The Woods and My Father

Jack Bynum

The boardwalk swayed as I walked through the phragmite brush of saturated swamp to the solid earth of green fern-forest. My small hands reached out to push away the golden reeds that hung low in my path shooting their seeds into ecstatic dance—like those white semi-transparent dandelion spheres blown away by young breaths. To the right of the boardwalk was a large patch of prickers—green leaves, inviting red berries, and painful needles. Every time I walked by, I wound up with small trickles of blood from the places the needles pierced my miniature denim overalls. After my father left, my mother let the briars grow all over. She said they were protecting her, but my feet took the beating.

The woods behind my house were once farmland—the trees will prove it. The old rock walls of lichen-covered granite are still there, but have eroded with time. You can see the old boundary lines where the pastures separated. In these places the trees grow tall and wide. It would have taken three little me’s to stretch around these giant trees and feel the gentle hum of their internal watery rush.

On early August nights, when constellations sprinkled through the trees, I would sit down in the moist velvety dirt with my legs crossed Indian-style, my back following the tree’s back, my left overall strap undone, and stare up into the sky at the arms of this eternal being. My father once told me that the Oak was 150 years old. It would live those years once again before death. Before tears stopped running through the roots.

I remember the fallen oaks. On their horizontal bark I tiptoed, holding tight my father’s leathery hand as he walked alongside. He in his denim jeans and jacket with light faded leather boots and hair flung wispily back; me in my one-piece hazy sky blue overalls with a thin blanket of hair the color of the late- summer pond reeds and wheat. Toe to heel, heel to toe, one foot, then the other; and for every four steps I took, my father took one. The calloused and creased bark beneath my feet was so much the same as the hand I was holding— rough and cracked like sun-dried cowhide. I choose to have that memory more than the others.

Some nights I would go out to the woods to swing from birches and crack sticks against beech trees. To listen to the crack carry, to be captured only by outstretched leafy arms and the ears of no one listening.

Once a month, when night was bright as day, Barred owls would shatter the veneer of stillness with their signature Who-Cooks-For-Youuu hoot, like a pane of tempered glass exploding into infinity and falling to earth like evanescent crystalline dew droplets. On those nights, color faded and sight was in varying depths of black and white like the undecided blues of the ocean.

On those days when my house erupted with steam rising from the chimney and cries rising from the walls, my sister and I would slip into our green rain boots and head to the woods where those same outstretched arms snatched up the running echo of the white house before our ears could. Then the woods became safe, serenity, solitude, silence—my sister sat with me. Each of us understanding the other’s thoughts as if they had simultaneously jumped ship.

When my father moved, he went to a studio where he found occupation as an artist and did artist things. I would visit him there and his clothes would be crusted with splattered drips of the setting sun. Crimson-sky-sun-ocean-mud- trees-fall leaves-oxidized barge black, all of which somehow never turned brown.

My father loved boxes. When I went to his studio I would open them when he wasn’t looking. I was always waiting to find the thing that made him leave.