Prologue
Days lost, I know not how,
I shall retrieve them now;
Now I shall keep the vow
I never kept before.
-- A. E. Housman
I was born in Mine Brook, New Jersey, a small town so named for the copper mines that once sustained it, and my story begins in one of those mines.
By the time I was growing up, the mines were long defunct, but my parents warned my brother and me not to play in certain woods where old shafts occasionally collapsed. Those woods had a dead, cobwebbed look about them; nobody went there, and in autumn the leaves piled high above mysterious dangers.
But like most children, I suspected my parents’ warnings were idle. They probably wanted to stop us from crossing Main Street—a lost cause already, since the best rollerblading hills surrounded the Catholic church across the road.
At the age of ten, I decided I absolutely needed a dog and my mother said no, so I ran away from home. I packed a bottle of water, a bag of Wonder Bread, my Bible, and a flashlight, and I snuck out at midnight. I cut across three adjoining backyards and followed the creek where my brother and I liked to play. I didn’t cross over Main Street; I went under it, beneath the stone bridge, into the woods.
I walked and walked, my childish anger diminishing as I grew colder, and I was beginning to think of turning back when the ground opened under me. Stale air and moldering leaves whooshed up. The fall sucked my scream into the night and I struck a slanted, sliding surface. My backpack padded my landing, but it also knocked the wind out of me.
I clutched a root and wheezed painfully. Down there, everything was dark and damp and loose. Tomblike air exhaled from deep in the earth. Tears soaked into a gash on my cheek and my arms and legs ached in a dozen places.
“Help!” I shouted.
I called for my mother and father, my brother, anyone, until my voice was ragged.
Gradually, my eyes adjusted to the darkness and I saw that I was perched on an earthen ledge supported by rotting beams and rocks. I shifted closer to the wall and eased my Bible out of my backpack. My parents and church had told me that the book could save me, and while I was too young to really take to any faith, I knew I needed saving.
That was how he found me: Sitting in a collapsed mineshaft and reading the Book of Ruth by flashlight.
“Don’t be afraid,” he called.
Despite the injunction, I jumped. Rocks skittered down the shaft, clattering and echoing. I turned my flashlight toward the voice. The beam caught his face before he shielded it: Stricken, pale-eyed, with a dark sweep of hair.
“Don’t move. Turn that off. I’m coming to get you.”
I obeyed with shaking hands. Darkness swarmed in as I clicked off the light and I closed my eyes. Better the darkness you know. Above me came the sounds of shifting leaves and boots scraping rock. Then his arm was around me, pressing me into his side.
“Thank God,” he said. “Hold on to me.”
I wrapped my limbs around him the way I did when I played bucking bronco with my brother, and like my brother the man was warm and solid. We left behind the odor of decay and colder air of the mineshaft. Hand over hand, smoothly, he ascended, and when he boosted himself onto the forest floor I opened my eyes.
He carried me away from the hole and set me on my feet.
Then he crouched and hugged me, hard, the same way he had grasped me in the collapsed earth, and I began to cry. The fear of death stays away from youth, but the man was a stranger, I knew I would be in trouble at home, my body hurt, and I sensed dimly that I had brushed against something monumental.
“Stop. You’re safe now. Oh, Leda, thank God,” he repeated earnestly. He dried my tears with a soft sleeve and pried the flashlight and Bible from my hands. He glanced at the items before zipping them into my backpack. “What were you doing? Why are you out here?”
“I ran away.”
“Why?” he demanded.
“My mom won’t let me have a dog.” I sniffled one last time. My harrowing encounter notwithstanding, I still felt justified in running away. I even felt a blow of disappointment because my half-formed plan had failed and there would be no dog.
“I’m taking you home,” the man said. He lifted me again and I clung to him. This time, I was aware of his wintery scent—firewood and pine—and the way his hair touched my fingers at the nape of his neck. I never thought to question how he knew my name or where I lived. He retraced my path unerringly, past the creek, through the yards.
After a while, he laughed.
“She won’t let you have a dog,” he said.
“No. She says they make the house dirty. I want one so much, to train.” When he chuckled again, I stiffened. “Put me down.”
He obliged and slowed his pace so that I could keep up.
“I have two dogs,” he said.
“What kind?” Owning two dogs raised the man in my estimation, and it also filled me with jealousy. “Are they smart?”
“German Shepherds. Black ones. They’re very smart.”
“Do they look like wolves?”
“A little,” he allowed.
“I really want a wolf, but people can’t have them.”
“Wolves are beautiful.”
My house was in sight, the man who knew my name and had carried me to safety no longer seemed like such a stranger, and my pain was gone. I looked up at him. He was beautiful, I could see that now, and I loved him immediately, completely, the way only a child can.
“What were you reading when I found you?” he said.
“About Ruth. We’re reading it in Sunday school. We’re making a craft with hay.”
We had reached the edge of my backyard and I wanted to run home and I also wanted to stay with the man who shared my views on wolves. He knelt and began dusting dirt off my coat. “Entreat me not to leave you,” he said, “or to turn back from following after you, for wherever you go, I will go, and wherever you lodge, I will lodge. Your people shall be my people and your God, my God. Where you die, I will die, and there will I be buried. The Lord do so to me, and more also, if anything but death parts you and me.”
I recognized the words from the Book of Ruth and I knew he meant them for me. I hugged him quickly. “Thank you for helping me.”
“Go home now. Go to sleep. Will you tell your parents what happened?”
I deliberated for a while. “They’ll be mad.”
“Then don’t tell them. It can be a secret.”
I never got to keep secrets from my family—especially ones as exciting as this—so the idea thrilled me. “Okay,” I said, and I ran home.
A stained coat, torn sweatpants, and muddy sneakers are par for the course in any child’s room, so nothing seemed amiss the following day. The gash on my cheek and bruises on my body would have been difficult to explain, but they were gone, just like the man, and eight years would pass before I saw him again.
