The Stranger in the Woods

by Michael Finkel

  “Obviously,” Mills adds, “you can’t get involved in any further criminal trouble of any kind—do you understand that, Mr. Knight?”

  “Yes.”

  “Any questions or anything else you would like to say, Mr. Knight?”

  “No,” he says, and the hearing is over.

  A few hours later, I visit Knight in jail for the final time. It’s our ninth one-hour visit over the course of two months, encompassing four trips to Maine. There are telephones in jail, but he has steadfastly refused to make a call, though we speak through receivers during our visits. He hasn’t placed a phone call in thirty years, and even before he went into the woods, he didn’t like phones.

  “People earnestly say to me here, ‘Mr. Knight, we have cell phones now, and you’re going to really enjoy them.’ That’s their enticement for me to rejoin society. ‘You’re going to love it,’ they say. I have no desire. And what about a text message? Isn’t that just using a telephone as a telegraph? We’re going backwards.” When he hears how songs are now shared and downloaded, Knight is equally unimpressed. “You’re using your computers, your thousand-dollar machines, to listen to the radio? Society is taking a rather strange turn.” He says he’ll stick with vinyl records.

  With his release imminent, Knight seems more unsettled than ever. He scratches furiously at his knees. Jail, he’s realized, might not be all bad. There’s routine and order in jail, and he’s able to click into a survival mode that is not too dissimilar, in terms of steeliness of mental state, to the one he’d perfected during winters in the woods. “I’m surrounded in here by less than desirable people,” he says, “but at least I wasn’t thrown into the waters of society and expected to swim.”

  Now he is being tossed into public life, and he’s frightened. It’s not the big things, like getting a job or relearning to drive, that worry him but the little ones, like eye contact and gestures and emotions, all of which can be badly misinterpreted. “I’m extremely emotionally thin-skinned. I need therapy. I realize that.”

  He feels like the stakes are high for him—he’s fearful that he is going to make a mistake that will send him to prison. The punishment looms over him like a guillotine. “I have no preparation for re-entry into society. I don’t know your world. Only my world, and memories of the world before I went to the woods. What is life today? What is proper? There are blank spots in my skill set. I have to figure out how to live.”

  He refers to what’s happening to him, literally and metaphorically, as his “double winter.” He was arrested as one winter was ending and will be released as the next is beginning. “It’s going to be a year without summer. Like when Krakatoa blew.”

  He’s been invited into the family home, to the sixty-acre plot in the town of Albion, back to his boyhood bedroom. “They don’t approve of what I did, but I am still part of the family. I am grateful.” He will move in with his mother and his sister, with his brother Daniel close by. Even after decades, his home looms large in his memory. He saw a picture of the house in a newspaper story and noticed right away that it had been painted a slightly different color.

  He is unimpressed with what he’s learned in jail of the society he is about to enter, and is certain he is not going to fit in. Everything moves at light speed, without rest. “It’s too loud. Too colorful. The lack of aesthetics. The crudeness. The inanities. The trivia. The inappropriate choices of aspirations and goals.”

  He admits that he’s really not in a position to judge. He says that when he is released, he is going to avoid even the intimation of wrongdoing; he will hew to the law and keep clean. “I don’t want people questioning my questionable judgment.”

  His job prospects, he knows, are dim. “Money, huh? I’ve got to reacquire the taste for money. I intend to get a job. But my résumé is rather thin.” He has low expectations of employment, low and slow. Washing dishes, stocking shelves.

  He was actually offered a sort of internship while in jail. The owner of a local organic farm contacted the DA’s office and said she had an idea to introduce Knight to her style of growing crops. The farm is plowed by horse and oxen, and has a roadside stand that sells homemade pies, jams, and sun-dried-tomato pesto. There are sleigh rides for kids in winter. The owner spoke of how the farm healed her family, and she thought it could do the same for Knight. She was permitted to present the offer to Knight in person at the jail.

  Knight tried his hardest, he says, to remain polite and cooperative during the meeting. “I talked farming. I know about farming. I talked about the whole hippie-experience thing, the back-to-the-land movement, worshipping nature. I think I gave her the wrong idea that I wanted to work in the fields.”

  Neighbors of the farm, according to Knight, were nervous about the notion of him being there, and the owner rescinded the offer. Knight was pleased that the crop-picking idea collapsed. “Me bent over in the hot fields after all those years in the shade of the woods was not going to happen.”

  I tell Knight that I can research employment opportunities for him, quiet jobs like security guard or librarian, and he shakes his head vigorously no. “Please leave me alone,” he says. The best thing I can do is not help him. Help is a kind of relationship. Next thing you know I’ll be asking to be his friend, and he doesn’t want to be my friend. “I’m not going to miss you at all,” he adds.

  He is a connoisseur of the arc of the seasons and the scent of the wind, but he can’t really see anyone else. I’ve told him a little about my family and my pastimes, and he didn’t even bother to feign much interest. He doesn’t know what to do with the information, what questions to ask. He knows people only peripherally, by the food in their pantry and the decorations on their walls. His only real relationship was between him and the forest.

  Knight thinks of himself both as a common criminal and as a Nietzschean Übermensch—a superman, subject to no one else’s rules, a master of self-discipline capable of transcending the vapidity of life. He has told me his story and asked for nothing in return, but he admits that he wonders which version of him I will portray. “I’m worried about having my identity applied by someone else,” he says. “I don’t particularly trust you. I don’t distrust you, either. I’m taking measure of the man. There are certain threadbare spots in your measure. You have the ability to do harm or good. Do what you think is right.”

  He really only had a single curiosity about me: What books were on my shelves? He asks me to take a video of them and send it to him. He says he’ll find a way to get the technology to work. Make the video, he says, but mail no more books or letters, and certainly do not pay a visit to his home. “Once I get out of here, you’re off my dance card. I can’t afford the indulgence that is you; I deny you my magnificent presence. Did you get my dance-card reference, or do I have to update my references? Did you read Little Women?”

  He especially detests my aggressiveness, my coming to speak with him so many times. “You get a bee in your bonnet, and there’s no stopping you.” He says that he regrets writing back to me. Then he backpedals. He fears, he adds, that he is being too hostile. He did get something out of the visits: “Some stress release.” But he has grown weary of talking about himself.

  Mostly what he wants me to do is just slow down and let time pass. “Don’t be a pest,” he says. “I’ll speak to you when the lilacs bloom. And maybe not even then.” I ask him if by lilacs blooming he means next year, and he says, “Yes, in spring. I don’t use years yet.”

  Knight is no longer able to disappear into the wild, not without risking seven years in prison, so he wishes to melt into the world. A guard comes to escort him away, and I thank him for speaking with me, for sharing his ideas. For the lyricism of his language. I tell him I like the way his mind works. “Good-bye, Chris,” I say. “Good luck.”

  There is time for Knight to express a last thought. He does not. There’s no wave, no nod. He stands up, turns his back on me, and walks out of the visiting booth and down a corridor of the jail.

&nbs
p; 26

  Chris’s oldest brother, Daniel, provides him with a job. Daniel runs a scrap-metal-recycling business, and he begins hauling old automobile and tractor engines to Chris, who takes them apart in a shed on his family’s property. He is not getting paid; it’s in exchange for room and board. But he works alone, fulfilling his employment requirement without social interaction.

  Each Monday, a family member drives him to Augusta for his meeting at the courthouse. He never misses one, and he’s never late. He follows the rules of his punishment to the letter. “He is doing a remarkable job,” says Maeghan Maloney. “He has been working hard to understand what it takes to become part of society again. He hasn’t had a single setback. I often see him on Mondays and say hi. We always talk a bit. He seems to be content.” He registers to vote, as an independent.

  Phil Dow, the president of the Albion Historical Society, has known the Knight family for fifty years. Joyce Knight calls him one day and asks if there’s any work Chris might do, to accomplish his community service. “I told her I’d love to have him,” says Dow.

  About once a week, Dow drives to Knight’s home and brings him to the train station. The village of Albion, enthuses Dow, has one of the few remaining narrow-gauge railroad stations in the world. The tracks are two feet apart, less than half the standard dimension—easier and cheaper to lay across difficult terrain. Passengers and freight were transported on this line through central Maine from the late 1800s until June 15, 1933, when a train going around a curve broke the outside rail and tumbled down a bank of the Sheepscot River. The Albion Historical Society is restoring the cedar-sided two-story station.

  Knight is volunteering as a painter. “He doesn’t talk much,” says Dow. “Though I don’t really let him because I’m such a ratchet jaw. But he seems happy.”

  While Knight was still in jail, a woman named Alice Macdonald, who went to high school with him, sent him a letter. She was a couple of years older, she wrote, but she remembered Knight and hoped to conduct Bible-study lessons with him. Knight did not want the lessons, but something about Macdonald interested him. She wasn’t prying to get at his story and seemed to have no ulterior motives. She knew him from before the woods. She was female. They met several times at the jail, his only other regular visitor, and Knight continues to see her.

  “So you have a girlfriend,” I’d teased, feather gentle, during our final jailhouse meeting.

  “No, I’m not engaging in a romance, if that nasty little thought crossed your mind,” Knight replied, knocked over by my feather. The visits with Macdonald were also non-contact, the window between them. He did say he preferred speaking with a woman. “She’s a nice lady. She provides me comfort. She got emotional one day and said, ‘I wish I could hug you.’ I found the idea of her touching me to be an alien idea.”

  Knight’s double winter progresses, and I fulfill his assignment by filming all the books in my house, sixteen minutes of unviral video. I mail the disc to him but hear nothing back. I don’t even know if it reaches him. Every time I hike in the forest, and others times too, I wonder how he’s doing. “The state can run him through programs,” said Terry Hughes, “and he may do fine, but then again, on some Monday or Tuesday morning, he could walk out the door and go back to the woods.” I keep expecting to hear that he’s gone, but the news never comes.

  I telephone Daniel Knight to inquire about Chris. Daniel answers, and I introduce myself and he says, “No thanks,” and hangs up. His brother Jonathan, who lives in Fairbanks, Alaska, hangs up without a word. Timothy never answers.

  Joel Knight runs an auto-repair shop in the tourist town of Belfast, on the Maine coast. I take a trip to Maine in which I do not contact Chris but drive over to Joel’s shop and walk in. There’s a flurry of activity in the four-bay garage, but Joel is easy to spot, in a black T-shirt, dipping in and out of the rear of an SUV, holding a drill, then a wrench, moving fluidly about the small space inside the vehicle. Natural physical grace seems to run in the Knight family.

  “He’s a genius with my Prius,” says the co-owner of Left Bank Books, the town’s independent bookstore. The co-owner says that of course everyone in town knows about Joel’s brother. “I could never ask him about Chris,” she adds. “I don’t know Joel that well.” She does, however, share the town rumor, likely apocryphal, that Chris’s mother continued to celebrate his birthday, even with a cake, for many years.

  I walk across the garage and introduce myself to Joel, and I see from the look on his face—not mean but firm—that we aren’t going to speak much. His hands are dirty, and we don’t shake. Joel does confirm that no one in his family ever knew where Chris was, and that as far as he knows, no one ever helped Chris, no one saw him, and anyone who thinks he’s lying is mistaken. It is clear from his tone that he doesn’t understand Chris’s actions, either.

  “When did you start to believe that Chris had died?”

  “That’s personal.”

  “What was it like when he returned home?”

  “That’s personal.” Joel slips back into the car, conversation over.

  I also stop by Chris’s girlfriend Alice Macdonald’s house. She opens her front door and says, “I can’t speak with you,” and closes it.

  When I call his mother and tell her I’d like to chat about Chris, she says, “I understand,” and disconnects me. Phil Dow, of the historical society, says that Joyce Knight told him it’s good to have Chris back. She reported that his appetite has returned and he’s been devouring the groceries. “She loves to see him eat,” says Dow.

  One thing does elicit a response. I mail Chris a holiday card, with a photo of my three children, and a couple of weeks later I receive a note, written in familiar shaky print, black ink on a white index card. “Such a display of beauty and happiness is not possible without contentment,” he says about the holiday card. He refers to my children, endearingly, as “the cowboys.” “Well done,” he adds. “Solstice greetings? Acknowledgment? Whatever.” There is no name, as usual, but it warms me to hear from him. It seems like getting out of jail has softened him a bit.

  That note, thirty-four words long, is all I get. Seven months after we parted in jail, I again return to Maine. On the drive from the airport, I stop by the Fox Hill Lilac Nursery and purchase a large sprig of purple lilacs. It’s my olive branch. Then I head to Hillman’s Bakery in Fairfield and buy an apple pie, a gift for his mother.

  Past lumber mills and antiques shops, bed-and-breakfasts and above-ground swimming pools. A couple of wild turkeys strut along the road’s shoulder. There are farm eggs for sale on a folding table at the end of a driveway, but no person there—just a box for the money. Central Maine is still on the honor system.

  It takes forty seconds to drive the length of Albion’s Main Street—post office, library, gas station, church, general store. At the store, a bulletin board has handwritten signs for diesel engine repair, yoga classes, snow removal, and hunting guides. There are no traffic lights. At both ends of the town are clusters of white or tan wood-sided homes set close to the road. Then it’s countryside again: a dairy farm, a place that will butcher your deer, a vest-pocket cemetery with a few tombstones nearly two hundred years old.

  The Knight house is mostly hidden behind a wall of hedges and trees. Only the second-floor windows, with bright blue shutters, are visible from the road, two rectangular eyes peering out of the greenery. A black mailbox says, “Joyce W. Knight” on it, beside two newspaper boxes, one for the Portland Press Herald, one for the Morning Sentinel. A giant red maple dominates the front yard.

  I pull my rental car into the short dirt drive, in front of a small garage separate from the house that has a weather vane on top and a metal sign that says in embossed letters, “Sheldon C. Knight.” The yard is quiet. There’s no sign of another vehicle. No one seems to be home. I sit in the car for a moment, wondering what to do. Something about the house makes me nervous, though it’s unremarkable in every way, just a boxy wood-sided place, painted pale ye
llow, with a couple of asphalt roof tiles in need of replacing. I get out of the car, carrying the lilac sprig and the apple pie, and take a few strides toward the front door when out of the bushes, soundlessly, steps Chris Knight.

  27

  He’s shaved, the wild whiskers now a smooth, rounded chin. He is wearing a brown-and-tan plaid flannel shirt tucked into faded blue jeans, and a brown baseball cap with no insignia. He still has the silver-framed bifocals given to him in jail. On his feet are old leather work boots.

  I hold out the lilac branch, drooping with flowers, and Knight looks at it crossly. It’s like offering a glass of water to a fish. There are lilacs, I now notice, blooming pink, purple, and white everywhere on the Knight property. I lower the branch and lift my other hand, like a waiter, pie box on my palm. “I brought something for your mother,” I say.

  Knight’s eyes slide over to the box. “No,” he says firmly. I retreat to my car, open the driver’s-side door, set down the lilacs and the pie, and shut the door.

  We stand there, unnaturally far apart. “Can I shake your hand?” I ask. We’d never had the chance; a wall had always separated us.

  “I’d rather not,” Knight answers, so we don’t.

  Knight indicates, twisting his head, for me to follow him. We walk behind the garage with the weather vane on top, out of sight of the road, in the perfumy breeze of a lilac tree, branches grazing our heads. The grass is vivid green after a week of rain. Apple trees bloom with white flowers, the forerunners to fruit. Nearby is the weathered wooden shed, sagging, where Knight does his salvage work.

  There are swarms of no-see-ums, flying grains of pepper, and I continually brush them away but don’t grab or slap. Even during our jail visits I’d tried to keep my gestures in check around Knight, to preserve his calm. His movements were always so clean and careful. Knight seems not at all disturbed by the insects.