The Spoils of Corinth
Excerpt
Alright guys, I say, and seeing the time now not just as a counter toward an ominous appointment but again as an informant of daylight and rhythm, I tilt the pitch of my voice upward and beckon the dogs down with me to the front door. Draping bright orange scarves around their necks I call down to Soph that we’re off to the woods, might be a little while, and she says ok and off we go.
A hackneyed mix of grass-veined wood and stone forms the path from our front door up to the dirt road. It winds clumsily around desiccated patches of ferns and flowers, winding outward away from the summit before curving back toward the parked cars on a plane roughly parallel to the frosted bathroom window. Marl makes his way about halfway up before he sees that we’re not going that way, instead circling around the house and out back into the woods, those woods I’d been looking into and through not long ago. Ell stays closer to me, always anxious we might be doing anything else, but when she realizes we’re heading in that direction she’s hit with triumphant relief, signaling to Marl that it’s time to run off, and before I can even make my way to the far side of the house the two of them have sprinted deep into the woods, just two flailing orange blurs far off by the time I make it to the brink of the trees. Always I pause for a moment on the precipice, the narrow sliver of grass between the house and the ramshackle walking path careening down into the woods, looking for a bear or deer or something more interesting or unnerving, but today I don’t see anything except the dogs, their scarves, the undressed or undressing trees and their layers shed slick all over the ground wherever mud’s not boiled up between them.
Even with the colors saturating steadily for weeks now, I’ve not yet purged the laconic ease of summer, so the trail is precariously untidy, the saunter downslope mildly treacherous, and despite my best efforts to shimmy down gingerly I do catch a deserved bad angle, slip, stop myself on muddy rock and let out a touch more blood down lower on my freshly stuck arm. The curses that come afterward are to and at myself, but the affair’s quickly absolved by the dogs, both back upon me with inexplicable alacrity, attendant to me despite their feral glee at being otherwise untethered. I am now enough of a mess to have no qualms with whatever the rest of the outing may bring. Getting up, I find something to throw and I throw it hard and the two of them disappear downward in its direction.
I do love it here. In here. Out here. Where the elevation reaches equilibrium again, this small stretch of woods just wide enough to obscure all intrusions of neighborly indiscretion. Four acres—not so much in Vermont—but four acres bordered by at least as many on the left and right sides and bound at the far end by the creek, a good one, a small river really, a walking path astride to link the properties, far from any buildings, where in one year of daily wanderings I’d never seen another soul, at least not dog or man, and bears only twice. The creek and its parallel path are really only four or five minutes from the house, maybe not even, but I never make my way in a rush, and despite the dogs’ wild sprints, their paths are always circuitous, so we take our time, always, and today no exception. About halfway through is a small clearing, perhaps the size of an infield, that I’d kept low enough to play fetch with the dogs without needing to sift through ferns for the ball, and as I approach the treebreak I see the two of them sniffing around its perimeter, momentary respite from the frenzy. Marl gallops over for the treat in my palm and Ell, not hungry, supervises the exchange and looks at me as if to say thanks for all this, this place, this sport, it’s good here, I know we could be someplace else and I remember being there, someplace else, vaguely, but now let’s go check on the apples and take a dip, and with that she dashes off with Marl to the next squall of trees where just this season they’d found old wild apples strewn across the ground from tall old trees that Soph and I had hardly even noticed last fall.
From the orchard the creek is plenty loud but still out of sight. Fallen trees form a phalanx around the gangly timber architecture and on one of them I’ll take a seat while the dogs forage wild fruit and I’ll shut my eyes and try not to think about anything. I wish I’d brought a drink. I’m glad there’s still a half hour or so till my sensor starts talking to me and I’m glad Sophie will be there when we get back. I picture her in the kitchen now, focused, irritated, disassociated from certain parts of herself, returning fire on various fronts against her keyboard and not turning the light on as the room darkens. A reluctant stoic sadness more like fatigue. If her nose stays buried in what’s in front of her there’s scarcely a stone to step on toward the dreamlike hazy light of the bathroom, drawer full of tests with taunting line counts haunted by pipes marked with old blood and indelible stains in the trash can. She compartmentalizes better than I do. Drift as I may to other rooms and wounds and nights I trust that she is firmly in one place for now and I feel overwhelmingly thankful that that’s where I’ll find her.
The dogs could mill about the apple trees indefinitely but after a few minutes I get up from the treebench and head toward the water. They don’t follow me till I’ve reconnected with the path and called them over and then all at once they whirl onward and overtake me and rocket toward the water in a straight line down the final series of small slopes between the path and the creek. The two converge a little farther along, but here, on the fringe of our property, the final descent is especially unruly and I take my time getting down. No matter the brisk air or lack of sun, the two of them clomp around in the shallow water, jumping in and out and onto stones and shaking themselves dry on the flat dirty earth over and over again and again. I step in too, just a bit, tall boots serving their purpose, white water noise crescendoing into the only sound. It is good here, I think, as if affirming Ell’s earlier eyes while repudiating the reverie my own had indulged not long before. It’s good here now.
I step backward out of the water, the din dampening only slightly, the gray light beginning to darken like smoke gaining sustenance sans flame. I always want to stay longer, but it’s time to get back, and I say it aloud, voice over the score of the creek, and once the phrase expires I realize the water’s all I hear. I look upstream and downstream and uphill, but I’m alone. I call out to the dogs, each once by name, and walk in the direction the water flows, the way that reconnects with the walking path up a softer slope than the one we’d trampled to get here. It happens often, brief disappearance, and in the imprecise duration before my heart rate ratchets up, I feel a coy sort of irritation at them, almost jealousy. Between metronomic crunches of leaves beneath my feet I call to them again, Ell, Marl, Ell, Marl, and then just Ell, Ell, Ell, who’s more trustworthy, principled, reverent, guilt-ridden, but still I’ve not seen or heard them by the time I’ve made it back to the path.
It’s strikingly clear, I realize. The path. Freshly preened in a way that immediately makes me feel grateful and guilty. This path has been here long before we have, shared by at least six families scattered across this nameless or many-named creek in Corinth, but seeing no one ever traverse it with us, it’s come to feel like our own, my own, yet here it is, immaculate, and I am just trudging along it in pursuit of animals too wild.
Ellie! Marlon! In bellows.
Ell-lee! Marrr-linn! Slower.
ELL. MARL. Staccato.
And in stark mockery the elements maliciously align, the fumigant graylight accelerating toward dusk, no longer gradually but seemingly all at once, the wind sharpening to reclutter the path I’d done nothing to clear, and very faintly mist now permeates the air, like rain spawning from the beads of anxious sweat on my neck and underarms.
Ellie, come!
I stop walking to listen. I stop moving to look. But there’s no jingle, no orange. I picture Soph in the kitchen, dark enough now that the laptop screen is like a spotlight against her face, imagine her beckoning to the dogs as I come back inside, her confusion not hearing them, the rapid tremor to her voice in retort to whatever sparse explanation I can improvise.
And then, five beeps. Ba da da da da. From my pocket. It’s been an hour since the sensor went in, and it’s working now, and its arrival salutation is a declaration that my blood sugar is low, and I curse it, and me, and the dogs, and staving off panic suddenly seems inordinately taxing and counterproductive and doomed and though it’s only just beginning I now foretell my hands quivering and knees buckling and vision blurring and heart hammering bones and hypoglycemically expiring out here in the woods but as if the alarm is a pitch-perfect whistle, instead of all that, any of that, in an instant they come storming toward me like nothing’s happened and lead us home.