The resolve to live in the woods with only the two dogs for company had been building unexamined a long time. He had picked up the germ of the idea when a boy. Back then, he had come to look at trees as the principal emblem of a hokey folk mythology stitched together from rags of Tolkien, Led Zeppelin, and who knows what else. Beneath the Ents and Dryads and the mumbo-jumbo was an instinctive sense that human life could be redeemed only through the imagination, a faculty somehow intimate with the natural world. At university he became enamored with Keats and Yeats, and a bookish sophistication put clothes on those raw early beliefs. In this new attire, those convictions persisted, concealed, a ghostly psychic presence. So, when in middle age he finally made up his mind to pursue the Unabomber lifestyle, it felt like solving a puzzle that had troubled him for years, perhaps his whole life. If the answer did not exactly make him happy, possessing it brought some satisfaction. He was going to meet the inevitable.
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desired, and got, ’twas but a dream of thee.
He liked to append snatches of verse like this to the situations he encountered. What John Donne had comprehended was that significant events feel both surprising and inescapable: the unexpected realization of a familiar dream. Or nightmare.
His partner had no objections.
“This is so much better than just saying we split up,” she said. “ ‘He decided to live like a hermit in the woods alone with the dogs.’ If that’s what I get to tell people, fine.”
“It’s you or nobody at all.” The gallantry pleased him.
“Then I’m losing out to nobody. I hope you’ll be happy together. Just be sure to keep the pups safe.”
The pups were grown dogs. Seated at the kitchen table, the separees considered the two animals, each a whirl of fur in his own bed. The dogs gazed back. The eyes of Wizard, the youngest, were round with uncomprehending curiosity, fizzing with energy as his jaw moved up and down with each breath. The senior dog, Parsley, watched with dread, expression radiating unappeasable need. Something big was happening. Parsley knew this from his wet nose to the tip of the forward-curving tail waving limply in surrender. Whatever was happening was bad. This much he understood.
~
Their relationship had wound down like a mechanical watch. That it would last long enough for this to happen might have surprised them both back in the day. Before their son was born, their fights could have been measured in megatons. The arguments were baffling, directionless. Something trivial — conflicting opinions about a movie, late arrival at a restaurant — led into a maze of escalating accusation and recrimination. There had been times when it seemed they stuck with each other out of morbid compulsion, the way smokers stick with cigarettes. But not only did they remain a couple, they had a child. For a long time, the child was incomparably wonderful.
The trainee dad took pride in decking out the baby’s room. The decals — the smiling animals, the map of the world — the well-stocked bookcase, the shining white crib, and plush toys. The atmosphere created was not solely, or even primarily, for the baby. In the first weeks, a saucepan waved in the air would tease out a smile as readily as would a felt elephant or wool donkey. The truth was that the anthropomorphic zoo on the walls and the rainbow cartography were there to make adults receptive to infancy. Only much later did the baby come to appreciate the décor.
Parenthood became the one big thing the couple had in common. Why not? After all, they each described a little boy in terms that matched almost exactly. They visited the same city playgrounds, attended the same birthday parties, adored or distrusted the same preschool teachers. When he said the boy came “trailing clouds of glory,” she indulged him with a smile. Encouraged, he made her wince with “Heaven lies about us in our infancy.” He snuggled with the boy at night and recited “The Jumblies,” who went to sea in a sieve. At the refrain — “Far and few, far and few / Are the lands where the Jumblies live” — the child’s eyes widened, limpid and joyful. Man and boy were one, connected in that moment by the rollicking nonsense of the divine Edward Lear.
It couldn’t last. With terrible rapidity, the teenage years were upon them, the age of individuation — the Great Separation. Their son’s eyes became furtive or impenetrable. Shades of the prison house began to close upon the growing boy. As he withdrew, the little family unit fell apart.
Dad shouldered the loss moodily. Mum was more expressive.
“What have you done with my beautiful little boy?” she yelled at their cohabiting teenager. The boy had been mystified at the disappointment elicited by his latest illegal behavior. “Is he in there? What did you do to him? Bring him back!”
Later, Dad watched from the living room window as his son slouched into the distance, trailing clouds from a vape pen.
They flee from me who sometime did me seek.
~
On learning of the couple’s separation, friends said they must have once had something valuable together, a powerful source of gravitational attraction. How else could they have endured so long as a biplanetary system? He thought this over. Miserable childhoods. There was the secret of their success. Neither had much fun as a kid, and the consequent insecurity had been their first bond. Then they had a child of their own. And when that son, despite every best effort, grew up discontented and perpetually distracted, the whole mechanism ground to halt. A horrible circularity had been achieved, like some sadistic Thomas Hardy novel. Surprising. Inevitable.
His partner started a new job importing and exporting textiles. She would travel practically nonstop and couldn’t wait to get going, eager to launch into her next act now their son was leaving home. Her first stop was Barcelona before powering on to Milan. That initial trip alone would eat up a month.
What was left for him was the classic fate of the middle-aged man, the life stage — or was it death stage? — he had long called in the privacy of his mind “shutting-up shop.” Having seen this played out by other men, he had thought his own fate would be different. He had spotted what was coming, after all, and could take evasive action. But in truth everyone knew about shutting-up shop; they simply kept mum. Without comment, the men who succumbed stopped listening to new music. They ceased to read fiction, switching to military history or political biography. Their circle of friends shrank. The sufferers increasingly retreated to the garage, garden shed, study, or discreetly positioned barstool. There was a vibrant public discourse about the social inequities and indignities heaped upon middle-aged women. He didn’t doubt these complaints were justified or that they underscored a genuine wrong. But to his eyes middle-aged women looked positive and purposeful. They had helpful advice and kindness to disperse. Workplaces thrived under their experienced guidance. When people socialized, these women were trusted with the kids, were dab hands at getting them to bed and making sandwiches. More generally, they organized itineraries, formulated plans, and arranged gatherings. In contrast, the men became proud in their aimless crabbiness. Birthdays and holidays passed them by unacknowledged. They hovered monarchical at the buffet table, deterring hungry guests with boring stories and saturnine looks. Children recoiled. Younger men who saw the warning signs tended to fantasize that a lot of money or status could prevent them decaying with time into the same asphyxiating irrelevance. They were wrong.
If there was no choice but to shut up shop, he refused to become a burden on society.
~
Their son was leaving home for an indifferent university, advancing on it with fidgety indifference. From now on, he would divide his days between being high and being hungover, warming his hands at the fierce bonfire of his opportunities. It hadn’t been all that different for his father at the same age. But Dad had thought his own shiftlessness originated in the discomfort and unhappiness of the family home. Why had he ever been so arrogant as to imagine a few cheerful nursery decals and classic bedtime reading could save his son from destiny?
Mum was traveling already. Wizard and Parsley accompanied father and son to the airport. Near the check-in desks, the boy made a show of petting the dogs, mussing their coats as they shifted anxiously, spooked by the wheeled luggage and the crowd. He had never walked them without first being chivied and berated into submission.
Father and son hugged, and Dad spoke his parting words:
Take thy fair hour [insert name]. Time be thine,
And thy best graces spend it at thy will.
The boy shook his head in a mime of amused patience.“When my dad needs a piss,” he told his roommate that night, “he can’t excuse himself like a normal person. He says, ‘There is a tide in the affairs of men.’ ”
~
Redundant as a parent, he gave up his job. He would freelance from an A-frame deep in the wooded mountains of Vermont. The previous owners had come here to ski. The place was decorated with vintage resort posters and slender antique skis, woodgrain bright beneath the varnish, crude bindings like giant bottle openers. To this he added one family photo — a three-headed portrait, all smiles, infant raised in his arms, a zoo in the background. When the picture had been taken, the little family had been excited to embark on life’s great journey, not knowing they had already arrived.
On the opposite wall, a cartoon skier crouched, a stylized Z on a terrifying incline. “Everything will kill you, so choose something fun!” read the poster. He had no interest in skiing and wouldn’t try it now. He had chosen his means of terminal fun.
The dogs were different here. In the woods and on the broad expanse of shaggy grass in front of the house, the weight of urban life was lifted from Parsley. Pain retreated from his heartbroken eyes. Woodland scents were gentle and varied. The city’s interminable and meaningless to and fro of deliveries, neighbors, and passersby, which had seared the nerves of a fatalistic canine, came to an end. Parsley was at peace.
In the outdoors, Wizard gamboled, circling his brother, bowing and pouncing, teasing the old dog into an occasional burst of play. In the new dispensation, the Wiz had his three-being pack, the frisbee, and the great outdoors. It was enough. In the woods, the smaller wildlife fanned away, rippling below the leaf cover at his approach, Wizard galumphing in pursuit as if in oversize pajamas, a clownish mimicry of hunting.
The walks lasted hours. Striding beside the animals, the man’s mind expanded to fill the steep and silent woods. There was no cell connection, and he finally dismounted from the maniacal carousel of news reporting — updated daily, hourly, by the minute, the second. His thoughts turned away from the roughly sketched half-realities of journalism, where the issues of the moment were dropped not at the progress of history but on ceasing to capture eyeballs and to harvest clicks. In place of current affairs grew irresolvable and elevating questions, many of them prompted by the novels and poems he was reading. This kept the woodsman’s mind supple, as the walks did his aging legs. With Parsley a little behind and the Wizard tearing up the forest floor, he recited poetry. His inner anthology wasn’t prodigious — he was no Harold Bloom — but he had works from each of his favorite poets by heart. (How else would he know they were his favorites?) These verses were a physical part of him, etched into mind, into his body.
“This morning’s walk,” he might tell the dogs on their return, “was brought to you by Wordsworth, Elizabeth Bishop, and James Fenton.”
~
Solitude, a punishment for his younger self, had become a luxury in endless supply. The only time he felt lonely was on encountering people. That mostly happened when shopping for necessities. At a roadside deli, he was momentarily entertained by the banter of a woman clerk merrily belittling two twenty-something men. She batted away an ancient ruin who had been pawing at the tip jar. But the woodsman’s heart sank when she greeted him with arm’s-length good manners.
As he was leaving, a large man dressed all in denim stepped into his path. His forked ginger beard was coarse enough to scrub an oil tanker clean.
“You live in that A-frame off Aintnomore Road.”
He reluctantly conceded.
“You’ll be needing the snow cleared in the winter. My brother-in-law plows for most properties on that side of the mountain. He’ll come by and speak to you.”
“Perhaps I could email him or get him on the phone? My dogs aren’t that friendly.”
Embarrassed to have been intimidated, he hoped the ginger giant didn’t spot the dogs. Their floppy ears and daft tongues dangled goofily at the window as the car exited the lot.
~
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.
In those first Vermont weeks, late September into October, Keats’s “To Autumn” was the poem recited most. The woodland’s variegated leaves — copper, burgundy, gold — were the scales of a slumbering dragon, under whose sheltering wings went the woodsman and his dogs. He realized for the first time how dogs had shaped his taste in poetry and intensified his appreciation. Walking with them, declaiming from memory, an old habit, he listened more intently to the words and their rhythms than he would have with the text to hand.
As he and the dogs set out early from the house, the sky blanched at the sun’s arrival before blushing.
Observe the morn in russet mantle clad
Stride o’er the dew of yon high eastward hill.
The words paced through the ear on iambic feet and flooded the woodsman with light. Wizard leapt for the frisbee in his hand.
-
As the weeks passed, Parsley would fall behind on their walks, sniffing at some unremarkable patch of ground, turning in circles, prevaricating endlessly, as if about to pee. Sometimes the old dog just stood stationary and watched, proud and sad, as woodsman and Wizard walked ahead. Parsley was especially reluctant to relinquish an elevated position. One day, he had to be carried home a long distance, gazing pitifully up into the woodsman’s face. Lowered onto the kitchen floor, Parsley let loose a horrendous mess from his backside. The shit was like tar. Panicking at what this meant for his old friend, the woodsman inadvertently knelt in the filth while cleaning up.
Stomach and heart constricting, he considered the soiled and sodden paper in his hands, his stained jeans, the shivering, regretful Parsley.
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
~
Sitting in an armchair, he watched the snowstorm from the A-frame’s steepling windows. A time-lapsed cosmos of white stars was revolving in the twilight.
So good luck came, and on my roof did light,
Like noiseless snow, or as the dew of night:
Not all at once, but gently, as the trees
Are by the sunbeams tickled by degrees.
Parsley’s head rested on one stockinged foot. The old dog, newly fearful of the cold, had barely left the house in days. Nonetheless, he was exhausted. He had lost weight, and the vet had nothing to recommend other than dietary adjustments. Wizard put his front paws on the armrest, standing to explore with an extended sniff the face the woodsman obligingly lowered. The Wiz liked to sniff faces very close and at length without ever making contact, not even with the briefest lick. It was a gentle olfactory scanning, a careful analysis, and it never failed to make the man happier. The snow lifted his spirits too. It accentuated his camaraderie with the dogs. If the snow kept up, they might be cut off from the outside world, since he had never contacted the man who plowed the driveways. But the fear of being trapped was nothing compared to the beauty of the falling snow. At least not at first. Only in the morning, when the snow’s depth could be measured in feet and internet access was lost, did he start to worry. Wet flakes fell determinedly now, dropping fast in the breezeless air. The snow was keen to make the most of its bridgehead into mountain territory.
And it’s afternoon, yet night comes chattering down
Like the shutters of a shop in a recession.
A. E. Stallings wrote those lines about a winter evening. A rare living poet in his inner anthology (they’re outnumbered, after all), she was categorized by critics as a New Formalist without any apparent sense of irony. When a day of sunless glare came to an end, the snow reached up nearly to the raised deck on the house front. Regular shoveling had kept the deck accessible to the dogs. Wizard hopped and skipped, biting at the airborne snowflakes. Parsley shivered and then, succumbing to the chill, lay down in surrender. Once again, the woodsman carried him indoors. Again, Parsley squirted black liquid on the floor, head hanging, eyes melting with shame. That night the woodsman made up a bed in the living room, unwilling to endanger the bedroom carpet or to sleep separately from his friend. Lying there, waiting for sleep, the room glowing with snow-reflected light, the woodsman stroked the old dog, vertebrae pronounced against his fingers. Parsley panted, breath stinking. There was no choice but to tend to him, and this came as a relief, this sense of rightness in a moral challenge unsullied by complexity. Caring for his son had once been this simple.
For weeks, he had acquired extra stocks of nonperishable food on each shopping trip. At the time, he told himself he was playacting, posing as a prepper, a grownup indulging in kids’ games. He was grateful now for the piles of tinned chickpeas, tuna, and soup, the freeze-dried backpackers’ meals, and the enormous sacks of kibble.
The three of them confined indoors, he played catch and tug-of-war with the Wiz, struggling with guilt on seeing Parsley’s eyes grow large with envy. A rawhide chew was welcomed by the old dog. He went at it with gusto. But that happy moment was undercut when the rawhide reappeared along with the morning’s kibble. Parsley might starve to death at this rate.
~
He turned the house over, looking for something that would make an ersatz sled but came up blank. He would have to carry Parsley. The Wiz couldn’t stay behind, so the woodsman took him out to see how he managed on the snow. Wizard did better than the heavy biped at first, skipping high over the frozen undulations. But within a few minutes his paws were balled in ice. The dog began to limp and then, each paw a block almost as big as his head, he lay down and tried to lick his legs free. The woodsman would have to carry both dogs, one in a backpack, the other in his arms, through snow waist deep and here and there even deeper. On reaching the end of his own long track, they would be on Aintnomore Road. That would presumably have been plowed, and Wizard would be able to walk. But from there it would be hours to the vet, and the road, if it had in fact been cleared, would be seasoned with salt that, despite the musher’s wax, would torture the dogs’ paws. And to cap it all they might hike an hour before a cell connection would permit a call to confirm the vet was even at her practice.
Back indoors, Parsley was under the coffee table, rolled up tight. His eyes shone pitiably from the deepening shadow.
There would be no flight through the snow.
They also serve who only stand and wait.
~
Two days passed without sign of a thaw or plow. Black shit had leached into the kitchen floorboards. A nailbrush was in order. On the third day, the sun angled into the living room. The house achieved an equatorial warmth come midday. Parsley rose onto all fours and growled at the Wiz in competition for a length of knotted rope. Wizard pranced in response. The woodsman put out some kibble, and Parsley ate. For a while, hope beckoned. But the old dog couldn’t keep the food down and retreated again under the coffee table.
Sometime that night, Parsley took himself to the kitchen area. The man was awake and got up to pet him for a while. In the morning, curled up in front of the dishwasher, Parsley’s skinny frame, devoid of life, looked more emaciated than ever — a puppet without its animating hand. Burial would have to wait for the ground to thaw. The woodsman rearranged the contents of the freezer, emptying its largest drawer. Wizard and he would live on defrosting salmon fillets for at least a week. He wrapped Parsley in a blanket, grateful the dog’s eyes were closed, and gifted him the fate of Walt Disney. He took a last look at Parsley’s face as he did so, anticipating the time he would remove the dog and afraid of what he might look like when long frozen.
On the shit-infused floor he sat, legs out in front of him, limbs heavy and weak. Exhaustion descended. As a boy, he had taken pride in his performance playing tag. He could dodge and duck, shaking off faster kids, evading them with inspired agility, rolling under outstretched hands, leaping obstacles. Eventually he would be overwhelmed by the sheer number of opponents in pursuit. Chest ablaze, a stitch in one side, he was grateful to give up, to sink to his knees and submit. The final inevitability was surprising only in being delayed for so long. With Parsley dead, no gorgeous line of verse came forward in consolation. There was merely a relentless sense of loss, a ravenous emptiness, a giant howling drain in which his sobbing echoed without pause.
The separation, the failure of his most significant human bonds, his inadequacies as a father, the way he had tried to guide his son over the years and yet watched the boy’s compass spin — all these shaming defeats descended in a crushing scrum that left him breathless. His chest was tight. There was a stabbing pain in his shoulder.
Wizard was sniffing his face, observing him intensely. The panic ebbed. Sleep came. When the man woke, it was dark and yet there was a subtle glow in the air. The shutters had lifted just a little.
Mark Martin’s fiction has appeared in the Manchester Review, Plenitudes, Dark Mountain, Stand, Storgy, Mythaxis, and the Missouri Review (online and in print). He has a story forthcoming in the Dalhousie Review. Martin was the overall winner of the Fish Publishing Short Story Competition 2021 and the managing editor at Verso Books. He lives in Brooklyn but grew up in England.
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