Excerpt from THE WHISPER OF LEAVES

The following material is excerpted from a manuscript of the novel and may differ slightly from the actual publication.  This is copyrighted material.

PART II

*

Odysseus in Disguise.

Coming south into Lues, Josie Darling had strange flashes of recognition. Certain turns in the road, certain smells set her heart pounding with a sense of nostalgia, a shadow smile on her heart. It was nothing she could place exactly. It was the spirit of the countryside, the way the unpaved roads now and then twisted away into the forest. Josie saw one of these coming up at some distance, so had a chance to slow down and contemplate it. She was nearly to the town of Lues and tired from her second long day of driving, but this road held promise and she turned off the highway excitedly. She thought this was the way home, but before she found it, the road came up against Lues Creek and stopped.

There was a little parking area, but no one was in sight. She was now five miles off the highway, in deep country, and the stillness of the place gave her chills. The only sound was water rushing over stones. An errant wind stirred the high branches of the trees. She got out of her VW and walked along the creek, checking the wooded ridges just to be sure she was alone.

She had a no idea where home was. She only knew she was close. Upstream or down. She remembered Lues Creek had cut behind their property. West Lues Creek had meandered through a field less than a quarter of a mile from their front door. There was a covered bridge over it, a long gravel road leading up to their property. This wasn’t the place, but the sand beside the creek reminded her of her last and only real memory of Lues. It was a memory which was nearly twenty years old.

Josie had watched five dark sedans coming up the road to Jack Hazard’s and her mother’s trailer. They came fast and kicked up big funnels of dust behind them. As the cars got closer she saw they belonged to the state police. Behind her, the door of the trailer creaked open. Jack stood next to her. She knew it was Jack, but she couldn’t remember his face. She remembered the great bending curve of the road as it collided with their land, the dust, the cars, and even how the cars pulled off the road and came across the front yard, sliding broadside to a stop. More than a half-dozen state troopers took up positions behind the sedans, their shotguns visible like black pipes against the gray sky. One of them called out something on a bullhorn. His voice echoed in the trees behind them. Three troopers ran at them hard, their weapons silent in their hands. Two of them took Jack down to the ground. The third took Josie’s wrist. She twisted away under his grip and broke loose. As soon as she was free, she ran for the woods. Behind her, one of them shouted, “Get the kid!”

Leaves slapped Josie’s face as she ran. She was certain they meant to kill her. She heard the trooper following her, his heavy breath, the crunch of leaves, the cracking of sticks. As they came to the creek, the man took Josie’s arm. He lifted her into the air. “I’m not going to hurt you!” he shouted.

For answer, Josie kicked him. He was still carrying his shotgun and his face was red from the effort of running. He set his gun down in the grass and knelt before her so she could see his face. “Now listen to me!” he said. He held her by her elbows, pinning them behind her back, shaking her angrily. She stopped struggling. They were both breathing heavily. She saw his shotgun. She remembered that she had kept staring at it as he said something Josie couldn’t understand. His big face was nearly against hers. She smelled the stink of tobacco on his breath and wrestled against his hold.

At the trailer she saw Jack cuffed and being pushed into one of the sedans. Jack looked back toward her, his face bloody with a fine scarlet sheen. It was the only face of Jack Hazard Josie would ever remember. She shouted to him: “JAAACK!” Inside the car, Jack looked down between his knees, ashamed.

The trooper holding her said in the calmest voice imaginable, “You don’t want to talk to him, honey. That man there is the one that killed your mamma.”

For years after that, Josie told herself her mother was not really dead, that there had been a terrible mistake. She was certain, as only children can be, her mother was alive and waiting for Josie to come back. She thought if she could just get home she would find her, and everything would make sense. Eventually Josie had given up the idea and with it gradually, whatever vestiges of memory she had carried out of Lues. For a time, the faces of her past were like shadows. Then, without photographs, without stories, without those accidental collisions with history that most of us encounter, even that faded. Now almost nothing of the first years of her life remained. Least of all, her memory of the road home.

She knew the reason, of course. It wasn’t just that she left and never went back. It was because her new parents had always hated Lues and Josie’s life in it. The Darlings had many virtues. They were fine, good people who took Josie out of the foster system shortly after her removal from Lues. They had loved her as their own, and all they ever asked in return, besides her natural affection for them, was that she forget the past, that she not talk about Lues or Jack Hazard or how her mother had lived and died. They told her that that time in her life was over. She could be anything she wanted, they said. She could make any life she cared to, but first she had to leave those things from Lues behind her. They told her to forget the past in many ways. They were gentle and persuasive, and Josie learned to honor their fears as her own. She forgot her first childhood so long and so hard that it came back as something else, something unrecognizable and terrible. She let it get out of hand, and even then she kept her silence. She did not look back. As a teenager she had told no one that Jack Hazard had begun to come out from under her bed, his face a bloody mask of rage, his killing only half done. She never spoke of the woman’s wailing voice that would sometimes called across the threshold of dawn, “Josie!”, a haunting lament or summoning or warning. Like the town of Lues itself, that voice held terrible secrets, and she had always found reason to resist its seductions.

There was a point in Josie’s life when things made sense, and Josie’s memories became like other people’s: splotchy and embarrassing, random as a roulette wheel, neurotically normal, desperately ordinary. That was the childhood Josie Darling claimed. She had made her revolutions and compromises. She did some of the things we all shouldn’t have done but did. She missed some of the other things. She was a bright, fearless scholar, a fumbling young girl with a few mistakes under her belt. She was guilty of her share of events and innocent of most things. There were some poignant memories of this time, her second childhood, some things she would have liked to do over. Josie had long ago come to terms with that life, if we can ever really say we have made our peace with the child we were. She grew up in her adoptive home a perfectly middle-class, suburban girl. She had hated as much as the next teenager the prefabricated life of the Midwestern small town. Unlike most of her friends, Josie got out as soon as she could. She headed east to where the ivy grows. Like most revolutionaries, she came back home because she missed it. A year later, Josie got her courage back and this time she left for good. She went off determined to make her own way and build her own home.

This was the life Josie could trace. There were records of her immodest achievements, official and otherwise. There were memories and stories and friendships and losses. That girl was Josie Darling. But there had always been the other childhood, the yawning emptiness of losing what she could not remember, the whispering of some far voice which told her that Josie Fortune was not entirely the same person as Josie Darling.

And so she had come home. It wasn’t exactly the triumphant return to Lues she had fantasized so many times when she was still a child, but it wasn’t a bad return either. She had gotten a job teaching at the university without ever mentioning in her letter of application or in the subsequent phone interview that Lues was her first home. Josie liked coming back in secret. Not a soul in all the town imagined that Deborah Josephine Darling was really Josie Fortune come back. She was a kind of Odysseus, gone twenty years and slipping home in another disguise, the perfect disguise, in fact. She was no longer seven-years-old!

She looked back along the creek bed, then checked her watch. She needed to get back to the highway. The moment she turned, Josie heard a sound of rushing leaves behind her. Instinctively crouching down, ready for attack, she turned and saw it was only a fat doe walking into the stream. It had not been more than fifteen feet from her, and she had missed it. It was moving through the water now. Step, step. Suddenly it leapt out of the creek and up the steep bank. It bounded over the broad, flat forest floor heading for the ridge. She saw the white tail, the jagged path it took, then nothing more. That fast and it was gone. Josie was still breathing hard, still fighting down the fear that had grabbed her. Her heart thumped with adrenaline. She was thinking it could have been worse. It could have been anything. Or anyone. Out here it wasn’t always nice, what you found. She was in the middle of the woods and no one knew where she was. If something had happened....

She did not finish the thought. Josie Darling knew only too well how things sometimes happened.

Faculty Apartments.

Less than an hour later, Josie entered the town of Lues, population 26,000, unless the university was in session, then almost double. The main road stirred no memory. Even the depressed real-estate close to the heart of the old town was only vaguely familiar. She wasn’t sure if she remembered it or if she had only seen too many towns like it when she lived upstate. It had the generic look of the Midwest. Lots of dirty brick facades with aluminum trim. Lots of empty buildings, blacked out or broken windows, rutted gravel lots, and all the embarrassing splotches of small town pride: Go, Lancers! Baptist Faith Rival, Lions Auxiliary Bake Sale, Welcome Back Lues State Students. There were fast food restaurants, gas stations with enormous American flags, bars by the dozen for the college kids, and cheap apartments advertised roadside. None of it was quite what she remembered. Even the university was not especially remarkable. The sign out front, like the road into it, was newly constructed, three, maybe five years old. Something like that. The football stadium was probably ten or fifteen years old. There was something reassuring about a couple of the administrative buildings once she was actually on campus. She knew she had been here, but she could not have said what waited beyond the next curve in the road. A bit discouraged that no deep memory had revived, nor any instinctive sense of direction beckoned her to go one place or another, Josie consulted her campus map. Housing was located in Harrison Hall which was, as it turned out, around the next curve.

Josie spent the next hour getting processed for her faculty apartment. When she climbed back into her VW with her new key and yet one more round of paperwork, she was no longer thinking about her lost past. Suddenly she was in a new life, and the excitement which had been building for several weeks seemed finally to bloom within her. The campus was enormous. The forest edged its northern perimeter, and long fingers of it reached in elsewhere with thick shady groves of hardwoods. The buildings came in clusters, all of them turned out in concrete, but the old tress everywhere gave shade and even a bit of character to the otherwise sterile architecture. She passed the university medical center, then saw a small sign that pointed her to Faculty Apartments. At the top of a fairly steep hill, Josie found two housing units facing one another.

Each building had ten apartments, all on a single level. The buildings were long and institutional in a way to make her feel like she had joined some kind of aesthetic commune instead of a modern campus, and they were made of concrete, of course, like everything at Lues State except the very oldest buildings at the center of campus. The buildings shared a common parking lot, which at the moment was filled with young, mostly unmarried professor types, all of them busily unpacking like so many gypsies setting up camp. Both buildings she noticed managed to butt back against the forest, though Josie’s was set up over a fairly substantial ravine with Lues Creek running through it. She would be paying twenty-five dollars extra a month to hear the stream off her back balcony, but she was sure it would be the best money she had ever spent.

Josie toured her apartment before she began unloading her car. For anyone accustomed to real life, the apartment would have been disappointing. For Josie, weaned on a decade of collegiate impoverishment, with a twenty month hiatus as an unhappy faculty wife, the place was great, sprawling even. At least by Boston standards of gentile poverty. It was relatively clean if not bright and, the reason she had picked it, fully equipped. As Josie had requested on the forms she filled out in May, she had a master bedroom with a double bed. The mattresses was firm, the sheets starched. The matching headboard and side table were done in some kind of macabre Spanish style. The second bedroom was set up as an office, everything done in scratched, gunmetal gray: bookshelves, computer console, a writing table, and an office chair. These had seen too many wars, but they functioned. The kitchen was a disappointment, and Josie regretted that she had left almost her entire domestic life in a storage shed outside of Boston. The pots and pans were beat and dented, the plates were chipped and shabby, the glasses were foggy.

The main room offered a six foot couch and two chairs in a scotch plaid just this side of nausea. The lamps were rickety and complemented in a vague way the bedroom motif, something for the last son of a bankrupt Spanish hidalgo. There was a tiny fireplace, two prints of Picasso, one with a bullet hole in it, and a telephone out of another era, the sort that used to double as a murder weapon in the Miss Marple mysteries.

Out of curiosity, Josie snapped the television on and waited. A black and white picture of an electrical snow storm presented itself finally. She flipped the knob and found three stations, only one of which had good reception, the only thing good about it, as it turned out. She turned the set off, opened a sliding glass door and entered the small balcony. About four feet by ten feet, it jutted out over the ravine. Lues Creek was some fifty feet below. Despite the public feel of the balconies, pressed up against one another as they were, Josie liked the effect. The creek was tight and quick. The air over it was noticeably cooler. The forest just beyond had a consoling effect as well.

She nodded happily, then went back to her car and began unloading it.