With that settled, he said he should call it a day and get some shut-eye. I offered to walk him partway down, and he assented. We walked in silence. Our conversation had been all fits and starts and confessional blurts, but I felt lighter. Just talking about something personal, for the first time in quite a while—maybe it had broken the ice; maybe we could talk together again soon and figure out what was ailing us. Surely he wouldn’t leave the farm, I told myself. Of course he wouldn’t. Would he?
About midway down, I thanked him and said goodnight and went back up to my clearing. I could just make out the great birch, lying like a beached whale among the brambles. The place had taken on a lonely feeling again, after just those few minutes away.
Chapter 58
Sept. 14
I am sitting on my log near the fire, which tumbled by increments and is now nothing but a nest of embers. Still, it puts out a good heat, and anyway it’s a warm night for mid-September. Earnest visited and left and tomorrow we’ll cut up the huge birch that fell across the upper end of the clearing yesterday. He says he might leave the farm.
I have a poem going round and round in my poor stupid head, one of Lewis Carroll’s pleasing, absurd follies I memorized when I was, what, ten? in Mrs. Griffith’s class.
“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things:
Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax—
Of cabbages—and kings—
And why the sea is boiling hot—
And whether pigs have wings.”
Why is it torturing me tonight? Because your life, Ann, has become a catalogue of absurdities and follies? Because your pratfalls aren’t funny anymore? Yes, but no. Because the time has come, Ann, to talk of love and loneliness, of woods and farms and yearning, and why your blood is boiling hot and what you’re going to do about it.
You’re talking about this on a paper page because you’re scared to talk about it in your heart.
And as for loneliness: You’ve become an expert. Now you know there are several kinds. There is the beautiful big kind, where you feel yourself to be a unique thing, a bright singular moment in a vast world—that’s frightening but exhilarating. I could not know of it without having lived in these woods, and knowing it makes me wiser and stronger and I wish I’d felt it much earlier in my life. Thank you, my dear hill, my dear woods.
Then there’s the curled grub of sad scared loneliness, missing everyone, feeling left out and left behind, unsafe, cold, quivering, shivering lonely. Not being whole and sound in the beautiful woods, just lost in them. So much of that since losing Mom and Pop and breaking up with Matt.
No. I had so much of that. I haven’t felt it for a long time, with Erik’s coming, all the people of Brassard’s farm. But now a third kind has taken its place, Ann, which is what’s killing you right now.
What’s it like? It’s not cold, it’s hot. Sort of like the brilliant hot circle you make by angling a magnifying glass toward the sun. Focus it on a dry leaf, and the leaf blackens and begins to smoke and then ignites. And the reverse of that bright spot hovers in your eyes for hours.
It’s focused loneliness. Loneliness for just one thing, one person. That focus burns and you are burning, Ann Turner. Accept yourself. Tell yourself your secret.
Chapter 59
That night I lay in my tent listening to summer in the woods. I have told you how this symphony plays: As the light fades, quiet near sounds and very distant sounds come to the fore in a complex weave. The veery elects to be the last bird of the day, singing that most liquid and supple song. It seems the forest’s watchman: All’s well, it says, hereafter is night, and fare thee well. All to your nests, all to your rest. It sings the day creatures’ lullaby and for me is synonymous with the arrival of night.
The blue evening dark slips and seeps in, and things go still. The rustlers come awake and move among the trees and low growth: my neighbors the bears and porcupines and deer and perhaps crepuscular creatures no one has ever seen or heard of, who are unique to late twilight and so subtle they have passed unnoticed by mankind forever.
But I felt no tranquility. I lay in my tent, on my cot, twisting in the sheet I had spread over me—it was too warm for the sleeping bag—unable to sleep, unable to think, unwilling to. The tangle and knot came from my belly, my spine, my thighs. I felt surges and fires, tides and flares, at once unbearable and irresistible.
The night was so fine that the air was silk. The moon had come over—half-moon, the gentle sort, neither the assertive full moon nor the insufficient, wary crescent—and I rose on one elbow and looked through the tent screen to the clearing, lit opalescent, cool and too empty.
I was in an agony you can understand only if you have felt it. I was as twisted as my sheet, I had a knot in my middle, the lines of my life were tangled and snarled and resistant. The feeling was as ancient and certain as the fear of night, tidal in its power. I looked to my memory, to my lessons here in the woods and on the farm in the past few years, and to my life before, and at first I thought they offered no answer to this state.
I could see that the past two years showed a through line, but that I had been, for all my divergence and contrariness, a creature of convention.
I felt an explosion of rebellion against being this dull-witted creature and against this state of tension and paralysis and cowardice. There was an answer to this state: You are strong
