Before Familiar Woods

  Before Familiar Woods

  A NOVEL

  IAN PISARCIK

  To Sarah. You are home to me.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to my agent, Alec Shane, for his belief and unwavering encouragement, and to my incomparable editor, Jenny Chen, who pushed me to make this a better book every step of the way—along with the entire team at Crooked Lane Books.

  This novel benefited from a couple of early readers. First, the brilliant Genevieve Gagne-Hawes, who pulled me from the slush pile and dusted me off. Also, Rebecca Starks, whose early insights were invaluable.

  I want to thank my parents for surrounding me with books and for reading to me every night as a child. These are some of my most important memories. You are kind and wise people, and I owe you so much. To Tania, my formidable sister, thank you for accompanying me on the adventures and misadventures of our youth. There’s no one I would rather have done it with.

  Sarah, because I can’t thank you enough, your grace, intelligence, and beauty leave me awestruck. You are truly a treasure this poor man inexplicably found.

  To River, the best damn dog a man could ever have. Thank you for keeping me company in cold basements and dusty writing sheds for every page of this book.

  Finally, I’d like to thank all the writers, musicians, and other artists out there who shined a light on my uncertain path and who continue to offer a place for people to be seen and heard and to feel less alone.

  Well silence is a mighty big grave, and whatever goes down there is as cold as the clay.

  —Tyler Childers

  MATHEW FENN

  The boys walked along the road, hardly more than woven shadows. The air was warm, though the sun had fallen beneath the dark steeps, and the boys wore short-sleeved shirts and carpenter shorts. Mathew carried a backpack and thumbed the straps. Sweat beaded down his face. William carried the tent in a swamp-green rucksack with worn leather fastenings. He picked up a hickory husk and threw it into the woods.

  “It’s going to be buggy by the stream,” William said.

  “Not on the ridge. It won’t be buggy up there.”

  William turned and spat. “Still. It’s hot. I don’t see why we couldn’t go on Saturday.”

  The boys continued along the graveled road. There were no cars. Only the sounds of their feet. Small and quiet.

  “Did you start reading The Gunfighter?”

  Mathew shook his head.

  “Come on,” William said.

  “I’ve been reading this book about black holes.” Mathew slid his hands down the straps of his backpack. “You can’t see them. The only way we know they exist is by watching what’s pulled toward them.”

  “What would happen if you got pulled into one?”

  “You couldn’t escape. Not even if you moved at the speed of light.”

  William picked up another husk and threw it into the woods.

  “If you looked at the universe from inside the hole, everything would look different. The light that wasn’t close enough to get pulled in would be bent, so everything would seem distorted.” Mathew looked back at the road. The undersides of his arms were damp with sweat and his muscles felt rigid. He thought there was something else he wanted to tell William about the black holes and what scientists believed might be inside them, but his thoughts swirled inside his head like dust and smoke. “It’s hard to explain,” he said.

  “Well, there’s nothing hard about The Gunfighter. It’s just about a guy who kills Indians.” William picked up another husk and squeezed it and let it fall to the ground. “The main guy’s name is Hoss, and he’s always quoting from books before he kills someone. That’s the part I think you’ll like. He quotes a poem or something while the Indians are tied up, and they just look at him like he’s crazy. That’s the thing. People don’t understand him. But he’s just Hoss. That’s just who he is, even if it don’t make sense to no one else.”

  Mathew looked back again at the road. He caught himself shaking a little. “Let’s start into the woods,” he said. “We’re close enough.”

  “How far is it?”

  “It’s not far. We’ve just got to listen for the stream.”

  “How do you know about this place?”

  “My dad took me a couple times.”

  William pulled a cigarette from his pocket. “My dad doesn’t like to camp no more. He was an Eagle Scout, though. That’s the highest rank you can get.”

  “Come on,” Mathew said.

  The woods were dense. Mathew felt his bare skin brush against the hairy goldenrod leaves. He pulled a small flashlight from his pocket and pointed it at the ground. The light swept over packed earth and flowering shrubs.

  After some time the canopy opened, and Mathew looked up into the cloudy sky. He stopped instinctively and put his hand on William’s shoulder. Then he leaned in close and pointed. William took a drag from his cigarette and coughed a little and held the cigarette smoking by his side.

  “Can you see it?” Mathew asked.

  William shook his head.

  Mathew had been trying to teach William to identify the constellations, but William couldn’t find them without Mathew’s help. Mathew thought maybe he was just pretending. William had told him once that he liked listening to Mathew explain things. That he liked how when Mathew got excited, he talked slower instead of faster, like he wanted everything to last.

  “Hercules,” Mathew said. “Between Arcturus and Vega.”

  William took another drag and flicked the cigarette dramatically a couple of times. A soft wind rustled the leaves. Mathew heard a noise and looked back to the road. In the distance he saw slow-moving headlights quartered by dark trunks.

  He turned off the flashlight. “Quiet,” he said.

  RUTH FENN

  Ruth Fenn sat on the porch chair with her husband’s deer rifle laid across the caps of her knees and the steam from her black coffee rising up beside her and listened to the sound of studded snow tires splash the water from the bottoms of the ruts.

  She watched the Ford with the broken side mirror come up the gravel drive and stop a good twenty feet from the house. She watched Della Downing get out of the truck and put her boot on a spot of gravel where the snow had stuck.

  “You can stop right there,” Ruth said.

  Della closed the driver’s side door. “How are you doing, Ruth?”

  “Ain’t any of your damned business how I’m doing.”

  Della pulled the lapels of her jacket close together and took a step toward the house. Ruth tightened her grip on the rifle just enough to let Della see her do it.

  Della paused. “It’s not you I’m here to see.”

  “Should I assume you’ve gone senile and forgot who’s living in this house?”

  “It’s your husband I’m here to talk to.”

  Snow clouds covered the sky over the southernmost portion of the Green Mountain range. The birches that crowded the ten-acre property were tall and white and shedding their bark. A low morning fog clung to everything as though the trees had gotten themselves caught up in cobwebs. Ruth, fifty-two, her face rigid enough to unlock a keyhole, round rimless glasses and gray hair that rested on her shoulders, faced the cold and blinked against it.

  “What is it you want with Elam?”

  “Horace didn’t come home last night. It was Elam he said he was going out with.”

  “Why would that be?”

  “I don’t know exactly.”

  “And you didn’t wonder to ask him?”

  “I didn’t have a chance. He left a note.” Della took another step forward. She wore ten-inch muck boots and a wool coat. Her dark hair came straight down under her snow hat. Dark as night. Not
a thing like Ruth’s, which had turned the color of wood ash. “Can I assume Elam didn’t come home neither? Can I assume that’s why there’s no truck in the drive and you’re sitting there with that gun in your lap?”

  “Just ’cause I had it out for him don’t mean I won’t use it on you.”

  Somewhere in the distance a truck drove by on the road, and then there was silence.

  “Both our husbands are missing, then,” Della said.

  “Your husband’s missing. I got a pretty good idea about where to find mine.”

  “He ain’t at the Whistler.”

  Ruth took a sip of black coffee and set the mug down on the wooden side table.

  “Horace’s truck is still there. Parked in front of the bar. But Elam’s ain’t.”

  “Maybe Horace went home with someone, then.”

  Della shook her head. “That ain’t like him—that ain’t like Horace.”

  “I don’t know nothing about what Horace is like.”

  “You know him. He’s not somebody different than the man who grew up three houses down from here. The one that used to take your boy to Little League practice when you had to work late.”

  Ruth took the rifle from her lap and leaned it against the clapboard. “I’m not sure why you’re here.”

  “I came here to talk to Elam.”

  “He ain’t here.”

  “I understand that now.”

  “And yet you’re still in my drive.”

  “I figured you might have some thoughts on the two of them being together.”

  “It’s Horace who said they were together.”

  Flurries landed on the steps. The wind blew some onto the porch, and some clung to Ruth’s arms and legs.

  There had been no flurries the night Ruth’s boy and Della’s boy went missing. It was three summers ago. The middle of a hot July. Della had shown up in the same truck. She had driven right up to the house, though. Come up the porch steps and let herself inside like she had done a million times during the fifteen years of their friendship. Ruth met her in the hall and sat her down at the kitchen table and put her hand over Della’s hand and told her that it would be okay—even though it didn’t turn out that way.

  “You want to know what I think?” Ruth said. She shifted a little. Her bones ached. “I think you ought to check the stalls at the Whistler.”

  “He’s two years clean,” Della said. “You might know something about that if you set foot outside this house once in a while. You might know something about what’s been going on in this town. But then you never made it your business to know what was going on, did you? Not even when it was going on inside your own home.”

  Ruth stood, but she didn’t reach for the rifle. She just stood there thick in the shoulders until Della took the hint and got back into her truck and started the engine and backed down the long gravel drive.

  When the sound of the engine had faded, Ruth went inside the home and hung her coat on the nail and leaned the rifle against the wall. Woodstock lay on the worn hearth rug in front of the wood-burning stove.

  “Some good you did just now,” Ruth said. “That woman could set fire to this house and I’m not sure you’d do nothing but wonder at your good fortune at finding heat in the middle of the winter.”

  The old dog looked up at Ruth with its oil-slicked eyes peering out from under its gray whiskers and then laid its head back down on the floor, its collar clinking on the wood.

  Ruth bent in front of the stove. “It ain’t even lit, you know. You think you’re feeling something, but it’s only in your mind.” She opened the glass door and added some newspaper from the basket and some kindling. She struck a match and lit the newspaper and waited for the kindling to catch and then shut the door.

  The border collie Ruth had named North came loping into the living room followed by the redbone coonhound named Emmylou and the Irish setter named Mud.

  “Well isn’t that something. You got good noses. All of you. Or at least one of you does and the others have the mind to follow.” Ruth stood and laid her hand on her back where it was beginning to stiffen. She felt older than she was—tricked by her own body. As though it had for years led her through a slow-moving river only to lacerate her skin and stir up the silt.

  She watched the dogs vie for position in front of the woodstove. Mud was the youngest of the four. Ruth had found him the previous fall in the pouring rain while driving home from the salvage yard in Pownal. Her house was the last on Stub Hollow, an out-of-the-way country road bounded by thick woods, and it was there that people had taken to tying their dogs to trees when they got tired of feeding them or otherwise taking care of them. Ruth never could drive that last stretch of road without rolling down her window and listening for the howls, and as a consequence there were times her home felt more like a shelter.

  The old wood creaked as Ruth crossed the living room to the kitchen. The house had been built in 1892. The wide plank floorboards slanted a little to the east and were covered with deep scratches and a sheen of patina. Dark-green wallpaper covered the walls, and some of Ruth’s ceramic pots sat dusty on the wood shelves. She still threw on the wheel most mornings, and for the last ten years she had taught classes—first at the Vermont Potters Guild and then in the shed in front of her home to children referred to her by the Department for Children and Families in Bennington. She no longer put her finished pots on the shelves, though. She let the children take home the ones they wanted and she let the others stack up behind the shed collecting rainwater.

  Ruth poured a cup of coffee and stirred in a small amount of butter and cold water. She carried the mug down the narrow hall to the guest room, where her mother sat upright in bed with a quilt drawn over her lap, watching the news on the television. Her face was thin and the lines that ran obliquely along the sides of her nose were dark and seemed to hold the ends of her lips like the ropes of a porch swing.

  “Anything I’m missing?” Ruth asked.

  “Everybody’s crazier than hell.”

  “Well, that ain’t nothing new.”

  Ruth studied the television propped up on the dresser in the corner of the room. A man stood in front of his home in a buffalo plaid coat gesturing violently and talking about how the salt from the road was damaging his plants.

  “I heard you talking,” Ruth’s mother said.

  “I wasn’t talking.”

  “You were. I heard you. It’s who you were talking to that I couldn’t make out.”

  Ruth turned from the television. “Someone lost is all.”

  “I hope you didn’t give ’em no directions. Anybody lost in North Falls is headed someplace they shouldn’t be going.”

  Ruth set the mug on the nightstand next to a glass of water and went over to the window and pulled the curtain open even though there was hardly any light—only tall trees with smoke-colored bark that had cracked, split, and peeled. “The stove is lit,” she said. “It’ll be nice and warm in the living room.”

  “I’ve got the news on.”

  “You won’t miss much. It’s just gossip and weather.”

  “I’m fine right where I am.”

  Ruth studied her mother. Seventy-nine years old. Her mind more often than not scattered like grains of pollen across fields and porches and hoods of parked cars.

  “Fine,” Ruth said. “Suit yourself. Wait another minute on that coffee.”

  Ruth went to the kitchen and turned on the AM radio station out of Warren she had found a while back where callers told stories about being abducted by aliens and transported to strange planets. She poured herself another cup of black coffee and grabbed a bottle of fluorometholone from the cupboard above the refrigerator and sat down at the table and pulled a cigarette from her vest pocket. The dogs lay side by side in front of the woodstove. Putting up with the closeness of each other for the benefit of the heat.

  Ruth smoked her cigarette and tried to remember the last time she had seen Della. There was the time at the grocery store
when she saw her talking to Emma Perkins by the meat counter, and the time she saw her leaving the church when Ruth was driving her mother home from the hospital. But she couldn’t remember which of those was the last time, and she supposed it didn’t matter. There was a new last time. Standing in her own drive. Della Downing in sheep’s trappings.

  Ruth smoked her cigarette and played the conversation over in her head. It wasn’t unusual for Elam to run off. He had done it for days at a time ever since they’d lost Mathew. It worried her at first, and she had followed him a handful of times from the Whistler to a place they used to go together. A large outcropping over the brook, where he sat and drank beers in the cab of his truck until he passed out. And so she put up with it—understanding that he wasn’t seeing someone, that he only wanted to be alone. It hurt her. But she understood he was putting up with things too. She had disappeared same as him.

  The only difference was she didn’t leave the house.

  What didn’t make sense was for Elam to be with Horace. The two of them had never been close. They’d made small talk whenever Ruth and Della had gotten together and made the mistake of dragging them along, but anyone could see they were different people, and if there was something beneath the surface that connected the two, neither one seemed interested in finding out what it was. It occurred to Ruth that Della could be lying, but she couldn’t see the reason. She took another drag from her cigarette and pushed the smoke upward toward the apex of the roof, which had been stuffed with a feathery white chinking. Then she rested her cigarette on the ashtray and thumbed open the bottle of fluorometholone. She tilted her head back and dropped the solution under her eyelids.

  The wind picked up and whipped against the side of the house. The man on the radio was talking about a cave in the Sego Canyon where paintings of aliens covered the walls. After a moment Ruth pulled the black paisley handkerchief from the pocket of her blue jeans and dabbed at her eyes and looked out the window at the gravel drive and the bare trees and the faint shadows of the branches moving across the dead grass and thin patches of snow. The clouds were still thick over the mountains, and she told herself there wasn’t enough sunlight on a cold morning to wake an old drunk passed out in his truck somewhere. She sat there at the same table she’d been sitting at for thirty years and told herself that Elam not being home was as simple as that.