Dark on the Inside

110 Dark on the Inside Jessica Bane Robert October again. The days go down heavily and soon. The morning comes later, cold and dark. Geese mark the gray sky. As much as I try, I will never like the fall. When I was a child living in the woods with my parents, October meant darkness. October meant time inside. October signaled the coming of the spiders. I remember the linked geese passing overhead full of direction. I remember the melancholy hoots of distant trains in the morning as I waited for the school bus on Grover Hill. I studied my vaporous breath and made it mirror the trains’ exhalations. When one puff had fully disappeared, I blew out another impish breath to keep me company. The trains’ voices trailed south. October. Everything seemed to say, so long. Death hung in the air. I heard the crackle of dry umber leaves underfoot and of gunshot echoes over the mountain. The frost-soft apples fell under bare trees, waited for deer. Mornings smelled cold and sterile, like certain snow. October was a reaper stealing sunlight and abundance, leaving me to worry. I worried about the woodland animals. I worried about my family. Would we have enough wood, enough food? Would we all survive another long winter, each of us folded into our corners, dreaming? Living off the land in the woods of Maine, my family spent many summer days intently thinking of winter—cutting wood, replacing chinking between logs, tending the garden, and canning its crop. However, nothing solidified winter’s certain arrival like the first frost. Stepping out of bed onto pine floors in the melon hues of dawn, my bones felt like icicles inside my skin. Outside, the field was an old giant’s beard, white and wiry. There was no more bounding out the front door in my nightshirt before my parents rose. No more barefoot, dew-soaked visits to the bullfrogs in the pond before breakfast. Red sky in morning, sailors take warning. First thoughts questioned how to make it through the day. First thoughts were thoughts of night coming again so soon. 111 Jessica Bane Robert Even the golden fields ablaze with morning sun couldn’t dispel images of the darkness to come inside our cabin. The dimensions of the original log cabin were twenty-four by twenty-four. The downstairs wrapped like a letter U around the wood cook stove, water heater, and Jøtul stove abutting the central staircase that led up to two long, narrow bedrooms. The bedrooms, like wings, attached to my parents’ rectangular closet where the central chimney rose. Each bedroom had steeply sloping ceilings that converged with large eaves that provided storage. Our long, dirt driveway climbed a small knoll, then graded down to the back of our house where it met the back door and kitchen with my bedroom above. On the sunnier side of the U was the living area, beneath my parents’ room. A small bathroom, containingtoilet,sink,andshowerstall,seemedtocoweratthebottomof the stairs. With only two bedrooms and the open floor plan downstairs, the cabin left little room in which to hide. The eaves, where the spiders came in at night, provided the only shelter from harsh words inside. On overcast fall days the cabin was dreary. The twelve logs that rested on one another to constitute the height of the first story were dark brown, the color of well-done (not burnt) wheat toast. They were no longer the sweet, slippery, and pale logs the color of my wrists that I remember peeling at age six when we built the cabin. Chinking—dark, scratchy, and furry—slumbered between the logs. Any other furniture or cabinetry was stained mahogany or painted barn red. The cook stove in the kitchen was black; the squat Jøtul was gray with a stone hearth beneath. A shiny copper hot water heater that looked like a rocket ready for launch stood between the two stoves against the cinderblock chimney and provided a shimmer of color. I liked to imagine myself inside the empty vessel shooting up along the chimney and bursting through the roof like Charlie in Willy Wonka’s glass elevator. I...