“The Larsons are involved?” I raised my eyebrows and looked at Jack in real alarm. “Does Louisa know?”
“We don’t know if they’re involved or not, but it’s reasonable to guess they might be. They sold off mineral rights to a big parcel of land just a few weeks ago—had you heard that? Those assholes realized where the real profit is, so they’re taking the fracking money and getting out of Dodge. Going to start over farther south.”
“We’re worried that Louisa doesn’t want to implicate herself with Beau’s current legal trouble because of the lawsuit with the Larsons,” Natasha explained. “Which is understandable, given how much she’s put into fighting them.” She looked over at Fennel, who rolled her eyes.
“I can’t believe Louisa would just…leave Beau in the lurch like that,” I said.
“You don’t think so?” Fennel snapped. “She cares about controlling Beau, not about protecting him. She hates that he’s found his own interests, and she wants to punish him for acting on his own principles. Just like last time.” Her face was dark with anger.
Now that I knew she was referring to last year, Louisa and Fennel’s mutual antipathy made much more sense.
“I think it’s important that we’re all on the same side,” Matthew interjected calmly. “We’re here to protect our Mother, the Earth. And while we all might take different tacks in achieving that goal, ultimately what we all want is a safe and healthy planet.”
“Which is fine,” I said. “But what about Beau?”
“I have an idea to help Beau,” Jack said. “Why don’t you guys let me deal with it?”
I looked at him in surprise. “What sort of idea?”
“Look, I need to make some phone calls. How about I check in with you guys in a few hours?”
Fennel and Natasha both nodded at Jack’s suggestion, and they all swapped phone numbers.
“Can we at least visit him? Let him know we’re trying to help?” I asked shrilly, feeling that I was about to be shut out of whatever would come next.
“I’m sure he already knows,” Matthew said, in a tone that was meant to be reassuring. We were shuffled out the door moments later.
* * *
Jack returned home with Beau the following day, looking pleased with himself. Beau merely shrugged when asked how he was, and Louisa made a point not to ask any questions at all. Jack wouldn’t tell me what he’d done to get Beau out. But I knew that he must have gotten his hands on over four thousand dollars in less than a day, and I upwardly revised my impression of Jack’s bank account. I’d had no idea that he was so well-off, and I asked myself, yet again, whether I knew any of these people with whom I lived.
Chapter 24
It was sap season, finally. It wasn’t terribly cold when the three of us walked out into the woods, Jack and Beau and I, bearing our sawed-off plastic milk jugs, tree bores, and the spigots we would ram into the maple wood to harvest the sap. There hadn’t been very many hard frosts, so we weren’t expecting a prodigious output, but Louisa was determined, naturally, and I found myself in my ragged parka and fingerless gloves as Beau showed me first how to identify the maple trees (“Canadian flag,” he said, holding out a leaf that had clung to the tree branch for my inspection and describing the tree’s trunk) and then how to dig the tap into the flaking bark and attach the gallon jug to the whole arrangement with some wire.
Since Beau’s arrest, we had all avoided discussing anything contentious or related to the Collective. We could all feel the tension, and it was as though no one was willing to disrupt the delicate balance of the household. It seemed that we were all afraid of being the one to topple our castle in the air; I knew that I didn’t want to be the person who kicked out the foundation, and so I bit my tongue, and prevented myself from asking for clarification. This didn’t stop me from enumerating every speculation that crossed my mind in the file that constituted my project—I stayed up late into the night, obsessively scribbling, composing half-fictions from the few facts I had.
* * *
—
“We’ll check on them every other day,” Beau was explaining. “I don’t expect very much this year, but we’ll see. Worth a try.” Jack was bounding around in excitement, pointing out every maple tree he saw.
“Take it easy, old sport.” Beau chuckled. “We only have twenty gallons and twenty taps to work with here.”
“Surely that’s a massive amount of syrup,” Jack said.
“Not really. I don’t remember the exact proportions, but you have to boil the shit out of this sap to get syrup.” Beau stood up from where he had been affixing another tap to the base of a thick maple. “My mom used to do this with me, when I was a kid. She really liked being out in the woods.”
Jack and I exchanged glances; I couldn’t remember Beau ever having independently mentioned his mother before, and I was afraid of startling him off the subject. I was, of course, morbidly curious.
“Once, when I was six or seven, she woke me up in the middle of the night. It was winter, bitterly cold, but I got into my snowsuit and followed her outside. She had me get in my sled and tugged me out into the woods. There was a moon, but it was so dark—I’d never been outside at that time of night, in the woods, and I was a little scared. She pulled me into this grove of trees and got into the sled with me, right behind me, and held me. She told me to listen. And after twenty or thirty minutes, we heard this owl, hooting right near us, and I could see its wings in the dark as it hunted a mouse.” Beau shook his head; he wasn’t prone to monologues. “I finally fell asleep, and she must have pulled me back to the house before dawn. But sometimes I wonder if she didn’t plan for us both to die out there. In the woods. Listening to the owls.”
I looked at Beau’s face, unreadable as he gazed up into the canopy, as though that owl might appear to him now. I could feel his hurt and his sadness as he remembered his mother. So used to his easy demeanor of distance, I couldn’t stand to see him vulnerable.
“I rejoice in owls,” I cried, spinning in a circle and gazing up at the trees. Beau smiled and Jack joined me in a fast twirl, spinning me around. We eventually both tumbled onto the hard ground, cackling. Beau watched us until I reached up my hand and tugged him to the ground between us. I snuggled into the crook of his arm, aware of the chilled, stiff mud beneath me. I could sense Jack tentatively leaning in closer on Beau’s other side. I suppose we were very silly.
* * *
—
Though I badly wanted to speak to Beau and Louisa about their year at the Collective, they never seemed to be in a room together, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to bear it if I asked and they dismissed me. I figured that if I asked Beau outright, he would write it off casually and make me feel as though I were creating drama where there was none to be had. So it would have to be Louisa.
The phone call from the vet school provided the excuse I needed to approach her. While I was in the field, someone left a voicemail letting me know that I could come claim Argos’s body, along with the autopsy results. I found Louisa in her cabin, where she was clattering away at her laptop.
“Do you want to go with me to the vet school?” I asked. “Argos is ready.”
She glanced up from her typing, her forehead furrowed. She was wearing glasses, and I tried to remember if I had ever seen her in them before.
“Um, sure. If you need me. Do you need me?”
“I wouldn’t mind the company,” I said. Quite frankly, I would have preferred Chloe’s compassion to Louisa’s brusque competence, but I needed to speak with her, and she would grant me this boon, would help me fetch my dead dog—she could hardly not.
“Gimme fifteen,” she said. “I’m almost out of juice with this thing—maybe we can do a power stop, charge some devices.”
She met me in the truck, and we were nearly in town before I summoned the courage to mention what had been on my mind.
/>
“I spoke to Lisa Robertson,” I told her.
“Ah,” she said after a moment. “I thought you might.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Christ. I don’t know. Beau and I talked about it. You know him, though; he was all for being cryptic. But I suppose it had a lot to do with the fact that we didn’t want you three to feel excluded. As though you were somehow the second string.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like we’d failed with the Collective, and you all were take two.”
“Well, weren’t we?”
“No!” she answered fiercely. “See, that’s why I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want there to be suspicions and questions hanging over it. We were starting for real, with the Homestead. The Collective was just a—I don’t know, an experiment. I was mostly humoring Beau. He was curious, he’d been going to the anarchist meetings. He dragged me along to the Collective and suggested we try it out. It was half-assed from start to finish. I wasn’t even living out there full-time.”
“And why did you leave? Because of the stuff with Lisa?”
“Well, Fennel did try to keep that all hush-hush, but we all knew something was happening. We just didn’t know what. As you can probably guess, Fennel and I weren’t exactly best friends.
“But I guess we really left because of Matthew. He—ugh, I hate talking about it. Anyway, we were all drunk, Beau was off with Fennel, and I was irritated. Matthew was by the stove in the living room, and he started flirting…let’s just say he propositioned me. Repeatedly. Aggressively. I was pissed but also pretty incoherent and I made Beau take me home. Afterward, I brought it up during criticism and Fennel just flipped out. She protected him, said I was lying, said I was too drunk. Basically, she said it was my fault.” Louisa paused to take a deep breath. “And, honestly, I thought it might have been too. But we found out about Lisa and Allison a few weeks later, and that was that for me. I told Beau he could stay but that if he didn’t leave with me, I wasn’t sure I wanted to see him again. So he left with me.”
“But he stayed friends with Fennel,” I pointed out. “And even Matthew, sort of.”
“The thing about Beau is that he hates the idea of being owned. I shouldn’t have given him the ultimatum; he would’ve come with me anyway. But because I did, because I put down my foot, he balked. I think he stayed friends with Fennel out of defiance, to prove that he was his own man. And maybe, partly, to punish me.”
“For what?”
“For Matthew, maybe. For years of tiny slights and injustices. To see if I would stay, even as he did something that made me furious.”
“As what? Proof of you caring about him?” I asked.
“You have to understand, he’s lost everyone. His father left him, and then his mother really left him. I’m the only person who hasn’t. I think he pushes everyone away to see if they come back, because he can’t bear it if they’re the one to walk.”
“Well, that makes some of his behavior a little more comprehensible,” I conceded, thinking of how he could be so present in one moment and then unattainable the next. Louisa chuckled.
“I know it can feel cruel,” she said. “But he’s like that because he’s vulnerable. If he cares enough to avoid you, he really cares.” She patted my knee, and I laughed.
“Well, I’m not sure that makes me feel better, but thanks.”
* * *
—
“What do you mean you cremated him?” I heard myself yelping at a petite vet tech. “We’re here to pick up his body.”
“I’m really sorry, but that’s the standard procedure. Most people can’t safely bury an animal at home.”
“Well, I can,” I insisted.
“I’m really sorry,” she repeated. I fumed for another moment, but there wasn’t anything to be done. “Do you want the autopsy report?” she asked. I nodded, reaching out my hand. She gave it to me and mutely scuttled away to fetch Argos’s box of dust.
Louisa looked over my shoulder as I read the words “cholecalciferol” and “anticoagulant rodenticide” and “renal failure.” Argos was now just a list of clinical terms and a container of ash.
“Rat poison,” Louisa said.
“What?”
“He was poisoned, Mack. Both of those are rat poison,” she explained, pointing to the salient words. “Not just one poison but two.”
“Who has two different kinds of rat poison?” I asked, bewildered.
Louisa’s face looked dark. “Someone who might be trying to kill something a little bigger than a rat,” she said.
We drove home in silence. I had no idea what to say, and I felt the weight of the box against my pelvis every time we took a curve in the road, the chalky remains of my pup just a soft knock at my hip as the road twisted up the hill.
Chloe was waiting for us in the driveway, and she came to me instantly as I hopped down from the truck.
“I am so sorry,” Chloe said, taking my face in her hands and pressing her forehead to mine. “He was—” She didn’t finish her sentence, and through my own clotted lashes, I could see her wet cheeks, her petal skin salted. She held me a moment longer, her frame shaking a little, the way it did whenever she was moved. It felt like she knew, that she felt it too.
She took my elbow, and we walked towards the clearing opposite the pond. Beau and Jack emerged from the big cabin, followed by Louisa, who had summoned them, and we made a gloomy processional towards the spot we had chosen for Argos’s burial. Louisa had one arm wrapped around Argos and the other around a whiskey bottle.
In the back field, where I had run so often with the dog, we stopped and formed a loose circle. There were several inches of snow on the ground, and the day was weakly lit by an anemic sun that refused to break through the low cloud cover. We stood twenty yards from the tepee made by the low-hanging branches of a huge pine tree; I could smell its sap. A hungry doe watched us from the edge of the trees, and countless other animals observed our progress, unseen.
“He was an excellent fellow,” Beau began. “I respected him.”
“Hear, hear,” said Jack, shifting uncomfortably. Not knowing what to say, he might say the wrong thing, something awkward, so I cut him off, unable to bear a parade of platitudes.
“He was a creature without words,” I said, “and that’s how we should say goodbye to him. He had no use for language and its lies and cruelties and failures.” There had been no gradations of truth with Argos, nothing left unsaid. These months, wrapped in words and ideas as I had been, I’d wanted only the simplicity of his deep breath after a long run, the genuine affection he showed when we had been apart.
Wordlessly, as I had asked, Louisa opened the box and slit the plastic bag inside with a Swiss Army knife. I was momentarily furious that she would assume the responsibility of scattering his ashes (it was my right!), but I realized I wanted nothing to do with that cold container. It could mean nothing to Argos, and it was nothing to me; I had said my goodbye in the cab of my truck, as his kidneys failed.
Louisa tossed the ashes into the air, and there was thankfully enough wind to carry them up and away from us; she had timed it well. A final dollop of dog remained, and these she emptied gently towards the ground; they skittered just above the snow, racing away from us, much as Argos had done. She replaced the lid and put the box between her feet, notched into the snow, and picked up the whiskey bottle. It was from the distillery on Seneca Lake, and the label was stamped with the image of the Finger Lakes. She poured out a driblet onto the ground, and I saw the amber liquid collide with the dusty gray of the ashes on the snow before it melted. Taking a hefty glug, she passed the bottle around until we had each tasted it. Silent, we turned and walked back to the cabin.
We sat around the table, not bothering to fetch down cups for the whiskey, just handing it around. Louisa’s cheeks were already br
ight red, and they deepened as she stirred the coals in the wood oven; she had been perfecting a method for baking bread in the stove, and that’s what we would be eating for dinner, with some garlic preserves. I had no real appetite, anyway.
“He was poisoned,” she finally said, breaking the grieving silence. “I think you all should know that.”
“Poisoned?” Chloe echoed. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that he ingested at least two different kinds of rat poison before he died of kidney failure,” Louisa said. “He wasn’t hit by a car. He was killed.”
“We don’t actually know that,” I corrected. “It still could have been an accident.”
“With two different kinds of poison? And a dog that size?” Louisa asked.
“I mean, if one of our neighbors keeps two different kinds of poison and Argos maybe got into the garage or something,” I suggested.
“Argos wasn’t a stupid dog,” Beau said. “Have you ever known him to eat anything that was bad for him? Remember, he was half feral when we found him. He wasn’t a fool.”
“He was just a dog!” I said.
“Mack, I know it’s alarming,” Louisa said. “But we have to get real. Things are getting intense.”
“What are you talking about?”
Louisa glanced at Beau. “I think it’s retaliation,” she said.
Beau raised his eyebrows. “You think they’re that upset?”
“I think they could be,” she answered.
“What the fuck are you guys talking about?” I asked.
“I have a notion,” Jack said. He had been quiet, and I could see he had been thinking. “At least, I know what you’re thinking.” Louisa looked at him expectantly. “You think it’s the Larsons.”
“Yes, I do,” she agreed. “I think they’re pissed about…some of the things that happened recently.” She glanced again at Beau, who met her gaze without blinking.
We Went to the Woods Page 30
