Strange Seed (7 page)

But maybe none of it would happen this time. It had started, but Paul Griffin had a bad destructive streak in him, though he’d deny it. He wanted to put things in order,
his
order, which had nothing to do with what had been intended.

His father had understood right off.
 
And there was hope to be gained from that, because Paul was his father’s son.
 
There was hope.
 
For Rachel, too.
 
Maybe more than for Paul.
 
She understood more than she realized.

*****

This is turning out to be quite a long letter, isn’t it?
 
A lot longer than I thought it would be.

I’ve got good news.
 
Friday, the man comes to put in the windows.
 
Thank God!
 
I go outside as much as I can to get away from this lousy darkness (our lights don’t help much).
 
Paul’s getting the fields ready for next spring’s planting (he has to put in a “cover crop”), and sometimes I watch him, and other times I go on little nature walks.
 
It’s amazing how many kinds and varieties of wildlife there are here, mostly insects and spiders of one sort or another, and birds—cardinals, hawks, etc.

Lately, my walks have been short.
 
That wolf (I find it hard to believe there actually is one) is once again on the prowl.
 
Paul found several more slaughtered animals, woodchucks and such, and a fox, and early this morning he was awakened by noises outside our bedroom window.
 
He swore he saw something moving around near the barn (about seventy-five feet away), though it was much too dark for him to be certain.
 
Also, the weather has become amazingly unpredictable.
 
We might have gorgeous blue skies early in the day, but by afternoon it can be sullen and overcast—as it is now.
 
In the last week, we’ve had two vicious storms, and walking anywhere, even on the road in front of the house, can be risky.

Believe me, I’d like to get outside more than I’ve been able to.
 
Other than its darkness (only temporary, I hope), this house is pretty noisy.
 
It’s an old house and noises are to be expected from old houses, I suppose, and maybe in time I’ll grow accustomed to it.
 
But—and this is what I don’t like---the noises this house makes are even less predictable than the weather.
 
It’s as if there’s a kind of diminutive symphony orchestra caught in the walls and floors and in the cellar, and one after the other, each member of that orchestra wheezes shortly into his brass instrument, or picks at his stringed instrument as if there’s something foreign on it, or runs his fingers delicately along his percussion instrument.
 
And, all at once, it will seem that the whole orchestra has decided to go out for lunch, and so they put their instruments down with varying degrees of gentleness and go galumphing, tip-toeing, running out the back door.

The noise of a bad cellist locked up in the cellar has been upstaged by the noise of a healthy rain flinging itself against the house.

Paul will be in shortly.

             
                         
My love to all,

                                          
Rachel

But it wasn’t rain, Rachel saw.
 
It was a fitful, strong wind.

She had gone to the back door, had pushed the screen door open, and was waiting for Paul to appear around the corner of the house from the path a hundred yards to the north.

She saw the hawk first as an indefinable speck over the western horizon, over the forest.

A minute later, she made out the slow, easy movements of its great wings—the wind, she noted, did not appear to be affecting it.

Then it was over the far field, where Paul had been working for the last two weeks.

“Paul!” she called, as if the hawk were a threat to him.

She saw, then, that the hawk was carrying something in its talons—something the size of a small cat—and that the thing was jerking about spastically, like a malfunctioning windup toy.

Then the hawk, its great brown wings still moving slowly, easily, gracefully, was over the near field, and she could hear it screech occasionally, just on the ragged edge of discord.

“Go away!” she whispered.
 
Tightly.
 
Desperately.
 
“Go away.
 
Please!”

Ten million deaths happened that day.
 
Most of the deaths went unnoticed, except by those that killed and those that died.
 
The forest survived because of the dead; the dead were food for the living, and the children and grandchildren of the living.

Near the edge of the forest, a pair of burying beetles had laboriously dug a hole beneath the corpse of a young blue jay.
 
Earlier in the day, a crow in search of food for its young had forced the blue jay from its nest, then had impaled and lost it.
 
Now the burying beetles were busy pushing dirt over the corpse.
 
They did their work quickly, perhaps aware that the longer the corpse remained visible, the greater the chances were that a raccoon or an otter or a fox would come along and snap it up.

From one of the lower branches of an old and insect-hollowed pine, a great horned owl watched the burying beetles.
 
His almost constant hunger had been satisfied.
 
Attached to the back of his neck, by the teeth, was the rapidly putrefying head of a marsh mink.
 
What remained of its body lay in the forest somewhere.
 
The owl had gorged itself on it—once he had been able to separate it from the head—but the jaws of the mink were strong and its teeth were sharp, even now.
 
In time, the head would fall away.

His powerful back legs holding him fast to the petal of a wild tulip, an ambush bug waited patiently until a fat honeybee settled onto the flower and started the business of pollination.
 
Though the ambush bug was only one-tenth the size of the bee, it attacked, quickly maneuvered it into the correct position, stung it between the eyes, and began its meal.
 
The bee died five minutes later.

The enemies of the snowshoe hare were numerous.
 
Besides the owl and the mink,
 
the fox and the weasel, they included the ever-present red-tailed hawk.
 
The forest housed six hawks and one of them could always be seen circling just above the trees.
 
The hare didn’t see the one above the clearing until it was nearly upon him, when the time for escape had long-since passed.

Near a small pond just beyond the forest’s western perimeter, a praying mantis had hidden itself in a growth of cattails.
 
A perfect hunter, the mantis would eat almost anything it could catch.
 
Not far from the mantis, a hummingbird—its wings invisible in the dim, early morning light—floated from flower to flower and finally hovered near a bee balm flower, close to the mantis.
 
The mantis moved forward stealthily, then its powerful legs shot out and quickly reduced the hummingbird to an unrecognizable mass of feathers and flesh.

Near a cluster of sumac, a vixen fed growlingly on the carcass of a woodchuck.
 
Her attention was diverted for a moment by a pair of blue jays flying away from the forest.
 
An hour earlier, two crows had attacked the jays’ nest and now the gutted bodies of four blue jay chicks lay on the ground beneath.
 
One of the bodies had already been found by a burying beetle.
 
Another burying beetle had since joined it.
 
Together, they would dig a hole beneath the blue jay chick then cover it so none of the other thousands of predators would find it.

Time was not measured here.

Life consumed it.

And death consumed it.

But death is only a servant to life—in all its forms, from the amoeba to the dragonfly to the owl and the hawk, from the euglena to the wild tulip to the white pine, from the lady’s slipper to the death’s cap mushroom.

Where sun and soil and water combine, there is life.

At first, Rachel took little notice of the footprints.
 
After all, the evidence of someone’s bare feet in the newly soaked earth wasn’t that unusual.
 
Kids enjoyed running around with no shoes on, especially after a heavy rain.

She smiled wistfully at the footprints, set her basket of just-washed clothes on the ground in front of the makeshift clothesline, and glanced around at the steep flight of steps leading to the back door of the house.
 
She looked in the opposite direction.
 
She could dimly see Paul in the far field, the one closest to the forest.
 
When he finished his work, she’d tell him about her near-tumble down the steps; dry rot had made using them precarious, at best.
 
She hoped that he and Mr. Lumas could fix them soon.

She fished a pair of Paul’s long johns from the wicker basket, hung them from the line, and laughed as they flapped crazily in a sudden brisk wind.

This isn’t New York City, is it?
 
She stopped laughing abruptly, stood on tiptoes, looked across the fields at Paul:
 
The distance was too great, she realized, and the wind too strong—he’d never hear her.
 
She settled back on her heels.
 
This isn’t New York City, is it?
 
Paul had told her that during their first night at the house.

She turned.
 
Where had she been, however temporarily?
 
Back in New York, where children were as common a sight as lampposts?
 
Where had she been for those few moments after she’d noticed the footprints?

She studied the bare earth around her.
 
There were no other footprints, only hers and…the child’s?
 
Yes, without a doubt, she reasoned, a child had made them.
 
They were far smaller than her own footprints, and they were not nearly as deep, but mere soft impressions in the earth, the impression of the heel noticeably shallower than the impression made by the toes.
 
The child had been running, or moving stealthily toward the house.

She bent over and ran her fingers around the perimeter of one of the footprints.
 
The child, she thought, had paused here—the footprint was the same depth all around.
 
She shifted her position slightly.
 
The other print, she saw, was the same.

She straightened, pursed her lips.
 
What, she asked herself, was this stupid game she’d involved herself in?
 
The fact was that someone had been prowling around the house.
 
Paul had to be told immediately.

She studied the footprints once more—it seemed important to be able to tell Paul what route the intruder had taken—turned and started for the path that ran along the northern edge of the fields.
 
She stopped and gazed confusedly at the cellar door.
 
Had she seen correctly.
 
Did the small footprints end there—at the door?
 
It would mean that the intruder had gotten into the cellar, but that was impossible—the door was closed and its simple lifting latch was not operable from the inside.
 
Once in the cellar, you had to leave the door open or be trapped behind it.
 
And most importantly, getting the snug-fitting door open even a foot or so—enough to squeeze through and into the cellar—was quite a noisy affair, requiring a great deal of strength.
 
If someone had opened it, Rachel knew, she’d have heard the metallic shriek of the hinges, the whine of the door moving against its frame.
 
No, the intruder had merely approached the door, tried it unsuccessfully, then had moved north along the cellar wall.
 
His feet would leave no marks in the weeds there.

She turned her head suddenly and cupped her hands to her mouth.
 
“Paul!” she called.
 
“Paul!” she repeated, feeling a twinge in her throat.
 
Amazed, relieved, she saw that Paul was looking her way.
 
Several moments later, he had crossed through the field and was loping down the path to the house.

He put his ear to the cellar door.
 
Rachel, just behind him, said, “No one could have gotten in there, Paul.
 
I would have heard—“

“Quiet!” he snapped.
 
His sudden impatience took Rachel by surprise.
 
She stepped back.

“There’s no one
in
there!” she protested.

Paul straightened, firmly grasped the door’s wooden handle with his right hand, and opened the latch with his left.
 
He pulled experimentally on the handle.
 
“Jesus,” he muttered, “it’s going to take two men to get this goddamned door open.
 
It’s old wood, the rain must have warped it.”
 
He turned his head and looked inquiringly at Rachel.
 
“Have you seen Hank around?” he asked.