We Went to the Woods

by Caite Dolan-Leach

  “Better than being eaten alive by a coyote,” Josh said.

  “That may be,” Louisa said. “I wouldn’t know. But I’m not quite sure what your cattle have to do with our disagreement.”

  “I think you have a pretty good idea,” Larson said, straightening his photos. “Why don’t you go call your daddy and ask him what he thinks. You’ve got my number. I’d be more than happy to talk it over, with either of you.”

  “And I’m sure we can catch up in court at the next hearing. October, isn’t it? I imagine you’re very busy that time of year. Must be hard to carve out time for court. A real inconvenience.”

  “Yes, young lady, it is.” Larson nodded once in goodbye, and he and his son churned off in a plume of dust, their Hemi engine revving all the while.

  “I’ll bet they don’t even get fifteen miles to the gallon with that thing,” Jack muttered.

  * * *

  After our neighbors’ departure, Louisa was cagey and clearly wanted to be alone. Jack and I tried, unsuccessfully, to get her to divulge some information, but she was taciturn and unwilling to say much.

  “Look, guys, it’s classic intimidation tactics. They want to psych us out so that we’ll settle and they can keep dumping toxins into our water. It’s bullshit. I’d think you should be able to see that at least, Jack.”

  At this stage it was dawning on me how little I knew of Louisa’s (and Rudy’s) lawsuit, and I couldn’t help needling her for information I should have requested months ago.

  “Louisa, how far has the suit gone? It’s, uh, civil, right? How much are you suing them for? Is there actually a precedent for this type of case?” I was suddenly impressed by the ballsy magnitude of what she was attempting, and how little I’d either cared about or contributed to this sector of our shared pursuit.

  Louisa, however, wasn’t fielding questions at this time, and answered me in what I considered to be her press secretary voice, each response couched in vaguely legalistic terms that committed her to nothing.

  “That, I’m afraid, is privileged information,” she said. Deflecting us, she returned to her cabin. Jack shook his head and went into the big cabin to sterilize some more Ball jars and start up a fresh batch of sauce. Though Louisa had been proprietary about her tomato sauce recipe in the beginning, she had since allowed anyone who was willing to replicate it to take a turn at the stove; the dullness of repetition had convinced her to relinquish her secrets. At least in that arena.

  Chloe, I noted, had retreated back to her own bunk without saying a word. She was doing this more and more often; I frequently found her swaddled in her quilt in the middle of the day, conked out and damp with sweat. She would sleep through any jostling attempts to wake her. I occasionally wondered if she was taking tranquilizers or some other kind of downer; I knew very little about prescription medications, but her attitude and catatonic stare didn’t seem appropriate to someone who wasn’t stoned out of their mind. Surely not our Chloe, my Chloe?

  She didn’t answer her door. Though I knew she couldn’t be asleep yet, I also understood that she wanted privacy. I reluctantly retreated back down the steps and scuffed my sandaled feet in the dust of the clearing. The wild grass we had attempted to cultivate had faded during that summer’s drought; there was barely enough water for the vegetables, with nothing to spare for the extravagance of a lawn, something Beau liked to point out in a very pragmatic tone, as though we didn’t realize it. It had been one of the driest summers ever, and nearly everything alive had been affected.

  I was alone, so I gave in to my baser instincts. I went to spy on Louisa.

  I sidled up as carefully as I could to her cabin, hoping that Jack wasn’t peering from a kitchen window. What I was doing was very undignified, and I very badly didn’t want to get caught snooping. I had, once or twice (or perhaps three or four times), in my lower moments, come skulking around these same sills, and I therefore knew that I was least likely to be observed and most likely to catch some helpful piece of dialogue by standing near the back, north-facing window. In broad daylight, I was too afraid to look directly into the frame; at night, the glimmers of light from within obscured my prowling face from any occupants. But if Louisa glanced outside right now, she would see me creeping near the tall grass she had inadvisably allowed to crop up near the base of her cabin.

  I could hear her right away, because she was not making much of an effort to keep her voice quiet.

  “Well, it was fucking dumb and irresponsible! I mean, Jesus. Fennel is supposed to be such a crackpot civil disobeyer, but none of you bothered to fucking, I don’t know, wear a balaclava?” She paused in her tirade, presumably to listen for a response.

  “Yeah, but why on earth didn’t it occur to you that there might be surveillance? I mean, we know they’ve been careful after what happened with the tractor. It only stands to reason—” Here she was interrupted.

  “No, you absolutely do not get to accuse me of having fucking less conviction than you, Beauregard. I play a longer game, and I’m not wasting my time—not to mention my criminal record—on doing something that won’t have a long-term impact. I’m not just liberating a handful of veal calves so they can end up as aperitifs for the goddamn coyotes!” I could hear her pacing the boards of her cabin, and I thought I could also make out the rattle of glasses, the clink of the bottle of Scotch she kept on her shelf.

  “Look, I did my best to throw them off. Did the whole ‘see you in court’ bit. But Larson isn’t an idiot. He’s suspicious, and he’s got a lot at stake. I don’t think it’s a good idea to antagonize him over small potatoes, okay?” Another fretful pause.

  “Look,” she said again. “I don’t need you to rationalize Fennel’s genius plan. I see what she’s getting at, but I also see that both her vision and her execution are maybe not ideal. You need to be careful about letting her call the shots.” Louisa turned her head, and I missed some of her next rant.

  “—their glorious leader’s notion? Fucking Matthew? You trust him, after everything?”

  Beau presumably answered, and I wished desperately that she had him on speaker.

  “Well, it just seems a little impetuous to me, is all. And it’s obviously a gigantic fuckup if Larson follows through and actually takes it to court. Am I supposed to swear before a judge that it’s not you in the picture? Because I’ll do it, but it’s going to make me—and my dad—look like total assholes, Beau….No, it’s not that. I just wish you’d look at the bigger picture and, I don’t know, fucking reflect before you do things. When did you turn into such a raging hothead? If I didn’t know better, I would think it’s Fennel goading you into this….No, I’m not jealous.” I could hear her smile as she said this, could feel her already forgiving him a little, already willing to be on the same side again. “Look, you just need to give her, and Jesse, and—actually, was that Sy in the picture?” She stopped pacing, and I could feel her head tilting back to lap Scotch from the glass. “Fuck. That is a much bigger problem. Fennel getting caught in this is bad, but if Sy ends up booked…I don’t fucking want to think about it. I mean, the charges he might already be facing, he could say anything— Shit, hang on, I thought I heard something.” I froze, like a guilty, busted deer. If she decided to walk the perimeter of her cabin, we would be having a very awkward conversation. Even if she decided to open her window…I crept towards the corner of the cabin, again hoping that Jack wasn’t looking out a window.

  “Look, I just wanted to call quickly and let you know. I need to call Rudy and tell him what’s going on, before he gets blindsided by Larson’s lawyer. Just, fucking keep Sy out of everything from here on out. You know we can’t afford for him…” I didn’t hear the end of her sentence, because I was dashing towards my cabin. Argos, seeing me run, greeted me happily, leaping up on his enormous haunches, and we pranced on the dry remnants of the lawn for a minute before I ducked inside to collect myself.


  * * *

  In spite of the intrigue, those late-summer evenings were my favorite. We would wash up late, in the gloaming, and converge on the big cabin for dinner. Some nights we opted for simplicity: big bowls of pasta primavera, green salads, bread, garlic. Some nights we spent hours cooking, each of us contributing dishes and condiments: pickled radishes, chèvre–squash blossom fritters, fresh whipped butter, tomatillo salsa. I’d never eaten so well.

  After one such evening, we cleared the table and all, simultaneously, yawned. It had been a hard day of work; we’d bushwhacked and tilled an additional plot to put in winter veggies and had split stakes to encircle it. The chicken coop had needed cleaning out, too, and everyone was exhausted. Louisa gave us permission not to do the dishes, and everyone gratefully dispersed to their own cabins. Argos accompanied me, his tongue dangling. Every so often, he would nose my rib cage and run the length of his snout and face along my side, soliciting a pat on his head. When we got to my cabin, he entered before me and collapsed in a heap on the floor. Within moments he was napping, legs poking ridiculously up in the air.

  In spite of my physical weariness, though, I couldn’t sleep. Something niggled at me, some thought I couldn’t let go, and I tugged out my research materials, hoping that whatever it was could be banished with some notes.

  I flipped through my information on the Oneida Community, with whom I was growing bored; I felt I’d mined their odd little commune for what I could get. The sheaves of recipes and planting notes made me smile, remembering each day that corresponded to the entry in question. I had precious few notes on the Collective, still, and this bothered me—perhaps that was what was keeping me awake. Without last names, though, I had almost no information to go on, and I looked at the defunct Facebook page for the dozenth time, hoping to catch a subtle reference I hadn’t seen before. But my battery was close to dead, and I didn’t want to run the truck at this hour of the night to charge it.

  Finally exasperated, I packed away all my papers in the box that lived beneath my bed. I’d made no progress tonight, and felt no closer to sleep. I slid down from the mezzanine and wrapped a scarf around my shoulders—the temperature was just beginning to dip in the evenings. I skirted Argos’s sleeping body (his legs were now fully extended towards the sky, and every now and again he emitted a delicate “ruff”) and went out to my porch, where I sat on the steps. I’d slipped a packet of cigarettes into my overalls, and though I rarely smoked, I wanted some sort of chemical relief. I lit one and sat, watching the fireflies winking in and out of the reeds near the pond. The whole clearing was dark, illuminated only by stars and those odd phosphorescent insects. The pond bullfrog croaked.

  “Can I bum a drag?” a voice asked, and I startled.

  “Jesus, is that you, Chloe?” I said, irritated to have been crept up on. “I didn’t see you.”

  “I was just trying to clear my head. The thought of the dirty dishes was really bothering me, so I washed up, and then I was walking near the pond. Just trying to get some quiet.” I tilted my head; though we tend to think of nature as peaceful, the clearing this evening was actually filled with all kinds of ruckus: the crickets, the frog, the occasional thrum of a mosquito, the splash of a fish. “I saw your lighter and thought I’d come say hi.”

  “Guess we’re the night owls tonight,” I said.

  “I’m sure Louisa is still up. And probably Beau,” Chloe said, interpreting my wounded comment correctly, as she always did.

  “Not Jack, I bet. He sleeps like the dead.”

  “He doesn’t have anything to worry over,” she said.

  “And Louisa and Beau? Do they? Have something to worry about?”

  She looked sideways at me. “I imagine they do, and I’m betting you know more about it than I do. You’re always hungry for information. I can’t imagine much has slipped by you.”

  “On the contrary,” I said with a snort. “I have no idea what those two are up to. They’re secretive as hell about it, though.”

  “Beau is always like that, and Louisa…well, Louisa probably has a reason.” Chloe sighed. “What do I know? It’s always been the two of them.”

  “Really? I got the impression it was, um, the three of you, these days.”

  “That’s the impression they like to give,” she said. “I sometimes feel like, I guess, an accessory, though. Beau’s attracted to me, and Louisa needs me, but there’s always this sense that…I don’t know, that I’m still outside it.”

  “Tell me about it,” I said, hoping I didn’t sound too self-pitying. Nevertheless, Chloe picked up on my tone.

  “I know you understand. That’s why I’m saying it. It’s like…do you remember making shapes, in, like, geometry class? I remember drawing lines to complete isosceles triangles and hexagons and whatnot. And it makes you feel like the dots are necessarily connected, right? Like if there are five dots on the paper, well, then, you’re making a pentagon. But that gives you the wrong impression. Sometimes you don’t get to connect all those discrete points. Sometimes it’s just a line between two of them, and those other dots just sit there, on a homework question that matters to no one. Pointless points,” she said, smiling.

  I wasn’t sure how to respond. I wanted to speak in her metaphor so badly. “Well, we’re not living in a homework assignment, right?”

  “Don’t you sometimes feel like we’re living in some kind of assignment, though? Some task, some burden?”

  “Haven’t we chosen to take that on?” I asked.

  “I don’t know if I believe in choice,” she said, attempting another smile. “Doesn’t it sometimes just feel like repeating loops? Patterns?”

  “Your brain has a very mathematical bent,” I said.

  “I suppose studying music changes your brain. Makes you look for repetition.”

  “I think you’re right, though. Humans repeat too.” I thought of the recurring generations of people who had tried to remake the world, here in this corner of it. Chloe accepted my cigarette and took a long drag on it before handing it back.

  “I feel it pulling apart,” she said. “Especially when it’s quiet like this. I wonder if the strength of that one line—between those two, or the repeated line of music, whichever you like—I wonder if it’s strong enough to hold us.”

  “I’m not sure what happens if it isn’t.”

  “I don’t like to think about it.”

  “I suppose we’re supposed to make our own connections, then. Right?” I didn’t dare look at her. She took my cigarette again and held on to my hand. She traced the lines of my fingers, and put the palm of her hand against mine. I could feel our calluses rub. She knit her fingers through mine and looked up.

  “I trust you, you know,” she said. “I trust you not to hurt me. Not to hurt any of us.”

  “That’s all I want,” I said. “To not do any damage.”

  “I know,” she said, and leaned in to kiss me. Her mouth was unexpectedly soft, and I could feel her breath coming quickly. Could she possibly be nervous, to be kissing me? The notion made my belly swoop with pleasure. She seemed like she didn’t want to open her eyes, and her heart was beating faster—I could feel it in the pulse of her hand that still held mine. I moved closer, leaning her back, until we both lay on the boards of my porch, afraid to speak and afraid to move except to angle ourselves towards each other. We reached for each other, giggling when we realized how impractically we were dressed for this.

  “You know, whenever I imagined this, I didn’t think I’d be wearing overalls,” I mumbled. She laughed.

  “Well, there’s something we can do about that,” she said. Argos slept on the porch that night.

  From the diary of William Fulsome

  Autumn:

  I begin to fear that we have over-reached ourselves. I always recognized my ambitions, our ambitions, to be lofty, nigh unachievable. After all,
who can hope to attain Paradise? And yet. And yet I thought that if we lived close enough to God, if we dwelt fully within his Spirit, we would be welcomed into a Kingdom on Earth before we departed to that in the Afterlife. To live simply, to love one another, to worship, to father children who would go on to continue God’s work. How modest, how attainable!

  But the harvest season is drawing to an end. The flowers droop and molt, and it is the time of slaughter. I fear that we are insufficiently prepared. Wood we have, but Jeremiah informs me that our stores are inadequate for the long season ahead of us. We must pray for an early spring. The food stores are not what we hoped. But perhaps by practicing some abstemiousness and self-control we will make do and tighten our belt-buckles as the warm weather arrives!

  Mary’s condition weighs on me heavily. I never dreamt that our congress would lead to her conceiving—I practiced Male Continence dutifully, as I was taught to do as a young boy and have continued to do except for the occasion of the conception of my daughter with Elizabeth, an occasion that was planned and approved of by the elders in our former community. And yet Mary finds herself heavy with child, and I find myself heavy with Guilt and Apprehension. I cannot keep her safe from this child, from her own Flesh; I can do nothing but ensure that she gets food and rest. I fear I cannot even comfort her. Still, I thought I saw her smile as she watched the chickens going to roost, and she put her hands on her belly and looked to the sky. Perhaps a child can heal her.

  Jeremiah dotes on Mary, and I have seen him bring her a posy of autumn blooms. As leader, I feel I should comment, to each, on their impropriety. Due to her condition, Mary is unable to venture much into society, but in spite of our unconventional living here, she will likely have to answer for her morality eventually, once the child is born. I can insulate her from some of the outside world’s cruelty, but it is evident that we can never hope to be truly self-sufficient and self-enclosed. The prudishness of society will require her to repent, sooner or later. My position, alas, prevents me from claiming the child as my own, of course, and therefore she will need to find the strength to support and defend it.