We Went to the Woods

by Caite Dolan-Leach

  Spring:

  Just a few short weeks have so transformed our home (and, indeed, our very souls!) that I scarce know where to begin in my chronicle. But such a project as this needs the steady hand of a true and honest scribe, and it has been my intent to faithfully record our Experiment, so as to avoid and prevent the tragedies and failures that besmirched our previous attempts. I am determined that the pernicious, immoral blight which befell my uncle’s community shall not touch us here, and to ensure our authentic and open discourse, I shall endeavor not to dismiss or conceal my failings out of Vanity. Rather, I shall write them down, for my wife, Elizabeth, and for any who come after us to read and reflect upon my imperfections.

  The planting and tilling is most back-breaking work, and our dwellings are rudimentary. We will have to work doggedly to prepare ourselves for the long cold of winter, but I have faith in our determination and ability. Daily, my wife astonishes me in her Strength and Capability. Truly, she is a helpmeet sent to me by our Lord, to help us achieve our more perfect Society.

  Brother Jeremiah’s wife, Annabelle, is, like Elizabeth, a mother of two small children, and they find themselves in such similar circumstances that I wonder at my wife’s reticence. Her avoidance of young Mary is perhaps more understandable, though no less unlucky; Mary’s refusal to speak since she joined us in our departure from Oneida has been a source of great concern and some consternation. I realize that her childhood within the Community was not easy, and that she found herself most disastrously paired with Elijah, who has since been excommunicated for his regular failure to adhere to our practice of Male Continence. Truly, she should never have been encouraged in that Communication, and I fear I will never forgive my uncle for his part in making that decision. I cannot help but feel, however, that once removed from that harmful union, Mary might find her way once again to Language and Friendship, and perhaps even to Trust. I speak with her daily, and encourage her to speak and share with me whatever has so destroyed her Faith in men. She now looks at me with the Fear and Unease she held for Elijah, and as I try to soothe her, she further withdraws.

  I will ask Elizabeth to speak more to Mary, and will encourage both Jeremiah and Annabelle to reassure her. But how I would love to hear her voice, emitted from that sweet, bow-lipped mouth!

  Late Spring:

  My most recent trip to town for provisions turned unpleasant. We are here in the North, surrounded entirely by those who supported Abolition, and I was consequently shocked to overhear three gentlemen in a public house detail their support for the most horrific practice of Slavery in these United States! These reprehensible Snowflakes held forth for some time, girding their unconscionable Opinion with a most dubious appeal to Science.

  I gathered my courage to confront them. Though, unlike my uncle, I am no orator, I have been well educated. These callous interlocutors had no interest in reasoned conversation, however, and immediately launched ad hominem attacks, casting aspersions on my own Character, and that of my Family! The local opinion of our former fellows in Oneida seems to be as it was in Hamilton: that we are godless men who have profaned Christ. I was called a Bigamist and many worse things. One man even accused me of being a follower of Joseph Smith, who, I understand, lived in this area some decades ago. I am reluctant to defend the practices of my former brethren, but it wounded me to hear them slandered so, by such ignorant creatures.

  This encounter has left me to doubt, and to wonder: What is the good of our Project if we cannot alter the Evils of the outside world? Is it enough to find and create our own Utopia when Society itself remains so profoundly unjust? How dare we dream of Perfection from the safety of our quiet homestead, safe in the luxury of knowing ourselves able to withdraw and support ourselves with other means? My old companion Henry David confronted these anxieties, refusing to pay his taxes while that money would go to a government that enforced Slavery…but does this not seem too small a gesture, too timid a response to the horror of that institution?

  But then, how can one small group of committed individuals hope to alter a whole Society bent on Injustice?

  Chapter 9

  “Where’s Beau?” Louisa asked testily. We had deposited a fresh batch of early spring greens on the table, gleaned from another farm in exchange for some eggs; the chickens had arrived a few weeks earlier, and two had begun to lay already. We wanted to raise chicks, but we had gotten conflicting answers on when we could begin the project. We had a rooster, in any case, who had been terrorizing us, as roosters do, whenever we had to go into the fully enclosed chicken yard, or when, invariably, he escaped.

  Deferring to our neighbor’s assessment, we had buried the fence three or four feet deep in the ground, to keep out coyotes and foxes, then tented the whole arrangement with additional yards of chicken coop wire to fend off the hawks. So far we had managed to keep all our fowl safe, but the fucking rooster somehow managed to get loose at least once a week; sometimes he intimidated and bullied whoever came to the coop until he was able to escape, but at least once he had just sauntered up to the big cabin, where he had charged anyone who walked out the door. Predictably, he woke us with the dawn. Chloe, in an uncharacteristic display of irritation and resentment, had begun to mutter “Goddamn fucking rooster” every time she heard or saw him, and had torn out a recipe for coq au vin from an old Julia Child cookbook and posted it prominently in the big cabin. She disliked his disruptive nature, his commitment to discord. To her, the greatest crime was promoting disharmony. Only Beau seemed not to mind the cantankerous bird, and referred to him as “that excellent rooster fellow.” This may have been just to irritate Chloe, but in my less generous moments, I speculated that he appreciated Rooster’s preening, undaunted masculinity.

  The minute the chickens began to lay, Louisa insisted that we set aside as many eggs as we could for barter; we would each be allowed one per week, but we needed everything else to bring to neighbors or farmers’ markets in exchange for early summer vegetables. This exchange served two purposes. We were able to vary our diet, which for the last month had consisted of fiddleheads, ramps, rhubarb, and whatever bread Chloe could make with our dwindling supply of flour. We’d relied on our storage of legumes (oh God, the endless lentils!) to supplement these few fresh ingredients, but I was deeply excited to eat something that wasn’t green or beige. In addition to our dietary needs, though, we also needed information.

  And so we went to the market and visited other farms and CSAs, asking questions and trying to keep track of where to plant the squash and whether eggshells really were great for the compost. And we brought anything we could use to trade. Firewood turned out to be a useful commodity, and the back eighty acres or so of the Homestead were mostly untouched woodlands, filled with hardwoods that had stood for a hundred years. At first we felt horror at the prospect of chopping down trees, but Jack pointed out that they were a terrific renewable resource, and after agreeing to replant each year, we stopped feeling guilty. We borrowed a chain saw and felled some of the larger trees, then split the trunks and limbs into logs and stacked them under tarps to stay dry and start curing. There was also plenty of deadfall to haul in, so we were able to keep our cull of the old wood modest. We knew we would need several cords at least for our own needs that winter, and Beau insisted on setting aside most of what he thought we’d burn during the cold months before we began to use the wood as trade.

  One day in June, Chloe, Beau, and I had brought two dozen carefully hoarded eggs to the farmers’ market, along with the first quart of painfully harvested wild strawberries. We’d also dragged along giant armfuls of rhubarb, without any real expectation that anyone would be interested; at the Homestead, rhubarb grew as vigorously and fast as a voracious weed, and an entire patch of ground was overrun with the big, leafy pink-and-green plants. Still, not everyone had such a bounty of it, and it looked like we were going to be able to trade our goods with some friends of Beau’s who had a stand at
the market.

  The wiry dreadlocked girl smiled at the sight of Beau. I recognized her and her friend, a tiny human with gorgeous skin, as the same girls who had dropped Beau off at the Homestead, and they spoke with an easy familiarity that suggested they had spent some time with him. He leaned casually against the sturdy wood of their stand while Chloe and I lurked, arms laden, a few steps behind him.

  “Girls, meet the other girls,” Beau said by way of introduction.

  “Chloe,” she said, with a curtsy-like bob.

  “Hi, I’m Mack Johnston.”

  “I’m Fennel,” the dreadlocked girl answered, looking irritated. “We’re part of the commune on the other side of the hill. West Hill Collective.” She stopped and squinted more closely at me. “Mack Johnston? Wait, are you the Mackenzie Johnston from The Millennial Experiment? That Mack Johnston? What a catastrophe that was!”

  “Fennel!” her friend said, giving her arm a remonstrative rap. “If she were, it wouldn’t exactly be polite to bring it up, no?” she mumbled under her breath.

  “I suppose,” Fennel answered with a shrug. She didn’t seem to feel chastened or embarrassed. My heart was racing at the possibility of being outed, right here; how dare she ask like that? But really, I reasoned, it was a miracle no one had mentioned it before now. Beau and Chloe had almost certainly heard. I ducked my head to hide my guilty eyes but was spared having to say something as Fennel immediately turned her attention back to Beau. They continued their negotiations until a deal was struck. I felt that Fennel was unnecessarily generous with the arrangement; the West Hill Collective apparently had a great greenhouse, and they were even seeing early tomatoes. She gave us three “to bread and fry,” she explained, as though the words “fried green tomatoes” couldn’t possibly mean anything to us. We also walked away with spring greens, some fresh herbs, a handful of aged sausages, and a prize bottle of homemade applejack. I knew Louisa would be delighted with our daily haul, but I sensed that she wouldn’t love its provenance—her irritation at Beau’s frequent absences seemed related to this gaggle of green-thumbed women. When Beau announced that the “West Hill girls” could bring him home in their van at the end of market, I felt that my anxieties were maybe not so far-fetched.

  “It’s the least I can do, after all these treats,” Beau explained. “I’ll help them unload the van, and I can walk home later.”

  “Always walking, you.” Fennel smirked. I felt outraged at the intimacy this implied, as though she knew him and his habits well enough to comment on them. Glancing at each other, Chloe and I piled into my truck to drive back out to the Homestead, toting fresh supplies but minus Beau.

  Louisa’s reaction was restrained but clearly annoyed; when any one of us didn’t sit down at her table for meals, she became personally affronted, and when it was Beau, the most frequent offender, she was downright seething. I always thought she wanted to cultivate in her own demeanor a version of Beau’s mysteriousness, to mimic his maddening ability to conceal his thoughts and feelings. But with her, it always came across as sulking. After learning that Beau would get a ride back to Hector with some of his other friends, Louisa sniffed.

  “Fennel, I presume?”

  I nodded.

  “That fucking girl,” she said. Louisa then asked pointedly what we had brought her, since we’d failed to bring back Beau. I let Chloe catalog our items, while I searched for clean glasses for the applejack. Louisa’s broody expression and fiery eyebrows made me nervous, and after pouring glasses for her and Chloe, I slipped outside with a glass for Jack, who was pacing the length of the remaining garden space, apparently in an effort to determine what else we could still plant. His forehead was rumpled in thought, and he periodically spun around to glance up at the sun, performing calisthenics presumably meant to help him calculate some abstruse agricultural cipher.

  “Happy hour,” I said, shoving aside the awkward gate that allowed us access to the garden. We’d put up eight-foot stakes strung with more chicken wire, to keep the deer out of the veggies. The garden still looked meager at this time of year, but Jack was excited about it, talking with his arms, shoulders, and torso in enthusiastic terms about what we could expect it to yield. I handed him the applejack, which he drank in one swallow before shaking his head in surprise.

  “What the hell is that?” He scowled at the glass, then at me, as though we had both intentionally conspired to fool him.

  “Applejack.”

  “I thought it was apple cider,” he said accusatorially.

  “I think that’s how it starts. But then I think you freeze it, and keep saving the really boozy bits.” I hadn’t listened too carefully to Fennel’s explanation, but that seemed like the gist of it.

  “Hmmm. Interesting. Makes sense.” Jack stared at the glass again. “Maybe I could try something similar with my beers….”

  “I’m not sure, Jack—”

  “No, no, no, I’m sure you’re right. Still, interesting idea. Concentrates the alcohol…” I watched him as he contemplated this, and knew that he was engaging in the millennia-long human occupation of concocting things that fuck you up. We were still breathlessly anticipating his early batch of mead, and Beau had rigged up a kooky still back in the woods for producing some hard stuff. Louisa had criticized the practicality of its location, but I suspected that Beau was secretly aspiring to imitate a Prohibition-era bootlegger.

  “I didn’t see Beau come home with you,” Jack said, letting his arm and glass fall to his side as he gazed out on the garden.

  “He caught a ride home with some friends.”

  “Huh. Is that where he goes when he just disappears like he does?”

  “I have no idea. Probably sometimes.” The idea of Beau lurking around someone else’s campfire made me cranky in a way I couldn’t fully justify. Certainly, I had the smallest claim on him out of everyone, and my jealousy made me feel foolish.

  “Is Louisa pissed?” Jack asked, a mischievous grin on his face. He really was a terrible gossip.

  “Of course. Though she’s pretending to be distant and unaffected.”

  “Ha! Of course she is. And you left poor Chloe to deal with her alone?”

  “Chloe is the only one she won’t snap at,” I said with a shrug.

  “True. Those two have…a special rapport,” Jack said. I squinted at him, seeking any sort of subtext or innuendo, but he seemed to mean nothing by his statement. Could he possibly be oblivious to the nocturnal game of musical mattresses? I had assumed he knew, had followed the moving candlelight with the same intensity I did, but suddenly I wondered if his innocent good-naturedness was actually born out of ignorance.

  “We should go in, regardless. Louisa will want us to wash the greens we brought. Shame you’re a vegetable—we got sausage,” I bragged.

  “Wow, red-letter day. Maybe I’ll try it. I’ve been curious about the whole carnivore situation, lately.” We ambled back to the big cabin, and I watched the gloaming settle over the Homestead, intensifying the grays and purples of spring. I leaned my head on Jack’s shoulder, and thought: This.

  * * *

  That night, I peered through my window for hours, waiting for the appearance of Beau’s moving flame (it was for Beau that I pined the most, and his light that I watched for in the dark). I observed Chloe’s little gas lamp traveling to Louisa’s cabin, where it didn’t remain long before dancing back to her own. When the lights weren’t moving, I stared at my walls, and at the parade of stinkbugs, restlessly in search of whatever their spiny bodies craved. Finally, I slumped up the ladder to sleep, miffed.

  A sound at my cabin door rattled me awake, and I sat bolt upright, nearly knocking my head on the ceiling. I was momentarily disoriented; for half a second, on waking, I thought I was still in my parents’ house, in my drab little room with wall-to-wall carpet. The scratching persisted, and I flailed around wildly for my little lamp. I
n the flat darkness, I was afraid of knocking it off its hook and breaking it, though, so I slid from my covers and down to the floor, blind. As I crept towards my door, the only possibility I considered was that it was Beau outside, asking to be let inside. I can only assume now that this was the desperate wish fulfillment of someone still asleep, since the scenario seemed unlikely. I didn’t pause for a moment to further consider what might actually be lurking out there in the dark.

  Which is why I was completely unprepared for something large and hairy to launch itself past me and into my cabin. In the absence of light, I could only hear some sort of hefty panting, and smell that this was an animal, inside my cabin with me. Toenails clicked on the wood floor, and I shuddered, a primal response harkening back to the cave. I thought about defending my home for only a fraction of a second before I flung myself out of my door, leaving the hellbeast to ransack and ruin as it would.

  I ran directly to Louisa’s cabin, sure that she would know what to do. She blearily opened the door, annoyed, and I quickly took in her crumpled curls and white nightgown. The moon was bright enough that I could see her clearly.

  “Jesus, what?” she said.

  “There’s a—thing! In my cabin!”

  “Sweetie, are you sure you’re not having a nightmare?” Hands on hips, she could not have sounded more condescending.

  “No­I’m­not­having­a­fucking­nightmare,” I hissed. “There’s a fucking animal in my house!”

  “Right. Okay, okay, not ideal. Do you…did Beau come home?”