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They’ve been wandering around in these woods since they were born. At least J. thinks they were born. He doesn’t remember being a kid. He does remember existing before the woods, walking through tall grass that was never higher than his own head. Had he ever been a small child, a vulnerable one, someone too delicate to survive alone in the world?
W, E and JB had entered his life one by one, sprung fully formed into the natural world as grown-ups, with grown-up ways and grown-up lives, but none of them had memories of their lives before the woods, before the time that they found one another and started to play their music. E he’d found down by the old mill creek, wading in on bare feet to catch fish in a net for supper. W he’d seen the first time trying to climb up a heavy, honeybee-laden pine tree to steal something sweet for breakfast. And then there was JB, who had made a home for himself in the hills over by the edge of the territory, where mountains sat silent and frost-capped most of the year.
They chose to live together; it was easier than trying to live alone in the woods, and safety in numbers was definitely something that factored into that choice. It was better to have multiple people to scare a bear off to get more fish, to use smoke to ward off the bees so they could sneak honeycombs from the hive. And it was warmer to sleep together, under a big thick heavy goosedown quilt in their warm but ramshackle farmhouse than it was to do it completely alone with no one else around to care.
They liked their little home, the way they kept it clean; they took turns baking, mending, washing and beating back the brush around the cabin. Mostly they slept under the stars with the windows open, cuddled together whether the snow was thickly crusted underfoot or whether it was sunny and hot. The grass could kiss their shoulders and the sun could tan their skin, or the ice could make them slip and stumble as they skittered through the hills and dales around them. The little ghost town where they hung out sometimes, so devoid of anything resembling human life, but an easy enough platform for them to sing, dance and entertain from.
They needed nothing – no money, no nourishment. Everything they had was all they wanted in the end. Maybe it’d be fun to have a dog – if they could find one. How would they even know how to get out of the woods for long enough to find one, though? That was the big trick. In any event, for now they were mutually content.
And yet, in the back of J’s mind, he kept wondering how they’d fallen into this natural rhythm, how they’d managed to make a life together when it was so hard to live alone. Surely, more people would lead to more arguments, and yet they all got along as easily and pleasantly as humanly possible. He wondered if, somehow and in some way, he had been rewarded by an odd God – or was being punished by one, given something wonderful for absolutely no reason, with the ever-hovering possibility that they could lose it at any time.
J decided to bring it up at rehearsal. Unfortunately, the rest of the men he lived with really didn’t have the time or patience to discuss the situation.
“Do you ever remember not existing?” he asked W, which isn’t the sort of thing you would ask anyone, were you not made of stardust and stuck on a big farm for all of eternity.
“No,” W said. He’d been trying to tune the piano and had been spending hours with wires and wrenches, trying to get a C to sound like a C again. “I don’t think anyone rightly would. How can you know about not existing if you don’t exist?”
Huh. That was true.
JB wrinkled his brow when J asked him the question. He’d been sitting on the ground re-stringing his banjo. Being immortal and all-powerful didn’t mean that they weren’t subject to the slings and horrifying arrows of semi-morality. “No, I think I would remember not existing.”
E, meanwhile, was convinced they were stuck in some kind of simulation anyway. “Maybe this is God’s shoebox,” he suggested. “And we’re all stuck in here waiting for him to slam an Odor Eater in here and clean up the whole world with one fell swoop.”
“That’s dark,” J said. Well, it was the darkest thought he’d ever expressed to J.
“I’m just thinking out loud like you are,” said E lightly. Then he swung his leg around the side of the fallen tree log where he’d been sitting and strumming the banjo. “It’s all a weird coincidence we found one another anyway. Miss Fate’s an odd, odd lady and you don’t wanna mess with her if you can avoid it.”
J had never even thought of fate as a woman, let alone someone who would want him to ruin himself by making some sort of terrible, colossal mistake for her entertainment. Had E simply lived longer than him? Was that it?
J didn’t want to ask anymore questions. It was time to gather in the clearing for practice. And when J opened his throat to sing, suddenly all his questions went away and nothing else came close to mattering. It was better than knowing what God was, and better than understanding why they were feeling so confused about their own origin point. It was as close as they could get to touching God’s face.
Dinner was chicken stew, and he didn’t want to know which of his feathered friends had been butchered for the honor. They had plenty, and they’d always managed to breed in larger numbers than the group needed, but it was always sad for J to consider what was going on under the surface.
Not enough to make him stop eating, though. The stuff was pretty darn tasty.
They passed around the salt and the pepper, and they ate it up with corn on the cob and potatoes. They had the last of the cornbread and cold milk and water to drink. Everything was warm and cozy until E looked up.
“Are you still wondering why you can’t remember what you were like as a kid?” E asked J.
“Well,” J admitted, between bites of chicken.
“I thought so,” E said, and turned to JB smiling smugly. “You owe me so much money, dude.”
“The answer is to stop asking so many dumb questions, I guess,” admitted J. “But I can’t help but start to let my mind wander.”
“Don’t let it go too far,” said E. “It might never come back.”
“Don’t be cruel,” W said. “There’s no harm in trying to think about who you are and why you are. I’d venture to say that that’s even healthy.”
J smiled as his feelings were validated once again. And was bold enough to follow up on this nagging question he had and try to answer it.
“Maybe it’s time I take a walk to the edge of the woods. Find out what’s really out there beyond the mountains.”
Dishes rattled. There was deep concern on JB’s face. But it was W who said, “I don’t want you doing that. It’s so dangerous, way too dangerous for anyone to try to get that far away from this place. What if you get hurt? Who’ll be there to help you.”
“I’ll take a first aid kit,” said J. He hated feeling miniature. He was just as old as these men, and he had a right to his own adventure.
W nodded. “Well, I don’t see why we should stop you, if that’s how you feel about it.”
JB frowned. “I want to go with you,” he said.
“If you’re going I’m going with you,” said E.
“One of us has to stay with the house!” W said. The idea of sending them alone into the unknown clearly weighted heavily upon his shoulders.
“We’ll be fine,” said J happily. “Just wait and see.”
They set out with packs loaded with food and supplies, marking their way with ribbons tied along the trees. The clearings and trees were easy enough to confuse for one another, so J was happy to pay attention as they walked along the edge of the forest, until it dovetailed into a treeless valley. They stopped to drink and eat when they reached the edge of the stream, to get extra energy to ford it.
The climb got harder from there, over feet of rocky terrain. He was glad that JB was there, as often as JB indicated that being with J was a total hassle. But J noticed the way he offered him extra sips of water, and the last little bit of steak jerky from his own rations. There was something warm to it, sweet.
They kept climbing, regardless. Until they got to the top of the hill that bordered the forest and took a long look around.
There was a world outside after all; it was noisy down there – monsters made of wheels belched black clouds into the air; and they were roaring by at top speed. There were hundreds of people shouting, holding hands, laughing, as they ran down long streets that were made of something flat instead of dirt. They were alone with their thoughts, the lot of them.
J wouldn’t mind being part of that world, but on the other hand he couldn’t ever envision becoming a major part of them.
“We’ve been up here for a long time, haven’t we?” J asked. He meant in both ways. Either he’d died here decades ago and been reborn as a spirit of the forest, or he WAS a spirt of the forest, and had been hewn of the terrain the land, the same way they’d made their guitars and banjos and piano. It was too much; he didn’t even want to consider the possibility of it all.
“Yeah,” said JB. He reached for J’s hand and held it. “We have.”
So that was what it was.
They were not evil, but of the woods, of the trees, of the rocky streams and the breeze blowing the clouds around.
The three men stood for a long time on the peak of that hill, watching those cars and hearing those people call. They remained oblivious to the three men’s presence, and soon they collectively realized that W was waiting for him.
The next day, they avoided talking about what they’d seen, the world that they never knew existed outside of their own. But electricity still sizzled in the air, memories of what they now knew.
“We need to get ready for rehearsals,” E says, without looking up from the piano. The upright had also been with them for years, since before J could remember. It was ancient and sacred, as if it were a mother to them all.
J would always be curious about the world he’d seen, but he understood, now. He’d always be a part of these woods – the echo in the canyon, the babble of the brook. Children would hear his laughter in the air and wonder about the magic protecting this place. If they did not want to leave it, then surely they’d guard any who came to stay or go as the years passed on.
And so the boys lined up to sing their praise of the world where they lived.
But before he started singing this time, he did something unexpected.
He kissed JB.
The kiss seemed to last for years, and It made everything shine a little brighter, like a bright slug of the applejack that W made the other winter. It made the back of his throat burn and his heart sing like a new mountain song.
And JB kissed him back, in front of the others, who smiled and nodded their approval.
The tune, when it came from their mouths, rang sweeter than the breeze through the empty air for the joy of it all.