A History of Wild Places(14)

I read the article twice. Then I searched the same newspaper for more articles about Pastoral, but there was nothing. No other mention of it. Either the community broke apart in the years after, its members scattering back to their old lives, or something else happened.

When Maggie abandoned her car out on the road, she must have believed she had found the hidden location of this place. She must have thought she was close.

Maybe she was wrong.

Or maybe not.



* * *




The wood fence stretches along the left side of the road, straight and low, with snowdrifts against each post. I scan the trees, the length of road, but there are no signs of a house or a mailbox or lights in the distance.

Maggie’s afterimage loses its density, fading in with the snow. But I keep walking, following the road where it rises up over a small hill and the trees begin to thin, a clearing opening up on the other side of the fence. A field. A pasture in warmer months, where animals graze, ripping up the tall meadow grass. Horses or cattle or sheep maybe.

My gate hitches slightly as I move faster through the snow, the cold making my joints stiff. But I know I’m closer to Maggie than I’ve been; I can feel it in the hum at the back of my teeth, a grinding pulse in my eardrums.

I swing one foot in front of the other, moving quickly up the slope.

And then I see something ahead through the snow, blocking the road.

A gate.

A small outbuilding also sits on the right side of the road, with a single window at the front. The structure is just large enough for a guard to sit inside, his gaze turned out to the road. A checkpoint.

I take a few cautious steps closer—my heart ratcheting up in my chest, pounding like a fist.

I haven’t been invited.

Yet, chances are, way out here, this deep in the woods in the middle of the night, the hut will be deserted. A remnant of something: a compound, a logging site. It’s obvious no vehicles have passed up this road in a long time—the snow hasn’t been packed down—and with no visitors venturing this far up into the mountains, there’s no need to post someone at the hut to keep watch.

But when I’m within a few yards, I see movement inside.

A tall, lank figure steps out from the little building, a hand over his eyes as if to block the moonlight, to see me better, and his expression seems just as startled as my own.

Behind him, a piece of wood is nailed to the front of the gate, with letters carved slantways into the grain. They are shallowly carved, weather-worn, and barely legible, but I can make them out. Each one proof of where I am.

I’ve found it, a community forgotten, hidden for the last fifty years. A myth deep in the woods.

Carved into the sign is a word, a welcome for those who have made it this far: PASTORAL.

Yet the man standing before me looks anything but pleased by my arrival.

He looks terrified.





FOXES AND MUSEUMS


Excerpt from Book One in the Eloise and the Foxtail series

Eloise crawled from beneath the sunflower-embroidered blankets of her wood-framed bed, and tiptoed across the floor. The fox spooked at her movement and its face vanished from the other side of the window.

But she caught sight of it again, darting through the backyard, past the crooked swing set her father had built two summers ago, to the border of the woods. It paused at the spiky line of trees, beckoning her, its eyes just as wild and vibrant under the moon as they were at the window.

She glanced at her cherry-red rain boots beside the bedroom door, feeling the pull to chase after it, but when she looked back into the yard, the fox was gone.

Slipped into the dusk and dark.





PART TWO THE FARMHOUSE





THEO


I like the way her head looks resting on the pillow.

A hard, white shell with a cascade of auburn hair draped over her sun-kissed shoulders. When she sleeps, sometimes I don’t recognize her: She is a stranger in the bed beside me, breathing softly, her chest expanding like a bird pressing against its cage. She is a curiosity, a woman who feels like an endangered creature—a thing I don’t deserve.

A summer wind blows through the open windows of the old farmhouse, and in the distance, I see the line of broad oak trees that border the community—a line we do not cross.

Calla wakes, a dimple drawing inward on her left cheek, eyes pearly and clear in the morning light, drawing to mind the images I’ve seen of the ocean: specks of light winking across the roiling surface. I curl my toes, as if digging them into wet sand—a sensation I’ve only ever imagined.

“You couldn’t sleep again last night?” Calla asks, running her fingers through my hair. She moves with the slow gentleness of a wife who can’t see the thoughts strumming inside my skull—the ideas I would never say aloud, the places I sometimes imagine beyond the walls of Pastoral.

“I was thinking about winter. About the snow,” I answer, a strange little lie. But my wife doesn’t like it when I talk about the outside. It irritates her—her ears drawing down, the line between her eyebrows puckering close. So a lie is easier, as lies usually are.

“Winter won’t come for another few months,” she says softly. Plenty of time to prepare firewood and stock the cellar for the cold months ahead.

“I know.”

She slips free from the sheets and walks to the closet, the old wood floor moaning against even her softest footsteps. She is pretty in this light, younger-seeming than her true age. She pulls on a pair of jean cutoffs with holes worn in the pockets from too many washings, and a thin cotton T-shirt. Our clothes are in endless need of mending, of stitching, an ongoing effort to make everything last for one more season.