Gwen, in Green

“It’s the instinct of an Indian fighter,” he said. “In the old days on the frontier, they cut down all the trees around the house so that Injuns couldn’t sneak up from tree to tree to do them in. When I’m finished, we’ll be safe from bill collectors and magazine salesmen. Nary a one of them can sneak up on us.”

Gwen checked out books from the library. She re­membered happy Mandy and was curious about the poisonous plant which she’d eaten. With the aid of books, she identified jimson-­weed, growing on the far side of the clear pond. In addition, she identified a half dozen other varieties of more or less poisonous plants. Poison oak, ivy, and sumac were there in abundance. There was also some white snakeroot; hundreds of bracken fern, a cumulatively poison plant when eaten by animals; polkweed, a poisonous plant whose leaves were often eaten by people after proper cooking as a green; fumewort; and rattleweed. And, to compound her astonishment at the variety of plants which could kill or weaken, she dis­covered that the common oak, the most plentiful tree on the island, could poison with large amounts of tannic acid and a volatile oil if animals ate young shoots and leaves in quantity. Pines were poison. Some lilies were poison. Tobacco plants, if eaten by cattle, were poison. Dozens of varieties of plants caused effects ranging from itching and breaking out to painful death.

She shared her knowledge with George, who treated it lightly. “Murderer,” he said, kicking at an oak tree.

The mower roared, the ax flew, and the chain saw snarled. There was a pile of neatly stacked fireplace wood large enough to last for years. And the house was begin­ning to stand out from the woodlands, although the happy pioneer had left plenty of trees for cover and shade in his cleared areas. He was working his way around the clear pond, working also into late May, when the days had begun to show the promise of summer. He would end his work with a nude swim in the pond, and come up puffing and dripping to have his drink and dinner on the balcony, insisting on the outdoor bit in spite of vicious deer flies and mosquitoes. And his mornings began, as he’d dreamed, with a plunge into chill, clear water. His body, trimmed by the hard work, would slice into the water and disappear into the cool depths. He’d panic Gwen by staying under for impossible lengths of time, surfacing halfway across the pond.

Gwen began to live in shorts and bathing suits, but she was not, as yet, attracted to the water. “I need an out­side temperature of at least ninety and a water tempera­ture approximating a warm bath,” she would tell George when he coaxed her to join him in his twice daily swims.

She was sleeping slightly better, but her nights were still troubled by dreams. The dreams seemed to follow a pattern having to do with dismemberment and death. “You sonofabitch,” she told George, while discussing a dream with him, a particularly violent dream in which she had felt the pain of having both arms severed from her body, “you planted it in my mind with your talk about fears. Before that I was content with being chased by unseen monsters and being unable to move.”

“Your problem, kid, is that you need a—”

“—a good screw,” she finished for him.

On a Wednesday in early June, she got a good screw. If the treatment had been applied lovingly by Dr. George, the foremost practitioner of anti-­lackanookie medicine, it would not have been unusual. However, this particular treatment was applied by a surprised and delighted meter reader from the rural electric cooperative. The effect on Gwen was much more than surprise.

6

At first she thought she was going mad and bounced words such as “schizophrenia” around in her muddled mind. Certainly, the girl who had performed that animal act on the chaise longue on the balcony, in broad daylight, was not Gwen Ferrier.

“Ummm,” that girl had said, spread-­eagled, filled with relaxing man, “there’ll be more of that.”

That girl declined the half-­embarrassed offer of a hand­kerchief. “I have this,” that girl said, pulling on her bikini bottom with sensual motions, displaying her body with pride even after the act. “This” was soaked with semen, a stained, horrible object held in a trembling hand, held at a distance, the offensive, musky odor of semen wafting up­ward to cause nausea in Gwen’s now hot, now cold body.

“I’d like for there to be more,” the meter reader had said.

“Call first,” that girl had said, actually reaching down to seize the limp member which, moments before, had been the point of concentration for her entire being.