VIRGIN

The path led through a four-hundred-year-old virgin stand of white pine, hemlock and beech. His grandma promised him she’d find the tree he carved his initials into last year but he had his doubts. She charged into the woods, walking thirty paces ahead of everyone, Aunt Millie pleading with her to slow down.

When they visited from Michigan, his grandma baked him a different pie every day and told him about her own childhood. The rest of the family joined in with stories mythologizing her wild and prickly nature. Even her maiden surname Liberty — anglicized from La Liberté — seemed mythic. When she was not much older than he was now she’d helped her mother cook for lumber camps where her father worked. One day she found a kitten in a hollow log and carried it back to camp, her face and arms scratched and bloody. When they told her it was a bobcat and had to be let back into the wild she threw a tantrum. Now sixty years later the wilderness was gone and so were the bobcats. The few places lumberjacks hadn’t gotten to with their axes had been designated National Forests with names like Heart’s Content.

When they found the tree — Grandma had gone straight to it — he saw that the wound from his jackknife was already healing over, leaving a barely discernible scar on the bark. In a few years his initials would disappear and be forgotten.

On the way back to the car Grandma doubled over in pain from an angina attack. She waved away everyone’s help, popped a nitroglycerin pill, and kept going.

Two years later they got a phone call. Grandma was in the hospital. It had taken six attendants to get her into the ambulance. Aunt Millie had found her wandering the house in the middle of the night carrying an axe.