out of the woods, white in the face, a gash on the side of his head. He didn’t say anything. He just stood there.”
“Didn’t you ever see that gash?” asked Lily, passing the backs of her hands over her eyes.
“He came home with his face cut up,” I said. “But he said it was nothing.”
“Right. For him it was nothing,” Lily said.
“Lily, stop interrupting,” Karen said. Lily began to cry again, quietly, but Karen kept talking. “Where’s Rudy? I asked him. Rudy, Shane repeated. Tell us, I said. Where’s Rudy? Then I just dropped my knife and took off at a dead run through the woods. Rudy was back there on the ground. He was out. There was vomit all down his beard, a blue and red bruise at the front of his head. His shoulder was pinned beneath an ash branch. I pushed at the branch, but couldn’t move it. Shane had followed me, but he just stood there with his mouth open. He said, I dropped it on him. I killed him. It was an accident.”
“But he didn’t kill him,” I said.
“Nearly did,” Lily said.
“Why didn’t he roll that branch off Rudy?” I asked.
Karen looked at me, long and cool. “How should I know why your boyfriend does things or not?” she said. “All I know is I tried to push that branch off Rudy. He’s not dead, I told Shane. You have to help me. I can’t move it on my own. I can’t, said Shane. You have to, I said. Okay, he said like he was waking up. He knelt down and heaved on that branch, and it rolled off into the leaves. You could see the marks up and down Rudy’s chest. He wasn’t breathing.”
“What did you do?” I asked.
“I started breathing into him,” Karen said. “Finally he breathed back. He came to. The first thing he said was, No hospitals, no doctors, no nurses, they’ll put me away again. I’m a nurse, you stupid idiot, I told him. He turned over and threw up again.”
“And my boyfriend? Where was he?” I asked.
“Shane left,” Karen said.
“He walked right past me as I went into the woods,” Lily said, wiping her dripping nose on the back of her hand. “He looked right through me. I found Karen back there, and she and I carried Rudy out of there. We don’t know where Shane went.”
“He came home to me,” I said. “He came home to me and told me he quit. He said Rudy was crazy. He said he couldn’t bear to work for him anymore.”
“Well, now you know it wasn’t quite the way he said it was,” Lily said. “I always liked your boyfriend, though, really. Hard not to, he was so nice.”
“Nice,” Karen said. “That’s one way of putting it. You could see he cared a lot what people thought of him.”
“What about Rudy?” I asked. “Did you take him to the hospital?”
“We kept Rudy on the land overnight,” Karen said.
“Isn’t that against the Land Trust rules?” I asked.
“We drew the curtains, is all,” Karen said.
“Do you know where Shane is now?” asked Lily.
I could hear up to the tops of the beech and sycamore. I could hear the flapping of turkey vultures. I knew how to answer. “Somewhere that no one really knows him. Somewhere that he can be new,” I said. We gathered our clothes and headed back up through the forest.
* * *
Winter came hard, and tree work ended for the season. Rudy gave me my final pay and said, “I’ll see you in the springtime, if I still have a liver.”
“I probably won’t be here in the springtime,” I said.
“Don’t be so fatalistic,” he said. “Most people make it through.”
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“What do you think I’m going to do?” he said, starting up his truck. “I’m going to go dormant with whiskey.” I watched him drive away.
I told myself I could leave anytime. But first, I taped an extra layer of plastic in the windows of my camper. I sealed the door of the woodstove with new rope, and I cleaned creosote out of the pipe. I can get a bus ticket as soon as there’s a thaw, I thought. But when the thaw came I didn’t bike to the bus station. I didn’t even bike to the bar. I biked to the public library and checked out some books with pictures of local animals and trees, encyclopedias of primitive skills, accounts from old homesteaders that