We Went to the Woods

by Caite Dolan-Leach

  “Indeed. But isn’t that just so much poppycock that we’re fed? Like”—she paused and tried, unsuccessfully, to line her words up with Frankie:—“ ‘If you successfully conform to our values of teleological progress by getting a paid job at a huge corporation, you’ll make it anywhere!’ ” She shrugged. “And then we’re taught to feel shame, to self-enforce this notion of success and internalize it when it doesn’t work out. Which, of course, it can’t, because there are too many college graduates overqualified for the remaining handful of desirable jobs.”

  “Well, we all hope we’re the special ones.”

  “And then we get labeled ‘the entitlement generation’! Like, yeah, I worked my ass off through my adolescence to ace the SATs so I could go a hundred grand into debt at an elite institution that I was told from birth was my destiny, and now am I maybe entitled to an entry-level position at the same global corporation that will ensure I have no breathable air by 2050? And maybe healthcare? Pretty please?”

  “Well, I’m the idiot who bought into it. I let my parents project their fantasies onto me without ever considering if that was good for the world. Or even what I wanted,” I said, crouching down to seize what looked like a morel but turned out to be a ball of dirt.

  “It wasn’t just you.”

  “And I think my parents are ashamed to tell people what I’m doing now. As though trying to learn how to feed myself is somehow beneath me. Beneath them.”

  “It’s fucking ridiculous,” she concurred.

  “At least your parents—or your dad, at any rate, believes in what you’re doing,” I said. I felt I had to point out that she was impossibly privileged to be handed not just a free pass on the generational-expectations front but also the land on which to give her version of the future a whirl.

  “Ha,” she snorted. “Of course he supports me. He would support literally anything I tried, even becoming a Republican. He’s symptomatic of the bizarre American parent who believes that their child really is flawless.”

  “Could be worse,” I pointed out.

  “Maybe. But now we have a generation of kids who don’t especially want to go work in the salt mines because Mommy and Daddy said they were unique and they could be whatever they wanted. Explains why so many of us are just genuinely bummed over what paths we have open for us. Not exactly the ballerina/astronaut future we were told was within our grasp as wee tykes.”

  “I didn’t even think I was being particularly ambitious.” I paused. “What about your mom?” Louisa rarely mentioned her.

  “Oh, she’s desperately committed to the rat race,” she said. “An eighties feminist who thought the only way she could beat the patriarchy was by joining it. She’s a partner at a law firm in the city. A cold, brilliant, driven woman.” She smirked bitterly. “I think she was relieved when Dad wanted to keep me. Her protestations were feeble.”

  “Well, your dad is pretty great.”

  “Maybe Beau is the lucky one,” she said halfheartedly, though it seemed immediately as though she wanted to take it back.

  “How, um, how did they die?”

  “Overdose.”

  “Jesus, both of them?”

  “Well, his dad might actually still be alive somewhere, but he’s probably dead. He was a drug addict, and Cindy threw him out when Beau was still real little. She OD’d when he was fourteen.” She shrugged, familiar with this tragedy. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t known. Had it been intentional? “Supposedly just an accident,” Louisa said, sensing my morbid curiosity. “Beau found her. I feel the whole experience explains his strong self-destructive streak, though.”

  “Jesus.” I inhaled the sharp foresty smells and felt briefly grateful for my own timid parents. They disapproved of me, sure, and made me feel profoundly incompetent, but the idea of my tiny mother doing something so damaging was more or less unthinkable. “And you and Beau? Were you guys, uh, together then?”

  “I think Beau and I have never really been together,” Louisa said lightly, and strode ahead with a tug of her chin, clearly intending to leave me behind.

  * * *

  On a cool morning, Jack, Beau, and I rose early to clear some brush from the far end of the orchard. We were hoping to plant some young apple trees, though the commitment to the future that this investment implied made me, at least, a little twitchy; would we be here in five, ten years to see them fruit? Like all mornings when I knew I would spend time with Beau, I changed into multiple outfits, gazing down at myself with dissatisfaction. I pinned back my straight, thin hair, which had been cut into a rather impractical length—a straggly bob, making it impossible to properly put up out of the way—and finally settled on a pair of jeans that at least partially concealed the straight angle of my hips and my complete lack of anything approaching luscious curves. Jack finally interrupted my dithering by knocking on my cabin door, offering a thermos of coffee and a chatty recitation of his dreams from the night before. Beau fell in beside us as we loped off towards the undertended fruit trees, silent and thoughtful. We startled a clutch of rabbits from their hiding place in the brush, and they scattered into a frantic fan, scampering off in terror.

  “The bravery of minks and muskrats. And rabbits,” I said, and Jack and Beau smiled at me appreciatively.

  The weeds we were planning to eradicate were tall and dense, even at this time of year, and we all had thick gloves to protect our hands from the bite and itch of the foliage. Though I was slight and not nearly as strong as the boys, I liked these days with a hoe in my hand more than the slushy, inclement hours spent scrubbing pots or sorting through seeds inside. For the first time, my sticklike arms had a swell of muscle, and my abs were solid, compact. I liked the sweat, the bruise of color that rose up on my skin from the cold air and the exertion. I liked to watch Beau swing mechanically through his steady strokes, sometimes tying a bandanna around his forehead to keep the sweat from dripping into his eyes. Maybe most of all, I liked seeing our progress, how I started at the beginning of the day with a huge heap of unchopped wood or untilled earth and forced my body to defeat it with incremental trials and defiances.

  We attacked the brown foliage, a thicket of tall grass, hops, and old vines. Within minutes, I was pink and damp; we all looked at each other, acknowledging that this would be a long day. I paused every ninety seconds or so to readjust my gloves and take a deep breath. After an hour, I was worried that my arms wouldn’t be able to lift the hoe much longer, and I resorted to tugging determinedly on the vines, ripping them loose, and hurling them over my head, into a pile we would later burn. Burdock caught at my clothes, leaving itchy little hangers-on that I would have to tear from the fabric that evening, burr by infuriating burr. I let some of my rage—at my debt, my decisions, myself—do the work. At some point I noticed Beau watching me, and risked a glance at him: his mouth was curled in a smile, one eyebrow slightly raised.

  “You look very determined there, Mack,” he said, and I blushed.

  “No point dragging it out,” I mumbled self-consciously.

  “You’re that desperate to finish and leave us?” Beau asked, maintaining eye contact. I shook my head.

  “Shit, guys, look at this,” Jack said, bending from his long waist to poke at some rotted wood and what looked like old roofing tiles. Using our hoes, we nudged some of the moldy timber aside, and Beau and Jack tore back the vines to reveal a small collapsed structure.

  “Do you think it was another cabin?” I asked.

  “It seems smaller than our cabins,” Jack mused. “Could be a storage shed or something. Obviously hasn’t been used in a while.”

  “I’d guess outhouse,” Beau suggested. “Maybe we shouldn’t disturb it,” he added with a smile. But Jack was already flinging aside boards and planks with his gangly force, achieving results with fervor rather than precision. A broken chair soon came into view, along with a bucket and a container fille
d with some badly rusted nails. The next layer produced an axe head, an old saw, and a large shard of glass. As we shifted a window frame, trying to avoid jagged nails and splinters, we all glimpsed something menacing made of steel. In surprise, I almost dropped the crumbling wood I held.

  “Jesus, is that what I think it is?” Jack asked. Beau stooped to investigate, then held up a steel animal trap that was rusted but fully intact. Its fiercely toothsome jaws were fused together, and a crawling sensation raised goosebumps on my forearm as I imagined feet or fingers clamped within. What creatures had died caught in this industrial maw?

  “Spooky,” Jack said succinctly. Beau tossed it to the side, into a grassy clearing. I instinctively gave it a wide berth, even though the trigger had long since been tripped.

  “There’s a box here,” Beau said, shoving at the debris. “Help me drag it free.” He and Jack pulled at the metal container, pinned beneath some of the collapsed roof. I felt strangely anxious. My fretful mother had raised me to be unadventurous, to let things be, and confronted with this unopened box, my urge was to leave it, to walk away from this doomed storage shed and clear some more space on the other side of the orchard instead. Beau and Jack had no such concern. They immediately sprang open the lid on the chest, revealing a stack of yellowing pages, bound in leather and still beautifully emblazoned on their covers.

  “Oh, you must be joking!” cooed Jack, lifting out a volume of Plato’s Republic. “This is too perfect.” The books were in remarkably good condition; maybe the box had been airtight, or the roof had protected it from the elements? They looked old.

  “Where did these come from?” I asked, still hanging back slightly.

  “We’ll have to go home and ask Louisa. There have been some other folks who’ve lived out here on this land,” Beau explained. “Rudy told her about some of them—she’ll know.”

  “Should we bring all of these back now?” Jack seemed eager, his curious, insatiable mind already moving away from brush clearing to the pleasure of pawing through a stack of decomposing books.

  “Let’s try to wrap up here first,” Beau said. “We can bring them home when we stop for lunch.”

  * * *

  Around the lunch table, Louisa lifted out copies of Walden, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and, to her extreme delight, Transcendental Wild Oats. Upon the discovery of this last text, she let out a girlish shriek of glee and began excitedly to flip through the pages, which threatened to disintegrate in her hands.

  “This is amazing! These must have belonged to that guy who started a utopian commune before the turn of the century. My dad did a whole bunch of research on them when he spent the summer out here. The whole group sounded mad as a bag of cats, but he said they made a go of it, and probably started the orchard. I guess their leader wrote a few semi-religious tracts. There’s an archive of his shit at Syracuse University, I think.”

  “I remember your dad mentioned something. What happened to them?” Chloe asked.

  “I forget. I think eventually they got bored and merged with a bigger commune, closer to Canada. Or died? I’ll ask him if he remembers.”

  We finished lunch with Louisa reading Dickinson poems at random, until Beau beseeched her to knock it off. She did, though she looked hurt. A sprinkle of rain threatened the books, and we bustled inside, bringing the remains of lunch with us.

  “Oh, nearly forgot,” Beau said to Louisa, ignoring her sulk. “I have a present for you.” He ducked outside and came back in, damply, with the steel trap. Chloe recoiled, but Louisa cooed excitedly, forgetting her hurt feelings.

  “What on earth?” She reached out her hands to accept Beau’s creepy offering, and she fondled it thoughtfully. “This is amazing. Do you know what I think this is? I think it’s an Oneida fur trap. A Newhouse.”

  “From the Oneida Community?” Beau asked.

  “The very same,” Louisa confirmed. “This is how they made their first fortune.”

  “Who’s this now?” Jack asked, inspecting the trap more closely.

  “They were a utopian community not too far from here. Dad thinks our utopians started off there, sometime in the mid- or late nineteenth century. They were basically communists, though they adopted some other more unorthodox practices. Like a version of polygamy.” Beau’s eyebrows quirked up, and he coughed. “Anyway, they’re fascinating because even though they were utopian communists, they built their entire community on this really cruel, industrial product. Fur traps.”

  “That’s fucking terrible,” Chloe, our confirmed vegetarian, said.

  “It was, rather. They later transitioned to silverware, but it all started with these things. It turned into this really successful capitalist enterprise.”

  “The irony,” said Beau.

  “This must be a hundred and fifty years old, at least. It’s amazing.”

  “Louisa, it’s fucking awful! We should bury it or something,” Chloe said.

  “Nope. I love it. I think it’s also an important reminder,” Louisa countered. “I think we should keep it as a way to remember that trying to live the good life can be fucking complicated.” She moved over to one of the kitchen walls, where a nail protruded from the old wood. She dangled the fur trap from the nail, right by the stove. “There. Perfect.”

  “Et in Arcadia ego,” Beau said. Louisa grinned at him.

  “Exactly.”

  As we finished and cleared our plates, I offered to tidy up, explaining that my arms were wretchedly sore after our archaeological mission of the morning. Chloe and Louisa were going to take over clearing, and Beau and Jack planned to start erecting the chicken coop. We’d just acquired some coop fencing, and we wanted to get a few hens soon.

  Alone in the big cabin, I scraped food into our compost bin and put dishes into the buckets I would use to wash them outside. I wiped down all the surfaces of the kitchen and swept. Only Chloe and I seemed particularly concerned about cleanliness, and I viewed my days on kitchen duty as an opportunity to combat the entropy permitted by our three other comrades. I was also feeling lazy and not particularly excited to retrieve my hoe—I had a blossoming blister at the base of my thumb—and was experiencing post-meal grogginess. I boiled some water for nettle tea, which I would deliver to everyone after it steeped, and rummaged deeper into the chest of books. Our new library. I took each book out and spread them all on the table, admiring their antique type and the almost miraculous quality of the pages; they were yellow and delicate and the bindings were separating, but they could still be read, albeit gently. The box must have been airtight, or at least mostly immune to the weather.

  The last thing I pulled from the chest wasn’t a traditionally published book. It had an unembellished leather cover, and the lettering on the inside read, “Mr. William Fulsome.” The pages in this manuscript were in slightly better shape than the other books, in spite of the leather binding, fastened with two leather thongs. The pages were lined with minute handwritten script that had faded to brown against the yellowed pages. I understood, not even considering it, that I would keep this book a secret. Another.

  From the diary of William Fulsome

  Early Spring:

  Our flight from Oneida was a hurried affair, conducted under cover of darkness, and with a strong sense of sin and guilt. Sulfur and brimstone in our nostrils as we fled. In truth, I feel we are in fact leaving behind the sinful, those who have extended the practice of complex marriage beyond its original purview. Could Monogamy and One True Marriage be closer to true Spiritual Honesty? I feel that I may breathe easier, and finally speak my mind now that we have left, to begin again. To, once more, attempt Perfection.

  If Mutual Criticism remains essential to our journey and Spiritual Health, then I must in good conscience criticize myself as much as my peers, and I have found myself lacking. Not only do I question the premise of Complex Marriage, but so, too, the manner in which o
ur young people are initiated into it. What happened to that young girl…May all men of Virtue and Spirituality be called upon to confront their own conscience, and to act in accordance with its needs and instruction!

  Even simply to call Elizabeth my wife seems luxurious and foreign, after so many long months of hiding our attachment. We have feigned mutual indifference to satisfy the elders’ distaste for exclusive relations, but I have felt this burdensome subterfuge increasingly unnecessary. Complex Marriage being one of the foundational sentiments and beliefs of our old community, I recognize how our exclusive attachment (redolent, perhaps, of more traditional monogamous couplings) could threaten the elders’ programme of Community Building. In that community, how closely did we observe the openings and closings of doors! Each bedroom opened into the common room, where all passed their time talking and sewing. In this manner, no exclusive attachment could be unobserved. However, I am still not entirely certain that my love for Elizabeth is incompatible with the overall aims and ambitions of that glorious Project. Indeed, we have been engaged in nightly Communication these past three years, often unobserved, ever since Elizabeth was herself deemed ready to join the Community at the age of fifteen. My virtuous Elizabeth! May I deserve her.

  With trepidation we set out on our own, joined by a few friends in our attempt to achieve our own Self-Reliance. This plot of land, unworked and untended as it is, is a welcome gift and an unlooked-for bounty—today, I awakened to the frost-tipped grass with such an overflowing of Gratitude that I was unable to speak for moments. In just a few short days, we have rehabilitated the modest living structures in which we will dwell, and cleared a field of rocks. The physical labor has hardened my hands but opened my heart, and I have not felt my conscience so lightened in what seem to me years. I listen to Elizabeth smooring the fire, and to the sounds of squirrels up on our newly thatched roof and I feel at peace, with myself, my God, and my home.