We Went to the Woods

by Caite Dolan-Leach

  “Just—just try not to let it get out of hand this time, Mackenzie? Have better judgment?” I rolled my eyes, but nodded. Surely my judgment could hardly be worse?

  I waved from the truck and backed out of the drive, fleeing the manicured lawn and the grim town of Lansing, gunning for South Hill as fast as my little Ford could go.

  Chloe lived pretty high up on Hudson Street, within walking distance of campus, and I had a hard time finding parking. Her house was essentially a tenement, a collapsing building filled to the brim with artsy Ithaca College students who had nearly enough money to pay their exorbitant tuition but not quite enough to live in a legally zoned building with more than one bathroom. As depressing as I found living at home, Chloe’s grim building was worse. I located her upstairs in her dark, boxy room, dithering. An hour later, after much hemming and hawing and unpacking and repacking, we were wrestling her suitcase into the bed of my truck. Then we were driving out of town, headed to the Homestead, stomachs aflutter with excitement and panic. We drove silently, taking the back roads up the hill and climbing into the country.

  The other three were there when we arrived, scrubbing out the stuffy cabins, which had stood uninhabited for decades. It was a chilly day, and I prayed desperately that it wouldn’t snow. We’d begged some cured wood from a neighbor, enough to keep us from freezing for a couple of weeks of less-than-balmy temperatures, but we would need to hoard our fuel in case spring came late.

  Having agreed on who would take which cabins ahead of time, our task today was to make our little huts habitable before launching into the daunting farm work. Louisa was the first one we saw, standing in front of her dwelling with a kerchief tied over her curls, wearing a turtleneck and worker’s gloves and staring in consternation at the cabin’s grubby floor. She came skipping over to us as we pulled up. The ground was soggy and treacherous.

  “Oh, we’re all here! Goody. The cabins are appalling. Come!” She led us to a ragged shed that was untidily crammed with various tools. A glance at a serious hatchet and a jagged, rusty hoe gave me a spooked pause. They looked like props from a horror film. “Brooms, mop.” She pointed. “I borrowed a bucket and some cleaning supplies from my dad, just until this place is habitable.” By agreement, we’d decided not to buy anything yet, so this seemed like a necessary workaround. The windows were filthy and needed Windex, even if said product was produced by an evil multinational. Another concession in a lifetime of them. The five mattresses that sat wrapped in plastic on a tarp were an indispensable gift from Rudy, along with the cleaning supplies, delivered earlier.

  I remember that first day in stark detail; many of the others stretch out in identical visions, endless sessions of digging in the dirt and collapsing, legless with fatigue, into a hammock. That first day, though, I had yet to spend a night in my own little cabin, which felt at first so blessedly private and cozily flanked by friends, before I began to lie awake, unable to close my eyes, feeling alone and isolated and listening for sounds outside—clues to what was happening nearby. That day, everything was imagined and imaginable, and I fantasized about folding myself up into a fluffy bed, possibly with someone else, waking with the sunrise to harvest beans. The bare walls and floor of the cabin could be host to infinite scenes, moments of intensity and perfection that would justify this decision I was making. Had made. I tackled cobwebs and scrubbed corners and polished the magnificent old wood of my floor in a happy daydream.

  After a few hours of cleaning, we helped each other schlep the strangely dense mattresses into each cabin in pairs. Beau easily lifted a corner, I less easily lifted another, and we stumbled into his cabin and hoisted the mattress up onto the boards of the mezzanine, then did the same in my own. Our eyes met as the palliasse slipped into place, and I couldn’t look away.

  Reader, I wanted him. I knew it in a second of perfect clarity: Oh, this is lust. Maybe I should have left right then, taken the keys to my Ford and headed home to Lansing to lick my wounds. I knew that Beau didn’t want me, that I probably didn’t have the stomach to compete with Louisa. But I wasn’t capable of leaving. Standing there, gazing at Beau’s coy smile, quirked almost knowingly, I was transfixed. I would stay on the Homestead until it was finished. Whatever “it” was.

  Chapter 6

  With the equinox a scant fortnight behind us when we’d arrived, the sun was setting later each evening, and as early twilight crept across bare fields, we hastened to stoke our meager fires, batten down the windows, and think about tucking ourselves in for the night. I made my bed with sheets that still smelled like my home (a sudden flash of the basement, of my mother clearing the lint trap), fluffed my down comforter, and engaged the stove. I made sure my door was shut tight and bounced to the big cabin for our evening meal.

  Recognizing that we couldn’t avoid eating and hadn’t yet grown much, we had procured some start-up materials from local farms and producers, most of whom Beau and Louisa knew personally. It is difficult to begin without borrowing. Our pantry was stocked with a huge bag of local flour, cornmeal, and oats. We would buy eggs from a neighbor until we got the chickens laying (which would occur, presumably, at some point after we acquired the chickens). A few bricks of hard cheese lurked on a shelf, a precious commodity. Louisa had a stash of sweet potatoes from last year, when she had halfheartedly planted a few semi-successful winter crops. Chloe had brought some chutneys and sauces she had received as a gift from a local CSA. People loved giving things to Chloe, though she didn’t seem to realize this was out of the ordinary. She loved gifting as well. We five trooped out to the pantry to see what we could make for dinner, and to stare covetously at our goods.

  “When I was little, I liked to play this game,” Chloe explained. “Basically, all my stuffed animals and doll-things would provision themselves for the winter. What I liked was making lists and being certain of a season of bounty.”

  “Born to live off the land,” Jack said, with a charmed smile. We continued to contemplate the shelves of our pantry, which looked pretty good, considering that we hadn’t dirtied a fingernail yet.

  “Sweet potato frittata?” Chloe suggested.

  “We’ll use up all our eggs and not have any for the rest of the week,” Louisa said dismissively. “What about pasta?” she countered. We deferred, naturally. She was a tyrant in the kitchen, and it seemed wise to let her plan the menu.

  Alcohol was a concern. We all liked to drink, though in different degrees of depth and frequency. Beau was in the process of constructing a basic still and concocting some type of grain alcohol, but it wouldn’t be ready for a while yet. Jack was going to make beer and mead. Our temporary solution was barter with a local winemaker named Bartoletti, a friend of Rudy Stein’s and an occasionally whimsical fellow. He thought our little project was “downright admirable” and had a lot of sympathy for our thirst. We’d offered a share of veggies delivered weekly to his house once the season was in full swing, and he’d advanced us five whole cases of wine that had gone unlabeled during bottling last year and were subsequently unsalable. We had no idea what we’d be drinking, but it seemed like an excellent deal to us. We were also hoping to arrange similar trades once we had something more to offer.

  Our first evening, we uncorked some reddish wine while Louisa rolled out pasta using another bottle. Beau went outside to the now-working pump and filled a pot with water, which he set up to boil on top of the woodstove, then went back to bring in a jug of drinking water. It was slightly sulfurous and a little earthy-tasting, but it was cold and came straight from the ground. We later splurged on a filter, which helped with the taste; I kept hoping I would grow to love it but never did. We giggled and sipped wine out of Ball jars, and after dinner dispersed to our cabins with full bellies. My cabin was blazingly warm, and I tugged on my long underwear with languorous happiness, wondering what everyone was doing in their own little rooms. I snuggled into my mattress and fell asleep to the sound of coyotes calli
ng to one another nearby, a tight-knit little pack that hung together even in the late-winter night.

  * * *

  I had assumed that Louisa and Beau were a couple because of their intense, evident intimacy, and probably because of Beau’s habit of fondly leaning over and biting her on the nape of the neck in a possessive chomp that just about broke my heart each time.

  We were loafing aimlessly in the big cabin the first evening I saw him do it to Chloe. Seated on the floor, on an old rug of Louisa’s, we were playing some foolish game. Pictionary perhaps, or charades? Duck, duck, goose? Discussing, in any case, the provenance of some of our seeds.

  “Did you know Monsanto controls, like, ninety-eight percent of the food that’s grown commercially in the U.S.?” Jack was looking slightly pink with rage. He had a tendency to repeat his arguments, in an attempt to perfect them; we’d heard this complaint before, and knew that he would segue into a rant about subsidized corn farming.

  “Preaching to the choir, Jacky boy,” Beau said, leaning casually back on his elbows. His long body stretched out catlike, all in black. He was seated between Jack and Chloe. Chloe leaned her head against his shoulder, the motion so confidently physical, like all her gestures.

  “Yeah, but even we’re not immune from ingesting all that shit. You can’t just order up seeds from a catalog, because they’re most likely Monsanto. That company is evil.” Jack was getting all fidgety, as he did when he had an ideological bone to pick, his sandy hair sticking up. Pretty soon he would accidentally knock something over.

  “Let’s destroy the fuckers!” Chloe said, pumping her fist in the air and wrinkling her nose.

  “You,” Beau said very simply, and leaned down to bite her neck in his playful, rather erotic way. I froze, completely unsure of what was happening. I looked at Louisa, expecting her to erupt, but she was suddenly studying her drink, as was Jack. My eyes widened as Chloe nuzzled a little closer, twisting sinuously. It wasn’t a kiss, but there was something distinctly sexual in the arch of her back, the curl of his neck, and I realized I had misunderstood Chloe and Beau quite drastically.

  “Well, someone really should do something about those criminals,” Jack said, awkwardly trying to fill the silence. There was a long pause before Beau answered.

  “Maybe somebody will.”

  * * *

  It should be noted that I knew next to nothing about farming. I grew up in a rural community, true, but the largest industry in our part of town was probably the coal-fired power plant that sat belching smoke on the eastern shore of Cayuga Lake. My parents cultivated an obnoxiously green lawn, which my father managed with manic intensity, perching on his riding mower with a cheap beer clenched in his fist at least three times a week. My mom grew geraniums. We purchased corn on the cob from roadside stands in the late summer and sometimes bought tomatoes from the Amish. My knowledge of a potato involved only the final product, none of its interim stages or states of being. I was a total rube, swept along by enthusiasm and desire. My misadventures in Brooklyn had been informative about making kombucha and bathtub mozzarella, but I had no idea how to milk a cow, and fermented tea wasn’t our first priority.

  Louisa and Beau were cagey about the work they’d done around the Homestead during the last year, for reasons that eventually became transparent; we were all meant to feel equally crucial to the success of this little enterprise, and it was supposed to have germinated only once we were all assembled. The two of them concealed the fact that they’d been thinking of doing this for a long time—partly, I surmised, so that we wouldn’t feel like we were just laboring bodies put to work on their land, like hungry sharecroppers, tugging at the coattails of their vision. The preservation of this illusion was manipulative and self-serving, sure, but I also think they genuinely wanted us to feel at home, invested and indispensable. They couldn’t do it without us, and they knew it. We’d learn about the year before eventually, but the work those two had done before our arrival seemed at the time just like good forethought.

  Louisa had waged a bloody crusade against the burdock that plagued our vegetable garden, digging up the tenacious weeds with a fervor that bordered on manic; her eyes glowed with a fury as she buried her pitchfork deep into the earth, uprooting viney underground filaments that were sometimes as thick as her forearm. This campaign would continue into the spring, and the sight of the gritty fronds of a nascent burdock continued to provoke fits of disbelieving rage in her—each leaf that doggedly popped up sent Louisa flying out to the vegetable patch to tug it out. She took it personally. Jack wanted to try eating it, but Louisa forbade it, having taken an almost religious umbrage at the crop.

  Only Jack knew enough about farming to understand that some previous prescient groundwork had been accomplished; Chloe and I accepted the early arrival of ramps and scallions just a month after our arrival as naturally occurring. We threw ourselves into tilling deep furrows into the garden, putting in seed potatoes, along with carrots and beans. Jack was in charge of irrigation, and managed a network of trenches and raised beds that still remains opaque to me.

  We spent days repairing the sheds and patching up the cabins; Chloe had volunteered with Habitat for Humanity and had some basic knowledge of woodworking and tools. Beau spent long, solitary afternoons out in the woods locating deadfall and breaking it into more manageable chunks, which we would later take turns splitting. As the owner of our one road-worthy vehicle, I was the unofficial admiral of our small flotilla; I presided over an antique tractor, two bicycles, and my own rusting truck. Towards the end of the afternoon I would head through the woods on the wheezy tractor, making painstaking headway to where Beau waited, sweaty and with blistered palms, and we would fling dismembered trees onto the ratty hay wagon while I tried not to make a fool of myself.

  Soon, things were tentatively, bravely budding, and we prayed that the frost would stay away. The remnants of an informal orchard still stood in one of the clearings, and we hoped the trees might eventually fruit. On one warmish day when the buds were beginning to look blowsy, Louisa led us beneath the trees for a picnic and read aloud, with Chloe, some of the more hilarious segments of Emerson’s Essays. The sunlight and smells of incipient summer drove us bonkers after the gray of the previous season, the accumulated gray of a lifetime of these upstate winters.

  Beau turned his face skyward, adopting a moony expression.

  “What are you doing?” Louisa asked, flopping onto his belly and propping her elbows on his rib cage, abandoning the book. This posture didn’t look comfortable for either of them, but Beau neither complained nor shifted to dislodge her.

  “Contemplating nature with my transparent eyeball,” he said, with such sincerity that I couldn’t help a snort. He really meant it.

  “Indeed,” Louisa said, rolling her own eyeballs.

  “I think I’ll stick with Thoreau,” Jack announced. “He’s much less self-serious. And less, I don’t know, spiritual. He’s a practical fellow, our Henry David.”

  “Agreed,” Beau said. “He worries about how many nails you need, not whether divinity is present in each of them.”

  “Well, divinity is present in these nails,” Chloe said, grabbing one finger each from Jack and Beau and kissing the tips. Both were somewhat grubby, but she seemed not to mind. She lay between them, all three on their backs. I sat at everyone’s heads, a heap of wildflowers in my lap. “That’s the kind of mysticism I’m interested in,” she clarified. “What keeps each of your souls alive, and what connects all of ours.”

  “Well, isn’t that obvious?” Beau said slowly. “We’re connected by desire.” I raised one eyebrow. This was very direct, for Beau, and I was curious where he was headed. “We desire a different world, a better life for ourselves. To discover something real, beautiful.”

  “We want to learn how to live,” Jack corrected. “We believe we’ve maybe found an answer. At least, we’re trying it out.”


  “Together,” Chloe added. “We’re trying together. That’s what keeps us here. This is something we have to do, all of us.”

  “I dunno, kids. Seems a little hi-falootin’ to me,” Louisa said, adopting her faux country accent. “I’m just here for the tomatoes.”

  “Lou, don’t be that way,” Chloe chastised, extending her leg across Beau’s shins to poke Louisa with her bare big toe. “You always want to avoid anything about what we feel, anything that alludes to the existence of feelings. Desire is part of this.” She waved around us, indicating the entire homestead.

  “Maybe I just don’t feel like talking about it as some sort of group problem,” Louisa said, sitting up. “My feelings are my own, and I don’t always want to discuss them, Chloe.” Though Louisa directed this comment at her, she didn’t meet Chloe’s eyes. I felt like there was a subtextual conversation taking place, perhaps one they’d had more than once.

  Beau tilted his head back to look at me, his familiar features inverted. His grin looked odd upside down. “Mack, you’re the most sensible person here.” I blushed, as I did whenever he paid me a compliment. “What do you think? Of our collective endeavor?” he asked.

  I paused, though I’d already been formulating what to say, if asked. “I think we all have our own motivations. And they don’t need to perfectly align. So much of what goes wrong in other communal-living scenarios is an attempt to force everyone to feel the same way, to, I don’t know, worship the same thing. Maybe Jack cares most about the environment, and Louisa cares most about anti-capitalism. And, Beau, you share those opinions, but what you want is the good life. None of that conflicts, so why should you try for absolute agreement? We can all have what we want.”