A Clearing in the Forest

by Gloria Whelan

  Wilson fastened on his safety line and slowly made his way up the snow-covered scaffolding. Climbing the open ladder was bad, but riding the block up was worse. You stood there suspended from the giant steel weight, moving unprotected through the air.

  He eased himself onto the platform’s slippery metal slats. The wind and snow slashed at his face. Snow accumulated in heavy flakes on his eyelashes, making it difficult to see, and fell on his nose and mouth. He ran his tongue around his lips and tasted the snow. In other years the first big snowfall had been reason for celebration; in this work it was nothing but a nuisance.

  A hundred feet below, Lyle, manipulating the drawworks, had sent the block shooting up through the derrick’s open center, and Wilson reached out to attach the first piece of pipe. The block was barely within reach. Wilson had to stretch dangerously close to the edge of the platform. Since he had been chased off of Mrs. Crawford’s property, Lyle had done everything he could to make Wilson’s work as difficult and dangerous as possible. Wilson thought Lyle suspected him of telling Pete and T. K. about the hornet’s nest. He hadn’t. Even when Lyle had turned up at work covered with red welts, Wilson had said nothing. Maybe that was what had really angered Lyle: Wilson’s silence. It gave him a kind of power over Lyle.

  Wilson shook the snow from the top of the pipe and made the connection. In weather like this everything took twice as long. They wouldn’t be breaking any records tonight. Wilson’s first half hour on the platform seemed like a week. He thought of calling down and exchanging jobs, but he didn’t want to give Lyle the satisfaction of seeing him give up.

  From his perch on the platform, the river below him was little more than a black ribbon winding between the white, snow-covered banks. He thought of how different it had looked a few months ago and remembered a day in August when he had fished one of the small feeder streams. To take his mind off of the wind and snow, he tried to summon back the summer afternoon.

  The wet sand along the low edges of the bank had been covered with a filigree of woodcock tracks and tunneled with muskrat holes. There were spikes of scarlet cardinal flower and the grass-of-Parnassus was just starting to bloom. Where the land had been burned off, silt had washed into the stream and the water all but disappeared. He had to wade through swales of tall sedges, soft mud sucking at his feet.

  Water striders swam upstream in little jerks, stopped, and were carried downstream again, each time gaining half again as much distance as they had lost. Their shadows moved with them like black flowers, each one with a large center and four smaller surrounding petals.

  It was nearly impossible to cast without snagging his line in the tag alder and willow branches that stretched like a green canopy over his head. The trout here were small and wary, skittering off at the least movement.

  Behind him he saw how the path he had made through the tall marsh grass allowed the current to flow more quickly. In the small feeder streams, unlike the river, where a hundred men coming and going would make little difference, one person passing through the tiny creek could cause an irreversible change. For this reason the small stream seemed more human than the river, more vulnerable.

  About twenty feet upstream a cloud-shaped mass moved over the water. It was nearly ten feet across, much larger than a swarm of bees. It dipped over the stream, rose, and dipped again. He hurried to investigate. As he got closer, he could see the cloud was made up of shiny green fragments, thousands of migrating dragonflies—green darners. They were driven by an instinct that made no sense. He knew dragonflies rarely migrated. They would die before the season was over, so why did they bother to leave their breeding ground? The shimmering green cloud bannered out and disappeared, leaving him with the loneliness of one who had seen a vision—something that no one could ever share with him.

  A cold gust of wind scattered the images of the summer’s day and Wilson, feeling the sharp chill of the steel through his gloves, swung out the last length of pipe. He started down the ladder, only to find it was nearly impossible for him to keep his balance on the snow-packed rungs. He would never be able to make his way down. Below him through the white streaks of snow, he saw Pete wave his arms and motion toward the block. Wilson guessed he was telling him not to try decending the ladder but to ride the block down.

  When it reached the platform, Wilson forced himself into the open elevator that dangled from the block. It was like standing up in a swing one hundred feet in the air. The snow and wind came at him from all sides, each flake highlighted in the glare of the floodlights. Below him he could make out T. K.’s red parka and Lyle at the drawworks controlling his descent. From this height they looked like midgets.

  It seemed to him that Lyle was bringing him down too fast. He felt himself dropping toward earth as though someone had pushed him out of a window or the door of an airplane. He was nearly even with the roof of the doghouse and he waited for Lyle to slow the block down, but the ground rushed toward him. Then it slammed against his body.

  18

  In the early hours of that November morning Frances dreamed she was walking in the deep forest where the thick trees screened out the sun. Enormous white triangular forms sprang up in front of her. They were the skeletons of icebergs, their bones ice-encrusted steel. A wintery gale pushed and tugged at the huge shapes until they began to sway and groan. Animals raced past her to escape the teetering giants. As the winds howled, the skeletons crashed to the ground, one by one, crushing the fleeing animals beneath them. It was their frightened screams that awakened her. Then the animals shrieks became a siren—something real.

  Frances extricated herself from the tangle of sheets and blankets she had woven with her tossing and turning. The siren was coming from the well site. The lights of the rig were visible through the white snow that sliced the black sky. Her first thought was that the well had caught fire. She looked for flames rising in the darkness, but there was only the usual cold white glare of the fluorescent lights that made the site look like an operating room. The sirens faded. Since Wilson was working on the night shift, he’d be able to tell her what had happened.

  Although it was only six o’clock, she dressed hurriedly, anxious to get out of the room where she felt that pieces of her nightmare were still bumping about in the darkness. There was a lovely early-morning farm program from the state college on television. The people appearing on the program were exactly like the people she used to know fifty years ago. Only their clothing had changed.

  Frances turned on the porch light before letting the dog out and saw a huge gray shape leave the ground, circle the cabin, and fly away. A small mangled animal lay a few feet from the door; beneath it the snow was red. An owl had been tearing at something. For the last week the tracks of a snowshoe hare had cut through the yard. Last night she had thrown out some old apples and greens for the hare. Instead of it having been a kindness, she had made the hare move into the dangerous open space where an owl had been watching.

  Stupid and thoughtless she had been. The trouble was that in winter she felt deserted when raccoons and porcupines curled up in trees and snakes and worms twined together underground. There was nothing for company but birds.

  She scolded herself for sounding like a petulant old lady. She had her books, and Wilson managed to stop by each week. Together they were charting the drill’s progress as it passed through shale, where cold water was trapped in pools, down into rock that had once been covered by inland seas, and into the salt beds. Wilson had brought some of the salt for her. It had given her a strange feeling to taste salt from her own land and know that it was millions of years old. “Don’t worry,” Wilson kept assuring her, “they aren’t going to find any oil. I won’t let them.”

  She settled down in front of the television set with a cup of coffee. The dog lay beside her, gnawing idly on the leg of the chair. The farm program today was on beekeeping. Unsettling closeups of the insects turned them into huge furry animals.

  She refilled her coffee cup and listened to the m
orning news, read by newscasters natty in red blazers with the station’s crest in gold on their pockets. Plans were announced for a cross-country ski-athon later in the winter. The first snowstorm of the season had resulted in a delay of several school buses. The announcer shuffled his papers. “An accident occurred early this morning at a Ffossco well site, located in Pine County. A young man working at the site was seriously hurt in a fall. It is not known at this time what caused the accident. The name of the injured man is Wilson Catchner, believed to be a resident of Pine County.”

  Frances threw on her coat. Her boots were buried somewhere in the pile of winter clothing on the floor of the closet. She left without them, and as she hurried to the truck, the wet snow crept into her shoes and chilled her feet. The accident was her fault! She remembered how Wilson had wanted to quit and she had encouraged him to stay. She prayed that he would be all right, falling back for some reason on a childhood prayer that she hadn’t thought of for seventy years.

  The truck moved hesitantly through the drifts, resisting her efforts to gun it over the slippery rises. The wiper didn’t seem to be working; in order to see the road, she had to stop every few minutes to clear off the windshield.

  At seven-thirty the sky was still dark, the shapes of the snow-covered houses along the road a ghostly white. A snowplow loomed up in front of her. It was impossible to see beyond it in order to pass. The snow from its blade was thrown against the truck, encrusting the windshield with snow. The ride seemed endless. Nearly an hour later when she reached the hospital, its rows of lighted rooms in the darkened city suggested a terrible urgency. The parking lot was familiar. In the last years of Tom’s illness she had often driven him there so that he could see his patients.

  She hurried inside. A nurse was walking in and out of the patients rooms, dispensing medication from tiny paper cups arranged neatly on a metal tray. An aide rattled a cart of breakfast trays past her. Frances looked for a familiar face, but everyone was a stranger.

  When she reached the large swinging door that led into the emergency room, she stopped, afraid to go farther. Only her need to see Wilson finally gave her the courage to push open the door.

  Mr. and Mrs. Catchner were standing beside the nurse’s desk. They looked defenseless and out of place, like civilians caught by an invading army. She started toward them, relieved to see that the nurse at the desk was Lou Walsh, whom she had known for years. Before she could say a word, the Catchners saw her and moved close to each another, forming a wall between her and Lou’s desk.

  Mrs. Catchner’s voice was sharp: “I don’t think you have any business to be here, Mrs. Crawford.”

  Frances tried to answer, but it was like groping about in a dark bag to try to find the right words. “I just wanted to see Wilson—to find out how he is.” Then, acknowledging their prior claim as his parents, she hastily added: “If it’s all right with you.”

  Mr. Catchner’s face was red, his voice loud in the hushed hospital room: “Don’t you think you’ve caused enough trouble? If it weren’t for you giving Wilson grand ideas about going to college, none of this would have happened!”

  Frances was not hurt. Hadn’t she had already accused herself of the same thing? The phone on Lou Walsh’s desk rang. Then she motioned the Catchners to follow her. She glanced back apologetically at Frances.

  Frances watched them disappear. She considered running after them, but knew she would be turned back. She thought of remaining until they returned, but could not bear to face them again. She fled.

  All day long she sat in front of the television set, hoping for news of Wilson. One daytime serial followed another. Their artificial tales of woe seemed to Frances a mockery of her anguish. A game show came on. The master of ceremonies was a fatherly man proudly showing off the contestants as if they were his bright children. A young couple stood at the microphone. The woman was jumping up and down, squealing with excitement; her husband continually slapped his forehead. Every few minutes the couple threw themselves into each other’s arms with obviously feigned excitement.

  Frances got up from her chair and carried her cup of cold coffee into the kitchen. The snowstorm had stopped. It was dark now, but a full moon cast a pale glow on the snow-covered ground. From the window she could make out the carcass of the hare. She thought of the owl returning in the night, circling the cabin, nervous in the bright light of the full moon. It would settle on the hare and try to tear off some meat, but the hare’s body would be frozen into a solid lump. The owl would hunch patiently over the hare, waiting for the warmth of its body to thaw the carcass. Then it would begin to rip off pink ribbons of the hare’s flesh.

  She searched through the cupboard. On a shelf next to a box of old cookie cutters and a bag of dead light bulbs she found some rat poison. She would make slits in the frozen body of the hare and insert the poison. The owl would do no more killing. But before she could carry out her plan, a dark shape appeared against the moon.

  It was a great gray owl, rare in that part of the country: Scoliaptex nebulosa, the Greek eagle-owl of darkness. The owl was the white-gray color of a winter morning, its breast soft and thick with down. The great gray owl had been sighted flying across Lapland and Russia and Mongolia. It was the largest of the owls. For revenge she had nearly murdered a king. For the first time that day she began to cry.

  A pair of headlights appeared on the trail and the owl flew off. It was the Catchners’ truck. For a minute Frances expected to see Wilson climb out and make his way up the walk, but it was his father who knocked at her door. She urged him to come into the cabin, but he refused her invitation with a quick shake of his head.

  “I guess he’s going to make it,” was all he said, and then he turned on his heel and headed for the truck. The headlights swung in an arc and disappeared.

  Frances went out into the yard, forgetting to put on a coat. She hacked at the frozen earth with a shovel until she had a hole large enough to bury the hare. She laid it gently into the ground and covered it over. As she finished, a shadow winged silently across the snow. The great gray owl circled the yard, once, twice, and flew off carrying its shadow with it.

  19

  In the third week of December an unseasonable rain fell. Drops of water clung to the bottoms of the tree branches. By early afternoon the temperature suddenly fell, and the drops stretched into icicles. The trunks of the trees were glazed, their ice-encrusted branches bent nearly to the ground. Frances shouted to the wet birds gathered on the feeder to go home, but some primal knowledge of how hard it would be to find food with all the vegetation iced over kept them there eating compusively, stopping only long enough to fluff up bedraggled feathers.

  At five minutes past five, the electric clock stopped. The furnace died, and the lights went off. She wondered if a tree limb, heavy with ice, had fallen on the power line. She could still hear the whining roar of the oil drill. Nothing seemed to stop the drilling. She looked through windows glazed with ice. The lights on the rig were on. They must have their own generator, she decided.

  When she opened the door to go out for firewood, she heard a sharp crack as the ice sealing the door split. One look at the slick sidewalk made her think better of going outside. What if she fell and broke a leg? Who would find her? The dog ran past her, spreading his paws to give him more traction on the ice, but when all four legs slid out from under him, he turned around and came back in, avoiding her gaze.

  She closed off the rest of the house, drained the pipes in the bathroom and kitchen so they wouldn’t freeze when the cold began to fill the house, and started a small fire in the fireplace. Sometimes the power stayed out for a couple of days. In a way it was pleasant, this containment within a small center of warmth by the fireplace, with nothing to do. These last weeks since Wilson’s accident, the simplest thing had been an effort.

  After the confrontation with his parents, she had been afraid to return to the hospital. Instead, she had gone into town nearly every day so that she could use the ph
one to call Lou Walsh and find out how Wilson was. He had been badly shaken up, but mercifully, Lou had told her, no bones had been broken. Their greatest concern had been the possibility of a head injury. There had been headaches and for a few days a memory loss, but gradually these symptoms had cleared up. The day before yesterday Lou had told her that Wilson had been doing so well he had been allowed to go home.

  Driving by the Catchners’ house on her way home from town, Frances had peered through the lighted windows, hoping against hope for a glimpse of Wilson, but the living room, which faced the road, had been empty. She would probably never see Wilson at her cabin again, but that was a small price to pay for his recovery.

  She slept for a while, waking to a cold dark room. The fire was out. She fed a little of the wood that remained into the dwindling blue flames and lighted a kerosene lamp. Her world had shrunk to a circle of pale yellow light. Familiar objects looked strange. She might be in someone else’s room. It was the shadows, she decided, the way they concealed certain things that had been visible.

  She knew she ought to eat some dinner, but she couldn’t bring herself to leave the warmth of the fire for the cold kitchen. She ate less and less these days. As soon as she thought of food, she thought perversely past the point of its edibility, imagining bread green with mold, butter rancid, meats tinged with putrescent green; even a fresh red apple tasted of soft brown spots and wormholes. She blew out the lamp to conserve kerosene, crept deeper into a coat she had put on that had once belonged to Tom and was long enough to reach down to her feet, and fell asleep. She dreamed she was picking berries in the middle of winter, reaching up high into bare black branches for fruit red as blood. As she bent the branches, she could hear the sheath of ice that coated the twigs breaking into shards. The juice from the fruit covered her thick wool gloves and formed a frozen sugary crust along the edges of her pail.