We Went to the Woods

by Caite Dolan-Leach

  * * *

  Not too many days later, I found myself more or less asking Louisa for permission to go home for Christmas. I felt silly, yet nevertheless obligated to, well, check in. Declare my intentions, but without wishing to seem too headstrong. Louisa, for her part, behaved like a college professor who has been asked for a hall pass by a grown student—she looked surprised, then made it clear that I really needn’t have asked.

  “Mack, if you want to spend the holidays with your people, that is entirely your call,” she said as we reorganized the root cellar, making sure the oldest vegetables were within easy reach. “I didn’t even realize it was Christmas. We don’t celebrate it, obviously.” I was, of course, aware that she would be unlikely to mark the holiday in any way, which added to my desire to be home, surrounded by familiar celebrations.

  “I know, it’s not that I’m asking permission,” I clarified, though unconvincingly. “I just wanted to be sure there wasn’t anything to be done around here or, I don’t know, things happening that I should be here for.”

  “No, no, of course not. We’ll manage just fine,” she said, the unspoken “without you” ringing clearly in my ear.

  I was hurt by her easy dismissal; I realized that I had wanted to be fussed over, begged to stay. Maybe I’d had some notion of doing Christmas here, at the Homestead. But the fantasy quickly dissipated with Louisa’s uninterested wave of the hand, and instead of feeling truly disappointed, I discovered that the possibility of spending several days on the other side of the lake, with my own family, made me goofily happy.

  When I told Jack that I was going home, he told me that he, too, would be heading back to his family, such as it was. I hadn’t gotten too much detail from Jack about his parents and siblings; he tended to get very vague when pressed for details about his hometown or his upbringing. But once I was able to pin him down about his Christmas plans, he couldn’t avoid answering direct questions without seeming ridiculous, and so I took the opportunity to grill him.

  “They’re from the Midwest?” I asked, meaning his parents.

  “Not from, though that’s where they’ve settled now. Actually, my mom’s dad is originally from Missouri, near St. Louis—you don’t actually care about this, do you?” Jack asked with a suspicious smirk.

  “Of course I’m curious. I’m an anthropologist, after all. Or was.”

  He shook his head disbelievingly.

  “You don’t have to give me the full genealogy, if you don’t want. But you’re flying to St. Louis, in any case?”

  “Yeah. My parents live a few hours from there now—that’s their retirement house, I guess you’d call it—but my sister works in St. Louis. A lawyer. So we’re going to her ridiculous suburban mansion, with her kids, and both my brothers are apparently flying in. Which makes it historic, for the Schumann family.”

  “When was the last time you were all together?”

  “God, it must be before I went WWOOFing in France, because I haven’t really been out there since then. So a few years at least.”

  “Are you looking forward to seeing them?”

  “Yeah, I think I am,” he said with a surprised smile. “I don’t see them that often. But my grandparents were farmers, you know, and I actually want to ask my parents a little about growing up on a farm. I don’t think I’ve ever really asked before.” He shook his head again, seemingly at his own sentimentality. “What about you? Happy to see your folks?”

  “I am. They’re…I mean, they’re not that far away, of course, but in some ways I feel like they really have no idea who I am. When I decided to move to New York, they all just shrugged, like it was whatever, but I know both my parents would rather give up instant coffee than live in the city. And that would be a real sacrifice, for them. They just accepted that it was what I wanted, like it was, I don’t know, somehow the obvious course for me.”

  “I think that’s a pretty common intergenerational experience,” Jack said.

  “Yeah, of course. But now I kind of just want to…let them make me dinner and not ask me too many questions, and I can hear about their daily routines and help my dad with the snowblower.”

  “Just a little slice of middle-class normalcy.”

  “Precisely,” I said, thinking of the bulk jar of off-brand mayonnaise in my mother’s pantry.

  From the diary of William Fulsome

  Winter:

  Mary has lost the child. She is most understandably distraught. Annabelle, whose own child is growing heavy within her, sits with Mary and comforts her as best she can, but Mary is inconsolable. Annabelle, who is all too aware of the danger she and her own child face in the coming months, looks terribly wan, and though she continues to sit with Mary, it is damaging her spirit. No doubt Annabelle feels keenly the loss of her son, Josiah, several months ago, and remembers Mary’s compassion. Observing their downturned, grief-stricken faces, I cannot help but feel that it is a terrible thing to be a woman. To carry always the imminent possibility of Life, so inextricably linked with that of Death. A woman takes a child’s life in her hands to give birth, and once separated from that fragile umbilicus, forever tolerates the fear of that life being extinguished. What a strange, terrible burden. Male Continence is meant to mitigate this heavy encumbrance; by denying ourselves completion, we take upon ourselves some of that burden. In our failures, Jeremiah and I are both culpable. And yet, as men, we suffer very little from our failure.

  Jeremiah behaved most strangely in the wake of the infant’s death: he sat holding the child for hours after its early birth and short, suffering life. He grieves for the child as though it were his, and not mine.

  It is my fault. I have failed to live as Christ demanded. I have failed them. My vision—my Dreams, my Faith. I brought them here to live as I had been called to do, and my hubris may cost Annabelle her life. The loss of her child has turned Mary into a wraith; she scarce eats, and her Muteness has intensified. When I look at her face, I feel almost as if she is screaming, screaming at me, accusing. You! You did this! You must make it right!

  And so I shall. I shall undo what I have done. I must do as the Lord asks me, so that we may all join him in the Paradise that has escaped us here. I will ready us for the Coming. I will cleanse us. They, at least, will be unpolluted. I will purify them before the Return.

  Chapter 21

  My childhood home reeked of cheap cinnamon candles bought from the Bath & Body Works at the mall just a few miles away, but I didn’t care. I took my shoes off on the plastic mat by the door and let my feet sink into the grayish-beige carpet that my mother insisted was the most stain-resistant color available. Mom bustled around the kitchen, clearly in something of a tizzy over the fact that both my brother and I would be home for several days. Dad drank a can of beer and flipped through a tractor magazine that I suspected he had already pawed through several times; he wanted somewhere to focus his eyes while he tried to surreptitiously survey his children.

  Ben had beaten me home and was full of stories about school. He was at SUNY Binghamton and seemed likely to outstrip me in every way. Academically, he was unimpeachable, and I could tell from Mom’s approving nods that she felt his social achievements were much more satisfactory than my own questionable ones.

  “You’ve clearly fallen in with the right sort,” she said more than once during the next few days. My mother was unlikely to ever reproach me outright; this was as close to barbed criticism as she would come.

  For my part, I was happy to sit back and let Ben brag about his classes, the track team he was on, his friends, the city. I remembered all too well my own smug tales when I was still in school. While I suspected that Ben’s stories were more grounded in reality than my own had been, I didn’t mind letting him bask in youthful enthusiasm. Here I was, just four years older than him but feeling jaded, like part of a different generation. As though I somehow lived in the “real world.” It see
med undeniable that I lived in a different one.

  Naturally, I couldn’t remain quiet indefinitely; over dinner, the conversation finally turned, reluctantly but sharply, towards me.

  “And how’s life out on your hippie commune, big sis?” Ben asked after a particularly enthralling recounting of how he’d gotten his chem lab work finished just in the nick of time.

  “Not really hippies,” I said, chewing Mom’s chicken à la king and trying not to think about where the chickens had come from. Mom always bought the cheapest family-size pack of everything (with a coupon), and I had narrowly prevented myself from being the obnoxious family member who asked whether the food was antibiotic- and cruelty-free. “We’re just…we just grow most of our food.” I let it go there. I realized I had no energy to explain our project, and that Ben probably had little interest in (or sympathy for) what we did at the Homestead. And, I realized with pleasure, this didn’t bother me as much as it once might have.

  “But you don’t, like, use electricity, right?” Ben continued.

  “Pretty much. For the most part, yeah, we stick to the hours of the sun.” I realized with dismay that I was repeating something Fennel had said when we barely knew each other. It still sounded sanctimonious, but it was accurate.

  “Cool. Isn’t that hard, though? I mean, how do you get everything done?”

  “Wake up early, I guess. There are five of us.”

  “Don’t you get cold, honey?” Mom asked, nudging the bowl of iceberg lettuce in my direction, even though I had not asked for it. Though I could scarcely admit it to myself, I was enjoying the flavorless crunch of the pallid leaves, the sugary tang of the bottled Italian dressing. (Plentyofaddedpreservatives.)

  “We have woodstoves in all the cabins, so we stay toasty warm. Really.”

  “But isn’t that an awful lot of work?” she asked.

  “I mean, sure. I guess. But you get used to it. It’s really very cozy.”

  “Well, there’s nothing quite so picturesque as a woodstove in winter,” she agreed, happy to latch onto something about which she could be enthusiastic. “I always wanted one, you know. But in this house, it would just be so impractical.”

  “Not to mention expensive,” Dad chimed in, not looking up from his plate. “Any idea how much those things cost?”

  “Not to mention expensive,” Mom agreed. “And I mean, with our schedules, who would have time to deal with the wood? All that splitting and stacking.”

  “When you can just turn up a thermostat? Yeah, ridiculous,” Ben said.

  “Well, it is a renewable energy source,” I countered.

  “You know what isn’t a renewable energy source? Time,” said Ben. “Specifically, my time. I mean, there are only so many hours in a day, and each one of those hours is worth something to me. Say I get paid twenty bucks an hour for my job—low estimate,” he clarified, in case we thought he’d waste his time on such a paltry sum. “And then figure I end up spending an hour a day dealing with a woodstove. That’s”—he paused to do some mental math—“over seven grand a year that I’ve wasted. Just thrown away.”

  “I used to think about that when I was doing housework,” my mother mused softly. “When you kids were younger and I couldn’t work.”

  “I don’t want to crunch numbers with you, Ben. I’m not an economics major, as you regularly like to point out. But you don’t actually get paid every hour of the day. And you haven’t factored in the cost of traditional energy, like natural gas.”

  “Doesn’t cost twenty bucks a day, I can tell you that,” Ben snorted.

  “The problem with you rationalists is that you think everything is so easily quantified,” I said, hating the way my voice was rising in frustration. “Sure, natural gas and coal might be cheaper, monetarily, for now. But when we don’t have air to breathe? When we’ve done so much fracking we can’t drink the water? What’s the price then? We’ll be measuring prices in human lives.”

  “Oh, please. Did you go out and join a little Greenpeace cult or something?”

  “Did you go out and turn into a Republican?”

  “What if I did? It’s not like the other side’s got any real answers or unity at the moment. At least Trump stands for something,” Ben retorted.

  “Please tell me you didn’t actually just say that,” I said, my fork hovering in the air between my plate and my mouth.

  “You liberals and your paper-thin skin,” Ben teased. “You are exactly why this election went the way it did.”

  I put my fork down and pushed back my chair. “May I be excused?” I said, already rising.

  “Mackenzie, we haven’t even finished eating,” my mother pleaded.

  “Let her go,” my father said, and I did.

  “Fucking snowflake,” I heard Ben mutter as I stalked to my room.

  “Benjamin! Language, please,” my mother chided.

  In spite of my brother’s frustrating presence, I did enjoy being home, with the thermostat cranked high; I wondered if the needle on that silent dial, fixed unusually high, was meant as a comment on my woodland lifestyle, but I found that it was relaxing to not worry about loading the stove or bringing in wood. I watched snow through the window, not fretting about whether I would have to shovel my way to the woodshed. Dad ran the snowblower with the same pointless regularity that he operated the lawn mower in the summer, carving unnecessary lanes through the yard. I spent time locked in my childhood bedroom, blankets heaped high around me and watching Netflix, which, with our hot spots and limited battery life, was not an option in the cabins. I would emerge to make a slice of toast (so blissfully easy with an electric toaster oven!) and a cup of tea before creeping back to my room. I sank into a motionless torpor of a sort I hadn’t been able to indulge in since moving to the Homestead; there, it was unthinkable to spend a whole day without tackling a fresh task. I skulked around my house like a teenager, quite willing to let my mother do the dishes and prepare the food.

  Christmas involved an excruciating visit to my mother’s sister’s house in Ithaca. She was older and more successful, professionally and matrimonially speaking, which made holidays at her house a display of riches as well as an uncomfortable performance of happiness by both my mother and my aunt. They never diverged from this competitive smiling and beaming, never acknowledged to each other when things might be hard or years might be a little lean. This year, I suspected, I would somewhat weaken my mother’s position, since her children had for many years been her strong suit in the face of Aunt Marie’s large city home and well-off husband. There was little I could do about it, other than drink too much punch or hide in my cousin’s bedroom.

  Marie lived in Belle Sherman, a posh neighborhood on the east side of Ithaca, and had a well-kept, four-bedroom home there. She was a therapist, as was her husband, and she had recently converted a downstairs room into a home office, where she now saw her patients. Within the first few minutes of our arrival, she was already telling us how delightful it was to work from home.

  “What a privilege! I never thought I’d be the sort of person who can start their day in slippers and pajamas, but, oh my goodness, how I’ve enjoyed these last few months of not having to go into the office to do my notes and paperwork. I only see clients in the afternoon, because you know how I am, Jackie, with my sleep—I swear, I only get in one or two good nights a week, so being able to lie in a bit in the mornings has just made all the difference! I have no idea how you’ve managed to go in to work at seven all these years, bless you. I just can’t imagine how you keep on doing it. Maurice, of course, still goes into his office, which is really for the best”—at this she winked conspiratorially at my mother, in the time-honored shorthand for “husbands are a real pest, aren’t they.” Mom smiled politely, though I knew that she herself would probably relish more time with my dad—their schedules had been so rigorously determined by work over the last
twenty years that the waking hours they spent together were usually passed in front of a TV; they were both simply too tired to do much else.

  Marie paraded us around the house, as she did every year, commenting on the updated fixtures, which sinks had new backsplashes, the new hardwood floors in Becky’s bedroom, the laundry room, which now served as the dog’s kennel. She patted their high-strung border collie on the head as she opened the door to this room, and Shep began barking madly at us, hoping to be liberated. I felt bad for the poor thing; he’d mellowed with age, but I had no idea what Marie wanted with a working dog. She had no patience for training, and Shep spent most of his day turning in circles here in the laundry room, shredding dryer sheets, or on a leash in the backyard. Maurice sometimes took him for a walk. Marie shut the door on the frantic dog, who whined pathetically. Maybe, I thought, I should offer to take him walking with Argos. Maybe I should steal him.

  Neither of my cousins was home for Christmas dinner, which was a blessing, since they both loathed their mother and usually generated a tense atmosphere, if not an outright scene. They were now old enough that they could claim to be spending the holidays with their partners’ families (or, in Portia’s case, at a silent, nondenominational meditation retreat). Marie announced both excuses proudly; for once, she would not have the evidence of her unappreciated parenting on display. My mother, on the other hand, had me, trying my best to hide behind the obnoxious holly centerpiece. Ben, surly and hungover from a party the night before, barely looked up from his phone and might as well not have been at the table at all.

  “Mackenzie, I must say, your hair is very bold these days.”

  “That’s what I was going for,” I answered, without real commitment.