Before Familiar Woods Page 13

  Milk turned from the girl and pulled open the door.

  There were no other customers in the store, and Milk went straight for the exit. He left without grabbing his cigarettes or his ten-dollar bill or turning back to see if the girl was following.

  “What took so long?” the boy asked. He had put his goggles back on.

  Milk’s hands were shaking. He started the truck.

  “It’s cold,” the boy said. “The heat wouldn’t turn on.”

  “That’s ’cause the truck wasn’t running. Don’t you know nothing about how things work?”

  The boy was quiet.

  Milk turned up the radio and put the truck in drive and peeled out of the lot. He got the truck up to sixty and then seventy once he hit a straightaway. He steered the truck over the center line where the road was smooth and pushed it to eighty. He felt his boy tense up—saw him push his palms against the seat. There were no other vehicles on the road, and Milk steered the truck back over the yellow line and slowed her down.

  RUTH FENN

  Ruth was trying to apologize for not saying anything when Elam hit Mathew that night after the school play. At least that’s what was on her mind when she turned down Schoolhouse Road and stopped in front of the old two-room schoolhouse.

  It was warm, but there was a fine summer breeze in the air. Ruth and Mathew were on their way home from clothes shopping at the department store. Mathew sat in the passenger seat of the truck, drinking the last of his ice cream from a waxed paper cup. Ruth was listening to a Stevie Nicks cassette tape. She had her left hand out the window holding a cigarette.

  The schoolhouse sat on a small plateau above the road, surrounded by trees and green ferns. It was where Ruth and Elam and everyone else in North Falls had gone to school up until 1958, when the town built the new public school to serve North Falls and the two neighboring towns. Ruth remembered when the schoolhouse was put on the market and how strange it had been to see her school for sale. The man who bought it was Jim Luchs, an attorney who used it as an office for several years until it was sold to the state and put on the historic register. The way Ruth heard it years later was that Vermont was the first state in the nation to authorize public education and that the little two-room schoolhouse had been one of the first of its kind in all of America.

  Ruth came to a stop in front of the school and finished her cigarette with the truck running and the window rolled down. Then she flicked the butt onto the paved road and opened the door.

  “I want to show you something,” she said. “Come on and follow me.”

  Mathew hesitated and then got out of the truck. He looked like a little version of Elam. Ruth always noticed it in the summertime when he wore shorts and his knees stuck out from his thin legs like smoothed knots on a branch. There were times she tried to see herself in Mathew and it bothered her that she had to strain, but then he would do something small, like blink his eyes when he got excited or hold his hand over his chin when he was nervous, and she would see it and her heart would swell.

  “Where are we going?” Mathew asked.

  “I told you. I want to show you something.”

  The sun was coming down, and it shone in slanted lines through the branches of the trees that surrounded the schoolhouse.

  “This was my school,” Ruth said. “You might not think I was ever as young as you, but I was.”

  Ruth headed up the steep drive to the white clapboard schoolhouse with the stone foundation. The building was in good shape save for some rust on the metal roof and some paint chipping on the low belfry that sat on the roof ridge facing north.

  Ruth pointed to a wooden railing running along the west side of the four concrete steps. “This wasn’t here,” she said. “Someone must have added that on.”

  Above the door was a semicircular gable window. Two more double-hung wooden sash windows flanked the door. Ruth went up to one of the windows and peered inside. She stood there a moment, and then she lowered her head and started around the side of the schoolhouse.

  The woods that surrounded the school had started to choke the small side yard, and the two of them brushed past ferns and tangled weeds. Four large windows ran the length of the sidewall, and through them Ruth could see the small cloak room and then a larger room with a recessed stage alcove and a blackboard.

  Ruth wasn’t sure what she hoped to accomplish by taking Mathew here, but she thought guilt put wings on your feet and ideas in your head and there was no use fighting either one of those things.

  “We weren’t allowed back here,” Ruth said. She stopped to light a new cigarette and then said, “We didn’t have recess like you guys have now. They kept us cooped up in that classroom all day long.”

  Big chest-high woodland ferns stretched out in front of them. Mushrooms crowded the shaded spots under pine trees where the ferns wouldn’t grow. A squirrel rustled the branches of a hemlock and then darted down its trunk.

  “Your father didn’t know about this place,” Ruth said. “Nobody knew about this place.” She smoked her cigarette and continued through the woods for several yards before she stopped. “Well, goddamn,” she said. She pushed past a group of ferns with cinnamon-colored spores grown up through the middle until she reached a pile of rocks ten yards out and nearly as tall as her. “Rockslide.”

  “What is it?” Mathew asked.

  “This was the entrance.”

  Mathew stood staring at the rocks.

  “Right under here.” Ruth pointed to the face of the pile. “I wanted to show you inside there. But it’s all covered up now.”

  “Inside where?”

  “The cave.”

  A breeze picked up and shook the ferns. The light turned a dusty yellow.

  “I used to come out here in the middle of lessons sometimes. There was a little window in the bathroom above the sink, and I’d lift myself onto the toilet seat and climb out.”

  Ruth looked back toward the school. The building was still visible from where they stood—the rear wood door and the small framed opening leading to the crawl space.

  “This cave runs at least a quarter mile long. Pools of water in parts and gravel in other parts, just like an old road. I never could see much inside. I could only feel what was there and smell it.” Ruth put her hand on one of the rocks and shook her head. “I’d walk this cave in the dark and imagine it was a road leading somewhere different from here. I’d spend the whole walk imagining someplace on the other side, until I started to believe I might just come out there. But I always turned around before I reached it. I guess part of me knew there was nothing there. Now it’s all covered up.”

  Mathew studied the pile of rocks that blocked the cave entrance. His mouth twitched, and it seemed to Ruth like he wanted to say something. But no words came out. He just stood there staring intently at the rocks like he was trying to see inside the cave to that other place.

  RUTH FENN

  The wind blew the vent dampers on the side of the house. Ruth sat at the kitchen table, listening to the clanging sound and watching the window where the sun had gone down. All that was visible was her faint reflection and the shadowed outlines of the tall trees, like rows of paper dolls.

  She thumbed the chip on the rim of her mug and thought to call the Shaftsbury barracks. Leo hadn’t come around asking questions, and she wondered if he assumed Horace had run off and had only tried to comfort Della by telling her he would do something about it.

  “I’d like to see him,” Ruth’s mother said. “I’d like to see my grandson.”

  Ruth looked to her mother, who sat in her rocking chair in the living room with the quilt draped over her lap. “Mathew’s not here,” she said.

  “I know he’s not here. I’d like to go see his grave.”

  “It’s cold. It’s a long walk and it’s cold.”

  “Not right now. But sometime. Sometime before the snow.”

  “We’ll go in the next couple of days.”

  “I’ll go myself if I have to
.”

  “You don’t need to do that.”

  “He’s my grandson.”

  “I know. I’ll take you.”

  Ruth’s mother was quiet. She rocked slowly in her chair. The vent damper clanged shut again, and Ruth took her thumb from the chip in the mug and stood.

  “I’ve got to make a phone call.”

  Ruth went to the hallway table and picked up the receiver and dialed Cecil’s number. She stood in the dim light and waited as the phone rang, and after it had rung several times she set it back down in the cradle and hesitated and then let go. She studied the mail that had accumulated on the table. The envelope on top was addressed to Elam. An advertisement for Johnson Woolen Mills. She recalled how Elam had bought her a necklace through the mail for their anniversary years ago. It was just about the ugliest thing she’d ever seen. Large geometric shapes made from brass and colored with turquoise and white powder. She couldn’t figure out why he thought she’d wear a thing like that. But he was so pleased to give it to her. He told her it came from New York, and he handled it with such care while he was showing it to her. She wore it just about every day after that. It was ugly as horse dressing but he had picked it out just for her.

  When Ruth returned to the kitchen, Woodstock was lying underneath the table. Ruth picked up her mug and carried it to the sink.

  “I don’t remember the last time I saw him,” Ruth’s mother said. “I don’t remember the last time I saw my grandson.”

  “It was in the fall.”

  “Last fall?”

  “Two falls ago.”

  “That’s too long.”

  “It’s a long walk,” Ruth said again. “It’s a long walk up that hill. And then you’ve got to get over the stone wall.”

  Ruth’s mother continued to rock in her chair. Her gray hair bunched behind her head like a loosely woven nest. “Where do you think he is?” she asked.

  “Who?”

  “Elam.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who do you keep calling, then?”

  “Someone he knows—someone we both know.”

  “Does he know something?”

  “No one knows anything.”

  “What does he think? Where does he think Elam is?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Ruth’s mother continued to rock in her chair. “He’s lost then—or else missing.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Whether he knows where he is—whether he knows what he’s doing. That’s the difference.”

  “I don’t know what he knows.”

  “You don’t ever know somebody completely, do you? You can know a lot. But not all of it.”

  Ruth went back to the kitchen table and sat in the chair. She removed her glasses and set them on the table and began to massage her forehead.

  “Take your father,” Ruth’s mother said. “I told you he had a heart attack helping that woman push her station wagon out of the ditch.”

  Ruth kept her eyes closed and listened.

  “And that was true. But I didn’t tell you that he had been driving the station wagon.”

  Ruth opened her eyes.

  “I suspected something was going on. But I wasn’t sure about it. I probably could’ve figured it out. But I don’t think I wanted to know.”

  “Jesus.”

  “She called me. The woman. She called me soon after it happened. And then she came to see me. You were in your bedroom, and we sat and talked on the porch.”

  “What did she say?”

  “It don’t matter. She was a nice woman. I remember that. I remember being happy that your father had found such a nice woman.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Ruth said.

  “Oh, stop it. There’s no use getting bent out of shape over it.”

  “Bent out of shape?”

  “That’s right. It’s long over.” Ruth’s mother stopped her gentle rocking. “I don’t mean to suggest that Elam’s done the same. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m only talking about how you can’t really know somebody. But you already know that—so I guess I’m just talking. I guess I’m just saying things because I’m old and I got nothing else to do with my thoughts.”

  RUTH FENN

  They had driven home from their first appointment all those years ago in what the forecasters called a weather event. Rain and hail and forty-mile-per-hour wind gusts that shook Elam’s truck. The sky resembling some sort of complicated tapestry.

  Elam had driven slowly. He fidgeted with the steering wheel and neglected a cigarette. The wipers beat against the glass, and he kept turning to Ruth and then turning back to the road. They were in North Falls before either one of them spoke.

  “Mathew,” Elam said.

  “How’s that?”

  “That’s his name.” Elam looked at Ruth and smiled. “What do you think?”

  “I think we don’t know if we’re having a boy or a girl. You comfortable calling a girl Mathew?”

  “It’s a boy,” Elam said. “I know it. I can feel it.”

  “That’s them pork biscuits you had this morning.”

  Elam shook his head. “I knew it the minute you told me you were late. The name came to me right then.”

  Ruth shook her head, but she smiled too. She thought of Elam in the doctor’s office wearing his oil-slicked cap and dragging mud through the carpeted hallways. Out of place with all the other women. Staring at the wall most of the time so as not to embarrass her but then asking the doctor all those questions she could tell he had been thinking about.

  “I got to show you something,” Elam said. He turned up Mill Road, where mowed pastures stretched on both sides of the pavement, and then he turned onto Holcomb Hill and followed it straight.

  “Where are we headed?”

  “I’ll show you.”

  “You taking me to that old make-out spot?”

  “It ain’t an old make-out spot. It’s still a make-out spot if you want it to be.”

  “We’ve gotten into enough trouble with that kind of thing, haven’t we?”

  “I’m not asking you to make out with me. That’s not why I’m going there.”

  Ruth studied the road through the wipers. The way the pine boughs reached over the gravel and then pulled back against the wind, the way the road narrowed and seemed to grow steeper.

  “You won’t make it all the way up there.”

  “I’ll make it.”

  Elam continued up the road, uneven like a washboard. The tires slipped off rocks and splashed puddles of muddy water. The engine moaned, and he continued up the road until it leveled off, and then he pulled the truck under an old oak tree in front of a large boulder and shut the engine but left the wipers going.

  He scratched at his beard and leaned his head back against the seat. Ruth looked out over the rising brook and at what she could see of the rest of the town.

  “I never made it up here much as a teenager,” Elam said. “I was working most of the time. Besides, there wasn’t no one I wanted to bring up here until now.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “Well, there was this one girl. But that ain’t the point. I just don’t want to go home quite yet is all. I want to remember this day. I want to take the time to stop and remember how it feels.”

  The two were quiet for a long while. Just the sound of rain and wind.

  “I been saying it in the shower,” Elam said. “Mathew. Repeating the name out loud. Just to hear how it sounds. Just pretending. Just talking to the water.”

  “You ain’t nervous?”

  “Sure I’m nervous. But I can see the mother you’ll be, and that takes the nervous away.”

  Ruth turned from Elam and wiped quickly at her eyes. “You sure you didn’t take me up here to make out?”

  “I only want to sit with you. That’s all I ever want. To be sitting next to you.”

  “You will be,” Ruth said. “I’ll make sure of that.”

  MILK RAYMONDr />
  There were guys who should have been messed up more than they were. Milk knew one guy who got hit when a mortar round fell from the sky and exploded, sending a piece of shrapnel two inches long careening through the bridge of his nose and into his brain. The man had a two-inch piece of government-issued steel sticking out of his prefrontal lobe, but the only thing wrong with him was that he couldn’t blink his left eye. The guy should have felt like the luckiest man on earth. But all he did was complain and talk about how he might as well be dead. Might as well, Milk thought. And maybe he was now. Milk hadn’t kept tabs on him. He thought he remembered the guy being from North Dakota or some other place like that where Milk didn’t think anybody lived outside of cows and prairie dogs. But then people probably thought the same of Vermont. He’d met one guy in boot camp who didn’t even realize Vermont was a state. Thought it was some kind of capital, like Washington, DC.

  Milk tore a long piece of duct tape from the roll. He secured it to the wall so that the edge of the tape sat even with the floor, and then he tore another piece and stuck that piece next to the first. He continued until the tape ran the length of the wall and then he stood. His knees were sore from being pressed against the concrete. He looked around at the sepia-toned basement.

  One of the things he hated most about Iraq was the sandstorms. There was something about the way they swallowed you. The way you felt like even the landscape was against you. There were stories of soldiers who went so crazy with the taste of sand crunching between their teeth that they would step outside the tent and fire rounds into the shrieking winds. People lost their nerve.

  Milk stuck a screwdriver under the lid of the paint can and popped it open. The smell was strong, but it was too cold to open the cellar door, and so he pulled his undershirt over his nose and spilled the paint on the ground at the far side of the basement. The paint was bright blue. It was the same color as the floor of the room where he used to take shop class in high school. Milk grabbed the roller and did his best to spread the paint over the floor. He stopped when he had covered three-fourths of the floor, and he stood in the unpainted section beside the workbench where he had gathered the chairs. He figured he would paint the rest the next morning when the painted section was dry enough to move the workbench. He wished he had a fan to turn on, but he figured things would dry quickly enough in the cold.