Three September 1965
THREE
There was a time early in my childhood, before the world got messy and complicated; a time when I looked forward to October.
I still love Octobers, a vestige from those cool autumn days.
I spent most of my childhood in the company of my grandmother, but when the apple pickers arrived, there were children who came with their parents.
Many were too young to help pick and weren’t yet in school, but there were a few my age.
I remember Susan asking once how the children were permitted to miss so much school, and it was never something I thought about.
Kiju told us later that agricultural kids were permitted during harvest season, but some of the mothers brought books just the same, and after the evening meal you could see them working with the children on addition and subtraction, reading and writing.
I don’t know when I started to wait for them, but it must have been when I was very young. Kiju teased me when each day I got off the bus and stomped into the house, annoyed that the pickers hadn’t yet arrived.
“You act like a wet hen. All mad and squawky,” she said when I entered the house, the screen door slamming behind me. “They’ll get here when they get here.”
And they did, every October, and I would race off the bus, drop my school bag just inside the door of the house, and seek out Kenneth and John.
They had been coming with their families for as long as I had memory, and each fall we were inseparable.
John was one year older than me, and his family were kind.
His mother made the best potatoes over a fire with onions and pieces of pork.
His older brother had moved to Boston and joined the American military.
He had two younger sisters, who he helped look after when his father was in the orchard.
Kenneth used to spend more time at my house than John did on account of him being a cousin somehow.
His mother was a nervous woman, always looked like she was about to jump out of her skin.
And where she was quiet, her husband was loud and brash.
He made me feel uncomfortable, and Kiju told me that Kenneth and his baby brother were always welcome in the house but Reg, his father, was not.
I never thought to ask why. Kiju was kind to everyone, but for Reg she had nothing but scorn.
When the pickers arrived, I was still forced to attend school.
But the weekends were ours. Susan, my only real friend in the town, spent many of those weekends at our house.
She was the youngest of five and her mother claimed that Kiju was a godsend for taking Susan off her hands every once in a while.
So, on those early Saturday mornings when the dew was still on the grass, we would seek out adventure, no matter how small.
We collected mushrooms for Kiju, made up worlds where we were heroes and villains, hid while someone else counted to ten and then we’d cry foul when we were found, accusations of cheating forgotten the moment Kiju stuck her head out the front door to chastise us.
As night fell, we tried and mostly failed to catch lightning bugs and stayed out until the stars littered the sky.
There is a scent—only in autumn, when the sun is just about to set and the air begins to cool—that, when caught, can send me right back to those days.
It’s so strange to think about that now—Kenneth and his violence, the soft touch of John’s hand on mine, and Susan, almost lost to history.
But Susan was, thankfully, not eternally lost. I think sometimes that I don’t deserve her friendship, but I value it too much to say this to her.
Susan never liked Kenneth, not from the day she’d met him.
He called her an Indian wannabe for hanging out with the rest of us, and she never forgave him for that.
John tried to tell her that Kenneth was joking, but Susan wouldn’t believe it.
Kiju always made us include him. She’d tell us that Kenneth’s life had never been easy, and that kindness was contagious and maybe if we demonstrated it to him, he might just catch it.
And while there may have been good times with him, I can’t recall them, and for the last quarter century Kenneth’s name has not been uttered by anyone who knows me.
The last time we were all together, before Kenneth’s father forbade him to associate with us anymore, and before he turned mean, Kenneth got us lost.
On this particular Saturday, the apple pickers headed to the orchards just as the sun was coming up, and we were left to the care of Kiju.
She made us breakfast and then shooed us out the door.
Not that we needed shooing; we were eager to get out of the watchful eye of the adults.
Normally, we didn’t stray too far, always within hollering distance, but that morning Kenneth had a different plan.
Back in the woods, farther back than we were permitted to go, stood an abandoned shack. It was so old that even Kiju didn’t know of its origin. I’d seen it once when she and I had gone chaga hunting.
“Now, you stay away from that. It’s dangerous. A slight breeze and it could collapse. I ever find you’ve been in and around it, I’ll tan your hide.” She looked serious, but I couldn’t imagine Kiju being violent, so I muffled a laugh.
“I want to see it.” Kenneth glanced toward the edge of the woods.
“Me too,” John said.
“We’re not allowed,” I pleaded, but the other three were already making their way to the tree line.
I looked back toward the house, where I knew that Kiju was in the kitchen mixing up a medicine for a sore belly for one of the pickers, before following them into the trees.
As we ducked into the woods, the smell of damp pine wrapped itself around us.
I took the lead, John close behind me, then Susan, and Kenneth behind her.
They didn’t walk together on account of him being mean to her.
The only thing Susan and Kenneth could ever agree on was their shared teasing of John and me.
That childhood rhyme, something to do with kissing in a tree, was flung at us if we dared stand less than three feet away from one another.
We ignored it, but other times, when no one was looking, John would take my small hand in his and I’d let him.
There is something comforting, even as a child, in knowing someone who isn’t related to you for as long as you’ve had memory. And John had known me my whole life.
The day grew darker the farther we walked, and the noise of the outside world was soon replaced but for the gentle rustling of leaves and the occasional twig as it snapped when we passed.
There was a small trail that if you weren’t looking for it, you’d miss it entirely.
No one wandered these woods anymore. Kiju, in one of her many stories, told me how her great-grandfather had been one of the last Indians around here to live off the land.
His wife passed at a young age, and he and his two sons lived the old ways: camps in the woods in the winter, by the water in the summer.
That wasn’t these woods, but I still thought of those stories each time I entered, and wondered if someone who shared my name and my blood had once wandered these woods.
I’m not sure how long or how far we walked before we got to the little clearing where the shack leaned dangerously to the right.
“Maybe a witch lived out here,” Susan whispered as we approached.
“Or a hermit,” said John.
“Or a kid killer.” Kenneth always went dark. “I bet it was a kid killer. He would get kids to come out here with candy and then cook and eat them.”
“That’s just Hansel and Gretel,” Susan said, rolling her eyes.
“Shut up. You think you’re so smart.”
“Smarter than you,” Susan said as she ducked inside the doorway. The actual door was nowhere to be found. Kenneth and John followed her inside.
“Susan, you shouldn’t go in. Kiju says it’s dangerous.”
“Kiju says it’s dangerous,” Kenneth mocked.
I hesitated, but not wanting to be left out or made fun of, I followed.
It was dark inside, with a single square hole in the wall that I imagined was once a window.
Moss grew everywhere. The rocks that had once made up the chimney lay mostly scattered on the hard-packed dirt floor.
My eyes didn’t adjust to the darkness, and I was feeling my way back to the door when a few of the remaining stones from the fireplace fell. Susan screamed and Kenneth laughed.
“Wimps,” Kenneth said.
“Jerk,” Susan replied.
“We need to leave, now,” John said as we made our way to the door.
As we stepped out of the shack, dusting years of cobwebs from our clothes and hair, there was a loud cracking, like a branch being stepped on and broken. I looked to Susan, her eyes as wide with fear as I imagined my own to be. John took my hand.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said, pulling me toward the trail we’d come in by.
“No way, I wanna know what that was.” Kenneth looked giddy with excitement.
“Probably a bear, or just a rotten branch falling off a tree.” I tried to steady my voice, but I knew I sounded scared.
“Scared?” Kenneth teased.
“Yup,” said John. “Now let’s get out of here.”
But before we had time to turn around, there was another sound, this one closer. With a mischievous smile, Kenneth turned and disappeared behind a thicket of scraggly pine.
“Get back here,” John whisper-shouted, but Kenneth was gone.
“Leave him,” said Susan as she turned to head back down the trail. But we all knew how much trouble we’d be in if we showed up back at the house with no Kenneth, having to explain where we’d been.
“Susan,” I pleaded.
With a huff, she turned back and started toward the same place Kenneth had disappeared. John and I followed.