We Went to the Woods

by Caite Dolan-Leach

  My memories of that time are of being physically exhausted, of arms that ached whenever I lifted them, quads shivering from squatting in the squash patch, a sunburn on my nose making me feel sun-drunk, groggy. But I was also content. We were all too tired and busy to fret about drama. The members of the West Hill Collective were, if possible, even busier with their more substantial harvest. They had neither the time nor the inclination to entertain us, even on the few evenings when we could have spared a few hours near dark. Instead, we would sit at the picnic table, eating ratatouille and grilled sweet corn and Caprese salad (the mozzarella made from unpasteurized milk we got from the Collective, this skill maybe the one benefit I retained from the Experiment) and sipping some of our bartered wine or Jack’s improving honey mead. We skinny-dipped in the pond after dinner, all of us cavorting naked. I wanted the season to go on forever.

  In early September, though, I realized that things had changed. I watched for the lights moving betwixt our various doors, sometimes thinking of William and his community, with their policy of free (but communally monitored) love. How could they ever have thought that would work? I waited for Beau to reprise his interest in me, but he stayed on the edges, giving me only the occasional kiss on the neck, a palm rested briefly in the small of my back. Enough, enough to keep me hungry. Chloe still sometimes crept in with Louisa, but she spent more and more time in her cabin, practicing her music. I wish I could have understood that she was withdrawing, drifting away from us.

  When Beau went AWOL yet again, instead of Louisa’s usual irritation and banging of pots, she was oddly casual. About a day after Beau’s disappearance, she got a phone call from her father. After a few minutes of unusually sedate conversation, she came over to where I was standing, slicing cabbage into thin slivers.

  “Can we take a quick ride over to the Glen?” she asked, dripping nonchalance. I saw Jack turn to glance at us, eyebrows raised. Louisa never drove; I wasn’t even sure she had a license. She insisted on being chauffeured. Normally, though, Chloe brought her wherever she needed to go.

  “Uh, sure,” I answered. “Let me just finish up this cabbage.”

  “I’ll wait for you outside.”

  I looked back at Jack, who shrugged a shoulder and returned to his pile of green beans and hot peppers.

  “What do you think it’s about?” I asked him.

  “Look, I have an idea. But you should talk to Louisa. And Beau.” This was circumspect for Jack, who always happily dished any shred of gossip he possessed. I shaved my way through the cabbage, tossed it quickly into a crock, dumped some salt on it, covered it with a plate and a cloth, and stepped outside. Upon seeing me, Louisa immediately headed for the truck.

  As we drove, I waited as patiently as I could for an explanation. I had learned to let people reveal their stories as they wanted to—they rarely gave them up unless they wished to talk. Finally, as we were pulling into town, Louisa asked me to head for the police station. I bit my lip and resisted begging her for details.

  I parked nearby and was coming around to the other side of the truck to go in with her when Louisa suggested that I wait at the nearby coffee shop. Affronted, I started to protest, but she shushed me.

  “Look, I promise I’ll tell you about it later,” she assured me. “Right now, I just have to talk to my dad.”

  I glowered ineffectually before spinning on my heels and heading to the sandwich joint on the corner. I wasn’t hungry, but I grabbed a bag of potato chips from the counter while I ordered an iced coffee. It had been a long time since I’d eaten processed foods or trans fats. I sat there sullenly, munching my bounty, which tasted almost unbearably salty, and waited for Louisa.

  She and Beau and Rudy walked in the front door moments later. Beau was beaming, dressed in a black T-shirt and slim black jeans. His hair stuck up rakishly, and he clearly hadn’t shaved in a few days. He looked beautiful, and more than a bit like an outlaw. In spite of myself, I could feel my pulse clamoring.

  “Greetings,” he said, and as I stood to give him a welcome-back hug, he gave me a kiss that fell half on my mouth and half on my cheek.

  “Where’ve you been, sailor?” I inquired, looking from him over to Louisa.

  “Listen, how about I stand you kids to some lunch and a beer across the road?” Rudy asked, his volume uncomfortably loud. The people working behind the counter glared at us over this blatant snub. Rudy was already a bright fuchsia in the midday heat, and he seemed unconcerned.

  “Thanks, Daddy. I think that’s a good idea,” answered Louisa. Beau and I followed them out the door and across the quiet main street to the Wildflower Café. It was dark and air-conditioned, and we slid into the booths, Rudy sighing with relief and sliding his flesh across the rubbery seat. Having just eaten the chips, I was now definitively without appetite, but I ordered a beer and sweet potato fries, for the hell of it. Who knew when I would be granted such caloric bounty again? I slurped my beer, staring at my three dining companions and waiting for someone to explain. Finally, just as the food was arriving, Louisa cleared her throat.

  “I imagine you’re curious about what happened, Mack,” she began. My expression, I hoped, was eloquent enough to express my irritation at being kept so persistently in the dark.

  “Beau got arrested yesterday,” she said.

  “Ah,” I said.

  “For trespassing. And destruction of property.”

  “Okay. Whose?” I took another swallow of beer. I wasn’t surprised, exactly.

  “A fracking company,” Beau said shortly.

  “The one we were protesting? Lakeview?”

  “The very same.” He nodded.

  “Were you alone?”

  “No. I was with Fennel. And Jesse.”

  “I see.” I looked around the table, unsure what to say. “Rudy?” I finally ventured. “What do you think of this?”

  “He’ll probably only get charged for the trespassing, and since it’s young Beauregard’s first offense, I don’t think we need to worry too much. The hearing won’t be for at least a month, in any case. He’s out on a fairly moderate bail.”

  “And Fennel? And Jesse?” I asked.

  “They have their own lawyer,” Louisa answered quickly. “Part of what they raise money for is their legal fund. That’s why they tolerate Sy, after all. He’s the most financially solvent of all of them.”

  “Is this their first offense?” I said.

  “No,” Beau answered. I leaned back in the booth, my skin sticking to the plastic.

  “I see. And…will we be bailing you out of jail again?” I asked.

  “It’s always possible,” Beau said, breaking into another smile.

  * * *

  After Beau’s arrest, I was desperate to know what was going on at the Collective. It was clear that Fennel and Jesse at least were a little more civilly disobedient than I had expected. I angled for a visit, which bugged Louisa, but she could hardly forbid me to snoop around. I fussed at Beau, telling him I absolutely had to ask Natasha about her ferments, since my last two batches had ended up soggy—I thought she was the most likely one to talk to me about what they were up to there, and I figured if I could get her alone, she might say something. I claimed that I had made a special type of chutney for her, that I needed to speak with her before I ruined any more cabbages, and Beau finally relented; he invited me to come the next time he popped over to barter.

  As the weather grew gradually colder, we wanted some of Fennel’s precious mushrooms. I had prepared a big bag of raisins, several jars of chutney, and some apple rings so that I would be invited along for the trade. Driving the few miles to the Collective, I could tell that Beau was tempted to say something to me, but instead he smoked his cigarillo, exhaling out the window.

  I was almost as excited to share my bounty as I was to corner Natasha and see if I could learn anything from her. Unlike ne
arly all my new friends, before I moved to the Homestead, I had never foraged for dinner, had never made chutney. This past year was the first time I had ever come near a farm animal or seen what a growing potato looked like or known how to identify a raspberry leaf. I was, in short, very pleased with myself.

  When we arrived at the Collective, though, there was an air of frenzy, people flurrying around, trying to get very important things done. For the tail end of harvest season, this didn’t seem too unusual, but it felt different in quality from some of my earlier visits. Beau appeared to notice it, too, though he again kept his mouth shut.

  In the farmhouse’s kitchen, we found Fennel, flustered and red, laboring over some type of brownish stew. This was what all of Fennel’s food looked like, no matter what she was making, so it was difficult to identify this particular dish, but I guessed that it was a tomato-zucchini sludge. More zucchini. Fennel also didn’t believe in salt or seasonings; she had spent some time dallying with macrobiotic diets and didn’t approve of too much flavor. As we entered the kitchen, she seemed distracted and didn’t even brighten when Beau stooped down to give her a kiss on the forehead. Indeed, as his lips met her salty brow, she glanced behind herself almost guiltily, and I thought I saw her flinch.

  “We come to do trade,” Beau announced. “Wee Mack has even brought some of her own contributions.”

  “That’s great, Beau, but it’s not really a good time. We’ve got a lot going on right now.”

  “It does seem busy. Are you guys harvesting something special? Anything we can help with?” I offered eagerly.

  “No, no, it’s not that.” Fennel waved me away. “It’s—”

  “Where did the sheets on the line go?” Natasha interrupted, bursting into the kitchen. “I hung them out to dry hours ago and now they’re gone, and I swear to God if they’ve blown off again I’m going to burn Sy’s fucking DIY clothespins!” I’d never seen Natasha anything other than totally unflappable, and I barely recognized this manic incarnation.

  “Do you think someone might have taken them down? The vegans were near the clothesline, digging up burdock, so maybe one of them…?” Fennel suggested absently, turning back to her glop. “Shit, I think it’s burning,” she said. It was; I could smell it.

  “Well, if they did, they could have told me,” Natasha fumed, ducking back outside.

  “Here, I’ll help you look,” I said hurriedly, plunking my goods down on the table and following her before she could tell me not to bother.

  “Is everything okay out here?” I asked as we set off at a brisk trot towards the vegans’ cabin.

  “Yeah, yeah. It’s just, we found out that Matthew’s coming in, like, an hour. He’s the original founder of the Collective,” she continued. “So we’re trying to get everything shipshape. It’s something of a to-do.”

  “Really, just because he’s a founding member? I thought Fennel was too.”

  “No, he’s the founding member. He’s the one who got everyone together out here—he bought the land, started the member charter. He recruited the first five girls. Fennel’s the only one left now.”

  “First five girls?” I asked, my neck prickling a little. “They were all girls?”

  “I mean, not by design.” She waved away my alarmed expression. “The first five people who were ready to commit were just all women, that’s it.”

  “And he lived out here with them by himself?”

  “Look, it’s nothing like that. We’re not, like, a cult. We just all believe in the same principles of openness and sustainability.”

  This sounded a bit like a party line. “Okay,” I said uneasily, thinking again of William’s journal. “So he’s coming soon?”

  “He’ll be here any minute. His room upstairs has mostly been left as is—we just need to tidy it up a bit. Clean sheets, you know.”

  Said sheets were located about two minutes later, having apparently blown off the clothesline and settled, luckily, on a bush. “I don’t see why we can’t just buy some actual clothespins. It would cost about two dollars,” Natasha muttered, gathering the soft, worn cotton in her arms. I claimed the top sheet from the brambles and followed her back to the farmhouse.

  I had never been upstairs in the farmhouse; Fennel was, unsurprisingly, territorial about her room, and we’d never been offered a tour up here. There were just the three bedrooms: Fennel’s, Natasha’s, and the one that sat empty. We’d heard it referred to as the guest room, but I’d had no idea that it was kept as a shrine for the Collective’s glorious leader. I half-expected the room to be tricked out with creepy sex props (ropes hanging from the ceiling, mysteriously shaped furniture, a variety of leather), but it was instead a monastic chamber with a bare floor, a small double bed, and an empty nightstand.

  “There’s not even a lamp,” I observed as Natasha and I hurried to dress the stripped bed. The mattress was striped and creaky; it reminded me of the mattresses at the sleepover camp I had been forced to attend as a kid because my parents worked in the summer. Those mattresses had always been redolent of urine and must, and I couldn’t resist the urge to sniff this one; it simply smelled old.

  “Matthew liked—likes—to keep time with the sun,” Natasha explained, and I was surprised to hear her sound just like Fennel with her preachy admiration for this ultranatural practice. She normally kept a tone of removed irony in her voice when talking about “shared values”; it was one of the reasons I liked Natasha and found her, of all the members of the Collective, the easiest to talk to. She never sounded like she was in a cult.

  “Is he coming alone?” I asked as we tried to fluff a single lackluster pillow, which nevertheless stayed persistently lumpy.

  “I actually don’t know.” Natasha frowned. “Fennel spoke to him, and we’ve all been rushing around since.”

  “Seems like quite a bit of hullabaloo for one person,” I said.

  “I guess we’re just trying to impress him, you know? To make sure he can see that we’re still working hard, that we all still share his, well, vision.” She glanced over at me as she said this, as though realizing what she sounded like. It occurred to me that I had yet to see the Collective’s charter. Jesus, what if it was all hippie-dippie spiritual garble? Visions and revelations and energy work? I’d always assumed that it was a practical document to ensure that everyone was working towards the same goals, but for the first time I wondered if maybe the Collective had a different agenda than we had supposed.

  “Well, I mean, no one could be unimpressed by the Collective,” I said, genuinely meaning it. “It really is an amazing place, and you guys all manage to live almost completely without outside support. That’s really something.”

  Natasha smiled. “It is. But you know how things go. It’s like a high school reunion. When you see an old friend, you want to look your best.”

  “I totally get it,” I reassured her. Having finished with the bed and wiped up some dust and crud from the windowsills, we returned downstairs. Fennel’s culinary efforts seemed to be a disappointment, and she was fidgeting with her dreadlocks in an attempt to get them off her sweaty neck. It was hot in the kitchen, and I thought I could smell her, beneath the scent of tea tree oil that always hovered around her. Beau, I saw, had excused himself, and I went to join him and Jesse on the porch, while Natasha stayed to help Fennel.

  Beau was smoking another cigarillo, and without asking, I plucked it from his fingers to take a drag. Though I was hoping for a quiet smile, he seemed not to notice. Jesse was talking about his plans to plant soy, so they could make their own tofu. I really couldn’t see why anyone would bother; in spite of my all-natural lifestyle overhaul, I still hadn’t developed a taste for the stuff. Beau asked a few questions about crop rotation and growing season, but I could tell that he was being polite, rather than storing the information for later use. Two or three people I didn’t recognize had arrived at the farmhou
se, and they greeted Jesse with a bob of the head without introducing themselves. Perhaps these were the ever-fleeting vegans?

  “Is Sy here?” I asked Jesse, interrupting his description of tofu manufacturing.

  “Think so, but he’ll probably keep to his yurt. He and Matthew aren’t entirely, you know, simpatico.”

  “Oh, really?” Beau asked, smelling gossip. He always tried to maintain the sense that he was above such things, but I knew that he, like Jack, loved tidbits of social discord and interpersonal strife.

  “Matthew is pretty firmly into the whole clean-living thing,” Jesse explained. “Most of the founding members were. I mean, yeah, look at Fennel. But they didn’t want to write that into the charter, because they felt that it’s really a personal decision. Membership shouldn’t be, you know, ‘predicated on sobriety,’ is how I think Matthew puts it.”

  “But I imagine he doesn’t care for some of Sy’s more blatant excesses,” I said.

  “Not that you can blame him,” Beau said. “Nobody really wants to live and work with a drug addict.”

  Jesse shrugged. “Really, it’s not so bad. Sy keeps it together. He’s smart. And, well, he does a lot to support the Collective. I mean financially.” A black Prius coasted up the dusty way and came to its weirdly silent stop. The man who stepped out surprised me. I had expected, for some reason, someone older, more serious, dour-looking. But Matthew (I assumed that was who this was) was young, trim, and very good-looking. As he approached, I saw that he had scruff on his sharp jaw, and just a sprinkle of gray in his brown hair, and bright eyes that held my gaze. They were bluer than any eyes I had ever seen. He seemed to vibrate with energy.