Olly, Olly, Oxen Free
Two history majors on a romantic weekend in the woods are forced to confront their deepest beliefs in this short story by Leah Eichler
Hi friends! To celebrate the end of 2023, I wanted to share one of my short stories. Olly, Olly, Oxen Free is part of a linked short story collection called It’s Going to be a Beautiful Day and Other Stories.) I hope you like it. Let me know in the comments.
By Leah Eichler,
Betty stared at the rocky walls that towered over both sides of highway 400 as she and Mark sped by, a familiar ticking noise under the hood of her father’s beloved Jaguar the only sound to break their silence.
“She had an affair with a concentration camp guard, that’s how the family legend goes, or at least what I have been able to piece together,” Betty said quietly and almost immediately regretted it.
The entire drive, Mark has been quizzing her on her family’s experience during the Holocaust: who survived and who didn’t, and how? It was something she knew precious little about, and that lack of knowledge ate away at her.
How can you be a historian if you can’t even figure out your own history? Mark once said to her, and the observation burned because she knew he was right.
“Was that so hard? It was just a question, Bets. So, what if your grandmother prostituted herself for survival? We’re historians, it’s not our place to be judgemental.”
“Don’t speak that way about my grandmother!”
“Well, what would you call it?”
Betty kept quiet. She didn’t like the way Mark used the word historians as if that title defended them from criticism, made them above history, not subservient to it.
Besides, it seemed a little premature. Mark had just finished his first year towards his doctoral thesis at Berkeley. The plan was for Betty to join him in September.
A large cloud passed over the car, momentarily turning everything grey. Betty prayed it wouldn’t rain before they arrived at the cottage she rented near her old summer camp.
This weekend was supposed to be about romance, not history. Betty suspected that Mark intended to propose, and discussed it with her mom last night, as Mark and her father sipped schnapps in the dining room. It made sense: they’d been together for three years and planned to live together at Berkeley. Why not make it official?
Betty wondered why the idea didn’t make her feel happier? After her parents went to sleep, she slipped naked into bed with Mark, hugging him from behind. She kissed his back, as he held her hand to his chest.
“Your father told me something interesting tonight,” Mark whispered.
“Hmm?” Betty replied, throwing one of her legs over his. Mark pushed it off gently to face her.
“He told me that his father, your grandfather, was in love with someone else before the war. Your grandmother knew about it. They waited a year after the war to get married just in case she came back.”
Betty inched away from Mark and lay flat on her back. Her entire life, she begged her father for information about their family before the war and here he was, telling Mark over schnapps. Since then, Mark wanted to speak about little else.
Betty stared back out the window at the rugged stones she knew to be part of the Canadian shield, which were blasted into submission to create this quaint two-lane highway to the north. This rock has been around for four and a half billion years, she thought. Before humans. Before history. When washed clean by the rain, it acted like a clean slate.
Tragedy is like a disease that gets passed in the womb, Betty’s father would tell her as a child, after each visit with her grandparents. I refuse to infect you with this nonsense. That’s my gift to you.
But it did infect her and suddenly it irritated her that Mark could enjoy her family’s story without history ever personally infecting him.
“I don’t want to fight,” Mark said, reaching out to squeeze her thigh under her shorts. “I’ve really been looking forward to some time alone with you. Can we hit the reset button?
Betty let his hand linger on her skin and shook her head in agreement.
“So, you never told me exactly why this spot near your old summer camp was so special to you,” Mark asked. “Young love?”
“Nothing like that, no,” said Betty, annoyed by his feigned jealousy. “It was the woods around the camp that I loved. They always struck me as magical. At night, when we’d play games, I’d hide in the trees and think.”
Lately, the memory of the woods kept coming to her. She could smell the wet earth in her dreams. When Mark suggested they go on a weekend trip alone, she insisted on finding a cottage within walking distance of her old campgrounds, as if to prove to herself that it was real.
“Your favourite memory is being alone in the woods, huh? Jesus, Betty, your childhood sounds even sadder than I thought.”
The cottage looked exactly as it did in the Facebook posting. The smell of burnt firewood lingered in the walls even in the middle of summer. Mark was already swimming in the lake when Betty woke up. She sat down in a Muskoka chair and took a sip of his coffee, now cold, as she admired his dolphin kick from afar.
Mark’s body was all symmetry. In bed, at night, she loved staring at the right angles of his jaw. The first time he took off his shirt in front of her, Betty immediately ran her tongue along the perfect grooves in his abdominals. Everything about his body, about him, was logic and order. Maybe it was insecurity, or even jealousy that kept her from fully committing herself to him, Betty thought, as she absent-mindedly picked up his book, faced down to hold his page. Seconds later, she dropped it to the table as if it were on fire.
“Good morning, Love,” Mark offered, leaning in to kiss her. “Want some breakfast?”
“Mark, how can you read this shit? Is this why you were asking me about my grandparents yesterday?”
Mark moved into the kitchen, casually taking out the eggs from the fridge as he fired up the gas stove.
“I knew you would overreact. You want to be a historian — not all of it is pretty.”
“You are telling me history isn’t pretty? What am I, a high schooler? I want to specialize in Pompeii, where superheated poison gas and pulverized rock killed thousands of people in the blink of an eye. Since when do historians ever remember the good parts? But this, this is revisionist crap.”
“It’s not revisionist, just … provocative.”
Betty hit the button on the kettle and grabbed a couple of bags of instant oatmeal.
“Bets, come up, let me make you breakfast. This is our holiday. I don’t want to fight.” He wrapped his hands around her waist, resting them on her bum, his bathing suit still wet from the lake.
“You should have told me,” she whispered, as he kissed her neck.
“I know, I was going to, I swear. My thesis advisor gave it to me, and I felt obligated —"
Betty pushed him away. “You always brag how you come from a family that fought for the abolitionist movement and women’s rights and you couldn’t even say no to reading a fucking book?”
“It’s by a notable scholar! Please keep an open mind. We can’t just pretend he doesn’t exist. Let me make you breakfast. I think you are just hangry.”
“I’m not hangry and that word is ridiculous.” Still, Betty accepted a mug of hot coffee from Mark’s hand and sat like a child at the kitchen table. A small wooden plaque with a Facebook emblem and the words, “share your experience,” leaned against a vase of plastic flowers. Suddenly, the idyllic cottage experience she hoped for seemed elusive. Maybe it never existed at all. Betty reached for her cellphone in her pocket to check the news.
“Uh uh, we said no cell phones, remember? We are disconnecting from the world.”
Betty placed her phone face down on the table and stared at the back cover of the book.
"Dr. - Fucking - Allistair Johnston," she mumbled to herself. An up-and-coming celebrity academic-slash-YouTuber. He inspired a fan following with his first book, The Third Sex. The title of the book referred to a magazine with the same name popular near the end of the Weimar Republic. Dr. Johnston’s book linked the popularity of non-heteronormative sexualities in Germany between the wars directly to nazism, as if Germany “was asking for it,” according to a review in The New Republic.
Critics argued that the author was out of his league writing about gender issues, as a white, cis-gendered male whose academic expertise focused on Germany before, during and after World War II. As if in rebuttal, his new book tackled the very subject critics told him to stick to, and true to form, he continued to intellectualize his more sinister ideas.
The Collaborator and The Muselmann divided the Jewish experience in the Holocaust to those who overtly or covertly supported the Third Reich, and those who were resigned to their ultimate death. Opportunists or sheep-to-the slaughter victims. It lacked nuance and made collaborators like Jozef Szerynkski, a self-hating Jew who became the head of the police for the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, a household name. Like Anne Frank. Or Oskar Schindler.
“See,” said Mark, handing Betty a plate of scrambled eggs on an English muffin. “I knew you would be intrigued by the book. Your intellectual curiosity always wins out.”
“Wartime experiences are never black and white, Mark. You know that. People do crazy things to survive.”
“I know they do,” he said taking a bite. “Didn’t your grandmother prove that?”
***
After breakfast, Mark suggested they explore the woods. Betty noticed a bulge in his pocket and wondered if it was the ring. She followed Mark towards the lake, before taking a quick turn down a narrow, worn-out path into the woods. Within moments, the trees enveloped them both.
“It’s like being in another world, isn’t it? Like we are the first to discover this beautiful place,” Mark said, staring up at the tree line.
“We are clearly not the first,” Betty replied.
“Why do you do that? I’m trying to have a romantic moment with you.”
“Sorry,” Betty mumbled. She touched the trees, closing her eyes ever so slightly, hoping that if she relaxed enough, the forest would talk to her, reveal its secrets.
“I didn’t mean what I said yesterday about your grandmother. It was horribly sexist of me. Elitist. Privileged—"
“It’s okay, let’s just move on,” said Betty, squeezing his hand. Mark’s apologies often irritated her, as if he read from a script given to all the straight, white academics she encountered. She closed her eyes and inhaled the forest, remembering how she and her camp friends would hide behind the trees and call to each other, seeing if they could track each other down, given how the sound travelled. Betty sometimes stayed quiet, wondering how long she could hide amongst the trees, live her life in the forest.
“My grandmother hid in the forest. During the war. She and my grandfather. That’s how they met,” offered Betty.
“Your grandmother told you that?” Mark looked surprised. “I thought she didn’t tell you anything?”
“That’s not exactly true. She did, when my dad wasn’t around. But there was a language barrier. And she died when I was so young. Sometimes I’m not sure if I remembered correctly but at other times, things come to me, as if I knew them all along.”
“But you said she had an Auschwitz tattoo, and she slept with a Nazi guard…”
“I suppose at some point, she was caught. I don’t know.”
“So, your grandparents fell in love and reconnected after the war?”
“I don’t think it was that simple. I do think my grandfather was in love with someone else before the war, but he never did find her. My dad once told me that people just married after the war, eager to get their life back on track.”
“So, they weren’t in love?”
“My dad used to say that love meant something different back then.”
“What does that mean?”
“Love, he told me, meant not ratting someone out to the Gestapo.”
“That’s a grim view.”
“Well, like you said, history isn’t pretty.”
Betty couldn’t sleep that night. The ticking of a clock somewhere in the cottage grew maddeningly loud. Worried about waking Mark, she stepped outside and checked her phone to reread the email she received before the weekend.
“Dear Ms. Simko, We would like to offer you an invitation to tour Oxford college and meet some of our faculty…” Betty decided not to say anything to Mark yet. He spoke about them attending Berkeley together as if it were a given. But Oxford has been around for nine centuries. How can Berkeley possibly compare?
Her old summer camp was just up the road. She meant to walk there with Mark, show him evidence of her idyllic youth, but they never found it. The moon lit the path like an invitation and suddenly she was sure she could find it by herself. For the first time in many years, she remembered the melody of a song her grandmother sang to her as a child, “Pretty Like The Moon You Are,” it went. “Bright Like the Stars.”
“Olly, olly, oxen free!” Betty heard someone yell, startling her. She remembered how the other girls at camp thrived on the chase, their faces menacing as they surprised their target. Got you, they slapped. You are out.
It’s late for a game, Betty thought, and sat leaning against a tree. The darkness comforted her as she listened in on the teenagers running and screaming as they grabbed each other in the forest. She closed her eyes, inhaling deeply. When she opened them, a young girl of maybe 15 sat beside her and smiled.
“You can stay here as long as you like,” she said. “I won’t tell anyone.”
***
“Are we still arguing about this?” Mark covered himself with a towel before carefully wiping down his legs. Betty sat waiting in the Muskoka chair.
“I just want to understand why you took the book. You know a good chunk of his followers are right-wing nut jobs.”
“And that’s his fault? Betty, you know as well as I that people will read into things any way they want.”
“Well, that doesn’t explain why Dr. Johnston hasn’t come out and denounced them.”
“Come on! He’s an academic. He likes to spark healthy debate.”
“Is it?”
“What?”
“Healthy?’
Mark ignored the question and placed the pan on the stove, deftly breaking each egg with one hand.
“Don’t even dare use the word with me,” Betty warned.
“Hangry. Hangry, hangry, hangry. Am I wrong?” Betty accepted her plate and ate in silence, refusing to admit that she did feel better. “Can we hit the reset button please? In two more nights, I need to drive you home and then head back myself.”
Betty nodded weakly.
“Hey, I think I found my camp last night,” Betty said as Mark rinsed his dish.
“You went out last night by yourself?”
“It’s totally safe, I’ll show you.” Betty led him by hand to the forest, eager to put their romantic weekend back on track. But as soon as the trees enveloped them, the terrain looked foreign.
“Are you sure you know where you are going?” Mark asked. Betty turned around to answer but stumbled on a large tree root sticking out of the ground.
“Okay, Magellan. Time to head back.” Mark reached out his hand to pull her up. “You’re bleeding,” he said nonchalantly. “I think your days in the woods are numbered.”
###
The clock woke Betty again, and it sounded more menacing than last night. Tick Tock, Betty thought. She quietly closed the cottage door behind her and let the moon guide her back down the path. She reached the camp much faster this time and could hear the teenagers chasing each other, their voices stretching from excitement to fear. Betty turned to sit by a tree and was surprised to see the same girl from the night before.
“I used to hate these games, too,” said Betty, making herself comfortable beside the girl. “Do you hide here every night?”
“Every night,” she said, with a slight accent. “And they will never catch me.”
A few feet away, several girls shouted, “Olly, olly, oxen free. Olly, olly, oxen free.” A dog barked and Betty thought she heard someone yell “Alle, alle, auch sind frei.” She looked back at the teen to check but she was gone.
***
“You’re putting it on the curriculum?" Betty shook the book at Mark as he walked out of the lake.
“What makes you say that?” Mark replied, avoiding her stare as he entered the cabin, water still dripping off his legs.
“Your notes, your compulsive notes in the margins.”
“My thesis supervisor asked me to. He’s the reason I got into Berkeley! I was going to tell you —”
“So, you were just following orders, huh?”
“Really? You are going to take it there?” Mark handed her a plate of eggs. She debated not eating them.
“Can I ask you a question?” he said, methodically eating his eggs on toast as if he were trained. “Why does all this bother you so much?”
“You are telling me that my people, my family, who suffered so much, were complicit in their murders?”
“I’m not saying that but even you don’t know what they did. Maybe there is a reason your dad never talks about it. Besides, your people? Have you ever even set foot inside a synagogue?”
“I don’t need to set foot inside a synagogue to know my people. I know them. They are with me. I can feel them.”
Mark sighed deeply as he collected the dishes and gave Betty a peck on the cheek.
“You know that sounds crazy, right?”
Betty started to wonder herself, but something didn’t feel right.
“When did you first realize you were in love with me?”
“Come on. Are we going to play this game? I loved you from almost the moment we met.”
“Before or after I told you my family died in a genocide that would become part of your life’s work?”
Mark turned away, dumping the dishes in the sink, and headed up to the bedroom.
“I’m not even dignifying that with an answer,” he replied, shutting the door behind him a bit too strongly.
***
Betty waited in bed for Mark to return from town. He said he needed a time out and thought it best if he went to a local sports bar to watch the game. So much for the no-screen weekend. She tried to sleep but her mind wandered to the girl in the woods. Betty couldn’t shake the feeling that she knew her.
She hurried towards the lit path. The voices in the forest appeared louder today. Alle, alle, auch sind frei. Alle, alle, auch sind frei. Arbeit macht frei. In moments, she found the tree and the girl.
“So, we meet again,” Betty said, hoping to add levity. The girl indicated for her to be quiet and sit down. Her shirt looked torn and dirty.
“Why do you even come out here?” Betty whispered.
The girl stared at her and Betty noticed her beautiful, large eyes that mirrored the moon. Pretty like the moon you are, she remembered the song. Bright Like the Stars. From Heaven you were sent to me like a Present.
“I want to escape, run to the mountains. My love is there.”
Betty wondered which mountains she was referring to.
“Ah, so there’s a boy in this picture. Does he love you as much as you love him?”
“He’d die before he’d let anything happen to me.”
The melodrama of teenage love, thought Betty, feeling slightly envious.
“Why do you stay here then? Why don’t you join him?”
“I’ve always been at the camp,” said the girl. “And I’ll always be here.”
A dog barked ferociously nearby. “You should go,” said the girl. “Don’t come back.” The dog drew closer, forcing Betty to run back to the cabin, the distance seemingly longer on her return. With relief, she found her father’s Jaguar parked in front but Mark must have locked the cabin door behind him. “Mark,” she yelled, “Mark. Open the door!”
Betty stood back hoping to see Mark in the upstairs window. She could hear him singing as he usually did, with his headphones on. She threw a rock, but it missed the window. Betty sat down, with her back against the door waiting for Mark to realize she was gone. That she was outside. Alone. In the dark. The dog’s barking grew distant but she imagined she could still hear it, even after Mark let her in.
Leah Eichler is a fiction writer, journalist and the publisher of Esoterica Magazine.