If there is a municipality immune to the folkways of the rest of the country, Copeland gets the prize.
Secluded in the Heart-Shaped Forest, which it endlessly devours, inward and inward, the town of Copeland has no need for the rest of America, except for nourishment. Copeland gets fed from afar. Food and stuffs are replenished by the trucks returning through the barrier of the Heart-Shaped Forest from their distributions.
The outside world would have a hard time getting in, even if it cared to try. Sure, there are movies at the theater, books in the library, newspapers and commerce. But it is as if these transact across a barrier of time, and something more than time - a gulf of inertial resistance to the flow of the world itself.
This gulf opposes theories, prejudices, fashions and trends of all stripes. There is no Quantum, nor Relativity in Copeland. Vietnam is something to be listened to on the radio; no Copeland man signs up for the draft, and, somehow, no government agency seems to care. Equality of the races and the genders is fuel for the rest of the country to burn. Women work the wood with the men. A black man can do anything he is fit to do, though, admittedly, he may have a tougher row to hoe.
Things are not perfect - Copeland is no Utopia - not by a long shot - but the corrosive divisiveness coming to a head in the rest of the country is anathema here.
It makes one wonder.
~
There is Copeland.
The town of Copeland sleeps in the crook of the Heart-Shaped Forest’s arm, smoking and glittering as if in envy of the clouds and stars above.
One aspect of Copeland knows no sleep, however.
Like an anatomical organ, ever trudging, the Copeland Lumber Mill churns eternal.
The sawmill renders the fresh-chopped trees that amble down the lane of the Meritimus River into angled shapes and rectangular pieces. In testament to this, hundreds of crosshatched stacks of 2x4s - an impossible, limitless plenitude, march back from the river docks awaiting distribution by truck and boat.
Atop one of these stacks, far back toward the rear of the mill, sits a raven.
The huge bird observes, with its gloss black eye, the body of a woman sprawled supine near the garbage bins, in a widening pattern of her own blood. If it were one of the folk of Copeland observing, instead of a raven, the blood might seem to assume the shape of wings, the shattered green glass surrounding her head, a halo.
The raven turns its placid gaze to a man standing above the fallen woman, just done sawing at the poor woman’s neck with a fish-scaling knife.
The man looks north, toward the road, with a face of frustration. He studies his work a last time: the intimacy of betrayed flesh no one should ever see, before turning toward the south side of the building. He walks calmly out of the dark bird’s sight.
The raven looks back to the woman.
The woman looks into the black eye of the raven until her own eye dims.
The woman slips reluctantly into death.
Inside the mill, the work continues, unmindful of the freshly murdered woman outside the east doors. The night shift workers joke and bicker, and work the wood.
Just north, on the main road leading from town, an old man shuffles mill-ward, muttering, wheezing. A pickup passed the old man going the opposite way, some five minutes prior. The dusty wake still hangs in the air, as if to purposely torment the old man’s breathing. He is drunk on cheap wine, not tired enough to sleep in the cold, yet too tired to walk all the way home.
He knows of an inviting vent at the back of mill that blasts hot air all night long, and he intends to sleep under it.
East, through the forest, at the top of an earthen rise comprised primarily of two elements: dirt and bones (graveyard bones, Indian bones, bones preceding all record), two teen boys --twins -- slip like eels from the window of their home, a tiny, decrepit dwelling.
When the twins are sufficiently far from their tarpaper shack of a house, they crouch in conspiratorial whispers before heading off through the trees, toward their mysterious ends.
They pop out of the forest onto the Mill Road, startling the drunken vent seeker.
“You near gimme a infarction!” The town drunk barks.
Neither of the twins says a thing. Shoulders hunched, hands stuffed deep in their pockets, they hurry guiltily past the man, north, away from the mill.
Upon reaching a safe distance, one of the twins emits a loud fart, and they both crack up.
The old man blearily regards the diminishing twins for a moment, then turns back in the direction of the mill with a disgusted shake of his head.
Inward a tortured mile of forest from the twins’ shack, sits a log cabin, under a bright green roof.
In the small bedroom, atop an old sleigh bed, an ancient woman jumps bolt-upright out of a nightmare. Sweat is like a second skin all over her, from her glistening forehead to the bottoms of her feet. The old woman sweeps apart the hand sewn curtains that block the light of the moon from her sleeping head (for privacy is of no concern at all).
The dame scans her clearing with intense blue eyes, as if in search of the nightmare’s author.
The Old Cross Bridge waits nearby, spanning an endlessly burbling creek that empties into a nearby waterhole, a waterhole always inviting of troubling herthe children who splash in its shallows, long into the autumn.
The road crossing over this bridge leads to another house, not a log cabin, but a real family home. The teen boy fights at his covers, his dreaming, of unrequited passion and danger.
His younger sister, in the next room, lies peacefully on her back, in a fashion vaguely reminiscent of a corpse in a coffin.
Mom and Dad slumber in their bed, in an attitude of military formation, as if ready to combat anyone who might threaten to wake them.
Across a patch of forest is Builder’s Cemetery, delimited by a cold iron fence. Is there some thing crouched in the branches of a tree above one of the graves?
Upon closer inspection there is not.
Some rows back, however, we are captivated by movement among the gravestones. It’s a trio of older teens, two lads and a lass. She dances weaving among the stones, enticing one of the boys while, unbeknownst to her, grievously disturbing the other.
Beyond the cemetery is a small area of tiny houses, more roughhewn than the rest we meet. This part of Copeland seems to fend for itself, creating spaces in the forest and populating those spaces with buildings and systems without assistance, or interference, from the municipality.
Ad hoc phone and electricity lines string the trees above the houses. The roads are unpaved dirt. Herb and vegetable gardens comprise nearly every yard. Garments gesticulate from the laundry lines like gentlemen in congenial disagreement.
The residents here, few in number, are Negro and Native men, women and children.
Now we approach Copeland proper, and Main Street.
Before we travel down it, let us stop and consider this tidy house. Nestled in Copeland’s only official neighborhood, the shrubs are trimmed with aesthetic purpose. The sleeping flowers in their boxes are as content as domesticated flowers might ever be. A bright green mat entices welcome at the base of the meticulously swept steps.
In the tiny parlor, snoring on the couch (having immediately succumbed to the warmth of the fire he has only just made), a strikingly handsome man in his mid thirties dreams the last pleasant dreams he will ever dream.
Here is Main Street, along which resides the supermarket, the post office, the police station and the diner. Way at the end of Main Street is a small public library. Over from that, the liquor store, owned by a woman who now sleeps in the small residence at the back, muttering impatiently to her sister, who never lived at all.
The Pink Motel is at the edge of town.
The motel has no room 13. There is a room 14, however, and in that room, a married couple, just passing through, have lost their fitful struggle with sleep and are making love like they invented the practice.
Their mutual climax is wistfully noted by the single woman in 12, traveling cross country to disburse her father’s will among herself and her hated younger siblings. This unpalatable event will transpire the next day, at 330 pm in Red Wing, and makes the woman fit to bursting with anxiety; she can’t get a wink of sleep.
The sounds of passion are also heard by the man over in room 11, who is on his way from New York to Texas to deliver an important message to a man he has no idea is already dead by misadventure.
All of these rooms’ residents are destined to pack up and leave the very next day, and, as intriguing as their circumstances may be, have nothing to do with the remainder of this tale.
Remember the handsome man sleeping in front of his just-made fire? The handsome man’s father is of some concern here.
The handsome man’s father lives in the wealthier, elevated part of Copeland, overlooking town. The lanky old man is the only legal resident of the mansion, and has been known to stalk its halls, deep in the night, or so his guards and chauffeurs, otherwise known as the Burlymen, have been so indiscreet as to describe, when in their cups.
But not tonight. Tonight the lanky old man got to sleep early.
The lanky old man wakes with a start as one of his Burlymen knocks urgently at his bedroom door. He spits vituperative as he drags his lanky frame out of the bed.
The Burlyman hands the lanky old man a phone handset, which he takes and puts to his lanky old ear. On the other end of the line is the night boss of the sawmill, of which, the lanky old man is the despised owner.
The lanky old man knows that every one of his employees at the mill, from the highest boss, to the lowest sawyer, hate him to his marrow.
He eagerly approves.
The night boss on the other end of the line is no different.
The man seethes between anxiety and animosity as he reports that a dead body has just been discovered behind his sawmill by a bum looking for a place to sleep. The lanky old man better come quick. The lanky old man asks his manager if the police have already been called, to which the manager replies in the negative.
“Good,” says the lanky old man, “Don’t.
“I’ll be right there.”
So wakes the sleepy town of Copeland.