He drove the rest of the way without speaking. Just before we reached our driveway, he pulled over and let me out. We didn’t say good-bye, he just drove away.
I walked up to the house, rubbing my shoulder where it still hurt from the rifle’s recoil. But soon, it wouldn’t hurt because I would get used to it. It was amazing to me, what a person could get used to.
TWELVE
IT WAS DARK.
I didn’t know whether the moon was full and ripe or just a slender crescent, balanced on its side like the white edge of an eye. Out there in the woods, the trees were thick and they were tall, obscuring the sky. Even on the brightest summer day, you could see only flashes of blue. The trees were greedy, hoarding all the light for themselves at the very top of the canopy, letting only a pittance shine through. So either the trees were blocking the moon or perhaps clouds were, a layer of them like a floating sheet.
Or maybe there was no moon at all, maybe it had vanished, bounced away from the Earth. It seemed possible tonight that the universe had gone insane.
Luckily, I knew these woods. Not only did I know the path that reached from the beginning of the forest in our backyard and extended deep, crossing a stream, running behind all the homes on our street, but I knew the landscape that held the path. I’d memorized the large rocks, had used them many times as desks, cars, horses. Beneath one low, flat stone I’d dug a hole and buried my locking fireproof box. I’d placed favorite objects inside—leaves baked with fall color, the silver ring from our trip to Mexico when I was small, a collection of stamps from countries so exotic I couldn’t pronounce their names. I would return as an adult and dig up the box, I thought. It was my time capsule.
I knew these woods and didn’t need moonlight or any light at all to know my way around.
But terror was dulling my vision in a way the darkness couldn’t.
I was barefoot and grateful for the thick cushion of moss that grew in great blankets across the forest floor.
At other times, I’d gently peeled this moss from the ground, careful not to tear it. I would hold it before me and think, You could almost wear this. But the moss was fragile and would break apart if you tried to wrap it around yourself. Still, it astonished me that nature had created sheets of something so wonderful and green and soft it would be all right to lay a baby on it.
I could see jabs from his flashlight cutting into the woods on either side of me. He was back there, somewhere. The light beam was like a knife and I didn’t want it on my back.
I dashed to the right, through a clutch of young silver birch trees, and ran up the embankment, crouching forward to maintain speed. With his bad knee, he would have trouble with the hill. Lumbering forward, he would need to pause and massage the swollen, throbbing kneecap, catch his breath. The hill would slow him.
But when I suddenly realized the beam from his flashlight was gone, I worried that he’d cut around, that he’d thought one step ahead of me. That he was already on the hill, climbing it from the other side. What if I reached the top and he was there to meet me?
I veered back to the path then crossed it. I wanted to stop and listen, but I couldn’t. Fear pushed me forward. My breathing roared in my head, as though my ears were beside a gigantic heaving machine, a bellows stoking some hellish fire.
Even though I was wearing only pajamas and had no shoes, I wasn’t cold. I wasn’t anything at all. I was only a blur.
When I stepped on a branch, the rough bark cutting into my arch, I just kept running. The pain exploded in my feet, then shot out the top of my head, and was left behind in my wake.
MANY DAYS AFTER school and on the weekends my best friend Greg and I would play in these woods. School, meals, and sleep were interruptions to what became our private, untamed life.
We had a hospital, located just off the dirt road that threaded our two houses together, a natural clinic with walls made of ferns and witch hazel bushes, a bed of rust-colored pine needles. A waist-high rock with a nearly flat surface served as our apothecary, where we ground dried leaves and various barks into makeshift powders, deciding on the spot what they could heal.
“And for sprains, I think this will be good. We’ll grind it up and mix it with mud from the stream and then put it on the sprain. Birch bark will be for when your heart races. You’ll apply a paste on the chest.”
We stored an inventory of honeysuckle, gathered in spring. The dried, shriveled blossoms could be consumed whole and contained the power to revive somebody close to death.
We’d infused the ferns, flowers, leaves, and berries we gathered with healing powers. We never sampled our drugs because we were afraid of them, though to admit this out loud would have broken the spell.
Not far from the hospital was a wooden bridge, just a flat roof of thick wood planks over the brook that ran parallel to the street until it cut back and followed alongside Greg’s driveway. Beneath the bridge was our rock factory, where we smashed stone against stone, looking for diamonds.
We believed that if we split enough rocks, we eventually would find at the center of an ordinary gray rock a perfect white diamond, already cut with dazzling facets. Once or twice we panned for gold with one of my mother’s pie pans, but it was diamonds we believed in.
In the other direction, just past my house, was the pond. Here, we crouched down at the overgrown, blurry edge of the water and scooped clouds of pollywogs into our hands, just for the vivid sensation of feeling life slipping between our fingers and dropping back into the water. The pond was rife with all that was alive—cattails bursting white fluff, throaty frogs, snakes, and turtles that could take a finger. There were cunning little birds in brazen colors that flashed about like wild thoughts and perverse impulses.
The lowly majesty of a beaver’s dam at the mouth of the pond amazed us, being finer than any fort we’d ever managed to construct ourselves.
When a stranger parked alongside the reservoir and went for a walk beside the water or along the path into the woods, we stalked them from a distance, feeling possessive of every tree.
• • •
I WAS ELEVEN and I was strong and I knew these woods. What was hunting me beneath the black sky was old and crippled, with foul skin and a bad knee that caused a limp and required frequent visits to the doctor for draining with a hypodermic needle.
WHEN I WAS alone in the woods I brought Brutus with me. I’d seen other boys play with their dogs, watched them run in the backyard, shrieking with joy while the dog chased after, overtaking them.
My relationship with Brutus was different. I carried a walking stick I’d carved myself from ironwood and I never smiled when I was alone. Why would I? Brutus followed, sometimes charging ahead to chase a squirrel or lingering over the deflated but treacherously barbed body of a porcupine.
Sometimes Brutus sat while I lay on my side and stroked his chest. “I need you,” I told him and Brutus turned his head away from me. I thought, I need him too much. I need him to be too human. I had the sensation of colliding with a limitation.
I PAUSED FINALLY and watched the trees for slashes of light, but saw none. As my heart settled and my ears became less occupied I listened and heard nothing but the thready pulse of the night. And I sensed that the hunt was over. I’d been prey and now I was not. Prey knows this. Prey knows when it has escaped.
MY GRANDFATHER, MY father’s father, in Lawrenceville, Georgia, sent us a pool table when I was very young. I liked to knock balls into the pockets, listen as they rolled inside the channel within the table and were returned at the mouth. I begged my father to teach me to play, but not once did he play pool with me. In time, the felt was shredded, books stacked on its surface, the balls long lost.
The stain that my baseball glove had bled onto the rock was still there.
At night, my father still answered, “Very much I love you.”
Five words.
I MUST HAVE made my way back into the house, walked into my bedroom, and closed my hollow-core door—no protection
at all against a fist. I must have peeled back the covers and buried myself beneath them, nestled my head on one pillow, and placed another over my eyes. I did not wake up in the woods, I woke up in my bed. And I was confused, because it all seemed a dream. The dark was gone, the missing moon no longer a puzzle.
After dressing for school, I walked into the kitchen, the sound of my mother’s typing now reduced to just a background throbbing, like pebbles continuously running through the plumbing of the house.
My father was sitting at the table, grading papers. He had a mug of coffee before him, a cigarette burning in the ashtray.
Hesitantly, I said, “Hi.” I wanted to be small. I was still confused over the dream. And yet, I was aware that the bottoms of my feet felt sore, that they dimly ached.
Looking up, my father smiled and said, “Well, good morning. You better hurry up or you’ll miss the bus.”
It was when he looked back down at the paper he was grading that I saw the thin line of green.
A pine needle. In his hair.
I backed out of the kitchen, as though I could undo my entrance. But I could not.
After school, I met Greg at our apothecary rock. It was comforting to be with him because I never had to explain anything. He didn’t ask me why I sometimes looked frightened or had dark circles under my eyes. I imagined he knew something was wrong at my house but he also knew it was not something I could ever talk about. With Greg, I could be alone without having to be alone. It was like I was with an extension of myself.
And for a while, for as long as we were in the woods together, that’s all there was. There were no mothers and fathers. It was a whole other world and it was ours alone.
With Greg I was able to escape. And sometimes, more than anything else, that’s what I needed.
THIRTEEN
DOWN THE ROAD from our house, close enough that a human voice could travel there, lay a body of water so entirely still that the pine trees surrounding it were reflected in needle detail. At first glance, there didn’t appear to be any water at all, only forest and a sudden curious chill in the air. A levy sheltered the water from breezes, so on some days the surface never so much as trembled.
White signs posted on the land surrounding the water warned, NO TRESPASSING. PUBLIC WATER SUPPLY, TOWN OF AMHERST. But the signs did not apply to me. The reservoir was mine, as were the pine trees, the path framed by ferns, and the lady slipper orchids that bloomed only in the shade. The law I obeyed was never to pick their blooms—swollen, pink, and veined, the most human thing you could find in the woods.
The town of Amherst didn’t know there was a red tackle box hidden beneath the wooden footbridge. The town didn’t care that the slight peninsula that extended north into the water was overtaken with butterflies in the spring. Or that they would land on you all at once like a sentient blizzard. If you stood with your arms outstretched, you would have hundreds of wings all over your body, all of them beating, pulsing. And you would almost believe that you were about to become airborne.
The reservoir was mine.
“It’s twenty-nine feet deep here in the middle,” I said.
“How do you know that?” Greg asked.
“Because this is one foot,” I said, holding my hands a width apart. “And there’s about twenty-nine of these worth of string.”
I’d come out alone the day before and measured; tied a rock around my string and thrown it over the side of the raft. Really, what I wanted to do was drain the lake and see what was at the bottom. But since I couldn’t, I measured its depth instead.
Greg nodded. “That’s neat. Twenty-nine feet is a lot.”
We ate cucumber sandwiches that my mother had made. Our fingers were wet, which made the bread soggy and fall apart in our hands. Cucumber slices slipped out, landed on the rubber floor of the little boat. “These are good,” Greg said.
“I know.” Cucumber sandwiches on white bread with mayonnaise—this was the taste of summer, like biting into the actual day itself.
We tossed the bread crusts overboard for the low-flying birds and saw the flickering shadows of their wings play across the ripples of our lazy wake. We paddled slowly to the shore. It was dark as we walked home and the tall grasses by the side of the road glittered with fireflies.
AT HOME MY father saw me kneeling before my mattress. I seldom knelt when I talked to God. Kneeling is for people who aren’t friends with him, I thought. Kneeling was formal. Kneeling was for guests. You would kneel if you weren’t certain. Kneeling was wanting and showing, not knowing and believing. That’s just what I thought, at least.
But I was kneeling that night because I needed so much, so desperately. And what if I was wrong? What if kneeling was merely good manners? Like never putting your elbows on the table, the way my grandmother Carolyn taught me.
“Augusten, what are you doing down on your knees like that?” my father asked disdainfully.
I turned around as I stood up. I sat on my bed. “Nothing.”
He parked his fists on his hips and asked incredulously, “Son, were you praying?”
The sheer disappointment on his face made my own cheeks burn. “A little,” I admitted.
“Oh, son,” he said, rolling his eyes and lightly shaking his head from side to side. “Jesus Christ, Augusten. You’re much too old for this praying business, much too old.”
His eyes continued to bore into me as if the full magnitude of my dishonor was only just beginning to be revealed.
He continued. “Praying is something little kids do. Son, it’s like writing a letter to Santa. Now, you wouldn’t sit down there at your desk and write a letter to Santa anymore, would you? Praying is just exactly the same thing. You’re old enough now where you have to understand that if you want something in life, you are responsible for taking care of your needs yourself.”
Boldly, I said, “But you were a priest.”
He didn’t shift position, but I sensed a change, a certain tensing of his body. “Well, no. That’s technically not correct, I wasn’t a priest. I was a preacher.” He waved his hand in the air to dismiss the distinction. “Son, there is nobody in life who is going to do anything for you. There isn’t a God in any traditional sense; a man up there in the sky who grants wishes like a magic genie or a wizard.” He laughed softly, even contemptuously. “Is that what you really believe, son? That there’s an all-knowing something or other up there in the sky with a magic wand who’s going to get you a new record player or whatever it is you’re asking for?”
I had been on my knees, moving my lips along with the silent prayer, because what I was asking for was that important.
God, please take my father away. Please make him leave. I am very afraid that he’s going to do something bad. There’s something wrong with him. And I am very worried that my mother and I won’t make it. She used to say he was dangerous and I didn’t understand. But now I do. If death is the only answer, please take him. If he doesn’t hurt me, I’m afraid I might hurt him. I’ve become quite good with the rifle, you know. I’m sure you’ve seen me. Unless you think I’m the one that’s bad and then you can take me. I won’t be mad at you.
When I spoke to my father my voice came out low and soft, almost a whisper. “I don’t really believe in a God that gives you new ice skates and stuff.” I kept to myself that when I ate vanilla frosting straight from the can, I could feel God standing right beside me like a real best friend, watching and smiling and wishing he had a mouth.
My father stepped forward and slapped me on the shoulder, a rare and shocking instance of physical contact. “Okay, son, all right,” he said and walked out of my room. Without having to watch him, I knew for a fact that as he walked down the hall and into the kitchen, he turned off each light switch as he passed it. He then checked all the burners on the stove, even though nobody had cooked a thing all day—I’d had cold cuts from the package for dinner, pickles from a jar. Next, he would walk into the living room and peer at his thermometer-barometer unit, which
was bolted to the wall. He’d repeat the figures in his head until he made it back into the kitchen where he would write them down on the top page of his diary. Next, he would pour himself a glass of vodka and carry it into the living room. He would sit in his rocking chair in the dark.
I didn’t know if it was because of what he said or just that I was getting older, but I soon stopped feeling God standing right beside me everywhere I went. I stopped talking to him when I was alone in the woods or under the bridge looking for diamonds among the river stones. I stopped asking God to protect me.
I came to think that maybe God was what you believed in because you needed to feel you weren’t alone. Maybe God was simply that part of yourself that was always there and always strong, even when you were not.
And if I put everything in God’s hands, wasn’t that a cop-out? If I didn’t get what I wanted I could use God as an excuse, I could say, “He didn’t want me to have it.” When, in fact, maybe I hadn’t worked hard enough on my own.
If I wanted to be free of my father, it wasn’t up to some man in the sky. It was up to me.
THERE WERE THREE of us. It almost felt like the house contained three caves, and each of us sat in the back of our own.
Sometimes I could hear my mother howl from inside hers. Over the sound of her endless typing, I could hear her forlorn, desperate wail. Like a wounded animal crouched in the corner, knowing it would soon run out of life.
When my father came near my cave, I could hear him breathing and grinding his teeth.