Hidden
The worm was waiting, hiding from the light its whole life. Jo may have seen its mother in the spring, searching through the brown sky of the orchard for a place to plant children. The mother would have been one of the anonymous apple moths of April with small dull white wings that flipped the air as casually as wind tosses blossoms. The orchard called to the moth, so black and ancient, twisted, bent, with the centers of the white blossoms bleeding out its scent like promise. And the moths would answer, fractals of flight tasting the intensity of the location, disguised as petals to escape the carnivores.
The very black time was far away now; the air was no longer metallic, not acid except when the dead limbs were burning, the leaves burning and releasing their bitter stagnant water into the heavy winter air of the crushed room. Mama found the orchard in some muddy spring almost before Jo could remember. Jo never thought, “Where are we now?” She only remembered vaguely the very black time, and the crooked decayed house and the orchard. “Home,” she observed. She knew what that meant. Apples and walnuts and pears. Only her own noise. Mama. It had to be April because of the Daffodils.
Mama told her about the miracle of the Daffodils every spring, every winter: how they had pointed to a forgotten path, how they had saved them. The Daffodils were providence. The Daffodils were proof. She was searching for walnuts and squirrels, something for them to eat when she saw the small distant interruption of the white orchard fleet in the hills far from the river calling to her. She had to find food for Jo and Shepherd. Jo thought, “I am in this story. This story is about me.” So she climbed them up away from the river, slinking past the silent houses, away from living and dead eyes. Up, up, they flew over the barbed wire fences, through the fields, along the twisting gravel for another place to cut across, another way to wind, some way that would get the orchard.
Mama saw it across a field of old stumps: monuments of blackberries that Shepherd was already halfway across. It sat at top third in the lea of a southern hill, in full light, a “C” of blooming trees and soon-to-bloomers around a broken relic of a tiny old house on a slope. The place had been quiet and secret long before the black time. The hill around the house happened in shelves, and Shepherd found places where you could still see stone steps. Leggy hollies had taken over the doorway but there was a shed attached along the side. When Mama approached, carrying Jo, six fat grouse came flapping up frantic and clumsy, and Shepherd went crazy. They flew low over the field and settled in the long hiding grass, Shepherd heeled and Mama saw the Daffodils. Double Daffodils in a double row that led like a path. They followed it to a wide circle in the grass that surrounded a slight dent in the ground, with grass less tall. Mama stepped on the edge of the depression and felt the ground give. Mama took Jo to sit under the cherry trees, told Shepherd to stay and returned to the daffodil path. She drove a stick into the ground and felt resistance. She pried her stick under the edge of the shorter grass and worked loose a sheet of rotting plywood, which stubbornly held mostly together as it lifted off the field. A well! A hidden hole, disguised as a fairy ring lying in wait for Mama or Jo or even for Shepherd. She was grateful to the Daffodils, grateful to the well, grateful for the water and grateful for the escape. She was grateful for the broken house, grateful for the deer scat in the orchard, grateful for the remnants of broken tools in the shed, grateful, grateful. She lowered the broken plywood back into its place and went to the orchard to hold Jo and figure things out.
That had been six springs ago, and five winters and Jo was eight now so she was two when she remembered running, and her feet leaving the air as Mama pulled her along by her arm, she was flying and she was scared, but she felt the important hurry. She saw the light make the sky white. It made a line that ended before. Ended it. And the sky got angry and turned brown and hurt when it howled, and couldn’t ever get over the light that had happened. In a moment the very black time began. They had stayed with the radio people in the bottom of a school then. One of them gave Jo cheese. A lady with a pink dress and glasses, she remembered. And she remembered the man in the wheelchair smiled at her. And she remembered when the sounding box would wheeze and crackle while everybody paid attention, then all fighting about adom boms and metorites. Then the day they were running again, and the other people, the lady with the cheese, bloody teeth and gone.
Jo had to be very quiet when they were hiding from the men. The men were not quiet. One of them had firecrackers that he would put in the mouths of the gone people and light. She had been very quiet. After a long time, he had gone away, walking like he was made of sticks that pointed out in front of him, talking like two people. Mama said Jo was good. The man is crazy. When you talk like two people.
They stayed by the river. Jo got very good at hiding: her hair the texture and color of dried fields, she went undetected by birds, and watched the worms and potato bugs and the ants, the tiny flowers of moss in a sliver of field until Mama would come back to her with a fish, and she could move. Bottom feeder. Carp. Only good for the dog, Shepherd they had found at the river.
Now they have their garden with starts from all the neighboring places, tools too, and pots and dishes, rope and pruners, canning jars. They found a root cellar built into the hill. Lousy with mushrooms. And Mama put a beam across the well, of course, and it’s really pretty to see Shepherd’s graceful single trail of footprints dancing along that beam in a slight dust of snow; it looks like filigree on a negating diagonal bar across the black hole of the well in the white world. They live in the two good rooms, and Mama has mostly fixed the floor. The barrel stove is warm in the winter and that one time it glowed red-hot and they were scared it would melt, and Mama made them stay in the second room, the kitchen. That was a big piece of walnut, don’t do that again. All the high limbs have been cut down so the blossoms can no longer be seen from the river, and some of that wood is still in the stack. Shepherd doesn’t chase the deer, hasn’t forever, Mama taught him, but he’ll chase squirrels and skunks, not raccoons, he learned, with his nose divided in threes and the raccoon just walked away. The orchard was to share with the deer.
This is how Mama killed a deer. She put a pile of apples on the ground and laid a loop of rope to catch its feet but that didn’t work because the feet slipped through, and the deer stumbled on one knee and hurried away. So Mama went to a house and found the gun and the bullets, and then she put a pile of apples on the ground and shot the deer in the head. Then she tied its back feet and hoisted it in a tree and cut its throat and cut its middle and covered herself in blood, but it washed off, and Shepherd licked it off. Three deer and a root cellar full of potatoes and squash and apples and cabbage and the big bags of nuts in the kitchen on the warm high shelf could get them through a winter, with the winter truck in the garden, and the noodles from the houses, and the fresh water from the well.
Mama left Shepherd with Jo when she went to the houses, and took the gun. After five years, the houses hardly stank anymore, though Mama never opened their refrigerators or their bedroom doors; so many, when their teeth began to bleed, had gone to bed to die. Twice, the hairs she had carefully placed in the doors at her last exit were missing so she didn’t go in and she didn’t go back to those houses. The houses were on roads; that was the problem. Too easy to find. She and Jo lived, she realized, “Nowhere.” All she had gone after, this day, was gas for the chainsaw and some more books for Jo.
The lank male follows the marks of a wheelbarrow over the blackberry written margin of a gravel road, a wheelbarrow that has carried a load, and leaked an occasional angry droplet of gasoline, stewing the green with recoiling. He follows this fine trail with the assurance of a man until he finds the wheelbarrow full of dried grass on its side in a hollow by the gravel road where barbed wire and alder trees guard a blackberry filled field of ancient stumps. In the distance beyond, nearly obscured by the alders, a relic of a farmhouse and a dog. He crosses the barbed wire and begins to whistle melodically as he approaches. Clair de lune. He has his Winchester .30-06 casually slung over his shoulder on a leather strap. He thinks of taking out the dog, but waits and continues to whistle. More flies with honey.
Jo is in a tree watching the tree change water into apple, watching the mature leaves guard the unripe fruit, watching the stems just beginning to deepen the crease where they will release in the wind their heavy load, watching the ants sludge through the deep folds of bark and hurry over the smooth stems and carve and carry leaves back home. Apple leaves are good to eat, she concluded, and ate one stem first. Mama was beyond the orchard trying to start up the chainsaw, and it was trying then silent, trying then silent, trying then silent, and Mama had begun to swear conversationally. Shepherd was laying flat on his side in the dry earth under Jo’s apple and he stretched his legs long and sighed, nuzzled a little dirt and relaxed again, reassured by the soft swearing and the warmth of the afternoon. It was only a breaking twig.
Shepherd was on his feet barking and barking for Mama and guarding Jo’s tree. The man’s silhouette was standing at the edge of the orchard, his legs wide, his hands resting on his rifle spread across his shoulders like a yoke, and he whistled low to Shepherd. Jo hugged the tree and became part of it. Invisible. A blossom. Shepherd slowed his barking but viciously growled, and his teeth wanted to bite, and his saliva dripped. Mama called out to Shepherd “Stay!” and came running into the orchard with her chainsaw shaky in her hands.
“Get or I loose my dog!”
“How do, ma’am.”
“Get! There’s nothing for you here! You get!”
“This your place? S’nice. S’nice dog too.” The man stood with his feet planted wide and lifted his rifle straight up over his head. “I don’t mean you no harm.” His voice sounded like someone washing the syllables like little white stones before he dropped them in the air. Shepherd was waiting for a word from Mama.
“You alone? Who else knows about this place? Answer me!”
“Yes ma’am, I’m alone. And I could have took out your dog, but like I said, I don’t mean you no harm.”
“What do you want?”
The stranger looked back and forth between the house and the orchard, from Mama to Shepherd, not growling anymore, but alert.
“People. Folks is what I want.” He brought down his rifle and laid it on the ground in the orchard. He knelt down and whistled for Shepherd, but Shepherd only growled. Mama and the man waited in a stalemate as the moment for action passed and Shepherd quit growling and made a little questioning yelp, and Mama exhaled a sigh. It said: this will be this way.
The man, Will, took over the chainsaw work and over the week built the woodpile higher than Jo could reach. He slept in the orchard and made friends with Shepherd, eventually using him for a pillow. He told them stories about where he had been and what he had seen. He made friends with Mama in the woods, and Jo was alarmed to hear Mama’s rare laugh distant from her. Jo thought: “I am not in this story” and Jo perceived that reality was not solely her reflection. She squirmed and felt awkward around the man, and the man left her alone, talking to her differently when Mama was around, like two people.
It was mixed in with the best eating apples. Jo was supposed to eat worst ones first, but that meant they would never catch up to the good apples, but continually eat them as they went bad, and this was unfair, so Jo had taken the apple from the best while Mama and Will were in the woods and Jo had shined it up on the leg of her dirty man-pants and bitten into a filthy green slime hole half an inch from the surface. The white worm reared its head in circles looking for purchase and settled on the shelf of the bite where Jo could see the blood from her teeth forming little rivers in the white flesh of the moist fresh apple, and they meandered down to meet the worm where once again, the aquifer met the rain.
