The stretch of woods is narrow, it gives onto back pastures. I follow fence lines that go arrow-straight as far as I can see. Cattle graze in some pastures, in others hay is awaiting a second harvest. In one, yellow bales have been abandoned, rained on, and the green is growing up around them. I look aside, away from the good alfalfa hay left to rot in bales. It isn’t time to think of that yet. I list my high-school boyfriends, put them in chronological order. Kerry and Steve and David and Larry and Steven and Brad and Eric and Bruce and … were there really that many of them in only four years? Yes. I try to think which one I would want to see again if I could summon one up. None of them. They were all disposable, interchangeable, and I knew it even then. So why had Tom become the permanent one, and when?
By the end of the day, when I am still following fence lines, I think I know the answer. I didn’t choose him. He chose me and I went along with it. Until I believed I had chosen him. He was something to belong to, someone to be with when my parents stopped being. Somebody real to cling to, to show I could live a real life. So I had gone with him. Simply because he was so big and handsome I would have been crazy to refuse him. And good. Yes, admit he was good. He was honest and hearty and strong, laughing and true and brave. That part had been real, at least for a while. I am tempted to look for cracks in it, to somehow dull the shine by putting corrosion on my bright silver dreams. I could look at him with jaded eyes, with the malignancy of hindsight and impugn all his golden ways with tin motives. But it wouldn’t be true or fair. And that is the point of all this. To find out what was real.
I sleep in the thin shelter of a brushy fence line. Myriad tiny birds are still hopping and bouncing within the brush as I drop off to sleep, pecking at dry seeds as they cling to twigs with unlikely weightlessness. All of me aches very good when I lie still and let the warmth of the earth flow up through me. Pan’s blanket covers me, and I consciously go to sleep, climbing into the blackness with as much control as if I were climbing into a hot bath.
Morning comes and I move on. I wonder how many miles I have traveled, then dismiss it as unimportant. When I get there, I’ll be there. Where is there? I’ll know that when I see it, for my ultimate destination is no longer all that clear to me. I travel as much in my mind as I do in my body. When I get to a stopping point, I’ll know it. Down all the years with Tom. Less than a decade, but it seems so much longer. Some of the days were so good. Sometimes I am smiling as I walk, and once or twice I even laugh aloud at shared silliness remembered, at smoky eroticism dissolving into puppy-ish roughhousing. It is like organizing a library, each volume handled carefully, catalogued and inspected and shelved, a thing done with. The days of the honeymoon, the months of the pregnancy, the time spent fixing the cabin, putting in the garden. Fixing the car on a dark cold afternoon in Fairbanks winter, fishing for nothing on the Chena riverbank. Trips to Manley Hot Springs, dip-fishing at Chitna with Teddy in the backpack.
And now it is finally time to think of Teddy. My baby, my boy. I go back to the moment when I decided I was pregnant, before any doctor told me. I cherish each instance I can recall. Careful as a miser I am, to miss nothing. I try for day by day, but often have to settle for a general idea of what we were doing season to season. The memories are jumbled as old photographs in a trunk, but I slowly shuffle them into an order I can understand. I leave the fence lines and pastures, walk through a small town and out of it, down a stretch of unpromising little lots with mobile homes and wanigans, ramshackle fences and abandoned cars, into a crossroads town consisting of a tavern, a gas station, and a gift shop, and over a bridge. On the other side of the bridge, I leave the road and go down, slipping and sliding in the gravel, and follow the riverbank north.
Travel is more difficult along the riverbank. The river is down this time of year, and the bank is littered with last winter’s snags and driftwood. The river is a thick, silty grey-green, but it smells clean. Human litter on the bank is minimal. Probably the river’s rise and fall cleans itself. Where there are reeds and grass, the grasses are rough and sharp-edged, and high enough to slice at my hands. Insects stir up in my passage, tangle in my hair, hum wildly in my ears. In their frantic buzzing is the message that rain is coming soon. I begin to think that following the river was not the best idea, but I make no effort to change direction. It flows past me, a dark grey-green beast, its song changing as its bed does, going south as I go north, not a true course, but close enough. Occasionally I walk past yards, past people’s summer cabins and tidy lots fronting on the river. They politely ignore me and I ignore them. Public right of way and all that rot. I wonder idly why people would move out from the city to the country, and then spend hours changing a brushy riverbank into a rolling lawn, with white plastic furniture and tables with umbrellas sprouting out of the middles. What is the point of having a summer place in the country if you dress it like a suburban home, skirt it with lawn, belt it with pathways, manicure the bushes? The people are out on their ride-on lawn mowers, they are on their knees grubbing in the flower beds, they are refinishing the picnic tables, they are cleaning the rain gutters. All so busy getting ready to have a relaxing time at the country place.
I am glad when the river widens and the land to either side of it becomes more swampy. The houses dwindle and cease, and the forest moves closer to the banks. Raccoon sign here. Duck rises off her nest, in a flurry of air and feathers. I spook grandfather frogs into leaping out into the river’s sullen shallows. So much more life going on here than along those manicured lots. Angry wasp in a hurry. A red-winged blackbird sings angrily at my intrusion. I realize I have stopped thinking-
I stand still. Deliberately I wheel my mind, bring it about, and head into it again. I think about the decision to visit Tom’s family when the letter came about Bix doing his shoulder. I think about how excited we all were, an adventure, getting out of Fairbanks during the draggly end of a wet, cold spring, going to go Outside, Teddy would see the farm, the moo cows, and the roosters going cock-a-doodle-do. Packing up a box of our best homemade preserves, rose-hip jelly and blueberry jam, wild raspberry jam, sourdough sauce, mincemeat with real moose meat in it, the old kind. Pack it all up, roll the jars in newspaper so they won’t crack and pack them in a beer box. Take new pictures of the cabin, of Teddy with his puppy, of the cache on its stilt legs. Tom buys the stupid Alaskan souvenirs, the plastic totem pole, the souvenir plate made in Japan, the “Moose-quito” made of shellacked moose turds and pipe cleaners. I should have suspected then, it occurs to me, what I was coming down into.
The first days of the visit went so well. They were so glad to see Tom, so proud of Teddy. Even me. I was so … interesting. I remember the introductions. “And here’s the boy’s wife, Lynn. I understand he caught her running wild in the brush up there, liked what he saw, and tamed her down to be his wife!” Laughter. “Is it true, Lynn, that you helped Tommy skin that big moose in the picture Maurie showed us?” “Hell, Jim, she did all the skinning, just ask Tom! He’s real proud of his frontier girl.”
The bragging family, talking about the wild girl they had taken into their midst, while I grow quieter and quieter. I suppose I was something of a disappointment to the guests. I could tell how I had been talked up by the Potters to their friends. Tom’s crazy Alaskan wife. She’d rather live up there with no plumbing and forty below zero than in a real house. She’s quite the squaw, kills the meat, tans the hides, splits the wood, and smokes the fish. They’d given me quite a buildup. Guess they’d had to, to explain why their son would want to live in that far-off, cold place.
So here I came. Nondescript. Quiet. No sealskin parka, no mukluks. Just a skinny, mousy woman. I could tell by the reactions of the people who met me that more than half of them had believed I was Eskimo. “What pretty green eyes!” they’d say, to cover the shock that I was not brown and black-eyed with wide flat cheeks. Even as a conversation piece, I’d failed the Potter family.
The shores of the river are narrowing as the banks become steeper. The going gets more
difficult. I push through tangles of brush and emerge on a tiny beach with horsetail fern all over it. These are the big ones, old as dinosaur days, thick and dark green and high as my shoulder, no leafy fronds, just the vertical segmented tubes with each segment marked in black. The younger ones are a set of startling greens, all shades, with the segments less clearly marked. They are raspy and coarse, good for scouring out the fish-frying pan on a camping trip.
Finally, there is no shore left at all. The trees are right at the water’s edge, leaning from the steep bank, some are half fallen into the water. Time to leave the river’s edge. The brush is very thick, and I don’t spot any animal trails at all. So I clamber up against the flow of the forest, the worst way to move in the woods, snapping branches, forging through blackberry bushes. There is cedar here, both old and young. One old fallen trunk provides me with a brief and treacherous pathway up the hill. The trunk widens as I go up it in a crouching walk, sidestepping what is left of its branches. I pass one of the huge anthills so common in this part of Washington. They always seem to be big reddish heaps of pine needles until you get close and see the life stirring all through it. The fallen trunk comes to an end in a claw of root and clinging earth. There are true ferns sprouting in the earth still trapped in its roots, delicate fronds studded with tiny brown seed spores on the backs. I think of eating fiddlehead ferns, gather the heads while they are still rolled and tight like the tuning pegs on a fiddle, rinse them and saute them in butter. But these are all mature ferns, their fronds wide and somehow mysterious in the green under-light beneath the trees.
I cannot see the sky at all. Washington’s rain forest, canopied almost like a jungle but without the lacing of vines weaving it together. I scramble down from my tree trunk, almost drown in the thick brush taller than my head. I pull my shirt cuffs down over my hands, for the hillside is steep, with patches of stinging nettle. The nettles are face high and I am climbing up through them. I know I will get hit, and I do, but I pick one of the thick fern fronds and squeeze out the sap to treat the sting. The nettle sting is oxalic acid, I think, like a bee’s sting. Or, no, what is that acid that starts with an “f”? Or is any of that right? Names don’t matter, the forest tells me, as the fern sap soothes away whatever it is that is burning on my skin. There are plants here in the green dampness that I cannot give a name to, huge leaved things with green flowers like the naked pistils of lilies, lacy little ferns I do not know, tiny plants with minute, petaled white flowers. Names don’t matter. Only existence. I have to struggle and rip my way up through them, cracking branches, trampling crisp stems, leaving a wake like a hippo had wallowed up this hill. I am not proud of my destruction. It is not natural to leave this much evidence of passage.
I finally reach the top of the bank. I look back, but I can neither see nor hear the river. The brush is that dense. I am in cedar now, big fragrant trees. If one should fall, if a tree should crash down to lie supine on the forest humus, others will rise from her body in a neat rank. Nursery trees, they’re called. It’s life, I think. Use your body to live, or someone else will use it. Young trees, shelf bracken fungi, mushrooms, ferns, moss, all coat one fallen giant, take sustenance from its softening, sinking body.
I find myself thinking that this is a better way. They’d shot Teddy’s body full of chemicals, and hermetically sealed him in a box. Kid preserves. Teddy jam. Like spiced crabapples in a jar. So pretty to look at. Then they’d taken that box, designed so carefully to keep the rest of the world out, and lowered it into a hole and buried it. I thought about his little body in its dress-up funeral clothes, alone there in the box, under the dark earth. How long would the embalming stuff hold decay at bay? How long before his body juices, what was left of them, began to work on his flesh, to try and turn him back into useful nutrients, to bring him back to oneness with the world? But they’d be defeated by the stout walls of the box, with its pressure-resistant layers. So lonely, alone in there. I remembered a story I heard a funeral salesman tell once. It was a long time ago, in Fairbanks, when I was little and those kind of sales were still made door-to-door. He’d been talking to my mother, pushing her to get land in a cemetery for a family plot or something while she stood in the kitchen, ironing shirts, and he sat at the kitchen table, telling her about these new coffins, how they never collapsed in on the bodies like the old ones did. And he told us what was supposed to be a shocking story about a widow who went to visit her husband’s grave one spring, and found it all sunken in, and how she had grabbed a shovel and heaped dirt on the grave until it was level again because she just couldn’t bear to think of what had happened down there. My mom didn’t buy anything from him, but she let him talk himself out before she sent him on his way. She used to think doing stuff like that was funny.
Once Tom and I had talked about it, in a joking offhand way, and I’d told him to skip the funeral and just slip me into the compost heap beside the garden. I’d probably grow great tomatoes. It had been a joke, but now I see the merit. I can imagine setting Teddy into the warm black earth, a cloth over him, planting him like the root ball of some very precious flower, pushing the soft soil down over him, patting him into place. Somehow that would be better than the human selfishness of sealing up the remains, as if keeping the body out of nature’s cycle will somehow preserve some essence of humanity. Preserve? It seems to me a very cruel setting apart.
I stop. The light pattering of rain sounds on the leaves overhead. I select a big cedar, move close to its trunk. I stand there awhile, waiting to see if this is just a passing squall. But the rain goes on, falling steadily, and now it starts to make its way down to the forest floor. The air cools perceptibly even as it comes alive with scents.
I sigh. My mind is a reluctant animal, reined back once more to the track, put again over the jumps.
If I had wanted to, I could have made Tom’s family like me. That’s what I have to admit. What I would have had to do, I would have had to change my external self enough for them to think they understood me. I should have been enthused about shopping, I should have begged Steffie to help me pick out some stylish clothes. I should have asked Mother Maurie about Tom’s early toilet training. I should have asked Ellie which was better, Clorox or Purex. They would have loved me.
I didn’t. Because I didn’t want to. Because being me was still more important to me than being liked. And that was where Tom and I had always differed. Being liked had always been more important to him than being Tom. At school, at our cabin in Alaska, at his home, he had always been whatever he had needed to be in order to be liked. I had once admired his wondrous ability to be whatever anyone wanted him to be. Now it seemed a lapdog’s trick to me.
I tried to twist my mind about, tried to see our days in Alaska from Tom’s viewpoint. How had he really felt the first time he shot the moose, how had he felt about working on the little cabin, grubbing in the garden, trying to keep a truck running all winter? I didn’t know. He’d been too good at it, too good at being the Tom Potter I’d wanted him to be. I would never know the real Tom.
Maybe there wasn’t one. Maybe he’d been pleasing others for so long that there wasn’t any real Tom Potter left. Maybe he would spend the rest of his life now being whatever his family wanted him to be, Tom Potter’s life determined by popular vote. It had always worked for him. Until he got a divided audience, and had to make a choice whom to play for. Hell, it was still working for him.
Slowly it dawns on me that he probably never even saw it as a choice. Probably never even stopped to think about it. Be whatever the majority of people want you to be. I was the one it hadn’t worked for. Tom had quit playing to me, had opted for the larger audience.
I sit very still. The rain is falling on the branches and needles above me. Then it runs along their edges and falls again to the earth. If I listen very carefully, I can hear the pattering of the drops on the leaves and the different pattering as it hits the forest floor. The same rain, falling twice.
I suddenly discover I
am finished thinking about Tom and myself. A strange relief, cool as the rain, comes over me. No more guilt, no more feeling bad about any of it. No point to trying to make high tragedy out of something that has only the makings for comic opera. We’ve been soap characters, the shrewish wife, or the much-suffering wife, depending on who you’re rooting for. The dutiful son, the dutiful husband, depending on which camera is currently on Tom. The all-American farm family, backbone of our country or the self-devouring incestuous horde. I am tired of all of it. And I am done with all of it.
There is only one thing left to think about. Teddy. And Teddy’s death.
Teddy comes to me as sensations, not memories. Soapy washcloth getting the pine sap off his small fingers. Smell of his skin when he falls asleep on my lap in the truck on a long car trip and the absolute lax heaviness of his sleeping weight. Tying his shoelaces. The tight grip of his round downy arms around my neck.
It was and it isn’t. It’s gone. Like the wet footprints he’d leave on the bathroom floor, the handprints on the mirror, the sticky peanut-butter lipmarks on the rim of his milk glass. Teddy himself turns out to be as ephemeral as the tracks he left.
I balk, suddenly. No more. I am not ready to think anymore about Teddy.
Instead, I go back to my earlier lives and ponderings, pick up the one thread that has run straight and true through all of it. The one I have not had to think about these past three days; the piece that doesn’t have to fit in the puzzle, for it is complete in and of itself. What is apart from my life and encloses it? Who has left his cloven tracks on every day?
I lean back on the big cedar, close my eyes. “It’s okay,” I say through the pattering of the rain. “You can come back now.”
But when I open my eyes, I am still alone.
NINETEEN
* * *
Cloven Hooves Page 26
