GRETEL’S FATHER did not want her to marry a farmer, but she thought she knew better what was good for her. Anyway, he was an older father who kept to his books, vice principal of the high school in Pattapan County. He had a paunch that draped over his belt and a beard from which flakes of sandwich bread sometimes fluttered away as he spoke, and after he chaperoned the school dance, he would come home with the tip of his necktie soaked in cafeteria punch. Going through her own awkward moments, she found these defects—results of cerebral distractions—especially embarrassing. In the time when her body began to change, strange hairs cropping up, her breasts aching, knocky foal legs starting to fatten, she felt it was some sort of physical betrayal she had committed against herself, coming closer to this humanness.
Then the boys would pinch her, shoulder her up against the lockers, drop things under her skirt to see how far they could get just a hundred feet from the vice principal’s office as she walked the gauntlet, hugging the line of lockers so close, the locks clocking the metal doors. Nobody feared Vice Principal Varney. Had he administered the willow switch, he might not have been passed over so many times for a promotion. But there it sat, for his whole tenure, in the corner of his sparsely furnished office, untouched, because he could not bring himself to act violently toward anyone.
Instead, he flushed and stuttered, unsure of his viewpoint, and the troublemakers—young degenerates with questionable futures, he would call them later at the dinner table—always came away with the upper hand. Greasers racing hot rods at the fairground, he meant, or the sons of hired hands who’d spent so much time drifting from town to town, a lack of accountability had been bred right into them. And if, by young degenerate, he did not mean Karl Olson, that did not mean he believed the son of a farmer had a promising future, either.
Karl wasn’t the kind of boy you noticed. Not at first. He didn’t talk much in class and when he was called on, answered off the cuff, never exactly right nor wrong. He had a sense of what should be said even if he hadn’t done the reading, and he always couched his half answers in “ma’am,” doing just well enough to skate above the line beyond which nobody pushed him. He didn’t have time for reading, or the football squad, either. There were chores after school, and by the time he arrived at the eight o’clock bell, he’d have burned off the fumes of breakfast a long time ago and moved on to a wad of mint gum. He’d been up since five, milking the cows and feeding the horses. You could read industriousness in the faded blue knees of his jeans, in his callused hands so unlike her father’s. Hay and manure, leather harnesses and mint chewing gum. That was the smell of Karl Olson, and sitting in the close bright classroom smudged with chalk dust and the radiator clanking, she tricked herself into thinking those who had no time to think were maybe nobler, that she was closer to the rhythm of something truer and purer whenever Karl Olson was around.
It began that autumn her mother became so ill her father had to lift her from bed and carry her to a hot bath every morning just so she could straighten her knees and uncurl her fists. One September afternoon, Gretel and her father were walking home from school when a robin hopped onto the sidewalk and began fluttering in circles, flapping one wing because the other was gone. Something had torn it off—a high wind, or a hawk, or one of the cats that prowled the widows’ porches in town. There was a seam of blood where the red breast met the brown shoulder feathers, coagulated around a nub of exposed bone. The bird kept trying to launch itself into the air, managing only to lift on the left, the wingless side holding it earthbound. Eyes shining like beads of mercury, it chirped the same note over and over again, a broken wind-up toy of persistence, as if all it had to do was keep trying to fly and eventually the situation would rectify itself.
“Do you remember that rhyme you were read as a child?” her father said, staring down at the wounded bird just as Karl Olson, who must have been walking ten paces behind them, caught up and stopped on the edge of the curb. “It was in that collection—deckle-edge first edition. Very fine illustrations.” He raised his finger to his larynx and began, in a reedy voice, “Who killed Cock Robin? I, said the sparrow, with my bow and arrow—”
But before he could go on, Karl Olson dropped down to the bird and crushed it with a stone.
Something surfaced like a swimmer in Gretel at the sound of that smacking, as a single rusty feather fluttered into the street and all the birds in the crack willows stopped chirping in the same instant. Everything shifted, and the word now came into her mind. Now—like wind sweeping through the caverns in her body. Everything slowed except for the sky and the clouds drifting east toward the town green.
With Karl Olson bent over the stone on one knee in an attitude almost of supplication, she could see how violence had been the only course of action. What had they been thinking they would do with a one-winged bird anyway? Recite a poem over it? Place Cock Robin in a strawberry box and bring him home?
“No more to see here, Mr. Varney,” Karl said, rising from his knees, dusting the thighs of his blue jeans. “No use in the suffering.”
Mercy killing. That’s what Karl called it. When an animal was suffering the best thing to do was put it out of its misery, but when it came to humans, you had to ferry the invalid through every unendurable moment.
Before the illness, her mother had enjoyed parties and dressing in clothes that elevated her beyond her station as vice principal’s wife. Her nails were always painted bright colors to match the flowers on her clothes, and she brought Jell-O squares to picnics in which tiny bits of canned fruits were suspended like dark corruptions in perfect jewels. At high school dances, she had been known for taking a misfit’s hands and leading him in a thin-wristed waltz under the streamers as the vice principal smiled wanly from the baseline.
Now she slept on the couch, knees drawn up, arms crossed over her chest, her body curled around her feverish thinking. She spent the day reading books or staring out the window, past the town and the cornfield, into her own thoughts floating somewhere out over the wood that flanked the west edge of the Olson Dairy Farm.
It was cold in the living room. The windows were open and the long white curtains swelled inward, before being sucked back against the sills, like the lungs of heaven expanding and contracting. They lived in one of those Victorian houses with high ceilings and rooms that opened onto each other, always so impractical to heat. Her father went to close the windows, but her mother stopped him. The high dry air did her joints good. “Besides,” she said. “Do you want to know a secret?”
They came close to listen to what she had to say.
“I was sailing,” she whispered, patting her hand on the Atlas of Obscure Islands. Her breath smelled sour for not having had a glass of water in hours. Instead she drank oceans of brine, marooned somewhere inside the atlas. It was a leather-bound book with thin, translucent pages. Her father had purchased it at an estate sale and it was worth quite a lot, but because it had given them so much pleasure, he could not bring himself to sell it. All the maps inside were blue with white spots for islands so accidental, smack-dab in the middle of vast oceans, they had only ever been discovered on the way to some other big discovery or scientific experiment, which was the human condition, wasn’t it? her father had once told her—the winds blowing a person where he did not mean to go and wrecking him on the edge of a cornfield.
She took the atlas from under her mother’s hand and opened it to an infinitesimal hunk of volcanic rock poking up from the middle of the South Pacific. “Pitcairn,” she said, thinking of the stone Karl had used to crush the bird in mid-chirp.
“You must be sailing on the Bounty,” her mother said.
“Then I guess it won’t be long before we burn the ship and turn on each other,” said Gretel.
“Oh, let’s not,” her mother said. “Not just yet. Let’s keep our options open a little bit longer, shall we?—see where we end up. We might go to Easter Island from Pitcairn and then from Easter to Possession. Or Charles Island!—where they wear no clothes.”
What would her mother look like nude, in the hard-boiled sun? A piece of driftwood, Gretel decided. As she thought of that body nudged and tossed by the sand-crashing waves, a hollow feeling came into her chest. Had someone tapped on her heart just then, it would only have been able to answer, Nobody.
“Tell me about your day,” Gretel’s mother said, patting the cushion beside her.
So Gretel sat there and told her, leaving out the crushing of the bird and the strange new matter-of-factness that had come over her.
Stepping toward the window, her father looked out into the long shadows falling across the sidewalk. “Who killed Cock Robin,” he murmured,
I, said Karl Olson,
With my granite stone, I stoned him.
And all the birds of the air
Fell a-sighing and a-sobbing,
When they heard the bell toll
For poor Cock Robin.
The evening was cool, the stars bright, and after dinner they went out onto the porch to hear the birds grieving in the crack willows. For that was what they were doing, grieving the death of the robin. Or was it the end of daylight? Or the woman carried out of the house and placed on the porch swing with a cream blanket over her shoulders?
Just last season, she had been able to come and go as she pleased. Years before that, she had danced in the ballet studio downtown, pirouetting and pliéing, holding the bar and staring into the mirror at what she imagined to be certain fame as the clouds raced across the blue sky behind her. Then came the day when a fierce wind tore into town and slammed Larkin Varney up against the studio window.
There are things the dusk illuminates that nothing else will. The lines sharpen, wrinkles smooth into alabaster, the sidewalk’s fissures deepening as the dropping sun steers the house on Vine Street right up against the end of everything. Gretel steps off the porch. She walks down the path toward the place where the town falls away and the cornfield starts, running to the wood, which arches its back against all cultivation. Closing your eyes, you might imagine you were on a ship, might imagine the rustling husks to be wind snapping the sails, and you, bound for that island of trees off the starboard bow. Pasture to windbreak to the farm where Karl Olson is bringing the cows back from the edge of twilight. Sea of swaybacks and paintbrush tails flick in the darkness. Pod of whales, her mother would imagine. Gretel, though, prefers things as they are. With seas of grass like this, who needs oceans?
She is prettier than either of her parents ever were, and it worries them, the way gifts like that can get girls who are unsure of themselves into trouble. Farther and farther away from the porch she strays, her steps no longer clacking on the macadam, until she stands frozen at the spot where the town’s pavement surrenders to dirt and funnels into the cornfield. Pointing her toe, she brushes it back and forth across the tip of a weed, tempting a greaser out of the darkness. She turns her head and scrapes her chin along her shoulder, the side of her face nestled into her collar in an almost coy gesture. A conspiratorial little wind gathers out of the wood now, chattering in the corn before it dies, and then the night comes down hard, smothering every last glimpse of her.
Her father turns on the porch light to guide her back to them. Back from the degenerates standing behind the school, smoking like overgrown man-children. Back from the dangers that lie in wait for girls named after characters in fairy tales. The moths come fluttering in and the cat slinks up on the rail and bats them between her paws as the season’s last crickets thrum in desperation. “A trail of bread crumbs,” murmurs her father. “Rather poorly considered, I’d say, bread crumbs in bird country. Though of the pair, Gretel was always the industrious one.”
Or was it Gretel who went into the oven—the first to pick candy from the house and bring the witch down on them? He moves his hand to his throat to choke out the idea of such an inauspicious beginning. A bit of dinner roll whispers out of his beard as the breeze kicks up and then the stillness sets in again.
“My, it was such a long time ago,” the mother says, her wide eyes catching the glow of the porch light. “And it feels just like yesterday afternoon. Do you remember when she was a baby? How she used to cry and cry until we picked her up—and she always stopped right away. We’d never mattered that much to anyone. Who ever thought she could be so angry at us?”
“Too many books and blunders,” the father says. “Books and blunders.”
“And what blunders would those be?”
“Mine, my dear. All mine. One can’t be forced into Melville and Shelley. And with all the resources allocated to home ec. and football, is it any wonder we’ve never had a matriculation to the Ivies?”
“Not yet! It isn’t over, Larkin. It can’t all have been decided,” the mother says, lifting her eyes to the place where the cornfield drops off and the wood whittles away the black horizon. “She’ll find she’s more like us than she realizes. She can’t help it. That’s how come she’s so angry. It’s the things we can’t help about ourselves we see reflected in other natures.”
“You always knew more about her than I.”
“See, I didn’t feel that I knew anything, though—that’s the thing—not until just recently.”
“You could fill a book with all you know,” the father says, staring out into the stars winking over the cornfield that seems to be playing a joke on him.
It’s the loss of motion the bird grieves when it sings. Mourning dove. Barn swallow. Catbird. Thrush. Sparrow and starling. Sunrise bleeds into aimless afternoon. Gretel throws a ball in the air and swings a stick, the suck of missed contact whispering of disconnection. Sometimes the owl flaps up from her crook in the dead ash and floats out of the wood to haunt the garden. Other times she spreads her wings and flies over the cornfield, picking up mice as they scurry between the rows, bearing them back to the wood in her talons. From the wood to the cornfield and back again, she swoops and dives, snatches and soars, over and over again. The creatures struggle and writhe as she searches for gaps in the crowns of trees through which to thread herself and gulp down her quarry. Her eyes are deep black notches in a wooden face, her wings like a geisha’s fan, ribbed and unbending. Those times she misjudges, her prey too heavy or her talons not sinking in far enough, the animal twists out of her grasp midair, hitting the earth at the edge of the cornfield with the lightness of a heartbeat to scurry into the crack willows where the cat lies in wait.
This is what must have befallen the rabbit: the cat hunted it, or the owl stole it and dropped it into the garden. A young rabbit playing dead in the middle of the first flagstone on an otherwise uneventful Saturday. When Gretel touched it with her foot, it leapt up and sat there puffing, trying to appear bigger than it was. How still the eyes were, like big glass beads catching the sunlight. Only the nose betrayed the fear, twitching to the rhythm of the creature’s racing heart, its ears crunched tight against the head like flower petals. There was a deep gash in its side and one of the hind legs appeared nearly severed.
What is a rabbit without a haunch?
A dancer without joints.
A wingless bird.
A fish out of water.
“It’s me,” she said into the telephone.
Karl remained silent at the other end of the line.
“Gretel Varney,” she offered helpfully.
“Right,” he said, sounding far away. “The vice principal’s daughter.” Then swinging back, his voice solid, round: “Hi, you.” He was doing something else as he spoke. He always would be. Drying his hands of the barn muck or getting ready to do the afternoon milking, his voice growing rich and full and fading out the next second as if the wind were always plucking him away right when you thought you were going to capture him.
“What are you doing right now?” she said.
“Oh, lots, Gretel Varney, and then again—nothing much.”
She had not expected him to say something like, Hi, you, or to repeat her name that way, as if he not only remembered her now, but understood her maybe better than she could even hope to understand herself.
“Out of milk, are you?”
Burying herself between the staircase and the telephone table, the cord pulled tight enough to choke her finger, Gretel shook her head. “I’ve got something that needs putting out of its misery.”
An hour later Karl Olson was standing in the front hall, chewing a wad of mint gum. His hair at its lightest parts was the color of hay, his jeans worn to white in the knees. Looking down, he froze. His boots! Suddenly, he crept back in his own footprints, knelt and untied the laces, then placed them by the door in a gesture she wanted to take as the gentlest intimacy, though it was only that the soles had manure in their grooves, that the toes had been soaked in cow piddle. Rising, he handed her a bottle of milk still warm from the udder. She opened the cap right there and drank the quart down in seven long swallows.
“Thought you didn’t need milk,” Karl said.
“Then why did you bring it?” she answered.
“Farmer’s job to know what needs what without ’em having to ask for it,” Karl said, and with his hands in his pockets, he followed her from room to room, past the clock that chimed once for the half hour. He stopped and ran his finger up a groove in the wood, as if he had caused the hand to shift, the pendulum to swing; as if Karl Olson was in control of everything.
The rabbit lay in one of her mother’s hatboxes on the parlor table, next to a lamp fringed in tassels. Old books crowded the shelves, stacked sideways where they didn’t fit. “Who does all the reading?” Karl said.
“My father sells rare books,” Gretel said.
“Rare, huh?” Karl smiled. “Woulda thought he’d go for well done or something.”
She laughed and covered her mouth with her wrist. “You know, first editions—signed, deckle edges. That kind of thing. He goes through dead people’s stuff beside all the old biddies hunting for samplers and memory boxes. Says people don’t know what they have half the time.”
“Forty-two Herefords,” Karl said, counting fingers on fingers as if he could not fathom a person who did not know at all times precisely what was in his possession. “Sixteen Plymouth Rock and four New Hampshire chickens. Two potbellied pigs, one Morgan horse, one draft. Two American quarter horses. The only kind of books at the farm are the cooked kind. Know what that means, cooking books?”
Gretel just stood there.
“Fudging numbers.” Karl looked into the box. Once it had been home to her mother’s Easter bonnet, and a piece of floral tape was hanging from the rabbit’s whisker.
“You know, when you said misery to me, I thought you were talking about yourself.” He lowered his hand, touching his knuckle to the rabbit’s nose.
“Do I look that miserable?” Gretel said.
“I dunno. Bored, maybe.”
“I’m so bored.”
“Misery loves company,” Karl told her, and picking up the rabbit, he snapped its neck.
She had never skinned anything before, but he talked to her as if she had, or might want to practice on this rabbit. The secret to skinning, he told her, was to slip the nozzle of a bicycle pump under the hide and blow it full of air, inflating it like a balloon so the pelt would come away without a tear from the rest of the body.
He told her how you could dig up a lilac bush and leave its roots exposed in the hot sun and when you planted it again, even after a whole season like that, it might still take if you were lucky.
Last night a calf had been born feet first.
When cows eat dandelions, it makes the milk taste bitter. That’s why he had to go home straightaway to spray weeds before the ladies were turned out into the east pasture.
Maybe she was like that. Maybe she was a lilac that had been dug up and left in the hot sun and when Karl put her back in the ground he would press the soil around her feet and she would rise up, standing tall, and bloom because he’d watered her.
Only it doesn’t feel like a blooming. More like a skinning, a pumping full of air that leaves Gretel raw and wanting. One afternoon that week when her mother takes a turn for the worse, Gretel finds herself walking up to the edge of the cornfield, the wood looming like the shadow of some giant hand just over her left shoulder. Things are moving in the wood, things she wouldn’t want to know or have explained to her. Birds of prey keen in the snags. The owl sleeps, surrounded by pellets spat from her hollow tree, each one a piece of young rabbit or vole, a mouse with its bones and fur curled around itself the way her mother’s infirm body cages her rapid thinking.
She reaches the pasture with her heart beating in her mouth, every inch of her tingling. Indian summer now. Insects surprised from dead leaves weave dizzy arcs on the edge of the shadows. She stands behind the barbed wire, watching Karl Olson crouch in the grass, one elbow on his knee, as he pulls up weeds to keep the cows from eating them.
In time, she will come to feel that a weed is a weed only when it grows where you don’t want it to be—and who are we, besides, to judge the taste of a cow’s milk? If a cow wants to eat a dandelion, why deny her the pleasure? Many years from now, these questions will bubble up from a place in herself she hadn’t known existed. A voice will confront her as she stands over the stove in the predawn making Karl’s breakfast, washing the supper dishes, or leading a bawling calf back home through a broken fence on the edge of the lot where her parents’ house once stood. A voice will speak in her mother’s tone, dazzled by mystery, and Gretel, pregnant and soaking owl pellets in water to reconstitute mouse skeletons, will wander into the pasture and press her cheek to a cow’s velvet nose, shivering in ecstasy as the grassy breath tickles her. When she tries to explain to Karl why she can no longer cook him ruminants, he will rise slowly from the creaky chair and say, “A what?”
“Steak, Karl.”
“Oh, I see. So you’re a kook, now, hunh?—an intellectual.”
But all this is waiting in the wings. Just a shadow haunting the trees, on the very periphery of the moment when Karl Olson catches sight of her and smiles, smiles as if he already knows everything.
“Hi, you,” he says, wiping his brow with a cloth and sticking it in his breast pocket.
She presses the tip of her finger to the barbed wire, stealing a glance back over her shoulder.
“What’s the misery?” Karl says, squinting past her into the distance.
The peak of her house rises behind the cornfield. Why has it always felt so lonely? No brothers and sisters. No chores. Not enough responsibility, maybe.
“They know where you are?”
Gretel shakes her head. “They don’t know much of anything.”
“Awful lot of books for not much, then,” Karl says, doubtfully. He parts the wire for her to step through, and a barb catches her sleeve. He looks away. Pressing a thumb to the tear in her best blouse, she follows him across a pasture pocked with cow patties all the way to the windbreak, where old maples and oaks reach over a tangle of raspberry bushes to snatch scraps of the town and drag them into wildness.
Come back with me, she was going to say. And what would you do then, Karl Olson? If you plant a woman in the ground like a lilac, will her ghost rise up and dance again?
But the light shifts into a point of no return. She reaches for Karl’s hand as charred leaves lift from the branches, stirring and twittering. A wave of blackbirds surges out over the wood, breaking around trunks and bracken to strand themselves high in the trees, each red wing as it spreads calling to that ill-fated robin.
In time, she will come to think it was the blackbirds that stole whatever crumbs she might have dropped to find her way out of Karl. She will remember being swept up in this destiny, the birds tumbling her dark blond hair out of its ribbon, untying the cravat at her neck, picking at her stockings, fluttering their red wings against her cheeks, marooning her on their way south in a middle-aged wintering. Not that any of this is here yet. Only the wood knows what is coming.
The wood, with its primeval stands of maples and oaks. Hemlocks. Poplars into which the Norse gods breathed souls to populate the emptiness. The tallest ash, bearing its scar to mark the year the milk ran blue, and Karl’s grandfather trapped six mice and crushed each with a boot until he caught the shrew, then bored a hole in the wood with an auger, and immured her in the heart of the trunk to chew and scratch until she suffocated.
And do you know, Karl will say, standing over her one night with a branch in his hand after she has threatened to leave him, that if you strike a lady with a switch made out of ash, they say your violence will never leave a mark on her?
What will you do to me? the wood whispers inside Gretel, lifting her chin from her neck to expose the artery. She squares her shoulders and turns to face him under a bower of late September leaves so suffused in gold, it’s as if she has come to stand beside Karl Olson in the belly of the sun.
“You weren’t in English,” she says.
Karl shrugs. “Don’t go telling the vice principal.” He slips his hand into his back pocket and offers her a stick of gum.
“He always knows,” Gretel says, taking the gum, unwrapping it, letting the silver paper fall into the crevice of an old root ball. “Not that it matters any. What’s he going to do about it? Whip you? Probably won’t even give you detention.” She leans into a trunk, sliding to the earth, strands of her hair combed up by the bark. “He’ll be off reading a book and raccoons are breeding in the attic. Off writing a poem about the death of an insect.”
She laughs at her own joke, covering her mouth with the back of her hand even as a shadow drops through her chest, taking root across her groin. For a moment, it feels like something is living inside the tree. Deep inside the rings, something is waiting for her, deep in the wooden heart of all things, trapped and restless.
“So there’s the misery,” Karl murmurs, as if feeling down a horse’s leg to detect some hidden injury. When he says misery it sounds like mystery. And what then? Of course the horse will have to be put down.
On this particular day, she has no suspicion of Karl’s own misery—that his father is drinking again, that his mother complains, as she hurls bread crumbs to the birds, that in thirty years of marriage the only Paris she’s been to is the amusement park three towns over, with all the fountains and that fancy antique carousel. Gretel doesn’t know that Karl’s older brother is running away to the army, that the farm is tightening itself around Karl’s neck, that English class makes him feel insignificant, because nobody gives a hey what he answers. That when the fence caught Gretel’s sleeve and his eyes passed over the scratch, he had to stop himself from reaching for a hole in his own fabric to slip through.
He waves to a depression in the earth where fallen leaves have collected and started to brown. “We made it to the boneyard,” Karl says, as Gretel searches the gray trunks and golden leaves for gravestones. “It’s where we lead the ladies that can’t be sold.”
“Oh,” she says, “it just looked so pretty.”
“Pretty’s a waste on a farm, Gretel Varney.”
Nothing wasted. Not a word. Not even a quarter acre for a flower garden. What she mistakes for quaint from a distance will prove run-down once she’s living inside it. What seems practical will become a poverty of imagination. For example, when one of the two oxen in the team goes south, the other ox is thought to be as good as useless.
She takes Karl’s hand, which feels more like the one-winged robin than anything capable of crushing it with a stone. Tears well in his eyes and she hopes he is about to profess his love, but he just coughs, leans past her, spits out a wad of mint gum. Can’t say I didn’t warn you, Karl will tell her, the morning after their wedding, when he rises before dawn because the ladies will be aching.
Now a breeze moves through the wood, hurrying all creatures toward their final destination. Dried leaves blow over Gretel and Karl, bits of their clothes swept up, the buttons of her silk blouse clicking against his belt buckle. His body parts from hers and rolls lightly into the dirt. The sun drops behind the farm. A chill gathers in the wood. Hurry up! Be quick about it! Picking the leaves from their clothes, they turn away from each other, buttoning and buckling, and pulling up stockings snagged by twigs and thorns. Milking time. Time of the lady-aches. And what about Gretel? High time she placed Karl Olson at the center of everything.
“See you,” he says.
“Will I?”
“Misery loves company, doesn’t it?”
“I won’t be if you aren’t.”
Karl stops and looks back at her over his shoulder. “That so?”
If she should lose herself in the wood alone, how would she ever find her way out? No bread crumbs. No pocket of moonstones, and leaves falling faster by the second to obscure every footstep. Karl would point to lichen growing on the north face of the trunk, or trails carved by errant calves, faces matted in burdock. Gretel, though, cannot tell north from south, or a spruce from a hemlock. Can’t find your way out of a paper bag, Karl might say. Until he names it for her, she won’t know a thing. An ash merely a tree. A shrew just a mouse.