The Vaster Wilds

by Lauren Groff

For even a good man was more deadly than the worst of bears,

For what woman has not, walking in the dark of the street or along a path deep in the countryside, sensed the brutal imaginings of a man watching her from his hidden place, and felt the same chills chasing over her skin, and quickened her steps to get away.

pushed the girl down and had his way with her body as she screamed and wept, and when he had used her, he left her lying there in the dirt bleeding. Some time passed, then one day, when this same man was out in the bay gathering oysters, he looked up to find that his companions were nowhere near him, that they had disappeared as if they had been told to flee, and even the birds in the trees had silenced themselves and were waiting. Then, as though magicked out of the fog that lay upon the waters, women began to take shape all around him and came close and had him surrounded in silence. Before he could cry out, they put a leather thong in his mouth so that he was muted and could not scream, then they dragged him away with them by the hair of his head, and in that same night, four women tied him as naked as a newborn babe to the twinned trees visible from the gate of the fort, the man’s arms and legs wrenched outspread and his body stretched to the near snapping of his joints. Then they built a fire in front of him so that his pale skin was glowing against the dark behind him, and they loosed the thong in his mouth so that his screams could be heard even into the heart of the fort. Then all at once, more women poured out of the forest with sharpened oyster shells in their hands. With these as their knives, the women slowly flayed the skin off the man, first his eyelids so that he had no choice but to watch what they were doing to him. Next, the skin of his arms and legs and ...

For, verily, godlessness and murder, the girl knew, were certainly not limited to the people of this new country.

For it was a truth that mothers, having already lost their liberty when they bore children, having been tethered to the earth with this new soft tender body they must now protect forever, were the ones who understood the delicate balance between the price of freedom and the price of their children’s lives.

As well, they told the people of this place that if they did not kneel to the water-walking three-headed god of the spanish, they would remain heathens and thus burn after death in a place of long torture. And this, the powhatan felt, was a terrible unkind thing for these uninvited guests of their hospitality to insist upon.

And that these trees, too, had been planted by the gardeners of this place. For her understanding of gardeners was limited to the ones of the city, and the ones of the city loved a straight line and a neat border, and looking out upon the trees seeming scattered there by the hand of nature itself, she did not recognize the human genius and planning in the wild abundance.

They were only speaking the part of god that they themselves could glimpse. And this truth was only as small as they themselves were small.

And perhaps, she thought, god was neither trinity nor singular but multiple, as various as the many living things that did live upon the earth. Perhaps god is all. Perhaps god already lived within all. And this place and these people here did not need the english to bring god to them.

As glass is brittle, so is he, the girl said, laying down the brush. How, brittle? the mistress said, frowning. With pride too easily broke, and the jagged shards kept to hand to cut another with.

It is a moral failure to miss the profound beauty of the world, said the voice in her mind. Yes, she said aloud, for now she did see the sin in full.

Light was simply light, unpeopled by hope.

She thought it wonderful that if the bear ate her, some part of her would enter the bear’s body, would flow through her milk into the bodies of the babes, and the babes would grow to adult bears and would have their own babes, and some small part of who she had been would live somewhere within the blood and meat and fat of all of them. The only kind of eternity there would be for her, for she would never have babes herself, and no one still alive would remember her after she was gone.

To be alone and surviving is not the same as being alive, she understood.

For, inches beyond this face of hers and in the profoundest sufferings of her body, the world went on in its grand and renewing and wholly indifferent beauty.

The wind passed, even as it is passing now, over all the people who find themselves so dulled by the concerns of their own bodies and their own hungers that they cannot stop for a moment to feel its goodness as it brushes against them. And feel it now, so soft, so eternal, this wind against your good and living skin.