We Went to the Woods

by Caite Dolan-Leach

  I nodded.

  “Then you know how…unnerving he can be. You never quite know where you stand with him, but you really want to find out. I was fifteen. I had no sense. I actually met him over there, in the bar. I snuck in with a fake ID.” She pointed across the road to a bar whose windows were shuttered. “He was charming, and compelling, and he just believed in things so intensely. He invited me out to the Collective, which was just a run-down house and a few tents at that point. My whole life was such a shitshow, and there he was, explaining to me how I could start a different one. I met Fennel, and I just…I don’t know, everything seemed to click into place for me. I packed a duffel bag full of jeans and moved out to the Collective with the rest of the girls. And Matthew.” She took another deep breath.

  “I was definitely in love with him. Like I said, I was fifteen. I believed in him, and he had, I thought, kind of saved my life. It didn’t matter that he was twenty-seven, it didn’t matter that he also seemed to have a thing with Fennel, who was twenty. We were all in it together, working for the same thing. We were going to save the world.” She snorted.

  “You don’t have to explain to me,” I said. “I know what it’s like.”

  “And it was good, for a long time. Years, even. Matthew made me get my GED, Fennel taught me carpentry. The Collective grew. I got a dog. That would be Rex,” she said, closing her eyes momentarily. “But the more vegetables we grew, the more members we seemed to acquire. What had started off so small turned into a much bigger venture, and I didn’t always like the people who showed up. You’ve met the vegans?”

  “Sort of,” I said. “I mean, I’ve been introduced to them.”

  “Yeah, they were doing a vow of silence when they joined. And they were spooky as fuck, I’m telling you. Just wandering around with their dead eyes, never communicating. But Fennel thought they were fantastic additions, because they’d both done a lot of farm work. And she liked, quote unquote, ‘the integrity of their vision.’ ” Lisa snorted again. “It sounds so silly now, I can’t believe how into it I was.

  “Anyway, the politics started to get weird. We had started formally doing the criticisms, and those can get really nasty. Have you been to one?”

  “We didn’t stay,” I said.

  “Well. Everyone has all this pent-up frustration, and that’s the only place to let it out. I hated the criticisms. And I hated a lot of the new initiates. And I hated that I was losing Fennel to this, I don’t know, sort of fundamentalism. I loved her too. And there was Matthew, who was kind of my life for a while there.

  “But then there was Allison.” Lisa paused, and covered her eyes with her hands for a moment.

  “Who was Allison?” I asked.

  “Allison was another young woman. She showed up at the Collective with Matthew one day, and she was just immediately welcomed. When I joined, it was all women except for Matthew, but now there were the guys too. Jesse and Sy had put up their yurts, and we had maybe two or three other male initiates. Matthew was pretty selective about which guys he let stick around, if you know what I mean.

  “Allison was really beautiful, and easy to be around. And it was clear from the beginning that there was something between her and Matthew. We weren’t delighted about it, but the whole point of the Collective has always been free love and open doors and all that. No one said anything. Until we found out her age.”

  “How old was she?”

  “She was seventeen. So, older than I was when I arrived. But I was twenty-one by then, pretty much over the hill. Allison was fresh blood. Things turned south pretty quick. Allison’s parents showed up one day and basically held a deprogramming intervention, where they accused us of being a cult and of sexually exploiting minors. Matthew was who they really meant, but we were all accused of collectively seducing a teenage girl and forcing her into slave labor. It was pretty disruptive.”

  “I bet,” I said, imagining the scene.

  “Allison went home with them, and even though Fennel tried to get in touch, we didn’t hear from her. Then, one day the cops showed up and arrested Matthew.”

  “For what?”

  “Statutory rape,” Lisa said. “I didn’t really even know what that was then, and when I found out, I was pretty freaked out. That was me, too, after all.”

  “Did you identify with Allison?” I asked.

  “She had parents who came to get her,” Lisa answered softly. “Anyway, things felt pretty toxic after the arrest, even when the charges were eventually dropped. I think Matthew settled; his family has money and they just made it disappear.

  “But I didn’t feel at home anymore, and I wanted to leave. Fennel tried and tried to persuade me to stay. She promised me my own cabin, that I could get a job off-site, that I could go to community college and the Collective would pay. But I was starting to understand that I just didn’t want to be owned.

  “Then, right before I was going to move out for good, Rex went missing.”

  “Christ,” I said.

  “It could’ve been coincidental, I suppose. But Rex never disappeared for too long. He always came home. I went calling for him in the woods, looking everywhere. But he wouldn’t come back. I stuck around a few weeks longer, looking for him.”

  “Do you think…” I didn’t finish the thought.

  “Do I think Fennel took him? Yeah, I think she might have,” Lisa said. “I’ve thought about this almost every day for the last year, whether she would do that. And I’ve decided that I think she probably did.”

  “I mean, did you think she killed him?”

  “I did wonder, when he never turned up. But I figured she took him out in the woods, maybe over to the national forest, and just set him loose. Which I guess she probably did, since he showed up on your property.”

  “That’s pretty fucked-up,” I said.

  “You have to understand how deeply Fennel believes they’re doing the right thing. My defection was symbolically and practically really bad news for the Collective, especially after Matthew’s scandal. Scandal, ha. Rape accusations. My leaving made those rumors look true, and it made the Collective weaker. She would do what it took to keep me there. Especially since there were a couple of new recruits she was trying to get to commit right around then. They’d arrived after Matthew’s arrest and right around when Rex went missing, so I don’t think they knew anything about it, and since the charges got dropped, it’s not like Matthew was on a database or anything. She wanted it minimized. But my leaving was a big statement. No full member of the Collective had left them yet.”

  “Do you…do you remember who the new members were?” I wondered if they were any of the people I’d since come to know.

  “Oh yeah. The redhead is hard to forget, and so is her dark and mysterious sidekick.”

  “Wait, do you mean…?” To my mind, this could describe only two particular people.

  “Fennel really wanted them. She had a bit of money, and he had, I don’t know, this thoughtful intensity. Their names were Louisa and Beau.”

  I lost the thread of the questions I knew I should be asking.

  “I heard she killed herself, actually,” Lisa said.

  “What? Who?”

  “Allison. I heard that she took a nosedive off Ithaca Falls last March.”

  * * *

  —

  I drove home processing what I’d heard: Matthew’s transgressions, Fennel’s ruthless commitment, Louisa and Beau’s proposed membership in the Collective. Why had they never said? Why conceal it from all of us?

  And could Allison have been the jumper we saw at the waterfall? Was that the name Beau had screamed up at the gorge?

  Though I maybe should have thought of the implications of all these revelations, I thought first of my project. I couldn’t help noting the parallels with what I’d been writing about—Oneida, and William, and the other
communities that had collapsed for a simple reason: sex. Who gets to have sex with whom, and who controls that decision-making. I mulled over instance after instance, running through the list of utopian communities I had researched, considering which of them had tried to redefine marriage and sex as a central way of reordering society. It seemed the key to me, this one central question that everything orbited around, the very thing I had spent so much time fretting over.

  As I navigated the slushy roads, I mentally organized the communities into categories of how they had dealt with the problem of sex and marriage. There were those who’d proposed complete celibacy and separation of the sexes, like the Shakers and the Rappites. The Icarians had opted for mandatory marriage, insisting on its centrality. The Mormons had gone for their version of polygamy. And, of course, there were those who’d wanted something like free love, like at Modern Times, or the so-called complex marriage that the Oneidans favored. Louisa May Alcott’s family had ultimately left Fruitlands because other participants felt that Bronson’s loyalty to his wife and child threatened the unity of the community. Even Beau’s beloved Thoreau had hightailed it into the woods to commit himself to his celibate musings after being rejected by the woman he loved. What happened, what was happening, at the Collective was almost a perfect case study, with the high-minded ideals being compromised yet again by a man who wanted to fuck all the young women. If I could write it all down, if I could make a coherent narrative about it, maybe I could change something, show us the error of our ways. If I could just ferret out enough information, and find the right words, I could solve this problem, and maybe we would be spared these same pitfalls at the Homestead. And maybe, at last, we could find a way to not let it ruin our experiment.

  * * *

  —

  When I pulled into the drive at the Homestead, I was prepared if not to confront Beau and Louisa, at least to sit down with them and try to get the story of their involvement with the Collective. It bothered me immensely that this had been hidden from us, and I couldn’t understand why.

  But Beau wasn’t home. He didn’t return home in the hours before sunset, and when I woke up the next morning, he was still gone. I didn’t want to pitch a fit if he was just staying over at the Collective, so I drove by to check, pulling up to the farmhouse to see who was around. But it seemed that no one was; there were no cars parked there, and when I knocked on the farmhouse door, no one answered. The only chimney emitting hints of habitation belonged to the vegans, and I was hardly about to go visit them. I looked at the property differently, in light of my conversation with Lisa, and I wondered at everything that had happened here that I still knew nothing about. I wanted to find out, to solve the riddle. Glancing around to make sure I hadn’t missed anyone, I tried to open the door. Oddly, though, it was locked; I hadn’t even realized there was a lock. It was unusual to encounter a barred door here in Hector, and I wondered why they had bothered.

  At home, Louisa seemed supremely unconcerned. She strolled around the garden, checking to see that the hay was spread evenly on the raised beds. She spent an absurdly long time with the chickens, talking to each of them and trying to coax winter eggs from their reluctant cloacae. She cheerily made cup after cup of nettle tea for Chloe, who shadowed her closely, leaning her blond head on Louisa’s shoulder while they stood, looking out at the field. Frustrated with her insouciance, I finally cornered Jack while he was repairing the fence around the main garden; some desperate young deer had made an attempt on its borders.

  “Where the fuck is Beau, and why doesn’t Louisa care?” I asked him. “He doesn’t have family, so where else could he be?”

  “Where do you think?” Jack said with a shrug.

  “He’s not at the Collective. No one is.”

  “What do you mean? How do you know?”

  “I went there. No one’s there.”

  “Oh.” Jack wrinkled his forehead; he looked puzzled, then worried. “I assumed that’s where he was. That’s where he usually disappears to.”

  “I know. But Louisa’s not even worried.” I glanced towards her cabin. “It just seems off to me. Normally she’s seething whenever Beau disappears. But she’s totally calm. After Argos, and with the lawsuit…doesn’t it seem weird to you?” Jack nodded slowly. “Should we do something?” I asked. “I don’t have Fennel’s phone number, and Beau’s obviously not answering his. I’ve tried him three times.”

  “Have you called Rudy?” Jack asked.

  “Louisa’s dad? No, of course not, why would he—”

  “Listen, I have a hunch where Beau is. Let’s just give Rudy a ring and see if he knows anything.”

  “I don’t have his number.” I paused, reflecting. “But Louisa sometimes leaves her phone in her cabin. And I could probably peek at it when she’s cooking, if it’s not password-protected….” I started to spin through other possible techniques, ways to lift Rudy’s phone number from her.

  “Mack, he’s a lawyer,” Jack said, shaking his head in amusement.

  “So?” I responded.

  “Let’s just look up his office phone number online.”

  * * *

  —

  Beau was in jail, again. And Louisa, apparently, had refused to bail him out and had forbidden Rudy to get involved. He’d been arrested more than two days ago, and as far as Rudy knew, no one else had yet posted bail for him. When we asked about Fennel and company, he claimed not to know. Jack and I hung up the phone, entirely unsure what to do.

  “Maybe if we could talk to Natasha,” I finally suggested. “She’s the sanest one of all of them, and she might give us some straight answers.”

  Jack and I got in the truck, not even bothering to make up an excuse for Louisa and Chloe. Hopefully they’d assume we’d just gone to town. How had it come to this? We swung into the driveway at the Collective, prepared to find it still empty. But I halted the truck at the sight of not just Jesse’s Honda but the black Prius in the drive. I glanced over at Jack; I’d told him that the Collective was deserted.

  “Well, maybe they’ll have some answers for us,” Jack said, lurching from the cab. “Straight from the horse’s mouth.” Because, for whatever reason, we both felt certain that Fennel was involved in this, and that she would know about Beau’s arrest.

  She greeted us at the door with a wide smile.

  “I thought some of you kids would show up sooner or later. Thought it might be Chloe, though,” she said. “Come in. We’re just trying to make a plan for Beau.” She beckoned us inside, where Matthew, Natasha, Jesse, and two others sat around the table.

  “Reinforcements,” Matthew said, standing up to greet us. He gave me a kiss on my cheek that felt warm and sincere, but I still couldn’t help cringing. “Sit down with us. We’re trying to fix this.”

  “Tea?” asked Natasha, hopping up to get us cups. I declined, but Jack said yes.

  “Is he still in jail?” I said, not sitting.

  “For the moment,” Natasha answered, pushing a cup of tea into my hands even though I had said no. “He got picked up all on his own this time. We used up everything in our legal fund with the last arrest, so no one’s been able to post bail for him.”

  “How much is bail?” Jack asked.

  “What the hell were you doing?” I asked.

  “Five grand,” Fennel said. “It’s a bit steeper for your second offense. The hearing could be a little rough too. They might try to make an example of him, and Mr. Stein”—she bit his name off acerbically—“has declined to help. Presumably because of Louisa. Who has washed her hands of this. So we’re trying to think of how to scrape together bail, and then what our best defense will be, to help him out. We’ve got about five hundred dollars that we can spare, but that leaves us a little short.” She glanced at Matthew and Natasha.

  “We were just putting together a list of people and organizations that might be able to he
lp,” Natasha added, for our benefit. “Matthew has some friends who do this sort of work, and it will take a little bit of time to pull it all together, but we think—”

  “You’re just going to leave him in jail while you figure it out?”

  “We don’t really have many options,” Fennel said pointedly. “They don’t just let him out because we promise to pony up.”

  “Yes, Fennel, we realize that,” I snapped. “Why is he alone, though? Weren’t you with him? What were you doing?” I tried to quell the hysteria creeping into my voice, but was not entirely successful.

  “We cut open the fence of the company we’ve been protesting,” Natasha said. “It was just the three of us.” She gestured at herself and Jesse. “It was supposed to be reconnaissance, so we could get a feeling for the site, but they’ve hired full-time security guards since the last time we were there. Beau ran directly towards the guy so that Jesse and I could get out.”

  “So he took the fall for you,” I said accusingly.

  “That was the plan we’d agreed on,” Fennel said. “Beau has the fewest arrests, except for Natasha. And since she’s black, we generally try to keep her from having any interactions with law enforcement. For obvious reasons.”

  “Oh,” I said meekly. “Still. You can’t just…leave him.”

  “We’re not planning to, Mack,” Matthew said, putting a hand on my shoulder. “We’re going to get him out, and we’re going to do everything we can to make sure he doesn’t serve time for anything. But he did enter into this knowingly. Knowing the possible consequences.”

  “Unfortunately, those fucking corporate goons have their fingers in everything. They probably have a super PAC to elect judges,” Fennel spat. “Along with those agro-trolls your little orphan Annie has been picking a fight with. You can bet they’ll be more than happy to testify about Beau’s ‘hostility’ if it ever comes to that.”