugar, Titus wanted to call it Sinzibuckwud; Abe prevailed quietly but persistently as he does sometimes, and they are calling it Arcadia Pure.

  Hannah and Bit come out to the Quad to meet him and help him unload. Abe pulls up to the Bread Truck, the radio spits out a w
hine, “Tiptoe Through the Tulips.”

  How was Vermont? Hannah says.

  Abe envelops Hannah in his arms and whispers in her ear. He is tall, she is tall, and between them Bit is pressed as if by the warm trunks of old trees. He doesn’t want the hug to end, but after a minute it does. Their bodies fall apart. His parents turn away.

  On top of everything else, the women must do the sugaring: the men work up in Arcadia House from sunrise to sunset and often beyond. They scrape and hammer, put in pipes and plaster, roll on the oopsie paint they got from a store in Ilium in exchange for Sweetie Fox and Kitty posing provocatively with rollerbrushes in the store’s advertisements.

  The Kid Herd follows the sugaring ladies out one day to learn. The huge maples are hung with icicles, roots so intertwined they form a mat above the ground. There is no wind here, and when the sun finally touches the copse, it glows softly as a kerosene lamp.

  Like a church, breathes Maria and turns away to privately make a four-pointed sign from head to belly to shoulder to shoulder, which Bit mimics again and again behind a tree, loving the gesture’s solemnity. He doesn’t want the others to see. Superstition, snorts Hannah when the others talk about God. Though people here have private rituals, Muhammad kneeling on a bit of carpet during the day, Jewish Seders and Christmas trees, religion here is seen much like hygiene: a personal concern best kept in check so as to not bully the others.

  Mikele drills holes into trunk after trunk, and Eden screws in the spouts. The trees bleed clear blood into the buckets. The ping-ping-ping on metal is a sound like warm rain on the Bread Truck roof. But this sound feels different; sweetness will come of it.

  Language has begun to shift in Bit. There are small explosions of comprehension every day. He remembers last August, when he lay in the sun-warmed shallows of the Pond while under the water he was nibbled by things unseen. With his Grimm book, it is as if he has his eyes below the surface and can at last see the tiny fish there. Speech splinters into words, each phrase with its own order: Scuseme becomes Excuse me, Pawurduthpepel becomes Power to the People, all words he understands both alone and combined.