We Went to the Woods

by Caite Dolan-Leach

  “Yep. Two fine gentlemen, of agricultural stock. They were not in a great mood.”

  “Did you document it? Did you have your phone? Oh, please tell me one of you recorded something with your phone!”

  “No, Louisa, I didn’t fucking record anything. I was too busy trying to decide whether or not to scream for help. They. Were not. Friendly,” I explained.

  “Are you both okay? They didn’t touch you, did they?” Jack asked.

  “No, but I’m pretty sure they meant to scare us. They’re pissed about the lawsuit and whatever happened to the tractor. And whoever was involved,” I added, with a nasty glance at Louisa.

  “That’s intimidation! It’s completely illegal. It could make a huge difference with the lawsuit. I can’t believe you didn’t record anything. Fuck. Would you sign an affidavit, though? We can get my dad to interview you and Chloe, and we could report it, so there’s a paper trail.”

  “Louisa, get a fucking grip. These guys just came to the house and threatened to make things, quote unquote, ‘downright unpleasant’ for us. I’m not especially interested in stirring shit up right now. I do not want my life to be ‘unpleasant.’ ”

  “Then they win, Mack! This is our chance to change how things get done out here. Agribusiness has been riding roughshod over what’s good for the land, what’s good for the community, what’s actually sustainable, for decades, with zero accountability. If we can show that their practices aren’t just unethical but are in fact doing real damage, we can turn—”

  “Save it for the jury, Louisa. You’ll get another chance to talk to them. They promised they’d be back.” I spun around, not sure where I was planning to go but too irritated with Louisa to stay there listening to her. Did she really not understand? Or did she simply not care? “Oh, and Chloe has been locked in her cabin all afternoon. You might want to check on her,” I called over my shoulder as I headed down the driveway to the dirt road.

  I scuffed my way up and down the “shoulder” for at least an hour, pausing occasionally to observe life in the ditch. A few frogs, a couple of late-blooming tadpoles. The cattails had dissipated into fluff, and weeds grew thick along the banks. I felt suddenly unsafe at the Homestead, made vulnerable by these men who belonged in this county in a way I felt I did not. They had resources and sturdy bodies and a financial stake in the land I’d spent the day composting and coaxing into fertility. They had ownership.

  But beyond my personal insecurity, I wondered about my friends, my comrades, the people with whom I’d undertaken this venture. I was sure Louisa was lying—maybe she hadn’t personally sabotaged the tractor, but I felt certain she knew something about whatever had happened. Or maybe she had personally set fire to the tractor. Jack was fundamentally sweet, but he could be easily swayed, and I feared that Louisa and Beau’s charisma could lure him into doing something he otherwise would never consider. And Chloe’s blank stare today had rattled me; she had seemed completely non-present, and now I kept seeing her glazed expression, empty and cold. What would Chloe be capable of without her compassion, her deep feeling? And Beau himself. He walked so lightly, so carefree, as though nothing could touch him, or as though it wouldn’t matter if it did—would he dare?

  Finally, I saw Beau on his bicycle, spinning up the hill towards home. When he caught sight of me, he broke into a huge grin and hopped nimbly from his seat. There were bags hitched to the back of the bike, bearing what looked like comestibles.

  “At the Collective again?” I asked, shooting for a casual tone.

  “Yep. Their greenhouse is something else. Maybe next year we can rig a simple one, get a head start on seedlings. But, man, their stuff looks beautiful right now.” He whistled appreciatively and showed me a head of lettuce that was indeed impressive. I stroked it.

  “Beau. What do you know about what happened in the back field a while ago? With the tractor?” I asked, not meeting his eyes.

  “Sweet Mack. Don’t worry too much about it. It’s done with, and none of us were there.”

  “The owners of the field came by today and threatened us,” I said with a little more heat than I intended. “It’s not done with.” I looked up at him, trying to show that I was here, that I was listening, that I wouldn’t judge if he told me the truth.

  “Owners?” he scoffed. “Do any of us ever really own land? Seems like silliness to me.” He laughed, and swung one leg back over the bike to cruise up the driveway to the Homestead. I watched him go, black-clad, and my heart sank as I stood there. Always watching. Lowering myself to the dusty ground, I took my shoes off and slid my feet into the ditch. The running water was bitterly cold, but I flicked my toes at tiny fish until I couldn’t feel them anymore.

  * * *

  Death and Sex. It was all I could think about, the twin forces that drove every community, and every individual I was reading about. The desire to sculpt a worthy life seemed to be linked by two pressures: the certainty that the world as we know it would soon come to an end and the desire to have sex with people outside the traditional purview of marriage. I wrote and read, dragging home heaps of books from the public library each time I went into town. Whenever someone came to my cabin, they chuckled at the stacks of historical works piled high against my walls; I’d outgrown the bookshelves, and so the tomes climbed upward in wobbly stalagmites on my floor and sprawled across my bed.

  Jack joined me one afternoon to flip through some of the drier academic texts in search of something that would underpin my thesis, and we giggled at the elaborate justifications concocted to let old men get involved with desirable young women. His quick brain was ideal for skimming dull pages and lifting out the paragraph that spoke to my work—he would tag the salient citation with a little colored sticker, a research organizational system he taught me and that became invaluable to my work. Though everyone seemed to respect my project, it was Jack who grew excited about it, and he would bring me morsels of information he’d stumbled across in his own voracious reading. My work allowed me a safe place to retreat to, so that I could withdraw into myself, and the more I read, the more I became convinced that it was my research that would ultimately help us succeed; if I could learn why these other communities had failed, I might uncover the secret that would permit us to remain, safe and happy, on our Homestead.

  * * *

  —

  I traipsed over to Jack’s cabin hoping to make use of his almanac—the little journal that contained the endless notes that chronicled his inventions. Always on the hunt for an innovation. I loved this about him, but I also found it to be a great hindrance to productivity. He did, however, keep excellent records, so he could determine when a cockamamie adventure actually worked out. I was fleshing out my project, writing down everything I could think of, and Jack was one of the best resources I had. Whenever the journal of our endeavors couldn’t be located in the big cabin, it was likely to be found with Jack.

  That day, I had a question about winter vegetables; it seemed to me that we had more than we should. Our root-vegetable cellar was oddly well stocked, given that we’d only begun planting in March. And Louisa had repeatedly mentioned a garlic harvest that we hadn’t even put in yet, as far as I knew—garlic would go into the ground in autumn. We also had more potatoes listed there than seemed feasible, given our late start. I was hoping Jack could help me break down these seeming contradictions. I also, secretly, had other designs on that little book of his, filled with information and notes and his own strange brainy thoughts. I was hoping he’d let me copy more of it.

  He called me in when I knocked, and I found him on his bed, reading a ragged copy of Brideshead Revisited.

  “Beau lent it to me,” he said as I entered. “He reminds me weirdly of Sebastian, if he were a bit more outgoing. Dashing and dissolute young gentleman, seduces all.”

  I laughed, then said, “I was hoping to pick your brain for a quick second. Had a few dull
questions about vegetables.”

  “No prob. Shoot. Pick my brain.”

  “Well, Louisa said something the other day about the garlic harvest. She said we were going to have an epic harvest soon, and we’d be able to sell it and trade it for some of the veggies we haven’t done yet.”

  “Okay, and?” Jack asked.

  “Don’t you plant garlic in the autumn?”

  “Ah. Yes. You do.” Jack frowned. I thought he could guess where I was headed.

  “But we didn’t start doing anything around here till March.”

  “You could get away with a March planting farther south, but here, I think it wouldn’t be a great idea.”

  “And I don’t remember planting any garlic,” I said.

  “Me neither.” Jack rumpled his nose exaggeratedly; all his facial expressions seemed to be almost caricatures. His smile was always enormous, his guffaw too loud. He reached for his almanac and flipped quickly through the pages, each gesture large. “You’re right,” he said. “If there was garlic put in in the spring, I didn’t write it down.”

  “No, that’s what I thought. Also, potatoes.”

  “What about them?”

  “Don’t we seem to have a lot? I mean, we have almost nothing to barter with, but plenty of potatoes, always,” I said.

  “Louisa said she put in a crop earlier.”

  “Doesn’t that seem weird? And where? I haven’t seen any in the veggie garden.”

  “Um, yeah. Hm. That’s all sort of strange,” Jack agreed. “Should we ask her?”

  “Of course you would go for the direct route,” I said, smiling. “Never one to let things fester.”

  “What do you mean?” His expression was guileless.

  “I mean that you can’t stand secrets. You want to talk about everything, out in the open. You’re a terrible gossip, you know.”

  Jack grinned. “Oh, Mack, you’d be surprised,” he said. He paused, searching my face for something. “I guess, speaking of which…”

  “Oh, goody. Here we go. Whose scrap of a secret are you about to reveal now?”

  “Actually, I was wondering about yours.”

  I froze. “What do you mean.”

  “Mack, I mean, we live in the Information Age. The boundless digital and all. I totally understand why you don’t want to talk about what happened before you came here….”

  I closed my eyes and breathed out slowly.

  “I mean, if you don’t want to talk about it, I get it….”

  I opened my eyes. “Did Chloe tell you?”

  “She didn’t have to. I Googled you way back, not long after we first met. Louisa said it would be mean to bring it up, though.”

  “She said that?” My eyes opened in surprise.

  “She pointed it out, yeah. She said you’d come to it on your own. I’ve been waiting….” He shrugged. “Just thought I’d clear the air.”

  “And here I thought I’d managed to get away from it.”

  “We’ve all got our reasons for being out here,” Jack pointed out. “Frankly, yours makes a whole lot of sense. I mean, you’ve got a real reason to want to not participate in that world, in all that post-capitalist madness.”

  “Thanks,” I said drily. “I thought we all had valid reasons for wanting something else.”

  “You know what I mean, though. That world really punished you. When you think about it, it’s a much more authentic reason for wanting something else. We’ve elected to live out here, subsistence-style, when there are people all over the world who have no choice but to live day to day, hand to mouth. They don’t do it out of high-minded idealism, they do it out of necessity.”

  “And we do it because…we’re naïve?”

  “We do it because that other world—the world of such huge injustice and cruelty—has become unlivable. And because we have the immense privilege to try something else.”

  Chapter 17

  August brought with it bounty, even excess. We found ourselves wading through cucumbers, eggplants, basil, parsley, sweet corn, peppers, tomatillos, tomatoes, and mountains of zucchini. We ate zucchini twice a day, since it was difficult to preserve: raw zucchini salads, noodles made from zucchini, grilled zucchini, zucchini curries, zucchini on flatbread, zucchini fritters. After a while, I looked at every squash I picked with loathing and despair, heavy with the knowledge that I would later have to consume it. In desperation, Jack tried drying some, and Chloe put up a few jars of pickles that she was convinced would be “utter mush” by the time we got around to eating them. I tried to make a zucchini sauerkraut that turned to green goo after about three days, and, gagging, I was forced to chuck it into the compost. I later saw Argos munching away at the heap, and I shooed him off, nevertheless hoping it was the moldy zucchini he was eating rather than the sad little pond fish Jack had caught, which had turned out to be completely inedible. The dog’s breath reeked for days, regardless, and I made him sleep on my porch, rather than flopped bonelessly in my bed.

  I was writing more and more. Whatever I had begun was turning into something stranger, a bizarre mishmash of memoir and history. I chronicled the tedium of washboard laundry and jotted down the dates of which foods appeared when. I wrote cryptic notes about my friends and their foibles. I speculated wildly about the Collective. And I began to research William—or, more specifically, the community from which he had fled. I was fascinated to learn about their trap-making, complex marriage, and strange little eugenics project: stirpiculture, they called it. The ultimate failure of their experiment filled me with fond pity; how easily I could relate to good intentions gone awry! I scribbled my notes into a document that was interlaced with my own thoughts and observations, and the document began to metamorphose into a literary Minotaur of nonfiction, a hybrid beast caught in my maze. It gave me pleasure to flip through the pages, feeling as though the words gave weight to my life here, somehow made it more real. I wanted it to be perfect; my book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects.

  * * *

  —

  The end of August and early September meant tomatoes. Per Louisa’s requisition, we had planted twice what farms of a similar size would normally bother with, and our daily diet included about half a pound of Sungolds, snacked upon straight off the vine as we battled time to get their burnished flesh plucked before they fell to the ground and split open in seedy carnage. Louisa oversaw our haul with satisfaction, processing first those cheery yellow orbs, then all others as they rolled in. Paste tomatoes became sauce; Cherokee Purples, bright exotic chutney; beefsteaks were sun-dried and canned; and heirlooms got sliced and tossed into salads, laid on sandwiches, or eaten whole as snacks. We were drowning in lycopene. Louisa’s ratatouille appeared on the menu at least twice a week.

  Canning was tiresome and hot. Chloe and Jack had taken a community course about the process, so we could rest easy, confident that we wouldn’t be stricken with midwinter botulism. With her ability to be detail-oriented to the point of myopia, Chloe boiled Ball jars and sterilized tongs and insisted on a completely sanitized workspace. Having accidentally set down unapproved vegetables in her sanitized area, Beau got chewed out with some thoroughness, and he joshed her gently for her precision. In a cranky tone, Louisa ordered him out of the kitchen, which he wisely departed.

  In addition to the tomatoes, we were swamped with the rest of the canning and processing. Dilly beans, corn, and pickled beets: all to be canned. Sauerkraut to be started; potatoes to be buried in baskets of cheap rice in the root cellar. Onions to be stored; garlic to be braided and hung; herbs to be dried. Cabbages to be laid in their graves in the ground. We found a curtain of wild Concord grapes near the forest’s edge, and we ate as many as we could before turning some into raisins and the rest into a cloudy grape juice. We filtered it with cheesecloth, but it still looked pretty damn murky; I think we all had our
doubts about the advisability of fermenting it, though Jack thought maybe we could get a light fizz to it, like a pétillant naturel.

  Each night we dropped into bed exhausted. The work of harvesting and prepping veggies took up the whole day, and that was in addition to any of our other obligations. Beau and Chloe still worked at least two days a week at the restaurant for cash; Louisa was still trying to haul in a bit of income from her online remote work, but since she had money anyway, it seemed half-hearted. Jack and I were dedicated full-time to our agricultural endeavors (it had been more than a month since I’d taken a catering shift), which meant we often ended up with the more unsavory tasks; I considered this a (mostly) fair trade, though we griped to each other when the composting toilet needed rotation, or later when we had to handle the painful task of garlic harvesting on our own.

  We all had to dedicate time to splitting and stacking so the wood would be cured by the time the cold arrived. And as we harvested each vegetable, we had to deal with its plot in the garden, either tilling and replanting with late-autumn and winter veggies or letting it go fallow until the spring. Water had to be hauled, filthy overalls washed, chickens and goat fed, trails kept clear, honey harvested, buildings prevented from falling down. Our flock of chickens had multiplied alarmingly; a small brood was suddenly an intimidating flotilla of poultry, producing warm globes of protein that could be sold and traded. Argos followed me around as I moved about the Homestead and sometimes accompanied Jack or Chloe on their ventures into the woods. Beau and Louisa seemed to have no time for our leggy familiar.

  The hot work of canning involved hours crouched over the stove with the water boiling. The main cabin was not especially well ventilated, and Chloe began using a spritzer filled with water, with which she would mist her face and the back of her neck to stay cool. After any canning session, whoever had been confined in the kitchen would leap off the dock into the pond; while it was slightly fetid and brackish as only late-summer ponds can be, this was still the best way to cool down. On the hottest days, I overcame my reservations and joined everyone in the pond, living for the feel of Beau’s slick belly against mine underwater. Other days, I would dally in the woods, hoping to be waylaid by him while purporting to be hunting for wild strawberries (it was ludicrously late in the season for this) and (more plausibly) grapes, then sitting in dry pine needles beneath the deep shade of an old conifer, letting my aching muscles unclench while I dozed off, to wake with my short hair caught in sap.