The great oak table stood in the middle of the room, warped by heat from an old wood stove in the corner.  Its dark brown finish had boiled up in the center into little pockets of wax and cure, and that was its grand history--a hundred years or more of Christmas dinners and knives hammered thoughtlessly into the wood.  The leaves and edges drooped down, worn under the weight of rough, uncultured elbows and wood bundles for the stove.  Underneath, the modest planks gave way to the graceful arch of the leg, terminating in the vicious paw of a huge dog, polished claws gleaming on the drab floor. 

At night the legs tapped their way upstairs, past the rooms of sleeping adults, stopping at the unfamiliar bed in which I slept.  The moonlight illuminated every glistening nail slathered in dew and blood with fierce intensity.  That evil table, with hairy paws like a dog, a lion, a monster, came to devil with the shifting patterns of blue, playing on my coverlet and left again before the silvery, delicate cicadas pealed their morning mass. And I was afraid.

At the table, my chin barely reached my cereal bowl and my legs dangled wildly above the floor.  I eyed the strange woman who stood at the kitchen counter and gazed out at the morning.  

"Miz Edna," I said, "Where'd ya get this table?"

"Well now child, I don't rightly recall.  It came from my grandmother, I reckon."

I couldn't imagine Edna's grandmother.  My grandmother was already very old and very wrinkled.  She stooped when she walked, and shuffled along the floor with a cane.  Edna looked like that, and she said her heart hurt when she looked at pictures of her children.  That was an affliction which plagued old people; sometimes I had heard they died of it in a shocking and abrupt manner.  Edna's grandmother must have been very old, even older than mine.

"How old is your grandma, Miz Edna?"

"She's dead now, child.  She died afore I was born. You hurry up with your cereal and run outside and play."

"Yes ma'am.  One thing I can't figure though," I said.  

"What's that?"

"How did you get this table if your grandmother was dead afore you were born?"

"I tol' you, child, hurry up.  Your ma and I're going down to the store, and I've got to get these here dishes scrubbed.  Get on outta here," she said, laughing and playfully swatting me with a towel.  She walked over and pulled my chair out.

"Thank you, Miz Edna." I looked down at the floor and the hairy paws that lay waiting for me, just waiting to tear at my feet like I had seen some old barn dogs tear at a rabbit.

"Miz Edna?"

Her shoulders drooped down a little, and she rested her wrists on the edge of the sink.  "What, chil'?"  

"Could you pull my chair out some more?"  

She walked over without a word and dragged it across the marred linoleum.  I hopped down and stood teetering on the white square beneath my feet.  Somehow, I had to find a way to hop from the table to the screen door without stepping on a black tile, which were what the four feet claimed as home.  It was like a  game, and I could get captured by... "Come back here and push your chair in like a young lady!" Edna said.

"I can't," I lied.  "It's too heavy."

"Well then...tell yer pa and John that the coffee's ready."

"Yes ma'am.  Pa, Mr. John! Your coffee's ready," I hollered from the screen door.

"Child, I swear, you are the most incorrigible thing I ever met!"

"What's incorrigible mean?"

"It means get outta here before I have to tie some meat to yer bee-hind and set the dogs a runnin'!"

My father had told me that I could take the old bike from the shed and ride down the road past the house where we had walked the day before, but the wobbly training wheels slammed in and out of ruts in the road with such bone-jarring regularity that it was altogether impossible to travel any distance without the occurrence of skinned knees and elbows.  Then I'd have to run back to the house, and mama would brush my ringlets out of my wet eyes and ask, "What's the matter?  What happened?" And everyone would gather round and think I was a cry-baby and that I didn't know how to ride a bike.  I was planning to go places that day, and I didn't need my plans to be interfered with by some old bicycle. 

The yellow farm house stood by the side of a dirt road, shaded on the east side by what big people called a "grand ol' tree." I couldn't understand what was grand about it; it was too tall for climbing and too weak for a swing, but mama liked to sit underneath it and pat her belly and think up names for the baby, and that made it grand to me.

Out back of the tree there was a barn filled to the brim with tools and rusty cars and old tires.  The dogs liked to slink in there to get out of the hot noon sun, or to bother the possums that darted in and out of holes along the foundation.  I had a job much more important for them that day, however: protection.  You couldn't ride a dog, and you couldn't trust it to keep watch when you were doing something you weren't supposed to, but the big brown dogs could snarl at bears and lions in the woods.  They could chase down robbers and protect you with their fat, hairy paws and snarling lips from Mean People and Strangers.  I was altogether fond of dogs in general.

"Come here, Red.  Get out here!  Come on, boy!" I called to the inside of the dark barn.  A big loppy-eared mutt came out, his drooping lips grinning at me as his long tale wagged in the dust he had stirred up. 

"Good boy!  Good dog!  Ya wanna come for a walk with me?  Do ya?  You wouldn't chase me if I had meat strapped to my bee-hind, would ya?" I said, giggling as I remembered the way Edna said that word.  "Bee-hind," I said again.  But Red wasn't listening.  He was on point, chasing after some poor chicken that wandered the wrong way.  Sometimes I thought I liked cats better.

So I was on my own as I left to wander down that farm road in a place I didn't know.  People didn't keep chickens in the city.  They didn't drive tractors to work in the morning and come home to a hot pot pie and music from the piano.  They didn't have to worry about chopping wood for the stove, or cleaning out the chimney.  My grandmother didn't knit beautiful sweaters and tell stories about how it used to be while she sat rocking in a chair her father made.  They didn't have wild, terrorized people knocking on the door in the middle of the night and screaming that their husbands beat them and could you help them, please? 

People from the city called themselves cultured and prayed to all sorts of gods and petitioned for water rights and asked why I didn't know my alphabet.  People from the city closed their windows to the night when it rained and were frightened when the only sounds they could hear didn't come from a motor-car or airplane.  People from the city didn't know the beauty of the Valley, as clouds cast shifting shadows over the tree draped hills.  They didn't understand the way it felt to dip your tired feet into the sparkling James and watch as tiny minnows picked their way through the rocks between your toes.  They couldn't feel the pleasure of watching soft fields of grass and flowers blowing in the breeze, or how much a cold glass of iced-tea waiting on the porch meant to an old man, tired from the many years of dirt and seeds and worry that had collected on his red neck.  People from the city didn't understand that elusive and wonderful place, so far from everything important to them.  And neither did I, and so I was afraid.

The red clay road beside the house ran in two directions--to the left was the way into town and ladies who smiled and shaded their eyes and knelt down and said "heh-llo leetle gi-rl" and asked, intrusively, who exactly you were.  To the right lay the vast river and a wooden bridge and fields of wild onions and the dead buck. And that was the boundary between this land and the next.  

My father had found him when we were walking the day before in the bright fields along the road.  I'd run along behind him and pulled up wild onions, broken off the tips and tossed them in the bunched up bottom of my yellow sundress, the one my mother had apliqued with the green flowers.  I'd thought, Miz Edna will be so proud of me when she sees how I've helped with dinner.  My father had said, "Put those down right here.  Put them down now." And, oh, how I'd fought with my hands as they threw down the glistening white bulbs, for they were my own.  I had pulled them from the brown, brown earth, these tiny things, and they were good, they were useful, they were my links, because I wanted to understand just how Mr. John felt about the land.  Because they were mine.  And I'd asked my father what had made them Ungood, but before he'd answered I'd known, for I had seen the magnificent antlers rising out of the grass when the wind turned the stalks side to side in a vast school of green.  I had seen the peeling velvet falling to the earth and the ribs rising  along the side where they had once guarded the heart of that beast.  I had smelled the sickly-sweet smell of killed venison and had felt the shadows of vultures circling over our heads, waiting to return so they might continue to plunder the sightless eyes.  

But that was yesterday.  Today the sky was new, for last night the sun had dipped into the ocean and washed off all the Ungood of that day, and the deep blue sky ached with freshness from the early rain.  I reached the place where the buck lay, and paused, for though I could see the river where we tubed down the long, shady banks and where we swam in deep holes and the bridge where we cast flowers into the water and watched them drift lazily away, though the wind blew the scent of the deer to creep along dark places in the forest, far from me and my questions, this was not the place I had discovered beside the ready hand of an adult.  My father had said I could leave, he had said I could be free, for now I was not in the land of Mean People and Strangers; I was not in the city. But just behind me, ahead of me, lay the lurking unknown. And I was afraid.  

Now I faced a decision. I could go forward and discover that place from whence the dead buck had come, indubitably slain by the dripping paws of the dog-table.  I could go forward and trust my father, who said it was okay, even though from the day of my birth, solitude had been something to be feared.  I could go forward and face the ghosts that came to me at night, I could battle the windmills and murder the dragons.  I could look into the eyes of every murderer I had seen on the local news and say, "Touch me, harm me, see how I do not kneel." Or I could go back and live with the beasts I already knew, and face the same things, the same way, and I could be safe.  It was a hundred yards perhaps to that bridge that traversed the beautiful river I loved, but it seemed a hundred miles, and every step steeped in danger, and every foot piercing me with needles because it went against what the city preached.  

I do not know what it is to stand on a bridge over the James on a bright summer day and gaze at time-worn rocks with nothing but the cool leaves and clean air at my side.  I have not visited that place for many years, and now the fields are grown over and perhaps the table is in another house.  I took the road more traveled by, and now I know the difference.  And of that, I am afraid.

Author's Biography

Elizabeth Routen, 21, a native of Norfolk, Virginia, is the author of the recently released short story collection VOICES ON THE STAIR.  

Her writing has appeared in publications including The Paumanok Review, The Adirondack Review, and The Newport Review.  She is a staff writer for Storyteller Magazine.  

E-mail Elizabeth at erouten@yahoo.com or visit her online at http://routen.windriverpress.com.

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