Jane Was Here

by Sarah Kernochan

  He picks up a rock from the driveway, hurling it at Hoyt’s front window.

  The rock smashes through the pane, shards of glass collapsing inwards. Letting out a whoop, Gita watches him take another rock from the lawn. His aim is sure and true. The air echoes with the crash of another window destroyed.

  Gita and Collin grin at one another, no words necessary: Hoyt is as much their enemy as Jane. Grabbing a rake leaning against the tool shed, Gita moves to the kitchen door, swinging the handle with all her might against the glass panel.

  They circle the bungalow, demolishing every window. The woods seem to shiver with each report: a crash, and then laughter. Not the laughter of children, but of a goddess and her acolyte.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Jane’s sneakers crunch in the dead leaves, her socks snagging on greenbrier. When she started out, entering the woods in back of the bungalow, the trail was visible, climbing the hill diagonally. Passing a ravine where someone had dumped some junk, it switched back, continuing in a gentle zigzag uphill. But as Jane got higher, the trees grew closer together and the underbrush took over until the trail disappeared entirely.

  For the last 20 minutes she has been climbing without guidance, fending off the thorny reach of blackberry bushes, tripping over roots and saplings. Conifers crowd out the birch and oak trees, carpeting the ground with their needles.

  Granite rocks great and small protrude on the hillside, but do not constitute a wall.

  She trudges upward, straw hat tipped over her eyes, gaze fixed on the ground before her, not daring to look behind. One glance will confirm that the way back is swallowed up, and she is lost.

  Suddenly her head slams hard into a low-hanging branch. Rocked back by the blow, she loses her balance, tumbling into a thicket, her hip hitting something solid beneath a snarl of vines.

  Rubbing her already swelling forehead, she extricates herself from the vines, tearing the strands apart. Her hip is bruised; beneath the tangle of vines is a pile of stones—the hard thing her hip encountered when she fell.

  She scrambles unsteadily to her feet. Something directs her gaze back to the pile of stones. Though the smaller rocks are scattered about, beneath them is a sturdy base of large, heavy rocks.

  She is looking at the remnants of a wall. A farmer’s arduous labor, from more than a century past.

  Brushing off the heaps of dead leaves, she discovers more such rocks. Looking up the hill now, she can trace the wall beneath the foliage vaguely creeping and crumbling upwards.

  Farmer Quirk’s wall! In a burst of exhilaration, she is almost running up the steep incline. Where will the stones lead? Something of great importance waits at the top—so her vision said! She gasps for breath as she climbs, salty sweat trickling into her open mouth.

  The crest of Rowell Hill is up ahead.

  Throwing off its camouflage, the wall emerges wholly, real and intact, crowned by a glory of green moss. The terrain levels out; Jane slows to a walk, taking more care to step over the loops of vines, skirting the prickly shrubs. She is intensely thirsty.

  She glimpses a bright expanse of sunlight through the trees—an open area. Heart pummeling her ribs, she rushes toward the light. As she parts the pine branches to step through, she finds herself in a small clearing. In its center is a shack.

  JANE DRAWS NEAR a small, primitive lean-to made of weathered planks: perhaps an old hunting shelter. The roof seems recently tarpapered, shaded by the overhanging branches of chokecherry trees. The door hangs tilted on loose hinges, a long-handled ax and a spade propped beside it.

  Pressing her ear to the door, Jane listens for sounds of someone inside. She hears only the drilling of a woodpecker nearby, the katydids simmering in the trees. Lifting the door’s hook-and-eye latch, she peers inside.

  A single room. The flooring is made of the same splintered wood as the walls; a built-in bench covered by a narrow mattress and folded blanket are its only furnishings. There are no windows, only a hinged flip board that props open to serve as hunter’s lookout. Arranged neatly against the wall are a kerosene lantern, folding camp stove, some butane canisters and plastic gallon jugs of distilled water.

  She enters eagerly, unsealing one of the jugs and gulping down water as fast as she can. Pausing for breath, she lets the water splash over her face and clothes.

  Looking around the room, she feels no stirring of memories; her instincts are silent. Is this her journey’s end? Is this mean little shack the answer to her soul’s eerie unrest?

  She curls up on the bench mattress to collect her thoughts. Fishing Eleanor Graynier’s brooch from her pocket, she clasps the talisman between praying hands, closing her eyes: Why was I brought here? Help me understand what I’m to do. Heavenly Redeemer, send another memory, a vision, an answer…

  Sleep comes instead.

  THE SOUND OF CRASHING in the underbrush outside jolts Jane awake. Something approaches. Sucking in her breath, she waits helplessly.

  A light tattoo of hooves on dirt, crossing the clearing, fading.

  She opens the door in time to glimpse a herd of deer, a regatta of seesawing white tails, bounding away through the woods. Following the deer’s progress, her eyes stray to a heap of stones strewn over the clearing’s opposite perimeter.

  How could she have missed it? Quirk’s wall does not end at the clearing, and it beckons her onward.

  Glancing at the long shadows extending over the ground, and the slanting light through the trees, she sees the sun is low. No time to venture further; she must turn back and retrace her way down, God willing, before dark.

  “I MUST GO BACK tomorrow, to follow the wall further.”

  Brett applies iodine to Jane’s scratches where the branches flayed her face and arms as she stumbled down Rowell Hill.

  “You should’ve waited for me.” He dabs the cotton ball to her cheek, the warmth of her breath on his wrist, the flowery smell of her soap. They sit on her bed, a province not permitted him before tonight.

  “You disapprove.” She pulls away. “Yet I am so close to remembering. I can feel it.” She glances at the doorway, suddenly aware of a pair of eyes on them.

  Collin flits out of sight; they hear his bare feet pattering back to his room, his door shutting.

  “Your son feels a certain antipathy to me.”

  Brett wants to stay on point. “I don’t like you wandering about the woods all alone.”

  “But I have a map.” Slipping under the covers, she slides her feet down, playfully nudging him until he is obliged to get off the bed. As he lays a cold pack on her forehead for the bruise, she chatters on. “It will help my concentration to be alone. I must be mindful every second.”

  Messages abide in everything God places in the world before us, she tells him. Every crumb of earth, every blade, leaf, rock and cloud signifies, “if we could only learn to read them!”

  Brett has never seen her so pretty and beguiling, her cheeks’ customary pallor yielding to bursts of pink, as if life and spirit have broken to the surface. He wishes that she could always be so happy, and that he was the cause. Jane settles back on the pillow. “I shall hardly sleep, waiting for tomorrow.” Brett offers to read her some poetry to help her sleep. “I should enjoy that very much.” He fetches an anthology of the romantic poets he got this afternoon, driving all the way to the nearest library in Quikabukket. She listens intently to some poems of Shelley and then Poe, asking him to read several times over the one called “Ulalume.”

  And we passed to the end of the vista,

  But were stopped by the door of a tomb –

  By the door of a legended tomb;

  And I said –”What is written, sweet sister,

  On the door of this legended tomb?”

  She replied –”Ulalume – Ulalume –

  ‘Tis the vault of thy lost Ulalume!

  The romantic poets are a real gloom-and-doom crowd, Brett thinks, disappointed; he could come up with better poetry himself. Like, Jane, oh oh Jane…You st
eal my heart again… and again…

  He looks up from the page. She is sleeping. Removing the cold pack, he touches his lips to her cheek, and to the sweet dent at the corner of her mouth. Oh, Jane…

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  When Hoyt lifts his head, he is in pitch blackness, hunched over a table. His mouth tastes of bile and tannins. His brain stutters to life: he is at Jack Meltzer’s desk in the study.

  Groping for the desk lamp, his hand collides with a glass bottle. It topples. He switches on the light; red wine is spilling onto the keys of Meltzer’s computer.

  Righting the bottle, Hoyt swabs the keys with the hem of his T-shirt, waking the computer from sleep mode. The screen brightens to reveal the Wikipedia article he was reading when he passed out.

  It all started earlier that day when he’d picked up the Meltzers’ chair at Iacovucci’s. The repairman had turned the chair over to show Hoyt where he’d had to glue the joints. “Tell your client no one should sit on this,” Iacovucci said. “These chairs aren’t just old, they’re crap.”

  That was when Hoyt noticed, inside the seat frame, a strange insignia burned into the wood: a variation on a broken cross. The same symbol that was stamped on the cover of an old Bible. The same book containing the lock of auburn hair that had multiplied and clung to his fingers. “Any idea what this mark is?”

  Iacovucci’s snowy eyebrows lifted over his bifocals.

  “That means it’s a Gabriel Nation chair. Crazy what some people pay for them—they’re rare, made upstate by some nutty 19th-century commune like the Shakers, except with zero talent for furniture. That’s why you don’t see many of these, on account of they fall apart so easy.” Iacovucci eyed Hoyt’s cervical collar. “So what happened to you?”

  “Whiplash.” Hoyt’s pain was increasing every day; the foam collar didn’t seem to be helping any more. Alcohol worked better, along with a modicum of weed.

  By late afternoon he was hanging out in Jack’s study, chugging a bottle of the Meltzers’ best Bordeaux and sucking on a joint as he surfed the Web for wildlife porn. He liked to watch the big-loined animals going at it: elks, Kodiak bears, lions. Also hot, bundled king cobras.

  Halfway down the bottle, and a charred roach all that remained of the marijuana, Hoyt found himself typing “gabriel nation” in the search bar. Following a link to an antiques site, he read a short paragraph on the insignia:

  “The Gabriel Nation cross, with its base bent to the left signifying the angel Gabriel’s position at the left hand of God, and its apex touching the scalloped canopy of heaven, symbolizes the highest spiritual state which can be achieved during mortal life.”

  Wikipedia offered a few more details:

  “Gabriel Nation, a short-lived Christian utopian community, originated in Beller, Texas, in 1849 under the leadership of Levon Artzuni, an Armenian immigrant. Two years later, when Texans proved hostile to his ministry, the charismatic Artzuni moved a small group of followers to Hovey Brook, Massachusetts.”

  Hoyt knew Hovey Pond. It was about fifty miles northwest of Graynier, near Marlborough. The town had a massage parlor whose Friday “Wild West” nights made the trip occasionally worthwhile.

  “Declaring himself the messenger of the angel Gabriel, Artzuni preached that the divinity of angels was attainable by humans: through prayer, ecstatic trance, and conversion of sinners, concepts he drew from the evangelical religious traditions of the South. What gave the group its notoriety was Artzuni’s claim that virginity was a prerequisite for all members, without which one could not aspire to angelic beatitude.

  “For a time, Gabriel Nation was tolerated in Massachusetts, until disaffected locals spread rumors that Artzuni himself had divested some female converts of their virginity, and local outrage forced the group to move on. Whether they would have eventually died out like the Shakers, who also promoted celibacy, can never be known, since all the followers of Gabriel Nation perished of famine en route to the Pacific Northwest in 1857.”

  For a moment, Hoyt was with the little band of believers, huddling with their demented leader in some god forsaken mountain pass as doom howled in. He shivered: it was a feeling like when he was ten years old, hunkered down with his scripture-spewing mother as the eviction notice was hammered to the door.

  He touched his fingers to his eyes, suddenly aware he was crying. Angrily he wiped the tears away, but they only flowed harder.

  It was a mercy when he passed out.

  AND NOW, REGRETTABLY, he’s conscious again.

  Hoyt shuts off the computer, getting to his feet. The blood booms in his head; his neck is on fire again. Ripping off the useless cervical collar, he chucks it in the trash basket and lurches to the door, leaving his mess on the desk for Honorata the maid. Tomorrow she’ll clean everything up before the Meltzers copter in. Right now he requires neat liquor, fast.

  He yanks open the glove compartment in his truck, his hand closing around the sleek, cool glass shape of deliverance. Twisting off the cap, he brings the bottle to his lips, throwing a slug of brandy “derrière la cravate”— behind the necktie—as the froggy froggy French put it. The thought hits him that he forgot to order a replacement for the missing tiki torch on the pool path—no doubt the work of teenage vandals. Ah, the Vandals. Sack of Rome, 455 A.D. Were they hormonal too, with acne? He drinks to them, those naughty Vandals.

  Then he remembers Pete. Climbing out of the truck, he puts two fingers in his mouth and whistles for the dog. The night’s humidity seems to suffocate sound. Haze drifts across a chawed-off moon as Hoyt walks up the driveway toward the lawn, whistling again. “Pete!”

  Honks from the lake greet him, which means the dog is in the woods; the Canada geese wouldn’t be back if Pete were around.

  Taking the brandy with him, Hoyt strides out on the grass. Immediately he realizes his blunder. He’d left the sprinklers on—for two days? Three? Now every step he takes is in mush, the viscous soil sucking up his boots, the grass drowned. Halfway to the lake, his feet have sunk past the ankle; he can’t pull either boot up.

  “Pete! You asshole!”

  The unseen geese chortle. The skunks must be highfiving each other in the bushes.

  Trying to pry his boots from the mire with all his might, he manages to drive them deeper. His stomach recoils as the mud breaches his calves. Cursing, he decides to undo his laces and pull his stockinged feet clear.

  But first, a drink.

  Before he can take a swig he is sinking further, as if in a slow elevator down…

  With a sound like thunder, the ground below his feet opens and he free-falls, hurtling through a void.

  He lands with a crash on his back and lies there in shock, staring at the stars above. His thumped brain burps up the German for star: stern. The stars are stern indeed, admonishing him: Your fault. You left the fucking sprinklers on.

  He scrambles to his feet. He is standing at the bottom of a crater, a gaping sinkhole in the middle of the Meltzers’ flooded lawn, the rim of its steep mud walls at least five feet above his head, far out of reach. Water droplets pelt his upturned face: the underground sprinkler pipes, sticking naked out of the collapsed soil overhead, drizzle on his head in further mockery.

  If he can climb partway up the side, he can grab onto the pipes and hoist himself up the rest of the way. Clambering up the slope, he grasps at frangible roots, dislodging stones.

  The wall caves downward under his exertions, melting away. Hoyt is back at the bottom, the hole bigger than before.

  He gropes up the opposite side. This time when the wall gives way, he is sent rolling to the bottom with rusted metal scrap, loose chunks of concrete rubble, and what looks like a part of a toilet seat.

  He realizes the contractor used improper fill, then neglected to compact it. The sprinklers’ deluge only hastened a collapse that was long overdue. Flat on his ass and panting, Hoyt mentally hoists a glass to his fellow cheat, who really should be here with him celebrating at the bottom of the canyon.

>   Taking his cell phone from his back pocket, he dials 911: he’ll rouse that circle jerk known as the Graynier Volunteer Fire Department. No service, his phone announces. Maple Manor’s signal is weak; Jack Meltzer had brought in a brace of lawyers to defeat the installation of a phone tower on Rowell Hill, which would have compromised his view. Usually Hoyt can find a spot where there’s a flimsy connection—but not here at the bottom of a twelve-foot pit.

  Hoyt leaves the phone on, just in case someone might be able to get through from the other end. But no one knows he is here; no one lives nearby; and no one, in any case, cares. Everyone above is sweating through a hot summer night, but down here the bowels of the earth are cold, wet, and covetous, hoarding their captive. He’s in for a long night.

  Even worse is the prospect of getting sober. He feels around for the brandy bottle, hoping it survived the plunge. His hand contacts something smooth and round. But it’s only a piece of plastic duct pipe amid the debris. He flings it aside and keeps digging, first methodically, then with a vengeance, dirt packing his nails, his arms scraped bloody by stones and scrap metal.

  At one point he pulls forth a long femur bone. Perhaps from a horse, from the bygone days when this whole area was carved up into farms. In the deep woods behind his house, he has seen remnants of stone fences. Suddenly a straight, carefully-laid wall will appear, demarcating nothing anymore except maybe history.

  Yes, plenty of history to be found in a ten-foot scrap hole. If he gave a shit.

  He slumps back in defeat, gulping air heavy with decomposition. Always knew I could sink lower if I tried. He laughs bitterly, then settles in to wait out the night.

  From time to time, Hoyt hears the light rumbling of more soil breaking from the walls, sifting to the bottom, covering his outstretched legs; he can feel the bumping of worms underneath as they collide with his body and reroute. He pushes away the thought that he is in his grave. Nothing to do, nothing to drink, and all thought is ill-advised.