Big Woods Read online

  Two hours passed and my body ached from crouching behind the rock, so I got up and moved around, my breath making smoke circles in the cold air. I was pacing back and forth, trying to warm up, when I heard the engine of a truck approaching and saw a beam of headlights slice through the trees. I ran and crouched back behind the rock.

  It was a black Blazer, and two men in white hoods and robes hopped out and opened the back door and dragged a woman out by her wrists. It was hard to make the figures out, but when they dragged her in front of the truck, I could see in the headlights that the woman was wearing handcuffs. She was naked from the waist up and her hair was long and wild. Bloody scratches covered her chest and arms and she was screaming and kicking at the men.

  I watched as the taller man took out a pistol and whipped it across her mouth before throwing her to the ground.

  The two men circled around to the back of the truck and started unloading firewood. While one man built the fire, the taller man tied the woman to one of the stones facing the fire. Blood drained from her mouth and her head just hung there limp, like a ragdoll’s.

  It was so cold I couldn’t stop shaking. I worried the men were going to hear my teeth chattering.

  The bonfire crackled to life and I slipped back behind the rock, afraid they’d see me. I heard the creak of a car door and then heavy metal music that sounded like Metallica, blaring through the open windows of the truck.

  I peered around the rock once more and gasped as I saw the taller man raping the woman. The ropes crisscrossed her breasts and it looked like they were cutting into her chest, making her bleed from there, too. I had to look away, so I turned my back flat against the rock and stared into the dark, tangled forest, my stomach hardening into a knot as the scent of the fire drifted to me.

  Then I saw another pair of headlights bounce over the trees beyond the clearing. I peeked around the stone and saw a white van bump over the pitted road. A man in a white robe jumped out of the van and before he pulled the hood over his head, I could see that he had thick, black hair that was smoothed over to one side like someone from the fifties. He slid the side door of the van open and led two children out by a rope. My heart seized in my chest. He had fastened the rope around their waists and at first I thought the girl might be Lucy, but as he led them closer to the campfire, I could tell it wasn’t her. This girl had stringy red hair and she looked younger than Lucy, maybe six. The other child was a blond-headed boy, maybe five years old, who couldn’t stop shaking. This seemed to make the man angry so he gave them a shove toward the fire and I watched as the light from the flames licked their frightened little faces.

  As the man walked back to the van, I was holding my breath, hoping that he would lead Lucy out next, but he just slammed the door and spit into the ground. It hit me then that Lucy was probably already dead, that he’d already killed her, and I was suddenly filled with such a white-hot lightning rage that before I knew what I was doing I stood and was running to the campfire, screaming, “What have you done with my sister?” my voice sounding primitive and strange to my ears.

  The taller man spun around from the unmoving woman tied to the stone and marched over to me, his robe falling to cover his undone pants. He pulled out his pistol. “You got no business bein’ here,” he said.

  I couldn’t be sure, but I felt like I’d hear his voice before, and dread crept over me when I placed it: he sounded exactly like the sheriff from Starrville, Sheriff Meeks. He stopped right in front of me and started waving the gun in front of my face.

  “STOP!” the man from the van shouted at him. “It’s okay.” He walked over and stood between us until the taller man retreated. He then turned to me and pulled off his hood. He had chalk-white skin and dark freckles. His lips were full and looked red as if stained by cherries.

  “You must be Leah,” he said. My stomach flipped. “We’ve been waiting for you; we knew you would come,” he said, his mouth spreading in a wide smile that showed a row of crooked buck teeth.

  I stared at him with seething hate. “Where is Lucy?” I asked through clenched teeth again, prepared to fight him to my death.

  He looked me up and down, his eyes lingering on my small chest. I felt like I was going to be ill. “Come with me,” he said. “I will take you to her.”

  I thought he was full of shit, but I followed him to the van anyway.

  70

  Sylvia

  My mouth is parched, I feel dizzy, but I grab the railing and head down the stairs. I walk down slowly, into the dank cellar, the putrid smell growing stronger, and I cover my mouth and nose with the sleeve of my coat. When I reach the bottom step, I see a white cord dangling down. I yank it and a bare bulb casts a dull light over the cellar. I squint—there are darkened places near the back that I cannot see—but at first glance, the cellar looks empty except for a few old tins of paint and a rusted out gasoline can.

  I creep along the pitted dirt floor to the back wall. It’s empty, too. Something like giddiness floods over my body and tears spring to my eyes. Maybe it’s not Owen. Maybe I’m wrong, I think. Maybe this is just his church, as simple as that, and he has nothing at all to do with any of this. My head is spinning, and I’m just about to lift my hands up and give thanks when I hear muffled voices outside. Then the creak and groan of heavy footfalls on the stairs, followed by the flat sound of the cellar door slamming.

  Hairs rise on the back of my neck. I don’t have to turn around; I know it’s him, and I know what this means for me. And I know my last thought will be of Leah and Lucy, so I say a quick prayer for them and soon I hear his voice, low and wretched behind me.

  “Mother?”

  71

  Leah

  He pulled the children along by the rope and I trailed behind them, looking back over my shoulder at the other two men who were both consumed again with the woman.

  “I’m the Reverend Goforth,” he said in his strange voice, a mix of baritone edged with a feminine shrillness. “But you can call me Owen, or, if we get along, Papa.”

  He slid the dented side door open to the van and pushed the children inside. The seats had all been torn out, and there was just a thin wooden bench lining the driver’s side of the van. The children scrambled to the bench, but I hesitated. A fierce pang for Mom and Dad tore through my chest. For Dad’s sturdy arms, roping me into a tight hug. For Mom’s warm hands, silky with lotion, rubbing my back before bedtime. Their faces blurred in my mind and a hot cry strangled the back of my throat and I thought, How can I do this to them? They’ve lost Lucy, and now they’re going to lose me, too. What am I doing?

  But I looked at the faces of the filthy children and thought of Lucy, who was one of them and who might still be alive out there somewhere. I grabbed the sides of the van and stepped in.

  Owen slammed the door shut behind me and climbed in the front. A sheet of chicken wire divided the front of the van from the back, but I felt his eyes watching me through the octagonal silver holes.

  As we thumped along the cemetery road, the boy (I would later learn that his name was Nate) huddled next to me. He smelled like piss and campfire smoke. When we hit a deep rut, we all clamored together for balance, and Nate clasped his tiny, sticky hand around mine.

  I just assumed that we were headed to the church, so I was surprised when Owen slid the door open and we stepped out into the middle of a pasture. The moon was just a sliver so it was hard to see, but then a dim porch light clicked on, washing over a small, ramshackle house. A young girl in a long denim skirt and a button-up shirt walked over and whispered something in Owen’s ear.

  “Follow Heather, children,” he commanded to us and soon we were walking across the dewy field, tall grass licking at our shins. After a few minutes, once we reached the top of a hill, Heather bent down and pulled a key out from her sock, and twisted it into the ground and wrenched open a wooden door. Warm light shone from underground, and Heather
stared at me blankly and motioned for us all to descend the wooden steps leading down. The girl scrambled down first, and Nate tugged at my pants until I followed him down. The steps down were rickety and long, about twenty feet. It seemed to be some kind of underground cave, deep and dark, lit only by a kerosene lamp.

  When I got to the bottom step, I heard the door shut and lock above us. The first thing I noticed about the cave was the smell: decaying earth, rotting food, and gasoline. My eyes scanned the cave for Lucy, but all I could see as my eyes adjusted was a brown-haired girl curled up on a cot. She shifted when she heard us.

  “Do you guys know where—” but I couldn’t finish. As soon as the words left my mouth, I heard her voice, the most glorious sound I’d ever heard.

  “LEEEEEYYYAAAHHHH!” Lucy cried and scurried out from the very darkest corner of the cave and came running at me. Her blond hair was longer than I’d ever seen it, shaggy and a few shades darker. Her eyes were sunken in and her legs were sticks. She leapt into my arms and wrapped herself around me. She was so light, lighter than I ever remembered her being. I broke down and started sobbing and just said, “Lucy, Lucy, Lucy,” over and over again to somehow make the unreal moment more real. I buried my face into her greasy hair, which smelled like dried apple juice and old sweat.

  Eighty-four days. Twelve weeks exactly. That’s how long it had been since I’d seen her. Tears gushed out of both of our eyes until we were just one hot pool of gooey, snotty mess. When we finally untangled ourselves, Lucy looked up at me and said, “I knew you’d find me!”

  She led me by the hand around the cave. It was no bigger than our kitchen, but it was dug out so far underground that the roof of it soared above our heads, making it feel roomier than it was. Other than the kerosene lantern that rested on the staircase, there were only tiny white cots in every corner of the cave and a tall plastic bucket that served as the bathroom.

  Heather, I would soon learn, made sure to wipe the place clean every night, placing forks and knives and bowls and the little food they were rationed into a cardboard box and marching it upstairs before she locked the place down.

  Lucy introduced me to the other children. “This is little Nate,” she said, “he doesn’t know how to talk, so we don’t know where he’s from.” Nate looked up at us from behind his curly blond bangs and gave me a sheepish smile.

  “And this is Julie,” Lucy said. “She’s from Louisiana. She’s been here the longest.” Julie looked at me with huge brown eyes and just nodded her head. She was shy, I could tell, but I asked her for her last name—Benoit. I was trying to collect as much information about everyone as possible.

  The little brown-haired girl was back on her cot, her thumb in her mouth, eyes turned to the wall of the cave. “Isabel, meet my sister, Leah!” Lucy said, cheerfully, as if she were introducing me to her latest best friend from elementary school. The girl just stared at me and rolled back over on her side. “She’s not trying to be mean, she just doesn’t speak any English,” Lucy said, shrugging her shoulders. I would later find out Isabel’s last name—Chacon—and even though I only knew “restaurant” Spanish, I would deduce that she was from Hot Springs, Arkansas.

  Later that night, after all the other children had fallen asleep and I was curled up on Lucy’s cot with my arms clasped around her, her sharp shoulders blades digging into my chest, she whispered in my ear all she had been through.

  Owen took her when she was just around the corner from the bus stop. He threw her in the backseat and she kept looking out the back window, her eyes frantically searching for Dad, until he finally hit her so hard she crouched down.

  He drove her to his church and told her to act as though she belonged with him; if she didn’t, he said he would kill her. He led her around to the side of the church to the cellar and forced her to climb down the steps before he locked her in. She decided not to scream, and instead stayed huddled against the steps with thin blades of light slicing through the rotting wood.

  “I thought that first day the police or Dad or someone would find me,” she said, “but when they didn’t, I got really scared he was gonna kill me.”

  She obeyed each of his commands and did exactly what he told her to do. “Soon you will see,” he told her every night while he set her in his lap, running his fingers through her tangled hair, “you will understand that we are meant to be together.”

  At first she was the only kid in the church cellar, but after a few weeks, he started to bring the other children down there. They all tried together, once, to bust open the door and break free, but none of them had the strength to pop off the rusty lock.

  She had no idea how long they had lived in the cellar—every day was just a darkened blur of breakfast, lunch, and dinner—but one night they were all startled awake by Heather shaking them, telling them to get up and follow her. She led them to the dirty white van and slammed the door behind them. Owen drove them to his land and through the chicken wire, he told them that the “end times were near, and they needed to move.”

  I knew that we were probably going to die in this dark pit, especially if Sheriff Meeks was involved, but I was okay with it, because at least we’d be together, at least Lucy knew that I had come for her.

  Lucy, thank God, was spared from having to witness what went on in the cemetery. Owen took her with him, let her ride in the front seat beside him, but parked far away from the cemetery and ordered her not to look. She didn’t. He forced the other children out of the van and they’d come back shaking, cold, disturbed.

  Julie told her what they had to watch, even if neither of them fully understood it.

  According to Owen, Lucy was the chosen one, and he was keeping her pure so that she could be his bride one day. “Heather’s his bride,” Lucy told me, “and he has four other ones that live in the house. I never met them, but he told me they would be my sisters one day.”

  Lucy seemed to understand that she needed to play the part. She told me that she trusted I was coming, that she had seen my messages to her in her dreams, too. Sometimes at night, she’d stay away and fix her mind on something so hard, like the road from my dreams, until she believed the message had reached me.

  That first night, I couldn’t quit sobbing, listening to all she had been through, and it was Lucy, this time, who consoled me, bringing my hands up under her chin and saying over and over to me in a soft sing-song voice, “Christmas, Easter, Happy Times.”

  Owen would come to the cave most nights, Lucy told me at bedtime a few nights later, and in the glow of the kerosene lantern, he would read passages from the Bible and talk about how there were signs that the end of the world was near, and that soon, very soon, they would need to move again, to a piece of land he knew about in Oklahoma. On those nights, Lucy worried that I wouldn’t find her in time, so she’d made a plan to try and break free and run when they pulled them out of the cave for the move.

  “And now that you’re with me,” she said one night, her voice raspy with thirst, “I know we can!”

  I shook my head. “No, Lucy, we need to escape now.”

  “But there’s no way! She takes everything at night so there’s no way to break through the door or anything!” she said, her voice turning into a squeal.

  We laid back on the cot and stared at the dank ceiling. Lucy’s cot was in the very back of the cave and the ceiling sloped down so that if I stood up on the cot, my fingertips could reach the roof. I stared up at the compact, red clay, shiny and slick, and automatically started twisting Lucy’s butterfly bracelet around on my wrist.

  Lucy saw me doing this and her mouth dropped in disbelief. I fingered the sharp tips of the butterfly wings and it hit me, too: this is how we would leave here.

  “See, you were right,” I said to Lucy, smiling, hot tears streaming from my eyes. “I would need this.”

  And that night (it was Sunday, I forced myself to keep track of the days), we s
tarted to dig into the rich, thick clay while the other children slept. I’d stand on the cot and hoist Lucy on my shoulders and she’d tear through the meaty clay, dropping clumps in my hair, coating the bed. I didn’t want to think about how far we’d have to dig to escape, but that first night she dug so much she threaded her entire arm inside the hole.

  We saved a thick plug to cover the hole each night and made sure we shook out the sheets and stuck the largest clumps back into the wall.

  72

  Leah

  Two nights later, on Tuesday, the day after Christmas, after one of Owen’s sermons, he shut his thick, worn Bible and said, “Tonight, Leah, I would like for you to come with me.” Dread spread across my chest and I looked over at Lucy, who gave me a quick, secret nod as if to say Do whatever he wants. I stood and followed Owen up the stairs, leaving a fuming Heather behind with the kids.

  The thought of being separated from Lucy again tore through me, but I climbed the steps. Outside, it was night. A few feet away from the door to the cave, Owen had built a huge fire. I was afraid that somehow he found out we had tried to escape, but he sat down on a red wool blanket and patted the space next to him.

  “Come here, sit down. I just want to talk to you, to get to know you better, Leah,” he said. He had this unnerving way of never breaking eye contact. I felt queasy but sunk down anyway and stared into the fire.

  He asked me all kinds of questions about myself, about my sexuality, if I had ever been kissed or touched before. I lied and said that I hadn’t, not yet anyways, and he smiled and shook his head as if he’d just won a big prize. He stood up and started stirring the fire, poking a long stick into the logs, sending a spray of orange embers flying.