The land went on almost endlessly toward the sky. Our yard, which we set on fire every september, sloping down a ways before meeting the old and crumbling pavement, and across the road an overgrown field reaching for miles to the sunset. There was nothing in the world besides the trees, grass, brush, and the four of us.
Usually, the four of us. In our rented and barely renovated doublewide at the end of a long dirt driveway where our rusted out gold station wagon sat dead more often than not.
In the spring the air was cool and the sun was filled with colors and the flies were only beginning to bother you. I'd stand at the end of the driveway, kicking small stones and waiting for the schoolbus ("UNORGANIZED TERRITORIES" painted along it's side) to let me on and take me, over the course of an hour, to the nearest elementary school.
Jessica Neal and her brothers burned alive in their trailer one morning and we all watched from the bus and I have no memory of it. My mother only reminded me a few years ago over a family dinner. I had come home and told her all about it. A few weeks later my school planted a tree in her memory in the front lawn of the school. I wonder if the tree is still there. I wonder if the lawn is still there. I wonder if the school is still there.
A high school girl with long black hair convinced me to let her touch me on the way home in the fall and I do remember that. You are now the first person to know. I felt special and proud and then ashamed before I even got home. I sat in the middle of the bus, near a window and daydreaming, watching the flat country pass and I remember the low grey clouds and the early orange and purple sunset. I remember the mud on the side of the road and the smell of the plastic seats and her weight next to me when she sat down. I remember her holding my hand and I remember her smiling and asking me if she could. I remember not saying anything and then nodding. I remember how cold her fingers were. I remember her sitting silently and motinless next to me until her stop and I remember watching her hair wave across her back as she stood and left. I remember not looking at the other kids.
Our nearest neighbors were a mile or so in either direction and the children were cousins and two of my only friends. Matt Dunbar lived in a nicer house, to my memory. He had a collection of Masters of the Universe figures and we would sit at his dining room table and make them fight, though I often got distracted and just looked at their joints and hologram stomachs and thought they were magic of some kind. His cousin, Rebecca, lived in the other direction in another trailer with a yard of god knows what, including an old phone booth where we kissed and felt each other one rainy morning while her parents, who I do not remember, were elsewhere. The phone booth. The trash. The torn pink carpet inside. The blankets nailed to the window and cans and cardboard all through the kitchen. I still occassionally wonder how the two of them are doing. If they're still alive.
But our yard, the land we lived on, was mostly empty. A stone wall in front of the house where my sister split her head open. Blood pouring into her eyes. My mother as calm as she could be and panicked. On the phone. The long and tangled curling phone cord. The roar of the station wagon and clouds of dust behind it as my father raced up the driveway. And a small garden, or cornfield, out back. I'm not sure which. In the early mornings with dew on leaves I remember standing in front of it and touching the leaves and the dew. The cat around my ankles. The puddles growing in ruts in the mud. There was a treehouse my father had built and behind all of that the forest.
A forest so deep and alien that were you to walk a mile in the animals wouldn't run. They would stare at you. They had no idea what a person was and were curious. Again, more magic. In winter my mother would set my sister and I in a sled and drag us all through the woods and we'd be on a freezing and beautiful adventure. I can still see the sun setting through the trees as we were almost home again and feeling alive in that moment. Like things were as they should be. Like there was more to see and everything would be right.
Sometimes the four of us. Sometimes only three. Laying in my bed and wondering. Crying to my mother. Then after a few weeks, four again.
A handful of snakes.
Sliding off the road and a screwdriver slowly rotating past my head as time dragged and we slid into a ditch.
My father quietly watching porn in the living room, just off of my bedroom. Me sneaking out and accidentally laughing at it, runing his moment.
Violence I can't describe.
But in the yard, with my sister, with the cats, wonder. The tall grass, just a bit taller than me. We would crawl through it, calling our paths tunnels. Moving through puddles and popping up a few dozen yards away and waving to my mother sitting on the stone wall. At the end of the day I remember staring at the treeline and knowing the boundary but unable to stop wondering about the world inside of it. In the trees. In the dark. I still get that way about forests. I still feel the call to slip into them and let it all take me.
A man did. He lived a few miles in, in a rotting shed. My father had met him one day and though maybe not friends, they knew each other well enough, getting up to what you might expect those types of people get into. He broke into our house one day. Kicked the front door in half, and stole our VCR and a few other things. I didn't see him until years later on the news when he was arrested for breaking into houses a number of miles away. "Maine hermit living in wild for 27 years arrested on burglary, theft charges" the headlines said.
My mother had been insistent that I went to sunday school. I went for most of my childhood, but it started there, in the basement of a roman catholic church. I don't remember much of it, only a small collection box filled with canned goods.
"Can we donate cans to the poor?" I asked my mother.
And in a rare moment of exhaustion she said "we are the poor."
It was the first time I had the thought, and it never left me. It brought everything into focus. The bags of clothes at the door. The white labeled cans and boxes. The rotting car and house. Then waves of anger and resentment. Not at my family, but at other families. At Matt Dunbar's family. And each family with more than us for a long time. Not envy. Anger. I was not like them, at the core.
Kicking small rocks in the driveway. Climbing onto the school bus. Sitting across the aisle from a kid with a new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles lunchbox, filled with anger.
It all crept in, though my mother did her best to shield my sister and I. Did her best to give us a good life. And when I think about it now, when I think about the sled rides and the grass tunnels and the joy of the colors in the sun, she succeeded. The world was magic despite anything else. The rot set in then, but so did the wonder.
And I'll be eternally grateful, despite it all.
