The Inverted Forest

by John Dalton

  “Winter,” she said. “My favorite time of year.”

  There wasn’t any sarcasm in her voice or, more important, in the direct bearing of her gaze. Apparently she meant it. She was a woman who’d prefer to be up before sunrise in January chipping away at a water trough with an ice pick, the long off-season her reward for all the unacknowledged work she put in during the summer months.

  “But don’t you get lonely?” Harriet asked.

  The question made Linda Rucker sigh deeply and screw one corner of her mouth shut. She didn’t at all appear offended, but she didn’t reply to Harriet, either. Don’t you get lonely? The sigh, the crimped grin seemed to say there was no single or simple way to answer.

  But the next afternoon, sitting opposite Harriet at the picnic table, Linda Rucker, who was gluing together award medals for that evening’s camp Olympics, raised her head and said, “It’s not as if I go the whole winter without seeing another soul. There’s always the town of Ellsinore twelve miles away. There’s a place there for pizza and a saloon I like to go to on Friday nights.”

  Harriet nodded thoughtfully and went back to sorting meds.

  “I’m known in Ellsinore,” Linda said. “I have a friend I meet at the bar. Sometimes this friend of mine will come stay with me here.” She smiled wryly. “A gentleman caller.”

  “I see,” said Harriet. So that explained something significant about Linda Rucker, the aura of experience that hung over her. But you’d expect the opposite. You’d expect that she’d be the sort of person who would close herself off, protectively, from the world of love and sex. Instead she seemed entirely aware of the various lies and disappointments and stolen pleasures involved in that world. When she’d said gentleman caller, she’d done so in a voice weighted with both fondness and trepidation.

  Some things, personal things, Harriet was willing to offer in return. The very fact of James made it clear she’d had her own experience with a gentleman caller. At the time she’d been a first-year student at the state university in Durham, North Carolina, and she’d held a work-study job in which she helped shuttle supplies some thirty miles outside Durham to the university’s agricultural research farm. She could tell Linda Rucker, truthfully enough, that her gentleman caller had been a recently married graduate student with whom she’d worked. He’d driven a large gray university van. It was in the back of this van where he’d done his calling.

  She didn’t bother mentioning that he was a white man. Linda Rucker could figure that out. She could know the bare outline of Harriet’s story and jump to her own conclusions: Harriett had been young and naïve. The gentleman caller had seduced her. Once she was pregnant, he’d abandoned Harriet and returned to his unsuspecting wife. All of this was generally true, though not specifically. Did it matter now, six years after the fact, that they’d loved each other? Maybe it didn’t matter. She had to use all her powers of forgiveness to remember that her gentleman caller was modest and kind and very smart. For a married man, he was surprisingly unworldly. He blushed sometimes if she looked at him too directly. How strange and wonderful it was to have a man crave her opinions the way he did. He’d say, “I’ve been wondering what you’d think of this all weekend, Harriet. I’ve been itching to tell you.” He brought her small, perfectly chosen gifts, unaware of their implications. In the end, though, he needed a little encouragement from Harriet to take the first step. They found a secluded corner of the university farm where they could park and talk and hold one another. Initially they’d decided only to bend the rules of monogamy. But, of course, their resolve didn’t last. Several times they were hasty and reckless in their lovemaking. Five months after they’d begun she was pregnant.

  The fallout, for Harriet Foster, was nearly unbearable. She’d had to withdraw from the university and return home. In her hometown the Fosters were known as a moderate and accepting family. Yet once she was pregnant, she learned that this leniency toward others came from a belief in their own impeccable behavior. Her mother assumed—falsely—that they were being shunned by the community. Outwardly her father seemed unfazed by the news. But his misery had turned inward. After a fifteen-year abstinence, he was found drunk and inconsolable one afternoon in the family garage.

  Two months before James was born Harriet moved to St. Louis and into the home of her aunt Marie, whom the rest of the family had pegged as moody and lonesome. They’d misjudged her. Marie was only irritable when visiting North Carolina. In St. Louis she led a lively and successful life. She had a large house and a wide array of interesting friends. In Aunt Marie’s neighborhood there were other young black women who shared Harriet’s situation, which was to say that, like Harriet, they were pregnant and single and angry. They made elaborate plans to punish the men who’d abandoned them. Unlike Harriet, they were scalding, even violent, in their anger, and yet she carried the notion, rightly or not, that her betrayal was somehow more painful, more personal than theirs.

  James, when he arrived, was a thousand times better than any notion she had of herself as a wronged woman. He was such a good boy. But it wasn’t easy to explain or describe his goodness. She might say that as a person he ran deep and true. He’d almost certainly grow up to be a thoughtful and generous young man. Whatever this quality was, it was neither simple nor common. And to see it present in her son brought her a radiant new happiness.

  She’d reconciled herself to the fact that her gentleman caller’s suffering had been minor compared to her own. By now he and his wife might have a child of their own. She wouldn’t begrudge them if they did.

  Of course it took years of living and raising James to accomplish this perspective. One thing still troubled her. Before leaving Durham she’d discovered something significant about her gentleman caller’s wife. During the course of the affair, he’d said very little about her except that she was an overworked and driven medical student. He never mentioned she was black—a black woman, a black wife. It was still a rarity to be a white man with a black wife, to be part of an interracial marriage, even in a North Carolina college town. He’d chosen to keep this crucial fact about his wife to himself.

  But knowing it distorted everything Harriet thought she understood about her gentleman caller, especially his reasons for loving her. It was the part of her story she always kept secret. Six years later it still had the power to unsettle her.

  On Wednesday a cool front passed over the Missouri Ozarks and graced Kindermann Forest with the season’s first lovely June afternoon. The glaring heat lifted. An eighty-four-degree, low-humidity crispness fell across the valley. Sunlight, warm and pure, shivered the dogwood leaves and made the cedar buildings and gravel pathways appear soft-edged and perfectly arranged.

  Such fine weather raised the counselors’ spirits. Harriet’s, too. Once siesta ended and the campers and counselors were set loose from their cabins, she put a note on the infirmary door and headed south across the meadow. But she stopped halfway to consider her surroundings. It really was a beautiful place. A summer camp. A kingdom unto itself. There wasn’t a single television in any of the camp buildings—Mr. Kindermann wouldn’t allow it—and therefore no news of Unabombers and mad cow disease and African civil war. The world was elsewhere. Harriet had to concentrate to locate it.

  She pressed on, into the yawning mouth of the woods, along the gravel pathway bordered by railroad ties, up the walkway to Cabin Four and through the screen door, where Linda Rucker stood waiting beside an impossibly fat and entirely placid woman named Ms. Peacock. The other residents of Cabin Four—some two dozen campers and five female counselors—had been sent away, most of them to the swimming pool.

  It had been decided that Ms. Peacock, the obese camper who’d forced her counselor to the bathroom stall floor and sat on her, should have a proper shower during her time at camp. At the moment Ms. Peacock, eyelids half-closed, was swaying to and fro on her heels. She breathed through her nose in long, slow draughts of air. Was she deeply relaxed or asleep on her feet? Either way she was an e
xemplary patient, easy to lead into the latrine’s shower bay, unperturbed when her expansive sundress was tugged over her head and her sagging underwear fell to the floor.

  But the spray of water across Ms. Peacock’s freckled back sent her into a frenzy. Her eyes flew open wide. She reached for them with her meaty hands. “No, no, no, no, no,” she cried. “No. You. Won’t.” Her voice, clear and exacting, was an instrument of authority. “You will not,” she insisted. “You will not.” Linda and Harriet blinked at one another in surprise. It was as if they were being chastised by someone with a lucid mind and enough administrative power to have them fired. They wetted sponges in soapy water and began a lunging dance in which they washed under Ms. Peacock’s enormous arms and hanging belly and hips, between her legs. Then they doused her with buckets of clear water. She screamed until the water rolled off her and whatever it was that had been angry and awake in Ms. Peacock shrank away. She was herself again, an obese woman—listless, slovenly, more than a little sad. She allowed them to pat her dry with towels and dress her in fresh underwear and a sundress.

  Then they led her along the pathway to the swimming pool and told her to sit in the shade of the shower house. Ms. Peacock, who held no grudges, did just as they asked, sat with her back against the shower house, licking the callused skin on her knuckles and watching her counselor and fellow campers slap a beach ball back and forth across the shallow end of the pool.

  Harriet waited at the gate while Linda Rucker went about her director’s duties: a quick tour of the pool deck, a sober appraisal of the maintenance schedule. She chatted awhile with Christopher Waterhouse, who sat alert in his lifeguard’s chair, his eyes shielded by Wayfarer sunglasses, his face—and presumably his gaze—trained on the deep-end swimmers. Now and then he tilted his ear toward Linda and nodded in recognition of whatever she’d said. Afterward she climbed the stairs and joined Harriet at the gate, where they stood looking out at the whole of the pool, its rowdy swimmers and shrieking energy, its waves of sloshing water.

  “Harriet,” Linda said. She seemed to have readied her thoughts with exceptional care. “How about our two lifeguards? What do you . . . think of them?”

  Harriet shrugged in reply. She wasn’t at all sure what she was being asked to evaluate. “They’re good,” she offered. “So far they seem to know what they’re doing.”

  “And what about Christopher Waterhouse?”

  Again there was an air of uncertainty. Was she being asked about his competence as a lifeguard? Or was it something else? An invitation to crack wise about his good looks, his sexiness? Because Christopher Waterhouse was probably the most attractive male member of the staff. For one thing he had strong and shapely legs, swimmer’s legs, masculine in their way, but really not so very different from a female dancer’s or woman athlete’s legs. He seemed to like sitting above everyone in his lifeguard’s chair and stretching those legs out in front of him, flexing his handsome ankles and feet. To watch him do this was, for Harriet, one small perk of coming to the pool each afternoon with James. You could see the direction Christopher Waterhouse’s handsomeness was heading—toward a rougher and manlier presence. But this summer there was still a fresh-faced, boyish edge to his looks, something that Harriet found interesting but that the white girl counselors of Kindermann Forest might easily swoon over. If there was room to speculate about Christopher Waterhouse, it was to wonder which of the girl counselors he would end up partnered with. The easy assumption was that it would be his fellow lifeguard Marcy Bittman. The two of them were tan and elegantly shaped in a way that placed them in a category above the other counselors. In all likelihood they’d wind up together.

  “He seems all right to me,” Harriet said.

  “Do you trust him?”

  She could only say that she had no reason not to trust him. At the mess hall he’d been the first to jump to his feet and help rescue James from the grip of the cerebral palsy camper. For that act alone she’d give him the benefit of the doubt.

  They left the gate and walked the tunneling pathway out into the meadow, and Linda, who’d been studying the progress of her feet as she walked, stopped and folded her arms across her broad chest. She squinted in concentration. “About Christopher,” she said. “I have a few things—well, maybe just one thing—that worries me.”

  “What’s that?”

  Linda Rucker offered up a rueful half smile. “I don’t even know if I can describe it. All I can say is that there’s something about him, his sincerity maybe, that I don’t quite trust.”

  “But you don’t know anything about him for certain?” Harriet said.

  “I don’t, no. It’s just a feeling I have. And I had this feeling the instant I met him, even before he opened his mouth and we had our first conversation. I don’t know what it is about him, but I have an intuition that he’s not a good person. And so I’m wondering, Harriet, if you have the same intuition.”

  This wasn’t coercion, not exactly. Still, if Harriet wasn’t careful, she could wilt under this delicate pressure. She said, “The few times I’ve been around Christopher he’s been fine. Helpful. So he seems all right to me.”

  “Does he?”

  “Yes.”

  From Linda a complicated response: she bowed her head and weighed the answer given to her, and then she pretended—Harriet was sure it was pretense—to reach some private understanding, a revised opinion of Christopher Waterhouse. Her expression brightened. “Well, this is good for me to hear,” she said. “It’s really just a feeling I had. Thank you, Harriet,” she said, her voice cheery but unemphatic, as if they’d just met and were bringing to a close their very first conversation “I’ll see you around,” Linda Rucker said and headed off, in her heavy-footed way, toward the Kindermann Forest camp office.

  But what did Harriet know about other people’s private natures? Their deepest intentions? Her family had once considered her a sound judge of character. (They’d changed this opinion once she’d become pregnant.) But perhaps it was true. It also had to be said—though she would never say such a thing to Linda Rucker—that she was less confident in her appraisal of white people. Easier somehow to recognize a black schemer or narcissist or Good Samaritan than it was to distinguish their white counterparts. With white people the motives were more deeply buried, the disguises less familiar.

  She knew certain things, however. As camp nurse, she sometimes opened the infirmary file cabinet and read the staff health forms for no better reason than the itch of curiosity. And she dispensed medication to the staff. It was a strictly held camp rule that employees of Kindermann Forest turn over all their medications to the nurse. (Far too dangerous to have bottles of pills lying about the cabins for children or state hospital campers to discover.) So the counselors came to Harriet each day for their aspirin and Benadryl and laxatives. Pretty Veronica Yordy used prescription ointment for an odd, yellowing toenail fungus. Marcy Bittman and Carrie Reinkenmeyer and Emily Boehler and Ellen Swinderman arrived each morning for their birth control pills, but so, too, did a member of the Lonesome Three, a deeply shy, spindly, and mournful-faced young woman. Was it a matter of controlling her menstruation, or was this homely young woman hoping for love?

  Wyatt Huddy came to see her after dinner each evening for his stomach medication—a stool softener. He preferred to wait on the steps rather than enter the infirmary. He was invariably shy in her presence, more so, Harriet felt, than with any other staff member at camp. Why should this be? Perhaps it was the fact of her race. But it might also be that he sensed her deep interest in him and backed away as a result.

  As it happened, she knew the name and terms of his disorder without the need to consult his health form. Apert syndrome, a genetic disease in which the bones of the skull fused shut and gave the head and face a distorted appearance. There were other effects as well, though one of them wasn’t, as people expected, a diminished IQ. She knew this not because of nursing school or any research she’d done on genetic disorders, of which th
ere were thousands. She knew because a family in her North Carolina hometown had twin boys—one with Apert syndrome, one without. She’d see them about town and, from a distance, she’d dreamed up a sad life for the Apert syndrome boy.

  Then she came to know both boys. As a high school junior, she was asked to babysit for Taylor and Eddie. Taylor, the afflicted one, had a pointy crown to his head and a sunken, uneven quality to his eyes and nose. But at age three, what did it really matter? His appearance might be striking at first, yet soon enough you saw the beauty and ordinariness of a young boy. Taylor, it turned out, was bright and eager and more outgoing than his twin, Eddie, who tended to stand back and learn from his brother’s successes and failures. The first day Harriet had arrived at their home the boys were out in the backyard trying to shape the scattered remains of a March snow into a convincing snowman. After an hour of play she’d brought them inside, removed their jackets and mittens. Taylor’s hands took her by surprise. The index, middle, and ring fingers were fused together like the three-digit hands of a stuffed animal or cartoon character. She was sentimental about those hands. She liked to cup them in her own hands and feel the contours of those fused fingers. A few months later, when he turned four, a surgeon separated his fused fingers into five better-functioning but decidedly less beautiful digits.

  Now, each evening when she placed pills in Wyatt Huddy’s hands, she saw that he had undergone the same procedure.