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In the House of Wilderness
In the House of Wilderness
A NOVEL
CHARLES DODD WHITE
Swallow Press / Ohio University Press
Athens, Ohio
Swallow Press
An imprint of Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701
© 2018 by Charles Dodd White
All rights reserved
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
For
A., E., and I.
These lonesome people in the wild places, it is their nature to speak; they must cry out their sorrows like the wild birds.
—Frank O’Connor
Wilderness. The word itself is music.
—Edward Abbey
Contents
Part I
1
THESE THREE had survived by charity and deceit for the better part of the winter. Two women and one man, all young and adrift in the turns of the American South. They’d left the wilderness preserve the autumn before, hitchhiked down into Charlotte, and stood around bus stations telling fictions of abandonment to any kindly face. Taking the dollars with self-abasement, saying God’s blessings and crushing the money into their rucksacks until they collected enough for food and weed and the means to find a new place to hold them.
In the cold they stood in evening lines at the shelters and moved around the streets through the sunlit hours, bound always to the next alcove, adopting whatever stray dog they could for the day so that they might beg more profitably.
Still, their eyes grew hungry. Their faces took on great depth.
They called themselves Wolf, Winter, and Rain. The names they’d taken when they met and fell in love in the forest, married one another by their own decree before they came back to the cities where they’d learned this new kind of survival and what it exacted.
Things had taken a turn in Knoxville. March held onto the cold and the shelters overfilled. They’d headed east of the river to find abandoned homes near the interstate they might occupy, but there was little to be found that wasn’t already claimed.