Communicating Arts - Main Web SiteI seen a wasted old Dodge once in there off the Hopkins property, and once, a pile of old horse bones. Otherwise there ain't much--just the fences, fields, silos and barns, the ditches runnin' through the pastures, the river that don't go nowhere interestin', the roads that aren't much use if you don't drive a car and don't go nowhere anyway that ain't two hours away, and the hills which don't amount to much but oak, pine, ivy, and thicket.
Up north, there's Columbus and Mansfield, and to the west, Cincinnati and Dayton. But to the east, right here by the Scioto, south a bit of Chillicothe, all there is, is state forest, Indian mounds and places like Zann's Cors and Givens and Darwin and Chester seventy miles to the Pennsylvania line, and beyond that, there ain't much neither.
It sure is different comin' down here from Akron. For one thing, I can't smell the air, which is, I suppose, a good thing. And then there's not much in the way of other folk; every mornin', the catbird wakes me, and every evenin' the crickets get going', and, no mistakin' it, I miss the sound of a bus starting up or a siren driftin' over from the expressway. But it's healthy, I suppose. Back in Youngstown, I had the cramps real bad, like I would miss class and not see nobody, but here, what with the river and the long days and time passin' like nobody cared, it's easier to be a girl.
It's easier for daddy, too, now he's got some weight and don't seem as jump out of bed as he used to. It's a bet he's not up yet.
I wish I could sleep late like he does. It's for sure today's the same as yesterday and tomorrow's the same as today. If I could, I'd sleep right through it. I mean I got the same things to do--put the beer bottles in the trash and take the trash out, set the ladder against the side of the house, put an electric cord out the window and hook up the radio so we'll have something to listen to while we scrape the wood, go to the store and stand around looking at paint, come home, set myself in my room for a while then cook the dinner and watch tv, and go to sleep after the news. I know when my eyes open at sunries I'll be brushin' teeth at eleven-thirty and fallin' asleep listenin' to Carson comin' up from the parlor. And in the mornin' there'll be more bottles.
I got another cause for sleepin'--no close friends. Daddy only retired last year and moved us here just before school started. Everyone makes new friends, I suppose, but it's not like having the old ones. The new friends got their old friends and old things to talk about and it's hard to fit in. At least I'm liked okay.
Except for sex and bein' a beast, I'd sleep the summer through. As soon as the sun comes up, though, I'm up. But I like to lay awhile in bed listenin' to that damn bird. I swear I know how that bird feels singing "Wake up, crabapples!" the way it does. It's got chores too.
It's a nice thing to do, and it's just on waking, and maybe it has to do with having nothing here but the river and woods. In any case, I get out there with the bird, say good morning and what's it to you, and I like the feel of the breeze cutting around the corner of the house.
Down at the river, there's a path takes you all the way to Pine's Furnace, an hour and a half by foot, where there's a rail takes you over the river and through the fields. There's wheat planted now and the wind combs through it so it all bends the same way. I like getting out there too and walking with the sun flashing off the steel and heating the gravel. And I like feeling the beast.
The beast leans against the doorframe and says it don't give a damn how the coffee was done. It goes to the store and gets looks that make it bristle like a cat saying, "Don't mess with me." On the tracks, it lopes toward sunset, alone. At night, it tunes into the cries of other beasts coming in off the radio and it cries itself for another beast: Where are you? When will you get here? The beast wants flesh. It's hunger pushes it into the light, makes it leap for every chance of going out, sends it slouching through the weeds and tangles by the river, and makes it hunt on lean grounds.
This ain't no place to hunt, though. There ain't beasts enough for me here. It may be okay for daddy, what with them older folk finishing up at the veteran's hospital or the quarry, but I got to get out at the end of high school. I need my world too. Trouble is, the beast gets tired of waiting. It gets sour pacing back and forth in its bare room. It snarls walking to the mailbox down the lane. It gets so it turns purple and can't think and goes nasty on the trainer who makes the chalk squeal in the cage, and sometimes it breaks a rule and takes a beer down to the river and pulls it back on a rock mid-stream. That's when the hurrying goes away, and things settle out. The green smells on the wind and the cool splashing water give the beast all it wants. For a while.
This here's Krill's Corner. The moon's high and bright and makes the rails look like two ribbons of the magnesium wire you get to burn in high school chemistry. Strollin' out here gets me thinking about Jeffrey Chauson up in Akron. After he did himself in, everyone talked how obvious what he was thinking of doing was.
Jeffrey kept to himself, never sat with us at lunch, but he always said "hi" if you said "hi" to him first. He was quiet, polite, like someone at a party who feels he don't belong but don't want to make a fuss over it either. People like that just get along. But Jeffrey, who we didn't worry about, had this haunted look come over him about every Thursday or Friday and he'd answer somethin' like "How're you doing?" with "Not too good but let's not go into it, okay?" and nobody would "go into it." Everyone's got a right to be left alone, I suppose, but what about those who don't want to be alone but don't know not to kick when they're cozied Jeffrey's thing, see, was he didn't know how to take care of his beast. Somebody got into him and subdued it just when it should have been showing itself. You could tell by the way he never defended himself from much. I remember once in sixth grade a bunch of us girls pulled his pants down out back of the school. It was just to his underwear and I don't think it was as mean or humiliating a thing as it might have been were he a couple years older. But you never know how something like that's gonna fit in with all the other shit he's taking. I don't know what the boys did to him either. But there you are four years down the road with someone who won't talk to anyone, who hints at but won't level with any problems and then he starts talking about ropes and razor blades and if you look over at his notebook, you can see how he's made the margins black with doodles--you know, curlicues, hatchmarks, crosses, but who's friend is he? Who's supposed to do something? For the teachers, he's not a problem. He don't throw no bricks or puncture no tires. For us, the few who sat around him in class because that's how the seating turned out, he was less a friend than a curiosity. Anyway, he did what he did and we all saw it coming and I don't doubt a few of us thought it was for the best, but I think about him, because, really, when your mom skips out with her boyfriend and your daddy takes you away from what you knew to some quiet, do-nothing place, and you want so much to take to your own ways, then the difference between life and death comes down to having some choice as to how you take care of the beast.
This is the second time I've done this--come out here at night beyond the crossing and looked up at the stars and around at the barnyard lights of farms a quarter mile off both sides of the track. I'll try to get back by ten or eleven so my Dad don't worry. I don't think he'd worry anyhow 'cause I never gave him cause--I wasn't much of a problem in school and my friends are okay except for a beer now and then--and out here, we don't get swept up by perverts the way kids do in Cincinnati, say, or Cleveland. Another thing about my daddy: about all he's got on his mind this time of night is pissin'.
It wasn't always this way with him. When I was little, I remember him holding me on his lap, reading the comics out loud in front of the tv. I remember shopping and how firmly his warm old hand pinched my shoulder as I stood staring at a shelf full of Barbie Doll boxes and Barbie clothing and Barbie appliances, furniture, and jewelry. But then mom left and took her clothing and such and he couldn't play with her anymore and he'd come home and I'd want to play with him but he'd just stand near the window and look at the houses across the street. He'd stand there in his work overalls and wait for the neighbors to drive up and for lights to go on in the windows of those houses, and then he'd sit at the kitchen table with the day's mail and beer. I cooked for him then as I do now.
I don't like my being out here anymore than my daddy would if he were sober enough to take it into consideration. But this is the route I'm taking and if I scare now I won't get far when the time comes to make it real. It's just like Jeffrey making a joke about playing with razor blades and then really playing with them when no one was looking. Dying or running, you got to rehearse, and then you got to do what you were planning to do. Otherwise, you couldn't be sure it was you running your own life.
Even if I weren't fixing to leave, I'd come out here. It's just a way of breathing, which reminds me: I said I couldn't smell the air here the way I did in Akron. That's true enough for what the factories give out, but this air's got smells too. In the spring, farmers manure the fields and you can't hardly go outside your door without thinking you was living near a pig sty. Then in the summer, the air's so damp and heavy you can smell the thunder storms and tornadoes coming in though I admit I can't smell much this eve'n 'cause the pollen's stuffin' my nose. Even so, when I get back to the river tonight, I'll catch a whif of honeysuckle and fern, my favorite sweet smells, since the woods are so thick and heavy. They'll go away too come fall when rain gets the leaves to rot and cold nights set folk to burning wood for heat and sending smoke to hang in the tree tops.
I'm gonna miss this place. Heck, everyone says that when they leave someplace quiet where they weren't bothered. I do know I miss parts of city life, though.
I miss having my choice of movies.
I miss Mogadore Reservoir where my dad fished and visiting with the Burgess's and their son, Kenny, in Cuyahoga Falls, and shoppin' at the mall with mom.
I miss the big newspaper on Sunday, the playground at the end of the block, playin' spin-the-bottle with Billy Jones and the old crew, the cars running on wet streets, dad getting up in the morning and burning the toast, and those fucking noisy, dirty, stinking son-of-a-bitch buses. Damn it all! I mostly miss the chances I had with boys and being close-by so many people.
I wouldn't go back 'cause it wouldn't and I wouldn't be the same. Without mom, there'd been no Burgess's. No one'd play spin-the-bottle or such foolishness no more 'cause they've got cars and the games are getting serious. I mean kissin'--so what? It's a bet life kicks you forward even when you'd rather lay back.
But ain't it nice anyway with a country of wide fields, open skies, and railroads that cut through places and run on near to forever?
They're my fields and sky. They're my share of the freedom I've got comin'.
Most people fear the woods at night.
Meeting somebody they don't want to is part of it; the other part's getting through the brush and stepping over roots, logs and rocks without breaking their necks.
The moon helps, but not much. The leaves on these old tree branches block its light so you can't hardly see the river 'cept as a dark space in the woods. As for the path, I stay with it by walkin' where the trees are more widely spaced and in a straighter line than if man hadn't been at them. Even so, I got to go by the heavier shadows of the trunks and it's often I get slapped by a low branch.
But for all that, I'm not scared.
I'm more scared of someday not bein' able to take myself off like this. A girl gets caught up with a boy or school or becoming something and forgets her own spirit. In these woods, I become the woman coming back from pegging salmon to drying racks off the Quenalt in Washington or from berry pickin' in the Smokies. I set pottery in the sun striking the stucco walls of a Zuni pueblo, and, close by this river, stitch deer hides to warm my Miami brothers.
I may be white with German-Polish ancestors, but it don't make no difference; the land makes changes in those who get close to it.
None of the girls I knew from my old home could do what I do and be so free and easy. They got their television and pop, their cassette players, their fashions and their boys. Drag them out here and all you'd get is a lot of whimpering about mesquitos and shadows. But I been out here a year, most of it alone, through rain, snow, and flood, and feel kin with the women who knew these paths and who had their kids squattin'. I sure ain't getting bent out of shape over the color of a pair of shoes or some screwball's new album. I just couldn't.
The woods ain't America, though. That's part of my problem. America's out there somewhere on the asphalt. It's on the tv and at the movies. It's what made my daddy retire three years before he thought he'd have to, and what made the mounds out here--buriel sites, maybe--museum pieces for egg-heads and air-heads. Nobody lives out here no more except those who live apart. For a girl, it's lonely. You come home to a home, not a village. Where this path comes out of the woods, for instance, there's a row of houses with crabgrass and gravel drives, some with new Cameros, Trans Ams or Toyota pick-ups parked out front (a way some folks show muscle when they're just as old and stuck here as anyone), and others with junked cars rustin' on blocks in the side yards. In any case, when I get there, a few folks will have their windows open for the night air and the chirpin' of crickets and few will have their tvs turned up, and a few will be arguing about love or the rent but there won't be no one but daddy depending on my getting back, and it's a bet I find him sleeping in front of the set.
It don't matter much where I go or what I do just so long as I go and do something. Even though I feel the past out here in a way it can't be felt up in Akron and I get a sense for who I am, I don't hardly know nothing about the world. This is the sort of place to leave when you're young and maybe get back to when you're old. So I won't stay. As soon as I get through high school, I'm walking to Krill's corner.
Correspondence and Permissions: James S. Oppenheim
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