A History of Wild Places(76)

I touch my cheeks and the hollows of my eyes, feeling separate from my own skin—like I’m clawing my way back from my dreams.

This isn’t the first time I’ve slept outside the valley, past the border of Pastoral, but it’s the first time I have no memory of how I got here. These last few nights, I have stepped over the creek and into the sacred trees—I have allowed myself to be judged, appraised—I have touched the wounded elms and welcomed illness into my flesh, but it never came.

Something skitters away to my right, but it’s only a night creature—voles and bats and ground mice who seek out the scraps left behind by the more discerning daylight animals. I reach my hand across the ground and find the knife, the edge still sharp, but caked in mud. I grip it tightly and push myself to standing, holding the blade at my side.

Why do I have a knife? Why do I have a knife?

I press a palm to my left eye, to stop the humming. Did I hurt someone with this knife? Levi?

But there is no scent of blood on the blade—that awful metallic smell that burns the nose. The knife smells only of mud and earth and wood. The bitter sweetness of fresh sap. When I woke, I was gripping it tightly, as if I had wielded it for protection. For some unknown purpose.

My legs tremor, and I reach out for a tree to steady myself. My palm meets with the rough, scabbed bark of an evergreen, the scent of its needles fragrant and rich in the midnight air. And then my fingers feel it: the sap spilling down the trunk, the wet, honey-like texture. Sticky like glue. My hand follows the trail of sap, until my fingers fall inward, into the soft white center of the tree—where it’s broken open. I can smell it, the woolly fragrance of freshly split wood, that soft green scent.

The tree is sick. Bark peeled back, trying to rid itself of the pox.

My fingers slide along the edge of the wound, feeling its shape, the sharp serrated curve about three feet long, top to bottom. It’s only recently split open—the wood still fresh and tender inside.

The whole forest is infected.

I turn away from the sick tree and move swiftly through the dark woods, over the creek, and back into the safety of Pastoral. Fear boils in my gut, fear for something I can’t quite explain—not just the pox, but another thing. Yet, the knife in my hand comforts me, the balanced weight of it, and I pick my way back to the path. Back to the farmhouse.

The buzzing in my ears—behind my eyes—growing louder.





THEO


My wife has fallen asleep, her hand still clutching the necklace I found in Levi’s fireplace. But I sit awake at the edge of our bed, my mind ratcheting clumsily over thoughts that keep doubling back on themselves. A machine that repeats the same motion, stuck in a maddening loop.

How did Levi get Maggie’s necklace? And Travis’s last notebook page? Why was he trying to burn them, melt them down to nothing?

When I showed him the photo of Maggie, why did he lie? Why did he say he didn’t know her?

What did he do?

Calla exhales softly, her breath stirring a strand of her dark hair. And then I see it: something beneath her head, beneath the pillow—the sharp corner obvious against the soft edges of the white linen sheets. Quietly, gently, I pull the thing loose from beneath her pillow.

Calla stirs once, her foot kicking at the blankets, sending the green patchwork quilt to the floor. But she doesn’t wake.

It’s the book: the Foxtail book written by Maggie St. James. My wife has kept it hidden from me, as if she feared what I might read inside. This book belongs to her, while the notebook I found in the sunroom belongs to me. We each have our own secrets that we covet and keep close, so the other won’t see—but what do we fear they might reveal? What unknown words live inside?

I stand up from the bed, the Foxtail book in my hand.

It’s heavy, a book you don’t simply open and read before sleep—a chapter here or there. You must commit to it. A book like this demands something of its reader.

And holding it now, I wonder what Calla discovered inside.

I move toward the open door, nervous that Calla might wake and catch me with her precious book, when something passes by out in the hall. At first, I think it might be Bee—sneaking through the house, tiptoeing into her room to change her clothes, to get something to eat, before retreating back out into the woods where she’s been spending her nights. But when I walk to the doorway and step into the hall, I see the flash of hair—of a woman I don’t know—hurrying down the stairs.

It’s not Bee.

But the woman isn’t entirely unfamiliar either.

I don’t call out to her, instead I move quietly down the stairs and through the house after her, the Foxtail book tucked under my arm. She opens the screen door and ducks outside, dashing up through the meadow beneath a clear, night sky. I stop on the back porch and watch her, her blond hair sliding across her shoulder blades, her gait long and deliberate, pale arms moving with the ease of a deer knowing its path through the tall grass. She’s humming a tune, words slipping gently from her lips.

I blink and refocus, I hold the book tight against my side—she isn’t a ghost, a specter set loose from the old farmhouse. This is something else: an afterimage. A word that drips through my mind, unmistakable.

This is a moment from the past.

The soft-blond hue of her hair reflects the moonlight, but it’s not quite how it was in the photograph. Her hair has grown out several inches, and at the roots, I can see the dark brown shade of her natural color.