Scratch. Steve Himmer
leaves, and cleared ground is overtaken by trees. The forest thickens around him as smoothly as waves swallow shores and glaciers retreat to leave valleys behind, and he pauses just once, to crouch when a glistening white shard of china catches his eye in the mud. It’s part of a plate, not enough to make out the whole pattern but there’s a gilded rim and a design of bell-shaped pink blossoms—they’re twinflowers, but he doesn’t know that—and he can make out only the opening “1” of the date on the back. 19? 18? These fragments look old, but they’ve been in the ground, scoured by stones and soil for who knows how long. They could be ancient or they could have fallen at a picnic in this forest last week, for all Martin knows. So after inspecting them for a moment he rises out of his crouch and hurries in the direction he thinks the fox went, though now the animal is out of his sight.
The sticky heat and muffled sound remind him of lying in bed when he was eight years old and living in one of many cramped apartments he shared with his mother. He listened to adult voices growing louder in the next room as she fought with the man they were living with then—the one he remembers as only a walrus mustache—and Martin knew that in the morning they would move somewhere else the way they always did after that kind of fight. Despite the dead, city heat in his room, he pulled the bedclothes up over his head until the voices were almost drowned out. Soon he was dripping with sweat so he peeled off his pajamas and pushed them out of the bed, and then pulled the rattling box fan from the window into the tent of his blankets and sheets. Naked and clammy in that mechanical breeze, he sang to himself through the blades of the fan and pretended he was a musical robot instead of a boy beneath a pile of blankets.
Eventually he fell asleep, and when he woke up the fan was back in the window and his mother had already packed his few things. His small suitcase of clothes stood on the floor with his baseball glove perched upon it. The incomplete series of wilderness adventure books one of his mother’s earlier boyfriends had bought him at a flea market—the one with the green van, perhaps, or the one who got great baseball tickets?—were stacked to one side of the bag. The rising dough scent of his mother hung in the room like an echo and Martin couldn’t tell how long ago she’d been there.
Now sweat collects in his armpits as he picks his way through dense trees, and without stopping, without breaking the motion of walking, Martin peels off his jacket and ties its sleeves at his waist. A cool breeze wraps itself around his body and he is suddenly cold, shivering and prickled with gooseflesh. He smells what he thinks is himself before placing it as part of the forest, the rich, rotten smell of wet dirt and crushed leaves.
He thought the clearing back at his trailer was quiet, but the woods are quieter still despite the crunch of his steps. He listens for rain on the canopy but it isn’t there, and the absence of birdsong is audible—a cliché, a bit of nonsense, but a description no less true for that.
He’s driven on by a restless desire in his legs and an impulse to follow. Never mind that the fox has slipped out of sight, some mysterious certainty of the creature’s path pulls him behind it. Martin walks through what little remains of the morning, past a rusted old car so deep and so long in the forest a tree has grown up through its hood and pushed the engine apart. Fallen brown leaves lay all over what remains of the car, about the same shade as its rust. Years of wind and weather have piled dirt and branches against its doors, filled its wheel wells with mud and debris and—though Martin can’t see all of this—a crowded nest of squirrels in the trunk and a flattened patch of ground on the far side of the car where a deer bedded down for the night to get out of the wind. The machine has become so much a part of the forest he has to slow down and look twice to be sure it is hiding in there at all.
He rests against a downed log, blanketed with bright green moss and half-rotted. On its side it is nearly as high as his waist, and younger trees have taken root in its surface, a row of them extending the length of the trunk. Mushrooms and ferns crowd its shadows and the moist, dark soil made rich as the tree comes apart, and though Martin can’t see them, not yet, beetles scurry and worms curve under the log, in the earth—in the dark, loamy world this fallen tree brings to life. A nurse log, I’ve heard your kind call these, but out here in the woods we just call them lives. New lives emerging where old ones are lost, a space cut in the canopy so young trees might grow toward the sky—layers upon layers, time upon time.
Martin walks into the long afternoon until at last he reaches a crumbling wall of gray stones rising out of the brush. The wall becomes better preserved the longer he walks beside it, as if being raised while he watches. Near the top of a hill it seems to be whole, its stones woven tightly and not torn asunder—as other walls Martin’s spotted have been—by tree roots pushed under and through over the long course of years.
Then it ends against the foundation of a burnt house, two feet of blackened stone half-buried in leaves. Nothing remains of the timbers the foundation must have at one time supported. There’s a gap in the wall that was once a door, and Martin steps through to the single large room of the house. At one end a hearth stretches from corner to corner with a broad, soot-darkened fireplace in its center. A cast-iron arm still hangs on a hinge, withered by years of rust, a scarred kettle dangling from its hooked end. It strikes him as strange that the kettle and arm should still be here at all rather than rusted away into nothing, but Martin doesn’t know much—nothing, really—about how quickly decay comes in the forest, and he knows little of rust, so he assumes the metal knows what it’s doing. He’s a man who puts buildings up and he’s never paid very much mind to how they come down.
Exhausted once he stops moving, he first leans against the stones of the foundation then sinks to the thick carpet of leaves piled inside its walls. Shivering, he unties the jacket from his waist and pulls it on over his head. As he catches his breath, he wishes he’d taken a bottle or two of water from the plastic-wrapped case back in his trailer. A lump of thirst clogs his throat and swallowing makes it larger.
It’s dim in the shell of the house, with the thick shade of trees overhead. Martin wishes he’d brought his phone, or worn his watch, and had some way of knowing what time it is; even if he knew how to read the hour from the sun, it wouldn’t be much help out here in the trees. He walked for hours, but it only feels like a long time now that he’s stopped—the day passed in a blur of rising and falling, valleys and hills, back and forth strokes of fox tail—when he could spot it—decisive as the hand of a clock, and finally this abandoned stone house. His calves quiver with cramps and he raises filthy pant legs to knead the sore muscles beneath. He has no idea where he is, either in relation to his trailer or to the town, and for a second he feels as if he’s been led, as if something—the fox?—wanted to show him this house and drove his legs forward as metal is urged onto a magnet, but the idea evaporates quickly, replaced by the feeling he’s foolish.
Still, there is something familiar; the ruin resonates. Its calm isolation echoes the house Martin imagines when he pictures the home he might have. This quiet is what he looks for when he paces through empty houses before their owners move in, listening to floorboards he’s the only one walking, inhaling the sterile smell of a never-used shower. He thinks of empty houses as souls awaiting their birth, and life lingers in this burnt-out shell long after its walls came down. It still feels like occupied space.
One of his mother’s boyfriends—the one with the dog—had three bedrooms and several acres and they stayed with him for a few months. It’s the only actual house Martin has ever lived in, and the first night he lay awake feeling thin as a ghost, behind walls so thick he couldn’t hear the rest of the rooms. The night was so dark on the other side of his window he waited for it to burst through the glass and swallow him whole.
Later he grew used to the silence, when his mother and her boyfriend went away for a week and left him alone with the dog, a Finnish Spitz named Aino. Sitting on the front steps of the house with Aino beside him, her spiral tail flicking the air as she napped, Martin knew there was traffic a mile away but he couldn’t hear cars or see dust rising over the road. He spoke to the dog a few times that first day, but by the time his mother returned Martin marveled at how quiet he had become and how far time could stretch in a comfortable place. When that boyfriend was gone, after Martin’s mother had steered the two of them away from his house and into their next short-term home, it was Aino he missed, and these three decades later he’s promised himself that