The Woods & The Widow
Gardener (Le Jardinier) (ca. 1885) by Paul Cézanne
My family became very troubled. Or rather, trouble, as a rule, sprouted tendrils from our grounds. Sometimes my father did things that seemed to emerge from a mysteriously dark place in him. The source of this place I can only chalk up to my father’s youth. He was a foster child.
It gives me comfort in trying to draw connections between the behaviors of people, and the little bits I know of their traumas. I can only speculate what pain and abuse his childhood contained. His cartwheels were half-finished by a kick in the gut. He was restrained to the ground and sobbing, unable to escape from the torture of other troubled children. He lived among other young creatures, cultivated in the predatory way, fighting for scraps tossed to them through a door fast closed.
The last time I lived with him was around 2002. A fierce separation between my parents had taken place two or three years prior. My mother, for a chance to clear her head and to find a new lease on life, had moved out to Wyoming to work in the National Parks, and so I had to stay put in the east with my father in North Carolina.
The farm house was magnificent, a two story house with an acre of land. We had just moved out of a cramped apartment to the Appalachian solitary. There were three other residents of the house. Courtney and Carly, my father’s girlfriend and wife, respectively. And my baby-sister, Kaivanu, whom I have not seen or communicated with since then.
There was an old twenty-foot satellite dish that stood at the edge of our field. an eccentric fixture on the farm. At night, in the corn field, next to the spring-pink willow, I watched into the lonely night for the silhouette of unbelievable skin walkers. My imagination would thrust me into trances. I would get worked up over aliens, zombies, all types of cryptic entities.
On one morning, I awoke exhilarated for a new day of play. I took my post behind a slump near the chicken coop. This was my garrison and it supplied me with a suitable ration of ammunition with which to fend off the cannibal chickens. I used dirt-clods. Some had rocks in them that made pleasant thumps against the ground and plumed in dust near the chickens. I was careful not to be too direct, but if a clod hit a bird, all is fair.
I grabbed the bow which my brother, Daniel, crafted for me from a flexible branch and the braided skin of vines. Wearing it like a seatbelt, I darted between bushes and trees toward the old barn. It was built out of very dark wood. Even on the brightest days, the sun at its pinnacle, the barn seemed always to reside in shadow. It was the home of the goats, and at one time the home of a sheared pheasant which my father showed me how to gut. I remember pulling out the exotic and slippery innards into a round bucket. “The next time I have a chicken sandwich,” I said, “I’ll be glad I didn’t have to pluck it.”
“Pluck you,” my father responded as he smiled and waggled his middle finger jokingly at me.
I ran back to the farmhouse, passing chickens at the hay footpath and down the slump. Courtney was there at the backdoor, a cigarette held in her pierced mouth.
“You need to clean up your room,” she sounded frustrated, “Julia got out and pooped all over the living room, too.” She was referring to my Guinea pig, that lived in a gated hallway. I sighed and stepped past her through the screen door.
Ignoring the request, I gathered up the notched dowels I called arrows. I sneaked into the kitchen as well, and found a trove of Coca-Cola cans in the refrigerator. From the back, I heard the swinging screen door shut. Quickly, I grabbed a can and fled through the front door. A racket carried from a cracked window, and I heard Courtney stirred to anger.
I cut through the cornstalks to stay hidden. Turning back, I looked over the field to the great, looming satellite dish. It’s face tingling in the heat with tiny messages from the bottomless sky. Among the fields and poultry, it was out of place. A relic from a time of exploration.
With a reliable stick and my braided bow, I marched into the forest. There was an old concrete shelter somewhere in these woods where my brother had led me. An acre in, I approached a clearing in the woods. A tingle of stealth washed over me as I kneeled behind a bush, looking onto a neighbor’s property. A man was there, walking towards a car that had arrived. The driver was a middle-aged woman who was still grasping the steering wheel. She smiled kindly at the man who was leaning on her car door and they talked. I decided to move along, the buzz of voyeurism had diminished.
I walked between the tall narrow trees with my stick out in front of me to catch any spider webs. There was a brilliant web that was high enough up that I could duck below. I marveled at the spider who made it. The abdomen was spiked and colored with three blotches that appeared like a face. The thick pointy legs were striped yellow and black. No sane bird could make a snack of that, I thought, still unacquainted, even on my hungriest days, of the extents to which life goes to treat desperation.
The structure stood only four feet and was round with a staircase leading down a few steps to a doorway. It was made of concrete and looked like a bunker. I reached up to climb the ledge but released at the sight of a garter snake. The snake quickly retreated, leaping belly first onto the littered soil of the forest. I ran after it with my walking stick trying to catch it. The smooth scales slid with ease from the awkward clutches of my stick before the snake found refuge in a thicket.
I rushed back to the farm through the clearing. Preoccupied, I failed to walk carefully enough and found myself the object of scrutiny of the neighbor man. He held dirty weeds like decapitated skulls that bled onto his gardening knee pads. His brow was determined as he shouted a quick “Hey” which startled me and I ran into the thick of the forest. Dodging the bushes and trees, I was too concerned with maintaining a suitable distance from the frightening neighbor that I ran headlong into a spider web. I felt the carapace of the pointy spider smack me directly on the forehead and I yelled.
I bent at the hips and swiped at every angle of my face and hair and shook like a wet dog until I felt certain I was clear of the beast. The stickiness and phantom itches remained for some time and I continued to swat at my clothes as I ran. I looked back to make sure the dirt-sodden Kali was not chasing me. I had finally made it back to the cornfield. Only months ago, it had been a meadow of tall weeds. I winced at the heat on these summer days and the peculiar smell of the farm. A smell characterized by a floral tree which blended with the smell of hay, chickens, and animal waste. And even a little bit of the filth I was covered in.
It was Wednesday night and that meant the newest South Park was on Comedy Central. This was the best night of the week, my brother would often come over and watch it with my dad, Courtney, and I. After South Park, though, I would be sent to bed. The stubborn and curious kid that I am though, I always found a way to stay up.
The door to my room was shuttered and had slits in it through which I could continue watching TV if I was sneaky enough. And I was. I would sit quietly behind the door and watch.
Growing up is a long, strange process. Reality bears down on an organism. It is unsympathetic to the slow calibrations occurring within. There is no on-ramp to reality, one must be going 60 miles per hour immediately to keep pace. Or be tethered by the support and trajectory of a community that raises him. My community was a precarious shamble. The separation between my parents was devastating. When my mother discovered the affair between my father and Carly, she left him.
There are so many admirable qualities about my brother. He is just under six and a half feet, maintained near perfect grades through high school and college even though he had to support himself from the age of fourteen. He can recite the Odyssey from memory. And lastly, Carly was his girlfriend at the time of this affair.
And as Daniel sat on the couch watching the Daily Show, Courtney propped herself up on all fours on the ottoman of my father’s chair, facing the screen. My father, behind her, sat up on his knees, removing the sarong he wore every night and rubbed his hand between her legs. I was at a complete loss as to what was occurring. And there he sat, my strong brother who lost his girlfriend to our own father, watching television as if a spaceship did not just land in the living room.
It took every resource of my self-control to not blow my cover. But I was full of blood, confusion, loneliness, and I had to prevent what harm I could from being done. I stormed out from behind the shuttered door and screamed for them to stop. I sobbed there while my father stood up protesting and affixing his sarong. With haste my brother took me to my room. He had to leave.
I sat there on my mattress on the floor, curled into the corner of the wall and crying. Why couldn’t my parents love one another? How could my brother forgive him? How could he ignore the profanity of it all?
My father entered my room with a leather jacket, jeans, and boots on. He must have had to get into some kind of rambler’s costume in order to deliver a birds and the bees lesson which involved chickens and eggs and none of this was actually making any sense to me in my dissonant state. I just had to go to sleep.
The remainder of my time on the farm felt like an agony. I was alone. There was no mention of that night again by anyone. No attempt to offer me solace or resolution. I dreamed that somewhere in the world, another boy like me was trapped. Two freshly hatched chicks ran in frenzy along a wire fence, searching for egress.
I pilfered through empty cabinets, my bare feet sore on the counter. I stunk like the goats and chickens in the coop. I groaned and shambled vacantly through the woods like a zombie. The picture of the world did not work, and no fact seemed to ease my turmoil.
At the end of it all, as I rode away in an old Volvo from that retired satellite dish, I realized that people cannot see unbelievable skin walkers like me. I am half a dream myself, stepping partway into a realm of noise like an apparition. And every night, to avoid from drifting away, I sewed myself, loop for loop, into the carpet. ■
Clive Roberts is an underachiever. Typically his attention is directed towards expedience and distraction. His main interests include video games, comedy, podcasts, philosophy, and skepticism. Behavior modification is another great interest of his, but does almost nothing to alter his life. In this short tale, "The Woods and the Widow," he reveals a turning point in his life. The story is fiction, however. There was no corn growing on that farm. Nothing grew there.