I flung aside my wadded pillow and extricated myself from my sheet. I stood inside my tent, shivering from the vital awakening in me. I was wearing only my pajama bottoms and a T-shirt and I didn’t care and I unzipped the tent and stepped outside into patient moonglow. It was not so bright that it hid the stars above in the darkness. With the light of both, I could see my way as I started down the track to the farm.
If you have lived in the woods, you know that holding a flashlight or lantern does not help you see. In fact, it’s self-imposed blindness that makes all near things too bright and all distant things too shadowed—turn your eyes to one side for a moment and you are sightless. If you have walked in the night, you know that you can indeed see, that even simple starlight can be enough, especially when your feet are bare and can feel the subtle textures on the path and remember the contours of the land. On this night, the path was clear to all my senses.
I left my campsite clearing at the downhill end and entered the deeper tree shadows. Here, the moonlight fell through leaf shadows, turning the woods into an impressionistic landscape in which distances were defined by degrees of dappled bright and dark. My body knew these trees, this track, these turns, and gravity told me the way down.
I was just past the first bend when I saw a dark shape moving below me, a shadow detaching itself from the tree shadows. For a moment, I was startled breathless. And it came closer, silent but solid dark, and it frightened me until his voice came from the shadow: “Ann! Where are you going?”
I was no doubt also a shape, suddenly there, pale in my nightclothes, and my pale shape said, “I was coming to meet you on the path.” Which I hadn’t known until that moment.
And there he was before me, the shadow shape moving purposefully up my track. And if I’d been able to hear anything but my own startled heart beating, I know I would have heard his.
When he reached me, we turned and walked up, back toward my tent, his weightless but solid shadow next to mine.
He said, “I—”
And I said, “I couldn’t either.”
I could bide no longer alone. I couldn’t deny it anymore. I couldn’t endure it anymore. I don’t care if it’s impossible.
Side by side, not touching, we came into the moonlight of my clearing and said nothing, because all had now been confessed, admitted, and needed no elaboration.
There was the tent and inside was the bed and there we knew we would end up, but here was the pale moonlight and the smooth air and the first delicious moments of acknowledgment. There had been long courtship here, and there would be chivalry now. We stood facing each other, holding each other’s hands on each side, thinking we should speak, but failing, simply moving, very slightly, in tandem. At intervals, our chests collided and I felt his strength and his honesty. This was not postponement, this was fulfillment fully taken and fully savored. We moved together there in my clearing. I felt a bubble straining in my chest, a laugh of joy that celebrated relinquishing a burden, accepting the improbability and rightness and inevitability of this. He fitted his hands to my waist and lifted me as if I had no weight at all, as if he were wishing me flight, wishing me to touch the moon. He held me over his head as I balanced straight-backed, arms out to each side, legs together straight behind me. We spun that way. The first time Earnest ever kissed me was as he held me above him and placed his face against my belly and kissed me there.
And after a time, we went into my tent, my transient little house, and made our bed upon the floor, improvised but not hurriedly so.
And thereafter, that night, it is only mine and Earnest’s to know and to remember.
Chapter 60
I don’t know whether you think it most improbable that we came together despite nineteen years’ difference in age, or find it incredible that we took such a long time to acknowledge something so clearly apparent. Earnest and I marveled at both, but in fact we talked very little about it; it was as moot as moot can get.
For me the greatest irony was that I thought I’d learned that love will most likely come to you in unexpected forms, from unexpected angles. But I hadn’t entirely believed it. Still stuck in my wretched brain was some childish mythology about love. It belonged in the same category of notion that made me expect my land to be spacious eighteenth-century English woods, full of wealthy scions but devoid of biting insects and bad weather. The same expectation that small farm life was about happy horsies and piggies but not about overworked people and money problems and cows that actually pooped.
So it took me a while to recognize that for me love was an Oneida tree surgeon built like a bear, no taller than I am, and nineteen years older. Recognize and give myself permission. Took me that long despite the obvious fact that we had fallen into step beside each other within the first week, more than two years before. That from the start we had spoken the same language with such fluency, understood each other’s inflections of irony and humor and affection and intention.
Two days later we got to work on that fallen birch. We didn’t talk about nineteen years, because it was already so long ago that we had largely forgotten it.
Mainly we talked about the moose we saw in the clearing when we came out of the tent that morning. He was an adult bull, so gigantic he seemed an animal that belonged in Africa, among elephants and giraffes, not here. His antlers spanned at
