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woods was a disaster. The sudden move from a cell to the wilderness seemed to leave him nervous and unsettled. The first day he tried to play the hip nudist and got a terrible sunburn. Then he drank some ‘fresh’ spring water and spent three days heaving in the outhouse. I stayed indoors with him while he recovered, making him tell me stories. ‘Me and nature never got along,’ he said.
    But as the days drifted on, we settled into the place. My father taught me to use a BB gun in the field beside the commune’s main house. Arms around me from behind, he cheered when we shot the faded beer cans off the stump. ‘Sock it to me,’ he would say, holding out his enormous, olive-colored palm. We ate homemade bread and black beans which the women in the main house prepared, swam naked in the creek flowing through the property. One wall of the room we shared was given to me as painting space. I spent the afternoons scribbling figures on the white paint as high as I could reach, faces with huge, lidded eyes and no mouths, rapt but mute.
    One day we wandered into one of the many rough-framed buildings on the property to take shelter from the midday heat. Cinder block and knotty pine bookshelves lined the walls. Up near the ceiling, a long sagging board supported Lenin’s collected works. A sink and countertop unit pulled out of a remodeled kitchen shored up one wall. There was no running water; spider webs stretched from the tap to the drain. A propane stove sat on the drainboard, and beneath it, on the floor, were jugs of cooking fuel and water.
    My father moved to the open door, raised his arms up to the door frame and stretched like a cat. He was there in body—a body honed by hours in the weight room, on the courts playing ball with the other prisoners—but in another way he was fitfully absent. At five, I was having trouble pinpointing this. He circled the room slowly, traced a pattern in the countertop’s dust, not pent up, but aimless, as if he had lost something and didn’t know where to search. I squatted near the sink, playing with a set of plastic measuring cups, watched him closely. He moved through the doorway—for a moment framed by light, a dark cutout of a man—then passed out of view.
    Thirsty, I decided to make a tea party. I went outside to see if my father wanted to play, and found him sprawled under a large oak tree near the door. He was staring up at the leaves, his hand spread open in the air above him, and didn’t answer at first.
    ‘Do you want some tea?’
    He raised his head and his eyes slowly focused, placing me. ‘No thanks, honey.’
    I went back into the shack and filled two of the cups from a jug on the floor. I pretended to have a partner for my tea, and chatted with him a while before drinking from my cup, thumb and forefinger on the short handle, my pinkie raised high.
    From the first sip I could tell something was wrong. The water burned my tongue, and when I opened my mouth to scream all the air in the room was gone, there was only fierce vapor. I spat out what I could and yelled, feeling a white heat unfurl down my throat. My father dashed in, smelled my breath and the spilled gas and scooped me up from the floor. He ran with me toward the spring and over his shoulder I watched the shack jiggling smaller and smaller in the field. It seemed lonely, canted off to one side on its foundation like a child’s drawing of a house. The dry, summer hay swayed like the sea, and I heard his breathing, ragged as surf.
    When we reached the spring, a bearded man was there filling a green wine bottle. Water spilled down a rock face into a pool bounded by ferns and moss. My father gasped out the story and together they hovered over me, making me drink from the bottle again and again. ‘That’s good,’ they said. ‘You’re doing really good.’ My father stroked my hair. And though I wanted to stop, I tipped my head back and drank for him.
    That night we stayed in the main house. My lips and