Enchanted Forests (17 page)

If his arthritis was bothering him, he was too excited to think

ahead about it. He almost dislocated my shoulder as he leaped

down from the truck. He landed with a yelp, but was up again in

a moment. I let him tug me down the dim forest tunnel that was

once the road to Benbow.

We walked fast, almost trotting. We forded shallow streams

and ducked under deadfalls. All the while, apprehension swelled

inside me like a toadstool. I couldn't keep my mind off bear

traps and homemade mines and the glazed dopiness I'd occasion-

ally seen in the eyes of known growers. There was something

else, too. The forest felt strange here—"powerful" is the word

I'd choose. And I wondered yet again who or what Birk was,

and what had brought him here.

We were hot and out of breath by the time we reached what

was left of the commune. I hadn't seen it in two or three years,

since the dme a neighbor gave me a guided tour of the ruins. It

looked perceptibly less human now than it had then. The hippies

of Benbow had never had electricity or a sewage system or run-

ning water, Just a misguided sense that they could live as the In-

dians had and the earth would take care of them. Now slugs,

flies, and green things went about the business of reclaiming the

hills of garbage. Wasps and wood rats nested in the sagging raft-

ers of Ae shacks.

The place had the feel of a battle lost. Redwoods and oaks

watched darkly over the place from rare heights, as they always

had. Even in the spots the residents had cleared, first briars then

baby trees and madrone had reestablished themselves. The plank

walls sank into the green earth. Grass grew on the roofs. There

was no longer a trace of human scent, just the damp smell of

earth and mushrooms. Scratch, however, disagreed. Whining

with excitement, he followed his nose to a place among the ferns

and snowberries where we discovered the burgundy duffel.

As I knelt to examine it, 1 heard voices. Scratch lifted his nose

toward them, silent for once, almost apprehensive. It wasn't a

conversation exactly, nor a song. A windy murmur drifted

through the forest, like people praying in a language I'd never

heard before. It made Scratch's legs tremble, and my empty

stomach bum.

"Birk!" I shouted. "Birk, where are you?"

I got no answer, just a flood of imaginary horrors, the boy

maimed and unconscious from a shotgun snare, or gagged and

BENBOW              111

bound by paranoid pot growers. Almost at once I regretted hav-

ing called to him. Now the owners of the voices knew I was

here. I had no way to defend myself, just carpenter's muscles and

an old dog. I thought of running back down the road to the truck,

driving somewhere in search of a sheriff. But anything could

happen between now and the time I returned.

An insidious thought crept up on me, familiar and reprehensi-

ble. Technically, Birk wasn't my problem. But then, that's what

I'd thought about Bobby. Had I learned anything at all since

then?

The voices continued undisturbed, and I, realizing there was

only one course of action I could live with, moved toward them

carefully. This time, my role and Scratch's were reversed. I did

the tugging.

We walked a quarter mile deeper into the woods before the

voices surrounded us. I still don't know exactly when we stum-

bled into the grove; maybe the grove engulfed us. Suddenly the

trees looked different—unlike anything I'd seen in this forest or

any other. They had drooping branches and narrow, silky trunks,

a little like aspen or birch. A pale golden haze enveloped them,

like sunlight shining through dust. Their leaves were small and

slender, as if from miniature willows, exactly matching the ones

in Birk's hair.

The boy stood with his back to me. His clothing, including the

beloved baseball cap, lay in a neat pile beside him. His leafy hair

stood out in otherworldly dreadlocks, and a fine down of leaves

ran along his spine from neck to buttocks. He grasped a golden

tree trunk with his hands, head thrown back, eyes wide but un-

seeing, and his whole body shivered as if he were caught in an

electrical current. I could hear his teeth clicking, and it looked

and sounded horrible.

Before I knew it, I had my hands on Birk's, trying to pry him

away from the whispering, luminous tree. A feeling bubbled up

through my arms, like a bath of tepid honey, and it kept going.

First my shoulders, then my neck, my spine, the tops of my

thighs, loosened and warmed. It reminded me of sliding into

sleep as a child—that drowsy comfort of blankets in a cold

room, the perfect hum of a thriving young body, knowing that

Mother is near.

I've never taken any drug stronger than aspirin, except once

when I had a tooth out and they gave me nitrous oxide. The part

of me that people know as Chet the retired principal with both

feet on the ground hates to even think about what happened next,

112                 Nancy Etcnemendy

because it sounds so irrational. I never mention it to other peo-

ple, but privately I take the memory out and relish it now and

then. It's important to me, though I still don't understand it com-

pletely, and probably never will.

When the warm honey feeling reached my head, I realized that

I had become the forest. I felt the movements of every animal

and bird and leaf, every rivulet of water; I stood as tall as a

mountain and when I looked up I could feel the light of the stars

pulsing through me. I dipped into the day of Birk's conception.

I watched his human mother make love with the trees in this

very grove, lithe, glowing, impossible. "She lived in Benbow a

while, you know," I heard Birk say as if from the mouth of a

cave. "My tree father says I'm not the only one."

After a while, I realized Scratch was licking my face. I sat up

among the fems, frightened and disoriented. Moisture from the

forest floor had soaked through the back of my shirt, and I ached

as badly as I had after my first day of framing the house. Birk

and his clothes were gone. I dragged myself to my feet, much to

Scratch's delight, and made my way back toward the old com-

pound. In the trampled place where Birk's duffel had been, I

found a note written in pencil on a scrap of binder paper.

"Dear Chet," it said. "Thanks for trying to help. You can see

I have to look for the others. I'll be okay, and I appreciate every-

thing. I'm asking a favor. Please don't follow me. Sincerely, your

friend, Birk."

The loneliness of the ordinary young is a terrible thing. For a

boy like Birk, it must have been beyond imagining.

I thought about Birk all day, and for many days afterward,

wondering if I should have gone after him, or told the sheriff I'd

seen him. I mulled it over while Scratch and I fished for smelt

on a deserted beach, while I worked alone in my transformed

garden, while I methodically cooked dinner for myself and my

dog. I wondered where he was, and hoped he was safe. A long

time later, I drove back to Benbow and looked for the grove of

strange trees, but I never found them. In the end, I kept Birk's

secret in return for the gift he gave me: the certainty that life is

full of unlikely possibilities.

Not long ago, after a series of regular phone calls, I drove up

to my daughter's house in Washington state for a visit. It feels

like springtime, like ice is melting, and anything might happen.

Who would have thought I'd have Benbow and a boy with leafy

hair to thank for that?

INHERITANCES

Different dances to a single tune

The Prism or Memory

by Jo Clayton

Jo Clayton lives in Portland, Oregon with a calico cat

named Tigerlily who functions as monitor sitter and a seal

point Siamese named Owl who has a habit of levitating

into small high places. While listening to the rain and

laughing at the cats, she manages to write science fiction

and fantasy novels and a few short stories.

One summer day when Jenny was four, she put the sandwiches

her mother had made for her lunch in the pocket of her dress,

took the thermos with the milk in it, crawled through the hole the

dog dug under the back fence, and went into the Forest.

A squirrel went rippling along the ground, and she trotted after

it.

When it scrambled up a tall scraggly pine and disappeared into

a hole, she stopped to look round. She was in a small glade with

a pool not much bigger than a bathtub but round like a silver dol-

lar. And there was a big old rock taller than she was and covered

with moss. It had two deep holes like eyes and a crack for a

smiling mouth, and the moss was like short green hair.

Jenny put the thermos down and curtsied to the boulder.

"Grandma Mossy," she said. "You have a very nice house."

The tree rustled at her with that whisper pine needles make.

"Aunt Piney, I din't forget you, but I din't know it's your

house, too."

She took the crushed and grubby sandwiches from her pocket,

shared bits of them with the boulder and the tree and poured a

little milk in me boulder's mouth crack and on the pine tree's

116                      Jo Clayton

roots. She was a lonely child. The house on the edge of the for-

est was miles from the nearest farm and even farther from the

small town that was the shopping center for the area. When her

mother wasn't painting or on the phone to her agent, she played

wonderful games with her, read to her, or just talked with her,

but those times were scattered among the many more days when

her mother's smile was there only because she forgot to take it

off and her eyes had a glaze that told Jenny she was only seeing

what was on the inside of her head.

Grandma Mossy smiled at her and her hole eyes squinted with

good humor as the sun shifted the pattern of shadow. Aunt Piney

rustled her needles in a friendly, chatty way. The sun was warm

and the clumpy grass next to the pond was soft and warm and it

was time for her afternoon nap. Jenny yawned, curled up and

went to sleep.

She woke to me ripple of music, sat up, rubbing her eyes, pre-

pared to be afraid. She saw a small goatboy on the far side of the

pond. He grinned at her and lifted a funny thing like a harmonica

made of twigs and played a giggle for her. She hugged her arms

close to her chest because it was beginning to get chilly out here,

then giggled back at him.

He played some more and a white doe came from the shadow

under the trees. She circled the pool, touched her nose to the

hand that Jenny held out to her, then she walked a few steps

away, turned her head and fixed her brown eyes on Jenny. As

clearly as if the doe had said the words, she heard in her head,

It's time to go home.

She went to the pool often that summer, chatted with Aunt Pi-

ney and Grandma Mossy, shared her lunch with them, played

with the goatboy, and watched in awe and wonder as a golden

man with branching antlers danced with a pure white woman.

The man wore brown heavily encrusted with embroidery and a

long brown velvet cape lined with gold satin. The woman wore

a white silk dress embroidered in silver. Her hair was her cape,

ice white, long, and fine enough to float on air.

They were wild and strange and made the hair stand up on

Jenny's arms, but they were also eerily lovely and touched that

hunger for beauty she'd gotten from her mother.

The woman beckoned to Jenny, calling her to join the dance,

but she was shy and shook her head.

The summer when Jenny was six, the Man came to live with

them. He had shaggy brown hair and a roar of a laugh that made

THE PRISM OF MEMORY         117

everyone who heard it laugh with him. He made Jenny nervous,

but she didn't know why until she saw his eyes never joined the

laugh. And she started to hate him when she saw her mother

glowing with happiness and letting her paint go dry while he

wheedled money out of her and bought things they didn't need,

Fall came and her mother's eyes went absent again. She

started spending most of her days and sometimes much of the

night in her studio. The Man grew restless. He bought a gun and

went hunting in the forest and shouted at her mother when she

wouldn't clean and cook the game he brought back.

He threw the dead things outside the back fence and they rot-

ted. The stink they gave off came into the house, and Jenny felt

that rotting, too. She went still and silent like a killdeer chick,

hoping that if she stayed hidden the danger she sensed but didn't

understand would walk past and miss her.

The Man came round the kitchen table, bent over Jenny's

mother, and whispered to her. His face was red and there was a

sheen of sweat on his skin. Jenny could hear the urgency in his

whisper even without knowing the words he said.

Her mother pushed her plate away, shook her head.

He whispered longer, caught hold of her hand, and nuzzled it.