DOI: 10.3726/9781915734822.003.0002

1: Groundhog in the woodpile

I trudge across the quiet, snowy field facing south towards the hardwood forest on the farm that my parents bought back in 1979, when I was 8 years old. Now, I am 13 years old. The bitter February afternoon wind stings my cheeks. A little knapsack is slung over my shoulder.

In the woods, I follow the imprint of tractor wheels in the snow to a plywood shack, grey and faded from the weather. When we first moved to the farm 6 years ago, my sisters, Lucy and Ava, and I decorated the shack so we could play there. Now, the shack looks abandoned.

Opening the door, I look inside. Three rickety wicker chairs and a small table sit in the middle of the floor. Two rough-hewn, 3-foot boards are nailed to the wall beside the door, providing a makeshift set of shelves. A rectangular piece of light blue cotton fabric with tiny sprigs of flowers, now threadbare and frayed, hangs over the cracked window with rusty thumbtacks. There is a short stack of mismatched plates and bowls on the shelf. A couple of framed pictures hang crookedly on one wall. The floor is rotted away in one corner. One of the hinges on the door is rusted and broken. It smells like rat piss and mouse shit. We never could keep the rodents out of there.

I close the door and turn around, tramping a few steps in the the snow towards a large old stump. I sit down and open my knapsack, pulling out a wad of newspaper, a few short pieces of kindling and two small wedges of chopped wood from the woodpile beside the stove in our kitchen, a small book of matches, a fork, a pair of metal tongs, a can opener, a thermos of hot chocolate, and a can of Libby’s Brown Beans. I clear away the snow in front of me until a small fire pit encircled by rocks appears. Among the rocks, I stack pieces of kindling, one on top of the other, in the shape of a tiny log cabin, like I learned at summer church camp. Crumpled paper stuffed inside the middle of the cabin lights quickly, and smoke drifts up into the frosty air. Blowing on the flames, I add more kindling, then, a piece of wood.

Opening the can of brown beans, I tuck it beside the piece of wood in the coals. I lean back on the stump. The forest stands on guard around me. Sugar maple, green ash, and yellow birch trees reach skyward from the crusty snow, cold and hardened from the long winter months. I feel held by their presence.

I breathe in the quiet air, and the stillness envelops me. I relish being away from the house. Away from Lucy’s many health issues. My father’s frustration and demeaning comments. My mom’s quest to understand what’s wrong with my sister, how to help her—the doctors, hospital visits, medical and psychological tests, psychiatrists in white coats—and how to keep it all together. My own guilt that I am not sick. That I, too, am irritated with her. That I’m embarrassed by her. That I can’t save her.

Then, a soft, strained sound comes from the calloused logs that my father and I stacked a few hours ago. I cock my head to the side, trying to make out the sound, but there is only the sound of the crackling fire in front of me.

In a few days, my father and I will return for the logs. He will buck them up with his chainsaw, and I will toss the pieces onto the trailer attached to the tractor. Then, we’ll drive back to the house, unload the firewood on the porch, and stack it in neatly arranged piles.

When I help my father around the farm, he is impressed with my strength and determination. I try to make up for the fact that he has three daughters. He never says it out loud, but I think he wants a son. Sometimes, he jokes that he’s the only man in the house, that he’s surrounded by girls, outnumbered. Mostly, I think he’s okay with it, but sometimes, there’s something in his voice, something that suggests he got the short end of the stick. That he’s longing for something that would make his life complete. That he feels alone.

And I feel guilty that I’m a girl.

I am determined to be the son he never had. To be his right-hand boy and help him around the farm. I don’t mind so much because it means I get to spend more time with him.

And, it feels good being boyish. It feels good being noticed. It feels good when he brags to my mom about how strong I am, what a good worker I am. After a morning of tossing hay bales into the barn, he proclaims proudly one afternoon over the lunch table, “Katy sure is robust!” Pride brims inside me.

I eat a forkful of brown beans from the can in the fire, the warm syrupy legumes soft and velvety in my mouth.

Again, I hear the strained sound coming from the pile of logs. I drop my fork into the can of beans and rise from my stump in the snow. Following my ear to the edge of the woodpile, I kneel beside the logs, listening. It’s the sound of a small animal breathing. Wheezing, panting, and grasping at life in the darkness between the logs. There is an awkward rhythm to the breath and the soft sound of “kuh…kuh…kuh” with each mouthful of air. There is a pause too, between gasps; the thin space between holding on and letting go.

As I crouch in the snow, the sound moves into my body. Down past my throat, along my windpipe, and into my heart. I realize it is the laboured breathing of the groundhog my father had shot earlier that day. He’s always on a mission to rid the farm of groundhogs because they dig large holes around the fields. Holes that could cause one of our horses to break a leg should their hoof land in one. Holes that could cause a tractor to get jammed in the ground and break an axle.

Once, I accompanied my father as he drove our pickup truck out into the fields of the farm, looking for groundhog holes. When he found one, he blocked it with tightly packed dirt. “The back door,” he told me. Then, he located the front door of the burrow and fed a large hose down the hole that he attached to the tailpipe of the truck. He turned on the engine and gassed the unsuspecting groundhog family to death.

As I huddle there by the woodpile, listening to the dying groundhog, rage and dread suddenly bubble up and melt together into fiery lava in my blood, searing the thin membranes of my veins. The dark, red sponge marrow in my bones screams inside of me and rushes up to my neck, spreading up across my face.

A sudden urge grips me. I want to tear the log pile apart with fierce, angry fingers. Rip through the timber to the huffing and gasping until I find her, trapped, terrified and small, her brown, coarse fur caked with blood, eyes brimming with fear. Reach past my fear, grasping her limp body.

If her yellow rodent teeth sank into my hand from panic, drawing blood, I would ignore the pain. I would pull her up out of the icy logs and clasp her to my heart inside my red plaid lumber jacket. I would stroke her body and hold her as she rattles and rasps and dies in my arms. At least, she would die with the warmth of my body. Not alone in a cold, hard, winter woodpile.

But, I don’t do any of it.

Instead, I kneel in the crunchy, frigid snow, listening to her short, laboured breathing, and cry. Frozen in my loyalty to my father and his gun and the pickup truct with the gassing hose. Frozen in the fear that if I went against his actions and dug the groundhog out of the woodpile to try and save her, I would have to face him and tell him what I did, knowing it wouldn’t end well for the groundhog anyway. Frozen in the understanding that if I defied him and told him that I didn’t like that he killed groundhogs, he would be angry and something bad might happen to me.

Like the time when Lucy was on a weekend pass from London Psychiatric Hospital. She was living there because she was sick in the mind and my parents didn’t know how to take care of her. On that Sunday afternoon when it was time for her to go back, she refused to get in the car. She didn’t want to go back to that place. That place where people shuffled aimlessly up and down the hallway, mumbling to themselves. Where they were slumped over in chairs lined up, side by side, against the wall. So, my parents called our family doctor. He drove all the way out from Cambridge to our farm to give Lucy a needle in her arm that reduced her to jelly at the kitchen table. Then, he and my father carried her out to the car, and put her in the back seat. My mom told me and Ava to squeeze in beside her and we drove her back to the hospital. We never talked about it.

I hear a gunshot off in the distance that jolts me back to the groundhog in the woodpile. Tears stream down my red cheeks, turning icy in the frigid air.

The grey clouds part, and shafts of late afternoon sunlight stream down through the trees. I realize that I don’t do anything about the groundhog because, somewhere deep down, I know there is nothing I can do for her now.

Her tiny, struggling breath slows down. Then, there is one short, final gasp and it is silent.

I place my bare hand quietly on the logs and turn my tear-stained face up to the sky, inhaling the late afternoon winter air. I feel the groundhog’s spirit float away. Shafts of sun dance among the treetops. The wind spirits waft around me, through me. The treetops bend and bow in rapture.

My knees are cold and soaked from kneeling in the snow beside the woodpile. I stand up and look back at my fire, now smoldering.

Then, a rush of a thousand tiny groundhogs flows into the rivers inside of me, swirling and swimming through the tunnels in my marrow, laughing and singing through my bones.