Walking the Poem
By Meredith Wadley
Kate and her mom, Gloria, were on a grocery store run. Halfway between the family farm and town, they saw a young woman on the side of the road walking toward them. She held out her thumb and smiled.
“That’s odd,” Gloria said, “she’s walking away from town but hitching a ride back to it?” She took her foot off the accelerator.
“You picking her up?”
“Should we?”
Kate shrugged. She wasn’t allowed to hitchhike. Or pick up hitchhikers. And didn’t one of her sisters get caught trying to thumb rides? Got grounded for a month?
The young woman stepped back, leaving room for them to pull over. She wore an urban style Kate’s sisters had adopted after starting college. Hiking sandals, low-hipped jeans, a cropped T-shirt, two braids, and a backpack.
The Volvo’s dust blew off before the young woman ran up and jerked open the sticky rear door. “Hey, thanks!” she said, tossing in a dark backpack and following it.
“Car broken down somewhere?” Gloria said.
“Just catching rides.”
Gloria, a large woman who taught middle-school math and language arts, glanced into the rearview mirror. “May I ask why?”
If the hitchhiker noticed the question’s disapproving tone, she ignored it. “I’m a poet,” she said as breezy as the air flowing through the open windows, the car gaining speed. “I’m walking the poem I write, and I’m writing the poem I walk.”
Kate slid down in her seat. The hitchhiker’s answer would sound like nonsense to her mother.
“I’m just going up and down the road. For inspiration, you know? So, you can let me out wherever.”
Kate’s side-view mirror framed the woman, her golden-brown eyes flickering as they drove past orchards, cereal crops, and grazing cattle, and she imagined seeing their landscape for the first time.
In a hayfield, two teenage boys tossed bales onto a flatbed trailer, the pickup being driven by a tiny figure. A haze of particles haloed the boys, and their sweat-slick chests glistened. There may have been poetry in their movements, but Kate knew the Swanson twins too well, how they bullied their little sister, a fourteen-year-old who could hardly see over the steering wheel.
Any poetry in the landscape deteriorated the closer they got to town. Acreage became tracts overgrown with brambles, thistle, and tansy weed. Rusting cars, a collapsing RV shed, and a buckled above-ground pool. Then gravel parking lots for the old wooden feedstore, the glass and brick tractor supply store, and the cinderblock vet’s practice.
At the turn to the grocery store, Gloria kept to Main, its faux-fronted stores and three traffic lights. Past its block of Victorian houses, several recently renovated, they reached the opposite edge of town with its own scraggle of parking lots, the migrants’ bar, with its battered Cadillacs and pickups, and opposite it, the farmers’ with its battered Subarus and pickups. The speed limit lifted, and under Gloria’s heavy foot, the car lurched, the hitchhiker’s head thrown back.
Pulse Creek Vineyards, the trailer park, the new housing development, Eddie Bless’s sheep herd, and Kate’s high school sped by. Before reaching the interstate, which sliced through good farmland like a tectonic fault, the Volvo slowed. An apple-green VW bug sat in the shade of the overpass.
“This yours?” Gloria said.
“Yes.”
“You’ve seen enough to write about. Go home now.”
The hitchhiker gave their back door a shoulder tackle. Grabbing her backpack, she said, “This is great, thanks. You two have a great day.”
The door slammed shut, and the car swerved across the road, heaving gravity into a turn Kate didn’t realize the boxy wagon could maneuver. “Now that’s poetry,” Gloria said. “Out of ten words, two greats.”
***
The checkout clerk, one of Gloria’s former students, shared the local news: “We’ve got ourselves a cougar, ladies.”
“A cougar?” Kate said. Her mom fed the belt their items from the cart, and she packed the bags.
“Eddie Bless found three dead sheep this morning and had to put down two. Said he could make out cougar prints—before the dogs trampled ’em.” His land bordered the high school. The dogs were two goofy mastiffs.
“Eddie on the booze, again?” Gloria said. Around Kate’s dad, she called him “Eddie Mess.”
The clerk shrugged. She wore dark, sloppy makeup, choppy black hair, and under a pink pinafore an unraveling black cardigan. Concealer hardly masked the fuck you tattoo on the back of her hand. “He told Sheriff to do something—and Sheriff knows just the guy.” Sheriff was her dad.
“That’s not the work of a cougar,” Gloria said.
“Could it be his own dogs?” the clerk said.
“Or coyote?” Kate said.
In the grocery store parking lot, Gloria handed Kate the keys. On the way home, where the sheen of the Swanson hayfield, now picked clean of bales, came into view, she said, “Well, I’ll be; our little poet-hitchhiker.”
Kate lifted her foot from the accelerator, but Gloria said, “Keep going.”
The poet smiled and waved as they roared past.
Toward the end of the valley, their white, Dutch-style house came into view. Perched on a hillock of lush pasturage—grazed by horses and beef cattle and bordered by a forest of Douglas fir—the tidy and resolute house shielded a matching barn, equipment sheds, and outbuildings. Rhododendrons as big as haystacks and in full blossom framed the front porch. Kate’s granddad had bought the place after retiring from the military. When her parents took over the place, her dad leased additional acreage, turning a hobby farm into a business operation.
Kate rolled to a stop behind the house. Her dad’s heeler, Sepp, lay curled on the mudroom step. The dog’s presence meant her dad was inside, probably in his office, going through paperwork and chewing on a toothpick. He hardly seemed interested when told the news from town. “That was no cougar,” Gloria told him, not mentioning the hitchhiker.
Despite it being hot outside, Kate changed into her running gear. She braided her hair loosely and took off, running toward town. Her thoughts on the poet, she regretted not having asked where she’d come from or how she’d chosen their road to poeticize. They could have asked her to recite some of her work. They didn’t even ask her name.
She sweated profusely, the pavement throbbing with heat. Usually, she headed in the opposite direction, past the neighbor’s place, where the pavement ended, to run in the forest, along a ridgeline overlooking their valley and town.
If she expected to see the poet again, Kate was disappointed. She cut across the Swanson’s shorn hayfield and climbed to the forested ridgeline trail. The tall trees sheltered her from the sun.
***
Those who knew Kate's family, would simply walk into the kitchen to visit. So, when the doorbell rang, she went to the landing on the stairs to see what was going on.
Her mom opened the door to a weathered man. Removing a straw cowboy hat, he revealed a white forehead imprinted by the hat's band and asked if a cougar had ever been sighted on their land. “I’m sure you’ve heard of the livestock being lost, ma’am. Some more sheep and a calf were ’tacked night ’fore last.”
“That’s no cougar, sir,” Gloria said, squaring her shoulders. “That’s not their manner of hunting, and you know it.”
Thick fingers worked the hat’s busted creases. “Might I speak to your husband?”
“Get off my land and stay off.”
“I have a permit.” As the man shoved his hand into a back pocket, Gloria shut the door. She glanced up at Kate and rolled her eyes.
***
Kate’s dad, Bret, returned from the feedstore and walked straight into the house. “A body’s been found,” he shouted as if quoting a price hike in oats. He ran the water hot in the mudroom sink and scrubbed his hands.
In the kitchen, Kate helped her mom prepare potato salad. Her dad, now wiping his hands on a kitchen towel, said, “Grundin found it. Was driving along his vines when his lab jumped clean over him and out the truck window. Came back stinking every which. Roadkill, he assumed.” Bret dried his hands with a dishtowel. “Caught in the dog tags were human hairs.”
Kate and Gloria’s hands stilled simultaneously.
“Was pretty desiccated. The clothes so filthy Grundin couldn’t tell if it was male or female. The hair was in braids, but—”
“Mom,” Kate said. “the poet.”
“Poet?” her dad said.
“Several weeks back, we picked up a girl,” Gloria said. “I dropped her off at her car.”
“Mom told her to go home, but then we saw her again,” Kate said. “Close to the Swanson’s.”
“I’ll let Sheriff know what we know,” Gloria said.
Information emerged piecemeal: a missing McMinnville college sophomore; her car found abandoned; and local residents reporting having picked up a young woman hitching rides into town “in early June.” The regional paper reported that “foul play has not been ruled out, but recent losses of livestock east of Klikitat Township have been attributed to cougar attacks.”
Several days later, Kate closed her laptop on the latest news about the fallen hitchhiker and went outside. The morning air shimmered with heat, and a tractor growled a fierce start, which lapsed into a steady gurgle. Geese squabbled and honked. A rooster chased a hen across the barnyard.
In the vegetable garden, her mom, watering the roses, whipped the hose to open a pinched loop. “Caroline,” Kate said to her. “The poet’s name was Caroline.”
“Yes, I read the paper.”
She had not died of natural causes. Her injuries were inconsistent with an animal attack, and she’d been sexually assaulted. The Swanson twins had confessed to finding her car and taking it on a joyride but swore they had nothing more to do with the poet and were released from custody.
“Until we know more,” Kate’s mom said, “you’re not to go running alone.”
“Who am I supposed to go running with?” Like Kate, the Swanson twins were on the high school cross-country team, but she didn’t want to run with them.
“If you can’t find someone, Dad or I will follow you, either in the car or on horseback.”
“Can I go riding alone?”
Gloria wiped her hand across her brow. “That should be okay.”
Kate headed to the horse barn, saddled her mare, Talia, and rode to a patch of clearcutting that overlooked their farm and the funereal black ribbon of road rolling through their green valley. She imagined herself back in the car, stopping for the hitchhiker a second time, and Caroline introducing herself, perhaps reciting one of her poems.
Something in the trees popped, and Talia jerked her head. The reins slipped through Kate’s fingers, and the mare bolted. She let her gallop out her goosies, bringing the mare down to the trot the moment her pace eased.
***
Once DNA results absolved the Swanson twins of rape, the Sheriff and community were willing to believe their innocence in Caroline’s death. Most figured the hitchhiker-poet’s murderer to be some city filth who’d brought violence to the edges of their safe and clean town. Sure, rural places had oddballs—the Eddie Blesses and Eliot Sheetzes—but being odd, drunk, or both didn’t make someone a rapist and murderer. Right?
Right. Until Eliot Sheetz turned himself in.
Gloria read the news from her tablet at Sunday breakfast. “Well, I never,” she said. She’d gone to high school with Eliot, who’d grown up on the neighboring farm. The last on their road.
He’d been bullied, called Smelliot for being obese and stinking of barn muck and rancid frying oil. “At graduation, though,” she said, “he got us, setting a district record for scholarships, which stands to this day. He matriculated to an ivy league school, earned a Ph.D., and ran some a fancy lab outside of Boston.”
He retired early after inheriting the family farm and leveled the corner of his land with the best valley view. Everyone expected to see some dream home going up, but Eliot installed a manufactured home instead. Was he frugal? Cheap? Or in financial trouble?
All but the manufactured home and a tract of old-growth forest—went up for auction, which Kate went to with her dad. She remembered there being an aura of general disgust. The old house had already been bulldozed to oblivion. Blackberry brambles, thistle, tansy, and Scotch broom covered most of the pastures. And the farm equipment was hardly worth scrap.
The half-starved cattle went straight to slaughter.
Afterward, Dr. Sheetz spent his days at the migrants’ bar, setting the farmers-bar patrons to grumbling—not, as it was, that they would’ve welcomed Dr. Smelliot into their fold. But still. odd fella.
Following his arrest, the local paper uncovered a scandal. Yes, the doctor had headed a university research facility, but he’d been dismissed. For “sexual misconduct.”
***
Kate returned to running on her own. First time out, she took off toward town, intending to cut across the Swanson’s land to loop back home along the ridgeline trail. Where they'd last seen the poet, a small red car overtook her. Focused on the rhythm of her footfalls, she barely noticed how slowly it was going. It wasn’t a car she knew. Occasionally, cars found their road only to turn around where the pavement ended. This car returned, too. She recognized its motor approaching from behind and slowing again. This time, it crossed the middle line, sliding by so close that she saw that the man was beating off. “Hey!” she shouted, and the driver gunned it. When she saw the little car pulling onto a culvert to turn around again, she panicked, leaping into the ditch, clawing her way through brambles, and reaching a filbert orchard, the ground raked bare. She ran full out, up a row shaded by thick foliage, and stopped only at the far side of the orchard, where she vomited against a tree.
At home, she said nothing about the incident. But she changed her route, running in the forest along the ridgeline, a galvanized steel gate, access to the Sheetz tract of old-growth forest, marking her turn-around point.
***
Out for a run one spring morning, well into her senior year of high school and months after Dr. Sheetz’s arrest, Kate approached the steel gate blocking access to the murderer’s tract of old-growth forest. Sunrays penetrated the ancient Douglas firs, red cedars, and hemlocks. It stippled a set of parallel tracks, which vanished into a collage of deciduous undergrowth, their crosshatching of branches covered in bright green, freshly budded leaves. Drawn to the forest’s beauty, she checked the gate’s padlock for the old farmer’s trick of closing the shackle without latching it. With a tug, the lock and chain fell open with a satisfying clatter. The going was soft and mossy underfoot, the air cool, fresh, and full of birdsong. A few minutes into running along the tracks, she found herself in a clearing, a meadow covered in purple, wild iris. Gasping at the sight, she thought of Caroline the poet and imagined leading her along the tracks to this very spot. Imagined her eyes widening with wonder and delight.
The following Saturday, she packed a lunch and a book from her mom’s shelves, an anthology of poetry, and rode to the meadow. As Talia grazed, Kate leaned against a log to read—thumbing through the pages for women poets: Emily Dickenson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sylvia Plath, Mary Oliver, and Maya Angelou. Throughout the spring, the meadow became her fair-weather destination and retreat.
One day, before heading home, she’d led Talia to a stream bordering the meadow to allow the mare to drink. The mare lowered her head, and Kate saw a print pressed cleanly into the muddy bank. It was larger than her fist. Cougar.
Livestock was still being lost periodically on the far side of town, and a cougar was still being held accountable. At dinner that night, Kate shared her find. “Saw a big print today on my ride. Cougar, I think.”
Her dad wanted to see the prints, and although it wasn’t her intent to admit to trespassing on Sheetz’s land, she saddled two horses after breakfast the following morning, and they rode to the gate.
“This is trespassing, you know, even if Sheetz is locked up,” Bret said, working a toothpick in his mouth.
She led him to the stream, where he leaned over his horse’s shoulder, the saddle leather creaking. Water burbled, and birdsong effervesced. The horses stamped their feet at flies, and their tails swept their flanks free of them.
“Cougar, all right. Are you here often?” The toothpick rolled between Bret’s lips, and Kate licked hers, which tasted of horse sweat, road dust, and the anguish of an indisputable ending.
Scrub jays followed them as they rode out, hopping branch to branch above their heads and bickering.
“Cougar can take down a man, you know,” Bret said. “It’s rare. They’re shy creatures. Your mom and I have found prints on our land.”
“That’s terrible.”
“No. They prey on livestock only if food’s scarce—or they’re young and inexperienced.”
The jays squawked. The soft tracks absorbed the horses’ hoofbeats but not their sway. A mix of warm and cold breezes carried the scents of moist detritus and sun-dried sap in equal measure.
“Maybe it is cougar killing all that livestock close to town. A young one,” Kate said.
“Nah. Your mom’s right: cougars don’t maim. It’s something else.”
“Like what?”
They reached the gate, and Bret dismounted to open it. Kate thought he might drive the lock home, but he closed it the way they’d found it and said, “I’d sure like to own this tract.”
“Is it for sale?”
“I’ve offered to buy it.”
“To log?”
“Oh, I’d rather see it stay like this, wouldn’t you?”
***
Kate’s drive to school took her past the ditch where Caroline’s body had been dumped, left to rot, and be rolled in by a dog. On the first anniversary of her death, white lilies appeared, and she pulled over, the engine of her car idling like her thoughts. She wondered about Caroline’s family and friends—who’d been here? Who’d left these flowers?
That morning, the local paper had reported on a statement the doctor had read in court to Caroline’s grieving friends and family. He claimed to have been ruined by the “unsubstantiated” attack on his character and professional capacity. “If those technicians who’d accused me of misconduct had retracted their false claims, this never would have happened to your daughter.”
Kate’s dad had said, “That’s a helluva thing to say, the damn creep.” He’d rapped the table with his knuckles. A firm knock.
She stared at the roadside lilies, and several cars drove by, horns honking and hands waving out open windows. Her phone pinged messages. U ok? And the Swanson twins stopped to ask if she was having car trouble. One noticed the flowers and said, “Oh. Are those about that girl?”
The other said, “Bitch shouldn’t have been hitchhiking. What a hassle—you hear about that?”
“Joyriding.” She rolled her eyes, and the pair laughed. They drove off, good riddance.
That night, she woke to something scuffling about outside, restless geese, barn cats, or raccoons. A horse whinnied, another answered. She dressed and made her way downstairs. A full moon: the white house and farm buildings shimmered pearlescent, looking ready to float away.
In the barn, the horses chewed their hay and straw bedding, and she wondered how they endured the nights, needing so little sleep. Talia nickered, and Kate opened her box. The mare’s ears pricked forward like an invitation.
She rode into the moonlight, bareback, straight to the Sheetz’s forest, its centurion trees looming dark and menacing and the understory creating a layered weft of shifting light and shadows. When they reached the meadow, she gasped. Anemones as bright and white as Caroline’s lilies covered it.
A bird screeched, and Talia twitched. The mare shorted. She reared and spun around, Kate sliding off the mare’s back and hitting the ground with an oof.
Talia’s three-beat gallop grew faint and remote in an instant.
In the dark and silence, as she moved to stand, her hand brushed something. Something wet, which she took for droppings, except it was too firm and didn’t fecal. It smelled, instead, faintly metallic. She shone her phone’s light, illuminating a ragged and bloody deer shank. Kate screamed.
And knowing not to run, not to panic, she ran. She ran like hell.
***
The moon setting and the sun rising; Kate made her way home, a distance far longer on foot. She heard the two-beat trot of a horse and saw her dad. Like a cowboy, Bret stood in his stirrups and leaned slightly forward, reins loose over the pommel of his saddle. He’d grown up on an Eastern Oregon wheat farm. Met Kate’s mom at college—where her sisters now went, one studying animal science, the other electrical engineering.
“You, okay?” he said, reining up. “Your mare came flying into the yard, scaring the hell out of us. Her fetlock’s open. It’ll need attention. Chlorhexidine.”
She grabbed his offered hand and swung her leg over the saddle.
“What were you up to?” he asked.
“Full moon ride.”
“You weren’t trespassing, right?”
“I’m okay, Dad.”
“I don’t want you up there alone, certainly not in the night. Even if we get that tract.”
“You’re right.”
Talia’s wound was minor and quickly treated. Kate put her out with the other horses and mucked their boxes, and by the time she headed into the house, exhaustion hung on her like a wet blanket. She entered the kitchen, where her parents’ faces looked more deeply lined than usual. She thought of Caroline’s parents, the enormity of their loss.
Bret glanced at Gloria. He rapped the countertop with his knuckles and marched off through the mudroom, Sepp scrambling after him, the dog’s toenails clicking.
***
Gusts of passing traffic had blown over Caroline’s lilies. And Kate, driving home from her final day of high school, stopped at the place they marked. To leave the vase, all covered in grime, seemed a shame, but it wasn’t hers to take. Still, she couldn't help herself. She brushed aside the flower remains and took the vase home.
She’d been accepted to the McMinnville college that Caroline had attended. To major in English. At the end of summer, on her last evening home, she remembered the vase—just a cheap, pressed glass thing from a florist’s shop—and packed it in a box going with her.
A festive dinner was in the making, the scents of baking bread and an apple pie making their way to Kate’s room. Sepp barked, and the oder of lighter fluid drifted through her open window—her dad at the grill. “Kate?” he called, drawing her to the window.
“Coming!” she shouted down at him. He waved, and she noticed something. Movement. Out past the pastures, an animal crossed the shorn wheatfield—an animal of stealth and bearing that belied domesticity, its coat of sand and shadows designed to blend in with its surrounds.
A cougar.
Lithe as poetry.
It stopped at the edge of tree cover as if sensing Kate’s gaze, and its long, thick tail swept low, side-to-side. Earlier that summer, the cougar had been absolved of the region’s livestock losses, the real culprits being dogs from the new housing development, family pets being let loose at night and gathering to form a pack. A rottweiler, schnauzer, two wired-hair dachshunds, and even a chocolate lab. Inexperienced predators, they’d learned the art of the chase. The lust of it. For diversion. Not survival. Killing but not consuming.
The cougar slipped into the shadows, and to Kate, watching, life felt so utterly magical, mysterious, and brief.
THE END
Author Bio: Meredith Wadley is an American-Swiss who lives and works in a medieval micro town on the Rhine River. Her writing has been anthologized and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Find her short stories in a variety of publications, including As You Were: The Military Review, Line of Advance, Longleaf Review, New World Writing, and upstreet. Her flash fiction appears in Bandit Fiction, Gone Lawn, JMWW, Lammergeier, and Orca Lit. She’s at work on a collection of short stories, a collection of flash fiction, and a campus novel involving misogyny and plagiarism. Visit her musings on life at: www.meredithwadley.com. Twitter: @meredithwadley. Instagram: @meredithkaisi.