Behavior Report 26

Dearest Love,

We began our escape from the Cauchemar Forest with only the sun and the mountain to guide us. The sun guided us eastward towards Germany and the mountain … well, we did everything we could to avoid it. The strange thing about the mountain is that no matter what we did to avoid it, every break in the forest seemed to reveal that the mountain somehow was closer. Wispy clouds whisked past its peak like a furrowing brow. The magic within the forest seemed to keep us trapped in a loop where we couldn’t run away from its center.

We rarely rested, and when we did, it was for a matter of minutes. Sometimes we drank from my canteen and the smallest sip brought back a zip in our step. At night, we slept in a tree, safe from anything below. We walked under a patch of white lilies that looked like fireworks frozen in time at the zenith of their explosions. Elsewhere, we crossed the most cheerfully lemon-yellow daffodils that held the essence of the noon sun in their petals. We bounced on soft mossy carpets, burrowed through dense leaf piles, and took a quick break beneath a small city of mushrooms.

Earl’s demeanor loosened throughout our journey. When we first started, he kept his Schmeisser at the ready, pointing at every possible danger. That attentiveness eventually turned into smiles and, much later, he strapped the gun over his shoulder when we encountered no danger.

Of particular interest in our journey was a dense evergreen forest. The wind groaned as it tried to pass through all the needles, which sparked my imagination. I found myself on the deck of an old pirate ship, riding the waves of the Caribbean Sea with the salty wind in my hair. Each groan was the ship’s way of handling the rough seas. The ground was buried in dead needles of rust and orange and cinnamon. Each spear was longer than my sword and, at one point, we each picked up a needle and pretended to have a sword fight as if we were Blackbeard and Calico Jack.

I climbed up on a fallen pinecone the size of a boat and held up my spruce spear. I said, “Man the sails you greasy swabs! We have treasures to find!”

Earl saluted and replied, “Aye aye Captain!”

Our steps were light. Our hearts were lighter.

We finally laughed.

A little later, after some silent walking, Earl said, “So, for George it is a treasure to bring home to his dad, right?”

“Yes,”

“And we found a bag of gold coins?”

“Yes, but I don’t think that is much of a treasure.”

“It’s a start. I remember that Lafe wants to get a tin of Kraut soil. Troha is what again?”

“I was thinking that we could find a red scarf and maybe a pistol, like the hero on his favorite radio show. He thanked the man who took his family in after his father left them all. They listened to the show whenever it was on. I thought it would be a nice gesture.”

“I like it.” Earl said. “Russell is what again? I’m sorry.”

“I was thinking for Russell that we’d find him a bunch of pens, hopefully Kraut pens, that we could send back to the newsroom for the paper he worked in back home. He wanted to show those reporters that he was worth his mettle and giving each one a pen would rub it in every time they wrote a news story.”

“That’s perfect,” he said, smiling.

“Surplis promised to bring home a bat for the block to play baseball. I was thinking we could find a nice piece of wood that could be fashioned into a bat.

“Quint promised ladies underwear to his friend. He wanted to show that he liberated some ladies from the sorrows of war. I’m not sure how we’ll do that one.

“Bob promised to bring home stories to his barber. I’m kind of stumped on that one. I am thinking that we find an interesting Kraut dagger or pistol or something really unique that could show what he was up against.”

“We should have taken something from the cave, why didn’t you say something?” Earl’s voice strained with frustration.

“When should I have said something, when I was tied up to a rock to be sacrificed to a monster or when you were recouping from dying a hundred times over?”

Earl’s face relaxed and moved into a smile. “You have a point.” He padded my back. “We can send my Schmeisser or something else if we come across it. What else do we need?”

I thought for a moment of who remained. “Walt. He promised to send a flag home with everyone’s names written on it to show that he’s made friends. The problem is that everyone’s gone and the only flag I have is Lieutenant Talbott’s, whose flag was meant to be raised up in victory.”

“What’s the problem? We put everyone’s name on the flag and fly it over some place. When we’re done, we send it home to Walt’s family.”

“The flag is made from pieces of fabric from Lieutenant Talbott’s family. Like clothes and sheets and shirts.” I stop to pull it out of my pack to show Earl. “See. This isn’t something we can send to someone else.”

“Ah, yes. We’ll need to find another flag for Walt.What else do we need to find?”

“Those were the easy ones.” I laughed. “Emil promised to come home and ask for a woman’s hand in marriage and Roland wrote to his parents about leaving them and going off on his own.”

“Oh, yeah. Guess we’ll have to think about those while we go.”

Later, we crossed a distinct line where the spruce ended, and maple and ash and oak began. Our shadowy thoughts of pirate pilfering and impropriety were washed away in swaths of sunlight and summer.

“Is that a trail?” Earl said while pointing through some leaves. “It is! Frank, come here.”

A normal sized or maybe I should write a human-sized path in the Cauchemar Forest was lost in the grandeur. To us, the worn dirt path was wide enough for a single file line of tanks and trucks to pass through, but to the forest, it was nothing more than an ant trail. Thin wagon wheel ruts and tire tracks and horse hoof prints had punched and rolled through the dirt on wetter days. Miniature men must have spent countless hours clearing the path of leaves and debris because the path was a definitive line through the forest, like a mark purposefully drawn onto a map. Between the trees we could see the mountain looming in one direction and leaves mixed with shadows in the opposite direction.

“We are not alone here,” Earl said. “But it may be our way out.”

“As long as we are going away from that mountain, then I think it’s a good idea.”

“Agreed. Maybe we should stay off the path. You take a side and I take the other and we keep within eye contact so that we can communicate if anything happens.”

The Schmeisser found its way back into his hands. My rifle did the same.

We turned and walked away from the mountain, following the path from a comfortable distance within the wood. I was safely in the spruce side amidst the shadows, and he was exposed in the sunlight. We didn’t talk or signal to one another. We didn’t gaze in wonder of the woods or return to our pirate ways. We just marched back into our life of intense awareness and profound silence.

All the evidence that pointed to a well-worn path was misleading. We didn’t cross Krauts or tanks or wagons or anything. We walked cautiously, carefully, and pressed forward with the continued hope that we would find nothing. I missed the gaiety of our pirate ways. The path presented us with an easy way to travel but who would have thought that wheel ruts and tire marks would welcome Anxiety and Fear back into our lives?

‘Why am I more afraid of a Kraut than a monster?’ I thought. ‘I don’t get it. We walked through the woods without any care and now I see a few footprints on this path and I’m nervous.

‘There’s a perfectly rational explanation. We spent months preparing to fear a Kraut. We watched films of their atrocities, learned what weapons they used, and created endless scenarios on how they could harm us. Think of all the news reels you’ve seen and stories you’ve heard. All of that adds up.’

Just then, we spotted a weathered wooden sign about a hundred feet or so in front of us. Four large human-sized boulders were planted around the base to hold up the signpost. At the top of the post were two boards with letters painted on them.

Earl ran across the path and we knelt behind a leaf to scout the path. 

“Ville de Roche. Village of Rock? Rock Village?” Earl whispered. “I think that what the sign says.”

“Think we’ll find anyone friendly in the Rock Village?”

“I just hope it’s not a village of those rock monsters we crossed paths with in the cave.”

We started walking again, rifles readied. The ruts in the path grew more numerous and deeper the closer we came to the village. Stones as big as pumpkins began to line the path like a curb that bounded a pavement made of pebbles. I write about boulders and gravel, yet, compared to the rest of the Cauchemar Forest size, we stood upon dust.

Our protection in the pines began to thin the closer we got to the village and were replaced by human-sized thistles and grass. Shortly beyond the last trees, we came up to a cliff that marked an edge to a sandy colored stone quarry. Earl and I cautiously walked to the edge to look down upon the village. The quarry was easily a thousand yards wide and a hundred or so feet deep and looked like a footprint stamped in mud. A river bisected the quarry. The water spilled from a cave on one side, wound its way through the quarry, and then entered a cave on the other side.

The stone path meandered back and forth along the side of the quarry wall until it ended into an avenue surrounded by hundreds of cone-shaped stones. From our vantage point on the top of the edge, we could see how the avenue branched off into numerous alleyways that spread out to fill the entire quarry.

“What a strange place,” I whispered. “There must be hundreds of those stone structures. They look like stalagmites.”

“Maybe. That’s a different type of rock than what we saw before in the cave. This looks more like sandstone. I’m not sure that sandstone forms into stalagmites.”

“Do you see any buildings? Anything that would suggest there’s a village here?”

“Almost looks like there are square windows cut into the sides of some of those stones,” Earl said. “Only one way to find out.”

We waited a little while longer to see if we caught any movement within the quarry and only began down the path when we were confident that there were no signs of life. The temperature rose the further we walked down the path into the quarry.

“Those stones …” Earl began once we reached the bottom of the quarry. “Those stones are the village. They look like homes. Look, there’s a wooden balcony affixed to the top of that one.” He pointed.

“If you look down this alley, you can see one of the homes has been painted red and another one is blue,” I said.

The longer we walked around, the more we saw how the residents decorated their lives with things found in the quarry. With no grass to mow or plants to care for, it appeared that they used their free time to carve out textures that mimicked grass about their home. Someone chiseled out the details of a story with people and landscapes and sunbursts that spanned around the stalagmite home.  

But with all the evidence that people did live in the quarry, Earl summed up our feelings when he said, “Where is everybody?”

“Why is it that wherever we go, we find nothing?”

“Just be happy that we didn’t stumble into a village filled with swastikas or red flags hanging from their windows.”

“You have a point, but I’m beginning to think that when the Krauts took France that they sent all its people somewhere.”

“It would be easier to control them if they were all in one place,” Earl added.

I peeked through the window of a nearby door with a Victorian style brass doorknob and ornate backplate. “Something’s off about this place.”

“Seems like everyone left in a hurry. I saw a bike back there left in the middle of the road. There was also a wheelbarrow full of stones just left out in the open. I even saw a bucket full of something that had gone rotten some time ago.”

“Do you think the people left quickly to avoid something?”

“Beats me. There are no bullet holes or marks anywhere. Nothing’s destroyed.”

“I’d almost prefer that we’d see some evidence of a fight or a struggle.”

“Be careful what you wish for. What does it look like in that house?”

“Like nothing happened. Like the people left for work one day and never returned. I wouldn’t say that the house is messy, but it’s not clean. It looks … I guess you could say that it looks like it was lived in.” I turned the doorknob and pushed the door open. Earthy aromas, like that oddly sweet smell when a rainstorm first hits a parched land, filled my nostrils. Shortly after that first wave, a muted musk from years of hot summers in a stone village replaced any of the enjoyable smells. I walked in.

“What are you doing?” Earl yelled and ran after me with his Schmeisser readied.

My Love, the stalagmite was about the size of our home, maybe a little smaller, but felt so much larger because there were no walls. Imagine if our home didn’t have anything blocking the dining room from the kitchen or the family room. The space was cut from the stone, using the natural curves of the stalagmite to give it character. A rocky stove with doors to an oven and a cook top for pots, likely built from the bits that were chiseled out, was planted in the center of the home. The owner had a rug that circled the stove and spread out to the outside edges of the home. Peanut colored strands were woven as the backdrop to a brilliant tangerine sunburst.

There was a comfortable squash colored couch and side tables gathered on one side of the room, a blocky oaken dinner table on the other side, and a kitchen of sorts in the remaining space. Rectangular stairs, wooden blocks pushed into holes made into the wall, practically floated, and led to the second floor.

“Frank,” Earl began in a wavering whisper. “I think we should refill our canteens and get out of here. This reminds me too much of our last experience.” His Schmeisser began to rattle in his hands.

As much as I wanted to continue touring, I followed my friend out and to the river.

“I don’t like this,” he continued. “Not at all.”

“We may be able to find some things for the promises inside these homes.” I knelt and dipped my canteen into the flowing water, bubbles floated to the surface and were then carried away by the current.

“I want to get out of here,” Earl said while splashing water on his face and neck. “I don’t like anything about …” His voice trailed off.

I looked up to my friend and found that his attention was stuck on something over my shoulder. I followed his gaze and passed on anything that didn’t seem worthy of a stare, but then, I saw it.

“What is that?”