by Nick Arvin
She found it uprooted and on its side, its spiral ladder to the sky now a ladder to the west. It looked much like the others, its foliage still thick and green, but in the branches near the crown was a dead boy, his spine folded backward.
When she remembered to breathe again, she gulped rapidly, swallowing air. She could not know from his position whether the boy had been up in the tree or had been caught underneath as it fell. Yet, she felt certain he had climbed to that place in the tree.
A man’s voice called in the distance.
Elizabeth turned so she could not see the boy, and she felt more calm. But when she looked up she felt a dizzy buzzing, and the sky itself appeared to ripple and flow like a river.
The man’s voice called again. “Wilson!”
She began running toward home, stumbling in the wrecked landscape, backtracking the tornado’s route. She came into the house sobbing, and Allison found her and gripped her in a hug. Then Allison was crying, and Elizabeth started to tell her everything, about the fence, the woods, the man, the boy—but Allison shushed her. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “It doesn’t matter.”
Growing up, Elizabeth never felt as comfortable in the house as she felt in the woods. The house seemed to her to have a sepulchral quality, and she could not understand why it didn’t drive Allison outside as well. Their parents were stoics, impassive and unplayful people. Their father, a salesman of solvents and other industrial chemicals, was often away on a selling circuit that took weeks to complete. Their mother was always waiting for him—either to return or to leave again. She spoke only in whispers, washed her hands compulsively, and gave her daughters somewhat less attention than she gave her own interminable despair.
The suburbs eventually oozed out around them—lots across the road were sold, houses were built, families arrived—but the process took many years and in the meantime, with few neighbors and town miles away, Elizabeth and Allison faced broad expanses of lonely, empty time. Elizabeth watched Allison move toward internal, two-dimensional preoccupations—paper, ink, pencils, books—while Elizabeth herself spent more and more time in the woods behind the house—a collection of oaks, beeches, and maples that formed a canopy across more than a hundred acres. Allison was obviously never comfortable in the woods, and it pleased Elizabeth to imagine that her own sensibilities were as alien to her sister as an Apache’s.
The land the trees stood on was not owned by her family, and later she wondered if the thrill of trespass might have formed some of her pleasure in the place. But she also simply loved to be outside with her feet on the mulch and muscle of the earth, surrounded by wind, green life, and the crawl of the sun. She climbed into the tallest of the trees and clambered precariously among the high thin boughs to find a view out, or perched herself in the uppermost possible crook where, within a dappled tent of leaves, she felt so isolated and exalted that she could have passed days at a time without touching the ground if not for the necessity of meals and sleep.
As for the man who owned the woods, Elizabeth watched him from a distance, her curiosity alloyed with apprehension. It was said his family had once been significant in the paper-making industry, that he had inherited an enormous fortune, that he was a widower, that he had a daughter he wouldn’t speak to. Whatever the circumstances of his family and his past, he now seemed content to live in isolation. His house was set deep amid the thickest timber, an old frame house with a newer, aluminum-sided pole barn beside it where he garaged a heavy-duty pickup truck. He was known to be utterly antisocial—anyone who approached to proselytize or peddle goods or even to trick-or-treat was greeted with a shotgun. However, outside every one of his windows he had hung bird feeders. Apparently the finches, sparrows, robins, and jays were companionship enough for him. On a daily schedule he came out and placed pieces of suet into certain feeders, loose seed into others. Into a red plastic hummingbird feeder he put sugar-water, which seemed an act of perpetual faith, or stubbornness, because the hummingbirds never came.
He never sold any of his acreage, developed it, or harvested the trees. He didn’t have any barbed wire or fencing, but he posted many No Hunting signs. Elizabeth stayed quiet and hidden when she was in sight of his house and listened constantly for a footstep that might be his. But she never saw him venture more than a few feet beyond the bird feeders. She thought perhaps he saw his woods as a playground for his birds and, like most adults, had no interest in using the playground himself. She sometimes imagined that she might have an unusual rapport with him; he might be kind but tragically shy; he might secretly know about her use of his woods and be glad she was there.
They were pulling the bags out of Elizabeth’s car when Allison paused to explain about the electrified fence that had been erected in the woods. Gripping a suitcase halfway out of the trunk, Elizabeth stiffened. She set the suitcase down. “These woods?” she asked, pointing. She stood gazing toward the trees.
Later Allison tried to recall, what had been on Elizabeth’s face at that moment? But either memory failed her or, perhaps, Elizabeth’s expression could not be read. She was always so reserved.
Allison had touched her gently on the arm and said, “You can’t see it from here.” Elizabeth shook her head and lifted her bag. They went inside in silence.
Allison had arrived a day before Elizabeth. When she learned of their father’s death she also learned that he had previously arranged for his body to be cremated. Only the silvered urn needed to be picked up, the inheritance dealt with. Their mother had passed on some years earlier, and both parents seemed to have drifted into the next life as quietly as they had lived in this one. Allison was saddened by her father’s death, but not deeply so, and this seemed both tragic and fair to her. The main loss she felt was for the opportunities her parents had ignored, for the tightly bound family they might have created but did not. She had consulted with a lawyer, met some of the new neighbors. They seemed to be kind people, and she wondered how her life might have been different if other families had lived along this road when she was young.
From them she heard about the electric fence that had been erected in the woods. Her parents held the property right along the road while the land behind, bracketed by narrow dirt roads, had always been owned by the old man with the birds. The fence had been an enormous project and it must have been incredibly expensive—expensive enough to prompt several neighbors to offer competing theories about the sources of the old man’s money (family wealth, commodities trading, real estate fraud). The chain links stood nearly ten feet high and wove through the trees around all his land, surely more than two miles of fence.
It was crazy. Why, Allison wondered, had no one protested? Perhaps because he had erected it far enough back in the trees on his own property that it wasn’t an eyesore. Even the signs posted regularly along the fence—large, yellow and black warnings: Danger! High Voltage!—were invisible until you came through the woods right up to the fence. If anyone should have gotten upset it should have been Allison’s father, with his strip of land bordering the fenced area, but apparently he had done nothing.
Allison didn’t know anything about the fence when she first arrived. She had gone straight into the house, which she found mired in a dark, stale, unloved atmosphere. The first thing she did was throw open all the windows. Then she sat a while in the empty house, now bright with sun, and soon began thinking she might enjoy living here again. It had always been to her a place of protection, and she liked that the suburbs had come out around here, that other houses had been built up and down the road. She was glad of the new chances to socialize, happy to see children playing in yards, bicycling in the street. She did not wish to be withdrawn from the world, not in the way she had been when living here as a girl.
She was surprised by how quickly Elizabeth settled her things into her old room, then appeared in her jeans and an old shapeless smock, ready to begin. Allison trailed after her as she took an inventory of the appliances and utensils in the kitchen, the furnitur
e and books in the living room, the power tools in the garage. In the bedroom closet they found their mother’s clothes on hangers and her shoes stacked in boxes. Allison said she wasn’t sure if it was spooky or romantic that their father had never thrown them out. Probably just laziness, Elizabeth said. A couple of decades-old porn magazines were hidden under the mattress. A wedding ring lay at the bottom of a drawer. Elizabeth said, “He wasn’t much of a father.”
Their father always seemed to Allison a sad man, defeated by she knew not what. “He did his best,” she said.
“He never invested himself in us,” Elizabeth said. “I see no reason why I should expend sympathy on him.”
“Elizabeth!” Allison exclaimed. “How can you say that?”
“Well, what reason is there?”
Allison’s thoughts seemed to have lost their order, like sheets of paper subjected to a wind. After a moment she sighed. She said, “He was our father.”
“Happenstance.” Elizabeth was taking dresses from the closet and throwing them, arms and hems aflutter, toward the bed.
“Oh,” Allison said, “Elizabeth, please don’t. Don’t be cruel.”
Elizabeth bent and in a two-armed embrace lifted the loose clothes off the bed and crammed them into a cardboard box. She hefted the box and took it downstairs.
Allison stared after her, then followed.
She found Elizabeth in the kitchen, seated in the chair that had always been their father’s. Allison took Mom’s chair. Beside her sat the box of clothes, exuding odors of mothballs and dust. Elizabeth stared at the window, the green space of the back lawn. Allison watched the urn on the table and tried to make her own gaze as tough and cold as Elizabeth’s, given courage by her anger at Elizabeth’s lack of reaction. But soon she began to doubt herself. Then Elizabeth rose and went outside.
When Allison cast back over all of it—from the moment Elizabeth arrived in the driveway until they stood at the fence with the squirrels overhead playing pranks—seeking some indication as to what had led Elizabeth to walk into the fence, it remained impenetrable, and she could only fret vaguely, worrying in all directions at once. She sometimes thought Elizabeth seemed not so complicated, a simple person hidden inside a careful arrangement of shields. But now, in a moment like this, Elizabeth seemed to be moved inside by currents of a depth and complexity beyond anything she could grasp.
She would have liked very much to have had the kind of sister she could talk to every day on the phone, with whom she could exchange every possible secret, a sister she could know and sympathize with profoundly and intimately—a sister.
Allison carried the silvered urn out to the back lawn while Elizabeth followed slowly behind. She was still marked with crisscrossing red welts like war paint. She had discovered herself reaching unconsciously, again and again, to touch the lines on her face, and now she kept her hands in her pockets. Allison opened the urn and offered it. Elizabeth glanced inside, but shook her head. “You do it,” she said. Allison brought the ashes out in tiny pinches that she tossed overhead, and a gentle wind carried them toward the sumac and the woods.
For the last couple of days Elizabeth had been trying to analyze and understand what she had done. She had awoken flat on the ground, just inches from the fence, and when she regained sense enough to understand what had occurred, it had been a surprise to her. She recalled that she had walked straight into the fence, but she could not remember, or even imagine, why. Despite the welts on her flesh she still couldn’t quite accept the reality of it, as if its presence in her memory might have been due to a particularly cogent, evil dream. Watching the dust thrown by her sister wisp aloft and vanish into the trees, Elizabeth decided she needed to go see the fence again, to try and fathom it—both her actions, which were hazy and improbable, and the physical thing itself.
She got up at the first light of day, well before Allison, and stepped quietly across the dewy lawn, through the brush and into the woods, to the fence. The old path still ran under it and onward, but weeds had begun filling it in. To Elizabeth it was as if her own fingerprints were disappearing. A squirrel several feet away on the opposite side zigzagged across the ground, sniffing and testing things with its teeth. The fence itself was silent, just a thing in her path, and whatever had caused her to step forward before was gone now. She was relieved, but also annoyed; she could not summon any sensible conception of what she had been thinking. The squirrel came to the fence and reached up with a paw. In the past Elizabeth had seen squirrels make some spectacular long-distance leaps from tree to tree; as a girl she had envied their ability to do that. But she had never seen a squirrel jump like this—backward and probably four feet in the air. It hit the ground tumbling tail over head, found its feet, and frantically skittered away.
Then the woods stood quiet again. She had keen memories of the light here, coming down in long shafts filtered by leaves moved by fingers of wind into green-stained, kaleidoscoping patterns. But the foliage seemed thicker now than when she was young, allowing less light to earth, and the birdsongs were not as dense as she recalled.
At the sound of a foot on a dry leaf or a small branch, as if she were a girl again, fearing the bird-man had found her out, she took a step away.
She recognized the approaching figure—his height, thin chest, and broad shoulders: the man she had watched fill bird feeders years before. She was surprised by how he had aged—heavy creases marked his face and he looked about seventy. A boy was at his side, thin and maybe six or seven years old. Holding the boy by the shoulder, the man halted a short distance from the fence. “Hello,” he said.
“Good morning.”
“You’re on my property.”
“I’m sorry.”
The man grunted and switched his grip from the boy’s shoulder to his neck.
“Hello,” Elizabeth said to the boy.
The boy stared. The man tapped the boy’s neck with a finger. “What do you say?”
The boy said, hurriedly, as if the longer he stretched the syllable the more dangerous it would become, “Hi.”
“Hi,” Elizabeth said. She smiled at the boy.
“What are you doing?” the man asked.
“You put up this fence?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“It’s my goddamn land.”
“I’m not going to argue about it. I’m just curious.”
“Everything’s an argument.”
Elizabeth stood watching this man watch her through his electrified fence and wondered if her silence constituted an argument, if this fence did. Certainly the fence did.
He said, “You’re the one that shocked yourself the other day, aren’t you?”
“You saw that?”
Now he was silent.
“Did you see that?”
“I know what happened.”
Elizabeth shifted her feet, setting them more firmly on the path. “You must be glad, then, that I’m okay?”
He nodded. “Sure.”
“What about him?” She looked at the boy. “Aren’t you afraid he’ll run into the fence someday?”
The man chuckled. “My grandson’s not that dumb.”
The boy’s eyes were big and dark as a deer’s. Elizabeth leaned forward, putting her hands on her knees. “You like this fence?”
The man interrupted. “You be careful. Leave the boy alone. I’ve got video cameras up in these trees, recording all this.”
“You do not.” Elizabeth scanned the foliage. She didn’t see a camera, but there were a couple of squirrel nests high in the trees that might have concealed something that size.
“What I want to know,” the man said, “is why you’re messing with my fence. You going to do it again? You shouldn’t even be where you are now; that’s my land too. I got to push the fence all the way out to the property line?”
“I’m not going to do it again.”
“Well. I’m glad to hear that.”
“I don’t know why I did
it.”
“One might guess either stupidity or craziness.”
The boy crouched, picked up a stick, and scratched in the dirt. Elizabeth said, “I’d be worried about your grandson.”
The man snorted, hocked, spit. The saliva crackled on the fence like water on a frying pan. “He’s exactly what I’m worried about. There are crazy people everywhere out there.”
“That’s absurd. It’s cruel to shut a child in.” She said to the boy, “You get to play with other boys and girls?”
The boy dropped his stick. “I’m home schooling. It’s better.”
The man added, “You’ve seen what’s going on out there. I’m supposed to send him into a war zone? I’ll teach him everything he needs to know.”
“There’s a great tree to climb, just over there,” Elizabeth said. She pointed. “A huge tree, perfect for climbing. You can see everything from there. Miles and miles.”
“You know these woods?” the man demanded.
She had not been to the climbing tree in a long time, and she wondered if it was still there, still climbable. She didn’t know these woods anymore. The trails were vanishing; the fence created an irreconcilable disjunction. She thought she understood what had impelled her to press herself against the fence: it hadn’t been an impulse to suicide or a strange masochism but the fence itself, its existence, how it cut her off from the woods, from her own past, which left her clawing inside with anger, and she felt that anger starting to scratch in her again. She said, “No, I’ve never seen this place before in my life.” Turning away, she saw the boy watch her with an expression of utter concentration.
“She’s a liar,” Wilson’s grandfather said. Wilson looked up at him. His grandfather strode along, scanning the shadows and the branches to either side and over the path. “I remember her, when she was a little girl, slinking around here like she had something to hide.”
