I’d work on it tomorrow, I promised myself. As I topped the last rise, I wasn’t too surprised to see yellow kerosene lamplight spilling from the windows and the faint gray billow of smoke from the chimney. I saw a form pass by the window and released the grip I’d instinctively taken on my gun. Sylvia again. Just what I needed.
She opened the door as I stepped onto the shallow porch. “Hello again,” I said, stepping across the threshold. She inclined her head and went to sit in the straight-backed rocker, the same one she’d taken earlier. Her liquid brown eyes flicked up to meet my gaze, and then she stared down at the floor again.
I took a deep breath of woodstove smoke, kerosene, and some faint musk, probably perfume, though I’d never smelled anything quite like it on any other woman. It was a sensuous aroma, a rutting-animal whiff, but redolent of leaves and loam and deep shaded forest glens.
“Did you find him?” she asked in her precise way.
I plugged my cell phone into its charger, took off my jacket and tossed it on the bed, got a wine bottle and a glass and poured myself a drink. I sat down facing her. She obstinately stared at the floor as I studied her more closely than I had earlier. Her skin was odd, both young and old, flawless from a distance, but from close up scored with minute creases and wrinkles. She might have been twenty-five, she might have been fifty, on the evidence of her skin. Her face had the Asian, high-cheeked quality I’d seen in many Native Americans, but in the lamplight she seemed more European. And now I decided that her hair wasn’t black after all, but an incredibly rich and deep chestnut brown.
“Thanks for feeding the stove,” I said.
She nodded but did not look up.
I drank a third of my wine in one swallow. “You were right. Someone used a car to murder the old man.”
She began to rock placidly, silently, casting moving shadows on the rough pine boards.
“Do you know anything else that you should tell me?” I asked.
“You will not believe me.”
I handed her my glass of wine. “Try me.”
She took one small sip, then returned the glass. “Some people stopped you so you would hear the old man’s grandson. You went to him. You probably saved his life.” She took a long breath and then let it out. Dropping her voice as if confiding a secret, she murmured, “You are a good man.”
“And some bird told you that? Or a squirrel?”
She shook her head. “You cannot understand. It doesn’t matter.”
“Deer were standing in the road. Not people.”
She folded her hands in her lap and weaved her head from side to side, but kept her eyes on the rug.
“I can’t believe the deer told you, so who did? How? Cell phone? Radio?”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said again, and sighed.
“Maybe it’s the only thing that does,” I said, and that made her look at me, her brown eyes wide. “Are you talking about, about forest spirits?”
She smiled, a surprisingly childlike smile—or maybe the smile of a mother whose little one had finally said two sensible words. “You think there are spirits in the forest?”
I took another sip of wine. “Sometimes it feels that way. Especially at night.”
She shook her head, now watching me closely. “No little people live out there, if that is what you are thinking. No tiny fairies or sprites or dolls or toys or cartoon characters. No what do you call them, no little elves that disguise themselves as squirrels, trees, rocks. You have to know that the animals, the plants, the rivers, mountains, the soil, are not like that, not like cartoon characters.”
“OK,” I said. “I won’t expect a rabbit to ask me what’s up.”
She smiled again, as if we had shared a private joke, and then she frowned. “But everything around us does hold Spirit. Is Spirit. Even the walls, the metal in your stove, the floor. This cabin is Spirit, and all its pieces are Spirit, and it is a seamless whole. Like Squirrel. All squirrels are individual animals, and yet all are Squirrel. It is not that this bear or that bear is Grandfather. It is Bear that is Grandfather. Do you understand what I mean? Your words are difficult, like trying to shape a cup to hold water out of water itself.”
“I don’t know.” I couldn’t suppress a yawn. Black night brooded outside the windows. “I’ve been through times of serious thinking about spirit and souls. When my parents died, when my fiancée died, when my best friend died. My conclusion? It beats me. I may find the answer when I die myself. Or not.”
“Your religion teaches you strange ideas. You believe you must die before you know Spirit?”
I gave a weary chuckle. “Religion isn’t about making sense. Most believers are satisfied with ‘God said it, so I believe it, and don’t bother me with questions.’”
“And you meet God when you die.”
I ran my finger across the window. The Thermopane—one of my upgrades when I bought it—had a small flaw, letting in moisture. It dripped from my fingertip. “Yeah, that’s the idea. You meet God and he judges you.”
“I think he will judge you with compassion,” Sylvia said. “You offered your help. Life needs your help, here, in this place, now.” In the lamplight she was startlingly attractive. I thought longingly of bed and of how many months mine had been lonely. She smiled. “I am not here to have sex with you.” It was a soft, firm declaration, spoken without embarrassment or harshness.
“I didn’t mean to ask you,” I told her.
“No. But you did ask what you should do next with your life. I have the answer: Life needs your help, and since your life is part of all Life, it would be a good thing to offer that help. We believed you were sincere. That is why it was suggested that I talk with you, guide you if I could.”
“Who suggested?”
Her expression clouded. “I’ll introduce you to them when the time is right. They live nearby. All around.”
“Your people?”
She sighed and rose from the chair to go. At the door she paused, hand on the knob, again avoiding eye contact. “I cannot put some things in any words you would accept or understand. But I think you can feel this: when things are out of order, or in the wrong order, the world is in disharmony.”
“A few decades ago kids talked that way,” I said.
“Many thousands of years ago everyone knew it without talking.”
She opened the door, stepped out, and closed it behind her.
I stood, holding a half glass of wine. Sylvia exuded a primal sensuousness that aroused me, made me want to touch her, to hold her. She had a softness and a self-assurance that combined oddly in a feminine mystique so powerful that it made me feel like a kid in her presence. At times she spoke with such confidence that her words were heavy with what felt like ancient wisdom, and at other times she had the affect of a beautiful girl-child. And despite her soft refusal, a sensuous grace lived within her that made me want to be with her, to join with her in pure and primordial sex.
And yet she talked to squirrels. She didn’t know how to use a phone.
I felt tipsy, but I drank another glass of wine. Then I wanted her back in the cabin with me. I threw open the door and looked out into the faint moonlight. The clouds had cracked open, and through a wide rift in them I saw overhead the glittering strip of the Milky Way, stars like diamond dust on black velvet.
“Sylvia!” The forest was silent, save only for the gentle sound of a wind through naked tree limbs, the soft rustle of pine needles. The wind was coming out of the north, pushing a cold front in. It brushed my face with a bitter touch.
I knew she had gone. Yet I stepped outside and circled the cabin, boots crunching in the snow. She wasn’t hiding in the shadows. I didn’t spot her tracks.
I’d spent more than half my life coming up with the right answers for people who’d paid me well. John Lincoln was fond of saying there are no real mysteries. “Somebody always knows,” he had told me more than once. “Find the person who knows, and the mystery goes away.”
I was quite certain that John had never met anyone like Sylvia. Completing my circuit of the cabin, I stepped up on the porch again. It was late enough, and I had drunk enough, to make me feel as if the timber under my feet were drifting on an unsteady current. “Sylvia!” I called again. “Come back. I need you.”
No response. My nose ached from the cold wind.
“Screw it,” I muttered. I went inside and got a pan, and took it out to a deep, clean drift, then scooped it full of snow, carried it back into the cabin, and put it on top of the stove. By tomorrow morning it would reduce to maybe a pint and a half of water.
Still cold despite the stove’s warmth, I stripped to my underwear and fell into bed. I fell asleep with the sour aftertaste of wine and failure on my tongue.
10
I woke the next morning with a pounding headache from too much wine and not enough water—that and the heat in the cabin that had further dehydrated me for the first half of the night. Twice I’d risen to step outside to pee, not wanting to walk the thirty feet or so to the outhouse. Both times, as I stood shivering in the cold moonlight, having thrown on only a T-shirt, jeans, and unlaced boots, I’d felt that someone was watching me.
Easy to dismiss as wine-induced paranoia. Each time I’d stepped lively back into the warmth of the cabin and the depths of the flannel sheets and army wool blankets and had drifted back to sleep wondering if I should call Jerry. My dreams were vivid worries about his safety.
The sun woke me, lying in a bright stripe across the bed. It was still low in the sky. I guessed the time at somewhere between seven-thirty and eight, late for me. By design I’d bought no clock for the cabin, but now and again I turned on a little transistor radio to catch the news on Vermont Public Radio in low fidelity.
During my months in the cabin I’d adjusted to judging time by the fall of the light, knowing the rough times of sunrise and sunset, knowing how they changed a few minutes each day. The Earth had swung past the winter solstice just before Christmas, and now the hours of daylight were getting longer, heading toward the summer solstice in June, when the sun would come up before five in the morning and linger until nine in the evening.
Perhaps because of my elliptical conversation with Sylvia the night before, I meditated on my life and its pattern as I got the stove going, poured some of the melted snow into my Brita water filter, then heated the rest of the water and used it to wash my face and torso. Thoreau had been right: living in the forest you discover a thousand unsuspected connections to time and seasons. Winter is when you withdraw, retreat, slow down, and think and brood.
The radio told me that many people experienced this ebb into self as depression, and they even had a name for it—SAD, seasonal affective disorder. But the folks who came down with that tended to be those who spent their working days in the fluorescent rabbit-warren mazes of offices. When they retreated into themselves, they found an echoing emptiness, a vacated house.
Not so with me. John and I had always kept busy, winter and summer alike, so I’d had few opportunities to contemplate and speculate on the Meaning of It All. Still, the past months had slowed me down, accustomed me to the natural flow of time, eased me out of the tyranny of a clock that bit another small chunk out of my life each minute. I had flowed into winter, had flowed with it, had learned to greet and celebrate early darkness with a glass of wine and a good book. I had accepted winter as a season to go to sleep early and wake up late and lazy, a papa bear welcoming hibernation.
Now I’d begun to look forward to summer, expecting it would bring a contrasting energy. They’d told me stories of how the entire green state of Vermont erupts in early summer, festivals, parties, and fairs popping up as if sprung from the deep stony soil, a hectic, hilarious time as the residents release the stored-up energy of the cold months.
I finished my ablutions and combed my hair, amid the lingering scent of Dr. Bronner’s Peppermint Soap. I grinned at what the old doc might have made of my philosophizing. He could have squeezed it down into a snaking passage of agate type and wrapped it around one of his bars of soap. I thought fleetingly of shaving, fingering my short beard, the product of a month away from the razor, then decided the hell with it. When in Rome.
So I poured a shot-glass of Listerine, dipped my toothbrush into it, and then dipped it into an open box of baking soda and scrubbed away the tooth-scum and hangover sourness. I rinsed with the rest of the mouthwash, then got dressed in local costume: blue flannel shirt, jeans, brown work boots.
I pulled a lemon out of the grocery bag under the table, sliced it in half, and squeezed the juice into a glass. I topped it up with water from the Brita pitcher and drank it down. My headache had mostly dissipated and my vision had cleared. I took the half-full washbasin outside and poured the dirty water into a little gully, then I scrubbed the basin clean with a couple of handfuls of snow.
Then as I turned to go back, I saw Sylvia standing motionless beneath a leafless maple right at the edge of the small clearing around the cabin. The air had become frigid, almost crystalline, the sky a deep blue dome overhead. Sylvia stood watching me, her breath condensing and drifting away over her shoulder.
I stopped, facing her, and said, “Good morning.”
She simply stared for a long, silent moment, and I didn’t know if she was trying to reach some big decision or was simply carefully considering her next move. She reminded me of the way the deer had deliberately stood in the roadway the evening before. At last she smiled and stepped toward me. “Good morning.” She passed me and went into the cabin.
I followed, pulling the door shut behind me.
“Good to see you again.” I put the bowl back into its place in the wooden washstand, realizing that I hadn’t thought through what I wanted to tell her and ask her. Or maybe that wasn’t so, maybe I had thought it through too much.
“Thank you.”
“Where’d you go last night?”
“I have a place to sleep nearby.”
“House? Trailer?”
“I have a home.” She sat in the straight-backed rocker. “What did you dream about last night?”
“Don’t know. Danger. Jeremiah’s grandson was involved, but that’s all I remember.” I pulled a loaf of bread and a jar of raspberry preserves from the pantry. “Want breakfast?”
“I have eaten.” She was staring at the rug again, not making eye contact. “I dreamed of times past and times to come, about my people and yours. It was sad. You really don’t remember when you dream?”
I shrugged. “Sometimes I remember bits and pieces, images. My dreams are surreal and usually make no sense.”
She raised an eyebrow but did not look up. “What if this is the dream? What if where you go at night when this ceases to exist for you is the reality?”
I had opened the preserves and spread a portion on a slice of seven-grain bread. “I’ve heard that kind of question before. But it’s pretty well established that this is what is real. Dreams are processed junk from our waking lives. How do I know this is real? It’s a hell of a lot more consistent than my dreams, for one thing.” I took a bite of the bread. “Sure you don’t want some?”
She glanced toward my breakfast with a look of covert and lustful hunger but she said, “No, thank you.”
She sat in a kind of absorbed, natural silence as I ate the bread, crunching the raspberry seeds between my molars. When I finished, I took my cast-iron snow-melting pan, went outside and filled it, and brought it back to the stove. A few drops of water hissed and sputtered as they dripped from the pan’s sides onto the stovetop.
Sylvia did not look at me, but just sat and rocked. I put some gunpowder green tea in John Lincoln’s old mug, the one I’d given him years earlier with the CIA logo, and carried it back to my chair, waiting for the snow to melt and the water to heat. “Anything happen last night that I should know about?”
She shrugged in an odd way, not a gesture of resignation or defiance, but more as though she was saying, Yes, but nothing urgen
t, as though it was more natural for her to shrug than to nod.
When she didn’t say anything, I said, “So are you going to introduce me to your people today?”
She stiffened for a second before slipping into a more relaxed posture. “You must promise me something first.” She looked me in the face, and the force of her attention struck me as something almost palpable.
“What?”
“First tell me: do you think your people are in danger? Do you think the whole human race could be—what is the thing you call it—an endangered species?”
I didn’t know how to field that. For a few moments I rocked slowly, hearing the chair runners against the wood floor, the crack and pop of the logs burning in the stove. “Nuclear war could do it,” I said. “Pollution, killer germs developed by the labs of three dozen nations, chemicals from genetically engineered foods. I’d say there’s some element of danger. Is that what you mean?”
“There is a larger danger,” she said. “A more immediate one, though it could come from any of those things. But even without any of those happening, there is a graver threat.”
“What?”
“The Spirit of the world is ill. The Mother who gives us all life is weakening. If she becomes ill enough, you will all die.” She leaned forward, her intense brown gaze locked on mine. “Since this time yesterday, one hundred species have become extinct forever. Millions of plants and animals have died, ending a hundred million lineages. Each came from billions of years of trial and error, birth and death, growth and change. Each species had ancestors going all the way back to the beginning of life. Each should have had descendants to carry the line to the infinite future. Every one of those hundred species that were living yesterday morning has now vanished beyond recall. No one on Earth will ever see them again. And by this time tomorrow another hundred, or maybe more, will vanish.”
Death in the Pines Page 7
