Paul Harding - Enon

“That’s just people’s backyards,” she said, and just like that it was true; her understanding of the landscape unseated my own — the mythical wild man of the meadow simply disappeared or, simply, had never existed for her and would never be grafted into her impression of the place.

Scooting past the meadow, I felt so panicked that someone was going to pull over and talk with me before I reached the woods that twice I nearly stopped and turned around and ran back to the house. When I reached the West Enon playground, I hurried off the sidewalk and past the empty basketball courts to where an old path entered the woods at a break in a stone wall. I sat on the wall for a moment and half-sobbed in relief at reaching cover. My broken hand ached terribly. The blood pulsing through it hurt. I took one of the six painkillers from the breast pocket of my flannel shirt and swallowed it.

The path in the woods dated back to the Revolutionary War, and I thought that only animals and kids must have used it for many years, deer and coyotes and the dogs of the village, which were allowed to roam with complete freedom, Enon never having had a leash law, and kids, at least when I’d been young, always having been given the run of the village by the time they were nine or ten years old. My friends and I had used the path when we were kids. I realized that I’d never shown it to Kate and that I had not walked it in over twenty years. As I recalled it, a quarter mile into the woods the path crossed in front of the ruins of an old cabin engulfed under thickets of bittersweet. The cabin was harmless but eerie. I had been inside only a couple of times, when I was a boy, on dares, during the day; otherwise, I always skipped into a half run to get past it. It lent the sense of some forsaken soul lying in a bed in the back room, someone who had been ill and semiconscious for two hundred years, his limbs and body wrapped in the bittersweet, too, who sensed me passing by out on the path, and who wanted me to come into the house and snip the vines from him and take his hand and put a cloth soaked in cold water on his forehead. But his hands would have been hairy with roots and would have crumbled away like dirt when I cut the vines from them and took hold of them, and his old striped shirt would be rotted and full of spores that would have made me cough, and his old body would have been packed dirt that had half-rotted through the bedding, and the entire room would be full of a noxious suspension that had been fermenting for over a century, since the dying man had been quarantined and forgotten, exiled in an obscure dead water of time, the sort of which Enon is full, if you observe carefully enough.

There was no trace of the cabin where I remembered it being. I ranged up and down the area where it should have been, looking for a pile of logs or tangle of bittersweet that somehow might have digested the cabin, but there was nothing.

“There was an old cabin here when I was a kid, Kate,” I whispered out loud, still scratching a little at the underbrush with my foot, half-looking for a threshold. “But it’s gone, just disappeared, like it never even existed.” I turned back to the path and resumed walking.

I walked all afternoon through the woods and hidden meadows of Enon. The sun went down and dusk spread and darkness began to fall. At one point it occurred to me that I had not eaten anything, but I felt neither hungry nor very thirsty. I reached the western shore of Enon Lake as the last light left the sky. I knelt down by the water and raised my broken hand above my head so it wouldn’t get wet and cupped some in my good hand and took a couple sips. The water was cold and clean-tasting, fine, mineral. I swallowed two pills with another mouthful, then jogged across the street and into the trees on the other side of the road, at the edge of one of Enon’s two nine-hole golf courses. The cemetery was a quarter mile away, back toward the village. It lay between the two golf courses, along the flank of a large hill. The golf courses and cemetery begin on flat tracts directly off the old Post Road to Boston, which then steeply elevate in a succession of rises. I crossed the near golf course and stepped over the stone wall into the upper part of the cemetery. Kate was buried below, toward the front, in the family plot, next to my grandfather George Washington Crosby and my grandmother Norma Crosby and my mother, Betsy Crosby, and where I will be buried when I die. My great-grandmother Kathleen Crosby is also buried in the cemetery, in another section.

It was just superstition, but I did not want to pass in front of Kate’s grave. I felt the way I would have had she been alive and I on as many drugs as I’d taken over the course of the day. Without having paid attention, I realized I had taken at least twice as many pills as I ought to have, and maybe more. It almost felt as if I were levitating when I stopped walking and stood still and looked down through the shadows to where Kate’s stone was. The moon was out and there was a beautiful view from the top of the cemetery. Deer browsed on the golf greens below to my right, and the tombstones made of white marble glowed. A corner of the lake was visible below, past the road, beyond the trees, sparkling.

I sat and surveyed the land, and looked down the hill, toward the Norway maple under which my grandparents and my mother and my daughter lay. A stupor fell over me and I floated without direction for some time, possibly hours, until I was roused by the voices of two young girls. They were sitting fifteen yards away from me, to my left, cross-legged, face-to-face, hidden from the road behind an enormous rectangular white headstone, on the other side of which, as I knew from my many trips to read the inscriptions on both the cemetery’s prominent memorials and its modest ones, lay a family of six, named Smith, all of whom had died during an epidemic in 1839. The girls shared a cigarette and swapped a bottle of wine. They both bent forward to examine something on the ground between them. One took a drag from the cigarette and passed it back to the other and opened a small book she had in her lap.

The girl with the book held it close to her face and fingered through the pages until she said, “Here it is.”

“What, what; what is it?” the other girl said.

“Give me a second, will you?” The girl examined the book, then dropped it into her lap and stared at her friend. She said, “Dude, this deck is whacked , it’s always so right. This card is that you lust for someone you know is evil.”

The other girl blew smoke out of her nose and clapped herself on the head, her forearmful of bracelets and trinkets clinking and twinkling in the moonlight, and groaned, “Oh man — that’s freaking Carl !”

Both girls had long, very dark, unkempt hair, which I assumed was dyed black but could not tell for sure. They both had pale skin and heavy black eyeliner on, and very dark lipstick, which might have been black or a very dark shade of purple or red, and they both wore all black clothes. I guessed they were a couple years older than Kate. I liked them immediately, and imagined Kate being their friend and going through a safe and uproarious adolescence with them. I even found myself wishing that they might do what they did in front of Kate’s stone, so that Kate could hear them and have the company, although she was too close to the road, and the girls would have been overheard by someone walking his dog, who would probably have called the police on his cell phone. I lay still where I was for half an hour, while the girls sipped wine and smoked and used their tarot cards as prompts to talk about what was important to them. Their conversation was endearing, although I was embarrassed by a good deal of it, and embarrassed that I was eavesdropping on them. But I did not want to try to sneak away or attempt to rise and act as if I’d stumbled on them by accident. I did not want to frighten or upset them. So I let them chatter and laugh and enjoyed the smell of the smoke from their cigarettes and looked up at the stars and tried to see if I could detect their movement through the sky, and thought about Kate watching the whole scene and being amused by it and teasing me about it when we both returned home.