Old Growth
Michael Williamson
The first snowfall of the season arrives without warning. Even here below the dense overhang of maples and elms in the woods behind my house, it doesn’t take long for snow to find its way to the ground and, soon enough, my steps begin to peel away from it with a crunch. When I was a little girl, I used to love these woods for the way they seemed to go on forever and ever, for the way they could make me feel so lost. On days like today, I wish they could hold this sway over me again. There is no path here for me to follow, but I long ago memorized the few twists of footworn grass, the kinks in the spaces between trees. Even the wildness that lives here—the kudzu, the animals, the poison oak—seems to have tamed over time. Wild as those things are, the woods and the trees have taken them, sequestered them. That’s one thing I’ve seen the woods do: take. Like the time when I was eight years old and our dog died in a late November snowstorm—froze to death in the carport on the first cold front of the year.
Oren, the dog was named, a border collie. It was me who demanded he be buried, though I’d been told I wasn’t allowed to watch it happen. Instead, I peeked through my bedroom window and watched as my dad picked Oren out from the gravel and draped his body across his forearms. At the threshold where our yard became woods, my father stepped in and got lost there among the trees. When he reentered the lawn only a short while later, I ran to meet him there. He wouldn’t lower his eyes to meet mine as he removed his torn-up trapper cap and folded the flaps in his hands. His voice was measured, serene even, when he claimed he had dug through a sturdy layer of ice in order to reach the soil and deposit our dog into the earth. A few months later, in the slick of mid-February thaw, I found Oren unburied beside a felled trunk not that deep into the woods. He had withered into the nettles, but there was enough of him left that I recognized him. The pelt of his black and white fur was picked over, with long gashes stripped out, and where it remained intact it had receded into something coarser. I remember the smell of death, how it spiced the air, and how I wasn’t sure why there were tears in my eyes when I averted them and tried to focus in on a network of roots at the bottom of a nearby tree.
And I remember, ten years later, struggling to see another set of roots as I shined a flashlight at the base of a fir somewhere in the middle of a tree farm outside Palace, Kentucky. Spread from under a fat bunch of pine, they sank into the ground like chains, these roots, and I squinted to take in their full path across the ground. My friend Charlotte twitched in the cold beside me and notched her head this way and that to see if anyone watched us through the dark. It was the middle of the night, snowy, and we should not have been there.
The tree farm took up a dozen acres or more, with near identical Christmas trees organized into uniform columns and rows. I’d convinced Charlotte to hop the gate in order to steal one of our own, assured her that the memory of this crazy thing would propagate between us in the years to come. We hadn’t known each other for long, only since the start of twelfth grade, and I was certain the tree would be the thing to bond us. It was my only hope, really, in those few months before she left me to go to college and study art. Our relationship, after all, was such a nebulous thing. Less than girlfriends, I might have said if asked to describe it. But more than friends, I might have added, with a coy smile, if further pressed.
Charlotte uncapped the hatchet she’d fidgeted the whole walk over and dropped to her knees, then unpeeled her parka and laid it on the ground as a barrier from the snow and mud. In the hay-yellow glow of the flashlight, I could see her pretty face pucker in concentration. The tips of her nose and ears shined bright red in the cold, and I worried for her not having a coat, but she dropped beneath the pine branches of our tree without complaint.
She tapped the trunk with her knuckle and said, “Let’s get this over with.”
Feeling a little idle, a little cold, I huffed a warm bolt of air into my cupped palms, as if in preparation, and asked how I could help.
“Alice,” Charlotte said, and waved an arm to halt my approach. “I’ve got it.”
I nodded, but only once, and extinguished loads of feelings I would have rather lit with a match.
Charlotte readied her hatchet for a close-swung peck, and then dug it into the trunk. I leaned close to watch, careful to hold my hand still. Between the meager glow of the flashlight and the snow-freckled sky I could just make out the layer of underbark her first strike had revealed—a chunk of beige wood in the middle of the striated brown patchwork. Charlotte pressed on, and each time the hatchet bit into the bark, I winced a little, nervous that the sound of its thwap would reveal our position on this stranger’s farm as it bounced between the many trees. No one came, though, or saw, and by the time our tree stood with a precarious lean, I shivered only because of the cold.
Without warning, the trunk snapped and a flush of pine tumbled right at me. I let out a yelp and leaped out of the way just in time to avoid being buried under our tree. At once, Charlotte was on her feet, her face obscured by laughter. She ran over and raised her hand for a high five, a gesture I reciprocated with a mitten, still breathless. Wasting no time, Charlotte slid back into her parka and dug through the pockets to uncoil a strand of twine.
Together now, we wound the twine around the jagged trunk of our tree and dragged it through columns of its replicas. It was heavy, but I was large enough to bear the brunt of it while Charlotte kept watch ahead of me. When we made it back to the gate, we realized we hadn’t planned a way to get the tree over its highest rung and improvised a shared lift and toss that left several of our tree’s branches snarled when it landed in the snow.
We giggled when we met it on the other side, amazed at our dumb luck getting away with something like this, and continued to drag our tree toward Charlotte’s car. As we talked, our volume in the night grew beyond our control, and by the time we made it to the clearing where we’d parked, our voices coalesced in the air somewhere above us. We managed, not without effort, to hike our tree onto the roof of Charlotte’s beat-up Honda, where we tied it down with the length of twine. When we stepped inside and Charlotte turned the key in the ignition, the blast of artificial heat that came from the vents washed over us and settled us into a sense of calm we hadn’t known all night. Charlotte reversed the car and set us off down the road toward Palace, which itself was canopied by old-growth trees—these ones oak or cypress—and layered with a thin sheet of ice.
Charlotte banged the steering wheel with her thumb and said, “I can’t believe I did that.” Her expression was hard to read, some mixture of pride and reticence.
“Of course you did it,” I said. “Thanks.”
She didn’t turn toward me, but I could see her face relax into a grin, and then I followed her eyes to the road. The headlights made the starry snowflakes glimmer on the road before us like mica. Charlotte focused on them, careful to keep the car steady, but she removed one hand from the steering wheel and wrapped it around my thigh, where she fanned out her fingers only inches away from my zipper. It was a gesture celebrating the night’s co-conspiracy as much as it was a romantic one. But a great seizing of desire for this girl took hold of me anyway, as though her little squeeze had left me melted. I sank into my seat and placed my own hand atop hers.
The first time I had pressed my lips against Charlotte’s—two weeks back, in the dark of her mom’s basement—the experience of doing so had weeded me of desire for anything else. We were on the couch, and I remember there was music playing, a song Charlotte liked. Her lips tasted like Coke, and I couldn’t control my hands as they moved to explore new places on her body. We’d gone no further than kissing, she’d made sure of that, though even then I had wanted to. I’d had sex once before, with a friend of a cousin’s I’d met over summer break after freshman year, and after kissing Charlotte there in the basement, the thought of that boy from two summers past—of being bounced random as cobblestone—served only as a reminder of the distance Charlotte mandated, of the school she’d be leaving me for in a few short months.
Today, here in the woods behind the house I only last month inherited from my father, I can’t help but cry to recall all that came next. But between the rush of taking the tree for our own, and the frankness with which Charlotte’s hand sat there on my leg, I couldn’t help myself. I unbuckled my seat belt and leaned over the console, where I placed my lips on the first bit of Charlotte’s skin I could map out. She was timid at first, told me to knock it off, but then my hand found her thighs in a realer way than hers had found mine and she quieted. Her face in the moonlight that pulled through the windshield was so pretty, and her lips were so open, and for one brief moment I couldn’t tell whose lips were whose. The smell of pine was alive still in her pores and I buried my face into her neck to taste it, roiled my tongue down from her ear until I tasted sap. I applied pressure to the pads of my fingers and there came to her body a quiver and I tried to still it, tried to depress enough of my weight to pin her down and I touched her neck, her hair, her breasts, her stomach, all with my hands. She let out a throaty broken moan, a carnal noise, wild with implications, and I matched her sound with my own and squeezed my knuckles past her beltline. I wanted to open myself up to her as well, wanted our two bodies to tangle into one another, but there was the console between us and it was all I could do to keep my hands, my mouth, on her.
The first thing I saw when we fishtailed on the ice was our tree barreling past the windshield and smacking a big dent into the hood. It bucked off by a headlight, and Charlotte’s brakes squealed on the ice like the whine of a chainsaw motor. Without my seatbelt, I rammed into the dashboard, felt my bones come into harsh contact with the vinyl there. The car spun on the icy road and Charlotte couldn’t help but overcorrect at the wheel. We skidded into a ditch where the car rolled and landed on its nose and there was a great crunch of glass and metal. Gravity pulled me down on top of Charlotte and I scrambled, frightened, in an attempt to locate her face.
When I did, I screamed, would have cupped my mouth if not for the crumpled position of my body. She leaned against the glass, eyes closed, and a runnel of blood trickled around her pretty lips. Her airbag had deployed and it sagged, deflated, over her shoulder. I put my hands on her again, for all the wrong reasons this time, and shook her, called her name until my voice cracked. I remember the heater still whirred along with the engine—I had never felt hotter—and I cried as I said her name once more.
When she came to, there was fright sown deep into her eyes and she coughed. I said her name, “Charlotte,” happily this time, and when I reached to her I felt for the first time the thousand thorns of pain that spiked up through my muscles.
She ignored me. It was dark, and we were cramped inside the car’s smashed interior, and her body collided with mine as she pushed past me to rabbit kick the passenger side door, grunting with each attempt. Inch by inch she managed to wedge it through the grass outside the car until there was a space just wide enough for her to crawl through. When I went to follow, she pulled to make the space a little wider for me and there we were again in the cold, each of us bruised and bloody under the expanse of trees that lined the side of the road. One of the car’s headlights was still on and it shined onto our boots. I rushed to Charlotte, went to put my arms around her, but she shirked from my grip and backed up until I couldn’t see her anymore. Around us, snow fell everywhere.
Paramedics came, then police. They asked if we’d had anything to drink, then shined a light into our eyes when we said no. Charlotte’s mother arrived, her sobs getting lost on the breeze, and scooped her daughter into a hug. Someone at some point told Charlotte she had a broken nose. (I don’t remember this. I was told only later, after her mom had carted her off to the hospital, and though I wish Charlotte well, part of me hopes her nose is still crooked, rooted all wrong in the middle of her face.)
As I waited with one chatty cop for my dad to pick me up, I noticed our poor fir sprawled out in the ditch that jutted against the tree line, only a few yards from Charlotte’s crunched-up car. All this time and not one person had asked how it got there. Even I hadn’t thought to bring it up. But there it was, abandoned and haggard. A blanket of snow piled on its upturned side and into those empty spaces where its branches had been culled in the fall. We’d torn the fir down with a hatchet and left it for dead there at the edge of the woods where it would brown in the winter sun, never to reach the towering height of the trees that looked down on it.
I couldn’t help but to cry at the sight of it, and once I started I couldn’t snub it to a close. It wasn’t just the tree that made me cry then, but Oren, and my little house off near the woods where I lived with my dad. The cop raised a hand to pat it against my back and reminded me what a miracle it was I got to go home at all. “A Christmas miracle,” she said, and laughed.
My father arrived much later with claims about how he’d gotten held up at his night shift. With limbs stiff as planks, I folded myself into his truck, and he asked if he should take me to the hospital. I told him no. My father usually listened to me, more or less, though part of me now wishes he had forced the issue some more, taken me anyway. Maybe there, some doctor or another could have done something for my hip so it didn’t click with pain every time it got as cold as it is today. Maybe I would have run into Charlotte there in the waiting room and gotten the chance I still wish I’d gotten to say goodbye before her mom made her stop seeing me altogether. But my father did no such thing. Instead, he started the engine and drove us back here—to the place that kept us—down the twisted, unpaved roads that led to our house in Palace.
Michael Williamson was raised in Mississippi and Kentucky. These days, he lives in Chicago with his partner and their cat. More of his fiction has been published or is forthcoming in Natural Bridge and Hypertext Review.