all the ways we kill and die

The ghosts in the wood behind my home are not of the wood, they are of me, and I am the one who takes them there.

I cut a path in that wood. It is a young wood, not yet second growth, and the stands of green ash and thickets of sassafras swarm so tightly that the way was nearly impenetrable before I labored days with axe and handsaw and great long-handled loppers to cut a trail through.

Now I walk that path in all seasons, I walk it alone with the ghosts of my dead brothers, and I tell them stories, and point out each item of significance, and note each change from one felled tree to the next. 

Be careful when you walk here, I say, this where the sharp stump of young ash pokes through; it could snare a foot or ankle and trip the unaware. And here is the last vestige of a two-thumbs-thick sassafras trunk; oh, you should have smelled it when I cut it down, sweet and oily and fit for old-time tea. 

And if you ever get lost, I say, just follow the trail of dismembered wild grape vines, each guillotined shoulder high, their fat woody foundation cut out from under them, leaving the bulk orphaned in the canopy above. The wild grape so terrorizes the wood, attacking only the oldest and tallest trunks, it’s as though some nameless malignant gardener planted them at the base of each grand tree. See, here is the maple I saved from that choking viny infestation. This one lived. And that elm. And another ash farther in. They lived because I lopped off the strangling vine and withered the grape’s leafy blanket and gave them a new chance to find the sun.

This is what I tell myself.

I walk my path and show the grape vines to ghosts, because my friends are at war thousands of miles away or dead already because of it or bound in wheelchairs and propped on unsteady metal poles.They cannot walk the path with me, so like a museum tour guide with no patrons, I show it to myself.

And here was where I found piles of ancient sheet metal that crumbled to red dust as I cleared them. And here you can see what remains of a farmer’s furrows, diverting rainwater through the clay-heavy soil to the remnants of a shallow retention pond beyond. Each year the depression fills a little more with layers of leaf crop, so that now it is more marsh than watering hole, but you can still find the bermed banks among the honeysuckle bushes and nearby, growing feral, the odd apple tree that has far outgrown its fruit, and see how the pond bed has filled with cottonwoods, the only tree that can survive such persistent wetting. 

The sheet metal and furrows and shallow marsh and sparse untended apple trees, now stretching to the sky like their maple cousins, are all the evidence you will find that farms once covered my island where my house and wood now reside. But the orchards proved unprofitable, the land more valuable abandoned, and so the wood came in and slowly undid generations of labor as it retook the soil for itself. Now it is all I can do to keep the worst of the wild grape off the mightiest elms and oaks along my path. Kill this one to save another. Save that one but not another. I can’t clear the whole wood, I know; one by one I do what I can.

In winter the snows come and turn the wood into a web of black wet trunks and white-lined branches, and the wind scours the forest clean like an astringent that scalds your red face raw. In spring the mud and mire overtake, but the observant can find the path by following the cookie crumb trail of just-exposed deer droppings. In the summer the sun will bake the path hard, and a fair wind cools, and every weed and twig must grow grow grow to form a knee-high net that tangles every step.

But in the fall the ground cover falls away, and the insects are gone, and the ash yellows and the maples become red and gold, and my wife Jessie says she loves me and she will now come with me since it’s her favorite time to the walk in the woods. I hold her hand, and she smiles at me, and she knows the ghosts walk with us, even in the brilliant sun. But we can almost forget it on such a day and anyway, if the ghosts are in my woods then they are no longer shut tight with us in our home. 

When I’m alone, it takes me only a few minutes of brisk walking to get to the back of our property, but once you break through the last thicket a new country is revealed. I remember the day I cut that final section of path and saw it for the first time. The land opened to brush like a hedge, then tangled scrub, then stunted oaks covered in gout-like puffs and tumorous spiny galls. Behind them lines of tall pines, and further on cedars rose and blotted out the sun, leaving mold and moss and the decaying limbs of their neighbors below. 

The gunshots of hunters rang. A snowmobile track crashed through from one side, then an uneven path broken by muddy pools ready to suction off an unwary boot. I considered, standing at the edge of my yellow wood.

I have heard that, past the wall of undergrowth, a maze of trails leads to coyote dens and deer hides and creeks that have no name. I have heard there is a deep pond guarded by a thick wall of cattails and swarms of thirsty mosquitoes claim it for their own. I have heard the swamp is growing, and groves of massive drowned willows bulge into the sky like great mastodon skeletons, their bare bones infested with metastasized wild grape vines so pervasive and hungry you wonder if the leg-thick tendrils are reaching for you. 

I have been told all this but never seen. 

For then I heard my Jessie calling to me, calling me to come home. So I turned back and retraced my steps and some of my ghosts followed me but some carried on alone.

Excerpt from All the Ways We Kill and Die, by Brian Castner (Arcade Publishing, 2016)