Death in the Woods

“I have just suddenly now, after all these years, remembered her and what happened. It is a story.”

This is not just a story about the old woman. The narrator is a character himself, and he is transparent from the beginning that he is telling none other than a story based on a foundation of facts. Therefore, he is an unreliable narrator, and the reader should beware of confusing every detail as a fact.

“There was a look of defiance in his eyes… He did not say anything actually. ‘I’d like to bust one of you on the jaw,’ was about what his eyes said.”

This passage uses personification. Eyes can’t say anything, and this description evokes the old idiom about the eyes as a doorway to the soul. Jake Grimes does not literally speak in this moment, but the reader, and the other characters, can infer his thoughts through the look in his eyes.

“You see, the farmer was up to something with the girl.”

The narrator has already described the German farmer as an abusive person. This quote furthers this description by hinting that there was a sexual motivation as well. The author uses a euphemism to make this clear without resorting to a vivid description.

“I remember now that she was a bound girl and did not know where her father and mother were. Maybe she did not have any father. You know what I mean.”

The narrator is explaining the old woman’s childhood and why she ended up as a “bound girl.” Rather than being sent to an orphanage, which most likely didn’t exist in rural Midwest America at the time, she is probably sold off, or given away, for indentured servitude. The only way this would have happened is if the mother gave her child up, and very often the mother would not know who the father was. A single mother raising a child at the time would have been difficult both economically and culturally, since fatherless children were looked down on. Rather than go through this explanation, the narrator is giving a wink and a nod to the reader when he says, “You know what I mean.” In other words, he doesn’t have to explain all of this. You most likely already understand.

“She had got the habit of silence anyway—that was fixed. Sometimes, when she began to look old—she wasn’t forty yet— […] she went around the house and the barnyard muttering to herself.”

At nearly 40 years old, the woman is so conditioned to her life that she has apparently accepted her role. Rather than questioning her situation or fighting back, she chooses to isolate herself from any social interaction, even with those who live with her. She mutters to herself because she finds herself to be the only person worth speaking to.

“It was the first time any one had spoken to her in a friendly way for a long time. The butcher was alone in his shop when she came in and was annoyed by the thought of such a sick-looking old woman out on such a day […] The butcher said something about her husband and her son, swore at them, and the old woman stared at him, a look of mild surprise in her eyes as he talked.”

In the narrator’s telling, Mrs. Grimes’s only positive interaction is with the town butcher. He acts as a foil to all the men—and perhaps anyone else—in her life. He shows her pity and kindness by giving her extra food, and he goes as far as to criticize her husband and son. Unfortunately, by this time, the old woman is so used to her role that she perceives his comments as a critique of her position as feeder/nurturer rather than a demonstration of support.

“Starve, eh? Well, things had to be fed. Men had to be fed, and the horses that weren't any good but maybe could be traded off, and the poor thin cow that hadn’t given any milk for three months. Horses, cows, pigs, dogs, men.”

The old woman has been a feeder/nurturer for so long that she sees herself only in this light, no matter how she is treated. Her role is her essential identity, and when the butcher criticizes the way she is treated, she takes this as an affront to her identity. She responds—or the narrator responds in his telling of events—that “things had to be fed.” Otherwise, they would starve, and that would be a failure of her essential motherly role. Her final comment is the most telling, since she lists her duties to those around her by animals first and men second. Animals rank higher in her world because they offer something in return, whereas the men only take from her.

“Such men as Jake Grimes and his son always keep just such dogs. They kick and abuse them, but they stay.”

The narrator points out that the Grimes’s dogs stay loyal, even though they are kicked and abused. This is comparable to Mrs. Grimes, who never seems discontent despite her position in life. She is kicked and abused, figuratively and literally, from the day she is born, as she is pushed away from parents to the German farmer, and then to Jake Grimes. She never has a say in her circumstances and never rebels against them. As long as she has the yoke of men in her life, she remains fixed in their orbits until someone or something else moves her.

“After a time all the dogs came back to the clearing. They were excited about something. Such nights, cold and clear and with a moon, do things to dogs. It may be that some old instinct, come down from the time when they were wolves and ranged the woods in packs on Winter nights, come back into them.”

The dogs remain loyal to the men who abuse them, and to the old woman, whom they follow to town. They respect her enough that they wait until she has passed to target the pack of food tied to her back. As she is dying, they perform some sort of death ritual by circling around in the clearing in front of her with other dogs found in the area. They may be just waiting for the food on her back to be available, or they may be anticipating some sort of freedom that they equate to their ancestor wolves. Without the authority of the old woman in the woods, their survival instincts and pack behavior kick in, and they know it.

“In a woods, in the late afternoon, when the trees are all bare and there is white snow on the ground, when all is silent, something creepy steals over the mind and body. If something strange or uncanny has happened in the neighborhood all you think about is getting away from there as fast as you can.”

This scene sets a mood that many who have walked through the woods at that time of year would recognize. The imagery paints a picture that appeals to the senses and helps explain why the hunter misinterprets what he sees when he finds the old woman’s corpse. Considering the scene eerie, he assumes that there has been a homicide and doesn’t stay around long enough to determine the true age of the body.

“She did not look old, lying there in that light, frozen and still. One of the men turned her over in the snow and I saw everything. My body trembled with some strange mystical feeling and so did my brother’s. It might have been the cold.”

This is a coming-of-age moment for the narrator, as he sees a naked woman’s body for the first time. He doesn’t see the corpse of an old woman, though, but that of a young woman marbled in white. To others at the scene, she also looks young due to her gaunt appearance, frozen state, and position beneath a dusting of snow. The narrator is fixated on this moment as he grapples with the meaning of what he sees between his innocent boyhood mind and his older reflective self, who is now closer to Mrs. Grimes’s age at her death.

“The scene in the forest had become for me, without my knowing it, the foundation for the real story I am now trying to tell. The fragments, you see, had to be picked up slowly, long afterwards.”

The narrator is honest about the origins of the story here. He notes that it is full of facts that have been built upon by his own mind as he became older. This emphasizes that the narration is unreliable and shows that now, as an older man himself, he understands the woman’s plight in a way he could not before. 

“The whole thing, the story of the old woman’s death, was to me as I grew older like music heard from far off. The notes had to be picked up slowly one at a time. Something had to be understood.”

In the same way that a once-heard song haunts our memories as we try to recall its melody, rhythm, and lyrics, the narrator reveals he has been piecing together this story for some time. It’s important for him to do so, yet getting it just right seems like an impossible task.