Before Familiar Woods Read online

  Some of the toads exploded on impact. Others Brad managed to get ahold of just right and launch over the tops of the white pines that surrounded the property. Mathew kept wiping his nose while he told Ruth. Told her how Nick held up his stained palm and laughed about how the toads were pissing themselves in his hand. Like they knew what was coming—like they could somehow foresee it.

  “My dad said I could bring it,” Daniel said. “He said it would be okay.”

  “Of course,” Ruth said. “Of course it’s okay. Come on. Let’s get out of this cold.”

  The gravel crunched under their boots. Thin stalks of twinflowers bent in the wind. When they reached the shed, Ruth turned on the light and flipped on the space heater. The heater glowed orange and the fan buzzed.

  “I normally get it warmed up beforehand. It don’t take long though. Are you cold?”

  The boy shook his head.

  “You got a nice jacket there, it looks like. Did your father get that for you?”

  The boy shrugged his shoulders.

  “Well, it’s a nice one.” Ruth stood in the middle of the shed with her hands on her hips. Her mind kept returning to the truck in the woods. She wondered if she should call Leo and tell him about it. She wondered if there was any good it might do, but told herself she needed to wait for Cecil—give him time to find whatever he might find. Besides, she needed to give her attention to the boy. She knew it was important to do that much. “What are you working on in art right now?”

  “Watercolors.”

  “That’s good.” Ruth went to the cupboard where she kept the clay. It smelled like damp paper. “What else are you doing in school? Do you have a subject you like?”

  “Reading.”

  “Reading. That’s good. My boy liked to read. He liked science too. He was always reading about astronomy.” Ruth thought back to a time just before Mathew died. When she had gone through his room looking for clues as to what was bothering him and found a book on his desk with a leaf marking a page about black holes. She recalled sitting down at his desk and reading the marked page. Trying to imagine what it was that drew him to that book and that page. Trying to imagine it when she should have been asking him about it.

  She removed a block from the shelf. “Have a seat,” she said.

  Daniel came around the table and dragged one of the chairs back. The seat was covered in dried red paint, and Ruth’s heart skipped a beat when she saw it, even though the paint had been there as long as she could remember.

  Daniel sat down in the chair, and Ruth unwrapped the clay and set it in front of him. She stood there a moment gathering her thoughts, and then she sat down at the table across from him.

  “I wonder if you’re excited or if you’re nervous,” she said. “Or if you’re thinking about your father or wondering about me.” Ruth looked out the tall window. “I used to go on long walks with my father, and on our walks he would give me a nickel for each one of my thoughts. It got to add up to something.”

  The boy was quiet.

  “It’s okay if you don’t want to tell me what’s on your mind just yet. I’ve put you on the spot. I had a thought of my own, though. The first time I saw you, I was thinking to myself that this little boy has a talent. I’m not sure what it is yet exactly. It might be working with clay. Or it might be doing something else—like drawing with charcoal. It might even be drawing one specific thing, like a frog. But I was sure of it the first moment I saw you.” Ruth paused. “I’m excited to find out what it is—your talent. That’s the other thing I was thinking. I’m excited to find that out.”

  Ruth studied Daniel a moment more and then stood. “All right,” she said. “Now there are all sorts of tools we use when working with clay. And there are all sorts of things we do to prepare the clay—to make it easier to work with. But I don’t want you to think about any of that right now. What I want is for you to do whatever you feel like. You’re probably not used to hearing that. But that’s what I want. There’s a kind of freedom that comes from not overthinking things. And I can’t teach you more in an hour than you’ll learn in just a few minutes playing around without any ideas in your head.”

  Ruth filled a small bowl with water from the tap and set it on the table. “Just get your hands dirty. Use the water if the clay is too hard. You can try to make something or not—that part is up to you. In a while I’ll show you all the tools and I’ll teach you some techniques. But for right now you can’t do nothing wrong. Does that make sense?”

  “I think so.”

  “Good. Would you like a smock?”

  The boy looked over at the smocks that hung on the wall and shook his head.

  “Okay, then. How about some music?”

  “Okay,” the boy said.

  “You got any particular type of music you listen to?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, let’s find out what you think about Grace Slick.”

  Ruth went over to the small desk where she kept the blue Dansette. She removed the record from the sleeve and looked over at Daniel, who had begun to tentatively touch the clay. She set the record on the platter and lifted the needle and placed it just before “Two Heads.”

  The flurries had started to come down quicker, and they stuck to the window. She studied the birches and thought again of Elam and the truck and the spots of blood and the clearing in the woods. After a moment she went to the sink and washed her hands. “Your dad said you never kept no animals. I’ve got dogs. Sometimes they wander in here. Do you like dogs?”

  The boy nodded. He worked the clay with his fingers.

  “I’ve got a couple students who really love dogs. Billy and Bobby are their names. Their mother’s name is Polly. You’ll probably meet them some time.”

  “My mother’s allergic to dogs,” the boy said.

  “Is that so?”

  “She’s allergic to a lot of things.”

  “Well,” Ruth said. “Some of us are. Some of us can’t hardly stand our surroundings.”

  The boy continued to work the clay.

  “I’m sure she’s managed, though.”

  The boy was quiet.

  * * *

  RUTH WAS SITTING at the table with Daniel, taking him through some wedging techniques and coming to recognize and appreciate his unusual calm and focus, when she glanced up and saw Elam in the drive. Something sharp twisted in her gut like a knife, and she shot up from her seat, but it only took her a moment to realize it was just her mother wearing Elam’s old field coat. Ruth told Daniel to hold on for a minute and went to meet her mother.

  “What the hell are you doing out here?” Ruth asked.

  “I was wondering the same about you—out here in the woods like some wild animal.”

  “I’m not in the woods.”

  “Looks to me like you are.”

  “Where did you get that jacket?”

  Ruth’s mother looked down at the brown field jacket with the torn pocket and then settled her gaze on Ruth. “Got it from the closet. It’s colder than Billy-be-damned, if you hadn’t noticed.”

  “I’ve noticed.”

  Ruth’s mother craned her neck. “Who is that? Who have you got in there with you?”

  “A student.”

  Ruth’s mother studied the shed.

  “Come on,” Ruth said. “Let’s get back to the house.”

  Ruth’s mother didn’t move.

  “Come on,” Ruth said again. She put her hand on her mother’s shoulder and turned her gently to break her gaze.

  “Cold as Billy-be-damned,” her mother said again. “Out here like some wild animal.”

  Ruth led her mother over the dead nettle grass and the gravel drive. When her mother reached the porch steps, she walked up them gingerly, making use of the railing, and then she sat down in the old rocker and produced a pack of Elam’s cigarettes from the coat pocket.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Having a smoke.”

  “You don’t smoke
.”

  “The hell I don’t.”

  “Not in twenty years, you haven’t.”

  “It’ll come back to me.”

  Ruth’s mother put the cigarette in her mouth. She struggled with the match but finally got the cigarette lit and took a long drag. She closed her eyes a moment and then opened them and held the pack out to Ruth. “Go on,” she said.

  Ruth didn’t move.

  “Come on.”

  “You’re going to freeze out here,” Ruth said. She studied her mother. Her thin, veiny hand on the arm of the chair.

  “What’s his name?” Ruth’s mother asked.

  “Who?”

  “Your student.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It’s a secret, then?”

  “Daniel.”

  “Daniel. How old is he?”

  “I don’t know. Eight or nine, maybe.”

  “He looks like Mathew.”

  “A lot of boys look alike at that age.”

  Ruth’s mother took another drag. “I wonder what you’re doing,” she said.

  “What does that mean?”

  Ruth’s mother waved her hand at the shed as though that explained everything.

  “I’ve got to get back,” Ruth said.

  “Of course you do.”

  Ruth watched her mother.

  “Go on, then. Nobody’s stopping you.”

  “You’re going to stay out here?”

  “I’m going to finish this cigarette. And I might have another after that.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “Jesus ain’t got nothing to do with it.”

  Ruth held her mother’s eyes and then turned back to the shed. She could see Daniel watching through the window, his small face a little distorted. She wondered where the boy’s mother was—whether she was fighting for him or even looking for him. And then she thought of Elam and of Mathew, and how a person could be lost and still not missing, or else missing and not lost—and how she wasn’t sure which of those was worse.

  MILK RAYMOND

  Milk headed north past the gas station and the blinking light and then turned left onto Bennett Hill Road. He followed the road past old homes and fields and barns and stretches of deep woods. He kept a lookout for the Miller Lumber sign, but after a while all he saw were tall pin oaks. He slowed his truck and came to a stop in front of a small shed with a restroom sign. The snow was coming down steadily.

  A state tag was stapled to the trunk of one of the pin oaks. He looked across the road, but all he saw were more pin oaks and some white pines farther back. He continued north. The woods broke, and he passed a vacant lot bordered by cinder blocks stood up on their sides. At the back of the lot was a building with a hipped gambrel roof that was mostly rotted.

  Milk watched the thick woods that crept right up to the road until eventually he passed a wooden sign that told him he was leaving Wilmington. He looked in his rearview mirror and swung the truck around and started back the way he had come. He watched the woods made up of black and green and white. His windshield wipers pushed away the flurries. The heat sputtered and the tips of his fingers were cold.

  He reached the vacant lot and put on his turn signal and pulled into the drive. He got out of the truck and stood there studying the lot. The snow covered most of the grass. Some pieces of trash lay on the ground. A large piece of yellow egg-crate Styrofoam and a barrel tipped on its side, rusted with white lettering spray-painted on top of the rust.

  A chain-link fence stretched behind the building but stopped several feet shy of the woods. The windows were boarded up, but there were gaps between the boards. Milk went to one of the gaps and peered inside. Weeds had grown up through the floor. He saw a dirty sock and a broken beer bottle on one of the few remaining planks.

  He followed the building around to the back, where he spotted a second door with a wooden sign over the door that said MILLER LUMBER. The door was closed and the curtains were drawn over the small windows.

  Milk knocked on the door. He stepped to the side and tried to peer in through the curtains but couldn’t see anything. After a moment the door opened and the old man stood there in a heavy Carhartt sweater and his Miller Lumber hat.

  “Shit,” he said. “Come on in out of this.”

  Milk stepped inside the small room. He felt the heat blowing around him immediately. There was a worn leather office chair pushed back from a small desk covered with maps and scraps of paper and a portable radio and a liter plastic bottle of Coke. A framed picture of the man’s dog sitting in front of a spot of beach grass was centered on the wall in a dusty wooden frame. A heater whirred from the corner of the office next to a small refrigerator.

  “You want something to drink?” the old man asked. “I got beer and Coke.”

  “I’m okay,” Milk said.

  The old man looked around the office. “Shit,” he said. He shook his head and stood there with his hands on his hips. “I got some bad news. We got this contractor out of Rutland—and he dropped us. Decided to go with some New York outfit. I just found out last night.” The man removed his hat and held it by his side. “That’s most of our winter work. I didn’t expect nothing like this when I saw you the other day. Shit,” the old man said again. “I feel awful.”

  The old man wasn’t making eye contact with Milk. He was looking every which way around the office, and Milk could tell that he did feel awful. He thought he should say something. But he was thinking about how he was going to find another job and how he was going to pay the next month’s rent and the heating bill.

  “It could be that something will open up,” the man said. “I can take down your number. Sometimes we get guys leaving in the summer—run off to work on blank sites. You’d be the first one I’d call.”

  “Sure,” Milk said.

  “Here,” the old man said. He went to the desk and picked up a pen and a scrap of paper. “What’s the number?” Milk gave the man his old number, even though he had tossed his phone across the road and into the snow when he pulled the overdue bill he couldn’t afford from the mailbox a couple of days back.

  * * *

  THE SUN WAS setting behind the clouds when Milk left the Miller Lumber office, and it glowed in the distance like something nuclear. Milk wasn’t quite ready to go back to his boy, so he headed east toward Anvil. He followed the road until it straightened out, and then he shifted and pushed down on the gas. The gray birches and the quaking aspens and the white pines with flecks of snow caught in their needles rushed past his window. He put the truck into fourth gear. The road rushed under his tires like a river.

  In the distance a flock of birds appeared like a handful of river stones tossed into the air. The woods broke, and he passed a small home with a flagpole in the front yard surrounded by a stone ring. He put the truck into fifth gear and followed the winding road through forest. It felt good to be moving. He had come to hate sitting still. Moving felt like purpose. Though he knew it wasn’t the same thing.

  RUTH FENN

  There was a little light still left when Daniel finally left with his father. Ruth tucked her hands in her coat pockets and came up the porch steps and inside the home and found her mother sitting in the chair in the living room.

  “Come on, then,” Ruth said.

  Ruth’s mother turned in her chair. “Come on where?”

  “You wanted to see Mathew—let’s go see him.”

  “It’s almost dark.”

  “We’ll take a flashlight. You said yourself we need to go before the snow comes, and it’s already falling. It’s already piling up.”

  Ruth’s mother nodded slowly. “All right, then,” she said. “Yes. All right.”

  The two left the home in their winter coats and gloves and boots. The dogs followed, not wanting to be left out of whatever was happening. Ruth’s mother walked slowly, and Ruth stayed behind her so that she wouldn’t force her into keeping a pace she wasn’t comfortable keeping. The dogs ran ahead and then circled
back. The light was almost gone and there were flurries that came down through the tangle of tree limbs.

  “What’s wrong with this one?” Ruth’s mother asked.

  “What one?”

  “The boy. Daniel. What’s happened to him?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know that anything has happened to him.”

  “Something happened.”

  “His father was in Iraq. The boy was living with his grandmother.”

  Ruth’s mother turned to the side a little as she made her way down a gentle slope toward the narrow clearing that had at one time been a road. “Where was his mother?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, I guess it don’t matter. Gone, I guess. Not there.”

  Ruth kept close to her mother in case she started to fall. The ground was hard, and the forest floor was dark enough that it was difficult to see the tree roots. It would be pitch-black on the walk home. Ruth had brought the flashlight, but with their eyes focused on the ground, they were bound to walk into a tree limb.

  “It’s good what you’re doing,” Ruth’s mother said. “I just worry about you.”

  Ruth nodded. Grateful that her mother seemed alert.

  It had been a long time since Ruth had been in these woods after dark. There were times her and Elam would walk through the woods and listen to the sounds. There were times Mathew would join them. The three of them shadows cutting through shadows under stars.

  “You got something on your mind,” Ruth’s mother said.

  “I’m just worried about Elam is all.”

  “Have you heard something more?”

  “No.”

  “You’ll worry yourself into a circle—won’t know which way is which.”

  “Not much I can do about that.”

  “No, there’s not. We fill our pockets with our worries. That’s different than men. They don’t let go of theirs exactly, but they keep them hidden somewhere and come back to them now and again. We carry ours with us. Into every room and then into our graves. You got more than your fair share. I won’t lie and tell you different.” Ruth’s mother slowed and then stopped.