On the night that Henry Adams died we went into the woods for the last time, on the night that Henry Adams died we went into the woods, on the night that Henry Adams died...
I grew up in Black Point Minnesota, a town of twelve hundred fifty three inhabitants, seven bars, nineteen miles of road, and three kinds of Lutheran. It clung to a patch of land some five hours north of civilization and two and a half west of the Iron Range, on the border between forests that were traditionally called “Up North” and prairie, colloquially referred to as “Meth Country.”
Our social scene, such as it was, consisted of four bars and the half dozen cover bands that rotated between them. Occasionally, maybe twice a year, enough of us would club together to pay for gas that we could get to WE Fest or a show in the cities and we would pack enough booze to float the British navy, circa eighteen ninety, and pile into Henry Adams' hippie wagon.
The “wagon” was an old school bus that even the local district felt was to old and unreliable to use and so, in my freshman year, they parked it in the back of the lot a town and a half over, just off of I-35, pulled the wheels off, and called it a day. Henry spent the next three months trying to convince us to help him steal it. Of course he eventually succeeded.
It was late at night, somewhere in the vicinity of February, late enough that winter that snow had lost its novelty, but not late enough that we looked towards spring with any hope of reprieve. Henry had not been idle, as he assembled his team, he had been combing the city dumps for maybe thirty miles on a weekly basis, looking for tires forty-one and a half inches in diameter, throwing them in his fathers pickup, and stashing them in a deer stand he had found, deep in the woods.
He would return to the deer stand, twisting in the breeze above blood, and mud, and melted snow.
My father had two pickup trucks like any good northern redneck, one with a gun rack and a stained tarp in the back that was in no way allowed in the house, and the other with a pristine bed and smooth suspension that he drove whenever he didn't need to impress anyone. We all had farmers drivers licenses, and some of us went to church with the sheriff.
The sheriff was a German Lutheran, or as we Norwegians and Swedes called them, drinking Lutherans. Consequently his children, fraternal twins, threw some of the finest parties in the area, and we were understandably more concerned about the weather than we were about the law.
The night we stole the bus was clear, picturesque, and arctic cold. Our breath froze on the windshield and our tires kicked up clouds of brittle crystal that hung in the air like the ghosts of storms. When we broke the cover of the truck, tools clenched in well-wrapped hands, the air was a punch to the chest. I didn't stop hiccuping for four hours.
Gritting our teeth we stole forwards, myself, by far the largest, carrying bolt cutters and anti-freeze. Sarah, skinny, almost meth-head skinny, but too smart and with perfect teeth wraith like behind me carrying the hundred eighty lumen flashlight (discretely shut off) and a police scanner dug up from lord-knows-where. Sven, like a parody of the Norse stereotype, carried the tire iron, a bottle of wine, and the jack more typically used on tractors. Henry, as the ring leader, and the only one who knew how to hot-wire a car, convinced us that he should stay in the truck and keep his fingers limber.
We had conceded the point with less argument than expected, leaving him slightly flummoxed and, I think, wishing he were out with us. The look on his face warmed me, as we cracked open the gate and, over the course of three and a half hours fitted the wheels to the bus, but not as much as did the home made wine, or the back breaking labor.
The sun had not yet begun to rise as we packed up, backed the bus out, and replaced the chain lock on the gate that I had cut. That's how Henry did things, he lived, and died, in darkness.
We got caught of course, not three weeks later, though in the interim we had repainted the bus, torn out two-thirds of the seats, and made all sorts of plans. Hubris played a role, as it so often does, and drunkenness, and a frank lack of discretion for which we were justly known. Fortunately for us, it was Henry's father that found it.
Mr. Adams was notable in two respects; he was the head of the history department at the district school, Henry's younger brothers were named Samuel and John, and he was a misleadingly round man. His face was round, his body was round, his hands, when wrapped around a piece of chalk were two softballs. Every day he squeezed into one of his several not-round-enough suits, donned a pair of eyeglasses, bow-tie, and bowler before facing the world. Underneath his academic facade however, Mr. Adams was probably the best shot, and certainly the sharpest mind, in town. He often held court in the Halfback Tap, telling war stories, his own as well as those dating back to Hannibal and the Romans.
He ran into the Halfback that day, breathless and red, glasses nowhere to be seen, to announce that Henry was missing.
I was with Sarah when we got called to the Adams house, on the edge of town (if indeed the town was not all edge) its back yard bleeding into the woods. I was with Sarah an awful lot after the robbery, we found each other easy to talk to and enjoyed an easy cadence to our verbal sparring. She would, from time to time, inform me that we were getting coffee, going for a walk, or doing homework, and I would find myself agreeing with this version of reality.
All that changed when we started dating was that she informed me when I would be picking up the tab, and when it was her turn. We argued genially about almost everything, but she never gave me reason to argue about the division of power in the relationship. Maybe I was a push over then. Maybe I still am, Sarah just isn't around to do the pushing.
When we got to the Adams' I noted, with some trepidation, that the bus was parked on the street. We exchanged meaningful glances.
“So, we blame Henry?” Sarah said.
“It was his idea...” I replied.
“Our fingerprints.”
“Our friend...”
“So, of course we blame him.”
“He would do the same for us.” Our breath pooled in front of our faces as we stood a while longer on the sidewalk, admiring the pine trees, the slush in the street, and the faint tracks of the first cock robin of spring with the wonder of condemned criminals. Sarah took the lead up the short walk to the Adams' peeling red door.
That we got off without any real trouble goes without saying. Mr. Adams thought it was great fun, and didn't really harm anyone, he just insisted that it not be traced back to him, which we all agreed was perfectly reasonable, and that we get it properly insured. A lawyer friend of his from the Cities was able to set that up somehow, for a fee.
Mrs. Clavell defended me for free, years later.
Odd, maybe, that a bunch of fourteen year olds could drunkenly steal a school bus, get caught, and not walk, but drive away from it. That was Black Point. The town was dying, and everyone knew it, so no one really gave a damn. Who cares about a couple kids stealing something that no one wanted, that no one was using, when half their class will drop out, nearly ten percent will become addicted to meth or heroin. When twenty-five percent of the girls their age would be pregnant before they could vote, and when any jobs they might want would be many miles away, even if they could get them?
Kids are kids, were kids, until the night Henry Adams died.
There's one, in almost every circle, one person that's a little bit moody, a little bit angry, repressed and reserved. One person that everyone else worries about, on some level, one person who just doesn't quite fit.
Henry was a drama queen, in whatever sense of the word. He was Sky Masterson and Billy Crocker, he sang in the chorus during a production of West Side Story and stole the freshman year production of Our Town. Theatrics bled over into his home life, with a tendency to get into incredibly tense fights with his father, his pastor, people at parties, the town drunks at the Halfback or, on a bad night, down the road at Sideways Sisters, a tin roofed trucker bar.
Those of us who were close to him knew he was gay from the time we were all in grade school together, or at least we joked about it with all the callousness of the uneducated, heteronormative country kids that we were. When he came out, first to Sarah and then to me, before admitting to Sven that he had been his first crush, we gave him no end of grief.
It was all in good fun. Knowing him as one of us opened our eyes, or mine at least, in ways that I hadn't expected. When we went to the cities we would follow him downtown, kick around the bars with our fake ID's, while he blew perfectly good drinking money on touring shows, and meet him later at the Brass Rail, or the Saloon, where we would dance to better music than we heard elsewhere, shoot pool on free tables, and where Sven would drink for free.
Henry wasn't the odd one in the group, it was me.
Senior year was bad for us. Autumn was long and winter was mild and somehow we seemed constitutionally incapable of dealing with it. Of course “dealing” had traditionally involved staring at the falling snow through the haze of a bottle of Jack so maybe being forced outside wasn't such a bad thing.
Regardless of the reason a great restlessness settled on us, Sven was going by Sean and talking about moving to the cities, where his uncle could set him up as a bike delivery guy for some restaurant in Uptown. As far as I know he had never eaten Thai food but he waxed rhapsodical about the concept.
Sarah and I split up, fucked, got back together, strayed, got coffee, and did it all without exchanging more than a half dozen words directly related to our, for want of a better term, relationship. We had gotten to the point in our mutual existence where a slight change in posture or tone could convey levels of meaning not captured in mere words. Whether that meaning was actually broadcast, or generated wholly in the mind of the receiver is something of which I am still not sure.
None of us did well in our classes, a trend that extended to the entirety of our graduating class, and by the time those of us that gave a damn, or were told to give a damn, were receiving responses from colleges it was eminently clear that they would be underwhelming. St. Cloud accepted me, Madison wait-listed me, and nowhere out of state gave me a second glance. Sarah got into Reed, the one college to which she applied but, for reasons unbeknownst to me she never accepted admission.
We met in the cafe around which our lives together had centered for over three years, a cramped affair in the back of the bookstore that moved in when the Swedish Lutherans had moved to a more economical (read smaller) location, just off Broadway avenue, the most inaccurately named street in town. There were four tables, one of which we liked, and almost never found occupied.
“I've got too much going on these days.”
I stared at the scarred landscape stretching between us and tried to think of a commiseration that wasn't a lie, “See if they'll give you a gap year maybe?”
“I really don't know if I want to go.” she was typing as she spoke, and the chatter of laptop keys did as much to contextualize the conversation as the red light from the wall sconce behind her and the whistle of wind over ill-sealed windows. It was night, and a dusting of snow listed gradually downwards.
“You were just saying...”
“I say a lot of things.” she reseated her glasses with two hands, “I think I might spend some time in Europe.”
“So... Gap year?”
“I don't want to be tied down with dates, I just want to be. Somehow I don't think I have much time left.” She would say these things, and they would annoy me. Middle managers used to dream of joining the twenty-seven club, Janis Joplin never had.
“Sure.” my fingers played with a well ordered set of scratches in the wood, “Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”
“What?”
“They attributed it to Kurt Cobain.”
“Oh.”
We left without sharing another word. That was a theme, or as our Lit teacher would say, sighing, a Leitmotif.
Henry, always Henry, had the idea for the party.
“There is very little,” he said, “in a young persons life, that can not be solved by an injudicious application of liquor and nudity.”
We looked at him blankly, which only made him grin more broadly. Like all of his ideas Henry pursued that of the Last Great Lingerie Party (capitals universally acknowledged) with an enthusiasm that beggared belief. In the end, of course it was the smile that made it happen, and come the first solid night-time thaw we were piled into the Hippie Wagon with a dozen other scantily clad and recently shaved bodies, heading to the one place we were likely to attract more members.
The sheriff worked nights, his children didn't sleep, and were one promise of free booze away from doing almost anything. On a Friday night this made their house a nigh-perfect destination, and on that particular Friday anyone showing up after eight or so found the living room packed and the bar well stocked.
When the captain of the football team came by three or more of us stripped him down in a matter of seconds. I was too busy propping up a wall to help, but I remember Henry doing so as I remember little else of that evening. A few hours later, perhaps, I and a young Asian women whom I had failed to notice until that evening, stumbled in on him and the selfsame captain, failed to be surprised, and took our sloppy make-out session elsewhere.
The next day Henry glowed, the day after no one saw him.
And I was in the Halfback that evening, so I was in the first group to get the news. We hit the tree line with dogs and rifles, wearing reflective vests and letter jackets and orange stripped hunting caps. We went in without plans, without coordination, most of them went without telling their families or settling their tabs, but somehow, perhaps reflexively, we strung out into a human chain over a mile long, calling his name. As darkness fell I knew we wouldn't find him, not that way, and so I went where I didn't want to go, knowing somehow what I was going to find.
Henry's Hollow was an overhang on the bank of a creek, maybe ten miles north of town, that we had discovered some seven years before, when the creek was frozen and we could hike it easily. The four of us had eaten lunch there, had painted fantasies on the snow whipping past, of towering spires and brilliant witches, incompetent knights, and beautiful princes. We had made it home just in time to get into trouble, and Henry had later earned the naming rights by finding an overland path.
It was that path I struck, between the trees that arched together, down a trench between ancient barrows. I had trod the length of the path often enough, in all manner of mind, that my feet knew it, even in the dark, even after it had been tempered by yet another winter. When at last I emerged into the Hollow, where the barrows parted, and the trees with them, and the land sloped smoothly down to the pebble beach, and the overhang, and the caves, I breathed a sigh of relief.
At first I saw nothing out of the ordinary. “Henry?” but my only reply was the wind in the pines and the echoing calls of the hunters. Two steps forward, three, I felt the grass slip beneath my feet, “Henry?”
The ripple of the water seemed immense, and too near, and I longed for the cracking of ice. “Henry?” but I didn't expect him to answer. A shadow detached itself from the tree nearest the river, a willow amongst spruce. I started towards it, but was stopped short as it relaxed, and its heels clattered.
Cutting him down was the most tender thing I have ever done, closing his eyes and reading the tale told by his bruises and abrasions. His nose had been broken, and I set it, knuckles had bit deep across his stomach, and the impacts of boots laid over them. He had bit his lip, and it stood out red and swollen against a face far to pale. In his right pocket there was a note, unfinished and hastily written, a note that I like to pretend was to me or Sven, a note from years ago.
“I really like you.” it read, “We should do it again? I hope”
I moved to California, up in the mountains. We get plenty of snow. I tried to write, tried to paint, to compose, I've ended up mostly working odd jobs for the guys in town. I don't go back much, Black Point basically doesn't exist anymore except in my head, but Sarah is still there, and my dad.
Sven is living in Chicago, or was last I heard from him, riding a twenty year old Harley and wearing a top hat, and feeling like the city is getting to small for him.
Mostly we're happy, I guess, but I miss that time, and the months just after it. The camaraderie, the crying, and the silence in the forest.
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