The Pines (18 page)

But milky opalescence had covered the boy’s eyes.

“You see it, don’t you?” Ernie held a pocketknife with a gray mother-of-pearl handle. Smiling, he touched the sharpened point to the boy’s flesh and slowly pressed. A dot formed, and the tip entered slowly. He cut down.

Not much blood now. Instead, a yellowish fluid leaked out, flowing easily over the thicker, slower stuff that puddled around his body. It accumulated around the blood, thinly circling it before soaking into the sand.

A warm breeze stirred the woods, and a butterfly flitted past.

Fierce heat beat down on Ernie. Pushing orange hair and sweat out of his eyes, he straightened and stared into the pines.

He was tanned dark from living in the open. For a time he’d survived on foodstuffs scavenged from the torn litter of the campsite. But now he was hungry.

He waited for the woods to give him a sign.

Nothing.

Why?

Sighing, he crouched, pulled away the rest of the bandages and tenderly caressed the stubbled head. Then he stood and faced the trees again. “I offer you this!” Clenching his eyes shut, he spread wide his arms, opening himself to the sentient woods.
Accept it!
His teeth gritted with concentration.
My gift !
A chattering hum came from his mouth.
Accept my offering.
Beginning to go into a coughing fit, he opened his eyes to the sun, and the pines seemed to shiver.
Please!
On the verge of once more falling to his knees and prostrating himself, he let his vision stray to the boy.

Sunlight fell softly now, and the purple wounds looked almost pretty.
There!
Startled and jubilant, he stared at the incision across the chest.
I didn’t do that! I’m sure I didn’t make that one! I
didn’t!
He began to laugh. The woods! The pines! In a pool of motionless white light, he reveled.
They did it! A sign!

From the trees, the crows were calling.

Often, she found herself drawn here, here to this island of peace, this sanctuary where the stones lay deep and quiet. Silently, she skirted the mounded rubble of ore slag, lumps of refuse from the extinct forge. Stalky weeds sprang from the piles, reclaiming them. She stumbled over an old shoe, cast off in the yellow earth.

Finally sitting down, she flexed her leg. The shattered wall, already sun warmed, felt almost dry, and drowsily, the hornets buzzed. She’d always found a peculiar solace in this place. Heavy with age, it had long since surrendered its fight against the pines.

Vines grew over sun-soaked bricks. She sighed, glad she’d decided to come here, then laughed, because she hadn’t decided, not consciously. Rising, she stretched and approached the foundation hole of the old furnace itself.

The stones here weren’t soft and crumbling, but black and fused together as though spewed forth by an eruption. The hole…

Bottomless.

Something like coldness breathed out from it, coldness and a permeating silence. Everything wooden had rotted away, leaving only this dim brick outline. It was the grave of a town. Black leaves oozed beneath her feet.

Balancing like a child, she walked along the bridge wall between two cellar holes, the only sound the murmur of the sides crumbling into stagnant water as she passed. She gazed into one shuddering pool. Something plunked. A frog? The weaving patterns of water-strider spiders stirred a patch of iridescence, and rippling crescents spun. Disks interlocked and overlapped, trembling at the edges of the granulating bricks, turning them to sediment. At last, her anger seemed a distant thing—the sun had steamed away the breeze, but what remained of it caressed her hair. She glanced up at the rough ring of the clearing, now bathed in sunlight, clear and fresh.

Flowing, the morning’s dream came back to her, not in fragments, but slow and thick as honey: herself straining, here, in this place, screaming on a slab of stone, and the baby’s head, enclosed in a bluish caul, squeezing through the redness. The features looked…not normal. She squirmed from that vision, from the burning agony and tearing. The dream shifted, and she was once again a child, facing the image of Granny Lee’s lined face, explaining about the blood, the old lady embarrassed, the little girl deep in shame. They walked through this empty town, her leg brace chiming against the stones as she tried to avoid places where blood had pooled. Suddenly alone, she flew down the road with mystifying speed, lame no longer. And she walked in the new town, empty as these ruins. Doors flew open to show tables set with drying dinners. But she saw no people. Only caked blood everywhere. In the streets, like a crushed-brick paste. On her legs. She passed a truck with its motor running. And everywhere the crusting wetness, as if it had rained blood. And the moaning of the truck became the droning of a fly, became the buzzing of the hornets.

Shrugging away the images, she blinked at her surroundings. Though still saturated with sunlight, they no longer seemed calm. She heard the agitated voices of birds.

Standing straight, she looked beyond the clearing to the circle of pines.
Why did I come here?
More than anywhere else, this place made her realize how self-enclosed the barrens were, how cut off from the outside world.

God, I’ve made such a mess of things.
Tension pulsed in her stomach.
I was only trying to make a life for my husband…for my son.
She clenched her teeth.
Liar!
She struck her thigh with her fist.
For yourself!
She wanted to laugh at her own ineptitude—her being alone seemed so inevitable, so inescapable. She thought of Granny Lee and wanted to cry.
How could you leave
me? There’s no one for me. I’m all alone. Oh, Wallace, how could you
leave me here?
Suddenly blinded by tears that almost came, surprising and frightening her, she put her hands to her face.
But I never cry. And they won’t make me leave. I won’t let them. He loved that house. We worked so hard. Someday, I’ll…

He’d been working on the fence when the catastrophic heart attack had come. She’d found him in the yard, his face already gray.

Someday I’ll finish fixing up the place, and then…

The locals had hated her from the first day—an outsider who thought herself too good for them. Once they learned about her African-American background—and she knew she could thank Lonny for this—they’d been implacable. But their respect for Wallace, for his strength and his position in the community, had kept their resentments at bay at least to a certain extent. After his death, it hadn’t taken them long to assert their bigotry. Then she’d found Barry, or he’d found her. She knew he was nothing like Wallace, except in strength. A powerful cop, he had clout around here, and the townspeople, living as they did on the fringes of the law, feared him. Besides, she’d been so lonely.

She drew away from these thoughts, loathing her self-pity.
I have to stay strong. Have to.
Squeezing her hands to tight fists, she cleared her eyes with the pain of scratched palms.

No, no magic lingered here, and no nightmares either. It was just a town that like so many others had been swallowed by the pines. No ghosts. Crumbling bricks and a sense of vast age yawned all around her. Yet the pines were older still. They’d ruled here before the colonials had come, even before the Indians. Only small remnants of the Leni Lanape nation lingered; only fragments of the works of the settlers remained.

She considered those people who had mysteriously stayed, pictured their huddled encampments after the collapse of the bog-iron industry. Nearly starving in the woods, they’d survived on almost nothing, becoming ever more primitive, slipping in time until their children became like the descendants of castaways. Alcoholism, illiteracy and incest constituted social norms.
The South Bronx with pine trees.
This was what she’d escaped to, the legacy into which she had married.

But Wallace wasn’t like that.
With a smile and a shake of her head, she recalled their first meeting. She’d been a sophomore at City College, a stack of books in her arms as she hurried through the park, and this tall soldier had walked right into her, scattering her books all over the grass. He’d been so embarrassed as he helped gather them, stuttering and stumbling all over himself. He’d been perhaps the handsomest man she’d ever seen in her life. So sweet. So shy. And he couldn’t take his eyes off her.

She stared again into the flooded basement holes, and a weight settled on her, the lead of great age and of sadness and failure. She thought of the pineys and hated them, hated the limited gene pool, the inbreeding that resulted in all the deficiency and deformity. She’d heard that in the old days, whole decades would go by with the only new blood coming from escaped lunatics and convicts.
And now my genes are floundering in that pool.
She kicked sand into water, watched circles gently widen.
Cripple genes, at that.
She cringed at the thought. What if Lonny were right? What if Matthew’s problems were her fault? No, she wouldn’t consider this. If she were to blame, she could never face the boy.

And do I face him?
Slowly, she retraced her steps, moving back toward the woods. If only her grandmother hadn’t died before Matthew was born. She would have known how to love him.
After all, she even loved me.

She looked back at the once-prosperous community of Munro’s Furnace. Generations ago, her husband’s family had owned this town, building their own house just close enough so they could sit on their front porch in the evenings and watch the bustling activity. Only this remained.
And if you try to sit on the
front porch today, you’ll probably go through the floor.

The heat increased by the moment. As she walked, she resisted scratching her mosquito bites. If there were ever a war, she reflected, and the big cities were destroyed, it would be as though a dam had burst. Someday the pines would pour out, flooding into New York and Pennsylvania, and the barrens would cover this part of the world.

Someday.

The heat weighed on her, and she dragged her feet, feeling lashed to the earth. The trees around her stood ragged and stark, tortured looking, like the people who lived among them.

Monday, August 3

Three hot days had passed since the rain, and again the parched ground crunched underfoot.

His hair gleaming, bronzed by the sloping sun, Matthew stooped to the wildflowers, their small heads bobbing like insects. As he picked more blooms from the clump of weeds, he sang to himself, a soft, wordless tune of his own creation. Taking a bite of the crab apple in his other hand, he imbibed the sweet-acid flavor, then chucked the core. All around him, tall grasses lay down before the wind.

From the pines, a man watched through narrowed eyes. He inched forward. “Hey, you. Boy. C’mere.” He stepped suddenly onto the path. “I wanna talk to ya.”

Only the boy’s eyes could actually be seen to change; yet his body tensed with a movement like the shifting of light.

“It’s allkay, I jus’ wanna ast you ’bout sumthin’. Don’t be ’fraid.”

The boy stood poised, ready to dart like an animal through the trees. Only curiosity held him.

“It’s awright, honest.” Wes edged closer, holding out his hand and smiling. “Your ma said I could talk to ya. You know what I wanna ast ’bout, don’t ya? Yeah, you know.” The smile twisted, became something else. “You know sumthin’. Fuckin’ loony.”

The flowers fell to the ground.

Wes lunged and grabbed the boy’s arm. “In a hurry?” They tussled. “You ain’t goin’ nowheres. You go runnin’ round in the woods a lot, don’t ya, retard? Ye r out here allatime, I hear. Ya ever see a old man?”

“You! What’re you doin’ ta him?” The blonde woman charged down the path. “You leave him alone!”

“Ah, Pam, I was just…”

She crashed into him, shoving his chest with one hand and pulling Matty away. She pushed the boy behind her. “You stay the hell away from him! You hear?” She looked ready to fly at him with her nails, her face suddenly red and swollen with anger, the birthmark standing out vividly.

“I wasn’t gonna hurt the little squirt,” said Wes. The blotch on his face matched hers exactly.

“You shut up! I don’t want you round here!”

Snickering, he slouched away from her. “Yer mother don’t mind me comin’ round.”

“You think that bothers me, Wes Shourds? That don’t bother me. I don’t care what that whore does. Matty, you go back inna house now.”

“I just wanna ast the moron a couple a questions. Ain’t gonna hurt ’im. Thought he might a seen sumthin’ is all.”

“I don’t want you bothering him!”

“’Bout a month ago,” he yelled after the running boy. “Old man with a truck. You see him?”

“Shut up! You stay away from here! Dooley!” Quickly, she stooped and grabbed a small rock, made as if to throw it at Wes. “Dooley! Come on, boy. Where are ya? Dooley!” The dog was nowhere in sight, but sharp barks came from the direction of the house.