Before Familiar Woods Read online

  The small parking lot was nearly full when they arrived. Most of the other men had come straight from work, and they wore clean clothes that they had stored in their trucks over steel-toed logging boots thick enough to stop coasting chains. Elam found a parking spot, and he and Ruth walked across the pavement, where they joined with several other families and funneled through the double doors and passed the student-made signs to the auditorium.

  The school was hot, and two tall metal fans stood in the back of the auditorium, rotating and blowing warm air. Metal-backed chairs lined the room, and Elam and Ruth made their way to the front row, where they sat down and watched the small stage where the children would soon be performing.

  They sat for some time with parents still streaming in and talking to one another and the principal of the school walking around the auditorium shaking hands and adjusting the fans and looking around to see if there was anything else that needed to be done.

  When the show was almost ready to begin, Elam removed the video camera from its metal case and made his way to the back of the auditorium, where some of the other fathers had started to gather and pick out their spots. A moment later Della came into the auditorium and sat in the empty seat next to Ruth. The two waited and talked about getting together for lunch and a walk the next day and turned every now and again to observe their husbands, who stood next to each other underneath the EXIT sign.

  The principal turned off the lights at six o’clock, even though the sun came in through the windows and lit the room. The crowd quieted save for a few young children.

  When the curtain lifted, Mathew was alone onstage, standing just behind a shaft of sunlight holding a wicker basket with a stuffed dog and wearing a frilly blue dress and a dark wig and red lipstick. Some of the people in the crowd started whispering, and a couple of the men laughed and were quickly hushed by their wives. Ruth sat, staring forward at her son with his pale, thin legs and his dress that was a little too short and a little too tight.

  And then he spoke. “Oh, Toto, I wish I could go somewhere over that rainbow. I just know there’s more to the world than this.” He spoke in a high-pitched voice with a slight accent of some kind, and more people began to laugh and cover their mouths.

  Ruth didn’t turn to see Elam or the rest of the crowd. She sat quietly and stared forward for the entire thirty minutes. Through the munchkins and the scarecrow and the trees and the flying monkeys and the wizard behind the curtain, played by William. When the play ended, she stood and looked for her husband, and when she couldn’t find him standing against the back wall, she looked for Mathew. She went to where the children came down the steps to hug their parents and found him. One of the boys bumped into him, and he stumbled and fell on the ground, and his dress came up high on his legs and showed his white underwear. Some of the boys laughed, and a couple of the parents tried to quiet them. Mathew got up quickly, and Ruth went to him and adjusted his shirt and then told him to change with the rest of the children. She stood there in the auditorium and waited while the other parents either looked at her and tried to smile or else looked away. When he was finished, she walked him out through the parking lot, where some of the other children shouted things at him. Ruth watched him as it happened and understood that it wasn’t the first time the children had shouted these things, but that it had happened before, possibly many times, long enough for Mathew to stop responding or even seeming to notice.

  Elam was waiting in the truck, and he turned the key in the ignition as soon as the doors were shut. Ruth sat in the passenger seat with her feet crammed next to the camera in its big metal case. Mathew sat in the back seat. His lips were still pink where he had tried to wipe off the lipstick and his hair was ruffled from the wig.

  “What the hell was that?” Elam asked.

  Mathew was quiet.

  “What were you supposed to be?”

  “Dorothy,” Mathew said.

  “Do you know what people are going to say? Do you know what they’re already saying?”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Jesus Christ—what are you turning into?”

  “I’m not turning into anything.”

  Elam reached over the seat and slapped Mathew hard across the face. Then he put the truck in reverse and pulled out of the parking lot onto the narrow country road.

  MILK RAYMOND

  “How was it?” Milk asked.

  Daniel set his backpack on the bench seat and pulled himself up into the truck. “Fine.” He reached for his seat belt and snapped it into place.

  “Just fine?”

  The boy nodded.

  “What did you do?”

  “When?”

  “Today. At school.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How do you not know?”

  Outside the truck, some of the other children were playing tag while others stood around ignoring the teachers trying to herd them onto the buses lined along the blacktop.

  “Can we go?” Daniel asked.

  “Tell me one thing that happened at school, and then we can go.”

  Daniel sat there quiet for a moment. “One of the kids ran away during recess.”

  “Ran away?”

  “Into the woods. He took off during Capture the Flag and wouldn’t come back when Mr. Grant called for him.”

  “Did they find him?”

  Daniel shrugged. “I don’t know. They made us go inside.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “William Nelson.”

  “Like the singer?”

  “I guess. He doesn’t talk.”

  “He can’t talk?”

  “He can—he just doesn’t. Hardly ever.”

  “Well, shit,” Milk said.

  “Can we go now?”

  Milk started the engine. He put the truck in reverse and backed up a couple of feet so that he would clear the bus in front of him and then headed out of the parking lot. Once he reached the rutted road, the shovels in the truck bed began to clang together. Daniel turned in his seat.

  “Shovels,” Milk said.

  “For what?”

  “I need your help getting some dirt for the drive. It’s supposed to snow in a couple days. You can’t wait until the last minute or else the whole town will be trying to get dirt.”

  The town garage was located just past the firehouse on a stretch of property used to store plows in the winter and host flea markets and classic car shows in the summer. Milk pulled into the drive and followed it down to where the piles of dirt were spread. He backed the truck up to one of the piles and shut the engine.

  The garage stood in a clearing just beyond the last dirt pile. It wasn’t really a garage. It was an old agricultural shed with tin siding. There were orange snow plows parked behind the shed, and some of the straight blades were detached and sat in the dead grass.

  Milk got out of the truck and lowered the tailgate. He pulled himself up into the bed and grabbed a shovel. Daniel got out of the truck.

  Milk stood on the edge of the gate. He adjusted his grip and speared the dirt. He lifted a shovelful and flung it into the bed of the truck. The dirt sprayed across the plastic liner. After a moment Daniel put his hand on the tailgate.

  “Use the tire,” Milk said.

  “What?”

  Milk stopped shoveling. “The tire—step onto it and pull yourself up into the bed.”

  Daniel looked at the tire. He approached it cautiously and stepped onto it and pulled himself up so that he was standing on the tire with both feet. He remained there for a moment, and then he swung his right leg over the side of the truck followed by his left and stumbled into the bed.

  Milk shook his head. “You won’t get points for form.”

  The boy stood and untwisted his jacket. A murder of crows leaving the mountains for the valleys counted numbers out over the woods.

  “Grab a shovel and come beside me.”

  The boy did what he was told.

  “When you lift, lift with
your legs, not your back.”

  Daniel speared the dirt and lifted a shovelful and dropped the dirt into the bed of the truck.

  “Good.” Milk watched him for a moment and then went back to shoveling. “Your mother keep dirt on the drive while I was gone?”

  “No.” The boy wiped at his face.

  “Did she keep it clear at least?”

  “She had someone come over and do it one time.”

  “What? Shovel?”

  “He had a Jeep with a plow.”

  Milk lifted another shovelful. He looked toward the trailer and saw an old man step out wearing a brown snow hat and coveralls. “She say anything to you when she left?”

  The boy shrugged.

  “It’s all right to tell me. I won’t tell her.”

  The boy stabbed the dirt. “She got into a fight.”

  “With who?”

  “Grandma.”

  “What kind of fight?”

  “They were yelling at each other. Grandma slapped her in the mouth and Mom hit her back.”

  “Jesus. What were they fighting over?”

  The boy shrugged. “I was supposed to go with Mom. She had me put my stuff in a cardboard box. But then she and Grandma started fighting. He had to come in the house and break it up.”

  “Who did?”

  “I don’t know. The guy with the plow.”

  “She was seeing this guy?”

  “She went out at night with him sometimes.”

  “And he broke up the fight?”

  “Mom was yelling, and he came inside and pulled her away. She said she was gonna come back for me. Grandma just kept crying.”

  “What’s this guy look like? The one she was seeing.”

  “I don’t know. He was old. Older than you.”

  The man from the trailer started toward the truck.

  Milk looked over at his boy and then stood there holding the handle of his shovel upright like a walking stick.

  “How’s it going?” the old man asked.

  “We don’t need much more,” Milk said.

  “Oh, I ain’t worried about that. We got plenty this year. People are getting their dirt from Breznick Farms. Paying ten cents a pound. Breznick is claiming it’s a special kind of dirt. Probably somebody pissed in it and called it blessed is all. I just thought I’d check if you needed anything.”

  “We’re all right. We’re almost done here.”

  The old man nodded. “It ain’t no rush. I like to see a man working with his son. Most boys don’t like to work. Wouldn’t know a piece of hard work if it jumped up and bit them in the ass. I known plenty myself. My old man had me shaving ladder rounds before I knew how to write my name. Never paid me a cent for it neither. His biggest fear was raising a boy up to be spoiled. There weren’t nothing worse than that is how he felt. He was probably right too. He usually was. The kind of right where you don’t always know it until years later.” The old man coughed up something and spit. “All right,” he said. He turned to Daniel. “It’s good of you to help your father.”

  Daniel didn’t say anything, and the old man nodded to himself a couple of times and headed back to the trailer.

  Milk watched the man and then turned to his boy. Daniel looked like he was thinking about something, as though there was something else he wanted to say to Milk about his mother. But he just regripped the shovel and speared the dirt with more force than Milk would have thought him capable of generating.

  * * *

  THE SUN HAD almost set when Milk pulled up in front of the duplex. The bed was filled with more dirt than they needed to cover the small drive and the two concrete steps, but it felt good to get outside and to get his muscles stretched. He looked over at his boy and saw that he was asleep.

  He let the truck idle. He thought he should carry his boy inside, but decided Daniel was too old for that. He watched the last of the light play on the wet branches of the trees in the woods behind the duplex and then he shut the engine. He was about to wake his boy when he saw something move from behind a tree in the woods. He studied the tree and saw a black bear emerge. The bear scratched at the bark of another tree and then sniffed at it and pulled something from the trunk with its teeth. It chewed on whatever it had pulled from the bark and then paused and turned and looked in the direction of the truck. It remained that way for a long moment and then began lumbering toward the vehicle. Milk looked over at his boy. His eyes were still closed, his head still pressed against the window. He turned back to the bear. The bear looked to be about three feet tall and its ears were cocked forward. Its head dipped and rose as it walked so it looked as though it was rolling toward the vehicle. Milk straightened his back. He reached out and locked the door and then thought how ridiculous of a thing it was to do. As though the bear might pull on the door handle. The bear stopped in front of the truck and looked Milk dead in the eyes and then started around to the passenger’s side of the truck with its head held high. Milk looked at Daniel still asleep with his head against the glass window.

  “Daniel,” Milk said.

  The boy opened his eyes and looked at Milk.

  “Pull your head away from there.”

  The boy sat up.

  “Listen to me. There’s a bear.”

  Daniel turned to the window and immediately pushed his back against the seat.

  “It’s fine,” Milk said. “He don’t want nothing from us.”

  “What’s he gonna do?”

  “He ain’t gonna do nothing. He’s just sniffing around a bit, and then he’s going to get bored with us and head back into the woods.”

  The boy studied the bear.

  “Look at him,” Milk said. “It’s a sight, ain’t it? Wild as hell. All teeth and muscle.”

  The bear lumbered around to the bed of the truck, and then it rose on its two back legs and brought its paws down on the tailgate. The truck shook, and Daniel gripped the seat cushion.

  “It’s all right,” Milk said.

  The bear sniffed the piles of dirt, and then it lowered itself from the tailgate and started around to the driver’s side but kept on going. Milk watched the bear trample through the flowers in the small side yard and head into the woods.

  “See that,” Milk said. “You just got to keep calm. Wild animals like that don’t want nothing to do with humans. Mostly they want to be left alone. It’s rare they ever attack.”

  “What happens if they do?”

  Milk turned to Daniel. Wide-eyed and still pressed against the seat. “Well then, boy, you run like hell.”

  RUTH FENN

  Ruth heard the truck from the kitchen while she was warming up a pot of soup for her mother. She grabbed her coat and stepped outside and closed the door behind her.

  It had begun to rain again, and Della cowered a little as she crossed the drive and came up the porch steps. “Can I sit?” she asked. Ruth nodded toward the porch chairs, and Della went to the farthest one and sat down and wiped the rain from her brow. “Aren’t you going to sit?”

  “I’m fine standing.”

  Della was quiet a moment, and then she stood. “I called Leo.”

  Ruth looked out toward the birches, the white bark dull and stressed by the wind and rain. She thought inexplicably of Elam stepping out from behind the trees, waving his arms as if to tell her to call off the search. That his disappearance had been a joke and that it had gone too far.

  “I didn’t tell him about Elam. I only told him that Horace went missing and that his truck is still at the Whistler. I would have told him about Elam if I thought it would help. But I figure the only thing he’d do is come talk to you. And you don’t know nothing—so that wouldn’t help.”

  “He’ll come here anyhow. It won’t take him long to figure out they were together.”

  “That may be. He says the first thing he’s gonna do is put out an all-points bulletin. I guess that means he’s going to send a message to all the officers across the state with a description of Horace. And then he
’s going to get a couple people from the state police barracks in Shaftsbury to start calling around to some of the hospitals and shelters. He says there’s not a whole lot more they can do for a grown man. It’s different for a child.”

  “I suppose it would be.”

  “Still. It’s good that people will be looking.”

  The wind blew and swung the wooden birdfeeder that hung from the crossbeam of the porch roof. Ruth had hung the bird feeder a few years back with the hope of attracting mourning doves. Their cooing had always comforted her. But mostly it brought squirrels, who stole the seeds and scampered across the roof.

  “There’s something else I wanted to say. I reached out to you after everything that happened. With the boys, I mean. I wanted to talk. I tried to call, but I couldn’t get ahold of you. So I came here and Elam answered the door. He said you didn’t want to see me, and I asked him to tell you about the support meetings at the church. I’ve always hoped he gave you that message.”

  Ruth looked out toward the birches again and thought back to the funeral for Della’s sister, who had been found in her 1962 Studebaker with a wooden potato masher shoved in the exhaust pipe. Ruth sat in the first pew beside Elam and Mathew. Right next to Horace and Della. The preacher spoke first, and when he finished Della walked up to the lectern and said some words. Ruth couldn’t recall exactly how she started, but she remembered how she ended. Della laid into her sister. Called her weak for not giving herself to God in times of trouble, as though there wasn’t a thing in the world that couldn’t be fixed by looking up to the sky and extending a hand. Ruth thought the people in the church would be furious, but when she looked around, most of them were nodding in agreement. Ruth understood then that there was something different about those who put their fate in God’s hands and those who didn’t. And probably there was something different about Della, who seemed to go a step further and put the fate of the people around her in God’s hands, too.