The Land
by Ana Weidenfeld
The morning was black and thick and a misty rain fell. I switched on my bedside lamp and a pleasant glow filled my bedroom, illuminating boxes of seashells, bins of buttons, and ceiling-high stacks of books and magazines. Throwing wrinkled shirts, torn jeans, colored pencils and wool socks into an old duffle bag, I heard the low rumble of voices. When I walked into the kitchen my father was already preparing sandwiches and tenderly placing small pieces of fruit into a cooler.
“Hey kiddo,” he said. “You all packed?”
“Yeah I’m ready. What’s this place called again?”
“It’s called The Land. It’s great.”
I was a bit skeptical about the whole trip. From what I had heard about this cabin it was in the middle of the woods, about an hour away from the town of Mendocino. There was no television, no radio, and no noise.
The ride to The Land was golden and cold with winter. Oak trees grew single file on smooth hills and the underbrush shone silver. We wound our way around the belly of a mountain and I stuck my head out of the window as far as it would go and just let the cool air surround my face.
“Hey, what the hell are you doing?” my dad screeched. “Get your head back in this car right now before you lose it.”
“But dogs do it,” I retorted, glancing behind me at the wiry head of Calvin.
My father didn’t say anything, and I began to sing “Wildwood Flower.”
Oh he taught me to love him and call me his flower
That’s blooming to cheer him through life's dreary hour
He's gone and neglected this pale wildwood flower.
We soon reached a small bridge and my dad said that there was a river that flowed below it.
“Can we go down dad? Please,” I begged.
“Yeah okay,” he said.
We pulled over and I tugged off my shoes and socks. Calvin and I raced down the treacherous hillside as my dad yelled something at our backs, but we were running at the speed of light so his words were lost. The water felt like ice as it rushed past my ankles, and then my knees, and it glinted like diamonds. We walked down a ways; balancing on large pebbles and the trees stood tall like soldiers in an army.
When we got back to the car my eyes were burning so I closed them for the rest of the ride. I remember hearing the hoot of an owl and someone’s rap music but when we made a sudden turn I was forced to open my eyes because a hush fell around us.
The cabin was brown and small with a purple door. I ran towards it and slid the key into the lock. The cabin was one large room with two lofts on either side and I decided that I liked the left side. I climbed up the wooden ladder to discover three mattresses in a row, a bookshelf and a dusty lamp. The beds gave off the odor of mothballs, but nevertheless it was very comfortable. I seated myself at the top of the ladder to the loft in order to look down at the cabin to see it like a bird would. There was a small kitchen, a table, and a stove with a lumpy sofa and armchairs situated around it. A feather collection rested upon a shelf, and small trinkets like a nest and cracked eggshells sat inside a shoebox.
We carried in our belongings, set up our beds, and I sat at the table as dad made dinner. We had grilled cheese sandwiches and I had warm lemonade. He had beer that was black as coal. After our meal we lit a fire and dad played his guitar while I hummed along, and I could barely hear myself over the crickets. When the fire began to wane we crawled up the ladder and went to sleep, or at least my dad did. He produced the sounds of a locomotive and so I was forced to bury my head deep under my pillow and count in my head in order to fall asleep. I’m pretty sure that I made it past 1000.
“Ana, wake up and come look at this,” yelled my dad.
I opened my eyes to see rays of sunshine dancing across my legs.
“Come look at this--would you?” repeated my dad.
“Hold your horses,” I said, as I clambered down the ladder. “Okay, what did you want to show me?”
“Oh. Nothing. Never mind,” said my dad, all the while staring at a spot on the border of the clearing behind the cabin.
“It was just my imagination,” he said. “Just a trick of the light.”
I was feeling a bit uneasy about my dad’s behavior until he mentioned a rope swing and then the odd episode flew out of my mind.
The Land rests in the middle of a seemingly endless forest but there are narrow paths that snake through the trees. The rope swing stretched up, and up, and up, to the highest tree branch of the tallest tree. An old door was precariously positioned on a large mound, and it is from this spot that I propelled myself into the air. Branches tried to grab my hair and arms with sharp hands but I was unstoppable. Everything swirled past my eyes in a mess of browns and greens but then I could see images, like a ballerina and a swan. At the time I thought that they were keeping me safe.
On most mornings we would go on hikes and I would run ahead of my father looking at what surrounded us. Small patches of goat grass, maiden’s hair, and pale dandelion sprouted in open fields and from under fallen tree trunks. We stopped at a small creek where small frogs crawled onto my hands and where I found a deer antler. The antler was as long as my arm, with four prongs coming off of it.
“But what happened to the deer?” I asked my dad fearfully.
“Healthy stags can regenerate their antlers and grow knew ones. The stag that lost this must have been a sight to see.”
“Do you think he was a king?” I asked.
“Probably,” said my dad. “And he’s growing a new crown.”
I put the antler on the shelf next to the blue eggshells.
I remember that there was one spot in the forests around The Land that I did not like to explore; a tool shed that a woman at my dad’s work said was home to a ghost. I did not believe in ghosts but I did believe that the air around the shed was colder than anywhere else. When I told my dad this he rolled his big gray eyes and told me that things are not always as they seem. He wrapped his huge hand around my sweaty palm and began to lead me towards it. Towards its rotted wood and broken windows. I held his hand with all of my might and he told me to be very quiet, but when he opened the door I could not help but let out a little yelp of delight.
“I found them yesterday,” said my dad.
On an old shirt in the corner of the shed lay a large speckled black and brown cat and five kittens. The kittens were all sleeping on top of one another and I could see their small bodies rising and falling with each breath. Their noses looked like pink velvet.
“Aren’t they chilly?” I whispered.
“No. They have each other,” said my dad.
I smiled at this and fought the urge to scoop the kittens into my coat.
While walking away from the shed I remember seeing a narrow path that I had never seen before. I began to walk down it and the soil was soft with moisture. Moss carpeted the fir trees and a breeze stirred the spotted leaves. Walking down a ways, I decided to turn back because my toes were cold, but something caught my attention. Deep in the shrubbery I could make out something white. It looked like snow or a crushed piece of paper. I walked towards it, bent down, and realized that it was a half-buried bone. I began to dig furiously and found that the earth was surprisingly soft. I dug past small centipedes and earthworms and finally I pulled out a humongous bone. I then saw the tip of another bone. I felt like a paleontologist excavating for dinosaur bones. The sky was a deep blue when I had finished, so I ran back to the cabin to grab a flashlight and to tell my father about what I had discovered. Tugging his sleeve the whole way, I told my father about the discovery of a rare dinosaur to be called the “Anasaurous.” He stared intently at the collection of bones and then began to arrange them, forming the rough construction of a long figure.
“Ana, do you know what this is?” my dad asked very slowly. “This is a human skeleton. See this? It’s the tibia. And see this? It’s the pelvis. Look how it faces outward.”
“What?” I felt like my lungs were collapsing.
I stared at what my father had put together on the brown leaves and instantly realized that he was right.
“Go on back to the cabin, okay?” said my father.
“But…”
“Go on,” he repeated firmly. His face had changed.
I ran back to the cabin and decided to take a bath to get the dirt off of me, but as I lay in the chipped tub all I could see were the bones. The scene that I had unearthed danced before my eyes. Had that person been killed and buried in that spot? The thought was unbearable. I felt so stupid. Of course it wasn’t a dinosaur. Maybe two people had lived in the cabin and had gotten into an argument. A horrible argument and one person killed the other in rage and dragged them deep into the woods.
When my dad came back his face was pale and tired.
“I’m so sorry dad,” I said, as tears began to fall onto my pajama shirt.
“You didn’t know,” he said kindly.
“Do you think that they were killed?”
“Oh no. I think they probably died a long time ago from an illness. Maybe that spot was used as a graveyard.”
I thought of the graveyard in my background that housed guinea pigs, a rat named Dr. Rat Blue, and a cat. One year my mom forgot that they were there so she planted tomatoes and some of them grew to be as big as cantaloupes.
My dad said that he had buried the bones that I had dug up deep under the earth, below the fertile soil where roots grow, so that no one would ever make the mistake that I did. As I lay in bed that night I felt like I was in motion, like I was driving or floating and this made me want to throw up. My hands also felt like they were caked in mud even though I had rubbed them raw with soap.
When I woke up the next morning the rain would not stop falling and I imagined that I was in a submarine far away from The Land. I sat on the couch and looked through books and atlases. I would close my eyes and randomly point to a spot on the map and wherever I pointed determined where I was going to steer the submarine. I went to unpronounceable cities in India where it was too hot, microscopic islands where I befriended wild turkeys, and to the Yukon where I went sledding down icy slopes.
My dad spent his time roaming around outside and he would bring me small presents like acorns and leaves. We didn’t talk about what happened except for once when we drove about an hour away from The Land to go to the beach. The sky was dark gray and the wind was blowing from every direction. We were the only people there.
“How are you,” asked my dad.
We sat behind a large sand dune and my nose was running like a faucet. This question seemed impossible to answer.
“Fine,” I lied.
“Everyone makes mistakes Ana.”
“I know.”
I did know this. My mistake was different though.
The rest of the day at the beach we saw one person wearing a yellow raincoat with a giant hound dog. The man would throw a piece of drift wood into the sea and then his dog would disappear under the waves to find it.
When we returned back to the cabin I decided to begin an art project. I had brought with me a stack of origami paper and I began to fold small spheres that resembled tulip bulbs. In the morning I climbed a tree and began to decorate it with my colorful globes.
“They look like fruit,” said my dad. “You’re going to trick all the animals.”
I laughed at this. “Oh well.”
When I looked over at my father I pictured his bones resting in a home with no windows and no doors on a green hillside.
As time passed I began to think less and less about the skeleton, especially after we left The Land. I stopped thinking about how we are all going to end up under ground and I stopped feeling the touch of a vanished hand. But I still see the faces of the yellow flowers that watched me dig, and feel the rough gray notches in the old bones.