A Clearing in the Forest

by Gloria Whelan

  When she saw him staring at the books, Frances pulled one from the bottom of a pile, pushing aside the resulting avalanche. “Here’s the book on fossils I was telling you about, Wilson.”

  Wilson held the book in his hands. The heft of it was intimidating.

  “It’s not a difficult book, Wilson. If you’re interested in geology, you ought to read it.” She was cross with herself. Who said anything about his being interested in geology? He would in all likelihood spend his life fooling around with cars in his dad’s yard. She knew herself to be a great meddler. It was one of the reasons she saw little of people. The tendency on her part to give gratuitous advice disgusted her. After all, no one hated to receive advice more than she. She was horrified to hear her voice, presumptuous and carping, “Wilson, I want you to promise me you won’t quit school; it’s only another month. You might want to go to college someday.”

  Wilson was uneasy. No one in his family had ever gone to college. His older sister was the only one to graduate from high school.

  Frances saw his hesitancy and said hastily, “Listen, Wilson, forget any advice I give you. I talk too much.”

  When he left, she walked down the road with him as far as her mailbox, wanting him to see that she was perfectly all right. The dog trotted ahead of them, sniffing out familiar landmarks. “I’ll tell you how I find birds’ nests, Wilson,” she said. “You take the same path each day, a trail like this one along the edge of the woods is best. You watch to see where the birds are flushed out as you pass. After you see a bird fly out at the same spot several times, you know just about where to look. Before the nesting season is over, I’ll have found twenty or thirty nests just along this trail.”

  They came to a robin’s nest in a young beech tree. Wilson saw that it was still in the process of being built. Like prudent contractors, the pair of birds had stockpiled strands of straw and strips of birch bark which they would work into their nest. Just before they came to the mailbox, she led him to a small fir tree. He couldn’t see anything until she parted some branches and a brown bird shot out. “Song sparrow,” she said. In the nest were two eggs of the palest green, spotted with brown and lavender. Wilson thought he had never seen anything more delicate. Beside them was a large white egg, freckled all over with dark brown spots. It was three times the size of the sparrow’s eggs. Mrs. Crawford snatched it out of the nest and gave it to him.

  “Cowbirds,” she said distastefully. “Parasites. They lay their eggs in the nests of small birds that can’t fight them off. When the eggs hatch out, the baby cowbird will be three times the size of the tiny sparrow fledglings and he’ll get all of the food. The song sparrow fledglings will starve.”

  “Why don’t the song sparrows destroy the egg?”

  “They can’t make the choices we can, Wilson.”

  Wilson held the egg in his hand. It was still warm. There was life in it. “How do you know you ought to choose the tree sparrow?”

  When Frances walked back to the cabin, alone now, carrying the letters from the mailbox, the song sparrow had returned to its nest. Did it know the egg that would have killed its young had been removed? Probably not. Another example of her interfering. In nature the chain of casualties was long and complex and had a purpose. Wilson had asked the proper question: why the song sparrow? The boy would make a good scientist. With all her journals and notes, she was only an amateur.

  Frances opened one of the letters. A local real estate firm had written to her again. They were always trying to get her to part with her land. River frontage was in demand:

  This is a premium time for selling your property … buyers in our office every day … future uncertain … under no obligation …

  Someday they might get her land and turn it into a development with concrete roads and condominiums. But while she was still alive and kicking, no one was going to touch it.

  When she opened the next letter, she saw how little her boast meant:

  Dear Mrs. Crawford:

  This is the third letter we have sent you regarding our wish to complete a seismological survey of your land to determine whether or not it would be worthwhile to drill for oil on your property.

  As you know, since you do not have the mineral rights, it is perfectly legal for us to go ahead with our investigation; however, we prefer to do so with your permission.

  I must also bring to your attention complaints by our crew that on a recent preliminary survey, some person or persons let the air out of their tires. The crew has also reported attacks by a vicious dog. We are anxious to do everything we can to foster good relationships in the community, and therefore in the interest of working out some solution which will prove satisfactory to all concerned, our representative, Mr. Clyde Looster, will be in touch with you in the near future …

  When she got to the place where the robins were building their nest, she carefully shredded the two letters into long thin strips and hung them on a nearby branch in the event the robins ran out of birch bark.

  3

  Wilson pulled onto the sandy trail that wound through his front yard. As soon as he turned the motor off, the car became indistinguishable from the fifty or more cars strewn around him. Every once in a while the township supervisor would stop by on the pretext of wanting advice about a problem he was having with his car. After he had made the kind of jokes people make when their hearts aren’t in them, he’d say to Wilson’s dad, “Ty, it don’t make any difference to me, but some folks along the road, and I’m not saying their names, are complaining about all the cars you got scattered around your lawn.”

  His dad would thin his lips into two straight lines, like he always did when he got angry, and say to just tell those nosey so-and-so’s to mind their own business. “This is a free country and what I do with my yard is up to me and nobody else.”

  After some more talk the township supervisor would slink away and not return till the Catchners’ neighbors got after him again.

  Wilson noticed Lyle Barch had dropped off his motorcycle. Wilson had promised to fix the starter. He didn’t much like Lyle, who was the kind of person who always looked right at you after he said something to be sure you thought it was clever or funny—and it seldom was. Wilson didn’t like to be bullied into pretending to feel something he did not. Another thing he had against Lyle was the way he ran around with boys who were younger than he was so he could boss them. He’d buy beer for them and they’d race around on their motorcycles like a swarm of angry bees.

  He pushed open the screen door and carefully wiped his feet. To make up for the disorder in the front yard, his mom kept the inside of the house immaculate. If you moved so much as an ashtray out of its place, she would call from someplace in the house, “Wilson, what are you up to?”

  He found his parents where they were every afternoon before dinner, his mom at the stove and his dad at the kitchen table, newspaper spread out, reading out loud to her back. His dad didn’t consider a newspaper properly read until he had made a pronouncement on each story.

  “What they need down there in Washington,” he was saying.… He looked at Wilson, “Well, here’s the hunter come home. Got yourself a rabbit, eh?”

  His mother smiled at him, “You must be a mind reader. I’ve had a taste lately for a rabbit.”

  Wilson thought how young his mother looked compared to Mrs. Crawford. And you never saw his mom in old clothes or even slacks, just neat housedresses that all looked alike. “I had two rabbits but I left one with Mrs. Crawford. I got them in her woods.”

  While Wilson’s father did not encourage anyone to tell him what to do with his own property, he considered a little unobtrusive poaching on the property of others good sport. “Well, I suppose you got yourself caught and had to hand one over. I’ve heard the doc’s widow is having a hard time making ends meet. That sickness of his went on for a long time and those last years he wasn’t able to do much business. You’d think she’d sell that property of hers along the river. She’d get a good pric
e for it and she could move into town. Anyhow, I guess we owe her. Doc never did charge much when he took care of you; not that you were worth much.” His father gave Wilson a friendly wink to show he was fooling.

  “What do things look like down there? I heard she’s gettin’ a little funny living all by herself,” his mother asked, and then, noticing his book, “What’s that you’re holding?”

  Wilson started. He had forgotten to hide the book before he came in the house. “Just something on geology Mrs. Crawford gave me to read.” He carefully laid the rabbit down on some old newspapers and started for his room.

  “Let’s see it.” His father held out his hand.

  Wilson turned over the book. His mother walked over to the kitchen table and stood looking soberly over his father’s shoulder as he turned the pages.

  “Wilson, I don’t want to see you with anymore books that talk about the earth being millions of years old. That goes against what we believe in this house and you know it.” His dad slammed the book shut. “That’s just nonsense. How does anyone know what happened that long ago? The devil could have put those fossils there just to mislead us. I want you to take that book back to Mrs. Crawford tomorrow.”

  “Dad, what if I was to go to college? I’d be seeing books like that all the time.” Wilson saw his mistake as soon as the words were out of his mouth.

  “That’s just why you aren’t going to college. What’s the point getting a lot of education? You read all the time about young kids coming out of college and ending up waiting on tables. You can make all the money you want working for me.”

  His mother never liked to hear people arguing. “You get upstairs now,” she said to Wilson, “and get yourself cleaned up. Dinner will be ready in half an hour and it’s pot roast.”

  Once he had shut his door behind him, Wilson felt better. He thought he could probably get through anything if he could just know that at the end of it he would be all alone in his room or out in the woods by himself with a chance to think over what had happened.

  He picked up a coffee can full of Petoskey stones and dumped them onto his bed. You could find them all over the northern part of the state. It was a rather nondescript rock which came in all sizes, brownish gray with a pattern of little hexagons that were anywhere from a quarter of an inch to two inches across. Each hexagon had a slightly pitted center. After you polished the rocks, the little centers of the hexagons stared out at you like a lot of shiny eyes. All the kids collected Petoskey stones. The stores in town had them made up into jewelry and sold them for high prices.

  Wilson looked through Mrs. Crawford’s book. There they were. The book said the stones were fragments from the ancient Devonian coral reefs that had existed 400 million years ago when a great salt sea had covered the whole state. Each one of the hexagons was a small animal; each shiny eye a mouth. He decided that when he returned Mrs. Crawford’s book to her, he would take along his collection of rocks. He could see her sharp bright eyes looking at him, wanting to tell him—what?

  4

  The moment she heard the car approach, Frances Crawford escaped through the back door, stopping only long enough to pick up her berry basket. Peering out from behind a tree at the top of the bank, she saw the man knocking at her front door. He seemed to be acquainted with the dog; in fact he was giving the dog something to eat and the dog was fawning all over him in gratitude. Disgraceful! Frances turned away and headed into the woods, noting with distaste how a motorcycle had beaten down a path through one of the small stands of maidenhair fern.

  When she came to the meadow, she found that the handsome flowers with ugly names were in bloom: ragwort, boneset, and viper’s bugloss. She hunched down over what appeared to be a copse of diminutive cedar and pine trees, none of them more than ten inches high. They were Lycopodi, descendants of the ancient tree club mosses. Four hundred million years ago they were giant trees rising a hundred feet into the air. Unable to survive as large trees, they modestly reduced their size. And here they were.

  A black flower beetle, glistening like a chip of coal, lumbered through a forest of slender green stems. Each stem supported a cluster of wild strawberries. Frances sat down and began to gather the berries. It was the only way to pick them. If you stood up and looked down, the tiny fruit disappeared beneath its leaves.

  Her hands grew red; so did her mouth. Red stains covered her slacks and shoes as she inched her way from one patch to another. While she picked, she was in a green room with walls of bracken and a moss floor. The ceiling of maple and oak leaves produced a filtered light, dim in the early morning hours, and then, as the sun moved overhead, dazzling. Ants came to investigate the strawberry juice on her knees.

  Around noon, certain the man would have tired of waiting, she started back to her cabin only to find that he had outwaited her. He sat peacefully looking out at the river from her lawn chair. Before she could turn back, the dog, who had been sleeping at the man’s side, saw her and raced up the bank. There was nothing to do but go down and have it over with.

  The man placed a long leg on either side of the sling chair and stood up. He had not been prepared for someone so old. With her wrinkled face and small trim body, Frances Crawford looked like the little dolls his grandmother had fashioned from shriveled apples. But he was only momentarily disconcerted. He knew he had a way with the ladies, never mind what their age.

  “I guess you were hoping I’d get tired and go away,” he said. “I’m Clyde Looster, the pen pal been sending you all the notes.” A big smile followed each sentence. “I guess you know I’m with the Hutzel Seismological Survey Company.” He handed her his card, which she took without wanting it. “We’d like your permission to do a little surveying of your land.” He illustrated his speech by holding out the township map. An inked line ran between the river and her east-west boundary. He patiently shifted his weight a few times while she tried to study the map, but without her glasses it was fuzzy.

  At last she looked away. “Certainly not,” she said.

  He decided to change his tactics. “Well, look at that, you’ve been picking berries. I don’t believe I ever saw such little ones. Where I come from, it’d take a dozen of those to make one berry.” Another smile.

  She knew all about these people who worked for the oil companies. Since the discovery of oil in the area two years before, they were all over the town. They filled the two motels, and an overflow had settled into a mobile-home park, referred to as “oil city.” Their trucks and cars had license plates from Texas and Louisiana and Oklahoma. Their wives could be seen in the supermarket, slim and friendly, calling out to one another across the aisles in girlish Texas drawls that sounded exotic in this northern state. The supermarket now carried collard and mustard greens, okra and black-eyed peas.

  The children of the oil people were instantly identifiable by their good manners. Because it was so pleasant to be called “ma’am” and “sir” and have students stand up when you addressed them, the local schoolteachers forgave the children their frequent absences. When the yearning came to go back home for a visit, it was not unusual for a family to leave on a Thursday night, drive the thousand miles each way, and return early Tuesday morning. The exhausted children sat nodding sleepily at their desks, their faces sunburnt, fresh mosquito bites on their arms and legs.

  The parents were strict with the children. Talking back could mean an instant reprimand, but no one else was encouraged to discipline them. A school-bus driver who had pushed one of them around for misbehaving had been taken off the oil-city run because the father of the child threatened him with a shotgun.

  “My, you’ve got a beautiful place here.” The man continued to grin waggishly at her. “I hope I didn’t take a liberty by sitting on that chair there.” The dog had settled down on the ground and was resting his chin companionably on the man’s boot. The man reached down and thumped him.

  “I don’t know that you’ve got any right to be here at all.” Frances was tired from being out all mor
ning. Her knees ached and threatened to give out altogether. Her nose was running and she had nothing to wipe it with. When she tried to look up at the man’s grinning face, the sun shone mercilessly into her eyes.

  He moved a half turn so that he would face the sun. “Ma’am, it’s a real pleasure to meet you. I suppose you know your husband’s some kind of legend in town. They say Doc Crawford birthed over a thousand babies around here.”

  Tom would have taken the man in stride, had him in for a beer, found out where he came from, how many children he had, what church he attended and who he had supported in the last presidential election. He knew how to separate the enemy from the man without losing either of them. Once she let the man emerge, she lost the enemy, a dangerous risk in a war. “I suppose you’ve got a little speech to make to me,” she said in a cold voice. “You go right ahead and then you can be on your way.”

  For an instant his smile went from high to low simmer. “I just wish we could be friends, Mrs. Crawford. I don’t see but what we could do each other some good.” He knew that she scraped by on almost nothing to keep hold of her property. His company made a point of seeing that the local banks got some of their business. Ralph Tondro, the manager at the Oclair Bank, had told him all about the Crawfords.

  Dr. Crawford had been well liked in town, but he’d never made much money. During the depression years he was paid in cabbages and eggs, or if it were a big operation, a quarter of beef. When things got better and he might have earned more, he had come down with a crippling disease with a long name. Mrs. Crawford used to put him and his wheelchair in the back of their pickup and drive him around to make house calls. There he’d be, sitting in the back of the truck, waving to everybody.

  The man smiled down at Mrs. Crawford. “What we want to do is make you a little gift, Mrs. Crawford, just for testing the property. And if we find something interesting, the company that will be drilling will be prepared to do more for you. Now we don’t have to do anything. Since you don’t own the mineral rights to your property, the oil company can come in anytime they want to, but we prefer to do things in a friendly way. We want you to be happy.”