We Went to the Woods

by Caite Dolan-Leach

  “Would you mind telling me about it? I’d love to be able to personalize William’s story a little more. For my project.”

  “Well. Sure. But now, I can’t promise the whole thing is one hundred percent true. Grandpa was one for tall tales, so he may have embellished a bit.”

  “I’d still love to hear it,” I pressed. I could see Pat settling in; she sat back into a chair. I felt like she should have knitting, or some other useful activity with which to keep her hands busy. “Do you mind if I record?”

  She looked at my phone a little suspiciously but nodded. “Well. I don’t know how much you know about our Mr. Fulsome.”

  “Assume I don’t know anything.”

  “Well. He was a fairly young man when he came here—to Hector, in any case—in his thirties, I believe. He was one of the descendants of the leader of a utopian community that was founded north of here, in the Burned-Over District. Our friend William had grown tired of the community, and had, I guess you could say, lost faith. He wanted to marry, and the community forbade monogamy. So he left, taking with him two young women and their children, to join other members of the community who had left before them.

  “Jeremiah Winthrop owned a parcel of land out here that had been handed down in his family for a few generations. An ancestor of his had fought in the Revolutionary War, and it was common to give distinguished veterans some land after the end of the war. The land, of course, originally belonged to the Native Americans, but the federal government didn’t much care about those details, so they divided up everything into homestead plots. The Winthrop plot was a valuable one, nice and big. Jeremiah, though, was an idealist. Instead of working the land his father had left him, he went off to join that commune. When he decided, after a few years, that it wasn’t right for him, he took off and headed back home to Hector. He offered the property to his friend Fulsome, when William wanted to leave not too long after. Their goal, they decided, was to continue with their vision of utopia, but without the complications that had plagued their last attempt. Smaller scale, they thought. Monogamy. Raising their own children. See, they believed that Christ was about to come back any day, and they just had to keep on living right until he showed up, and then they would ascend right up to heaven with him.” Pat leaned back into her chair, and her story. She seemed to be enjoying herself.

  “Problem is, they knew almost nothing about farming, certainly not about subsistence farming; jobs were divided up at Oneida, and the more educated folk did clerical work and the like. Our friends knew how to harvest strawberries but not how to grow a cucumber or put up enough food for the winter. And they were living in a remote place, remember. They would’ve had one horse, and not many neighbors. The closest town was almost a day’s ride away.

  “The story goes that the winter came on hard and fast, and things went south for our perfectionists, so to speak. The babies got sick, and two of them died. One of the women was pregnant—the unmarried woman, I think it was—and lost the infant. They were running out of food way too fast and everyone was getting squirrelly, stuck in their cabins and watching the babies die. You know how winter can be.” Pat smiled incongruously. As though my experience of winter typically involved watching babies die.

  “Winthrop’s wife, I think her name was Anna, well, she and her one surviving kid got sick sometime in late winter. Winthrop put them on a sled and decided to drag them into town—he couldn’t watch another child die, and he loved his wife. So he headed for the city on a horse and sleigh, leaving behind William and the two women, both sorta mad with grief, you know. They were running out of food, like I said, and one of the women got sick and William just sort of cracked, I guess. He wrote a letter about how he’d seen Christ’s return and he was ready to take his wives into the afterlife to meet him in the kingdom of heaven. ‘Our attempt at Paradise has been so successful that two of our little ones have gone before us to prepare the way, perfect beings,’ he’s supposed to have written in a letter, or some such thing. He went out onto the pond and cracked a hole in the ice, and then he dragged the two women and the little boy and little girl one by one out onto the ice and dropped them in. The women likely sank to the bottom, but he must have held the little ones down. Then he walked back to the cabin and hanged himself from the rafters. Winthrop found him a few days later, when he came back to tell them that Anna was recovering in town.”

  I must have looked sufficiently horrified at this story, because Pat laughed, sharp and barking. “I agree, it’s a dark little story, isn’t it?” I just stared at her, and stopped recording on my phone.

  “Mind you, it could just be an old wives’ tale,” she continued. “My grandfather said the story came from a letter Winthrop wrote back home to the community, to let them know what had happened to Fulsome and his family. I guess the letter is with the community documents over at Syracuse. The university.

  “My grandpa believed the place was haunted, of course. That the ghosts lived in the pond there and dragged people below the surface, preparing them for Christ’s coming. You can guess that we stopped swimming in ponds for a bit.”

  “I can imagine,” I agreed.

  “Well, I hope that’s helpful to you,” Pat said. “Like I said, it might just be an old ghost story. But I have a feeling some of it’s true. You might be able to fact-check at the university archive, if you want to. See if they have Winthrop’s letters.”

  “What archive?” I asked.

  “At Syracuse. They have some papers to do with the Oneida Community; they might have something from our locals stashed in there. Should be interesting, anyway.”

  “Thank you for telling me all of this. And, yes, I might follow up with the archives, see if I can track it down. Depends what my project ends up looking like, though.”

  “That’s up to you,” she said congenially, if dismissively. “I leave here at four, and still have to put away one or two more pieces of paper.”

  “I’ll get out of your hair,” I promised, standing to leave with my treasure.

  “Pieces of paper. That’s all it really comes down to, isn’t it? So many accumulated scraps of words, and that’s what we build our lives on.” She shuffled the papers on her desk, looking around the room, which was indeed simply accumulated stacks of paper.

  “Better than nothing,” I said and left.

  * * *

  —

  I stared at the pond from my cabin window, wondering if there were skeletons in the frozen silt, whether blue corpses waved their tattered arms towards the surface, willing living beings into the water as their heavy petticoats drag them ever downward. I found myself giving the pond a wide berth.

  The days were filled with pale sap, sticky but almost clear. We would lug the gallon jugs back to the clearing near the big cabin and dump them into a large pot that sat suspended over a quiet flame, reducing the liquid within to dark syrup. The pot gave off a perpetual cloud of sweet steam, and I liked to stand near the fire, letting my hair and clothes become drenched in the scent of firewood and boiling maple. Walking in the woods between the trees was soothing and quiet—the birds were active for a few hours a day, but the summer cacophony of activity was virtually silenced in these winter months.

  We started to talk about spring, cautiously. We didn’t want to wish for it too hard, almost as though thinking about it, fantasizing about it, would delay its arrival. We limited ourselves to practical considerations: when to till the beds, when to put in peas, whether the seedlings we planned to start in the big cabin’s windows would have enough time and light to grow. Louisa spoke enviously of the West Hill Collective’s greenhouse, and she and Jack began to design a very simple one of our own, to be built mostly with plastic sheeting and jugs of water painted black and stacked in the sun to keep the temperature up. Maybe we could get it built sometime in March, Louisa mused. Start the seedlings in the kitchen and transfer them outside once the greenhous
e was in good shape.

  One evening, as Louisa and I were washing dishes in the kitchen, I asked her the question that had been on my mind.

  “Louisa?”

  She paused in her drying. “What?”

  “When you asked me to join the Homestead. Did you want me here because of what I did? I mean, because of why I left New York? The Millennial Experiment?”

  She set down the plate she was holding. She took a deep breath.

  “Yes. That is a part of why I picked you. Your shame, the publicity of your embarrassment…When I found out, I knew that it would…that you would care about all this that much more deeply. And that you would…maintain privacy. Discretion,” she said.

  And though I’d thought this answer would hurt me, I found myself instead pleased: I had, indeed, been chosen.

  * * *

  —

  Beau continued to head off on his missions, but he was around the Homestead more often than he had been before Christmas. Whether this was to pacify Louisa or a result of his legal troubles, I wasn’t sure, but his presence had a stabilizing effect on everyone. Exasperating as he could be, it felt good to be around him; his laughter made one feel especially clever, and he had a way of pausing thoughtfully before speaking that lent all his comments gravitas. During his absences, I noticed that Louisa was unconcerned, and even seemed supportive of his friendship with our neighbors. Once, she went with him on a visit, without duress or protest, and I wondered at her strange new acceptance. I asked Jack about it, thinking he might have some insight, and he paused before answering me.

  “She didn’t say anything to you about it?”

  “About what?”

  Jack bit his lip, debating whether to continue. “The lawsuit,” he said after a pause. “It was dismissed.”

  “What? I can’t believe she didn’t completely fly off the handle! When did this happen?”

  “Not long after Beau’s arrest. It had been sort of inevitable for a while, but I think it was still a blow when it happened.”

  “Huh.” I reflected on this. She hadn’t told me, so I was hurt. And she’d told Jack? But without worrying about the lawsuit with the Larsons, she seemed to be less upset with Beau’s connection to the Collective. Surely she hadn’t come around to their belief in direct action? But as I thought about it, that seemed to be exactly the sort of thing that might appeal to her; without a legal win, she might feel that triumph by any means was now a legitimate option. To my eternal regret, I didn’t ask Jack that day if he knew anything more. Simply because he, too, felt further away from me. Those final days at the Homestead, we were all withdrawing, each into our own preoccupations and manias.

  My fascination with the Collective translated into a fever of writing; my document grew, and I added speculation, details on the satellite in California, and any information about Matthew and Fennel I could track down online. My narrative was beginning to split and twine back into itself; I was weaving a story about us, about our comrades a couple of miles away, about the perfectionist community that had settled here. In grander moments, it seemed I was writing about everyone who had undertaken a project like ours: to start over and remake the social contract. Those few of us with the means and the desire to begin again, better. I felt like I was in the middle of a complicated braid, and each strand had to be carefully plaited into the others or the whole thing would dissolve between my inexperienced fingers.

  I was eager to continue my research on William’s tragedy. I’d emailed two people at Syracuse University, trying to set up a time to visit and have a look through their archives. They seemed willing to let me come, though distracted, and our correspondence moved at a sluggish pace. In the gray winter light, I was desperate for something to do, something with momentum that would relieve the tedium of winter days spent largely indoors. I could only lose to Beau at mah-jongg so many times before I stabbed him in the eye.

  Finally, we set a date in early March, for a Monday. I would be allowed to poke through the documents to find the letter that would corroborate the gothic tale related to me by Pat at the historical society. Did it matter to me whether or not the story was a fiction? I knew it should. But in all honesty, I’m not sure that it did. At least not enough.

  Chapter 26

  The drive to Syracuse is a bleak and dull stretch along the interstate, and I contemplated it with reluctance, particularly in light of a sinister weather forecast that predicted snow. Still, I reasoned, if I were to change my plans every time the winter interfered, I would be static until May, and I hopped into my truck nonetheless. My decrepit old rust bucket had no jack in which to plug my phone, and I owned only one tape, a tinny old Neil Young, which, like the truck, I had inherited from my dad. I couldn’t stand advertising anymore, and therefore found the radio intrusive. So I drove in silence, watching the gray carpet of slush encroach on the shoulder of the highway, musing, sometimes aloud.

  I hadn’t told anyone where I was going. I felt emboldened by my solitary project, imagining how I would present it to my comrades once I finished writing everything down: A tale of nineteenth-century utopian dreams, and the interwoven story of our own contemporary attempts. The truth about William, and perhaps about Matthew. The truth about us. Caught up in the flush, the near mania of fresh fantasy, I pictured my triumphant return to writing. Hell, maybe I could even publish after all—?

  My visit to the archives was not, however, as revelatory as I had hoped. A librarian showed me where to hunt, took my bag, and gave me instructions. She seemed annoyed when I mentioned my specific interests—William Fulsome and Jeremiah Winthrop—and she pointed out that this was my own research, and everything was alphabetically organized. Thus, I was left to my own devices. Much good it did me.

  After hours, I had located a log that mentioned William and a roster that recorded Winthrop’s financial assets when he joined the community, but I had found no trace of the apocryphal letter that recounted William’s breakdown. The heater in the archive was cranked up unforgivably high; after a season of woodstoves, sweaters, and perpetual shivering outside, the forced air felt stuffy and unbreathable. I wished that I weren’t wearing my long johns beneath my overalls. After pawing through letters that spelled out a lot of tedium and some heartache, I felt defeated. Without confirmation, how could I hope to write this story? Did it work as well without its macabre end?

  The librarian poked her head back into the room where I sat.

  “Oh, you’re still here? I thought you must have left.”

  “Nope, still combing through history,” I said, trying to smile and cracking my neck.

  “Haven’t you looked outside? You said you came from down eighty-one?”

  “Near Ithaca. There aren’t any windows in here. What’s going on outside?”

  “The weather’s starting. I would have left hours ago, if I was you.”

  “But the blizzard isn’t supposed to roll in until tonight,” I said, standing up.

  “Well, lake effect and all. The roads might stay clear for another hour, but unless you want to spend the night here, you’d better get going,” she chided. She clearly thought me a fool, and I wondered if she wasn’t right. In a vague panic, I tidied the documents I’d been looking at. I didn’t have enough money in my bank account to pay for a hotel room, and I certainly didn’t want to get stuck on the highway overnight. My heater didn’t really work.

  “Don’t worry about all that—I have to reorganize it anyway,” the librarian scolded. “Go get your things and head home, while you can.” I bobbed my head in thanks and scooped up my bag and coat in the entryway. Struggling to force my arms into my parka while simultaneously fishing for my keys and my phone, I stepped outside into the parking lot.

  It wasn’t a full-scale blizzard yet, but the weather had indeed started. Gusts of icy air were swooping down from the Great Lakes, and I fumbled for my zipper. Although the snow
was falling delicately, the wind turned everything I could see into a pixelated gray as I walked through the fine dusting already on the asphalt to my truck. I turned it on and cranked the heat as high as it would go, though I knew it would generate little more than a gust of air in the cab. I was already nostalgic for the claustrophobic atmosphere in the archive.

  My phone had a worrying six missed calls. One from my mother, four from Chloe, and one from Louisa. My mother was the only one who had left a voicemail, and I skimmed the transcription without listening to her voice; she wanted to make sure I wasn’t driving anywhere. Oops. Chloe had texted follow-ups to her call:

  Where are you?

  I’m worried for Beau.

  I think something’s happening with him and Louisa and Fennel.

  Mack??? I think you should get back here.

  My heart started skittering and I stabbed at my phone, trying to call her back. No answer. I tried Louisa and Jack next; Beau didn’t have his cellphone on, of course. No one answered. I tried to calm my breath. Absent my truck, they had probably just walked to the Collective for something and decided not to trek back in the snow. Maybe Chloe had gone after them. Now they were all likely drinking wine and laughing, preparing to hunker down for a snowstorm. Louisa would make the atmosphere festive. I felt a stab of envy at the thought of them already huddled around a stove. I put my truck in drive and started to head for home.

  The highways weren’t bad; the plows were out in force, salting the road prodigiously, and the visibility was still fine. I fussed at the radio until I found a local station, and learned that what I had flippantly been treating as a small storm was likely to be a major blizzard; feet of snow were predicted to fall on our roofs in the next two days, and people were advised not to travel unless it was an emergency. Feeling adrenaline begin to course through me, I tapped my hands on the steering wheel, keeping the car at a clean fifty miles an hour. There weren’t too many other cars on the road, and I forced myself to sing along to Neil Young until I turned off the interstate.