Schoharie

They ran together through the fog and the rain. She pulled the boy by the hand through half of Brooklyn in the small hours of a Sunday in the dawn of November. At times she carried him in her arms. They rode three trains in three directions in case he had someone watching before they caught the subway to Grand Central and took the Metro North up to Peekskill where she hid a small Datsun she had bought for this purpose alone. They made the thruway before dawn and the boy slept in the back with his feet up on the seat and his head nestled on his folded hands. She fixed the mirror so that she could see his face if she tilted her head and she did this every time she saw lights coming from behind. They never stopped. By the time they crossed the Schoharie County line the rain had turned to ice.

She drove straight through until she found the mile marker she remembered from when she was a girl on those long rides to the cabin when they’d leave before dawn in a teal colored Oldsmobile that smelled like cigarettes and stale milk. It was mile fifteen on the old county road. The post was askew in the weeds and shiny with a coating of frozen rain. She drove another mile and turned onto a dirt road near a cluster of rusty mailboxes pocked with buckshot holes. The boy slept on. She drove over old tractor ruts and deep puddles where skeins of ice cracked under the tires like plates. More than once the car scraped bottom and several times the wheels spun in the mud. But she made it all the way.

The cabin itself was still green, but much faded since she’d seen it last. The tin roof had become a rippled sheet of rust. She left the motor running to keep the boy warm and found the key to the padlock where the letter said it would be waiting - laid neatly beneath the flagstone like some fossil waiting to be formed. She pulled it out carefully with her fingernail and the key left an impression that would later delight the endless curiosity of her son.

There was the smell of old wood about the place with the remnants of smoke and the memory of fire from the time she broke the lantern when she was even younger than Isaiah. She could still see the charred spot on the wall that rose like a witch’s shadow, and she remembered how her own father flew into a rage on a morning such as this when the light was gray on the horizon and the air inside cold enough to freeze the washbasin solid as bone. That was the first time she was ever struck by someone she loved.

She lit a fire in the pot-bellied stove with an old box of Ohio matches and used a torn up Schoharie Argus for kindling dated August 4, 1969. She brought in the fresh sheets she stowed in the trunk of the Datsun and made up one of the bunks for Isaiah. He woke a little when she lifted him but she shushed him back to sleep with whispers and a verse of Silent Night. He held her around the neck. She felt his warm face next to her own and fought the urge to cry. She carried him inside and laid him down on sheets that smelled like what once was home.

She was alive and she had Isaiah. He was her miracle and he was her hope. You cling to what visions you can. You cling to those small aphorisms of logic that, when repeated over and over, allow you to sell the decision to yourself. There’s safety in distance. There’s safety in the woods. If you leave without warning and cover your trail you won’t be followed. You lay low. You tell yourself that there’s plenty of time to get to California. You don’t go straight to it. You wait. You pay cash for everything and telephone no one. You sit by the old stove where you used to toast marshmallows when you were a child and allow yourself the luxury to dream because dreams are the only things that keep you sane.

And in that dream she sees them in Eureka, or Humboldt, maybe even Ft. Bragg, but she sees them, alive and living, safe and happy, out of the darkness and into a light of new kind altogether, from the brown-gray haze of twilight Brooklyn to the amber sparkle of Mendocino county, miles and miles from nowhere known to him. A young boy and an old mother. A new life made up of kerosene lanterns and candle wicks. A wood stove and a pot. And it begins now, in a tarpaper shack with a hole for a toilet dug deep in the Schoharie loam. This place that was once a refuge for hunters was now the only thing in the world that she could call her own.

*

She woke when she heard him laughing. She heard him talking to someone in the woods behind the cabin in a dark stand of old growth pine. She ran to him in a blind terror and found him on his knees speaking to something that was, at first, too small to see but then she did see. It was a toad. He was old enough to wander the woods alone and hunt the things a boy will hunt when he seeks to know and not to kill – insects and serpents, owl pellets and river stones. He was old enough to explore yet he still believed he could talk to the animals. She watched him quietly as he spoke to the amphibian. It was a splendid Spadefoot that he called Franky and he spoke to it patiently and with great affection the way a little girl would talk to a doll. Hearing that name unnerved her, but she stood behind him in the quiet of the pine needles and watched him. His hair was still of that fine, silky quality from the time when he first began walking. It was still the color of blanched pecans. It blew gently across his face as he knelt in the woods and he was a beautiful sight to behold. He turned and looked up at her and she knew then that this was right. His eyes told her everything she needed to know. His eyes. They were all peace and wonder again. It was for this moment that she was born. She knew this. She felt it. She thought that this was how it must be when you hear God, when you’re called to become a priest or a nun. You just know.

She knew other things. She knew lies. She knew fear. And she knew that they were all but temporarily screened, obscured now by but a small buffer of trees and highway and time. She bought for them a little time. That’s all. For a few weeks at least he would not find them. He would not come. All his ill-gotten cop-money, and all his well-placed cop-friends and all the detectives in the world could not find a place that did not exist. The deed to the cabin was in her mother’s maiden name, McCadden, the name she now took for her own. She never spoke of it to Frank and until the letter came a year ago, the Schoharie cabin didn’t even exist in her own memory. She had forgotten it, just as she had forgotten her father after he left them. Just as she had forgotten how he smelled, and how he used to breathe through his mouth when he was angry, and how he’d stand there in the dark, watching her and listening to see if she was asleep. Forgotten, but not lost.

For some reason it was his dying wish that she should have the hunting cabin. It said that in the letter from the probate lawyer. It was a gesture born of guilt and she despised him for giving her something she could not reject or return. Yet she held onto it because she knew that it meant something beyond the memory. She believed in that simplistic brand of faith and fate, where all things have meaning and fit somehow into a grander scheme designed for her greater good and the benefit of the boy. In the mind of Ruth McCadden a coincidence was simply an unrecognized opportunity, and she took it as a sign from that same God who calls young men to the priesthood that her father’s death should come at the time when she needed a refuge for her son.

Isaiah, whom she named for a prophet, whom she hoped would show his father what love was and still could be, placed the toad within a ring of stones, unaware that he was created by her as a gift, as a bridge, as a living symbol of God in a world long thought forsaken by such divine gestures as prophecies and signs. He was now what he was always meant to be. A boy. A child in the woods. A keeper of small and beautiful things. She raised him on books and images. He had great passion for dinosaurs and reptiles and the mammals of the African plains. She showed him beauty in small things and to demonstrate the rewards of careful observation and kindness, and he would now, if she could help it, spend the remainder of his boyhood amidst the earth’s true gifts – the stars and the trees and the precious few who understand the power of those things.

The boy watched the toad and Ruth McCadden watched the boy. His eyes were wide and alight with a magic shade of blue. The eyes of the toad were as black as sin and they shined in the morning light, blinking slowly every so often and she could see the pulse of the creature in the celadon flesh at its throat, expanding slightly and contracting in clock-like repetition. He turned and smiled at her.

Where did you find him? She said.

At my tree.

I don’t like you up there alone. It’s too far to go.

It’s not so far.

I don’t want you up there at this time of the year.

Why not?

She wanted to tell him it was because of the men in the woods, because of the hunters. She wanted to tell him that it was nigh on gun season and how it was when she was a girl, with men out there who’d shoot at anything that moved. She wanted to tell him that it was dangerous to be out alone with all those trigger-happy drunks up from Long Island on the loose. But the truth was that the hunters had long abandoned this part of the county for regions further north. There hadn’t been much deer here since she was a girl. What she feared was that the boy would simply disappear at the hands of some agent employed by his father – who was a man who once poisoned a dog just for barking at night, a man who had abandoned his idling car in the midst of traffic to smash a guy in the face because he didn’t move fast enough when the light turned green. He was a man, who seemed to know everyone, who carried a gun with him always, and who was once a street cop in that burnt out, bad part of the Bronx before he made detective. He could do whatever he wanted, and right now she imagined that he wanted her dead and he wanted his son.

Ma, the boy said. Why can’t I go to my tree?

Because I’m asking you not to. Please don’t go up there alone. Promise me.

Okay.

Say it Isaiah.

I won’t go up to the tree alone.

She smiled at his thoughtfulness. She smiled at how much he is like his father was, when he was still a young man, a boy really, before the police academy and before the drugs and the streets turned him into something she no longer recognized, something she no longer remembered. Until she looked into the boy’s eyes. That’s when she saw him. She saw young Franky there. She saw him building his famous paper kites, how he would carefully fold the newspaper around the wooden frames he used to make with hands that were so nimble yet so strong, and the way he’d let out the string and tug gently with his fingers, wrapping the loose end around his thumb and holding a cigarette too, running sideways in the hard-packed sand below the high-tide line on those Coney Island Sundays when his hands were still implements of wonder and delight. And she remembered how they’d touch her and trace her form with nicotine fingers that could sew buttons and rescue honey bees caught in spider webs and trace light circles below her navel that would make her see stars. The boy was all of those things. He would grow into a kind and gentle man.

She watched the way he handled the toad and knew he’d one day be the best kind of father. She listened to the way he spoke to it and knew he’d never hit his wife. There was great beauty in his innocence and in his goodness, and in that moment, as she watched him caring for the little toad, she understood the very idea of Jesus Christ. It didn’t matter if she believed the words of the bible, and it didn’t matter if she went to church. Names for things that could never be described by words had only served to dilute her joy. What she read in the bible and what she heard about faith from the mouths of others lost all meaning in that moment, and in the boy she saw the simplicity and vastness of a thought named God.

Will you take me? The boy said.

Take you where? She said.

To my tree. I want to show you something.

Yes, I’ll take you but not now, okay? Tomorrow.

The boy put the toad in a wooden cigar box that he had found in the cabin. It had been her father’s, and she noticed that he had carved Little Franky on top in crude block letters. Inside he placed fresh pine needles and some of the blackberries she picked for his breakfast the day before. We do what we can for the things that we love. The toad would not survive this way and the boy knew it. He understood the biology of amphibians better than she. He knew they didn’t eat berries. He had long been an opponent of zoos and animals in captivity. He looked at her then, as if reading her mind.

I’ll let him go tomorrow, he said. With you.

They ate well on the canned rations she had stowed in the back of the Datsun. They had SPAM and Campbell’s soup and later the Chip’s Ahoy. They slept in front of the fire and she rose before the boy in the gray dawn to fetch water. It was silent in the world and there was a smoky mist about the trees drifting like a slow tide. There were no birds and there was no wind and the woods felt empty and dangerous. It was very cold. The brass thermometer which hung on the outside of the cabin read thirty-six when she emerged from the cabin and she looked up at the sky as if searching for a sign, perhaps a certain star, for the sky was still dark and there were a few stars, and she fixed on one of them. It might have been Rigel or Betelgeuse because Orion hung above her and she saw it titled like a man falling from space. She tapped the thermometer with her wedding ring to see if it was true. And it was.

She knew where she was going without having to articulate the thought itself and she knew that when she told him where she’d been he’d be angry for awhile. But she’d make up for it with his favorite meal and all would be fine. She found a deer trail through a meadow and followed it into a grove of tall oaks where in years gone by the tree-stands would be full of men waiting for bucks to come. The trees were long empty of men but not of wood scraps and crude platforms and she could see the boards still nailed to the trunks where they used to climb. This was the place. He told her about the tree houses, as he called them, a whole city of them he said, and she knew his tree bore one that was large and still intact. She found it in a great beech that was much larger than any of the surrounding trees and whose trunk was of a different color entirely, with bark that was smooth and gray as the mist. There on the trunk of the tree he had carved his name. Isaiah. The letters were cut out of the thick bark down to the phloem. Around this he carved a heart, below which he cut her name in letters so small she had to squint to read it.

Ruth.

And she heard it spoken as she read it there in that quiet place, she heard her name as her mother would say it in the mornings when she was a girl and still fast asleep when she’d gently wake her, and she heard it from her father’s lips from the time before he left them when he’d tell her stories from memory of the Dublin of James Joyce, and she heard it from the mouth of young Franky in the days of Italian ices and paper kites when he’d call to her from the alley behind her house, and then from the boy himself who’d taken to calling her that when he wanted something he knew he shouldn’t have. And there it was. The substance of herself on the trunk of a Schoharie beech, the beginning and the end and the beginning again, four letters, forty years, this legacy of loss and love and cruelty and hope on the land of her father and at the hand of her boy is the voice of the thought named God who speaks her name in chorus to tell her that all will always be well.

She walked back through the mist to the meadow on the deer trail. There was sunlight in the grass and within the dewdrops themselves so that each glowed like a tiny sun. They were marvelous orbs of light and she stooped to examine them. She was surrounded by the wet meadow grasses and as invisible as a bedded doe. From that vantage she could see only grass and light and sky. Wispy clouds scudded above her and the mist rose and she knew what she’d make him for breakfast. She would make the boy pancakes and pick enough blackberries to make a syrup dark as wine and sweeter than honey. If she hurried she could have them ready before he woke. She stood and got her bearings and turned to see something moving in the trees beyond. She could not see well but she thought she saw a man in a bright orange vest – the kind you’d wear to hunt. Was it gun season already? She couldn’t remember. Perhaps they changed the dates. She did not move. She stood very still and waited to make sure it was only a hunter. She could not see him and he could not see her. He simply raised his gun and fired.

The boy was sitting on the small porch of the cabin holding the cigar box when he heard the shot. It was a muffled pop that sounded like the distant beat of a drum. He rose and listened. He held the box in his hands. It was very quiet and he could hear Little Franky shuffling among the dried grass inside. He stepped off the porch and walked to where the woods met the clearing. He could see deep into the pines and beyond to where the light flickered from the east. He shouted into the trees.

Ruth.

And there was no echo, nor answer of any kind. The boy could not see beyond the mist.

*