The Yellow Wood

by The Yellow Wood (v5. 0) (epub)

  Something slithers between my feet. It crosses in front of me, coils around me, approaches me from behind and from the side. A snake. My skin crawls as the snake crawls.

  “I do not need your help. When I need your help, I will let you know.”

  Herpie ignores me. If a snake can be said to have ideas, she has ideas of her own. In a patch of sun on a lichen-spotted rock she makes a thin tower of herself, like a child’s stacking toy, and from among the coils flicks out her tongue, presumably gathering data I may or may not be interested in using.

  I see, though, that I have come to the place I think I intended to reach when I set out on this jaunt, and I suppose Herpie was my guide. That is, after all, her function. I am tempted to say her raison d’être, but I acknowledge, somewhat grudgingly, that probably she has reasons for being besides keeping me from getting lost. I thank her, though. Of course she does not respond. She is a snake.

  I must have been about seven, just barely still fitting under the sofa pillow roof inside the sofa pillow walls of my hideout in the corner of the living room, which gave the illusion of hiding me without really doing so; anybody who’d wanted to could have found me. Mama could have found me, but by then we’d had one round of birthdays, one Christmas, one summer, and parts of two school years without her.

  From inside the pseudo-shelter of the pillows, I couldn’t see or smell or touch Daddy, but I could feel him over there in his big chair, where on Saturday mornings I sat with him and we read to each other and he made me memorize poetry. “Sailed off in a wooden shoe.” “Sturdy and staunch he stands.” “Admiring bog.” “Ghostly galleon.” “Come live with me and be my love.” “And all but cry with colour!” “The ends of being.” “Nevermore!” Nobody else had to do that. They all got to go outside and play in the woods, or they had to do chores, or they’d be at some activity. Me, I sat with Daddy and we read to each other and he made me memorize poetry. “One could do worse.” “Say I’m growing old.”

  This wasn’t a Saturday morning. It was evening, winter; I remember how cozy it was inside my pillow hideout inside our house inside our woods, which couldn’t have been yellow at that time of year but always felt yellow. On Daddy’s big white console radio, people were talking. I wasn’t paying attention to the words, just their voices, serious, important, giving me a sense that there were important things to know in the world and I could know them.

  Daddy’s recliner was creaking a little; the mere thought of his thin black-stockinged feet up in the air made me feel privileged and terribly responsible. Probably he had one of his headaches. I was afraid of his headaches and resented him for them. He was my Daddy. He could get rid of his headaches if he wanted to. If he loved me enough. My brothers and sister weren’t around. I don’t know where they were.

  All of a sudden, whole and clear and pure as a trumpet, one man on the radio was saying, “Homosexuality is unnatural,” and the other man was countering, “Handkerchiefs aren’t natural, either. That groove in your upper lip is so the mucus from your nose can run straight into your mouth.”

  I was seven. Bodily functions were of tremendous interest. The man on the radio couldn’t have picked a more persuasive metaphor. Now I find his implication that being gay is more civilized than being straight a bit much, but at the time it was nothing short of an epiphany, a palpable shift in the way I looked at things, a sudden breakthrough into profound tolerance. It also instilled in me, all of a piece, a reverence for the power of words.

  “Did you hear that, Alexandra?” came my father’s quiet query. Naturally, he’d known where I was all along. “I want you to remember that. Do you understand?” Choked with wonder, I could only nod. He couldn’t have seen me inside the pillow house, but he said to me softly, just between us, “Good girl,” and in that instant words became associated with my father’s power over me and mine over him, with neither of which I have yet come to terms.

  Vaughn has launched into a song, probably one he’s making up on the spot, or maybe something inspired by whatever man is his current lover and muse. It’s not bad. It draws me in. Now I want to find him a lot more than I want to find our father. Calling his name a couple of times produces no results. When I come upon a branch shaped like the seat of a chair, which I’m not sure whether I remember or not though it must have been here when I was a kid, I settle myself onto it. It gives under my weight and there’s nothing to brace myself, but it doesn’t break.

  A memory surfaces. About five years old, I was playing at being lost in the woods. When somebody found me or I got tired and went home on my own I would be in big trouble, but it would have been worth it. I could hear the music Daddy made on his harmonica, so I wasn’t alone, and even if I didn’t know where I was or where I was going, there was always the sense of having a guide.

  I didn’t round a bend in the path or crest a hill or push through a thicket or anything; from my childish perspective, Daddy just materialized. Much later, when I learned about gargoyles and gnomes, I would flash to how he looked: shadowed in a little cave under an overhanging rock, crouching around the magical instrument in his hands, eyes on me.

  Then the keening music stopped—to me it seemed in the middle of the song, but knowing my father’s characteristic neatness, it probably wasn’t. He lowered his cupped hands. “Alexandra,” he said. “Come here. I have something to show you.”

  I remember hoping my brothers would show up and just as desperately hoping they wouldn’t. Where were they, anyway? The woods were still and might as well have been home to nothing but me and Daddy.

  “Come over here, Alexandra.” This time it was a command, though not yet harsh. For a long time, much of what I did was to get him to say my name like that.

  Taking several steps toward him, I could see what he held. Not the harmonica, though I hadn’t noticed him put it down, but a lump the size of a basketball of some thick squishy substance like modelling clay. There was a face in it. I looked again. There were three, four, six, countless faces in it, under my father’s hands.

  But then, with a chill, I saw that he wasn’t touching the clay. His hands made a place for it, but there was space all around between the surface of the brown lump and his long white hands. The faces were taking and losing shape into and out of the clay, all by themselves. Except that I knew he had something to do with it. He had something to do with everything.

  I sat down on the ground beside him and together we watched the cavalcade of faces emerge and recede. Daddy told me who they were. Not anybody we knew personally, but people who, Daddy gave me to understand, were real and lived in this world. People of all different races. Having never seen anybody who wasn’t white, I found them beautiful and hideous, alluring and scary. Old people, even older than Grandpa, whom we saw once a year. Newborns and not-even newborns with only the promise of faces; right there and then he made me memorize the pronunciation and spelling of the new words: foetus; embryo. People with no arms, blind people, people who couldn’t walk. All kinds of people in that ball of clay. I stared.

  Then my father took my hands. Took them for his own. Daddy touched us often and easily so there was nothing alarming about that, but when I guessed his intention I recoiled and squirmed and tried to close my fists. He was stronger and smarter than I would ever be. His long, thin fingers dwarfed mine. His palms were twice the size of the backs of my hands.

  With great care he positioned my hands where he wanted them among all those faces, and then he pressed down. The clay gave, shifted, rose between my fingers and around my wrists. It was neither warm nor cool, neither wet nor dry. It felt just like me. I couldn’t tell where my flesh ended and the flesh of all those faces began.

  My father held me there. With his arms around me from behind, I felt his breathing and his heartbeat through my shoulder blades. His thin thighs in those silly plaid pants made a V that I fit right into, protecting my back while exposing me to whatever came next.

  The faces
were moving. I felt eyes open and close, mouths turn up and down, brows knit; my own eyes, mouth, eyebrows, cheeks, teeth, tongue, chin slid into one expression after another. My left thumb quivered from the pulse under someone’s jaw, and my own pulse raced. A moustache rasped the web between my right ring finger and pinky, and the skin of my own upper lip prickled. The insides of my wrists were tickled by hair quite unlike my own—nappy, luxuriant, sparse, stiff—and the roots of my braids stirred.

  At five years old, I understood without thinking about it that magic existed in the world in much the same way as weather or the woods: perfectly natural by definition, since it was part of everyday life and by nature mysterious. When later I could put words to what transpired that morning, it came as no surprise that Daddy had been giving me both a gift and an order, neither of which I had the option to refuse, even if I’d wanted to, which at that point I didn’t.

  Personally, Daddy didn’t like people who were different from him. His discomfort around my best friend Penny was mortifying, and he outright glowered at my Korean homecoming date, whom I’d had to go into the city to find. Later the next day, my father had the balls to say to me, “I taught you wrong.”

  “Daddy is a traitor, Daddy is a prick. Daddy is a hypocrite, Daddy is a dick.”

  I am sitting on the ground. I have no memory of having sat down, so the change in position feels magical, even sinister, although it probably is neither. I am in a familiar place. I am in the grotto I have both found and fashioned under the overhang of this rock slab protruding from this hill. In order to enter, one must crawl; therefore, I must have crawled.

  I conduct my standard inventory, among simultaneous sensations that I have never done this before and that I did so only a few moments ago. Nothing seems to be missing: books, notebooks, granola bars, bottled water, flashlight, various potions, various poisons, raw ingredients for both. I have use for them all.

  Vaughn comes ambling toward me. At the moment he’s not actually playing any instrument, but he’s festooned like a Christmas tree with all manner of objects that rattle and swish and clang in rhythm as he moves. For a moment he seems not to notice me, and I’m ready to be pissed, but then he does stop. “Fancy meeting you here,” and he salutes me.

  “Hey, Vaughn. I’ve been enjoying your music.”

  “Thanks.” He ducks his head.

  “Have you seen Daddy?”

  “He’s in his hideout.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Over that way.” He gestures unhelpfully.

  When I start to get up, the branch creaks, so I ease myself back down to say cautiously, “Music is really important to you, isn’t it?”

  “It’s what I do.” When he shrugs, something thin and metallic rings. “It’s Daddy it’s important to.”

  “But you like it,” I persist. “You love it. Right? You love music. That’s why you play it all the time.”

  “I hate music.”

  “You’re not serious.” For answer, I suppose, or elaboration, or just because he feels like it, he pounds his fist half a dozen times on the snare drum strapped around his waist, making an awful racket. “No, you don’t,” I splutter stupidly. “Nobody hates music.”

  Vaughn raises his flute, folds his lips in, and produces a long coo that ends in a screech. “Music makes my ears hurt and my head hurt. Music makes the voices worse.”

  “Voices? You hear voices?”

  “Singing.” He grins. “That figures, right?”

  “But, Vaughn, your music is beautiful.”

  “I guess. It’s all just noise to me.”

  “Then why do you do it?”

  “I don’t have any choice. It’s who I am. He gave it to me.”

  The branch breaks under me. It’s a short fall, but jarring, and embarrassing. Vaughn reaches to help me and I manage to get to my feet and turn to survey the damage. I’ve destroyed the tree seat, part of this landscape for who knows how long. Now there’s just a wound in the bark of the trunk and a vaguely oval piece of wood sticking out of the underbrush. “Shit.”

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah.” No need to mention that my coccyx aches. “Aside from feeling like a bull in a china shop. A cow in a china shop.”

  My brother gives me a quick, startling hug and continues on his way, musical no matter what he might have wanted his way to be. I hear him for a long time and find myself walking, breathing, searching for our father to the rhythm he establishes.

  I’m not even sure I’m searching for Daddy anymore. There’s no chance in hell I could find my way to his hideout again. Maybe he’s gone away to die. There would be some sense to that, some rightness and justice that could be called poetic. But I can’t stand the thought of it. I quicken my pace, stumble, grab for a branch, break it and savagely break it again. When I shout, “Goddammit, Daddy! Where are you?” my voice is the same voice I’ve always used with him, thin and petulant, almost immediately absorbed by the yellow woods. The thought of Vaughn possessed not by his own passion for music but by Daddy’s—by Daddy’s conviction that music deserves passion even though he himself can’t produce it—makes me want to set this place on fire.

  I’ll find him if he wants me to find him. If he doesn’t, I won’t. It’s as simple as that. I force a path for myself, plunging and careening, smashing and breaking and tearing things up, as if the woods were my father’s heart.

  This peanut butter jar is almost full of dead spiders. Small to begin with and containing minuscule quantities of fluid, the bodies quickly dry and pulverize and ultimately take up little space; there are many arachnid sacrifices in this two-pound jar. The contents of the jar are striated, greyish compacted spider dust on the bottom variegating into the more recently alive, brown and black and still distinctly eight-legged layer on top. Every time I check, there is more room again in the jar.

  Dozens of empty baby-wipes boxes, plastic with hinged lids—a material benefit to me of Emily’s fecundity—hold my drawing, carving, cutting, weaving, mixing, calibrating, measuring tools. One of them contains the harmonica. Emily indulgently saves them for me, thinking it a doddering old man’s harmless eccentricity. The necessary process of checking each one of them consumes a fair amount of time, especially as I lose track more than once and must begin again.

  I can never be certain, but it appears nothing has been disturbed. If Vaughn has found this place and sometimes appropriates it for his own hiding, as I have long suspected, he has been following the leave-nothing-take-nothing rule of the respectful trespasser.

  As I pour one thing into another and stir, I become aware that someone is here. Alexandra is here. I crawl out of the cave to face her down.

  “Well, there you are.”

  My jaw and fists clench almost involuntarily at her condescending tone, and I respond condescendingly, “Yes. Here I am.”

  “Everybody’s looking for you.”

  “Really? Everybody?”

  “Well, Galen and Will. And Vaughn, sort of.”

  “And you.”

  For the reply she is tempted to make, she substitutes, “They seemed to think you might be lost or in danger.”

  “When have I ever been lost in this wood?”

  “Don’t ask me.”

  He used to stand at the fork in the path and turn around and around to look in all four directions. He’d bring home ugly little roots my brothers and sister and I would dress up like dolls. He made meals, remedies, dyes, potions out of stuff from the woods. Half of what grows in the woods he planted—big trees, tiny flowers, plants with fuzzy leaves, and purplish plants he sometimes said were poisonous and sometimes insisted were not.

  Now he gets to his feet. The planes of his already angular face show their bones. His thin shoulders have squared. His elbows and knees jut belligerently; noticing my father’s elbows and knees makes me a little queasy. While he glares at me I lift my chin and ho
ld his gaze, but when he dismisses me, turns his back, starts to move away, I crumble.

  “Daddy, wait.” He doesn’t wait. He never has. But it’s the only chance I have. “Ever since I got here I’ve been trying to read something to you. Can I read it to you now?”

  Since the day she was born I have done nothing but wait for Alexandra. I do not intend to wait now just because she tells me to. But she knows how to get to me; at the promise of her reading to me something she has written, against my will I pause. At my right ankle is a needle-leafed flat-headed ground clover whose name has escaped me but whose use I well know.

  “Don’t laugh at me!” I’m yelling like a thirteen-year-old, furiously insulted, hurt, and invigorated. He doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t laugh anymore, either, and in terms of capitulation that’s the best I can hope for from him. “Goddammit, you listen. I did this for you.”

  This is it. This is the moment. This is the reason she came home, and the reason she stayed away. She has written something for me.

  But I’ve been deceived. She has deceived me again, eluded me, refused me again. What she is reading is that damned letter from the Old Country that she tried to show me at Emily’s the other day. In awkward English, which she reads awkwardly, it mentions people I do not doubt are family members, descendants of the brothers and sisters Pa left behind. The letter concludes with an invitation for ongoing correspondence and is signed, “Your cousin, Elena.”

  Alexandra’s childlike expectancy is vexing. It is true that, years ago, I might have been gratified; at one time I toyed with the notion of travelling to the village from which my father emigrated and the family he left. Alexandra must have known that. But she has misjudged. She is too late. Somewhat to my satisfaction, I have absolutely no interest now, and no interest in feigning any. “It wasn’t easy tracking the family down,” she informs me indignantly. “It took a while.” Perhaps I nod. She holds the letter out to me. I do not take it. “Here. The address is on the envelope.”

  “I do not write letters.”