• • •
There are four structures. Judy knows nothing about agriculture, but one seems to have been a dairy barn, its large doors open to the air outside. Inside, the standing stalls still have that animal smell, though they seem to have been abandoned long ago. Above the barn is a hayloft; a rickety ladder lets Judy climb high enough to poke her head into it, take in the remains of several hay bales standing against the walls.
She descends.
Next to the dairy barn is a small building set up on legs, windowless. Whatever its original purpose, it has since become home to rusting farm equipment. She enters it only briefly, then moves to the building to its west.
The interior of this third building, too, puzzles her at first: its floors are concrete and angle downward toward a drain. Perhaps, she thinks, this was where horses were sponged after exercise? There’s a smell in here she can’t identify, but it sets her on edge.
Then she looks up.
Five metal bars run from one end of the ceiling to the other. From these bars hang dozens of hooks in straight lines.
At last the smell makes sense to her: this was a slaughterhouse.
She stands there a moment longer, her body tense.
Then comes the noise: above her head, the sound of footsteps.
Tracy
1950s | 1961 | Winter 1973 | June 1975 | July 1975 | August 1975
Survival Trip was never announced in advance. It was, instead, sprung upon them in this way: with an air horn, at 5:30 in the morning, just after sunrise.
All summer, they’d been coached. When the air horn sounded, they would leap out of their bunks and into their clothes, no shower in between, and run as fast as they could to the flagpole.
Whoever arrived first was given extra provisions; whoever arrived last was given nothing at all.
Barbara was up and dressed before anyone else in the cabin.
“Put warm clothes on over your uniform,” she whispered to Tracy, and then she was gone.
Tracy was not last in her group to the flagpole, but she was close to it. And therefore she received, inside the backpack a counselor handed her, only four cans of beans, and a full water canteen. She looked around: Barbara and Lowell Cargill were inspecting tarps, compasses, Swiss Army knives. And the two youngest in her group, who arrived at the very end, opened their backpacks to find them entirely empty. Tracy watched their faces: they were trying to be brave, but their chins were tight with stopped tears.
T.J. Hewitt stood at the base of the flagpole, overseeing the chaos impassively. Once every camper was holding a backpack, she shimmied a small way up the pole and, planting the thick sole of her Danner boot on the cleat, lifted a bullhorn to speak.
“Survival Groups,” she said. “Your leaders will come to you shortly. But remember: they’re there only for emergencies. They will not help you in any other way. In general,” she said—here she looked around the meeting grounds for so long that it seemed as if she was trying to catch every camper’s eye—“you’re on your own. Good luck.”
From the center of the group, counselors began making their way outward toward the groups they had been assigned. Tracy scanned them, wondering who would come their way.
But it was T.J. Hewitt herself who approached.
“You’re with me,” she said.
• • •
Five minutes later, they set off.
T.J. was in the lead. Next came the youngest campers in their group. They fell in line like ducklings behind their leader, who looked back at them every so often, as if surprised or annoyed by their presence.
“Pretend I’m invisible,” she kept saying—and they’d drop back next to the rest of the group, only to return to T.J.’s side a moment later.
Barbara and Tracy and Lowell and his friend Walter—the oldest—walked four abreast. Tracy glanced sideways at Lowell from time to time, remembering what it had been like to sing in harmony with him, then blushing furiously at the thought of it.
Walking north, they crossed in front of the main house, Self-Reliance. In the windows, Tracy thought she could see people moving, and she said so to Barbara, who shrugged, looking straight ahead.
“They’re getting ready,” she said.
“For what?”
“They’re having a party. It’s the house’s hundredth birthday.”
“Are you invited?”
Barbara shook her head.
“I don’t want to go anyway,” she said.
• • •
They crossed the main road, and hiked an hour more, until finally T.J. stopped them.
“This is good,” she said. And then she walked away.
It was Barbara who broke the silence. “Open your backpacks,” she said.
Between the twelve of them they had: sixty-two cans of various foods, twelve bags of gorp, twelve water canteens, four small bottles of iodine tincture, nine tarps, four can openers, various knives, a roll of snare wire, ten ropes, and—the last item to come out of the last bag, and the item that drew the biggest sigh of relief—one box of matches.
Barbara stood up, inspecting the goods, making calculations about how to use it all. Then she glanced at T.J., who was leaning against a tree, one knee bent, the sole of her boot resting against its bark.
“Don’t look at me,” said T.J. “I’m invisible. I’m not here.”
She turned and hoisted her backpack onto her shoulders, then walked thirty feet up a slight incline, where she found a relatively flat place in the earth and began to set up her tent. In a flash, she’d made her own fire, strung a hammock between two trees, and begun reading a book while boiling water for coffee.
• • •
By noon, the campers had set up too, with Barbara leading the charge. Not for the first time, Tracy marveled at how well she moved, how much she knew about the woods. She was the one to locate running water in the form of a nearby stream, to lead a small group to refill their canteens, with an iodine topper; she was the one to use ropes and tarps to make primitive tents, to clear a patch of ground, to frame a large circle with rocks. Then she sent the children off to find the driest wood they could find, and kindling too.
She was not much older than the rest of them—in fact, she was younger than Walter and Lowell—but to Tracy she seemed, that day, like a grown woman.
On the nearby rise, T.J. glanced up from her book from time to time, watching impassively, saying nothing.
When she was not following Barbara’s orders, Tracy sat on the ground and played a game invented by one of the younger children, a boy named Christopher who seemed sweet-natured and sort of frightened. He was eight years old: the youngest of the bunch. “The youngest in the whole camp,” he noted glumly.
• • •
At night, after dinner, they told ghost stories—avoiding any mention of Jacob Sluiter, or Slitter—who felt too real to be fun. Lowell told the one about Scary Mary, the gray-haired woman, a favorite ghost on the grounds. “Boy in my cabin said he saw her just the other night,” said Lowell—until one of the younger girls began to cry, and Lowell recanted. They sang camp songs instead, and then Lowell sang, a cappella, a beautiful mournful song about a sailor lost at sea.
