Goerwitz

By Sam Goodwin

While very young, I was already familiar with North, South, East and West. (I still have trouble with Right and Left.) The World was very simple. It was, in fact, made up of rectangles. I spent several cold months in a rectangular house, made up of rectangular rooms, so, I began to spend more and more time out-of-doors. I looked for rectangles and, where there were none, I made them. One day my grown-up brother, Mike, took me in his truck to the gravel pit. For some reason, he didn't drive into the gravel pit but parked his truck outside. Then he and I walked to the rim of the gravel pit and looked down into it. Immediately my rectangular eyes moulded this big, irregular hole in the ground into the shape of a big rectangular box, with vertical sides. Another truck was maneuvering almost directly below us. How did it get there? How would it get out? I came up with an answer of simple elegance. Trucks had the ability to climb up and down vertical walls. Grown-ups would have found a way to make it more complicated.

The Sun was a disk of fire and the Moon a disk of much duller fire. Each was about four inches across, and each moved across the blue ceiling of the World (which grown—ups called "the sky") from East to West. Grown-ups kept saying the Sun and the Moon were balls.

Teeth were simple. I had upper teeth and lower teeth. Each of the two, a solid wall of hard material. Grown-ups complicated teeth by talking about having trouble with a "tooth," having a "tooth pulled" or having a "tooth filled." Was a tooth anything like a filled cookie?

A rutted, brown dirt road ran through the middle of the World from North to South. Our house stood on the east side of the road and faced south. On both sides of the road were hay fields. Beyond the fields on the east side of the road were pastures. The pastures were separated from the fields by cab-and-bunk rail fences, the cedar rails gray with age. Beyond the pastures were the woods. The World really should have been symmetrical, but it didn't quite make it. On the west side of the road the woods bounded the fields with no pasture in between.

Somewhat less than a quarter of a mile away, to the south, was Tom Berry's house. Tom's house and ours had similar silhouettes, except that Tom's house had a steeper roof. Both houses were on the east side of the road facing south. Both had a big high section on the end nearest the road, with gable ends facing north and south. Both houses had a lower "ell" section joined to the high section, extending eastward. Both houses had a long, low shed connecting the "ell" to a barn. The barn was bigger than all the buildings combined. Both houses had apple trees behind them.

But, Tom's broke the symmetry of the World in two more ways. On the east side of the road his pasture reached to within a few feet of the road, with no field between. On the east side of the road his field reached a fence (running east and west) just across from our house. That didn't seem quite right, but the grown-ups didn't seem to mind these breaks in the symmetry of the World.

Somewhere beyond Tom's house was Tom's sheep barn. West of the road and beyond that, mostly concealed by trees that grew beside the road, was Uncle Ray's and Aunt Lizzie's house. The land on that side (south of the house) sloped gently upward to the top of Oliver Hill.

North of our house, the road with some minor swaying from side to side, reached the North End of the World between two maple trees. I asked my mother what was beyond those two trees. She said, "Stewart Hill." Stewart Hill obviously didn't rise up like a hill in front of the house, so it must go down, straight down. Stewart Hill got its name from the Stewart house that had stood at its top, but the house had burned down a few years earlier.

One evening, after supper but before dark, we looked out of our back window and saw three deer come out of the woods west of the road and stand grazing in the field. It must have been June. The day light lasted well past suppertime, and the hay hadn't been cut yet.

My mother called me to the back door to watch them. After a little while she clapped her hands. I guess she didn't want them to get too tame, with the hunting season coming, even though several months away. The three deer galloped gracefully away, showing their white tails and leaping over three fences, hardly breaking their stride, disappearing into the woods east of the house.

Two or three times more the deer came after supper and repeated the show with minor variations.

One night I asked my Mother, "Where did they go"?

"Into the Woods."

"Why?"

"They live in the Woods."

Again my simple World was getting a little more complicated. I had not thought of the woods as having an "in." The Woods had been a solid fringe of trees, bordering the World, maybe serving as a barrier to keep people from stepping off the edge and falling forever through space. Now the Woods had to be a double row of trees or maybe a tree covered belt of land wide enough to allow the deer to lie down and do whatever else they did in their home. I wanted to see how wide the Woods were and even more to see the deer up close.

One day soon after that, I ran out of interesting things to do in the house, barn, shed and yard. I decided it was time to go and find the deer.

I had thought about it and figured out a plan that couldn't fail to take me right to the deer. At least I couldn't think of any way it could fail. I would go north across the field until I was well beyond the route that the deer always took, from west to east. Then I would go to the Woods and walk southward along the Woods until I came to the deer in their home. "Hello, you pretty deers," I would say, "Don't be afraid of me. I just want to look at you and touch you, if you will let me, and maybe we could play."

I was going north, directly away from the house, in grass almost up to my shoulders when, I became aware of a shrill, female voice in the distance. After hearing it three or four times, I reluctantly broke my concentration on my plan that couldn't fail. Slowly I turned around. My mother was standing in the back doorway.

"Willis! Come back!" she shouted. By now her voice was getting imperative.

"I'm going to find the deers."

"Come back!"

"I'm going to the deers." That was so perfectly reasonable, she could hardly object.

"Come back here this instant!"

I dunno why she has to spoil such a perfectly thought out adventure, but she does sound awfully worried. I'd better go back.

"Did you hear me calling?" She asked.

"No. Why can't I go into the Woods and find the deers?"

"You'll get lost in the Woods."

"Oh!" Another new idea had come from the complicated World of grown-ups into my simple World. Hard to believe. I could get lost in the narrow fringe of trees that bordered the World.