Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
On a gray winter morning in 1946 in upstate New York, Carol walked to church with her parents. The lacy frills of her dress made her legs itch. They passed the manicured lots of her square-block neighborhood in silence. As they crossed Titus Avenue, her father clasped her five-year-old hand tight.
"Stop scratching," he warned her. "You're worse than a fleabag mutt."
Two cans of tuna were tucked beneath her dress. Her parents did not hear the metal cans thunking as they marched up the steps of United Congregational Church, a red brick edifice with colonial pillars and a domed steeple. Just before the church bell clanged, Carol and her parents scooted into a pew near the back. She fidgeted through the preacher's sermon, which was about a man feeding fish to a hungry crowd. Wedged between her parents, it smelled like roses and bleach.
"Can I go to Sunday School now?" Carol asked.
Her mother frowned. "Go on, then."
Carol dashed down the aisle, but instead of turning down the hall to the classrooms, she creaked open the heavy wooden doors and tiptoed out of the church.
Outside, the wind tussled her dress. She headed straight for the boarded-up high school behind the church. In the empty parking lot, she opened the tuna cans and sat on the curb.
A scrawny black tomcat crept out of a broken window. He was little more than a patchy, threadbare mat of fur draped over a cage of bones, and he devoured the tuna with big bites. As Carol rubbed her hand down his back, he arched his spine and flicked his wiry tail. A low purr rumbled between mouthfuls.
"That's a good boy," she said.
Four more feral cats climbed out of the school windows and jostled for position around the tuna cans. Carol pulled her dress over her knees to keep out the cold wind. A slant of winter sunlight broke through the tattered clouds, and she felt it warm her cheeks. She didn't need to hear sermons about feeding the hungry. She was doing it.
Then Carol smelled smoke curling from the church chimney and followed its trail down a narrow flight of stairs into the church basement. Carol peered around the corner of the doorway. A silver-haired groundskeeper was tending to a fire in the hearth of the church chimney. The wheelbarrow beside him was loaded with the carcasses of feral cats. One by one, he lifted dead cats by their tails and tossed them into the flames. The fire sparked and popped. She watched the charred flesh of a tabby cat smolder and then ignite until all that remained was the bony skeleton swallowed in orange flames. She wanted to cry. But she also wanted to get closer.
When the groundskeeper left the room, she crept up to the fire. A scorched skull lay buried in the ashes. It seemed shockingly small and naked to Carol, and its exposed teeth made it look more vicious. Is that what she looked like under her skin? She stared into its empty eye sockets for a long time.
Carol was late returning to church. Her parents were waiting for her outside the empty Sunday School classroom. Her father grabbed her hand and yanked her down the hall.
"You smell like barbecue! And your dress is filthy. Where the hell have you been?"
Carol Anne Ruckdeschel was born in Rochester, New York, on December 3, 1941, four days before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Her parents, Earl and Anne, beamed over their daughter, with chocolate brown eyes and a tangle of brown hair.
Raising a child during World War II was stressful for the young couple. Anne planted a victory garden, and Earl amassed an arsenal of guns. Earl and Anne decided to wait until after the war to have more kids, but when the Japanese surrendered in 1945 they were too exhausted from chasing after their rowdy four-year-old to consider having another. Carol would be an only child, just like her father.
Earl's parents had died of tuberculosis when Earl was barely a toddler. He was raised by his Aunt Mabel and Uncle Free, who themselves never had children. Uncle Free worked as a chemist for Kodak, and despite the Depression-era job shortages he begged his boss to hire Earl as a messenger boy at age fourteen. From the very bottom rung, Earl worked his way up the corporate ladder and became a lab manager for Kodak. "I went up the ranks by following orders and respecting authority," Earl said. "My daughter took a different approach."
Earl was a tall, commanding authoritarian of German descent. His chestnut-brown hair cleanly parted to the right, and his face was chiseled by sharp cheekbones and a wide brow. Despite his stern appearance, he was a lively entertainer, engaging conversationalist, and the life of a party. After a few drinks, Earl could match wits with anyone in the room.
On his way to a meeting with his boss one afternoon, Earl passed by the desk of twenty-four-year-old Anne Rogers, a secretary at Kodak. Short and slender, Anne was dark skinned with round amber eyes, a button nose, and a wide, warm smile. Over the next few weeks, he invented more excuses to visit his boss and eventually asked Anne on a date. One year later, they were married. They moved into a small, two-story suburban box on the same block where Earl's family lived.
Quiet and curious, Anne steadfastly played the role of housewife but longed for more creative outlets. On summer afternoons, Anne unfurled a blanket beneath a backyard maple tree for her infant daughter while she staked tomatoes and harvested squash from her postage-stamp garden. Later, Anne let her five-year-old daughter roam the neighborhood and play tackle football with older neighborhood boys, despite whispers from neighbors about her uncouth tomboy of a daughter. Anne often took Carol to a nearby creek, where Carol waded in her underwear and caught minnows and tadpoles.
Her mother's leniency stiffened at the end of each day when Earl arrived home from work. He expected a tidy house, a cocktail at five o'clock sharp, and dinner on the table by six. Anne dutifully complied.
Earl prided himself on precision. His grandfather had been a diamond cutter in Germany, and Earl inherited his obsession with intricacy. He tinkered with watches and built his own stonecutting tools so he could transform uncut semiprecious minerals into gems of polished perfection.
But his lifelong passion was guns. Every evening after dinner, he cleaned gun barrels and refashioned stocks to fire with pinpoint accuracy. He collected World War II rifles and pistols, and he taught Carol how to shoot when she was a toddler.
Once, when Earl took Carol to the rifle range, she wandered out onto the range, directly beneath her father's gun. He fired, and the deafening discharge knocked his two-year-old daughter backward. She curled into a ball, clutching her bleeding ear and sobbing. Carol lost 50 percent of her hearing in her right ear that day. It only sharpened her other senses.
Her acuity became apparent one autumn morning when she was five. Carol had feigned illness to stay home from school. Her mom brought in a bowl of tomato soup and a washcloth while Carol looked out the bedroom window. She saw a dark object on the road.
"Look, Ma. It's a turtle."
Anne squinted. "That's just a fallen leaf."
Carol smelled diesel and heard — through her left ear — a distant engine rumble. She sprang out of bed, spilling her soup, and dashed out the front door.
Her mother shouted after her, but Carol was already scampering down the road toward the turtle. Seconds after she plucked him off the pavement, a tow truck rounded the curve. Carol hopped to the shoulder of the road as it barreled past.
Carol filled an old washtub with water and fed the turtle lettuce leaves from their garden. She named the turtle Coon, beginning a lifelong habit of naming pets after other animal species.
Coon would soon have company in the Ruckdeschel basement. With no siblings and few neighborhood children to play with, Carol turned to animals for companionship. By age seven, she was riding her bike to a nearby pond to catch crayfish, frogs, and turtles. She waded alone into neck-deep water, probing the bottom with her bare feet. One afternoon, her toes bumped something hard in the mud. She dove down into the brown water and scoured the bottom. Suddenly, something pinched her hand sharply and let go. She screamed underwater, sending a torrent of bubbles to the surface. But she still had enough oxygen in her lungs to go back for a closer look. Bedded down in the mud was the largest snapping turtle she had ever seen.
She popped up for air, grabbed a hefty tree branch, and pried up the giant turtle from the bottom of the pond. It was nearly two feet long, with horned ridges on its back. As she lifted it from the mud, she felt like she was unearthing a prehistoric creature, with its long claws, hooked beak, and horned shell. She lifted it by its tail and balanced it headfirst on the handlebars of her bike. At home she filled up the bathtub and kept it hidden for nearly a week. Finally, Earl demanded that she take a bath.
"I don't need to, really. I got clean splashing in the creek today," Carol said.
"You're covered in filth and you stink," Earl replied, dragging his daughter into the bathroom. He pulled back the curtain and jumped back. The snapping beast hissed at him.
"I got whipped that night," Carol said. "My rear was always chapped from whippings. I probably deserved most of them."
For her eighth birthday, Carol received the present she had been hoping for: her dad's broken watch. She immediately grabbed a screwdriver and began disassembling it on the kitchen table. Earl beamed.
Both Carol and her dad loved to tinker. Carol especially savored the time her father spent with her, huddled together over the workbench, taking apart and reassembling watches, radios, lawn mower engines, and, of course, rifles.
"It was the only real quality time we spent together," she said. "I loved sorting through a mess of gears and springs. I always wanted to understand the inner workings of things."
Carol's fascination with how things worked extended beyond the mechanical world and into the biological. As early as age six, Carol was dissecting dead cat carcasses behind the church. She used her pocketknife to slice into the cats, gutting them to see what they had been eating. Often the scrawny feral cats had empty stomachs, but occasionally she'd find partially digested mice. Next, she cut down the legs and shoulders to admire the lean, dark muscles and sinewy tendons attached like guitar strings to mottled gray bones. Finally, she spread open the chest wall, pulled back the ribs and lungs, and found the heart. Even after several days of decay, the meaty red lobes of the heart were distinctly swollen, with arteries branching from the top like a celery stalk.
"The heart is the most beautiful organ, and it always made me feel more alive to see it and touch it," Carol recalled. "When I held the heart's red flesh in my hands, I could feel my own heart beating. Seeing another animal's heart was like looking inside myself."
On weekends, Earl drove country roads, smoking heavily with the windows rolled up, hunting for woodchucks. When he saw one, he'd pull off, crouch, and shoot. Despite the suffocating cigarette smoke, Carol loved accompanying her dad on his Sunday drives, mainly to listen to the radio and to see the dead animals. Earl would examine his kill to see how far his bullet penetrated the woodchuck's skull. Carol was more interested in the animal's anatomy: How did it all fit together inside? How did life work?
Once, Earl took Carol hunting, and he shot a deer. Carol was the first to arrive beside the buck. She knelt beside him, enraptured by his moist brown eyes, so much like her own. She held her hand over the bullet wound in his chest and felt the warmth rise against her palm. Then she watched life flicker from his eyes. Yet nothing had perceptibly changed. The eyes were still brown and wet — only now they were eerily empty.
Later that evening, Earl parked at the edge of the woods. He handed a quarter to Carol and ordered his six-year-old daughter to march fifty feet, extend her arm, and hold the quarter between her thumb and index finger. Earl shouldered his favorite rifle and took aim at the quarter. Carol saw the barrel pointed toward her, and a flash flood of adrenaline swept through her.
"Stop shaking, dammit!" Earl shouted.
Carol closed her eyes and gritted her teeth. She stood frozen in dark silence, listening for the gunshot. Finally, she heard a metallic clank, followed by the rifle's report echoing through the woods. When she opened her eyes, the quarter was gone.
CHAPTER 2
A wave toppled Carol, and she tumbled in a froth of sand and saltwater, her body tossed like seaweed. She couldn't tell which direction was up. Then the wave flowed away, her toes felt firm ground, and she stood, sputtering and ecstatic. The ocean had grabbed her, and it would hold her for life.
Carol flourished in both the cultural and natural diversity of the island. Porpoises and sea turtles swam in the canal near their rental apartment. Whenever a sea turtle glided past, Carol would follow it in the canal for miles, all the way out to the bay.
"They're swimming dinosaurs," she told her band of barefoot Hawaiian boys. "They're the oldest animals in the ocean."
"They're also delicious," the boys replied.
At school, Carol hung out with the native Hawaiians more than the white kids. Carol's elementary school was located in the island's affluent business-class neighborhood, and most of her fifth-grade classmates were white or Japanese. However, a handful of native Hawaiians walked barefoot to her school from their villages miles away. Carol absorbed their music, their language, and especially their knowledge of plants and animals. She started dancing and dressing like her Hawaiian friends and walking barefoot everywhere. She even convinced her parents that it was customary to attend school barefoot.
"Nobody wears shoes at school. It's just the island way," she explained.
When the bell rang on the final day of class, a herd of kids thundered out of the building and down the school's steps. Earl and Anne waited at the bottom of the steps with the other parents. The neatly dressed American and Japanese children emerged first. To Earl and Anne's surprise, they were all wearing sneakers and dress shoes. Then came a scraggly group of barefoot, disheveled, dark-skinned natives ... and Carol.
Carol received one of the worst beatings of her childhood.
That night, bruised and banished to her bedroom, Carol listened to her parents talking through the paper-thin walls.
"What did we do wrong?" her father muttered.
"We didn't do anything wrong," replied her mother.
"I'll beat it out of her if I have to. She responds to the belt."
"That only confuses her. Maybe she'll grow out of it."
Carol opened her window, drowning out her parents with the chorus of crickets and the wash of the tides. A salty breath of wind stirred the trees. She rested her head on the sill and watched sea turtles swim silently through the canal. "Someday I'll have my own island," she dreamed. "I'll walk barefoot every day. I'll always have sand between my toes."
In 1952, Queen Elizabeth was crowned in England, the Big Bang was proposed, the United States detonated the first hydrogen bomb, and Earl Ruckdeschel was offered a promotion to manage the Kodak processing plant in Atlanta, Georgia. After only a year in Hawaii, the Ruckdeschels left island paradise for suburbia. Earl and Anne bought a brick ranch house on the northernmost edge of Atlanta. Although her house faced a well-traveled road, her backyard stretched for miles. She could walk through unbroken forest all the way to the Chattahoochee River. At age eleven, Carol was hiking four miles to the river every weekend, setting crawfish traps, tracking coons, and flipping rocks in search of salamanders.
Her parents had only one rule: be home for the family five o'clock cocktail. Every evening, Earl expected Anne and Carol to join him for a drink — usually martinis or manhattans. Her dad poured Carol her first glass of liquor when she was twelve years old. She felt the beehive tingle on her tongue and was hooked.
In the evenings, Earl polished his guns and gems. Anne knitted while watching television. Neither spent much time with Carol.
"They were traditional, conservative, and walled off," Carol said. "I got used to being by myself. I didn't know anything else, so I didn't know I was lonely. I knew from an early age that I was different. That meant being comfortable with solitude."
Not finding her place at home, she sought it in nature. In the wild, she found companionship in the creek, friendship in the forest, and a kinship with critters that ran deeper than blood.
"Out in nature is where I belong. I love it so much, and it accepts me," Carol wrote when she was fourteen.
At night, Carol slept with her window open and her pillow propped on the sill. The night air calmed and restored her, and even in suburban Atlanta she could still see the Milky Way's soupy river of stars. But as her parents' fights grew louder, she began sleeping in the basement to be closer to her menagerie of animal companions.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Untamed"
by .
Copyright © 2014 Will Harlan.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
