Heart of the Woods

by Grant C. Holland

  “Watch out for all of those, buddy. I’m just saying sometimes the truth is weirder than the stories we all make up. I want to see your pretty face around long enough that I can feel less envy when you get old and wrinkled and gray years before me.”

  2

  Levi

  For Levi, there was nothing better in the world than sitting cross-legged on the end of the dock while the sun spread its orange-streaked fingers across the sky. Early morning was the best time of the day. Levi inhaled the piney scent of the woods while the sun slowly rose over the trees on the eastern end of the lake. On most mornings, he climbed out of bed almost an hour before dawn and made his way to the edge of the water to greet the morning.

  Although he’d been living in the lake-filled wilderness of northern Minnesota with only his grandmother for company for nearly three years, Levi still found himself turning to his right to speak to an invisible companion when he saw something particularly beautiful or surprising. It wasn’t technically summer yet, but it felt that way. The weather was warming up early in the first week of June. Levi dipped a fingertip into the water off the edge of the dock and listened to the calls of the morning birds. He counted the different species he could identify.

  Levi didn’t wear a watch, and he’d long ago stopped organizing his days by the hands of a clock. Instead, he listened and watched the natural signs unfolding to monitor the passing of hours. The rhythmic patterns of his body helped suggest what to do next, too. When his stomach began rumbling as he sat on the dock, it was time to return to the cabin for breakfast.

  Levi rose from the dock and picked up his red St. Louis Cardinals T-shirt. Although the day was already warm and a little sticky, Grandma Daley would insist that Levi spend most of the day fully dressed. Just before pulling the shirt over his head, he smiled at the redbird perched on a baseball bat. He did miss baseball games. They were the highlight of summers back home in the small farm town near St. Louis where he grew up.

  Levi’s body shone with a deep tan even though the last snowy days weren’t too far back in the rearview mirror. His olive-colored skin rarely burned. Instead, late every spring, the pale cast of winter disappeared to give way to a creamy light caramel color. He was slim of build, but the sculpted muscle of his chest and visible veins running the lengths of his forearms told the story of Levi’s daily schedule of physical labor. The T-Shirt fit tighter than it ever did, and he knew it was due to the muscle he’d packed on his slight frame.

  When Levi looked in the mirror in the morning, he liked the body he saw. Before moving to Minnesota, he was always a skinny kid. To make matters worse, he wore large black-framed glasses. His parents didn’t allow contact lenses until his senior year in high school.

  “There goes four-eye Levi!” was a frequent taunt. Contact lenses were one of the few luxuries he insisted upon when moving in with Grandma Daley.

  The pain of the verbal attacks was doubled by the fact that Levi realized he was physically attracted to one of the most vicious of his tormentors. Levi tried to avoid what he called the “gang of three,” Sam Henderson and two of his buddies. However, they always managed to discover Levi’s new routes through the maze of hallways between classes during his freshman year in high school. All three boys towered at least three inches taller and twenty pounds heavier than Levi. The taunts turned physical only once, and that proved to be a turning point.

  Sam warned him. During lunch hour, he pushed his nose into Levi’s face and said, “After school, it’s coming your way four eyes! We’ll make sure we take the glasses, so you don’t have to watch.” Sam and his toadies stalked off laughing uproariously while Levi contemplated how to slip out of the school building unnoticed at 3:00 p.m.

  He thought he was successful exiting the school building by picking his way through the darkened cafeteria. Almost all of the other kids left through the building’s main lobby. Levi didn’t hear the boys approaching. Thinking back on the incident, he thought they must have crept on their tiptoes to surprise him. Fifty feet from the building, someone hit Levi from behind and knocked him to the school’s gravel driveway gasping for breath. The force propelled his glasses off his face, and the right lens shattered into a spiderweb pattern.

  A rough grip rolled him over onto his back, and Levi found himself staring into Sam Henderson’s wicked sneer. It was ugly, but something about it was exciting at the same time. Levi scrabbled at the gravel trying to escape. Sam growled, “Hold him.”

  The two toadies pinned Levi’s arms and legs in a spread-eagle position while Sam leaned in close. “So, one of my buddies saw you scoping out Eddie Healey before gym class. Do you like dick, four eyes?”

  Levi gasped. It was true. Eddie was one of the best-looking boys in class. His hormones were already in overdrive, and Eddie matured ahead of most of the rest of the guys. Levi shook his head “no” scattering gravel across the drive.

  Sam’s voice took on a low, measured tone. “That’s not what I heard, Levi. You were staring through those glasses licking your lips when Eddie was buck naked.” One corner of Sam’s mouth twisted into a sneer.

  “No! Let me go, Sam. Pick on somebody else. You’ve got me all wrong.”

  Levi groaned when Sam reached down and gripped the bulging package in his own jeans. Levi felt himself grow stiff. He closed his eyes so he couldn’t see. Not now. Please, God, not now.

  Sam bellowed, “Give me his hand!” One of Sam’s buddies released Levi’s right hand. Sam grabbed the wrist and pulled the free hand to just below his waist. “Feel it, four eyes! That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? Isn’t it?”

  The tears started to flow as Levi whispered, “Yeah,” and then immediately shouted, “No!” Through choking tears, he moaned, “Let me go.”

  Mercifully, Sam slapped Levi’s hand away and turned to his toadies saying, “Let him, go. He’s just a sad little four-eyed fag.” Just before he stood up, Sam looked into his victim’s eyes and said, “You’re going to dream about me. I’ll be your nightmare every night.”

  It was the only time Sam touched Levi. After the incident, the taunts gradually dissipated. At the end of the school year, the Henderson family moved across the country, and Levi breathed a massive sigh of relief when he heard the news on day one of his sophomore year in high school.

  Levi still occasionally wondered about Sam’s hard cock. He wondered if Sam Henderson ever came out or if he was bisexual and found a woman for a partner. He feared that Sam stumbled into life as a criminal and found himself locked up in prison for life. In his gut, Levi knew that Sam was better than that.

  Barefoot and dressed in his worn cargo shorts and Cardinals T-Shirt, Levi set out for the cabin. Two years earlier, he carefully placed stones approximately a stride apart leading into the woods so that his footsteps wouldn’t wear down the undergrowth plants and make the path visible to strangers.

  With the stories about Levi’s Grandpa Daley and his mysterious death trickling down the waterways to the residents of nearby towns, tourists and wilderness guides avoided Lone Cedar Lake, but Levi could never be too careful. It was one of the thousands of lakes in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA), and most of them saw little to no human contact. Levi and his grandmother wanted to keep it that way.

  Levi was always surprised when he heard stray comments at Iron Crossing about the fate of his grandfather. He heard speculation about a shooting, strangling, and an epic battle with a bear. Grandma Daley always implied that the drowning was an accident. Levi thought Grandpa stumbled or was the victim of a sudden storm overturning the canoe. Grandma got too choked up to share details. Six months after his arrival in the Northwoods, Levi quit asking any questions about it.

  On the walk back to the cabin, he thought about his college friends for the first time in several days. They were the only upside of his higher education experience. The rest was pure drudgery mixed in with a side order of insecurity.

  Hector, Levi’s best friend in college, was so good-looking that Levi’s attract
ion twisted his gut into knots as they were getting to know each other. Despite his handsome Latin features and perfect brown skin, Hector was painfully shy and desperately attracted to women he was too timid to approach.

  Levi smiled remembering Hector’s fumbling courtship of another good friend, Jillian. She was as bold as Hector was bashful. As the two young men sat at a table in a gyros joint on the edge of campus eating lunch, Jillian strode to the counter to place an order. Hector hissed into Levi’s ear, “I’m going to die right here and now. Look at her! She’s pure beauty in motion! Watch her move. Oh, my God!”

  Levi shrugged. “I’m more interested in the sexy guy slinging gyro meat. Why don’t you say hi to Jillian? She’s friendly. Maybe you can find something you have in common.”

  “And melt into a puddle there on the floor? She won’t ever speak to me. I’m just another scoop of dog meat to her. She can have guys five times better than me.”

  Levi didn’t think guys five times better than Hector existed. He patted his buddy on the shoulder. “Give me a minute, and I’ll be right back.”

  Jillian drummed her fingers on the counter waiting for her sandwich while Levi stepped up beside her. He glanced back over his shoulder at the terrified gaze filling Hector’s face. Levi whispered, “You don’t know me that well, but we’ve got extra space at our table over there. I noticed you sitting a couple of rows behind me in anthropology class the other day. My buddy Hector over there is a whiz at anthropology. Would you like to join us?”

  For Levi, it was easy serving as wingman for a good friend. He boldly plunged ahead in efforts to set up the foundation for a happy ending. If he was forced to say hello first to an attractive guy on his own behalf, Levi’s gut twisted into a knot, and his tongue tied itself into a bow.

  Jillian looked Levi up and down and then turned toward Hector. “He’s pretty cute, and you are, too. Sure thing. I’ve still got another minute of waiting for the sandwich. Thanks for asking.”

  “Keep your eyes on Hector. I’m out of your league.”

  “Oh, is that so? What makes you so special?”

  Levi nodded toward the guy making sandwiches and briefly licked his lips.

  Jillian responded, “Ohhh,” and she glanced at Hector again.

  That was the beginning of a courtship that was both endearing and amusing. There was the time Hector stumbled in a fast food restaurant and dumped a chocolate shake in Jillian’s lap. There was the time that Jillian laughed so hard at one of Hector’s jokes in the campus food service hall that milk came out of her nose. Levi hadn’t seen that since elementary school.

  Hector and Jillian consummated their relationship three days before the end of the three friends’ sophomore year in college. Hector floated through the last two days of finals. As they all headed home for summer break, it was the last time Levi saw his friends Hector and Jillian.

  Levi reached up and ran his fingers through his sandy brown hair. He smiled hoping that Hector and Jillian were considering marriage somewhere and were planning to raise at least three children. Levi knew they would be outstanding parents and bring great people into the world.

  As he opened the door to the cabin, Levi heard the voice of Grandma Daley, “How is the world outside this morning? Breakfast will be ready in five minutes. Go wash up.”

  Levi entered the kitchen and spotted his grandmother at the propane-fueled cooktop that served as their stove. Her papery skin hung loosely from her arms, and her cheeks were drawn and slack with age. However, the light in Grandma Daley’s eyes never seemed to fade. Despite her dark hair streaked with gray, they were sky blue, and they sparkled in the early morning light streaming into the kitchen.

  Giving her a light kiss on the cheek, Levi wrapped his arms around Grandma Daley’s body from behind. It was a morning ritual. He wasn’t feeling for anything in particular, but with his hugs, he could sense the days when she was more frail than usual and less steady on her feet. Those problematic periods were coming faster with shorter periods of the old strength returning in between. “Grandma, make sure you eat well. You’re feeling a little skinny this morning.”

  Grandma Daley reached up briefly with her right hand to touch Levi’s cheek as he leaned his head over her shoulder. “You’re a good boy, always checking up on your old grandma. As long as I’m on my feet, I’m fine. On that day that I can’t get out of bed anymore, that’s when you need to call the people in town with the box. I’ll be ready to go then.”

  Levi looked down at the cooktop. There was oatmeal as always. Grandma Daley insisted it was a cornerstone of long life. On the other burner, she scrambled eggs with a bit of cheese. Levi reached for a pinch of shredded cheese on the counter.

  Grandma Daley slapped his hand. “Now go wash up, and I’ll have this on the table when you get back. We need to both eat well because we’re packing up pieces for your trip to town tomorrow. I’m sending an extra painting for Mrs. Simpson in the Hamptons. Harry told Don Wagner she’s one of his best customers, and she’ll pay a top price. That’s what he told me the last time I was in Iron Crossing.”

  As Levi washed his hands with the collected rainwater in the cabin’s tiny bathroom, he stared at himself in the mirror. The bathroom was a little larger than a closet, and Levi had to stand against the opposite wall to create enough distance to see his entire face. He liked the young man looking back. As his body settled into its adult shape, he lost the chubby chipmunk cheeks of childhood, and his body filled out. He finally had real shoulders. Levi’s face had a more chiseled appearance than in the past, and his wide, toothy smile was warm and friendly.

  Grandma Daley set a cheerful table. An old porcelain pitcher sat in the center of the roughhewn table stuffed full of flowers from the garden. Cut blossoms adorned the cabin throughout the summer season. Grandma Daley carefully collected and stored seeds from one year to the next. On rare occasions, she had Levi buy a packet or two of new seeds while in town to bump up the production of her flower garden.

  She set two plates of eggs on the table and then fussed with the brightly-colored blooms. She said, “You should always bring beauty into your life. It makes life worth living.”

  Grandma Daley brought tremendous beauty into the lives of dozens of people, and Levi felt like his heart nearly burst out of his chest with pride each time he took more of her pieces to Don Wagner in town. Mr. Wagner was the first link in a somewhat complicated chain that led to Harry Els, a prestigious art gallery owner in Manhattan.

  She painted abstract pieces sometimes bursting with bright colors like pink, orange, and yellow, and, when she was feeling more reflective, they contained subdued earth tones, royal blues, and dark purples. Before Grandpa’s untimely death, Isabel Daley was one of the best-known of living Minnesota artists. After his death, she went into voluntary seclusion. The reputation of her work remained strong, but she no longer appeared in public. Soon, the locals stopped asking about her.

  The paintings Levi carried in the canoe on his three-hour trips to town were all small-scale by necessity. They were carefully wrapped first in paper and then in plastic to save them in case of a rare accident capsizing the canoe. The small pieces were only a tiny part of Grandma Daley’s output as an artist. A small shed near the cabin contained a large collection of larger pieces that could never be carried in the canoe.

  Grandma took a small bite of the eggs and then stopped eating. She sipped her mug of coffee. “I want you to pick up something special for yourself when you’re in town. Splurge on chocolate, or maybe the best steak they have in the shop. Then I want you to search Don’s shop for something bright and cheerful to place in the living room.”

  “Do you want anything in particular?”

  “No, you choose. You need to start making more decisions around here. It’s good practice.”

  Levi shivered slightly when she made comments about him taking over control of parts of their lives in the cabin. Grandma was always a strong, stubborn woman. She said the reason Grandpa first started
bringing her to the Northwoods was to clean fish, but Levi knew she was always in charge. Grandpa worshipped his bride for a bunch of good reasons.

  Levi watched as his grandmother picked at the eggs again. She held a forkful of food up to her mouth and then set it back down again. He asked, “Aren’t you going to eat your breakfast?”

  “I’m not very hungry this morning. I ate a lot last night. I’ll take two more bites of the oatmeal. Then I need to go to the studio. A piece is calling my name. I’ve got so much work to do before summer ends.”

  Levi said, “Three bites of oatmeal. I insist.”

  Eating significantly less was something new in the past few weeks. It worried Levi, but he knew that he couldn’t push his grandmother. Despite slowly weakening with advancing age, she was as stubborn as always.

  Grandma Daley took her first bite of oatmeal. She cringed, but she managed to swallow it down and chased it with another sip of coffee. She smiled weakly. “I’ll do this for you. I don’t know what I would do here without you. You’re more than this old lady deserves.”

  She spent the first seven years after Grandpa died alone in the cabin. She made the canoe trips back and forth to Iron Crossing on her own. Don Wagner suggested that she was growing frail enough that she should either move to town or hire someone to take care of the cabin. After an exchange of letters with Levi’s father, her only son, Levi took the long trip into the wilderness with a plan to help his grandmother pack up to move to town.

  The arguments were intense and occasionally provoked raised voices. Grandma Daley insisted, “I’m not moving to town. I promised your grandfather that I would take care of the cabin for the rest of my days. I’ll die here in the woods alone if I have to.”